In 1974, Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace to avoid being impeached and removed from office for obstruction of justice.  New shiny new president, Gerald Ford, pardoned him of any possible federal charges immediately after taking the oath of office citing that it was in the best interest of the country and “a tragedy in which we all have played a part. It could go on and on and on, or someone must write the end to it. I have concluded that only I can do that, and if I can, I must.”  Nixon walked and lived out his life out in isolation in San Clemente.

In 1998, Clinton was impeached by Republicans in the House for obstruction of justice (for lying about sex), but the Senate failed to convict.  Clinton’s popularity actually rose during the proceedings and the impeachment hearings ended up hurting the GOP in the subsequent mid-term election.

From 2002 through 2008 George W. Bush and Dick Cheney led one of the most lawless periods for the executive branch in US history, prosecuting the “War on Terror” by terrorizing millions of innocents, killing hundreds of thousands of people, detaining thousands without charges, kidnapping and torturing, and killing thousands more remotely by drone.  That’s not to mention the war profiteering and mass surveillance of millions of Americans.  President Barack Obama refused to allow any investigations of the Bush Administration, sweeping 7 years of crimes against humanity under the rug saying, “We need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.”  Bush, Cheney, and the rest of the sorry lot walked, most into lucrative speaking and lobbying gigs.

So.  Bad conduct, lawlessness, violation of human rights laws, obstruction of justice, and profiteering don’t matter anymore, especially after internal DOJ memos of 1973 and 2000 opined that the President of the United States cannot be indicted for a federal crime while in office.  These memos are just another nail in the coffin of our democracy, giving a criminal like Trump free reign to plunder and pillage the US government, allies, other foreign governments, US industry, farmers, religious devotees, workers (especially union), children, migrants, and the poor with impunity.  Surely, there’s a special place in hell for the sumbitches who came up with that stupid policy that led to the catastrophe playing out on our televisions on a daily basis.

The Founders feared corruption in the executive branch as a critical threat to our democracy.  That’s why they inserted the Emoluments Clause, (Article I, Section 9, Paragraph 8), that forbids federal officials from receiving money, gifts, and titles from foreign governments.  They also inserted Article II, Section 4, which provided for the impeachment and removal of a corrupt president or vice president.  The problem?  Our elected gerrymandered representatives don’t give a shit about us.  Our Senators are drunk with power (or just trying to hang on), and corruption is consuming the very core of our democracy.  The Supreme Court has become a cancer on the rule of law, infested with deplorables who believe that money is speech, unlimited money does not corrupt, and that individual liberty is subject to corporate power and permissions they grant.  And all this set the stage for…

Trump.  Trump is the president the Founders dreaded.  Trump is the president we all feared.  Trump has destroyed our norms of conduct and common decency, ignored our laws, and exuberantly claimed the WH, the US government, our society, and the global economy for himself.  He’s too stupid to actually govern, but smart enough to line his own pockets.  And he’s mean; cruelty and revenge are hallmarks of his infestation of the Oval Office.  Yet, we do nothing. NOTHING.  Our decades long practice of looking the other way in the face of felonious conduct has now come home to roost.  Past presidents and congresses have demurred in the face of abject corruption, and this is what we get.  Who do I blame?  I blame everyone…Nixon, Ford, Clinton, Bush, Cheney, Obama, Gingrich, McConnell, and yes, absolutely Trump.

All these sumbitches let us down, and now we, as individual Americans, are threatened…threatened with the undoing of over 230 years of democracy and the greatest experiment in the history of free people.  Politicians know they can urinate all over our laws and society and there is no price to pay.  Trump understands this…McConnell understands this…they’re raking in millions and millions of dirty dollars as our justice system does nothing.  Our representative form of government atrophies while our leaders do nothing.

Such is the price of complacency and corruption.  The Founders saw Trump coming.  The problem is that those who followed took the easy route and let him come.  Now we’re paying the price.

So, the RNC is now so corrupted by Trump’s control that it is now using donor dollars to pay lawyers to obstruct justice by interfering with Congressional investigations.  That’s right, Teabaggers – your money is being used to violate your precious Constitution into order to protect your spray painted tribal chief.  Along with that, WH lawyers paid with your taxes are also actively helping Trump violate his duty to protect and defend the Constitution in order to hide his crimes from the Congress.

During Hope Hicks non-testimony testimony this week in a closed door session with the House Judiciary Committee, US government paid lawyers objected to every question from the committee, even including her office location in the West Wing.  Trump’s lawyer, Pat Cipollone, even told Congress that Hicks has “absolute immunity” from testifying before Congress, a legal condition that simply doesn’t exist and is being laughed at by legal and ethics experts.  Clearly, Trump believes the courts are so packed with corrupt radicals that they’ll rule in his favor.  I don’t believe that when it goes there, SCOTUS (even with its corrupt justices like Alito, Thomas, Kavanaugh, Gorsuch) won’t go there.  John Roberts may be a conservative and somewhat corrupted, he is still  true to the Constitution and will rule correctly.

I predict this one won’t end well for Ms. Hicks, and in the end, she’ll pay dearly for her silence and her loyalty to Trump.

We all remember it – the time that the most respected member of the Bush II administration, sat before the UN’s Security Council blatantly lying about the fake evidence of Iraqi WMDs that didn’t exist.  Colin Powell permanently stained his impeccable reputation by carrying Dick Cheney’s water to invade a sovereign nation just because.  As is well documented now, too little and too late, Cheney and company lied their asses off for months to whip up a case against Saddam Hussein, to justify a full-fledged invasion which continues to destabilize the Middle East to this day.

The War Based on Lies killed over 4,000 American lives, maimed over 30,000, and created an entire generation of veterans with PTSD, and other mental problems.  This is not to mention the hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis murdered on their own soil.  Trillions of US tax dollars were spent doing that, and we’re still paying today for a terrible result.  These thousands of people and trillions of dollars paid for Bush II’s re-election in 2004.

Trump and his enablers are doing exactly the same thing again, except this time they don’t have a Colin Powell to lie us into war.  There’s no one in this criminal administration who hasn’t already sacrificed their own reputations and careers and the altar of Trump Loyalty.  Mike Pompeo made the rounds of Sunday talk shows yesterday beating the war drums and miserably failed to make a case that passed the straight faced test.  He presented not one shred of evidence beyond the grainy video of an unidentified boat alongside an unidentified ship doing an unidentified activity.  It looked just like the manure that Powell shoveled in 2003 to the UN. The others banging the war drums all wrecked what little reputation they had last time around and have no credibility this time around.  John Bolton comes to mind as the poster child for lying us into war.

I’m no genius, but I knew from the very first moment that Bush and company were lying in the run up to the invasion of Iraq.  I’m seeing exactly the same thing right now.  Trump is lying.  Pompeo is lying.  They’re all lying to get us into a war because that is Trump’s only chance for re-election.  Let’s not give him that opportunity.

We talked last week how hideous Trump looked at the state dinner with Queen Elizabeth wearing his clearly borrowed white tie and tails, and now we have at least part of the story.  Ismet Dil, whose company has provided formal wear to presidents for over a century, says that he doesn’t recognize the suit that His Orangeness was wearing and has no idea where it came from.  Dil said, “This is my profession. It’s not right.” Saville Row tailors analyzed the suit for it’s legion of flaws:

I personally just can’t stop laughing at this clown, especially when he dresses like a clown.

UPDATED:

We all saw it last week, Trump suddenly tweeting that he’s going to slap tariffs on all Mexican imports if Mexico doesn’t immediately stop illegal immigration into the US.  He tanked stocks from manufacturers to grocery distributors, probably after he leaked the announcement to his cronies so they could short those stocks to make a tidy sum.  Remember Carl Icahn dumping steel stocks just before Trump announced the steel tariffs?

Anyway, negotiators between the US and Mexico were supposedly in feverish negotiations to come to a border security deal, and yesterday, with great fanfare, Trump announced on the Twitter machine that he has cut a last minute deal with Mexico.

Then he announced that Mexico has committed to purchase large quantities of American produce:

All that is great, except for one thing.  The deal he breathlessly announced yesterday was negotiated with Mexico…wait for it…last March.  Some provisions in the agreement date back to December.  This negotiation has been completed for months.

So let’s recap – Trump creates a gigantic economic crisis by demanding Mexico do what it has already agreed to do.  He costs the US economy billions of dollars (probably creating a profit opportunity for his buds).  He ratchets up the rhetoric during the D-Day commemoration, even while sitting in the US cemetery in Normandy. He berates Mexico, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, and even Bette Midler (I still haven’t figured that one out).  Then, with great fanfare, he announces that he’s saved the day by forcing Mexico to agree to a deal that had already been done.

Folks, this is gaslighting in its purest form.  Lie and create a problem that doesn’t exist.  Then lie again, claiming to have fixed a problem that really wasn’t a problem in the first place.  Then take credit for fixing the problem that didn’t exist.

Jesus.

UPDATE:

Trump also lied about a new farm deal.  This morning, he tweeted, “MEXICO HAS AGREED TO IMMEDIATELY BEGIN BUYING LARGE QUANTITIES OF AGRICULTURAL PRODUCT FROM OUR GREAT PATRIOT FARMERS!”

Three Mexican officials say, nope, no farm deal was negotiated; in fact, Mexico has no agricultural conglomerate to even do that.  Another day, another lie.

Anyone who bases their judgment on facts knew they were lying from the start.  In fact their entire strategy is based on massive lying.  What am I talking about? Voting.  Republicans figured out a long time ago that their demographic (old, white, angry) is shrinking.  Historically, this is a relatively recent phenomenon, started when the GOP went nuts after Goldwater lost in ’64.  Ultra conservative voices began rising during that time, really more Libertarian and Bircher, and when Reagan beat Carter, the calcification of the party really set in.  From those days to today, the GOP has pushed the entire country farther and farther to the right, pushing everyone not white, not old, not nuts out of the tent.  Trump’s takeover of the party has completed the calcification, adding white supremacy as just another adjective to describe the base.

The GOP base is so demographically narrow that it simply cannot fairly win anymore.  As the country becomes more diverse, our population is moving away from the radicalism and obvious insanity that is now the party.  So, how can they win on a national scale?  It’s two pronged: by keeping the base continuously whipped up and raging about dark-skinned people, and, of course, by cheating.  A lot.

That cheating comes in the form of radical gerrymandering and voter suppression.  Gerrymandering is a fact of life and several cases have been consolidated at the SCOTUS, but, unless Roberts has a sudden fit of rationality, I don’t have much hope.  Voter suppression, though, is just as insidious; keeping Americans from being represented in the Congress, the very basis of our republic.  Voter ID laws have been pushed now for twenty years, based on the lie that there is massive voter fraud occurring during our elections (by dark skinned people) that simply doesn’t exist.  Trump used that same blatant lie to explain away him losing the popular vote in 2016 by 3 million votes.

One of the Republicans pushing this lie is Chris Kobach, a white nationalist (who won’t admit it) and former Kansas Secretary of State.  Kobach was behind faked voter fraud studies in Kansas, and pushed anti-Muslim policies as well as strict voter ID laws.  After he lost the election for governor in 2017, he became an advisor to Trump, bringing his radical ideology to the WH.  And it’s not good.  In 2017 he lead Trump’s bogus voter integrity committee that quietly folded in 2018 after it couldn’t find one shred of evidence of massive voter fraud and being stopped by the states in amassing private data about voters.

One of the tactics Kobach pushed to Trump was adding a citizenship question to the US Census questionnaire.  Sounds benign, right?  Hardly.  The question is specifically designed to scare people who may have members of the family who are not citizens, have a green card, or are undocumented.  Why?  To undercount these populations and disproportionally increase representation to the GOP base (old and white).  Seats in state houses and in the US House are at stake.  Trump and crew have been lying about the reason for adding this question from the very first moment.  Their problem though, is that they’ve now been caught lying to Congress about it.

It turns out that Kobach pushed the citizenship question to the Trump campaign in 2016, long before Wilbur Ross claimed it was introduced in early 2017.  Yesterday, Elijah Cummings, chair of the House Oversight and Reform committee, disclosed details of a closed door interview with Kobach last Monday where he revealed this new detail.  Now we know why Trump has desperately been trying to expand executive privilege over even those who don’t actually work for him, but who just talked to him.  That effort failed and the administration is caught now in yet another lie.

So, Kobach lied until last Monday.  Wilbur Ross lied and stonewalled the House, likely earning a contempt of Congress vote just like Bill Barr did for refusing to testify.  This episode is yet another page in the encyclopedia of lies told by this administration.  Hopefully we can use this lie to shut down another of the GOP’s efforts to win by cheating.