Tag: Donald Trump

The ‘biggest’ impeachment ever?

~ odd man out ~ 1 Comment

Swamp Rabbit’s parole officer Victor Cortez dropped by a few days ago and jabbered about current events. He was upset because Donald Trump had claimed that the killing of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi by U.S. forces was a great triumph for Donald Trump.

“Trump gave final approval for the raid,” I said to Victor. “Doesn’t that count for something?”

“Not really,” he replied, noting that Trump had nothing to do with the planning of the al-Baghdadi hit. If anything, he jeopardized the impending operation when he let Turkish dictator Recep Tayyip Erdoğan talk him into a withdrawal of American troops from Northern Syria and a betrayal of the Kurds who had done most of the fighting against ISIS.

Then he dashed his chance to look presidential, Victor said, by lying about the circumstances of al-Baghdadi’s death (“[He] died like a dog. He died like a coward.”) and by claiming the al-Baghdadi hit was the “biggest” ever, more significant than the killing of bin Laden.

I wondered aloud if Trump and his flunkies would spin his ongoing impeachment saga with the same vigor they brought to the al-Baghdadi story. Trump could justifiably boast “This will be the biggest impeachment ever. Clinton didn’t come close to being convicted. Nixon didn’t even hang around long enough to be impeached.”

At that moment Swamp Rabbit emerged from the swamp and approached my shack for his weekly check-in with Victor. “Trump ain’t gonna get convicted by the Senate,” he predicted. “But I’m looking forward to him losing the election then getting hit with criminal charges.”

“He could spin that, too,” I said. “He could say he’s the biggest American politician to ever face criminal charges after leaving office.”

“Damn right,” Swamp Rabbit replied. “Then after he gets convicted and tossed in the slammer he could say ‘I’m the biggest federal inmate ever, bigger than Al Capone. They treat me like a king in here. My cellmates have to settle for ratburgers, but I get Big Macs.”

I said, “Big Macs in jail? That’s far-fetched, rabbit.”

“The idea of Trump getting elected in 2016 was far-fetched, too,” he replied. “Look how that turned out.”

Out with the old kook, in with the new

~ odd man out

“John Bolton’s ouster makes the world safer,” according to a headline in The Nation, but the analysis that followed was unpersuasive. Yes, the loony chickenhawk is gone but not his boss, who has launched a misguided trade war against China, trashed the nuclear deal with Iran, threatened to nuke North Korea, and encouraged Boris Johnson to destabilize the EU and destroy what’s left of the United Kingdom. How is the world safer?

“Why do you read that crap?” said Swamp Rabbit, who was looking over my shoulder at the story. “Why don’t you feed the cats, or pull up them weeds over there by the tomato patch?”

I told him it’s important to follow the mainstream news analysts. They usually reach the wrong conclusions from the facts they gather, but careful readers can use the same facts to piece together conclusions that make more sense.

“I’m gonna piece together some lunch from that pork roll I swiped at the SuperFridge today,” Swamp Rabbit said. “Stop by my shack if you want a sandwich.”

I told him no thanks, I had some Triscuits, I was reading up on who might be chosen to replace Bolton. Politico said Trump was looking at more than a dozen “generally conservative” candidates, some of whom have ties to Bolton or Fox News or the George W. Bush administration. The pick will be a “yes person,” according to an insider quoted in the article.

But we already knew all that, didn’t we? We knew the new national security adviser is likely to be as despicable as Bolton (one of the liars who helped start the disastrous war in Iraq by falsely claiming Saddam had WMD) though possibly not as overtly kooky. That he or she will be an ass-kissing neocon who will obey all orders from Trump, no matter how stupid or vile.

In the end it won’t matter who’s chosen. No one Trump hires could possibly be any more impulsive or vindictive than he is, and he has the final say on policy. The world will be no more or less safe.

I should have waded over to Swamp Rabbit’s place for that sandwich.

Footnote: Imagine a just world in which government officials and their toadies are held responsible for their roles in debacles like Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya, where hundreds of thousands of people died for nothing and trillions of dollars were wasted. All the Boltons would have been banished years ago. A lot of them would be in jail.

Rudy, Rudy, Rudy!

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

US-GIULIANI-TESTIFIES-AT-HOUSE-CMTE-FIELD-HEARING-ON-SECURITY-IN

Not sure of the details, but I’m going to assume if Rudy says something, he’s lying:

President Donald Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani said on Thursday he doubted the veracity of a bombshell NBC News report from earlier in the day that federal authorities wiretapped the president’s longtime counsel, Michael Cohen.

“Us lawyers have talked about it, we don’t believe it’s true,” Giuliani told The Daily Beast. “We think it’s going to turn out to be untrue because it would be totally illegal. You can’t wiretap a lawyer, you certainly can’t wiretap his client who’s not involved in the investigation. No one has suggested that Trump was involved in that investigation. So they’re going to wiretap the lawyer, his client, and his client the president of the United States? I don’t think so, not if they want to stay out of jail. Disclosing a wiretap is a federal felony. I never took ‘em home when I was a U.S. attorney.”

Giuliani said that he found out about the wiretap news from NBC News’ report, which cited “two people with knowledge of the legal proceedings,” and not from Cohen himself. He believed someone in the Justice Department was behind the leak.

“Nobody else would know about it,” Giuliani said. “Cohen didn’t know about it, so it has to be the FBI, the independent counsel, or the Justice Department.”

“Anybody who says that I’m exaggerating when I say that this is an out-of-control investigation and they’re acting like storm troopers—give me a break, baby! They prove it every day.”

The former New York City mayor is in the midst of a media blitz that has upended previous Trump-world talking points and caused ripple effects across a variety of legal and political fronts. Only recently added to Trump’s legal team, Giuliani said that the Cohen news makes him even more hesitant to let the president sit down for an interview with Special Counsel Robert Mueller for his separate probe into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election.

“Right now, the odds are against it,” he said. “Look at all of the bad faith we’re seeing here. And whether this wiretap story is true or not true, it’s bad faith to leak it. We should find out about this with a notification from the Justice Department, they’re wiretapping the pres of the United States, they’re wiretapping a man talking to his lawyer and then they want us to cooperate? We’re not suckers.”

Jim Comey should have followed the rules

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

James Comey, in 'A Higher Loyalty,' says he feared 'illegitimate' Hillary Clinton presidency

Instead of treating Hillary Clinton more harshly because he thought she’d win.

And Spanky’s really going off the deep end over Comey’s book:

Etc.

WP: Arctic warmth is ‘stunning’ scientists

~ odd man out ~ 1 Comment

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Swamp Rabbit and I stopped for an overnight at a motel midway through a sales trip in upstate PA – Trump country. Some cadaver in camo gear checked us in and said there would be no meals until 7 a.m., so we settled for pork rinds and coffee from the vending machines. The coffee was rotgut, so we added sugar and a powdered milk substitute made of mercury or something.

We sat on a couch in the lobby, not far from a paneled wall hung with an elk head looking down on us with black marble eyes, very judgmental. Its jumbo antlers seemed to reach for me.

Swamp Rabbit told me gun-toting rednecks were less of a threat to wild things these days than human-made toxins, that scientists were finding tiny bits of plastic on polar ice, thousands of bits every square foot.

Not that there was much ice left at the North Pole, as the Washington Post noted yesterday. Swamp Rabbit pulled out his phone and showed me a picture of a polar bear standing on a small slab of it, surrounded by a thawing-out sea.

“I feel like that bear,” I said.

He threw a pork rind at me. “How you know how that bear feels? I don’t know how he feels.”

I told him all the bear wanted was a decent meal and a safe place to hang out, but there it was in the middle of nowhere, on a surface that becomes more fragile by the day, thanks to guys like Trump’s boy Scott Pruitt, the climate-change denier who heads the Environmental Protection Agency.

Swamp Rabbit said, “You’ll feel better once we’re out of Trump country. Even better when Trump and his gang get kicked out of office.”

“That’s the problem,” I replied. “Climate change is happening now. By the time Trump gets kicked out, the whole world might be Trump country.”

Comey: Trump asked me to drop Flynn investigation

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Kontroversi di Washington Meningkat Pasca Pemecatan Comey

James Comey is famous for leaving a paper trail, and this is really a bombshell:

WASHINGTON — President Trump asked the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, to shut down the federal investigation into Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, in an Oval Office meeting in February, according to a memo that Mr. Comey wrote shortly after the meeting.

“I hope you can let this go,” the president told Mr. Comey, according to the memo.

The existence of Mr. Trump’s request is the clearest evidence that the president has tried to directly influence the Justice Department and F.B.I. investigation into links between Mr. Trump’s associates and Russia.

Mr. Comey wrote the memo detailing his conversation with the president immediately after the meeting, which took place the day after Mr. Flynn resigned, according to two people who read the memo. The memo was part of a paper trail Mr. Comey created documenting what he perceived as the president’s improper efforts to influence an ongoing investigation. An F.B.I. agent’s contemporaneous notes are widely held up in court as credible evidence of conversations.

Mr. Comey shared the existence of the memo with senior F.B.I. officials and close associates. The New York Times has not viewed a copy of the memo, which is unclassified, but one of Mr. Comey’s associates read parts of the memo to a Times reporter.

Why are people always making up lies about Donald Trump?

Lindsey Graham: Trump budget ‘dead on arrival’

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

Cumhuriyetçi senatörlerden Trump'a tepki

Here’s some good news:

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said Tuesday that President Donald Trump’s budget outline is “dead on arrival” and that proposed cuts to State Department funding “would be a disaster.”

“It’s dead on arrival. It’s not going to happen. It would be a disaster,” Graham said.

He said that if Trump limits the State Department’s ability to exercise “soft power” he is “never going to win the war.”

“What’s most disturbing about the cut in the State Department’s budget, it shows a lack of understanding,” Graham said.

Let’s not congratulate him

~ susie

The day after Trump's election.

Connie Schultz writes what a lot of us are thinking:

Don’t ask us to congratulate him.

Not today. Not this week. Not ever, probably.

He stands for so much of what we’d dared to hope was behind us as a country. Bigotry, misogyny, xenophobia. He spewed it with reckless abandon, and now he is going to be our next president.

Of course we are distancing ourselves. We love our families, our communities and our country. Our commitment is not a charade. And we want to live with ourselves.

This is not a sporting event. This is not about good manners. Sometimes there is no deliverance in the fake smile, the phony congratulations.

This would be one of those times.

We are exhausted but wide-awake aware. We have no choice, because we are his targets — a diverse group, which, in his view, qualifies us as the collective enemy. We are women. We are immigrants. We are black and Latino. We are Muslims and Jews. We are gay and lesbian, bisexual and transgender. We are the people on the margins, the ones invisible in plain sight.

We have listened to him talk about us for months. We know him.

Go read the rest.

The DNC celebrity fest, from a distance

~ odd man out ~ 8 Comments

This week, more reminders that police and the major parties have mastered the trick of keeping protesters at a distance from national conventions without making mass arrests that might result in bad publicity.

That’s why this year’s DNC is at the Wells Fargo Center, one of several sports venues on Philly’s southern fringe, far removed from any actual street life. You can see for miles down there, but all you can see are parking lots, ballparks and arenas.

Hardcore Bernie loyalists, Jill Stein supporters and other protesters are permitted to march down Broad Street and gather in FDR Park, to the west of Wells Fargo Center, in the unrelenting July heat, but fences prevent them from getting anywhere near the center itself.

In fact, they can do little more than march past one another chanting slogans — preaching to the choir, as it were — with the knowledge they will be herded into police vans and face federal charges if they do anything cops deem disruptive.

Philly is my hometown. I’ve biked to the convention scene several times to join the protesters, but the setting raises an age-old question: If thousands of protesters chant in a place where no one else can hear them, do they really make a sound?

Inside the convention center rich celebrities, one after another, have taken the stage to tell us commoners why we should vote for Hillary, who in the past has taken exactly the wrong stand on many issues important to progressives.

Paul Simon sang and so did Alicia Keys. Meryl Streep’s speech was a testimonial for Hillary. And so on. The message of the event is that Democrats must unite in order to make sure Donald Trump is defeated. A good message, but why all the celebrity kitsch?

On Monday, former Bernie supporter Sarah Silverman went so far as to admonish nay-sayers in the building. She said, “To the Bernie-or-bust people, you’re being ridiculous.”

To which I would have replied, “To me, Sarah, the fact that you can scold Bernie die-hards on national TV, just because you’re a celebrity, is ridiculous. Your presumption that you can influence my vote, just because you’re a celebrity, is insulting. Vote for whomever you prefer. Meanwhile, please shut the fuck up.”

Donald Trump May Not Understand How U.S. Debt Works

~ susie ~ 4 Comments

Trump Puts The Idea of a US Government Debt Default On The Table. On Thursday, Donald Trump told CNBC that his solution to dealing with the $19 trillion-plus national debt involves a form of default such as repurchasing existing bonds at a discount. The m

Donald Trump is struggling to clarify his recent statements about how, as president, he would reduce the U.S.’s debt without crippling the economy. In a May 5 interview with MSNBC, Trump said he would keep borrowing, but “if the economy crashed you could make a deal.” The New York real estate mogul and presumptive GOP nominee… Continue reading “Donald Trump May Not Understand How U.S. Debt Works” →