The Smoking Cannon

So much evidence, so little time.

It seems like every time the president speaks, he says something that could be construed as abuse of power or something that the founders clearly meant to protect us from. Trump calls these things, "perfect."

Now comes the unraveling. The president is obviously not going to get contrite. He's getting angrier and angrier and his communications are getting more and more abusive, personal and vile. He's clearly angry because Rudy and his other sycophants probably told him that what he was asking of foreign leaders was perfectly fine, and that in their opinion, the president cannot be the subject of a criminal complaint while in office. Of course, that's just conjecture and will have to be tested before a judge, but I'm thinking that once somebody tells the president something he wants to hear, then the president takes this as an iron-clad guarantee of correctness.

Uh oh.

There's that darned United States Constitution in the way again.

And the real issue is that most of the other people who work in government know what the rules are and that what the president has either asked them to do or what he's done under the impression that everything a president does is legal, is actually not. The next phase of this drama has already begun. It's where the civil servants and the credentialed professionals, as opposed to the aforementioned sycophants, begin to talk, release documents, ask for whistle-blower status, hire attorneys, or seek bargains. They will not give up their humanity or morals for a president who seems to have left his in Queens, exactly at the spot where Trump and his father decided to build apartments, but not rent them to African-Americans.

We are almost at the "my kingdom for a horse" moment. But first, the president has to repeat conspiracy theories while accusing Joe Biden of something for which there is no evidence. He must curse and sputter and offer excuse after contradicting excuse to cover his behavior. Then he will ask the last of his sycophants to fall on their professional and person swords. And some will.

In the end, though, his behavior makes the country less secure, more divided, and sullied by the mud he's slinging.

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Calling the Impeachment Bluff

Well. That was predictable.

And given that the administration has also moved phone calls to Russian and Saudi leaders into a classifies computer shows you just how common it is for the president to embarrass, at the least, and be criminally liable, at the worst, when performing his presidential duties. This president, though, has always been woefully unprepared to be president, both temperamentally and intellectually, and clearly believes that anything goes in foreign policy because, well, he has advisers who who have supported that view.

And this was not just Trump's interpretation. The powers, both real and perceived, have grown exponentially since the end of World War II, and were greatly enhanced in the Nixon White House because of Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. Until now, though, we've had presidents who understood the constitution and the basic ideas of democratic republicanism. Now we have an executive who thinks he has unlimited powers and doesn't understand how to use the system to get his agenda passed.

Which also makes Trump's lament that an impeachment inquiry will bring his legislative program to a halt the howler he doesn't recognize it to be. He had two years of Republican rule and barely got a terrible tax cut bill passed. He could have started with infrastructure and had a bipartisan agreement  on something that would help the whole country. When you rule through your base, you don't go very far.

So here we are, facing months of investigation because the president put us here. And I'm sure there are more revelations to be learned, more finger-pointing, more resignations and more vile, unrepentant, personal attacks from a graceless man who considers himself history's greatest victim. I don't know what else he expected when he released the transcripts of his phone call with the Ukrainian president and essentially confirmed everything the whistle-blower's report contained. The president is the perpetrator, not the victim, and thankfully we have people in the government who see his actions as undemocratic and dangerous. Add in the fact that Rudy Giuliani was acting as a de facto Secretary of State, and you can see why this scandal is so grave.

Unlike the Mueller Report, which showed the president trying his best to cover up and ask people to do illegal things, and his people delaying, stonewalling and denying his requests, we have a clarifying situation here where the president has been caught red-handed perpetrating an offense that he doesn't see as a problem.

That's a problem. And like Nixon, but unlike Clinton, there is far more below the surface of his actions that will reveal him to be the unfit leader we always suspected he was.

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Pollution Politics

If Bill de Blasio quits a presidential race that nobody knew he was in, does his dropping out count as news? It's not like there will be one less person on the debate stage, because he missed this month's event due to no poll numbers.

So we move on.

If this week's news didn't raise the usual alarms about four more years of Donald Trump, then I don't know what will. Climate change denial, suing California because it had the audacity to vote against him and run a surplus on liberal policies and economics, a whistle-blower's complaint about the president seeming to withhold aid to Ukraine because that country's president didn't investigate Joe Biden and/or his son.

Seems to be part of the playbook.

Perhaps I'm especially naive, but I can't understand why anyone would want to allow more industries to pollute the air and water. The automobile industry is even against the rollbacks on gas mileage that the president wants to implement. The coal industry is all but dead. Companies can look forward to massive lawsuits and significant responses on social media if they try to foul the country. Yet, the president plows on for no greater reason than to undo President Obama's policies not because they are bad policies, but because they are Obama's. In the end, history will not reward the polluter. And once Trump is out of office, the final push to cleaner fuels, air and water, will benefit the country.

The young people who protested this past Friday represent the future in more ways than just political. I hope they will vote in numbers that compare with the people who showed up to protest, although if the past is any guide, it will take them a few years to get into the ballot box. In the meantime, governments around the country and the world will have to contend with the new climate realities: wetter storms, warmer days, less colder days, (which will lead to more insects), floods and erosion. And these negatives will outweigh any positives that might come from warming, such as longer growing seasons and new crops in new latitudes. We will need new leaders who will make the difficult choices and count on our neighbors to do the right things.

We won't get this leadership from the crew that's presently in Washington. They want policies that will make things worse. Democrats will need to continue to press for the new ideas that will hold companies accountable and set reasonable standards for pollution and emissions. This should clearly be the main focus of the next Democratic debate.

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