Julie Bindel on the WPUK meeting:
State of this outside the venue where #WPUKLab19 were meeting to talk about women’s sex-based rights, a load of trans-activist misogynists screaming, shouting and banging on the window while the police did absolutely nothing:
Ok here we go, Adam Entous did a New Yorker piece on Hunter Biden in July.
In speeches, Biden rarely talks about Hunter. But news outlets on the right and mainstream media organizations, including the Times, have homed in on him, reprising old controversies over Hunter’s work for a bank, for a lobbying firm, and for a hedge fund, and scrutinizing his business dealings in China and Ukraine.
He went to work for a lobbying firm right after he spent three years working in the Clinton administration. That’s not necessarily directly corrupt, but it is parlaying government employment into a job as a lobbyist, and not, I think it’s fair to assume, of the public interest kind. Lobbying for cleaner air is one thing and lobbying for weaker laws on clean air is another.
There is little question that Hunter’s proximity to power shaped the arc of his career, and that, as the former aide told me, “Hunter is super rich terrain.”
That’s the thing. Trump’s claims can all be bullshit, and they probably are, but this using proximity to power to get lucrative jobs pattern is its own problem. Hillary Clinton took huge fees from banks for talking to them and then ran for president, and that was not a good move.
Hunter Biden got his law degree in 1996.
Joe Biden was running for reëlection in the Senate, and he appointed Hunter as his deputy campaign manager. Hunter rented an apartment close to his father’s campaign headquarters, and also got a job as a lawyer with MBNA America, a banking holding company based in Delaware, which was one of the largest donors to his father’s campaigns. At the age of twenty-six, Hunter, who was earning more than a hundred thousand dollars and had received a signing bonus, was making nearly as much money as his father. In January, 1998, the conservative reporter and columnist Byron York wrote, in The American Spectator, “Certainly lots of children of influential parents end up in very good jobs. But the Biden case is troubling. After all, this is a senator who for years has sermonized against what he says is the corrupting influence of money in politics.”
Would a banking holding company hire a nobody right out of law school for a huge salary? (What would it be in today’s money? 200k?) I don’t think so. I think the huge salary was because he was Biden’s kid. In other words the bank was buying him to buy influence with Biden.
Then he got the job in the Clinton administration. Then…
In late 2000, near the end of President Clinton’s second term, Hunter again consulted Oldaker, who was starting a lobbying business, the National Group. Oldaker asked the co-founder of the firm, Vincent Versage, to teach Hunter the basics of earmarking—the practice of persuading lawmakers to insert language into legislation which directs taxpayer funds to projects that benefit the lobbyist’s clients.
It’s not illegal. Does that make it good?
Jumping ahead to Burisma.
Several former officials in the Obama Administration and at the State Department insisted that Hunter’s role at Burisma had no effect on his father’s policies in Ukraine, but said that, nevertheless, Hunter should not have taken the board seat. As the former senior White House aide put it, there was a perception that “Hunter was on the loose, potentially undermining his father’s message.” The same aide said that Hunter should have recognized that at least some of his foreign business partners were motivated to work with him because they wanted “to be able to say that they are affiliated with Biden.” A former business associate said, “The appearance of a conflict of interest is good enough, at this level of politics, to keep you from doing things like that.”
What I’m saying. The conflict is there even if nobody did anything shady.
Trump is going farther out on that limb.
“Joe Biden and his son are corrupt,” Trump said, referring to unfounded claims that Biden’s son was involved in a corruption scheme in Ukraine.
Trump then claimed — with no proof — that, “If a Republican ever did what Joe Biden did, if a Republican ever said what Joe Biden said, they’d be getting the electric chair right now.”
Hmmyes, as a Republican did in that…um…er…
The President also denied claims he put pressure on the Ukrainian leader by threatening to withhold US aid, saying, “I did not make a statement that ‘you have to do this or I’m not going to give you aid.’ I wouldn’t do that. I wouldn’t do that.”
He would do that. He would do that. Of course he would do that. He would do anything. He would do anything that popped into his head and gave him a thrill. It’s part of his incredible stupidity that he thinks we’ll believe him when he says things like that.
“There was no pressure put on them whatsoever. I put no pressure on them whatsoever. I could have. I think it probably, possibly would have been OK if I did,” he said.
He thinks a lot of things are ok if he does them, but he’s wrong, and he’s stupid to think he can just consult his own hunches to know whether they’re ok or not. He’s never done any homework for this job, and he has no prior experience that would be relevant, and he just carries on doing whatever he feels like anyway.
But all the same I would like to know why Hunter Biden remained on the board of a Ukrainian gas company while his father was vice-president.
There’s a Woman’s Place UK meeting happening in Brighton right now. It’s being loudly and threateningly disrupted. There are police present but they’re not stopping the disruption.
WPUK:
Thank you to all the people and speakers for persevering tonight in the face of a noisy, threatening protest. The police are here but seem incapable – unwilling? – to stop protestors banging on windows. Democracy for some it seems. The law is an ass @BrightonPolice #WPUKlab19
Unbelievable mob outside the @Womans_Place_UK meeting in Brighton tonight, banging and pounding the windows, the din inside is deafening. Coming in we ran the gauntlet of hostile aggression, this is hate-filled public disorder and the police are not stopping it. #WPUKLab19
#WPUKLAB19 ran the gauntlet of a very threatening group of people objecting to a group of women and men calling
byme and others scum – for wanting safe space for women and to discuss gender and sex issues. Free speech threatened!
Attending an all women (feminist) meeting @AWomansPlaceUK and run the gauntlet of a disgusting protest outside. Can barely hear for the banging on the windows. Absolute fuckwits. So women can’t gather to discuss women and girls issues without being threatened now? #WPUKLab19
Women trying to attend @Womans_Place_UK meeting this evening are being met with intimidation – and @sussex_police not intervening.
Women have the right to meet without the fear of violence or intimidation. #womensrightsarehumanrights #freedomofassembly #freedomofassociation
We are present and ensuring that those wishing to attend are not obstructed.
WPUK:
You are not stopping the protestors intimidating our audience. You are not stopping them banging violently on the windows of the room we are in. The venue may wonder why you are allowing them to do this to their building. #WPUKLab19
New boss just like the old boss: women must not be allowed to gather or organize or speak.
On the other hand – it would be better if Joe Biden’s kid had never gone near any Ukrainian natural gas company (or any other kind of company).
It would, in fact, be better if this whole business of leveraging a political career into big cash flows from private companies and corporations had never been embraced. It would be nice if US politicians had always seen that as a profoundly wrong and bad and indefensible move, and stayed away. Instead we have the opposite – everybody does it, it’s normal, shrug shrug. That’s all Trump and Giuliani need. The fact that Trump is doing the same thing but more so is neither here nor there.
Mr Trump and his allies have been suggesting that Mr Biden, as Barack Obama’s vice-president, encouraged the firing of Ukraine’s top prosecutor because he had been investigating a company that employed Mr Biden’s son.
Hunter Biden became a director at Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma in 2014 while his father also held a key role in US policy towards Ukraine.
There. That’s your problem right there. Don’t do that. Biden senior should have seen it was dirty, Biden junior should have seen it was dirty, Obama should have told them both to back the fuck off.
Hunter Biden is well embedded in the DC politics-lobbying loop:
Hunter Biden was appointed by Bill Clinton to serve in the United States Department of Commerce[8] under Secretaries Norman Mineta and William M. Daley. He was director of E-commerce policy issues in the Department of Commerce,[8] a position he held from 1998 to 2001.[9]
From 2001 to 2008, Biden was a founding partner of Oldaker, Biden, and Belair, LLP, a Washington DC-based lobbyist firm [10] and law firm.[11]
Boom, done, he’s made for life – he gets a Clinton job at age 28, puts in three years, and then whizzes off to cash in at a lobbying firm. It’s totally routine and normal and it’s sleazy as fuck.
What Trump did and is doing is much worse but by god the Bidens handed him plenty of ammunition.
Nancy Pelosi, who has stridently avoided calling for impeachment, wrote in a letter that continued White House obstruction over releasing the whistleblower complaint about Trump’s call with the Ukrainian president would trigger severe consequences.
How do you stridently avoid calling for something? How do you stridently avoid anything?
I think they meant “strenuously advised against.”
It’s live reporting, so of its nature they do it quickly and without time for proofreaders to check it…but at the same time it does kind of hint at that unconscious bias thing we all drag around with us. Whether you agree with Pelosi or not, it is after all her job to advise for and against things, and why do women get called “strident” so easily?
Anyway…meanwhile Giuliani continues to lie and bluster in the service of the worst human in the world:
Rudy Giuliani, who serves as a lawyer to Trump, was asked on Fox News about whether the president threatened to cut off aid to the Ukraine if the country did not investigate Joe Biden.
The former New York mayor initially denied the reports as a “false story.” But when pressed on whether it was “100 percent” false, Giuliani said, “I can’t tell you if it’s 100 percent.”
According to reports, Trump repeatedly pressured the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to work with Giuliani on a probe into Biden. Giuliani has previously suggested that Biden leaned on Ukraine to stomp out corruption because of an investigation into a natural gas company with connections to his son, Hunter Biden. But there is no evidence of wrongdoing on the younger Biden’s part.
That has not stopped Giuliani from cranking out baseless conspiracy theories apparently meant to try to deflect attention away from Trump.
Such as a tweet early today:
If Dem party doesn’t call for investigation of Bidens’ millions from Ukraine and billions from China, they will own it. Bidens’ made big money selling public office. How could Obama have allowed this to happen? Will Dems continue to condone and enable this kind pay-for-play?
Baseless conspiracy theories aka libel.
Trump says you have to talk about corruption.
Arriving at the UN General Assembly in New York, Trump said he was talking Democrats’ talk of impeachment “not at all seriously.”
The president also dubiously argued that his conversation with the Ukrainian leader was appropriate given the importance of discussing corruption.
“It’s very important to talk about corruption,” Trump said. “If you don’t talk about corruption, why would you give money to a country that you think is corrupt? … It’s very important that on occasion you speak to somebody about corruption.”
But it’s one thing to bring up a country’s history with corruption and quite another to suggest that the country investigate one of your political rivals.
Also, can we talk about Trump’s corruption now?
President Donald Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani confirmed Thursday that the State Department assisted his efforts to press the Ukrainian government to probe two prominent Democratic opponents of the president: former Vice President Joe Biden and the Democratic National Committee.
Specifically, Giuliani has wanted Ukrainian officials to look into any impropriety related to the former vice president’s push to crack down on corruption in Ukraine and his son Hunter Biden’s involvement in a natural gas company there. Giuliani also sought to have Ukraine examine whether the Democratic National Committee worked in connection with Ukrainian officials to harm Trump’s 2016 campaign by releasing damaging information on the president’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort.
Giuliani had conversations with Andriy Yermak, a Ukrainian official closely allied to Zelensky, on the phone and in person in Madrid. (Why in Madrid? Was Giuliani trying to play Casablanca? Madrid is neutral territory so if he talks to a Ukrainian official there it doesn’t count as a violation of the Logan Act? Or just that Giuliani is more interested in Madrid than Kiev? Who knows.)
Trump’s attorney [i.e. Giuliani] confirmed to NBC News that the State Department helped put him in touch with Yermak.
“Times completely turned a story about astounding allegations of serious crimes of state concerning Dems into a piece trying to suggest I did something nefarious except they can’t say what it is,” Giuliani told NBC News in a text message Thursday. “Typical spin against Trump or anyone close to him.”
The State Department put Yermak “in contact with me,” Giuliani said. “Not other way around, and I told him they should not be cowered [out of] fully investigating serious possible crimes like bribery, extortion, fraud, money laundering and illegal interference in 2016 election.”
But but but Giuliani wasn’t (and isn’t) a government employee. He’s Trump’s personal lawyer. What business does he have meeting with foreign officials? Especially given the fact that Yermak wasn’t clear about his status?
The Times reported that Yermak was sent to Washington to build relationships with U.S. officials, discuss sanctions related to a Russian oil pipeline and lay the groundwork for a meeting between Trump and the Ukrainian president…
Yermak told the Times he asked Volker to arrange discussions with Giuliani, additionally saying it was unclear to him whether Giuliani was representing Trump in their discussions.
Which means Giuliani and the State Department people were careful not to make it clear to Yermak that Giuliani is not a government employee and was not representing Trump as part of his administration but only as his dirty personal lawyer.
That gabble of Trump’s this morning actually confirmed that he leaned on Ukraine to lean on Biden.
Trump told reporters on Sunday that his phone call with Zelensky was “absolutely perfect” and that he “did absolutely nothing wrong.”
Trump said his conversation with Zelensky focused on corruption and on “the fact that we don’t want our people, like Vice President Biden and his son, [contributing to] the corruption already in Ukraine.”
He didn’t say “contributing to,” hence the brackets. He said “creating to” – which is gibberish.
Also:
Later, he told reporters he “had every right to” bring up Biden because “we don’t want a country that we’re giving massive aid to to be corrupting our system.”
No, he doesn’t have every right to try to bully Ukraine into sandbagging one of his political rivals, using funding Ukraine needs to defend itself against Putin’s Russia. Nope, that’s not a right he has.
Trump signaled he is open to [releasing the transcript] Sunday in Houston, Texas, telling reporters “it would be fine” to release the transcript; he also said he might “give it to a respected source, they can look at it,” but did not specify whether he meant a news source he sees as credible or to someone within the government. He again stood by his words, however, saying of the transcript, “what I said was so good … everybody will say that.”
“Look, Mommy, look, I said words to the nice man! What I said was so good, wasn’t it Mommy? Wasn’t it perfect? Wasn’t it absolutely perfect and so good?”
Dinesh D’Souza being…well, Dinesh D’Souza.
Children—notably Nordic white girls with braids and red cheeks—were often used in Nazi propaganda. An old Goebbels technique! Looks like today’s progressive Left is still learning its game from an earlier Left in the 1930s
Left. In the 1930s. Goebbels.
The Nazis were not “the Left.” Not then and not at any time. They killed every communist and socialist they could get their hands on. The left in the 30s was socialist or communist or somewhere between the two, and it was anti-fascist when most people were ignoring the whole subject. The Communist Party did stab all that in the back when Stalin signed the pact with Hitler and CP policy reversed itself overnight, but that doesn’t make Nazism “the Left.”
Dinesh D’Souza is a toe rag.
Australian journalist sees Trump press conference for the first time, is taken aback by how much stupider he sounds than the press has reported. I know how she feels, even though I’ve listened to him babble extempore many times – he keeps surprising me even though I already know. He’s that bad.
But watching a full presidential Trump press conference while visiting the US this week I realised how much the reporting of Trump necessarily edits and parses his words, to force it into sequential paragraphs or impose meaning where it is difficult to detect.
That but also he sounds and looks so much more cracked than even a fully accurate transcript can convey, because of all the head-twitching and lips-funneling and smirking and other live-action habits.
The press conference I tuned into by chance from my New York hotel room was held in Otay Mesa, California, and concerned a renovated section of the wall on the Mexican border.
I joined as the president was explaining at length how powerful the concrete was. Very powerful, it turns out. It was unlike any wall ever built, incorporating the most advanced “concrete technology”. It was so exceptional that would-be wall-builders from three unnamed countries had visited to learn from it.
See? She’s summarizing too, and the mere words can’t convey the mannerisms and grotesqueries that go along with them.
The wall went very deep and could not be burrowed under. Prototypes had been tested by 20 “world-class mountain climbers – That’s all they do, they love to climb mountains”, who had been unable to scale it.
It was also “wired, so that we will know if somebody is trying to break through”, although one of the attending officials declined a presidential invitation to discuss this wiring further, saying, “Sir, there could be some merit in not discussing it”, which the president said was a “very good answer”.
The wall was “amazing”, “world class”, “virtually impenetrable” and also “a good, strong rust colour” that could later be painted. It was designed to absorb heat, so it was “hot enough to fry an egg on”. There were no eggs to hand, but the president did sign his name on it and spoke for so long the TV feed eventually cut away, promising to return if news was ever made.
The words alone don’t do it. The man in all his crazy and idiotic is the only thing that can.
In writing about this not-especially-important or unusual press conference I’ve run into what US reporters must encounter every day. I’ve edited skittering, half-finished sentences to present them in some kind of consequential order and repeated remarks that made little sense.
Yep. What I’m saying. He has to be seen and heard to be believed.
I’ve read so many stories about his bluster and boasting and ill-founded attacks, I’ve listened to speeches and hours of analysis, and yet I was still taken back by just how disjointed and meandering the unedited president could sound…
I’d understood the dilemma of normalising Trump’s ideas and policies – the racism, misogyny and demonisation of the free press. But watching just one press conference from Otay Mesa helped me understand how the process of reporting about this president can mask and normalise his full and alarming incoherence.
We know. We know.
Hmm.
[I removed the image; see comments]
Tiffany @catgirlsister asks
WHY are cis lesbians so transphobic
and adds
pls tell me I won’t be alone forever
Maybe it’s mean to make fun of what Tiffany says…but then again women who are accused of being “transphobic” or “cis” or lesbians or all three are subject to quite a lot of meanness themselves, often set off by people like Tiffany saying things like the things Tiffany said in those tweets.
So I’ll point at what Tiffany says, and ask why Tiffany feels entitled to demand that lesbians do something to prevent him from being alone forever. Why is that lesbians’ job? Why is it lesbians’ fault that Tiffany is alone? Why isn’t Tiffany hooking up with other trans lesbians? Surely it can’t be because Tiffany is transphobic…can it?
“Tiffany” tried [to] walk into a lesbian support group but chickened out. Tiffany wants to cry. Tiffany is the real victim here, not the lesbians who just want some fucking space.
[I removed the image; see comments]
Tiffany apparently thinks lesbians ought to welcome him as a lesbian without even looking at him as he walks in the door.
Honestly I think Tiffany would feel more at home around Trumpys than around lesbians.
It is no secret that Trump and his attorney, Rudolph Giuliani, have been pressuring Ukraine to open a corruption investigation into Democratic front-runner Joe Biden. Their contention is that Biden, as vice president, encouraged the firing of Ukraine’s top prosecutor because he was probing a company that employed Biden’s son. Numerous journalists have shown that this accusation is bogus. The prosecutor was notoriously lax in pursuing corruption cases. So rather than fomenting corruption, Biden was fighting it. Trump and Giuliani have been acting in a highly improper fashion to induce a foreign government to lie on Trump’s behalf.
Notice how filthy this is. Biden and Obama were leaning on Ukraine to get corruption out of its justice system. A corrupt justice system benefits rich crooks, and no one else. Making a justice system non-corrupt is a good thing, not a bad thing. Trump and Giuliani see this and, instead of thinking “a good move for the people of Ukraine,” they think “we can flip this to smear Biden.” What kind of people think that and then go on to do it? People like Trump and Giuliani – and, apparently, Trump and Giuliani themselves. It’s filthy. Not content with corrupting everything in the US, they want to spread the corruption to the rest of the world, so that they can have more power and money and corruption.
Filthy.
On Sept. 5, The Post’s editorial page reported that Trump had put a hold on $250 million in U.S. military aid to Ukraine to force Zelensky to launch a probe of Biden. Several congressional committees are now investigating this explosive accusation for which there is considerable circumstantial evidence.
Kiev’s own readout of the call between Zelensky and Trump says that Trump urged Ukraine to “complete investigation of corruption cases, which inhibited the interaction between Ukraine and the USA.”…
Oddly enough, just as Congress began looking into these allegations last week, the White House finally released its hold on the $250 million for Ukraine.
Oh gee, I wonder why.
Trump’s defense — that he would not “say anything inappropriate with a foreign leader” knowing that others were listening in — is unconvincing, given how many inappropriate things he says with the whole world listening.
I’ve been thinking about that one. It’s an absurd defense, because he has no idea what’s inappropriate. None. Nearly everything he says is inappropriate. He has said thousands of inappropriate things on Twitter, knowing that others were listening in; of course he would do the same (and has) when talking to a head of state. He shoved the prime minister of Montenegro aside knowing that cameras were running; he has no clue how to behave or what not to say.
Trump has already won an election once with foreign help. If he is now misusing his office to force a foreign leader to help him in 2020, the House would be compelled to impeach, even if the Senate wouldn’t convict, simply to show that Trump is not a king who can violate the law with impunity.
Compelled how, though? Compelled by what or whom? It’s a very boneless, non-specific claim, especially when we the people have been yelling for impeachment until we are hoarse and cranky, and nothing ever happens. I think this idea of agentless “compulsion” is magical thinking.
I’d love to be wrong though.
Just confirming that he really does stand funny.
The knees are locked, the butt sticks out, the torso tilts, the hands dangle, the jacket flaps.
Typical Trumpy behavior – if there’s an island that had had a ban on motorized vehicles since 1898, why, what’s there to do but go to that island with 8 SUVs and parade around in them.
Vice President Mike Pence arrived at the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island in an eight-vehicle motorcade Saturday, prompting cries of “sacrilege” on social media.
Cars are generally banned on the island, and that century-old ban is integral to its charm.
When President Gerald Ford visited the island in 1975 — the only sitting president to make such a visit — he and first lady Betty Ford traveled by horse-drawn carriage.
Pence, who spoke at the Mackinac Republican Leadership Conference, is the first sitting vice president to visit the island. He traveled to and from the airport with a cluster of monster SUVs shipped to the island Friday night.
It was the first-ever motorcade on Mackinac .
Who but a Trumpy would want such a first-ever?
Trump this morning gave an eloquent defense of his phone call with the president of Ukraine:
While Democrats stepped up calls for impeachment, President Donald Trump directly acknowledged Sunday that he spoke with the president of Ukraine about an investigation into political opponent Joe Biden, but called the talk appropriate.
Speaking with reporters en route to a trip to Texas and Ohio, Trump said: “The conversation I had was largely congratulatory, with largely corruption – all of the corruption taking place – and largely the fact that we don’t want our people like Vice President Biden and his son creating to the corruption already in the Ukraine.”
His brain is like a broken record. The word “largely” gets into it somehow and then it gets stuck, and he can’t stop saying it. And he can’t find the word “contributing” when he wants it so he swaps in “creating.”
He described the call as “absolutely perfect.”
It’s odd the way he keeps telling us how “beautiful” his talks with heads of state are. It’s very odd, and seems like classic protesting too much. Why do people protest too much? Because they’re worried or afraid or insecure about the X they’re protesting too much about. What’s Trump insecure about? This whole business of talking to heads of state – of pretending to be a grownup and a normal functioning professional when in reality he’s a child and a bizarre incompetent amateur. He keeps bragging about the talks because he wants us to think he aced this difficult task of faking the Head of State on the Phone act. It’s no good though – we know he didn’t because we know he’s incapable of it.
The plans for Trump’s day out are almost as bizarre.
Trump spoke before a day of travel to Texas and Ohio in the company of foreign leaders.
First comes a visit to Houston for an event with India Prime Minister Narendra Modi to be held at the city’s pro football stadium. The administration is billing the Texas event – dubbed “Howdy, Modi!” – as the largest gathering ever for a foreign leader (except for the Pope).
And…why? Modi is dreadful. He’s a Hindu nationalist, which is no more benign than being a Christian nationalist or an Islamist. Theocracy is a bad thing, and Modi is a theocrat. Why is Trump giving him the Top Dog treatment? Hell if I know.
But don’t worry, the Ivankas are still enjoying their White House Years.
When in Rome …
Updating to add Alfalfa:
Tensions rising.
“It appears that an American spy in one of our intelligence agencies may have been spying on our own president. The complaint suggests that this intel agent was listening in on Trump’s conversation….….with a foreign leader. Was this person officially asked to listen to the conversation or was he or she secretly listening in?” @GreggJarrett
I think we can feel sure that a whistleblower would not make a report unless he or she had legitimately accessed the information in question. This is ridiculous.
Just shut up already, this person is, unlike you, a patriot.
This switch in strategy away from denial may mean Trump finally read something, the transcript of the call. Also …. isn’t this the same guy who 2 days ago denied the story because he knows his calls with foreign leaders are “heavily populated”? Now he’s saying the call wasn’t?
Seems clear he extorted them, likely even offered a quid pro quo. But it’s not necessary to show he extorted them or offered a quid pro quo. The man used his high office to solicit foreign election interference. If that’s not enough, let’s drop the pretense of being a republic.
Trump’s been tweeting away, attacking Joe Biden and our intelligence officials. But to my knowledge he hasn’t once denied that he repeatedly demanded of the president of Ukraine that he investigate Hunter Biden.
Speaking of “Charlotte” Clymer –
“Before, I used to get a lot of women accusing me of ‘mansplaining’ stuff to them, but if they say that to me now I can get them fired.”
Remind us of how fragile and vulnerable Clymer is, because at the moment I just can’t seem to see it.
Here’s the deal: don’t fall for the “if there was quid pro quo” trap. If @realDonaldTrump
told a foreign government to investigate his opponent that’s it. Game. Set. Match. He has committed a crime. If he’s innocent, he’ll release the tapes. #ReleaseTheTapes
But is it though? Is it Game. Set. Match? How? When, by what process, how? What new mechanism will come into play now that hasn’t before? Republicans will vote to impeach? Of course not. So, what then?
It should be, of course, but then so should a long list of other outrages (which is not to say this isn’t the worst outrage). Should be but never was, because oh what do you know, it turns out we don’t have any effective mechanisms at all for getting rid of a wholly evil and uncontrollable president if the president’s party also controls the Senate.
Oops.
The president of the United States reportedly sought the help of a foreign government against an American citizen who might challenge him for his office. This is the single most important revelation in a scoop by The Wall Street Journal, and if it is true, then President Donald Trump should be impeached and removed from office immediately.
Until now, there was room for reasonable disagreement over impeachment as both a matter of politics and a matter of tactics. The Mueller report revealed despicably unpatriotic behavior by Trump and his minions, but it did not trigger a political judgment with a majority of Americans that it warranted impeachment. The Democrats, for their part, remained unwilling to risk their new majority in Congress on a move destined to fail in a Republican-controlled Senate.
But what difference would it have made if it had triggered a political judgment with a majority of Americans that it warranted impeachment? The Senate would still be free to ignore it.
Now, however, we face an entirely new situation. In a call to the new president of Ukraine, Trump reportedly attempted to pressure the leader of a sovereign state into conducting an investigation—a witch hunt, one might call it—of a U.S. citizen, former Vice President Joe Biden, and his son Hunter Biden.
Yes, it’s gruesome, but the Republicans will just wrap themselves in Fox robes and say it’s all the Democrats’ fault and Trump will carry on regardless, doing even worse things.
If this in itself is not impeachable, then the concept has no meaning. Trump’s grubby commandeering of the presidency’s fearsome and nearly uncheckable powers in foreign policy for his own ends is a gross abuse of power and an affront both to our constitutional order and to the integrity of our elections.
Yes indeed, but we’ve been learning that the concept does in fact have no meaning if the president’s party is in control.
The story may even be worse than we know. If Trump tried to use military aid to Ukraine as leverage, as reporters are now investigating, then he held Ukrainian and American security hostage to his political vendettas.
No, it’s worse than that. It’s not about vendettas. (Nichols quoted a Ukrainian official saying Trump did it in revenge for his friend Manafort, which I think is ludicrous – Trump doesn’t care about Manafort, he doesn’t care about anyone but Trump.) It’s about breaking the knees of the guy he perceives to be his biggest threat in the next election. It’s about Trump holding Ukrainian and American security hostage to his determination to stay president whatever it takes.
Let us try, as we always find ourselves doing in the age of Trump, to think about how Americans might react if this happened in any other administration. Imagine, for example, if Bill Clinton had called his friend, Russian President Boris Yeltsin, in 1996, and asked him to investigate Bob Dole. Or if George W. Bush had called, say, President Vicente Fox of Mexico in 2004 and asked him—indeed, asked him eight times, according to TheWall Street Journal—to open a case against John Kerry. Clinton, of course, was eventually impeached for far less than that. Is there any doubt that either man would have been put on trial in the Senate, and likely chased from office?
Yes. The doubt all hinges on which party was in the majority in the Senate.
I am speaking only for myself as an American citizen. I believe in our Constitution, and therefore I must accept that Donald Trump is the president and the commander in chief until the Congress or the people of the United States say otherwise. But if this kind of dangerous, unhinged hijacking of the powers of the presidency is not enough for either the citizens or their elected leaders to demand Trump’s removal, then we no longer have an accountable executive branch, and we might as well just admit that we have chosen to elect a monarch and be done with the illusion of constitutional order in the United States.
I admitted that long ago – with rage, without a trace of resignation, but the fact of it, yes.
One from the “stupid shit” file – the deep personal importance of The Pony Tail to a trans laydee.
It starts with a photo of an actual pony tail on the head of an actual woman, I guess so that we’ll know what “Charlotte” Clymer is talking about.
When I was in kindergarten—and very much in the closet as transgender—I had begun to crave a ponytail like the ones I saw on many of the girls in my class.
Five-year-old children are not “in the closet.”
I’m well aware that for many girls and women, the ponytail is a “bare minimum” style, often for lazy days, but the girls I saw in my class emulated the women I saw on television who were strong, confident, and successful.
Wut? Five-year-old girls emulated women who were strong, confident, and successful? No they didn’t, any more than little Clymer was deep in the closet. Those are adult terms. Also, the women little Clymer saw on television were strong, confident, and successful? What universe is that? We don’t get to see many strong, confident, and successful women on television now and I don’t recall more of them 25 years ago. The ones we do see tend to be on cable news and the like, which I doubt little Clymer was watching. His own story about himself sounds like complete bullshit, so how good can his understanding of women and sex and sex roles and stereotypes be?
Even at six, I knew better. I was raised in deeply conservative Texas, in a world with firmly cemented gender roles. I was a boy and I had better keep to “boy things.” The bouncy ponytail of my dreams? Not a boy thing.
Yes but here’s another aspect of that bouncy ponytail: it’s not enough to shape your life around.
But it seems Clymer is just too dim to grasp that fact.
In 1999, when I was 12, the U.S. Women’s National Team won their second World Cup, and Mia Hamm became a personal icon. For weeks I dreamed of what it would be like to have the freedom to sport a ponytail like Hamm’s. By then I was fully aware of a desire within me to be a girl, but I kept it buried in the back of my brain, suppressed whenever possible. Still, it sometimes crept up, summoned by the most mundane signifiers of femaleness. Mia Hamm was confident and beautiful and successful, and although I had no sense of what womanhood meant to me, I couldn’t help but feel that her hair represented all the things I was missing. I wanted an authentic life. I wanted to feel confident. I wanted a ponytail.
Confirmed. He has no clue. He confuses the trivia of personal grooming for “an authentic life.” Dude, a ponytail does not an authentic life make.
Then we get his journey, his struggles, his therapy, his coming out. Then we return to his hair. It was short. It took a long time to grow out. He kept fiddling with it, wishing it would hurry up.
I hadn’t tried putting my hair up in months when one evening in late July, I absentmindedly grabbed a hair tie off my shelf and made a go of it. After some awkward handling and smoothing of rogue strands, I adjusted the band high on the back of my head and turned toward the mirror. I don’t know how to adequately articulate the combination of happiness and relief I felt in that moment. It’s just hair, I thought. But then I glimpsed the waves, how the strands bundled together so beautifully. I couldn’t help it. I got emotional.
Maybe he couldn’t help getting emotional, but I tell you what he could help, and that’s writing about it in Glamour.
Imagine a white guy writing this kind of shit about getting corn rows. Nobody would publish it and if he did a blog post about it anyone who read it would heap scorn on him. But burbling about his journey to Womanhood and A Ponytail? Oh that’s brave and stunning and gets space in Glamour.
