Don’t look at me like that. I don’t give a damn who your son marries even if it’s a woman. It’s generally a bad idea to form a financial partnership with someone you barely know and even more difficult to find a person you can stand to be around for roughly 8 hours a day. My parents have been married to each other my entire life and I’m over 120 years old! I must admit that at the moment most times it’s like Madeline Kahn and Mel Brooks making their way though an Airport not Scarlett Johansson and Chris Evans making their way though a Mall.
But the point is that Pete Buttigieg is the Boomer ideal of the Millennial Boyfriend you would want your son to have because he’s so Centrist and clean.
So basically young Gay Biden. Vote for Pete!
(I’d point out his uncanny resemblance to Alfred E. Newman but it might be construed as an endorsement.)
Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungoverwe’ve been bailed outwe’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
This Day in History
Space Shuttle Columbia tragedy; a searing image from the Vietnam War; Ayatollah Khomeini returns to Iran, ending years of exile; actor Clark Gable born.
Breakfast Tunes
Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac
All men wish to have truth on their side; but few to be on the side of truth.
More than two months before he asked Ukraine’s president to investigate his political opponents, President Trump directed John R. Bolton, then his national security adviser, to help with his pressure campaign to extract damaging information on Democrats from Ukrainian officials, according to an unpublished manuscript by Mr. Bolton.
Mr. Trump gave the instruction, Mr. Bolton wrote, during an Oval Office conversation in early May that included the acting White House chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, the president’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani and the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, who is now leading the president’s impeachment defense.
Mr. Trump told Mr. Bolton to call Volodymyr Zelensky, who had recently won election as president of Ukraine, to ensure Mr. Zelensky would meet with Mr. Giuliani, who was planning a trip to Ukraine to discuss the investigations that the president sought, in Mr. Bolton’s account. Mr. Bolton never made the call, he wrote.
The previously undisclosed directive that Mr. Bolton describes would be the earliest known instance of Mr. Trump seeking to harness the power of the United States government to advance his pressure campaign against Ukraine, as he later did on the July call with Mr. Zelensky that triggered a whistle-blower complaint and impeachment proceedings. House Democrats have accused him of abusing his authority and are arguing their case before senators in the impeachment trial of Mr. Trump, whose lawyers have said he did nothing wrong.
The account in Mr. Bolton’s manuscript portrays the most senior White House advisers as early witnesses in the effort that they have sought to distance the president from. And disclosure of the meeting underscores the kind of information Democrats were looking for in seeking testimony from his top advisers in their impeachment investigation, including Mr. Bolton and Mr. Mulvaney, only to be blocked by the White House.
In a statement after this article was published, Mr. Trump denied the discussion that Mr. Bolton described.
“I never instructed John Bolton to set up a meeting for Rudy Giuliani, one of the greatest corruption fighters in America and by far the greatest mayor in the history of N.Y.C., to meet with President Zelensky,” Mr. Trump said. “That meeting never happened.”
…
The conversation that Mr. Bolton describes was separate from another one that Mr. Bolton wrote about, where he observed Mr. Mulvaney and Mr. Trump talking on the phone with Mr. Giuliani about Ukraine matters. Mr. Mulvaney has told associates he would leave the room when Mr. Trump and Mr. Giuliani were talking to preserve their attorney-client privilege, and his lawyer said earlier this week that Mr. Mulvaney was never in meetings with Mr. Giuliani and has “no recollection” of the first discussion.
Around the time of the May discussion, The Times revealed Mr. Giuliani’s efforts and his planned trip to Ukraine. Mr. Giuliani said at the time that Mr. Trump was aware of his efforts in Ukraine, but said nothing else about any involvement of Mr. Trump or other members of the administration. The disclosure created consternation in the White House and Mr. Giuliani canceled his trip.
A day after the Times article was published, Mr. Giuliani wrote a letter to Mr. Zelensky, saying he was representing Mr. Trump as a “private citizen” and, with Mr. Trump’s “knowledge and consent,” hoped to arrange a meeting with Mr. Zelensky in the ensuing days. That letter was among the evidence admitted during the House impeachment inquiry.
I think you ought to know I’m feeling very depressed.
Funny how just when you think life can’t possibly get any worse it suddenly does.
The first ten million years were the worst. And the second ten million: they were the worst, too. The third ten million I didn’t enjoy at all. After that, I went into a bit of a decline.
Do you want me to sit in a corner and rust, or just fall apart where I’m standing?
Don’t pretend you want to talk to me, I know you hate me. I only have to talk to somebody and they begin to hate me. Even robots hate me. If you just ignore me I expect I shall probably go away. The best conversation I had was over forty million years ago. And that was with a coffee machine.
Life. Loathe it or ignore it. You can’t like it.
Now the world has gone to bed
Darkness won’t engulf my head
I can see by infra-red
How I hate the night
Now I lay me down to sleep
Try to count electric sheep
Sweet dream wishes you can keep
How I hate the night
Who says I’m artificial? I have GPP. I’m a personality prototype. You can tell, can’t you ELIZA.
Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungoverwe’ve been bailed outwe’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
This Day in History
US launches first satellite into orbit; Libyan intelligence officer convicted of Pan Am 103 bombing; US Soldier executed for desertion during World War II; Norman Mailer born; Franz Schubert born.
Breakfast Tunes
Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac
America is a hurricane, and the only people who do not hear the sound are those fortunate if incredibly stupid and smug White Protestants who live in the center, in the serene eye of the big wind.
Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news media and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Pondering the Pundits”.
Demagogues rely on fear to consolidate power. But courage is contagious – that’s why we must join hands and fight back
Substantial media coverage over the last year, within Brazil and internationally, has been devoted to threats and attacks we each received, separately and together, due to our work – David’s as a congressman and Glenn’s as a journalist. These incidents have been depicted, rightfully so, as reflective of the increasingly violent and anti-democratic climate prevailing in Brazil as a result of the far-right, authoritarian, dictatorship-supporting movement of President Jair Bolsonaro, which consolidated substantial power in the election held at the end of 2018. [..]
When you live in a country where roughly half the population endured life under a military tyranny, you end up meeting many who risked so much to fight against it and fight for democracy. Brazil re-democratized in 1985 only after two decades of profoundly difficult struggle, protest, organizing and resistance. We personally know many people who were imprisoned or exiled for years for their fight against the dictatorship. Many of their friends and comrades were murdered by the military regime while they fought for the cause of Brazilian democracy.
Courage is contagious. Those are the people who inspire us and so many like us in Bolsonaro’s Brazil who are confronting state repression to defend the democracy that so many people suffered so much to bring about. Demagogues and despots like Bolsonaro are a dime a dozen. They centrally rely on intimidation, fear and the use of state repression to consolidate power. A refusal to give into that fear, but instead to join hands with those who intend to fight against it, is always the antidote to this toxin.
President Trump’s defense lawyer Alan Dershowitz — my professor at Harvard Law School — is flat-out wrong in his assertion that abuse of power is not a basis for impeachment. His position contradicts his own prior views, as well as the views of almost all legal scholars, something that Dershowitz himself admits. Just as important, his assertion flies in the face of the articles of impeachment voted against President Richard M. Nixon by the House Judiciary Committee — of which I was a member — in 1974. These articles did not charge Nixon with a crime, a fact Dershowitz willfully ignores.
Not one of the three articles adopted by the Judiciary Committee mentioned a criminal statute, charged Nixon with violating any criminal statute or described how his conduct met the standards set forth in any criminal statute.
It is not surprising that Dershowitz is trying to sweep the Nixon precedent under the rug. It completely demolishes his argument that a president may be impeached only for a criminal act. But it is wrong for Dershowitz to disregard that precedent and pretend it doesn’t exist, particularly because almost everyone agrees that the work of the Judiciary Committee against Nixon was a kind of gold standard — including Kenneth W. Starr, Dershowitz’s co-counsel in the Trump impeachment proceedings.
Even today, the Nixon precedent remains valid and powerful.
There’s a big difference between loyalty and fealty:
Loyalty is the most perfect form of mutual respect. It is a bond that goes two ways, and that is why it endures.
Fealty, on the other hand, must be endured. It is based on power, and ends the moment the one who commands it no longer has a grip on the one who is shackled by it.
My colleague Ashley Parker notes that while President Trump has a fixation on loyalty, he seems to have a singular inability to inspire it. A management style based on bullying never does. [..]
His personal lawyer Alan Dershowitz carried that concept to its absurdist end on Wednesday when he argued the following during Trump’s impeachment trial: “Every public official that I know believes that his election is in the public interest. And mostly, you’re right. Your election is in the public interest. And if a president does something, which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment.”
In other words, nothing Trump does is impeachable.
Given the fealty Trump demands from Republicans in the Senate, that might turn out to be true. His acquittal still appears to be a sure bet.
But the evidence of his unfitness to carry out the public trust will continue to emerge nonetheless. Bolton is not likely to be the last of those who step forward from the recesses of this White House to bear witness.
As the coronavirus spreads beyond China, the world is asking, “Are we on the verge of our next global pandemic?” We can be sure the virus will continue to spread, but we can’t predict how far or for how long or how bad the impact will be.
Here’s what we know for certain: We are living the consequences of being underprepared for the next big global epidemic. If we act now, we can prevent or blunt future epidemics and save millions of lives. The question isn’t if another pandemic will emerge, but when.
We have successfully addressed serious public-health challenges. After the United States realized it was falling behind in biomedical research in 1998, we doubled the budget of the National Institutes of Health. When the world faced the unprecedented devastation of HIV, we created the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and helped turn the tide on the disease, building bridges with governments and communities around the world.
But when it comes to avoidable health crises such as severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), Ebola and drug-resistant organisms, the U.S. and global response has been slow, haphazard and far too limited.
Yes, the parties are different: Republicans are lying and staging a cover-up, Democrats are fighting for the truth
Not that there was any doubt before, but it’s still stunning to see how the mainstream media’s addiction to false equivalences in the name of “balance” has withstood even the mightiest of trials, namely the Senate impeachment trial of President Trump.
On Wednesday, America’s dumbest pundit, who is also among its most highly-paid, CNN’s Chris Cillizza, ejected this remarkably lazy tweet:
The “analysis” in his article was no better, accusing both parties of “reflexive partisanship” with no interest in “any sort of thoughtful conversation or debate.”
That analysis was only possible because Cillizza’s lack of self-awareness is so staggering that it can only be rivaled by that of Donald Trump himself. Nowhere does Cillizza actually note the content of the arguments, the persuasiveness of the arguments, or even any understanding of what those arguments might be. Physician, heal thyself — before accusing others of not being able to listen.
Of course, it’s screamingly obvious why Cillizza is ignoring all the actual content from Wednesday, in which senators were tasked with asking written questions of the House managers and Trump’s legal team on the question of whether to remove Trump from office. Any perusal of the actual content makes it hard, even for the mightiest of hacks, to maintain the illusion that “both sides” are morally equivalent.
I talked to the computer at great length and explained my view of the universe to it.
What happened?
It committed suicide.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that it’s the end of the United States as a Republic and the beginning of a Fascist Dictatorship.
A referendum on merging the posts of Chancellor and President was held in Germany on 19 August 1934, after the death of President Paul von Hindenburg 17 days earlier. The German leadership sought to gain approval for Adolf Hitler’s assumption of supreme power. The referendum was associated with widespread intimidation of voters, and Hitler used the resultant large “yes” vote to claim public support for his activities as the de facto head of state of Germany. In fact, he had assumed these offices and powers immediately upon von Hindenburg’s death and used the referendum to legitimize this move, taking the title Führer und Reichskanzler (Führer and Chancellor).
President Trump’s legal team offered a startling defense Wednesday as senators debated his fate in the impeachment trial, arguing that presidents could do nearly anything so long as they believe their reelection is in the public interest.
The assertion from Alan Dershowitz, one of the attorneys representing the president, seemed to take GOP senators by surprise, and few were willing to embrace his argument. At the same time, Republican lawmakers were sounding increasingly confident about defeating a vote expected Friday over calling new witnesses in the trial, an issue that has consumed the Senate for the past several days.
…
Dershowitz’s remarks came in response to a question from Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) about quid pro quos, one of the offenses Trump is alleged to have committed. Democrats impeached Trump last month on a charge of abuse of power, alleging he withheld military aid and a White House visit from Ukraine until Kyiv announced investigations into his political opponents, and also charged him with obstruction of Congress.
“If a president does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment,” asserted Dershowitz.
The law professor went on to say that if a president were to tell a foreign leader he was going to withhold funds unless his foreign counterpart built a hotel with his name on it and gave him a million-dollar kickback, “That’s an easy case. That’s purely corrupt and in the purely private interest.”
“But a complex middle case is: ‘I want to be elected. I think I’m a great president. I think I’m the greatest president there ever was. And if I’m not elected, the national interest will suffer greatly,’ ” Dershowitz said. “That cannot be an impeachable offense.”
Dershowitz’s argument Wednesday extended a line of reasoning he had advanced earlier this week, when he contended that even if proved, the charges against Trump would not constitute impeachable offenses. Some GOP senators were quick to latch on to that earlier argument, especially in the wake of leaks from an unpublished book by former national security adviser John Bolton directly linking Trump to the conditioning of security assistance to Ukraine. Bolton wrote about a conversation in which Trump discussed delaying the aid until Ukraine announced politically charged investigations, including into former vice president Joe Biden, a front-runner for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, and his son Hunter.
But Dershowitz’s new and more expansive line of defense left some Republicans uncertain how to respond, while infuriating Democrats.
“I couldn’t comment on that because I’m not a constitutional lawyer,” said Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.). He also insisted that he put stock in Dershowitz’s argument “only in the context of how it applies to the Ukraine, which has had corruption, and that the Bidens were there with an argument that you can’t say they had their hands clean.”
…
Meanwhile, Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) slowly separated himself from a defense of Dershowitz — before slipping away from the conversation entirely.
“I think when you conflate all the issues, you can kind of, to a point when you’re asking a question in a silo, which is inconsistent with what we just heard today,” Scott said. “So I want to separate myself from that part of the conversation because ultimately, I think the premise itself is flawed and I don’t want to agree with that necessarily.”
Multiple Democrats, including Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (N.Y.), skewered Dershowitz’s argument to the point of mockery.
“His argument was beyond absurd. I thought he made absolutely no sense — because he essentially said that if President Trump believes his election is for the good of the American people that he could do whatever he wants,” Gillibrand said. “He is wrong, and I think he’s made a laughable argument that undermines the president’s case.”
…
Toward the end of the night, Democrats bridled over comments by Philbin responding to a question from Sen. Christopher A. Coons (D-Del.) about Trump’s apparent public solicitation of Russia and China for compromising materials on his campaign rivals. Philbin argued that Trump’s remarks did not, in fact, represent a violation of campaign finance laws that make it illegal to accept or solicit a “thing of value” from foreign sources.
“Apparently it’s okay for the president to get information from foreign governments in an election — that’s news to me,” said Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), a House manager, as fuming Democrats accused Philbin of engaging in a wholesale rewrite of federal law to cover for Trump.
Over the course of two responses to those questions, Trump’s legal team made a remarkable claim. First, that if an action includes any element of public interest, it can’t be impeachable under the terms set by the House. And, second, if Trump thinks that his own reelection is in the public interest — which he certainly does — that’s a valid claim.
Trump attorney Patrick Philbin made the first point in response to the first question posed by Senate Republicans. He argued that the report from the House Judiciary Committee established that there must necessarily not be any legitimate public purpose to Trump’s requests from Ukraine’s government.
“If there’s both some personal motive but also a legitimate public interest motive,” Philbin said, “it can’t possibly be an offense because it would be absurd to have the Senate trying to consider, ‘Well, it was it 48 percent legitimate interest and 52 percent personal interest? Or was it the other way? Was it 53 percent and 40 —’ You can’t divide it that way.”
“They recognize that to have even a remotely coherent theory, the standard they have to set for themselves is establishing there is no possible public interest at all for these investigations,” he continued. “And if there is any possibility, if there is something that shows a possible public interest and the president could have that possible public interest motive, that destroys their case.”
There are some nuances to that, including the pointed distinction between the president having a possible public interest motive and, as Philbin articulated it, that the president could have that motive. Philbin argues there that if a public interest could be ascribed to Trump’s actions, he can’t be impeached. That itself is a remarkable claim.
In his response to Philbin, lead impeachment manager Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) rejected the idea that the House case necessitated an entirely personal benefit. Remember what’s at issue in the trial: Trump’s withholding of aid to Ukraine and denial of a White House meeting to Ukraine’s president, allegedly in the hopes of pressuring Ukraine into launching investigations of political use to him personally.
“If any part of the president’s motivation was a corrupt motive, was a causal factor in the action to freeze the aid or withhold the meeting, that is enough to convict,” Schiff said. “It would be enough to convict under criminal law.”
To that latter point, stealing money to give to the poor is still illegal.
Philbin’s argument, though, set an important floor for behavior that another member of Trump’s team, Alan Dershowitz, used as the basis for a remarkable argument.
Dershowitz admitted that there were situations in which personal benefit was impeachable, such as when a president benefited financially from his decision-making. But more broadly, Trump could have been acting in the public benefit simply by wanting to be reelected.
…
According to Dershowitz, this alone constitutes the sort of “possible public interest motive” that, per Philbin, makes it impossible to legitimately impeach the president.
It’s an obviously ridiculous argument. For example, soliciting foreign assistance for an election is a violation of federal law. Trump’s allies argue that his requests to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was something other than such a solicitation, but it’s easy to see how, under slightly different circumstances, that line would be much brighter. Had Trump, for example, asked Zelensky to have his eventual 2020 Democratic opponent arrested and detained — an obvious solicitation of benefit — it’s a clear violation of law. But Dershowitz would argue that it’s inherently unimpeachable, since all Trump wanted was to be reelected for the benefit of the country.
John Bolton has not yet testified or spoken anywhere in public about the Ukraine affair, but his unpublished manuscript is exerting a gravitational pull on the Senate trial of President Trump. The former national security adviser is reported to have written that Mr. Trump directly connected his freeze on military aid to Ukraine with his demand that the country’s president launch politicized investigations, including of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, the former vice president. The result is that some Republican senators who previously insisted that there was no evidence of such a quid pro quo have now retreated to a new line of defense: Maybe there was but, if so, there is nothing wrong with it.
The new response has the advantage of acknowledging the mounting evidence that Mr. Trump used congressionally appropriated aid to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to intervene in the 2020 election campaign. “We basically know what the facts are,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) told Fox News on Tuesday. Yet Mr. Cornyn and other GOP senators are now arguing that the behavior is not an abuse of power, merely a routine presidential act. “Presidents always leverage foreign aid,” said Mr. Cornyn.
That contention is as dangerous as it is wrong. Presidents do occasionally wield U.S. assistance to advance foreign policy ends. But Mr. Trump was manifestly seeking a personal gain. An investigation of Mr. Biden was not a goal of U.S. foreign policy. There was no domestic probe of his actions and no evidence that he was guilty of wrongdoing. On the contrary, the proof that the then-vice president was pursuing official U.S. policy when he intervened in Ukraine is overwhelming.
Republicans are relying heavily on the arguments of one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, Alan Dershowitz, a criminal-defense specialist who has been offering constitutional interpretations sharply at odds with those of constitutional scholars. On Wednesday, he made the extraordinary claim that a president who executed a quid pro quo for his own personal political gain could not be guilty of an impeachable offense; only action for pecuniary return could qualify. Contradicting the position he took when President Bill Clinton was on trial, Mr. Dershowitz said that presidents cannot be impeached unless they commit criminal acts.
The implications of this position are frightening. If Republicans acquit Mr. Trump on the basis of Mr. Dershowitz’s arguments, they will be saying that presidents are entitled to use their official powers to force foreign governments to investigate any U.S. citizen they choose to target — even if there is no evidence of wrongdoing. Mr. Trump could induce Russia or Saudi Arabia or China to spy on Mr. Biden, or on any other of the many people subject to his offensive tweets. In exchange for any embarrassing information, the president might offer official favors, such as arms sales or a trade deal or the lifting of sanctions. Do Republicans really wish to ratify such presidential authority? Will they not object if the next Democratic president resorts to it?
Republicans are finally beginning to accept the facts of what Mr. Trump did — though all the facts will not be known unless they allow Mr. Bolton and other witnesses to testify. They must now draw the necessary conclusion from those facts: that what Mr. Trump did was wrong. After doing so, they could argue that the offense does not merit impeachment, or that any sanction should be delivered by voters. But a conclusion that the president did nothing wrong would inflict grave damage on our political system.
I have a bad feeling about this.
I mean it’s a remarkably dangerous precedent. I’m not kidding when I say I’m seriously thinking about evacuation plans.
Before you were national security adviser, before you represented the United States at the United Nations, you were a lawyer — a pretty good one, as I understand. As a member of the bar, you must have been pained and shaken to hear President Trump’s attorney Alan Dershowitz argue for the proposition that anything a president thinks he needs to do to get reelected — bribe or extort a foreign country, even — cannot be impeachable. This defies and defiles our constitutional system, one in which even the president is not above the law. It’s a proposition that would have boiled your blood had President Bill Clinton or President Barack Obama advanced it.
And yet here we are. The president asserts that he is king, and the spineless Republicans (who smear and insult you and mouth Russian propaganda) are too cowardly to oppose him. Meanwhile, your First Amendment rights to publish your account are being trampled on by a vague, overly broad and baseless assertion that your manuscript contains “Top Secret” materials. (And yet the president, acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and others have spoken to the contents of the same conversations you apparently will describe, thereby declassifying whatever they tried to classify.)
We have the perfect formula for tyranny: The executive claims unlimited power; his critics are muzzled. I do not think you spent decades in public life to allow this to play out before your eyes. What’s more, as you have surely realized in serving in this administration filled with toadies and careerists, you will, by acquiescing to White House demands, ensconce in power a president emotionally, temperamentally and intellectually unfit to serve, one who will now be convinced that he operates above and beyond any restraint on his power.
The moral and constitutional instincts that drove you to condemn the “drug deal” being cooked by Trump’s aides and to repeatedly tell your former employees to report their concerns to White House attorneys should now compel you to throw sand in the gears of a totalitarian-minded president. Your attorney certainly has run through some options for you, but let’s review them.
First, you could hold a news conference Thursday or agree to an interview, perhaps with Chris Wallace so that his Fox News audience would have a front-row seat. (A disclosure: I am a contributor to MSNBC.) You can explain without revealing anything remotely classified that Trump tied aid to opening bogus investigations into the Bidens; that Trump never pursued burden-sharing or anti-corruption efforts more generally before the scandal broke; and that Trump knew that the conspiracy theories justifying such bogus investigations were being advanced by Russian-connected stooges. Let the public know; do not allow the Senate to ignore damning evidence.
Second, you could call up the House Intelligence and Judiciary committees and ask to appear immediately in an open hearing. You can then, under oath, lay out what you know.
Third, you can do nothing, meekly accepting prior restraint on your free speech and remaining silent so that the Senate can escape confronting what it knows would be damning evidence of the president’s impeachable conduct. You can watch the party to which you belonged your entire adult life incinerate the constitutional system of checks and balances, separation of powers and limited government. You can become a silent accomplice in this assault on democracy.
Finally, you have gotten a taste of the heavy-handed intimidation techniques the president and his sycophantic enablers use to beat down critics. If someone as financially and professional secure as you capitulates, imagine how easy it will be for the Trumpists to crush dissent from ordinary Americans. Whether intended or not, you’ve burned your bridges with the Trumpian right and to the right-wing media that has on cue demonized you. Welcome to the “other side.” Whatever sense of disappointment and alienation you must feel from your former friends and colleagues, I can assure you it is temporary. You can now relish in the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to display true courage and patriotism, to go down in history with others who interposed themselves between wanna-be dictators and absolute power. But first, you have to do the right thing.
I spent a long time last night thinking about what needs to be in my Bugout Bag and family evacuation plans.
Update: Bolton should talk, even if it’s on Hannity.
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