It has been quite a while since I’ve written anything for TNB due to ‘adulting’, as Halodoc likes to put it.
However, these are interesting times to say the least and I’ve had quite a lot of things rolling around in my head that haven’t made it to the comments section for whatever reason. The range had originally been pretty varied but Tony posted a tweet by Lara Trump and I’ve pretty much settled on this topic to centralize my ramble.
— Lara Trump (@LaraLeaTrump) September 28, 2019
This tweet reminds me so much of Trump’s oft used, ‘How can you impeach me when the economy is so good!’ or ‘How can you impeach me with black unemployment at HISTORIC lows!’.
Of course, the answer is simple:
The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.
USCS Const. Art. II, § 4
It does not matter how good the economy is going, it does not matter what your electoral college map looked like, it does not matter what your polls look like, it does not matter what Congress did or did not do in regards to the last guy in office.
HER EMAILS!!! don’t even matter when it comes to treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors. So, as we roll along through these next few weeks of Trumpantrums, we should probably recall the reactions of Richard Nixon during his impeachment inquiry period.
Below is a press conference Richard Nixon had with various news publishers across the country, during which he utters his infamous line of not being a crook. I would urge everyone to listen to it and be amazed at the artistry of the lies, knowing what we do today, and how similar the current president is behaving (although Trump would NEVER have the stones to face these types of questions). It is truly a wonder that some of the same fools who never gave up on Nixon are most likely some of the same fools who will never give up on Trump.
This whole idea of a civil war is absurd. Questions, for any of Trump’s enablers out there reading this who have some notion that a civil war would happen: What EXACTLY are your justifications for civil war? What EXACTLY are the issues you find so heinous that you would go to war with your fellow citizens?
I don’t recall there being this kind of rage towards the Democrats or the media when W was in office. I don’t remember there being a cry of, “CIVIL WAR if Bush is impeached!”, even though various factions of the Democrats called for his removal continuously throughout both terms. But W didn’t have a cult, did he? Definition of a cult from Merriam-Websters:
2 a: great devotion to a person, idea, object, movement, or work (such as a film or book):
b: the object of such devotion
c: a usually small group of people characterized by such devotion
I would surmise most people agree that all politicians, be them left or right, suck. This would account for why the polling data for Congress hovers at the garbage line year after year.
And yet, Trump is not considered a politician in the cult’s eyes. Not at all. Not even now, after nearly 3 years in office. Thought it would be interesting to go back and look at some of the comments from the primary season, to see just what kind of projections the cult had installed onto Trump.
1. His foreign policy is juvenile and superficial – not worthy of a response. Pinhead didn’t actually make a point, he just made an ad hominem argument.
2. Cut the size of government by 40%, Get rid of all the useless liberal programs. Return the Federal Government to its enumerated powers under the Constitution only, lower taxes for INCREASED revenue. There’s your hundreds of billions of dollars.
3. As “John Doe” below stated, tax the remittance that Mexicans send to Mexico, wall paid for in full. Further, the savings the wall brings by not letting millions of illegals into America pays for the wall 10 times over.
What has the reality been?
- I get beautiful letters from Kim!
- I gave REALLY rich people (like me) and corporations a YUGE tax break! Me and the Republicans have been spending like drunken sailors and ZOOOOOOOOMED past Obama’s record deficits!
- Uh… that was too stupid an idea for even me to try. Oh, and that last part? @ABC News Mexico Congressman, Braulio Cuerra, Climbs Wall.
And so here we are, on the cusp of Trump being impeached by the House. There are tapes of him and other despots around the world locked up in a very secure location in a flagrant abuse of that system, while the “transcript” Trump, himself, put out is unbelievably incriminating in the context of what Trump was doing during that time period.
But Trump’s cult doesn’t care and neither do the Republicans, for now. That 17% of the population says ready to go to war with their fellow countrymen over a man who has never shared their stated values, who has done absolutely nothing to better their lives, who has done everything within his power to enrich his own life and that of his family.
That 17% of the population has not believed their own eyes or ears for over three years, there is undoubtedly nothing that will shake them of their delusion. They believe they’ve been wronged by the political class, and they are right. However, instead of calling to task their elected representatives who shoved massive spending bill after massive spending bill through during Obama’s administration, the representatives who ran on repealing Obamacare but couldn’t manage to do it with both houses of Congress in the red, these are the guys the cult says are telling the truth on Trump when it comes to his corruption.
The cult doesn’t want truth. The always R don’t want truth. The truth is hard. Unfortunately for America, we are finding out that Trump’s truth begins and ends in Russia.
During Nixon’s era, the Republicans and Republican voters were much like they are today. Murray N. Rothbard wrote an essay that was published in the Libertarian Forum which could be copied word for word, substituting the relevant actors, today and be absolutely on point.
In the 1960 campaign there first appeared the curious phenomenon of “anarcho-Nixonites”, several friends of mine who had become aides to Dick Nixon, and who assured me that Tricky Dick had assured them that he was “really anarchist at heart”; once campaign pressures were over, and Nixon as President was allowed his head, we would see an onrush toward the free market and the libertarian society.
In the 1968 campaign, anarcho-Nixonism redoubled in intensity, and we were assured that Nixon was surrounded by assorted Randians, libertarians, and free-market folk straining at the leash to put their principles into action.
Well, we have had two years of Nixonism, and what we are undergoing is a super-Great Society — in fact, what we are seeing is the greatest single thrust toward socialism since the days of Franklin Roosevelt. It is not Marxian socialism, to be sure, but neither was FDR’s; it is, as J. K. Galbraith wittily pointed out in New York (Sept. 21) a big-business socialism, or state corporatism, but that is cold comfort indeed.
There are only two major differences in content between Nixon and Kennedy-Johnson (setting aside purely stylistic differences between uptight WASP, earthy Texan, and glittering upper-class Bostonian): (1) that the march into socialism is faster because the teeth of conservative Republican opposition have been drawn; and (2) that the erstwhile “free-market” conservatives, basking in the seats of Power, have betrayed whatever principles they may have had for the service of the State.
Murray N. Rothbard Essay.
I suggest reading this entire article also.
Alien wrote not too long ago about falling into the binary choice fallacy again.
Will we be the first voting generation in quite some time to actually break the cycle and seek a better candidate than what will be presented to us by the Democrat and Republican Parties? The system will not change until the public who votes it into existence every two and four years changes.
