TomFlannery.com

 If a president did something that he believes will help him get elected, in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment.

–Alan Dershowitz 

I just want to write all of this down so I can remember what I was thinking when democracy was strangled to death. On live television. It’s been said that “democracy dies in darkness”. Well, that may be true. But it’s gasping for breath with all the lights on as well.

This is where we’re at. The initial argument was that the President did nothing wrong. That democrats made up impeachment charges and that there was no quid pro quo in Ukraine. All that’s gone now. John Bolton’s upcoming book destroyed that narrative.

So once there was no quid pro quo. It was a “perfect phone call”.

And now? Well….not so much.

“Quid pro quo doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if there was a quid pro quo or not.”

–-Senator Ted Cruz

“Just because actions meet a standard of impeachment does not mean it is in the best interest of the country to remove a President from office.”

–Senator Marco Rubio

You could make this stuff up I suppose. But you no longer have to.

So they’ve got one more card.

“For the sake of argument, one could assume everything attributable to John Bolton is accurate and still the House case would fall well below the standards to remove a president from office,”

-South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham

So there you go.

Using this logic, a President could order the arrest (or assassination) of a political opponent, which would obviously assist in his getting re-elected, and quite legally argue that he did so for our own good. Because it is what he thinks is “best for the country”. Or he could decide that keeping blacks and Hispanics from voting would vastly help his re-election, and thus legally restrain them from casting a ballot.

This all sounds like really bad third-rate Orwell……but it’s happening. The President’s lawyer is standing up on the floor of the US Senate arguing for a dictatorship. And nobody seems to have the balls to stop it. The media seems paralyzed….cowed. Like not wanting to admit that somebody farted in the waiting room.

Look, I get it. This was maybe even fun a while. It was like a classroom erupting into chaos when the teacher left the room. Throwing spitballs and erasers at each other. Peeking at the grade book. Setting up the whoopee cushion. Fucking around with the status quo and all that. “Draining the swamp” even though….well….you know.

But this is what happens when the teacher who left the room falls down the stairs and breaks her leg.

It’s not funny anymore.

With this argument, the President comes out of this even more powerful. He has, essentially, unchecked powers. He has the mother of all excuses. For the upcoming 2020 election, the tiny-fingered gloves will come off. There’s nothing off the table now. Who’s to say that even if he loses the election, he doesn’t simply reject the outcome as not in the public’s best interest? Who’s gonna stop him? We’ve had various “adults in the room”. Even from the military. Each one has been ritually debased. House and Senate republicans don’t just drink his kool-aid….they bathe in the stuff. The ones who do speak out do so only after announcing they’re not gonna run for office anymore. Democrats just keep getting rolled. They’ve been unable to even slow him down. And through it all his poll numbers have remained consistent. Adoring crowds lap up his bile. He hasn’t lost a single supporter that I’m aware of. Call it a cult of personality. Whatever. Maybe he’s got Hoover-like files on everybody….and dangles this over their heads like Putin’s piss-tape hangs over his own. It has become the great political question of our time. How has such an casually cruel, wholly ignorant, corrupt, repugnant, friendless piece of human garbage risen this high and this unchecked for this long?

Are we just fucking a nation of imbeciles?

Whatever happened to the constitution?

At this point I expect at least 4 more years regardless of the election results. That’s where we are at boys and girls. Ironically, quite Putin-esque. Which was perhaps the goal all along.

Make no mistake. The damage has already been done. The shit is cake-dried to the walls, and even when he goes away, the stench will remain. History will not be kind to him, nor to those who enabled him. We’ll be left with a minefield of lies and brazen corruption that generations will have to navigate.

There will be attempts to re-write history as well. But the window is closing. It’s the last gasp of the old rich white men using fear and propaganda like a cudgel…..and even though they ain’t going quietly, they’ll soon be outnumbered.

Let’s hope what replaces them smells better.

In a bit..

–tf