How Many Reasons to Impeach?
Let's start out by remembering that, no matter how they spin it, the Republicans impeached Bill Clinton over a blow job, and that they tried for years to gin up an impeachment of Barack Obama based on an endless series of lies about Benghazi.
Times have sure changed, huh? We now have an absolutely out of control, mentally defective Republican President who seems to be licensed to engage in any sort of abomination without its bothering Congressional Republicans one bit. He seems to commit clearly impeachable abuses weekly, if not daily, and not one single Republican will state the obvious in public.
I think I'll just take a walk through the last few months and list some of the grounds that exist to remove this malignant character from the White House. I will start with the most recent and work my way into the past, where the real abominations lie.
1. Trump has just been caught revealing the nation's most secret intelligence data to the Russians. Compare the Republican silence about this to the year-long screaming fit about Hillary's alleged revealing "classified data," which turned out to consist of two e-mails congratulating foreign leaders on their election. Republicans answer that the President has the right to reveal any damned thing he pleases. That may be technically true, but imagine him tweeting out our nuclear codes, which he is apparently legally entitled to do. Having the "right" to do something and getting kicked the hell out of the White House for doing it are two separate things. And let me add here that this revelation is going to relate to one of the two really big reasons for impeaching Trump, in that it provides further damning evidence that the bastard is selling the country out to the Russians.
2. He has engaged in a continuous round of obstruction of justice, to prevent the real knowledge of his connections to the Russians from being revealed. The firing of James Comey is the most recent of those criminal actions, which also include appointing a Secretary of State and national security advisor who were both involved up to their necks in dirty dealings with the Russians, firing prosecutors who were investigating the matter, choosing an Attorney General who is such a corrupt right winger that he will crush any internal investigation into Trump's treason, and a host of lesser intimidations of these and other people.
3. He has allowed his family to profit from his position. The most recent obscene example of this is the selling of visas into the United States by Jared Kushner and his family, in return for $500,000 investments into Kushner's company. In contrast to the behavior of previous Presidents, Trump has absolutely refused to separate himself in any way from the operation of his family businesses; we have seen numerous examples of the use of government resources to promote his companies, or even to financially benefit them directly, as when the government pays him to have his staff stay at Mar-a-Lago or Trump Tower. He has furthermore absolutely refused to even let the American people know the full extent of his financial entanglements, which may point to not just corruptly benefiting his family, but which will likely reveal the extensive nature of his dependence on the Russians.
4. Now I come to what is, in my opinion, the main reason that Trump should be impeached: the refusal to carry out his sworn duty as President of the United States. The Constitution requires of the President that "he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." Trump has appointed a whole host of cabinet secretaries and other top government officials who are openly committed to frustrating or reversing the standing law of the United States.
This happened most blatantly in the past with Ronald Reagan, who appointed the likes of James Watt to head the Interior Department, and Clarence Thomas to head the Civil Rights division of the Justice Department. People like them had long-standing ideological commitments to tearing down the rule of law in this country, and should never have been allowed to take office; when Reagan appointed them, he should have been impeached immediately for refusal to carry out his sworn duty as President. The cowardly Democrats failed to do this, and as a result we ended up with Bush-Cheney and Trump. Well, what Reagan did, Trump is applying in a wholesale manner to every bit of the government he can get his hands on.
Within the last couple of days, just to cite one example, Trump has put forward for the position as chief scientist at the USDA, a man who is not a scientist, who has never been a scientist, but did spend several years as a right wing talk show host in the Midwest, where he endlessly railed against climate change science as a hoax. I'm sorry, but the President has no right to do things like this, not and retain his position. And this example hardly begins to approach the seriousness, for example, of his appointment of a man with $500 billion dollars riding on doing away with sanctions on Russia, to be Secretary of State, or making a woman dedicated to turning our educational system into nothing but a profit center for the rich, most notably her own family, to be the Secretary of Education.
5. Now for the final area in which Trump has engaged in (to say the least) impeachable offenses: The absolutely clear evidence that he is a traitor, who has sold the country out on numerous occasions to a foreign dictator, in payment for that dictator's rigging our election system to make him President. And I will not budge on this description. We now have dozens of examples of his entanglements with Putin and the Russian oligarchs, as well as so many specimens of clear payoffs to them, that you would have to be a fool to let yourself be swayed by the thundering chorus of right wingers trying to shout down the obvious: Trump is a traitor. The most recent of these payoffs spectacularly came, as I mentioned above, with the betraying to the Russians some of the country's most closely guarded intelligence secrets; something we would not even know about if he had had his way. But the payoffs to the Russians are legion, and have been occurring since the time he won office; the deliberate alienation of the United States from its allies, the obvious intent, with the appointment of Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State, to do away with sanctions on Russia (can you give any other explanation why he would pick as Secretary of State a person without one day's experience in foreign diplomacy in his whole life, but who has the most to gain financially of any single person in the United States from doing away with Russian Sanctions? I mean, really, how obvious does something have to be?), his appointment as chief National Security advisor a person with his own massive entanglements with the Russians, including some pretty big financial payouts, and on and on.
I want to say this again: despite all the Republican screaming to the contrary, it is absolutely clear that Trump is the tool of a hostile foreign country. He is a traitor, beyond any reasonable doubt. The proofs that this is true come out almost every day.
Well, there is a list of four main areas, within which lie at the very least several dozen absolutely justified reasons for removing Trump from office. Unfortunately, the evidence as of today is that the entire pack of Republicans in Congress are every bit as corrupt and subversive as he is, so all of this will still not reach, in their minds, the magnitude of a blow job, or even what they all knew were a pack of totally false smears about Benghazi. It only took three honest Republicans in Congress to side with the Democrats and bring down Nixon. As I have said before, the Republicans learned their lesson from Nixon very well. There is today, as the result of a decades-long, systematic effort, not one single honest Republican in Congress, and perhaps there is not one on earth. Otherwise this farce of a Presidency would have been over two months ago. Not that Mike Pence will give the country anything better in the way of governing than the lunatic Trump, but apparently nothing is too low for Republicans to swallow, while they are waiting to vote in those massive tax cuts for the rich and deregulation for their corporations. Until then, Trump could invite a Russian army to occupy Alaska and they'd all have reasons why that was just fine.
Times have sure changed, huh? We now have an absolutely out of control, mentally defective Republican President who seems to be licensed to engage in any sort of abomination without its bothering Congressional Republicans one bit. He seems to commit clearly impeachable abuses weekly, if not daily, and not one single Republican will state the obvious in public.
I think I'll just take a walk through the last few months and list some of the grounds that exist to remove this malignant character from the White House. I will start with the most recent and work my way into the past, where the real abominations lie.
1. Trump has just been caught revealing the nation's most secret intelligence data to the Russians. Compare the Republican silence about this to the year-long screaming fit about Hillary's alleged revealing "classified data," which turned out to consist of two e-mails congratulating foreign leaders on their election. Republicans answer that the President has the right to reveal any damned thing he pleases. That may be technically true, but imagine him tweeting out our nuclear codes, which he is apparently legally entitled to do. Having the "right" to do something and getting kicked the hell out of the White House for doing it are two separate things. And let me add here that this revelation is going to relate to one of the two really big reasons for impeaching Trump, in that it provides further damning evidence that the bastard is selling the country out to the Russians.
2. He has engaged in a continuous round of obstruction of justice, to prevent the real knowledge of his connections to the Russians from being revealed. The firing of James Comey is the most recent of those criminal actions, which also include appointing a Secretary of State and national security advisor who were both involved up to their necks in dirty dealings with the Russians, firing prosecutors who were investigating the matter, choosing an Attorney General who is such a corrupt right winger that he will crush any internal investigation into Trump's treason, and a host of lesser intimidations of these and other people.
3. He has allowed his family to profit from his position. The most recent obscene example of this is the selling of visas into the United States by Jared Kushner and his family, in return for $500,000 investments into Kushner's company. In contrast to the behavior of previous Presidents, Trump has absolutely refused to separate himself in any way from the operation of his family businesses; we have seen numerous examples of the use of government resources to promote his companies, or even to financially benefit them directly, as when the government pays him to have his staff stay at Mar-a-Lago or Trump Tower. He has furthermore absolutely refused to even let the American people know the full extent of his financial entanglements, which may point to not just corruptly benefiting his family, but which will likely reveal the extensive nature of his dependence on the Russians.
4. Now I come to what is, in my opinion, the main reason that Trump should be impeached: the refusal to carry out his sworn duty as President of the United States. The Constitution requires of the President that "he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." Trump has appointed a whole host of cabinet secretaries and other top government officials who are openly committed to frustrating or reversing the standing law of the United States.
This happened most blatantly in the past with Ronald Reagan, who appointed the likes of James Watt to head the Interior Department, and Clarence Thomas to head the Civil Rights division of the Justice Department. People like them had long-standing ideological commitments to tearing down the rule of law in this country, and should never have been allowed to take office; when Reagan appointed them, he should have been impeached immediately for refusal to carry out his sworn duty as President. The cowardly Democrats failed to do this, and as a result we ended up with Bush-Cheney and Trump. Well, what Reagan did, Trump is applying in a wholesale manner to every bit of the government he can get his hands on.
Within the last couple of days, just to cite one example, Trump has put forward for the position as chief scientist at the USDA, a man who is not a scientist, who has never been a scientist, but did spend several years as a right wing talk show host in the Midwest, where he endlessly railed against climate change science as a hoax. I'm sorry, but the President has no right to do things like this, not and retain his position. And this example hardly begins to approach the seriousness, for example, of his appointment of a man with $500 billion dollars riding on doing away with sanctions on Russia, to be Secretary of State, or making a woman dedicated to turning our educational system into nothing but a profit center for the rich, most notably her own family, to be the Secretary of Education.
5. Now for the final area in which Trump has engaged in (to say the least) impeachable offenses: The absolutely clear evidence that he is a traitor, who has sold the country out on numerous occasions to a foreign dictator, in payment for that dictator's rigging our election system to make him President. And I will not budge on this description. We now have dozens of examples of his entanglements with Putin and the Russian oligarchs, as well as so many specimens of clear payoffs to them, that you would have to be a fool to let yourself be swayed by the thundering chorus of right wingers trying to shout down the obvious: Trump is a traitor. The most recent of these payoffs spectacularly came, as I mentioned above, with the betraying to the Russians some of the country's most closely guarded intelligence secrets; something we would not even know about if he had had his way. But the payoffs to the Russians are legion, and have been occurring since the time he won office; the deliberate alienation of the United States from its allies, the obvious intent, with the appointment of Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State, to do away with sanctions on Russia (can you give any other explanation why he would pick as Secretary of State a person without one day's experience in foreign diplomacy in his whole life, but who has the most to gain financially of any single person in the United States from doing away with Russian Sanctions? I mean, really, how obvious does something have to be?), his appointment as chief National Security advisor a person with his own massive entanglements with the Russians, including some pretty big financial payouts, and on and on.
I want to say this again: despite all the Republican screaming to the contrary, it is absolutely clear that Trump is the tool of a hostile foreign country. He is a traitor, beyond any reasonable doubt. The proofs that this is true come out almost every day.
Well, there is a list of four main areas, within which lie at the very least several dozen absolutely justified reasons for removing Trump from office. Unfortunately, the evidence as of today is that the entire pack of Republicans in Congress are every bit as corrupt and subversive as he is, so all of this will still not reach, in their minds, the magnitude of a blow job, or even what they all knew were a pack of totally false smears about Benghazi. It only took three honest Republicans in Congress to side with the Democrats and bring down Nixon. As I have said before, the Republicans learned their lesson from Nixon very well. There is today, as the result of a decades-long, systematic effort, not one single honest Republican in Congress, and perhaps there is not one on earth. Otherwise this farce of a Presidency would have been over two months ago. Not that Mike Pence will give the country anything better in the way of governing than the lunatic Trump, but apparently nothing is too low for Republicans to swallow, while they are waiting to vote in those massive tax cuts for the rich and deregulation for their corporations. Until then, Trump could invite a Russian army to occupy Alaska and they'd all have reasons why that was just fine.
Comments
Either that or he's the biggest incompetent to hold the office since James Buchanan, and possibly ever. I'm still leaning towards Mark Cuban's hypothesis that Trump's advisors are the Russian agents, and that Trump himself is too blockheaded to realize he's being played.
*"The most recent of these payoffs spectacularly came, as I mentioned above, with the betraying to the Russians some of the country's most closely guarded intelligence secrets;"
Or, as Mike the mad biologist suggests, this might be narcissism. He highlighted this bit from the Washington Post:
In his meeting with Lavrov, Trump seemed to be boasting about his inside knowledge of the looming threat. “I get great intel. I have people brief me on great intel every day,” the president said, according to an official with knowledge of the exchange.
Boasting of what he's learned and failing to realize that he shouldn't be saying it certainly sounds like something Trump would do. This is also why I think Trump isn't a Russian agent - Russian intelligence would have too much sense to work directly with that blabbermouth.
*"can you give any other explanation why he would pick as Secretary of State a person without one day's experience in foreign diplomacy in his whole life, but who has the most to gain financially of any single person in the United States from doing away with Russian Sanctions?"
I can come up with two. First, his closest advisors are the traitors, and he's being played by them. Second, Trump is incompetent enough to have appointed Ben Carson as Secretary of HUD; someone like that would see a business executive as having all the experience necessary for conducting diplomacy. (Actually, that second part would describe how Trump sees himself. He's that clueless.)
*"He has engaged in a continuous round of obstruction of justice, to prevent the real knowledge of his connections to the Russians from being revealed. The firing of James Comey is the most recent of those criminal actions"
It certainly is obstruction of justice, for which he should be impeached. However, I can imagine a different reason. All Trump's experience has come in the private sector, where a narcissist such as him could always remove anyone who questions or simply distrusts the boss. He's prized loyalty over everything else. Put him in charge of the government, have him face an underling who's investigate him, and his first thought would have to be "fire the underling."
I don't think Trump's a traitor; I think he's a stunning mixture of narcissism and incompetence who's surrounded by Russian tools and incapable of realizing it.