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If anyone of you dear readers cares to postulate that the maelstrom of the coming constitutional crisis - or democracy crisis as The Gadfly more fittingly sees it - is just another, "both sides do it," partisan political skirmish, then you have not been paying attention, and you could not be further from the bare reality.
This is about the law, this is about order, this is about national security, this is about the U.S. Constitution, and this is about the history of the United States of America and whether that history continues on, or dies with the appeasement of Vladimir Putin, his government, and his hand-picked aide de camp, Donald John Trump - along with a loyal GOP syndicate of constitutional termites.
This is not a fucking local yokel, tearing each other's campaign signs down sort of partisan political kerfluffle we've got going on here folks. This is about one of our two major political parties, willingly and with malice aforethought, working in concert with (the very definition of collusion) a sitting U.S. president, to obstruct justice in a special counsel investigation, an investigation which said president is very well likely to be under active law enforcement analysis for his own obstructing of justice, and possibly even worse transgressions. This is holy shit kind of stuff dear readers!
Now, before we go any further - it needs to be noted that not every single Republican is marching in locked goose-step with Devin Nunes and the conspiracy minstrel show that he and the bumbling Teabaggers are staging in the House of Representatives. A few (few too many), John McCain for example, have spoken up and they should be acknowledged for taking a stand and speaking truthfully. But those voices amount to little more than muted murmurings within the ranks of the ruling right wing at this stage of the crisis.
The Gadly does truly wonder though -- what are the Trumpies truly so abjectly terrified of? Why did Nunes and his fellow GOP House Intelligence Committee (HIC) lackeys insist on releasing an obviously hastily prepared, amateurishly written screed of mendacious charges questioning the integrity and character of FBI and DOJ leadership with the goal to, as Trump himself admitted in a Tweet, undermine Robert Mueller's Russian election meddling investigation?
What act have these people committed, that is so egregious, and that has so gotten them so untethered from reality and sanity to the extent that they have actually convinced themselves that a three and a half page, practically crayon-scribbled memo, that Devin Nunes wrote himself as chairman of the HIC, that he refused to allow the FBI and the DOJ to view and vet, and that he also refused to allow a rebuttal response from the Democrats on the same committee, needed to be rushed to Donald Trump for his release approval, with the pomp and circumstance that occurred? Why have Nunes and gang gone to such extreme lengths to do what they have done. This all smacks of breathless desperation and cover up.
The Gadfly can confidently guarantee you that the contorted machinations that Trump, Nunes and the cover up crowd are spinning and weaving are most unquestionably not being whipped up for frivolous reasons. These people have something very, very serious, very abominable and very dangerous that they wish to keep hidden from public and legal oversight.
The Gadfly long ago arrived at the elementary conclusion that if you really want to know exactly what the modern-day, conservative political movement is presently up to - simply document all of the accusations of wrongdoing and skullduggery that they are leveling against their perceived enemies. What you will have then is a list which will be a point-by-point accounting of the activities that the conservatives themselves are willfully engaged in. For if anything has become abundantly clear with these conservatives, based on The Gadfly's many years of observing them, is that they are the masters of projection - meaning that whatever it is that they are accusing others of, the likelihood that they themselves have probably already done it, are presently doing it, or are in the late planning stages of preparing to do it, is most decidedly assured.
Carl Bernstein, one half of the investigative reporting team of Woodward and Bernstein, the former Washington Post reporters who uncovered Nixon's Watergate crimes, sedately stated yesterday that Donald Trump is an authoritarian, and that he has plunged the United States of America in to some of the darkest days since the Joseph McCarthy communist witch hunts of the 1950's:
As some Republicans suggested the memo exposed a scandal at the heart of the FBI worse than Watergate, the reporter who was one of the duo who exposed the White House's involvement in the 1972 Watergate break-in, said it was Republicans who had got it wrong.
Bernstein called the memo a “disingenuous partisan document.”
“We may well have not seen such dark days for American democracy and its institutions since the days of Joe McCarthy,” Bernstein said, referring to the notorious anti-communist purges orchestrated by the Wisconsin Republican senator in the 1950s. “In the case of McCarthy, it was a senator, not the president of the United States, who was a demagogic authoritarian.”
http://www.newsweek.com/watergate-reporter-carl-bernstein-says-authoritarian-trump-has-plunged-us-its-798894
Bernstein is unquestioningly right of course and that in turn begets quite a sobering conundrum - one that a great many Americans who, prepared or not, are going to be starkly faced with here soon -- a choice between protecting American democracy and it's institutions, or the alternative choice - shrinking away in democracy's darkest hour, by not caring, and not making your voices heard.
The choices we all make . . . . . . . . . . . .
That's all.
“THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated”
― Thomas Paine, 'The American Crisis' - December 23, 1776
----TFG
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