This post previously began:

At the risk of a simplistic formulation:

I realized the risk was a stupid one, in these troubled times when good and evil take their cast from political “ideology”.   So to clarify what I am setting out — good, in the abstract, is what we’d wish on ourselves and our loved ones,  if extended to everybody, would make life better, increase contentment, peace and understanding; evil, in the abstract, things done with knowledge that people are being seriously harmed, but the thing done benefits you, so what the hell?  We’ve always had war, what’s one more?)

Our fundamental moral choice as humans is to act toward others in a way that helps or hurts.   In most situations the outcome of this choice is clear, though there are complicated situations when it’s not always easy to know if our actions will result in harm or benefit.    People who routinely act based solely on what’s best for their own narrow self-interest tend to hurt others more than help them.  It’s the way justice and fairness works out in a competitive world of limited resources.  Doing good requires a high regard for others, evil uses the much lower standard of what’s better for me right now and fuck everybody else.  Sometimes this attitude of “winning” is called being “transactional”– everything is a business deal where the only consideration is being the greatest artist of the greatest deal.

On Saturday the New York Times ran an article entitled Trump Stymies California Climate Efforts Even As State Burns.   The article summarizes Trump’s long, ongoing, transactional denial of Climate Change, noting that he “directed the Environmental Protection Agency to roll back nearly every federal policy designed to curb the heat-trapping fossil-fuel pollution that is the chief cause of global warming.”  [1]    As climate change-exacerbated wildfires burn, Mr. Trump continues to double down in an attempt to force the big blue state to back down from more stringent fuel emissions standards to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and slow down the rapidly worsening climate catastrophe.   The only “good” that comes from denying what we are all seeing, that alarming trend that scientists have documented for years, is that reduced regulation on pollution increases profits for some already very wealthy toxic polluters.

Trump spokesman, Judd Deere, is quoted as saying California leaders “support destructive liberal policies” and the state “should focus on its own affairs rather than trying to regulate 49 other states with its big-government policies.”   Trump, for his part, seeks “to eliminate California’s authority under the Clean Air Act to set standards on planet-warming tailpipe pollution that are stricter than those set by the federal government”.   

The Trump administration has also threatened to withhold highway funding, opened an antitrust investigation into California’s deal with the carmakers [who’d agreed to the more stringent emissions standard] and filed suit to block part of a state initiative to limit greenhouse gases from power plants.

Wildfires rage in increasingly hot, dry California while Trump pursues political goals for himself and his powerful backers, in this case the fossil-fuel industry and the major American automakers.    He doesn’t read the NY Times, but if he did this line might have hit home: 

“Hotter temperatures means drier vegetation, making it more likely to burn.” 

On the other hand, he no doubt reasons, fossil-fuel is a dynamite product and there’s nothing wrong with selling what the people need and want —  including big, powerful SUVs — and, that repeatedly and forcefully bitch slapping liberal California, a gigantic and powerful state that clearly is against him, is simply good politics.   I have to once again state the obvious, Trump does not “reason” in the usual way people come to reasoned conclusions — he thinks and acts the only way he knows how — by reflex.

I had a close friend for many years who was stuck in the Repetition Compulsion, painfully fighting the same fight over and over.   He had no choice, he simply had to endlessly reenact the same primal battle, with everybody he met.   It no doubt started in early childhood when, the youngest of three boys, he used to hide his candy from his older brothers and vigilantly wolf down his food at restaurants so his brothers couldn’t poach his fries.   It may seem simplistic to say, but he simply could not act any differently — not as a child, not as a teenager when I met him, not as an adult.   

He always felt he was being short-changed and would wheedle, whine and cajole his way to the better end of every deal he ever made– with the predictable result that he also eventually wore out and alienated everybody he triumphed over.  Whenever the inevitable alienation happened he always felt that he was the victim of a totally unfair “putz”.   When he ran a small business, he underpaid and exploited everyone who worked for him.  There was a lawsuit for years of unpaid overtime brought against his business right after he died.   There was no joy in any of this regular winning he did, it was simply the way it had to be for him, for no doubt painful reasons he couldn’t bear to examine.

I think of the president very much the same way.   It’s not that he wants to lie all the time — it’s pretty clear he can’t help it.   There is some demon driving him to tell lies intended to make others admire him, cheer for him, like him, love him.    We might call this the mark of an empty soul, to live entirely for the falsely-stoked admiration of others, but why be judgmental?   It’s clear he doesn’t choose to lie in the strict sense, lying is a tic he can’t control [2].   It’s the same with his reflexive need to constantly “double down.”   He doesn’t know another way to react in the zero-sum game that is the high-stakes life of a glorious winner among pathetic losers.   The thought of being seen as a “loser” is a “winner” like Mr. Trump’s ultimate nightmare.

Trump is often referred to as a narcissist.   He does tend to make everything about himself, sometimes inappropriately.   He needs praise desperately.   He expressed dismay the other day that the heroic, “talented” K-9 that chased down al-Baghdadi (to “die like a dog”) was getting more credit for the death of the notorious terrorist than he was.   He told voters in Kentucky, the night before the gubernatorial election, to think of how he, Trump, would look if a Democrat took the governor’s mansion– what a bad reflection that would be on Trump.    His business pursuits while president are another example — no reason to divest himself of anything for a mere appearance, the presidency is already costing him billions, he says, the effort to selflessly make America great again while trying to simultaneously maintain and strengthen his super-profitable worldwide brand — very, very hard!

There is a strong case to be made that Trump is a Malignant Narcissist.  This is the clinical diagnosis for someone whose narcissism causes him to be destructive to others in the eternal pursuit of elusive self-love (or whatever it is that drives this type).   Malignant Narcissism is also as close to a clinical definition of evil as we will find in the psychological literature.  Somebody (probably not wearing a MAGA hat or a Read The Transcript! t-shirt)  has filled out a scorecard for Mr. Trump, based on the clinical criteria for this horrific disorder (note, I’ve located and swapped in the same checklist, without the check boxes checked, in the name of fairness to Mr. T — you can mentally tick the boxes you thing apply):

Diagnostic criteria are famously open to interpretation, so even though many of these check marks might seem justifiable in the case of Donald Trump, based on what we can observe of his personality and behavior, even though we are not trained professional psychiatrists who have personally examined the president, are we?   There is no magic formula to accurately pigeon-hole the quirks of every person who seems to be acting under the sway of some psychological disorder.   You might be more comfortable comparing the president’s behavior with the checklist on this chart, which is perhaps a little less damning:

However you slice it, if you put the president’s words and actions on the table and sort them into two piles —  Probably Good and Probably Evil —  you know which pile most of his tweets, verbal attacks, insults, accusations, exaggerations, threats, lawsuits, lies, political appointments and policies would go onto.   

UNLESS, of course (and this is HUGE): you stipulate that all this black and white dividing and knee-jerk condemning of the president’s words and actions is part of a ruthless, calculated, well-orchestrated, sinister, dark money fueled conspiracy of  powerful Never-Trumpers, haters, losers, jealous, powerless, sick, dangerous politically correct Justice Warrior cucks with a vicious ax to irrationally grind against the greatest American history has ever produced.  HOW ABOUT THAT?!   WORDS TELL THE WHOLE FUCKING STORY, DON’T THEY?    READ MY SHIRT!!!

[1] In fairness to the president, he claims that Climate Change is an anti-American Chinese hoax and that ‘heat-trapping fossil-fuel pollution’ has nothing to do with anything, it’s a vicious anti-freedom Communist talking point promoted by the failing NYTimes fake news service by sick, dangerous people who irrationally hate Trump for winning, completely on his own, in 2016 (in the largest presidential landslide in American history). 

[2] Hence, any proceeding in which he is sworn to tell the truth is, inevitably,  a “perjury trap”– he has no control of his need to lie.

A career diplomat, Michael McKinley, the Secretary of State’s former senior advisor, appointed by Secretary of State (former CIA director and handpicked Koch congressman)  Mike Pompeo, testified under oath about conversations with his boss that Pompeo had already denied knowledge of on television.   McKinley testified that he’d spoken to Pompeo, on three separate occasions, about issuing a statement of support for abruptly dismissed U.S. Ambassador to the Ukraine Marie Yovanovich.    Mr. Pompeo had previously stated on television that he’d never heard a peep out of this distinguished diplomat, who has since resigned, about anything concerning Yovanovich’s dismissal.

Here is the actual bone of contention:

“From the time that Ambassador Yovanovitch departed Ukraine until the time that (McKinley) came to tell me that he was departing, I never heard him say a single thing about his concerns with respect to the decision that was made,” Pompeo said of McKinley. “Not once … did Ambassador McKinley say something to me during that entire time period.”

McKinley testified that he chose to resign because of what he saw as the use of ambassadors “to advance domestic political objectives” and a failure of the State Department to offer support for those officials caught up in the impeachment inquiry.

“The timing of my resignation was the result of two overriding concerns: the failure in my view, of the State Department to offer support to Foreign Service employees caught up in the impeachment inquiry; and, second, by what appears to be the utilization of our ambassadors overseas to advance domestic political objectives,” McKinley said. “To see the emerging information on the engagement of our missions to procure negative political information for domestic purposes, combined with the failure I saw in the building to provide support for our professional cadre in a particularly trying time, I think the combination was a pretty good reason to decide enough, that I had no longer a useful role to play.”

The State Department did not respond to CNN’s request for comment about the contradiction.

source

A career diplomat, speaking under penalty of perjury, versus a  loyal gunsel [1] of the president’s, speaking on television in defense of his unfairly beleaguered  boss’s innocence.    Who to believe?   Your view of who is telling the truth will depend on which side you’re on: the greatest president this nation has ever had or the despicable, treasonous, dangerous DEEP STATE who are hate-filled, vengeful, unscrupulous partisan snakes!

I will assume, for purposes of this post, that Mr. Pompeo was not being entirely truthful when he, arguably, deliberately misremembered on TV.  Now, before you rush to argue, let me set out Mr. Pompeo’s defense for this apparent calculated set-aside of candor (or simple compound memory lapse).   Pompeo is following the Lewandowski Doctrine, which can be summarized as:

I have no obligation to be honest with the media.

There is no doubt that a person has no legal obligation not to lie, except under very few, carefully delineated scenarios.   Lying under oath is perjury, and people can go to jail for it (though for a surprisingly short time, it turns out, in the cases of powerful liars).   There is libel — a specific circumstance when one side proves in court that the other side deliberately and maliciously spread a lie to damage the other person’s reputation.   There is a statute here and there about other kinds of lies being forbidden, but as a general rule: LYING IS NOT A FUCKING CRIME IN AMERICA, ASSHOLE!

Former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, confronted with videotape of himself that proved he was either lying on TV or had lied under oath, defiantly spat this doctrine at his accusers during testimony before Congress.   The media lies all the time, he said, why should anyone on the lying media be held to a higher standard?   His tough guy audience of one no doubt loved him for that bravura display of omerta-scented bravado [2].   

The Lewandowski Doctrine  is not a doctrine to build an empire on, I don’t think, or a just society, for that matter, but solid enough for someone like Mike Pompeo to rely on in telling anyone who thinks his arguable lying on camera is wrong to simply FUCKING FUCK OFF, ASSBITE!

Here’s a well-done short piece about Lewandowski’s contentious testimony before Congress. 

[1] check out the puckish definition here

[2]     “Omertà is a Southern Italian code of silence and code of honor that places importance on silence in the face of questioning by authorities or outsiders; non-cooperation with authorities, the government, or outsiders; and willfully ignoring and generally avoiding interference with the illegal activities of others.”   Wikipedia

In the competitive field of the most disgusting things Trump did and continues to do as president, the open hate speech, the public attacks on everybody, the murderous abandonment of military allies, the association with a series of close advisers now convicted of felonies done in his service, the deliberately cruel separation of children from their parents at the U.S. border and their warehousing, the race baiting, the misogyny, the homophobia, the pathological bragging, the uncontrollable lying, the open obstruction of justice, the claim that Article II gives him unchallengeably broad powers including immunity for anything he does while president, including public murder on Fifth Avenue, the assertion of bogus blanket privileges to stall disclosure of evidence of likely crimes, the insistence that the whistleblower law is BULLSHIT etc.  the forced 50-48 appointment of doctrinaire conservative partisan Brett Kavanaugh to a lifetime seat on the Supreme Court was perhaps the most disgusting.   

I recently heard an interview of the New York Times reporters who wrote a book about the Kavanaugh confirmation, about the severely truncated sham FBI investigation into troubling allegations that revealed, after less than a week, “nothing to see here” without even interviewing the people involved in the alleged incidents.    The authors’ presentation was quite nuanced, and it got me to thinking beyond my reflexive hatred of an openly partisan judge like Kavanaugh.   

These authors determined, after a great deal of research and interviewing, that Kavanaugh as an adult is nothing like the awkward, drunken, puke-prone adolescent who sometimes got shit-faced enough to pull his penis out at a party, or try to forcibly feel up a cute fifteen year-old at an informal afternoon gathering at a house where the adults were away.   He has matured, seems to show great respect to women and females of all ages.  I’d say that’s a good thing.

Of course, in American politics, in America in general, one does not apologize or admit jack shit.   Kavanaugh presumably could have conceded he had a rough patch as a teenager at his high pressure prep school, when he sometimes drank too much and did stupid things, but thankfully he straightened himself out and is a different person today than the kid who did some stupid and regrettable things.   Not so hard, really, even Dubya did something similar when he recounted how he was reborn, from a drug sniffing alcoholic until the age of 40 to his rebirth in Jesus Christ– two totally different individuals, I swear to Jesus.   But in Kavanaugh’s case there was a chance that even an admission like that could have sunk his divisive nomination.   He consulted with Trump who told him exactly what to do.   He did it.   Which is one part of what makes his whole confirmation as an impartial, an unappealable lifetime arbiter of basic rights so disgusting.

As Trump did at his debates with Hillary, when he came out sniffing and snorting like a hopped-up coke fiend (some people say he had a few hits of Adderall [1] before taking the debate stage for those hideous showdowns between Americas two most hated and divisive politicians) Kavanaugh, who’d spent an entire day at the White House prepping (between appearances on TV with his wife and daughter and penning editorials and infomercials arguing righteously for his impartiality) came out sniffing and snorting, ready to defend his good name by taking on the traitors who set him up with a tangled conspiracy of total lies.   Trump had apparently told him — you want this?  Show some balls!   Do like me!

Kavanaugh was one name off Leonard Leo’s list famous list of vetted, diehard, ideologically pure Federalist Society-selected judicial candidates.  Trump had promised to choose his Supreme Court nominees from this list and, as a man who always keeps his promises (and I have to admit, I am loving my almost free, incredibly comprehensive Trumpcare) picked the single most divisive name off that list.   The choice of Kavanaugh above all the others with less extreme partisan baggage was a matter of triggering the libtards, fanatical cucks (their girlfriends and wives are constantly cuckolding them) who need to be kept in their enraged, snowflake state of powerless outrage.

The snorting Kavanaugh, whose right wing bona fides are impeccable [2], delivered this defense of himself, a defense that in a properly functioning democracy should have disqualified him from consideration as an unappealable interpreter of the US Constitution, to wit:

A calculated and orchestrated political hit, fueled with pent-up anger about president Trump and the 2016 election, fear that has been unfairly stoked about my judicial record, revenge on behalf of the Clintons and millions of dollars from outside left-wing opposition groups.

I will not be intimidated by the coordinated and well-funded effort to destroy my good name.

When I did at least OK enough at the hearings that it looked like I might actually get confirmed, a new tactic was needed…

etcetera

As it always is with the well-funded, billionaire endorsed anti-majoritarians who seek public office, they are the innocent victims of unscrupulous, well-funded, conspiracies.   Obama’s nominee (who was denied a hearing by Moscow Mitch McConnell), Merrick Garland, a centrist, we are told agreed with Kavanaugh on 90% of the cases they heard together on the DC circuit.   Susan Collins gave us that stat in defending her vote for the divisive Mr. Kavanaugh.   Most legal cases are decided on the law and there’s little wiggle room in a judge’s discretion.  In a small number of cases, an interested judge can be creative in crafting a decision.    A look at the 10% of cases where Kavanaugh and Garland disagreed would have been most instructive, methinks.

Of course, even if Trump winds up impeached, improbably removed from office, prosecuted, convicted and jailed, we are stuck, for the rest of our lifetimes, with lifetime appointee I fondly refer to as Boof Kavanaugh (for his harmless lie under oath about not bragging in his prep school yearbook about ingesting alcohol through a tube shoved up his ass– he said it was a reference to his flatulence.  So be it.)

Have I, somehow, against all odds, created a meme by constantly referring to this despicable example of entitled judicial arrogance as “Boof Kavanaugh?”  Hopefully:

[1]  Adderall is a combination medication containing four salts of amphetamine. Adderall is used in the treatment of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and narcolepsy. It is also used as an athletic performance enhancer and cognitive enhancer, and recreationally as an aphrodisiac and euphoriant. Wikipedia

[2] As a law student Kavanuagh was a charter member of the doctrinaire Federalist Society, was then Kenneth Starr’s most zealous assistant in the Clinton impeachment, was part of the legal goon squad sent to Florida by the Dubya Bush campaign to stop the recount of the 2000 election, was a dependably partisan lawyer in the Bush White House whose many legal opinions were kept secret from the Judiciary Committee, to avoid revealing the full extent of his loyal partisanship. 

His record as a federal judge should also have been disqualifying, though only in context with the rest of his lifelong bias in favor of one side– the powerful, and one party – and seen in light of his tearful, snorting partisan rant about the vast left-wing conspiracy (and their unlimited outside money)  intent on viciously and unfairly destroying his entire entitled life.   

True believers are convinced that what they are doing is the will of a higher power.   None of us act without believing we are right, or at least justified, in doing what we do.   You will search life and literature in vain for an example of a character who acts without believing he is, at least in some way, justified.  But true believers are convinced they’re also serving something higher and infinitely more important than themselves, than the petty little concerns of regular people going about their ordinary lives.  In every case they are motivated by dedication to an infinitely  higher power, a dedication that allows them to justify doing anything necessary to serve this thing so far greater than themselves. True believers are moralizers.   

Sometimes they moralize in the name of an all-powerful deity– as Bagpiper Bill Barr, Boof Kavanaugh [1], Mike Pence and others do when using the high standards of Jesus Christ Himself to justify their pursuit of a moral order far higher than dirty, mundane politics.   Sometimes a true believer’s zealotry is couched in the name of an ideology: liberty, freedom, democracy.   Often (though rarely here in the land of the free and the home of the brave) their honor and their bond, and all of their hopes for a better future, are tied to loyalty to a supremely powerful, infallible leader.  

Here is one reason the most loyal defenders of openly corrupt president Trump are essentially Nazis.  Their beliefs, such as they are, like the beliefs of the man they follow, are completely transactional.  Their views and positions can change on a dime, and often do.  The talking points they repeat are  based strictly on the real-time calculation of what they feel will advance their leader’s cause, which is their own.  Their fates are intertwined.  These loyalists act purely out of belief in the righteous power of the leader himself, as diehards who’d taken a personal loyalty oath to the leader did up until the collapse of Nazi Germany.   

Last week every last Republican in the House went on  the public record as a loyal Trumpist, all of them voted in lockstep: the invalid, unfair, unconstitutional witch hunt of a partisan impeachment inquiry must not be allowed to go forward!

Their reasoning goes like this: the president did nothing wrong, OK, if it was wrong it wasn’t impeachable, these secret witness depositions are a witch hunt that denies the president due process — we demand public sessions, we will not support public sessions, which are a lynching,  Mueller was a conflicted partisan traitor who should never have been appointed to conduct a totally unfair, likely criminal (Barr is actively investigating the investigators in his own department) witch hunt (although the conflicted Mueller totally exonerated the president), the whistleblower is a traitor who must be revealed and vigorously, yea, publicly interrogated, the Ukrainians helped Crooked Hillary win!  Ukraine has the DNC email servers!  Benghazi!   etc. 

This ever-shifting series of contradictory rationales is wrapped in the larger one: these unfair attacks are all brought by deranged traitors motivated by irrational hatred of Donald J. Trump and anger over the Electoral College ass-whupping they received in 2016.

Conservative Opus Dei member Bill Barr, the nation’s current top law enforcement official, is the most dangerous of these blind loyalists, because he is smart, and unscrupulous and charged with faithfully enforcing the laws that would constrain a president who abuses his powers.  In abusing his power as Attorney General (as when he refused to make lawful disclosures pursuant to a credible and urgent whistleblower complaint) Barr will usually raise lawyerly defenses he knows could take years to resolve in court.  As when he advised Trump to assert blanket protective privilege over any request for documents or witnesses that could lead to evidence of his wrongdoing, an absurd claim of absolute privilege that will eventually be dismissed by the courts.   In a year or two, as Barr knows.

At the heart of Barr’s unfailing advocacy for the president, Barr will say, is his unshakeable core moral and philosophical, deeply held Christian belief that a strong president, an “imperial” or “unitary” executive, is necessary for the operation of a moral Christian nation that is not a debased and godless place.  He will defend this belief in a supremely powerful president as rooted in his moral conscience and unchanged in him since before he helped president George H.W. Bush cover up, finally and for all-time, a lingering scandal called Iran-Contra.

OK, fine.  There is a branch of conservatives who believe that the president needs to have more power than the other two “co-equal” branches of government, be unaccountable to them and act as a practical CEO who can speedily carry out a higher will than his own.  I may find this an insane and dangerous belief, an anti-democratic, authoritarian-leaning one, but you can make an intellectual case for why it makes sense, I suppose.  The president, elected by the will of the People, must have sweeping powers to do what must be done, without undue delaying interference from other branches.  Fine.  That’s our general operating principle then, right, conservatives?

Yes. 

… unless that president is a lying fornicator (Bill Clinton), or a lying Negro not even constitutionally eligible for the office he usurped (Barack Obama), or someone completely distorting the teachings of Jesus Christ to try to curtail free trade, job creation and liberty itself (Jimmy Carter).  In the case of these presidents, you know, these are not fitting unitary executives.  Tie their hands, fuck them, hard, humiliate them, render them powerless, and, if possible, make them one terms losers.  While they’re in office, block their policy initiatives, undermine them, bend them to our political will by any means necessary.  Break them any way we can, as the brilliant Newt Gingrich showed us the way. 

Say, Opus Dei, what happened to the Imperial Presidency?   

(It’s obviously not for unAmerican presidents!   We highly moral individuals decide, as the Founders did, who is a real American president entitled to absolute constitutional deference in all matters, thank you!)  

Trump is currently on the pedestal, an object of inviolable loyalty by these “unitary executive” types, as well as by every craven opportunist in the party Trump now suddenly leads.  As long as the transactional  president does whatever his wealthy donors want,  radically cut taxes on them and their businesses,  destroy inconvenient regulations made to protect endangered owls at the expense of free enterprise and American greatness, mockingly deny the mounting climate catastrophe as a baseless hoax, promote other useful conspiracies, prosecute endless war vigorously and lucratively, appoint lifetime federal judges off a list of Federalist Society vetted uber conservatives,  all while provocatively pandering to religious bigots (to keep the giant evangelical voting block solidly Republican) and racists in a way that keeps the working masses divided and enraged at each other, well, that president has earned and deserves every bit of the power and loyalty the Republican party gives him.

Make no mistake about what we are watching now.  These lockstep marching, investigation-thwarting, simple logic-despising motherfuckers are the moral descendants of their proud Nazi forebears.   Just sayin’.

That said, and call me Anne Frank, I still believe that in a nation of law (however unfair many of those laws might be), the law will prevail against a cult of extremists, temporarily united behind a bully they rightfully fear, that is determined to enforce only laws that advance their dream agenda — a dissent-free dictatorship of the corporate elite serving the inviolable, impeccably moral will of Jesus Christ Himself.

[1]  As for Kavanaugh, he shouldn’t necessarily have been forced to withdraw his nomination strictly over a few drunken sexually awkward adolescent moments of excess, no matter how disgusting.  He is obviously not the man he was as a pampered teenager.   

Kavanaugh should have been disqualified from sitting on the Supreme Court for the partisan screed he gave in denying allegations.  He should have been disqualified for his unbroken, hyper-partisan career as a right wing zealot, as underscored by the angry conspiracy theory remarks he snortingly made while defending himself against the “calculated, orchestrated” revenge of the “Clintons” and a shit ton of “dark money”.

 An entitled and ambitious young man, as a law student Kavanuagh was a charter member of the doctrinaire Federalist Society, was Kenneth Starr’s most zealous assistant in the Clinton impeachment, was part of the legal goon squad sent to Florida by the Dubya Bush campaign to stop the recount of the 2000 election, was a dependably partisan lawyer in the Bush White House whose many legal opinions were kept secret, to avoid revealing the extent of his loyal partisanship.  His record as a federal judge should also have been disqualifying, though only in context with the rest of his lifelong bias in favor of one side– the powerful, and one party– and seen in light of his tearful, snorting partisan rant about the vast left wing conspiracy (and their unlimited outside money)  to destroy his life.   

A giant entitled partisan dick in a robe, who may well be nothing like the teenaged drunk who sometimes had too much, acted like a creep and passed out in his own puke.

Whenever a certain type of bully is accused of anything, he levels the same charge at the accuser.   It is classic projection, the thing feared is denied and projected on to the other person.    So we have a reality TV president who is quick with the unfounded accusations (about things that apply to himself)  and gleeful in attaching catchy nicknames to his enemies.   Crooked Hillary, Lyin’ Ted, Low-Energy Jeb, Ugly Carly.

Shaking down the new, young president of a besieged ally for dirt on his  political opponent, fellow thought-challenged dotard Joe Biden?    President MAGA is honestly fighting corruption, you corruption loving fuck!   Biden is the one who is corrupt, Trump is making America great again!!!

U.S. forces recently hunted down and killed a raping butcher named al Baghdadi.  The president had these insightful things to say, in his rambling remarks following the successful mission to capture or kill this terrorist monster:

“The thug who tried so hard to intimidate others spent his last moments in utter fear, in total panic and dread — terrified of the American forces bearing down on him… he died after running into a dead-end tunnel, whimpering and crying and screaming all the way…”

Nobody knows where Trump got this information, there was no audio on the video he saw of the raid, no report of this whimpering, crying, screaming.   Never mind, makes a good story for the base who loves this kind of thing, an enemy not only killed but utterly humiliated!

As for the ISIS leader’s followers:

“… the losers who worked with him — and losers they are — they had no idea what they were getting into. In some cases they were very frightened puppies, in other cases they were hard-core killers…”

Losers.   Frightened puppies.   A bully who spent his last moments in utter fear, in total panic and dread, whimpering and crying and screaming all the way.

Remember those stage directions, we will be seeing them again, if justice is not dead in the Koch Brothers’ anti-majoritarian America.

Here’s a quick one that speaks for itself, then a word to reassure this agitated patriot:

Major League Baseball is looking into a since-deleted tweet by longtime umpire Rob Drake, commissioner Rob Manfred said Wednesday.

Drake tweeted late Tuesday that he planned to buy an AR-15 rifle “because if you impeach MY PRESIDENT this way, YOU WILL HAVE ANOTHER CIVAL WAR!!! #MAGA2020,” according to a copy of the tweet obtained by ESPN.

The tweet, which was deleted soon after it was posted, followed one earlier in the night regarding the House of Representatives’ impeachment proceedings with President Donald Trump.

The other tweet read: “You can’t do an impeachment inquiry from the basement of Capital Hill without even a vote! What is going on in this country?”

Look, we certainly don’t want another CIVAL WAR, I think we can all agree on that.

Just a few words about this new Republican mantra about a secret star chamber to lynch the president without due process or the slightest chance to defend himself, the one that thirty Trump dead-enders stormed by force the other day to protect non-majoritarian democracy.  The impeachment vote in the House comes after the fact-finding depositions, and after public hearings, and then, if articles of impeachment are adopted,  there is a trial in the Republican majority Senate, where all due process rights are present for the accused.   The fact-finding phase is not the time for the president’s army of private and public lawyers to make his usual full, loud defense.  That time comes once he’s officially impeached.

Depositions are part of most legal proceedings, including impeachments.  There are lawyers for each side present at a deposition.   The prosecution is asking questions to get incriminating evidence.  The defense is objecting to questions beyond the scope of questioning the law allows.   The defense also asks questions that might elicit answers that can be used later to exculpate the person being deposed, or the person they are giving evidence about.  Republicans and Democrats on the committee act as these “lawyers” and both parties are present at these depositions.   Depositions are never public.

These closed door meetings (at one time demanded by Trump for the people he “allowed” to be questioned on a very limited basis, like Hope Hicks) are followed by public sessions with the same witnesses.   Republicans can make all the legal motions they like, right there on TV, can object to everything they find objectionable.  The answers they give in public, under oath, can then be compared to the answers they gave in the sworn, private session.  If their answers change, there is a strong inference of perjury and everybody gets very excited.    Depositions are a way of locking in the truth, particularly for nervous, lawyered up, evasive witnesses concerned about appearing loyal to a powerful official.

What the Democrats in the House are doing now is an impeachment inquiry.   Inquiry, dude.   There will be open, public, televised hearings in the House after this round of depositions.   Then the House will vote on articles of impeachment.  The impeachment proceeding, the trial that decides if the impeached person is removed from office, is conducted in the Senate, presided over by the corporatist jurist, the  self-proclaimed “balls and strikes” umpire, John Roberts.   The president will get all the process that’s due.

Even a fucking Cival Wor Buff ought to know that.   You give the obviously guilty varmint a fair, quick trial and then invite him as guest of honor to a damn neck-tie party!  Yee hah!