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Understanding Democrats/MSMers

Mark Noonan21 Comments

Warning: language will get a little salty in this

A tale of a couple stories:

Politico quietly updated a story after first claiming that President Donald Trump currently “owes millions to the Bank of China” Friday.

The publication posted an article Friday suggesting President Donald Trump currently “owes” millions of dollars to the Bank of China, adding that “the loan is due soon.” Politico was forced to quietly edit its story after it was determined that Trump apparently did not currently owe the Bank of China millions of dollars.

And:

Of the 4,377 coronavirus deaths in New Jersey, over 1,700 died due to infections in nursing homes. That nearly 40% of coronavirus deaths in one of the hardest hit states took place in nursing homes casts a stark light on the misplaced priorities of blue states battling the pandemic by locking down houses of worship and small businesses, while putting few to no resources into protecting nursing home residents.

New Jersey’s coronavirus deaths were part of the coronavirus outbreak in 425 nursing homes. At one nursing home, after an anonymous tip, police found 17 bodies being stored in a shed.

Let’s tackle the first story:

How many times have we seen this? You know: where something is reported – often rather breathlessly – about anyone on the wrong side of the Democrats only to find out that the actual facts are the opposite of what was reported? That is, what was reported was a flat out, bald faced lie? You can probably think of dozens of such instances over the past few years. If you dug around for a while, you’re going to swiftly find hundreds (just in fake racist attacks we’re probably at an astonishing number).

And, yet, when most people on the right comment about such things, it is in terms of “how could this have happened?” and usually ending with something along the lines of “this is not a good look; do better, Media”. But that doesn’t get at what really happened: a lie. A deliberate, malicious lie. These aren’t mistakes. Mistakes are fairly rare when you have multiple sets of eyes on a news report before publication – and they would, over time, work out to about 50/50 against both sides. From what I understand, Politico didn’t even contact the bank in question before reporting Trump owed millions to it. I think that would be my first inclination if someone told me something like that about any American politician: checking out if the basic facts alleged are true. Politico didn’t – and my assumption is because they made the whole thing up.

I’m serious: a bunch of people at Politico sat around one day and brainstormed what they could say to help the Democrat Narrative…in this case, trying to attack Trump over China as China is one of the huge cards Trump holds over Biden. After discussion, this is what they came up with…and that they were swiftly caught doesn’t matter in the least. I absolutely guarantee you that years from now I’ll come across Progressives on social media who will assert that Trump downplayed Coronavirus because he owed millions to a Chinese bank. The hit was accomplished; millions of people – because they saw the headline bubble up on social media and/or TV news – are now convinced that Trump has dirty ties to China. But that is not really the important point here. What’s important is that the media lies. They lie quite brazenly. They lie all the time. And all of their lies are at the service of the Democrat party – of which almost all media people belong to or at least heavily sympathize with.

And that brings me to the second story: the huge portion of Coronavirus deaths which are happening in nursing homes. Not being reported very much, is it? Oh, the total number of deaths are being reported – rather excitedly – by the MSM. They love that ever-rising total number of deaths. One MSM hack actually asked President Trump yesterday if the number of deaths means he shouldn’t be re-elected. You’d get the impression listening to the MSM and to Democrats that they care about the deaths…that they think the deaths are bad and we should really, really work hard to stop the dying. But, then you see the report: massive numbers of deaths at nursing homes. Hey, wait a sec: shouldn’t this matter?

I mean, after all, we’ve known nearly from the start that Coronavirus has a much higher mortality rate among elderly people, especially if they have underlying conditions, which most people in nursing homes have to one extent or another (its kinda why they’re in there, right?). If your greatest desire is to reduce the number of deaths, don’t you think you’d have expended a little bit of energy on making sure that nursing homes had adequate resources to deal with Coronavirus? That maybe you’d try to provide some separation between the oldsters? Not have them packed so tightly in? Certainly you wouldn’t actually send a geezer with Coronavirus to a nursing home, right? Well, not quite:

New York’s nursing homes weren’t allowed to challenge a controversial order to admit patients with the coronavirus, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Thursday — even though it’s been blamed for spreading the deadly disease among residents.

“They don’t have a right to object. That is the rule and that is the regulation and they have to comply with that,” Cuomo said during his daily briefing in Albany.

Shut down everything! You can’t even go to the park! We’ll arrest you – I have that power!!! So goes the darling of the MSM, Democrat Governor Cuomo…but, hey, sh**; sorry, nursing home, rule is you gotta accept the diseased person into your rather small and close-packed facility.

Why in the f*** would you do that? I mean, seriously: as a mere human being if you are tasked with anything related to the care of other human beings, why would you in a million years consider not merely allowing, but forcing infected people into the company of a very high risk population?

Cuomo is out there, day after day, saying his actions are to save lives – and its all reported in the MSM as if he’s actually, you know, trying to save lives…but his order for nursing homes to accept patients with Coronavirus is a death sentence for people in the nursing homes. There’s no way to mistake that or put it any other way: you put someone infected with Coronavirus in a place with a high risk population and you know that people are doing to catch it and die. And yet, Cuomo gave the order. There is no way that Cuomo is stupid enough to think that this wouldn’t result in more infections in an at-risk population thus resulting in more deaths. He definitely, absolutely and with no shadow of a doubt knew what he was doing – and what he was doing was trying to drive up the death toll.

No, Mark! You can’t say that! That just isn’t fair or right! Oh, yeah: watch me.

Two plus two equals four. Always good to remember that. All sorts of people will come up with vastly complex reasons for you to believe – if you want – that it equals five but the bottom line remains: two plus two equals four. What is more likely here:

1. Cuomo simply forgot that Coronavirus is infectious?
2. Cuomo felt that a miracle would occur and no geezers exposed would die?
3. Cuomo is a veritable drooling idiot who just doesn’t know how things work?
3. Cuomo wanted higher death tolls?

“Well, Mark: maybe there wasn’t room for them anywhere else?”

No, sorry: if you have someone infected with a virulent disease which specifically reaps a bloody harvest among a certain demographic group you do not put infected people in with that group. You do not do that. Not ever. You find some place else for them. Better if they are left to die in a gutter than be sent into a place where scores of others can get infected and die. And, as it turns out, there were other places for them – the temporary hospital at the Javits Center is a 2,500 bed facility which has, to date, seen a total of 1,094 patients and currently has 72. It never got close to being full. The USNS Comfort – rushed to NYC at great speed and expense – barely saw anyone. In other words, when Cuomo gave his order to nursing homes to accept Coronavirus patients, he had other places to send them. He choose to send them to the place where they were sure to do the most damage.

Why?

Because he wants more dead people.

I’m sorry, but there it is: it is the only rational conclusion to draw from it. Remember: Democrats are the party in favor of federally-funded abortion on demand up to the moment of birth. Not a group of people actually concerned greatly about any individual human life. What matters to a Democrat in an election year whether or not someone’s grandma dies in Brooklyn nursing home? That Democrat, after all, isn’t concerned that grandma’s great-grandson is to be aborted tomorrow in the ninth month. And, in fact, if grandma kicking the bucket can be blamed on the Republicans – especially on Trump – where’s the downside for the Democrat? And its not like he has to worry about the media putting two and two together. No chance the NY Times or CNN will ask Cuomo, “your order to nursing homes to accept infected people pretty much ensures more people will die; how do you justify that?”. It won’t happen – because, as noted, the media is Democrats. They are just as ok with all this as official members of the party are…it helps the media, after all: they can concentrate on the very easy story of how many are dead and allows them to keep up an endless drumbeat about how its Trump’s fault.

And the reason for all this is simple: power. The Democrats want it. Very, very badly. Power is all – more important than sex or money, especially as once you get power, you get all the sex and money you want. It doesn’t matter what happens as long as Democrats get power.

Democrats will push up death totals while keeping you from going back to work for the simple reason that high death totals and you unemployed makes it easier for them to beat Trump – at least in their theory. Maybe it won’t – but the Democrats are sure trying. Two plus two does equal four: there is no rational reason to keep a guy from giving a haircut at his barbershop as long as a few simple protocols are followed – and no rational reason to send infected people into nursing homes. You only ban the haircut and send in the infected if your desire is poverty and death.

And the media – remember – is merely Democrats working a different beat. They will simply report whatever bullsh** the Democrats need them to report…whether its a refusal to point out the obvious (infected people shouldn’t be sent to nursing homes) or simply making up negative stuff about Trump (owes millions to a Chinese bank), the media will gamely do it. Without the slightest shame – like the rest of the Democrats, only results matter. If the results of a series of lies is that a Republican is beaten, then the media is just as pleased as regular Democrats about it.

What we are faced with in the Democrats and their media allies are very ruthless, very determined and relentlessly dishonest people who want to win regardless of cost. I hope we can beat them – I think that if anyone can, it is Trump…but if he does win, then starting in 2021, we really – as a people – need to start figuring out ways to correct this state of affairs: this condition where elected officials and their media transcriptionists are able to lie without consequences. How, exactly, we fix that I’m not sure – but we must do so, if we are to survive long terms as a Republic.

Coronavirus is the Real World, and It Came Knocking

Mark Noonan39 Comments

New York City has turned in a disaster area for Coronavirus. It is overwhelmed with cases and hospitalizations – and it is overwhelmed because it simply wasn’t prepared. Let us pause for a moment and review some salient facts:

The 2020 fiscal year budget for New York City is $92.5 billion. That’s about $11,500.00 in government spending for each person in the city. That is quite a lot of money, don’t you think?

Prior to the crisis, an N95 mask could cost less than one dollar. One dollar. So, for 8 million dollars out of the 2020 budget, NYC could have provided a mask for every man, woman and child in the city. After spending that 8 million dollars, NYC would still have $92,492,000,000.00 left over. If you want to have your eyes glaze over, you can read the entire NYC budget – I went through it a bit and found millions of dollars being allocated for such crucial things as replacing the skylights in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and providing illegal immigrants funds to defend themselves against deportation.

In addition to that, the directory of New York City is handy for you to see what the city is up to – among many, many other things, they have:

NYC Mayor’s Office of Climate Policy and Programs
New York City Department of Cultural Affairs
Four different listings for housing departments
New York City Commission on Human Rights
New York City Loft Board
New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission

And on and on like that – and, rely on it, these things are staffed to the gills with people who make high salaries and get excellent health and retirement benefits. None of these things, though, provide a mask for a nurse working a Coronavirus ward. What is a city government supposed to do? Easy:

Water supply.
Police protection.
Fire protection.
Waste disposal.
Maintain public thoroughfares.
Non-Police/Fire Emergency services.

That’s pretty much it. Anything beyond that isn’t necessary for the city to function. That you might want to have it do other things is all well and good, but the purpose of the city is those six things – and only after those six things are completely done do you have anything left over for additional wants. New York City – like most governments – has got this all backwards. They act as if their primary function is to provide economic opportunity, to end bigotry, to make art – to do just about anything but what the government is supposed to do. The city has been living in a world of make-believe – a world in which the bad things simply won’t happen and so the crucial things can be slighted in favor of fashionable vanities.

Coronavirus has changed that. The real world does, indeed, exist and it is very insistent that we deal with it.

I’m not here just to knock New York City – as worthwhile as that exercise is – but the whole attitude of a world which has been whistling past the graveyard. It isn’t, after all, New York City’s fault that it can’t just make masks in the city. New York used to be a manufacturing powerhouse…but various taxes, regulations and trade policies over the years moved that capacity out of New York. And out of the United States, of course.

What Coronavirus is teaching us is that we have to act like adults and do the important things – and only after the important things are done can we spare any thought or effort to other desires. We have to build back our manufacturing capacity. We must stockpile the necessary equipment for emergencies. We have to make sure our transportation system is durable. That our water supplies are secure. That, at need, we can live for an extended period of time without one thing coming in from outside the United States. In other words, we have to start being adults, again. Cruel as that might seem.

One of the crucial parts of getting back to reality is to directly ask the people in charge just what the heck did they think they were doing? DeBlasio can be raked over the coals – and should be – but he’s not the only one out there spending money trying to keep immigration laws from being enforced. He and a host of others – including many Republicans – have prioritized all sorts of useless garbage over the necessities of American survival. To put it as bluntly as I can: because our leaders have had us spending on trivialities, Americans are dead of the Coronavirus. It is that one for one here, guys: because if we had been as prepared as possible for this – and had acted like adults at the first sign of trouble – many people now dead would still be alive. And many who are going to die wouldn’t. The vanity project of having a green new deal in your home town might have produced a glowing editorial, but it also produced a corpse. Or dozen.

And we had better get serious about this soon – because Coronavirus, by all historical standards, is mild. This is the alarm in the middle of the night waking us up to the threat…and if we don’t take it seriously, then we will pay a very high price in blood.

The Ballad of God-Makers

Mark Noonan1 Comment

Could get a little dull what with no sports and the stores all out of toilet paper, so we’ll have to entertain ourselves. Here’s a good, Lenten poem

By G. K. Chesterton

A bird flew out at the break of day
From the nest where it had curled,
And ere the eve the bird had set
Fear on the kings of the world.

The first tree it lit upon
Was green with leaves unshed;
The second tree it lit upon
Was red with apples red;

The third tree it lit upon
Was barren and was brown,
Save for a dead man nailed thereon
On a hill above a town.

That night the kings of the earth were gay
And filled the cup and can;
Last night the kings of the earth were chill
For dread of a naked man.

‘If he speak two more words,’ they said,
‘The slave is more than the free;
If he speak three more words,’ they said,
‘The stars are under the sea.’

Said the King of the East to the King of the West,
I wot his frown was set,
‘Lo, let us slay him and make him as dung,
It is well that the world forget.’

Said the King of the West to the King of the East,
I wot his smile was dread,
‘Nay, let us slay him and make him a god,
It is well that our god be dead.’

They set the young man on a hill,
They nailed him to a rod;
And there in darkness and in blood
They made themselves a god.

And the mightiest word was left unsaid,
And the world had never a mark,
And the strongest man of the sons of men
Went dumb into the dark.

Then hymns and harps of praise they brought,
Incense and gold and myrrh,
And they thronged above the seraphim,
The poor dead carpenter.

‘Thou art the prince of all,’ they sang,
‘Ocean and earth and air.’
Then the bird flew on to the cruel cross,
And hid in the dead man’s hair.

‘Thou art the son of the world.’ they cried, `
‘Speak if our prayers be heard.’
And the brown bird stirred in the dead man’s hair
And it seemed that the dead man stirred.

Then a shriek went up like the world’s last cry
From all nations under heaven,
And a master fell before a slave
And begged to be forgiven.

They cowered, for dread in his wakened eyes
The ancient wrath to see;
And a bird flew out of the dead Christ’s hair,
And lit on a lemon tree.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan40 Comments

Remember Valerie Plame? Well, after her 15 minutes were up, she seems to have gone down the road of anti-Semitism…which may now make her a prime Democrat House candidate.

People are making fun of AOC’s latest brainstorm: a non-profit banking system run through the US postal service. Don’t make fun of it. You must view AOC as a junior-league Lenin. A Stalin-wannabe. She’s a tyrant in the making. Given this, of course she’d want to get banking into government hands…and then make the dispensing of loans based upon political rather than financial calculations. The perfect Leftist system is where everything you do is controlled by government and you can only do things (ie, live) if you are approved by the government.

I’m kinda hoping the Cubs go another 108 years without a championship.

Bio-pic about Tolkien’s early life – looks pretty good; understandable complaint about them excising Tolkien’s vigorous Catholic faith…but, that’s just Hollywood playing to a mostly non-Catholic audience.

Don Surber points out that China is likely thinking at the moment they can outlast Trump…just wait until another Democrat or GOP squish gets in there. I think the Chinese will find they miscalculated.

Happy Easter!

Mark Noonan2 Comments

On the first day of the week,
Mary of Magdala came to the tomb early in the morning,
while it was still dark,
and saw the stone removed from the tomb.
So she ran and went to Simon Peter
and to the other disciple whom Jesus loved, and told them,
“They have taken the Lord from the tomb,
and we don’t know where they put him.”
So Peter and the other disciple went out and came to the tomb.
They both ran, but the other disciple ran faster than Peter
and arrived at the tomb first;
he bent down and saw the burial cloths there, but did not go in.
When Simon Peter arrived after him,
he went into the tomb and saw the burial cloths there,
and the cloth that had covered his head,
not with the burial cloths but rolled up in a separate place.
Then the other disciple also went in,
the one who had arrived at the tomb first,
and he saw and believed.
For they did not yet understand the Scripture
that he had to rise from the dead.

John 20:1-9

Notre Dame and Civilization

Mark Noonan

NOTRE DAME is not a myth. Notre Dame is not a theory. Its interest does not spring from ignorance but from knowledge; from a culture complicated with a hundred controversies and revolutions. It is not featureless, but carved into an incredible forest and labyrinth of fascinating features, any one of which we could talk about for days. It is not great because there is little of it, but great because there is a great deal of it. . . . Notre Dame, on its merely human side, is mediaeval civilization.

~G.K. Chesterton: in “Fancies Versus Fads” (1923)

That last word is important: civilization. These days, no one really knows what the Middle Ages were like. They are scorned as a time of ignorance, poverty and oppression. It wasn’t like that, at all. It was a very high civilization – better than any contemporary and better than all that had come before it.

First and foremost, we must remember what it came out of – the destruction of the Roman Empire was a cataclysm such as the world had never seen before. Indian and Chinese civilization had suffered, many times, invasion and conquest. But the barbarians were easily absorbed into the Chinese and Indian civilizations and though there might have been some alterations in how things were done, the basics of each civilization endured. Indeed, were almost entirely unchanged. That is the real oddity of both Chinese and Indian civilization – for 2,000 years or more, there was no real change in how they worked. The underlying ideas behind them just kept going…in a rather sterile manner, but going. When Rome fell, the entire civilization which underlay it went with it.

Some of the barbarian invaders wanted what Rome had, but especially the latter barbarians who finally overthrew Rome were uninterested in any civilization. They were barbarians in the purest sense – only wanting wealth and adventure with no thought for the morrow. When there work was done (say, by about 700 AD) there was very little left. Books were rare as most libraries had been destroyed. Most of the Roman infrastructure (roads, bridges, aqueducts) were in ruins. War and disease and dropped the population to a fraction of what it had been during Rome’s height. And then, schooled by the Church, people got back to work – slowly building an entirely new civilization on the ruins of the old.

Notre Dame was not built by barbarians, but by people of a highly sophisticated civilization. The church, itself, attests to the technical skill of the civilization as well as to it’s artistic excellence. But beyond that, Europe was already filled with scholars expanding the frontiers of human knowledge – and unlike the sterile, nearly unchanging civilizations of the East, the Europeans were rapidly absorbing and adapting every good thing they could come across from other civilizations. These people were eager for knowledge and improvement and were willing to dare greatly. Not for these Europeans was any sort of stand-pat attitude. And Europeans were already greatly curious about the non-European world (Marco Polo made his journey to China in the 13th century, shortly after Notre Dame was completed). And as Chesterton pointed out, Notre Dame was an excellent, enduring symbol of what these highly civilized people were about.

And now its burned down – and the pity is that the civilized people who built it are long gone and replaced by barbarians, who despise Notre Dame because they both can’t understand it as well as being incapable of building something like it. They are very much like the Visigoths and Vandals who threw down Roman civilization in the 5th century. It is sad, I think, what is going to happen: a bunch of people who have no idea of anything are going to place themselves in charge of rebuilding Notre Dame and they are likely to create a savage monstrosity in it’s place. We can only hope that in some future year, civilized people will knock down what they are about to do, and replace the crude, barbaric result with something remotely as civilized as Notre Dame.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan13 Comments

The 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde, starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, is an excellent film. It is, of course, almost complete nonsense as far as depicting what Bonnie and Clyde were like; the film treats them as cool, misguided kids in love and trying to have fun. They actually were, of course, psychotic killers who murdered people for no reason whatsoever. Now, to be sure, Clyde had his issues – he appears to have been horribly brutalized as a youth in prison. On the other hand, he landed in prison as a youth because he decided to become a crook at a young age. There’s no real explanation for why Bonnie decided to become a killer, other than general insanity. Netflix has a new production called The Highwaymen covering the pair from the other side: how law enforcement dealt with two people who killed in cold blood nine police officers. There has been controversy about it I never understood: some people taking issue with the likely chance that the cops, in the end, just ambushed the pair and blew them to heck and gone without a warning. My view: when you’re dealing with psychotic killers who have already demonstrated they’ll even kill cops without blinking, you don’t give them a chance to return fire.

New York is now going to tax the street if you go for a drive. Wasn’t there once a song about this?

The concept of time is now racist.

Multiculturalism is good, as long as it isn’t an American culture. Some are trying to change that.

Related: moves to ban Thomas Jefferson. One of the defining marks of the left is hatred – most especially hatred of Western Civilization in general and the United States in particular.

Democrats want to interrogate Fox News over their programming decisions. The Democrats are fascists at heart.

Joe Biden says he’ll keep his hands to himself from now on. If the Democrats wanted him to be their nominee, he’d be allowed to get out of this jam just as the Virginia Democrats were allowed to skate…but if the Democrats want Joe gone, this won’t do a darn thing to save him.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan49 Comments

Trump came back from Vietnam empty handed – seems that the North Korean’s tried to pull a fast one and Trump walked. Neither Trump nor the North Koreans are saying this is the end. I figure the North Koreans were testing to see how far Trump would go to get a deal. They found out: not too far.

Here’s the thing that our Experts are missing: the proper goal for American foreign policy vis a vis North Korea is to detach North Korea from China. I’m starting to see some hints that Chinese realizes this might be Trump’s goal, and they don’t like it one bit. China likes having a crazy North Korea around to muck up things in east Asia. Makes it easier for China to do things…at least they aren’t crazy, right? That Trump went to Vietnam to meet Kim is also interesting: in relation to China, we need the Vietnamese as allies. I’m wondering if Trump is working on a grand realignment in Asia? Hope so. It is long overdue.

Now, if we could just get everyone to see that our proper policy in Syria is to detach it from Iran…even if this means making a deal with Assad.

In a very quiet way on a Friday night, the Washington Post issued a correction regarding its original reporting on the Covington Catholic boys. I don’t think this will be good enough. I do think that they’ll eventually settle out of court for a large sum of money in order to avoid a crushing loss in Court. Either way, the MSM is being instructed that they must not slander regular folks. I like this.

Seems that religious believers don’t like it when their parish or synagogue gets all SJW. My parish is mostly free of overt Progressivism, but there is still the jarring note from time to time. I understand that in some parishes, it is quite SJW…one friend of mine going to a Church for Mass and the first thing she noticed was no crucifix. If you’ve ever been to a Catholic Church, you know the most prominent thing is usually a gigantic statue of Christ crucified right over the altar. I can’t imagine why anyone calling themselves Catholic would find such a thing inappropriate, but apparently some do. The bottom line is that when religious bodies seek to become part of the world, they die. The end. I know the Catholic Church is in sorry shape right now, but I also know plenty of young Catholic men and women are rising up to rebuild the Church. This Progressive drivel shall pass. Don’t know about the old mainline Protestant congregations…they seem to be gone for good.

The Tru Cons sent a pro-choice liberal to cover CPAC. That’s all you really need to know about the Tru Cons. As Glenn Reynolds points out:

“Conservatism conserved?” They haven’t even conserved women’s sports without penises. And, more tellingly, they haven’t even tried.

Governor Northam’s (D-Minstrel Show) wife handed out cotton balls to African-American children.

No, I did not make that up.

End Stage Trump-Russia

Mark Noonan19 Comments

So, we had Cohen at the House today – where someone convicted of lying to Congress got to testify…which just shows how stupid this whole thing has become. I was working a bit of over time today, and so missed the hearings. When I got home to check on how it went, this stood out:

Cohen testified that he went over “topics” that Democrats would raise at today’s hearing with lead anti-Trump attack dog, Adam Schiff (D-CA), chairman of the House intelligence committee. So the substance of his testimony was coordinated with the Democratic leadership.

And that is that – he’s coordinating with the people supposedly just trying to elicit the facts of the case. That isn’t fact-finding and oversight: that is prosecution. But the House doesn’t prosecute – not even in impeachment; the House just gathers facts and, depending, refers them to trial before the Senate or to Justice for prosecution. The fact that Cohen was getting coached from the Democrat side of the aisle means that all he was doing was feeding the partisan, Democrat Narrative. Not a word of what he said can be trusted, even if he hadn’t previously lied to Congress.

I have noticed – and so have plenty of others – that the Trump-Russia thing is rapidly morphing into “Trump violated campaign finance laws by paying off women”. Lawyers would have to really decide, before a judge, if such payments were campaign finance violations. But even if they are, such things are invariably handled by fines. Personally, I don’t see them as such – even if Trump dipped into actually donated money to pay the ladies off. From what I can gather, Trump has had a lot of women shake him down for money post-interaction. What isn’t completely certain is whether he had sex with any of these claimants. Such things are difficult to prove unless there’s a third witness or forensic evidence (like a blue dress, ya dig?). Normally, people aren’t having sex a trois; so, its “he said/she said”. But if you’re a billionaire, maybe you just make the calculation that its better to pay for it to go away than to fuss about a sordid scandal in public? The ultimate outcome of the Stormy Saga indicates that Trump may be the put-upon person in all this (though it is enormously funny, still, that Stormy will be the first prostitute to ever pay a politician). If a lot of ladies, justifiably or not, were coming out of the woodwork demanding cash for silence in 2016, then in my view that would be a campaign expenditure…after all, Trump has never hid his social life; none of us were shocked to find out he might have had a dalliance with a lady of interesting background. He wasn’t paying to hide; he was paying to get rid of so he could get on with the campaign. So, campaign expenditure. Of an odd sort, to be sure; but, still.

I don’t know the Democrats’ end game here. Clearly, the large majority of the Democrat base wants Trump impeached. They are convinced that he colluded with Russia to switch votes from Hillary to himself in 2016. So, too, do a large number of Democrat House members want him impeached. Its not a matter in the House of “can they get to 2018?”. If Nancy holds a vote, I can’t see any Democrats voting against. The only question at that point would be if any GOPers would vote along with them. But I don’t see Nancy wanting to hold a vote – such an action is fraught with peril for the Democrats. I think that Nancy would only go along with it if she were assured that at least 5 Republicans in the Senate would vote to convict (this wouldn’t be enough to remove: but it would be enough to say that a bipartisan Senate majority voted to convict, and that would be enough for political purposes). If they impeach via a party-line vote and then Trump is acquitted in the Senate, that would be a disaster for the Democrats heading in to 2020. Trump would be vindicated – and the Democrats very publicly exposed as mean-spirited, hyper-partisans. OTOH, Nancy might be forced to it: the base gets more extreme every day. They might start talking up primary challenges in 2020 for House members who don’t vote to impeach.

Do keep in mind that there is a part of the GOP – rapidly shrinking but still there – which would love to go along with the Democrats in getting rid of Trump. Flake and McCain are gone…but Romney is there along with Murkowski. Cocaine Mitch, though, can probably keep his caucus in line: remember, if the House impeaches, there has to be a trial in the Senate. It isn’t up for debate: the Chief Justice comes over to preside and the Democrats make their case, then the Senate votes. And if it comes to that, absent some really solid evidence against Trump, I think McConnell will be able keep the GOP majority in line…and even a Murkowski would tread carefully, knowing that a vote to convict would make her toxic with GOP voters unless there was clear evidence of criminal behavior to justify the vote.

And so we go on with our insane times – the most law-abiding President we’ve had in ages being dragged by people who probably violate federal laws a dozen times a week…and all of it being done in service to a stupid theory cooked up by Team Hillary to explain away their loss. Just incredible.