Monday, September 30, 2019

Peeking Over the Ramparts

I warned you.

I warned you in November, after the Democrats took the House of Representatives and der Sturmtrumper could no longer hide behind a solid GOP wall that would gladly overlook his crimes, his corruption, and his dictatorial urges as long as they got their judges and their tax breaks.  I warned you that it would get ugly, that it would get worse, that the future of the republic was in jeopardy, that the hard part had just begun.

And all those things have come true.

Der Sturmtrumper has been twisting feverishly in the wind for the last week, spitting bile and random accusations in all directions, ever since the impeachment inquiry became real.  He’s raged.  He’s thrown half his administration under the bus.  He’s held the most bizarrely pathetic open-air pity party in federal history.  He has, in violation of federal law, demanded the identity of the whistle-blower whose complaints he has explicitly confirmed as accurate, and his minions have set up a $50,000 bounty on the whistleblower’s head because nothing about that screams dictatorship or nutjobs at all.  He’s called for civil war.

Imagine – a sitting US president calling for civil war because the US Congress is starting to exercise its Constitutionally mandated oversight.  Who’da thought it?  Well, besides anyone who has paid attention to this sorry and lawless excuse for an administration since before it was inaugurated, I mean.  Who?

The Founding Fathers, that’s who.  Der Sturmtrumper is the sum total of everything they feared when they set up the republic in 1787.  The demagogue and would-be tyrant.  The guy riling up the mob and tearing down the Constitution.  The thing they fought the Revolution to create, built the Constitution to thwart, and created the Electoral College to avoid when the mob got out of hand.  They knew it was coming.  They just didn't know when.

Bearing in mind that my success rate as a fortune teller is pretty much zero, this is how I'm going to guess it will go.

There will be an investigation – a lengthy and excruciatingly public investigation, one hopes, though in the last 48 hours there have been new revelations of impeachable offenses roughly every 45 minutes or so, so perhaps that won’t be necessary.

There will be a vote on impeachment.  Given that our Criminal In Chief has already confessed and seems proud of it, there is only one way for that to go.

There will probably be a trial.  Let me clarify – the Constitution mandates that there be a trial, but then the Constitution also mandates that a sitting president shall get a vote on his nominee for the Supreme Court, and Moscow Mitch – the single most corrupt man in Washington DC, up to and including der Sturmtrumper – didn’t care about that either.  It’s entirely possible he will just refuse and then it will be up to the GOP Senators to decide if they care about the country more than their party.

I know where my money is.

But let’s just say that, perhaps by mistake, Moscow Mitch lets a trial happen.  Der Sturmtrumper will either be convicted, as the evidence and confessions demand, or his party will declare the republic to be at an end and all hail our absolute GOP overlords.

It's rather late in the game either way.

Der Sturmtrumper has already done incalculable damage to the standing of the US in the world.  He has already – perhaps fatally – undermined American political institutions and social norms.  He has shaped and encouraged a large body of Americans who think that Fascism is perfectly fine as long as they’re the ones doing the marching and the killing.  He has run roughshod over laws, morals, Constitutional restraints, human decency, and any claim this country ever had to have actual values.  It will take decades for the US to recover from this administration even if everyone involved in it slinks away quietly in chains.

There is nothing so dangerous as a cornered rat, however.  The odds of anything happening quietly with this administration or its supporters are effectively nil.  They're just a hairsbreadth away from a coup and you can see the idea gaining traction with them.  They're cornered, their ship is sinking, and they're ready to blow the whole thing up rather than see justice being served.

Hold onto your hats, folks.  We could end up miles from here.

6 comments:

  1. Ya know, I was having a pretty good week.

    The wife went into the hospital with an intestinal bacteria infection.

    While we were in the ER waiting for them to decide whether or not to admit her, an ambulance arrived with our six-year-old great-grandson who had just been stabbed in the arm by his bio-illogical father - he had to be life-flighted out to Primary Children's Hospital in SLC. Severed the primary artery just above the elbow, and severed about 40% of the nerves in his arm. CPS is "investigating". Police are waiting for the results of the "investigation" before acting. ::roll eyes::

    Since he lives with us, they're coming to inspect our home. Why not inspect the asshole who actually stabbed him? With a streak knife. Who stabs their six-year-old kid with a steak knife?

    Fender mount on my big truck broke. Cat puked on the new hardwood floor. 3 times. Dog chewed up the sofa. My pickup has a tire that is currently less than inflated. Flat, actually. But luckily it's just on one side. It snowed Sunday. And Monday. Fall lasted not quite 36 hours.

    And my internet keeps going down. The modem is going bad. Frontier Communications sucks.

    Then, since everything is going so well, I decided to drop in on you for a little cheer, because, ya know, David's always good at handing out smiles ...

    So ...

    Here we are. You're just full of wonderous thoughts today, aren't you?

    Lucy

    (Except for the bit about the great-grandkid, and, well, pretty much all of the rest of it, this post should be read as having been written with tongue planted firmly in one's cheek. Or something.)

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  2. Damn, man. That's one hell of a week. My sympathies.

    If I'm reading the last paragraph correctly, you're not kidding about it all.

    I hope that the clown who stabbed that child gets everything that is coming to him and more, preferably with a shovel.

    I admit it's been hard to be cheerful of late, given the news. Nobody's stabbed anyone close to me, though, at least not that I know of.

    I wish him a quick recovery.

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  3. Consensus around here - with which I agree - is that they key Q is whether and how documents and people are *forced* to be handed over and deposed. If that happens, rule of law exists. Which may bring us back to *$^&ing Kavanaugh.

    On the plus side, so far, democracy is still alive in the UK; and it *is* still the UK. I do not expect anything substantive to happen until the 19th, but then we have the same Q: can BoJo be forced to obey the law? If so, how? If Lizzie gets involved, I would be delighted, but the odds against that are _very_ long...

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  4. It's a hard time for the rule of law these days, yes indeed.

    While I have no doubt that Justice Party Boy will vote whatever way his masters tell him to vote (and Gorsuch will join him), I'm slightly less worried about Roberts, Alito, and even Clarence Thomas. I do have some hope that they will value the power of the courts more than the partisanship. We'll see if I'm right. I won't put money on it.

    BoJo is another one cut from the same cloth, if slightly less stupid. The Anglo-American world has truly fallen on hard times.

    As my dear departed grandmother used to say in response to the idea that the cream rises to the top, "Remember that shit floats too."

    How much power does E2 actually have in this situation? Leaving aside all considerations of advisability or fallout, could she actually step in and do anything substantive here?

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  5. And not to pick any nits or anything, I just noticed that you misspelled "Peking" in the title of this post.

    Ducks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peking_duck

    And shouldn't that be ramfarts? https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-a-fart-killed-10000-people

    And Runs seeking shelter.

    Lucy.

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  6. Farts are always funny, even when they're not.

    It's good that something is, these days. :)

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