686

 

You may have noticed that my chapter on Reagan-Iranian collusion 1980 is considerably longer than my chapter on Nixon-South Vietnam collusion 1968. 

This is because what Nixon did in 1968 is fairly widely known about and accepted as fact after the smoking gun from a few years ago-Halderman’s diary. 

For more on Nixon-Vietnam,  see the final chapter in Lawrence O’Donnell’s excellent book comparing 1968 to 2016 on this ‘perfect crime’

Yet Nixon’s Vietnam collusion wasn’t the perfect crime as the perfect crime is where you don’t get caught. No-the perfect crime was Reagan’s Iranian collusion circa 1980.

As I explained in the Reagan-Iranian collusion chapter, my reasoning in believing in Reagan’s guilt despite the fact that the MSM consensus ended up being to dismiss Reagan-Iran is that

FN: Note however that as argued in this book the MSM is only about truth and facts to the extent that they confirm and validate their preconceived current narrative. And how do they come by a particular, contemporary narrative? As journalistic studies academic Jay Rosen explains less because it jibes with the truth than what enables them to show off how savvy they are.

So you may think the idea that Reagan colluded with the Iranians to win the 1980 election is logically absurd on its face-or like me that it deserves a serious look; that there’s at least enough reasonable suspicion- but if you find it logically absurd because the MSM thinks its logically absurd-remember they aren’t driven in the first instance by truth but by what confirms their latest savvy narrative

Indeed as Michael Wolff explains the truth for the MSM is always a negotiated truth. They know many things that they would never publicly admit as they didn’t get there by the right method.  A very recent example of this is Lawrence O’Donnell being forced to publicly repudiate his story from the other night that a single source tells him that Trump’s loans have the signatures of Russians on them.

The very next night he was compelled to repudiate it. But why? Not because the story is false-at this point he himself doesn’t know that. What O’Donnell himself said is true-a single source told him there are Russian signatures on Trump’s loans. So why is he forced to disavow? Because it’s not in keeping with normal MSM practice that requires multiple sources.

O’Donnell now says he should not have reported on this story with only one source.

But notice that for most of the public-which doesn’t understand the nuances of MSM policy on sourcing ‘retraction’ means ‘refuted’-ie the story has been retracted because it’s false. The implication of O’Donnell’s own retraction is that it would be better that we not know that a single source asserts there were Russian signatures on Trump’s loans because this is allegedly unfair to ‘the President’-someone who literally is the most unfair person on the planet.

But this is the MSM position-we’d be better off today not knowing and so they will going forward pretend we never heard this.

But if you’re actually looking at the facts O’Donnell’s story is not logically absurd-it very much fits the current fact patterns those familiar with Trump-Russia are aware of.

So once again the Spirit of the Truth is shortchanged so that MSM quibblers enable ‘President Trump’ and his GOP co-conspirators to wrongly and misleadingly declare vindication.

And even if later on the Savvy add in more context and nuance they’ll still accept the basic false narrative.

This idea-that we’re better off knowing less of the truth out of fairness to the fake ‘President’ who ‘won’ his own election by the most unfair means imaginable-is the clear implication as well as the IG’s politically motivated report on Comey’s memos-yes I said it; as someone who doesn’t live in The View From Nowhere with the rest of the MSM pundits I don’t have to negotiate my facts.

Great analogy-the implication of the IG being that Comey should have let the place burn down.

If you look at the IG”s body of work-going back to Emailgate-rather than just presume the IG is a nonpolitical agency that always does the right nonpartisan thing-it’s been a very troubling pattern from when it gave misleading stories to the NY Times that Clinton was under criminal investigation-rather than that State Department protocols and practices were being reviewed-Chapter A for more.

End of FN

1. It goes to a clear historical GOP pattern of being determined to win elections through ANY MEANS NECESSARY right up to colluding with hostile foreign powers-aka treason. 

2. For Iran to release the hostages literally the morning Reagan was inaugurated in January, 1981 was just too convenient. Note what I’ve argued in this book. There’s Nance’s Law-coincidences take a lot of planning. There’s Catherine Vance’s assertion that there really are no coincidences in law enforcement. 

Vance as a former Georgia AG is simply stating something that most investigators in law enforcement and intelligence intuitively believe. As I explained elsewhere in this book, I came to believe there was something going on with Trump and Russia after the all too convenient way Wikileaks dumped the DNC emails at the absolutely most optimum moment, forcing the DNC Chairwoman to step down the morning of the Convention where the party desperately needed the Bernie and Hillary supporters to link arms.

Unlike Nance and Vance I don’t have a background in law enforcement or intelligence-though I do find intelligence work fascinating. But my intuition in late July was that the release of the DNC emails was too on the nose, too successful, too convenient. My feeling was that while coincidences happen, you have to be highly suspicious when they are this convenient.

A few days later Trump declared at his last press conference of 2016: Russia, if you’re listening. 

For me this was confirmation. Indeed, I used to dismiss ‘conspiracy theories’ like who killed Kennedy. But after Russia if you’re listening I actually for the first time in my life actually looked into some of the  who killed  JFK literature-and I’ve come to see that it really is fascinating-whatever the truth is exactly if it can ever be found exactly after 56 years. My research into JFK’s assassination led me to a few conclusions:

1. Logically it may well be the case that the Warren Report was correct but because they clearly had a predetermined outcome before they wrote it and they failed to answer many legitimate questions there will always be those that doubt it was ‘just a lone nut.’

The Warren Report wasn’t about finding the truth but quieting the conspiracy theories. By the way, you can’t totally blame them as there was real fear that a civil war could start if people didn’t believe the official explanation-a lone nut.

2. But I don’t  find counter theories-the mafia, the Cubans,  the Soviets obviously absurd. That, say, Castro killed JFK in revenge for all his attempts on Castro’s life is not absurd, wether it’s true or not.

3. And I do find Lee Harvey Oswald himself a very interesting, enigmatic character. It’s very plausible that he was much more than just a ‘lone nut.’ He acted in ways that often suggested he was some sort of agent provocateur-like when he was in the army and loudly proclaimed to the world his support of Castro, Russia, and the Communists. This was just a few years after the fall of McCarthyism after all. Talk like that might well get you a target on your back as a ‘pinko traitor’ in late 1950s America especially in the military. 

That the military authorities didn’t come down on him is very notable.

4. But the main takeaway was: conspiracy theories-even if they are false-can be very interesting and thought provoking. Again, refer to something Nietzsche said: for great men even their errors are productive in the highest degree. The same thing is true regarding the scientific method-wether a theory is true or false you still  can learn a lot. In debunking a theory you can still end up with a Eureka moment. 

By the way, in saying that conspiracy theories can be productive and thought provoking doesn’t mean the reduction ad absurdem argument that you have to believe everything is a conspiracy. 

What ‘conspiracy theories’ you may or may not find plausible is largely a product of what they call your ‘priors.’ If you think Reagan is a very moral and courageous man, you will tend to reject the notion that he colluded with Iran to withhold the release of the hostages to guarantee his election victory over Nixon. Indeed, as Bush Sr himself said-who stood accused to be a big part of Iranian collusion:

“If there’s evidence . . . let them go forward,” Bush said during an interview with local television reporters. “To assign to me the motive that for political gain I would assign an American to captivity one minute longer than necessary, I think is a vicious, personal assault on my integrity and my character as President. I don’t think I’d deserve to be in this office if for one minute I suggested a person be held hostage so I could get political gain. And I know the same is true of President Reagan.”

Bush of course was right: if it were true neither he nor Reagan would deserve to have been in the WH for one minute.

FN: Just as Trump hasn’t deserved to be there for one moment-as he clearly did collude with Russia-and the anti Clinton pro Trump rogue NY FBI agents-to ‘win’ that election.

That Trump did collude with Russia many times over is abundantly clear from the Mueller Report-which is just a small drop of all the evidence-in counterintel.

End FN

So wether you believe it true is largely a function of what you believe to be the moral character of Reagan-Bush. My prior is that they were very powerful Republicans and  I wouldn’t put it  past anyone who’s such a major part of the modern Republican party-after all, Nixon did it and Trump may well have done did so.

FN: I initially wrote this chapter in November 2018-but it’s long past the time there’s any question Trump colluded.

And I also believe that to be an intelligence agent you have to be something of a ‘conspiracy nut’-to be any good at it at least. After all, when you come across something arresting or uncanny there are two ways to explain it: coincidence or conspiracy. Someone who sees everything as ‘mere coincidence’ isn’t cut out to be in intelligence.

In any case after the fall of Debbie Wasserman-Schultz the morning of the Democratic convention and Russia if you’re listening  I was convinced that there was something going on between Trump, Wikileaks and Russia.

I did feel some level of vindication when the intelligence community later released it’s report on Russian interference done explicitly to harm Clinton and help Trump-of course the rogue agents at Comey’s FBI wanted the same. When we later learned more about the beginning of the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation of Trump-Russia, I felt highly vindicated that their reasoning  was the same as mine:  the timing of the DNC emails was too perfect to believe it was a ‘mere coincidence’-anyway coincidences take a lot of planning.

So my reason for believing in Reagan-Iran collusion was deductive and intuitive-and it’s clear that investigators and intel agents use a lot of deductive and intuitive logic-by necessity. I mean in law enforcement you often have a dead body but a totally cold trail of evidence. You know somebody killed the victim-possibly him/herself as it could be suicide.

But if intuition and deductive logic are very important tools in getting to the bottom conspiracies on this scale, it’s also a fact that MSM journalists see such things as the devil’s tools.

Journalism as practiced by mainstream American journalists is supposed to be done on a purely inductive and empirical basis. There is no greater insult from a MSM journalist than to declare something mere speculation. 

Ideally- Ezra Klein discussed this fact after the third 2016 Presidential debate-, the media likes to see itself as merely passive vessels, receptacles, and stenographers ‘just reporting the news’-as if there’s no discretion on what gets counted as ‘the news’ and what doesn’t make the cut. Indeed, they more or less fit Nietzsche’s critique of ‘merely objective men’ who lay prostrate on the floor before ‘objective facts.’

In principle, journalists are supposed to be 100% convinced empiricists-and basically as much as is possible to be wholly lacking in priors-what-as we saw in (Chapter C) Jay Rosen calls the view from nowhere . And it is a fact that Reagan-Iran collusion doesn’t have the consensus on its side that Nixon-Vietnam collusion does-or even Trump-Russia collusion which is at lest admitted to be a live possibility today.

FN: But as we saw in an above footnote the MSM in fact has pretty strong priors-at any particular moment in time the ‘smartset’ has a narrative that virtually everyone in it are amplifying. If this narrative happens to be true that’s pretty happy luck as truth is not the main concern for the MSM’s narratives but savviness. They claim have no priors which only makes their narratives all the more treacherous.

End of FN.

This is why it’s not Nixon 1968 but Reagan 1980 that can be called the perfect crime as the Reaganites until now have gotten away with it-presuming as I do they’re guilty.

I have spent much more time on Reagan 1980 as I know my assertion that Reagan-Bush did collude remains very controversial. Indeed, in a way it isn’t even controversial anymore-it’s simply been dismissed and now forgotten-ie, the perfect crime.

So while my reason for believing Reagan-Iran is inductive and intuitive I have also looked at  what the empirical, deductive side of it shows. And what it shows is that you really can’t dismiss it out of hand as a jury  of ordinary Americans refused to do so regarding Brenneke’s trial for perjury. More than this. The judge in that case made some very strong assumptions in giving Brenneke the choice of going to prison or admitting he made up the alleged Reagan-Iran collusion meeting in Paris, October 1980 up. He refused, went to trial and the jury unanimously acquitted him. But their reason for this is astonishing:

On 4 May 1990, after only five hours of deliberation, the jury found Brenneke “not guilty” on all five counts. Following the trial, jury foreman Mark Kristoff stated, “We were convinced that, yes, there was a meeting, and he was there and the other people listed in the indictment were there…. There never was a guilty vote…. It was 100 percent.”[6]

The jury believed there was a Paris meeting and that Brenneke was there. In other words, the jury believes Reagan-Bush colluded. Now obviously the jury could be wrong but certainly there is no way you can presume that.

Nevertheless, the GOP was very successful in shutting down the public interest in this shocking crime-if true. Let’s start from the beginning. First of all, remember Reagan’s 11th commandment.

I argued in (Chapter D) that in a way you can argue the parties in American politics are gendered: the GOP is the boy’s party, the Dems are the women’s party. Indeed, prior to the 2016 election Joy Reid observed on Twitter that the Democrats are like King Solomon’s true mother-they are unwilling to split the baby to win the argument. But the GOP is less the false mother than the false father. Or is it that fathers tend to be less loyal to their children, that their love for their kids is often just self serving vanity?

Indeed, at best the GOP is kind of the tough Daddy’s party-at worse it’s the abusive Daddy’s party.

One old cultural saying is that men stick together. It’s certainly true that Republicans always stick together-which again seems to highlight the fact that the GOP is the-maybe abusive-Daddy’s party. We saw this for example in 2009 when the GOP-unlike it did in the early 1930s-chose not to work with Obama and the Democrats to fight the Great Recession but instead became the Party of No.

#MoscowMitch and his GOP friends coldly calculated that the best way to get back into power ASAP was to oppose Obama on everything-even things they previously agreed with. While such obstruction could potentially retard the recovery that too was a feature not a bug: after all Obama was President and Green Lantern Theory held that only the President is responsible for anything that happens in American life. If the choice was between fighting the Great Recession or defeating Obama and the Democrats it wasn’t even a tough call for the GOP.

Ok, so maybe the GOP stuck together rather than tried to save the American economy. But surely if it became an issue of protecting the security and integrity of American elections the GOP would go bipartisan. It seemed a not unreasonable assumption but if you assumed that  in 2016 you were proved wrong. The last two years we’ve seen the GOP band together in lockstep to obstruct the Russia investigation at every turn.

It’s been so outrageous that some have turned nostalgically to the Watergate Republicans as an instance where the GOP put country over party. But as we saw in (Chapter D) the notion of Watergate bipartisanship is yet another zombie myth that is always repeated though with no basis in reality.

It was only after the release of the tapes that clearly showed Nixon’s obstruction that Barry Goldwater told Nixon it was over. This was after it became impossible politically for the GOP to stand behind him anymore. Ok so these are the Theses on the GOP so far:

1. They always stick together-as men are held to do.

2. Here’s the second: the GOP never does the right thing because it’s the right thing but if they are absolutely convinced the wrong thing is bad politics-and it’s not easy to convince them of that either as they suspect the wrong thing is almost always good politics-and we can add there is little in the empirical record that contradictions them of this prejudice.

In yet another interview, Nancy Pelosi once again declared that Dems shouldn’t impeach Trump unless it’s bipartisan. 

I couldn’t disagree more with this and couldn’t agree more here than with Brian Beutler: impeachment must be on the table.

Of course, Pelosi isn’t taking it off the table exactly just seemingly putting out of reach. Yet, as I argued in (Chapter E) another way to look at it is that currently Trump’s approval rating is about 42%. There’s no question that the Dems need it to be closer to 22% before we impeach him which there is good reason to think he is within the next year or two.

UPDATE: Yes it’s true that today his numbers remain in the low 40s but my thesis can’t be debunked yet as we haven’t had public impeachment hearings-though maybe we will in the fall.

And it has been empirically proven that Trump is not teflon. His numbers crashed into the 30s after his fake national emergency government shutdown in January.

Indeed, currently we see his numbers falling-it seems the combined impact of all these bad stories-his racist slurs, El Paso where the shooter was another #MAGAshooter with a Trumpian manifesto on Facebook-with new awful stories every day about how he’s putting kids in cages-the latest is he’s deliberately marked kids who need medical surgery for death by kicking them out of facilities.

So you can’t claim nothing hurts Trump’s poll numbers. Now you can argue if an impeachment inquiry will hurt them but the only way to do more than assert in a sterile way along with MSM pundits and Dem consultants that it won’t hurt them or do what the Constitution calls for-open an inquiry and make your case to the people

End of UPDATE

And it’s possible though I wouldn’t want to try to put odds on it that if Trump is at 22% rather than 42% #MoscowMitch might actually put the impeachment articles on the floor. He’d only do that if he felt politically there was no choice. Again, Republicans never do the right thing because it’s the right thing.

But I do worry about the Democrats and the awesome responsibility they have before them in the next two years. Adam Schiff clearly understands it. But I worry about much of what I hear from them. Whenever they speak about investigating Trump they sound so apologetic. 

Like listen to Elijah Cummmings here doesn’t he sound defensive?

Why do the Democrats always negotiate with themselves? I mean he starts with a caveat? Great, so now the GOP gets to hold him to it-they will very quickly decide that Cummings and his fellow Democrats are in fact engaged in a mere spectacle. 

It sure is efficacious for the Democrats to promise they won’t be as horrible to Ivanka as the GOP was to Hillary-for the GOP of course. Even when the Dems get power they let the GOP define their boundaries?

Then Eric Swalwell was on Last Word and he got me going as well.

But-Congressman Swalwell actually responded to my rant-which made my evening. Indeed, one reason I tweeted to him was I believe on some level he agrees with me. I’m paranoid right now that the Dem leaders-the sensible centrist Dems-telling Maxine Waters not to look into Trump’s ties to Deutsche Bank(!) are strong arming the Swalwells, the Ted Lieus the Maxine Waters(es) into not talking about investigating Trump or even criticizing him in any way. Ok, so what matters isn’t talk but are they also circumscribing the investigations?

FN: Swalwell’s 2020 campaign never did get too much traction. I believe had he run the kind of campaign I was urging him to on Twitter he might have made more of an impact.

His campaign was centered on gun control-admittedly a very pressing issue but not the central issue for so many in the Dem base in 2020. What he should have done is come out and said from day one ‘I’m on both House Intel and Judiciary and while I can’t share everything I’ve seen with you I will share as much as I can and we need to #ImpeachtheMF now.’

He did late in the game get to impeachment but even then he never directly linked it to his work on both Judiciary and Intel. Kamala Harris is also missing this opportunity. As I’ve argued elsewhere a large part of what made her in the eyes of many Democrats like me-and even Hillary Clinton who had her over to the Hamptons in 2017-was her powerful cross examinations of Jeff Sessions and Friends from the Senate Judiciary.

What I would recommend for her today-if I was advising her-is to hold regular-if not weekly then biweekly or at least monthly-reports on Russia. She should document what she has discovered on her Committee-you can always leave out the classified bits while still informing the public which is vital-and she should talk about all the stuff Lindsay Graham is not looking into while he’s busy with Clinton’s emails and Comey’s memos.

That would be playing to her strength. Until now no Democrat has figured out the benefits of such a muscular approach. I actually celebrated Tom Steyer’s entry into the race but he right away partitioned off the his impeachment advocacy from his campaign. Big mistake he should have run on impeachment-after all he was very close to making the debate stage in September-he ended up like one or two polls short.

This remains the $500 dollar bill on the sidewalk no one in the Dem campaign has fully embraced-rather surprisingly it’s been Elizabeth Warren who’s done the best job here-she was first and most unequivocal in her advocacy of impeachment-which was closely correlated with her rise in the polls.

Indeed, prior to this personally she was never my ideal candidate but after her full throated and principled call for impeachment I donated to her that same night. Even now her case is principled and unequivocal. Soon after Kamala also came out for impeachment. But her call was more equivocal and less principled-until then Harris was my first choice but since then it’s something of a tie for me between the two women for my most first choice.

Even now Kamala could help herself if she’d embrace Russian collusion and impeachment not to mention her own key role. She did make a good statement about how her DOJ would prosecute Trump but the MSM took it to mean she would direct them to do it like Trump directed them to go after all his enemies. I took it differently-she wouldn’t do a Gerald Ford-or an Obama 2009 and Clinton 1993-and simply let Trump and his co-conspirators off the hook.

Obama directed his DOJ not to go after Bush-Cheney criminals. I read her comment as simply she wouldn’t handcuff DOJ. But after the MSM went off on a false equivalence bender she backed off. It’s still not too late to fully embrace the role of the tough prosecutor who will directly confront Trump and call for his impeachment but first she-and any other candidate who needs to move up in the polls-should fire her consultants-the Steve Israel types who dismiss even accusations that Trump’s a rapist with yeah but his base won’t care so… 

BTW Kirsten Gillibrand totally missed her moment. It’s true that many of us held the way she forced out Franken against her-she was the ringleader. Sure other Dem Senators followed her but she set the unreasonable standard that Franken didn’t even deserve a hearing.

Then she went out of her way to demand that somehow Bill Clinton-rather than Donald Trump-needed to retroactively resign 20 years later. When the Al Franken question raised its head during the campaign her reaction was to dismiss those-women and men-upset with how she handled that by saying we were all just a bunch of billionaire men who’s opinion therefore apparently doesn’t matter or need to be engaged.

Clearly this was the answer she was comfortable with but it sure did nothing to help her poll numbers. IMO her best response was to focus on the fact that Trump is a many times accused sexual harasser, predator, and assaulter. That he’s been accused multiple times of rape. She should have called press conferences-none of these candidates ever call pressers or understand how to garner publicity-again fire your consultants!-and demand Trump resign now and then enumerate all the reasons why-he’s a credibly accused sexual predator many times over.

After the Jeffrey Epstein scandal broke she could have done a presser tying Trump directly to Epstein. But she-or any other Democrat-went there in any kind of sustained way.

There was no way she could win on the Franken question-other than to consider if she should have allowed an investigation so that Franken could be either found guilty or cleared. Clearly that was not to her taste so she should have just sidestepped the Franken thing and focused on Trump as the Sexual Predator in Chief who’s the worst person in the world to be commander of our service women and men-and that he should be impeached.

 

She should have done biweekly pressers going over the latest outrages Trump has propagated onto American women-the attacks on choice-those awful Red state laws, etc. But tie it all to Trump. End every presser for a demand he resign and if he not do so then demand Pelosi and Friends impeach him. That’s what she could have done. Instead she was dragged down by Franken and ran a campaign that was high minded but unable to break through in such a huge field.

I would strongly urge Kamala Harris who is still in the race to continue biweekly pressers. Warren on the other hand seems to know what she’s doing though a presser now and again could be good even for her-I don’t think it would hurt her to talk about impeachment even more and plug the latest Trump outrages in her speeches-but again she knows what she’s doing.

She’s clearly got her opponents worried

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/08/30/elizabeth-warren-2020-competitors-1477953

End of FN.

What it is I don’t know-is it cowardice-are they as scared of ‘President Trump’s’  tweets as ‘President Trump’ is scared of a little rain? Do they still think he’s political teflon?

The answer might well be: we will have to protest all ‘cautious, centrist Dems’ who have decided political expediency means not investigating Trump properly.

We must not make the mistake too many Dem voters made in 2009-they had done their job, they’d got Obama elected. No-you have to stay engaged. You also have to let Dems who don’t get it know they are there for a reason-and a major one is to investigate Trump-no matter how much happy talk they want to engage in on ‘working with President Trump on immigration reform and the Dream Act.’ That’s what Swalwell said last night and though I appreciate his responding to me so much I have to hope he’s just making bipartisan noises and isn’t serious-I mean there’s no grounds to believe Trump gives a whit about policy much  less working with Democrats.

I mean Trump is why the latest attempt at a Dream Act failed. If anything, I had thought it’s possible Mitch McConnell’s Senate might work with Pelosi and pass something over Trump’s veto, but McConnell’s post election words make that seem remote-he certainly doesn’t seem interested in revisiting what he passed in 2014.

We’ve already seen some of this power in action when Seth Moulton’s own voters let him know the other night that despite what his consultants very well may have told him, trying to take down Pelosi is not a such a brilliant political move. Somehow he saw the 40 seat House gains as proof not that the country wants a check on Trump but a check on Pelosi.

https://twitter.com/LPeterP/status/1065103510620987392

Exactly, before he tried to take down Pelosi nobody knew who he was, and now nobody can stand him. By the way, I saw some argue that Pelosi needs to go because she talks about working with Trump and the GOP. If that’s your problem with her, Moulton would hardly be an improvement-quite the opposite, he’s one of these white male centrists who think the Dems should shut up about Russia as it alienates white Trump supporters in the MidWest.

UPDATE: In retrospect this take wasn’t entirely right. While there certainly are a number of white male centrists who believe Dems should shut up about Russia for reasons of expediency-Steve Israel comes to mind-it’s not clear that this describes Moulton. He made a powerful argument for impeachment during his aborted campaign-he too should have done pressers and it turns out he’s a compelling speaker-it turns out he had been for impeachment for over a year.

If only he’d framed his fight against Pelosi around the moral urgency of impeaching the fake “President.’ All the main ringleaders-such as they were-in the bid to replace Pelosi are now for impeachment-even my NY Congresswoman Kathleen Rice. If only they’d made that the central issue of their campaign they might have had more success.

End of UPDATE

But Dem voters and others who empowered this Congress to investigate Trump properly need to hold each and everyone of them accountable if they-uh, flake out like Jeff Flake.

Speaking of the Democrats, if the GOP is the-possibly abusive-Daddy’s party, who are the Democrats? Clearly the Mommy’s party.

But in reality, often Mommy’s belief that ‘love will conquer all’ is no more beneficial to her kids than Daddy’s selfishness-because the reality is that contrary to the Beatles, there is more you need than love. A happy medium is what would be helpful but is often out of reach.

If men stick together, what do women do? They bicker and fight amongst themselves. This certainly seems true of Seth Moulton and Tim Ryan who see Pelosi rather than Trump as PublicEnemy#One.

I argued that Watergate bipartisanship is a historical canard. But in a sense there was bipartisanship: as a lot of Democrats didn’t want to investigate Nixon either. Indeed, if the Democrats often hardly seem eager to investigate Trump they didn’t seem so eager to investigate Nixon either. Of course, back then a sizable part of the Democratic party were Blue Dog Democrats-who were in ideology quite similar on many issues to the conservative Republicans.

While they might seem to have partisan reasons to take down Nixon, they were actually one with him on ideology. You want to talk about bipartisanship? How about the bipartisan decision to give Clarence Thomas a pass. With all the talk about Biden, this is the conversation he will have a tough time surviving. Indeed, Biden’s utter failures as a Presidential candidate have been swept under the rug-plagiarism in 1988, under 10% in 2008-in order to thread together the false meme that Hillary Clinton was a terribly bad candidate and that any median Democrat would have beaten Trump easily. How quickly it’s forgotten that in 2011 Obama’s team seriously considered dropping Biden for Clinton at VP.

Indeed, as we saw in the Reagan-Iranian Collusion chapter, we had some bipartisanship on the question of a House inquiry into Reagan’s alleged collusion:

In October 1991 the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee approved an investigation; but the bill for the $600,000 budget was filibustered by Republicans.[5] Some hearings were held by the Sen. For. Relations Subcmte on Near East and South Asian Affairs (then chaired by Terry Sanford) in November 1991[6] until an unnamed Republican senator, invoking a rarely used rule requiring Senate permission for committees to hold formal hearings, filed an objection, bringing the hearing to a close whilst Gary Sick was testifying.[7] In December 1991 Senators Terry Sanford and James M. Jeffords appointed a special counsel to investigate.[5] This report, published on 19 November 1992, concluded that there was probably no Republican deal to delay hostage release, but that William Casey (Reagan’s campaign director) “probably ‘conducted informal, clandestine and potentially dangerous efforts’ on the campaign’s behalf to monitor the hostage situation.”[8]

In early February 1992 the House of Representatives voted to launch an investigation, with no Republican support and 34 Democrats opposing.[5] This became the House October Surprise Task Force.”

It’s notable that the GOP was able to shut down the Senate inquiry even though the Democrats had a 56-44 majority-Mitch McConnell would have raised Holy Hell and then ended the filibuster on the spot-the entire MSM would have agreed with it as the Democrats in this case would have been acting outrageously partisan. But it was the GOP acting to protect a GOP President and so nobody set their hair on fire

Meanwhile in the House you had bipartisanship: the GOP unanimously voted no along with 34 Democrats. When you look back at instances of ‘bipartisanship’ it’s normally been the Dems voting with the GOP rather than vice versa.

As for the taskforce, it many ways it was like the Warren Report-it was clear that the top investigators themselves already ‘knew’ there was ‘no collusion.’

Yes-no collusion was a thing prior to Trump as was ‘witch hunt.’ While Bush Sr. was often derided as a milquetoast and a ‘wimp’ in fact ‘witch hunt’ was his coinage rather than Trump’s.

During his interview, Bush complained bitterly of political “rumor mongering and hate mongering” directed at him over the hostages and complained that an investigation would be costly, spending “taxpayers’ dollars based on rumors. . . . I don’t think that’s good.”

But he said a congressional investigation may be the only way to clear his name. Congress “can’t just go out there and have a billion-dollar witch hunt,” he said. “So I’d love to get it cleared, and I’ve (said) it as emphatically as possible because this gets to the heart of character. This gets to your soul. This gets to what’s decent and right in the world.”

But while Bush would lose the 1992 election in a near landslide, the taskforce on Reagan collusion would soon disband with the words no collusion. 

Robert Parry:

“On November 3, 1992, the American voters soundly repudiated George Bush. Giving the sitting president only 28% of the popular vote, the voters elected Bill Clinton and ended a dozen years of Republican rule. The weekend before the election, Bush’s furious comeback drive had stalled when Iran-contra independent counsel Lawrence Walsh disclosed notes by Casper Weinberger showing that Bush had lied when he claimed to be “out of the loop” on the scandal. Bush, it turned out, had been an advocate of the arms-for-hostages swaps that had so enraged the American people in 1986. The Weinberger case established that the White House had engaged in a cover-up of the scandal and that Congress and the Washington Press corps had missed the story again.’

Pg. 305.

Indeed, as you know I like using inverted scare quotes and the notion that the press and Congress had missed the story again should really be corrected: they ‘missed’ the story again as they never really were interested in the truth in the first place. Parry, like Gary Sick, relates how his own personal reputation was destroyed by his desire to know the truth about what happened in the 1980 election. If you are read each of their books both initially were interested in the narrower Iran-Contra scandal but then came to see it was just one episode in a much bigger scandal.

But the press had decided long before the 1992 election that this was just a ‘conspiracy theory’-by then they were already onto Whitewater about a nothingburger real estate deal in the 1970s. That the ‘liberal media’ decided was a story that mattered-unlike the idea that a Presidential election had been compromised and rigged in exchange for delaying the release of 53 Americans held hostage in Iran.

It was the Michael Kinsley’s allegedly ‘liberal’ New Republic that was at the vanguard of dismissing Reagan-Iran collusion out of hand.

“The House task force conclusion, dismissing the October Surprise allegations as impossible and denouncing the ‘witnesses’ as liars, might be reassuring to many. It might make Reagan-Bush partisans happy. It might justify a new round of Washington snickering about “conspiracy theories.” But for me, it will always carry with it the question: Is this official reality or real reality? A French spymaster deMarenches wrote, ” there are two sorts of history. There is the history we we see and hear, the official story; and there is the secret history=the things that happen behind the scenes, in the dark, that go bump in the night.”

Pg. 326

In saying all this, it ought to be remembered-there was a strong Democratic House majority-the 1990 Democrats had over 270 seats while the Dem Senate had 55. Yes, the GOP pulled every dirty trick in its very versatile arsenal-the table pounding was at a fevered pitch. But at the end of the day, many Congressional Democrats didn’t support it-34 voted against it, many of the Dem majority were actually Southern Democrats who didn’t want Reagan-Bush sullied and even many of the liberal Democrats weren’t that interested. Truth is the Democrat leadership itself had decided before hand this was just another wild and wooly conspiracy theory that while they went through the motions to investigate they’d made up their minds from the outset: no collusion.

Indeed, Bill Clinton and his new Democratic supermajorities in 1993 had zero interest in what the truth about the 1980 election actually was-which is rather ironic when you consider what Trump and Russia would do to his wife in 2016:

“But Clinton’s promise to renew American democracy did not include a commitment to get to the truth about the national security scandals  and mysteries that had spanned the Reagan-Bush era. Already, Clinton had decided to look forward, not backward.’

Pg.329

As we saw in (Chapter A) this was Obama’s sad song in 2009-all if forgiven, let’s look forwards not backwards and it was as big a mistake for him as it would prove to be for Clinton in 1993. The GOP repaid Clinton for his forbearance by investigating him over 10,000 different phony, fake scandals. The media, so derisive about the issue of a Presidential election being rigged, treated Whitewater and even Vince Foster with the highest seriousness; Ken Starr actually investigated Vince Foster.

“He saw his political future resting on his ability to revitalize the American economy and reduce the federal budget deficits, not to answer the controversial historical questions from the Reagan-Bush era.”

Again pointing to Greg Sargent’s ‘hardball gap’ and the asymmetry between the parties. Clinton dropped legitimate investigations of the Republicans and the GOP repaid him by opening up fake investigations of him and his wife. By the way, whenever the Democrats attempt to investigate anything you hear the GOP declaring ‘but it’s so long ago.’ And many Democrats fall for this.

As we see in (Chapter B) apparently Maxine Waters has been upbraided by the ‘sensible, centrist Democrats’ who say ‘who cares about loans ‘President Trump’ may have received 20 years ago, let’s go out to drinks with him now and pass infrastructure and lower drug prices.’

Himes, a committee member who chairs the centrist New Democrat Coalition and also serves on the House Intelligence Committee, said Democrats should be mindful of punishment that Republicans received after antagonizing President Bill Clinton.”

“There are enough questions around Deutsche Bank that it’s worth getting some answers,” he said. “But again, I think we’re going to need to make sure that we don’t get too carried away on investigations.”

Geez, someone on the House Intelligence Committee worries about ‘getting carried away?’ Trump stands accused of collusion with Russia to win an election-how is it possible to get carried away investigating that? 

And Deutsche Bank is an important part of the story in assessing if Trump colluded with Russia or not.

But even as a historical matter, Himes is wrong in matter of fact. It’s quite debatable that the GOP really was punished for ‘getting carried away with investigations.’

I mean, yes, if you judge it by the picture in 1999 it might look that way. The GOP led by Newt Gingrich ran on impeaching Clinton and lost 5 seats. Then Newt was run out of Washington on a rail. So there you go right? The GOP got its comeuppance. Right-accept… 

In 2000 the GOP ‘won’ back the WH-not won but ‘won’ as W didn’t win legitimately but was installed there by the GOP Supreme Court.

Is that really much of a ‘punishment?’ In a way it looked pretty futile in 1999. The GOP had done all this storm and stress to get to say they impeached Clinton. But they failed to knock him out of office, and indeed, the week they voted-and failed to knock him out-he had the highest  approval rating of his Presidency, a shockingly high 81%, kind of putting the point that the Clinton haters, despite how loud they were, were a distinct minority.

But despite Clinton’s survival and his sky high polls, it had taken a real toll. While the American people didn’t support throwing him out of office over what was clearly a trumped up pretext, they did absorb much of the endless stream of mud Newt and his friends threw all over the Clintons that would leave a real mark-a big one. The Clinton brand clearly came out of this sullied. While the public had not supported impeachment, most of the ‘liberal media’ did with great abandon and indignation.

In early 2015 Paul Waldman would discuss Hillary’s problem with the media. He noted that right or wrong the media felt that the Clintons had somehow ‘gotten away with something.’ Much of that goes back to Whitewater and Monica Lewinsky. The media felt Clinton should have walked the plank. Indeed, this is why they can’t stop talking about Monica Lewinsky again: not because they give a fig about sexual harassment and assault-the way they covered the Kavanaugh hearings remove all doubt of that. 

But because they still feel Clinton ‘got away with something’ even though in truth his reputation was greatly sullied, the crusade to take down the Clintons never ended-even after they robbed Hillary it’s still not over. While he survived it, the media’s hatred of the Clintons would, unfairly enough, take down Bill’s wife even though it didn’t quite take down himself.

The media was outraged when she talked about being ‘flat broke’ from all the senseless litigation with Ken Starr-even though it was an empirical fact-facts never mattered when the subject was the Clintons, just how people feel-remember Cokie Roberts: it doesn’t matter if she said it or not, everyone at the beauty parlor was talking about it this afternoon.

But, it is ironic that after Bill Clinton chose to ‘look forward not back’ in 1993 on Reagan Iran collusion, the same thing would happen to Hilary in 2016. Who knows? Maybe had he not played the usual Democratic game of ‘turning the other cheek’ the GOP would have had less time in the 1990s to pursue all the fake scandals about him, with the real ones about Reagan-Bush still going strong.

So while the GOP lost a few seats-and a few lightening rods like Newt went down in flames-in the big picture, all the mud they threw at the Clintons paid off-by 2016 the 25 years of mostly baseless charges took their toll.

So after Bill shutdown Reagan Iran collusion, the GOP came in and begun Whitewater. Again, there are ‘sensible centrist Democrats’ a la Jim Himes and Eldridge Cleaver who think that it’s a waste of time discussing a $ billion dollar loan Trump got from Deustch Bank because ‘it was so long ago.

“It’s not the only potential conflict Waters is facing. She’ll also likely confront resistance from moderate Democrats on the committee who aren’t eager to bash bankers. Some have been willing to work with Republicans to ease rules for large financial institutions in recent years, even when Waters wasn’t.”

“Finance industry watchdogs are hoping that Waters will use her gavel to advance new consumer protections and shine a light on how the Trump administration’s and Wall Street’s wrongdoing may be hurting Americans.”

“They’re less interested in exposing Trump’s ties to Russia. Dennis Kelleher, who advocates for tougher Wall Street regulation as president of the nonprofit Better Markets, said Deutsche Bank’s business conduct is worth an investigation but the American people don’t care whether Trump got a loan from the bank “20 years ago.”

It’s probably true that financial industry watchdogs don’t care about a rigged election but the American people do and this is a big reason we all campaigned and voted for a Democratic Congress.

All so Dennis Kelleher could say ‘who cares what happened in the 2016 election?’

But if nothing that happened beyond a week ago is worth investigating in Congress here’s the irony: the allegations about Reagan-Iran went back to 1980-which was actually more recent that Whitewater which give birth to the Mother of all Witch Hunts in the 1990s.

The switch from Reagan-Iran to Whitewater didn’t even move the calendar forward.

By the way, I’d again urge Democratic voters-all who voted for this Congress to by all means, protest and picket a Jim Himes if he’s standing in the way of investigating Trump properly. We saw how Seth Mouton’s constituents gave him an earful and how quickly his counterproductive junta against Pelosi is unravelling in the 48 hours since. 

Indeed, feel free to picket Maxine Waters herself if she allows Emmanuel Cleaver, Jim Himes, Dennis Kelleher, or even Nancy Pelosi to bully her out of doing what she knows is right.

So anyway, in 1993 Bill Clinton was listening to the sensible, centrists. Back to Robert Parry:

“In that approach, Clinton was following the majority opinion of his inner circle, which urged him to let bygones be bygones, “don’t stop thinking about tomorrow,” in the words of his campaign theme song. Pursuing the truth about the Iraqgate courtship of
Saddam Hussein or the Iran-contra coverups, or even the Bush administration’s clumsy attempt to unearth damaging evidence from Clinton’s passport file would be a distraction, these advisers thought. These investigations might sow the seeds of partisanship and dissension. The new administration might reap a bitter harvest of Republican obstructionism against Clinton’s economic programs. As for October Surprise, Lee Hamilton assured the incoming administration that his investigation had laid those troubling allegations to rest.”

Talk about that didn’t age well… The GOP was so grateful  for Bill Clinton’s magnanimity, that they hounded and investigated him and his wife for the next eight years-no ‘scandal’ was too small: they once even investigated the Clinton’s Christmas list for 140 hours.

Jerry Falwell Jr. caused quite a furor when he declared nice guys finish last. It is rather ironic for a supposed ‘Man of God’ to have that view but probably he was thinking about the Democrats.

Indeed, even Bill Clinton’s focus on deficit reduction demonstrated Falwell’s thesis: after the GOP got all the fun of 12 years of huge deficit spending the Democrats moved in to clean up their mess.

And maybe if we’d gotten to the truth about Reagan and Iran maybe we wouldn’t have had Trump and Russia in 2016 due to the greatly heightened awareness-ie, maybe Bill’s wife wouldn’t have been victim to foreign collusion just like Carter was in 1980.

Having said all this, it’s not entirely true that the Democrats are incapable of learning. Indeed, as noted in (Chapter A) while there were a number of similarities between LBJ in 1968 declaring ‘this is treason’ and warning Nixon but not backing it up, and Obama in 2016 wanting to put out a statement on Russian interference but retreating in the face of #MoscowMitch’s intransigence, at least Obama-unlike LBJ-did say and do something about this outrageous collusion after the election. 

Indeed, while it would take almost 50 years to confirm Nixon’s treachery and while Reagan-Iran has been buried for 27 years, Russia collusion has gotten a great deal of coverage. Much of this is no doubt thanks to Obama. During the election the media ignored-three days after this front page

Dean Baquet went as far as to give it a fake debunking with the help of rogue anti Clinton pro Trump FBI agents-it as in their mind Emailgate was much more important. But after Obama and the intel community put out information that showed the fact of Russian interference to hurt Clinton and help Trump and after news of the possible Russian collusion came out, the media treated this as the earth shaking story it truly is.

FN: Though they have totally dropped it off the radar post Coverup AG Barr’s fake exoneration letter-more below-and even at the heyday of good reporting on Russian collusion they never were very good at putting all the various stories together-each story was treated like something of a one off where no one had access to the other 200 stories about collusion. Unlike with Clinton scandals the Beltway was loath to ever ‘get ahead of the facts’ by connecting the dots.

As for the Dems going forward, they should ignore those cautious, sensible centrists and listen to FORMER REP. BRAD MILLER (D-N.C.)

“House Democrats must start investigations right away and be relentless or they might as well not bother.”

Hopefully Jim Himes and Emmanuel Cleaver understand and appreciate this.

UPDATE: Through the first eight months it’s often seemed like they have chosen the latter. There are some reasons to hope they are finally going to get serious now-though also for skepticism. It’s on us to hold their feet to the fire and insist they do the right thing-#ImpeachthMFer-not the political thing-let’s just win in 2020. We can at no point sit back and just assume they will do the right thing-not with their track record the first eight months.

“Democrats already largely know what information they want. House Democrats have sent dozens of letters in the last two years to request information. Democrats on the Oversight Committee, for instance, requested information about the federal government’s lease of Washington’s Old Post Office. President Trump and his older children converted the historic landmark into Trump International Hotel, now the home away from home for officials of the world’s most repugnant regimes.”

“The administration ignored the request despite a law that requires federal agencies to provide information that “any seven members” of the Oversight Committee request.”

“The constitutional power and duty of Congress to conduct oversight of the executive branch is beyond question. The Supreme Court called Congress’s subpoena power “as penetrating and far-reaching as the potential power to enact and appropriate under the Constitution.” A prominent political scientist, Woodrow Wilson wrote that it is “the proper duty of a representative body to look into every affair of government and to talk much of what it sees.”

The difficulty will be to extract information from a president who does not respect the rule of law or democratic institutions.

“He doesn’t care,” former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) said. “That’s why he has lawyers. They can come at him from a hundred levels. He’ll just hire a hundred lawyers and say ‘Call me when it’s over’…I don’t think he has any fear of the Democrats’ ability to investigate.”

That’s interesting. Perhaps the reason is Newt’s low estimation of the Democrats’ ability to investigate. Newt himself saw what a sad job they did on the October Surprise. Within a few years he and his GOP friends had a Select Committee into Whitewater.

This is the longest chapter in the book for a reason-while Watergate is the Hollywood ending where everything turns out right in the end, Irangate is the cautionary tale-the GOP will resist taking this seriously unless it feels it has no choice-it’s on the Dems to be vigilant and not back down. As we saw in (Chapter A)  Nita Lowery assures us she has her boxing gloves on ‘and so does Nancy.’

2019 should be the year Dems prove Newt wrong-that they have learned something in the 25 years since Newt’s Contract with America.

But, again, it’s on voters to be vigilant: they elected Dems for a reason. If some centrist Dems would rather go out to cocktails with ‘President Trump’ than investigate him, these Dems must be held accountable. There is no time to lose-it’s on us to begin the fight to #MakeAmericaLegitimateAgain.

The Dems should listen to Brad Heath who knows of what he speaks-start right away and be relentless or don’t bother. 

Yes and they should listen to Hillary Clinton. Fitting to give her the last word as it was the theft of her election that has gotten us to this quagmire. As she rightly said when Robert Mook gave her the bad news on November 8, 2016 they were never going to let me be President. She wasn’t surprised.

A good deal of what I’ve said in this chapter and elsewhere in this book suggests a kind of gendering of the two major political parties-the GOP is the ‘Daddy party’ the Dems are the ‘Mommy party.’

As we saw in Chapter A this is Jess Zimmerman’s jfascinating idea that I’ve taken and run with as a theory of our current partisan divide.

It does seem to accurately describe a lot when you compare the way the GOP acts to how Democrats so often responds-the Dems often seem to use stereotypically feminine strategies and responses-or like Ryan Cooper says play for responsibility points from the public that they never get.

The more despicably the GOP behaves the more the Dems attempt to ‘reach out’ and ‘look forward not backward’ and ‘extend the olive branch.’

Still, note that it’s Hillary as the first female candidate of a major party, who gets it right on the GOP: they respect only strength. 

She was, of course, as usual, totally right-and, as usual, she was pilloried for being right. Indeed, the media even gave Mitch McConnell’s affectation of being for bipartisanship  a respectful hearing. McConnell-aka #MoscowMitch-who threatened to smear intel agents for telling the truth about Russian interference in the 2016 election effected to be indignant and aghast at Clinton’s suggestion that he and his GOP co-conspirators understand only strength.

Indeed, when you look at the last 25 years, what stands out is that no one ever wanted to hear what she had to say-they excoriated her ‘prose’ preferring the ‘poetry’ of her husband, of Obama, of ‘Bernie, even of Trump. 

But her granular prose got it right on the nose where the poetry of her husband in 1993 or Obama in 2009 looked rather naive in retrospect. Certainly everyone thought Obama’s talk of ‘Yes, we can’ and ‘post partisan America’ was the sublimest of poetry; Hillary, on the other hand, was a buzkill, a killjoy,  a party pooper:

The Time Hillary Was Right About Obama in 2008

Some people wondered why Hillary Clinton failed to inspire voters in the 2008 presidential campaign with an explicitly cynical message”

Some people wondered why Hillary Clinton failed to inspire voters in the 2008 presidential campaign with an explicitly cynical message. Mocking then-Sen. Barack Obama, Clinton said, “I could stand up here and say: let’s just get everybody together, let’s get unified… The sky will open, the light will come down, celestial choirs will be singing, and everyone will know that we should do the right thing, and the world would be perfect.” Get real, she said. She’d lived through the 90s. “Maybe I’ve just lived a little long, but I have no illusions about how hard this will be. You are not going to wave a magic wand…” She did not win the Democratic nomination. But, Politico’s Glenn Thrush points out, history has proved her right. Even Obama admits his speeches don’t work like magic on House Republicans.

Not exactly poetry. But it was and is the truth. Would Hillary have been more successful negotiating the GOP’s full blown obstruction of 2009-2010? At least, unlike her husband in 1993 and Obama in 2009 she would not have been shellshocked.

Indeed, while Obama was right about the absurd Green Lantern Theorizing of folks like Bob Woodward who complained he didn’t somehow ‘will’ people to do the right thing, that is sort of what Obama ran on in 2008.

Obama himself has explicitly endorsed the no-magic-wands view. “I wish I had a magic wand and could make this all happen on my own,” Obama said of congressional inaction on the DREAM Act in 2011. Earlier this year, he complained, “Even though most people agree that I’m being reasonable; that most people agree I’m presenting a fair deal; the fact they don’t take it means I should somehow do a Jedi mind meld with these folks and convince them to do what’s right.”

I told you so, Clinton adviser James Carville says. “His message was ‘I can transcend Washington’ — her message was ‘I can bend it, I can cut through it,'” Carville told Politico. “Guess which one turned out to be right?”

For me, I don’t see her as cynical but just telling the truth. There’s the irony, while her honesty has been attacked many times-on clearly gendered lines-the reason many claim she’s not inspiring is because she tells the unvarnished truth. 

“Clinton laments how polarizing she is, but the fault lies at least partly with her. Asked at a Democratic debate to name the enemies she’s most proud of making, she replied, “The Republicans.” For all her talk of finding common ground, of reaching out, of respecting each other, she stood up, on national television, and said she’s proud of the enmity she inspires in roughly half the country.”

But what she said at least had the virtue of being true. I personally loved when she said that. But, again, the idea of American politics is actually that you ‘poetize’ rather than tell the unvarnished truth.

Does this make me cynical in loving her lines? Well I guess, as a voter and a citizen I’ve seen this movie once too many times myself. Saw what they did to her husband,-after he dropped the Reagan-Iran investigation-they spent eight years on Whitewater-saw what they did to Obama-while he was letting the Bush criminals off the hook they were hanging out a restaurant agreeing that never mind the economy let’s just make sure Obama’s a ‘one term President’-he must be opposed wether it’s good for the struggling recovery or not.

We hear a lot of talk from Dems about buddying up with Trump on policy as if he and Pelosi are going to agree to infrastructure, lowering prescription drugs, and and immigration over cocktails. If that’s just more campaign ‘poetry’ than great I have no problem with necessary political rhetoric.

My hope is the Dems don’t take their own poetry too seriously. 

Just  refer to Brad Heath-and Hillary Clinton.

And maybe watch have a movie night watching All the President’s Men:

https://twitter.com/WhoKJones/status/1065570992641183744

UPDATE: Add at bottom Mike

In Trump Russia collusion the GOP has also had a measure of success-it remains to be seen wether they are able to skirt accountability like the GOP did regarding Reagan-Iranian collusion. Coverup AG Barr was depressingly successful in shaping the MSM narrative that there’s nothing really to see here so let’s just move on and have a normal 2020 election.

Even after the MSM itself realized how misleading his fake exoneration letter really was they still essentially accept the conclusion of the fake exoneration letter-that in some sense Trump has been ‘exonerated’ politically if nothing else which is a very different tone than the Beltway’s tone with Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. In that case you had many media outlets and editorial pages demanding Clinton resign-Kirsten Gillibrand was still demanding he-retroactively?-resign in 2018 20 years after the fact. While her Clinton bashing didn’t help her stillborn campaign it surely pleased the MSM who even now would rather talk about Clinton resigning than the current fake ‘President.’

And you still have Democrats claiming that we need ‘all the facts’ to make a decision on impeachment-as if there isn’t more than enough of both obstruction and collusion in the report-not to mention the many other impeachable offenses he’s committed on a daily basis in terms of emoluments, abuse of power-just recently he brazenly boasted of misappropriating foreign assistance funds Congress has passed including-what else?-key funds for Ukraine, probably as a favor to his puppet master Putin.

Another ‘sensible centrist Democrat’ in this WaPo piece is still arguing we shouldn’t impeach Tump as this will distract from lowering prescription drug prices! Really in late August 2019 we’re still hearing that impeachment will get in the way of all this great legislation to ‘improve people’s lives.’

People in my district are wanting us to pass bills, and they fear that if we go down this path of impeachment, we’re not going to be working on the things that affect their lives, their pocketbooks, their kids,” said freshman Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), who represents a Trump district and has yet to back an impeachment inquiry. “

The House Democrats have passed plenty of bills and how many of them have improved anyone’s life or added any money to their pocketbook? Zero, exactly none. As #MoscowMitch prides himself on shredding all House legislation. Yet Congresswoman is still using messaging bills as an excuse to let Trump off the hook?

And as Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.) told impeachment-backing constituents at a recent town hall: The Senate is refusing to vote on a bipartisan gun control bill supported by the vast majority of Americans; if the Senate won’t do that, don’t expect senators to vote to convict Trump, she said.

Yes-but there’s the rub: Pelosi still sends bipartisan gun control bills to the House even though their fate is clear-a death at the hands of the Grim Reaper aka #MassacreMitch aka #MoscowMitch. Why is it a good use of time to send legislation to the Senate that never gets looked at-and so improves nobody’s life-but not articles of impeachment?

Sending articles to #MoscowMitch will put him in a tough sport. Sure if I’m a betting man I assume he and his fellow GOP co-conspirators won’t vote to convict. But then run against his craven partisanship and refusal to hold this fake ‘President’ accountable. It’s not rocket science unless you’re a Democratic political consultant.

It remains very much an open question here in late August if the Dems have learned anything at all. History is on the phone will Pelosi and Friends finally answer the call?

Do they really want to go down in history as the party of American’s Neville Chamberlain?

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