How About Trump Experiences Accountability for Once?

 

When I see the suggestion that to avoid a violent civil conflict, we have to entertain the idea that Trump gets away with an attempted insurrection and collecting national security documents for his own purposes as if we had no imagination whatsoever about what a "disgruntled former employee" would want to do with such material. I can't help but feel like "what in the whole fuck are you a human being in the world with the rest of us thinking about, give me an entire fucking break." 

Trump's little fan club believes in power. Trump doesn't have that much anymore--outside of his little fan club. You remember Cesar Sayoc and his mail bombs and maybe some dozen or so Trump fans who penetrated the veil between our tolerance of Trump's violence-fluffing and its actual conception. Well, after 1/6, and the deaths of some insurrectionists and LE officers alike, how are we pretending his rhetoric doesn't matter, and after the most recent breach of his faith to lawfully uphold our Constitutional government, we see once again he was inept and unfit to do it, why are we pretending it's okay to just not prosecute him for the damage he's done? 

TWGB: The "Raid" on Emperor Commodus

 

There's nothing like starting your damn dumb day out knowing you are going to have to post about your fucking Moby Dickless white supremacist whale, but when I cracked open yon internets this morn to finally unload about the weekend's vote-a-rama and how it demonstrates Republican fecklessness, I already knew I was committed to talking later about how the Trump presidency has gone down the toilet. Literally. 

It's been widely and accurately AFAIK reported that Trump tore up docs that were required to be preserved and may have even eaten docs he didn't care to be preserved, despite the presidential records act. For someone who derided and persecuted his 2016 opponent over records retention, it is astounding that this is the guy who presided over an entirely unaccountable wipe of DHS, DOD and Secret Service digital records. 

I mean, astounding for a value of being shocked when a chronic liar somehow does something the exact opposite of what he claims he finds important. 

What might get lost here is that today, the anniversary of Nixon's resignation announcement, Paul Manafort had admitted that yeah, he did give Trump Campaign polling data to someone he wants to pretend he didn't know full well was connected to GRU because why not? I mean, thanks, we have several volumes of Senate Intelligence Committee data on the various connections between the Trump campaign and Russia, but it's nice someone wants to skirt about copping to it in order to secret-boast about it. He's literally humble-bragging he does coups, you guys. Do you need an election fixer? Manafort is out here putting out feelers. He is broke and in need of the only work he knows-fuckery. Kilimnik, you guys, goes back to Ukraine shit, too. It all does.  Russia was always going to fuxxor Ukraine in Trump's second term, but they are fucked because they tried it in Joe Biden's first. 

I really wish MAGA so-called patriots tried to suss out where in their Daddy fixations they decided Trump or Putin were real men. They are baby-nard projectionists. 

Anyway, today we also got a glimpse of what an anti-democratic, pro-Nazi shit Trump is with respect to his relationship with the military and entire misunderstanding of the history of American service, which includes thinking Nazi generals were al loyal and this was somehow great (ok, Operation Valkyrie, and also, this dope heard of the idea of the "good Nazi" and thought it was a compliment?) and also there was a confirmation of Adam Serwer's most salient observation of the Trump presidency--that the cruelty was the point. We also learned Trump didn't want disabled vets at his military pride parade because he thought it would look bad. 

He thought heroes who showed physical valor in the line of duty was a problem, you guys. That their physical ordeal wasn't a visible reflection of sacrifice to a higher cause.

So how would I be shocked if Mar-a-lago was "raided"? (For a value of "raided" that means subject to a lawfully executed warrant based on probable cause because of due process.) This former president took 15 boxes of apparently classified shit out from the White House with him. 

We're supposed to give a shit that MAGAs are mad about it. Of course they are. They are conditioned to be mad because of a steady diet of mad-fuel. They believe a free and fair election was stolen with no proof at all--of course they are mad about their little God King. They literally don't know what due process is or appreciate that Trump is not inviolate but is still just a citizen subject to the same laws as anybody else. 

Literally any day could be the day when MAGAs decide to explode. They did on 1/6. It looks like for some reason some /Donald peeps thought 8/8 was some kind of big deal.  (88 stands for Heil Hitler in some Nazi iconography.) Who cares? Democracy isn't about the feelings of losers and bigots. 

And justice isn't about politics either. Sometimes, your boy is just guilty as fuck and you need to acknowledge it. The GOP is having problems with the basic idea of right and wrong. But the pursuit of the evidence and the facts matters. 

John Dean's Trip Down Memory Lane

I was skeptical about the value of John Dean's testimony comparing President Trump's actions in office with Watergate, and still am. It's not that I think the comparison is wrong--I don't! It's just that even after Nixon resigned (and was pardoned) we still got Republican presidents even though the madness of the criminality proposed or actually engaged in by Nixon and associates is actually mind-blowing when actually contemplated.

So we got Reagan and-Iran Contra (and I never could swear the October Surprise conspiracy wasn't a real thing, either). When George H.W. Bush got into office, he pardoned the handful of Reagan officials that had been convicted, and it seems pretty unlikely that Bush was as "out of the loop" regarding that affair as he claimed.

George W. Bush's presidency should have been the final straw. The pre-9/11 intelligence. The Iraq War. Guantanamo. Abu Ghraib.

But how did Republicans treat Presidents Clinton and Obama? (Do I need to go into how Whitewater and Benghazi weren't about fact-finding but fault-finding?)

And now, you can't even get Republicans to read the damn Mueller Report (which, it was once crowed in front of tv cameras, exonerated Trump--until it didn't).

The double-standard view holds up even to this day, though. While I, or liberals in general, or even objective folks of goodwill, might Dean's comparison seriously based on the details we know of Watergate and the detail in the Mueller Report, and think, for example, a line of questioning intending to diminish his testimony based on an ad hom argument was poor, Rep. Matt Gaetz's description of Dean as having made a "cottage industry" of criticizing presidents will stick simply because he pointed out that Iran-Contra and, well, shit, half of what the Bush Administration did was worse than Watergate. There might be truth in it--but not to Republicans if they've never admitted it to themselves.

And after all, didn't Dean make money...on his books?

Look, Dean made a perfectly good swipe at Gaetz for possibly not understanding the rule of law issues involved because "Watergate was before his time". But I was still in diapers at the time, and I get it. The problem isn't when Gaetz was born, it's actually assuming you can treat Republicans like they weren't born yesterday. The environment of unaccountability they've created has served them well, and they aren't going to be shamed by something that happened 46 years ago, or 35 years ago, or thirteen years ago. Or a minute ago--unless you rub their noses in current events.

Where some might see the throughline from then until now, Trump loyalist conservatives will only see water under the bridge, because there is none so blind as those who don't want to see. Everyone is either dead and gone or alive and pardoned and reborn on cable news. It's a little harder, though, to get away from what's happening right now.  And now is what and when Democrats need to focus on.

TWGB: Roger Stone's Time in the Barrel

You know, if I could save time in a barrel, the first thing that I'd like to do, is to save every email, text, and random Tweet from Roger Stone until eternity passes away, just to give them to Robert Mueller and fuck Stone the way he would fuck unto others. (My deepest apologies to Jim Croce for my appropriation of one of his tenderest songs. I'd like to think he would have understood.)

The Friday morning fortuitously-filmed arrest of Roger Stone was a great start to a very awkward day in Trump World, but in all honesty, Roger Stone had been hinting that his ass was due for an indictment or a half dozen or so for a good long while. I don't doubt the CNN claim that good reporting was the reason they had Stone's Florida abode staked out, because the day before, four indictments were filed after a rare bit of Mueller Grand Jury activity. (This is why my last post indicated that I knew I needed to clear my tabs in advance of Friday news, because I am not a reporter, but neither am I ever unplugged--RW journos claiming a tip-off for CNN exclusively for some reason are just mad they got scooped or trying to neg the Mueller investigation and the FBI for reasons that are not entirely wholesome.)

But let's get down to the barebones details--in August of 2016, Stone was caught bragging on his knowledge about what Wikileaks might drop. Even this little blog wondered if pimping the Wikileaks thing wasn't just meta-ratfucking from a person who only pretended he wasn't still working for the Trump campaign, and there's been good reason to think Roger Stone always was still "on the bus".  We've got glimmers of what folks like Randy Credico, Jerome Corsi, and Steve Bannon might have given up, but in any event, the so far collected private communications of Roger Jason Stone are amazeballs nasty.

Look, you can tell me perjury is bad and suborning perjury in others is bad, but literally going full "Wicked Witch of the West" and telling someone straight up "I will get your little dog too!" is just some crazy witness-tampering obvious almost fictional villain batshit evil. I will tell you right now, you get an entire posse of two dozen or so entirely for-free FBI just for threatening a man's little floofdog if I was running this arrest operation (complete with warrant for assorted whatever collection).

Which is about what happened, and which could be arguably overkill for some piddly "process crimes"--except let's be honest about what Stone has been doing here. Back to referencing the barebones details, if one is threatening violence, and frankly talking about abusing or leveraging other people to get certain results in a legal matter, that doesn't make them look good. To my mind, that says, you have to look at why they are engaging in these sorts of crimes that specifically try to effect the legal outcome of the Mueller investigation.

I think it's hard to say he'd have been doing these things if there wasn't some truth to the connection(s) between Wikileaks and the Trump Campaign, and their apparent foreknowledge that the info WikiLeaks had was from a Russian-sponsored cyber attack.  Although the indictment itself doesn't throw all the info Mueller has out there (and it shouldn't and for obvious reasons) we can nonetheless understand that Stone wouldn't have been indicted unless he was already screwed by what Mueller had in writing regardless of what Stone, a notoriously unreliable witness, might offer.

Which makes Stone's talk about not flipping fascinating--because this is something Trump has stated he really likes about Stone--he isn't gonna talk. But that sort of implies that there is a something he shouldn't be talking about, n'est-ce pas? The more Stone crows on various news outlets about what he will and won't do, the more it looks a bit like he's either pimping himself out for a pardon or trying to make himself look like a martyr for his legal GoFundMe. (And he isn't, based on his real estate, necessarily a poor man. He's just poor in his political choices, morality, and well, everything else that makes one human.)  Also his head is shaped very amusingly and his hair looks to be sewn-in--which probably adds to the sympathy some are wasting on this peculiarly buff-backed Nixon tattoo-sporting reprobate. But when I hear the RW Tweeters go on about poor old Rog, at age 66, the fact that he looks like  Abe Simpson is all about his life choices and he seems to be the reason weirdos like Loomer, Prosobiec and a score of other internet simple trash exist.

Miss me with any sympathy for this devil.

(Although, and to give him his due, his back tattoo is really quite good and the artist should be praised. It's awkwardly placed and sized, which is entirely Stone's choices, and the tattoo artist can't be faulted for that. But photo-representations of human faces are notoriously tricky when rendered as skin art, and entire websites exist of bad tattoo art to prove that. The Nixon tattoo is actually scaled well, and the features are proportioned correctly and do not look like a bad caricature. A piece of art like this would probably be better served on a bicep or, as a back piece, be larger. Located where it is, it's not somehow tattoo-correct. I guess a similarly-sized Nixon tramp-stamp would be far worse, of course. Maybe he could have it elaborated upon with borders of US flags or some shit when he goes to his eventual incarceration--because none of these minions even know how stingy Trump is gonna be with these pardons. He will want proofs of loyalty beyond your wildest indulgence. He's a narcissist. He can't help it.)