“It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” So said Macbeth back then, now says the Democratic Party today. And what I mean is the fact that after we spent God knows how many taxpayer dollars on a special prosecutor named Mueller, then more money not on one but on two impeachments followed by a Hollywood-ish extravaganza known as the House Select Committee, we still don’t have a single thing which links Trump to any illegal activity at all.
Stop and think about it for a second. During the 2016 campaign, Trump lied about trying to build a skyscraper project in Moscow, which just happens to raise all sorts of issues regarding a national Presidential candidate’s possible conduct of foreign affairs. Trump then sent a private attorney to a foreign country to dig up dirt on a possible political opponent and held that country’s government hostage unless the President of that country played ball. Trump then invented some bullshit about a ‘stolen’ election, and as if by magic, thousands of assholes wearing MAGA hats tried to stop the Congress from validating the election results.
The first head-to-head polls that matched Trump up against Joe appeared in April and gave Joe a seven-point lead. This poll result would continue without any change throughout the entire, seven months of the campaign. No previous polling of a Presidential election ever showed such unchanging results, even though Trump and his bunch threw everything they could throw at Joe – Hunter’s laptop, millions of Chinese dollars going into Biden bank accounts, blah, blah and blah.
Meanwhile, the poll numbers never moved, and Joe’s popular vote was exactly 7 points higher than the total votes received by Trump.
In June, when the social distancing being enforced in some states created plans for mail-in and early election voting, Trump began to whine about losing the election through ‘fraud.’ Two of his biggest and closest asshole buddies – Rudy Giuliani and Roger Stone – had both pushed election ‘fraud’ narratives in other campaigns – Giuliani when he ran and lost for New York City Mayor in 1989; Stone who pulled all kinds of nefarious stunts to ‘prove’ that the Florida outcome in the 2000 Presidential election represented a victory for Bush over Gore.
Could any rational human being who follows politics look at what happened in 2020 and believe that Trump didn’t hold one conversation with Rudy and Rodger to make sure the fix was in?
Let’s go back to the last time a President tried to maintain himself in power illegally going into an electoral campaign. I’m talking about Richard Nixon and the Watergate scandal, when a small group of ex-CIA employees burglarized the offices of the DNC in June 1972, hoping to get some intelligence on Democratic political strategies, a scheme hatched in the Oval Office when Nixon authorized an effort to find out who was behind some ‘leaks.’
Sound familiar to what went on in the Oval Office under Trump? It should.
The difference between 1972 and 2020 is that Nixon easily won his re-election. But if it hadn’t been for a chance appearance by a young, Washington Post reporter named Carl Bernstein at the arraignment of the schmucks who had been arrested during the DNC break-in, there probably wouldn’t have been any Watergate scandal at all.
The whole Watergate cover-up fell apart when Nixon finally handed over tapes in July 1974 containing a discussion with his top aides (Dean, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, et. al.) on June 23, 1973, about how to launder money to pay off the Watergate burglars, as well as how to prevent the FBI from further involvement in the case.
In other words, Nixon’s own words in those meetings opened him up to being charged with at least two felonies, if not several more, along with indicating an abuse of executive authority by pressuring the FBI.
All of this happened because one judge (John Sirica) and one special prosecutor (Leon Jaworski) became concerned about the possibility of a cover-up thanks to the reportage of Woodward and Bernstein in the Washington Post.
Now let’s go back from what happened to Nixon to what's going on today. We not only have gone through two Congressional investigations, a drawn-out special prosecutor case, and a House Select Committee production that would make Steven Spielberg proud, but we have not just the same print and network TV coverage that we had during Watergate, we also have 24/7 cable news, including two very decidedly anti-Trump stations (CNN, MS-NBC) plus a gazillion news blogs and internet news aggregators, all scrambling to be the first to come up with a story before anyone else.
And with all of that coverage, the Democrats still haven’t been able to tie the slightest criminal charge to Trump?
I don’t blame Trump for reminding everyone that he's sticking around by making some nasty comments about Rihanna, even if what he said motivated me and probably millions of others to watch her Super Bowl half-time show. After all, it’s not as if the Democrats show the slightest ability to do anything about Trump’s lawlessness beyond spewing forth with a daily dose of hot air.
Or as Grandpa would say, ‘genug schoen,’ (read: get something done.)
Comments