1/ It took a full day for Trump and his administration to deny, weakly, the story reported in the NYT about the administration’s briefing of the President on Putin paying generous bounty money to any Afghan soldier killing an American or UK Soldier.
2/ The administration doesn’t deny that Putin is doing this, merely that the President hadn’t heard about it, in spite of the reporting about a briefing.
3/ So, before I address the issue itself – that if he knew, Trump should be immediately impeached, removed and then tried for treason – let me address his denial that he knew about it.
4/ It’s remotely possible that Trump is telling the truth. Still, having been caught in over 50,000 lies & misstatements, his denial does not convince. If others were in the room when the briefing was given to the president, they need to speak out now. We cannot have this.
5/ Suppose Trump was told that Russia is paying bounty money to any Afghan who kills American soldiers. If he did nothing about it, if our Commander in Chief kept currying the favor of Putin, while knowing that Putin is paying people to kill our soldiers, ...
6/... then our Commander in Chief is sanctioning a foreign leader’s assassination of our soldiers. That is a treasonous betrayal of the men and women in uniform.
7/ Imagine being a soldier in Afghanistan, and discovering that your friend was shot and killed for a bounty provided by Vladimir Putin with the knowledge and consent of Donald Trump....
8/... Imagine the realization that you could be killed because Putin is paying someone to kill you with the knowledge and consent of your own President.
9/ You may remember that in the impeachment proceedings last year, Trump was impeached in the house but not removed by the senate...
10/.. Though he was caught red-handed in his corruption of our country’s foreign policy for his own political advantage, the boot-licking Republican senators said they wouldn’t vote to remove him because the offense wasn’t serious enough.
11/ No, for removal from office, they said, a president would have to be guilty of “bribery, treason, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” Treason, we were told by the Repubs, was imagined in the Constitution as an act betraying the country in wartime.
12/ Acknowledging and allowing Putin to pay Afghani soldiers big bounties to kill our troops is Treason.
13/ If this is just slides by as one more outrageous, stupid, corrupt act, an act we cannot bestir ourselves to oppose, then our Constitution just doesn’t matter.
14/ It’s time for an investigation. The briefers referred to in the Times article need to lay aside their careers and their personal safety and testify.
15/ We cannot allow treason in the White House to be unchallenged.
16/ If their testimony is that the President is telling the truth, then we can wait until the election and remove him that way.
17/ But if their testimony is that they informed the president of Putin’s bounty hunters and Trump did nothing to protect our troops while continuing to flatter their killer and while withholding this criminal activity from us,...
18/... then in the name of God and for the sake of our form of government, Donald J Trump needs to be removed from office and tried for treason.
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1/ I’ve had it. I’ve been watching and listening to the GOP as it invests in Donald o-my-god Trump and then in Herschel can-you-believe-this-monster Walker.
2/The Republican party has been thoroughly corrupted. Staying in it means you are willfully allowing your soul to be covered in the slime of depravity. A political party is not like a family. You’re not born into a political party...
3/...and you don’t break any commandments if you leave one. Anybody can leave a political party at any time for any reason. Leaving that party is never a criminal act. You belong to it by choice, by an act of the will. You stay in it because you believe in its principles.
1/ This morning,Tuesday, Sept 13, ’22, on Morning Joe. I heard several thoughtful folks having a political discussion. Often, as someone spoke about what they understood, others would listen and ask for the person to say more.
2/ Also, there was an assumption that everyone was attempting to speak accurately. I learned a bunch of new things about recent events. I changed my mind about some things. My blood pressure didn’t spike.
3/ The participants included Joe Scarborough, David Corn, Eugene Robinson, Adam Kinzinger, and Katy Kay. Black, White, Male, Female, Republican, Democrat, Congressman, reporters, news anchors. Each was intelligent, curious, courteous and committed to learning from one another.
1/ To all my sisters who awoke this morning, feeling betrayed and insulted -- I stand with you. The court is wrong. The decision expresses a sweeping, reckless misogyny.
2/ The decision is unjust. Should it stand as Alito wrote it, it will rival Dred Scott in its infamy. Indeed it outdoes Dred Scott, for this ruling takes freedom away from the majority of the citizens of the country.
3/ Freedom means, most basically, that I make decisions about what goes on inside my skin. I am not in charge of what goes on inside your skin.
1/Most of us have been watching Vlad the Terrible murder the brave and innocent ordinary people of Ukraine. We are watching an evil man do genocide.
2/Last night we watched as Russia fired on a major nuclear power plant. The danger was the release of nuclear fallout -- ten times greater than the disaster at Chernobyl. Putin is an utter monster, ghoulishly spreading death.
3/We are seeing evil on an epic scale. He is at enmity with God, with the Earth, and with humanity.
1/ Trump in the West, Putin in the East. This is the age of Transactional Man. Our heroes compulsively deal. The more amoral the deal maker, the stronger they appear. They advertise themselves as “strong men.”
2/ The Russian tanks entering Ukraine are an object lesson in toxic masculinity. Freud would have some choice words about those cannons. Some combination of greed and unregistered self-loathing has pushed Putin to Hitlerian depths.
3/ Putin's analysis of his situation is apparently that Russia can’t be secure because it just doesn’t yet have enough land. So now millions of people will lose their freedom and hundreds of thousands may well get killed. Then Vlad will get his mojo back for a little while.
I listened briefly this morning to a tape of Trump in Texas Saturday night. Evil is rising. It’s contagious.
2/ As fascism spreads, evil enfolds first the surly outsiders who become the future tyrant’s goon squads, then the ignorant, then the envious, then the ordinary. It takes years. It suffers defeats and then regroups.
3/This was the pattern for Italy, Germany, Russia, Yugoslavia, China, Romania . . . What begins as folly ends in oceanic suffering. Already the GOP has become morally bankrupt, as its once-honorable membership accedes to Trump’s lies and threats.