DISPATCHES FROM MOON OF ALABAMA, BY "B"
This article is part of an ongoing series of dispatches from Moon of Alabama
Democrats: The real War Party, farcical, smug, demagogic, reactionary politics from top to bottom.
President Trump’s job approval rating has ticked up 6 percentage points since the Democrats' impeachment inquiry began, according to a new survey.
The Gallup poll released early Wednesday found Trump’s approval rating at 45 percent, up from 39 percent when the inquiry was launched in the fall. The new findings mark the third-consecutive increase in Trump's approval rating, Gallup noted.
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Gallup’s new poll found that 51 percent of respondents say they oppose impeachment and removing Trump from office, an increase of 5 percentage points since the Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) announced the impeachment inquiry into the president's dealings with Ukraine. By contrast, 46 percent of respondents now support impeachment and removal, down 6 points.
Not even the Democrats core supporters are enthusiastic about the step the House Democrats will take later today when they will vote to impeach Donald Trump:
Liberal groups organized more than 600 events from Alaska to Florida, following a familiar model of mass protest that has come to define the left during the Trump administration.
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For all the passion among activists, the gatherings were notably smaller than many of the other recent mass protests ..
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Some activists acknowledge that impeachment doesn't fire up people like life-and-death issues such as health care, guns or climate change.
The Democrats hope that by November 2020 the voters will have forgotten about impeachment and vote for Democratic candidates. But Donald Trump and other Republican candidates will take care that everyone will keep the issue in mind.
Schiff, Pelosi: They now they have no case, but never mind, it's all a farce anyhow.
It is the reason why Trump's letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi reads like an overlong campaign ad. Its content will be at the core of each of his campaign speeches. It is no holds barred but surprisingly factual.
Trump partisans are not the only to think that the impeachment articles the Democrats brought forward are astonishingly weak and not supported by the facts. The Senate will need little time to exculpate Trump.
So how did the Democrats get here? Trump's letter notes that talk about impeachment started as soon as he stepped into office:
Speaker Pelosi, you admitted just last week at a public forum that your party’s impeachment effort has been going on for “two and a half years,” long before you ever heard about a phone call with Ukraine. Nineteen minutes after I took the oath of office, the Washington Post published a story headlined, “The Campaign to Impeach President Trump Has Begun.” Less than three months after my inauguration, Representative Maxine Waters stated, “I’m going to fight every day until he’s impeached.” House Democrats introduced the first impeachment resolution against me within months of my inauguration ...
Since Trump stepped into office the Democrats were looking for something that would make him impeachable. The deep state delivered them Russiagate, the claim that Trump 'colluded' with the Russian government, by taking seriously an obvious fake dossier the Clinton campaign had ordered and paid for. FBI agents who hated Trump even faked FISA court certification submissions to be able to spy on the Trump campaign. They found nothing that supported the 'collusion' claims.
The FISA court is not amused about that:
"The frequency with which representations made by FBI personnel turned out to be unsupported or contradicted by information in their possession, and with which they withheld information detrimental to their case, calls into question whether information contained in other FBI applications is reliable," Judge Rosemary Collyer wrote in an order published Tuesday.
For nearly two years the Democrats had hoped that the Mueller investigation would come to their help and deliver them the evidence they needed to impeach Trump. But Mueller did not deliver what the Democrats had hoped for. It turned out that the CIA and FBI driven Russiagate was a nothing-burger.
In 2018 eleven former intelligence and military operatives joined the House as representatives for the Democrats. This was presumably a planned invasion by the security state.
After the Mueller bubble had burst something else was needed to impeach Trump. The deep state delivered again.
A day after the Mueller act had played out Trump had a phone call with the new president of the Ukraine Zelensky.
A lunatic Lieutenant-colonel Vindman in the National Security Administration found that during the phone call Trump was not following the Colonel's preferred foreign policy. He informed a former colleague, the CIA analyst Eric Ciaramella, who then contacted two former colleagues who worked for the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Adam Schiff. They cooked up a scheme in which the CIA analyst would play a 'whistleblower' and accuse Trump of wrongdoing. When the legal review of the complaint within the CIA found that the 'whistleblower' had no case, the Schiff folks leaked the issue to the press to put pressure on the Trump administration to publish the complaint.
On September 23 2019 seven freshman Democrats published an op-ed in the Washington Post that called for impeachment.
CNN noted approvingly that all seven op-ed writers were (former) members of the security state:
The reason they made their announcement and explained their reasoning as a group, in an op-ed in The Washington Post, is because they had already formed a bond over their national security background -- especially the five women: Elissa Slotkin of Michigan and Abigail Spanberger of Virginia, both ex-CIA officers; Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania who was in the Air Force; Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey and Rep. Elaine Luria of Virginia were Naval officers.
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The op-ed the women penned, along with Gil Cisneros and Jason Crow, two freshmen male veterans, opened the floodgates for others who had been resistant, and gave House Speaker Nancy Pelosi critical political cover as she announced a formal impeachment inquiry on Tuesday.
Seven of the 11 security state representatives who had joined the Democrats in 2018 gave the impulse for impeachment. A day after the op-ed was published House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced the opening of her 'impeachment inquiry'.
The 'whistleblower' claimed, solely based on hearsay and public sources, that Trump had pressured the President of the Ukraine during the phone call to deliver dirt on Joe Biden. His complaint was published and the deep state then used it to again push for impeachment.
Trump then ambushed Pelosi and the whole impeachment effort by declassifying and publishing the memorandum of the phone call in question.
Reading the memorandum it was immediately clear to us that the impeachment attempt was dead in the water:
The immediate impulse to start an impeachment investigation came from some whistle blower in the intelligence community who claimed that Trump did something nefarious during a phone call with the newly elected President of Ukraine Zelensky.
The White House published a memorandum of the phone call. The call was made on July 25 2019, a day after the final Robert Mueller testimony in Congress. There are two passages which the Democrats will claim are damaging:
...[analysis of the transcript]...
Trump asks for investigations and Zelensky assures him that those will happen. Trump applied no open pressure.
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How the Democrats want to construct an impeachment out of this is beyond me.
It was therefore easy to predict this outcome that we are now seeing:
Pelosi has nothing. Six committees have investigated Trump issues but so far found nothing to charge him with. Nor did the Mueller investigation find anything damaging. How will combining all those nothing-burgers make an impeachment meal?
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There is no case for impeachment. Even if the House voted for one the Senate would never act on it. No one wants to see a President Pence.The Democrats are giving Trump the best campaign aid he could have wished for. Trump will again present himself as the victim of a witch hunt. He will again argue that he is the only one on the side of the people. That he alone stands with them against the bad politicians in Washington DC. Millions will believe him and support him on this. It will motivate them to vote for him.
The current polls, quoted above, seem to support that conclusion. A majority of U.S. citizens reject the Democrats' impeachment act while Trump's approval rating is back at its previous top.
The actions of the deep state, and the Democrats falling for them, will cost them the 2020 election.
Russigate was a false story, invented by the CIA chief John Brennan with support from MI6. The Steele dossier was recognizable as an obvious fake as soon as it was published. But the FBI still used it. To find evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russiagate the crooks at the top of the FBI went as far as to make false sworn statements to the FISA court. It did not help.
As soon as Mueller busted the Russiagate bubble the deep state cooked up a new issue. A Brennan man in the CIA colluded with Adam Schiff to create Ukrainegate.
Seven representatives of the security state then pushed Pelosi into launching the impeachment proceedings. Schiff again sprang into action by holding abstruse hearings in which some deep state minions were allowed to vent their antipathy to Trump and to Russia. The hearings exposed the sham for what it was.
It is unlikely that any Republican will vote today in favor of impeachment. No Republican senator will dare to vote against Trump.
Russiagate, Ukrainegate and the impeachment nonsense were all driven by members of the deep or security state. The Democrats have been riding on these issues while neglecting the real life-and-death issue of their voters - health care, guns or climate change. They will be punished for it.
The Democrats would be well advised to distance themselves from those services that invited them to travel on the Titanic. They should remember that historically they have been far more often the victims of CIA, FBI or military overreach than the Republicans.
As the failure of this impeachment affair is imminent the deep state will likely try to cook up a new issue that it can use against Trump.
If the Democrats want to prevent the further sinking of their ship they must avoid becoming associated with it.
Posted by b on December 18, 2019 at 20:47 UTC | Permalink
The Democratic Party cannot be sunk because it is not a party: it is one half of the American electoral machine.
American electoral system is very different from any other: vote is by land, not by people, the maps are drawn by the two dominant parties -- GOP and Dems.
Nancy Pelosi is the Dems' leader for the same reason Jefferson Davies was the president of the Confederate States of America: location. She's from San Francisco, the capital of the liberal billionaires, the Mississippi Valley of the "coastal" system. She's not the best, not the smartest, not the fittest, not the most representative: she's just from the right place, at the right time.
That's why the American electoral system will always be not only bi-partidary, but GOP-Dems bi-partidary. As a result, both parties essentially fused with the American electoral system, they are the American electoral system. It is for this very simple and self-evident reason that Bernie Sanders gave up his independent status and is trying to be POTUS through the Democratic Party: contrary to the other frauds that arose during America's recent History (Nader, Stein et al), Sanders is actually going for the win.
The GOP survived FDR. The Dems will definitely survive Trump.
That's why I maintain my hypothesis that the Dems, giving their socialist invasion [sic], are really not trying to win 2020. Instead, they are doing what Americans like to call "God's work", which in this case means stopping the socialist charge in the political front (AOC, Bernie Sanders, Gabbard, Warren etc. etc.).
Thanks b, it sure looks like distraction politics from the avoid doing anything for people party. I am astounded at how pathetically weak their case is. But most astonishing is the failure to have the LEAKER not whistleblower attend any public hearing to give evidence.
We are now well aware of Ciaramella's role in this absurd theatre. But he gives no evidence, fails to submit to a cross examination. He is a real Star Chamber performer.
The absurd race between the Repugnants and Democrazies to smash each other appears to have only one unfortunate outcome at this point and the Democrazies are not the winner. They are certainly going to lose Biden or lose because of Biden. That's how much they care for their electoral base. Meanwhile the Trump oligarch private finance capital team march up the hill. Tragic.
Posted by: uncle tungsten | Dec 18 2019 21:20 utc | 4
Another masterpiece of reasoning.
The only question that I can't understand is why did Pelosi and the other Dimocrat rulers fall for this? Or are they just too old, too much inside the corrupt bubble and too stupid?
(Should be "sank" BTW)
Posted by: Patrick Armstrong | Dec 18 2019 21:25 utc | 5
There is no such thing in the U.S. as an honest media poll. Don't put your reasoning in the result of a media poll. It's undoubtedly shaped for someone's political purposes.
Posted by: Tony B. | Dec 18 2019 21:29 utc | 7
The FISA court is not amused about that:
"The frequency with which representations made by FBI personnel turned out to be unsupported or contradicted by information in their possession, and with which they withheld information detrimental to their case, calls into question whether information contained in other FBI applications is reliable," Judge Rosemary Collyer wrote in an order published Tuesday.
She's shocked, SHOCKED the FBI lied to her.
Seems to me that judges at every level systematically encourage cops and prosecutors to lie to them. And what kind of legal repercussions are these agents going to face for lying to the court? Same as any other "law enforcement" personnel caught lying.
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"b" is Moon of Alabama's founding (and chief) editor. This site's purpose is to discuss politics, economics, philosophy and blogger Billmon's Whiskey Bar writings. Moon Of Alabama was opened as an independent, open forum for members of the Whiskey Bar community. Bernhard started and still runs the site. Once in a while you will also find posts and art from regular commentators. The name of the original Whiskey Bar was taken from Bertolt Brecht's Alabama Song where the first line goes: "Show me the way to the next whiskey bar". The name Moon of Alabama was taken from the first line of the chorus of that song: "Oh, moon of Alabama ...". You can reach the current administrator of this site by emailing Bernhard at MoonofA@aol.com.
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Democratic Party - Henceforth known as the Anti-Democracy Party.
Posted by: librul | Dec 18 2019 21:10 utc | 1