Trump
The Oregon State Republican Party and its Big Lie
The Oregon State Republican Party embraced a lie, a big lie. That Big Lie is that Trump really won the White House in 2020 but, due to voter fraud, the Democrats dishonestly captured the White House. Even after sixty of their Republican lawsuits were thrown out of the courts for lack of voter fraud evidence and even after more honest, honorable Republican Election officials testified to the integrity of the 2020 election, confirming the Democrats won the Presidency, the Oregon Republican Party promotes the Big Lie. But, then, on top of that lie, these Republicans take it a step further by promoting an even bigger unacceptable lie that equates the Democrats’ control of the government by the democratic process to Hitler’s takeover of Hindenburg’s government in the 1930’s with a reference to the “February 1933 burning of the German Reichstag” in a despicable resolution censuring the ten Republican Congressional Members that voted to impeach Trump.
We saw the Capital Riots in real time with our own eyes one month ago today, caught on live TV and by the rioters themselves with posts to their social media accounts. We know who is responsible for those riots. We know who is responsible for attacking and vandalizing our Capital Building. There is no doubt it was Trump supporters and there is no doubt they were incited by incendiary statements made by Trump and his dishonest band of corrupt lieutenants on that tragic day and for months earlier before the riot with their dishonest and unfounded claims of voter fraud.
It is a sick, twisted, dishonest, unethical, morally corrupt and demented argument that the Oregon Republican Party makes to say that the blame for the insurrection belongs to someone or something else and that the Republicans who had enough honor and dignity to respect our laws to impeach Trump are somehow traitors. Who is the traitor: someone who picks country over Party or someone who picks Party over country? To the contrary, in the view of the majority of Americans, these courageous Republicans who voted to impeach Trump are valiant heroes. They chose to defend our system of government. They chose to defend self-rule and our Constitution over the corrupt aims of a dishonest tyrant spreading a Big Lie about the election he lost and then inciting a riot after he failed to get his way with his many attempts to corrupt the election results.
And with these statements of false equivalency, these not so respectable Republicans in the Oregon Republican Party signing this resolution of censure against their more honorable colleagues are, interestingly, the ones who are committing the fraud they claim others are committing. The Oregon Republican Party fails to acknowledge reality. The Oregon Republican Party fails to recognize that the real traitors are the ones supporting a corrupt lying tyrant over the Constitution of the United States of America.
The Oregon Republican Party has pledged its loyalty to an inciting tyrant. The Oregon Republican Party has expressly rejected the ideals of our Founding Fathers that are prohibitively against destructive autocrats who divide the nation to steer a course towards “permanent despotism.” The very thing President Washington warned against in his Farewell Address about the corrosive path that can result from partisan affiliation that threatens our democracy is the very insidious thing the Oregon Republican Party is embracing with open arms. Their Party is more important than our country.
Ironically, it is the leaders of the Oregon Republican Party who are the ones most mimicking the actions of Hitler by embracing the Big Lie in the same way Hitler embraced his twisted Big Lie that the Jews were responsible for a conspiracy that made everyone think Germany lost World War I when, in the Nazi’s delusional minds, Germany actually had won it. Sound familiar? To add more confusion, the Nazis themselves referred to the proposition that the Germans lost World War I as the “Big Lie.” This act of paying homage to Hitler and his Nazi’s reprehensible propaganda tactics by the Oregon Republican Party comes complete with the dishonest conspiracy theories that are at the base of their warped belief system. Truth does not matter to the Oregon Republican Party just like it does not matter to most nefarious Political Parties positioned against democracy that you can name in the historical record.
There is only one way this story ends if it is not properly addressed. We’ve seen it before. It’s written in history and it is easily accessible for your evaluation. And to be clear, it’s not a good ending.
The Oregon Republican Party’s delusion will either serve to destroy their Party or serve to destroy our country. One scenario is less tragic than the other but both are very tragic. Either way, it does seem the Oregon Republican Party is bent on destroying our country in ways that are not too dissimilar from the ways that the Nazis destroyed their own country by using matching dishonest methods of creating doubt and division among its citizenry. These methods are not only offensive but they are truly un-American. It is why the Oregon State Republican Party, itself, needs to be censured.
Today is President Reagan’s birthday. President Reagan would be greatly saddened by how far his beloved Party has travelled away from that shining “City on a Hill” that he often spoke about. That city of truth, union and diversity that once welcomed all has now been replaced with a gloomy, dark, decrepit city full of lies and corruption where power for the sake of power is idolized and only Republicans who devote their entire being to Trump are welcomed.
When considering how much our system of government is based upon compromise and respect for the individual, this extreme polarization has no place in American politics but this is especially true when one side of that polarized fray is based upon a dangerously unacceptable lie that the losers won an election that they clearly lost. Such unfounded and outrageous notions are a clear threat to the very existence of our 244 year old experiment in self-rule. Such notions need to be rejected outright and, those perpetuating them, need to be condemned.
References:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler%27s_rise_to_power
https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/26/politics/oregon-republican-party-censure-donald-trump/index.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichstag_fire
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_liehttps://www.npr.org/2021/01/15/957141129/can-the-forces-unleashed-by-trumps-big-election-lie-be-undone
Detecting Fraud
Thirty one instances of suspected voter fraud out of one billion votes from 2000 – 2014. Something needs to be done about this according to fringe elements of the political spectrum. To them, that fraction of a percentage of probable voter fraud cases is way too high. For all you who are partial to statistical numbers: 0.0000031% of those votes are suspected of being fraudulent. The study was conducted by Loyola Law School Professor, Justin Levitt. Levitt is also the author of an earlier study on the same subject entitled, “The Truth about Voter Fraud.”
Similar studies confirm these results including one conducted by the Bush II administration. And the few cases that do exist may surprise you regarding who is committing these crimes. For example, a truly egregious, well publicized instance of voter fraud was committed in 2018 by Republicans in North Carolina. To increase the irony, it involved absentee voting. And then, just recently, the Republican Party in California somehow believes that they are exempt from State laws protecting registered voters against voter fraud when they decided to sponsor ballot boxes that are not owned or officially sanctioned by the State of California.
The California Republican Party is misleading voters into believing that the Republican operated drop boxes are official ballot boxes. The leaders of any other group of people involved in similar nefarious activity would be automatically hauled off to jail without a second thought since this action is typically regarded as a felony in California. Lastly, the President himself is encouraging his supporters to vote twice which is also a felony. It’s disturbing to think that a presumably respected long standing national Political Party would decide that turning to a life of crime is the only way it can win elections. It seems the ones making the most noise about voter fraud are the ones who are most often committing it.
Traditionally, the majority of absentee voters have been Republicans (including the President and the administration’s own Press Secretary—talk about Black Kettle complexes). So, if anything, voter fraud would have favored the Republicans not the Democrats if there were any merit to this erroneous claim. The assertion that there is rampant voter fraud being made by President Trump has no basis in fact. At 0.0000031%, voter fraud is virtually non-existent. The claim made by the President is itself fraudulent, dishonest and irresponsible.
Why would the President risk upsetting or alienating Republican voters and, really, all voters, by threatening to take their absentee voting rights away? Because Trump wants to give his Base something to rally behind and to hate. It’s what all demagogues do. It’s what all despicable people do who have no ethics, no morals to guide them and no integrity. If there’s nothing to hate, they’ll invent something to hate. It also sets the stage for Trump’s attempt to discredit the election results should he lose the election. This is something only a despot would do.
Even if voter fraud was rampant instead of the incredibly miniscule percentage of 0.0000031%, why would you throw the baby out with the bathwater? If you were truly concerned about election fraud, why not address the voter fraud in productive ways that improve the security of voting by mail? That way it would increase the confidence in the legitimacy of those votes. If you found the majority of voter fraud cases occurred at Polling Places, would that cause you to outlaw Polling Places? Such an action would be absurd and a deliberate attempt at destroying our right to self-rule.
We are in the middle of a pandemic that Trump initially labeled a hoax, a pandemic Trump failed to take seriously and then failed to do anything about for months. As a consequence, local governments were forced to take extreme measures absent any real leadership from the Federal government. It was a disease that Trump knew how deadly it was at the time he was calling it a hoax. This revelation caught on tape by Bob Woodward shows the dishonesty of a man who is willing to sacrifice the lives of the people of his own country in favor of what he deems to be his own favorable political fortunes. The destructive suggestion that voters should physically go to the polls to expose themselves to the very real chance that they could contract a deadly disease, a disease causing hundreds of thousands of deaths here in the United States, when there are more reasonable and safer ways of voting available to us is probably the single most irresponsible action a President has ever made in our lifetimes. This point especially resonates when you consider the President himself caught COVID-19 as a result of his own irresponsible recklessness.
For this reason and many other equally disturbing reasons, Trump is a dangerous threat to our democracy and to our country in general. Trump is especially dangerous when he advocates against our right to vote. No respectable American President dedicated to self-rule would ever advocate such a position.
Only a totalitarian leaning despot afraid of losing power would argue that your right to vote in the manner prescribed by the laws of your State should be taken away from you. If that’s not an offensive affront to our democracy, I do not know what is. A President who is against voting safely and securely should make you pause to reflect upon the stark possibility that we are truly a democracy in jeopardy. But it’s not in jeopardy because of voter fraud. It’s in jeopardy because of a different kind of fraud. And that fraud is the current occupant living in the White House.
References:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-47323556
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nL6ixYa1hUY
https://www.factcheck.org/2016/10/trumps-bogus-voter-fraud-claims/
https://www.politifact.com/article/2016/dec/17/fact-checking-claims-voter-fraud-2016/
https://www.lls.edu/faculty/facultylistl-r/justinlevitt/
https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/legacy/The%20Truth%20About%20Voter%20Fraud.pdf
https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/Fool+me+once%2c+shame+on+you%3b+fool+me+twice%2c+shame+on+me
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/truth-about-voter-fraud
https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution
https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcript
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ca-gop-ballot-drop-boxes/
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/12/california-gop-says-it-owns-unofficial-ballot-drop-boxes.html
Jumping Out of the Pages
It’s like Trump jumped out of the pages of a “Left Behind” book…he is that guy; the world leader that keeps doing unacceptable, evil, corrupt, unethical, un-American things yet people continue to follow him convinced that, somehow, all of this unacceptable, chaotic, narcissistic behavior, is making America great. And, ironically, the people who you’d least expect to follow someone like this, are following him—the very people who should have that special religious insight to know better.
Trump is the self-proclaimed 5th Avenue shooter who defends his thuggish, vigilante militia supporters whether they are White Supremacist groups in Charlottesville or presumptuous overzealous militia groups in Kenosha. Trump even defends his supporters when they are underage militia members charged with committing murder. Trump has his own Gestapo like secret police that he created from repurposed Homeland Security personnel—personnel that used to protect us from terrorist threats abroad but are now used to intimidate and threaten marching civilian mothers in Oregon protesting for justice.
At the same time, Trump claims to be the “Law and Order President who thinks all protestors marching for justice are rioters and looters. In Trump’s feeble mind, any protester marching for justice must be marching against him, right? Trump is only the “Law and Order” President for one race of people, his own. Trump is only the “Law and Order” President when they happen to be laws that apply to other people but these same laws are never to be applied to him or his supporters (i.e. Roger Stone, Michael Flynn, etc.).
People follow Trump to their own doom, like Herman Cain and other misguided conservatives, while the rest of us scratch our heads in complete horror wondering…how? How could they let somebody do this, all these self-destructive things that he does to our country, all the deaths people suffered because of Trump’s incompetent response to the pandemic, all the destruction done to our traditional American institutions like the Justice Department, all the abuses of power and all the abuses of position, all the corruption that lead to his impeachment, all the damage done to our Constitution, all the damage done to the rule of law, all the damage done to our values based upon respect for the individual, all the attacks against a person’s right to vote, all the actions to prevent votes from being delivered on time, all the remarks to persuade his supporters to break the law by voting twice, all the damage to our economy, all the actions never taken against national security threats from Russia, all the bounties on the heads of our military personnel in Afghanistan left unanswered, all the abandonment of our Kurdish allies in Syria, all the American troops pulled out of Germany and redeployed elsewhere because of all the delicate feelings that were hurt by a stately German chancellor, all the insults to our military servicemen and servicewomen who are the complete opposite of “losers” and “suckers,” all the grief he’s caused our traditional allies that have stood by us since World War II, all the bone spurs suffered in a letter from his doctor, all the incompetent conflicting messaging with the experts at the CDC, all the vindictiveness, all the petty, illegal retaliations against people who testified under oath, all the distractions, all the name calling, all the division, all the doubt, all the confusion and all the chaos?
Think about it. Who sows this type of confusion and division? What makes anyone think this is sustainable or aligned in anyway with any type of Christian thought? How do people, especially those who call themselves Christians, justify in their minds that this type of behavior is ever acceptable? Are they so bound and determined to continue to follow this world leader to their own doom as they attempt to drag the rest of us along with them into that dark un-American pit they have chosen? I, for one, am fed up and unwilling to tolerate any more of this indecency, nonsense and self-destruction. Let’s put Trump back into the pages where he belongs before it is too late for us and for our 244 year old experiment in self-rule.
Permanent Despotism
The President deliberately cost hundreds of thousands of people their lives all because he believed a national testing plan would only benefit Blue States. This, taken together with the most recent revelations from Bob Woodward’s new book, “Rage,” that the President knew how deadly COVID-19 was in the early weeks of February, paints a disturbingly grim portrait of an extremely morally compromised human being. That testing plan, had it been executed at its earliest, in all likelihood would have avoided the “shelter-in-place” orders that individual States were forced to later make. It would have spared us the devastation it is still causing our economy.
The President has a responsibility to consider all Americans whether they voted for him or not. The words of President Washington in his Farewell Address are just as valid today as they were 200 years ago: “Let me now take a more comprehensive view, and warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party, generally…The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism.”
We are Americans—we belong to the United States of America. We don’t belong to Red States or Blue States of some foreign, different America that has committed itself to endless political corruption and intrigue. Leaders who are morally incapable of recognizing that we are all Americans with basic core commonly held beliefs about liberty and justice are dangerously ill-suited for the office of President. These individuals, like Trump, will never do the right thing for their country because, in reality, they have no country. They just have themselves and think only of themselves. They will lead our country into a state of “permanent despotism.”
It’s time to remove dangerous threats to our republic and to our democracy. Starting with this virus but not ending there. We need to remove the self-serving politically corrupt demagogues that have made this virus outbreak in our country so destructive, so deadly and so unmanageable.
References:
#CNN #News – Jul 31, 2020 – Report: Kushner’s Covid-19 testing plan ‘went poof into thin air’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington%27s_Farewell_Address
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Washington%27s_Farewell_Address
Just Say “No” to “Make America Sick Again!”
The new administrative order that excludes the CDC from directly receiving data from hospitals around the country that is reported to the Federal Government is a clear attempt by a desperate individual in an ill-conceived plan to improve his political fortunes at the expense of the nation’s health and safety. By controlling the data being reported by hospitals, Trump expects he can hide and manipulate the data for his own personal benefit to spin the narrative in any way that he sees fit just like he’s always done. The truth is Trump’s enemy and just like the Devil, Trump will do anything he can to hide the truth from you by painting you a fluffy, Sharpie picture or a safe secure wall to show you how he is most able to so keenly keep out the invading hordes of foreign body antigens even if it means injecting disinfectant to do it. His objective is to deceive you into believing his many fanciful lies that will, ultimately, only lead to your own doom in the end. The story is all too common and all too familiar. It’s the story of a despot.
Meanwhile, the CDC doctors and other medical doctors around the country are left handicapped. Without access to this vitally critical information required by health professionals to aid in their efforts to stop the spread of this virus as quickly as possible, they are prevented from effectively doing their job as they work fervently around the clock to help reduce the tragically increasing number of deaths that keep occurring each day because of this pandemic. Hiding that data increases the risk faced by health workers and it also increases your own risk in being counted as a victim of this pandemic.
Trump’s disturbing self-serving, ego-centric pursuits are destroying this nation and its people by the hundreds of thousands as ICU beds fill up and places to put the bodies of those who have succumbed to this disease dwindle. Trump’s unacceptable behavior is not only becoming a more deadly menace to the effectiveness of our health system but it’s beginning to compromise our national security too. As we continue to become sicker, we are distracted from other nefarious players in the world who are already working to take advantage of the precarious situation. For example, consider the bounties placed on the heads of our military personnel in Afghanistan. The failure to act on that bit of intelligence is further indication of Trump’s inability to recognize dangerous, adversarial threats to our nation from nefarious foreign sources when it contradicts his own fanciful notions of how “he wants it to be.”
Had Trump prepared our nation like he should have months ago, had he not tossed the Pandemic Playbook prepared by the Obama Administration in the wastepaper basket when he took office, had he not fired the Pandemic Response Team in 2018, had he listen to his intelligence agencies, had he listened to the pandemic experts, had he not thought it a hoax and used his hoax story as a less than clever tool to make fun of the “Left” for the benefit of his political reelection campaign, there is every reason to believe we could have avoided the extreme shelter-in-place measures that local governments were forced to take because of Trump’s incompetence and failure in leadership. Then, later, after it appeared things were looking better, had Trump taken the advice of his experts at the CDC by not promoting the opening of America too soon and by not ignoring his responsibility to set a good example by wearing a mask, we could have avoided this sadly predictable but entirely avoidable resurgence of the virus. The unnecessary and economically destructive epidemic mess we are in is entirely the fault of Trump and his anti-science politically corrupted cronies who place their faith in ignorance and made-up tabloid conspiracy theories rather than science and reality.
Trump’s new campaign slogan seems to be: “Make America Sick Again.” It is apparently working in disturbing ways and in ways not too dissimilar from the actions that the Kremlin and/or other comparative totalitarian states might take. I’m sure the idea to control the data has nothing to do with Trump’s inexplicable peculiar fondness for Putin?
With reports about unmarked, unidentifiable Federal Agents kidnapping protestors in Portland, Oregon, questioning them, not charging them and then letting them go, we are left to grapple with yet more incomprehensible un-Democratic actions and abuses of power by a President who just does not seem to have a grasp of how democracy or the rule of law works in America. These unacceptable Gestapo like tactics are right out of a despot’s handbook. They are meant to intimidate the less powerful and used only as a means to deny citizens a voice; tactics a tyrant in a banana republic would embrace without a second thought. But, in America, it’s a violation of our Bill of Rights and of our Constitution. Is this an indication of how CDC personnel and other doctors who promote advice regarding how to decrease the risk of COVID-19 and/or other pandemic disease will be dealt with in the not too distant future when their advice contradicts the advice Trump wants to promote?
Dangerous despots are easily recognizable. We have thousands of years of history to reference in order to learn how to spot them. And this is a sure sign of one. In banana republics or in Russia, it would be a common, everyday occurrence to keep medical data intended for public review and public safety hidden from the masses. But, whoever thought it could happen in America where we are supposed to have safeguards in place to prevent this type of thing from ever happening?
This is a dangerous and an alarming turn of events that should have all Americans, regardless of Political Party, very concerned. Every American citizen who believes in freedom and liberty and the health of their loved ones should be demanding that this unacceptable and un-American self-serving action by Trump be properly reversed and corrected immediately. There is no excuse for threatening the public welfare or our stability as a democratic republic in this irresponsible way.
Freedom of information needs to be preserved. That is the American way and it’s the only way to fight this virus effectively. The CDC and the public needs to have direct access to this hospital data restored now. It’s time to just say, “No,” to “Make America Sick Again!”
References:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/14/us/politics/trump-cdc-coronavirus.html
https://gizmodo.com/white-house-tells-hospitals-to-skip-cdc-and-send-corona-1844385250
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cdc-covid-19-data/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wMlgEWZnN8
https://boingboing.net/2020/07/16/trump-administration-wants-all.html
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/25/trump-coronavirus-national-security-council-149285
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/05/trump-obama-coronavirus-pandemic-response
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-fire-pandemic-team/
https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-07-18/portland-protests-federal-agents
PragerU and that Chupacabra Story on Page 10
Recently, I’ve been having a major PragerU video infestation of my Facebook newsfeed:
-One PragerU video told me how Trump’s words were completely twisted, no, even mangled, by the evil liberal media (OK, I’m taking liberties to exaggerate and paraphrase a bit but it takes nothing away from PragerU’s message). I watched the footage from the actual press conference in question. It wasn’t hard to find on the Internet. PragerU is full of it. What the media reported was accurate.
No word twisting. Trump explicitly stated there were “very fine people, on both sides.” The only two sides on that awful day in Charlottesville that resulted in the loss of a life were racist groups protesting the removal of a statue of a Confederate General and counter-protesters protesting the hate those groups represent.
-Another PragerU video told me that the “Big Monolith Tech Giants” are manipulating conservative messages they don’t want me to see. However, they conveniently ignore the fact that their video about this topic is showing up in my newsfeed. This pretty much discredits their whole argument in one single “Big Monolith Tech” newsfeed instant.
-A third PragerU video, in a mindless crusade against Net Neutrality, tries to tell me how the poor ISP’s are being denied a revenue model that seems to me to be little more than an extortion scheme to wrestle away money from the real victims, innocent Web Application websites minding their own business on the Internet as they experience a shakedown by a consortium of unprincipled and unchecked ISP’s: “hey, we’ll make you an offer you can’t refuse; pay us and we won’t divert our subscriber traffic away from your website. Talk to our sales rep, Bugsy about our great ‘insurance’ plans. Choose the intimidation level you like best.”
Classy. Let’s damage the legitimate profit margins for 99.9% of businesses in America in favor of corrupt, nefarious business practices that benefit less than 0.1% of the businesses in America. That’s an odd way of being “Pro-Business,” especially if we want to be viewed as a country that sponsors a free enterprise system that is equitable, fair and honors a playing field free of corruption.
After being subjected to the barrage of insults to my intelligence, I can only come to one conclusion: PragerU has about as much credibility as that chupacabra story on page 10 of the National Enquirer. Not a credible source of information. Of course, if you believe chupacabras are real then I suppose there is really not much else to say.
References:
https://broadbandnow.com/All-Providers
https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/susb.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmaZR8E12bs (Trump’s Remarks about Charlottesville)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chupacabra
*The percentage of ISP’s was based upon a variety of sources, relying mostly upon data taken from 2012 (number of business in America) and 2018 (number of ISP’s). Since the economy is better today and the number of businesses has likely increased, the percentage arrived at is intended to be and is presumed to be a conservative estimate.
Ancient Rome’s Migration Disaster
We have it good here in America. We need to appreciate that. We live in a world that is interconnected. We need to appreciate that. In the late period of the ancient Roman Empire when migrants encroached on their borders, the people in charge thought much like Trump thought. The Romans called them “barbarians,” gave them a label, made them an enemy, a target people could blame for all their troubles (the “Bad Hombres” of their time).
That thinking cost the ancient Romans an empire. The ancient Romans completely forgot what their ancestors, just two hundred years prior, had brilliantly done to manage migration. We need to appreciate that too, understand it and study it. There is a way to solve our migration woes but what’s happening now, mismanaging how the money is allocated, misappropriations, inhuman conditions along with a sideshow of unacceptable bigoted Facebook postings by a small segment of CBP officers, this unthoughtful zero tolerance administration policy, this unchristian administration policy, is just going to make things worse.
We need to quit looking at migration as a negative and start looking at it as a positive. Fortunately for my Irish ancestors, we had Presidents dedicated to unifying the country with ideas of liberty and justice for all. There was no demagogue elected to the Presidency, to such a powerful position, who had any desire to fuel the fires of the prejudices and misconceptions Americans had at that time towards the caravan of Irish immigrants during the 1840’s and 1850’s. The Irish were the “Bad Hombre’s” in the eyes of many Americans who felt threatened by this influx of foreigners to their country but they weren’t.
My Irish ancestors helped make our nation great. We need to realize we are a nation of immigrants. Once we do that, there are some real policies that can be put into place. Rather than being that 30 foot multibillion, very expensive Band-Aid, they are cost effective policies that can help to address the sources of the problems. It will give the CBP what they really need, what they really want and what America really needs.
We are America, the land of the free, home of the brave, with emphasis on brave. We aren’t the home of the frightened little citizens threatened by caravan people who are only hoping to escape their unbearable conditions to make their lives better. We need to start acting like the country we were meant to be, what we used to be, full of honor and integrity and fearlessness, before we end up losing our republic in a way similar to the way the ancient Romans lost theirs’s. We need to grow up, learn and, most of all, be decent human beings about it.
Mr. Mueller’s Peculiar Legal Gaffe
Robert Mueller stated he couldn’t indict a sitting President because it is “unconstitutional.” It was a bold statement to make especially since it is not true. This OLC opinion that I presume Mueller is basing his own conclusion upon has not been tested in the courts. Furthermore, there is nothing in the Constitution that says that the President is above the law which is effectively what such a conclusion asserts.
In fact, I would argue the Constitution states the exact opposite: the President is not above the law. And I would probably win my argument dependent only upon the number of beer drinking judges on the bench that might not be totally impartial. When our Constitution was written our founders had just a few years earlier fought a war to end the rule of a man who was legally above the law. That would be the King of England for those who missed the memo. When considering that our founding fathers would not ever want any man to hold that much power ever again, the statement Mueller makes seems absolutely absurd.
It is generally understood that Mueller is basing his conclusion on an untested opinion by the OLC (Office of Legal Counsel) that was offered in 1973. Ken Starr’s team in the 1990’s offered a more recent opinion. Starr’s team asserted that a sitting President can be indicted. Around that same time, a Supreme Court ruling affirmed that a sitting President can face some civil lawsuits (Clinton v. Jones, 1997). And prior to that ruling, in 1982 (Nixon v. Fitzgerald), the Supreme Court’s Chief Justice, Warren Burger, in his concurring opinion that favored protecting Presidents against being sued if their actions were directly associated with official duties, stated this:
“The dissents are wide of the mark to the extent that they imply that the Court today recognizes sweeping immunity for a President for all acts. The Court does no such thing. The immunity is limited to civil damages claims. Moreover, a President, like Members of Congress, judges, prosecutors, or congressional aides — all having absolute immunity — are not immune for acts outside official duties. Ante at 457 U. S. 753-755. Even the broad immunity of the Speech and Debate Clause has its limits…”
“In United States v. Brewster, 408 U. S. 501 (1972), we held that the Speech and Debate Clause does not prohibit prosecution of a Senator for accepting a bribe designed to influence his legislative acts…”
“When judicial action is needed to serve broad public interests — as when the Court acts not in derogation of the separation of powers, but to maintain their proper balance, cf. Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, or to vindicate the public interest in an ongoing criminal prosecution, see United States v. Nixon— the exercise of jurisdiction has been held warranted. In the case of this merely private suit for damages based on a President’s official acts, we hold it is not…The Court has recognized before that there is a lesser public interest in actions for civil damages than, for example, in criminal prosecutions…”
If the Supreme Court ruled that sitting Presidents are not immune from all civil lawsuits (Clinton v. Jones) and if an earlier 1982 ruling included statements by the Chief Justice that indicates civil lawsuits are less worthy of interest than criminal offensives when perpetrated by elected officeholders, then there should be no question that a sitting President can be indicted for criminal offenses. The integrity of the office demands that we have people holding that office who have respect for the law. Presidents are required to face criminal prosecution just like any other citizen, and, in fact, they should be held to a higher bar than any other citizen given the importance of the office.
Failing to prosecute whenever egregious criminal offenses are perpetrated by occupants of our nation’s highest office damages the integrity of the office itself and damages our nation’s credibility as preserver of justice. The arguably errant 1973 OLC opinion was rendered by a likely Presidential apologist at a time when another more infamous President to date faced the threat of criminal prosecution. Had Mueller explicitly stated his intention to follow a traditional standard set by previous Presidential Investigators to refer the matter to Congress then I do not believe many, absent the political pundits, would find fault with that. However, when evaluating the incredible amount of dissention, past Supreme Court opinions and the quality of arguments made against that infamous OLC opinion of 1973, it is all the more reason to believe that Mueller’s assertion that his failure to indict a sitting President is settled constitutional law was a very peculiar legal gaffe to make indeed.
References:
https://www.justsecurity.org/44264/supreme-court-justices-president-indicted/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinton_v._Jones
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/22/us/politics/can-president-be-indicted-kenneth-starr-memo.html
Answering with Full Metal Integrity
The Republicans’ baseless accusations against Adam Schiff and their ridiculously tacky call for his resignation is not only “Grandstanding” of the worst kind but it is also the most vilest form of projection I have ever seen by one group of individuals in an attempt at projecting their own unapologetic twisted behavior onto somebody else. Not only is this an underhanded political maneuver on the part of these Republicans, it is also way beneath the integrity of even the most civilly debased political being that anyone might imagine can exist.
Adam Schiff, chairman of House Intelligence Committee, is way above the Republican’s dirty tricks. On Thursday, 3/28/2019, Schiff turned the tables on his accusers by highlighting the Republican’s own unethical behavior of not providing the proper oversight of their equally civilly absent President. Schiff convincingly outlined the evidence for collusion in his response to their inane request that dispels any myth that this evidence could ever be interpreted by anyone as “lies.”
Meanwhile these same Republicans fail to consider their own egregious misdeeds of participating in suspect memos tainted with political misinformation and running clandestine missions back and forth between the White House in order to contribute to the ample incidences of obstruction that has been made so public in its presentation by the President and his cast of Reality TV minions. The President’s `actions and the efforts by those in his campaign to coordinate with the Russians while, perhaps, not criminal under today’s laws as opinioned by the Attorney General, is still not OK. It also is certainly not OK for the President and his party line Republican soldiers to continue their vindictive, petty crusade of seeking revenge on their targeted political enemies who had every right to petition for an investigation into the odd behavior of this sitting President towards Russia and into the other strange choices this President has made.
This assertion is especially poignant when you consider that the President’s vindictive actions since the Attorney General released his summary report of the Mueller Investigation seem more representative of a Third World Country Dictator insecure in his own power than it is of a dignified American President who has any understanding at all of what it means to maintain even a minuscule measurement of integrity and decency. We need a return to civility and integrity. It should start with the President in a normal universe. Since that is an impossibility given this Reality TV Star’s DNA, we instead need more people of integrity like Adam Schiff in Washington to shut down and to call out those who apparently are absent any actual integrity of their own.
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The Polarity Resistance 