Month: January 2020

It becomes hard to have a democracy if one party – the GOP – no longer feels even the slightest obligation to make real arguments, and has decided there is no penalty for such bottomless bad faith.

-Greg Sargent

Well, as of the last day of January 2020, Donald Trump may not officially be a king, but by refusing to allow witness testimony at his impeachment trial, Mitch “the Bitch” McConnell has confirmed the new name of Trump’s Party: The Banana Republicans.

“No! This isn’t a Banana Republic! It’s just a system where one party has all the power, one party enforces the election rules, one party makes all decisions, one party can break all the rules they insist everyone else follow, and the Leader of that party is a law unto himself because his cronies will let him get away with anything!

“TOTALLY NOT the same thing!”

I mean, we already knew given the deliberately high standard for removing an impeached official, and the party-line consensus, that you weren’t actually going to have a removal, but they could have at least TRIED not to make it look like such a complete setup. As it is, The Party of Trump went in the total opposite direction, doing everything it could to send the message, “we can do whatever the fuck we want, and you can’t do shit about it.”

(Not that any true Republican would ever sully the air with such crude, un-Christian language.)

First, in the arguments phase, Trump’s mostly Republican staff pool of lawyers came to say in so many words, he didn’t do it, if he did do it, you can’t prove it (because we wouldn’t provide evidence as required by law) and even if you can prove it, so what, he’s the president. But as in so many cases, it took a real leftist to provide a foundation for right-wing corruption and rescue them from their own lack of imagination. That liberal being Alan Dershowitz, famed defense attorney and Trump’s fellow traveler in the Jeffrey Epstein Frequent Flyer Club. Of all Trump’s defenders, Dershowitz made the most buzz by declaring in front of witnesses Wednesday that “If a president does something which he believes will help him get elected, in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment.” After getting his ass handed to him by public commentary, Dershowitz complained that he was misinterpreted, saying on Thursday, “They characterized my argument as if I had said that if a president believes that his re-election was in the national interest, he can do anything. I said nothing like that, as anyone who actually heard what I said can attest.”

Those two quotes are put close together. Saying “if a president believes that his re-election was in the national interest, he can do anything” is NOT in any way like the statement “if a president does something which he believes will help him get elected, in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment”?

Sorry, Alan, but the only reason your remarks were “misinterpreted” is that they were so irresponsibly broad that they could be interpreted any way you want.

The presumption of innocence in common law already exists. There is already an institutional respect for the president’s prerogatives. But Dershowitz goes out of his way to go beyond these presumptions and actively assert that the president is the standard of judgment, and thus in his trial, the defendant is one who sets the standard of judgment. And it’s all justified by the liberals’ magic phrase, “the public interest.” As long as YOU can set the standard for what consitutes the public interest, you can literally do anything you want, because it’s “in the public interest.”

Years – or maybe weeks – from now, every political prisoner, everybody who’s lost their job because of the president, everyone who’s ever had their lives ruined by the political campaign of the ruling party, can look up and give thanks and praise to America’s great legal mind, Alan Dershowitz- that great left-wing defender of free speech and civil rights, and sole author of the US Constitution, version 2.0. A document that has one Article, one section, one paragraph: “Donald Trump can do anything he wants, cause he’s the President and you’re not. The End.”
As in, The End of the Republic.

Of course, one expects this sort of relativism and chicanery from Dershowitz, but when Ken Starr is on the same legal team as Alan Dershowitz, “conservatives” really need to take stock of where they are and how they got there.

It actually went downhill from there, as during the rest of the senatorial question phase, the Trump defense team and their amen corner in the Senate acted as though “BURISMA” was a magic word that would strike them with lightning and give them superpowers.

Bringing up Hunter and Joe Biden – or Rand Paul’s stunt of asking Justice Roberts to name the whistleblower (oh, by the way, Fuck You, Rand Paul) – were attempts to do the same thing as the Ukraine pressure campaign – smear Donald Trump’s assumed general election opponent, and in the process smear and intimidate anybody who gets in the way. Well, if Hunter Biden, who was never a Trump employee, is relevant to this case because of what he did in Ukraine during the Obama Administration, then former Trump employee Paul Manafort is relevant to this case because of what he did in the Ukraine during the Obama Administration. After all, that’s a large part of why he’s in prison himself and Hunter Biden is not. As much love as Adam Schiff gets, he really should have pointed that out.

What this behavior demonstrated above all else is that Republicans are not disinterested public servants or even political associates of Trump. They are active co-conspirators in a criminal act.

The “silver lining” in this is that there is no pretending about that anymore. There is no pretending that Republicans care about anything other than their Leader and their donor class. They don’t care about the Constitution and they sure as hell don’t care about the people who vote for them.
And this was demonstrated by the start of the endgame. Late Thursday toward midnight Friday, the elder-statesman Senator Lamar Alexander (BR.-Tennessee) stated on his position on the modern world’s preferred medium of intellectual discourse: Twitter. In a 15-post tweetstorm, Alexander went over the facts: “It was inappropriate for the president to ask a foreign leader to investigate his political opponent and to withhold United States aid to encourage that investigation.” “There is no need for more evidence to conclude that the president withheld United States aid, at least in part, to pressure Ukraine to investigate the Bidens; the House managers have proved this with what they call a “mountain of overwhelming evidence.” “There is no need for more evidence to prove that the president asked Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden and his son, Hunter; he said this on television on October 3, 2019, and during his July 25, 2019, telephone call with the president of Ukraine.” And yet, in the same paragraph where he said, “I worked with other senators to make sure that we have the right to ask for more documents and witnesses, ” Alexander continued, “but there is no need for more evidence to prove something that has already been proven and that does not meet the U.S. Constitution’s high bar for an impeachable offense.”

It’s totally cowardly, of course, but at least it’s honest. None of this smarmy defense of “my sweet little boy could never ever ever do anything wrong.” It’s flat-out: We don’t NEED more evidence because the case is already proven. We’re just not going to acknowledge it.

And notice we go back to that old bit, “he did it, but it doesn’t rise to the level of an impeachable offense.” I don’t know if that sounds familiar to you, but it was the same defense that Democrats in the Senate made for Bill Clinton in 1998. I know how much Republicans hate the Clintons, but apparently they decided the only way to beat them was to become them.

And to continue with the candy-ass: “The question then is not whether the president did it, but whether the United States Senate or the American people should decide what to do about what he did.”

If “conservatives” are going to stamp down any dissent with “It’s a Republic, not a Democracy!” it begs the question: What is the point of a representative republic if the representatives are not going to vote their own minds? If you’re going to take the choice away from the public but then when called upon to decide, you say, “let the voters decide” – well, why do we NEED you?

“I believe that the Constitution provides that the people should make that decision in the presidential election that begins in Iowa on Monday. “

Oh, don’t worry, Lamar.

We will.

In wake of the New York Times conditionally endorsing not one but two Democrats for president this weekend, I was going to go over an analysis of where the still dozen-odd candidates stand before Iowa. But that’s gonna take me a little bit of time.

So I’ll mention a couple of current events in passing. First, on Tuesday January 21, the Senate proceeded with the impeachment trial of Donald John Trump, Viceroy of Russian North America. The main news in a trial that Mitch “the Bitch” McConnell desperately wants to be over with as soon as possible is that, after first announcing that arguments would only have 24 hours over two days to proceed – two 12-hour shifts starting at 1 pm – he relented and agreed to stretch the 24 hours over three days in 8-hour shifts.

Now, I would not expect a Senate with a Republican majority to remove a Republican president. In the last impeachment, a (slim) Republican majority failed to convict President Bill Clinton. The removal of an impeached president requires a very high standard, and it is unlikely to be met even if the Republicans were not a bunch of goosestepping party hacks determined to avoid even the most blatant facts to protect their political machine. They ARE, but the fact that McConnell made even this much concession indicates that enough sensible people in his party know that publicly announcing themselves as goosestepping hacks for a political machine might hurt their re-election campaigns.

This is another reason why McConnell, even more than Nancy Pelosi, didn’t want things to get to this point, because if she was politically obliged to push for impeachment (after having a set of undeniable facts), he is politically obliged to force an acquittal in denial of undeniable facts. And that means that when the Senate refuses to judge the facts, it becomes the Senate that is on trial, and their jurors are their voters. And this year there are 35 Senate seats up for grabs, and Republicans have to defend 23. Democrats only need to pick up a net four. As a practical matter, whoever is in charge makes the rules, but also as a practical matter, they at least want to pretend to the rule of law over partisan advantage, and the blatant assertion of bad-faith arguments only goes so far.

This issue of political bad faith touches on the other observation I had. The trial of course did not start on Monday because this Monday was the official three-day weekend for Martin Luther King Day. This also happened to be the day before the Virginia Commonwealth Senate approved, as previously announced, SB 240, a bill allowing the state to remove firearms from “persons posing substantial risk”. In response, various groups announced a rally on Martin Luther King Day to protest the bill. Prior to January 20, Governor Ralph Northam actually declared a state of emergency due to alleged threats from armed protestors. Well, the event came and went Monday, and everything proceeded rather peacefully. And while a lot of right-wing media, including of course Reason magazine, emphasized that people protesting for their rights ought not to be considered a huge threat to the system, various other media emphasized how most of the protestors went outside the designated no-guns public protest space to wear not only guns but camouflage military gear.

It simply demonstrates that this country really is two enemy camps, one of which is literally armed and the other of which is starting to think that’s a good idea.

Of course if you follow Antifa – or Rage Against the Machine – you know that having a regard for political self-defense is not exclusive to the Right. And while Antifa activists were at pains to avoid the Virginia rally “citing serious safety concerns” and to avoid being associated with the right-wingers, the fact that such leftists exist means that the various Facebook liberals who call gun-rights people “fascist” while insisting that Antifa have nothing in common with fascist tactics once again have to come to a reckoning with cognitive dissonance. Be that as it may, it was very easy for liberal media to tag the protestors as a bunch of wannabe paramilitary fascists, because that’s how they intended to present themselves. Home self-defense, let alone hunting, doesn’t require guerrilla-warfare displays, and you can’t be surprised when other people feel threatened by an armed show of numbers. Not only that, Dr. King was murdered, by a racist, with a gun, in the South, and choosing MLK Day to make such a display might come off as bad form.

Keep in mind, the only reason the Right (and incidentally aligned leftists) even had to have this protest is because Virginia’s government switched to a Democratic majority as of the last election (which in Virginia is held in odd-numbered years). So it can’t be surprising that once Democrats got elected they actually set out to keep their promises. Well, maybe it might surprise you if you kept chanting “Lock Her Up” and “Mexico Will Pay For The Wall” and yet Hillary isn’t locked up and Mexico isn’t paying for Trump’s wall. The fact that the election was just last year ought to indicate the strength of the Republican Party in what was once a reliably conservative state, and indicates that this is what we can expect in the future. So if gun rights are an issue to you – or if that is only one issue along with “fetus rights” and pro-business policy – it behooves you to not vote for a party that undermines its case by saying that the rest of the country is the enemy, their political rights are a threat to yours, and if you are not allowed to rule unchallenged, you may take it to the streets.

Oh, that reminds me, Trumpniks – you sick of winning yet?

Some songs NEVER go out of style.