Repub-Speak

Alright, boys and girls, I know you have a dictionary or consult one online occasionally, but many words do not mean what you think they mean -- at least not as used by Republicans. An obvious example of this is, “Democrat Party.” There is no such thing as a Democrat Party; it is the Democratic Party. The list of words and terms below is partial and is meant to help you follow the impeachment hearings, the trial in the senate, and what could be called debates if you are inclined to dignify the arguments of the side that has no valid facts or evidence.

Coup, also known as a coup d'etat, is defined as: "[t]he sudden overthrow of a government, differing from a revolution by being carried out by a small group of people who replace only the leading figures.”

In Repub-Speak coup is defined as the impeachment and attempted removal from office of a POTUS who is also the leader of the Republican Party, regardless of how lawless, incompetent, compromised, and/or dangerous to this country and its laws that POTUS may be!

Impeachment: Is set forth in the constitution.  It is similar to a grand jury in that the House of Representatives prepares articles (one could say the charges) that are presented in a trial with the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court serving as the presiding judge and all of the Senators serving as the jury.

In Repub-Speak impeachment is a coup d'etat unless it is the impeachment of a Democratic President – preferably over some sexual transgression because descriptions of salacious behavior are so much fun.

Deep State: Apologists for Donald Trump like to babble about the deep state as part of their drain the swamp scenario and as part of the false claim that Trump is being persecuted by the triple digit IQ crowd. According to Wikipedia:

Deep State "... [c]onspiracy theorists believe that there is 'a hybrid association of elements of government and parts of top-level finance and industry that is effectively able to govern the United States without reference to the consent of the governed as expressed through the formal political process',[11] or consider the deep state to encompass corruption prevalent among career politicians and civil servants.[12]” (Emphases added)

The deep state theory is particularly helpful to Donald Trump at this time because it is non-elected, career civil servants who are now showing their commitment to the rule of law and the Constitution of the United States by obeying the lawful subpoenas from Congress and honestly testifying about what has been described as Trump's dirt for aid scheme in regard to the Ukraine. Unfortunately for Trump and the apologists trying the use the deep state conspiracy theory to discredit all witnesses in the impeachment hearings, the Civil Servants who have testified, at no small risk to themselves and their careers, have also displayed a dedication and an ethical code that tells us the Civil Service Act is serving us well. I might add here that Trump's Romneyesque approach to draining the swamp seems to assume that the swamp will drain itself in disgust if he keeps crapping in it. How many of the people close to Trump have been indicted, and/or pled guilty to committing crimes, or have been convicted of committing crimes? A corrupt president will appoint corrupt people to important positions, thereby creating the swampy conditions the right wing dumb asses say they object too and the Civil Service Act was designed to prevent to the extent that it can be prevented without forbidding presidents from appointing their cabinets and other members of their administrations.


Wisteblower is defined by Wikipedia as “... a person who exposes secretive information or activity that is deemed illegal, unethical, or not correct within a private or public organization.”

The person who blew the whistle on Trump linking a visit to the white house and military aid to the Ukraine with a publicly announced investigation of Burisma and the Bidens did so anonymously but in full accordance with the whistleblower protection acts. The Republicans said the Whistleblower's allegations were not based on direct evidence, that they were unreliable hearsay, and should not even be considered. But in defiance of Trump's repeated denials, Gordon Sondland, the ambassador to the European Union and what could be called the President's special envoy to the Ukraine, has described that linkage as a quid pro quo. Furthermore, Mr. Holmes testified that he heard Trump asking if President Zelensky agreed to investigate Biden.

Investigations: We all know what investigation means in normal usage, but as used in furtherance of political objectives (usually with the goal of digging up dirt that can be used against your opponent) investigation does not necessarily mean an attempt to uncover hidden or unknown facts. As Fiona Hill testified and our intelligence agencies have confirmed, Vladimir Putin and Russia have put out a false conspiracy theory that contends that it was the Ukraine that interfered with our 2016 election on behalf of Hillary Clinton. And a lousy job they did of it. So lousy, in fact, that no one with an IQ above eighty can believe that they even tried because the did not. This whole theory about Ukrainian interference in our election is utter nonsense propagated by Russia to deflect and draw attention away from the fact that Russia did interfere in the 2016 election on behalf of Putin's man ho, Donald Trump, and they are at this very moment trying to interfere with the election of 2020. Yet here we have Reublicans such as Diaper Devin Nunez screaming for the investigation of Ukrainian interferance in the 2016 election!

Burisma Holdings Limited is a holding company for a group of energy exploration and production companies based in Kyiv, Ukraine. It is a company with an unsavory reputation for corruption. But when Republicans talk about Burisma and corruption they are inferring that Joe Biden is part of the corruption because his son Hunter took a position on the board of Burisma after the corruption of that company was exposed. No one is arguing that Hunter Biden did not show bad judgment in taking that position. We all agree that, as the son of Vice President Biden, Hunter should have avoided even the appearance of creating a conflict of interest for his father. There is, however, absolutely no evidence that Hunter's position at Burisma had any influence on Joe Biden's actions let along any corrupt influence. Furthermore the falsity of the equivalencey the Republicans are implying between this and Trump trying to extort the aid of the Ukraine in furtherance of Trump's personal political goals is patently obvious.

Missing witnesses: The Republicans falsely claim they have not been allowed to call any witnesses. This is untrue; Messrs Morrison and Volker were witnesses the Republicans requested. Witnesses the Republicans claim they want to call are Hunter Biden and the whistleblower. They want to call Hunter Biden so they can send the hearings down a rabbit hole of false equivilancies and irrelevant distractions, and they want the whistleblower (who according to Republicans has nothing but hearsay to offer) in order to draw attention away from the real evidence by challenging what they insist is the source of the information that started the impeachment process. In lodging their complaints about not being able to call Hunter Biden and the whistleblower the Republicans are demonstrating the hypocrisy that has become a trademark of the twenty-first century Republican Party. Why won't Trump allow Mulvaney, Bolton, Pompeo, et al to testify, and why is the Trump administration fighting all requests and subpoenas for relevant documents, emails, etc.?

Impeachment And The Consatitution

Last week a right wing relative accused me of disparaging the political opinions of conservatives in general and him in particular. By conservatives he meant far right reactionaries, and I had to admit that he was right about my reaction to them. I simply cannot hide my disdain for the wacky conspiracy theories and total denials of all facts that are inconvenient to them. But in an effort to assuage his ruffled feelings, I apologized. He went into a right wing rant anyhow. The rant included telling me that Justin Trudeau is the bastard son of Fidel Castro, and he concluded by telling me to read the Constitution. At the risk of stating the obvious, he confirmed my worst suspicions about his political opinions. He also ignored a fact he was well aware of, which is that I can teach a class on the constitution. I responded by reminding him of that, and I added, “what are you going to do next, tell a professor of constitutional law to read Marbury v. Madison?”

After this encounter I could not help wondering why he told me to read the constitution when he knew about my education. I think the answer is that he could not help himself. Telling people to read the constitution has become a knee jerk reaction of the reactionaries who are no longer satisfied with waving the flag in your face. At first blush there appears to be a danger to them in using the constitution this way because people who know what the constitution says and have studied the debates and compromises that made it what it is are going to point out things that will refute some of the simplistic twaddle the right wing depends on to validate its ideology. Ah but never fear, the right wing is insulated from all inconvenient facts by their alternative universe; they have poisoned all the wells outside of that universe, and they simply deny any and all facts that do not comport with their beliefs. A perfect example of this is their lack of any reaction to Donald Trump calling the emoluments clause of the constitution "phony." The only thing I can conclude from this failure to defend the constitution from a lawless president is that it is the time and customs of the founders of our country that the right wing cherishes rather than the ideals and work product of our founders. In particular they (the reactionaries) want to go back to a time when white males had all of the privileges and ruled with impunity, and without admitting that that is what want they know that white male primacy is what our founding fathers intended. Fortunately, our founding fathers were wise enough to realize that their great work was imperfect, and they provided a mechanism for changing the Constitution as well as a way for us to remove a lawless, and/or incompetent president from office.

The best way to celebrate the good works of our founding fathers is not to enshrine the flaws in our constitution caused by the need to compromise on difficult issues such as slavery, but to change and perfect the constitution as we have done in the past -- so that it reflects the ideals of a free and democratic society, which includes racial, ethnic, and gender equality. It stands to reason that we must also protect our constitution and the rights it guarantees, including the sanctity of our elections and the checks and balances achieved by the separation of powers among the three branches of our government. One of the greatest fears of our founding fathers was that a President would try to usurp the powers granted to the other branches of government and defy the will of the electorate. Hence we see historical references to Republicans accusing Federalists of wanting to shape the American government to resemble the British monarchy.

In speaking of a well-constituted court for the trial of impeachments, Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist Paper 65:

“... The subjects of its jurisdiction are those offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust. They are of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated POLITICAL, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself.”

In Paper 66 he added: “... And it may, perhaps, with no less reason be contended, that the powers relating to impeachments are, as before intimated, an essential check in the hands of that body [meaning congress] upon the encroachments of the executive.” Thus we know that abuse of power is an impeachable crime!

Among the charges brought against Andrew Johnson and Richard Nixon is obstruction of Congress, which is in and of itself an impeachable offense and an abuse of power when used to defy lawful subpoenas or suppress the testimony of witnesses called by congress or the courts. Even if you set aside the Mueller Report and the evidence set forth therein, it is obvious that Donald Trump is guilty of obstructing congress in its duty to provide oversight of the executive branch, and an article of impeachment must be drawn up for obstructing congress in order to protect the oversight our constitution provides. Many of Trump's apologists are absurdly claiming that the summary of his now infamous call to Volodymyr Zelensky does not show that a publicly announced investigation digging up dirt on Joe and Hunter Biden as well as an investigation of whether it was Ukrainians rather than Russia that hacked the DNC in 2016 were preconditions for the arms Zelensky needed in order to protect his country from the aggression of the Russians. Anyone with an IQ above eighty who has read that summary knows better because the summary shows precisely that Quid Pro Quo! Furthermore, at the risk of sounding like a prosecutor, the House Intelligence committee will produce witnesses who will testify to that quid pro quo. We know this because many of those witnesses have given such testimony in depositions and the opening statements of those witnesses have been made public.

So what will this mean when Republicans switch to defending Trump by saying so what, these offenses do not rise to the level of impeachable offenses. Oh really? Extorting a foreign country to interfere in our elections by providing, perhaps even inventing, dirt on a presidential candidate would set the powdered wigs of our founding fathers on fire! It is exactly the sort of thing they feared most! It is a large part of why they provided impeachment and removal from office as a remedy. Trump is the most dangerous and lawless president ever. Move over Nixon, Trump should be the poster boy for impeachment.