So it starts.  Two nights ago the right-wingers were all aflutter, excitedly posting that everyone should be sure to watch Hannity because he was going to drop the bomb on Biden and his son, Hunter, even predicting that Biden’s campaign was “cooked” and over.  What was the “bomb”?  The same old warmed over bullshit that Hannity always peddles.  Take whatever Trump is doing, turn it upside down, change the names and label it a Democratic scandal.  Never mind that the only sane person at Fox Noise, Shephard Smith, inoculated against their viewers earlier in the day telling his viewers that “this is not about Biden, it’s about the phone call.” How correct he was.

When news broke last week that there was a whistleblower complaint against Trump about this conduct in a call with Ukrainian president Zelensky, Trump hitman Rudy Giuliani went into full meltdown, shouting about some fictional corruption of Joe Biden.  That narrative the fell apart when news broke that Trump had ordered the freeze of some $400 million in military aid to Ukraine to put maximum pressure on Zelensky to force him to investigate the Bidens.  So, to be clear, Trump used the full power of the US government to damage his US political opponent.  When caught, his cronies have desperately tried to flip the story around that Trump wasn’t really trying to get Ukraine to open a fake investigation on Biden, but really trying to get Ukraine to clean up its own corruption (which coincidently happened to suddenly include Biden and his son Hunter).  It’s nonsense, but as we’ve discussed, totally predictable.

Then Nancy Pelosi happened.  Yesterday afternoon, in a serious speech to the nation, Pelosi announced the beginning of a formal impeachment inquiry against Trump.  The shift in politics was seismic.  To pile on Trump, word then got out that he had called Pelosi yesterday morning wanting to “work something out” about the whistleblower report that she’s demanding.  It’s reported that she told him that his people should follow the law.  That call to Pelosi was the tell that Trump has figured out that he’s screwed the pooch.  He’s in real trouble and that fact has finally penetrated the narcissistic fog within which he hides.  You can tell he knows just based on his speech which he barely got through and the remarks he made to the press prior to the speech.  He’s told so many lies that he can’t keep them straight, and is picking up the pace of lying trying to worm out of this one.  To wit:

1. Earlier this week, Trump admitted that he talked to Zelensky about Biden, but his first excuse was that it was to get Ukraine to crack down on corruption (supposedly Biden’s), and said that was why he was withholding the $400 million in military aid.  Yesterday he changed his story, saying he withheld it funding because European countries weren’t paying their fair share.
2. Trump is lying about European countries not paying.  The EU has already provided $16.5 billion in economic support of Ukraine after Russia’s attempt to annex the country.  Additionally, NATO has an active program in place to support Ukraine’s defense efforts.
3. He then said he’s leading in the polls.  That’s a blatant lie since he actually trailed Biden in recent polls by about 15 points nationally and trails Biden in the swing states.  He’s even trailing Warren nationally, even though he’s leading her in some swing states.
4. Then he said that since he’s leading in the polls, the only way “they” can get him is impeachment, which has “never happened before”.  See Bill Clinton, Richard Nixon, and Andrew Johnson.
5. Lastly, Trump said that he put no pressure on Zelensky about Biden, but that Ukraine should clean up its corruption that Biden had supposedly engaged in.  He continues to lie about this even though the prosecutor in Ukraine that replace ousted Viktor Shokin (who actually was corrupt) publicly stated that there was no evidence of wrongdoing by either Joe Biden or his son Hunter.

For this tsunami of lies, the Washington Post awarded Trump 4 Pinocchios this morning.  Predictably, the Noise Machine is desperately trying to distract from yesterday’s disaster by whipping up “the Democrats did this,” “Joe Biden did that,” “Trump’s been investigated since he was born,” blah, blah, blah, but you can tell that the entire machine is on its heels, at least at this moment.

Will the system work and end this long national nightmare?  I don’t know yet, but you can feel the seismic shift in  our politics.  I continue to believe that as the cost of Trump goes ever higher, the Repubs will jettison him and throw him to the wolves.  We’re far from that yet, but you can see his iron grip starting to weaken.  Ousting him can’t happen too soon.

We were all outraged when Trump spoke to the Hitler Youth Turning Point USA Youth Conference earlier this week when he falsely asserted that Article II of the Constitution allowed him to “do anything I want,” and spouted a three course menu of other lies.  It was one of those events staged to whip up the crowd and provide sound bites for Fox Noise to broadcast in a continuous stream, but it ended up causing rising derision and laughter.

What’s causing the laughter?  There was one little detail in the visuals projected onstage that no one noticed until it was too late – it was the presidential seal that Trump loves to liberally splash around (and attach to the cheesy crap that he sells on the side).  But the seal projected on the screen behind him onstage was not the actual presidential seal. Have a look:

Look closer:

The seal had been doctored with the eagle from the Russian seal, the arrows replaced by golf clubs, and the olive branch replaced with a wad of cash.  The “e pluribus unum” ribbon has been replaced by “45 es un titere,” which is Spanish for 45 is a puppet.”  For reference, here’s the Washington Post’s side by side comparison with the Russian seal:

The seal is being sold on T shirts by a merchant that calls itself “One Term Donnie“, which is pretty funny by itself.  Combine that with some absolute genius who engineered getting it projected right behind His Orangeness, this imagery is not only hilarious, it’s perfect.  This seal precisely illustrate’s Trump’s total devotion to his Russian handlers, his love of golf and his drive for ill-gotten cash.

Turning Point USA is frantically trying to find the person who did this.  When they find him/her, rather than being punished, they should be awarded the Nobel price for brilliance and bravery.  Oh, and I bet the person who dropped the ball on this at the WH is already fired.

LOL.

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.

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.

Remember when Trump kept repeating the lie that Barack Obama was going to start a war with Iran to get re-elected in 2012?  Here it is:

Later, when he decided to run for the office, Trump released continuous Twitter salvos of all kinds of lies and taunts, but the Iran theme was a common one.

One thing we’ve learned from Trump (and other Republicans, BTW) is that when he accuses someone of doing something vile, he’s doing that very thing.  Now, with his polls in the tank and still going down, Trump is so desperate that he’ll try anything to get re-elected and stay out of jail for a while longer.  As we’ve discussed before, Trump is even trying to get impeached so he can cast himself as a “victim” of the big, bad, Democrats.  Since that’s not working, his next stunt is doing exactly what he accused Obama of doing – starting a war with Iran.  What’s really scary is that he’s got Iran hater, John Bolton, continually whispering in his ear achieve his ultimate dream of bombing the crap out of Iran.

Trump’s already moved a carrier battle group and Air Force bombers to the Middle East to “counter Iran’s threat”, and now, Bolton is pushing for deploying 120,000 US troops to the Middle East.  The drumbeats of war for politics are now being heard, even as Pompeo and Bolton whip up fears of Iran, just in time for the 2020 election.  The only real threat we have is allowing Trump another 4 years in the WH.

As we’ve already discussed, Sarah Sanders admitted to Robert Mueller that she lied about FBI agents opposing James Comey.  When the press started reporting that, she immediately went on the attack, lying about lying about lying.  She did it again this morning on national television, and frankly I’m sick of her polluting the WH press room.  Nothing she says is remotely true, and even if it was, she can’t be trusted that the bile spewing from her mouth is true or not.

Time for her to go.  #lyingSarah #Sarahsgottogo