Part One – Why is Our Party So Broken

Appalling to perhaps the point of criminal

This first section in all my many posts mainly focuses on the Russian scandal and the ongoing train wreck of the Trump presidency, which as Americans my comments & the articles in the links below only confirm we’ve never ever seen anything quite like this.  There’s never a day that goes by which doesn’t prove how incompetent, clueless and ill-prepared he is for the job, along with horribly-flawed personal traits offering very little hope this can ever get better.  Just this morning we saw ridiculous comments and lies, just some of thousands we’ve seen just this year, where he’s attacking Bob Corker.  All these tweets do is keep confirming what a liar & despicable person Trump truly is, nothing but a divisive thin-skinned jerk.  How can anyone refute that?  And he’s no leader!  Hopefully this attack on one of them helps GOP congress-people to rightly distance themselves from an unhinged President, which does take courage since a sizable portion of their constituents have been snookered by the evil-echo.  The reason I have a relentless focus on the Russian case is it offers real hope we can make amends for the huge blunder America made last year in the November election & the primaries, from which saving our nation may well require finding the constitutional means to legally remove Trump from power.  The future and very survival of America may literally rest in the hands of one Bob Mueller.

The scandal itself has numerous tentacles from which the more investigators uncover, the more it leads to new revelations which require further investigating.  There’s a ton of evidence to parse through.  We only know a small fraction of what the Mueller team knows.  He hired many prosecutors and convened three grand juries, so that sends strong signals he must be on to something.  Overall, not only did Russia attack our election process, but they may know such damaging info about Trump’s involvement that our President is forced to comply and kowtow to every Russian demand he can get away with.  One example over this past summer was the way Trump wanted to soften the sanctions against Russia, which only overwhelming support from Congress to strengthen sanctions could thwart Trump’s wishes.  There’s plenty of telltale signs the Trump campaign and the Russians were working in cahoots all along to fulfill each other’s vested interests, which in Trump’s case was to help him win the election by tainting his opponent.  The part of the case the public is aware of so far indicates obstruction is probable & collusion is possible.  Stay tuned.

The hot Russian news lately is that British spy’s dossier has credibility and being extensively researched by the investigations.  We just found out Mueller’s team did recently speak with its author, Christopher Steele, in London.  Once largely dismissed, the basic premise of colluding with Russia looks to be adding up from the details in the report.  While overall it appears some items in the dossier are false, there are enough proven facts in there to give it credibility, including more than a year ago predicting Russia was about to attack the election campaign and also accurately reporting about Trump’s Moscow real estate wishes.  The dossier includes plenty of info about how Russia managed to compromise Trump through a quid-pro-quo before and during the campaign, which if confirmed the principals involved attacked our democracy by engaging in criminal activity to discredit the election.  The dossier also mentioned salacious and disgusting details about Trump’s escapades with Russian prostitutes, yet to be confirmed.  Nothing would surprise me anymore about this guy.  Nor should it surprise you.  When we put someone in charge with no moral compass, the results are destined to backfire.

In other news headlines this past week, Trump caused alarm by referring to the calm before the storm on the international scene, as if we need anymore storms now.  My guess is he’s alluding to decertifying the Iran deal, but he’s also doing some saber-rattling on North Korea by saying there’s only one way to deal with them, so being the drama-king he likes to make vague references and milk the suspense.  I’m not smart enough to properly evaluate whether the Iran deal was good for our nation or not, largely due to it being an incredibly complicated deal and as laymen we really don’t know what the various options were, or if there were any good options at all.  My sense is Iran got their money while at the same time is stringing the world along until the day when, presto, they have nuclear weapons.  It’s disturbing Trump may be a lone ranger in dumping this deal (and probably without a bigger strategy), with some officials even within his own cabinet preferring we stay in, plus several of our allies originally signed onto the deal and wouldn’t follow our lead in pulling out.

Trump does seem way too flippant in threatening to go to war.  His veiled comments are seen by some as him adhering to a madman theory, where it’s easier to get our enemies to capitulate when they think they’re dealing with a madman.  That posturing might actually work for Trump, since a large part of the world really suspects he is indeed a madman.  I do confess to being more of a hawkish interventionist, especially in cases where being passive can allow a situation to regress into our very existence being threatened, but whatever actions we take need to have a more than reasonable chance of succeeding.  Overall we should weigh the long-term risks.  The dire predicaments Iran & North Korea both present are incredibly difficult, & it’s hard to overstate the dangers of either country having a nuclear arsenal, especially when they can mount them onboard long-range missiles or funnel to terrorist groups hell-bent on using them.  In his failing presidency, Trump may try most anything to turn it around.  This may end in catastrophic ways, but if he can somehow leave office with an improbable & incredibly risky achievement of leaving behind a non-nuclear Iran and North Korea while causing minimal collateral damage, it may be the only scenario securing a successful presidential legacy.

Whatever happened to our party?

It’s been a year since the Access Hollywood tape release

We had warning bells going off like sirens, yet tens of millions of Americans chose to overlook the iniquities and vote for someone so lacking in moral character, our nation is now paying a heavy price.  In watching this interview with Ken Starr, who had the role of Mueller in leading the investigation the last time we had a President caught in similar moral indignation, it offers hope the current investigation will give America a desperately-needed out, where proof of criminal activity can soon usher in a new leader with new administration to try and get us back on track.

I’m surprised he wasn’t working for Fox News

Views from the far-left

Just trying to counter the far-right echo with far-left reports which aren’t as far-out as the crazy stuff many conservatives bow to.  So enjoy these hard-hitting takes on topics like Russia, Corker, Puerto Rico, mental sanity and Pence’s staged charade.