Democrats failed to impeach Trump, but they won’t give up trying – it’s all they’ve got
by Nebojsa Malic
Even before President Donald Trump was elected US president, Democrats began talking about impeachment. Now that it has failed, will they finally accept the result of the 2016 election? Don’t get your hopes up.
Trump’s acquittal in the Senate on Wednesday was a foregone conclusion, given as it takes two thirds of the senators present to convict. The only way for 20 Republicans to switch sides was for the House case to be open and shut – something that only Rep. Adam Schiff (D-California) and ‘Russiagate’ truthers in the media actually believed.
In the end, the sole Republican to break ranks was Mitt Romney, and only on one of the articles. Not guilty, exonerated, case closed, let’s “move on” – as Democrats themselves advised in 1999, after the same thing happened to Bill Clinton.
Not so fast. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) has rejected the verdict, calling it “meaningless” because what happened in the Senate “wasn’t a trial.” It’s a retreat to last week’s talking points, arguing that the Senate should have called additional witnesses and documents that the House didn’t care to obtain before rushing to impeach back in December.
Never mind that doing this would have meant the House process was flawed, fatally undercut the second article – “obstruction of Congress” – or that the House managers themselves objected to any new evidence being introduced. If you’re expecting logic rather than lawfare, you’re in the wrong town.
Democrats began talking impeachment from the second Trump took office, having failed to prevent that from happening through a variety of long-shot schemes such as “Hamilton electors.” Their initial strategy was to allege “emoluments” and harp on Trump’s undisclosed tax returns, before settling on “Russiagate.” Then the Mueller Report came out and proved to be a dud of epic proportions. Hopes to at least get obstruction of justice charges out of it were decisively crushed by Attorney General William Barr.
Report came out and proved to be a dud of epic proportions. Hopes to at least get obstruction of justice charges out of it were decisively crushed by Attorney General William Barr.
Under tremendous pressure to find something – anything – to impeach Trump over, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi turned to Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff, a fellow Californian. Schiff seized upon a phone call between Trump and Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, which he was told about by staffers in touch with their former colleagues inside the intelligence community.
Schiff seized on Trump’s reference to Joe Biden’s bragging about getting a corruption prosecutor in Ukraine fired, to claim that this amounted to “soliciting foreign interference” in the 2020 election, since Barack Obama’s former VP was the front-runner for the Democrats’ presidential nomination.
While Schiff and his crew did their best to conjure a crazy conspiracy involving Trump holding up military aid for political leverage – mind-reading and inventing fake transcripts along the way – their case was ultimately smoke and mirrors. Zelensky himself said he was not being extorted, and the parade of other witnesses from within the very bureaucracy Trump had sworn to purge (but obviously hadn’t) had only their personal, anti-Trump opinions to offer.
Paradoxically, impeachment only made Trump stronger – and more popular, if the latest polls are anything to go by. By contrast, Democrats have gone from one defeat to the next this week, starting with Monday’s fiasco at the Iowa caucuses and continuing with Pelosi’s tantrum at Trump’s State of the Union on Tuesday.
“This impeachment was a destructive debacle in every conceivable respect, but don’t worry I’m sure [Democrats] will change their behavior moving forward, they have a well-established track record of taking responsibility for failure,” quipped political journalist Michael Tracey after the Senate acquittal.
If Trump wins re-election in November – which increasingly looks like it might happen – expect the Democrats to try to impeach him again. What for? It doesn’t matter, any excuse will do.
Simply put, they have to. In retrospect, impeachment seems to have always been a coping mechanism for 2016, the election that neither Hillary Clinton nor her party ever recovered from losing.
Clinton herself offered more proof of that on Wednesday, accusing 52 Senate Republicans of betraying their oath to the Constitution and saying the US was “entering dangerous territory for our democracy.”
She’s actually correct about that, though not in a sense she may have intended. Democracy works only so long as all participants agree to abide by electoral results. Refusing to accept defeat and attempting to rules-lawyer one’s way out would be bothersome enough at a board game night, but is downright toxic when it infects national politics.
Kaiser Report co-host Stacy Herbert summed it up best, calling the last three years “one horrible remake of ‘Goodbye, Lenin’ in which the entire political and media classes have constructed an elaborate alternative reality so as to avoid having Hillary encounter any further distress which might compound her humiliation.”
Unlike in the 2003 German film, nothing so far has been capable of bursting this particular delusion bubble – which means that America’s long national nightmare is nowhere near over.
ROMNEY SAYS HE WILL VOTE TO CONVICT PRESIDENT TRUMP
RINO Utah senator once again sides with the Democrats, this time for historic impeachment vote
FEBRUARY 5, 2020
Republican Utah Senator Mitt Romney announced on the Senate floor that he will vote to convict President Trump on the second article of impeachment on Wednesday.
“The grave question the Constitution tasks senators to answer is whether the president committed an act so extreme and egregious that it rises to the level of a ‘high crime and misdemeanor,’” Romney said. “Yes, he did.”
IMAGE CREDITS: SENATE TELEVISION VIA GETTY IMAGES.
“The president is guilty of an appalling abuse of public trust,” Romney continued. “What he did was not perfect. No, it was a flagrant assault on our electoral rights, our national security and our fundamental values. Corrupting an election to keep oneself in office is perhaps the most abusive and destructive violation of one’s oath of office that I can imagine.”
His break with the rest of the GOP isn’t so surprising given his disdain for and frequent betrayals of Trump in the past.
Romney’s latest betrayal came when he voted with the Democrats to seek additional witnesses in the impeachment trial last week, resulting in CPAC disinviting Romney from the annual conservative event this year.
Sean Davis of The Federalist noted that Romney’s vote to convict Trump despite not hearing from more witnesses he vote on just proves Romney was playing pure politics.
“Romney’s vote today also shows how dishonest his vote for witnesses was last week,” Davis tweeted. “He clearly didn’t believe more evidence or testimony was necessary since he’s voting to convict today. He just wanted a long, drawn-out process to damage his nemesis.”
Last fall, Romney revealed that he operated a secret Twitter account under the pseudonym “Pierre Delecto” for the sole purpose of disparaging Trump.
When Romney ran unsuccessfully for president in 2012, he sought and received Trump’s endorsement — he then denounced Trump in 2015.
Then when Romney ran for Senate in 2018, he again sought Trump’s endorsement — now he says he will vote to convict Trump in 2020.
Democrat Alabama Senator Doug Jones Will Vote to Impeach President Trump — Assuring GOP Pick-Up in the Senate this Fall
He’s an idiot Democrat at heart.
February 5, 2020
Alabama Democrat Senator Doug Jones announced on Wednesday morning that he will vote to impeach President Trump.
This seals his fate in the fall.
Buh-bye, idiot!
Doug Jones tweeted this out on Wednesday morning.
Alabama will be a pick up for Republicans in the fall.
Not a great look: Failed Iowa caucus app is deeply linked to self-declared winner Buttigieg… and Hillary Clinton
By Danielle Ryan
An app supposedly meant to ensure quick reporting of the Iowa caucus results was developed by a firm deeply tied to the Democratic establishment and went kaputt at the crucial moment. What are the chances?
It may sound like a conspiracy theory, but Americans can be excused for their distrust of the system after what happened in 2016 – and the facts that have been dug up on the group behind the failed Iowa app won’t do much to quell their suspicions.
The firm in question, rather ironically, is called Shadow Inc. — and, according to Federal Election Commission filings, it was paid thousands of dollars by Pete Buttigieg’s campaign for “software rights and subscriptions” in July 2019.
Fast-forward to February 2020, and the app has failed to deliver any reliable results in Iowa, Buttigieg has prematurely declared himself the winner — and #MayorCheat is trending on Twitter.
Adding to the suspicions surrounding the Iowa debacle is the fact that the company’s CEO, CTO and COO, among others, all previously worked for Hillary Clinton‘s presidential campaign, according to their LinkedIn profiles. For supporters of Sanders, convinced the DNC is attempting to rig the primary process against him for a second time, the conspiracy theory writes itself.
Shadow Inc was launched in 2019 by ACRONYM, a digital non-profit founded by one Tara McGowan, who happens to be a huge fan of Buttigieg, tweeting her excitement over his candidacy back in January 2019.
Despite declaring that it“launched” Shadow last year, ACRONYM has suddenly tried to distance itself from the company in the midst of the Iowa debacle. Yet, only a couple of weeks before the caucus disaster, McGowan herself was tweeting proudly about what ACRONYM was “building” together with Shadow. McGowan, by the way, is married to a top Buttigieg advisor.
Raising even more questions, there are rumors that Clinton’s former 2016 campaign manager, Robby Mook, was indirectly involved with the Shadow app. While Mook himself says he doesn’t “know anything” about it and there is no indication that he was involved in its actual development, investigative journalist Lee Fang tweeted that it was Mook’s security company, Defending Digital Democracy, which “vetted” the Iowa caucus app for “integrity.” The New York Times also reported that Mook’s company was involved in testing the app.
It’s not like Sanders supporters haven’t been burned by this sort of thing before. It is now widely accepted that the DNC was secretly working to thwart Sanders’ campaign in 2016, in an effort to ensure establishment favorite Hillary Clinton would face off against Trump. It is perfectly plausible to assume the party apparatus might try to do the same again in 2020, albeit with different tactics.
The utter contempt for Sanders among the establishment ranks of the DNC should not be underestimated. Despite the fact that Sanders ultimately supported Clinton in 2016, Clinton herself initially refused to say she would back Sanders if he became the party’s nominee in 2020 — and declared that “nobody likes” the Democratic socialist, who consistently ranks as the most popular politician in the country, but whose socialist-style politics are anathema to corporate centrists.
The Iowa drama is reminiscent of the controversy surrounding the alleged Russian hacking of the DNC in 2016. The determination that Moscow hacked the organization to harm Clinton’s campaign was made almost instantly by Crowdstrike, a private Democratic party contractor with links to an arms manufacturer-funded think tank. You couldn’t even make it up.
For progressive Democrats expecting a Sanders win in Iowa (that prediction based on recent polls in which he enjoyed significant leads), this all looks like blatant, bare-faced corruption. Or, as journalist Kyle Kulinski put it: “This is either record breaking incompetence or it’s an attempt to game the results. Those are the only two options.”
As of the time of writing, it has been 14 hours since the Iowa polls closed, there are still no official results available and Shadow Inc has assured everyone that it sincerely regrets the delay. While Buttigieg has declared victory based on limited data covering only his own campaign, Sanders’ camp has released data covering all candidates, indicating that he won the night.
With such a mess made of the Iowa caucus, and suspicions swirling about Shadow’s mysterious app, whether Sanders won or he didn’t, the DNC has once again ignited a rage in his supporters that it may come to regret.
Progressive Democrats were expecting yesterday’s caucus to potentially get messy, but “Shady app crashes and Pete Buttigieg declares victory before the result” probably wasn’t on anyone’s Iowa bingo card.
Democrats in Disarray Chaos: MSNBC Says Caucuses RACIST! Zerlina Maxwell: Iowa ‘Perfect Example of Systemic Racism’
By Pam Key – 2/4/2020
MSNBC political analyst Zerlina Maxwell said Tuesday on her network that the Iowa caucus was “the perfect example of systemic racism” given the demographics of the state.
Maxwell said, “The Iowa caucus is essentially the perfect example of systemic racism. Ninety-one percent of the voters in Iowa are white. The reason why you see a drop in turnout, I’m just speculating here, it could be perhaps that white children are not in the cages. So when you are talking about the tangible pain that black and brown people are feeling, they feel a sense of urgency because their kids are being put in cages, right? So if you have 91% white electorate, that sense of urgency may not be reflected in the turnout numbers. I’m not saying that’s the reason for this. It could be a factor.”
Media crushes Democrats for Iowa debacle | SUPERcuts! #741
2/4/2020
Hey press: It was Democrats last time too. “Russian Bots” translates to “Democrats” pretty reliably.
It’s Finally Almost Over!
By Mark Dice – 2/4/2020
‘Are you even human?’ Former CNN host says world is better off without ‘evil’ & ‘racist’ Rush Limbaugh
A tweet from former CNN host Reza Aslan meant to capitalize on Rush Limbaugh’s recent cancer diagnosis is not going over too well with fellow media figures.
It was only a matter of time before someone celebrated Rush Limbaugh’s lung cancer diagnosis. While the longtime conservative talk radio host received a flood of support and well wishes after revealing his health status this week, he’s not exactly the most popular guy on the left.
“Ask yourself this simple question: is the world a better place or a worse place with Rush Limbaugh in it?” tweeted former CNN host Reza Aslan in response to Limbaugh’s diagnosis.
One only needs to glance at Aslan’s Twitter account or recall that he somehow managed to be dropped by CNN for anti-Trump tweets calling the US president a “piece of s**t” to know the question is rhetorical.
And if Aslan’s question weren’t enough, he later doubled down multiple times in response to Twitter users by calling Limbaugh “despicable” and “racist.”
Aslan’s take on Limbaugh’s death has not exactly gotten the best response.
Ricochet editor in chief Jon Gabriel questioned whether Aslan is even human.
“This horrible, hateful, miserable man @rezaaslan is currently employed by a network in Hollywood as an executive producer on a sitcom for your consumption. Leftists reward each other for wishing death on those who disagree,” outspoken conservative and ‘Justified’ actor Nick Searcy tweeted.
Aslan currently produces and hosts ‘Rough Draft with Reza Aslan,’ a show on the streaming service Topic. He previously hosted ‘Believer’ for CNN and helped producer the comedy ‘The Secret Life of Muslims.’
Blaze TV host Lauren Chen called Aslan’s original Limbaugh tweet his “grossest take yet,” and recalled another controversial moment where Aslan called Nick Sandmann’s face “punchable.” Sandmann just recently received a settlement from CNN for defamation, after they released an edited video of him appearing to instigate a confrontation with a Native America elder, an edited video Aslan reacted to.
The criticism has not bothered Aslan, who later answered his own question and declared about Limbaugh: “There is absolutely no question the world is better without him in it.”
Caucus Chaos: You had one job, Iowa!
2/4/2020
The delay is because they’re all trying to get their story straight
Tom's Blog 