Caption Sunday.

I need a caption for this pic.

Pic from thenewyorker.com 

Ordinary Joe.

Democrats, you might have a problem. I watched your hope and prayer for beating Donald trump, Uncle Joe Biden last night, and sadly, he was not ready for prime time. Memo to every old white politician in America: If you have to defend your position on busing in 2019, things are not going good for you, and you just might have a problem. 

Uncle Joe has some baggage, and we would expect that from anyone who has been in politics (and Washington no less) for 50 years. But Uncle Joe is not doing a very good job of cutting his baggage loose. Saying over and over again that Obama is your black friend is just not going to cut it. The O train can only take you so far, and at some point you have to get off and find your own way.

This is why there is such a split in the democratic party right now. Old heads are willing to ride with Joe because they see him as the best chance that they have of beating trump, while the young ones are not having it. They are sick of the status quo, and of being told that it's only the old white men that can get elected president.

Kamala Harris (the clear winner last night) came for Uncle Joe, and it was sad to watch. Poor Joe must have been thinking that Kamala was sent from hell to torment him. *Hey, I am Barack's friend, remember? I was his side-kick for 8 years.*   

That's all well and good Uncle Joe, but it's not enough. You are going to have to work on your debating skills and your policies to outlast the orange monster. That's if you make it though the primary. A couple more performances like this and it will be Kamala, Elizabeth, or Bernie squaring of with Putin's best bud come 2020.

*Pic from people.com

Is this who we are?

I don't need a caption for this pic. I know what it says about us. 

As someone said earlier: "This is a cruel stain on trump's America."  

We should do better. 

Pic by Julia Le Duc/AP)

He moved on another one like a b***h.

Can you imagine the president of your country being credibly accused of rape and it is not even worth being put on the front page of any of the major newspapers in your country? Sadly, this is what is happening now here in America.

Of course, when your president is Donald trump, you already know that he has bragged about assaulting women on tape and was still elected. You already know that over 20 women have already accused him of sexual misconduct towards them, and of being the pig that we know that he is capable of being.

 The most recent accuser is a woman who alleges that Mr. trump raped her in the dressing room of a fancy New York store and that it lasted for about three minutes (Frankly, that's about two  minutes longer than most of us would expect.), and that she wasn't sure how much of his private parts had penetrated her. (No surprise there.)

Anyway, Mr. trump, in typical trump fashion, has lashed out against the woman by saying that she isn't his type. Not that he would never do such a thing, but that she is not his type. Do you see what we are working with here? If you guessed sociopath move to the head of the class. Then he declared, in typical trumpian fashion, that he has never met the woman and does not know who she is. And yet there are photos that prove otherwise. This follows a pattern, He has declared in the past that he does not know his accusers, only to have photos show up to prove otherwise/

trump's biggest asset right now is "media fatigue", because  frankly it is so hard to be shocked by his actions these days.

Speaking of the media, just because there is fatigue that doesn't that they should lose their willingness to get to the bottom of every story, and report it to America. This story has not been getting the attention it deserves, and I suspect that this is because editors and news producers, like the rest of the county, have fallen victim to Mr. trump's gaslighting tactics.

“I tried to f— her,” I moved her on like a bitch– and she was married.... When you’re a star you can grab them by the pussy." 

Or apparently even rape them.

Caption Sunday.

*

I need a caption for this pic. 

Example: I'm done trying to teach how to dance. Have your husband do it. Wasn't he the first black president? 

*Pic from foxnews.com

When hawks surround a chicken.

Let me preface this post by saying this: I despise and hate wars, and I believe that countries should avoid going to war with each other at all cost. Having said that, I hope that Americans realize what a coward they have as a president.  Mr. trump always talks a good game, but like all bullies he is actually afraid of his shadow. 

Consider what happened today with Iran. They shot down an American drone, and they declared to the world that they wanted to do it. Our loud mouth president first declared that he might have something cooking for Iran and that they would be sorry, but then, later on, he backed down and said that they might have made a mistake. Maybe they didn't mean to do it he declared. He tried to play down  the importance and seriousness of what the Iranians did, but no one is buying it.

The problem with Mr. trump's helter- skelter foreign policy is that it has given us moments like this. His hatred and jealousy of Barack Obama caused him to tear up the nuclear agreement with Iran, and now we are seeing the folly of that misguided decision. Iran is ramping up their ability to build up their nuclear program, and they are behind the attacks of ships carrying oil in Middle East. The sanctions put in place by the United States is hurting their economy, and like the North Koreans, the only way they know how to lash out and get our attention is to do what they are doing now.   

Iran says that the American drone was flying over their airspace, but the United States denies it. Of course given this administration's penchant for misrepresenting the facts, it is hard to tell the American people to trust what their government is saying over what the Iranians are telling us.   

Unfortunately this might not end well. Because while trump might be a coward who doesn't want any of the Iranians, the people around him like John Bolton, Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton are all itching to go to war with Iran. Graham has such a hard on for Iran ,that he probably closes his eyes and sees Ayatollahs in his most intimate moments.

Trump foolishly surrounded himself with these hawks, and now he is bound by the consequences of their actions.

 

A big bust, and is it time for reparations?

They just seized 16 tons of cocaine in the port of Philadelphia. Street value is.....wait for it.....one billion (with a B) dollars. Imagine that. Whatever happened to the Southern border? I suppose that trump will want to build a wall around Philly next. Delaware or New Jersey will pay for it.

The thing is, though, this is serious business. Clearly there is a demand for drugs out there. That 16 tons of cocaine would have been cut up and distributed to various markets, and it would have been gone in the blink of an eye. If you have a cocaine habit, you might be paying a little more for your product over the next few days.

I think that we can all agree that head are going to literally roll. The people who are responsible for packing the cocaine on those ships will not take losing a billion dollars worth of dope lightly.

Finally, Mitch (turtle) McConnell didn't think that there is a need for reparations because he felt that America was past racism. Why? Because we elected Barack Obama. Mitch doesn't think that people in America today should even have to deal with the issue of slavery and America's original sin because all those evil slave owners are dead.

Thankfully, he was given a history lesson today by Ta-Nehisi Coates in Washington.

"Yesterday, when I asked about reparations, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell offered a familiar reply. America should not be held liable for something that happened 150 years ago, since none of us currently alive are responsible. This rebuttal proffers a strange theory of governance that American accounts are somehow bound by the lifetime of its generations. But well into the century the United States was still paying out pensions to the heirs of Civil War soldiers. We honor treaties that date back some 200 years despite no one being alive who signed those treaties.

Many of us would love to be taxed for the things we are solely and individually responsible for. But we are American citizens, and thus bound to a collective enterprise that extends beyond our individual and personal reach. It would seem ridiculous to dispute invocations of the founders, or the Greatest Generation, on the basis of a lack of membership in either group. We recognize our lineage as a generational trust, as inheritance and the real dilemma posed by reparations is just that: a dilemma of inheritance. It’s impossible to imagine America without the inheritance of slavery.

As historian Ed Baptiste has written, enslavement “shaped every crucial aspect of the economy and politics” of America, so that by 1836 more than $600 million, almost half of the economic activity in the United States, derived directly or indirectly from the cotton produced by the million-odd slaves. By the time the enslaved were emancipated, they comprised the largest single asset in America: $3 billion in 1860 dollars, more than all the other assets in the country combined.

The method of cultivating this asset was neither gentle cajoling nor persuasion, but torture, rape, and child trafficking. Enslavement reigned for 250 years on these shores. When it ended, this country could have extended its hallowed principles — life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — to all, regardless of color. But America had other principles in mind. And so, for a century after the Civil War, black people were subjected to a relentless campaign of terror, a campaign that extended well into the lifetime of Majority Leader McConnell.

It is tempting to divorce this modern campaign of terror, of plunder, from enslavement, but the logic of enslavement, of white supremacy, respects no such borders, and the god of bondage was lustful and begat many heirs. Coup d’états and convict leasing. Vagrancy laws and debt peonage. Redlining and racist G.I. bills. Poll taxes and state-sponsored terrorism.

We grant that Mr. McConnell was not alive for Appomattox. But he was alive for the electrocution of George Stinney. He was alive for the blinding of Isaac Woodard. He was alive to witness kleptocracy in his native Alabama and a regime premised on electoral theft. Majority Leader McConnell cited civil rights legislation yesterday, as well he should, because he was alive to witness the harassment, jailing, and betrayal of those responsible for that legislation by a government sworn to protect them. He was alive for the redlining of Chicago and the looting of black homeowners of some $4 billion. Victims of that plunder are very much alive today. I am sure they’d love a word with the majority leader.

 What they know, what this committee must know, is that while emancipation deadbolted the door against the bandits of America, Jim Crow wedged the windows wide open. And that is the thing about Senator McConnell’s “something”: It was 150 years ago. And it was right now.

The typical black family in this country has one-tenth the wealth of the typical white family. Black women die in childbirth at four times the rate of white women. And there is, of course, the shame of this land of the free boasting the largest prison population on the planet, of which the descendants of the enslaved make up the largest share.

 The matter of reparations is one of making amends and direct redress, but it is also a question of citizenship. In H.R. 40, this body has a chance to both make good on its 2009 apology for enslavement, and reject fair-weather patriotism, to say that this nation is both its credits and debits. That if Thomas Jefferson matters, so does Sally Hemings. That if D-Day matters, so does Black Wall Street. That if Valley Forge matters, so does Fort Pillow.

Because the question really is not whether we’ll be tied to the somethings of our past, but whether we are courageous enough to be tied to the whole of them. Thank you."[Source]

Hopefully Mr McConnell was listening. Not that it will make a difference if he was. Some folks are just destined to be on the wrong side of history. /   

Tired of his act?

• 

According to a new FOX News poll 50% of Americans want to see Mr. trump impeached.  And if you think the FOX News part was a typo you would be incorrect. I meant to write FOX.

I hope Ms. Pelosi is paying attention, because Americans seem to be tiring of Mr. trump's act.  And her political strategy when it comes to impeaching Mr. trump might be out of step with where the rest of the country is right now. I mean that's a FOX News poll for crying out loud! 

And if you want further proof that Americans are over Mr. trump, just take a look at thew overnight ratings for his much hyped sit down interview with ABC News.  Politico called it a "ratings bust" It came in third in its time slot. America's Funniest Home Videos just wiped the floor with him. If you can't beat AFHV how the hell do you expect to beat Joe Biden?

During that same interview we learned that Mr. trump thinks it's cool to collude with foreign governments to undermine our democracy, and he confirmed what most of us already know: That he just horrible human being. Imagine chastising and berating someone for simply coughing. Most decent people would have asked the guy if he was OK or if he needed water. Not trump. Apparently it's a sign of weakness in his world.

"Mulvaney's cough is audible, albeit only faintly, but the president made it clear that it was unacceptable
.
"If you're going to cough, please leave the room," Mr. Trump told his top aide, insisting on reiterating his answer for the camera. "

Imagine if former president Obama had said that to an aide. 

And yet, Mr. trump has declared that he has been treated worse than any president in our history.  "Even Lincoln".           

OK Mr. trump, pick up a history book and try to read it and then get back to me. Things didn't turn out so well for Honest Abe. For you to compare yourself to  Lincoln just shows how depraved you are.                           

Caption Saturday.

I need a caption for this pic. 

*Pic via twitter.

Why we kneel.

*People wonder why we totally support NFL players (and US soccer players) kneeling during the singing of the anthem.

Please watch the following video of an incident that happened in Phoenix, Arizona and tell me what you think of these out of control officers.

Video here.

Honestly, this type of thing is happening every day * all over America, and we are fortunate to get a glimpse of the way that some of these officers are behaving thanks to citizens with cell phone cameras.

Here is another one. [Video] This young man might be dead today if it weren't for the woman who was filming the entire episode pleading with the police. 

Folks in the majority population do not understand this, because unlike people of color, they are viewed as human beings by those in law enforcement. They can kill multiple people in a church and be calmly taken into custody. That's just the way things are here in America.

"In her video, Holsey tells the officers that she is streaming the incident live. She told CBS News she felt it was her duty to do so. "I feel like we have nobody to stand up for us. So, in that moment, I had to stand up for him, for myself. I wouldn't have been able to live with myself if I didn't intervene in some way."

As more squad cars converged on the scene, Holsey asks the officers, "Is all that necessary?" She said by the end of the arrest, she saw at least seven cop cars arrive.

Holsey became upset and through tears pleaded with the officers: "I don't understand why you all have guns drawn on him right now. Are you going to kill him?"' 

They just might have killed him Ms. Holsey. Thank goodness you were there to film it all. 

*Pic from  thefreethoughtproject.com

Stories you should be reading but aren't.

I am still trying to figure out how some of these news organizations are choosing to ignore what in any other time would be major news stories affecting our lives.

Consider the following:

Right now there is a potential scandal brewing with this administration that's as big--- or bigger--- than anything Nixon and his gang could have come up with. It involves the Census, and it goes to the heart of just how corrupt and brazen the current administration has become.

"Ever since the Trump administration moved last year to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census, questions have been asked about the true motivation. The stated reason is that it is needed to enforce the Voting Rights Act, but that has never been a huge point of emphasis for the Republican Party. Indeed, GOP officials have worked to dismantle the VRA in recent years.

And as we’ve found out over the last few months, there are reasons to doubt those initial explanations. Exactly where the idea to add the question came from has been obscured, including apparently by Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, and now evidence exists that its earliest proponents may have had other, very political motivations."  [Source]

And now the trump administration is doing everything in its powers to prevent the House Oversight Committee from getting their hands on materials that could tell the public what is the true motivation of this administration it comes to the questions on the Census forms. 

Clearly there was something nefarious at play, and it's not a stretch to say that the GOP was trying to get a heads up on the elections by using and weaponizing the Census to their advantage.

Another story not getting any traction is the alleged corruption being practiced before our eyes by the Bonnie & Clyde of Washington D.C., Elaine Chao, and her hubby, Mitch (turtle) McConnell.

I suppose that when there are so many stories that in normal times would be considered shocking coming out of the trump White House, you have to choose your editorial battles. But something as serious as this should be a no- brainer. Sadly, they just don't make journalists like they used to.

Finally, there is a story out of York County right here in Pistolvania that is scary and shocking.

" The call came out of nowhere one April day last year: Everett Palmer Jr. was dead.

The 41-year-old father of two had traveled from his home in Delaware to Lancaster County, Pa., to resolve an outstanding DUI warrant from 2016, his family told The Washington Post on Thursday. But days later, his family received a call that he had died at York County Prison on April 9.

An autopsy report from the York County Coroner’s Office states that Palmer had become agitated in his cell, banging his head against his cell door, and was restrained. He was then moved to a hospital, where he was declared dead. But his family still knows little about the events that precipitated his death.

There was “so much mystery and unanswered questions in a way that violates every policy and procedure the state has,” said civil rights attorney Lee Merritt, who is now representing the family."

It gets worse.

"Gay said that Palmer was banging his head in his cell before his death and that the result for methamphetamine toxicity would appear if there was “methamphetamine in their system that was sufficient enough that it could have contributed to the death.” She said the question of how he could have obtained such a substance in custody was under investigation.

Lee Merritt, the Palmer family lawyer, told the Washington Post that the family had been shocked to receive Everett Palmer’s body with his heart, brain and throat missing, and that it was not immediately communicated to them where the body parts were. The family’s distress over the missing body parts was detailed in a NY1 investigation into Palmer’s death and reiterated to The Post." [Source] 

The first thing you need to understand is that York County, Pennsylvania has a history. They might as well call it York County, Mississippi, because frankly, Mississippi doesn't have anything on these folks when it comes to how they treat black folks. 

Imagine that, body parts missing! And still this story is not one of the leading headlines of every news station in the country.  

More people in America will hear stories about Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper's relationship than the stories I just posted. And we wonder why Americans are so shallow. They made us this way, and we could care less. 

   

The "electability" question.

Here is a great article from Jemele Hill that sheds light on a growing split within the democratic party. 

Progressives want the party to start focusing on women and people of color, while "traditional" middle of the road and blue dog democrats believe that the best way to beat trump is to go male and white. The reasoning is that there just isn't enough people of color and women voting out there to topple the "traditional" (see white male) vote.

"To former Vice President Joe Biden’s benefit, electability has become the unofficial buzzword of the 2020 presidential campaign.

Although it’s still early, most polls show Biden as the clear front-runner among Democrats. A CNN/Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll was just the latest to give him a solid lead. Among Iowa’s likely Democratic caucus-goers, 24 percent named Biden their first choice for president—a significant lead in a fractured field that has more than 20 candidates.

Biden’s early strength isn’t particularly surprising. He’s an experienced politician. And his service alongside former President Barack Obama has given him a priceless advantage. On Saturday, to celebrate “Best Friends Day,” Biden even tweeted a picture of bracelets entwining his first name and Obama’s—a not-so subtle reminder that the former vice president was a fixture of the good old days.

Nevertheless, Biden’s elevation to front-runner is a testament to how much President Donald Trump has shaken the faith of those who believe the White House could better reflect what America looked like.

This is perhaps Trump’s most crucial victory yet: successfully persuading Democrats—especially African American voters—not just to lower the bar, but to abandon the idea that inclusion and bold ideas matter more than appeasing the patriarchy.

More than likely, the Democratic nominee for president won’t be the person with the best and most progressive ideas, or the person most capable of galvanizing a fractured country. The nominee just has to beat Trump, even if the cost of that victory is reinforcing the idea that only an older white man is capable of getting this country back on track.

In a recent piece explaining Joe Biden’s early polling success, David Mark, a writer for NBC News’s digital site Think, wrote: “For starters, there’s Biden’s demographic edge in the primaries. Biden, 76 and white, broadly fits the profile of the Democratic electorate that will select the nominee.”

But older white Democrats aren’t the only ones who are bullish on the former vice president. In a Quinnipiac poll conducted in late April, 61 percent of nonwhite Democrats said Biden had the best chance of beating Trump.

Already many Democrats are cutting Biden much more slack than they’re giving other candidates. There is, for example, a double standard in how some African Americans judge the presidential candidate Kamala Harris—who was an Oakland prosecutor before becoming a U.S. senator from California—far more harshly than they judge Biden.

Harris has been criticized repeatedly by African Americans for her record as a prosecutor; many accused her of aiding a system that has disproportionately punished and targeted black people. There was even a hashtag created on Twitter, #KamalaHarrisIsACop, that her detractors employed to point out her failure to protect African Americans in the criminal-justice system.

David A. Graham: One big difference between Biden and every other recent Democratic nominee

Even though Biden wrote the 1994 crime bill whose mandatory-minimum sentencing rules sent many black men to prison, the former vice president’s support among African Americans remains significantly stronger than that of both black presidential candidates in the field—Harris and Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey. A poll released by BlackPAC last month showed that 72 percent of African Americans view Biden favorably, compared with 49 percent for Harris and 47 percent for Booker.

Remarkably, the negative energy directed toward Harris for serving as a prosecutor has not been aimed at Biden, who said recently that, although the “three strikes” provisions of the 1994 law were a mistake, the bill “had a lot of other good things.” While the explosion of mass incarceration was already in progress before the crime bill was signed, the legislation was still devastating for black and brown people. According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, the black incarceration rate rose from 1,200 per 100,000 in 1985 to 2,450 per 100,000 in 2000. For black men in 2000, the rate was 3,457 per 100,000.

For many African Americans, who understandably feel particularly vulnerable in Trump’s administration, prioritizing a defeat of Trump over progress is a means of survival. Biden’s treatment of Anita Hill, questions about his handsy behavior with women, his opposition to marijuana legalization, the accusations of plagiarism, his flip-flop on supporting the Hyde Amendment, which bans the use of federal funds for abortion services—none of it has weakened Biden’s position.

Unfortunately, the lesson even Democrats have learned from Trump’s election is that certain voters are willing to tolerate anything if they believe in a candidate. Especially if that candidate is an older white man." [Source]

To some people this all doesn't even matter. They will vote for Bugs Bunny if he led the democratic ticket before they vote for Mr. trump. 

*Pic from demoraticunderground.com

Banished, and knowing a con when I see one.

Twitter banished me for a week because of something I said to @piersmorgan. Go figure. All the crap trump spews on twitter and he doesn't even get a day. I get a week.

Anywhoo, trump is railing against twitter because they banned "conservative voices." The thing is, they were white supremacist and wacko right-wing conspiracy theorists. I personally wouldn't call for banning them, because I truly believe in free speech, but let's get our labels right. Unless you believe that conservative voices and white supremacists are one and the same.

I gotta give a shout out to Google. All the years that I have been on this platform and they have never given me grief about content. Honestly, if they did, I couldn't blame them. The comments section on this blog can get really crazy at times. Some of the worst of us have posted here under the cloak of anonymity, but we let it slide because it's good to let everyone know what we are dealing with in this country. Believe me, there is nothing united about these states.

Finally, Mr. trump wanted to take a victory lap (given his size it would have taken awhile) this weekend, because of his so called deal with Mexico on  immigration and migrants at the border. Mr. trump wants us all to believe that his threat of tariffs against Mexico brought the Mexicans to their knees and forced them to come to the table and give him what he wanted on border security.

Predictably, as with all things trump, it was a lie. Just another con and grift on the American people to make it seem as if he is doing more than he really is. Light a match and start a fire in the house. While the house is burning, run and call the fire department. The fire department saves the house. You then take credit for saving the house because you called the fire department in time.

That's how Mr. trump operates in a nutshell when it comes to governing for the American people.

We now know that this so called deal with Mexico was in the works all along, and that there was no need for the tariff con in the first place. But that's how he played it, because he needed a distraction and a win. That is why he is so angry today, because the New York Times called him on his scam.

"The U.S. State Department announced Friday night that Mexico would be deploying its National Guard troops throughout its country to help curb illegal immigration as part of the deal President Donald Trump boasted about after threatening Mexico with controversial tariffs.

However, according to a New York Times report on Saturday, Mexico had already agreed to deploy troops months before Trump threatened the country with the trade penalties. Mexican officials made the promise during secret talks with then-Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen in March, the Times reported, citing Mexican and U.S. officials familiar with the negotiations.

The difference between the promise made months ago and the one announced Friday night is the number of troops that will be deployed to various parts of Mexico, with the U.S.-Mexico border being a priority." 

America, you have been hoodwinked once again. 

Caption Saturday.

I need a caption for this pic.

Not being best.

The president of the United States held up the D- Day celebration to give an interview to state television in front of the graves of the men who gave their lives for freedom. And what did he do? He insulted a man who fought in the Vietnam war and won medals for his bravery. He also insulted Nancy Pelosi, who refused to take the bait and talk about him on foreign soil. ("Be best"?)

"Let me tell you, he made such a fool out of himself the last time," Trump said of Mueller, "Because what people don't report is the letter he had to do to straighten out his testimony because his testimony was wrong."

Trump continued: "But Nancy Pelosi—I call her Nervous Nancy—Nancy Pelosi doesn't talk about it. Nancy Pelosi's a disaster, OK, she's a disaster and let her do what she wants."

When he finally got to his speech, Mr. trump sounded like he was strung out on drugs while he labored through reading a well crafted speech on the teleprompter. The bar has been set so low for him that some pundits were actually saying that he gave a good speech. It's scary how this guy has gaslighted an entire country into thinking that bad is good, and that truths are lies.

Anyway,  now would be a good time for you to read the following article from a former senate staffer.

"On February 13, 2016, Justice Antonin Scalia died. Before his body was in the ground, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell announced he would block anyone President Barack Obama nominated to fill Scalia’s seat. The next week, Jeb Bush dropped out of the Republican primary, quickly followed by Marco Rubio, and eventually Ted Cruz, leaving Donald Trump as the
presumptive nominee. Polls showed Hillary Clinton beating Trump by solid margins, with forecasters pegging her chances of victory from 71 to 85 percent, and Democrats favored to take back the Senate.
I was working for Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid at the time. Being in the minority limited our options for overcoming McConnell’s blockade. But whenever we started to contemplate more aggressive tactics, they were dismissed on the theory that the upcoming election would sort everything out. Why rock the boat, we told ourselves. We’re on a glide path to victory in November, and then President Clinton will submit her Supreme Court nominee to be confirmed by a Democratic Senate.

The rest is history. McConnell’s decision to block Garland consolidated Republican support behind Trump and helped him pull off a narrow victory. Instead of a Democratic president appointing a liberal justice to tilt the balance of the Supreme Court, Trump has appointed two justices to entrench a conservative majority for a generation.

Republicans wielded their power while we hoped for the best. And the course of history was altered forever.

There are two lessons here for House Democrats as they debate whether to open an impeachment inquiry into President Trump.
First, polling can change.

I don’t know how else to say this: getting impeached is bad. It is not something you want to happen to you, especially if you’re president. You do not want to go down as one of only four presidents in history to be impeached. This is a bad thing. Only Democrats, bless our hearts, could convince ourselves that it is good for a president to be impeached.

Richard Nixon’s approval rating was at 65 percent when his impeachment process began and only 19 percent of the public supported his impeachment. By the end, the numbers had flipped: his approval was 24 percent and support for impeachment was 57 percent. Former president Bill Clinton survived because he was popular and the man pursuing him, Independent Counsel Ken Starr, was not. The public rightly thought Starr was on a fishing expedition. By contrast, Special Counsel Robert Mueller is popular and the public thinks he is fair, while Trump is historically unpopular. Even though Clinton survived, his heir apparent lost the next election—which he had been heavily favored to win—while Republicans gained seats in Congress.

The second lesson from the Garland experience is that like nature, power abhors a vacuum. The decision not to impeach is not a decision to focus on other things, it is a decision to cede power, control, and legitimacy to Trump. Trump is not a master chess player, he just bluffs his opponents into forfeiting their moves—and that is exactly what he is doing to House Democrats.

For their part, House Democrats have argued that by foregoing impeachment they can shift the conversation to topics their consultants tell them are safer ground, like health care. That’s not going to happen. Reporters cover news, and only events that drive news can shift the message. House Democrats are understandably proud of having run and won on health care in the 2018 midterms. But their campaign messages were buoyed by a constant flood of major health care news coming out of Washington, DC, driven by the very real threat that Republicans would repeal or replace the Affordable Care Act. But since Democrats took back the House, that’s not going to happen. This is a good thing, but it severely limits Democrats’ ability to drive news on health care. Passing bills in the House that are guaranteed to go nowhere in McConnell’s Senate, as House Democrats recently did with bills to strengthen Obamacare and lower drug prices, will not drive a message.

The void that House Democrats are ceding to Trump is the space between now and election day. Filling that space with easy messages like health care is not a viable option. And a good rule of thumb of politics is that if you have the power to do something that hurts your opponent, you should do it.

Impeachment is a long process that will highlight Trump’s crimes, which according to (literally) one thousand former federal prosecutors, include “multiple felony charges for obstruction of justice.” Imagine the Michael Cohen, James Comey, or William Barr hearings but on steroids, for many weeks. Anything can happen and hearings can go haywire, but the odds of making a convincing public case against Trump are stacked strongly in Democrats’ favor. Trump’s crimes are serious and laid out in meticulous detail by an unimpeachable source. The public already believes he committed serious crimes by a margin of two to one. There is already a loud chorus decrying Trump’s crimes and arguing that he should be impeached, ranging from Kellyanne Conway’s husband to a sitting Republican Congressman. In this case, the impeachment process is like one of those meals where all the ingredients come in a box: you have to boil some water and maybe crack an egg, but it’s basically idiot-proof.

If and when the House votes to impeach, the ball goes to the Senate. The Senate can ignore it, which means the House’s impeachment is the last word. That would be fine. But McConnell would be under enormous pressure from Trump and the entire right-wing echosphere to call a Kangaroo court into session for the purpose of letting Trump off. If the Senate conducts a trial, Senate Republicans up for reelection in 2020—like Maine’s Susan Collins and Colorado’s Cory Gardner—will have to decide whether to vote to remove from office a President who has been shown to have committed serious crimes, or protect him. They will likely vote to protect Trump and it will cost them: they will have to explain which of Trump’s many crimes they think are no big deal, why they disagree with the many voices from their own party saying his crimes make him unfit, and why a criminal president should be allowed to continue in office.

More importantly, if the public believes Trump is guilty but the Senate lets him off anyway, he won’t ever be truly exonerated—he’ll be O.J. Simpson, assumed guilty but sprung by allies and circumstance. Some Democrats have argued that we should skip impeachment and vote Trump out instead. But if the House impeaches Trump and Senate Republicans fall in line to protect him, the argument that the ballot is the only way to remove him will be supercharged.

By contrast, declining to impeach Trump validates his claim that Mueller exonerated him. At a Grand Rapids town hall held by Michigan’s Justin Amash, the lone Republican Congressman who has come out for impeachment, an attendee was confused by Amash’s position until hearing him lay out the case for an inquiry. “I was surprised to hear there was anything negative in the Mueller report at all about President Trump. I hadn’t heard that before," she told NBC. "I’ve mainly listened to conservative news and I hadn’t heard anything negative about that report and President Trump has been exonerated." People will not know what Trump did wrong if Democrats don’t tell them.
Even more ominously, Trump’s weaponized Department of Justice under Barr, who has shown himself to be Trump’s eager and obedient partner in abusing the power of the state to advance the president’s political interests, will inevitably invent a pretext for investigating the Democratic nominee. Democrats should consider whether they’d rather engage that fight against a president who has been impeached for serious crimes, or against a president strengthened by the de facto exoneration bestowed when his opponents declined to pursue the evidence against him.

It is a long way from June 2019 to November 2020. And as they say in Boston, you can’t get there from here. Hoping everything turns out well while giving Trump free space to wield his power is unlikely to end well.

The fight will be hard for House Democrats and the appeal of dodging it is strong. But like the monsters in “It Follows,” this fight will find you. It already has.

There is no way over, under, or around impeachment—only through." [Source]