Category: Fascism

Fascism rises: Graham says Senate GOP will do whatever it can to expose the whistleblower

Posted on by Hunter

If you missed it, yesterday strident Donald Trump toady Sen. Lindsey Graham explained to Fox "Business" host Maria Bartiromo what he believes the Republican Senate will do next, after voting to immunize Trump from a clearly criminal extortion scheme meant to gain foreign help in winning his reelection. Graham said the Senate will move on from declaring that no administration witnesses must be called in an impeachment trial to calling a litany of Obama-era administration officials to interrogate them about Trump's targets in that scheme, Joe and Hunter Biden.

Graham also vowed to do something far more serious: Summon the "whistleblower" who first told Congress of Trump's criminal conspiracy. This is so that Graham and Trump's other Republican allies can interrogate Dear Leader’s nameless critic and, possibly, expose, threaten, and target that person to the full force of the Republican’s treason-approving, violence-threatening, mail-bombing base.

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Graham told his host, Angry Fascist Banana, that Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Richard Burr told him the committee will be calling the whistleblower to testify. Graham said that he intended to expose "how all this crap started" and launched into a stream of absolutely false, propaganda-based conspiracy theories about who the whistleblower was "working with" that we will not repeat here. He did not, however, indicate whether Burr still intended to keep the whistleblower's identity secret or whether he had been pressured into changing his mind on that.

Graham, obviously, believes that he will find some conspiracy that will require, or at least justify, doing Trump's personal bidding by exposing the only White House-linked official in the entire administration who put their duty to their country above their fealty to a raving, corrupt man damaging national security and our elections for his own personal gain.

There can be little argument that the Republican Party is now a fascist organization. It has put Dear Leader above the rule of law. It has given Dear Leader an "absolute immunity" to solicit as much foreign government assistance as he can muster or extort for the purposes of throwing the next election in his favor, while insisting that it will still be a “free election” regardless of how much false, conspiracy-premised propaganda Dear Leader can bring to bear. Now it insists that Dear Leader's law-protecting supposed enemies be exposed, and made examples of.

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Lamar Alexander: Trump might be too dumb to know how to not commit crimes

Posted on by Hunter

It was soon-retiring Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander who effectively ended the impeachment trial of Donald J. Trump, doing so with a statement that asserted House managers had indeed proven that Trump used U.S. military aid as bargaining chip for obtaining a smear of his election opponent, but that doing so was merely "improper", and not an impeachable offense. Alexander thus settled on the answer that would do the most injury to our democracy and the rule of law: the "president" did it, the "president" was caught doing it, and the "president" is now allowed to do it, going forward, with no repercussions other than facing a vote he is now allowed, by Senate decree, to rig.

Defending this extremist, cancerous nullification on Meet the Press, Alexander did himself no favors. Alexander said that what Trump should have done, if he was so "upset" about Joe Biden and Ukraine, “he should have called the attorney general, and told him that, and let the attorney general handle it the way they always handle cases involving public figures.”

Why didn't he, asked his host? “Maybe he didn't know to do it,” Alexander said, letting loose a small chuckle after tossing that turd on the table.

Chuck Todd pushed back on this notion that Trump, entering his fourth year of office, was "still new to this"; Alexander allowed that "the bottom line it's not an excuse. He shouldn't have done it."

Let's just savor that, for a moment, as Alexander's continued defense for why Trump cannot be held accountable to the same standards as every other public figure corrodes our Constitution. Alexander is suggesting here that maybe Dear Leader was, as Robert Mueller's team concluded of Dear Leader Jr., during the last attempt by the Trump family to further international corruption if it is on their behalf, simply Too Stupid To Not Crime.

Trump may have an entire administration behind him, the top ranks stuffed with Republican radicals all, and a kept attorney general of his own mold, but Donald Trump is a stupid, stupid, stupid man. In three years nobody has been able to explain to him how to not crime. Through nearly a year of Rudy Giuliani scheming and Trump inserting Giuliani and his allied criminals into the decision-making loops of the State Department, White House and Budget Office, none of the myriad involved officials were able to inform him of how an "investigation" of such corruption would actually be done. If he were serious about it. If he had non-criminal motives.

Is it possible for Trump to be that stupid? Perhaps. He still believes "stealth" aircraft are literally invisible, after three years; his absolute immunity to learning absolutely anything is so impressive that we surely will come out of this with a new brain disease being named after him. It is less possible for every single member of his staff, sans John Bolton and subordinates, to also have accidentally crimed out of ignorance. Not impossible, but not likely.

In any event, the Alexander pitch is, somehow, worse than before. Not only has it been proven that Trump extorted Ukraine in order to gain an election favor, and not only is he now allowed to do that, the alternative being some (any) form of Senate check on his new discovered power, but Trump is allowed to break our laws if he is or can claim to be so very stupid that he simply cannot remember or absorb them.

If that were not enough, Lamar gave away the last bit of the game at the end.

"Now I think it's up to the American people to decide, okay, good economy, lower taxes, conservative judges, behavior that I might not like, the call to Ukraine. Weigh that against Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders and pick a president.

He broke the law, but we got our "conservative judges." He may have violated the Constitution, his oath of office, the public trust and the very foundations of our democracy, with the eager help of the Senate and the "conservative" press, but it is either rank corruption or electing a Democrat so rank corruption, hints Lamar, it is.

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Trump defense in court: Impeachment, not courts, is proper remedy for a president ignoring subpoenas

Posted on by Hunter

There were gasps and laughter on the Senate floor when House impeachment manager Rep. Adam Schiff announced this: Even as Trump's lawyers insisted repeatedly, over and over, that a president cannot be impeached for refusing to comply with congressional subpoenas, his Bill Barr-led Department of Justice is in court, today, insisting that Congress absolutely can respond to a president refusing to abide by congressional subpoenas by ... impeaching that president.

CNN reports, "Justice Department lawyer James Burnham said without hesitation that the House can use its impeachment powers, among other options, like withholding appropriations." The courts have no role in enforcing subpoenas directed at the executive branch—that has been the repeated Trump court argument. In the Senate, in the meantime, Trump's team is simultaneously arguing that impeachment cannot be used in response to a president's team ignoring subpoenas, that it must be argued through the courts.

The Trump defense is inherently corrupt. The Republican defense, in the Senate, is inherently corrupt.

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Warren Wants to Control Your Freedom of Speech

Posted on by LifeZette

By David Kamioner | January 29, 2020

Have a problem with Democrat Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts?

She doesn’t want you to be allowed to express it online.

Freedom of speech?

To her, it’s to be torched in the bonfire of her desire to silence anything and any person who may oppose her.

RELATED: Alan Dershowitz Hits Back at Elizabeth Warren

Warren has, in her zest to play to the prejudices of the extreme hard left, gone all the way to the end of the leftist dial and embraced the theories of national socialism and indeed the brand of authoritarian socialism that ruled in the Soviet Union for decades and continues to hold sway in the modern Democrat ideological homelands of Cuba and Venezuela.

Specifically, Warren said in a press release she wants to make a crime out of “disseminating false information” online and would prosecute tech giants for “false information that disempowers voters and undermines democracy.”

Who would decide what constitutes “false information” and what “disempowers and undermines?”

She would.

In her own words, “I will push for new laws that impose tough civil and criminal penalties for knowingly disseminating this kind of information, which has the explicit purpose of undermining the basic right to vote. The stakes of this election are too high — we need to fight the spread of false information that disempowers voters and undermines democracy,” Warren said. “I’ll do my part — and I’m calling on my fellow candidates and big tech companies to do their part too.”

Criminal penalties for speaking online against the likes of Warren and her ilk?

I hope I get a nice cell, one with a decent wine cellar and a walk-in humidor.

Perhaps it should be lauded that the Senator has dropped her mask and now fully and publicly supports installing national criminal penalties for opposing what Warren personally deems false and disempowering.

RELATED: GOP Brings Out Three Big Guns in Senate Trial of Trump

Even putting aside the outright fascist tone of her statements, in this era of the PC Thought Police and identitarian lunacy no doubt taking issue with any insanity the left may spread would be considered illegal and subject to prosecution.

Just how would a real republic, where people can freely voice their views, be able to operate under these strictures?

That’s just it. The Democrats fully well know one can’t.

Because a functioning republic is not what they’re interested in. Their only ambition is raw power at any cost.

This piece originally appeared in LifeZette and is used by permission.

Read more at LifeZette:
Rocket Strikes U.S. Embassy in Baghdad
More GOP Senators Could Defect in Impeachment Trial
Bolton Manuscript Leaked, Romney and Collins May Vote Against the President

The post Warren Wants to Control Your Freedom of Speech appeared first on The Political Insider.

Bribery. The crime is bribery. Say it

Posted on by Hunter

The Trump defense against impeachment is premised on layers upon layers of nonsense, but the notion that Donald Trump's act—suspension of military aid to a foreign nation until its government announced an investigation of his just-announced domestic political opponent—does not constitute a crime is among the most blatant.

Bribery. The crime is that Donald Trump demanded a personal bribe in exchange for an official act of his office. And soliciting a bribe is, unequivocally, a criminal act.

The defense theory that Trump was allowed to target a specific political opponent for an "investigation" as a supposed foreign policy is inherently corrupt. There is no other word for it. Criminal defender Alan Dershowitz went further still, claiming that if Trump believed that his winning reelection was genuinely in the public's best interest, then any action he took to sabotage his opponents would be legal and allowable. In every other public context, this is recognized unequivocally as an act of corruption.

Ex-House Republican Chris Collins was indicted for insider trading—using private information to make stock trades meant to benefit himself. Ex-Rep. Duncan Hunter was indicted for stealing, outright, campaign funds for his own personal gain. The then-governor of Illinois, Democrat Rod Blagojevich, was impeached, removed, and imprisoned for seeking to trade political appointments, an official act of his office, for personal bribes.

It is Blagojevich's case that is a close analogue to what Trump himself did. Trump unilaterally delayed military aid allocated by the House and Senate to a foreign ally. Trump distanced his White House from that government, refusing a meeting the newly elected Ukrainian leader considered of utmost importance in signaling to Russia that his nation had the support of the United States. He withheld both acts, indisputably now, to procure an announcement from the Ukrainian government that his potential election opponent was now being investigated for corruption.

That is soliciting a bribe. Trump could have requested that his Department of Justice "investigate" his election opponent itself; it would still likely be a crime. Trump could have made the request without using the tools of his office to pressure the desperate Ukrainian government into compliance; doing so in his official capacity as president would still likely be a crime. Trump did the most corrupt of all versions, however.

Trump demanded that Ukraine announce two specific investigations, one of Biden and one promoting an anti-Democratic Party conspiracy theory boosted by the same Russian government known to have targeted Trump’s election opponents in the past. The only investigations Trump demanded were focused on his domestic political opponents.

Trump coordinated the effort not through the United States' robust law enforcement and foreign policy agencies, but through his personal lawyer, working with now-indicted Ukrainian criminals, coordinating "evidence"-gathering with a known-to-be-corrupt Ukrainian official seeking to trade that evidence to Trump's team in exchange for getting his own criminal indictment squashed by Trump's Department of Justice. This gaggle of criminals was elevated above the official United States foreign policy apparatus, and quickly succeeded in getting a member of that foreign policy apparatus, the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, removed from her position by convincing Trump she was a political, not a policy, opponent.

Trump ordered multiple members of his Cabinet to take official actions, actions determined at the time to be baseless and soon afterwards judged to be illegal, intended to put maximum pressure on Ukraine to comply in providing the “favor’ he’d asked for. He ordered his subordinates to perform official acts meant to extort Ukraine into compliance—literally at gunpoint.

Trump provided no public explanation for his acts, Trump's subordinates provided their own government subordinates no private explanations for those acts; an after-the-fact effort was launched to investigate any possible rationale that could be offered for his acts; White House officials swiftly moved to conceal his acts as numerous White House and government officials alerted White House lawyers of the potentially criminal nature of those acts; and when Congress eventually learned of his acts, Trump offered no explanation, but instead ordered all agencies to refuse document requests, subpoenas for testimony, and other basic tools of oversight.

Donald Trump sought a bribe from Ukraine. Donald Trump demanded that the government of Ukraine grant him two very specific personal favors, both targeting his election enemies, and withheld official acts of his government to procure them. Trump ordered his administration to take official acts to obstruct congressional investigation of those acts.

Seeking something of personal value in exchange for performing an act as a public official is seeking a bribe. It is not hard to understand. It does not matter if it is called a new "foreign policy" in which personal bribes are, now, supposedly both official policy and good for the country.

It's bribery. Just say it. And every Republican senator either knows full well that Trump was soliciting a bribe or, by denying it, has indicated that they too are sufficiently corrupt to consider demanding precisely the same thing in exchange for doing their own official duties.

That is likely the case. It is evident, at this point, that nearly every Republican senator both stipulates that Trump did exactly what John Bolton claims to be an eyewitness to and is taking the official position that members of their party are indeed allowed to solicit such "favors" without repercussion or recourse. But it is unambiguously bribery, and each of them is now conspiring in that act.

Sen. Martha McSally defends insulting a reporter with rambling, self-satisfied op-ed

Posted on by Hunter

Republican Sen. Martha McSally will never be mistaken for a person of integrity. She is, however, the sort of Trumpian person who likes to invent insults and fundraise off them by selling overpriced T-shirts emblazoned with them. McSally responded to a CNN reporter's question about whether she would consider new evidence in the impeachment trial of Donald Trump by calling the reporter a "liberal hack," saying, "I'm not talking to you," and walking away. Within hours, McSally's website sported a new "You're a liberal hack" T-shirt as fundraising gimmick. Bask, America, in the glow of the world's greatest deliberative body and its assembled merchandise.

All of that looked boorish, unnecessary, and more than a little cowardly; McSally also faced calls to apologize to the reporter who had asked a perfectly legitimate question of a public official. So now McSally's got a long, rambling, extremely whining op-ed out, complaining that she, of course, is the real victim here.

Again, let's keep in mind that the chief justice of the United States recently called the Senate by its preferred porn name, World's Greatest Deliberative Body, as we try to glean any meaningful content from this piece other than self-satisfied grunting noises.

McSally writes, "Predictably, his entire industry melted down. How dare someone – a woman, perhaps? – ‘lash out’ at a reporter like that! In a hallway, no less! The pearl-clutching was more over-the-top than I could have ever imagined."

All right, that is about enough of that. There's also quite a bit of McSally reminding the world that she is a veteran, saying that, "as a combat veteran who survived situations where foggy communications could get people killed, I don't have time for the language games they expect you to play in Washington."

Right, because insulting reporters and refusing to answer the most fundamental questions about the single biggest issue and story in the country today is saving people from "getting killed." So brave. So, so very brave.

The rest of piece seems to be an entirely contentless stream-of-consciousness bashing of the "liberal media" and "DNC talking points," and by God I flew 325 combat hours so I should be able to insult all the reporters I want to because they are "liars" and this is, yes, pretty much what Donald Trump himself would write if he did not have bone spurs and if he allowed ANYONE AROUND HIM to edit his burping thoughts into complete sentences.

But the central message is unmistakable: The press is "liberal"; therefore the free press is an enemy, and attacks on it are therefore not only justified but required of all Good Republicans as we trundle toward the great Republican future in which no reporters will ask questions that our lawmakers do not like. And you can support this new Republican future by buying our favorite insults printed on T-shirts.

On the Sunday shows, Trump’s Senate bootlickers show how low they can go

Posted on by Hunter

Before this evening’s blockbuster John Bolton news, we’d already seen that the level to which Republicans will sink to defend Donald Trump on anything and, literally, everything has no bottom. There seems no cutoff point beyond which now thoroughly-corrupted lawmakers will abandon him; he could sacrifice Mitch McConnell's family to Satan on the steps of the Capitol and senators like Lankford and Cotton would applaud madly at his boldness and explain that this is indeed What Middle America Wanted.

Sen. Tom Cotton went pretty damn low on Face The Nation this morning when asked about Trump’s dismissal of soldiers being flown back to the United States for medical treatment after suffering TBIs, or traumatic brain injuries, in the Iranian strikes responding to Trump’s targeted assassination of a top Iranian military leader. Trump said “they had headaches,” and “but it is not very serious.”

That seemingly glib dismissal of brain injuries as “headaches” caused anger among numerous veteran’s groups, who have demanded Trump apologize. To Sen. Cotton, though, Trump is still-and-always in the right. “He’s not dismissing their injuries, he’s describing their injuries,” he told Face the Nation.

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The Veterans of Foreign Wars, for example, disagrees. “TBI is known to cause depression, memory loss, severe headaches, dizziness & fatigue—all injuries that come w/ both short- and long-term effects” said VFW National Commander William Schmitz in a statement.

Cotton had thoughts about impeachment as well. Asked about the release of a new recording in which Rudy Giuliani, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman got a Trump instruction to “take her out” after the trio falsely claimed that anti-corruption U.S. Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch was “badmouthing” him,  Cotton’s only take away from the extended recording was that “badmouthing” sounded like “a pretty sound reason to move an ambassador.” That Trump was getting that advice from Rudy Giuliani and two now-indicted foreign agents, he claimed, was not a problem. See the bar getting lower? Do you think a similar tape coming out featuring, say, any Democrat that Tom Cotton could name would be similarly uninteresting to Tom Cotton?

So there you go. That’s the kind of person the Republican base puts in the Senate these days.

As for Sen. James ‘Young Lindsey’ Lankford, he has been throwing himself in front of whatever cameras he can find to defend Trump, during the trial. He made forays onto multiple networks to hail Our Dear Glorious Tweeting Leader; it’s not clear what administration job he’s angling for, as Trump already has more shoe-shiners than the Trump family has shoes. On MSNBC he got slapped around for lying repeatedly to the viewing audience. On CNN he pivoted to defending Dear Leader’s tweet-grouse complaining that impeachment manager Rep. Adam Schiff “has not paid the price, yet,” for challenging Dear Leader. 

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If you need a measure of just how intensively the Lankfords of Republicanism are willing to grovel, this might be a good one: Well I don’t personally interpret Dear Leader’s latest remarks as an actual “death threat” against a sitting congressman, so everything remains fine. All Hail Twitterburp.

The standards of the presidency have fallen very far, in the last three years, and Sen. Lankford would like you to buckle in because, at least according to him, the new lower bound is openly calling for the death of his opponents. Is he there yet? No? Then all praise Dear Leader, who will be vindicated after we vote to conceal all remaining evidence. And if Dear Leader does cross that last line, Sen. James Lankford will defend him still.