Impeachment Day 14: Trump's "Great and Unmatched Wisdom"
That Donald Trump, what a card! Just as impeachment talk reaches new heights he sends Vladimir Putin a birthday present (b. October 7, 1952), and the political universe is roiled.
United States forces are getting out of the way in Syria, so the Turkish can eliminate the one remaining viable opponent of Bashar al-Assad, namely the Kurds. It’s a win for the Russian-backed forces from Damascus and a loss for every rebel band in the world dumb enough to accept assurances from the US.
I’m not going to delve much further into Syria (I'm in the middle of an impeachment rant), other than to note that the present situation is the latest result of imperialist meddling in the region, going back to when the British and their allies secretly carved up the Middle East into manageable revenue streams.
Congressional backers (of both parties) of the endless ground war against terrorism and their friends in the defense industry were furious about the realignment of US policy in the region. The British and the French, both of whom have troops in the area, were caught flatfooted.
Senators Lindsey Graham, Susan Collins, Marco Rubio, and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley all tweeted out their disapproval. There were even rumors of a sternly worded letter in addition to the furrowed eyebrows.
But fear, not. The President has a plan.
https://twitter.com/EylonALevy/status/1181240674173239299?s=20
That promise and $4 will get you a cup of brewed coffee in a hipster joint in North Park.
The one thing this latest executive move and everything else coming from from the Oval Office have in common is that they put Donald Trump’s interests first. Whatever happened to prompt this foreign policy move will eventually ooze out of the presidential slime and confirm this observation.
Back to impeachment…
If the Capitol Hill rumor mills are correct, there may be as many as five additional whistleblowers behind the second individual revealed on Sunday. Keep in mind that many of these same scandalmongers have been predicting doom and gloom since Day One. So keep the champagne corked for now.
According to Politico, this impeachment business has begun impacting what little is left of our functioning government.
The vice president’s office, acting chief of staff's office, State Department, Energy Department, Office of Management and Budget and Justice Department are among the government entities quickly finding themselves ensnared in the Democrats’ impeachment inquiry, joining a huge squad of White House lawyers, Cabinet officials and national security staffers — many of them detailed from the Pentagon, CIA and elsewhere in the intel community — potentially tainted by the widening investigation.
The impeachment fight under Trump is quickly surpassing the reach of the presidential impeachment battles under Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton, swallowing even larger swaths of the federal government. The whistleblower complaint and the resulting investigative sprawl are making the probe harder for Trump and his White House to stamp out, with Democrats gaining new avenues to uncover damaging details that contradict Trump.
And a president who loves to be in control is increasingly finding himself out of it, left to lob angry tweets from the White House residence or the Oval Office as he and a handful of emissaries — such as personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani — function as their own uncoordinated rapid-response operation.
And sure enough, one piece of this morning’s breaking news concerns the House Intelligence, Oversight, and Foreign Affairs committees subpoenaing the Pentagon and OMB for documents on the decision to withhold military assistance to Ukraine. They are demanding the agencies turn over documents by October 15.
Over the weekend the Washington Post, and too many other media outlets to count, delved into Republican consternation over saving their own political asses in the wake of President crazypant’s latest troubles. To make a long story short, doing as little as possible is the preferred option.
This is not the first such crossroads, of course. Republicans largely stood behind Trump in 2016 after the release of the “Access Hollywood” tape on which he bragged of sexual assault, as well as during the darkest days of the Russia investigation and in the wake of racist comments.
“It feels like we’ve been constantly moving the line,” said Tom Rath, a GOP fixture in New Hampshire. “We say, ‘Don’t cross this line.’ Okay, you crossed it. So, ‘Don’t cross this line.’ We’re finally at a point where patience is exhausted, reason is exhausted and, quite frankly, the voters are exhausted.”
A Republican strategist who is close with several senators and spoke on the condition of anonymity to share a candid assessment called the situation “a disaster.” This consultant has been advising clients to “say as little as possible” about impeachment developments to buy time.
After all, Republicans have an agenda to pursue beyond packing the courts and enriching the one percent. There’s trashing Obamacare, privatizing Medicare, and bankrupting Social Security to be done, in addition to making life miserable for anybody who they’ve decided stands in the way of rolling back the clock to a pre-Brown vs Board of Education America.
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About that corruption in the Ukraine…
There is, after all, a Rick Perry connection to the Ukraine going beyond the President’s claim that his phone call on July 25 was suggested by the soon-to-be-departed Secretary of Energy.
From an explosive story at the Associated Press, chock full of juicy details:
As Rudy Giuliani was pushing Ukrainian officials last spring to investigate one of Donald Trump’s main political rivals, a group of individuals with ties to the president and his personal lawyer were also active in the former Soviet republic.
Their aims were profit, not politics. This circle of businessmen and Republican donors touted connections to Giuliani and Trump while trying to install new management at the top of Ukraine’s massive state gas company. Their plan was to then steer lucrative contracts to companies controlled by Trump allies, according to two people with knowledge of their plans…
...The Trump and Giuliani allies driving the attempt to change the senior management at Naftogaz, however, appear to have had inside knowledge of the U.S. government’s plans in Ukraine. For example, they told people that Trump would replace the U.S. ambassador there months before she was actually recalled to Washington, according to three of the individuals interviewed by the AP. One of the individuals said he was so concerned by the whole affair that he reported it to a U.S. Embassy official in Ukraine months ago.
Smack dab in the middle of all this plotting was Secretary of Energy Rick Perry:
In May, Rick Perry traveled to Kyiv to serve as the senior U.S. government representative at the inauguration of the county’s new president.
In a private meeting with Zelenskiy, Perry pressed the Ukrainian president to fire members of the Naftogaz advisory board. Attendees left the meeting with the impression that Perry wanted to replace the American representative, Amos Hochstein, a former diplomat and energy representative who served in the Obama administration, with someone “reputable in Republican circles,” according to someone who was in the room.
Finally, the seriousness of our domestic situation has dawned on the editorial board of the Union-Tribune. From their Sunday editorial... (Emphasis mine)
If the current moment doesn’t lead — at least — to firm bipartisan pushback, history may record it as partisan bickering instead of what it is: a slide to authoritarianism. The San Diego Union-Tribune Editorial Board has long expressed confidence that the durability of U.S. democratic institutions would rein in Trump’s excesses. That doesn’t seem certain now.
The first example is the president’s attempt to get foreign governments to come up with dirt on Democratic presidential contender Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden. Trump delayed the release of $391 million in congressionally appropriated military aid to the Ukraine while urging the nation to probe the Bidens. U.S. diplomatic text messages made public Thursday give greater weight to the idea Trump was seeking a quid pro quo from a foreign national instead of a crackdown on corruption.
That same day, in a spectacle without comparison in American history, Trump told reporters on the White House lawn that China should investigate the Bidens. The exhortation comes, of course, as the U.S. and China wage a trillion-dollar trade war that Trump launched — giving Beijing a massive motive for helping Trump and thus interfering with an American election. At the president’s request!
The second example has to do with Trump’s interactions with California. Despite the president’s verbal wars with state Democrats, the federal government’s dealings with the Golden State have in most key ways been unchanged. But in the last two weeks, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has used its powers in unprecedented ways that back up Trump’s claims that state Democrats are running California’s quality of life into the ground.
https://twitter.com/RightWingWatch/status/1181258801455996934?s=20
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