Punishing Political Opponents? #ImpeachTrump

Politics Trumpismo

Trump is now considering revoking the security clearances of former intelligence officials who have criticized him.

Not even Richard Nixon went this far. It’s not just petty and vindictive. It’s bad for American policy. Former heads of intelligence agencies retain their security clearances so they can speak about sensitive matters with their successors and with Congress. Trump obviously doesn’t want them to.

Robert Reich

That’s right. Go after the most popular President in our lifetime, Mr. Trump. Try to take away Barack Obama’s security clearance (What is a security clearance? Who has one and why?) Don’t mess around with the underlings from previous administrations. I mean, you act like you heft a decent sized pair of balls, you should take on the truly powerful in your current sphere not muck around with underlings. Take on the Clinton’s and the Clinton Foundation. I’ll get the popcorn out to watch those fights. This would be better television than impeachment hearings. An emasculation live on television, without all that bothersome blood. A lesson to white men everywhere. There is a limit to effective power.

But, he won’t challenge the truly powerful. This was revealed in Helsinki when he sucked Vladimir Putin’s cock live on television. Mr. Trump has no balls, if his display of authority in Helsinki was any kind of example of his true manhood.

There are dozens of conservative pundits who are bailing out on Mr. Trump and his racist, fascist, oligarchical kleptocracy in the making. They are bailing out because they can smell failure in the air. I don’t want to cast aspersions on Steve Schmidt (pictured at right) personally, but his cohort of conservative Republican operators created the fertile ground that Mr. Trump’s candidacy sprouted in. They are the ones that accepted Nixon’s Southern strategy. They are the ones that built on that legacy. They are the ones that tried to navigate the tricky waters between outright, obvious racism, and just not liking the black Democrat in the White House.

Rather than just declaring that Nixon was wrong, abandoning the white nationalists and Christianist extremists that Nixon and then Reagan had saddled their party with, they kept trying to make a legitimate national party out of what has come to visibly be a regional/racial delusion, a frame of reference that can only be found within the minds of the overwhelmingly elderly, white, rural, Republicans that are virtually the only group voting for Mr. Trump and his policies. Why they are voting for him remains the only unanswered question, because there is little doubt of Mr. Trump’s culpability and criminality any longer.

All of this, all of it, comes from factionalization. Comes from believing that your political opponents are not just simply mistaken, but evil. Evil, malicious, law-breaking fraudulent actors. Conservatism is a political ideology, not a philosophy. Much like libertarianism, it simply does not have enough guidance, enough mental meat, to serve as a real philosophical basis for rational action. Failing to convince the rest of America that their conservative ideals were correct, political conservatives have continued isolating themselves until they can’t even accept commonly held scientific findings for fear that they controvert some pet belief of theirs. They insist on their own news outlets and their own facts. This is how ideologies fail, and modern conservatism has failed. It failed when it elected Donald Trump. It failed when it could not distinguish his lies from the truth that is all around them. If you think I’m going to cry for them, you are sadly mistaken.

Rachel Maddow points out that six of the seven people James Comey told about his meetings with Donald Trump are gone or leaving the FBI, with the one who hasn’t been made into a political punching bag, David Bowdich, firing Peter Strzok. All contrary to FBI personnel office guidance.

Mr. Trump is destroying our justice system in front of our very eyes, and he’s doing it with the excuse that these people oppose his presidency. Yes, members of the justice department oppose your presidency Mr. Trump. Your actions are all the proof they need to justify their opposition. You can’t stop yourself from punishing people who criticize you once you’ve noticed them. It’s not in your nature. You destroy people. You always have and you always will.

Trump gave Sessions the job for the same reason Thump hired Cohen as his personal attorney.

Because he was looking for a crook.

Because he thought Sessions was a corrupt little toady with the same lack of morals as Trump himself, a guy who would abuse his office to attack Trump’s political enemies and to help Trump profit from the office and stick it to liberals and for no other reason.

And it’s right there in Trump’s own words.

Stonekettle Station

Mr. Trump punishes the heroic and belittles the people who serve him. Most of them probably deserve belittling. Toadys. Sycophants. Yesmen. These are the kinds of people that he surrounds himself with. It’s not like this was news to anyone who knew him or knew the kinds of work he does. As I said the day he took the oath Caveat Emptor. Words to live by in the age of Trump.

Postscript

This was originally part of another article that I have now broken into three parts and appended more work to all three. All reasons to #ImpeachTrump:

With any luck I’ll have the other two out by Monday, as well as an update for the Kavanaugh post. In case you missed it, they impeached Trump. Fifty-two Republican Senators are now just as treasonous as their president is because of their votes. Only Mitt Romney can be called blameless on this subject.

They ended up impeaching him twice.

There were a few less Republicans that were traitors that time. Still not enough to remove him or prevent a second attempt at an authoritarian takeover of our government.

(deorangified)

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