Impeach the Motherfucker!

Steve M has a good piece on the hurt feelings excuse that Karen Susan Collins and the rest of the “moderates” (God I hate that word in this context) are going to use for a reason not to call witnesses. Two things:

First, we all have little clichés or old saws that we use to explain human behavior. In this case, I’m going to go with either “Never teach a pig to sing, it wastes your time and it annoys the pig” or “How many psychologists does it take to change a lightbulb? One, but they have to want to change”.

These pigs don’t want to change, and they’re pissed that Schiff, Nadler and the rest are pointing it out while they have to sit quietly and listen.

Second, you often hear people remark that, for a group that uses the expression “fuck your feelings” a lot, these people sure are delicate. That’s true, but there’s a little more to it than simply hypocrisy. It’s a result of the very effective, 30+ year project of “othering” by the conservative media. Long before Fox News, Limbaugh and others worked to make “liberal” an epithet to describe someone who is lesser than the person using the term. These fuckers couldn’t use racial epithets in public anymore, so they found a better one – it doesn’t matter what color you are, or where you came from, if you’re a god damned liberal, then fuck your feelings. But if you’re a conservative, please tread carefully, because you’re dealing with a legitimate human being who is easily damaged by lack of respect.

It would be bad enough if this attitude had been embraced by a third of the population or more, but it’s also been accepted by the mainstream media. There are hundreds of examples of this behavior, but here’s one: how many stories have been written in outlets like the Times that contain concerns that a given Senator or Congressperson is “too right wing”? Find me one, I’m sure they’re rare. That’s because these people are legitimate members of the establishment “Freedom Caucus”, and as such, they have a certain set of deeply held legitimate beliefs. But the same media outlets will shit themselves if they don’t crank out a story about Warren, AOC, Ilhan, etc. that doesn’t contain handwringing about whether any of those women are “too liberal”.

I guess this is all bloody obvious to most of us, but it’s the coronavirus of the mind that is going to kill this country.

You Coulda Said Something Nice About My ProfiterolesPost + Comments (108)

I get why Moscow Mitch is cramming the impeachment into a couple of days – it has to be done before the SOTU so Trump can declare victory from the podium. But my God what a toll that’s going to take on the older Senators. When Collins complained to the manager about her order, sent a note to Roberts to complain about Jerry Nadler, it was after midnight, for christsake. That’s way too late for the over-80 crew ( Shelby, Feinstein, Grassley, Roberts, and Inhofe) and probably pretty damn late for the over-75ers (a bunch of them).

My experience with people in their mid-80s is that they sleep a lot, and they need their sleep to get through the day. And these were relatively healthy 80-somethings, “relatively healthy” being a stretch for a few of these Senators.

Look, I’m not pissing on these people for being old. Aging sucks, I fucking hate it, and we’ll all suffer through it, if we’re lucky. We can have an argument about whether these guys should all have retired some other time. But from just a simple human perspective, we’re risking the lives of a bunch of people just to ram this thing through the Senate.

Tough on the SeniorsPost + Comments (78)

Breaking:

MOSCOW — Ukrainian authorities announced a probe Thursday into possible surveillance of U.S. Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch before she was dismissed from her post by the Trump administration.

The statement by Ukraine’s Interior Ministry followed the disclosure of new documents in the impeachment case against President Trump. The material included exchanges between Lev Parnas, an associate of Trump’s personal attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani, and others about the need to push Yovanovitch from her post.

Some douchebags decided that they were going to start a surveillance project on one of our ambassadors, perhaps in preparation for an assassination attempt, and we’re not the first country to launch an investigation? Jesus, how can the he-man Republican superhawks, ready to launch a fucking war at the drop of a god damned hat, live with themselves? If a Democrat had done this, the emasculation rhetoric would make spring castration on a Dakota ranch seem like a kiddie rodeo. But not these disgusting, compromised, subservient, traitorous fucks in the Trump administration — they just bend the knee.

(If there’s been any statement from the State Department at all on the latest Yovanovitch revelations, I haven’t seen it.)

At Least Somebody Is Doing ItPost + Comments (105)

He was pretty awful a few years ago but I guess a rising Trump lifts a lot of mediocre boats :

This had to be one of the most successful failures — one of the most triumphant defeats — in modern political history.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) clearly failed in the stated aim of her four-week delay in sending impeachment articles to the Senate: to withhold the articles and the naming of impeachment managers until, as she put it last month, “we see the process that is set forth in the Senate.” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) didn’t reveal his impeachment resolution and made no commitment to bring forth witnesses or documents.

But Pelosi’s delay seems to have blunted any hope President Trump’s defenders had of dismissing the charges without a trial. Before the speaker’s gambit, McConnell pledged that “there will be no difference between the president’s position and our position as to how to handle this.” Trump is now calling for a dismissal, but Senate Republicans say they won’t allow that.

This is about as close as a beltway asshole who treats politics like sports talk radio — picking winners and losers for everything, focusing on personality instead of performance — is going to get to a nuanced perspective. When you only control the House, you’re “winning” if you’ve been able to leverage your power to make the Senate do more then they were otherwise going to do, and get some positive attention. Both of those goals were accomplished, even though we’re ultimately going to “lose” on conviction.

Even Dana MilbankPost + Comments (18)

Mitch has always struck me as a show, not tell, guy, so I’m guessing the pressure is getting to him just a wee bit.

In other news, here’s yet another argument for mandatory retirement in the Senate (via Jim, Foolish Literalist in the last comment thread):

Seems a Little Foot StompyPost + Comments (70)

What a major concession:

Former national security adviser John Bolton, highly sought by Democrats as an impeachment witness, said Monday that he is prepared to testify in a Senate trial if a subpoena is issued — a move that could be damaging to President Trump.

My conclusion from this announcement is that McConnell has been signaling behind the scenes that no witnesses will be called. But perhaps I’m being too cynical. In any event, the candidates running in Colorado, Maine, Arizona, etc. should all be making big noise about this, so Gardner, Collins, McSally and the rest have to get on the record saying either that they want witnesses, or why they don’t.

He Will Be Happy to Ride a CentaurPost + Comments (115)

Lindsey Graham is a fool whose comments can’t be taken seriously, but since he’s embedded himself deep in the nether regions of Trump’s anus, we can use his blather to measure Trump’s mood, and it looks like both of them are rattled:

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey O. Graham suggested Sunday that Republicans should try to change Senate rules governing impeachment if House Speaker Nancy Pelosi continues to withhold the charges against President Trump — an unlikely 11th-hour bid to begin a trial within days without the actual documents.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) was unequivocal in a Senate floor speech on Friday that “we can’t hold a trial without the articles; the Senate’s own rules don’t provide for that.” But Graham (R-S.C.), a close ally of Trump, floated the idea of a unilateral GOP move, saying he would work with McConnell to allow the Senate to proceed without the two charges against Trump for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.

Graham, who was a House manager for Clinton’s trial, knows damn well that it’s pretty hard to have a trial without a prosecutor, but I’m sure Trump or Rudy or some other numbskull told this fool to go out and threaten this, so he dutifully did.

Sounds like withholding the documents – or even threatening to slow play them – has really gotten under Trump’s skin, so we should keep it up for a few more days. If the tables were turned and McConnell was the Speaker of the House impeaching a Democratic President the Senate wouldn’t convict, you know god damned well that he would pull out every little trick he could to get as much mileage out of impeachment. No harm, no foul if we do the same.

Panic on the Streets of WashingtonPost + Comments (90)