monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

...The attack on Bolton was swift and predictable. Bolton was a disgruntled former employee, a neocon, a money-grubber with a two-million-dollar book to sell. The President himself led the mob, beginning to tweet and retweet anti-Bolton statements around midnight. By 9 a.m., he had sent out about a dozen critiques of the man he employed to oversee America’s national security for a year and a half, including the false statement that the House had never called Bolton to testify in its impeachment inquiry. On the Fox Web site, a headline trumpeted that Trump & Company “strikes back” against Bolton for the “manuscript leak,” without saying what the leak actually said. By midday, the Republican National Committee was sending out official talking points attacking Bolton.

...At any other moment in Washington in my lifetime, I would have predicted with absolute confidence that the Bolton revelation would force Republican senators to switch their position and support witnesses. And not just a few, but almost all of them. But this is now, and the unthinkable and inconceivable have become increasingly routine. Here it was, the proverbial smoking gun, right in the middle of the trial, crucial evidence that Trump, his advisers, his lawyers, and his enablers on Capitol Hill knew about and were trying to suppress. Just last week, Trump’s legal team told senators that “not a single witness with actual knowledge ever testified that the President suggested any connection between announcing investigations and security assistance.”

The Repukes are going to try and character-assassinate any dem candidate.

Here it was, the proverbial smoking gun, right in the middle of the trial,

...In such an environment, ideology inevitably becomes less important than tribal identity, power for the sake of power. Policy goals and principles are cast aside as inconvenient burdens when the only thing that matters is winning at all costs. Political rivals are demonized, a necessary step to excuse the coming excesses against them. Debate ceases to be about two sides of an issue, becoming entirely separate streams of information, or misinformation, to the faithful.

...There is no easy way out of these traps, and they don’t have to be fatal or final to be hugely damaging. Of course, the United States in the 2020s isn’t 1930s Spain or Russia in the early 2000s. A civil war or a full-blown dictatorship remain very unlikely outcomes. It’s the trend that is worrying—that these well-known roads to disaster are being cleared and paved in the world’s most powerful country.

Leading the way to political perdition is the American Republican Party. The party of Lincoln, Eisenhower, and Reagan is now slavishly loyal to a corrupt reality-TV host whose only demonstrable allegiances are to his own image and Vladimir Putin. GOP legislators of the past pushed back against Richard Nixon, against Gerald Ford, and even against Reagan and George W. Bush. That someone of the high crimes and low character of Donald Trump now commands complete Republican fealty says more about the state of the GOP, and perhaps the country, than about Trump—and it says nothing good.

Worse, the GOP sees Trump not as an embarrassment to endure but as a working model to perpetuate. What Trump believes matters not at all; it only matters that he won and holds power. Worst of all, Trumpism looks set to outlast Trump himself—with whichever equally unqualified family member tries to succeed him in the finest autocratic tradition.

Trump was wrong. That's been proven pretty clearly by now. What he did is a crime.

Doesn't matter what you think about it.

You are as usual incorrect..

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Former National Security Adviser John Bolton may have singlehandedly stopped Senate majority Mitch McConnell from simply acquitting Trump in the Senate impeachment trial and adjourning without witnesses or documents. Bolton publicly announced his willingness to testify before the Senate, after having stiffed the House proceedings. And then a manuscript of his forthcoming memoir of his time in the White House mysteriously showed up in the hands of New York Times reporters on the eve of the Senate vote on calling witnesses (Bolton denies leaking the text but says it has been with the NSC since late December).

Noah Weiland of the New York Times reported Jan. 26 that “During a conversation in August with Mr. Trump, Mr. Bolton mentioned his concern over the delay of the $391 million in congressionally appropriated assistance to Ukraine as a deadline neared to send the money. Mr. Trump replied that he preferred sending no assistance to Ukraine until officials had turned over all materials they had about the Russia investigation related to Mr. Biden and supporters of Hillary Clinton in Ukraine.” (These are crazy conspiracy theories Trump has bought into).

Since the Republican defense of Trump had derided the House witnesses as not insiders and insisted that there was no evidence that Trump squeezed Ukraine for his personal gain, Bolton blew a gaping hole in their entire defense case.

So the question is, what are Bolton’s motivations in all this?

He is not a principled person, as some believe, just a very conservative man. He is in his own way as much of an erratic maniac as Trump himself. I wrote last May,

“Bolton is a sadistic bully who wants to dominate people. He never got to be more than temporary UN ambassador under George W. Bush because he had mercilessly tortured his office staff. Bolton likes to hurt people who are weaker than he. He is not after Iran because he is afraid of it. He is after it because it is one of the last countries in the world still bucking the US power architecture and which is too weak to resist an all-out assault. He wants to see flies walking on the Iranians’ eyeballs and wants even their dogs to be f–ked.

Back in 2005 when Bush tried to slip him in at the UN, people testified against him because of, like, the maniac thing. Time wrote:

“One charge came from Melody Townsel, who dispatched an impassioned e-mail to the committee about her encounters with Bolton while working for a private subcontractor on a 1994 U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) mission in the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan. Townsel says she wrote a letter to AID officials complaining about the lack of funds for the project from the contractor, a company that had hired Bolton as a lawyer.

“Within hours after dispatching that letter,” Townsel told the committee, “my hell began. Mr. Bolton proceeded to chase me through the halls of a Russian hotel–throwing things at me, shoving threatening letters under my door and generally behaving like a madman … Mr. Bolton then routinely visited [my hotel] to pound on the door and shout threats.” Later, Townsel says, Bolton falsely told AID and other U.S. officials that she was under investigation for misuse of funds.”

He chased her through the halls of a hotel in Kyrgyzstan throwing things at her. And when he could not physically intimidate her, he spread smears against her, saying she was corrupt.”

Bolton was an important part of the Bush Jr. propaganda campaign for the US invasion and occupation of Iraq. He has wanted a US war on Iran for twenty years. Really wanting it. Like, waking up every morning and tasting it in his back molars. He is part of the covert MEK (Mojahedin-e Khalq or the People’s Jihadis) network that links the “Marxist-Muslim” organization seeking Iran’s overthrow with Israel and Saudi Arabia. Bolton was very upset that Trump did not bomb Iran last summer after it shot down an unmanned US drone.

So if he is not acting out of principle, what is driving him to intervene against Trump?

Well, it could just be the money. By making himself and his book manuscript central to the Trump impeachment proceedings, he could be trying to transform a minor memoir into a best-seller.

His motives could be more sinister and more consequential, however. What if Bolton is trying to get Trump removed from office? That would imply that he wants a president Pence.

Bolton and Pence are much more in sync than Bolton and Trump. Pence might well take a militarily more aggressive stance against Iran, whereas Trump steps back from the brink of all-out conflict. The very idea would make Bolton’s mouth water so much his mustache would wilt.

Mind you, Trump is fostering war with Iran by his policy of economically blockading it, and is a very dangerous man. But arguably Pence could be more dangerous if he could get in power.

All this isn’t a reason not to impeach and remove Trump. It is a reason to include Pence as a target for impeachment.

Greg Sargent
@ThePlumLineGS
At the core of pro-Trump propaganda and the ongoing cultish deification of him is a relentless effort to disappear the fact that the real majority in America is an anti-Trump one.

Mind you, Trump is fostering war with Iran by his policy of economically blockading it, and is a very dangerous man. But arguably Pence could be more dangerous if he could get in power.
All this isn’t a reason not to impeach and remove Trump. It is a reason to include Pence as a target for impeachment.

Obviously, too late to include Pence in any articles of impeachment, although he was caught up in it to some extent.

Lindsey Graham
@LindseyGrahamSC
I totally support @SenatorLankford's
proposal that the Bolton manuscript be made available to the Senate, if possible, in a classified setting where each Senator has the opportunity to review the manuscript and make their own determination.

Kevin M. Kruse
@KevinMKruse
Why would they need to read it in a classified setting when six weeks from now it's going to be on bookstore shelves?