Shit’s official. They impeached the motherfucker. The articles are now formally in the Senate’s hands and the House Managers have been approved. In the lead-up to the vote, Speaker Nancy Pelosi went to the floor to advocate for passage of the bill, and I’m going to paraphrase what she said here because I don’t yet have a transcript.
Pelosi said, essentially, “The Russians are still hacking on the behalf of the president. Everything Trump does seems to be for Putin’s benefit, including his decision with respect to (the Kurds in) Syria and Turkey. With Trump, all roads lead to Russia. Some people think it’s okay for Putin to select our president, but I don’t.”
What’s fucked up is that this would normally be alarming. We should worry when the Speaker of the House sounds like some tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy theorist who accuses the president of being a Manchurian candidate. Unfortunately, the truth of what she was saying was so obvious that the cable news commentators who came on afterwards didn’t even think it important enough to mention.
And I think it’s important not only because it’s true and everyone has noticed even if some’s self-interest precludes them from admitting it. It’s important because the impeachment investigation and the impeachment articles haven’t really been directly about Russia (or Syria or Turkey) in any way. They’ve been about Ukraine. But Pelosi didn’t give a shit about staying within the four corners of the indictment. She just went out there and laid it out. She believes Trump is compromised and serving a foreign adversarial power, and she wants him removed before he can do any more damage.
I agree with her 100 percent, but I’m still surprised she chose to say these things in the context of this vote. It’s kind of awesome, but extremely disturbing at the same time.
Our country is so fucked.
I agree the motherfucker needs to go.
We are fucked because the “conservative” movement laid the groundwork for transforming 40-some percent of the citizenry into ignorant, spiteful lamebrains ripe for a reactionary demagogue, utilizing (plutocrat-constructed) nationwide network(s) of hate media to dutifully sling the cult leader’s propaganda. The vast majority of these Volks cannot ever be restored to responsible citizenship, absent national Gotterdammerung. Their lib’rul countrymen are now seen as (by far) a greater threat to the nation than Vladimir Putin. Bravo, Team Conservative!
And of course because we are compelled to operate under a ridiculous, anachronistic 18th Century “electoral college” mechanism that (in wonderful irony) forced upon the nation the exact sort of unqualified, amoral grifter that it was supposed to protect us from. The Exceptional Nation indeed!
I’m not the first or only way to make this point, but I keep making it because I think it’s important: we’ve been here before.
In both the 1850s and the 1920s a reactionary minority manipulated the anti-democratic levers of our Constitution to hold onto power to preserve their “way of life” (unchecked support for slavery and its expansion in the first case, Prohibition and Protestantism in the second). In both cases, persistent, repeated, multiple efforts and organizing of all sorts (political, social, economic, cultural) overcame those reactionaries and produced some of the great collective achievements of US history (e.g., emancipation, the Reconstruction amendments, land-grant colleges, Social Security, the Wagner Act).
Yes, MC, we’ve been here before; I don’t disagree. The 1850s resulted in the Civil War and the 1920s (with its industrial-scale unregulated “conservative” capitalism) resulted in the Great Depression. I classify both of those as National Gotterdammerungs that effectively destroyed the prior model of American constitutionalism and civilization, while deprogramming (through personal destruction) large numbers of white reactionary irreconcilables….it is looking increasingly clear that this is what the 2020s will require as well.
When you put it like that…
Yep. All the more reason to be thinking and talking and organizing around the changes the new American majority would make when it takes power: constitutional amendments, new states to admit to the union, eliminating the Senate filibuster, reforming the judiciary, new labor & corporation laws, tax reform, building a carbon-free economy, etc.