(See: Just Above Sunset : Our Neighborhood Now )
I really enjoyed the way CNN summarized the breaking news of Monday's court ruling, which was that a federal judge informed the White House that “'Absolute Immunity’ is ’not a thing’!”
Sooner or later, it was bound to come down to someone explaining the way things really are to Donald Trump in the go-to language of a Middle Schooler. I love it!
I have two suggestions, plus one comment:
(1) I’m more and more thinking lately that Nancy Pelosi is wrong to narrow the focus of the impeachment to just the one article, concerning the famous phone call, which for some reason too many Americans find not necessarily all that impeachable.
Still, how anyone can think that a U.S. president, casually and for his own personal reasons, betraying one of our close allies, and one that we’ve promised to protect, putting them at risk of being swallowed up by one of America's long-time adversaries, is not the commission of a huge crime, is a mystery to me.
(In fact, I’m at a loss. I need these people to tell us what sort of crimes they think would be impeachable. I suppose the reason we don’t hear any Republicans coming up with any of those right now could be because they’re afraid of coming up with something Trump might have actually already committed, or that he might accidentally commit soon, god forbid. That could be very embarrassing! But if so, I have to agree, given that you never know if Trump will zig when you zag, they're probably right to be cautious.)
All we need in the Senate trial is one guilty verdict on one article, and I suppose threatening to hand Ukraine over to Russia is a better candidate for a guilty verdict than most, but it’s not the only thing he’s done wrong.
In fact, I imagine that failing to fulfill one's oath of office to protect the Constitution (such as ordering his people to not cooperate with impeachment proceedings, a remedy spelled out the same Article Two of the Constitution that he cites as authority that he can do any corrupt thing he wants) is another. After all, we have so many misdeeds to turn to here, maybe we really should increase our odds by piling on.
When if comes to other crimes we could bring up, we can draw inspiration from Max Boot’s list of giveaways included in the price paid by Republicans when they chose to sell their souls to Trump:
When the Republican Party sold its soul to Trump in 2016, the price included overlooking his attacks on Mexicans and Muslims, on Gold Star parents, on a disabled reporter, even on John McCain; his abysmal ignorance of basic matters of public policy (he had never heard of the nuclear triad); his open collusion with Russia (“Russia, if you’re listening”); and, of course, his boasts about sexually assaulting women. ...
Trump has dramatically escalated the cost his supporters must pay to stay in his good graces as we approach his fourth year in power. The price came to include overlooking his racist rants (e.g., telling congresswomen of color to “go back” to where they came from); putting kids in cages; kowtowing to Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, Recep Tayyip Erdogan and other tyrants; abandoning America’s Kurdish allies; obstructing justice and stonewalling Congress; declaring a state of emergency to spend money that Congress has not appropriated for a border wall that we don’t need; lying nonstop; using the presidency to enrich himself; and disparaging the press as “the enemy of the people.”
There are, of course, many many more, but I suppose there is a point at which America will simply stop paying attention and drift off to sleep.
(2) Also, we need to push back on this idea that maybe we should just skip the impeachment, and let the upcoming elections decide the impeachment question.
The problem with that is that elections and impeachments are not the same thing, and serve two totally different purposes.
Elections ask the people to choose who (and also who’s vision) they want to run the country, whereas impeachment asks the government to determine whether the president committed any “crime” or “crimes” against the country, and should be removed from office because of it. Just as a priest who sexually molests a child should be fired and reported to the police, even if the Bishop likes the guy’s work, a president who commits a serious breach or law or rule should lose the job and shouldn’t even be allowed to run for future office, no matter what the voters think. (And by the way, part of the impeachment process includes an option allowing the Senators to vote to bar him from serving in any elected office in the future.)
(3) And finally, only because I haven’t heard anyone else mention this particular thing having to do with that Trump tweet, "We train our boys to be killing machines, then prosecute them when they kill!”:
Trump, of course, having never served in the military (rumored to be because of bone-spurs — maybe on his brain, one might guess), never learned first-hand that America does NOT train its boys and girls to be “killing machines”. In fact, soldiers and sailors and Marines are not machines of ANY kind, they’re human beings, and when did it become anything but an insult to say someone is NOT a human being, but is, instead, some sort of machine, without a brain?
Trump has, once again, unknowingly stepped into doodoo of his own creation, thereby insulting the noble heritage of our military that traces itself back to George Washington, and also misrepresented the values of the country it serves. Trump has never understood that America's power comes from its goodness, or at least from its attempts thereto.
So I suggest that Trump's reckless destruction of the American command structure should also be included in the articles of impeachment, as should Trump's unilateral betrayal of our allies, the Kurds, even if Republicans decide these crimes are no big deal.
(4) Okay, I lied. Here’s one last thing that the Republican sock-puppets need to realize about us “Never-Trumpers” (which, for my money, is a way-the-hell better thing to be than an “Always-Trumper”) whenever they accuse us of trying to impeach Trump "simply because [we] don’t like him!”
First of all, they’re exactly right: I’m for impeaching Trump simply because I don’t like him.
But why don’t I like him? I’ll give you a hint, it’s not because I arbitrarily flipped a coin to decide whether, “Heads, I like him”, and “Tails, I don’t like him”. The real reason I don’t like Donald Trump can be summed up thusly:
President Trump is a stupid shit-head, and keeps doing stupid shit-head things.
In fact, being an annoying and stupid shit-head was essentially his whole campaign. He promised to do things to piss off the good guys and please the bad guys. And he kept those two promises.
But who are the good guys and who are the bad?
The good guys tend to be people, trying to do good things for people in need. The bad guys are the ones trying to undo what the good guys do.
I didn’t used to believe in “Evil”. I saw it as too religious for my liking. But with the success of this president and his “Always-Trumpers” followers, I changed my mind. I became an empiricist. I now realize there are good people in the world, trying to make the world a better place, and there are bad people in the world, whose goal is to undo all the good done by the good people.
During the campaign, Trump promised all his followers that he’d annoy the establishment, a promise he kept, but now he’s whining that the establishment is trying to impeach him! And for what reason are they trying to impeach him? Simply because “they don’t like my policies!”
That’s true, we don’t like your policies, especially the ones having to do with destroying America’s place in the world, trying to undo all the good it’s been doing, and replacing it with evil.
But also your policy about you being a stupid shit-head.
