Tag Archives: MitchMcConnell

Impeachment Blahs?

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One thing I always try to keep in mind anytime there’s an issue or event requiring more than an hour of the public’s attention is: how high is the entertainment quotient here?

Take impeachment, where for all the headlines, all the indignation on cable news and all the chanting at rallies like the one I attended last night in downtown Duluth, (+2 degrees, but “Hey, hey, ho ho, Donald Trump has got to go”), there doesn’t seem to be the same pitch of fervor that I remember back when ’70s-era Republicans were telling us every president did what Richard Nixon did, so get over it.

A lump of beautiful coal for you, Donnie boy. Duluth. Dec. 17.

Good public entertainment requires juicy dollops of suspense, excitement, hilarity or prurient appeal. Mix and match as you see fit.

But other than Trump’s Stephen Miller copy-edited letter to Nancy Pelosi, the antics of Rudy, Lev and Igor and the fools-at-court blithering of Doug Collins, Louie Gohmert, Matt Gaetz and other House Republicans, hilarity is in pretty short supply with this impeachment drama.

Likewise any prurient appeal. Especially if like me you’re still trying to bleach your neurons of the image of Donny having his way with a porn queen.

There’s been too much inevitability about this episode to really grab and hold an American audience. Going way back, everyone familiar with Trump’s career as a fraudulent real estate buffoon (of the casino-bankrupting variety) knew he was such a reckless fool it was inevitable that sooner or later he’d screw the pooch so badly he’d get himself impeached. We’re just amazed it took this long.

But now we’re dealing with the House’s long inevitable vote to actually do the deed, and that’s rolled in with the very high expectation that Mitch McConnell will cook the Senate trial into a quickie nothingburger putting a “fully exonerated” Donald on the road to reelection against a creaky, bumbling Joe Biden.

As loathsome a national embarrassment as Trump is nothing galls me more than the fact that there has never been even an hour of reckoning for Mitch McConnell. You know the system is in shambles when he flat-out says things like he said to Sean Hannity last week, about how he, the jury foreman, is tightly coordinating his trial duties with the defendant, right before, during and after he takes that oath to be impartial … and there’s no legal downside.

There are various ideas being floated to force a series of votes on things like the witnesses (Mike Pompeo, Mick Mulvaney, John Boltobn) Mitch doesn’t want anywhere near the trial cameras.

There’s even an interesting idea whereby Pelosi and Adam Schiff don’t even formally send the articles of impeachment to McConnell to begin a trial. They do this on the grounds that (pick one) McConnell has disqualified himself by his public remarks to Hannity and/or the obvious fact that Giuliani, the president’s personal attorney, is still running around try to get Scorsese-worthy Ukrainian wise guys to invent a tale or two about those Biden bastards. In case you’ve forgotten, that presidential attorney Rudy who is being paid by his “translators” Lev and Igor, the former of whose wife recently came in possession of a $1 million check from a Russian gangster.

Point being, the plots to pollute the next U.S. election and obstruct Congress are clearly still going on. So … instead of a sham trial led by a guy who has said he’s in the bag for the defendant, Pelosi and Schiff hang on to these articles and announce they’re contining the dozen or so inquiries slogging through the Trump-crippled U.S. court system.

Wait long enough and the SDNY may spit out its case against Rudy, Lev and Igor … and Principal #1. Or maybe … really maybe … in June the Trump-toady Supreme Court will go all Nixon on him and compel him to release his tax returns.

Whatever. As effective as the Democrats have been in telling the story of Trump’s Ukraine scandal, the Senate trial, hobbled and gelded by Moscow Mitch, is going to need several twists of plot to go boffo at the box office.

Nancy’s Game: Cut Mitch Off at the Knees

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Any doubt that “the I-word” is coming at us fast evaporated with Robert Mueller’s Byzantine, double-negative laced statement a couple days ago.

” … if we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so. We did not, however, make a determination as to whether the president did commit a crime.” (Hello! Copy desk!)

The only question(s) now are, “By what name” and “when”?

The fundamental problems of accusing Donald Trump of gross corruption and criminal conduct remain the same. To reiterate: (1) Mitch McConnell will not permit a conviction of Trump under his watch. (2) Any chance Democrats had to promote their policies — climate change, women’s reproductive rights, gun control, consumer advocacy, yadda yadda — will be buried under a landslide of constant, hourly, tweet-by-tweet impeachment insanity, and (3) Impeachment plays to Trump’s only real game, which is chaos and supercharged partisan warfare.

But I have some confidence that Nancy Pelosi, who is steering this bus, understands the game she is playing. Despite the criticism of her for “slow walking” impeachment, I have to believe she appreciates that impeachment in 2019 is much more a competition with Mitch McConnell than Donald Trump.

The strategy as I see it is to commence impeachment by another name, reducing media hysteria as much as possible, and orchestrate a steady run of damning hearings that conclude (or not) as close to November 3, 2020 as possible. The effect being to give the extraordinarily cynical and diabolical McConnell little or no time to hold a fraudulent show trial and acquit Trump before election day.

Pelosi is well acquainted with McConnell and certainly sees him as someone fully willing to abuse and violate whatever law or tradition necessary to protect his tribe. Only a naive fool would expect McConnell (and Bill Barr) to behave honorably and within the bounds of accepted standards in an full out impeachment brawl.

Pelosi’s problem, in addition, to wrangling all the Democratic firebrands demanding “impeachment now, goddamn it!”, is staging and coordinating a long series of televised hearings that connect all the characters and dots in the Trump-Russia saga in a way that is understandable to the millions of semi-informed Americans who only read headlines or listen to Rush Limbaugh.

Day to day I’m constantly struck by how few people — even among those disgusted by Trump — are conversant in what has actually been revealed over the last two and a half years. On one hand, those people can be admired for not being the kind of sad pathetic bastard who follows this sprawling story obsessively. They clearly have lives I don’t.

But the point of an orchestrated series of hearings — not called impeachment — is to explain to “those with lives” how second and third-tier Trump-Russia characters like, for example, Trump Inc. CFO Allen Weisselberg and Deutsche Bank “private banker” Rosemary Vrablic fit into the story. And to use revelations from their public (i.e. televised) testimony to explain how Trump is fatally compromised by his long (long) association with Russian “investors”, i.e. oligarch gangsters.

Explaining in common language — unlike the very old school and convoluted vernacular of Robert Mueller — how Russian money has propped Trump up for decades then allows Pelosi to explain how and why there was obstruction of Mueller’s investigation into “collusion.”

The wild card — and I do mean “wild” — is Pelosi preparing for the sheer hellstorm of lies, rage and seditious threats Trump will — not “may” — unleash to protect himself against defeat in the 2020 election. Her understanding being pretty much what us sad bastards have come to appreciate.

And that is this: Trump may not fear impeachment so much knowing that his 91% approval rating among Republicans requires McConnell to contort the constitution to do everything possible to protect him on Capitol Hill. But defeat in the 2020 election, and the (no doubt messy, howling) removal from office means finding himself suddenly naked and exposed to a torrent of indictments from a dozen different jurisdictions.

Put most simply, Trump is in a fight for his life.

Removal from office, which will not happen by impeachment, means both the very high likelihood of financial ruin, (for a guy who is nowhere near as wealthy as the MAGA-hat crowd believes he is), and total, unequivocal exposure as arguably the most legendary fraud and con man in American history.

Pelosi’s strategy is to tell the story of Donald Trump’s long, sordid con well enough and long enough that Mitch McConnell never gets the opportunity to acquit the guy … by any means necessary.