It is hard to keep up. Key figures in the House are now talking about completing the impeachment investigation and House vote before Thanksgiving!! As someone old enough to remember Watergate, I am astonished by the speed with which secret information leaks out. It took thirty years or so for Mark Felt to be identified as Deep Throat, the source for Woodward and Bernstein. It has taken days for the NY TIMES to publish identifying characteristics of the whistleblower.
I sit at my desk working up lecture notes for Tuesday's class and periodically nipping into the kitchen to check MSNBC or CNN for late-breaking developments.
This is the class in which I quote from the script of the Burt Reynolds movie Stick by way of explaining what capitalists do. Those with short memories or who are new to this blog can check my post for June 1, 2015.
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This is the scene from Stick: https://youtu.be/t4b6wKdzSIg?t=274
Good grief, is everything on YouTube?
it was pretty easy to figure out that the whistleblower was a CIA, DIA, or maybe State Dept. person posted to the National Security Council. He/she was likely part of the NSC team of experts on the Ukraine, and his sources were likely the other members of the team who had witnessed the conversation and the concealing of the transcript.
While I would like to see impeachment happen quickly, there is the matter of several other transcripts still sequestered in the highly classified intelligence server. They may well be as damming as the Ukraine transcript, and the greater the volume of evidence the greater the odds Republican Senators will vote to impeach. After all, Trump is incapable of acting in any fashion other than as mob boss running a corrupt family enterprise so the other transcripts should be a fun read, as well. And let's not forget Pence has played a role in this and it has been largely ignored.
There is an argument for leaving Pence alone. If Trump is impeached and Pence isn’t then if Trump is convicted Pence gets to serve out the rest of Trump’s term, something that Senate Republicans might be willing to vote for. If Trump is impeached and Pence is indicted as a co-conspirator, then the Presidency goes to Pelosi, an option that they would resist. Thus leaving Pence out of it makes it more likely that Senate Republicans will vote to convict. And though Pence is an appalling human being, and very likely implicated in Trump’s shenanigans, he won’t be able to do too much damage in one year especially as he is likely to be trying to demonstrate that he personally is squeaky clean. Thus in order to get rid of Trump it might be better to leave Pence off the indictment.
There is an argument for leaving Pence alone. If Trump is impeached and Pence isn’t then if Trump is convicted Pence gets to serve out the rest of Trump’s term, something that Senate Republicans might be willing to vote for. If Trump is impeached and Pence is indicted as a co-conspirator, then the Presidency goes to Pelosi, an option that they would resist. Thus leaving Pence out of it makes it more likely that Senate Republicans will vote to convict. And though Pence is an appalling human being, and very likely implicated in Trump’s shenanigans, he won’t be able to do too much damage in one year especially as he is likely to be trying to demonstrate that he personally is squeaky clean. Thus in order to get rid of Trump it might be better to leave Pence off the indictment.
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