Rhymes With "Lucy Glass Witch"

The Republican-majority House Oversight Committee attempted to prove that the Democrats and the Biden campaign forced Twitter to take down a link to a New York Post front-page story about Hunter Biden's laptop in order to help Joe Biden win the Presidency in 2020 (assuming that the Republicans on the committee don't think Biden stole the election).  They wanted to prove that the Democratic Party used its power to suppress opponents.  Instead, they proved that Trump did just that.

Twitter employee-witnesses admitted that they should not have barred the link to the story about Hunter Biden, given free-speech protection being a cornerstone of the Bill of Rights.  But not only did they say they were wrong to do that, they also said they were wrong to delete a tweet from model Chrissy Teigen, wife of soul singer John Legend, dismissing Trump as a - I'll just come right out and say it - a "pussy ass bitch."

Apparently, calling Trump a pussy got Trump pissy, and he used his influence as President of the United States to have the tweet taken down.  It is common for most dictators to punish anyone who speaks out against them.  I know that a lot of people in the Soviet Union spoke out against Joseph Stalin.

This is what became of them.

Chrissy Teigen is lucky Trump didn't get re-elected.

But the House Oversight Committee's witnesses weren't so lucky.  After failing to corroborate the conspiracy theories of the MAGA Republican right, they got chastened by the GOP committee members who were pretty pissy themselves that their own witnesses wouldn't support their fact-free version of the truth.  It took Democratic committee members like Jamie Raskin (MD) and Maxwell Frost (FL) to assume some sort of control of the meeting and bring it in for a landing.

The crash of a Republican conspiracy-theory talking point will harfly deter the MAGA crowd from trying to humiliate Biden again.  They are, though, more likely to humiliate themselves again. 

Trump Tripped

What did we learn from Michael Cohen's testimony before the House Oversight Committee this past week?  Well, we learned that Donald Trump is a bigot, we learned that Trump personally saw to it that Cohen paid the two women he slept while married to Melania to keep quiet and that Trump reimbursed Cohen personally, and that it turns out that Trump was well aware of the Wikileaks dump of DNC e-mails after all.

In short, we learned nothing new.  But the fact that it all came out of Cohen's mouth made it all the more believable.

Except of course, for the Republicans on the House Oversight Committee, who refused to believe Cohen because he had lied to Congress before.  But Representative Stephen Lynch, a Democrat from Massachusetts, made it clear why the Republicans had problems with Cohen.  It wasn't that they thought Cohen would lie this time, but rather, that he would tell the truth.  And the GOP committee members bashed Cohen without defending Turmp.

Although I'm disappointed in her for her botched roll-out of the Green New Deal - and although I'm flabbergasted by her threats to run liberals against moderate House Democrats like my own congresswoman, Representative Mikie Sherill (D-NJ), in the 2020 primaries if they vote with Republicans on, well, anything - Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) was still impressive in how she got answers from Cohen about the suppressed stories that the National Enquirer and its parent company, American Media Incorporated, have been hiding. Cohen replied that he was no longer certain of where these documents were, and  Ocasio-Cortez was able to get Cohen to tell her and the committee under oath who might know without asking for salacious details about the stories themselves.  He named David Pecker, Barry Levine, and Dylan Howard.

It was kind of entertaining to hear Cohen say that Trump never expected to win the Presidency and only ran to make money off the 2016 campaign, but there's nothing funny about the fact that Trump won and that he's ripping off the country.  It may be, though, the Trump's time is almost up.  Not only is he flailing and flapping like a fish out of water at home, he's bumbling and bungling abroad.  His summit meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un accomplished nothing, and Kim realized, when asking for a relief from sanctions before giving up his nuclear weapons,. that Trump, while stupid, is by no means insane.  Trump's mature handling of an otherwise regrettable situation, however, doesn't excuse his own ignorance of foreign affairs.

But at least the old draft dodger finally made it to Vietnam. 

If Trump finally falls to scandals of his own making, historians will say that it started here.  If he comes back stronger than ever, the Democrats will be blamed for blowing a golden opportunity to win back power in 2020.  Alas, that may yet happen.