Is it just me or is Stephen Hayes using Bill Kristol’s rag to call for impeachment?
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BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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Cleek’s Law says anything that Democrats appear to want will make a lot of Republicans angry. I do not foresee anything happening to Trump before, say, mid-2018 earliest. Maybe if polling shows Trump is a serious drag on electoral prospects of vulnerable pols something happens, not earlier. The costs of angering the base just too great, regardless whatever bad stuff (for Trump) surfaces.
I’ve mentioned before that back in the day I was sitting in a restaurant in Charlottesville Virginia on a Sunday morning. Nicely dressed ladies at the next table, apparently having just come from Church, were talking. One said “Communists drove Nixon out of office.” The others agreed.
If you catch Trump in bed with a five-year-old or a dog, then the public will understand the issues. Not before. We will hear “Communists drove Trump out of office. Thank God, Pence was there.”
That’s not quite what Cleek’s Law is: today’s conservatism is the opposite of what liberals want today: updated daily. It doesn’t really have anything to do with anger;it has more to do with hypocrisy and cynicism.
Just what we need, Bill Clinton’s impeachment redux.
I just have to laaaaaaugh my ass off every time I read where some conservative is whining about “where are the principled Republicans?”, or “self-respecting officeholders need to lead, even if it’s politically risky”, and things like “We cannot afford any lingering questions.the legitimacy of our democracy and the sanctity of the rule of law is too important”.
I heard both David Frum and Bill Kristol on the TV doing the same thing yesterday.
Cut me a fucking break! What planet have these people been living on for the last 30 years? Certainly not the same one I have been inhabiting. The crazification of their party has happened in plain sight of everyone, for god’s sake!!! And they never a damn thing to try and stop it. Hell, they never even furrowed their brow in feigned concern until it was painfully obvious to anyone with a pulse that the whole damn operation was fully bat-shit insane. I want these people to give me one single instance where the Republican Party, when faced with a decision to go against their base, has made that politically risky choice? It is never about upholding rule of law, following unwritten and unspoken precedent or just plain doing the fucking right, humane and moral thing. It is about appeasing the craziest motherfuckers in this country, who scare the living shit out of their spineless little bodies.
BOO-Fucking-HOO to all these shit-heads! You OWN this!!! Sorry about your luck.
Repub.s can’t be expected to care about trifles like principles, the rule of law, or respect for institutions, when ignoring them has been winning election after election for decades. What people like Frum and Kristol are really saying is “why do the voters keep electing assholes like us? Haven’t they learned yet? Even now?” The answer is no, they haven’t, and many of them probably never will. So there will continue to be asshole R. candidates like Trump, or worse, until God knows what finally gets through to the idiots who keep drinking their koolaid.
What?
You’re surprised!!!???
Surprised that the supposed “establishment far-right” is angling for impeachment?
I’ve been trying to tell y’all!!!
There is only one gang in charge. The DemRatpublicans. They are broken up into two factions, each consisting of several sub-gangs. As long as business continues pretty much as usual, they fairly well stay out of each other’s neighborhoods…maybe some internecine squabbling as one sub-gang confronts another on the various neighborhood borders or someone in one of the gangs starts to get just a little too powerful.
Every four years there is a vote held about who gets to be capo di tutti capi…boss of all bosses. In order to make sure that no one gang acquires too much power, they passed a rule saying that no one can be the head boss for more than 8 years. It’s worked pretty well..,a capo and his brother had to be assassinated when they got a little too popular, another had to be forced to retire, and at least one elected boss wasn’t really with the whole program so they had to run a Bush I game on him. Otherwise? It’s been a pretty smooth run for 50+ years. Business has been good…at least it has been for them and their allies/power interest investors…and although the people who live in in their various neighborhoods have been having a continuingly rougher and rougher time of it, the ongoing electoral fix has worked pretty well to provide Capos who were in on the whole scam. When certain neighborhoods showed signs of rebellion, they were punished and/or bought off into silence, and in extreme cases their leaders were either assassinated, seriously discouraged with threats, made to appear crazy or at the very least electorally beaten before they acquired enough power to actually mess with the ongoing system.
Until Trump.
They have been hoping against hope that they could either corral him into non-consequence or buy him into the scam, but he’s having none of it. He actually wants to be capo di tutti capi of his own gang and get rid of (or at the very least control) the old players entirely.
So…the “center” expands to include relative outliers like Frum and Kristol. When Bernie Sanders posed a less radical threat to the main gang the center expanded in the other direction to include supposedly “liberal” members. Same same here.
Business as usual.
I don’t think Trump can survive as president, myself. I just don’t know what means they are going to be able to successfully use to get rid of him. They obviously can’t embarrass him into acquiescence…you can no more embarrass a clown than you can laugh one offstage. The choices are getting down to forced resignation, successful impeachment and/or…well…you know…
May you be born(e) into interesting times.
Later…
AG
Hayes is all over the place. Clearly he doesn’t like Trump. Clearly he doesn’t like Democrats. Seems like a guy thinking “fucked if we do; fucked if we don’t”.
I agree. Looking for a principled-sounding reason to not take a stand. The courage to say, “I don’t approve of the Comey firing, even though the reasons for doing it were IMMENSELY respectable, bur please don’t think that means I’m AGAINST Trump:”
No, I don’t think he’s calling for impeachment. It took some concentration to get through the fog of his words. Hayes is not clear-headed himself if he misunderstands that Democrats are “monumentally hypocritical” about Comey’s dismissal.
His screed comes down to this quote:
Hayes doesn’t want Trump gone or even held accountable, he just wants the madness to stop.
Organized crime hates disorganized crime.
When I was a lad the North End of Boston was the safest neighborhood in the city.
A safety which was beginning to degrade 20/30 years ago when I lived there, no doubt thanks to the steady infiltration of yuppies into the neighborhood — thinning the ethnic herd while offering more attractive prey. I’m sure the trend has continued since I left.
I think it’s just self-preservation on the part of the writer.
Whether or not the right-wing media supports the idea of impeachment and another Watergate-like investigation of the Trump campaign and the Republican Party, they need to be able to say “see, I predicted this” if it unfolds that way.
I’m sure they would all like for this ugliness to just go away but they hear the same rumors of secret investigations, FISA warrants, sealed state and federal grand jury proceedings, etc from the same leaky unnameable sources.
Something’s up, they know it and they’re just trying to position themselves as being on the right side of history.
My theory, anyway.
You write:
Where there’s this much smoke, there is bound fire, even if the smoke-reporters set the fire themselves.
And:
Or…maybe better (more accurately) stated…they are trying to position themselves as being on the right side of the continuing payoff(s).
it is often said that the winners write history. It is not so often mentioned that the winners also invariably reap the rewards of winning.
Big time!!!
AG
. . . right?
The Stephen Hayes who thoroughly and permanently discredited himself in The Weakly Substandard with his credulous, sensationalistic flogging of a bullshit Saddam/al Qaeda partnership (whereby Saddam purportedly provided hijacking training at Salman Pak in Iraq), and was still at it as late as 2006 (see link; note absence of correction, clarification, withdrawal, etc., i.e., any of the things actual journalists do to correct errors they’ve committed).
Just thought this reminder seemed kinda timely about now.