Waiting for Mueller is now an unacceptable and inadequate response from the national legislature. Mueller’s job is to see if the president* and his minions should go to jail. The House’s job is to determine if the president* should not be the president* anymore.
Bring it. Impeach the sonofabitch. If nothing else you give him a fresh case of ants in his pants to distract him from rendering the Republic uninhabitable.
The pestilence of the Benighted States, Wally O’Steele, a.k.a. Artie Deal, wants a Big, Beautiful Wall® at the nation’s southern boundary to keep brown people* from crossing the border to work anywhere other than at his hotels or golf courses.
Unable to procure funding for same, he has instead walled off the feddle gummint from its own tax-paying citizens, idling more than a few of them in the process and forcing others to work without pay while selling their Christmas presents on eBay to keep from freezing to death in the dark.
It’s a hard reign, and the water — if that’s what it is — just keeps rising.
Man the lifeboats and rig for heavy seas, matey — it’s the latest episode of Radio Free Dogpatch.
* Russian oligarchs and Saudi princelings get a pass, of course, along with a coupon for a complimentary fluff and fold at Artie Deal’s Motor Inn & Money Laundry.
I just rang up our freshman representative in DeeCee, Deb Haaland, and asked that she and her colleagues start working up articles of impeachment.
Haaland was quick out of the chute with a response to last night’s State of the Wall Address, saying:
“The real national emergency right now is thousands of New Mexicans not being able to put food on the table or pay rent, because of the government shutdown. New Mexicans need quality public education, good paying jobs, and a renewable-energy economy — the wall does nothing to address those issues. On day one, the House passed a bill to get federal workers back to work and paid, and now it’s time for the Senate and the President to do their part.”
I imagine that the congresswoman has a pretty full schedule, being new to the job, but as I told the woman who answered the phone, “This administration is a cartoon that never was funny, and it’s long past time the show was canceled.”
During his nearly two years in office Zinke came under at least 15 investigations, including inquiries into his connection to a real estate deal involving a company that Interior regulates, whether he bent government rules to allow his wife to ride in government vehicles and allowing a security detail to travel with him on a vacation to Turkey at considerable cost.
I guess Turkey was too far a trot on horseback, alone, like Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name (in this case, more like a Man With No Shame). And now there’s one less horse’s ass in this criminal clusterfuck. Two, if you count the horse.
But before we cheer too loudly, consider this, from The New York Times:
Rather than an end to Mr. Zinke’s pro-fossil fuel policies, the resignation quite likely signals a passing of the playbook. Mr. Zinke’s deputy, David Bernhardt, a former oil lobbyist, is expected to step in as acting head of the department.
In the meantime, Charles P. Pierce uses his weekly newsletter to call for the impeachment process to start, today. Sez Chazbo:
If the House doesn’t begin its own inquiry, and very soon, then the impeachment power in the Constitution is what Jefferson called it — a scarecrow. … The Founders made it a point in the Constitution that it would be the House, the half of the national legislature thought to be closest to the people, that would possess “the sole power of impeachment.” The exercise of that power begins with the power to investigate independently—independently, not only of other investigations, but also independently of political calculation and institutional timidity.
Nero didn’t get it either and cashed out the hard way.
OK, let’s see if I’ve got this right:
“A major scientific report issued by 13 federal agencies on Friday presents the starkest warnings to date of the consequences of climate change for the United States, predicting that if significant steps are not taken to rein in global warming, the damage will knock as much as 10 percent off the size of the American economy by century’s end.”
In response, the courtiers attending His Most Pissant Majesty, King Donald the Short-fingered, Terror of Twitter, are focused like the proverbial laser beam on whether trans folk may serve in the Empire’s armed forces.
Got it. Makes perfect sense. See, if they’re not camping in camo’ down by The Wall*, or using the wrong latrines in Afghanistan, they’ll be available to fight fire and flood elsewhere, p’raps in more fashionable neighborhoods, in order that the gentry may be both protected and entertained.
Speaking as an angry white man, all these angry white men are starting to piss me off.
That eternal sense of entitlement was on full peacock display in yesterday’s Cirque du SoWhat? over whether the mendacious and elusive Bart O’Kavanaugh can stand erect long enough to make it to the Supreme Court.
The well of privilege seems bottomless from the top, and these angry white men will continue to draw from it until the bucket finally comes up filled with their obituaries.
Then, I suppose, their angry white sons will inherit the family business.
That business is bankrupt, but failure is for lesser men, and women. The angry white man picks himself up using our bootstraps and plows forward, like the dolt who, when told that he’s penniless, broke, flat busted, says, “That can’t be true. I still have checks in my checkbook.”
Actually, it’s our checkbook. And one of these days the angry white man’s mouth is going to use it to write a check his ass can’t cash.
The angry white man still has that big orange credit card we gave him back in 2016. And he’s gonna use that to buy shit the country doesn’t need and can’t afford until we take it away from him.
Remember your Martin Luther King: “We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”
One senator could make a difference? What a Capitol idea.
That’s all it would take, given the present composition of the Senate, for that august body to do its fucking job for a change.
As James Fallows notes:
Every one of them swore an oath to defend the U.S. Constitution, not simply their own careerist comfort. And not a one of them, yet, has been willing to risk comfort, career, or fund-raising to defend the constitutional check-and-balance prerogatives of their legislative branch. …
In any circumstances, the Senate’s arcane procedures mean that lone senators, determined to make a stand, can hold up business or block nominees to get their way. When the ruling party holds only 51 seats, or for the moment 50, the power of any one or two members goes up astronomically. With great power comes great responsibility—a responsibility that 50 men and women are choosing to shirk.
This is not the President Pigasus for which the Yippies had hoped.
There are seven pigs for every person in Iowa.
In DeeCee, of course, the pig-to-person ratio skews even higher on the Sooey Scale, and thus the relentless oinking from that quarter has become deafening.
Even tools like Texas Ted Cruz the Gucci Shitkicker, Orrin “Down the” Hatch and Joe “The Moderate Mannequin” Manchin find the separation of children from their parents distasteful. And those guys will swallow anything.
Ironically, this administration may have provided its own solution. Il Douche wants a space force? Fine. Let’s draft him and every one of his appointees, fixers, enablers, thugs and stooges, and deploy them via Elon Muskmobile to Mars.
The Martians may detain them in cages for a spell, just to see whether “they could be murderers or thieves and so much else.” Especially since we’ll stencil that warning on the exterior of the spacecraft. “Contents: Murderers, thieves and so much else.”
But hey, they’ll just be trying to protect their interplanetary borders. Ack ack!
I thought, I am on top of the earth and I don't work for the government.
—Thomas McGuane, "Another Horse"
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