"See you in October." Those were my last words last month. And here we are.
My sports-style sign-off was based on the fact that, not long before my last post, Nancy Pelosi finally announced that the House of Representatives was going to begin a formal impeachment process against T****. Since then, quite a bit has happened to fuel the media and political frenzy surrounding the process, much of it related to the now-infamous Ukrainian quid pro quo and the evidence that establishes its existence beyond any doubt, reasonable or otherwise. On top of that, and worse in so many ways, there was the systematic slaughter of our erstwhile but highly effective allies, the Syrian Kurds, green-lighted by the Criminal-in-Chief himself.
Like much of what has happened in this country over the past almost-three years, I find myself thinking that these events, like so many similar ones before them are shocking/not shocking. That is, they would be shocking coming from any of the other 43 individuals to have held the office. But not from this one.
The only given with T**** is that he has absolutely no ability to separate any aspect of his life--his family, his businesses, and now the country he's supposed to lead--from his individual interests. He thinks that being responsive to the needs of others is for wussies, even though the Constitution and history ought to bind him to doing exactly that. Whatever can be said about his mistreatment of the Ukrainians and the Kurds, there is only one clear winner as a consequence of it--and it's not the United States.
It's Russia. And Vladimir Putin. Putin's Nos. 1 and 2 foreign policy objectives, as part of his overall plan to restore Soviet-level hegemony, are to push westward against NATO and southward against American interests in the Middle East (i.e., Israel and oil). And T**** has spent the whole of his presidential term serving both interests, culminating in the revelations (in the case of Ukraine) and the events (in the case of the Kurds) of the past several weeks.
All of this has made the impeachment work of Pelosi's House committees much harder in one sense. There's now more to investigate, which may delay the completion of their work well past the original informal Thanksgiving deadline. At the same time, it may make it easier. In fact, I have believed for some time (and continue to do so) that all of the T**** shenanigans boil down to one basic and highly criminal issue: rather than viewing his office as a public trust, one that requires some level of personal sacrifice for the good of the nation as a whole, he simply sees it as just another property among many property that he "owns," something to be used and abused for personal gain.
This, of course, is why he can't show his tax returns; those returns almost certainly would provide a road map of how this process has worked for him in business, and how it continues to work for him as President. In particular, it would show how far he has been willing to go in the selling of his public office: to the point at which he has been actively working as an agent for a foreign power against the interests of the country whose fate has been placed in his hands by a theoretically democratic election. And now, based on recent events, we may not even need to show what the returns would show: that T**** is guilty of bribery and treason, to say nothing of other high crimes and misdemeanors.
The real problem, however, is that this is no longer just about T****. If it were, I would treat his eventual removal from office as a foregone conclusion. But I can't do that.
T**** didn't come to us out of nowhere. His presidency is the culmination of fifty years of systematic betrayal by his party of both the Constitution and the values it embodies. Richard Nixon, and his intervention in the Vietnamese peace talks as well as Watergate. Ronald Reagan, and his betrayal of the Iranian hostage negotiations as well as the Iran-Contra scandal. George W. Bush, and his "election" to the White House as well as--well, do I really need to say more than WMD in Iraq?
And now, the congressional Republicans who wanted to impeach Bill Clinton over the constitutional equivalent of double-parking his car now desperately want you, me, and everyone else to pretend that T****'s entire term in office is as pure as the driven snow. And they're so sure of this themselves that no level of bullying is too much in making the non-existent point.
Not even this.
What's instructive about this episode, I think, is twofold. First, as the article recounts in some detail, the behavior of House Republicans is far from an aberration; it's part of a part of systematic abuse of the political process, and the deceit that goes hand-in-hand with it, that party members have been honing at the state level for some time. In other words, this can't be considered "rouge" behavior. The people engaged in this egregious behavior aren't outliers. They are the mean, medium, and mode of the modern Republican Party.
Second, it should be noted that the House Republicans who "crashed" this committee hearing--and keep in mind, some of the "crashers" were committee members who had the right to be in the room without resorting to fraternity-level (or worse) behavior--brought their cell phones into a setting where full security procedures are meant to be followed, including the securing of all electronic devices in snoop-proof lockers. These clowns, however, were having none of that. In fact, they were using their phones to record what were supposed to be closed proceedings, exposing the proceedings and their phones and the contents thereof to foreign monitoring.
From this latter point, you can only conclude that the Gang of Gaetz--a House member who has his own checkered career with the law--is either stupid or corrupt, although the possibility of both can't be completely discounted. But, when you compare this incident and the potential consequences of it to the past half-century of corruption of the part of the Not-So-Grand Old Party, it doesn't seem like an isolated case.
So one is left to conclude, based on all of the evidence, that the Republican Party, the party of Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Eisenhower, is no longer a political party. It is more properly viewed as a criminal enterprise. Perhaps, far worse, it is little more than an agent for one or more hostile foreign interests, led by a real-life Manchurian Candidate.
If this is true--and I for one see no other conclusion that one can fairly draw from the available facts--the party and its members must be opposed by every lawful tool available to the rest of us. And, by "us," I'm including registered Republicans whose own beliefs and interests have been betrayed by the actions and inactions of their party.
In any case, the elephant's share of the party must be stopped. In the courts. And at the ballot box.
And beyond that?
Well, if they won't rule it out, perhaps the rest of us shouldn't.
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