Is America a Nation of Laws?

“Volume II of the Mueller report is nothing less than a categorical astonishment. A majority of the evidence regarding Trump’s serial obstructions of justice has been in the public sphere for a while now, but because of the avalanche of scandal that has become our daily gruel, much of it has fallen down the memory hole.” William Rivers Pitt, Truthout

It’s dizzying. From William Barr’s performance piece as Trump’s personal attorney on Thursday, to the risible Sarah Huckabee Sanders attributing her lies to a slip of her famously forked tongue, to Trump’s braying about how a report he’s not read -- and could not comprehend even if he did -- completely exonerates him. This is how a once reasonably competent nation fractures. I read somewhere recently that a failed state is one where all the criminals operate from inside the government.

If Trump isn’t impeached, then the United States is a failed state.

I am trying to understand why William Barr would willingly smear himself with Trump’s excrement? Was he offered a condo in Trump Tower, a bag of cash, a lifetime membership at Mar-A-Lago, what? When this mockery of a presidency finally ends, William Barr will be remembered as a partisan hack who lied to the American public to protect Donald J. Trump, the most corrupt, venal person ever to sit in the Oval Office. Why would Barr want to be remembered this way?

It always amuses me when important people in positions of power testify before Congress or in a court of law, and respond to simple, direct questions with, “I can’t recall,” or “I have no recollection.” How do you think that would go over if a 19 or 20 year old African-American male told a judge he couldn’t recall or remember? We have always had multiple legal standards in this country, one for the poor, one for African-Americans and Mexicans and native people, and one for the wealthy and connected. The rule of law in America is as flexible as Gumby, imperfect, as is our ongoing experiment with representative democracy.

At the moment, the American democratic experiment looks like something that stumbled  from Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory.

Protecting the rule of law as it applies to the government is now in the hands of Democrats in the House of Representatives. Democrats led by Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer. Are you as scared as I am that Pelosi will sit on her hands while she makes endless political calculations about the 2020 elections? That she will sputter about the need for unity and the futility of impeachment given that the GOP owns the Senate? That she will claim the Mueller report isn’t damning enough? Pelosi is busy keeping down the progressive wing of the Democratic Party and assuring Wall Street, pharmaceutical, insurance, fossil fuel, and military-security-surveillance industry donors that the Dems are still faithful servants of the neoliberal project.

In other words, I fear Democrats will fuck this up, let Trump spin and spew his exoneration fairy tale, let this moment pass without any attempt to hold Trump accountable, and still wind up losing the White House to the Orange Menace in 2020, most likely because they will field a Clintonite-retread like Joe Biden or some other cipher who steadfastly clings to the magical, but losing, moderate middle.

What, who, will Democrats blame when they lose the Electoral College again in 2020?

What’s it going to be, politics or the rule of law? Regardless of whether an impeachment proceeding removes Trump from office, protecting the rule of law is worth the effort. The question  is, does Article II, Section 4 of the hallowed US Constitution have meaning or not? The framers obviously understood the danger of the abuse of power and the corrupt use of authority. It’s as if the framers had peered into the future and saw the ugly spectre of a man like Donald J. Trump.

Incredible Progress

“The presidency is serious. The presidential electoral process, however, is a sick joke, in which everyone loses except the people behind the rope line.” Matt Taibbi

Life goes on in Trumpland. Babies are born, elderly people die, children have birthday parties, people get married, divorced, kids go to school. One can almost forget that a con artist slipped through the barriers erected by the oligarchy and became president. Forgetting is easier if one maintains a total media blackout.

But if one is any kind of citizen, a media blackout is next to impossible. My inbox is jammed every day with appeals for action and money to block this and fight that; I’ve given money to Truthout, Truthdig, the ACLU, the Democratic Socialists of America, and Common Cause. I remind myself that there are more good-hearted people than bigoted people. Trump and his band of kleptocrats and Christian zealots, I also remind myself, are symptoms of a diseased system. Even if Trump goes, forced out by scandal or because he is clearly unfit to be president, the system remains; another servant of the oligarchy will either step or be pushed forward. At the moment, Mike Pence is next in line.

It took a long time to get to this place. A lot of dominoes had to fall to make Donald Trump possible. If you watched Trump’s press conference on February 16 you know the man is insane, not within a country mile of contact with reality. “Incredible progress,” said Trump about his first month in office, and all the assembled reporters could do was gasp or text “WTF” to their colleagues. Trump resides in his own hermetically sealed universe, where he is the all-knowing, virile, and infallible leader.

If Trump is still in office a year from now I will be shocked. Another batshit performance like he turned in on the 16th and it’s likely the GOP will turn on him with the ferocity of a cornered wolverine. Trump is ill-mannered and ill-tempered, and so stupid that he makes George W. Bush look intelligent.  

The impact of the Trump regime hasn’t plopped on my doorstep yet, but these are early days and Trump’s fine-tuned machine (try not to burst out laughing) of an administration isn’t firing on all its diabolical cylinders yet. Once the Trump gang figures out how to turn the lights in the White House on, order a sandwich and a glass of milk, and get an extra blanket from the housekeeping staff, the insane ideas and stupid policy proposals will really start to flow, and the ugliness will begin in earnest.

I haven’t seen any evidence that the Democratic Party learned anything from its humiliation on November 8, 2016. As yet no mea culpa for abandoning working people 40-odd years ago in favor of corporate and professional class interests; no public rejection of Clintonism; no honest appraisal of how badly the DNC fucked up. Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi are still in positions of authority, which isn’t saying much in a party that only operates on the margins. What this shows me is how out of touch Democrats are with the needs, fears, and concerns of ordinary citizens. They don’t listen to us and they sure as hell don’t speak a language we understand.

Vote Mickey

“The votes that matter are the votes on the street. Either Trump or Clinton will provoke mass upheaval. The key contribution of the Sanders campaign has been to lay bare for idealistic youth the magnitude of the rot in the system itself…”  Gary Leupp

I wrote on this blog a few months ago that Bernie Sanders would cave and urge his supporters to get behind Hillary Clinton. As predicted, it has happened, and Sanders was as craven as I feared. So much for the “revolution.” I don’t feel terrific about being right: any rookie political handicapper could have predicted that Sanders’ quest to reform the Democratic Party from within was doomed.

As Gary Leupp noted in an article for Counterpunch, Sanders did succeed in one respect: his campaign demonstrated, particularly for younger Americans, how utterly corrupt the American political system has become. No matter how often the mainstream media tells us our voices and votes matter, millions now understand that they matter not at all. The corrupt system has puked up Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, two people despised by wide swaths of potential voters. This is a curse, not a choice.

I will give the Clintons credit for their unparalleled skill at fixing the game, using their government positions to enrich themselves, and the nimble way they skirt the law. Bill and Hillary dance in the gray and never get caught; that they are crooked is not in doubt, but catching them out is another story. How many scandals has this detestable duo dodged over the past three decades? It tells me they know exactly what they are doing, that everything they do is calculated, thought out in advance. The Clintons are masters of corruption.

When I’m not completely pissed off about this dismal state of affairs, or frightened about what it portends, I marvel at how completely the Clintons manage media perceptions. Again and again Hillary is described as capable and experienced and exceptionally qualified to hold the highest office in the land, but peel back the gilded cover and you find a record of mediocrity or outright failure. What did she accomplish as a senator? Squat. What harm did she cause as Secretary of State? Plenty. Honduras and Libya come to mind. Trump scares me because he’s a buffoon; but Clinton scares me many times more because she has the potential to plunge the country into another undeclared war, exacerbate an already staggering level of wealth inequality, and to render our government even more subservient to financial elites.

If partisan politics hampered the Obama government, imagine what the gridlock will be like when Hillary moves into the Oval Office. Even though she’s practically a Republican, the GOP leaders are unlikely to give her much leeway, meaning that the critical problems facing this country will not be addressed.

What did Sanders get for his capitulation? I’ve read in various places that Sanders forced Clinton to move in a more progressive direction, and that the party platform reflects this, but honestly, who cares about the platform? It’s not binding on Clinton, and after the convention will largely be forgotten. And anyway, who’s going to hold Clinton accountable? Remember, she was for the TPP corporate trade giveaway before she was against it, or was she against it before she was for it?

Writing on the Truthout website, William Rivers Pitt summed it up: “Hillary Clinton is a fully owned corporate entity with a faux-populist message drafted on the back of a cocktail napkin at a Goldman Sachs convention. Donald Trump is a punchline who speaks in befuddled half-sentences and who wouldn't know a policy position if it squatted on his face and farted up his nose. These are our alleged options now, a choice between Wall Street and reality TV.”

There is no way I will vote for Hillary Clinton come November. I’ll write in Mickey Mouse before I tick the bubble next to Hillary’s name.