Not a Rational Actor

Trump the Terrible:  In the run up to the impeachment vote Trump toned down his comments, don’t get me wrong, he still held his rallies and said and did lots of awful things but they just weren’t as outrageous as usual.  Now having gotten away with extorting Ukraine for his own personal benefit he’s learned his lesson, just not the lesson that Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and those other quisling Republicans “hoped and prayed” that he would.  Instead he’s learned that he can get away with saying and doing anything he wants.  To that end yesterday during a news conference with President Lenin Moreno of Ecuador, malicious Trump was in full force.  While he continued to deny that he had anything to do with it, he congratulated Attorney General Barr for intervening to lower the Justice Department’s Roger Stone sentencing recommendation calling Stone’s prosecution “a disgrace” for which he deserves an apology.  Commenting on the Russia investigation Trump then went on to say that “Evidence now clearly shows that the Mueller Scam was improperly brought & tainted. Even Bob Mueller lied to Congress!” Of course though Mueller’s testimony was far from adequate, especially to those of us who had pinned our hopes on him  actually condemning Trump, Mueller didn’t lie to Congress.  Trump knows that but he also a big user of that Hitler Big Lie technique, the one where if you repeat a lie enough times, lots of people eventually believe it, and keep in mind that while the Germans had evil propaganda genius Joseph Goebbels they didn’t have Fox.  With that in mind Trump also lashed into former FBI Director Comey saying that it was unfair that he hadn’t been jailed, once more brought up his favorite foils, FBI sexters Lisa Page and Peter Strzok and suggested that all those prosecutors who participated in the “witch hunt” go back to school before launching into a number of other boldfaced lies about everyone else involved in the Mueller investigation. That he did all this in front of another world leader was par for the course but at least this time he picked one who was somewhat simpatico as just last week Ecuador’s Moreno said that “women only report harassment when it comes from an ugly person” and that “men faced the constant threat of being falsely accused of harassment,” two tenets that Trump must really relate to.  

Getting back to Trump and his good buddy Roger Stone, in addition to dismissing the severity of those charges that Stone was convicted of by a jury, Trump said he wasn’t ready to talk about a pardon now, pretty much confirming that he would at some future date.  As to Stone, we also learned yesterday that last week Judge Amy Berman Jackson rejected his lawyers request that he be granted a new trial, just one of those things that partially explains why Trump has added her to his long list of targets.  In other related news during testimony in front of the Senate, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin refused to answer any questions about the reason for Trump abruptly withdrawing the nomination of former US Attorney Jessie Liu to serve as the Treasury Department's undersecretary for terrorism and financial crimes even though everyone knows that her nomination was pulled because she previously headed the office that oversaw Stone’s prosecution and because Trump holds her responsible for failing to obtain an indictment against another one of his enemies, former acting FBI director Andrew McCabe. Though Senate Republicans, most notably Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham, have no interest in calling AG Barr in to testify about any of this, House Democrats are interested in hearing from the devious Barr.  To that end Barr has now agreed to appear before the House Judiciary Committee on March 31.  Don’t ink that one into your calendar, there’s plenty of time for an intervening national emergency.      

Dueling Democrats: On the Democratic front, Mike Bloomberg continues to fight off scathing criticism about his old “stop and frisk” policies while earning more endorsements from African American politicians who don’t seem to care as much about his past as they do about beating Trump.  Joe Biden is trying to find donors willing to keep funding his struggling campaign.  Pete Buttigieg’s people are sparring with Bernie Sanders’ people over who currently holds the Democrat’s leading position. Like Kamala Harris,  Amy Klobuchar’s prosecutorial past is coming back to haunt her because apparently having served as a prosecutor, something that used to be a good way for Democratic candidates to prove that they were tough on crime, is now a bigly minus. And still another Democratic candidate, albeit one who was very late to the game, has dropped out.  Deval Patrick the former Governor of Massachusetts who like Elizabeth Warren thought that his state’s proximity to New Hampshire would help him gain a footing left the field.  As to New Hampshire, one interesting footnote, that other former Massachusetts Governor, Bill Weld, actually won around ten percent of the vote in the Republican primary and as a result was awarded one delegate.  Clearly his performance won’t earn him the Republican party’s nomination but maybe just maybe some of the voters who cast their lot with him will either vote Democratic, go with a write-in, or stay home in the Fall.    

Better Late than Never?  Former Homeland Security Secretary/Chief of Staff John Kelly is finally speaking some truth.  Last night during a Drew University event he said “Lt Colonel Vindman is blameless and simply followed the training he’d received as a soldier; migrants are ‘overwhelmingly good people’ and ‘not all rapists;’ and Trump’s decision to condition military aid to Ukraine on an investigation into his political rival Joe Biden upended long-standing U.S. policy.” Kelly went on to question Trump cozying up to North Korea’s Kim Jong un and criticized his affinity for Vladimir Putin who he described as “not necessarily a rational actor.”  Need I point out that Trump is hardly all that rational either. Kelly also had nothing good to say about Trump’s intervention in the case of disgraced Navy Seal Eddie Gallagher, saying that he never would have let that “wrong thing to do” happen.  While it's nice that Kelly has found his voice, let’s not forget that a lot of awful things happened while he was in the White House and that he still hasn’t apologized to Congresswoman Frederica Wilson for the disparaging untruthful things he said about her.  Anyway, it’s fair to assume that Kelly will now be the target of some Trump’s tweets as soon as now.