The Electric Speakeasy

First, a couple of news items I'll share before I give my commentary...

https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/22/politics ... index.html

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2018/08 ... -says.html

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/08/ ... gal-791009

Here are a couple of things happening within the next couple of weeks.

Trump resigns just before midterms.
Donald Trump isn't going to admit to any wrongdoing. Trump is going to quit

Republicans Turn On Trump.
As we get closer to midterm elections, Republicans on the campaign trail openly call for Impeachment proceedings in an effort to dodge voter outrage.

Even politicians who were endorsed by Trump and avid Trump supporters will denounce him and say that they never really liked him, and Trump wasn't really ever a real Republican.

Not all Republicans are happy with Donald Trump for a handful of reasons. Most notably he is giving the GOP a black eye due to his behavior from his Tweets in the middle of the night, for bribing women who had extramarital affairs with him for their silence.

Since Trump resigns just in time for the midterms... his reward will be a full pardon from Pence.
Two words, Gerald Ford. Look him up on Google and see how he became President. For those of us who don't remember, Gerry Ford was hounded by the press and public alike for pardoning Nixon and it cost him the election in '76.

President Pence doubles down on some of Trump's worst policies.
This is something I'm on the fence on, either Pence is going to go ahead with many of Trumps anti-Immigration/AntiLGBT mandates because "The Left" got a pound of flesh in Trump's resignation, or he's going to moderate himself in hopes of getting re-elected in 2020. Which brings me to...

Return Of Hillary.
Just when you thought it was safe....

... I give it two weeks before I start seeing "Hillary 2020" bumper stickers and social media posts.

If Trump quits, it will be only in some way where he can say he's "done everything he possibly could, but the corruption in DC is too endemic" or some other such nonsense that we all know but no one takes seriously. That will be the most damaging thing he's done since becoming President because now people will refuse to believe DC is that bad simply to distance themselves from him.

I think he won't quit. He'll hang in. His friend Clinton was impeached but didn't loose office and he'll firmly believe the same will happen to him. He'll stay in office until the end of his first term unless forcibly removed. His ego won't let him do anything else. I think he won't seek re-election and 'anoint' someone, probably Pence, as the 'only one who could continue the job'. He'll say that he's doing it because he did more in 4 years than any other President in history (everybody says so).

The truth is that it didn't matter who won in 2016, I think there would be impeachment talk from day 1. Two worst candidates in living memory.

I quick google search will demonstrate that FEC violations are common in presidential campaigns. Something has to truly stand out for it to result in more than a fine. Going back to John Edward’s, even if a payment to Daniels or McDougal is proven and Trump said do it, it still does not
prove terminal for the president, with one exception...it’s Trump.

You guys know me better than my own brother and you know how much I love a good conspiracy theory!

Who is Michael Cohen’s lawyer, Lanny Davis?

What politicians has he worked with in the past? What candidate did he work with during the 2016 election?

Look this up on google, and we can guess that Trump ordering a Federal investigation into The Clinton Foundation is now inevitable!

Possibly relevant:

This is interesting to watch for many, many reasons. I'll try avoid my usual text wall and just get the high points.

First, on the overall scale of humanity Trump may be an absolute dumpster fire. Pretty sure he's not the first of those we've had in public office. Absolutely certain he won't be last. Worth remembering is Daniel Webster's maxim: "In every generation there are those who want to rule well - but they mean to rule. They promise to be good masters - but they mean to be masters."

Next, at this point there's nothing Trump's done that any other politician hasn't done - many worse, and more than a few still active in government. Does this make him a good president? A good man? Good anything? Maybe not. But he's not the only turd in the pool, not by a long shot. Counting aside those factors I'd say a major reason for all the coverage is regardless whether or not you love, hate, or tolerate the man he's done more in two years to make apparent to a broad audience just how deep the D.C. rot goes than any one reporter, news outlet, or conspiracy theorist in living memory. The fallout - nonstop news coverage, hit pieces from every quarter, disparaging remarks from supposed stalwarts in his own party - doesn't exactly quiet his supporters. To the contrary, that kind of blowback is the surest sign to some that he's right, that the system is rigged, and the more ranting opinion pieces and 'expert' commentary thrown at him the better he looks to people who've toed the party line all these years and gotten nothing to show. If he's a big dumb stick, he's one useful for beating their enemies.

As those same experts go...bring a truckload of salt. Experts said he was never a serious contender. He'd never beat even a GOP tag-along or some of the fringe candidates. He'd never get the Republican nomination. He'd never beat Hillary - not even close. After he got in, everybody was going to work together and stop him. He wouldn't last a month. Six months. A year. Yet here we are.

I don't know where this is headed. I have no illusions it'll be pretty. When it's all said and done I'm not sure how recognizable America might be at the settling of the dust. Of course you could say the same for the Obama Years, or Bush II, or Clinton, or...you get the idea.

Interesting times indeed.

I agree with Dillo in that the personal life of President Trump is damn messy. I also think that if any recent president were put under such microscopic scrutiny their personal lives would not be significantly better. There are many things that I do not understand about President Trump, his bluster, many of his Tweets, his willingness to die on every beach in reply to every insult, etc. He certainly doesn't say things the way I would. Despite of all of that I have to say that I do like his SCOTUS picks, his demand for a strong border, his tax cuts (Not deep enough but a start.), and his desire to bring production back to the US, and such.

I submit that we have had far worst president in the past, some in the not too distant past, yet they were not the object of such animus. There could be many reasons for this, his personality upon occasion is not unlike sandpaper underwear on a hot day but I think it goes deeper than that. The left sees Trump as the evil undoer of Obama's great march and usurper of Clinton Part II. The far right sees Trump as not conservative enough and potentially unreliable. Both left and right, Democrat and Republican establishment see Trump as an outsider, not one of the club. The establishment part of both parties view Trump's role as that of a donor who has had the temerity to overstep his role. The media, well the media would have been unkind to any president with an "R" after his or her name but with Trump they basically have a license to destroy and are making full use of it.

Basically I see it as this way; we could have done better than Trump if someone better had been running and we definitely could have done far worse based on the opposition. We dodged a bullet by jumping in a mud filled hole but there are nuggets of fairly good policy at the bottom of that hole.
Will they eventually impeach President Trump? Yes. Will it be successful? I doubt it.

My thoughts exactly, Pilot.

After reading all the posts here, except my own of course, I'm convinced that I have surrounded myself with the smartest people on the internet. Clearly, someone should be sending links to some of our countries leaders. With that said...

If Donald Trump is the evil genius so many people believe he is, he's sitting in the White House Cabinet Room today and is instructing everyone to open up investigations of everyone who has violated FEC law in the past 20 or 30 years and will command those under his power to starting going after them.

I would venture a guess that a full investigation into The Clinton Foundation isn't out of the question before Trump resigns. All "Foundations" should be opened up and looked at and gone over with a microscope and a fine tooth comb, and there are many campaigns that need to be looked into... like the aforementioned John Edwards who used some of his own campaign funds to take care of his daughter he had with his mistress that was a product of an extramarital affair... while his wife declined cancer treatment to campaign for her husband.

We tend to not believe that any of this matters because John Edwards didn't go anywhere 10 years ago with his campaign for the DNC nomination, but imagine if you will if he was a Republican and stood in the way of a candidate like Barack Obama. All of these people who are wringing their hands and clutching their pearls over what Trump is accused of doing have very short memories of the garbage that's collected in their own backyards over the years. John Edwards is a scumbag, a degenerate and a disgrace but he gets a pass because he belongs to the "correct" political party, and his campaigns failed.

But then, theres' Hillary Clinton and The Clinton Foundation for FEC violations and beyond.

https://www.cnn.com/2018/01/05/politics ... index.html

http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/36 ... estigation

The Justice Department has launched a new inquiry into whether the Clinton Foundation engaged in any pay-to-play politics or other illegal activities while Hillary Clinton served as secretary of State, law enforcement officials and a witness tells The Hill.

FBI agents from Little Rock, Ark., where the foundation was started, have taken the lead in the investigation and have interviewed at least one witness in the last month, and law enforcement officials said additional activities are expected in the coming weeks.

The officials, who spoke only on condition of anonymity, said the probe is examining whether the Clintons promised or performed any policy favors in return for largesse to their charitable efforts or whether donors made commitments of donations in hopes of securing government outcomes.

http://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow ... story.html#

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opin ... story.html

https://apnews.com/09cb8b14d118469eb3ca0763db142fc5

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/24/us/c ... mpany.html

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/ar ... zi/396182/

Because of Lanny Davis' relationship with Hillary Clinton and is now the lawyer for Cohen, it's a safe bet that all of these thigns that quietly went away after Donald was sworn in are now going to become front-page news again, for spite and for justice.

If he's going to go down for FEC violations, he's taking others down with him. Or... that's what I would do if I was an evil genius, too.

Eric Renderking Fisk wrote: ↑

Thu Aug 23, 2018 7:51 pm

I'm convinced that I have surrounded myself with the smartest people on the internet.