"He knows I was under enormous pressure to turn on him. It would have eased my situation considerably. But I didn't."-Roger Stone, implying that he could spill the beans, mere hours before Trump decided to commute his sentence.
More acceptance of their criminality leads to more contempt of us.It's all very nice to tear down, burn and shatter the statues of dead traitors and racists but what about the living ones? America has a hell raising, lawless, traitorous devil of a president who viciously attacks the country by siding with its enemies, teargassing and steamrolling its citizens, shredding its Constitution, and laughing at the very idea that there are laws of any kind. All the political leaders of the so-called opposition to Trump and his republican troopers bring pencils, manicure knives, and erasers to the fight when the only effective countermeasure would be to have leaders that give like for like. Yeah, I know we allegedly still have a legal system to take care of these things but how did that work out with Impeachment-lite? A legal system is no good when one side soft pedals it against the other side that laughs at it dismissively with unrelenting cruelty and psychotic actions. In short, our legal system has atrophied and died for lack of use and nourishment. The commutation of Roger Stone's already ridiculously lowered sentence is just the latest example of that. Trump and his cronies get away with everything because they know they can. The countdown to shooting people on Fifth Avenue is well underway.The leaders of the Democratic Party see this battle as a battle of just words and tedious do-nothing Impeachment-lite, mixed with half-hearted (at best) hearings and court cases full of endless parsing and posing. They refuse to call this situation what it really is and act accordingly. We are at war. The Civil War not only never ended, it has always simmered and flared from time to time. Now it has flared up anew, like never before. This war knows no borders. It's propaganda is broadcast nationwide 24 hours a day by people who are a virus all by themselves. The Republican Guard's armed militia parade in the streets, fire off their guns like their crazed middle eastern counterparts, and take over state houses as their Dear Leader tweets encouragement and talks up violence. Can you imagine if, in 1942, we had invited the troops of the Axis powers over to fight it out with loyal Americans here on our streets?Our Democratic Party "leadership" can't even put together advertising that resonates and people want to see. They leave that to a small handful of disgruntled Lincoln Project republicans who have a long term agenda of their own. Instead, the best we can do is milquetoast semi-dweebs like Adam Schiff who act all nice and civil when we need a hell raiser of our own. You don't win a fight by keeping your hands at your side and trying to polite your opponent to death. The voters are no better. Apparently the American public would look at Idi Amin eating their fellow citizens and ask him, "would you like fries with that?"As readers know, I've often compared what we now have in the White House to comic book villains. Lex Luther is generally my go-to villain of choice but I have used both The Joker, and The Penguin. Trump in a tux in particular reminds me of The Penguin. That's about how he walks and stands. Sadly though, the brutal comedy-tragedy we are living in demands attention, not escapism. What Trump is doing is real life villainy. He may not be manipulating the fabric of space and time but he is destroying what's left of our fabric of law and order and therefore the fabric of society itself. It's all very psychotically deliberate and planned of course, and if you think deliberately encouraging the chaos of the spread of a plague isn't part of it all, then you are a fool on your best days.Giving Roger Stone a Quid Pro Quo "Get Out Of Jail Free" card mere hours after he implied that he might talk and employing a traitorous Attorney General to wreak havoc on The United States Of America is exactly what all those Republican House members and $enators so eagerly voted for when they voted not to impeach Trump and not to remove Trump from the White House. Instead, they willfully voted for the death of untold American citizens and the death of this country itself, all for the payoff of confirming a hundred federal judges and getting millions in Russian rubles and corporate dollars. The Trump cabinet is no better. They all kiss the rings of The Orange Menace and our nation's adversaries with enthusiasm in their hearts and the cash in their pockets. They do it in plain sight. If Sam Giancana or Vinny The Chin Gigante were in the White House, it would be the same. It is the same, and that is how they want it. Donnie The Chin.Donnie The Chin is the stuff of Cosa Nostra chronicles. He and his crew of $enatorial earners and House wiseguys are what The Bush Crime Family dreamed of. They are also what we get for not demanding or choosing better candidates from our political parties and not demanding that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, be at the least, sent to The Hague to be tried for crimes against humanity. Scooter Libby got his sentence commuted too and what he did led to people dying. The voters shrugged.Barack "Too Much Mr. Nice Guy" Obama's relative silence about Russian election interference and Moscow MItch's bought and paid for part in that silence also helped lead us to where we are today, of course. Now, we have a president who is the stuff of third world dictatorships and we are on our way to being a third world country. And while I'm at it, let's definitely not forget that Trump's traitorous goon of an Attorney General was also Attorney General under George H.W. "Poppy" Bush and did legal work for Ronald Reagan. Clearly, he has an affinity for really bad presidents. We let the Bushes and their operators off the hook and sent a message that all is permissible with that and the acceptance of Poppy's pardons of his and Reagan's Iran Contra schemes and schemers, all on top of the ignored criminality of the October 1980 surprise. We turned a blind eye to Nixon's death dealing Paris treason and overall treachery, and we didn't demand that Gerald Ford be dragged off to prison for pardoning him and sentencing him to a full pension and life on a California beach; talk about your obstruction of justice! The seeds that bore the fruits of accepting criminality or not paying attention were sown long ago.