No Way Out

Snorts, Lies and Memes:  About the only positive thing that can be said about last night’s Trump speech is that Trump stuck to his allotted 8 minutes of prime time.  Despite its relativity brevity the speech was peppered with more snorts than a pig sty and chock full of what the media calls misleading statements but the rest of us call lies. Trump claimed that the situation on the southern border had reached crisis proportions despite the fact that the number of migrants is actually down and that much of what he calls a crisis has been caused by his decision to engage in metering, limiting the number of migrants processed each day to a trickle causing an unnecessary build-up of those waiting to apply for legal refugee status in increasingly intolerable conditions on the Mexico side of the border.  He blamed the migrants for the drug crisis, claiming that only his wall could prevent them from smuggling drugs into the country and though his concerns about the drug trade are valid, most of the Mexican originating drugs are hidden in cars and trucks driven through legal checkpoints and fentanyl comes from China, problems that no wall will fix. Sticking to the theme that has marked his presidency ever since his infamous ride down the Trump Tower escalator, he referred to the migrants as criminals and blamed them for committing thousands of murder, ignoring once again that though some migrants are “bad hombres,” most are not and overall they are less likely to commit crimes than US born citizens and to the extent that they have criminal records, most of their criminal convictions are for prior attempts to cross into the US.  In one of his odder lies, he claimed that he had altered his wall plans, replacing cement with steel, at the request of the Democrats, obviously not true. He stuck with his assertion that Mexico would pay for the wall, not up front, but indirectly through his new wonderful trade deal, the one that is a tweaked version of NAFTA.  Then he insisted that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and a number of Democrats had previously been all in on the wall concept because they had voted for the Secure Fencing Act in 2006, a partial truth in that they voted for the act, however that law provided a much smaller amount of money only fencing, not for a cement or steel wall.  And lastly he went on to blame the Democrats for the government shutdown, the one that he said that he would proudly own.  Polls indicate that most Americans don’t buy that assertion, they continue to lay the blame for the shutdown on Trump and the Republican party.  Curiously, yesterday at an off the record lunch with members of the press, Trump said that the Oval Office speech wasn’t his idea, that he was only doing it to satisfy communications advisors Sarah Sanders, Kellyanne Conway and Bill Shine.  For once he should have stuck with his own inclinations, the speech did nothing to improve his case for the wall and if anything only alienated more Americans.  As to the Democratic response, standing stiffly in front of an array of American flags, Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi made it clear that though they support border security, they have no interest in funding Trump’s wall.  Additionally, labeling the situation at the border a humanitarian crisis, they rejected Trump’s fearmongering assertion that those mobs of women and children amassing on the border were a security risk of mammoth proportions.  Unfortunately, instead of focusing on their words, the twitterverse lit up with memes making fun of their appearance, comparing their stilted stance to Grant Wood’s famous American Gothic painting or worse.  Proving once again that he’s not a Democrat except when it comes to running for president, Vermont’s Senator Bernie Sanders also delivered a response to Trump’s speech.  Though his speech wasn’t as widely covered he did hit upon a number of valid points.  He rejected Trump’s crisis claims, instead focusing on the 30 million Americans without health insurance, the threat of climate change, the half of older American’s without retirement savings and the 40 million dealing with “outrageous” student debt.  Bottom line, he is running.  Posturing, speeches and snorting aside, Trump hasn’t moved off of his position, its still $ 5.7 billion or else, and the Democrats aren’t moving either.  Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is still in witness protection mode, refusing to bring any of the Democrat’s funding legislation up for a vote.  However, a number of his Republican colleagues are growing increasingly concerned that their futures are on the line; to that end it appears that Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski is ready to jump ship and support Democratic efforts to fund the unfunded government agencies.  Additionally, finally recognizing that the sight of thousands of families going without food would be a bad thing from a public relations standpoint, the administration has suddenly discovered that they have enough cash on hand to fund SNAP food stamps through the end of February.  So at least for now, people will eat and tax refunds will go out, but that’s about it, the government remains in partial shutdown mode.  Trump hasn’t yet declared a national emergency but he’s feeling cornered and might think that initiating martial law is his only way out of the hole that he’s dug for himself….and us.

Russia, Russia, Russia:  Yesterday the Justice Department indicted Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya of Trump Tower meeting fame with seeking to thwart an earlier investigation into money laundering that involved an influential Russian businessman and his investment firm.  Though her indictment has nothing to do with the Trump Tower meeting or her association with the Trump family, it does establish her tight ties with the Kremlin, hardly a good thing.  Around the same time that her news broke, Paul Manafort’s lawyers filed a set of poorly redacted documents with his judge.  Though the purpose of the filing was to argue that Manafort hadn’t lied enough to justify Special Counsel Mueller’s decision to throw out their plea agreement, the filing inadvertently revealed what some of those disputed lies were about.  It turns out that Manafort shared proprietary Trump polling data with his colleague Konstantin Kilimnik, a known Russian spy, leaving open the not so distinct possibility that that data was then shared with Putin’s cronies, the ones who then went on to interfere in the 2016 election, “coincidentally” targeting the parts of the country where their meddling would provide the most bang for their collective Rubles.  Though we still don’t know if there is any evidence directly tying anyone named Trump or Kushner to any of those Russian meddlers, Mueller might and at least one Trump is very concerned.  It’s reported that Don Jr has been telling friends that he expects to be indicted shortly.   Also on the international front, though his trip to the Middle East was supposed to include a visit with Turkey’s president, security advisor John Bolton was shut out by the fuming Erdogan who said that Bolton “has made a serious mistake” by announcing that the US is committed to staying in Syria until ISIS is really vanquished, Erdogan was particularly irate that Bolton made his remarks from Israel.  Lastly, we are down another one of Trump’s generals, yesterday Retired Marine General Anthony Zinni who had been serving as the Middle East envoy for the Qatar dispute jumped ship, saying that with neither side all that interested in resolving the regional crisis he wasn’t hanging around.  Zinni who had been a Mattis hire, has found his way out.