Quote of the Day posts

Really tired of “Impeachment is useless because it will fail” takes. Impeachment will succeed. REMOVAL will fail—but that's on Republicans. At least the Democrats will have done their job and made their case.

— Mark Harris (@MarkHarrisNYC) September 22, 2019

“Trump has already done more than enough to warrant impeachment and removal with his relentless attempts, on multiple fronts, to sabotage the counterintelligence and criminal investigation by then-special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and to conceal evidence of those attempts. ...

”The current whistleblowing allegations, however, are even worse. Unlike the allegations of conspiracy with Russia before the 2016 election, these concern Trump's actions as president, not as a private citizen, and his exercise of presidential powers over foreign policy with Ukraine. Moreover, with Russia, at least there was an attempt to get the facts through the Mueller investigation; here the White House is trying to shut down the entire inquiry from the start — depriving not just the American people, but even congressional intelligence committees, of necessary information.

“It is high time for Congress to do its duty, in the manner the framers intended. ... Congressional procrastination has probably emboldened Trump, and it risks emboldening future presidents who might turn out to be of his sorry ilk. To borrow John Dean's haunting Watergate-era metaphor once again, there is a cancer on the presidency, and cancers, if not removed, only grow.”

— George Conway and Neal Katyal, “Trump has done plenty to warrant impeachment. But the Ukraine allegations are over the top,” in The Washington Post

You’re President of the United States of America. You’re granted power & resources to do good in ways only imaginable to most humans. And you choose to be a shit head. Imagine how fucked in the mind & spirit you must be.

— Jeffrey Wright (@jfreewright) July 27, 2019

I believe this was in response to Trump attacking Elijah Cummings' district as a place no one wanted to live, and demanding an investigation into where the federal money goes, but I could be wrong. It could be almost anything Trump did or said.

“For the past two and a half years of Donald Trump’s Presidency, I have consoled myself with the argument that, despite all the chaos and narcissism and racial incitement and norm-shattering, the American system of government is holding itself together. When Trump attempted to introduce a ban on Muslims entering the country and sought to add a citizenship question to the census, the courts restrained him. When he railed at nato and loyal allies like Germany’s Angela Merkel, other members of his Administration issued quiet reassurances that it was just bluster. When the American people had the chance to issue a verdict on Trump’s first two years in office, they turned the House of Representatives over to the opposition party.

”All of this was reassuring. But, while watching what happened on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, when Robert Mueller, the former special counsel, testified before two House committees, I struggled to contain a rising sense of dread about where the country is heading. With Republicans united behind the President, Democrats uncertain about how to proceed, and Mueller reluctant to the last to come straight out and say that the President committed impeachable offenses, it looks like Trump's blitzkrieg tactics of demonizing anyone who challenges him, terrorizing potential dissidents on his own side, and relentlessly spouting propaganda over social media may have worked. If so, he will have recorded a historic victory over the bedrock American principles of congressional oversight and equality before the law.“

— John Cassidy, ”Why the Mueller Hearings Were So Alarming,“ The New Yorker

Can't agree more. I listened to the hearings this morning as I was making coffee and unloading the dishwasher (I'm on the west coast), and the Republicans kept attacking and spinning, the Democrats didn't attack at all, and Mueller remained as tight-lipped as possible.

I go back to Ben Bradlee via William Goldman: ”Goddamnit, when is someone going to go on the record on fucking story!?!"

Or, in the case of anyone in the GOP, wake the fuck up and try to save what's left of this country. 

“Historians have a word for Germans who joined the Nazi party, not because they hated Jews, but because out of a hope for restored patriotism, or a sense of economic anxiety, or a hope to preserve their religious values, or dislike of their opponents, or raw political opportunism, or convenience, or ignorance, or greed.

”That word is ‘Nazi.’ Nobody cares about their motives anymore.

“They joined what they joined. They lent their support and their moral approval. And, in so doing, they bound themselves to everything that came after. Who cares any more what particular knot they used in the binding?”

— author A.R. Moxon, who goes by Julius Goat on social media, and whose Twitter avatar is the original Julius, Groucho, who also had a thing or two to say about the Nazis. The above is getting a lot of traction on social media. It should.