Let’s all keep in mind that Putin killed a new democracy in its crib back in 2000 when he took over Russia after Boris Yeltsin.  Using the KGB skills he honed in Communist East Germany in the early 80s, Putin then created a Russia that is now more dangerous and rich than the previously known Soviet Union.  Putin was ashamed that the Soviet Union collapsed after the Berlin wall fell, and he wants it rebuilt, but not as the Soviet Union, but as an imperialist Russian Empire.  He doesn’t want to be president, he wants to be Czar.

He can do that now that Russia is one of the largest oil and gas producers and controls energy supplies into Europe.  He has rebuilt the Russian military, now has a warm water port after taking Crimea from Ukraine, quashed all opposition, changed the constitution so he can stay in power for life and has made elections there a joke.  Billionaire oligarchs support and protect him, and his drive to build a new Russian Empire is relentless.
And who’s happy about it?  TFG himself and his supporters. Last night Putin brazenly invaded Ukraine, even shelling facilities near Kyiv, and millions of Ukrainians, in disbelief that he actually attacked, are fleeing to the west.  On Tuesday, TFG call Putin a genius and said how smart he was to go in as a “peacekeeper”.  Last night, right before Putin launched attacks in to Kyiv and other cities, TFG did it again, praising Putin at a fund raiser at Mar a Lago, saying how smart Putin is, walking in “for two dollars worth of sanctions”, then ironically claiming that if he were in office,

“This would never have happened, ever in a million years, it would have never happened.  And I know him very well. I know him probably almost as well as I know anybody in this room other than Doc Ronny [Jackson].”

So, let’s be clear – TFG is characteristically praising, as he has for years, then tried to push blame onto Biden for Putin doing what he himself supports.  Of course, his sycophants fell in line, praising Putin and TFG, bashing Biden.

If anyone doubts what the US would look like during a second TFG term, just look at Russia today and listen to TFG’s actual words.  He dreams of being a dictator and almost accomplished that in 2020.  With the Republican Party in tatters and now virtually 100% aligned with TFG and Russia, the only thing standing in his way is the rest of us making sure he never gets close to the Oval Office ever again.

TFG and his supporters are using Putin to undermine Biden and the US government to his own advantage, and Putin is so long term focused and patient that I don’t have any doubt that another TFG victory in 2024 figures into his calculus in going after Ukraine today.  Even if he doesn’t succeed this time, he’ll just come back in 2025 as Trump holds the door open for him by lifting all sanctions (like he did in 2017) and undermining NATO while fantasizing doing the same thing to Mexico.

If one ever needed another justification for abolishing the Electoral College, TFG is it.

We naturally assume we would know when evil exists amongst us. We’ve spent an entire lifetime watching crime drama and law procedurals on television. We watch as master criminals and intuitive investigators battle it out in 42 minutes (not counting the commercials).

We pride ourselves in figuring it out before the actors reciting a script. Occasionally even we are fooled and we chalk it up as another great show and another lesson learned. The clown is never the guilty party. The red herring is exactly that. It can’t be the red herring. That would be too easy.

Except someone has spent their entire life as the red herring. He struck again and told you just enough to land himself in hot water. He disqualified himself again. He openly admitted to crimes in his business and crimes against humanity. He couldn’t be guilty. We’re missing something. It can’t be that easy. It doesn’t follow the right story arc.

In many ways, Mitch McConnell represents the evil we readily relate to. He makes you work a little harder. You have to go back into the recesses of your memory to prove it. In this case, McConnell used the reflexive “blame Biden” approach. It was his fault we left Afghanistan. Except it really wasn’t. We all know that, but we have to work a little harder to get there.

Unfortunately, not all of us know it. Some have the memory of a gold fish. They just keep swimming. There is always a subset that never will remember these things. Trump made the deal that Biden executed. He even openly bragged at the time that Biden wasn’t going to be able to get out of the deal. Just keep swimming.

Maybe these things are just too easy to track. Maybe our minds are just too trained to follow the 42 minute story arc. Maybe we are just too used to working at finding evil that we just ignore it when it is standing in front of us. Maybe we are just trained not to trust the words of our leaders.

It is more likely that it is the story of the frog in a boiling pot. The idea is fairly simple. Throw a frog into a boiling pot and it immediately jumps out. Slowly turn up the heat and it will comfortably cook. While some debate the analogy, there is some thought that humans are no better than the common frog. It goes back to the theory of sunken costs. If I bail now then I somehow have to explain to everyone and myself that all of the stuff before was apparently okay.

So, either I am somewhat deplorable or I’m all in. I have a pair of fours in my hand, but I’ve already thrown twenty bucks into the pot, so what the hell? When you are all in you never have to admit the obvious. You can claim it was all fake news anyway. So, when the evil that tempts all mankind announces himself again you just keep whistling by the graveyard.

The NY Times published an explosive report yesterday tying the facts in the Ukrainian scandal together through thousands of pages of testimony and documents and from interviews with dozens of former and current administration officials.  In short, the story tells us that knowledge and assistance of Trump’s effort to extort Ukraine to announce a sham investigation of the Biden’s was much broader and deeper than anyone to this point has been willing to admit.  Also, it shows that alarm of career staffers to Trump’s and Rudy’s plan was high and ongoing.  This report really should be Trump’s Oh Shit moment.

As evidence piles up confirming everything and more that the whistleblower reported it’s becoming more and more important that the media keep Trump’s and his enablers’ feet to the fire, especially Mitch McConnell.  As Greg Sargent said in the Washington Post this morning, it is critical that the media stop equivocating and saying that this is just another political standoff and call what the Republicans are doing what it really is…obstruction and a cover up of corruption and criminal activity by Trump.

And that’s not the only thing they should be reporting; they should be reporting and amplifying EVERY crime Trump commits and every time he violates his oath of office.  And I don’t mean adding to the list of thousand of lies he’s told, but reporting them on the front page in a continuous stream.  Like the speech Bolton gave last month at a Morgan Stanley client conference where he admitted that Trump made national security decisions simply to benefit himself, especially in Turkey where he walked away from the Kurds to protect his hotels in Istanbul from Erdogan’s retaliation.  That’s goddam blackmail, and Trump is vulnerable to that from every country where he has properties and where he’s beholding, like Russia.

Sargent goes on to say that Trump is blocking the very people who were active in, and had direct knowledge of, the very wrongdoing for which he is being impeached and the risk for blowback when hard evidence comes out later (and it will).  So, if McConnell succeeds in holding a sham trial, calling no witnesses, and acquitting Trump, the stink will be on him and every other enabler who aided in the coverup.  The courts and federal agencies will eventually force the evidence out; that is a certainty, and could lead to a second impeachment if Trump wins the 2020 election when hopefully the House and Senate would be in Democratic hands.

I’ll be popping popcorn for that.

We know the conspiracy theory pushed by Trump and his henchman, Rudy Giuliani is nonsensical.  Every intelligence agency says it’s nonsensical.  During House impeachment hearings, former US intelligence officer and Russian specialist implored Republican congressmen to stop repeating Russian propaganda that it was Ukraine, not Russia, who interfered in the 2016 election.  The entire story is bullshit, and we KNOW it’s bullshit.

Ever wonder where the story came from and why Trump repeats it ad nauseam?  Well, the Washington Post dropped the bombshell this week that Putin himself planted the story in a private meeting during the 2017 G20 summit in Hamburg, when he began publicly repeating the story.  The meeting, and the subsequent meeting in Helsinki had NO US OFFICIALS PRESENT and there are no notes of the meetings.  We all knew it was stupid for Trump to meet with Putin alone, now we’re beginning to understand the depth of that stupidity.  The Post used interviews with former WH officials to confirm the story.

Let’s recap.  Trump withheld Congressionally appropriated funds to Ukraine to extort the announcement of an “investigation” into Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election using the fabricated story that Joe Biden and his son hunter were somehow involved in Ukrainian corruption.  When caught, he immediately released the funds and claimed what dozens of people saw didn’t really happen.  Then he defied all subpoenas for documents, ordered current and former officials to not testify, and repeatedly lied to the public about what is really going on.  The narrative he uses on a daily basis likely came directly from Putin, a former KGB officer.

Christ on a Crutch.  This is about as bad as it gets while Trumpists scream there is no evidence, no wrongdoing, and all of this is just made up by Democrats.  Sheesh.

Pompeo is in Italy with discredited Sebastion Gorka doing God-knows-what.  Bill Barr has been jetting around the world and talking to international leaders.  Rudy Giuliani has been engaged with the Ukrainians for months.  Now we know Pompeo lied on national television on Sunday feigning ignorance of the Zelensky call when, in fact, he was ON THE GODDAM call with Trump.

WTF is going on with all this globe trotting and mysterious meetings with world leaders?  Here’s what I think – Trump’s number one order from Putin was to get the international sanctions lifted from Russia that were imposed after it invaded Ukraine and annexed Crimea in 2014.  Trump floated lifting sanctions early on, after he infested the WH in 2017, but was slapped down pretty definitively.  Since then, his pandering to Putin is well documented, including trying to tweet Russia back into the G7 to make it the G8 again.  So far, that hasn’t worked either.

Trump’s goal, since dumping Jeff Sessions and gaining Bill Barr as his attorney general personal defender, has been to discredit the investigations that concluded Russia helped get him elected with their hacking and social media meddling.  He’s so obsessed with this mission that he’s ignored the vast majority of his duties as president, focusing only on watching Fox Noise, tweeting insults at enemies in a continuous stream, and trying to help Russia.  His primary effort has been to get Ukraine to dig dirt on Biden AND promoting the ridiculous theory that it wasn’t Russian meddling, but actually Ukraine doing the hacking of the DNC. It’s stupid, but Trump and Giuliani are pushing it hard, since they’ve got nothing else.

Trump sees the end coming, especially as his numbers for reelection have sunk even lower and the impeachment inquiry started heating up.  Lord only knows what kompromat Putin has on Trump, but you know the list is long, including money laundering and financial fraud.  Trump is clearly a Russian asset, and he’s desperately trying to get Russian sanctions lifted before he’s ousted, one way or the other.  The only way he can do that (in his fevered mind) is to discredit the Mueller report and the conclusions of every major intelligence agency in the developed world.  It’s simply not going to happen, but Trump in his addled state is trying to make that happen, and he doesn’t give a good Goddam who or what he burns down trying to accomplish this goal.

Call me crazy, call me conspiratorial, but nothing else, at least to me, explains this nuclear powered three ring circus Trump is orchestrating.

George Conway teamed up with Neal Katyal yesterday to opine on Trump’s latest outrage of holding up aid to Ukraine as inducement to dig dirt on Joe Biden.  Katyal was solicitor general in the Obama administration.  It’s become obvious now that the whistleblower case that Bill Barr is covering up is a blatant incident of Trump violating the Constitution and US law to induce a foreign power to assist him in defeating a domestic political opponent.  Another weekend must-read, this one is powerful.