Like we’ve written before, the whole “IOKIYAR” (“It’s OK if you’re a Republican”) line is kind of almost cringe by this point. Nobody should be shocked that MAGA politicians and media figures have virtually no regard for any sort of moral or logical consistency in their words or actions and that reacting as if you think they should know better is often empowering to them.
Often. Mostly regarding cultural or economic issues that in the real world don’t lend themselves to absolutism, but are black and white in the MAGAverse. It’s hard to come away from an online exchange with some incel who claims crime there’s an “epidemic” of gender transitioning and “race indoctrination” in schools and feel like you’ve won, that you shut that son of a bitch up good.
Less and less these days though does it apply however in the trials and tribulations of the now eight-year presidential campaign of their savior, Donald J Trump. It used to be that they could just capitalize on the complexities of the “Russia Russia Russia hoax” to overwhelm you with falsehoods and say that because CNN and MSNBC hyped every minute development of the Mueller probe that any provable lies Fox News told were not only justified but required to level the playing field.
Maybe some of you sense it, maybe you don’t, but there’s been this vibe shift lately since the fat bastard has been hit with 91 felony charges while the House GOP has made effectively zero progress in incriminating Hunter Biden and actually zero progress on the same with his father, Joe, even as Kevin McCarthy hastily announced an impeachment inquiry under pressure from Trump.
It seems as if responding to some MAGA troll posting “This indictment of Trump is total Marxism, banana republic third-world bullshit!” with “LOCK HER UP though, right?” is actually working and that they don’t have anything to come back with. That the rules the fanboys set for this zero-sum game they started suddenly apply to them and they’re reaping the find out after having sown the fuck around. As such, they’re scared and angry and it’s beginning to affect their ability to own the libs.
You see that frustration in this crazy asshole MAGA “youth” conference attendee seething “I am so tired of hearing we’re gonna hold them responsible,” and then screaming “I wanna know why AFTER SIX MONTHS, WE CAN’T PUT ANYBODY IN JAIL!!!” at Ted Cruz back in July. However antsy and impatient libs felt for the first two years of the Garland Justice Department this guy is orders of magnitude more bloodthirsty over the House GOP spinning their wheels with regards to Hunter’s “corruption” and other “crimes against the American people.” Cruz hilariously responded with a basic lesson in civics but with a pitch and tone to match the man’s anger while he was explaining how federal law enforcement works and that Congress cannot unilaterally prosecute people.
It was fucking hysterical and bizarre, and it speaks volumes about the wide delta between the expectations created by the right wing propaganda industrial complex overhyping the liabilities of the Biden family and administration. Republicans and Fox News have themselves to blame for this.
But for what the man lacked in patience and understanding of where the “evidence” against the Bidens stands – and let’s be honest, he probably thinks that the every piece of vaporware the House GOP peddled like the “bribery tape,” that one Israeli asshole “whistleblower” scam, that Devon Archer dipshit’s interview and the stupid “20 phone calls,” the same “Burisma” Ukraine nonsense that was already debunked in 2019, and the rest were somehow sabotaged by Soros and the Deep State – he actually isn’t all that wrong to expect that Congressional oversight can lead to prosecutions for offenses related directly or otherwise to the subject of an investigation.
Where to start with examples? Martha Stewart went to prison for that insider trading scam, convicted on evidence developed in a House investigation. Scumbag lobbyist Jack Abramoff the same with some Native American casino hustle after the Senate investigated. Enron hustlers Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling were nailed on a shit ton of crimes after the House and Senate investigated.
And of course Watergate. Those are just the ones that aren’t going to be particularly contentious in the current context. If you want that there’s plenty of it to be found in reporting on how evidence and testimony gathered by the House January 6th Select Committee fueled the Justice Department and the special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation, though until Trump’s trial begins we won’t know the precise extent to which the committee could be credited. What isn’t murky is how Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis’s indictment of Trump and 18 of his minions mentions the select committee’s findings at least twice: Once in “Act 7” of Trump and Rudy’s “overt acts of furtherance” concerning former Arizona state House Speaker Rusty Bowers’s testimony and then in “Act 159” against Sidney “Kraken” Powell, alleging she perjured herself in a deposition with the committee.
So it’s not so deranged to think Congress can put someone in jail, if indirectly, when an investigation uncovers incriminating evidence on someone. The unhinged part was thinking that this current House GOP, who have nothing at all, was going to make it happen in less than six months.
Or after just barely a month like Jesse Watters did back in February, having a meltdown because the House GOP’s first few hearings were so goddamned weak even he couldn’t feign excitement about the way things were going. “We get screwed, then we have a hearing. Nothing happens. We get screwed again. We have a hearing. Nothing happens,” Watters cried. “Make me feel better, guys. Tell me this is going somewhere. Can I throw someone in prison? Can someone go to jail?”
We’re not going to sit here and act like the playing field is balanced. It isn’t. Biden controls the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security who control federal law enforcement while House Republicans can only dick around and make it sound like the smoking gun that brings down the “Biden Crime Family” and puts them in prison for life is right around the corner. It is, to be completely fair and honest, about as likely that Comer and Jim Jordan and that really creepy, nasally-voiced incel guy on House Ways and Means will find clear and incontrovertible evidence that Joe Biden committed a felony as it is that Trump would survive 20 minutes on a Stairmaster.
But it’s really no exaggeration to say that either Donald wins the 2024 election or he (probably) dies in prison. Any conviction coming prior to election day, particularly in DC, is going to be a serious drag on his chances of winning. Thus, for all intents and purposes, there’s no practical separation between the legal and the political in the 2024 presidential contest. It will be the central, defining issue of this election and there is no escaping it unless you simply go off grid from politics.
My full statement on the fourth unconstitutional and unprecedented arrest of President Trump: pic.twitter.com/jRXmHbZIwi
— Elise Stefanik (@EliseStefanik) August 24, 2023
Which means we can admit that Trump’s criminal cases are “election interference,” insomuch that his repeated insistence on committing crimes is interfering with his bid to return to the White House.
And they’re “political” too. If somehow both Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris had suddenly and inexplicably fallen into a wormhole, leaving Kevin McCarthy as the 47th President of the United States, that – when he wasn’t busy trying to figure out how to appease the interdimensional aliens that control the wormholes, giving them everything they demand and then some – he probably would fire Jack Smith and order the Justice Department to drop all the investigations into Trump.
If we can admit that prosecuting Trump is what Republicans say it is and that it helps Dems win in 2024 then why can’t Republicans admit the same about their new impeachment crusade?
After McCarthy made his announcement “one senior House Republican” told Politico that he “was already looking ahead to a long inquiry that comes to a head sometime next year,” adding that he’s hoping “the timing of when this information comes out of Oversight and Judiciary is such that it gets right up to the convention next year. So that it’s damaging to Joe Biden.”
“Then the debate will be, ‘Which is more damning?’ You know, President Trump has unclassified documents and RICO charges in Georgia. Or your president, your sitting president, can bribe Ukraine, Romania and China. That will be the debate. That will be the vote,” the senior House Republican continued, naturally “speaking candidly” only “on condition of anonymity,” per Politico.
They’ll admit it now, albeit anonymously. They were more open about it back during Trump’s first impeachment trial in 2020 when, for example, then-Trump White House counsel Pat Cipollone told the Senate in his opening argument that, for all the Democrats’ “talk about election interference… they’re here to perpetrate the most massive interference in an election in American history.”
Montana Republican Steve Daines said “it should be up to the American people to decide who their next president is, not the US Senate,” around the same time. We could go on with similar quotes in the lead-up to the first time “the jury” nullified an open-and-shut case against the fat bastard.
Now to be fair, there were plenty of average schmuck MAGA trolls who did finally stop dropping any pretenses of the Biden impeachment effort of being anything other than “retribution” for Trump’s impeachments and indictments – not to mention Trump himself admitting it to Megyn Kelly last week “They did it to me. Had they not done it to me… you wouldn’t have it being done to them.”
Quite a “candid” admission from the mental patient who screamed that the Secret Service being unable to determine who left a bag of cocaine at the White House in July was “ELECTION INTERFERENCE” because they weren’t telling him what he wanted to hear, that it was Hunter Biden.
The wails of such perfidy from MAGAmerica have abated somewhat from the ultra-high volume of the summer after Trump racking up more felonies in June, July, and August – and as mentioned, the “goose for the gander” bullshit with the Biden impeachment inquiry. However any day now there’s going to be a decision from DC Judge Tanya Chutkan responding to Jack Smith’s team’s request for a gag order on Trump. It’s hard to tell how much of it is just hype to get MAGA assholes to donate to his legal fund as opposed to an actual expectation for the worst to happen on Team Orange, but Trump’s campaign have sent no less than 13 emails warning that he’s about to get slapped with a gag order in the nine days since the news Smith’s motion was unsealed.
“It’s no secret why Crooked Joe Biden is turning to his weaponized ‘Justice’ Department to SILENCE and GAG the one man who will BEAT him in 2024…” reads one sent this morning, with its subject line of “A private and secure message from the President” and its call to “please read President Trump’s private message by accessing this SECURE link with the password below” speaking to marketing genius on the level of the Little Orphan Annie-Ovaltine decoder ring scam from A Christmas Story.
In the same vein, but potentially considerably worse for Trump is a possible violation of the release agreement he already signed in the DC case last month last month with his deranged call for outgoing Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley to be executed for defying the Orange God Emperor. As Politico’s Kyle Cheney pointed out on Saturday “the reason it matters if Milley is a potential trial witness (which Trump would know based on discovery) is the part of his release conditions in which he specifically swore not to tamper with or intimidate witnesses,” and speculating that Milley may indeed be called to testify given that he told the House January 6th Select Committee that Trump knew full well he had legitimately lost the 2020 election.
Any response from the court, even a stern warning to shut up about the case, is going to be met with such pure, unadulterated rage that will increase exponentially if any real action is taken to punish the fat fuck. If you think the tinfoil MAGA freaks were shrieking “election interference” when he was indicted then try to imagine how they’re going to react if he gets put on house arrest or Chutkan simply says she’s moving up the trial and jury selection starts on Thursday.
Which just so happens to be the day dumbass James Comer has set for the first “Biden impeachment inquiry” hearing. One where he’s not interfering in the upcoming election, just conducting oversight on behalf of the American people while an Obama-appointed judge is taking the decision away from voters or whatever those chodes will say on their propaganda TV shows.