Checking in on Charlie Pierce

On Mike Pompeo:

I don't think there's any question that these committees had a list of people they wanted to subpoena all drawn up and ready to go. But it's important for the historical record to note that Pompeo got subpoenaed right after Rudy Giuliani, now completely out of control and raving all over television, managed to implicate the State Department in whatever incoherent "missions" he believed he was on in west Asia. In less than a week, the Secretary of State has been drawn into this incredible morass, and he's been drawn in by a completely unhinged, once-famous apparatchik. Either Pompeo is as corrupt as all the rest of them, or the State Department has spiraled completely out of control.

  Charles P Pierce

Or both, Charlie.

Whichever's the case, they've begun to turn on each other now and, as many subpoenas begin to pile up in many doorways, the cannibal feast can only get wilder and take in more people. There have to be some people in Camp Runamuck who still have reputations worth trying to save. The knives are out and the dinner bell is ringing.

On Trump's TV defenders:*

[T]his weekend, the small group of people still willing to go on television and defend El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago put on an ensemble performance of such glorious incompetence and mendacity that even the hosts of The Sunday Showz found themselves gagging on the undercooked codswallop they were being asked to swallow.

[...]

Stephen Miller, the White House dime-store Machiavelli, and not a man accustomed to daylight, went on Fox News with Chris Wallace, and Wallace tore him several new ones.

Rudy Giuliani, now performing on the national political stage as Trashcan Man from The Stand, went on ABC with George Stephanopoulos and had another public episode.

Rep. Jim Jordan went on CNN with Jake Tapper, and Tapper pantsed him.

Rep. Kevin McCarthy—the House Minority Leader, because what the hell, who else'd take the job anyway?—went on 60 Minutes with Scott Pelley, and Pelley skewered him with the president*'s own words.

And these guys are the best they've got. Wait'll Louie Gohmert and Matt Gaetz get to centerstage.

The self-evident fact is that the Republicans have no defense for what is contained in the now infamous phone call between the president* and the President of Ukraine. The president* himself has sawn off the limb behind them—first, by releasing the summary of the conversation and then by confirming, over and over again, that the call happened pretty much as it was described in the summary, except that the summary didn't mention that it was a beautiful, perfect phone call. So now, their only line of defense, and the only way they can continue to avoid their clear constitutional duty, is to cover the wall with spaghetti that everybody knows is undercooked and swimming in botulism. And hope, I guess, that Mexico will pay to clean it up.

  Charles P Pierce

On the rising tide of white supremacists in the Ukraine-Russia conflicts:

From the Voice of America:

According to a report released Monday by New York-based nonprofit research group The Soufan Center, more than 17,000 people from 50 countries, including the United States, have traveled to Ukraine in recent years to fight both for pro-Ukrainian and pro-Russian forces.The vast majority, about 15,000, have come from Russia. But the remaining 2,200, researchers warn, bear watching.

“A very significant number are white extremists," said Jason Blazakis, a senior researcher at The Soufan Center and a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies (MIIS). “The bulk of those foreign fighters are coming from the near region,” he added, pointing to 800 fighters from Belarus and hundreds more coming from Germany, Georgia, Serbia and dozens of other countries across Europe. “That’s, in some ways, not too different than what you saw with ISIS,” Blazakis said, using an acronym for the Islamic State terror group.

[...]

[T]he low-intensity war between Ukraine and Russia is probably not a great context in which the president* should be extorting a head of state for the purposes of ratfcking the 2020 election. There are all kinds of volatile elements swirling around that fractious part of the world.

  Charles P Pierce

On Mark Zuckerberg and Elizabeth Warren:

Well, it seems like Senator Professor Warren has gotten inside Mark Zuckerberg's hoodie and has set off some tremors. From The Verge:

"You have someone like Elizabeth Warren who thinks that the right answer is to break up the companies ... if she gets elected president, then I would bet that we will have a legal challenge, and I would bet that we will win the legal challenge. And does that still suck for us? Yeah. I mean, I don’t want to have a major lawsuit against our own government. ... But look, at the end of the day, if someone’s going to try to threaten something that existential, you go to the mat and you fight."

This, of course, comes on the heels of another report, this one from CNBC, that several big-money Democratic donors, all of them tied to Wall Street, and especially the private equity crowd, are so concerned about a Warren nomination that they're considering either sitting the 2020 election out, or actively supporting the re-election of El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago.

[...]

Patriotism in action is a wonder to behold, isn't it?

[...]

The masters of the universe seem to have tumbled to the fact that, in one way or another, the entire Democratic field has moved toward [Warren's] end of the spectrum. Certainly, Bernie Sanders always has been there, but everyone else, including friend-of-the-credit-card Joe Biden and relative middlers like Amy Klobuchar, also are talking about taking action to even out the grotesque financial inequity present in the country, and all of them have condemned the massive Trump-Ryan tax cut as an offense against average Americans.

The money power, I suspect, was feeling good about having largely ducked the hammer after having nearly blown up the entire world economy in 2008. Sure, there were fines, and some rough rhetoric, and a bit of new regulation, but considering what had been wrought by their greed and duplicity, the masters of the universe made a relatively clean getaway. Now, however, they find themselves between a mad king on the one hand, and a brigade of populists of varying styles on the other. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.

  Carles P Pierce

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

*UPDATE:



Eventually, he turns on everybody.  The more he sinks, the quicker he turns.