Thread by @jeffblack945

#RevThread # 139
What Lies Ahead

1/A couple of sources for you: in the current issue of The New Yorker, Jill Lapore has a brilliant 10-page summary of the history of impeachment going back to Medieval England.

2/Reading it helps us understand why impeachment has never removed a president before and most likely will not remove Trump this time. Yet each impeachment of a president has been very consequential, and this one will also have profound consequences.

3/The second source is the interview with Nancy Pelosi on the Stephen Colbert show on October 31.

4/What lies ahead is mysterious, given the way impeachments function. We mortals have daddy issues, and Donald is a massive daddy issue. He’s also a spoiled brat issue, so only someone as foolish as myself would hazard a guess as to how this is all going to turn out.

5/Even so I do learn from Isaiah that foresight has to be based on insight. Three insights to start us off are: (a) impeachment doesn’t need to succeed in ousting a president in order to be a major force in reforming a screwed-up democracy; ...

6/..(b) impeachment reveals diseases that are within our body politic; (c) impeachment reveals unexpected sources of strength and leadership.

7/Reform vs Removal: Watching the utterly solid opposition to impeachment by every Republican in the House, and listening to their shameless Trumpifying, tells me that these boys and girls are completely captivated by the Don.

8/Very unlikely that 3, let alone 20 R senators will vote against their Lord and Master. Once you’ve made a move as craven as supporting this mobster, apologizing and changing is too risky...

9/..You face not only his wrath but even worse the wrath of all the folks you’ve helped enfold into his church. Donny is the high priest of Mammon; for him, gold is all that glitters.

10/Even if the Senate will not vote to remove him from power, the impeachment process itself will weaken both Trump and Trumpism...

11/.. By the time the full perfidy of the Don and his goons is brought to light, a significant majority of Americans who have so far been ignoring the whole scandal-fest will tune in and decide this creep has to go.

12/This means that we folks who resist the tide of autocracy need to keep our eyes on next November, be actively involved in voter turnout, make the case against the current GOP, and support candidates who offer intelligent reforms.

13/We need to stay vigilant for some years ahead. We will need major, thoughtful reforms.

14/Healing vs Denial: There are some diseases in the body politic this impeachment will make clear. I’ve ministered to lots of seriously ill people in the ICU. Most of them recover; but if they don’t have an accurate diagnosis they often don’t make it.

15/The first sickness in our democracy right now is that our population has shifted its self-understanding from being citizens to being consumers.

16/After 9/11, when people asked the Bush administration what they could do to help in the cause that W called “The existential threat of our generation,” we were told...

17/.. that our role was to keep right on shopping and going to Disney World so our economy would not falter. No longer citizens. Just consumers.

18/A democracy cannot survive without an engaged citizenry. We’re not engaged because we’re distracted by our compulsion to buy things. Liberty becomes the freedom to choose Coors Lite over Bud Lite.

19/We need a thoughtful reintroduction of civics in our schools. I’ve been listening with care to both Nancy Pelosi and Donald Trump. It wouldn’t take that much civic education to recognize that Nancy is both competent and patriotic and that Donald is an oblivious traitor.

20/Another major snafu that helped produce the Trump presidency is the massive cyber attack coming in from Putin’s Russia. We’ve had almost no help from our main news sources about this, because our paradigm for warfare is all about warships and bombs and mass slaughter...

21/.. But we experienced a sweeping and successful cyber attack by Russia, an attack whose reverberations are still cracking our democracy.

22/Remember that 2 ½ hour meeting with Putin when Don was alone with Vlad and only Vlad’s translator? Here’s what I think happened. The useful idiot asked, “How do you do it? How have you become such a powerful leader?”..

23/.. And Vlad The Pale explained: First you discredit the Intelligence community; then you corrupt the judicial system; then you identify and assault an ethnic group to create solid majority support....

24/".. Create your own system of direct communication with the people and thereby neutralize the stupid legislature and the stupid media. Appoint as few people as possible.”

25/The idiot got quite a few of those instructions wrong, because he has neither Vlad’s intelligence nor his focus, but he has followed the autocrat’s playbook. First he attacked and discounted the intelligence community and upped his tweeting;

26..then he installed the servile and brilliant Barr and packed the judiciary with goons, he scapegoated Mexicans and Central Americans, and drastically reduced the circle of advisors.

27/We don’t get that we are flushing our democracy down the toilet because, in part, we are besotted with our notion of being the exceptional nation. It never occurred to us that we were being played by somebody as greasy and malevolent as Vladimir Putin...

28/...It was a real attack and we have been gravely wounded by it. Bannon and Pasquale et al are skilled propagandists. Propaganda messes up our brains.

29/ We also need to face and deal with a related menace--the presence and power of transnational organized crime. To say that Trump is a mobster is not a metaphor.

30/We do not understand that one of the great effects of the collapse of the Soviet Union was the emergence of the Mafiya State, and so we cannot identify our enemy nor can we recognize his work in our land.

31/RICO is only the beginning of the defense system currently required.

The body politic is pretty sick.

32/ Impeachment as a Watershed for New Leadership: Listen for candidates and for leaders in other arenas who understand that Trump is both a serious problem and a revelation of systemic disorder within our culture.

33/These will be people who can help us resist our flirtation with fascism. We’ve already begun to see that in Bill Taylor, Fiona Hill, and Lt. Col. Vindman, and especially in Adam Schiff.

34/Among the candidates for the democratic nomination, the one with the clearest understanding of our moment seems to me to be Mayor Pete, and the one with the surest touch for coalescing a majority of the people to face our challenges seems to me to be Amy Klobachar.

35/The country is filled with people who understand our history and our democracy, our Constitution and our calling to be a free and equal people.

36/My counsel to myself & others is to gird ourselves for a long struggle. The GOP has become a Trump enterprise--filled with grifters & liars & thieves & fools. The country badly needs a new, honorable conservative party. If you’re a conservative, please help to establish one.

37/Trumpism has established that we are, like every other nation, as capable of folly as we are of greatness. Trump has revealed how gullible we are in the age of social media, how greedy we are in the age of catastrophic debt,...

38/.. and how addicted we are to the primacy of propertied white males over all other expressions of humanity. We are not exceptional humans. Watching the Don seat Paula White at the Cabinet table might just be the nadir of American politics and religion.

39/Once we see these things, we can work on building a more sustainable future. Impeachment will be part of the process, helping us in the upcoming election to give the old order the heave-ho.

40/Be of good heart. The Lord has arranged this revelation so that we as a free people can see what lies beneath the surface of our nation and then work together to restore our nation’s honor.

41/The hour is at hand when we will be asked to make massive changes, most of them very inconvenient, to save this fragile earth, our island home. A people committed to the reign of folly and injustice can never make such changes...

42/.. So the great text for our times is this call of Moses from Deuteronomy 30:19:

“I call heaven and earth to witness before you today, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore choose life, that you and your offspring may live.”