It's Only A Crisis Because Pelosi Is Afraid To Impeach

     Donald J. Trump, America's current President, wants to be impeached just as Nancy Pelosi says, and he will stone-wall his way into making it happen if he must. Pelosi wants to win even if it means not doing her job, as if Trump will impeach himself for her. 

     So the war is underway. Impeach him and run the risk of helping him get re-elected, or try to beat him at the ballot box while fighting back the morality cops, like Elizabeth Warren, who see this as a clear matter of integrity.

     
 I agree with Warren and I believe Pelosi and the Democrats are joining Republicans in a really dangerous game of wanting to win the politics of the day so badly, they are running from the spirit of justice in a nation much too passionate about honoring that spirit.

     Wantonness is not a great emotion to plan around, but it is the driving force for everything Democrats talk about these days. They want Trump gone so badly, but they are afraid to listen to the Mueller report and just "Do Their Jobs" because of the potential political backlash.

     Instead of simply reading the report- which, I am starting to question if many in Congress have- Democrats want to chase down Bob Mueller and former White House attorney, Don McGhan, who might be forced to testify, but will never be able to say anything that isn't already contained in the report. No matter how much Democrats want their way on this, they will look silly having McGhan turn to pages in the report to read it out loud on television for them. In essence, they want Mueller and McGhan  and Trump to do their jobs for them.

     In fact, Pelosi said as much when she recently resorted to stuttering her way into a weird explanation of Trump trying to "self impeach", a term nobody in the world understands but Pelosi. Even her attempts to clarify herself only amounted to saying that "Trump is building the case for his own impeachment".

     Translation: Pelosi wants Trump to do her job within Congress of whipping up support for impeachment by convincing individuals who are too lazy to do their jobs, to do their jobs and finally read the report. Pelosi herself is more willing to claim that we are in the midst of a Constitutional crisis rather than do her job and accept the answer the Constitution has given for this crisis moment.

     Because of the Providential perfection of our amendable Constitution, you can never have a Constitutional crisis until you run into a problem that the Constitution has no answer for. The problem right now is that the politics are historically horrible on impeachment, which has nothing to do with a crisis at all. This is about Pelosi wanting to have her cake and eat it too. But, everyone wants to have and eat their cake right now, and it's not a good look for any of them.

     Progressive Democrats say they want a woman to be the next President of the United States, but can't find one the masses seem willing to support yet. In addition to their Medicare-for-all plans, these progressives really want America to finally get serious about climate change vis a vis their Green New Deal, which is currently just a cool name and not quite a deal or a plan yet.

     Many of the new progressives in the party came to Washington D.C. on a commitment to impeach this President, but they have been quieted by Pelosi even though the Mueller report gives them more ammunition to impeach than they had when they arrived.

     Republicans have their own wants, but they are limited because they got that tax cut that turned out to be 4-5% bigger than anyone ever wanted or asked for. As it stands, way too many Republicans simply want Democrats to move on from Mueller's findings and turn a blind eye to the outlined obstructions and impeachment instructions messaged in the report. If you read between the lines on Pelosi's "self impeachment" comment, she seems willing to comply.

     Unfortunately for the GOP, moving on from Mueller means moving on to a huge spending bill that Trump negotiated directly with Chuck and Nancy (Schumer and Pelosi) realizing Congress is hardly the right place to make agreements anymore. This odd trio have agreed to a $2 trillion infrastructure plan that will probably get jammed by the politics of deficits, special interest add-ons, or a combination of both

     But I am mostly upset with Pelosi who is convinced the impeachment process will "die at the Senate's edge" and has fended her party away from the process, even though she seems more and more willing to discuss the option herself after the controversial AG Barr Senate testimony recently.  If Democrat voters start to feel this President deserves more than he is getting, they will stop pressuring this President and start pressuring his enablers instead- Democrats included.

     Pelosi is correct in her view on the dead end road impeachment faces in the Senate, but she is dead wrong in her overall analysis of the benefit to detriment because justice can never be about politics. Whether every Senator in America chooses to align themselves on the right side of history or not doesn't diminish the importance of making them have to. 

     In fact, this is not the time to run from the process and suggest the ideal of a Constitutional crisis. This is the time to use the process and make every person in Congress have to place their marker in the history books for our grandchildren to study. This is a time to shame those who haven't read the report, and this is also the time to better explain what the word impeachment means.....because, in the minds of many, the word means removal, and Americans don't like removing people WE voted for unless we have no other choice. The first Democrat to own the process of explaining impeachment to US all will help drive the process to its proper conclusion, and they might even win the White House for their efforts.

     An impeachment is a trial.  Period. It is a fact finding process intended to investigate cabinet officials who could be immune to such an inquiry if not for impeachment. Anyone geeky enough to be reading this already understood that. Many Americans do not. The only crisis currently is that Congress is at a stand still in getting documents from the White House for every current congressional investigation, including Russian election interference, and Congress can't begin their duty of oversight without compliance from the Trump administration.

     Insert AG Barr, who runs the Justice Department and is the key lineman blocking out front for all of Trump's obstruction efforts. Ultimately, someone in the Department of Justice will have to decide to indict their boss if Democrats attempt to hold Barr in contempt for not testifying before the House as requested recently. Lying to Senators about the letter he had received from Mueller is also perjury, which is an impeachable offense. As with Nixon, obstruction of a congressional investigation is also an impeachment worthy offense. 

     At the very least, Trump and his administration have promised to obstruct and are presently living up to the promise. The reasons to shut up and do something about this administration are recent, ongoing, and exist outside of the Mueller report, a report which also begs for something to be done.

     Impeachments alone have never resulted in the removal of a President because they were not necessarily intended for that. Before the Senate ever gets a chance to vote to remove a President via impeachment, a majority vote has to happen in the House first. The Founding Fathers intentionally designed an impeachment to be just as difficult as it should be. 

     Despite popular perception, the politics of impeachment are much more damaging to the party of the President, but that is beside the point. The impeachment process is the point and it is a provision designed for scenarios that demand it. It is part of the oath of the office that Congress promises to fulfill when the President and his cabinet fails to fulfill their own oaths.  History has painted impeachments as toxic, but politics themselves are naturally toxic and occasionally corrupt. By reinforcing the toxicity of an impeachment, Pelosi and Democrats are blaming the remedy.

     A concerted push for a better understanding of the process would offer better clarity to the word itself and to the necessity for invoking it when the Constitution demands. The Democrats anxiously screaming for impeachment need to acknowledge the confusion about the process and clarify it enough to tilt public perception and force Pelosi's hand. 

     The reason impeachments have never removed a President is because our hope-filled dream of Democracy in this fractured Republic typically intervenes. In reality, the standard for removal has always been higher than"... high crimes and misdemeanors", even while the standard for impeachment is not. Until Nancy Pelosi gets that and gets the courage to do what is right and not what is politically expedient, she is failing her country, her party and herself.

     I hate to beat a dead horse, but this horse deserves a beating. Pelosi asking for hearings with Mueller is the equivalent of asking him to slap her and the rest of the Democrats over the head with the obvious before they do what the report begs of them. All of this because everyone in D.C. wants a political victory even if America loses along the way.

     Until political wantonness changes, beating Trump at the ballot box is the only trick the Democrat pony can pull off, and Joe Biden is the best option to do it. Yet, beating Trump in 2020 is what Nancy needs. It has nothing to do with integrity, justice or addressing the reason Trump won in the first place. Trump happened for a reason and his approval ratings have never been low enough for me to think that mysterious reason has changed.

     Yeah, Russia is the easy answer, however, I tend to believe that Russia tipped a scale that was waiting to fall over from eight years of the racial uneasiness from a black president that millions refused to call their own. Now, we have millions on the other end of the political spectrum unwilling to do the same with Trump although the underlying issues from both sides are bigger than either men.

   It might be time for each of US to take ownership of our own part of this problem. We all want the America WE dream of but can't see how we become our own worst enemies screaming to the winds for the America we want instead of pursuing a nation that fulfills the wants of many, Trumpians included. The Trumpian army isn't confused about what's wrong even if they have a fully distorted view of who to blame or how to fix it. 

     Because the "Lord Is My Shepherd" I loathe the word want and wantonness, and I run from the use of the word as often as I can. It is a selfish emotion.  It defies my spiritual upbringing and denotes a desperation that defies the constant provisions of God. It screams desperation, yet, some needs are desperate, and I too want this rightfully elected dude gone just as passionately as the rest of you.

     What I don't want is to use want as a strategy to get him out. I don't want an elected president to lose his job without the full benefit of a due process too politically risky to touch. I would like for Trump to get everything he deserves, even if the process results in a real exoneration and not a fake news variety.

     What I also don't want, is for Democrats to pursue a political gain and
short circuit the process and the pursuit of democracy intended by the Founding Fathers who created the impeachment to properly adjudicate the misdeeds of a President gone array. If the misdeeds are unfounded, only the process can fully investigate and set the record straight, either way.

     No matter how Trump fights it, history will be forced to sniff out the truth. No matter how Pelosi fights it, the impeachment process was meant to deal with certain presidential matters and everyone in Congress currently playing politics instead of doing their job to clarify the historical record will be held accountable by history as well.

     No, this isn't a Constitutional crisis because there is an answer for this moment and it lives in the Constitution. One day in the future, Republicans and Democrats will regret not reading the report soon enough, and they'll regret trying to take this moment to use it as an opportunity for their own political gain.  Every American who lets them get away with it will feel the same regret.

If Trump Falls, Twitter Will Become His Nixon Tapes

Waking up the first working day of the new year to another twit-parade of comments from our Twitter-In-Chief, Donald J. Trump, has me thinking about the value of his idiocracy of a presidency.

I would love to focus my attention on the scary international tweets Trump directed to start the year towards the instability in Iran, North Korea, and Pakistan where he felt the need to tweet threat the withholding of U.S. aid instead of just withholding it with back-channel admonition like Obama and others have done, but those feel like the very distractions that he intends them to be.

Trump seems focused on a lot of things to the potential exclusion of preparing for the November elections, elections that we can now describe as this year since 2018 is no longer some distant date of future political concern. 2018 is now, and NOW is the time for Republicans to focus on fighting off the Blue Wave of Democrats who are threatening to overtake Congress and pressure Trump in ways he can't fully understand based on his current Twitter focus. In between golfing and Tweeting, he probably hasn't seen recent reports about is plummeting poll numbers in Iowa

Reince Priebus, former RNC Chair, has seen the numbers and has sounded off recently on the immense risk Trump will face if he allows the Democrats to overtake the House and the Senate. But the Christmas push to pass an unpopular tax present for rich folks while blasting the credibility of FBI Special Investigator Robert Mueller and the entire FBI is starting to make curious observers wonder if Trump is feeling the heat of the investigation too much to focus on the other things that threaten his presidency even more than Mueller.

Despite the irony of Trump potentially committing the kind of crimes that could "Lock Him Up", America is not interested in locking up presidents anymore than it is in locking up the loser from a political campaign as some countries do.  For Trump to focus his energy on attacking losing political opponents and discrediting an investigation that will never result in jail time for the president- even if it might for his subordinates- proves he doesn't understand civics enough to see the clear off-ramps of immunity our laws have made to avoid jailing deposed presidents and embarrassing an entire nation in the process.

Trump also isn't civically aware enough to realize that losing a Republican majority in 2018 elections is even more dangerous than liquored up George Papadapolous who was reported to have kick-started the investigation into collusion between the Trump campaign, a report that debunks the recent Republican counter-claim of the Steel Dossier being the sole reason for the Russian investigation. 

Trump also seems not to understand how his own Twitter initiated words paint a picture any basic smart person can follow, much less a brilliant lawyer and lifelong FBI investigator like Robert Mueller.

What former President Ricard Nixon did to counter the efforts of an investigation against him came to our knowledge in the years following his resignation. How Trump thinks he can stop Mueller from doing a job he has given his entire life to do on behalf of this great nation is a matter you can decipher while you sit on the toilet or drink your morning coffee because that's when Trump is likely to lay his cards on the Twitter table, for all the world to read.

Occasionally, Trump's Twitter type tirades have come via two old-school mediums called audio and video recording, but they are no less public and just as revealing of a man who has lived his entire life spilling his guts all over the current medium of the moment, confident that no exposure is ever bad as long as you use it in your favor.

Twitter is an expose for and of Trump, and history will probably look to a connected chain of tweets that will unravel the mentality of a mentally disturbed man who displays both his mentality and his disturbances nearly every morning via Tweet, for all the world to read.

The damage to this nation is definite even if yet to be defined. The global trust we've lost in the process of selecting a president has rendered us as untrustworthy as our process.  Stated more clearly, WE the People will need the world community to believe we preferred Bozo the Clown over our Donald Trump mistake. We have to prove him an accident of populism and of political apathy, or possibly a clownish byproduct of Communist collusion. A fair combination of each would help even more, however, that proving can only be done in the same place of the initial accident. Voting Booths.

Has The Twitter-In-Chief tweeted his cards unto
the table revealing penis insecurity while
pointing investigators to a path of his own demise?

Clowns thrive on entertaining you to get your attention. As we finished the first working day of the new year, news reporter left and right have slapped their own hands for breaking a resolution to not allow the Clown to distract them with Tweets, only to have Trump issue multiple tirades of a madman on Twitter to kick off the new year. 

Are these Tweets distractions of an attention hound or head-fakes to hide collusion? Before I could edit this piece for syntax and synchronicity, Trump Twitter bombed the world with a slew of late night tweets, the kind of stuff that usually happens when most of us are well into our second glass of our adult beverage of preference. Tweets during certain times of day are always more revealing but often terribly regrettable, like the late night comparison of nuclear button size Trump decided to have with Kim Jong Un of North Korea.

I personally am viewing his regurgitations via Tweet as his version of the Nixon Tapes being dictated before our eyes. Much like Nixon, they are the ramblings of fear and of a foolish leader who doesn't know any better but thinks he does. Nixon recorded his happenings because he became overwhelmed with distrust of the crumbling walls around him. Eventually, the presence of the tapes and the evidence they showed of his cover-up of a petty crime became much worse than the crime itself.

Trump may or may not have recordings as he threatened to have when attempting to bully former FBI Director, James Comey, into obeisance, but he has resorted to making Twitter declarations for the jailing of James Comey and several other "Deep State" political opponents.

Yep. He did that too. Via Twitter!!

Donald J. Trump needs to direct a news narrative that he can't control, he can only share how he feels about it and what he wishes he could do if he had the power to do what he wants with the DOJ. He can also accidentally expose his mental makeup by speaking on important things in frivolous ways that promise to threaten his presidency and the world at large but not Make Anything Great Again. 

In an effort to own the news, Trump literally launched the new year with a Twitter threat against Rocket Man (North Korean dictator, Kim Jong Un), Pakistan, Iran, Obama, Huma Abedin, the entire FBI and someone else that will inevitably happen just before, or soon after I publish this piece.

What happens if North Korea does not dismantle? Are WE
ready to back our words or prove them ineffective forever?
Neither of those options is good for the United States,

Donald J.Trump does all of those things, and more, via Twitter every day. As we resolve to avoid over-indulging in his clownery, we would be historical jesters to not listen to this era's Nixon tapes before they are formerly compiled, vetted and released to the public. Making New Year's resolutions to try not to give Trump's Tweets the historical significance they will have in 20-year hindsight will not change the psychological revelations they contain today.

Trump's Twitter trail will also show the destruction to the mantle of world leadership once maintained by the U.S. Granted, it is slightly presumptive to say what his overall impact will be as we stand here today, but the world could soon look back on Trump's Twitter ramblings as our most salient view into the psyche and the psychosis of president #45. 

WARNING!! Trump's Guilt Is Not A Campaign Message

As FBI special investigator Robert Mueller moves closer to something there there, Donald J. Trump, president, is behaving more and more like a man in full blown meltdown mode.

It isn't necessarily his awful handling of Sgt. LaDavid Johnson and his grieving family. It's not even his inability to be nice to a room full of reporters and their kids, pointing out how SHOCKED he was that any of them were cute based on their horrific parents, and then questioning the kids if they get tough interviews and coverage at home like he often gets from their parents.....or something silly to that effect.

Besides the moment being as awkward as Trump's last so called "fun" press event, the Obama era correspondence dinner in 2011 that turned into a not so impromptu roast of "The Donald", a moment that is believed to be the animus for his eventual presidential pursuit, it was a clear sign to me of the crumbling infrastructure of a presidency that has yet to be fully formed.

Disregard his inability to be decent to kids or to get it right with Gold Star families. The notion that this man would let the evil press disrupt and denigrate his image and disrupt the life that afforded him so much time to grope and golf makes the prospect of a second run at the presidency less likely than avoiding the brunt of this Russia mess. Especially after today.

Today, Trump's fired campaign chair, Paul Manafort, and Manafort's top aide, Rick Gates- who stayed on the campaign team even after his boss was let go- have both been charged with multiple crimes, crimes that most of us anticipated against someone even if we had no clue exactly who would be charged first.

The shocker was that the first charges came months ago when campaign aide George Papodopolous was secretly indicted on a question of collusion that he lied about twice. Papodopolous has been sharing details with Bob Mueller for months, presumably to assist with his guilty plea and to calm a prosecutorial pit bull who just sent a message to potentially uncooperative testifiers.

The discovery of the Papodopolous news seems a shock to everyone, including team Trump. Whether this trail of tears and indictments reaches the very top is a matter of speculation still, though it seems clear that Mueller is using concealed weapons to blow open the reluctant truth in this matter as multiple Trump subordinates have lied, some while under oath. Insiders believe these verifiable crimes and lies should have been enough for the courts to unseal Trump's taxes too, which might be another weapon Mueller now has at his disposal.

Regardless of the criminal outcome, Trump, Pence and Putin will not be able to collude for another election effort, something that appears to have been vital to Trump's victory.

WHY SO SAD??!!

Meanwhile, Democrats are so hell bent on ousting Trump, no matter what Meuller uncovers, they seem unaware that they still need to wait for 2020 to find a way to replace him with a president progressives prefer.

The murkiness of the Russian involvement question doesn't change the results of our last election or point a path towards the next. If Trump goes, he will be replaced by Pence and Paul Ryan, not Hillary Clinton. If Mike Pence, the lying head of the Trump transition team goes too, Ryan and President pro tempore of the Senate, Orrin Hatch, will take over. This could be why Hatch announced he's not returning for reelection last week (stay tuned on that).

Pussy grabbing and wall building was never a winning message, except for the small caveat that it still worked, or didn't hurt bad enough for a little collusion to do the rest.

Whether the Democrats message got lost in the slimy sauce the Donald cooked up is hard to know because most of us simply can't remember what their message was in the first place. Actually, I recall so many messages to so many people that I am not sure which group of voters Hillary Clinton and the Dem's thought could sway the election in their favor.

Now, the same messaging problem remains minus the notable face to deliver it. They may find someone noteworthy, but has our electorate grown weary of familiar political faces anyway? Were millineals really ready for the Socialist, Bernie Sanders, or is anything except more of the same likely to gain traction in today's political climate?

Republicans might be forced to pass some kind of tax plan just to deal with the Socialist reality that has now made universal healthcare permanent. If Democrats need a silver lining, the wages WE all deserve will soon happen, or the last scoop of dirt will go on top of trickle down economics, killing the theory forever.

Before you liberals gain comfort in that thought, gerrymandering promises functional control of politics for Republicans at every level below the presidency for years to come. Unless progressives find a person and a message, today's indictments won't do much to swing upcoming presidential elections either.