Your Once and Final Supreme Double Impeachee

[kladner]

McTurtle is determined to ram through every nomination he can, judicial and otherwise.

[ewmayer]

The silence from those hereabouts who were prominent and at-the-time-strident Russiagaters is palpable on this subject of late. Consortium News explains the sudden shift in tactics of prominent MSM peddlers of said toxic 3-year-plus fairytale to "fine, but right now the country is facing a real existential crisis in form of [Covid-19|Trump|halitosis], so we really need to move on"-ism, lapses into "yeah, but [AG William] Barr is, like, a total *partisan*" ad hominems and similar rhetorical evasions:

PATRICK LAWRENCE: The 'See-No-Evil' Phase of Russiagate | Consortium News: The media spinfest following the collapse of this conspiracy theory suggests our troubled republic simply cannot accept its errors, leaving us unable to learn from them.

The long, destructive conspiracy theory known as Russiagate, the mother of them all, at last evaporates into thin air. No shred of it remains as of back-to-back disclosures over the past couple of weeks. Where does this leave us? What is to come of this momentous turn of events?

Among those not inclined toward hysteria or copious quaffs of Democratic Party Kool–Aid, it has long been a question how those who concocted and sustained the tales of Russian “meddling,” “collusion,” and mail hackery would manage their embarrassment — not to mention their potential legal liabilities — once their edifice-built-on-sand collapsed, as it was destined from the first to do.

The early signs are as some predicted: They will slither quietly off the stage without comment, they will deny their incessant, ever-vehement accusations, they will profess to weariness, they will insist there are more important things to think about now.

Here is a tweet from one Bob F published Saturday. Our Bob touches nearly all of the above-noted bases. His mentions of Matt Taibbi, Aaron Maté, and Jimmy Dore reference two journalists and a talk-show host who identified the fraud from the first and had the scruples not to surrender to the liberal totalitarianism we have suffered these past three years:

ok ok ok ok @aaronjmate and @jimmy_dore got one thing right in their lives. Can we move on from this shiny object that is Russiagate? Trump and the Republicans are looting this country. We could be very close to armed revolt. But let's talk more about Russia Russia Russia.

— Bob F (@BobF_666) May 9, 2020

Yes, Bob, lets. This is a brilliant specimen of the flaccid cowardice we’re now to witness many times over. Reassuringly enough, a modest twitter storm followed. Here is a reply from Kathy Woods, a consistently insightful commentator in Twitterland:

Move on? Hell no! I can’t stand Trump, but the Dems used the levers of the security state to perpetrate a fraud. They buried progressive momentum and brought us to the brink w/ Russia. It’s essential we completely expose this.

— Kathy Woods (@woods_kathy) May 10, 2020

For good measure, here is another response to Big Bob, this one addressing his implicit assertion of Democratic Party virtue in the Age of Trump:

A) liberals never stopped russiagating so obviously it needs to continue to be debunked.

B) if you think the Democrats are not equally to blame for the looting, I got a bridge to sell you.

— David Warschauer???? (@rogersmithbigo) May 9, 2020

There is anger abroad as Russiagate finally unwinds, plainly. This is an excellent thing. And Ms. Woods is right: It is important to make the sun shine on what became, before the end, a scandal of historic proportions. There is a chance of achieving the “complete exposure” Woods asks for, but it remains a question, as of now, whether this will come to pass.

Two weeks ago the Justice Department made public documents showing that when, in January 2017, prosecutors wanted to close the collusion case against Michael Flynn, who briefly served as President Donald Trump’s national security advisor, because they found “no derogatory information” against him, Peter Strzok, the philandering F.B.I. agent later found to be shaping an “insurance policy” against a Trump victory in the 2016 election, cajoled them into keeping it open — absence of evidence be damned.

Two Other Developments

The Strzok revelations turned out to be prelude to the two other developments further demolishing the Russiagate narrative. Last Thursday Justice finally dropped its case against Flynn altogether. We now know he was the victim of a perjury trap when questioned about his contacts with Sergey Kislyak, Moscow’s ambassador to Washington in 2016. “Get him to lie so we can prosecute him,” was the FBI’s directive.

Yet worse, Flynn’s guilty plea was in response to prosecutors’ threats to indict his son if he pled otherwise. Tell me the difference, please, between this kind of stuff and the treatment of the accused in the postwar show trials in Eastern Europe.

On the same day the Justice Department dropped the charges against Flynn, the House Intelligence Committee released documents showing that the FBI had no evidence that Russia pilfered the Democratic National Committee’s email archives by hacking into its servers in mid–2016. The FBI had none because CrowdStrike, the patently corrupt cyber-security firm on which it (inexplicably) relied, never gave it any: It had none, either — contrary to its many claims otherwise.

The taker of cake here is that the documents also show that the House Intelligence Committee, chaired by the inimitable (thank goodness) Adam Schiff, knew there were no grounds to allege Russian involvement in what wasn’t a hack by anyone, but a leak, probably by someone with direct access to the DNC’s servers.

My Consortium News colleague Ray McGovern has just detailed the collapse of the “Russians-hacked-it” ruse.

No evidence anywhere along the line of collusion, none of Russians stealing mail. There is a simpler way to put this: No Russiagate.

In truth, there has been evidence aplenty of the Russiagate fraud for some time, due in part to the researches of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, VIPS, of which McGovern is a principal. The problem has been to secure official acknowledgement of three years’ worth of wrongdoing. We now have it, even if it arrives with no admission whatsoever of responsibility.

Enter Perception Management

Now come the lies, the dissembling, and the media’s “perception management.” Tucker Carlson, the Fox News presenter, offered a funny-but-not-funny catalog of the liars who now stand exposed, none more thoroughly than the egregious Schiff, who ought to resign over this, and Evelyn Farkas, another Obama-era holdover with absolutely no regard for the truth. Loretta Lynch, Obama’s A–G, will also have things to answer for, assuming answers for her misconduct are required of her.

Among the press and broadcasters, it has been a spinfest this past week — led, naturally, by The New York Times, given no one in the media dares venture a syllable for which the Times has not signaled prior approval. The paper’s report on the dismissal of the Flynn case marked the judgment down as “the latest example of Attorney General William P. Barr’s efforts to chisel away at the results of the Russia investigation.” I lost count of the mentions of Flynn’s “lying” and “guilty plea” after nine. No reference to the perjury trap set for Flynn, or the threat to indict his son.

The Times ran two further pieces hatcheting Flynn and Barr in Saturday’s editions, here and here, and a straight-out character assassination of Flynn on Sunday, casting him as some kind of pathological split personality. The Gray Lady doth protest too much, in my view.

The press vastly over-invested in the Russiagate narrative from the first, and now appears set to throw yet more money after all the bad. This is not a good sign. It suggests that our troubled republic simply cannot accept its errors, leaving us unable to learn from them. This is why America in its post-democratic phase cannot self-correct. It is why we have no assurance that another Russiagate, in whatever form, will not be visited upon us.

[kladner]

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/eric-...b628279b41e292
Eric Trump Confuses Cliches And Becomes A Twitter Laughingstock

“Eric speaks near fluent Donald,” one person pointed out.

The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

Eric Trump this week proved he is a chip off the old block after he confused his cliches while attacking Democrats on Twitter.

“The chips are starting to crumble,” the son of President Donald Trump perplexingly tweeted on Tuesday:

Dozens of people on Twitter pointed out that there appears to be no such saying. Others slapped Trump with botched idioms of their own:

Spelling Mistakes Cost Lives @darren_cullen
Replying to @EricTrump
No use crying over pissed milk

[rogue]

Originally Posted by kladner

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/eric-...b628279b41e292
Eric Trump Confuses Cliches And Becomes A Twitter Laughingstock

I prefer to say "chip off the old blockhead".

[kladner]

Originally Posted by rogue

I prefer to say "chip off the old blockhead".

Accepted and commended!
Could he have meant: "The dominoes are starting to tumble"?

[garo]

Probably mixed up chips are down/on the table and that's the way the cookie crumbles. And maybe a bit of the case crumbling.

But who knows really what goes on in that void.

[kladner]

Originally Posted by garo

Probably mixed up chips are down/on the table and that's the way the cookie crumbles. And maybe a bit of the case crumbling.

But who knows really what goes on in that void.

That is a good question, but not one I would really care to know the answer to.

[Dr Sardonicus]

My all-time favorite regarding the mangling of a stock phrase (The United Negro College Fund's slogan "A mind is a terrible thing to waste"):

What a waste it is to lose one’s mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is.

--Dan Quayle in a speech to the United Negro College Fund, May, 1989

I can't remember my next-favorite precisely, but it was in the Rodney King - Reginald Denny PSA on In Living Color which would have been... I guess 1992. A not-entirely-coherent Denny (Portrayed by Jim Carrey) says something like, "You can lead a horse to water, but the early bird gets the worm!"

In regard to Eric Trump's blinker on Twitter, my guess is that his ward attendant he meant "The walls are starting to crumble"

As to what goes on in that void, I don't know; but physics offers the theory of "quantum fluctuations."

[kladner]

Originally Posted by Dr Sardonicus

My all-time favorite regarding the mangling of a stock phrase (The United Negro College Fund's slogan "A mind is a terrible thing to waste"):

What a waste it is to lose one’s mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is.
--Dan Quayle in a speech to the United Negro College Fund, May, 1989

In regard to Eric Trump's blinker on Twitter, my guess is that his ward attendant he meant "The walls are starting to crumble"

As to what goes on in that void, I don't know; but physics offers the theory of "quantum fluctuations."

@all of the above:

I had forgotten what a complete nincompoop Quayle was/is.

[xilman]

Originally Posted by kladner

@all of the above:

I had forgotten what a complete nincompoop Quayle was/is.

Hey, I'd almost forgotten Mr Potatoe Head!

[ewmayer]

Joe Biden mixes up number of jobs lost, coronavirus deaths | NY Post

In his latest blunder, self-proclaimed “gaffe machine” Joe Biden claimed “millions” of Americans have died of the coronavirus and 85,000 jobs have been lost as a result of the pandemic, according to a report.

“This is not a moment for excuses or deflections or blame game. We’re — we’re in the middle of a pandemic that has cost us more than 85,000 jobs as of today,” the presumptive Democratic nominee said during a virtual roundtable with three governors, according to Real Clear Politics.

“Lives of millions of people. Millions of people. Millions of jobs,” he said, possibly realizing his faux pas about the number of jobs after flipping the numbers.

“You know, and we’re in a position where we just got new unemployment insurance, this morning, numbers, 36.5 million claims since this crisis began,” Biden added in the roundtable with Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy and Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont that was livestreamed on PBS.

In other pandemic-related foot-in-mouth moments, Biden has referred to the disease as COVID-9 rather than COVID-19, and called the Chinese city where the pathogen emerged “Luhan,” not Wuhan, according to the Sun.

W.r.to the latter gaffe, I wonder what the late Marshall McWuhan would've thought of the message that is the medium of Joe "nobody home" Biden and his elevation to Team D frontrunner status. Whenevr I see interviews where Mrs. Biden seems to be physically supporting Joe I think of ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his puppet Charlie McCarthy - Joe simply should not be allowed to speak without a firm hand-up-the-back from Jill.