6/18/20: Unemployment claims for the last
reporting period totaled 1.5 million. That means the economy is still suffering,
despite the end of coronavirus lockdowns across most of the U.S.
This brings the total who have filed for unemployment in thirteen
weeks to 46 million, a staggering toll. It also makes Trump’s brag
about adding 2.5 million jobs in May seem ludicrous.
*
 |
There are 800,000 young people under DACA protection. |
____________________
“The
pattern looked like obstruction of justice as a way of life.”
Former National Security Advisor John Bolton
____________________
TEAM TRUMP is currently busy trying to block release of
former National Security Advisor John Bolton’s new book. The cover story they’re
floating is that Bolton included “classified information.”
Since advance copies have already gone out to news
organizations it may be too late to avoid the damage. That is, damage to the
image of Donald J. Trump. According to The New York Times, Bolton is
said to have torched the president in his book. Start with the small idiocies.
Bolton said his boss had to ask if Finland was part of Russia. (Dear MAGA
fans: It’s not.) Trump also had to ask if Great Britain, one of our closest
allies, had nukes. (It has since 1952).
Then you have the serious issues, the threats to the rule of
law, and diplomacy shaped in service to the president’s personal interest. Bolton
says he heard Trump offer “personal favors to dictators he liked,”
including the leaders of Turkey and China. It wasn’t just Trump asking Ukraine
to get the dirt on Joe and Hunter Biden if they wanted military aid. Trump did
do that, Bolton says. It was worse. “The pattern,” Bolton writes, in regard to
Trump’s foreign policy-making decisions, “looked like obstruction of justice as
a way of life.” That included the
president promising to “intervene in investigations into companies like Turkey’s Halkbank to curry favor
with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey or China’s ZTE to favor Mr. Xi.”
According to Bolton, during
negotiations with North Korea even Sec. of State Mike Pompeo had had more of
Trump than he could stand. Bolton says Pompeo passed him a note, saying of
their boss, “He is so full of shit.”
Expect Pompeo to kiss Trump’s
ass and deny he passed said note. Expect Bolton to still have it?
One can hope.
On the topic of ass-smooching,
you may forget the sequence of events revolving around Bolton, the Trump
impeachment hearings, and, later, the no-witnesses-trial put on in the U.S.
Senate. First, the Democratic House committees investigating Trump’s dealings
with Ukraine subpoenaed Bolton. Next the White House blocked his testimony and
Team Trump ignored all House subpoenas. When it was their turn to examine the
matter, Republicans in the Senate puckered up and decided not to invite Bolton
to testify, even though he said he was willing.
It’s kind of fun now to remind Trump fans what their
orange-tinted hero tweeted during the early stages of the impeachment
investigation:
The D.C. Wolves and Fake News
Media are reading far too much into people being forced by Courts to testify
before Congress. I am fighting for future presidents and the Office of the
President. Other than that, I would actually like people to testify
[emphasis added, unless otherwise noted]. Don McGahn’s respected lawyer has
already stated that I did nothing wrong.
John Bolton is a patriot and may
know that I held back the money from Ukraine because it is considered a corrupt
country, & I wanted to know why nearby European countries weren’t putting
up money also.
Bolton now writes that he
suspected ulterior motives all along, in Trump’s dealings with Ukraine. As related
by the Times:
On
Aug. 20, Mr. Bolton writes, Mr. Trump “said he wasn’t in favor of sending them
anything until all the Russia-investigation materials related to Clinton and
Biden had been turned over.” Mr. Bolton writes that he, Mr. Pompeo and Defense
Secretary Mark T. Esper tried eight to 10 times to get Mr. Trump to release the
aid.
That, according to Bolton, is the famous “quid pro quo,”
which Republicans in both the House and Senate swore at great length never existed.
On another occasion, an angry president suggested that “these
people,” his critics in the free press, “should be executed.”
Bolton also writes that his boss told President Xi of China that
if he wanted to lock up millions of Chinese citizens –
in
this case Muslims – in concentration camps, “Xi should go ahead with building the
camps, which he thought was exactly the right thing to do.”
On another occasion, Bolton
says Trump talked to Xi on the sidelines at a Group of 20 summit. Xi mentioned
that certain political figures in the United States were trying to stir up
trouble between the countries.
According to the Times:
“Trump
immediately assumed Xi meant the Democrats,” Mr. Bolton writes. “Trump said
approvingly that there was great hostility among the Democrats. He then,
stunningly, turned the conversation to the coming U.S. presidential election,
alluding to China’s economic capability to affect the ongoing campaigns, pleading
with Xi to ensure he’d win.” (Mr. Bolton says he would have printed Mr.
Trump’s exact words, “but the government’s prepublication review process has
decided otherwise.”)
*
YOU COULD TELL, early reports about what Bolton was saying
were getting to the president. He was up late tweeting Wednesday, firing off
this classic of Trumpian philosophy:
Wacko John Bolton’s “exceedingly
tedious” (New York Times) book is made up of lies & fake stories. Said all
good about me, in print, until the day I fired him. A disgruntled boring fool
who only wanted to go to war. Never had a clue, was ostracized & happily
dumped. What a dope!
Trump also noted that Bush 43 had fired Bolton, failing to mention
that he, Donald J. Trump, did not fire Bolton.
Bolton resigned.
Secondly, are we noticing a trend? According to Trump, he hired terrible people
and he suspected they were terrible all along. (See also: Mattis, Tillerson, Kelly, Omarosa, Cohen, Sessions, et. al.)
Thursday morning, Trump was right back at it, attacking
Bolton, before he finished could even digest his presidential Pop Tarts
breakfast. For starters, he tweeted:
If you follow this delusional president on Twitter, as, for
some unfathomable reason, Mr. Blogger does, you know he has referred to a large
number of human beings as “sick,” “sick puppies,” or some variation.
For example, you have CNN anchors: “sick losers.” Lamestream
media: “corrupt & sick.” Rep. Adam Schiff: “a very sick man,” “sick puppy,”
“he is sick.” Nancy Pelosi: “a very sick person.” The New York Times: “a
very sick joke,” “sick journalism.” Bette Midler: “a sick scammer.”
The list is always expanding. Democrats are “sick and
disgusting.” Chris Cuomo: “dumb and sick.” Sleepy Joe and Democrats: “sick &
demented ideas.” Reporters he doesn’t like: “very dangerous and sick.” Mueller
and his investigators: “very sick and dangerous.” Peter Strzok: “sick loser.”
Sen. Jon Tester: “very dishonest and sick.” James Comey: “very sick or very
dumb.” Megyn Kelly: “sick & the most overrated person on tv.” Karl Rove: just
plain “sick.”
My favorite, because Trump really loads up on some of his
favorite insults, would be his attack on Rosie O’Donnell, “a
mentally sick woman, a bully, a dummy and, above all, a loser.”
*
IN OTHER IMPORTANT NEWS, the U.S. Supreme Court has blocked
the Trump administration’s plan to dismantle the DACA program, which protects hundreds of
thousands of young “Dreamers” from being deported, many to countries they no
longer remember.
The ruling is 5-4, in favor of preserving DACA, which makes
it final. Except in the mind of Joseph Edlow, Deputy Director for Policy with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration
Services. A recent Trump appointee, Edlow apparently no more understands the
U.S. Constitution than the man who appointed him to his post. He complains
that the court’s decision has “no basis in law.”
As Mr. Blogger’s old
students should remember, the judicial branch of government “interprets the
laws.” When all else is done the U.S. Supreme Court has the final say in
deciding what the laws mean.
BLOGGER’S NOTE: In August, a federal judge blasts Edlow and his superiors
during a court hearing. U.S. District Court Judge Nicholas Garaufis tells lawyers for
DHS that they should tell, first, Attorney General Bill Barr, and, second, then-Acting
Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf, that he finds it disturbing that anyone in the
executive branch would so question a Supreme Court decision.
The attorney general should know, says the judge, “that it is not [a]
benefit to anyone to have a federal agency take issue with a decision of the
Supreme Court. I’m very troubled by anyone who would write such a thing on a
document issued by a federal agency regarding a decision by the U.S. Supreme
Court or any court, until it is overruled or reversed, any federal court.”
(Again, members of Team Trump act as if there’s only one branch of
government, and Donald J. Trump can do as he pleases.)
