Are You Willing to Crawl Over Broken Glass to Dump Trump?

The New Hampshire primary has come and gone, and while Bernie Sanders got the most votes, the real winners are the nihilists who pop up and proclaim that, whatever the scenario, all is lost. 

Breathless pinheads are in full angst mode on the op ed pages and cable news media because the so-called moderate wing of the Democratic Party hasn’t united behind the particular candidate they believe can defeat Donald Trump.

Twitter trolls and their doppelgangers are busy spinning conspiracies about how “The Man” is sabotaging “The Movement” and sowing cynicism about the prospect of unseating the incumbent unless their candidate emerges as the victor. This is often expressed as “if [blank] wins, they’re not voting in November.”

I have consistently said Donald Trump’s presidency is a symptom of a much larger problem.

I’m now beginning to wonder if treating this particular manifestation of a systemic crisis is an acceptable minimum action for the sake of both our Democracy and sanity. We may not have institutions to overhaul/reform/rebuild come 2021 at the rate things are going.

This doesn’t I’m going to relent in my support for candidates willing to acknowledge and address the larger problems. But I’m not going to get upset about Michael Bloomberg’s campaign focusing on Trump as the problem. I’d rather he spent his money on voter turnout or even buying all Trump’s debt and foreclosing on him.

If Bloomberg gets elected, I’ll be a leader in the protest movement against him, despite having voted for him while holding my nose. It’s that serious.

***

The very stable genius occupying 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is out of control and getting worse. The so-called “grown ups in the room” have fled, leaving a motley band of grifters, haters, and delusional types surrounding the Commander in Chief.

Three years ago, there was talk (even among his allies) of using the provisions of the 25th Amendment to remove a madman. Now, despite increasingly erratic behavior and physical clues, there’s nothing but silence from people who have sworn an oath to protect the constitution.

On Tuesday, four long-time Justice Department prosecutors quit working on the case involving Roger Stone when they learned--by way of Fox News--that their recommendations for sentencing were being withdrawn.

FYI--None of the four prosecutors has any record of making political donations of any kind over the past decade, according to NBC News Correspondent Tom Winter.

From the New York Times:

• The president assailed the prosecutors directly, asking on Twitter who were the lawyers “who cut and ran after being exposed for recommending a ridiculous 9 year prison sentence” for Mr. Stone, who he said “got caught up in an investigation that was illegal, the Mueller Scam.”

• In yet another Twitter message, he attacked Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the Federal District Court in Washington, who is presiding over Mr. Stone’s case. He asked whether she had ordered solitary confinement for Mr. Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul J. Manafort. The president said Mr. Manafort suffered worse treatment than “even mobster Al Capone had to endure.”

• Judge Jackson handled one of two criminal cases that resulted in a prison term of seven and a half years for Mr. Manafort for financial fraud and other crimes. But prison and jail officials, not Judge Jackson, determined his conditions of confinement.

Now the Department of Justice will have to explain to a (presumably angry) federal judge who gagged Roger Stone for threatening her on social media why they want to retroactively lower his sentencing recommendation right after Trump tweeted about it.

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1227561237782855680?s=20

Oh, lookie. It’s official: the Department of Justice is now part of the Trump empire.

https://twitter.com/NBCNews/status/1227400874785431557?s=20

Let’s take a quick look at co-conspirator Roger Stone.

A jury trial found Stone guilty of seven felonies stemming from actions he took to obstruct a congressional inquiry, lying to investigators under oath, and trying to block the testimony of a witness whose account would have exposed his lies.

The maximum sentence for all those crimes could have been 50 years in prison. The DOJ suggested 7 to 9 years was appropriate in writing. Now they have withdrawn that document. 

And Mr Stone is such a “gentleman.”

https://twitter.com/petemont/status/1227363223072133120?s=20

Meanwhile, over in the United State Senate:

• Senate Republicans blocked an effort by Democrats to unanimously pass three election security-related bills Tuesday, marking the latest attempt to clear legislation ahead of the November elections

• Democrats tried to get consent to pass two bills that require campaigns to alert the FBI and Federal Election Commission (FEC) about foreign offers of assistance, as well as legislation to provide more election funding and ban voting machines from being connected to the internet.

• But Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) opposed each of the requests. Under the Senate's rules, any one senator can ask for unanimous consent to pass a bill, but any one senator can object and block their requests.

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I won’t repost this tweet for obvious reasons: Yesterday Trump retweeted the name of the alleged whistleblower

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