Don & The Giant Impeach

The title of this post, as you can see, comes from a segment on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert, one of several show we watch regularly in order to keep our sanity in these obscenely crazy times.

For the past two weeks, the public sessions of the Trump impeachment hearings have been going on. A lot of good American people sat down at a table and told the Impeachment committee, made up of both Democrats and Republicans what they knew about the now famous phone call between Trump and Ukranian president Zelensky.

This is the conversation in which Trump, in exchange for releasing congressionally approved funding to aid Ukraine in their war against Russian territorial aggression, asked the Ukraine government to open an investigation into his chief political opponent (at the time), Joe Biden.

This really was an extortion threat. Period. You dig up dirt on Biden and I will release the aid money for your country, and give you a meeting at the White House to strengthen your political credibility.

And this is the core element that launched the impeachment hearing in the first place.

Now there was nothing to be proven here. There was all kinds of first hand evidence from a transcript of the phone call where Trump made this extortion demand, to his own admission on live TV, to the admission of his Acting Chief of Staff and the several individuals who overheard the call.

The amount of direct and corroborating evidence was absolutely overwhelming and obvious. But this is the United States and there is a process for everything. Hence the public hearings, which I personally found fascinating.

A lot of the stuff you hear about American politics these days has mostly to do with Trump, and the shit show he has created by basically failing to live up to the oath of office he took. Mostly because that’s all the media really give a shit about. This shit show keeps bums in seats watching big pharma ads every four or five minutes, and getting bullshit of one kind or another tossed at them in between the commercials.

But these hearings were interesting because, if nothing else, they demonstrated that there are still some mighty fine people working for America despite the non-stop asinine antics of the doofus-in-chief.

This testimony was fascinating for that reason alone. The content of it was exactly as we expected, basically confirming the now, infamous and quite sickening ‘quid pro quo’ that was in play in the extortion game between Trump and the Ukraine.

The people who testified have literally taken their lives in their hands, because of the intense amount of polarization and division that Trump and the Republicans have created in America.

So not only were they extremely brave, patriotic and courageous for coming forward with their testimony, they were also extremely articulate and knowledgable and easily able to fend of the bullshit laden diatribes from the principal Trump lackies in the hearing Devin Nunes and Jim Jordan, both of whom had no arrows in their quivers other than character assassination, personal attacks, innuendo and of the regurgitation of previously debunked conspiracy theories.

These people and all their hard core Republican allies in the congress and the senate should actually be ashamed at the lack of character that these men demonstrated in their futile attacks on the witnesses, all of whom stood their ground even under the pressure of a Trump tweet attack during their testimony.

What I saw here over the past two weeks was two things.

1. The Democrats in the Congress doing their job. They didn’t call this inquiry out of malice. They called it because it was their duty to to do so.

2. The Republicans, under the iron hand of Trump, sinking to new lows in terms of what they will do to try and bend the truth into something that it is not. It was sad and pathetic to watch. But it was not unexpected.

The Next Step

The next step in this process will be the drafting of the articles of impeachment and, quite likely a trial.

This may take some time, because the levels of bullshit that have to be cut through are deep and it seems like every passing day brings with it more revelations of just how many people were in the loop on this action, and how many other countries were involved.

Remember, the idea here is not to actually impeach and remove Trump from office, because senate approval to do that will never happen.

The main purpose of this is to reveal to the American people, just how much corruption this so-called president has created and how many laws he has willfully broken along the way.

The hope here is that this gets the moderate, fed-up Republicans and non-aligned and undecided voters to finally admit that the Trump experiment is a failure and it’s time to try something else.

Why I Keep Writing About This

Well there are a few reasons.

The first is that it’s endlessly fascinating in that it has revealed a lot of things about America that were not so obvious before Trump came along. And much of it not so flattering.

Secondly, because I am a Canadian and love my country, which is a major trading partner of the US. I want my country to do well. I want my people to be happy. I guess you could call it a left handed way of keeping my eyes on my fries as well.

And finally, because America, warts and all, is still the most important country in the world today. It’s still, believe it or not, a powerful democracy, and it’s still filled with good people with great ideas that are changing the world for the better.

The fact that its current administration and segments of the other two houses of government are totally corrupt is a rather small part of the big American picture. But it is a situation that, if not corrected, can fuck that country up big time, and I personally would hate to see that happen.

jim out