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Mitch McConnell is still the leader of the Senate and if Chuck Schumer were ever cast in a movie, he’d have to be cast as the Gimp in Pulp Fiction with Donald Trump his master.
A year ago, Chuck Schumer said an impeachment trial would be a sham if there were no witnesses to call. On Saturday, after a week of hedging on witnesses, a bipartisan group of senators agreed to call witnesses. In fact, 55 senators decided to call witnesses.
Then they didn’t.
Chuck Schumer had the opportunity to deliver a real impeachment trial. The Senate is not going to be in session this week. They could have deposed witnesses this week. The Senate could have recessed from the impeachment and confirmed Biden appointees or voted on COVID relief while the depositions of witnesses were happening.
But they chose to move on.
They were never really into an impeachment trial. This was Chuck Schumer’s sham.
While Washington may have been fixated, the political press may have covered it, and both members of congress and reporters who cover the Hill may have confessed to being in tears at times, most Americans were watching the snow.
Schumer could have given the public a spectacle they paid attention to. But he moved on. He could have given the nation a memorable impeachment trial. He declined.
He had the votes. He could have done it. He did not.
If the Senate Democrats won’t even call witnesses after getting bipartisan agreement to do so, you’l have to excuse me if I laugh when Democrats and the press assure me the public will hold the GOP accountable moving forward.
You know that is not true even if you can’t admit it.
Moving forward, over the weekend, former Senator Jeff Flake (R-AZ) says the GOP cannot survive as the party of Trump. There are parts of the country that this is true. But in those parts of the country, the GOP has gotten members of congress elected who are not Trump Republicans. In other parts of the country, Trump Republicans outperformed other Republicans. Nationwide, Donald Trump came within 43,000 votes of getting re-elected.
I don’t think we’re going to see Trump 2024 at this point. I think over the next four years, prosecutors, civil litigators, and corporate activists are going to bleed every drop of money they can from Donald Trump to ensure he is not viable. He is no longer a hypothetical and no longer a candidate Jeff Zucker, Roger Ailes, or any other media titan can casually promote for ratings without consequence as so many did in 2015 and 2016.
I don’t know whether he will want to run again. I just foresee a legal quagmire for him that makes it all but impossible to do so. Mitch McConnell is right that Trump has not yet faced the full fall out of what is coming.
Undoubtedly, that will solidify part of the GOP base for him in solidarity with him. But it will allow other voices to step forward. The path forward for the GOP is the path that takes elements of what Donald Trump did that blue collar voters appreciated and wraps it with a happy warrior veneer — someone who fights, but with a smile and a laugh, not a wink toward QAnon.
One thing is for sure. As we move forward, impeachment will not be an albatross around the GOP’s neck and neither will Trump. As much as some of the media and Democrats want to tie the GOP to Trump and sink it all, Chuck Schumer had 55 votes to call witnesses at an impeachment trial and declined.
Schumer’s sham shows the path forward for the GOP — a path that begins with not worrying about what Democrats think about them.
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WHY? https://townhall.com/tipsheet/
And:
A clear message: https://www.algemeiner.com/
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In addition to the Democrat Party being a domestic threat the press is even wore, if that is possible. Now that the election is behind us much truth, that has been suppressed, is creeping out. The Lincoln Project, which attacked Republicans for the very things the founders of the organization engaged in, has imploded. The Project's founders raised $90 million of which about 60 went to them. On of the founders is being investigated for sexual misconduct. Second, we have the Hunter involvement with China that persists and the Biden Mafia story below.
Ugly truth about ‘Honest Joe’: Devine
By Miranda DevineEnlarge Image
MORE FROM:
WHO's COVID 'investigation' was dishonest Chinese
propaganda: Devine
Tricky Joe Biden's family influence: Devine
Hey, WHO! Do a real Wuhan probe: Devine
Now that the election
is over and President Biden is installed in the White House, it’s safe for the
truth about his character to dribble out.
And what do you know?
Turns out the ethical standards of “Honest Joe” aren’t worth a hill of
beans.
Starting with the
obvious, Hunter Biden is still in business with
the Chinese Communist Party.
White House press
secretary Jen Psaki admitted a little over a week ago that the president’s
wayward 51-year-old son still owns 10 percent of Chinese equity firm BHR
Partners.
So much for Joe’s
promise that “no one in my family will . . . have any business relationship with
anyone that relates to a foreign corporation or a foreign country. Period.
Period. End of story.”
But that was B.E.,
before the election. Everything’s changed now.
Biden watered down his
family’s ethics rules immediately after the election to a vague statement about
“appropriate distance” from the presidency.
“My son, my family
will not be involved in any business, any enterprise, that is in conflict with
or appears to be in conflict, with the appropriate distance from, the
presidency and government,” he told CNN in December.
Clear as mud.
Joe’s younger
brothers, Frank and Jim, know what the rubbery rules mean: The Biden family’s
influence-peddling business can continue as before, only better, with an actual
sitting president to sell.
Frank wasted no time,
with a two-page newspaper ad on Inauguration Day touting his relationship with
“my brother” for the South Florida law firm that pays him as an adviser, even
though he isn’t a lawyer.
Of course, there is
still that pesky issue of federal criminal investigations hanging over the
heads of Hunter and Jim, another truth bomb that stayed hidden from the
American people until after the election.
But, wouldn’t you know
it, on Day One as president, Joe installed the law partner of Hunter’s defense
lawyer to lead the Justice Department’s criminal division, the very division
that is investigating his son and brother.
“The president is
committed to ensuring we have the most ethically vigorous administration in
history,” Psaki told reporters at the start of the Biden presidency.
It’s a refrain we hear
often from Biden and the White House, about just how honest and ethical he
is.
But people who feel
the need constantly to tell you how honest and ethical they are in life always
turn out to be quite the opposite.
In an interview with
People magazine published on Monday, the president and first lady Jill Biden
gushed that Joe was restoring “trust” in government and boasted about his
unimpeachable ethical standards.
Asked about Hunter,
Joe came up with a whole new formulation for Biden family ethics rules: “No one
in our family and extended family is going to be involved in any government
undertaking or foreign policy.” Hmmm. What happened to the ban on foreign
business relationships?
Then Joe told People a
curious tale, which raised more doubts than confidence in his personal
integrity: “I remember years ago an accountant said, ‘You know, you can charge
part of the gas you use in the vehicle at your home.’ And I said ‘No.’
“Here’s how I look at
it: The foul line is 15 feet away from the basket. Never get me closer than 17
feet, because it really is a matter of the public trust.”
Look, if you have a
legitimate business expense, such as the fuel you use while driving for work,
then you are entitled to be reimbursed, as millions of Americans are each year.
Few things are more black-and-white in expense claims than gas mileage.
Perhaps Joe is so
wealthy that 57.5 cents per mile is chicken feed, but he didn’t say “No” to his
accountant’s advice out of concern about the ethical ambiguity of claiming for
gas, because there isn’t any.
There is no need to
move his supposed ethical “foul line” two feet farther away than everyone
else’s, because the rules are utterly straightforward.
He was pretending, as
he has his entire career, that he is more honest than the average Joe.
So the only rational
response to such ostentatious virtue signaling is skepticism.
It’s not as if you
have to peer far into the past to find a genuinely dubious ethical decision by
Joe.
Just last Sunday, he
promoted Hunter’s new book in a
CBS interview on national TV played before a Super Bowl audience of 96 million,
in the very week the publisher launched the marketing campaign.
Even Obama administration ethics czar Walter Schaub said it was wrong, in since-deleted tweets blasting Joe for joining Hunter’s “book promotion tour . . . This is not the way to model strong government ethics.”
Nope. Nor is the fact that another hyperbolic statement of self-virtue from “Honest Joe” has fallen apart in less than four weeks.
The immediate reaction to Biden deputy press secretary TJ Ducklo hissing “I will destroy you” at Politico reporter Tara Palmeri, and deriding her with sexist vulgarities, was to send him home for a week without pay
It was a far cry from Joe’s Inauguration Day threat to staffers: “Disrespect or talk down to someone, I will fire you on the spot, no ifs, no buts.”
On Friday, the hapless Psaki tried to justify Ducklo’s abuse as a natural consequence of Politico reporting on his “private life.”
The penny finally dropped Saturday night and Ducklo resigned, but the delay says it all.
Talk is cheap in the Biden White House.
And:
Very worth listening to: https://twitter.com/i/status/
And:
This is what America has come to and it is indeed pathetic.
And:
This is what Democrat Trump Hatred breeds:
The Wages of Trump Hatred
Hating Donald Trump in the hater’s eyes makes one moral. But in the real world, such pathological fixations usually result in abject immorality and moral decline.
Over the last five years, the
pathology of Trump Derangement Syndrome has been widely described. It was more
than a chronic disease and was often characterized by an array of rapidly
advancing symptoms of deterioration in reasoning, emotional stability, and
personal ethics.
More practically, often the deranged Trump hater found in his odium a cover for all sorts of prior personal intemperance and careerist dissipation. Loudly hating Trump became a passport for excess, private and public, and a sort of preemptive insurance that excused or rather greenlighted smears, slander, and personal misdeeds.
For
over a year, the theme of the NeverTrump Lincoln Project was the organizers’
professed superior morality. They had it; most others on the Right did not.
Only a select heroic few of the Republican Party would dare to break ranks to
end the danger to the country posed by a supposedly morally inferior Donald
Trump.
Forget Trump’s economic,
domestic, cultural, and foreign policy record that had belied critics by its
successes—despite historic opposition, investigation, denigration, and
obstruction. No matter. Character was king. Again, the Lincoln Project had it;
Trump followers did not.
The Lincoln Project’s Band of
Brothers—initially four financially strapped, embittered middle-aged white male
Washington insiders—lectured the country that those few, those happy few, that
band of brothers would fight for us. If only they were adequately funded, they
could save us from the moral turpitude of four more years of Trump.
Their ostensible promise to the
Left was that they would hold down their end of the bargain by maintaining the
10-12 percent of Republicans who did not vote for Trump in 2016. In truth, they
may have had nothing to do with preserving a bare six percent of Republicans
who would again vote against Trump. That was a modest aim, but apparently,
every bit of Trump derangement was fundable. Or as the departing, now
mansion-buying Steve Schmidt put it, “I really didn’t give a sh-t how many Republicans were
voting for Trump or not.”
If one were to believe all the
sermonizing of these latter-day Elmer Gantrys, then their inherent paradoxes,
hypocrisies, and selfish agendas might magically disappear.
For example, it was quickly
evident that the Lincoln Project luminaries were not just fixated on destroying
Trump and derailing the most conservative presidential agenda since Ronald
Reagan’s, but also on refuting their own supposedly lifelong commitment to
conservative causes by abetting the Biden campaign and the hard-Left interests
that drove it.
When Republicans hired them,
they were conservative; when they did not, these buskins were liberal. To
ensure their own continued largess, they were not just to be Romneyite
rejectionists, not just Bidenites, but abettors of the neo-socialist cause of
Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, and the squad.
Money was the prime impetus to
the project. Again, we were supposed to forget that some of the Lincoln Project
luminaries were flat broke. Who cared that others owed huge sums in back taxes,
with no apparent way of repayment—given their own reputations for failed
campaigns and expensive, but otherwise mediocre consultancy?
Almost all were eager to set up
shadow service companies to siphon off the expected huge sums from rich
leftists. The project’s directors eagerly assumed their roles of useful idiocy,
their donors that of cynical manipulators. Both conspired to destroy their
shared bogeyman, Donald Trump, and with him all obstacles to the new hard
progressive future.
Before November 3, the media
was not so much interested in the backgrounds or details of these handy moral
preeners. Then suddenly Trump lost the election. Biden was inaugurated. And,
again mysteriously, a recalibrated media found the grifters of the Lincoln
Project expendable, although not so idiotic—given that they had diverted
millions of dollars into their own private coffers in the form of “consulting
fees.”
After November 3, we also
learned that co-founder John Weaver was a sexual bird of prey. He had leveraged his newfound Lincoln largess and influence as
quid pro quos for his own sexual predations—with little apparent regard for the
age of his targeted young male victims.
This sordid fact was apparently
known to many of the pre-election sermonizers at the Lincoln Project. But
again, disclosure of that fact, in a cost-to-benefit analysis, was considered
secondary to preserving the growing revenue stream from the Left.
So these moralists lied about
their ignorance of their own pederast, and apparently on one occasion at least
would-be pedophile, in their midst.
Only after the election, we
learned that Rick Wilson and Weaver in particular were raking in and largely
disguising exorbitant fees, in part to pay huge back tax bills. After the
election, the project’s legal consultants suddenly were “shocked” by such
disclosures, and began leaving the now-discredited project—at precisely the
time when it was in dire need of a legal autopsy and full disclosure.
Rarely has the abyss between
the pretense and the lie been so vast: a group subsidized on purported
conservative moral principles, and aimed at stopping the cultural damage to the
cause by Donald Trump, was funded by left-wingers eager to buy off a few
financially imperiled has-beens, who exaggerated their vestigial consulting
clout among the Washington swamp. But then again, beggars cannot be choosers.
In turn, the Lincoln Project
spent much of its near $100 million on themselves. And the grift sort of
worked, as they puffed themselves up about the Biden win, rescued themselves
from the IRS, splurged on opulent vacation homes and appurtenances—and declared
that ending Trump was the only the lucrative beginning, as they made lists to
hound and denigrate his former appointees.
But the con sputtered out, as
they ended up accusing each other of improprieties. Rodent-like they scrambled
overboard from the now rotting, putrid, and sinking ship.
The loudest of the moralists,
Steven Schmidt, epitomized the absurdity of the project when he contextualized
his silence about the free-wheeling Weaver. Schmidt, you see, was a victim himself, as he related a long ago purported childhood abuse trauma. And
in racialist and chauvinist fashion, as Schmidt left he announced that he
wanted a non-white male to replace him in the almost all-white male
partnership.
Think of the condescending
absurdity: Mostly all-white male swamp creatures were happy to rake in
millions. But when their own moral lapses and depravities destroyed their
grift, they quit—and only then invited in more women or people of color to
sort out the mess they left in their wake.
The only mystery in this entire
moral putridity was who deserved the most censure: the cynical rich leftists
who funded the charade hoping to manipulate pseudo-conservatives to serve their
hard-Left needs—or these two-timing, born-again charlatans who masqueraded as
conservatives to shake down millions from those who could afford to so indulge
themselves.
The common denominator, again, was Trump hatred. And so that noble aim excused every sordid means to enhance it.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo should have become a political pariah by summer 2020. His handling of the COVID-19 virus was all in all the worst in the country. At first, like most politicians, Cuomo had downplayed the chance of a pandemic. Then, like most politicians, he blamed other politicians for downplaying it as he had, once the coronavirus swept his state.
Where were the ventilators, the
hospitals, and the beds, once the virus struck?
For a brief moment, Cuomo
praised Trump, who had sent a hospital ship to Manhattan that went unused, who
gave him a plethora of ventilators that were stockpiled, and who sent an entire
tent hospital to the Javits Center that mostly stayed empty. But as the death
toll mounted, and as the 2020 election heated up, and as Trump’s popularity
dipped in the polls, Cuomo pivoted.
Abruptly, he now blasted Trump
as negligent, derelict, a veritable killer of the innocent. He appeared on his
brother’s CNN show, as they yucked it up to showcase his pandemic
competency—and always the federal government’s purported sudden laxity.
His self-serving daily press
conferences amplified his bombast and snark. And ostensibly they won Cuomo an
Emmy for his televised theatrics. Hollywood’s subtext was that by weaponizing
the epidemic against the now candidate Trump, the useful idiot Cuomo at least
deserved some sort of acting award.
As with the grifters of the
Lincoln Project, as long as Donald Trump was on the ballot, Cuomo was deified.
He wrote his own hagiography about the arts of dealing with a pandemic. He, not
COVID-19 and its victims, was the story. He bantered, strutted, and cajoled on
national television—always eying either the 2020 vice-presidential nomination
or at least the attorney generalship in the Biden Administration.
Cuomo may have had the
second-worst record of any governor in the United States, in terms of deaths
per million from the virus (currently 2,361 per million New York residents,
second to next-door New Jersey). He may have shut down his state, drove out
millions to seek refuge elsewhere, ruined New York’s economy, and yet suffered
more deaths and inflicted more damage on his own than a similarly sized, open,
and economically rebounding Florida and Texas. Still, Cuomo had one advantage
those red-state governors lacked: a large left-wing media platform to blast the
hated Trump.
Now, again mysteriously, after
the inauguration of Joe Biden, we learn the sordid details about Cuomo, in the
fashion revelations appear daily and simultaneously about the Lincoln Project.
It was known long ago that Cuomo, in a panic about the epidemic, had shuttled
infected patients into the state’s extended care homes—and by executive fiat—where
they proved mobile Petri dishes, infecting vulnerable residents, who began
dying en masse.
Cuomo might have stopped the
awful practice. He might have announced the accurate number of the dead to
highlight the need to end immediately the lunatic diversions. Instead, we now
learn he ordered his aides to hide the lethality figures. If he was blasted for
8,000 rest home deaths, then what, he feared, would be the public reaction at
the true figure of 15,000 dead?
Would the president whom he demagogued now demagogue him? So Cuomo lied. He hid the grim data from a media all too eager before November 3 to comply. He lied to the New York state legislature. He lied to the U.S. Department of Justice. He lied to the public. And he assumed these were all “noble lies”—necessary for the good cause of ending Donald Trump.
Before
November 3, Silicon Valley—especially the $4 trillion quartet of Apple,
Facebook, Google, and Twitter—had become unhinged by Donald Trump. They had no
idea what to do with his 70 million Twitter followers, the legions of his
Facebook fans, and the Gmail millions who adored him.
The Left became irate at Big
Tech. What good did it do for the obsequious traditional media to slant the
news, to offer 90 percent negative television and print coverage of Trump, to
smother the achievements of his presidency, when he circumvented the putdowns
through Twitter and Facebook?
Who cared whether they check
marked, or temporarily deplatformed or for a while canceled or shut down Trump
and thousands of his Trumper followers—when he still stirred up millions
through the technological gadgetry and hard-won capital of Silicon Valley’s
progressive anointed? After all, when the Obamas go public in their demand to
expel Trump from social media, who can resist their speaking truth to power?
The January 6 Capitol riot at
last gave Big Tech the long-awaited and long-planned opportunity. And they
seized it in night-of-the-long-knives fashion. Twitter, YouTube, and
Facebook, again mysteriously in concert, banned the president from its
collective platforms of communication—for life.
For the first time in his own
political life, Donald Trump went silent, inert, mute. The media continued its
nonstop invective, but now Trump had no detours around them.
Trump, they alleged, had used
their product to incite violence, perhaps in the very manner Antifa and Black
Lives Matter had used their platforms to plan demonstrations that
characteristically ended in rioting, arson, and looting.
But could not Trump reroute to
the conservative alternative, the upstart non-Silicon Valley Parler?
Big Tech had considered that,
too. So on January 11, 2021, in the same manner of the collisional nocturnal
action of Twitter and Facebook, so too Apple, Amazon, and Google, again
mysteriously, in the wee hours eliminated everyone’s access to Parler, a sort
of neutron bombing of a rising competitor.
In hours, it was clear that
they had effectively strangled Parler in its crib to preempt a Trump and MAGA
mass exodus from Twitter and Facebook, and thus inadvertently transmogrify the
ban into a Parler bonanza.
In the old days, these leftists
of the Stanford-Silicon Valley corridor might have called such collusion market
“rigging,” “fixing,” and “scheming.” Their lopsided market shares might have
earned the muckraking ire of independent journalists aghast at such open
monopolies, boastful cartels, and unapologetic trusts.
But the masters of the universe
now owned the news media and the means of most Americans both to access
information and to communicate over email and social media. Besides, Trump was
widely hated by Big Tech, Wall Street, the media, academia, entertainment,
professional sports, foundations, and the corporate boardrooms. So who would
object to their roles as our 21st-century versions of Jay Gould and
Diamond Jim Fiske?
Hatred of Donald Trump became the
wealthy agnostic’s version of medieval indulgence. One’s collective sins can be
washed away and a once marred soul can still make its way to tech heaven—if the
offender can purchase a contracted exemption.
Hating Donald Trump and doing
something about that venom are just those indulgences. And they can excuse
past, present, and future sin. Bar, cancel, and end a social-media Trump, and
all the wrongs of monopoly, market fixing, cartelizing, and trust creation are
washed away, in the eyes of the progressive supreme deity Reason.
So our cartels are beloved for
colluding and fixing their markets to ban not just Trump but any future access
to their competitors.
Trump is free to tweet and post
whenever and wherever he wants, but there will be nowhere else to tweet and
post. So spoke the liberal descendants of the old Jim Crow racists who insisted
they were free to deny service to anyone they wished, even when there were no
alternative motels or lunch counters to be found.
Hating Donald Trump in the
hater’s eyes makes one moral. But in the real world, such pathological
fixations usually result in abject immorality and moral decline, as the hater
becomes far worse than what he hates.
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