Unfortunately, we can already see how the Corrupt One is reacting.
P.S. Susan Collins is such a fool.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Unfortunately, we can already see how the Corrupt One is reacting.
P.S. Susan Collins is such a fool.
One of the first things I saw in the morning news is this:
https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/06/politics/alexander-vindman-white-house-national-security-council/index.html
TLDR version: Vindman testified against Trump and now he’s out. DJT is cementing himself in. He’s surrounding himself with people who are only loyal to him. This is exactly how democracies become dictatorships. God so help me, I can’t understand how the GOP leadership can’t see it. Well, maybe they can, but they’re playing dumb.
Either way November 2020 needs to be a referendum. Four more years of Trump is a recipe for disaster.
Collins is a tool, not a fool.
Dictators, monarchs, even minor warlords, doesn’t really matter…. They’ve never ruled on their own.
Or not for very long, I bet. If you had seen a bunch of Senators carrying their daggers with them into the State of the Union speech, that would’ve been your clue that some nasty shit was about to happen. “Et tu, covfefe?”
Collins is a tool of a fool and a fool of a tool.
The GOP is both craven and corrupt.
No.
Susan Collins is a RRINO.
Reasonable Republican In Name Only.
The media always gets very excited when they see a Reasonable Republican.
Because they are in reality, like Bigfoot, not common and entirely imaginary.
Susan Collins is pretending to be anything other what she is, a christofascist.
I’m Christian. These people terrify me. I’d much rather be around a bunch of secular humanists or atheists than be around them . The Christofascists are misogynistic, and tend to be racist and narcissistic bullies. I can see how we’re heading in the same direction as Nazi Germany and it’s making me sick . Hey PZ not all of us Christians think you’re doing a bad thing by calling out the ignorant , racist and misogynistic versions of religion. They do give religion a deserved bad name
I just had a gander at teh Constitution. There is nothing in there that says a president can’t be impeached more than once.
And becoming increasingly rare as the creeping dementia of the party drives out anyone with even a trace of moderation.
Joe Walsh ends bid to challenge Trump, calls on Republicans to ‘reject’ GOP and elect Democrats
Good luck with that.
@7: And precisely what would make a second impeachment any more likely to succeed than this one?
And precisely what would make a second impeachment any more likely to succeed than this one?
More revelations. More tell-alls from disaffected associates. More unhinged behavior. More Democratic Senators. More cracks in the perfect conspiracy. More confessions from DFT and Giuliani and others. More accurate headlines.
Less he-said, he-said horse race dribble from the corporate press.
It’s the second one. The GOP has spent decades motivating their followers with fear of things they were already wary of. Fear of the other (non-whites, non-Xtians); fear of intellectuals; fear of non-CIS folks; fear of not belonging to their own group. This conditioning made it inevitable that they would latch on to someone like Donald Trump eventually. And now, they (the GOP leadership) are simply stuck with him. As soon as he started securing significant support for the nomination in 2016, the party leaders knew that trying to dump him would cause that rapidly-growing faction of their base to stay home on election day (or vote Libertarian, which is functionally the same thing). They’re greedy assholes, not idiots – they knew that loosing 15-30% of their voters overall would doom them to defeat after defeat, from one coast to the other, on election night. So, they did the only thing they could to hold on to power – they threw all their past public reservations about the Great Orange Slimeball down the memory hole and started cozying up to him.
And now, they’re stuck. A significant fraction of the GOP voter base has made support for Trump part of their identity at this point, and since such folks are about as emotionally mature as your average middle schooler, they will see even the most mild rebuke of his toxic/illegal behavior as an attack on their own tribe. I’ve seen it first hand, several times over the past few years. I’m from just the kind of place that you would expect to be a Trump stronghold: a small town in the Midwest that is literally over 99% white and doesn’t even posses a single stop light. Admittedly beautiful country, peopled with mostly kind & sincere folks (in person), but also unmistakably xenophobic and tribalistic. Not everyone is like that, of course, but the majority certainly are.
The worst part is that I don’t know how to change it. There’s a lot of problems with the “Redneck Mentality” that the GOP didn’t create out of thin air, as they were already part of that culture (listen to the still-popular 1982 song “A Country Boy Can Survive” for a good list of examples). Sure, there are plenty of individuals who grow up in such places who would never wear a MAGA hat, but most of them end up moving away when they realize these places can’t give them the kind of lives they want as adults. Outsiders can talk at these folks all they want about scientific studies, evidence, legal theory, etc., but in my experience unless those conversations are happening with a member of their own community, they aren’t likely to be effective.
I think we can, must and will beat the Cheat in November. But kvetching won’t do it. Voter registration in crucial states might. See for example: https://swingleft.org
@10
as i see it we can do nothing else, and as yesterday clearly demonstrated he has not been chastened at all, in fact he has been on a none stop gloat binge since tuesday night at least.
He is too stupid not to create more shit for himself and thinks he is finally bullet proof. His actions and that of his cabinet of yes men will go along way toward getting out the none voters (I hope).
I really do not see how anyone could honestly think that he would become more moderate.
the threat is not some phantasm in the paranoid left.
F**K!
uncle frogy
@10 Okay, let me be a little clearer. The GOP has made I clear that they don’t consider blatantly breaking the law to be an offence worth removing him from office and that they will block all attempts to present evidence or call witnesses. Why should anyone believe that a second impeachment would have a different outcome?
@#14, microraptor:
As long as the Senate contains more than 39 Republicans, Trump will not be removed from office, no matter what. (It takes 60 votes to do so.) This was clear from before Trump was even the nominee, when we had to use “a putative Republican President” instead. One of the reasons we’re in this mess in the first place is that Centrists like Obama and Biden have been insisting for years that Republicans can be worked with while the Republicans have been saying outright that they don’t care about anything at all except power.
The point of impeaching Trump is not to expect the Republicans to suddenly admit that the thing they have worked towards for decades is bad for everybody. (We can’t even get Centrist Democrats, who have been working to enable the right wing for decades, to admit that, and their sin is much milder in theory even though it has led to the same thing in practice.) The point is to rub it in to the electorate that the Republicans are criminals who need to be stopped. The timing of this trial was very badly chosen; too early for the 2020 election (Trump has 9 months to get everybody to forget this) but far too late to follow it up with repeated further evidence. But that’s what the Democratic Party leadership has chosen, and I hope they do follow it up — preferably showing the evidence in the House, this time, rather than hoping to make a splash in the Senate.
At this point, the Dems have made it clear that they are willing to do their duty to defend the constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic–even at some political cost to themselves.
The Rethugs have made it clear that they scoff at that duty, wipe their collective arses with the constitution and will stop at nothing to keep the Orange Dolt in office.
The next step is not another impeachment, but nonstop investigations and a steady drumbeat of revelations of corruption, abuse and incompetence on the part not only of the Administration, but also Rethugs in Congress.
And it is up to the voters to decide in November whether or not they value what little democracy they still have left.
Re: The Vicar @ #15…
Your numbers are off. It takes a 2/3 majority, or 67, Senators to convict. So 34 Senators can stop a removal. Of course, you can modify the number of GOP Senators ti would take to block impeachment to 35 if you think you can trust Romney to vote against him again.
PZ, thanks for linking to Bob the Angry Flower — you made me realize that my RSS feed for it must be broken again. (How do you follow it?)
The steady drum beat of investigations is how we are morking on the Morrisson government here in Oz. It requires some heavy front by reporters. That’s mostly coming from the ABC which the government keeps trying to defund.
Sadly the Republicans are united and I fear whichever wing (Progressive or centrist) wins the other wing will not enthusiastically support the winner. Remember 2012 the Bernie bros voting for Trump or 3rd party? This being one reason of many we are in the mess we are in today.
I fear unless the stock market takes a hit – and it is able to be manipulated in the short run – we are in for a nightmare.
Not sure why you got to pick on Collins specifically when every single Republican voted to acquit on at least one of the charges.
rydan, I refer you to comment #5. That’s why.