The inevitable impeachment is great news — and no, Bernie isn’t Jeremy

No, Bernie Sanders does not equal Jeremy Corbyn. For starters, while Corbyn is much more unpopular in the United Kingdom than is Boris Johnson, Bernie Sanders is much more popular in the United States than is “President” Pussygrabber.

I’ve long supported the impeachment of “President” Pussygrabber. He’s not our president; not only was he not elected by the most voters, but he is a mob boss. He simply has continued his life-long criminality into the White House, and to his long list of crimes we can add treason. Plenty of treason.*

That said, I’ve also always known that the Repugnican traitors (redundant) in the U.S. Senate never would remove a member of their own wingnutty party, pretty much no matter what he’d done.

Still, impeachment is necessary if we give a flying fuck about such trifles as the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law.

I’ve only sporadically listened to the live coverage of the House impeachment hearings via NPR. I never felt that I needed to attend to every detail, as Pussygrabber is, of course, as guilty as sin — the transcript of his infamous, treasonous, quid-pro-quo July phone call with the Ukrainian president that the White House itself publicly released amply shows that, and that’s only one of his many crimes — and as the Repugnican-controlled Senate won’t remove him, no matter what.

Listening to Pussygrabber’s Repugnican buttboys (perhaps most prominently Sens. Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell and Reps. Devin Nunes, Jim Jordan and Matt Gaetz) lie for him like pathological liars on crack, however, has been interesting. It’s been a veritable gaslighting marathon: What you have seen with your own eyes and what you have heard with your own ears? You’re wrong! Let us tell you what you have seen and heard!

The Repugnicans will get their short-term “victory” — Pussygrabber won’t be removed from the Oval Office before January 2021, when, very hopefully, the American voters will have done the job — but one does have to wonder what the Repugnican Party’s pathological lying in pursuit of defending a treasonous, uber-corrupt “president” will do for it in the long term.

And of course when Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party did not win the UK election this past week, U.S. “pundits” were quick to say that of course this means that no progressive (that is, Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren) possibly could win the U.S. presidency in November 2020.

Except that this isn’t the UK.

There are philosophical and political parallels between the Labour Party and the Democratic Party and the Conservative Party and the Repugnican Party, of course, but we’re talking about two separate nations with different histories that are separated by a wide fucking ocean.

The United States is not in the midst of anything like a “Brexit,” and while Jeremy Corbyn is pretty fucking unpopular — Boris Johnson has a negative favorability rating in most polls, but Corbyn’s negative favorability rating in most polls is much higher** — comparing him to Bernie (or to Warren) is incredibly sloppy at best.

There has been socialism in Europe, but never has there been socialism in the United States (with the exception, perhaps, of some Native American societies). The historical contexts of the two nations are quite different; Americans cannot point to socialism ever actually having failed in the United States because we’ve never actually even had socialism.

And Bernie Sanders — and all of the top-tier candidates for the 2020 Democratic Party presidential nomination — are significantly more popular than is Pussygrabber. Here is a graph from a fivethirtyeight.com piece from just yesterday:

“Trump remains really unpopular — far more than any of the leading Democratic presidential candidates,” notes fivethirtyeight.com, adding:

But Democrats’ net favorability ratings have taken a hit. As you can see in the chart above, even though Biden, Sanders, Warren and Buttigieg are nowhere near as unpopular as Trump, their net favorability ratings have trended downward recently.

This isn’t totally surprising, though, as my colleague Geoffrey Skelley noted a few weeks ago: Many presidential candidates’ net favorability ratings have been negative or close to zero since at least 2008, a sign, perhaps, of the polarized times we live in.

Of course, there is still time for public perception to change (in either direction) between now and November. But if the polls are any indication, opinions of the Democratic candidates seem much more likely to shift than opinions of Trump. That might be because people’s opinions of the Democratic candidates aren’t nearly as entrenched. …

Again, Corbyn is much more unpopular than is Johnson. As elections still so often amount to popularity contests rather than contests of ideas, that is no tiny detail. (Thankfully, Corbyn is stepping down as the leader of the Labour Party.***)

In the U.S., it is the opposite: the top four Democratic presidential candidates all have significantly higher favorability ratings than does Pussygrabber.

And, again, not only has the post-colonial U.S. never been socialist, but a President Sanders (I love the sound of that!) of course very probably could not usher in a socialist utopia.

If he had both houses of Congress in his party’s control, President Sanders could make some significant improvements in the average American’s life — our Americans’ biggest enemies, after all, are not each other or other nations, but are the treasonous corporations that attack us from within — but within the next few decades we are likely to see, at best and at most, a hybrid of capitalism and socialism, in which basic human needs (medical care, food, water, shelter, education, etc.) are covered by a socialist system while capitalism continues its dominance over pretty much everything else.

But, of course, those who protect the status quo — because they personally benefit from the pro-corporate, anti-individual socioeconomic status quo or because they’re just sheeple who think the way that Faux “News” tells them to think (even if that makes them just like chickens that support Colonel Sanders [no relation to Bernie!]) — want us progressives to give up before the game has even begun.

And one of their “arguments” is that Jeremy Corbyn = Bernie Sanders. Except that that’s complete and utter bullshit.

Where Corbyn failed in the UK, we progressives can prevail here in the United States. We just can’t lie down and allow our enemies to keep walking all over us in perpetuity, as they want us to do.

—

*My definition of “treason” is broad, such as dictionary.com’s No. 2 and No. 3 definitions: “a violation of allegiance to one’s sovereign or to one’s state” and “the betrayal of a trust or confidence; breach of faith; treachery.”

**This fact does remind me of the November 2016 U.S. presidential election, in which both Billary Clinton and Pussygrabber were underwater in their favorability ratings. Our “choice” of president was bad (Billary) or even worse (Pussygrabber).

***I haven’t studied Corbyn nearly enough to have a super-informed opinion of him, but clearly, it’s indisputable that he is poison at the ballot box.

And at least we can’t call the ethnically Jewish Bernie Sanders anti-Semitic, as Corbyn has been called, whether he is or not. (Again, I haven’t studied Corbyn much, but the charge of anti-Semitism, whether it is accurate or not, often is bandied about in order to damage one’s political opponent.)

Will Bernie break our hearts?

In the video grab above, Bernie Sanders leaves a Las Vegas hospital yesterday after what first was reported on Tuesday as “chest discomfort” during a campaign event and then later was confirmed to have been a heart attack. This bad news came after it was reported that Bernie had raised more money than did any other Democratic presidential candidate in the third quarter. Bernie’s campaign says that he is doing well and that he intends to participate in the next primary debate, which will be on October 15.

News of the apparent heart attack that Bernie Sanders had on Tuesday while campaigning his heart out in Nevada predictably raised the question of his age (he is 78 years old now, and if elected, would enter the Oval Office at age 79, making him the oldest president we’ve had).

Two stents were placed in one of Bernie’s coronary arteries, he was released from the hospital yesterday, and his campaign says that he intends to participate in the October 15 debate in Ohio.

Will this sink Bernie?

I don’t think so. It gives those who weren’t supporting him anyway a(nother) “reason” to justify their self-defeating snubbing of the most consistently progressive presidential candidate that we have, but those of us who steadfastly have stood by Bernie will continue to do so.

As long as Bernie does well in his public appearances and has no more significant medical incidents, I expect this to blow over. It’s early October, after all, and the first voting isn’t until February 3, when the Iowa caucuses take place — and this is the United States of Amnesia.

And I think it’s fair to ask the question if it’s OK to stigmatize someone for having had a medical event after which one can, with medical attention, live normally and capably for many years. I know that if I had a heart attack but most likely still had several decent years of life left, I wouldn’t want to be written off.

Good news for Bernie from this past week is that in the third fundraising quarter of this year, he raised more money than did any other Democratic presidential contender — $25.3 million.

Close behind him was Elizabeth Warren, with $24.6 million, and poor Uncle Joe Biden raised only $15.2 million — he was eclipsed even by Boy Scout Pete Buttigieg, who raised $19.1 million. (Unlike Bernie and Warren, the center-right Buttigieg [like Biden] takes contributions from Big Money, though, so don’t take that fundraising figure as grassroots support for him that doesn’t actually exist.)

If fundraising is a measure of excitement for your campaign — and I think that it is for those few who, like Bernie, don’t take money from corporations and lobbyists and other power players — then Biden should be shitting his Depends. (Ah, c’mon; I had to go there…)

On that note, Biden continues to drop in the polls. Right now his nationwide polling average is around 27 percent, and Warren is nipping at his heels, with an average of almost 24 percent.

Bernie is at third place, with 16 percent, and after Bernie, at a rather distant fourth place, is Buttigieg, with around 6 percent. (Poor charisma-free Kamala Harris, who yet has to make a compelling case as to why she should be president, is at fifth place, with around only 5 percent.)

As I’ve noted about a million times before, I expect Biden to tank, as he did when he ran for the Democratic Party presidential nomination in 1988 and in 2008, and, as long as Bernie’s health holds up, I expect 2020 to be a race between Bernie and Warren.

It can’t be a direct comparison to the 2016 Bernie-vs.-Billary race, because while Billary only “found” progressivism rather late in the game during the 2016 cycle, this time around, from the get-go, Warren deftly has mimicked Bernie’s progressive angle while at the same time not pissing off the Democratic Party establishment hacks.

Warren, it seems to me, has a very good chance of winning this thing (the 2020 Democratic Party presidential nomination, I mean).

Unfortunately, Warren also has a good chance of losing in November 2020 — I still believe that Warren’s No. 1 weakness is that she so easily can be painted by the Repugnicans as just another clueless, weak egghead from Massachusetts, as was Michael Dukakis in 1988 and John Kerry in 2004.

Perhaps only the increasingly obvious and absolutely undeniable mega-corruption of the unelected Pussygrabber regime (including a copious amount of treason) can overcome this “swiftboating” tactic that has worked pretty well for the Repugnicans in the past.

P.S. With his hectic campaign schedule and his famously impassioned speeches, one might wonder why it took this long for Bernie to have a heart attack. Just sayin’…

I’m thinking that Bernie might want to slow down. He has, I think, built up enough political capital that he can relax just a little, at least for a little while.

Biden should tank, so Bernie probably doesn’t have to worry about Biden, and Team Bernie should, I think, emphasize the fact that he was an avowed progressive decades before Elizabeth Warren, who was a Repugnican as late as the 1990s, decided to join the club.

It’s a fair criticism — it is true, and it is, to me, anyway, at least a bit concerning.

Long past due: IMPEACH THE TRAITOR IN THE WHITE HOUSE

Associated Press news photo

People protest at the White House in 2018. “President” Pussygrabber has avoided impeachment proceedings thus far, but that officially changed today.

Finally we get to the point where the Democrats decide to do their fucking job to protect the republic, its constitution and the rule of law, and its people.

I’ll paraphrase Winston Churchill: The Democrats always do the right thing — after they have run out of all other options. (That quotation apparently is apocryphal, but I love it anyway…)

Of course, the presidential impeachment inquiry formally announced by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi today is in its infancy, and the Democrats still have plenty of time and opportunity to find a way to fuck it up.

Yes, it’s true that as long as the U.S. Senate is controlled by his fellow Repugnican traitors (redundant), “President” Pussygrabber won’t be removed from office because of his treason and other serious crimes. As Pussygrabber might tell you himself, he could eat a newborn baby alive on live television — bite right into its little head like a large, juicy apple — and his Repugnican co-conspirators wouldn’t make a peep.

But regardless of what the slimy, spineless Repugnicans in the U.S. Senate do, the Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives are mandated by the U.S. Constitution to do their job of investigating the U.S. president for serious crimes of his that come to light. (No, lying about having received a blowjob in the Oral — er, Oval — Office would not rise to the level of a serious crime. Pressuring a foreign government to sink your potential rival in the next election — that would.)

Nor is it a consideration as to whether or not impeaching Pussygrabber might actually help him politically.*

When Bill Clinton was impeached (but not removed from office) in late 1998 and early 1999, it politically helped him and his party — but that was because the impeachment, because it was over a “crime” that didn’t amount to treason or anything else that serious, clearly was a purely partisan, vindictive exercise and a waste of the nation’s time and attention (and taxpayers’ dollars). The case of Pussygrabber is quite different. He’s guilty of treason and other high crimes and he must go.

Pussygrabber apparently was so emboldened by the fact that thus far he’s gotten away with his collusion with Russia to help him “win” the 2016 presidential election that he decided to try to induce a foreign actor to fix the 2020 presidential election for him, too.

This level of presidential malfeasance cannot, must not, be allowed to pass if we, the people, wish to keep the republic that was formed 243 years ago. Otherwise, we turn into just another failed, backwater banana republic (if we’re not already there).

The likes of Pussygrabber doesn’t learn, is not humbled by his mistakes. Pussygrabber is a shameless fucking sociopath, and when he gets away with something, it only makes him want to commit even more high crimes.

Worse for the Democrats than any possibility of an impeachment proceeding actually helping Pussygrabber would be giving Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters the strong message that the Democrats won’t fucking fight for us, the people. Why the fuck should anyone vote Democratic in November 2020 if the Democratic Party refuses to confront one of the greatest evils that ever occupied the White House?

“President” Pussygrabber must be impeached. The U.S. House of Representatives can and must do so.

If the U.S. Senate refuses to do its constitutional duty and remove the traitor in the Oval Office, then we must do our best to get these treasonous co-conspirators out of fucking office as well as take back the presidency — the presidency that never legitimately was Pussygrabber’s in the first place.

—

*With an approval rating still averaging no more than in the low 40s, and with the polarized political environment, methinks that Pussygrabber already has all of the support that he’s going to have for November 2020.

I don’t see backlash from an impeachment proceeding helping Pussygrabber nearly enough to help him “win” “re”-election. (Um, if you didn’t win the popular vote, you’re not the legitimate president, in my eyes.)

I do see an impeachment proceeding firing up Democratic voters perhaps like they haven’t been fired up in a long time — not out of partisan acrimony, but out of the sheer ecstasy of the Democratic Party finally living up to its supposed principles in our lifetime.

We are at the beginning of the end of our long national nightmare

Updated below (on Wednesday, November 7, 2018)

As I type this sentence, Politico reports that the Democrats are projected to take back the U.S. House of Representatives.

That is the one and only thing that I really, really wanted to happen in today’s elections, if nothing else good happened.

If a Democratic U.S. House and a Repugnican U.S. Senate results in gridlock for at least the next two years, then so fucking be it. The Repugnicans stymied President Barack Obama when they took back the House in November 2010 and held it for the rest of his presidency. (Not that Obama was an ambitious progressive anyway, but still…) Payback is a bitch.

Just as the unelected, illegitimate “President” Pussygrabber ramps up his fascism, including sending troops to the southern border to “protect” us from impoverished, desperate human beings (just like Jesus would do!), talking about shooting any rock-throwing immigrants (er, “illegals”), and talking about unilaterally altering the U.S. Constitution by executive order, it’s time to rein in his sorry, orange, tinpot-dictator ass.

The American system works. It takes time, but it works.

We are on a course correction, and we are at the beginning of the end of our long national nightmare.

Update (Wednesday, November 7, 2018): Other good news from last night includes Democrat Tony Evers’ victory over piece-of-shit Repugnican (redundant) Scott Walker for the governorship of Wisconsin. Woo hoo!

Also, I’m delighted that Democrat Jacky Rosen beat incumbent Repugnican Dean Heller for the U.S. Senate seat in Nevada, the state in which I plan to retire. Also, the Democratic candidate also won the state’s governorship, so as of January, Nevada will, like California, have two Democratic U.S. senators and a Democratic governor. I hope that Nevada keeps getting bluer before I finally move there.

And in neighboring Arizona, the race between Democrat Kyrsten Sinema and Repugnican Martha McSally for the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Jeff Flake is too close to call, The Arizona Republic’s website reports right now.

Arizona is still pretty fucking red, but I hope that it, too, becomes more and more blue over the years, and I’m thinking that Democratic powerhouse California is having a blue-ing effect on its neighbors.

My biggest disappointment from yesterday’s election is that actual Democrat Kevin de León did not beat DINO Dianne “Cryptkeeper” Feinstein for the U.S. Senate seat for my great state of California, but thus far in the initial returns, De León has done better than the polls had suggested he would. Polls had Cryptkeeper ahead by double digits, but as I type this sentence, Cryptkeeper is ahead of De León by 8.8 percentage points, 54.4 percent to 45.6 percent.

A lot of Californians obviously want progressive change, but I don’t expect the crusty Cryptkeeper to be humbled by the fact that for an very-long-term incumbent she didn’t do nearly as well as she should have.

I’m also disappointed that Andrew Gillum didn’t win the governorship of Florida, but it was damned close (49.7 percent to 49 percent as of right now, per The New York Times).

I’m thinking and hoping that those progressives who did well but didn’t win yesterday, such as Gillum and De León — and such as gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, to whom I also gave a donation (but it’s Georgia) — will run again and will win next time.

P.S. Oops. Apparently Stacey Abrams still might pull out a win, despite the fact that her Repugnican opponent, Brian Kemp, is Georgia’s chief elections official who won’t recuse himself from overseeing the election in which he’s the Repugnican candidate for governor.

The votes in Georgia have yet to be finalized, and should Kemp’s final total fall below 50.0 percent, a runoff would be required in December, as for the governorship in Georgia, the winner must garner at least a simple majority, not just a plurality.

I hope that a runoff happens.

Finally, The Arizona Republic right now reports that the race between Kyrsten Sinema and Martha McSally still is too close to call and might take days or longer to be settled. Shit, for red Arizona, it’s good news even that the race is too close to call.

How many more whacks can the Pussygrabber piñata sustain?

AFP photo

A woman takes a hit at an effigial piñata of Pussygrabber during a protest in Mexico City in October 2016, before our long national nightmare officially began in January 2017.

For better or for worse — now, for worse — the United States presidency was built to be durable. The president, whether actually elected by the majority of the voters or not (tellingly, neither of our last two Repugnican “presidents” were), gets a fairly long term of four years, plenty of time with which to do plenty of damage, and it’s incredibly difficult to remove a sitting president.

Unless the president obviously, unarguably is incapacitated, such as through coma or death, he gets to remain in office, and sure, you can impeach him with a simple majority vote of the U.S. House of Representatives, but to actually remove him from office then would take at least 67 votes in the U.S. Senate. That’s never happened in our nation’s history. (I generally am against super-majorities, especially super-majorities of two-thirds. If we must have a super-majority, to me it shouldn’t have to be higher than 60 percent.*)

When we have a shitty president, our options aren’t many. Ensuring that his party doesn’t control both houses of Congress helps, and I am confident that the Democrats will take back the House in November. (Fivethirtyeight.com right now gives them a 78.2 percent chance of doing so.) That will be yet another significant blow to the Pussygrabber piñata, which has taken many hits so far.

Not that Pussygrabber would flinch all that much (at least publicly) after losing the House; he’s never understood or respected the U.S. Constitution, so he’ll still try to be a dictator. He’ll try; he’ll be slapped down by the checks and balances that the nation’s founders wisely and presciently built into our system of governance.

But, as I have noted before, Pussygrabber does make the cockroach jealous in terms of his ability to survive what should have killed him.

The pussy-grabbing tape publicly revealed in October 2016, for fuck’s sake, should have ended him.

And it’s been nothing but a parade of books about the Pussygrabber White House, first Michael Wolff’s best-selling Fire and Fury, then White House insider Omarosa Manigalt Newman’s Unhinged (which, whatever we think of her, still sits at No. 60 on Amazon.com’s top-100 selling books list as I type this sentence), and now, Bob Woodward’s Fear: Trump in the White House — which because of pre-orders right now is No. 1 on Amazon.com’s best-seller list (it officially come outs on Tuesday, which is September 11…).

When people independently are reporting the same things, um, yeah…

There have been plenty of other whacks on the Pussygrabber piñata, of course, including the indictments and convictions and guilty pleas of Pussygrabber associates, most notably of former Pussygrabber “presidential” campaign chairman Paul Manafort and former Pussygrabber personal attorney Michael Cohen (which didn’t happen even a full month ago), and plenty of wholly self-inflicted hits, such as Pussygrabber’s disastrous meeting with Russian tyrant Vladimir Putin in Finland in July, during which he surreally casually treasonously threw the United States of America under the bus.

Old-school Repugnican John McCain got in a postmortem dig by barring Pussygrabber from attending his recent funeral, which was attended by Barack Obama and George W. Bush, as well as by Joe Biden and former U.S. Sens. Russ Feingold and Gary Hart and current U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, all Democrats.

The New York Times last week released that interesting, anonymously-penned op-ed titled “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration” and tag-lined “I work for the president but like-minded colleagues and I have vowed to thwart parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.”

The op-ed didn’t tell us much that we didn’t already know, wasn’t much new, except that it purportedly was written by someone still working within the Pussygrabber regime (my best guess is that it was lodestar-loving Mike Pence, who would personally benefit immediately upon Pussygrabber’s exit), and of course Pussygrabber made the situation even worse by tweeting:

Does the so-called “Senior Administration Official” really exist, or is it just the Failing New York Times with another phony source? If the GUTLESS anonymous person does indeed exist, the Times must, for National Security purposes, turn him/her over to government at once!

Wow. Let’s unpack that: Saying or reporting anything that “President” Pussygrabber doesn’t want you to is tantamount to threatening “National Security.” Wow. No First-Amendment or whistle-blowing protections for us peasants where it comes to Mad King George!

To equate yourself with the nation (and your ego with the nation’s security) itself is beyond insane. Pussygrabber is not the United States of America; he is an aberration and an abomination. We know this now; indeed, we have known this for some time now, and we don’t need to wait for the historians inevitably to record his “presidency” as such.

And The New York Times is not “failing.” In fact, this never has been true during Pussygrabber’s “presidency,” and Pussygrabber will lie pathologically about anything, will spew even lies that easily are thoroughly debunked.

Forbes reported back in July 2017 of the Times that “the paper enjoys 2.3 million paid digital subscriptions, up 63.4 percent from a year earlier. Its stock is currently trading at a nine-year high, hovering around $20 per share and giving the company a market capitalization of about $3.2 billion.”**

Forbes added: “Like most traditional media organizations, the Times has weathered setbacks thank to falling print subscriptions and ad revenues. But Trump’s presidency appears to have breathed new life into the organization. Since the election, the Times has made itself a must-read, trading political scoops with The Washington Post on an almost daily basis.”

The Times reported 2.9 million online subscriptions last month and published this graphic:

Indeed, I renewed my online subscription to the Times after years of dormancy because I value the Times’ and The Washington Post’s fairly relentless coverage of “our” illegitimate, dangerous “president” (I subscribe to both online, and yes, their current success has a lot to do with the unelected maniac in the Oval Office).

But back to that “presidential” tweet: Most chilling about it, of course, is Pussygrabber’s dictatorial assertion that “the Times must, for National Security purposes, turn him/her [the writer of the anonymous op-ed] over to government at once!”

Who the fuck does Pussygrabber think he is — Vladimir Putin? (That was [mostly] rhetorical, but feel free to answer it literally.) Although Pussygrabber has done his best to be a human wrecking ball of our republic, in the end, although sometimes slow, such as the Mueller investigation, in the United States of America the rule of law still applies.***

The Times legally does not have to divulge its sources, and the specious “National Security” argument won’t work. Further, at least one federal former prosecutor says that the author of the anonymous op-ed has broken no law at all, either by having provided the piece for publication or by having admitted to any illegal activity within the piece itself.

Another whack to the Pussygrabber piñata is planned to come later this month, when Michael Moore releases his new film on the unelected Pussygrabber regime, “Fahrenheit 11/9,” a twist on the title of his 2004 film about the unelected Bush regime, “Fahrenheit 9/11,” which remains the highest-grossing documentary of all time.

Here is the poster for “Fahrenheit 11/9”:

Pussygrabber’s “win” of the White House was announced on November 9, 2016, and thus “Fahrenheit 11/9.”

True, “Fahrenheit 9/11” was meant to help to deny “President” Bush a second term in the 2004 presidential election and failed to do so, but I’ll take just about any new movie by Moore, and, again, it should be yet another whack on the Pussygrabber  piñata, followed by the Repugnicans’ loss of the U.S. House of Representatives later this fall.

And, of course, Pussygrabber’s approval ratings remain stubbornly stuck around the low 40s, which not only doesn’t bode well for the mid-term elections in November — widely considered to be a referendum on Pussygrabber — but doesn’t bode well for his “re”-“election.”

Pussygrabber’s average approval ratings have been historically low, which is like a constant hitting of the Pussygrabber piñata, weakening it even further and further, if only slowly.

Will there be a final, spectacular, perhaps inevitable blow to the Pussygrabber piñata? And who will strike it? Robert Mueller at any time? The Democratic-controlled House finding its spine and impeaching him? Bernie Sanders beating him in November 2020?

We’ll see, but in the meantime, this will, methinks, remain a fairly slow-moving train wreck.

We’ll probably finally see that piñata spew its contents all over the ground one day, but by the time that comes, we might be too exhausted from our long national nightmare to be able to derive all that much pleasure from it.

—

*On that note, the threshold for a new U.S. Supreme Court “justice” to be put on the bench used to be a vote of 60 or more in the U.S. Senate, until Yertle McConnell changed the Senate rules in 2017 to require only a simple-majority vote for Supreme Court “justices” in order to get Pussygrabber’s picks seated on the court.

The only way for loser Pussygrabber to “win,” once again, was to cheat.

**Forbes does note that maybe Pussygrabber, who is no wordsmith, means that The New York Times is “failing” in its coverage of him and his “presidency,” but most often when Pussygrabber criticizes a company, his criticism is that it is not doing well financially, even though he’s had six bankruptcies.

***It is because there are so many competing different interests within the United States, I surmise, that no one group of people can have power indefinitely, as it is the case in the thugocracy of Russia, which Pussygrabber wants to replicate here in the U.S.

(In March, Pussygrabber remarked that it’s great that China now has a president for life, and that maybe the U.S. will have that too someday. Maybe Pussygrabber was joking, but “jokes” like that aren’t funny. It wasn’t funny when George W. Bush “quipped” in December 2000, “If this were a dictatorship, it’d be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I’m the dictator.”)

IMPEACH OBAMA!

Associated Press photo

The impeachment of Barack Obama: Bring it, bitches!

I sincerely hope that the Repugnican Tea Partiers take advantage of their new majority in the U.S. Senate and impeach President Barack Obama.

I do.

Because it will backfire.

A civics lesson is required (for many if not even most American readers) first: the U.S. House of Representatives can vote to impeach a sitting president by a simple majority vote. It’s not that hard a feat, especially in a highly poisonously partisan atmosphere, such as we have had for some time now (at least since 1998, the last time that a sitting U.S. president was impeached…).

Presidential impeachment, of course, is not the equivalent of the removal of the president. (Yes, many if not most Americans are fuzzy on the definition of the word “impeachment.”) If the House of Representatives votes to impeach, which is much like a grand jury handing down an indictment, the U.S. Senate then acts much like a courtroom (with the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court presiding) and the senators vote on whether or not to remove the president. (They’re supposed to act like independent, non-partisan jurors, but of course there is no avoiding politics and partisanship in such a matter as the removal of the sitting U.S. president.)

However, the U.S. Senate may remove an impeached president only on a two-thirds vote. (This constitutionally required higher threshold apparently was intended to prevent petty politics and ensure that a president is removed from office only for very good cause.) Thus, while the Repugnican-traitor-controlled House of Representatives impeached President Bill Clinton in December 1998 — as Clinton was wrapping up his sixth year in the White House, just as Barack Obama is doing now — in February 1999 the Senate acquitted Clinton, as only 50 senators, all of them Repugnicans, voted that Clinton was guilty of one or two misdeeds, either one of which could have removed Clinton from office had 67 of the senators voted that Clinton was guilty of having committed it. (To be fair, not a single Democratic senator voted Clinton to be guilty of either misdeed, and five Repugnican senators [John Chafee of Rhode Island, Susan Collins of Maine, Jim Jeffords of Vermont, Olympia Snowe of Maine and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania — all moderate, mostly Northeastern, Repugnicans, of course] also voted Clinton as not guilty of either misdeed.)

A solid majority of Americans thought that the 1998-1999 Repugnican-led impeachment debacle was bad for the nation – because it was – and in apparent political blowback, the Democrats gained seats in both houses of Congress in the following election, in 2000.

So: The Repugnican Tea Party traitors in Congress, still bitter that a black man sits in the White House, never could get the two-thirds vote in the U.S. Senate that would be required to remove Obama from office.

An impeachment effort against Obama would be perceived by the majority of Americans as exactly what it would be: At best, the commission of a waste of time by the Repugnican-led Congress with a self-indulgent, petty political stunt instead of the addressing of the nation’s problems (an act of partisan grandstanding because Obama of course never will be removed from office) and at worst, yet another brazen attempt by the Repugnican Tea Party traitors to subvert the will of the majority of American voters, such as they did when they tried but failed to remove Bill Clinton in 1998 and when they had no problem with George W. Bush being seated in the Oval Office in early 2001 even though he’d lost the popular vote to Al Gore by more than a half-million votes (and no doubt Gore had won the pivotal state of Florida as well, but, of course, then-Florida-Gov. Jeb Bush and then-Florida-Secretary-of-State Katherine Harris made damned sure that Gee Dubya “won” Florida).

Pundits unanimously agree that the Democrats are poised to retake the U.S. Senate in 2016, when the electoral map will favor them as it favored the Repugnicans on Tuesday. (In 2016, 23 Senate seats now held by Repugnicans will be up for a vote, compared to only 10 Senate seats now held by Democrats.)

While I don’t like Billary Clinton (to put it mildly), polls have shown her around 10 points ahead of any Repugnican candidate in hypothetical 2016 presidential match-ups, and while I’m not happy about it, at this moment I don’t see an actual Democrat – that is, an actually progressive Democrat – emerging as the 2016 presidential candidate for the Democratic Party.

So 2016 looks like a bloodbath for the Repugnican Tea Party traitors already; the White House most likely will stay in Democratic hands and the Senate most likely will flip back to the Democratic Party.

If, drunk on their short-lived power, the Repugnican Tea Party traitors in D.C. act like they have the “permanent [Repugnican] majority” that they talked about during the illegitimate reign of George W. Bush (we saw how “permanent” that was), they’ll only further antagonize centrist and left-of-center voters, and November 2016 will be even worse for them than it would have been had they showed some humility and vision that extends past only two years.

Luckily, they’re not capable of showing such humility or vision.

Because of that, I should thank the Repugnican Tea Party traitors in advance for most likely inspiring me to blog much more regularly over the next two years than I have over the past year or two. (Obama’s second term thus far has been quite a snoozer.) I anticipate that they’ll give me lots of inspiration. They’ll be my muses – on crack.

True, I am ensconced here in California, which is like an isle unto itself, where, on the state level, anyway, we are not much troubled by the Repugnican Tea Party traitors. This week Democrats took every statewide office here once again, as they did in 2010, and the state Legislature remains in firm Democratic control. Both of our U.S. senators are Democrats, as are the majority of our members of the U.S. House of Representatives. As California Democratic Party head John Burton wrote in an e-mail today (with the subject line of “We’ll always have California”), “California remains a deep-blue beacon.”*

But, having lived the first 30 years of my life in the God-awful red state of Arizona, I know what it is like for the millions of Americans who languish in the red (and purple) states, and not everyone can move to California or to another blue state (and nor should they have to). It’s up to all of us progressives to do what we can to assuage the damage that the Repugnican Tea Party traitors have wreaked upon our nation. We have a duty to do our best to protect those who cannot protect themselves against the legions of right-wing traitors among us.

And I have the feeling that the Repugnican Tea Party traitors in D.C. over the next two years are going to fire us up to fight them like President Hopey-Changey hasn’t been able to fire us up for quite some time now.

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*Interestingly, though, the for-profit media widely are making an “issue” of the fact that the Democrats haven’t retained a two-thirds supermajority in both houses of California’s Legislature. Wow. The bar always is set much lower for the wingnuts than it is for those of us who are left of center, isn’t it? Just as was the case with the 2000 presidential election, an actual win is always a “loss” for the left and an actual loss is always a “win” for the wingnuts. I mean, George W. Bush not only should have been impeached and removed from office, but he (and his cohorts) should have been executed for their war crimes (Vietraq War) and their crimes against humanity (Vietraq War, Hurricane Katrina), Nuremberg style, yet here the Repugnican Tea Party traitors are talking about Obama’s impeachment.

Obama already relegated to mediocrity

At a time when our public-school teachers are getting pink slips, our “representative” government in Washington has given the war profiteers about $1 billion thus far via the Obama administration’s bullshit U.S. military action in Libya.

U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich, who I would support over Barack Obama in 2012, according to The Associated Press “said he would offer an amendment to the next budget resolution that would prohibit taxpayer dollars from being used to fund U.S. military operations in Libya.”

The AP notes that “His effort could gain significant congressional support, including the backing of tea partiers, if the U.S. military operation is going full-bore when lawmakers return from their recess next week.”

“We have already spent trillions of dollars on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, both of which descended into unwinnable quagmires,” the AP reports Kucinich wrote his colleagues. “Now, the president is plunging the United States into yet another war we cannot afford.”

If the “tea partiers” are on board with reining in the continued looting of the U.S. Treasury via the bloated military-industrial complex, especially during a time when we’re told that we can’t afford to attend to actual human needs, then, while I diametrically disagree with them on the majority of the issues, I certainly can partner with them in that.

And I agree wholeheartedly that the Nobel Peace Prize that was awarded to Obama ridiculously early in 2009 should be revoked. Bolivia’s president, Evo Morales, and others have made the call to take the ill-awarded prize back.

Ralph Nader’s statement — and Kucinich’s, too — that Obama’s having launched a military attack on Libya without the consent of the U.S. Congress is unconstitutional and impeachable is spot-on. While I don’t expect Obama to be impeached — yet — the fact that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and other war criminals and traitors remain at large instead of being excecuted for their treason and their crimes against humanity, including mass murder, doesn’t mean that the arrogant Obama — who excels only at breaking campaign promises — gets to continue the imperial, unaccountable, above-the-law presidency that the unelected Bush regime began.

Having shit and pissed upon his base for the past two years, it will be interesting to see the change in the percentage of Obama’s campaign contributions that have come from individuals versus corporations from his 2008 presidential campaign to his 2012 re-election campaign.

While Yahoo! News reports that “Obama raised $59 million for his presidential campaign during the first half of 2007,” and that “Obama’s prospective GOP challengers would have to raise $590,000 a day between now and June 30 to match that pace during this campaign,” this seems to assume that the same level of enthusiasm for Obama that existed in 2007 exists now.

Corporations might be enthusiastic about Obama, but progressive individuals like me? I surmise that millions of us progressives who gave him campaign contributions for his 2008 run — based upon his blatantly false promises of “hope” and “change” — won’t give him a fucking rent cent for his 2012 campaign. I certainly won’t. So I surmise that the only way that he’ll be able to match his 2008 take is if he is able to make up for the loss in his base through getting bribes — er, campaign contributions — from his biggest benefactors, the corporations.

Realistically, Obama probably will be elected to a second lackluster presidential term. I could see an impeachment attempt against him in the future, probably a Bill-Clinton-like bullshit impeachment attempt by the right, but perhaps, just perhaps, even a justified impeachment attempt from the left.

What opportunity Obama had — but squandered. With popular opinion on his side and both houses of Congress controlled by his party for two years, Obama did diddly squat.

He could have been a great president. Instead, he already has joined the pantheon of mediocre U.S. presidents.

Impeach the scumbag for perjury



Associated Press photo

Above: Right-wing U.S. Supreme Court “Justice” Clarence Thomas is shown pictured with his wife, Virginia, in 2007. Below: Anita Hill is sworn in before the Judiciary Committee of the U.S. Senate in October 1991. She testified to the committee that Thomas had sexually harassed her on the job, and consequently she was attacked by the right wing as a liar for the left wing. But now, a second woman, Clarence Thomas’ former girlfriend, has come forward to say that Thomas was a serial sexual harasser.

 

Associated Press photo

I always believed Anita Hill.

Anita Hill testified, way back in 1991, during his confirmation hearings before the U.S. Senate, that now-U.S. Supreme Court “Justice” Clarence Thomas, who was nominated by George Bush I, was guilty of having committed sexual harassment while on the job.

Hill was villified by the right, and then-right-wing gun-for-hire David Brock even penned a book about her titled The Real Anita Hill — a book that he later admitted was “character assassination” for his right-wing pimps. (Brock now works for the left.)

Now, Thomas’ former girlfriend, 65-year-old Lillian McEwen, says of Thomas’ on-the-job behavior: “He was always actively watching the women he worked with to see if they could be potential partners. It was a hobby of his.”

McEwen also now says that Thomas “was obsessed with porn. He would talk about what he had seen in magazines and films, if there was something worth noting.”

“In her Senate testimony, Hill, who worked with Thomas at two federal agencies, said that Thomas would make sexual comments to her at work, including references to scenes in hard-core pornographic films,” reports the Washington Post, which also notes that during his confirmation hearings before the U.S. Senate, Thomas said in his “defense”: “If I used that kind of grotesque language with one person, it would seem to me that there would be traces of it throughout the employees who worked closely with me, or the other individuals who heard bits and pieces of it or various levels of it.”

The “logic” there is that if only one person thus far has come forward to report wrongdoing, then that wrongdoing must not have taken place.

Well, now we have two women who have reported the same sexually harassing behavior of Clarence Thomas. Lillian McEwen also told the Washington Post: “The Clarence [Thomas] I know was certainly capable not only of doing the things that Anita Hill said he did, but it would be totally consistent with the way he lived his personal life then.”

Are we to call both of the women liars, as the right wing called the women who had accused Repugnican California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of having sexually harassed them (before he became governor) liars?

That Thomas’ pathetic wife, Viriginia Thomas, recently incredibly inappropriately called Anita Hill (who now is a professor at Brandeis University) essentially to tell Hill to apologize for having “lied” about her piece-of-shit husband’s sexual harassment*– and was incredibly stupid enough to leave her intimidation on Hill’s voicemail  — only underscores the fact that Thomas is guilty as charged of sexual harassment.

Clarence Thomas should be impeached — if not for the sexual harassment itself, then for the fucking perjury, the lying while under oath, that he committed during his confirmation hearings before the U.S. Senate’s Judiciary Committee.

Clarence Thomas must be in some deep shit, or his wife, apparently fearing that her privileged lifestyle is threatened, wouldn’t have made her (perhaps drunken?) phone call to Anita Hill.

And it’s interesting to watch the Repugnican Tea Party claim to be the party that really cares about women and women’s rights and women’s welfare when not only does the Repugnican Tea Party believe that women don’t have the right to determine what goes on inside of their own uteri, but tries to sweep the sexual harassment of women by powerful right-wing men under the red carpet.

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*“I just want to reach across the airwaves and the years and ask you to consider something. I would love you to consider an apology sometime and some full explanation of why you did what you did with my husband,” is what Virginia Thomas left on Anita Hill’s voicemail, according to The Los Angeles Times.

“I have no intention of apologizing because I testified truthfully about my experience and I stand by that testimony,” Hill stated in response to Mrs. Thomas’ incredibly inappropriate voicemail message.

Assorted shit

Associated Press photo

OK, so Rod “$enate $eat for $ale” Blahblahblahblah (pictured today above) by a unanimous vote of the Illinois state Senate is now the former governor of Illinois, but does anyone think that he’ll ever really go away?

That he’ll have a book published is a foregone conclusion; the punishment for wrongdoing in the United States of America is that you get to make big $$$ writing a book. (At least it will be legal for Blahblahblahblah to sell his book to the highest bidder…)

Let’s just hope that Blahblahblahblah doesn’t decide to go into porn…

Ted Haggard, either…

…

The poor Repugnicans are struggling to define their core principles.

Gee, I can help them with that. I can condense the ’Pugs’ core principle into one simple word: treason.

They stole the 2000 presidential election (via Florida and via Ohio probably the 2004 election, too) and they started the bogus Vietraq War, which has resulted in the wholly unnecessary deaths of at least 4,236 of our military personnel — and in the looting of about $600 billion of American taxpayers’ dollars thus far, most of which has gone to the pockets of war profiteers like Dick Cheney’s Halliburton.

The Repugnicans are perfectly OK with hundreds of billions of Americans’ tax dollars going to war profiteers via a bogus war — after all, they can’t just loot the U.S. treasury directly — but the Repugnicans are against spending billions of American taxpayers’ own dollars on Americans.

And the Repugnicans want to make sure that the super-rich pay as little in taxes as possible, while the common American taxpayer takes it up the ass.

The Repugnicans sold out the nation to the super-rich and the Repugnicans want to prevent the nation’s recovery from that sellout.

Yup, in a word, treason.

There, I’ve done their work for them.

If they want to add a few more words to their core principles, plutocracy, racism, misogyny, “Christo”fascism, homophobia, xenophobia, nationalism/jingoism and hypocrisy all come to mind.

…

Residents of Tikrit in Iraq have erected a sort of shrine to the Iraqi journalist who hurled his shoes at former “President” George W. Bush at a press conference in Baghdad last month:

Reuters photos

I never get sick of the shoe thing.

And this is the first statue in honor of George W. Bush that I’m aware of…

About fuckin’ time

Associated Press photo

Yeah, buh-bye, Blahblahblahblah. Good riddance, baby-boomer asshole.

From The Associated Press today:

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. – The Illinois House voted overwhelmingly [today] to impeach Gov. Rod Blagojevich, an unprecedented action that sets up a [state] Senate trial on whether he should be thrown out for abuse of power, including allegations that he tried to sell President-elect Barack Obama‘s vacant [U.S.] Senate seat.

Impeachment required just 60 votes. The final result was 114-1.

Legislators accused the second-term Democratic governor of letting down the people of Illinois by letting ego and ambition drive his decisions.

“It’s our duty to clean up the mess and stop the freak show that’s become Illinois government,” said Rep. Jack D. Franks, a Democrat.

Blagojevich was out jogging in his Chicago neighborhood when the vote came down.

Blagojevich refused to answer any specific questions about the vote, but upon returning from his jog, he likened his situation to long-distance running….

He then promised to say more at an afternoon news conference.

During the House’s 90-minute debate on impeachment, no one spoke up to defend the governor. But Rep. Milton Patterson, a Chicago Democrat, made the sole vote against impeaching Blagojevich.

Patterson said he read the impeachment committee’s report and wasn’t comfortable voting against the governor. “I have no firsthand knowledge of any of the evidence,” he said….

Rep. Elga Jefferies, another Chicago Democrat, voted “present.”

Blagojevich was arrested Dec. 9 on federal charges that include allegations he schemed to profit from his power to name Obama’s replacement in the Senate. The criminal complaint included an FBI agent’s sworn affidavit describing wiretaps that caught Blagojevich allegedly talking about what he could get for the seat, how to pressure people into making campaign contributions and more.

That arrest triggered impeachment hearings by a special House committee.

The committee [yesterday] unanimously recommended impeachment based on the criminal charges but other allegations as well — that Blagojevich expanded a health care program without proper authority, that he circumvented hiring laws to give jobs to political allies, that he spent millions of dollars on foreign flu vaccine that he knew wasn’t needed and couldn’t be brought into the country.

“The citizens of this state must have confidence that their governor will faithfully serve the people and put their interests before his own,” the committee’s report said. “It is with profound regret that the committee finds that our current governor has not done so.”

Blagojevich has denied the criminal charges. He criticized the House impeachment process as biased and said a Senate trial would produce a different result.

But he didn’t testify before the House impeachment committee and hasn’t offered an explanation for the federal charges.

“His silence in this great matter is deafening,” said House Majority Leader Barbara Flynn Currie, a Chicago Democrat.

Hopefully today’s development will sink the seating of former Illinois Attorney General Roland Burris in the U.S. Senate. It’s not about Burris as an individual, although Burris strikes me as craven for even wanting a U.S. Senate seat under such tainted circumstances.

What it is about is that change thing that President-elect Barack Obama promised us until he was blue in the lips (oops…). Allowing an individual who was appointed by a corrupt governor right before the governor was impeached to take a seat in the U.S. Senate indicates that it’s the same old corrupt business as usual.

It kills any hope for change.