One-Two Punch

The Russians are interfering in the U.S. presidential election, and Trump fired the acting Director of National Intelligence and replaced him with a hack for telling Congress about it.  One, two.

Devin Nunes informed Trump that Acting Director of National Intelligence Joe Maguire informed Congress about the Russians, and Trump got so mad because his cover was blown.  He then blamed the Democrats for starting false rumors about the Russians after firing Maguire for telling the truth.

I can understand why Maguire was fired as acting Director of National Intelligence. No one likes a snitch.

See, that's how organized crime operates, and that's how the Trump White House operates.  

No one believes the stories that the Democrats were involved in a nefarious disinformation plot, not because the Democrats wouldn't do such a thing because the Democrats don't have the ability to do such a thing.  Another lack of ability plaguing the Democrats concerns selecting a presidential nominee.

In Washington, White House crimes are organized. The Democrats are not.

I'm too dumbfounded to say any more . . ..  It took me half an hour of time - during which I spent surfing social media - to come up with this much to say.

Robert Mueller - What Did I Tell You?

There is a metric unit of length measurement called the micrometer, and it is so small it takes a thousand of them to comprise a millimeter.  And if I had the ability to measure anything in micrometers, I still wouldn't be able to measure any appreciable movement of the needle toward impeaching Trump after former special counsel Robert Mueller's testimony before Congress last week.

Mueller testified before two separate House committees last week and Democratic efforts to turn the dry words of his report on Trump and Russian interference in the 2016 election into electrifying prose for the cameras.  Instead he mostly gave monosyllabic answers to what were mostly "yes or no" questions.  When he did elaborate on an answer, or when the answer he gave was not to a "yes or no" question, he sounded like a non-English speaker ignorant of Tudor history reciting Shakespeare sonnets off a page.  Mueller had said that he was not going to go beyond the parameters of his report.  He was not going to provide any new or eye-opening information.  What, may I ask, did the Democrats expect?     

And so the Democrats remain divided on what to do about Trump even as the Republicans are united and confident going forward.  Also, barring a major disaster other than himself, Donald Trump will be the 2020 Republican presidential nominee.  The Democrats, saddled with a choice of two dozen candidates for their party's presidential nomination, have a way to go before even a quarter of them get eliminated - and the ones who will be eliminated first are the perpetual one-percenters in the polls that never had a chance anyway.

Meanwhile, the Democrats were able to salvage something out of the Mueller debacle by getting more attention focused on Russian resole to interfere in the 2020 election.  The Senate Intelligence Committee has just issued a report warning of the danger of Russian interference in all fifty states.  Except that Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell won't allow a vote on any election security bills passed by the House, and other Republicans dismiss the idea of a threat to or electoral system.  You know what that means.  It means we're licked.

As those two wise men Lionel Richie and Michael Jackson once wrote, we can't go on pretending day-by-day that someone, somewhere, will soon make a change. We can now stop pretending that Robert Mueller was that person.

Troll Trouble

Robert Mueller has caught so many parties in his Russia probe that I can't keep up with them. So I'll focus on the one that may be most important - this past month he indicted thirteen Russian nationals and three Russian companies on charges of conspiracy for trying to persuade voters in 2016 to support Hillary Clinton's various opponents and vote against Hillary herself.  The companies include the Internet Research Agency, based St. Petersburg (no, not St. Petersburg, Florida), which produced the political propaganda aimed at American social media and the two companies that helped finance it.

The tactic was simple - troll the voters.  The object was to discourage people from supporting Hillary and make sure she lost.  The Russians posted memes and fake Facebook pages promoting not just Donald Trump but Bernie Sanders in the primaries and Dr. Jill Stein in the general election.  There is not proof that Trump knew about this or was involved in it, and Trump naturally insists that it exonerates him.  It doesn't, of course, but it lets him off the hook for the time being, and it also buys Mueller some time.  And in that time so far,  he's managed to indict former Trump camping manager Paul Manafort on money laundering and bank fraud charges after former Trump aide Rick Gates pleaded guilty to fraud and agreed to cooperate with Mueller.  Gates had lied about the details of a 2013 conversation about Ukraine involving Manafort, a member of Congress, and a lobbyist.  Manafort and Gates have consulted Ukrainian politicians.

As for the 2016 disinformation campaign . . . well, it definitely proves even to those who dismiss the bot stories and the Russian "fake news" strategy as drivel that the Russians indeed tried to influence the outcome of the election.  But let me be clear.  I do believe that the Russians interfered in the 2016 presidential election and were using an online disinformation campaign.  I just don't think it determined the outcome.  To suggest otherwise would be to absolve Hillary Clinton of blame for blowing the easiest election for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1988 (2000?  No, Al Gore won and the Presidency was stolen from him!) and would be to suggest that voters who went for Bernie Sanders in the primaries and went third-party in the general election (myself included in the latter instance) don't have minds of their own and are subject to Russian brainwashing.  The people who blame the Russians for influencing the outcome, by the way, are the same people who dismissed Ronald Reagan's Soviet-bashing as xenophobic paranoia.  I'd vote for someone other than Hillary in opposition to Trump all over again.

I just don't know if I would still vote for Dr. Stein.  As a presidential candidate, Dr. Stein was not the best messenger the Green Party could have gotten behind to promote and advance its agenda.  Also, she failed to get the Greens to five percent nationwide, rendering them ineligible for federal matching funds in 2020.  Dr. Stein is right when she says that the Democratic establishment is trying to silence liberal voices both within and outside of its own party, and she noted that the Greens were promoted with a couple of Russian-generated memes out of a trillion that were posted on social media.  But her willingness to meet with anyone and everyone on the subject of global affairs - including the infamous Moscow dinner that placed her at the same table with Vladimir Putin and not-yet-then Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn - continues to embarrass some of us who voted for her.  To be fair, she did stress before that her trip to Russia was "about promoting diplomacy, peace, and international cooperation on pressing global issues," and that she was one of several Americans at that Moscow dinner promoting a saner and more just foreign policy.  And there was no intent on her part to conceal her dealings in Russia.  But it's not Dr. Stein's transparency that's in question; it's her judgment.  She wanted to be taken seriously as a third-party U.S. presidential candidate, yet she was seen hobnobbing not only with America's worst foreign adversary but also with its most ethically dubious retired Army man, Michael Flynn.

As a Martin O'Malley supporter, I wonder if I should have written O'Malley in back in November 2016.  The only problem is that you don't vote directly for a presidential candidate in the United States - you vote for Electoral College candidates pledged to vote for your presidential candidate.  New Jersey has fourteen electoral votes, and you vote for a whole slate of electors without even knowing their identities.  There are no Electoral College candidates for an undeclared write-in presidential candidate, of course, so how could I vote for fourteen O'Malley electors who didn't exist?  My vote for Dr. Stein actually offended some of my friends, which wasn't worth it.  One such friend, a dear, sweet woman I've know for a few years now, chastened me for my vote and told me I helped Trump.  

I give up.  I'd rather have voted for O'Malley and been ridiculed than voted for a third-party candidate on the ballot and be scorned.  Why not write in O'Malley? After all, no Russian meme encouraged anyone to vote for him in any way, shape or form.

And I've got a mind of my own.

(Oh yeah, the Democratic rebuttal to the Nunes memo was finally released.  Yay.  Whoppee. :-p)

Russian Dressing

Okay, let me get a few things straight about Russia and Vladimir Putin, who net with Donald Trump this past week in Hamburg . . .

I believe that the Russians hacked the U.S. presidential election campaign this past fall.  I believe Putin had a hand in it.  I do not, however, believe that Russian meddling caused Hillary Clinton to lost the election.  Hillary Clinton caused Hillary Clinton to lose the election.  The suggestion that the Russians manipulated the voters into supporting Trump with false news stories is based on the idea that Hillary ran an effective campaign with a positive message, and that she had a solid lead among the voters.  In fact, her campaign was fundamentally flawed, she did not try to shore up her base or key states that gave Trump his victory, and her only message was that she wasn't as bad as Trump.  And Trump voters - who were only 46 percent of the American electorate - were going to support him no matter what.  The Russians meddled, all right, but Hillary could have gone on the offensive by making her case better, or at all, instead of coasting on "inevitability."  And if Trump did collude with Putin, well, an investigation should find proof of that.  Until then, we have to remember that Trump is innocent until proven guilty.  That's why we have investigations!

Having said that, I also think that Trump didn't do this country any favors by accepting Putin's denial of interfering with the American elections at face value; this only makes these ongoing investigations more difficult to pursue . . . if not impossible.  Trump now wants to work with Putin in ending the conflict in Syria. Good news, until you realize that he is willing to do it entirely on Putin's terms.  The Russian president now has carte blanche to operate as he sees fit, even at the risk of diminishing American interests . . . because Trump doesn't know the difference between détente and capitulation.

It doesn't really matter whether Putin interfered or not.  In Trump, he got what he wanted.

Well, THAT Was Weird . . .

Former FBI director James Comey's testimony about Donald Trump in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee this past Thursday was pretty damning, showing how the Trump White House is more off base than we thought and leaving a lot of people to think that Trump's days in the Presidency are numbered.  Especially after Comey told of Trump having him alone in the White House to tell him to go easy on then-national security adviser Michael Flynn.  But while partisan attitudes on the Senate Intelligence Committee may be softening, partisanship outside the committee may be hardening. Trump supporters found Comey to be lacking in credibility, and while he suggested the possibility of obstruction of justice involving the investigation into collusion between the Russians and the Trump campaign, CNN's Chris Cillizza has noted that Trump's "hope" that the  investigation would get dropped, isn't the same as Trump flat-out telling Comey to drop it.  But Trump's pressure on Comey and Comey's recounting of the incidents of pressure don't look good for Trump.  Nor does it look good for Trump when he suggests that Comey is lying.

And why is John McCain still in the Senate?  He turns 81 this year, and he would be enjoying retirement right now if he and not Barack Obama had been elected to the first of two terms as President in 2008, and so he should just go back to Arizona and put his feet up and toss a cold one while looking back on a distinguished career in public service.  Instead he's still in the Senate, and he was so off his game he suggested at one point that the FBI should investigate whether Hillary Clinton colluded with the Russians.  How did she collude with Vladimir Putin?  To have Trump win so she could blame her loss on Jill Stein?

McCain also referred to the fired FBI director as "President Comey," which may have given the old G-man ideas.

McCain sought to clarify his line of questioning after the fact.  "What I was trying to get at," he said, "was whether Mr. Comey believes that any of his interactions with the President rise to the level of obstruction of justice.  In the case of Secretary Clinton’s e-mails, Mr. Comey was willing to step beyond his role as an investigator and state his belief about what ‘no reasonable prosecutor’ would conclude about the evidence. I wanted Mr. Comey to apply the same approach to the key question surrounding his interactions with President Trump - whether or not the President’s conduct constitutes obstruction of justice. While I missed an opportunity in today’s hearing, I still believe this question is important, and I intend to submit it in writing to Mr. Comey for the record."

I may intend to submit in writing a request for Comey to run for office - any office.

Meanwhile, British Prime Minister Theresa May appears to have lost her Tory majority in Parliament, she may lose her office, and by calling a snap election in Britain, she may have lost her mind.  This may put an end to Brexit. But Britain will still be in the Paris Agreement.

Oh yeah, record heat is on tap for my area this week . . .