Just a quick note or three about CINCO DE MAYO this 2025:
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| Find yourself in sunny Minot North Dakota!! |
Head out to Herbert's Taco Hut!
Get yourself a taco!
Aim both middle fingers in the general direction of donald Racist Orange Shitgibbon trump!
And Celebrate the Battle of Puebla as General Zaragoza intended!!!
P.S. more blogging to follow this Monday. brb.
So now that the indictments are starting to pile up, the Who's Who among the "centrist" (actually conservative) punditry in Washington are calling on President Biden to "become the statesman" and offer donald trump a blanket pardon for all sins "in order to unite the nation."
There are so many things wrong with that Beltway opinion it took me forty-two minutes to puke my guts out. I'm better now, still angry about it though...
The first thing wrong with Marc Thiessen and Danielle Plekta's proposal is that trump himself would never accept a pardon. Even he would recognize the pitfalls that would put him in. Above all, he loses the Fifth Amendment protection from self-incrimination on anything that pardon covered. If that covers his tax evasion stunts, that can block him from every business scam he knows to pull off. trump himself may remain protected but everyone who worked for him - could work for him - is screwed. It would cut himself off from every lackey he needs. It also opens him to Civil lawsuits on everything considered under the pardon. He will be stuck in courtrooms until the end of his days.
(There's a reason trump never issued a blanket pardon to the January 6th rioters and even his congressional allies who begged for them: They would have been compelled to testify on him as the DOJ/Special Counsel Smith's office went after trump for inciting it)
The next reason trump would never accept a pardon is that accepting such a thing would be an admission he did something criminal. It would go against his years-long screaming about "WITCH HUNTS" that fuels his "I'm the victim" narrative. He and his MAGA followers could pretend otherwise, but the mainstream media and millions of other Americans - not to mention the world - will never let trump live it down.
Somewhere in the back of trump's mind will be the thought that someone like Joe Biden can use that pardon to exact concessions from trump. Ever the mob boss, trump thinks in terms of "kompromat" all the time (one of the big reasons why trump held onto valued classified documents against foreign powers). Even if Biden takes the high road as Thiessen and Plekta suggest and issue a blanket pardon with no conditions, it will gnaw at trump that he will somehow owe Biden on this and trump's pride will make him reject that pardon.
But those are not the reasons why the Beltway pundits pushing for a pardon are wrong on this.
Above all, these pundits are wrong to claim that a pardon will "unite the nation" and let us "move on."
There are at least 81 million Americans - the number who voted for Biden - who will never accept trump escaping the justice of a courtroom and conviction. All they will see is a system of justice that punishes the lower rungs of the nation - the poor, the ones who can't afford lawyers, the low-ranking members of the military or civic administration who broke espionage and obstruction laws committing fewer crimes than trump has - while the power elites give themselves "Get Out of Jail Free" cards in order to continue their criminal acts down the road.
There will be at least 74 million Americans - the number who voted for trump - who will celebrate and crow that "their" boy donald trump "outwitted" the libruls who "hunted" trump as though winning cheap political points were the objective instead of upholding the Constitution and our belief in justice for all. Their behavior - already bullying and offensive towards those they hate - will get worse with the idea that as long as their Patron Saint trump is untouchable they can do whatever they like.
There will be no peace if trump is pardoned. There also will be no peace if trump is convicted in a court of law, there are no illusions about that, but at least there will be justice done.
No, the only real reason why the Beltway media is eager for Biden to issue trump a pardon is that it gets themselves - the blowhards, the opinionated, the often-wrong - off the hook for wasting 40 years of everyone's time on a Reagan Era Fantasy of (Conservative) Prosperity and Happiness that was never real.
These "Pardon trump" pundits are the same ones who went after the Clintons - especially Hillary - for slights and misdeeds without mercy or reason, they're the same ones who attacked Obama for any perceived flaw. These are the same pundits who gave Bush the Elder a pass when he issued pardons to everyone convicted or facing investigation into Iran-Contra. These are the same pundits who failed to go after Bush the Lesser for covering up the Plame Scandal by getting Scooter Libby commuted to time served, and told Liberals to "let it go" when they screamed about investigating Bush and Cheney for their lies that led to an unwinnable occupation of Iraq and a torture regime - that Thiessen himself cheers on - that blemished our global prestige.
Lemme ask you this, Mr. Thiessen: If Hillary Clinton had been charged and convicted on her secret server and her emails back in 2017-18, would you be calling on then-President trump to pardon her for the good of the nation?
What's happening here is that the Beltway talking heads, having built up their careers pushing a "Both Sides" narrative that equated Republican corruption to Democratic corruption, are running out of excuses for their lazy work. If they could point out the flaws and follies of Democratic elected officials, they did so in the desire to downplay or negate the sins committed by their Republican counterparts.
But they can't do that with trump's pending criminal charges on espionage, obstruction, and (hopefully soon) incitement to insurrection. There are no equivalents among the Democrats that make trump disappear from the judicial media coverage, there is no story out there to distract the Right-leaning media elites from the reality that their conservatism is clearly more corrupt than liberalism.
trump himself is trying to get the media to carry the stories about Bill Clinton keeping his memoir audiotapes in his socks drawer (which was investigated and the DOJ determined no laws were broken), and doing his damnedest to indict Joe Biden for having his Senatorial papers stored in a car garage (ignoring the reality that congressional paperwork follows different federal laws and guidelines). The wingnut pundits would love to spread those stories in the court of public opinion, but they are going to go nowhere in a real-life court of law where trump's crimes will attract attention across every corner of the globe.
So, I would say "HELL NO" to any attempt by Biden to pardon trump. President Biden, you will not be doing this nation or the world any favors by letting donald trump off the hook for the crimes he's committed.
You will only let the useless talking heads in our national media off the hook for being wrong for so long.
Ugh.
I don't wanna start up the bloody horse-race comparisons of Presidential primary candidates again.
Not for the Republicans. I wasn't enticed by the 2012 lineup - the Upper Class Twit lineup - and the 2016 lineup all crashed and burned against the nightmare juggernaut of the Shitgibbon campaign.
But we've seen Ron "Anti-Florida Man" DeSantis essentially start up his campaign this year by pushing the most painful set of laws - against trans and gays, against our schools, against libraries, against immigrants, against women - on his state in order to impress the Culture War wingnuts, and there's been a number of other desperate hopefuls starting off their campaigns - like Tim Scott this week - in the mad belief that they'll be standing when donald trump gets indicted on 108 different criminal investigations (I may not be exaggerating at this point) this summer. Even Chris Christie - one of the 2016 flame-outs humiliated by trump - is thinking "Hey, now it's MY turn to humiliate HIM."
Please.
I've already pointed out that trump being indicted - hell, trump possibly being IN JAIL by next year - isn't going to stop trump being on the ballot. The Republicans - hell, the entire Presidential election process - don't have that restriction blocking any jailed felon from their ballots. And we've already witnessed the way trump violates the law of gravity in that every scandal and revelation only increases his rabid MAGA fanbase support. Any photo of trump in handcuffs becomes a rally poster, and he's going to win every GOP state primary in 2024. Republicans WILL vote for a convicted trump. It then becomes a nightmare scenario where trump and his GOP state allies can rig the broken Electoral College system to steal 2024 like he stole 2016.
This is enough to drive a sober librarian to drink. Except the drinking game gag I tried writing in 2015 quickly turned sour and unfunny the minute it became clear a monster like trump was going to win the Republican nomination. It REALLY stopped being funny in November 2016 when the broken Electoral College failed all of humanity.
I've said this before as well: There are no saviors, no moderates, no Reagan-esque figure coming to rescue the Republican Party. They have been taken over by conservative extremists hell-bent on authoritarian rule against a majority of Americans they no longer view as fellow citizens. donald trump's campaign and Presidential misrule demonstrated how cruelty and fearmongering can lead the GOP to power and control, and there's no alternative for that party to emulate.
For the Republicans ever since that fateful June 2015, it's just trumps all the way down.
There's nothing else TO say about the impending primary clown car that's about to crash over the cliffs. Again.
Gods help us.
So there's this:
The Georgia prosecutor investigating former President Donald Trump and his allies for possible criminal interference in that state’s 2020 presidential election told a judge Tuesday that decisions on whether and whom to charge in the probe “are imminent.”
Anyone sane since 2015 is pretty much chilling the bubbly for the moment the indictments go public.
With all this... animosity I've clearly been showing towards donald trump, I have to be honest and admit Yes I am biased, and Yes I am a little too eager to see trump perp-walked to a jail cell where he can rot for the rest of his short days.
You might want to ask me "Why." Why all this hate for the man?
It's not that he's rich (whatever millions he has doesn't make him much different from other rich men), or that he lies about being richer (although the gaslighting is part of the reason I despise trump).
It's not that he's done anything directly towards me to raise my ire. trump's never come to my door to punch me in the face, or spike my car tires, or give a book I've published a one-star review. The closest he's done was ruining the USFL in 1987. However, taking away the Tampa Bay Bandits wasn't personal, it was just heartbreaking for myself and thousands of local sports fans.
It's not that he's a Republican political figure, although my disdain for that party has been decades long watching them sink into a Culture War miasma that's wrecking the national psyche for the last 25 years.
There are reasons to hate trump, and I listed a number of them back in 2016 regarding his unfitness to serve as President, only to watch since then every argument I made proved correct.
I would argue the reason I want to live long enough to see trump in a jail cell is the horrifying reality that this man has a long history of violating laws and cultural norms, to where he has never been held accountable for any of it. This is something which offends anyone who has a sense of justice in their soul.
I've been doing research on a non-fiction project, trying to put together a simple book about the basic ideologies that drive the American political scene. Between the Big Three of Conservative, Liberal, and Moderate, with the early research pulling up a lot of stuff on Liberalism (I'm trying to find Conservatism texts that don't devolve into QAnon nuttery, so give me more time on that).
The key element I'm finding about Classical Liberalism - the Ism at the foundation of our Constitutional government - is how its primary focus is on Justice: Faith in the application and upholding of laws to promote individual equality and essential freedoms. It's not a perfect ideology - early Liberals excluded a lot of women and minorities (it even tried justifying slavery until abolitionism became the vogue) from those essential freedoms - but it did bend over time towards that justice.
For all my self-appreciation as a Moderate, I know full well my moderation leans towards more Liberal beliefs than Conservative ones (I would classify myself as Center-Left than true Centrist). It's arguably why most of my blog readership are happily enjoying my rants against the short-sighted fiscal and tax-cut policies of the Goddamned GOP, and against the Far Right hypocrites waging religious culture war bullshit on the rest of us.
My sense of Justice when it comes to donald trump raged up on the dial to 11. The numerous bankruptcies he's committed without ever getting held accountable for the fraudulent acts that had to happen to make them fail. The constant gaslighting about his business savvy when all he was truly good at was marketing himself. The preening public misbehavior. The open acts of racism he never apologized for: Such as calling for the lynching of black men accused of rape who turned out to be innocent, and his later disdain for Obama by going after his birth certificate. At no time did he ever face true public reprisal, never faced a courtroom judgment that exposed his sins for what they were.
And all of that was before he officially announced to run in 2015.
That very day was an outrage as he went Full Racist against China and Mexico. trump never looked back as he kept campaigning on hate as an agenda to the delight of rabid Far Right voters who loved the pandering. He kept getting worse, and never answered for any of it. The Republican Party leadership never suspended him, called him to account, forced him to behave better for the sake of the public discourse. The mainstream media never held him to account, never boycotted his hate rallies, or refused to give him any coverage (his oxygen fueling the flames) to teach him manners. Hell, the Beltway Media gave trump free advertising 24/7.
By all rights, the day the Access Hollywood interview outtakes got out - the day the entire planet finally understood how vulgar trump truly is - should have been the end of him. Any other political candidate would have been driven from the stage like the sexually abusive Shitgibbon that he is. trump shrugged it off, and his allies and apologists among the mainstream media doubled down on attacking Hillary Clinton as if to exonerate the crimes trump himself admitted doing.
And when the election came that November, trump may not have won the popular vote over Hillary, but he won enough voters to abuse a broken Electoral College system to claim a Presidency that should never have gone to him.
Every act, every statement by trump became another act of injustice.
Like any person with a desire to see justice done, to see our system of laws hold everyone equal to those laws, trump's ongoing misdeeds from 2017 onward triggered in me this thought: "He can't keep getting away with it."
When the Mueller investigation started into Russian's interference with the 2016 elections, and with possible Russian ties to trump as a favored candidate, I held hope it would pan out. I still argue that Mueller's work did expose Russian interference, but that he failed to pursue trump on clear acts of Obstruction: Partly because he tried leaving it to Congress to punish trump, and partly because Attorney General William Barr distorted Mueller's results in order to absolve trump.
And so trump got away with it.
trump exposed himself to impeachable offenses when he got caught hiding illicit phone calls pressuring Ukraine in 2019 to start fake investigations into Hunter Biden to set up mudslinging attacks on Joe Biden. But because of the partisan nature of modern party dynamics, The Republican Senate refused to admit where trump crossed the line, refused to hold him accountable.
And so trump got away with that.
At some point, an honest defense of our nation's Constitutional system has to acknowledge the damage trump has done, is still inflicting, on the United States' well-being.
Which is why it matters. It matters to me, it matters to millions of fellow Americans, it matters to our future that all the things trump is under criminal investigation for today - the January 6th Insurrection, his tax fraud scams, that unfinished bribery allegation, his theft of classified documents, and the election interference in Georgia and other states - must finally bring him to heel.
It is a moral imperative as much as a legal imperative that at some point - for any of the crimes trump's committed in his pursuit of greed and power - donald trump must be indicted. It's not schadenfreude, it's not envy, it's not partisan hackery, it's not foolishness on my part or anyone else's.
It is a straight-up moral imperative that trump stand in an American court of law and be held accountable for the laws he's openly violated. It is a moral imperative that every excuse, every deflection, every lie that trump keeps uttering to avoid the facts all come to an end.
Gods help us. Let Justice Be Done.
China has an animal zodiac for each year on the calendar. I know for example that the European/Christian calendar corresponded 1970 to The Year of the Dog.
China is going to need to update their zodiac, because 2023 is going to be the Year of the Shitgibbon. This is the year a number of pundits and legal experts are claiming donald trump will finally face direct criminal charges for the crimes he's committed both before and during office as President Loser of the Popular Vote (Twice).
Over at MSNBC, columnist Jordan Rubin - who has a legal background working as prosecutor for the Manhattan's District Attorney's office (insert Law & Order ding-ding cue here) - makes the case that several ongoing investigations into trump's alleged misdeeds are set to wrap up soon with a lot of credible evidence the Justice Department can use to indict him:
On the one hand, it’s unremarkable to prophesy that a man who’s facing several probes by federal and state prosecutors for conduct that looks pretty unlawful will be charged with crimes.
On the other hand, it’s Trump, whose name hasn’t been synonymous with accountability.
There’s reason to think that will change...
...If anything, the feds’ search and seizure of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida last summer felt like a watershed moment: federal law enforcement action against a former president who had seemingly lived a consequence-free life and might have continued to do so. Even an incremental step toward potential prosecution from the branch of government that can actually bring charges seems more significant than the legislative branch’s asserting Trump’s guilt by way of criminal referrals (both things, of course, can be and are significant).
Plus, the Mar-a-Lago case appears to be more straightforward than the sordid legal maze of January 6 and its tentacles. As former federal prosecutors said in a November memo analyzing the documents case, published at Just Security, “there is a strong basis to charge Trump.” With his special master detour officially crushed — by Trump-appointed judges, no less — he looks a step closer to charges related to his apparent mishandling of classified documents and obstruction.
Rubin does also note the state-level legal trouble trump is facing, but Jacob Shamsian over at Business Insider has more details on that:
Fulton County's district attorney, Fani Willis, launched her investigation shortly after Trump made an infamous call to Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, asking him to "find" enough votes to reverse Trump's 2020 electoral loss to now-President Joe Biden.
Court filings indicate the DA's investigation expanded to include Trump's allies who plotted to send fake electors to Congress on January 6, 2021, and hand Trump a second term.
Willis has swiftly moved the investigation forward. Over the past year, she empaneled a grand jury and fought court battles to ensure testimony from Gov. Brian Kemp; the state's Republican Party chairman, David Shafer; Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina; and more than a dozen others who spoke with Trump at the time. Two other high-profile witnesses who fought grand jury subpoenas, Mark Meadows and Newt Gingrich, have their cases before appeals courts.
Trump and the fake electors could face charges of election fraud, improperly trying to influence government officials, and criminal solicitation, according to an analysis from the Brookings Institution.
As of December, Willis has gotten testimony from most of the main players in Trump's plot to overturn election results in Georgia. According to CNN, her office has been negotiating plea deals with participants in the fake-elector scheme.
If she's going to bring indictments, they could come soon...
Even without testimony from the likes of Meadows - who's facing his own legal woes to the point where pleading out is the only way he'll avoid hard time in prison - DA Willis reportedly has enough evidence to indict trump and others. It's just the niceties of getting the smaller fish (the fake electors who don't want jail time on their resumes) to plead out in order to catch the bigger fish (trump) with direct testimony that's slowing up the inevitable announcement.
The grand jury Willis is using now is only an investigatory one, which has to make referrals to a regular grand jury that can actually bring the charges for the DA to use. So there is another step to go through, but according to Georgia rules that regular grand jury has a two-month window to work in. Once the special grand jury is finished (likely February) the regular grand jury should be done late April.
Meaning I get a nice birthday gift in May when Willis issues the arrest warrants.
trump is still facing other legal woes such as the state civil case in New York over tax fraud is set for October 2023. The civil trial between trump and E. Jean Carroll - who accused him of rape and brought defamation charges when he mocked her - is set to begin April 17 (any settlement deal has to be done April 10, I think) this year. Both of these trials are likely to hit trump's wallets in ways that could well bankrupt him forever, as well as paint him a loser before the primary voters in 2024.
In 2016, trump bullied all the other Republican candidates while his opponents had nothing to hit him with - they couldn't attack his business failings because he shamelessly gaslight the public about them - and so they floundered. In 2024, anybody campaigning against trump will have proof on the debate stage that trump is a loser, a tax fraud, breaking laws he was sworn to uphold, and can force trump to be on the defensive instead of offensively attacking everyone else.
trump will be a broken man, one way or another, by the time 2024 rolls around.
Here's hoping trump will be broken sitting in a darkened jail cell for next New Year's.
Update: Thanks again to Batocchio for offering this blog to Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! Don't forget, kiddos, November is coming up and that means NaNoWriMo writing challenge! Please read through the blog and leave comments!
You may notice this blog as a certain... philosophical viewpoint when it comes to donald trump.
Mostly that he's a lying, crooked, bankrupt, racist, sexist, brain-dead, ill-read, ill-tempered, Russian-bought, law-breaking Shitgibbon of the lowest order.
I admit I've kind of been calling for trump's immediate arrest and placement in handcuffs and perp-walked to the nearest SuperMax for awaiting his trial dates without bail, probably even before I started blogging in 2006 (The sonofabitch killed the USFL and the Tampa Bay Bandits back in the 1980s). It's been frustrating to sit here - even as more criminal misdeeds go public and he's practically bragging he's getting away with shit - and wonder what the hell is taking so long.
Rude Pundit is with me on being frustrated with the failure of the legal system so far:
This is the kind of shit that plagues my brain at 3 a.m. when the whiskey is wearing off and the drugs just aren't holding the bullshit at bay anymore. Right now, a plague of lawsuits and investigations ought to be making Trump wonder if he'd rather live the rest of his miserable life in the UAE, Russia, or Indonesia when it comes to places without extradition treaties. And I know, I know, I fucking know that you want to be optimistic, even gleeful, thinking, "There's no fucking way he gets out of all of this." I mean, c'mon. If nothing else, E. Jean Carroll's lawsuit accusing Trump of raping her has to bring him down. She's got DNA evidence, after all.
It's not just that we've been burned before (although I'll brag that I stopped leaping at every "We got him!" moment a long time ago). It's that when Trump gets away with it, the story shifts. The Mueller Report has become nothing more than a failed witch hunt (which it wasn't). The impeachment over Ukraine has become part of the "Russia hoax" (it's not a hoax and the phrase has become so broad as to encompass anything that even mentions Russia and Trump). Trump prances all around his red state yahoo fests, lying about this shit with extravagant abandon as he pushes closer and closer to simply saying, "Kill everyone not like you..."
And it's not just that Trump's gotten away with so much throughout his life. How many regular, working and middle class stiffs does he have to dick over before the rest understand they're being conned? How the fuck did it take so long for some entity in New York to seriously go after his entire ass? And why do they always stop short of actually arresting someone who has blatantly flouted the law? I'm honestly pissed as hell at Cyrus Vance and every AG and DA who allowed Trump and his shit children to remain free to fuck over more people...
It's been noted before, that the legal system favors the rich over the poor: Partly because the rich can afford better lawyers, but mostly because the legal system is all about "who owns what" and favors the rich in the first place.
trump's benefitted from a legal system that makes it hard to prove financial fraud, that creates a number of loopholes and exemptions that let him "do business" because we dare not overburden our Capitalism with regulations. he's benefitted from laws that give bankrupt businessmen like himself chances to file for Chapter 7-11-whatever and evade accountability to his creditors, and to keep doing that over and over even though by the third time he filed for bankruptcy someone should have noticed the trend and held him criminally liable before he ruined more businesses.
It's nice that there's NOW a criminal trial trump is facing this October for his company's acts of fraud, although it's just the company facing sanction and trump could walk away from jail time. It's nice that's there a slew of civil court trials trump is facing for tax evasion, acts of fraud, and defamation regarding his slandering of women he's sexually assaulted. It's nice that trump and his electoral fraud lackeys are facing likely state criminal charges in Georgia (and maybe also Arizona and Michigan). It's nice that there's NOW federal investigations into trump's overt refusal to abide by laws regarding Presidential records and illegal possession of CLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS. But where the fuck was everybody back in the 1990s when trump's bankrupt malfeasance - and possible ties to Russian mobs - went public... and still nobody did anything before he got worse?
I am also with Drew Magary over at SFGate (maybe paywalled). Just indict him already:
And so we come to said special master, Judge Raymond (British accent) Dearie, whose appointment has not stopped the Department of Justice from poring over some of the most sensitive documents they seized earlier this fall from Mar-a-Lago: documents that Trump definitely accidentally absconded from the White House with after his term as president came to an end.
Dearie has not been kind to Trump’s lawyers and even tried to force Trump to appear in court under oath. These plans were scuttled by a federal judge Thursday, but the special master’s moves are just one of many signs that the walls are closing in around our beloved Don-Don. The Department of Justice is still actively engaged in a criminal investigation of Trump. One of Trump’s most vocal defenders in the past is currently arguing that the former president’s attempts to ward off the probe may in fact be aiding it. I love it, unironically, when Trump hires people who he assumes will protect him and then they’re like, “Actually, f—k this guy.” And there are so many people like this out there! Fantastic...
It is time, both procedurally and metaphorically, to f—k Donald Trump. After all, if the guy who defended Trump against presumed white knight Robert Mueller thinks that Trump is in a highly f—kable position, let’s go ahead and take advantage of that.
It’s well past time, really. If you disdain Trump as much as I do, you’ve been on a six-year-long catharsis hunt in which every victory — even the 2020 election! — has felt hollow. I thought Trump was finished when he fired James Comey. I thought he was finished when Mueller was drafted to investigate him. I thought he was finished when he got COVID-19. You get the idea. It’s been an agonizing stretch in which all of us have had to live through Donald Trump being president, Donald Trump violently refusing to stop being president and then Donald Trump threatening to become president again. All Americans deserve a break from his bulls—t. We voted Joe Biden into office for this very reason.
And yet, here Trump remains. Still here. Still not officially f—ked. For six years, I’ve been waiting for a cavalry that always arrives unarmed. I’ve been counting on Democrats to put Trump’s head on the chopping block when that party’s leaders all share a bizarre reticence to prosecute him because they believe that indicting Trump is an indictment of the American Idyll or something. It’s possible that Trumpism is a fad and will die out on its own. Perhaps as soon as November, when a red wave that the dreaded polls supposedly once foretold fails to materialize. But given the damage that Trump and his cohorts have wrought, it feels wrong, IS wrong, to hope nature takes its course with this movement. I’ve done the hope thing. I did it in 2008. It only got me here, so you’ll excuse me if hope and I aren’t on the best of terms right now.
What I require, and what is there for the taking at last, is action. All of this due diligence has to be for something, and not just for due diligence’s sake. If Democrats want me to have faith in their precious institutions, then what I need is for those institutions to do what the label on the “Institutions” box promises and indict this man. I’m as sick as you are of the “Today would be a good day to charge Donald Trump with high treason” brand tweets that have polluted the internet since his inauguration, but the receipts are flooding in and the excuses have all sunk to the bottom of the sea in a beautiful, idiot boat. Truly, today WOULD be a good day for the hammer to drop. Don’t wait until after the election, when Republicans will have f—ked with an election that they have already pledged to f—k with. Don’t gimme some bulls—t about how there’ll be another civil war if we dare to prosecute Trump because I already watched the insurrectionists try to start that war and fail miserably. Most of those people thought they were going to a furry convention or something. And don’t put on your law degree and tell me about dangerous precedents and how fluid the definition of “crimedoing” is. I’ve been watching this s—tshow for six years now. I know what I’m looking at. I’m looking at robbery, treason, fraud and awful nutrition habits. Everyone knows what went down, what is going down and what Republicans WANT to go down. And I think I’ve had enough of the down parts...
To all the expectation that trump's rabid fanbase will rise up in acts of violence, we seen a part of that already back on January 6th. Yes, there will be violence, but that's going to happen no matter what we as a nation do to hold trump accountable for his crimes. Even if the legal system steps back, says to itself "oh dear we shouldn't do this, it'll set a terrible precedence for future assholes to abuse the law for partisan hackery," it's too late. trump's rabid fanbase will turn violent even if they get their way, because they will believe the legal system will let them get away with anything now. The Far Right wants their civil war, because they need the blood of their enemies to fulfill their Turner Diaries utopia. Damned if we do, damned if we don't.
trump keeps thinking he's protected, that he's safe, that he's one of the beautiful elite and that he's not a sucker who can ever lose. trump is running on that because Gods help us for 50 years the legal system let him run free even as the damage in his wake piled up higher than Trump Tower.
It is way past time to throw donald trump in a jail cell, take away his smartphone and shut down his social media accounts, slam that door shut, and call him a "sucker" as the guards walk away. Let trump brood in the darkness of his own making, because he's been such an inept con artist who only benefitted from fellow corrupt cronies and a lax legal system.
He's been leaving the clues to his follies and failures everywhere for decades, taunting our legal system and threatening to commit more crimes. Just stop him. Just fucking stop him, will you?
Seriously. We jailed Martha Stewart for less.
(Update: Many thanks to Infidel753 adding me to Crooks&Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up this morning! I'm a little busy working on NaNo today so... good luck writers!)
While the Presidential election is still getting counted out in the final states, with everything literally on the line for 270 Electoral Votes, there are a few things I wanna get off my chest tonight.
Ahem.
WHAT THE ABSOLUTE FUCK IS WRONG WITH MOST OF YOU?
I'm not even yelling at the trump voters from 2016 who voted again for the WORST SHITGIBBON ON THE PLANET, because they have been lost to us since even before 2016 2010 2000 1992. They're gleefully showing up for a man who will infect them with the Coronavirus at rallies and still vote as though he's their Personal Jesus Reagan.
No, I'm talking to a number of you Independent or centrist voters who didn't care to vote or voted differently in 2016, only to show up this election cycle to vote for a man in trump who spent the last four years objectively being the WORST POSSIBLE PERSON TO EVER SERVE IN THE WHITE HOUSE AND THIS IS GOING ALL THE WAY BACK TO JOHN ADAMS FOR GOD'S SAKE AND EVEN ADAMS HAD FCKING INTEGRITY, HELL EVEN GRANT AND HARDING WERE NEVER THIS BAD, ONLY JOHN TYLER AND ANDREW JOHNSON WOULD GIVE THIS SHITGIBBON A RUN FOR HIS MONEY SO WHY THE HELL DID YOU VOTE trump THIS TIME?!?!
Ahem.
Here, I tweeted this earlier today:
trump has 66 million voters so far. short of Biden's 68 million but an improvement on the 63 million he got in 2016.
— Witty Librarian In a Mask (@PaulWartenberg) November 4, 2020
WHERE THE FCK DID trump FIND 3 MILLION MORE VOTERS WHEN HE WAS BEING SO FCKING DIVISIVE???
I'd been noting for four years how trump never moved to the center of the political spectrum, never made himself more appealing to moderate voters to broaden his base, that he kept pandering to the 42-44 percent of the population that would have never guaranteed a popular vote win.
And the SOB still garnered more votes to him.
This was after constant and well-documented violations of the Emoluments Clause, revelations about bribing mistresses and porn actresses, case after case after case of him sexually assaulting women as proof of the vulgarity he revealed before the 2016 election. This was after trump's taxes went public this year, highlighting tax dodges and questionable claims that demonstrated trump wasn't just a failed businessman but arguably a tax fraud.
It was as though a massive plurality of Americans, maybe not a majority of us, just didn't give a fuck about ethical and honest leadership after all.
This was after a near year-long failure of leadership by trump and his administration in combatting and managing a global pandemic that was manageable if someone competent and caring set federal mandates for public safety (masks and social distancing) and fought hard to get Congress to fund for state aid and expanded benefits for the citizenry. trump refused to lead, even mocked the COVID-19 pandemic even as it spiraled out of control, even after he contracted the damn thing himself he never acknowledged the severity of it all. trump has a goddamn body count of 230,000 preventable deaths (and growing by the day) far worse than most wars other Presidents had overseen, and at least those leaders held themselves to account in some form or another. trump's failure on this matter made the United States one of the worst nations to handle the pandemic, likely prolonging it far longer in ways to make our recovery longer and more painful than what our counterpart Western European nations will do once we can get a safe vaccine going.
And the SOB still garnered more votes to him.
And the most obvious problem of all: How this openly race-baiting, rage-inducing tinpot encouraged the very worst in America, through appeals to violence, through the insults and denigration of Blacks, Latinos, Women. trump never appealed to the better angels, he always took the opportunity to summon the worst demons and historic wrongs that haunts our nation to this day. It's the one thing constant about trump that his fanbase will always fall for, always love him for. Allowing them to be as vulgar and hateful as he is.
And the SOB still garnered more votes to him.
I know we are living in a nation where there are far too many people being assholes than we had realized until 2016. I know. I can't understand it, but I know - like Rude Pundit in 2014 and Ed at Gin and Tacos in 2018 both pointed out - that the partisan divide in the United States created by the Far Right exists and can never be fixed. What I'm railing about now is how somehow, with all the bad shit trump served us for the last four years, even more Americans decided - against the availability of a reasonable, relatively normal political figure in Biden - to go with the SOB.
I may live in Florida, I may be half-mad myself. But Jesus Christ, even I know where the line shouldn't be crossed. trump shouldn't have even gotten 63 million voters this year, he didn't do anything to deserve getting 50 million voters this year.
And the ETERNAL SHITGIBBON THAT IS trump is still one bad state turnout against Biden away from stealing off with another goddamned Electoral College theft.
This is unforgivable shit here, America. What the hell.
This ain't the end of my ranting. I am still royally pissed and will add more thoughts about all this.
I’ve been watching Trump since I was teenager growing up in the New York media market. It has been obvious to me that he’s driven by insecurities and resentment toward the Manhattan financial elite who have always viewed him as a mannerless fraud from the outer boroughs. He really wants their acceptance and I think he thought he’d finally get it when he won the presidency. It hasn’t worked out that way, and the only thing that has changed is that people see him now as a threat.
It’s hard to imagine anything that would strike Trump to his core more than being ridiculed by his would-be peers, and that’s why it was predictable as the rain that he’d throw a fit when he realized that he was the butt of jokes at the Queen Elizabeth’s Buckingham Palace reception on Tuesday night...
Trump was particularly angry with Justin Trudeau who was captured on an audio feed sympathizing with Macron for being unexpectedly roped into a tense 40 minute press conference that was supposed to be a brief photo opportunity. Doing his best “Mean Girls” impression, Trump called Trudeau “two-faced” and suggested he was just angry about criticism that Canada doesn’t contribute enough money to NATO.
Then he did this:
President Donald Trump on Wednesday abruptly canceled a press conference that was scheduled to cap a contentious trip to London for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s 70th anniversary meeting.
The presser was scheduled to come after a series of bilateral meetings with NATO members, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte.
“When today’s meetings are over, I will be heading back to Washington,” Trump said in a series of tweets.
“We won’t be doing a press conference at the close of NATO because we did so many over the past two days. Safe travels to all!” Trump said.
The president is obviously wounded. His feelings are hurt. And now he will seek ways to exact revenge. This is such a well established pattern with him by now that I have no trouble predicting that he will repeat it.
This behavior has never won him respect in the past and it will not work in the future. At this point, I’m surprised that he continues to make foreign trips to Europe since they always end in humiliation...
Donald Trump has always been a Florida Man at heart, but the president has now put his allegiance in writing , officially submitting a “declaration of domicile” to move his primary residence from New York to the absurd state of Florida. Donald and Melania Trump both filed documents at the Palm Beach County Circuit Court in late September to relocate their primary residence from Trump Tower in Manhattan, where the president has been a resident since 1983, to Mar-a-Lago. Please welcome: Donald Trump, Florida Man.
Trump's legal move to Florida may indeed be about taxes, as Trump himself suggests, but just not about paying taxes, which Trump doesn't do. Instead, the move seems inspired by attempts to disclose Trump's taxes, which the President also very much does not like to do.
New York has been aggressive on the front of trying to shed light on Trump's taxes: The state legislature passed a law facilitating Congress's access to Trump's state-level returns, and the Manhattan district attorney, Cy Vance, has been pressing the case for access to Trump's returns in court.
New York State Attorney General Letitia James has also proven to be a talented and persistent thorn in Trump's side, specifically on the tax disclosure issue...
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald Trump on Thursday questioned why the United States would want to have immigrants from Haiti and African nations, referring to some as “shithole countries,” according to two sources familiar with the comments...
...The lawmakers were describing how certain immigration programs operate, including one to give safe haven in the United States to people from countries suffering from natural disasters or civil strife.
One of the sources who was briefed on the conversation said that Trump said, “Why do we want all these people from Africa here? They’re shithole countries ... We should have more people from Norway.”
The second source familiar with the conversation, said Trump also questioned the need for Haitians in the United States...
Many Democrats and some Republican lawmakers slammed Trump for his remarks.
Republican U.S. Representative Mia Love, a daughter of Haitian immigrants, said the comments were “unkind, divisive, elitist, and fly in the face of our nation’s values” and called on Trump to apologize to the American people and to the countries he denigrated...
And now this: Trump, uttering out loud the hate soundtrack that loops constantly through his lizard brain. This time, he was so obvious as to make it clear even to the meanest comprehension (not implying anything about CNN). There’s no hidden meaning, no subtext in his words. This ain’t eleven dimensional chess or brilliant electoral strategery. January 11, 2018 ain’t the day that Donald Trump became President.
It’s the one on which he reminded us exactly what kind of president he is, what kind of leader the GOP accepts, welcomes, follows.
And thus the test: every single GOP member of Congress, every cabinet official, every White House staffer who fails to condemn this statement, owns it — along with all the sentiments and intentions behind it. They become the bigots, aiders and abettors of the worst impulses in the public sphere. They are to be named and shamed; small children should grimace to see them and each of us will spit on the sidewalks as they pass...
Trump can’t perform the simplest, most ceremonial function without being a massive dick. A while ago, he worked his stupid, racist “Pocahontas” shtick about Elizabeth Warren into an event honoring Native American Code Talkers from WWII...
