December 11, 2018: The President Says He Is Proud to Shut Down the Government.

 

12/11/18: God damn those Mexicans! I was sure they were going to pay for the Great Wall of Trump! 

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“I am proud to shut down the government.” 

President Trump

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Now, Trump is mad because Democrats won’t give him $5 billion to build his pet project and he’s too lame-assed to work out a compromise. 

He’ll just pout. 

In a televised confrontation with Democratic leaders, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Chuck Schumer, Trump grumbles, “If we don’t get what we want one way or the other...I will shut down the government. I am proud to shut down the government for border security... I will take the mantle of shutting it down.” 

Considering who’s in charge of the federal government, it might not be a bad idea to close shop for a year. 

(You can watch the tape of the meeting between President Trump and Democratic leaders in the U.S. House and Senate, below. I think Nancy Pelosi mentions Article I around the four-minute mark - because she realizes the president has never read and never will read the U.S. Constitution. As for Vice President Pence, who sits at Trump’s left, he might as well be a dummy. He does not speak a syllable in over ten minutes, but practices looking concerned and serious.)

 

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IN RUSSIAN-INVESTIGATION NEWS, Maria Butina, the hot young Russian redhead who infiltrated the N.R.A. and spent the 2016 campaign hanging with leading conservatives, has agreed to a plea deal and will cooperate with prosecutors. That includes testifying in front of a grand jury. 

Her crime: conspiring to act as a Russian agent without registering with the Justice Department. That’s a felony. 

Now we may find out how it happened she was called on during a campaign rally in 2015 to ask Trump what he thought about sanctions on Russia. He said he didn’t think we needed them, which would have been sweet Tchaikovsky music to Putin’s ears. 

Ms. Butina, looking fetching.

 

Butina may spill a whole new can of beans. 

We might learn a great deal. We might learn what Paul Erickson, a much older conservative leader who had spoken publicly in favor of warmer relations with Russia (and with whom Butina was sleeping), was up to behind the scenes, when not fostering warmer relations with Butina between the sheets. We might learn whether or not the N.R.A. accepted Russian money and funneled it to the Trump campaign, as at least one U.S. senator suspects. We might get to the bottom of odd connections between the N.R.A., Alexander Torshin, a Russian placed under sanctions earlier this year, and Ms. Butina, his protégé. We might learn how the hot redhead maneuvered in close for a picture with Don Jr. (and pictures with assorted lecherous old Republicans). We might also learn why an N.R.A. delegation traveled to Russia in 2015, and why Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), the leading suck-up to Russia in Congress, spent four hours chatting with Torshin and Butina at a prayer breakfast in Washington D.C. in 2017. 

This Russian investigation – actually, several investigations now – isn’t going to end anytime soon.