Dial T For Treason

     Betrayal of the American people by aiding and abetting a hostile foreign power to subvert the electoral process for Donald Trump's personal and financial benefit then taking an oath to defend the nation against all enemies, foreign and domestic. is certainly a crime. It's called treason.
     One could see how little Trump cared about those hallowed American institutions in his final moments as a civilian while taking the oath of office on January 20, 2017. He cocked his head to one side and tonelessly and narcoleptically repeated Chief Justice John Roberts as if he was ordering a taco bowl from the Trump Grille.
     So why aren't the mainstream media doing their part and using the T word? That would be T for Treason. T for Traitor. Hell, even T for Treachery. Why is it up to guys like David Corn in non-corporate media outlets such as Mother Jones to remind those in the reality-based community what is palpably true? That Donald Trump is a traitor and not just any traitor. One worse than Benedict Arnold (Unlike the Russian plot to infiltrate and influence the 2016 election, the West Point plot involving Arnold was a bust).
     From practically the moment he took office, Trump would start treating the Justice Department as if it was his own private law firm and legal goon squad. He had made it plain that he'd appointed Jeff Sessions as his first Attorney General simply so he could spike any investigation into the Russian meddling in the election. Not long after Sessions had done the ethical thing and recused himself from any involvement or oversight of such an investigation, Trump publicly fumed that if he knew Sessions would do that, he never would've nominated Sessions, in the first place.
     Not long after Sessions was confirmed by the same Judiciary Committee of which he was a part, Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, lifelong Republican, on May 9th (which triggered the Mueller probe a week or so later) when Comey refused to answer whether or not Michael Flynn was under investigation. Then the very next day Trump bragged about doing so with Russia's Foreign Minister Lavorv and then-Russian ambassador to the US, Sergey Kislyak (whom several Trump insiders, including Sessions, lied about meeting during the campaign). He fired Comey, as he said in front of Tass photographers who were given the privilege of attending the Oval Office meeting that was denied US journalists, to relieve the pressure of the Russia probe.
     Others lied about meeting with Russian nationals and Kremlin-linked Putin insiders, starting with Trump's own son in law, Jared Kushner, who lied on his SF86 form (the security clearance application) and was allowed to revise no fewer than three times while still keeping his clearance. Flynn lied about meeting with Russians, Sessions lied about meeting with Russians (despite plenty of photographic evidence showing him speaking with Kislyak at the Mayflower Hotel), his namesake Don Jr lied about the Trump Tower meeting in June 2016 and even kept the meeting from the FBI, the Justice Department, the media and the American people. Then Trump Sr lied about the meeting again by dictating a memo on Air Force One about the meeting being about Russian baby adoptions and not sanctions.
     Trump openly invited the Russians to hack the DNC servers for Hillary's emails, which appeared on Wikileaks the very next day. That alone should've ended Trump's campaign but it didn't.
     So, after months of openly colluding with top level Russian government officials, then repeatedly lying about it, some of whom being sentenced to prison terms for doing so, after acting exactly the way a guilty man would act, how come the Mueller probe, according to Bill Barr's "I didn't read the book" book report on the report, gives Trump a free pass?
     The answer, of course, is it doesn't. Even the reliable right wing stooge Barr said in his ridiculous four page synopsis of the 320+ page-long Mueller report, culled from millions of raw documents, that it did not exonerate Trump of collusion or conspiracy to collude or anything specific. Trump was given, according to Barr, “multiple offers from Russian-affiliated individuals to assist the Trump campaign.” And then, there was the closest thing that Barr would give us to a smoking gun when he wrote “while this report does not conclude that the president committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”
     So, when one gives this even a cursory look, a disinterested bird's eye view of this whole sordid affair with a detached historical perspective, one has to ask why the mainstream media are not calling Trump's actions for what they are: Treason?
     Many Democrats are freely using the I word (Impeachment), something hardly ever uttered during the Bush years. Whereas the I word may have lost much of if not all of its shock value, the word treason has not and should not, considering the stakes. While Trump may or may not have colluded with the Russians to spike the election for his personal benefit, the fact remains, he knew about it, the Mueller report proves the Russians reached out with offers to help and, at the very least, he stood by and let them without once realizing they would immediately have leverage over him and his insiders (such as Flynn).
     Then there's Trump's post-election behavior while he slouches across the world like a bored, exhausted mall husband, the unconditional support for anything Putin wants: Lifting of sanctions on Russia, withdrawing from Syria (which still hasn't happened), walking away from the INF Treaty and a whole host of other wish list items. In short, anything that strengthens Russia and weakens the USA, you can be sure Trump will support.
     For his entire so-called presidency, Trump has been acting not just like a guilty man but a kept man, someone given an exalted slave position but is still a slave nonetheless, because his master has something compromising on him.
     These are words and ideas that people other than David Corn and Adam Schiff should be hammering home several times a day, every day. Goebbels once famously wrote that the way to make a lie the truth is to keep repeating it loudly and often until people accept it as truth.
     Might I remind us all that the same applies to the truth itself?