The New Third World, Fourth Estate and Fifth Columns

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari)

"The bigger concern is not what Mr. Trump has done to the presidency but rather what we as a nation have allowed him to do to us. We have sunk low with him and allowed our discourse to be stripped of civility." NY Times op-ed, September 5, 2018

The sky is falling. And those with feet of clay will find it very difficult to run for cover.

     There's a quiet revolution going on involving all three branches of our government (or three out of four, if you count the Lobbyist branch). But first, let's take a look at the always flailing and paranoid

Executive Branch

     This time, King Lear's got a reason to be paranoid. Yesterday, the "failing" NY Times took the extraordinary step of publishing an anonymous opinion piece by someone who took the initiative of revealing they were a "senior administration official." For several very good reasons I'll go into later, I'm almost convinced it's Chief of Staff John Kelly. But early in the op-ed, this craven, quasi-whistleblower writes,

To be clear, ours is not the popular “resistance” of the left. We want the administration to succeed and think that many of its policies have already made America safer and more prosperous.

     This automatically reveals several things about this miscreant. First, he gives props to Trump for two things that are patently and palpably false. Trump has not "made America safer" unless you consider ordinary Central American and Mexican families separated at the border to be greater threats than the radical right wing or ISIS.
     Secondly, it's hard to see how America was made "more prosperous" because of Trump considering his completely insane trade wars with our very allies have already resulted in thousands of US jobs being lost or outsourced overseas and the destruction of several small companies who can't keep up with the retaliatory tariffs being imposed on them. Unless this clown's talking about Wall Street's bullish market and that part of the economy, then, yes, the economy is booming. But that's largely due to unprecedented stock buybacks made possible by Trump's utterly ruinous tax scam bill. How Wall Street's fortunes translate to Main Street forever remains to be seen.
     So the scumbag who'd written this cowardly op-ed is still a True Believer of Trump's agenda. His only saving grace, or what passes for it. is he's digging in his heels and refusing to go over the cliff. He also thinks it's repugnant to be confused with the real Resistance of the left, which he dismisses and never mentions again. Because the author seems think there should be more than one resistance, one that hides behind anonymous op-eds and whispers in the halls about invoking the 25th amendment (which seemed to be an idea early in the administration but not since).
     That's a cowardly resistance if ever I saw one. This doesn't even rise to the level of a 5th Column. Not even close.
     Trump, as usual, is foaming at the mouth over this, claiming out of one side of his vagina-shaped mouth that the "failing" New York Times published another fake piece while saying minutes later the op-ed was "treason" and his various flacks like Sarah Huckabee Sanders calling out the author as "a gutless loser". Which he is. But I say it for different reasons. As usual, Trump, with his typical tenuous grasp on reality, is trying to have it both ways. It's both a "fake" op-ed yet it's treasonous.
     And the reason why I'm convinced it's John Kelly is because of something he'd said that'd been repeated in Bob Woodward's upcoming book, Fear. At one point, the author writes, "Meetings with him veer off topic and off the rails..." "Off the rails" is a quote attributed to Kelly in Woodward's upcoming book, who added that we're "in Crazytown." Furthermore, Kelly had defended the border family separations in the most callous of terms, the terms of someone who's convinced these people just looking for jobs and a new life are the greatest threat to our national security. And a guy who would defend Ben Carson's $31,000 dining set would also be even happier about the tax scam bill.
     Plus, in the lengthening list of quivering administration lickspittles denying they'd written the op-ed, one name is conspicuously missing: John Kelly's.

The Legislative

Let's get one thing straight: Blue Dog Democrat Cory Booker is no Spartacus. His heroism peaked when he used to shovel snow for residents when he was still mayor of Newark. Today, Booker did a mini document dump, more like a drip, of 12 "committee confidential" documents pertaining to Brett Kavanaugh. But what Booker didn't tell people as he was putting on his hair shirt and preparing to hoist himself on a nonexistent petard was that he'd gotten shyster Bill Burck's permission to reveal these documents which were about racial profiling on Kavanaugh's part.

     Now, all Booker did was reveal a few documents that shouldn't be "committee confidential" since those documents, ostensibly, belong to the American people. And the release of those documents shouldn't be at the whims of a random lawyer who just happens to represent three of Trump stooges: Don McGahn, Reince Priebus, and Steve Bannon. Burck's also worked for George W. Bush and is well-known in Republican legal circles. In other words, he's Federalist Society material.

     But the fact that Booker would do such a document dump as long as the perception remains that he could be expelled from the US Senate (and John Cornyn today read him the Riot Act if he made good on his threats) is extraordinary. In the three days since Kavanaugh's dog and pony show began, Senate Democrats have done some pretty persuasive political kabuki in opposing Kavanaugh's nomination. Say what you want about them- But Senate Democrats (especially in an election year) know how to link their arms and do the can-can.

     And with Kavanaugh's nomination, Trump's showing the American people once again that he's quite willing to make permanent changes to our government and its offices with the short-sighted intention of giving himself short-term gain. He'd appointed Jeff Sessions as Attorney General back when the Mueller probe was still Comey's probe and was visibly outraged, and still is, that Sessions had recused himself from any Russia investigation.

     Trump had Mitch McConnell shoehorn Neil Gorsuch onto the High Court to, again, give himself legal cover and to change the rules in the Senate to that short-sighted end. And Brett Kavanaugh's past opinions that the president (provided he's not black) should be shielded from indictment or any legal comeuppance whatsoever should also set off warning bells in the minds of anyone who cares about our nation's

Judiciary

It may be surprising to remember that the federal judiciary was actually the very first branch of our government to oppose Trump. In fact, it began in 2016. The first federal judge, Gonzalo Curiel, ruled in favor of the plaintiffs in a case involving the fraudulent Trump University. Later, after Trump was inaugurated, Curiel, oddly enough would remove a block toward the wall (environmental regulations), the very reason Trump said Curiel couldn't be impartial because of his Mexican heritage.

     But when federal judges stand in Trump's way, it's usually connected to his Caucasian-centric immigration policies, starting with his Muslim ban.  By October last year, three judges had placed at least partial blocks on it due to its blatant unconstitutionality. By May this year, another federal judge said Trump blocking critics on Twitter was in violation of the First Amendment right to Freedom of Speech. The list goes on.

     July this year, another federal judge, John Mendez, largely blocked Trump's attempt to bypass California sanctuary laws (so much for "states' rights"). Early this year, William Alsup, yet another federal judge, stood in Trump's way when he sought to end protections for 800,000 DACA beneficiaries.

     The only reason why it may seem premature to pronounce our nation and its government as being in free fall is our government's, whoever is in charge, freakishly infallible ability to still project a mirage of calm waters even as the waves crash over port and starboard. Donald Trump is a fat, festering splinter in the body politic and it is slowly but surely pushing him out for the infectious foreign entity he is.

     Once the Democrats take control of the House (and they will), they will launch no less than 100 investigations into this administration while the Republican minority that's shielded Trump from countless inquiries will scream about the "tyranny of the majority." Here's a brief but hardly exhaustive investigative laundry list for Democrats once the GOP loses control of it.

     Trump's days pretending to be the president are numbered. With any luck, once Robert Mueller finally wraps up his Waiting for Godot Russia probe and the rest of the indictments come tumbling down like a blue avalanche, Trump's election will be ruled null and void and everything done since January 20th last year, including the principals in the Rules of Succession, will similarly be swept forever out of sight.