Impeachment Fever

According to the Democrats' master plan, August was going to be used to make the case for impeaching President Trump at town halls. Then they planned to get down to impeachment when they returned to work in September. As it turned out the town halls didn't raise much excitement. Still, the Democrats returned to DC rested and ready to impeach someone.

The first target turned out to be Justice Kavanaugh. An excerpt from an upcoming book claimed that he wagged his penis at someone while in college and Democrats were ready to start impeachment proceedings over that. But then it turned out that no one could remember it except a lawyer connected with the Clintons. Even the woman who was supposed to be the victim denied it so that fell apart.

Back to the original target, President Trump. But the original justification for impeachment wasn't going to work. The Mueller probe came up empty on Russian collusion. It listed possible obstruction of justice charges but let's be honest, you can't remove a sitting president because he complained to the media that the special council should be replaced because of a conflict of interest.

But, just at the right time a new allegation appeared. There were rumors that a whistle-blower had reported a conversation between President Trump and the prime minister of the Ukraine in which Trump demanded that an investigation into Former Vice President Biden's son be reopened. Trump was supposed to have threatened to  withhold aid unless they acquiesced. Democrats and the press were up in arms.

New information has come out. Yes, Trump did put a temporary hold on $400 million around the call but he says that this was unrelated to the investigation. It turns out that the whistle-blower did not have first-hand knowledge of the call and technically is not a whistle-blower which is why the Inspector General has not released the complaint to Congress. The President has agreed to release a transcript of the call and of the complaint to Congress by the end of the week.

But Congress has Impeachment Fever. The Squad has been working their fellow members and Speaker Pelosi. So, rather than wait until they have all the relevant documents, Pelosi announced an impeachment probe. This raises the immediate question, "Has she lost her mind?"

She announced the inquiry just days before she will have the facts. If Trump is telling the truth then this will blow up in her face. And there's every reason to believe him. If the transcript showed a true quid pro quo deal then he'd be refusing the release the transcript. So this could blow up in her face by the weekend. This is important because she's likely to only get one shot at impeachment. If it fails then it will be much harder to do a second impeachment. Further, trying to get 67 votes in the Senate will be nearly impossible without an iron-clad case. After all, the Republicans have a Senate majority and will face angry voters if they remove a president with a 90% approval rating among Republicans.

There are other dangers. Joe Biden is the Democratic front-runner and he has bragged about using a quid pro quo deal to have a Ukrainian prosecutor fired. This is the same prosecutor who was investigating the company his son was working for. If the Democrats start impeachment over Trump trying to revive this case then people are going to demand to know if there was anything to it? And they will want to know why a quid pro quo agreement was ok for Biden but impeachable for Trump. This will also tarnish Obama's reputation. Biden insists that Obama backed him.

This could catch other fish, Hillary Clinton tried to get damaging information on Trump through the Ukrainian Embassy. People associated with her did PR work for Ukraine as did Mueller.

So there is a real possibility that the investigation could leave the Democrats disillusioned and dispirited and their front-runner's campaign crippled.

Why would Pelosi risk launching an impeachment with so many possible downsides? I can think of a few reasons. One is that she's lost control of the House. The Squad has always been for impeachment and they forced her to rush into it.

Another possibility is that the Democrats want a failed impeachment as a campaign tool. "Elect Democrats so that we can finally remove Trump from office!" This means that they've accepted that Trump will win the 2020 election and are thinking ahead to ways of removing him during his second term. While this is possible, it's not likely. If requires the Democrats to admit that Trump will win and that they will be able to mount a second impeachment after the first one fails.

The final possibility is spite. The attorney who represented one of Justice Kavanaugh's accusers talked about the importance of putting an asterisk on his name. The Democrats might simply be trying to put an asterisk on President Trump's name.

Kavanaugh Conspiracies

A bit over a year ago Judge Kavanaugh looked like a shoe-in for confirmation to the Supreme Court. But then, after what should have been his last confirmation hearing, Senator Diane Feinstein revealed that someone had contacted her weeks earlier with allegations of sexual misconduct. The accuser, Christine Blassy Ford, refused to contact the Senate Judiciary Committee directly, instead  going to the Washington Post with her story. That was followed by numerous other allegations.

Because of the #MeToo movement, people were inclined to believe Ford that something happened. After all, the #MeToo'ers said, coming forward with such complaints was such a burden that no one would make something like that up. But, as the allegations piled up, it was obvious that people were making things up. But let's assume for a moment that Ford and Ramirez were telling the truth.

Ford's basic story is that when they were in high school, Kavanaugh groped her over her clothing and swim suit but she easily got away from him. That's all it amounts to. What she said during her testimony had been coached to make it sound much worse. She talked about being afraid that he would suffocate her and life-long trauma she suffered from the incident. But, the trauma-induced claustrophobia she claimed to have did not exist. She lied about it which casts doubt on the rest of her story. Further, Kavanaugh kept a detailed diary showing that he was so busy with sports that this event never occurred, at least not with him. And, finally, the other three people named all denied it.

The second allegation happened at Yale. Somehow, at a drunken party, Kavanaugh lost his pants and put his penis in the face of Deborah Ramirez. Assuming it happened, so what? Yes, it's at odds with Kavanaugh's reputation as boringly straight-laced but it tells us nothing about his fitness as a judge 30+ years later. But, again, it's unlikely to have happened. Ramirez admits that she was drunk at the time and spent a week trying to decide if it was Kavanaugh or not. She called friends before coming forward but could not find any who remembered the incident. Again, it's likely this did not happen, at least not with Kavanaugh.

What brought this up again is that someone else remembers a second incident similar to the one with Kavanaugh. This launched calls for a new investigation and possible impeachment. But this allegation is on even shakier ground than the others. The accuser, Max Stier, is a lawyer with deep ties to the Clintons and the alleged victim doesn't remember it happening. Considering that Stier has his own axe to grind and could not produce a single witness, this is likely another fabrication.

There is some outrage because Stier informed the Senate Judiciary Committee of his allegations a few days prior to the final vote. Democrats are complaining that the process was rushed.

So, now that I've covered the facts, here's what I think really happened. When Justice Kennedy announced his retirement, the Democrats decided they would prefer to keep the seat open until 2021 in the hopes that a Democrat would defeat Trump for reelection. So their plan was to stall until the 2018 election when they hoped to take the Senate. After that, they would either refuse to consider any Trump nominees or would vote them down.

Kavanaugh was one of the best-qualified candidates in modern history. Some of his opinions were copied verbatim into Supreme Court rulings. The only way to keep Kavanaugh off of the Court was to engage in personal destruction. They used the same play-book as was attempted under the Clarence Thomas hearings - wait until after the confirmation hearing then breathlessly introduce an unsubstantiated accusation of sexual harassment. Ford's lawyer has even said that the whole purpose was to "put an asterisk" on Kavanaugh's name.

Stier's accusation came so late in the process precisely to stall for time. If they had waited for an investigation then it would have been followed by more accusations in an endless procession. No one wanted to know the truth about Kavanaugh, that he is a decent man. They wanted to stall and besmirch his character.

Now, a year later all of this is coming up again. Why? It is unlikely that Kavanaugh will be impeached and removed from the bench. The real reason is to add more asterisks to his name in order to scare off other conservative candidates.

Scary Old Men

The two Democratic front-runners, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, are both quite elderly. If either one gets the nomination then he will be the oldest candidate in history (and that's with the current record-holder, Donald Trump, on the ballot). Beyond this, both candidates are getting outright scary.

Biden has a long history of stretching facts, sometimes well past the breaking point. He plagiarizes other people's stories and inflates his own story. He claims to have been in charge of drawing down the troops in Iraq but the generals in command contest that. He says that he "beat the NRA twice" referring to the Clinton-era assault weapons ban. His role wasn't big enough to make Wikipedia's summary of the legislation and the re-authorization of the law died in committee, not on George Bush's desk so it's difficult to understand what his second "win" over the NRA was.

Even his reason for running is based on the lie that President Trump called neo-nazies and Klansmen "good people". Yes, Trump said there were good people on both sides but he also made it clear that he meant people protesting against removal of a statue. In the same breath, Trump condemned the racists. Beyond this, Biden has no clear reason for running.

Biden is also getting forgetful. He's referred to President Obama as "President my boss" and to President Bush as "the last President" (somehow forgetting Obama's tenure). He frequently forgets what city or state he's in. This sort of memory loss is common in people his age but it's not comforting.

Then there are statements he's made that are difficult to decide if he's stretching the truth as he always did or miss-remembering. He claims to have met with students from the Parkland shooting in his office as Vice-President but the shooting happened after he left office. He tells about a soldier refusing an award as he pinned it on while vice president but he was wrong about the name, rank, and branch of the service the soldier was in as well as the reason for the award. In addition, he was a senator at the time and someone else was pinning on the award.

Biden also has violent tendencies. When the Billy Bush tapes came out, he said that if Trump had said something like that when they were in high school he'd have beaten him up over it. He later said that if Trump followed him around on the debate floor then he'd turn around and deck him (Note: this was a lie by the Clinton campaign. Hillary repeatedly walked across the stage and stood between Trump and the camera so Trump would appear to be looming over her shoulder). Earlier this Summer when asked about debating Trump, Biden raised his fists and mimed boxing.

Biden's violent tendencies are not limited to Trump. He's known for inappropriately touching women but he has a worse habit. At least three times in the last month, when a woman asked a question he didn't like, he grabbed her hand or arm and held her in place while he lectured her.

So, is Bernie any better? No, he's scarier.

When he ran in 2016, Bernie said that people should have gone to jail for the 2008 crash. He went on to say that even if no laws had been broken, an imaginative prosecutor can always find something to charge someone with. For his current run Saunders wants to jail oil company executives.

When asked about population control and global warming, he said that he's eliminate the Mexico City rule (which prevents the US from funding abortions in other countries) and push the rest of the world to use birth control and abortion to reduce the population. Talk about your American imperialism!

So, we have Biden who lies, forgets things and has violent tendencies and Bernie who campaigns on jailing his enemies, even if they haven't broken the law, and dictating something like China's One Child policy world-wide.

I find both of these guys terrifying.

Their First Day

The presidential candidates are in a bidding war for how much they will do to limit guns through executive action on their first day in office.This means they are planning on circumventing Congress, defying the Supreme Court, ignoring the Constitution and violating their oath of office (almost as soon as they give it).

What are they planning on their second day?

And why aren't Democrats scared of these people?