Wednesday, February 15, 2017

Remember, This Is Just Within Trump's FIRST MONTH IN OFFICE...

Dan Rather, veteran of many a political scandal from the 1960s until today, quoted in the UK Independent:

“Watergate is the biggest political scandal of my lifetime, until maybe now,” former CBS news anchor Dan Rather said, in a post on Facebook. “It was the closest we came to a debilitating Constitutional crisis, until maybe now.”
His comments come after the White House admitted the President was told several weeks ago that National Security Adviser Michael Flynn had not told the truth about a telephone call with a Russian diplomat—and chose not to fire him immediately. The news has fueled broader concerns about Mr Trump's closeness to Vladimir Putin and the role Russia may have played in helping him get elected...

I know I'm wary of making scandal comparisons to Watergate and I'd love to find the time to be able to rank scandals objectively and accurately, but there is a seriousness and severity to this. These accusations about Flynn - and about Trump's unsettling relationships with a autocratic, kleptocratic nation like Russia - fit the criteria of scandal regarding Corruption (extortion, bribes, financial quid pro quos) and Political (rigging or altering elections, procedural misconduct) that make for serious offenses. Throw in the fact that what Flynn was doing - what Trump's campaign was doing - falls under "substantive" (meaning this is shit that can get you arrested and charged with federal felonies) more than "salacious" (merely exposing the dark, nasty soullessness of Trump and his circle).

Making this worse is that the only ones who can do anything about this - political leadership in Congress - are not in the mood to do a damn thing about it.

We're talking about bastards like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell and Jason Chaffetz who were all ready to investigate the shit out of a President Hillary over unproven rumors and the SAME shit they'd investigated for the last four twelve twenty-five years.

We're less than thirty days in on Trump's administration and he's already at a scandal level of an Iran Contra, one big leak away from full-blown Watergate/Teapot Dome, and Congress refuses to do its job of oversight or to force an independent special prosecutor to take over an investigation. Shameful.

Thirty days. We've had one President die in 30 days and even he didn't commit as much damage to the nation's security status or psyche as Trump has.

If we had a Congress with any balls (to hell with spine, let's call these cowards on their collective manhood), we wouldn't have another month of this disaster.

Man up and end this shit, Congress. It's not funny anymore. It's not SAFE anymore. There is every serious possibility our national security is compromised by a foreign power that is not allied to our domestic and global interests.

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