Some Thoughts on Impeachment

Like most of the rest of the nation, I have not been able to watch the whole debate over the President’s impeachment.

Too long. Too repetitious. Too boring. And half the people who are taking part of it in the Senate are liars.

Oh, I follow it from time to time. And I am appropriately outraged by the behavior of Republicans teaching us that might is always right, oaths mean nothing and the rotting of our Constitution is a good thing.

If you need that explained, it means that having 51 votes in the Senate lets you do anything you want. We can cut all that stuff about democracy, responsibility and law right out of the high school text books.

A trial doesn’t need witnesses, just 51 votes. 

But, you can’t just say that over and over again. It gets boring. And, in truth, that’s not what the Senate majority is really saying. We have people, all too clever by half, making endless arguments that we’ve all heard before.

Trump isn’t wrong because he thought he was right. Getting help from a foreign country to win an election isn’t wrong if the information is right.

Saying “there’s nothing going on between us” about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky wasn’t a lie, because, the relationship wasn’t going on at that very moment. 

As Bill Clinton said: ”It depends upon what the meaning of the word 'is' is. If the—if he—if 'is' means is and never has been, that is not—that is one thing. You don’t want to hear what the other thing was. It’s too depressing.

Oh, wait. That was an earlier impeachment. 

Oddly, I didn’t know why all of this bothered me so much.

Then I got it. It’s the same reason I didn’t even know when the National Football League had given us the Pro Bowl. I missed the game without ever thinking of it. Just too much.

You really can get too much of a good thing. And too much of a bad thing. Hell, even some of my blogs go on a little too long.

I was doing my usual routine this morning - get up, let the dogs out, feed the cats, feed the dogs, feed the fish…you know, routine stuff. Then it hit me.

This isn’t an original idea. I shouldn’t claim it as my own. Someone thought of it before.

I’ll give him credit right now, even though I risk the chance of losing a lot of readers.

Thank you, Plato.

This long-running, slow-moving impeachment is violating the Golden Mean, the classic Greek sense of order, the desirable middle ground.

Aristotle said courage was a virtue. But, too much courage is just recklessness, and too little is cowardice. Of course, he also said that money was a good thing, but that too much money was not because it led to bad behavior. So did too little.

My favorite was the legend of Icarus, who - you remember - was escaping captivity along with his father on feathered wings made with with wax. He flew too close to the sun, the wax melted, and he crashed into the sea.

Remember what his father said before they took off? No one does. He didn’t say “keep away from the hot sun.” He said “fly the middle course, between  the sun’s heat and the sea spray.”

Rough translation, of course. I don’t read or speak Greek.

The ancient Greeks even believed that beauty had to be seen as a combination of three things, sympathy, proportion and harmony.

Which brings up to an old poem. It was written in 1819, and was an ode to a Grecian Urn. We polish up the language a bit to make it sound easier to the modern ear. The phrase, of course, was ‘”Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” – that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’ 

What’s going on in the Senate right now is neither truth nor beauty. And, for the majority, not courage, either.

Crafty Old Mitch

I’ve been thinking about President Trump’s impeachment lately - well who hasn’t - and what Mitch McConnell will do when it finally gets to the Senate.

Oh, it could be really exciting. And, not in the way you think.

I’ve been watching that silver-haired fox from Kentucky for a long time now, and a couple of things have become clear.

Right now, he can only get things done if President Trump wants him to. He has lost control of the Republican Party, because every day it turns more and more into the Trump Party.

So, he’s used his power as head of the Deep State to lead Donald Trump down the path to impeachment. Yes, like the brilliant strategist he is, Mitch McConnell is getting ready to get rid of the President.

He knows that if Donald Trump gets re-elected, we will be facing another election in four years where the Republicans will give our nation its first woman President - Ivanka Trump.

He can’t have that. And, it will happen as long as Donald Trump is President. After all, who else would give him a free pass once he is out of office.

Now we know his supporters won’t let him get overthrown. No, that would be wrong.

But, somehow, this threat to his power got through the House of Representatives - you know, the thing the Democrats control.

And, strangely, the President didn’t really oppose it. “Bring it On,” he said, taunting Nancy Pelosi. “No witnesses. I want witnesses,”  he told Fox News.

And who watched this all, quietly smiling and throwing out enough smoke so that no one knew what was really happening?

Yep. Mitch McConnell.

I think that he and Nancy Pelosi had a secret lunch somewhere and planned the whole thing. He told her there were some reliable Republican senators who would support kicking Trump out of the White House if they could get some cover, and Nancy Pelosi came up with a plan.

Let’s hold things up for a few weeks, and argue about procedure. You talk about bringing in Joe Biden’s son as a witness. I’ll cave and let Rudy Giuliani in as a witness too. Just give me two other witnesses to be named later.

And they clinked glasses and toasted to the happy future.

Republicans - the old ones who were also a part of that Deep State - got the tax cuts they wanted, the judges they wanted and the ability to regroup after Hurricane Trump blew itself out of Washington.

Democrats get what they want too. They traded one year of Mike Pence for eight years of whoever they decide should run for President on their line.

They will win and reform the government. Republicans will re-discover their fear of the growing national debt.

We will finally get out of Afghanistan. And, we will have a new president who can find Afghanistan on a map.

See, everybody wins.

Oh, that crafty Mitch McConnell.

Pause

As you  can see, I am having technical difficulties. I will try and find a smart 10 year old to fix things. Be back soon.

Superman, Hitler and Trump

So, let’s try to make some sense out of the impeachment.

Why so late, you may ask. Well, I wanted to give everyone else a chance to say it all, and they did. 

The Left made it the last chance to save the country from a right-wing dictatorship. The Right made it the last chance to save our country - read that as its rapidly aging, rapidly shrinking white majority - from permanently losing control.

For the media - except for Fox of course - it was a horse race. Or a war game. Cover the strategy, count the votes, analyze how Brexit or conflicts in the Mideast will impact impeachment,

Not to make fun of that. Most of those stories were valid, and the speculation by experts told us some things we really should know, not that it will change things very much. Kind of like covering the forest and missing the trees.

So what do I think? Well, it will make some people mad, but I see a link between Donald Trump, Superman and Hitler. And, please, don’t think I am saying Donald Trump is Superman or Hitler, just their behavior is quite similar in one very important way.

Let’s start with Superman, and what his creators quickly saw as as a big problem.

Superman started out being faster than a speeding bullet and able to leap tall buildings. And, at first, he fought crime and saved people from harm. Stopped muggers on the street, went into burning buildings to rescue children, stopped a speeding car that was about to smash into a crowd.

But, that was exciting for only so long. You can’t just keep having him stop bigger and bigger buses without people deciding not to buy the next copy. 

So, his deeds got bigger and better. He stopped bridges from collapsing and held up skyscrapers during an earthquake. In World War II, he fought the Nazis and the Japanese, although he never brought that war to an end.

After the war, he got stronger and faster. He was able to lift icebergs, throw errant nuclear missiles into the sun to explode harmlessly, and eventually fly so fast that time itself went backwards for him. That, of course, led to many other things - saving whole solar systems for a start.

The problems his writers created had to keep getting bigger and bigger. Until the only plot device left was to deal with self-doubts, character flaws and his unplanned negative impacts on others.

And Hitler? Well, he started small. The world was in an economic recession, still dealing with the losses caused by World War I. Germany was saddled with monumental debt, and people in their 20’s - who had nothing to do with World War I - didn’t see why they were paying for it.

Many of the terms of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I were later modified, but not enough to keep Germany out of a deep recession. Today it is hard to find even the names of the people who signed the treaty for Germany, just the nickname they were given- the November Traitors.

Well, Hitler started small. He talked about how unfair outsiders were to Germany. Especially the Jewish traitors and the Communists inside Germany itself.  Groups formed - lots of angry young men who carried the National Socialist banner - and things got broken. Fires got started. People got beaten up. Jews especially, who Hitler shouted were not really Germans but a separate nationality. 

Trump last year signed an executive order declaring Jews to be a separate nationality too. It allowed hate crimes against Jews to fall under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which bans discrimination based on race, ethnicity and country or origin, but not religion. So, presto, Jews qualify for that protection.

What could go wrong with that? But does it mean Jews are not now Americans but a separate nationality, by executive order? 

Hitler came into power and started correcting long-perceived wrongs. There were jobs being created - good paying jobs - and little bits of other nations to take under German control. Not allowing Jews to work in most occupations helped. Seizing their businesses helped as well. For Hitler, it was a start.

Then he had whole nations to invade, with a powerful Nazi army and more powerful air force which - under the treaty that ended World War I - should not have existed. There were also treaties to be broken.

After the first treaty was ripped up and European nations didn’t actually do much about it, he kept going. Hitler effectively told the world that the treaties were stupid and wrong-headed document that should never have been signed.

And Germany got more powerful, getting lots of resources and slave labor from the nations he conquered. Growing and growing and committing more and more atrocities that the world protested but did nothing to stop. Until it couldn’t ignore it any longer.

The final result? 

Statistics vary, but globally 70 to 85 million people died as a result of World War II, 50 to 55 million of them civilians. More than half the dead were in the Republic of China and the Soviet Union.

The United States ended up spending $350 billion - twice as much as was spent in the entire history of the United States up to that time. In today’s dollars, it would be around $1.5 trillion.

United States casualties were just over 400,000 dead and 600,000 wounded.

Now, as for Donald Trump. Our President has, as far as I know, never had anyone say “no”to him. Well, yes, he fired some people who said that, but it didn’t cause him any great loss. Heck, he’s fired two wives.

He’s lost a lot of lawsuits, and closed a lot of businesses and even a charitable foundation. But, they were all separate corporations - it didn’t impact him personally.

Now, Donald Trump is running our government, and it seems that almost every elected Republican is lining up to support him. 

So, what’s the lesson of our ongoing national impeachment drama? Well, sooner or later everything ends. Lots of Republicans in the House of Representatives have already decided not to run for re-election. In October CNN put out a list of high-profile people who had left after he appointed them. I stopped counting at five dozen.

The lesson? Well, even if you’re as powerful as Superman or as threatening as Hitler, everything will come to an end sooner or later.

And, not always in a good way.