Faking It:

Donald Trump is what happens when the side show barker becomes the show. Bad! So Bad! Believe me!

                                                                                                                                                                                                   

                                     

The Trumped up populist (aka the President and faker in chief) is babbling again (in 140 characters or less) about “Fake News.” So fake!

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

Mika B bleeding from face lift. So fake. Talking about facts - not alternate facts, but real facts. The National Enq. will get her 4 that.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                          

Forget about how insulted women feel over Trump's comments about Mika! Although many members of his party feel compelled to express outrage because of how women are reacting, those Republicans actually regard his tweets to be mere idio[t]syncrasies, and they will support him because he is their idiot.

Meanwhile back in the real world of complete thoughts and full sentences the Donald now advocates repealing “Obama Care” before passing a bill to replace it. This will deprive tens of millions of people of health insurance and allow insurance companies to reinstate all the exclusions and coverage caps that made health insurance useless when people needed long term care or very expensive treatment. What Trump is advocating is like blowing up your house and telling you, as you stand amidst the rubble wearing nothing but your underwear, that you are going to love your new house if you do not die from exposure before it is built. That is how obviously desperate Trump is for anything he can call a victory!

And how are members of Trump's party reacting to his bellows of desperation? The usual suspects are echoing the bellows. In regard to the investigations of Trump they are also acting like dirty diapers covering Trump's beleaguered ass! This is not good for the country!

The Washington Examiner reported that: “[I]n a letter to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe sent Tuesday and made public Wednesday, Sens. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., request "all proposed and final applications for surveillance warrants."

I do not think Rachael Maddow was being paranoid when she said: “[t]hese Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee are now asking about why you started that investigation, what you have, what you submitted to the court, how you got your warrants? What they appear to be up to is trying to discredit the FBI for having started this investigation at all. What they are implying is that the whole FBI investigation all stemmed from that dossier of allegations against Trump and his campaign that one that was published in Buzzfeed in January, the Christopher Steele dossier. They’re saying implicitly that dossier of materials in unproven and suspect and that that’s what the FBI’s whole investigation is based on, and therefore, it’s nonsense.”

In other words this outrageous demand for highly classified information is an attempt to undermine an ongoing investigation of national importance.  Some would call that obstruction of justice.  Whether you agree with Ms. Maddow or not, her reasonable suspicions speak volumes about the need for a special committee to conduct an impartial investigation.

The Villains Villainize

Yesterday I posted on Daily Kos a diary entry entitled "Chasing Unicorns In Georgia." In that piece I was using the defeat the Democrats suffered in the special election in Georgia's congressional district six as a metaphor for all of the recent special elections taking place because of Trump appointing Republican congressmen to cabinet posts. My point was that all those elections were in safe, dead red districts. The defeats in those districts are disappointing only because our optimism made us expect unrealistic results. In spite of the demographics none of those districts were swing districts, and they are not indicative what we can expect in the mid-term elections where many swing districts are up for grabs.

Ah but the optics! In politics appearance is all important, don't you know? So say the pundits. And the pants wetters are now looking for someone to blame for the defeats and for lessons we can learn from the defeats. Perhaps that is why many of the people commenting on my post on Daily Kos seized upon the following paragraph:

“Supposedly some of the most effective advertisements against the Democratic Party's congressional candidate, Jon Ossoff, were the ads trying to tie him to Nancy Palosi. Interesting who the Republicans choose to villainize, isn't it? And what was Nancy Pelosi's great crime? She is widely considered to be one of the most effective Speakers of the House ever. She managed to get passed by the House Of Representatives a very impressive body of legislation such as Dodd Frank and the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. What legislation did John Boehner usher through the House? Well, we had an almost monthly repeal of the Affordable Health Care Act, two government shutdowns, and a downgrading of America's credit rating because of the refusal of the house to raise the debt ceiling in a timely manner. Paul Ryan's record is even worse than John Boehner's record. I guess the Republicans do not like competent politicians. All right, in all fairness I guess I should say they do not like competent politicians who actually get things done that Republicans do not want done: things like health care reform, raising the minimum wage, protecting our economy from the abusive behavior of Wall Street and investment banks, and/or protecting women or members of the LBGT community from employment discrimination and wage discrimination. The bottom line is that Republicans hate Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton because they are very good at what they do, and the government should not be doing anything at all according to Republicans!”

Before some of you get your panties in a wad over what I have just written let me say that we should improve our approach to the upcoming elections, and yes, I would like to see some young, dynamic leaders such as Barack Obama emerge to carry our party forward. But that does mean we should replace someone as capable as Nancy Pelosi because the Republicans have succeeded in demonizing her. That is cowardice.  We must stand by our people no matter how good the Republicans are at demonizing them, and I will grant you that the Republicans are very good at it. They started very early with Hillary Clinton and have spent decades castigating her for faults and offenses exaggerated and/or imagined. They have also succeeded at portraying Nancy Pelosi as an arrogant, liberal intellectual. In Republican world knowing too much is worse than knowing nothing. The Republicans believe ignorance is bliss because they blissfully exploit the ignorant! But that is an aside and another topic. My point is that we must realize that Nancy Pelosi is not the problem, and we must fight back!

Do not let the Republicans make it a battle of personalities, make them address the issues.  When they castigate you for voting with Nancy Pelosi, choose the ACA, the increase in the Minimum Wage, etc. and ask those bozos if they appose affordable heath insurance and living wages. Remind the voters that it is policy that will determine whether we will have an economy that will work for them, and that starving just because you do not care for someone who is sitting at the table is not a wise thing to do! That is not an intellectual statement unless you think hunger is something you have to go to college to learn. Hunger is actually something college grads and working people share. For college grads it is a post graduate coarse they inadvertently enrolled in when they took out their student loans. For the working men and women in this country hunger is a condition brought on by the jobs they lost and the wages that have not kept up with inflation.  Trump exploited the anger over that, and he is now demonstrating what everyone should already know, to wit that wrecking the car will not make it run better.

Ignore the anti-intellectualism.  Ask yourself why Bernie Sanders is not considered a know it all intellectual? I know some wag will probably say because “socialism” is a bogeyman the Republicans like better. That is probably true, but in using that bogeyman they are still fighting on the ground of issues, and that never favors them. We must make this about jobs, health care, and increasing the opportunities for all.  

Lordy, We're Screwed!

All right, the title is a play on James Comey's comment of “[l]ordy, I hope so” in regard to the possibility of Trump having “tapes” of the conversation in which Trump asked Comey for loyalty. The thing is that the possibility of Trump's Presidency ending well is as likely as Trump turning over his tax returns or recordings of his conversations with James Comey. I hate to be so gloomy about it, but there are no good options available to us at this time.

I recently had a conversation with someone who said the election is over and we should accept the results. But the investigation of Russia's meddling in our Presidential election is not an investigation of the results of that election or an attempt to overturn the election. Most people realize that no one has come up with a way to determine what the results would have been but for Russia's meddling. Which means there is no reasonable way to dispute the results. The question of whether there was collusion between Trump's campaign and Russia is therefore a question of criminality that is separate and apart form any questions regarding the legitimacy of the election.  But our inability establish a causal relationship between the results of the election and Russia's meddling does not mean that we can or should ignore the fact that Russia's acts were an attack on this country. That attack by a foreign power and anyone who aided and abetted the attacker pose a serious threat to our democracy and the very foundation of our political system.

Lets apply a bit of logic here. The question of whether Trump should be impeached is not partisan because the Democrats have nothing to gain by removing him. Granted that Trump is a horrible President, but he has no real ideology or agenda. It is Paul Ryan and other Republicans in the House of Representative that are trying to repeal Obama care and deprive millions of people of health insurance. It is Paul Ryan and other members of congress who have the desire and power to eliminate the safeguards provided by Dodd Frank and restore “too big to fail.”  Even in regard to enriching the rich at the expense of the poor and the middle class, it is Republican members of congress who want it. Trump merely wants to further enrich the rich; he does not care whether the tax breaks he wants to give to himself and other rich people are paid for or not. I will grant you that Trump is a dangerous demagogue who panders to the fear and loathing of the xenophobic reactionaries, but he has no idea of how to get anything done in Washington. That is why he is more than willing to go along with what the Republican leadership wants even when it breaks some of his campaign promises. He just wants to take the credit for what is done and to pass along the blame when what is done turns out to be unpopular. As Ted, the Canadian Texas turd, Cruz would have said during the primaries, "Some outsider, eh!"

Unfortunately here is what will happen if we impeach and remove Trump from office. Mike Pence, a right wing Republican, will succeed Trump. Right now Trump is mired in scandal and controversy, and his ineptitude combined with his penchant for demonstrating how unsuited he is to govern makes it almost impossible for him to get any legislation through congress. Mike Pence, on the other hand, is a competent politician who can get things done. The one trait he shares with Trump is that the things Mr. Pence favors doing are things that will ream the people who voted for Trump along with the rest of us! What I find so frustrating about that is that we still need to impeach Trump because he abuses his power, puts his own financial gain ahead of the best interests of this nation, and acts like Putin's man ho! To put it simply, Trump poses a serious threat to this country and its democracy because he acts more like the ruler of a banana republic rather than the elected leader of the Great Republic.

I sincerely believe Trump will be removed from office before the end of his term. I will take no joy in that. It is an extreme but necessary remedy. My greatest hope is that the American people will learn from this debacle, and that they will give the Democrats control of congress so that the Republicans cannot cause another economic crash and erase all of the progress we have made under President Obama.