It's Gonna Take A Dead Hooker

...but don't count on it - Nicolle Wallace, MSNBC:



"Shot four times in the back with a bolt-action 30.06? An obvious suicide - the facts are in." --Jim Jordan

Today's Tweet

The weird flipflop evolution thing that Lindsey Graham has gone through is one of the more intriguing stories of the Cult45 era.

How he went from the mavericky McCain entourage to the ass-kisser he is now will be a mystery that could easily make some history major's career.

Today I began an investigation into the Bidens. Did the Biden's do anything wrong? NO. Am I doing this to make @realDonaldTrump look innocent? YES. WHATEVER YOU DO, DO NOT WATCH THE VIDEO BELOW!! IT WILL MAKE ME LOOK LIKE A MONSTER... pic.twitter.com/ZBEe80o4zZ

— Lindsey Graham’s “Fake” Conscience (@LGsConscience) November 22, 2019

A Score Card

CREW - Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington

Go to the CREW website, hover over the different sections, and be astounded at the depth and the breadth of what this "administration" is about - even when you stop to see that the thing is only focused on the Trump part of it, and doesn't include the rest of Cult45.

Another Strong Close

Adam Schiff, Chair, House Intelligence Committee

We'll see what we see, but I still won't get my hopes up too high.

Republicans aren't coming around - not yet - not publicly. And the conventional wisdom is that they won't cut 45* loose until the political cost of staying with him becomes too great and too obvious for them to bear. Duh.

Our government is degenerate.

It's a little weird to think that way about the US. There's always an element of Daddy State philosophy in government. And always there are people who believe government is there to force us all into a particular way of thinking - not just the basics of knowing our rights and respecting each other's rights, but to use the full weight of the threat of deadly force to make people conform to the arbitrary musings of doctrinaires rather than trying to nail down a few guiding principles that give us a chance to live up to our stated goal of forming a more perfect union.

The good news is that I think we're starting to bend history's arc back towards justice.

The bad news is that we haven't passed thru this very dangerous crossroads yet.

And just to continue this little metaphor mashup - when you're going through hell, keep going.

Today's Tweet

What had to be said. And what too many of us have been thinking Schiff wouldn't say.

This is a pretty good close.

Here's that closing statement from Schiff, via ABC. It's worth a watch.

"My Republicans colleagues, all they seem to be upset about with this is not that the president sought an investigation of his political rival ... Their objection is he got caught."pic.twitter.com/M8r8JLrH61

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) November 20, 2019

Today's Pix

click

👁⬇︎👁

Today's Tweet

The only shot Repubs have is to turn the hearings it into something they're not.

Replublicans readying for today's impeachment hearings 🐾💕 pic.twitter.com/01KIwZeEt1

— Jay Arnold 🏳️‍🌈 (@JadedCreative) November 19, 2019

Today's Today

156 years ago, a little over 4 months after the fight, Lincoln speaks for about 2 minutes, and in the 272 words, says everything that could be said at the time.

3 days of battle. 7,000 dead. 11,000 missing. 32,000 wounded.

I think it can be said that there are wars more justifiable than others, but there is no such thing as a good war, any more than there is the real possibility of "winning" a war.

Whoever loses the least, or outlasts the opponent, gets to claim "victory", but nobody wins anything in a war.

Today's Charlie

Charlie Pierce, Esquire Magazine (rerun from a while back - worth repeating)

"In my life, I have watched John Kennedy talk on television about missiles in Cuba. I saw Lyndon Johnson look Richard Russell squarely in the eye and say, "And we shall overcome." I saw Richard Nixon resign and Gerald Ford tell the Congress that our long national nightmare was over. I saw Jimmy Carter talk about malaise and Ronald Reagan talk about a shining city on a hill. I saw George H.W. Bush deliver the eulogy for the Soviet bloc, and Bill Clinton comfort the survivors of Timothy McVeigh's madness in Oklahoma City. I saw George W. Bush struggle to make sense of it all on September 11, 2001, and I saw Barack Obama sing "Amazing Grace" in the wounded sanctuary of Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina.

These were the presidents of my lifetime. These were not perfect men. They were not perfect presidents, god knows. Not one of them was that. But they approached the job, and they took to the podium, with all the gravitas they could muster as appropriate to the job. They tried, at least, to reach for something in the presidency that was beyond their grasp as ordinary human beings. They were not all ennobled by the attempt, but they tried nonetheless.

And comes now this hopeless, vicious buffoon, and the audience of equally hopeless and vicious buffoons who laughed and cheered when he made sport of a woman whose lasting memory of the trauma she suffered is the laughter of the perpetrators. Now he comes, a man swathed in scandal, with no interest beyond what he can put in his pocket and what he can put over on a universe of suckers, and he does something like this while occupying an office that we gave him, and while endowed with a public trust that he dishonors every day he wakes up in the White House.

The scion of a multigenerational criminal enterprise, the parameters of which we are only now beginning to comprehend. A vessel for all the worst elements of the American condition. And a cheap, soulless bully besides.
Watch him make fun of the woman again. Watch how a republic dies in the empty eyes of an empty man who feels nothing but his own imaginary greatness, and who cannot find in himself the decency simply to shut the fuck up even when it is in his best interest to do so. Presidents don't have to be heroes to be good presidents. They just have to realize that their humanity is our common humanity, and that their political commonwealth is our political commonwealth, too.

Watch him again, behind the seal of the President of the United States. Isn't he a funny man? Isn't what happened to that lady hilarious? Watch the assembled morons cheer. This is the only story now."

Yeah, About That

So, back in 2012, there was quite an effort to revamp and re-brand the GOP. They realized they were perceived as not being down with the good folks of the "Real America" - that the Romney campaign had boomeranged away from McCain's "Just folks and Straight Talk" bullshit, and had shown the party as catering to the elite, with Willard's dumbass "gaffe" of the 47% being the perfect illustration of how badly out of touch Republicans had become.

So they embarked on the project to re-connect with the good people - the workin' guy - the common clay of the heartland. You know - the rubes.

It's not turning out quite the way they said they wanted it to turn out. Which is not to say it's not turning out the way somebody intended it, but that's another foil hat rant for another time.

Let's just say they're -

G.utless
O.bsequious
P.honies

- and let that suffice for now. 

Jennifer Rubin, WaPo:

When listening to President Trump and fellow Republicans throw around accusations against Democrats and the media or advance defenses for Trump’s impeachable conduct, there is a better than even chance they are misleading if not downright lying. In some cases, we discover the lies because other individuals are caught lying.

Roger Stone was convicted, among other things, of lying to Congress about his conversations with WikiLeaks’s Julian Assange. He falsely claimed: He had no emails, documents or texts relating to WikiLeaks; he never sought damaging information (i.e., emails) about Hillary Clinton; never contacted WikiLeaks through intermediaries; and never contacted the Trump campaign about WikiLeaks. The last lie — denying contacts with the Trump campaign — raises the question as to whether President Trump lied in responses to Robert S. Mueller II.

At the trial we learned about Stone’s numerous contacts with the campaign:

Rick Gates, who served as Trump’s deputy campaign chairman, testified Tuesday that Stone began discussing Clinton leaks with the campaign in April 2016 and that from May onward Gates understood Stone to be the campaign’s intermediary with WikiLeaks. By July 2016, Gates testified, Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort said he was updating Trump and others regularly and directed Gates to keep following up with Stone. After Trump ended one phone call from Stone at the end of that month, Gates testified, the future president said to Gates that “more information would be coming.”

In his written answers, however, Trump claimed he had “no recollection” of conversations with Stone about WikiLeaks nor did he recall knowing Stone had discussed WikiLeaks’s email drops with the campaign. Perhaps Trump’s memory is addled; if not, it appears he lied to Mueller.

For most of us, it's not hard to see the truth about the GOP's long slide into the shit pile of distilled concentrated hatred.

But it's also pretty easy to see how, for some, it seems like it all happened suddenly.

It didn't.

I'll say this again: Trump has not remade the GOP in his own image. He's the near-perfect reflection of what the Republican Party has been morphing into for at least 30 years.

Ms Rubin is pointing out just one of the main aspects of a political party that's been trying so hard to hang onto the fantasy of some glorious past that it's lost touch with reality altogether.

And it's gotten to the point where it seems like they have to lie about everything. As if all they can do now is try to reinforce one lie with another - to cover up, or to compensate for one lie with the next.

Likewise, in the Ukraine matter multiple witnesses gave testimony that suggests that Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland has been telling falsehoods under oath. Some he has remedied, such as his initial statement that he had not communicated to the Ukrainians that military aid was dependent upon their opening an investigation into the Bidens. However, we now know from at least one other witness that Sondland’s denial that he spoke to the president or to the State Department was false. (He spoke to both.) One wonders if he’ll share a similar fate as Stone, the former Trump confidant who this week was found guilty on charges of lying to Congress, obstruction of justice and witness tampering.

The Trump lies relating to Ukraine are numerous and serious, although not delivered under oath. CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale has documented 45 Trump lies concerning Ukraine including:

Trump did not ask [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky for anything on the call. (Trump asked Zelensky to look into former Vice President Joe Biden, look into a debunked conspiracy theory about Democratic computer servers, and speak with his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and Attorney General William Barr.)

Zelensky criticized former US ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch “out of the blue” on the call. (Trump brought up Yovanovitch first.) . . . .

The whistleblower was “sooo wrong.” (The rough transcript and witness testimony have proven the whistleblower to have been highly accurate.) . . .

Schiff might have been the whistleblower’s source. (This is nonsense. The whistleblower said in the complaint that information about the call came from “multiple White House officials with direct knowledge of the call.”)

Other Trump lies include his denial that United States military aid was held up, his bizarre accusations that House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) was the whistleblower’s source and his unfounded allegations that former vice president Joe Biden “stole” millions of dollars from foreign countries and pressured Ukraine to fire a prosecutor when Hunter Biden was still under investigation.

House Republicans continually traffic in lies — e.g., Ukraine interfered with our election, Joe Biden’s conduct pressuring removal of a delinquent prosecutor was illegal or corrupt, Trump was concerned about Ukraine’s corruption in general.

The good news is that Dems keep turning out and voting down the candidates who Trump is working very hard to prop up.

The bad news is that lots of Repubs are still in charge of some very important places, and they continue to ramp up their attempts to scotch the elections.

And I think it's a very safe bet that they're still getting plenty of help from the Russians.