TWGB: Fear, Smear, Conspiracy and Obstruction

The place I want to start with in this post is the law: our Constitution is a document that protects people. That is to say, it enumerates certain rights for the people, and defines the roles of government. You don't want a government that does too much--that reaches into people's lives obtrusively, that invades privacy, that needlessly judges personal choices that do not violate the law. But you also want accountability: government should have an aspect of accountability and dependability. If the social fabric has a warp (to the backdrop of history's woof), the rules are it. 

Trump likes to say that he's transparent. He's not transparent in actuality: in his person, he is opaque and likewise dense. But he believes that he has clothed himself in a dress of transparency by having posed himself as a straight-shooter or truth-saying SOB, or by merely repeating endlessly the formula "I am the most transparent..." And yet, that transparent cloth he drapes himself in is the Emperor's New Clothes. It is transparent because it lacks either warp or woof. It lacks threads. He is not clothed in laws, or history, or accountability, or tradition. His bare-naked ass is therefore covered by so many lickspittles. 

Enter the whistleblower, who, like the child in the story, says what everyone was fearing to say--the emperor's ass is out! 

So tell me, do: does who says the very true thing matter more than whether the message was very true? 

We are presented with a distraction, engaged by Trump out loud and personally in front of many people: he says he had some dirt on Lt. Col. Vindman, and also, he wants to know who the whistleblower is. Sen. Graham has said he'd out the whistleblower. (Outing people against their will has never been something I've been a strong proponent of, TBH.) And Sen. Rand Paul, son of Ron, claims the name of the whistleblower is already known, and he would release it. You know, unless the media wants to. Which really sounds to me like an effort to smoke someone out for a right bit of witness-tampering and intimidation. 

You know: crimes. Because all this, the threats against an anonymous person who only pointed out something they thought was hinky and should be investigated? Is a crime. What is not a crime? Doing due diligence to be sure that the government is held accountable and does its job well. Smearing people or causing them to feel threatened in their jobs or in their person is not great practice--it's basically a sign that the person doing that knows they have no other defense but bullying. That's the kind of thing Trump has left in his pocket: smear and fear. And conspiracy with those who still think the power is in his corner, and not on the side of truth or the law. And obstruction to try to prevent any further truth from coming to light. 

So, to the evidence of this tactic--we have the transcript of former Ambassador to Ukraine Yovanovich who was forced out of her position not because of not doing her job, because of doing exactly her job. She faced a conspiracy of bad will from Giuliani, Parnas, Fruman, and all, and because of that, was made to feel unsafe and got a late might call telling her she needed to get her go-bag and move it. In the words of "the perfect call", she was going to "go through some things".  That was some open-ended mob-talk. What things? 

A person working on behalf of our government was going to "go through some things"? That's not how transparent government is done. Ambassador Michael McKinley's transcript also is revelatory of a brutal and bullying atmosphere where state department personnel did not feel supported, but were bullied by State Department management.

That's Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and I barely have words for what it means for an agency to have no faith at all that a leader supports his own department when that same pompous personage considers himself a faith-based leader with GRACE. 

But McKinley and Yovanovich's testimony's were just the warm-up to the explosive testimony we now have transcripts for of Former Special Envoy Kurt Volker and Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland. For one thing, Volker explodes the conspiracy theory that Vice-President Joe Biden had been doing anything but US foreign policy when he suggested Ukraine ditch their prosecutor Viktor Shokin, and kind of let out that former Prosecutor-General Yuriy Lutsenko was basically selling porkies to Rudy Giuliani--telling him what he wanted him to hear, on account of he knew the president so well. 

That much is appalling--why is Rudy Giuliani, under his own private shingle, given so much shift to weigh in on US foreign policy? Is he acting on his own behalf, or the President's, or (holy cow!) misrepresenting himself as representing the president because he figured out it would all get sorted somehow? But the Sondland reversal on quid pro quo extortion is the real major story--this is a Trump investor, not a Never Trumper. And he admits (now) that yes, the hold up in aid was conditioned on announcing an investigation, and yep, he told them so his very own self. I don't know if that's falling on one's sword or remembering just in time to kind of not snatch a perjury beef. 

Again, I am not a lawyer, and don't prefer to play one on the blog. 

Anyways--there's your transparency: the closed-door depositions made their way to sunlight, much to the obvious delight and admiration of the Trump Team, yes? Why, know we have on record the voices of first-hand people actually doing the policy things and being on the policy calls--is the Trump Team not satisfied with this? Why ever then, would they want the personal history of the whistleblower, who they originally derided as having no first-hand knowledge of any of the things since proven to be true, since that knowledge is still not first-hand? Why dismiss the known quantities and concentrate on the fly on the wall, hmm? 

Because distraction is a part of the general pattern of obstruction, which the Administration is still persisting in with its nonsense suit regarding whether it's okay to violate a subpoena if the president very much wishes you wouldn't--because why? 

Because the president hates transparency, and not because of executive privilege. Trump doesn't have advisors because nobody tells him anything--he tells them.  Because the president would rather winkingly direct crimes and squash critics and not have anything of his be out in the open. Trump would claim executive privilege over a janitor if he thought that guy could fuck him up with some knowledge. Trump exists because he co-opts people, and creates conspiracies. 

See, this staying shtum thing would work if there weren't closed door hearings where people might give testimony that doesn't match (this is what had Sondland changing his mind after other testimny happened). Keeping testimony quiet keeps co-conspirators form synching up their stories. But maybe Sondland still tried that with Energy Sec. Rick Perry. 

They can try, but fear, and smear , and conspiracy, and obstruction, can all look guilty as hell when pointed out. And that's where I think things are: looking guilty as hell. Like Trump and them know they are wrong, and are just playing any note they think might plaintively play them off without massive repercussions.