You Will Anyway: I'm not yet through bitching about Nancy Pelosi

Friday, September 20, 2019

I'm not yet through bitching about Nancy Pelosi

Despite an enormous amount of evidence that Donald Trump is guilty of a multitude of crimes and ethical transgressions — including numerous episodes of obstruction of justice, courting foreign interference in our elections, blatant disregard for the Emoluments Clause, campaign finance violations and more — Nancy Pelosi has steadfastly refused to consider impeaching the president.

The conventional wisdom among the political punditry has been to praise Pelosi for her foresight, accepting as fact the notion that impeaching Trump after the Mueller report was released would have somehow made him more popular or fired up his base. This despite the fact that a) his base is already fired up; b) there’s no evidence to support this; c) impeaching Bill Clinton didn’t actually hurt the Republicans, if you examine election results; and, perhaps most importantly, d) there are indeed consequences to inaction, which we’re seeing now.

Trump knows he’s not going to be impeached, and that is indeed a very, very bad thing. It gives him carte blanche: He can seek foreign assistance for his campaign in the next election (as he indicated to George Stephanopoulos he would do, and as Rudy Giuliani is openly doing in Ukraine); he can suppress testimony to Congress (Don McGahn, Corey Lewandowski, and others); he can disregard subpoenas, use the Justice Department as a club against his political enemies, hide potentially illicit financial affairs, cancel primaries, leave our election systems vulnerable and perhaps worse.

It should come as a surprise to no one that Trump would try to collude with a foreign power to get dirt on a political opponent. First off, he’s done it before; and secondly, he’s Trump.

This is only going to get worse.

[...]

Trump is well aware of the fact that he needs to stay in office in order to avoid possible prosecution. He also knows that he’s going to be aided and abetted by Fox News and the various talking heads of right-wing media no matter what he does.

[...]

[Nancy Pelosi] has allowed the president to be above the law [and] Trump is now like an unleashed dog who knows that no matter who he bites or what he relieves himself on, there will be no consequences.

NY Daily News

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"It takes only a bit of knowledge of history to realize how dangerous it is to think that the people who run the country know what they are doing." -- Howard Zinn

"It’s not about not having something to hide; it’s about having something to lose. What we lose when we’re under observation is our humanity...Rights are inherent to our nature, they’re not granted by governments, they’re guaranteed by governments. They’re protected by governments." -- Edward Snowden

"Terrorism is the willingness to kill large numbers of people for some presumably good cause.” -- Howard Zinn

"What we have is a foreign policy which is essentially a marketing strategy for selling weapons." -- Jill Stein

"We should always remember that the danger to societies from security services is not that they will spontaneously decide to embrace [Stasi style] mustache twirling and jackboots to bear us bodily into dark places, but that the slowly shifting foundation of policy will make it such that mustaches and jackboots are discovered to prove an operational advantage toward a necessary purpose.” ~ Edward Snowden

"America: just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable." ~ Hunter S. Thompson

"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws." ~ Mayer Rothschild

"News is what somebody does not want you to print. All the rest is advertising." ~ LACUNA

"What matters in journalism isn't politics, which are as universal and inescapable as breathing. What matters -- along with a fundamentally adversarial attitude toward government, without which "journalism" is simply public relations -- is integrity, transparency, evidence, coherence, and principle. These are the principles on which we should evaluate the quality of journalism, and their absence is why some journalists are so desperate to get you to focus on something else." ~ Barry Eisler

"There is no inverse relationship between freedom and security. Less of one does not lead to more of the other. People with no rights are not safe from terrorist attack." ~ Molly Ivins

"The brain of our species is, as we know, made up largely of potassium, phosphorus, propaganda, and politics, with the result that how not to understand what should be clearer is becoming easier and easier for all of us." ~ James Thurber

"The highest patriotism is not a blind acceptance of official policy, but a love of one's country deep enough to call her to a higher plane....When you hold up your arm and swear to uphold the Constitution, you don’t say, 'Except in wartime.'" -- George McGovern

"I’ll believe that corporations are people when Texas executes one." ~ Bill Moyers

"When did hope become a political dynamic? Hope is right below wishful thinking and right above performing a rain dance on the scale of activity." ~ Rich Hall

Life, as Explained in "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead"

GUILDENSTERN: What a fine persecution---to be kept intrigued without ever quite being enlightened.

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ROSENCRANTZ : The only thing that makes it bearable is the irrational belief that somebody interesting will come on in a minute.

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GUILDENSTERN: But for God's sake what are we supposed to do?!

PLAYER: Relax. Respond. That's what people do. You can't go through life questioning your situation at every turn.

GUILDENSTERN: But we don't know what's going on, or what to do with ourselves. We don't know how to act.

PLAYER: Act natural. You know why you're here at least.

GUILDENSTERN: We only know what we're told, and that's little enough. And for all we know it isn't even true.

PLAYER: For all anyone knows, nothing is. Everything has to be taken on trust; truth is only that which is taken to be true. It's the currency of living. There may be nothing behind it, but it doesn't make any difference so long as it is honoured. One acts on assumptions.

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GUILDENSTERN : We act on scraps of information... sifting half-remembered directions that we can hardly separate from instinct.

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PLAYER: Life is a gamble, at terrible odds-if it was a bet you wouldn't take it.