I didn’t expect there to be a smoking gun in the Trump-Russia scandal. I certainly didn’t expect it to involve Trump Junior. I’ve always expected the Trumpers and their enablers in the Republican party to resort to the “everybody does it” defense. It’s what happens when past defenses are exposed as lies. Of course, nothing said by the Trump crime family and its lackeys is ever true. Nothing. No thing. Literally. Believe me.
The counterattacks are flying thick, fast, and unconvincing. They’re desperately trying to unearth past instances of a presidential campaign working with a HOSTILE foreign power. Good luck with that:
Moscow has, however, tried to meddle in previous American elections. The historian Michael R. Beschloss recounts in “The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960-1963,” an account of the relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Kennedy presidency, that the Soviet ambassador in Washington secretly reached out to both John F. Kennedy and Adlai Stevenson, another Democratic presidential hopeful, during the 1960 campaign. The ambassador was rebuffed by both candidates.
Imagine that. Of course, Jack Kennedy had smart relatives involved in his campaign something the Insult Comedian is sorely lacking. Jared? Junior? Gimme a break.
Instead of listening to his lawyers and shutting his big bazoo, the idiot-in-chief has chimed in on the Tweeter Tube:
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/885109663217352704
Hey, he’s not citing Fox News in support. This is some daring “thinking” on Donald’s part.
As the Trump’s tower of lies implodes, it’s time for Republican office holders to stop defending him or give up their frequent invocations of their secular saint, Ronald Reagan. Here’s the deal: I never supported or voted for Reagan but never doubted his patriotism. The current Russian kleptocracy is the successor state to the Soviet Union. Does anyone seriously think that the man who called the USSR “the evil empire” would accept oppo from a lawyer linked to the Kremlin?
Reagan may have been the leader who incubated what Charlie Pierce calls the GOP’s “prion disease,” but he was an old-fashioned patriot whose favorite president was Franklin Roosevelt. The Republicans have done a good job in the last 30+ years of making Reagan their FDR. Neither FDR nor Reagan would have colluded with a hostile power to gain political advantage. They didn’t need to do so to win elections. Defending Trump’s perfidy means that the GOP *should* lose the right to invoke Saint Ronnie. Will they stop? Hell no, but their invocations ring hollower by the day.
The world has truly turned upside down when I praise Ronald Reagan. Trump is so horrible that he makes Reagan look good in contrast. So it goes.
The “everybody does it” defense is a feeble one. Nixon and his minions trotted it out during Watergate. It did not work.
I originally planned to play Irving Berlin’s Everybody’s Doing It Now at the end of the post until I ran into the tune below. It was the label on the record that clinched it: Carnival Records with a clown logo. The Trump crime family brought the circus to the White House. It took six months for some people to realize that they’d taken a giant dump in the Rose Garden. Some people do not have a good sense of smell but the stench is growing day-by-day.
I don’t remember who tweeted it first, but from a couple of months ago, some guy tweeted that whenever you hear something new about the Trump administration, it always turns out to be worse than first reported. And it’s true.
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Love it! One of Bob Cesca’s listeners produced this little ditty: Clown car calliope version of Darth Vader’s Imperial March. So apropos of this administration and their idiocy. https://youtu.be/kIypuaK3DgM
(( “Neither FDR nor Reagan would have colluded with a hostile power to gain political advantage. They didn’t need to do so to win elections.” ))
I guess you forgot that Reagan negotiated a deal with Iran to delay the release of American hostages until after the 1980 election. Remember “arms for hostages?” For more detail, read Reagan’s National Security Council adviser Gary Sick’s book October Surprise: America’s Hostages in Iran and the Election of Ronald Reagan.
Too true. However. RR was already settling into the haze of Alzheimer’s and probably wasn’t fully aware of what was being done in his name. That excuse might be too generous to his sense of decency and patriotism – he was an ideologue through and through and might’ve justified it with the ability as Pres to act out his anti-govt fantasies.
Nixon conspired with N. Vietnam to keep the war going for his electoral advantage.
Reagan inherited a bunch of Nixonistas, conspired with Iran to keep the hostages for longer and trade arms. (his Alzheimers was later on, during the Iran-Contra deal, and particularly the investigation)
Trump conspired with Russia for electoral advantage.
GOP treason, we’re soaking in it.