This would be bad enough — a stolen election, autocratic rule by gutless criminal, a continuing pitch toward permanent minority rule — without a worldwide pandemic piling onto our misery. But, at least, the pandemic revealed that our dire circumstances were even more dire than we knew.
It’s probably too much to hope for that the villains who took down America would be “great” villains — world class villains worthy of our respect. FFS, they will have taken out the greatest experiment in human self government ever. They must be geniuses to have done it!
Um, no actually. Not a one of them even knows a genius. Geniuses wouldn’t get anywhere near these people for fear they’d find some way to leech IQ points. What Rick Wilson said is truer every day: Everything Donald Trump Touches Dies. Trump isn’t good at anything — including how he’s destroying America. He’s not doing this with any expertise or panache — he’s doing it like the rapist he is. Forcing it. Forcing it regardless of what we do or say.
Everyone who comes into contact with Trump walks away not just dead but a schmuck. Everyone knows this is coming. Either you said “Not to me, it won’t” — and you were wrong, SCHMUCK!” — or you willingly crawled into bed with Donald J. Trump and you’re the worst kind of schmuck.
The incompetence on top of the bad faith, bad acting, bad everything — that’s why we all walk around feeling gut-punched. The relentlessness is the point. Schmucks are relentless. They’re gutless and insensitive and over-bearing and conceited. They’re the person who makes you curse yourself because you refuse to get violent cos that asshole needs a good ass-kicking.
You know you’ve just encountered a schmuck because regardless of what you did to get stuck in their shit or free of it, their shit’s now all over you. What a schmuck!
We have schmucks writing laws, schmucks pushing through schmuck judges, schmucks wrecking the environment and violating other peoples’ rights. We have schmucks in the media telling us both sides do it (when they absolutely do not) and schmucks out in the streets — some armed to the teeth cos they want their haircut, damn it, and you can’t stop them.
America now does things for schmuck reasons because schmucks control virtually all levers of power except the House. Scmucks were told a pandemic was coming but did nothing about it because, being schmucks, they planned to profit off the pandemic first and foremost. Those same schmucks, we should point out, had already sold us out to Russia (and Saudi Arabia and Turkey and the UAE and Israel and who knows who else) because — say it together now: they’re schmucks.
We now live in a schmuck-topia run by schmucktocrats. Nothing good ever happens because nothing ever gets done for the right reason. What the schmucks want us to do — what they expect us to do — is give in to them. Do the schmucky thing.
The difference between good storytellers and bad storytellers is good storytellers know that a satisfying story will always answer the most important question of all about any character: WHY? Why did the character do what they did to propel the story forward?
Important distinction: “Just because” is not an adequate answer.
Funny thing? “Just because” is the answer 90% of our press seems to accept as “why” Donald Trump does what he does. Why does Donald Trump treat Vladimir Putin like a god? “Just because”.
Why do the Republicans let Donald Trump get away with dismantling the Constitution and the Rule Of Law right before our very eyes? “Just because”.
Why did Trump wait almost two months before doing a goddamned thing about the coronavirus pandemic coming at us? Why did he insist on America buying huge quanties of hydroxychloroquine even though we had no hard data that it was efficacious? “Just because”.
Weird, huh, that none of those “just bceauses” feels even remotely satisfying. Or true.
Take it from a professional storyteller — who relies on getting characters right because the instant we get a character wrong, the audience will bail — no one in the whole history of the world has ever done anything “just because”. They may not have been able to articulate what motivated them, but something motivated them. Even existential boredom — as a cause — shouts “motivation!”
There are myriad answers to WHY Donald Trump does what he does. None of it is a mystery. It is ludicrous that even now there are “journalists” who ask themselves, “Hmmm, I wonder why Trump did that?” as if a mountain range of data didn’t answer that question to a very fine point. Trump’s father and grandfather were unsavory men. Everything about Trump’s own personal history is redolent of bullshit and clumsy concoction.
Everyone in Manhattan knows the truth about Donald Trump — what he is (a con man) and what he isn’t (rich). FFS — as Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in August 2017 (when the Republicans in control were doing everything they could to undermine the Steele Dossier) — while doing their due diligence BEFORE BEGINNING their formal oppo research on Donald Trump (as they were hired to do by the Republican Washington Free Beacon), what they found in publicly available material (repeat — IN PUBLICLY AVAILABLE MATERIAL — accessible by anyone in the public and everyone in the news media) convinced them that Donald Trump had been laundering Russian mob money through his Atlantic City casinos.
Was anyone who watched Trump’s casinos GO bankrupt at the time thinking anything else? Of course not! We should ask (another time) — WHY did/does our main stream news media LET Donald Trump get away with so much obvious criminality over the course of his lifetime? What’s up with THAT? As I said — another time.
The answer to WHY? where Trump is concerned has always been there. It’s not hard. All one has to do is accept it (hell, Trump’s been confessing it all along!) Donald Trump is corrupt. Always has been. We don’t have to keep proving it. It’s as much a stone cold fact as “we are carbon-based life form”. Yes, we are. That is 100% correct.
Also 100% correct and 100% verifiable — Donald Trump has a long-standing relationship with Russia, Russian mobsters, Russian intelligence and Russian corruption. If we took what we have — in public — and took it to a civil trial (where all we need is the preponderance of the evidence — 51%), we’d win hands down. If we took it to a criminal trial — where we have to be dead certain?
Same result. We’ve got receipts. In our hands. We simply refuse to acknowledge that fact.
WHY, I wonder.
There’s not much the average citizen can do — even if they shout their heads off on Twitter to lots likes. We don’t have the kind of megaphone that MSNBC or CNN has. We don’t, most of us, have the followers that your average mediocre reporter does. Our voices simply don’t “broadcast” as wide as a working journalist’s does.
But, those journalists should know that We The People have deep concerns about how the Fourth Estate is failing to live up to its Constitutionally mandated obligation to be the final check on power and its abuse. Whether it’s lack of imagination, incompetence, lack of talent or curiosity, or just plain cowardice and corruption — they are failing us. And the tell is that strange refusal to ever ask “WHY?”
Why does Trump do what he does? Why did Mitch McConnell violate every “norm” imaginable to hijack the judiciary (oops — just answered my own question — silly me — Mitch did what he did TO HIJACK THE JUDICARY – for the very purpose he’s using it now!)
Why did Lindsey Graham do the strange back flips he did about Trump? Why does Devin Nunes behave the way he does? Why does Bill Barr regularly violate the spirit of the law like Brett Kavanaugh pumped up on beer at a frat party? Why did the Senate refuse to meet its obligation to America and convict Donald Trump of corruption?
“Just because”?
C’mon now. We all know the answers to these questions — even our main stream news media. When we turn off the cameras and get as up close and personal as social distancing allows — I betcha the overwhelming majority of them WILL say out loud what the rest of America has been screaming for years now: Donald Trump is a fully owned asset of Vladimir Putin & Russia.
And Saudi Arabia. And China. And the UAE. And Turkey. And Israel. And who knows who else.
We would have gotten to the end of this awful story we’re all living inside of eons ago if our news media had just asked “Why” and stuck to their guns about getting an answer before moving on to anything else. “WHY are Mexicans rapists?” “Why do you grab pussies?”
Hey, even ask WHY “but her emails” — especially now, in hindsight — with every member of the Trump family using private email servers just like they accused HRC of doing. Yes, please — ask “WHY?”
I’ll answer my own question — WHY does our main stream news media persist in doing this? Because “both sides do it” has distorted everything. If both sides do it, they both do it for the same reason: “politics”. See? Easy? No more worrying about the truth — the real WHY people do what they do.
We take “integrity” for granted. We take our own for granted — that’s for sure. We shouldn’t. Instead, we should be protecting our integrity like a mother protecting her babies. Integrity is the only thing standing between us and corruption.
Integrity and corruption are literal opposites. They gave literally nothing in common. The moment integrity even looks in corruption’s direction — as if to consider it? Can we really look at integrity the same way again, knowing that it was tempted? What about next time (when we’re not watching)? Will the lure be just enough to compromise integrity — even if just a little?
See the problem? There is no “just a little” where compromising one’s integrity is concerned. Integrity is an all or nothing proposition. You got it or you don’t.
I defy anyone to name a Republican with integrity.
You can’t. Now ask “why?”
The GOP’s integrity problem didn’t start with Donald Trump. In “Both Sides Do It” world, Democrats are just as capable of being corrupt. And Democrats have been and are now corrupt. But let’s talk scale.
Bernie Madoff is a thief. So is the character Jean Valjean from Les Miserables. One stole billions (albeit from billionaires) while the other stole bread to feed hungry people. Both Sides Do It, see? And yet, they don’t.
We’re talking minnows versus whale sharks. Let’s stop wasting our time, okay? Republican corruption goes deeper than just ordinary greed. The Republican money — the Kochs, the Mercers — made a calculated decision to control America’s politics so as to prevent it from reflecting who America really is and what America really wants. Their goal is permanent minority rule — make no mistake. To achieve this, with their hold on the Senate and a willing lieutenant in Mitch McConnell, the RW money (prior to 2016) set out to hijack the judiciary. They denied Barack Obama more than a hundred lifetime federal judge appointments, even denying Merrick Garland so much as a hearing.
Mitch wanted “the American People” to “choose the next SCOTUS judge while refusing to let the POTUS We The People overwhelming elected to do that very thing. This was bullshit. This was a power grab. And as we learned in Jane Mayer’s excellent piece on Mitch McConnell in the New Yorker, Mitch KNEW that lots of foreign players were actively engaged in altering the outcome of the 2016 election.
Mitch, don’t forget, refused to let Barack Obama tell We The People the truth in September 2016 about what Russia was up to. Mitch threatened to go nuclear, screeching about how Obama was “politicizing the intelligence”. No, Mitch, what Obama wanted to do was tell America the truth. What YOU wanted to do was be corrupt.
Now, here’s the deal — and we have to stick to it — but we have to acknowledge, going in, that it’s going to be hard. The Rule Of Law is or it isn’t. It plays by the same “rules” as Integrity. The instant we make an exception to the Rule Of Law (invariably for someone rich or powerful), it’s just a matter of time (and continuing corruption — because it follows as naturally as water running down a hill) before the whole structure collapses. Again.
No exceptions. For anyone Period.
That means the moment anyone tries to take advantage of anyone else or of the system itself, we investigate them, prosecute them (as warranted), sentence them, punish them and (if it’s in the cards) rehabilitate them — all fairly.
In the case of the Republican Party — all those people without an ounce of integrity — that’s going to hurt. A lot. Considering what they’ve done and the fact that every last one of them has at least something to answer for (even Mitt Romney has “inklings” of what Mitch McConnell is really up to and has not gone to the FBI or other “proper authorities”), the return of the Rule Of Law will dictate the end of the Republican Party.
Well, either it will be the “end” of the GOP or it will a null set as a political party — a party with literally no one in it.
Who would want to run for office as a Republican when the Republican Brand is the Corruption Brand? Going forward, it’s going to be hard enough finding Republicans who aren’t either dead or knocked down a few pegs by coronavirus. We all know what the investigations of the Trump response will turn up: a miasma of personal financial gain being used to leverage American foreign policy for even more personal financial gain — all in the middle of a catastrophe. And we all know that the Republican Party has enabled every last bit of it.
Just like integrity is all or nothing, so is corruption. Donald Trump may be the most corrupt human in history. That’s hyperbole. There’ve been plenty of corrupt assholes to equal Donald Trump. Our problem is none of those assholes ever stole the American presidency.
There’s nothing to lose and everything to gain from making “Anti-Corruption” one of the central themes of the Democratic Party’s 2020 campaign. Aside from the corrupt, no one wants corruption.
I’m old enough to remember when Republicans called themselves “the party of personal responsibility” without immediately laughing their asses off at the absurdity of calling themselves that. Even when they might have been personally responsible, there were always caveats. Republicans were responsible with everyone else’s lives, habits and sexual organs.
People who judge others so relentlessly are always hypocrites. Comes with the territory — and the DNA.
Republicans judge others because all those others aren’t Republicans. Even if they are “Republican” by political choice, the absolute truth is, if you ask a “real” Republican about “those” Republicans? They’re more “mascots” than “Republicans”. They’re what Republicans use to “sell” the idea that they’re diverse. The fact that there are so few of those “other” Republicans says a lot — about them. They’re not forward-thinkers, they’re sell-outs.
Republicans are the party of unmitigated, unrestrained, relentless greed. They’re greedy for money — but also power. The RW Money — the Koch Brothers especially — recognized a while ago that conservatism was facing demographic oblivion. A rapidly diversifying citizenry meant — over time — more power for the diverse citizenry and less power for the shrinking white minority.
White people were not going to let that happen without a fight. And here we are.
If Republicans are good at anything (and we know governing isn’t one them), it’s marketing. Being cynical shits who’d make Machiavelli blush at their soullessness, they have no compunction about lying to get a vote. In her excellent piece on Mitch McConnell in the New Yorker, Jane Mayer cites multiple examples of McConnell cynically telling voters he’d do one thing when he fully intended to do the diametric opposite. McConnell openly admitted to “pandering” for votes.
Republicans will say literally anything — not just to get elected, but to “stay” elected. If they thought they could get away with canceling the election right here, right now, they’d do it — because (as Trump himself said out loud) elections are bad for Republicans — especially when more Americans vote. If EVERY American voted as a habit, I bet Republicans would already be lying beside the Whigs in the graveyard of American History.
In 2016, Mitch McConnell knew he was serving America a bullshit cocktail. He KNEW for a fact what Russia was doing; he refused to let We The People in on the secret — that Russia was actively engaged in perverting the coming election in order to make Donald Trump and not Hillary Clinton POTUS. The Russians voted in our election — and McConnell knowingly let them.
Even as we teeter, McConnell continues to ply us with bullshit. Mayer points out that McConnell really believes in nothing other than money and power. Even his marriage to Elaine Chao is a cynical money grab (McConnell told an acquaintance after divorcing his first wife “One of the things I’ve got to do is marry a rich woman, like John Sherman Cooper did”.
Norman Ornstein — a political scientist at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute — puts it bluntly in Mayer’s piece: McConnell “will go down in history as one of the most significant people in destroying the fundamentals of our constitutional democracy… There isn’t anyone remotely close There’s nobody as corrupt, in terms of violating the norms of government.”
McConnell long ago committed himself to bringing the Koch Brothers’ plan to take over America’s politics — that is how Mayer herself puts it — to fruition. To do that, once he achieved the power that Senate Majority Leader possesses, McConnell began to destroy the Senate as an institution, the judicary as a separate branch of government and America as the greatest experiment in self-government ever.
McConnell — and the Republican Party he effectively leads (Trump doesn’t lead the party) — have behave no differently than a rapist feeding a victim a roofie. Maybe that explains the strange, out-of-body feelings we’re all experiencing. Maybe that explains why we feel like we’re resisting as hard as we can yet nothing seems to stop the assault.
McConnell ally says Senate won't take up House #coronavirus bill until after recess. “The Senate will act when we come back and we have a clearer idea of what extra steps we need to take,” Sen. Lamar Alexander told reporters.
It’s entirely possible — since no one knows how pervasive coronavirus is in the US since we have almost no test kits available — that the virus has already spread throughout America which will cause the Senate to NOT return as expected leaving all that vital legislation right where all the OTHER vital legislation Moscow Mitch still refuses to bring to the Senate floor.
This is after Mitch officially killed American Democracy dead-dead-dead, having completely undermined the legislative branch’s ability to oversee the executive branch. I guess all that’s needed now is one more sham election (stolen with Russia’s help — and now China’s & Saudi Arabia’s & Israel’s…) to sell the bullshit that Trump’s as legitimate as legitimate can be — and it’s just how it is that a shrinking white minority rules a diverse majority by fiat.
Mitch is the same treasonous MoFo who refused (at the September 2016 Gang Of 8 meeting at the White House) to let We The People in on the secret that Russia was working over time to make Trump president. He’s the same treason turtle who got rid of the sanctions on Oleg Deripaska (who was sanctioned for what he did to election 2016) so Oleg could drop a $300 million Russian aluminum factory on a chronically poor part of Mitch’s chronically poor (cos chronically stupid) state. That was TREASON, Mitch.
T R E A S O N .
Mitch knows — Karma’s got him in its sights. And Karma’s gonna be all over Mitch McConnell like a bitch.
Moscow Mitch snubbed at Elijah Cummings memorial service. Just a teeny-tiny taste of the Karma to come, Mitch…
The reason Donald Trump is POTUS to begin with is because Mitch refused – at a September 2016 Gang of Eight meeting convened at the Obama White House to let the American People in on the secret — the reason the Gang of Eight was hastily convened — that our IC had ample PROOF that RUSSIA was actively attacking our election in order to put Trump in the White House.
Mitch refused to let We The People in on it. He threatened Obama that if Obama told America what was really happening, he, Mitch, would insist that Obama was politicizing the intel for political reasons — to help Hillary Clinton win the election. This was bullshit of course. Mitch was betraying We The People on behalf of his Russian paymasters.
Mitch McTreason whined on the senate floor a few weeks ago how being called a “traitor” gave him a turtle sad. His speech gave new meaning to the word “hypocrisy”. Mitch saw to it personally that the sanctions levied against Oleg Deripaska for personally participating in Russia’s assault upon the 2016 election were lifted so that Oleg could drop $200 million and an aluminum factory on Kentucky.
Mitch will insist this is about 600 plus jobs for hard scrabble Kentuckians. That would be bullshit. Yeah, yeah — unemployment in Kentucky, a very poor state. Sorry, but screw them, screw their jobs and screw that factory. The factory itself is a deliberate attempt by Russia to create a beachhead INSIDE our politics. Why in hell’s name would we allow a foreign adversary to create an entity that controls the fate of Americans on American soil? Now they can threaten to pull out their factory if they don’t get what THEY want from our politics.
And whattaya know — a few days ago, Russia approached 8 other states with similar offers of factories or financial assistance. There’s a reason behind the thinking “Don’t shit where you eat”. It’s pretty sound actually.
Mitch just took a giant tortoise-sized dump on American Democracy. It wasn’t Mitch’s first time doing it either.
Mitch thinks it’s “partisan” to NOT let foreign countries undermine our democracy by destroying the integrity of our voting system. I wonder if Mitch thinks that because he’s owned lock, stock & bourbon barrels by Russia — same as every other Republican except even more so. Mitch is even more treason-y because his Wife — Elayne Chao — is as corrupt as he is (and probably just as compromised, she by the Chinese spy agencies).
Mitch NEEDS foreign interference in our election to either 1) get him the results he needs (permanent minority rule) or 2) destroy our ability to verify any future election’s results as free, fair or even valid. This should not be a revelation: Mitch McConnell is one of the biggest (if not THE biggest) villains EVER in American history.
That’s not hyperbole.
Remember — Mitch even went out of his way to keep Russia’s intense partisan involvement in OUR ELECTION a secret from We The People (the ‘Gang Of 8’ meeting at the WH — September 2016 — the IC informs 4 GOP Congressional leaders & 4 Democratic Congressional leaders that Russia is actively trying to swing the election to Donald Trump – and Mitch McConnell says that he won’t tolerate informing the American People – that he’ll insist Obama is ‘politicizing the intelligence’). Mitch insisted WE stay in the dark while his party conspired with a hostile foreign government to pull off a soft coup d’etat.
That’s some pretty awful Karma Mitch has created for himself. Hmmmm… bet it means — when that Karma boomerangs — as Karma always does — that it will fly back at Mitch with a real vengeance.
Now, if I were ‘In Control’ of Karma — and I could create a ‘Karma Tree’ that would guide all of Mitch’s future incarnations — based on what he REALLY deserves — Mitch’s Karma would go something like this…
Mitch dies (hold off on breaking out the champagne — for now). And he comes back as THIS — ‘Mitch McConnell: Toilet Brush‘ —
But here’s the ‘rub’ — ‘MITCH THE TOILET BRUSH‘ lives HERE —
Yeah — even worse than ‘The Worst Toilet In Scotland’…
A lot worse, it turns out — because THIS is the REFUGEE CAMP where Mitch’s Toilet lives — and CHOLERA just broke out all across the camp…
Yeah — CHOLERA.
And there’s already a LINE to use Mitch’s Toilet (and every last person in line has EXPLOSIVE DIARRHEA) —
And that line goes on…
And on…
And on…
And STILL, it gets worse for Mitch — Cos THIS is the creature at the very endof that line…
And it doesn’t make ‘dainty’ piles like THIS —
Nope — it produces an endless stream of foul-smelling poison as toxic as Mitch’s ‘soul’.
And just as Mitch sees how massive and unending that STREAM OF LIQUID SHIT IS—
He wakes up — and realizes it was all in his head — A DAYDREAM!
And that makes Mitch happy (even happier than Koch Money does when it lines his pockets — and that’s a lot of happy).
Everything, Mitch realizes, is back to normal. And he turns to go about what he was doing (before that awful daydream) and he reaches out TO SHAKE THE HAND of THIS MAN —
And the KARMA TREE starts all over again…
Forever and ever and ever…
Hey, Karma — call me — I bet we can work something out to everyone’s mutual satisfaction (and improved Karma)…
Shits N Giggles Karma Bonus Points — Mitch needs to answer why his military records are sealed — and why the word SODOMY makes him uneasy… Hey, Karma: Three, two, one — GO!
Aside from all around assholery, Donald Trump is “good at” exactly nothing.
If not for Tony Schwartz’s skill as a writer, we wouldn’t see any art whatsoever in Trump’s dealings. We’d see corruption and criminality. If not for Mark Burnett inventing the character of Trump, Master Deal Maker — I doubt even Russia could have made Trump president.
As has been well-documented, Trump comes from a family of con men and petty criminals, cowards and racists, men and women incapable of forming healthy human bonds with anyone — or anything aside from money. Think Fred Trump respected his son (as Trump insists was the case)? Good luck finding any proof of it.
There’s far more evidence that Fred Trump saw Don-Don as a lost cause. A criminal saw his son as being too inept to be a “good” criminal. The best Donald Trump could ever hope to be — in his father’s eyes — was a mediocre criminal. Even Fred Trump saw how banal Donald Trump was.
The Hitlers of the world don’t arise from hell. They arise from ordinary circumstances. They’re broken, to be sure. But, aside from being broken, they’re not good at anything. They’re not educated in anything. They’re not capable of anything.
Is Trump articulate? Is he clever? Is he observant? Is he deeply knowledgeable — about his own business even? No — he’s not. He’s mediocre at best. Banal.
Trump’s no Bond Villain. Ernst Stavro Blofeld he ain’t. More like Schmoe-feld. He’s the bitch in this equation. Ask Vladimir Putin…
That’s what makes what the Republicans are doing so appalling. It’s not like they’re following a master mind off the cliff.
They’re following Donald J Trump ffs.
If they didn’t deserve it so much, I’d almost feel sorry for the Republicans. I’m quite sure I won’t feel a bit sorry when we get to the punishment phase of the proceedings.
When you put your name on something, you damned well better stand by it. I hope the Trumps are ready to stand by what’s in that bottle with their name on it.
The Trump doesn’t so much have a “nose ” as an unpatriotic pong with acrid notes of corruption and nepotism.
When swirled, the Trump wine didn’t. Swirl. It sat there and insisted it WAS swirling. Strange, I thought, that a wine would lie about something so easily disproven.
There are hints of money laundering and fraud (that are all backed up later). If anything, the nose is Adultery Forward.
The first taste is offputting. Where you expect fruit, you get bullshit – and lots of it. Then fecklessness. Then waves of racism, bigotry and genetic ignorance.
Then one’s taste buds go completely numb. Mine haven’t come back yet. I fear it’s because everything Trump touches dies — including one’s taste buds.
The finish is all treason.
Good thing you get to spit this shit out.
For what it’s worth – Here’s an actual review of Trump wines. They weren’t as bad as colored lighter fluid — but not by much.
