In the “I told you so” department, Trump tweeted out his displeasure yesterday that US attorneys in charge of Roger Stone’s felony convictions recommended a 7 to 9 year sentence.  As a reminder, Stone was convicted of lying to Congress about his involvement with the hacking by Russians of the DNC server and coordinating with WikiLeaks, lying to the FBI, and federal witness tampering, not trivial convictions.  Not long after his tweet, Bouncing Bill Barr’s DOJ backpedaled the sentence saying it was reconsidering.  In response and protest, two federal prosecutors resigned.

It’s not like we didn’t know that this was going to happen.  Now the we have Trump Unchained, I’m shocked he hasn’t just given Stone an outright pardon, the Medal of Freedom, and an appointment as head of, say, the Bureau of Land Management.

The corruption of this administration is wide, deep, and getting wider by the moment.

Kirstin Gillibrand, once a strong voice for women’s rights, both military and civilian, quietly ended her run for president yesterday after failing to qualify for the next debate to be held in Houston.  After she took Hillary’s seat in 2009, she became a firebrand in the Senate, and grew into a possible candidate to be our first woman president.  The talk started early and gained momentum as Gillibrand became known for speaking out in hearings about justice and civil rights.

Then she made a gigantic mistake that pissed off a whole bushel basket full of progressives including yours truly…she aided conservative trolls by amplifying a coordinated attack and kneecapped Al Franken, another strong voice in the Senate who was voraciously anti-Trump.  Franken was also well known for speaking out in hearings, dismantling the likes of Jeff Sessions and other Trump apologists.  He was hated by rightwingers like Steve Bannon and Sean Hannity.  AND, Roger Stone, who we’ll talk about in a moment.  This is when talk of Franken running for president in 2020 also started.

When Leeann Tweeden made her accusation against Franken on a rightwing radio talk show, anyone paying attention knew it was bullshit.  Tweeden, a rightwing talker herself, is famous among the testosterone set as a semi-nude model whose USO performances and magazine photo spreads have always been sexually suggestive, to put it mildly.  As Jane Mayer reported in the New Yorker, Tweeden blatantly lied about Franken’s behavior and about the photograph of him supposedly  “groping” her in an obviously posed photograph with others in the room during a USO tour in 2006.  The entire attack was Trumped up (pun intended), but the damage was effective, and in those days of Me Too, sensitivity to these kinds of allegations was extremely high.  Others piled on, and Franken was under withering attack.

Many people didn’t catch on (or ignored) the evidence of obvious coordination of Tweeden’s attack on multiple fronts including Roger Stone tweeting about Franken’s “time in the barrel” BEFORE Tweeden’s accusation.  Yeah, THAT Roger Stone.  Alex Jones also got in on the act, “predicting” a Franken sex scandal.  In the following days, rightwing media everywhere blew up the accusation into a full blown scandal.  Keep in mind that all of this was activity was on the coattails of an actual scandal, Roy Moore’s 40 year record of pursuing and abusing young girls.  He lost his race for Senate, with Alabama voters electing a Democrat for the first time in about a thousand years.

This is when Gillibrand blundered.  Seeing an opportunity to eliminate a possible 2020 primary opponent, she jumped on the conservative bandwagon on national television, calling for Franken’s immediate resignation.  Pass go, pass investigations, pass an ethics hearing, go straight to home.  Under pressure in the growing din, many other senators, men and women, jumped in, demanding Franken leave.  With little support and the rightwing noise machine at full volume, Franken capitulated and resigned.  In the cold light of today, though, almost all those senators, except for Gillibrand, admit their haste calling for Franken’s head was unwise and unfair.  Conservatives, of course, remain giddy that their attack worked like a charm, hurried along by Gillibrand’s complicity.

Unfortunately for Gillibrand, though, millions of Democrats were turned off by her attack.  She violated the peoples’ trust, using a serious accusation against Franken as a political tool.  It IS critical that women be believed when they go public with stories of abuse both recent and long past.  It is just as critical, though, that these accusations be truthful, and especially in the case of public figures like Franken, investigated and fair.  Gillibrand denied Franken fairness for her own gain.  That’s obvious.  In doing so, though, she seriously damaged the Me Too movement and ended up dooming her own prospects of becoming the first woman president.  Now she’s dropped out, failing to get out of single digits or raise enough money.

Good riddance.

Over the weekend the NY Times published a piece entitled “Tracing Guccifer 2.0’s Many Tentacles in the 2016 Election” it is a sordid tale of how Roger Stone and others communicated directly with Russian intelligence officers posing as Romanian hacker Guccifer 2.0, aggressively seeking dirt on Hillary and other Democrats. The others communicating with Guccifer 2.0  included an unnamed Republican candidate for Congress in Florida, and Lee Stranahan, a right wing radio talker and all-round shitbag.  At the time he was talking to the RUSSIANS, Stranahan was working for Steve Bannon at Breitbart and now works full-time for the RUSSIANS at Sputnik International, an online radio station run by Rossiya Segodnya, the RUSSIAN government controlled English language propaganda outlet in the US.  How sweet.

Even though Mueller’s indictment says that idiots like Stone and others might not have known they were talking directly with RUSSIAN intelligence officers, they did know that the documents being released by WikiLeaks and Guccifer 2.0 were stolen.  Them using these resources is actually no better than buying watches off a thief on the street knowing that they had been stolen from the actual owner.

My question is, at which point did obtaining and using stolen goods become legal?  To me, it makes zero difference whether Stone and others knew they were dealing with the Russians; what matters is that the KNEW they were obtaining stolen documents.  Whether it was a Romanian hacker, Julian Assange, or the actual Russians, they were perfectly aware that they were receiving stolen goods.  Isn’t that a crime in itself?  Why are they not in jail rather than spewing their bile from Fox Noise, Breitbart, and other right wing hate outlets?

Each day of this slow motion train wreck I become more and more alarmed how ONE PERSON can destroy international trade, wreck centuries-long diplomatic ties, and virtually disassemble an entire government (ours) without so much as a whimper from those entrusted with protecting us.  The speed of the destruction of the balance of power so carefully designed by the Founders is at once horrifying and breathtaking.  At this point, I only understand one thing – once we rid ourselves of this cancer (either by impeachment, indictment for crimes, forced resignation, or just voting his ass out of office), we need to seriously rethink our system of governance and the tools of democracy that are supposed to protect our democracy.  I know, I know, the invertebrates in Congress will never fix anything, but they certainly need to to be called to task by the American voter.  I’m personally writing to all of my representatives today to DEMAND that they stand up on their hind legs and do their goddam jobs.  If millions of Americans around the country would do that, it would cause a seismic shift in the behavior of the idiots sitting on Capitol Hill.

There is a place for anger, and THIS is it.

Note:  Sexual misconduct and sexual harassment are serious issues that are systemic and have been allowed to persist in our modern society.  It should not be allowed to exist in any part of our culture, and the only way to eliminate it, in my opinion, is to have equal representation between men and women in every government entity from villages to Washington, as well as in every board room in America.  Short of that accomplishment, this problem will continue to persist.  Now, having said all that, I have an opinion about this issue.

Politicians are generally Stupid.  Democrats tend to be Really Stupid, and Democratic party leaders are Perpetually Super Stupid.  Given almost any tough situation, party leaders take the easy Stupid route versus the tough and true route. Let’s take the case in 2009 when Democrats allowed a twenty-something rightwing lying asshole to flog his clumsily and dishonestly edited video tape and take down a major community service organization, ACORN.  The media enabled him, and Democrats’ defense of the organization was virtually non-existent until it was way too late.  James O’Keefe, the little lying shit who used Breitbart money for his first successful hit job, paid no price, and indeed just this week was honored as a “hero”, receiving the Impact Award from United for Purpose, a rightwing propaganda generator.  He received the award from none other than Ginni Thomas, wife of Clarence Thomas.  To add insult to injury, the award came a week after the Washington Post blew the lid off of his latest “sting” operation.  By the Democrats not crucifying this little shit when he committed his first crime, he’s still around doing damage today and is even being “honored” and taking home a hefty six figure income to produce his lies.

With that one textbook example of Democratic leaders being Super Stupid, let’s talk about Kirsten Gillibrand and the rest of her posse this week when they Super Stupidly used an obvious rightwing hit job to take down one of our best and dedicated members of the US Senate.  If Ray Charles were alive today, even HE would have seen that Leeann Tweeden’s coordinated attack on Al Franken was trumped up (no pun intended), aided by Roger Stone.  Further, it’s now coming to light that she was also aided in the attack by her colleague, John Phillips.  More about this jerk later.

One of the most infuriating features of this particular attack is that prominent women in the media and politics didn’t look at the objective facts, enabling the attack to work like a charm.  I pointed out almost three weeks ago that Tweeden is well known for horsing around with men, playing grabass with them, forcibly kissing them in public, and posing semi-nude in magazines.  She also had a very graphic discussion about having sex on Howard Stern’s radio program.  She’s a rightwing anchor on KABC radio in Los Angeles, right along with John Phillips, another rightwing talker who has his own show.  Trump pal and future prison convict, Roger Stone, announced the attack hours before it happened on Twitter, through a surrogate, since he’s been banned.  It doesn’t take Robert Mueller to connect these dots.  And no, pointing out glaring facts is not “slut shaming”, so don’t even go there.

After the attack, the normal pile-on happened, coordinated for maximum effect, mostly anecdotal and/or anonymous with the normal “his hand went too low when I had a picture taken with him” kind of accusations.  There was not ONE accusation that demonstrated some terrible pattern of misbehavior.  Those facts were ignored.  At the very beginning of this mess, Franken called for a Senate investigation of the claim.  He was never given the opportunity for these charges to be investigated in public.

On the Republican side, the parade of well documented perverts continues.  Trump has never been investigated for the dozens of claims of serious misconduct from groping to rape.  He now endorses Roy Moore, whose stalking of little girls has been well documented; now there is your friend an mine, Blake Farenthold who used $84,000 of taxpayer money to buy the silence of his accuser, and then comes creepy Trent Franks who offered a staffer $5 million to carry is baby.

Gillibrand, like other Super Stupid Democrats, decided that she should railroad Franken out of the Senate to take the “moral high ground” against Republicans.  The first stupid decision was thinking that taking the “moral high ground” would force Republicans to do anything.  WRONG.  They couldn’t care less about moral high ground, because their base doesn’t.  When in the hell are Dems going to figure that out?  Answer: NEVER.  Second, Gillibrand thought taking the zero tolerance route will change people’s minds and get them to vote for Democrats.  WRONG.  See the above answer.  Finally, I’m sure she made the calculation that Franken didn’t matter since Mark Dayton, Democratic governor of Minnesota, would appoint a Democrat to the seat, so they wouldn’t lose any votes.  WRONG.  Now, they’ll have to defend that seat in 2018 instead of 2020.  STUPID.

Making this catastrophe even worse is that, in treating Franken’s seat as a party commodity, we’ve now lost the strongest and most effective progressive voice in the national dialogue.  Franken is brilliant, and had made the difficult transition from comedian and entertainer to statesman.  His takedown of Trump appointees is some of the best CSpan you’ll ever see (well, at least WAS). Gillibrand, and the other women in the Senate, with the aiding and abetting of some of the worst reporting in the history of the Fourth Estate, has abruptly snuffed out one of our strongest voices without due process nor even a pretense of being truthful.

Yeah, I’m pissed.  I’m really pissed, and for several reasons.  Gillibrand and company tiptoed around Tweeden, who clearly set the whole thing up to damage Franken, which simultaneously delegitimizes the stories of millions of women who have been ACTUALLY sexually assaulted. The damage done is simply breathtaking.  Secondly, she attempted to influence the Moore vote in Alabama by railroading Franken out of the Senate before even ONE ethics committee hearing.  No thinking person believes such nonsense.  They destroyed the reputation and career of a good man for political expediency.  All she did was railroad Franken and in the process railroaded all of us.  SCREW HER and the horse she road in on.

Finally?  I’m so pissed that I’ll just poke some of our Hillary Hardliner friends in the eye on my way to the bottom of this post.  I GUARANTEE that if Hillary was the current occupant of the White House and Ol’ Bill was First Husband (or whatever they would call him).  Gillibrand and the rest of the crowd wouldn’t have made a peep about Franken, fearing retribution for Bill’s documented malfeasance that many prominent women defended, and continue to defend to this day.  Yeah, that’s what I think.

So there.