TIME FOR AN EXORCISM
At long last, the tide has turned and the Orange-Crested Swamp Monster from the Triassic is in full retreat. Once more, Donald J. Trump, the self-proclaimed stable genius, is—consciously or not—in self-destructive mode. His horses have fled the barn, leaving behind only the bats in the belfry and the toads around him. Might this madness also explain his antic threats to arrest Adam Schiff for treason and his warning of a civil war to come if he is removed from power through impeachment?
Fear not. Coming to our defense is the politically gifted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has caught the impeachment wave at just the right time to skillfully deliver us to that bright golden shore…a nation sans Trump. We all have a brave anonymous whistleblower to thank for our likely deliverance. He or she gave us a detailed report on how the president violated the Constitution by trying to extort from Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky dirt on Joe Biden in exchange for the $391 million in aid—$250 million of it for weapons in its defense against Russian aggression. Congress had already passed the aid package, but Trump held-up their release to get his quid pro quo, thus delaying weapons needed to hold off the Russians, who had had already taken by force of arms Crimea and big chunk of eastern Ukraine in a shadow war. (Question for myself: Was Putin in on this scheme that favored his forces?)
Trump and his lickspittle attendants seem to have been caught flat-footed by the Whistleblower’s complaint. The usually prompt GOP fog machine was slow to sputter into life, and then only belched out sporadic gusts of fecal wind to cloak the naked truth. The first feeble salvo of “there was no quid pro quo” (Trump’s still using it) fell short; correct, the president never got his dirt on Biden, but the very attempt to solicit interference in our politics from a foreign country is unconstitutional.
Next came the claim (still resounding in the boondocks) that the president had broken no law with his actions. More GOP slight-of-word deception; by “law” they mean statute law, say, a state law against driving without a license, not Constitutional law, which considers his conniving with a foreign nation for political help an abuse of power and takes precedent over any other legal code in force.
More recently we heard the “it’s only hearsay—the Whistleblower didn’t personally hear the call in question” defense. Really? Are those folks serious? The President’s own redacted version of his call to Zelensky admits to the high crime alleged in the complaint. Moreover, according to the Whistleblower, he heard from “more than half a dozen government officials” in putting together his complaint. (Our president has now magically reduced that number in his stressed mind to one “spy” who supplied the Whistleblower his information; that spy then passed the “lies” to “Shifty Adam Schiff,” Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, who Trump has branded a “traitor.” From Trump’s own mouth, both have cause to fear for their lives. Isn’t threatening a judge or a witness another cause for impeachment?)
Let’s consider for a moment an inherent weakness of the “it’s-only-hearsay” argument. Where do hearsayers get their knowledge? Must be from either the perpetrator or perpetrators of an event, or from eyewitnesses to that event, via leaks. If the event is illegal or shady, it’s the eyewitnesses who are most likely the leakers, not the perpetrators. Doubters might compare the testimony of the Whistleblowers’ six or more informants (suspected witnesses) about the crucial July 25 Trump-Zelensky phone call with the lies and deceptions of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a perpetrator who, after more than a week of lies and deceptions, finally copped to being on the line listening. Let’s hear more hearsay.
During the Mueller Investigation, we often heard discussed “consciousness of guilt,” indications that a perpetrator knew he was doing wrong at the time. Well, we have a singular example of that in Ukraine-gate, too. Seems Trump and his team reviewed the transcript of the July 25th phone call with Zelensky and decided it was too hot to handle. So they moved it from the computer archive where state-to-state communications are normally stored to the top-secret lock box very few can access. Rumors have it that the Trumpers have also hid transcripts of the president’s phone calls with Putin and the Saudi Royal Family and possibly other head-of-state butchers.
The impeachment issue could be quickly resolved with congressional committees’ access to those “misfiled” documents. All Americans deserve to know what “deals” Trump made with our skins in his “secret transactions.” Have we been sold out to Vlad? Un? Bin Salman? Rupert?
We must be told.
Until then, let us pray his minders are able to keep the “Unhinged One” away from the nuclear football.