Are You Tired Yet?
I decided not to try and write any articles over the Christmas and New Year’s holidays. It was simply a matter of exhaustion. There was some disbelief in there as well. I mean, who isn’t exhausted with the antics of the President, the Democrats, and the Republicans?
To be honest, I hesitated over the use of the word “antics”. The word implies silliness and fun and, in my opinion, there’s not been anything fun or silly happening in our government for years now. The last few weeks have been heartstoppingly terrifying.
Let’s start with the impeachment. The Republican’s continuous cries for fairness and witnesses in the House process was mind-numbing. The process was shared with them. They had every opportunity to call witnesses, but they didn’t. Mainly because the President blocked anyone subpoenaed from testifying. So, without any opposition, and unsurprisingly along party lines, the impeachment was passed.
Then the Senate started its shenanigans. The Senate leadership came right out and told everyone that they had no intention of being fair minded. They were going to align themselves with the President and his team and too bad for any constitutional requirement to at least pretend to be impartial. Then, even with the Democratic Senate caucus contacting them with ideas about the rules of the Senate trial, primarily based on the rules set for the Clinton trial that were 100% agreed upon by the entire Senate membership of the day, Senator McConnell refused to even consider meeting. It seems as though he wants to skip the trial all together. Without any rules in place, the House leadership, Congresswoman Pelosi, refused to send the articles of impeachment to the Senate and refused to name the trial managers, as she must do to comply with the constitution. I think rightfully so. With no rules in place, how was she supposed to name managers?
That’s where it was left over the Congressional holiday break. Then, the Christian right, the people who put the President in the White House, began to break with him. The evangelicals made it clear that his moral code was unacceptable. That entire group was picking up steam about the President’s personal and criminal acts. The President, in a defensive move, and not content to let sleeping dogs lie, decided to take a stab at starting world war three. I know. I sound overly dramatic. In this case, I think I’m just articulating what reasonable people, not only in the U.S. but around the world, were thinking.
The story changes daily. We wake up one Friday to find out the United States used a drone to bomb the military leader of Iran, killing him and others. So, basically, we went into another country, without warning, and assassinated a member of their government. Was it with cause? Hard to say. General Soleimani was a known bad actor on the international stage. There’s no argument there. Other U.S. administrations had considered targeting the General but worried about consequences. This president didn’t seem to worry about that.
The word at the time was that the General had plans and four of our embassies were under imminent threat of attack, so the President ordered the assassination. The military chiefs all said they were totally surprised by the President’s order. Then the State Department and the Defense Department secretaries said that they had no warning of imminent threats. We’re a couple of weeks past the attack and now we hear that the President had been planning the assassination for the last 7 months.
I’ve had to think about this for a few days. Really? Seven months? And yet the military, the state department and the department of defense were totally surprised? I find that hard to believe. I mean a drone was used. They knew where the General was. Someone had to have been tracking his movements. Intelligence assets had to have come into play at some point. It’s hard to believe that no one knew. Especially since the President’s track record is at a level of about 15 lies per day since he took office. About one lie per hour if you want to spread it out across the President’s waking hours. Like the boy that cried wolf, that makes it pretty hard to believe anything the man says.
Then we get the cost. Not to us. At least not yet. But because of the attack — because Iran, like any other country, retaliated by sending missiles into Iraq onto known U.S. military bases, a jetliner was accidentally shot down. I believe it was accidental. The high levels of stress, technical capabilities of the equipment and the troops firing them, nighttime, yes, mistakes were made. The Iranian and Canadian people were the primary victims of the error. College students and business people and others, dead, because of President Trump.
Yes. I lay the blame at his doorstep. He was trying to shift the focus away from his impeachment by starting a damn war. Blame also lies with the entire administration. I was just an enlisted person while I was in, but anyone with any sense would know that Iran wasn’t going to take the assassination of one of their highest-ranked people without retaliation. Because we attacked a sovereign nation without warning, a sure declaration of war if someone had done that to us, Iran attacked another sovereign nation, Iraq. The entire area could have blown up in a domino effect of bombings, militaries crossing borders, and world war three would have surely followed.
I don’t know who to thank for talking countries down from the ledge. Maybe Putin, since it’s rumored that Trump talked to him but not his own Congress about the attack. Perhaps China, since Trump is such a big fan of dictators. I don’t know. However, I do care. I care that Trump’s Republican base is just ecstatic that Trump put those damn terrorists in their place. I care that Russia and China and to an extent North Korea have an inordinate amount of influence over our President. I care that the President, giant man-child that he is, thought that starting a war was a good idea so that people would stop focusing on his criminal acts and be distracted by a new shiny.
The whole story will come out eventually. Already there are Republican Senators breaking ranks over the President’s war powers. Congress as a whole is reasserting its power over the purse. Some Senators are even talking about the impeachment trial. They are calling for witnesses. Bolton and Pompeo in particular, are witnesses to the president’s actions that many Senators want to question. Will there be an actual trial, or will Senator Mitch McConnell produce a sham trial and let the president off of the hook? I think that would be a mistake on his part. Already people are asking what the President has to hide if he did nothing wrong. I think it will bounce back hard on Senators like McConnell who don’t do their jobs. Then, just as I was going to post this, I heard that McConnell doesn’t have the Republican votes to dismiss the impeachment trial. At least four Republican senators, the minimum number required to send the majority of votes over to the Democratic Senators, perhaps more, are in favor, at least they say so, of witnesses and documents at the Senate trial. So there’s that.
It’s an election year. The President is still going through his impeachment process. Word is already out that Russia, China, and others are flooding the internet and social media with political posts to influence the election. All fifty state’s electronic election systems are already compromised. Buckle up. This year is going to be a wild ride.
