Tag Archives: e-mails

The Gun is Smoking and the Shootin’ Has Just Begun

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Happy day after “Smoking Gun Day.”

When it’s all said and done — and it’s a dead certainty that after Ambassador Bill Taylor’s presentation yesterday that something will be done — one the greatest ironies of the Trump era will be how much the demise of his tabloid reign of blunder and vulgarity was the result of him being led around by the exact same kind of wildly implausible right-wing fantasy theories.

We’ll debate for years how much Trump actually believed this latest one, about how the nefarious Ukrainians and not the “very strong and powerful” Russians — were the real culprits in the election meddling of 2016. Not that it even matters if he even thought it was true. But the fact that Rudy Giuliani, working off the FoxNews/talk radio playbook, managed to convince Trump this was an angle with real marketing possibilities, says everything about Trump’s strategic acuity and his sense of the gullibility of his base.

Functionally illiterate in terms of understanding the Constitution and basic rules of presidential behavior, Trump has lived by the sewer-dipped sword of “sigh and gasp” inducing right-wing lunacies. From Obama’s birth certificate, to immigrant invasions, to Hillary’s e-mails and on and on … and on and on, his presidency, if we can even call it that, has been a ceaseless hopscotch back and forth from every bit of ludicrous nutjobbery belched up by conservative America’s most paranoid and cynical circus performers … a profitable shtick fueled by a shrewd assist from Vladimir Putin’s troll farms.

And now Trump is about to die, or at least be impeached, by that same tabloid-crazy sword.

If you’re Trump, the scariest words uttered by anyone in the moments after Taylor dropped his hand grenade on the “no quid pro quo” defense was Mitch McConnell saying, “I don’t recall any conversations with the president about that [Ukrainian] phone call.”

It’s always likely, of course, that Moscow Mitch was lying. He places no great value in public truth-telling. But by in effect saying, “The President is on his own on this one”, McConnell is signaling that the door is fully open to letting this impeachment thing go where it may.

Not that McConnell himself — up for reelection in Kentucky where at last glance he had the lowest approval of any incumbent Senator in the country — would ever vote for conviction. But if you’re someone way smarter than Trump, you’d be explaining to POTUS, when he isn’t getting political advice from “Fox & Friends”, that McConnell is signalling that he will not require his nervous Republican Senate colleagues to vote in lockstep for Trump’s acquittal.

I continue to believe that McConnell is actively considering a Mike Pence presidency. Due diligence requires as much from him. And that he will accept Pence — i.e. allow a Senate conviction of Trump — provided he’s confident the electoral blowback from Trump’s deranged Second Amendment/evangelical/racist base will be minimal, or at least less bad than with Trump on the ticket again in 2020.

That said, one of McConnell’s key tasks when — not if — Pelosi hands him the articles of impeachment, will be to protect his most vulnerable members. Maine’ Susan Collins (second only to McConnell in terms of miserable home-state popularity), Cory Gardner in Colorado, Thom Tillis in North Carolina, Martha McSally in Arizona — all up for reelection in 2020 — certainly understand the risk in putting their names to a vote acquitting a now demonstrably corrupt and incompetent Trump.

I have no idea how exactly Mitch will avoid a vote. But based on our long, sordid history with the man, you know he’s got his Federalist Society brain trust working on any permutation, truncation or contortion of the Senate trial process that gets him out of Trump and on to Pence with the least damage to his precious majority.

There are a few trusting souls who believe Chief Justice John Roberts will not put up with a historic dump of McConnell treachery. But me, I prefer to expect the worst.

Anyway, with Ambasador Taylor’s assiduously documented smoking gun, the game of impeachment is fully afoot. Which means it is time … again … to turn to the great Bette Davis …

“Fasten you seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy night.”

Ladies, It’s Time You Got Tough with Hillary

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Lambert_to_the_SlaughterAre we having another deep doo-doo deja vu Clinton moment, or what? Suddenly it’s 1998 all over again. If only the economy was nearly as good.

So it seems Hillary Clinton, presumptive next president, played by her own rules and kept her State Department e-mails (more or less) hidden from official prying eyes. That is except for government types who received her e-mails. Those are still on the big server system, accessible to every EOH (Enemy of Hillary) who wants to root around and prove she personally armed the terrorists who killed the ambassador in Benghazi.

Now … obviously … this is a (big) deal because she’s Hillary goddam Clinton, with an empty six-lane freeway in front of her leading to the White House. If she wasn’t we’d still be obsessing over that stupid dress thing. Whether this outrage(!) actually has legs, which is to say if the conservative outrage machine can sustain it for 18 months, remains to be seen. Personally, I doubt it, since Es of H have a bad habit of picking the wrong horse to saddle up their righteous indignation. See: Whitewater, Benghazi.

But this email flap is another reminder that liberals might want to demand a hell of a lot more from Her Regency before the coronation. Personally, I’ve never been comfortable with the acclamation route to big power. I like candidates who have had a scare thrown into them, people who have been forced to explicitly defend and/or adjust their thinking and promises based on aggressive examination from E’s and F’s alike.

The current Hillary-Jeb match-up is so embarrassing. Clinton and Bush. Again. We look like a goddam banana republic, alternating between owners of the two biggest estancias every eight years. It’s bad enough we have to endure a system at both the national and state level where millionaires (of both parties) essentially buy themselves a job, usually guaranteeing that their previous stakeholders have primary access to their souls. It’s so damned unimaginative, if nothing else.

More to the point, as many have written before, the Hillary ascension, with no Plan B, strikes me as recklessly perilous. Even if the jowl-flapping buffoons of modern conservatism fail to make “Email-gate” stick, where are we if something truly grave happens to our one-and-only roadblock to Bush III, or President Scott Walker? Tomorrow is promised to no one. Hillary may not get hit by a bus, but not being the springiest of chickens, her health could fail, or we could discover that she really did plan the Benghazi attack. What then?

Given a choice between female candidates, I’d much prefer Elizabeth Warren. (Hell, I’d prefer Warren over any other Democrat, x or y chromosome, off the top of my head.) But a Warren candidacy would ignite the most godawful firestorm of coordinated, multi-front, big money attacks this back water oligarchy has ever seen. She’s despised and feared that much by Wall Street. And frankly, I doubt she’s prepared yet for that level of intensity of defamation. Hillary on the other hand seems quite cozy and well-triangulated among the Goldman Sachs and Citigroups of the world.

Liberal women in particular seem all but unanimously united in their support of Hillary, which is understandable to a point. After 240 years of alleged democracy, a woman president is waaay overdue and Hillary clearly has more experience and retail savvy than any plausible male on the scene. (Sorry, Joe Biden. Ain’t never going to happen.) That said, it may be that the women rushing to carry Hillary’s sedan chair up the White House steps are precisely the people to be grilling her most intensely on how exactly she intends to transform this country’s financial regulatory system, which is so tightly inter-locked with campaign finance, which is to blame for the obscene, truly Guatemala-like corruption and waste of DC?

There are a half dozen other good questions, but getting Her Highness on record, explicitly and in detail on that point alone would be a damned valuable start.

And if (not when) she answers, don’t put up with any of the usual Clinton-ish legalisms.