Tag Archives: impeachment

Political Rants

Bad side of Buchanan.

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The historic second impeachment of Donald Trump got under way this week. I have to say that it was more engaging than the first impeachment in some respects. The House impeachment managers seem a bit sharper to me, though they are working what seems like an open and shut case. At some level this is all performative, as it seems unlikely that a sufficient number of Senators whose constituencies are made up of rabid Trump supporters will vote to convict the man. Still, anything that reminds people of the shit show that led up to this last election and the rabid, racist attack that followed it can’t be bad. Trump himself said something like “never forget this day” to his supporters. I embrace that entirely: we should never let Republicans forget January 6, 2021 for as long as they live. That should be one of our political obsessions moving forward.

If the jury (i.e. the United States Senate) in this proceeding were inclined towards acting in good faith rather than in their own narrow political self-interest, it might be relevant to emphasize the fact that, despite the similarities, an impeachment is not the same as a criminal trial. The standard of guilt is quite different, as are the stakes. I realize that barring someone from high office isn’t a small thing, but it’s certainly not what most people would consider a severe punishment. It’s not like a conviction in the Senate would send Trump’s ass to prison; no, it would simply keep him from holding office again. It’s not taking away your rights, because no one has a right to the presidency – it’s an office that must be earned. In that way, impeachment is kind of like a reverse job interview. I think people have a tendency to forget that, sometimes kind of conveniently.

I don’t know if you’ve ever perused one, but on the web there are a number of rankings of presidents from best to worst that get updated every year or so, as per historians’ assessment of the various chief executives and their impact, good and bad. I believe all of these polls put James Buchanan at the very bottom, though he is sometimes challenged in this honorific by Andrew Johnson, who most often appears second to last in the rankings. (Of course, these two putrid presidents flank Abraham Lincoln on either side, Lincoln being ranked number one almost universally.) Now that Trump is an ex-president, he will be included in these surveys. If I were a gambling man (which I’m not), I would put my money on him landing on the bad side of Buchanan. Trump likes to call himself “The 45th President of the United States” as a way of avoiding being referred to as a former president and, therefore, admitting failure, defeat, etc. Actually, the nomenclature might fit the next time these historians render their judgment. My guess is that he will, indeed, be named the forty-fifth president in the line up from best to worst.

We shall see what judgment the Senate hands down on Trump, but I think history’s judgment has already landed and it’s not pretty.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Fifth Column.

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Last week their minions were storming the capitol building, attempting to stop the counting of the electoral votes by any means necessary. This week, all they want is for everyone to get along. Fuck that shit. Republican members of Congress, particularly those who actively supported stealing the election and handing it to Donald Trump (the loser) appear to have played an integral role in the insurrectionist attack on the center of American legislative power. As I write this post, the attackers are plotting an even broader campaign against both federal and state targets. There’s reason to believe that this campaign will not only coincide with the inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, but that it will continue well beyond the change of power unless they are put down in a serious way. The only way to do that effectively is by holding their allies in Congress fully accountable and expelling those who coordinated with the racist minoritarian insurrectionists.

The House voted to impeach the president a second time this week. That’s a step in the right direction, but not nearly enough. Naturally the president should be removed and barred from holding public office ever again, and that should be done yesterday … or the day before, perhaps. But aside from that, we need a deep and timely investigation of this attack, with particular focus on who in the House and Senate may have aided and abetted these criminals. There’s some indication that cooperation may have involved both members and staff on the GOP side. Representative Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey, who spent part of last Wednesday hiding from the mob with Congressman Dan Kildee, has spoken about capitol tours given the day before by Republican congress members and staffers – tours have been suspended during the COVID pandemic – that were reminiscent of intelligence reconnaissance (Sherrill is a veteran).

Then, of course, there are members like Rep. Lauren Boebert from Colorado, a first-year congresswoman who promoted herself brandishing a handgun in some vain attempt to paint herself as Palin 2.0. Mission accomplished, as she appears to be a moron, like Palin, but also someone willing to egg on the angry horde that descended upon the capitol. “It’s 1776” she tweeted in advance of the attack. 1776? What happened then … a revolution, right? So … you’re in favor of the attack? Interesting. I understand that the relevant law enforcement agencies are looking closely at contacts between congress members and the mob – sounds like a good idea, but they’d best move with a bit more alacrity, because as I mentioned earlier, this battle is not over. If there’s a fifth column in the House and Senate, we need to know about it sooner rather than later. And we need to expel collaborators pursuant to the 14th Amendment. Now.

We didn’t get here overnight. We got here on a decade’s worth of lies about everything from Obama’s birth certificate to the legitimacy of 2020 election. We need to start holding people accountable, and the best place to start is with these freaks in the Republican caucus.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Bad start.

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My god, what a depressing week. Our first-in-the-nation presidential electoral contest ended in a train wreck, when the brainchild of Democratic Party operatives managed to turn the already chaotic Iowa Caucuses into a failed experiment in participatory democracy via digital technology. While it’s not clear exactly what went wrong with regard to the Shadow app, what is clear is the fact that the party officials and app developers did not adequately test their reporting system before the day of the caucuses. I’ve heard stories of technical problems, user errors, poor training, inadequate support, poorly staffed phone banks (which was, essentially, the traditional means by which results were reported in previous election years), etc. What I HAVEN’T heard is someone saying, “it was my damn fault.”

Trump's an asshole.

What was worse was that, days later, we still didn’t have the full results. When I looked Wednesday afternoon, only 75% of the results were in. That night it got up to 92%, the next morning, 97%. What the fuck is the matter with these people? And because of the screwed up precinct weighting algorithm they are using for whatever reason, even though Bernie Sanders over a thousand more votes in the final round, for two days Mayor Pete was still being described as the winner. Through Wednesday night and Thursday morning, Sanders gradually closed the gap in what they term “State Delegate Equivalents”, but if he doesn’t overtake Buttigieg, we all know what that means: More votes loses, fewer votes wins. What does that sound like? Is this the way all elections function in America now?

Of course, the timing was horrendous, as Trump’s great dictator-like State of the Union speech was Tuesday night, during which he staged a dramatic family reunion for an American soldier, decorated Rush Limbaugh with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and spun insane tales of prosperity in the face of a continuing recovery that if anything has lost steam over the past three years. There’s a lot to criticize about this speech and about the reaction of Democratic senators and representatives to Trump’s triumphalism about Iran, Venezuela, and other points of bipartisan imperial consensus. The biggest problem with it, though, is that in the wake of a major Democratic party failure, the president gets a prime-time opportunity to brag about accomplishments both imagined and hideously real. Iowa revives the “gang that can’t shoot straight” trope about Democrats (see the ACA rollout), while the SOTU raises the faint specter of Reagan standing tall against the “doom and gloom” crowd.

Oh, and then there was the impeachment acquittal vote. No big surprise, but again …. timing. Only one thing to do – pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and start fighting again.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Truth and ideology.

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I don’t know how many of you have been following the impeachment trial of one Donald John Trump. I’ve watched some of the proceedings, and it has been at various times hilarious, painfully dull, and infuriating. It seems now, though, that it has come down once again to the question of whether or not to allow relevant witnesses to testify before the Senate; particularly former National Security Advisor John Bolton, whose forthcoming book has been strategically excerpted and propagated by anonymous reviewers in the White House. With respect to this, I find myself in rare agreement with Ezra Klein, who this week commented on how crazy it makes him that we’re all focusing on witnesses when we already know what the President did …. he said it himself. Whether or not you think that’s enough really just comes down to party affiliation.

Just a word about Bolton. This man is an ideologue and a warmonger. His views are so toxic regarding war and peace that he failed to win confirmation from a Republican Senate back in the 2000s. I don’t know him, but I believe he is neither a Trump acolyte or a never-Trumper. I think it’s likely that he merely saw in Trump an instrument of power – the belief that, though Trump, Bolton could climb higher than he had ever done before and push his policy agenda forward in a way that had been unthinkable previously. Over his brief tenure as NSA, he supported coups in Bolivia and (attempted) in Venezuela, helped carry us to the brink of war with Iran, derailed detente with North Korea, and quite a bit more. Quite a roster of grisly accomplishments in just a few months. Dream come true for that guy.

So to all of you center-leftists out there who may be singing the praises of John Bolton just lately, don’t forget – he is a walking disaster, book passages or no. His prescriptions for foreign policy would have us plunging into war again and again. It may be, though, that he doesn’t feel one way or the other for the President, thus his willingness to spill. What is obvious is that Bolton got himself hired by doing a little Trump dance on Fox News, then took up a position that allowed him to affect the course of American foreign policy in a meaningful way. That’s all he cares about. Trump can be damned, or not … it depends on what’s best for Bolton’s agenda.

Iowa Votes. Big week ahead, people, and I don’t mean impeachment. Barring disaster, I’ll do a post on the Iowa Caucuses. Stay tuned.

Political Rants

Unfit.

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In the main, there are two things that the ongoing impeachment trial of Donald John Trump bring to my mind. One is that this man is perhaps the least suited individual in America for the high office he now holds. The second is that the office of the presidency is far too powerful for a single person to hold, and that if we do not act to constrain that power, we will be in the same situation again before we know it. So in a certain respect, you can say that the Trump administration was an accident waiting to happen, made inevitable by the weak constraints on executive power, particularly in the era of U.S. global dominance following World War II (i.e. the era we remain in now).

Brother Matt took a whack at the hyper paternalistic imperial presidency back in 1991 with his song, “World War II”, the refrain to which went like this:

Daddy likes things done in a big way
Daddy's back with bargains from D-Day
Daddy chose a game for the lads to play
Daddy showed his hand with Enola Gay

We have had mad men at the helm before, to be sure. I’m thinking Nixon towards the end of his Watergate troubles, certainly, but even before, during the terror bombing of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. The crazy, drunk Nixon whose Defense Secretary told fellow staffers to ignore the president’s orders – that Nixon was what people typically term crazy. The mad bomber president, not so much. It is emblematic of the imperial presidency that while Nixon could get away with dropping massive ordinance on defenseless populations, his administration was ultimately brought down by his attempts to spy on his political opponents. The power dynamic is obvious.

The inevitable impeachment ensues.

Why is Trump different? Well, if nothing else, he demonstrates the degree to which even the weak constraints we thought we had had on the presidency were only voluntarily complied with – that these were traditions and norms, not laws. Every president in my lifetime had some substantive exposure to constitutional law and therefore felt compelled in a minor way to observe some limits to their power. Not this president. He knows nothing about constitutional law (inasmuch as he knows nothing, period), and so he acts outside of the usual bounds, and there appears to be no remedy or even accountability for that. I think I’ve mentioned previously on this blog, I had tacitly assumed that the weak controls on the presidency were statutory in some respect, but apparently not so. This needs to change.

If a Democrat wins this year, I’m sure there will be plenty of cooperation across the political spectrum for constraining the presidency (in ways that can easily be reversed by Republicans). But the only truly reliable constraint is an energized, organized citizenry. Unless we put down our electronic devices and start working together on these weighty issues, we can’t expect any better from any future president.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Week that was (5.0).

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It has been another one of those weeks, packed to the gills with news, mostly bad. Of course, this is not a bug but merely a feature of the times we live in, so I will make my usual lame effort at grappling with a small subset of what has been assailing us over the past few days in the final full week of the third year of Our Lord Trump, king of the chimps.

Debate #7. Not at all sure I see the point of these corporate exercises in superficial political sparring. The CNN questioners were clearly excited to dig in to their “breaking news” story about what Bernie said to Elizabeth a couple of years ago in a private conversation. The moderator who queried Sanders on this when straight to Warren with a question that assumed he was lying in his response. I am disappointed in Warren, frankly, for perpetuating this line of attack. It plays on the odious claim the Sanders and his followers were misogynistic in their race against Clinton in 2016 – something Clinton alumni cling to as one of the rationales for their loss. This is toxic, and I don’t think it’s hyperbolic to suggest that it could ultimately blow the election. WTF, people … time to put the movement above your personal fortunes. Knock. it. off.

When a billionaire has to intervene, you know there's a problem.

Impeachment. A historic week in terms of the delivery of articles of impeachment to the Senate for only the third time in American history, with respect to presidents, at least. It seems like a forgone conclusion that Trump will walk away from this, but not unscathed – impeachment without removal is a kind of accountability. If there is history after this presidency, this action will be indelibly recorded next to his grisly name. As for the trial, well … I expect a relative circus as compared to the already ridiculous Clinton impeachment. The G.O.P. has decayed considerably over the past 20 years, such that there’s some question as to whether all of them will keep their pants on for the entire proceeding. We shall see.

War lies. Bernie had it right Tuesday night: our two biggest foreign policy disasters in recent decades were spawned by lies – Vietnam and Iraq. Though with Vietnam, I’m pretty sure he’s talking about the Gulf of Tonkin incident that never happened, with the U.S.S. Maddox and Turner Joy. (There were a lot of lies that preceded that with regard to Indochina.) Of course Trump is lying about Iran … that’s the same as saying he’s speaking about Iran. We are in a similar boat with Iran as we were with Iraq back in 2001-03; elements within the the administration want to have a war for whatever reason, perhaps ideological, perhaps mercantile, likely some mixture of both. It appears that the general population is more against the idea than it was in the case of Iraq 2003, and that that opposition is broad-based enough to make Trump somewhat cautious. Ironic that this heightened tension is taking place in the immediate wake of the release of the Afghan papers, the DOD internal history of the Iraq conflict, and the big Intercept / NY Times scoop on the activities of Iran’s intelligence services in Iraq. (Of course, these were all one or two-day stories at best.)

Natural Disasters. Heartbreaking climate-fueled fires in Australia, earthquakes in Puerto Rico, volcanic eruptions in the Philippines. Jesus H. Christ, what next?

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Lookout, Buchanan.

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There’s no question but that Donald Trump is the worst president in my lifetime, and I’m fairly certain he’s a serious contender for the worst president in American history. In most of the surveys I’ve seen, that position is held by pre-Civil War POTUS James Buchanan (1857 – 1861), but I think Buchanan’s one distinction is under serious threat … he may be surging to second worst by the end of Trump’s current term.

Of course, Trump doesn’t see it that way. His ranging, incoherent cabinet meeting this past Monday gave him the opportunity to crow about the greatest economy in American history, his single-handed defeat of ISIS, his deal-making acumen, and so on. Sure, he got Turkey mixed up with Iraq at one point, but who’s counting? He claims to be fulfilling a promise to bring American troops home, and one wishes that were true, but of course this claim – like everything else that comes out of his festering gob – is a cheap, transparent lie that wouldn’t fool a five-year-old. Like previous failed presidents, he sold the Kurds down the river, and they are paying a heavy price for his carelessness and self-dealing. (Trump freely admitted prior to the 2016 election that he had a conflict of interest with regard to Turkey, referencing his signature twin towers in Ankara; he still makes a lot of his money there.)

Look out, Jim. He's gaining on you.

You would think it would be easy to compare Trump unfavorably to other recent presidents, but the picture does get kind of complicated kind of fast. There was a discussion of this on Morning Joe this week, wherein Joe, Mika, and historian Jon Meacham talked about leaders putting the nation ahead of their own narrow political interests. Sounds good, but the example Joe gave was that of Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich in 1998, at the height of the impeachment conflict, working together to find a way “to contain Saddam Hussein.” I think what he’s referring to is the Iraq Liberation Act, passed in October 1998 and signed by Clinton, which provided the foundation for the 2003 war. This act came through at the peak of our sanction regime against Iraq that cost the lives of 300,000 Iraqi children, conservatively – a cost Clinton Secretary of State Madeleine Albright described as worth it. In other words, bad example.

Self-dealing and corruption are bad things, to be sure. They are not the only bad things, however, and we do ourselves no favor by forgetting the failed policies of past leaders in an attempt to single out the current president. It is obvious where he comes from, and we must beat him  next year. But we must also accomplish so much more than that one goal. Status quo ante is not enough.

luv u,

jp