Deeply Concerned

By D. S. Mitchell

I am generally considered pro-active. I  tend to handle problems when they initially present themselves, not wait until I have a full blown emergency.  I learned this lesson from my mother, and it is a lesson that has served me well for my last 71 years of life. The Trump Administration, headed by Donald Trump, has not learned that lesson. And as such, we have a major set of scandals threatening to blow up this White House and its corrupt, narcissistic, Mafioso occupant.

Calamity Politics is a political blog bringing news to my readers with an often biting and sarcastic commentary that I hope is at least mildly amusing.  I pray daily for the Impeachment of Donald J. Trump and Mike Pence. Please join me in that prayer.

The last two posts from Calamity Politics have been about 1.)President Trump’s Conflicts of Interest issues in at least 30 separate cases, and 2.)Donald Jr’s. meeting with a Russian attorney in June of 2016

Although both scandals at first seem separate, after about a minute and a half  of thought,  I decided, No. These are very much the same story. The story of a family that believes they are above the law.  Corruption and coverup seem to come naturally to the Trump team. It must be in the genes.

Paul Krugman, writing for the New York Times on July 10, 2016 indicted the entire GOP, saying, “It’s not just Donald Trump: The whole GOP has become a post-truth party. And I see no sign it will ever improve.” Krugman continued, “Political spin used to have limits: Politicians who wanted to be taken seriously wouldn’t go around claiming up is down and black is white.”

In that same story, Krugman further asserted that “conservatives keep scaling new heights of dishonesty in their attempt to sell their reverse Robin Hood agenda, of tax cuts for the rich and pain for the poor.”

On July 13, 2017 Ross Douthat published an article in the NY Times veering back directly to Trump, blaming him personally for most of the negative press, “a good rule of thumb for dealing with Donald Trump: Everyone who gives him the benefit of the doubt eventually regrets it.”

The argument that Trump is a political neophyte and that he is still hanging onto the 1980’s vision of the two great powers co-operating and working toward a world of greater understanding has been dashed by the revelations of the last week from Donald Trump, Jr.

It is no longer arguable that there is a normal explanation for Trump’s seeming love affair with all things Russian.  Donald, Jr. in an admitted effort by the Trump campaign to gather negative information on Hillary Clinton met with Russian nationals.  Those attendees’ have now been shown to have serious links to the Russian government.  Several high ranking Trump campaign and family members were at the meeting, including Jared Kushner, Donald Jr., and Paul Manafort.

Donald Trump, Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort had a meeting with “identified representatives  of the Russian government” in which, “it was explicitly promised that damaging information on Hillary Clinton would be supplied as part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”

So, we know that the Trump insiders were willing to meet with an adversarial government, a government that is actively working world wide to undermine the power and influence of the United States.  The Trump team had every reason to believe any information provided in that meeting was likely to have been hacked–more specifically, stolen–to have come into Russian hands, in the first place.

A direct quote from the emails between Rob Goldstone and Donald Jr., indicate that Junior was not skeptical, but rather eager, and in fact enthusiastically welcomed the encounter saying, “if it’s what you say, I love it.” Never seeming to question, why would a foreign government want to help a particular candidate? What will be the eventual cost for such support?

To make it look even worse, the emails and statements by Junior did not come out until the pending  release by a media outlet of the same emails forced his release of the emails.  His story, flipped and flopped and has to this day not settled on the whole story or the whole truth.

Everybody in that meeting lied, or conveniently forgot about their little get together.  Douthat’s article states, “So while this is not direct evidence that the president of the United States was complicit in a virtual burglary, perpetrated against the other party during an election season,  is strong evidence that we should drop the presumption that such collusion is an extreme or implausible scenario.”

Just imagine that the Watergate burglars had been foreign hackers.  Think about it, seriously, when viewed that way, there is an entirely new image. Why does it seem different when the burglar has a crowbar to jimmy a window, or a burglar attacking from behind the screen of a computer.  My private information is actually far more valuable to me than a television set, a stereo, or a gold bracelet.

Douthat concludes his piece, “anyone presuming his (Trump) innocence at this point should have all the confidence of Chris Christie awaiting his cabinet appointment….”

Finally, the conservative writer, and political analyst Charles Krauthammer  wrote for the Washington Post a scathing article on 7/14/2017 lashing out at the Trump administration saying, “Bungled collusion is still collusion no matter how you spin it.”

Krauthammer recounted that the White House for six months has claimed the Russian scandal was a ‘hoax’, ‘fake news’, ‘democratic hysteria’, nothing more than ‘innuendo’. “Yes, there had been meetings with Russian officials, some only belatedly disclosed. But, that is circumstantial evidence at best.”

Krauthammer continues, ” The evidence is now shown. This is not hearsay, not fake news, not unsourced leaks. This is an email chain released by Donald Trump, Jr. himself.  The Kremlin  is willing to share troves of incriminating documents from the Crown Prosecutor (error: Britain has a CP. Russia has a State Prosecutor.)”

When Donald, Jr., emailed back his willingness to meet, “he was in.” Once you’ve said, “I’m in,” it makes no difference that the meeting was a bust, that the intermediary brought no such goods.  What matters is what Donald, Jr. thought going into that meeting, as well as Jared Kushner and then campaign manager Paul Manafort, who were copied on the correspondence, invited to the meeting, and attended.”

Donald, Jr.,  told Sean Hannity that the meeting was “just a wasted 20 minutes, which was a shame.”

Krauthammer’s article asks, “A shame? On the contrary, a stroke of luck. Had the lawyer had real stuff to deliver, Donald, Jr., and the others would be in far deeper legal trouble.  It turned out to be incompetent amateur collusion, this was keystone cops collusion,   comically failed collusion. That does not erase the fact that three top Trump campaign officials were ready to play.”

“It may turn out that they did later collaborate more fruitfully.  We don’t know.  But even if nothing else is found, the evidence is damning.’

Krauthammer goes on to attack the Trump apologists who are claiming such interaction between the Trump campaign and the Russian government is “no big deal.”  First, the Trumpites have been telling us for six months that no collusion ever happened, and now they say: Sure it happened.  So, what? Everyone does it.”

“What’s left of your credibility when you make such a casual about-face?, Krauthammer asks.

Secondly, he states, “No, not everyone does it. It’s one thing to be open to opposition research dug up in Indiana.  But not dirt from Russia, a hostile foreign power that has repeatedly invaded its neighbors, that buzzes our planes and ships in international waters, that opposes our every move and objective around the globe.  What Donald, Jr.–and Kushner and Manafort–did may not be criminal.  But it is not merely stupid–it is also deeply wrong, a fundamental violation of any code of civic honor.

I leave it to the lawyers to adjudicate the legalities  of  unconsummated collusion.  But you don’t need to be a lawyer to see that the Trump defense — collusion as a desperate Democratic fiction designed to explain away a lost election–is now officially dead.”

Their stories change daily and sometimes hourly.  Head spinning deceit and lies to an unheard of extent. In fact, there seems to be no limit to the extent of the deception. A surrogate lines up “the story” and then one of the Trumps runs their car over the surrogates foot with a tweet, a statement, or an interview.

Trump has sent a Tweet from Paris blamed Loretta Lynch and the Obama Administration for wrongly allowing the Russian lawyer, Natalia Vaselnitskaya into the country.  Krauthammer swung back at Trump Tweets, calling it a “red herring the size of a whale.”

Is it all pathological? Or, are the shifting stories just an attempt to cover up an ever growing ugly scenario, that could get uglier and uglier.  With the Trump group it is hard to know. In fact, the two could easily overlap.

I have lived through 13 presidencies. That makes me really old and I have seen a lot. Some presidents I could ignore, while others I could not. I have for the most part felt we could survive a bad president, out of the thirteen there were a couple really bad ones, but the country survived and kept moving jerkily forward.

But now, I’m deeply concerned. Not once did I ever doubt the patriotism of any one of those presidents.  Never once, did I suspect that the sitting president had interacted with a foreign power to win election to the highest office in the United States.  But now, I’m deeply concerned.  Never once have I heard a President deny an allegation for months and then when the lie was exposed the President said, “It’s politics, it’s a dirty business and everyone does it, it’s called ‘opposition research’.  Anyone would have taken that meeting.”

How do months of denials from the Trump block pivot from “nothing Russian going on here”, to suddenly in one tweet, morph into “everybody does it.”

I’m deeply concerned and I hope you are to. Join the Resistance. Do your part, call your elected officials, email the same officials, call them again, make your voice heard. Neighborhood organizing, and protesting back up your words.  Don’t give in to exhaustion or disappointment. The road is long and the challenges great, but together we can remove this cancer from the White House, but it will take work and commitment and a hell of a lot of phone calls.

Even Fox News commentator Chris Wallace seemed to question the Trump campaign activities saying, “This should not be Pro-Trump vs Anti-Trump.  If you are a fair minded person you ought to be concerned about the fact that we were repeatedly misled about what this meeting concerned.”

Wallace didn’t stop with that but instead encouraged “anybody who has inside knowledge  should come forward with every single contact they ever had with a Russian. Come clean, tell it now, let the chips fall where they may.  And in fact, if there’s no crime you’ll survive it.  It will be embarrassing but it is better than this trickle, this daily drip” of new undisclosed Russian contacts.

Join the Resistance

DarleneC