Day 578

Day 578 Monday August 20, 2018 1,000 Days to Go

We are at a historic turning point. This is the last day of the Trump presidency that is in quad digits to go. (Is that correct? Quad digits?) Tomorrow we have 999 days to go.
It seems the walls are collapsing around Trump, but he’s has always managed to wriggle out, so don’t count him out. The worst part of it is that then there is Pence. My god which is worse? It’s a question I won’t worry myself with, again, right now. I’ve got other things to address.
There are a number of bits I wish to string together. It’s hard to know where to start because they are just bits and when you don’t have the whole story cogently formed all I can do is say, “Look at this! Look at that!” Then, maybe, by picking up the various bits and putting them back down a whole will emerge.
Bill Maher brought up an interesting idea in his last show. He said that when people are asked about something they may say one thing, but when no one is looking they say quite another. One example was what wives say about husbands. “He’s wonderful.” etc. But when they search the term on google they look up “mean.” etc.
He suggested the idea of an avatar, and that our avatar may not be the good heroic benign figure we imagine, but rather a cruel petty one. (I may have interjected my own opinion in here. The idea being that what we imagine and what we do or say could be quite different.)
This came up in the context of the Academy Awards. Their ratings have been dropping the last few years. It is thought that part of the problem is that the Academy keeps awarding movies that few go to see, and the blockbuster movies don’t get any recognition. They have a new category “popular” something or other to try and address this issue.
We’ve seen this issue come up in other areas too. There was a movie service that recommended “other movies you might like” based on what you had already looked at. Some folks were startled by the suggestions, because they wanted to believe they watched a different type of movie. I still remember the NPR article about it which finished with a line that suggested perhaps the service would recommend “Hot Tub Time Machine” to you and not something more high brow.
My mother used to refer to Walter Mitty a lot. “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” was a short story written by James Thurber that first appeared in the New Yorker in 1939, two years after my mother graduated from college. It’s worth looking up in Wikipedia. It’s been made into a movie twice. Walter Mitty was, according to the story, an ineffectual person who spent most of his life dreaming heroic dreams, and not really paying attention to the real world around him.
I’ve seen this idea expressed in a great one panel cartoon by Gahan Wilson. There is a French Poodle in the cockpit of an airplane that is clearly headed into a deep dive. The caption reads, “Suddenly, Fifi grabbed the controls.”
There is a gap between who we are and who we wish to be and who we see ourselves as and who we wish to be seen as. It manifests itself in many different ways. Therapy is often the art of helping someone see who they really are and getting them to act in accordance with that person. “Thoughts, words, actions – all in a line.” Is typically the way that is put. (Providing it is in a socially acceptable context I would posit.)
Nowhere does the image and the reality seem to be widening than in politics. I’ll leave that for now as an issue to return to at a later date, because there are a lot of fish that need frying today.

I saw a little something on TV yesterday. I was sitting in a bar writing and I only saw the text displayed so I don’t have all the particulars, but here’s what I gleaned. There was an author being interviewed. He had written a book whose premise was that Trump could be impeached, Constitutionally, on eight different grounds only two of which the Mueller investigation would touch on. Wow, let that sink in for a minute.

Okay, moving on. The bar also had old books on shelves, part of an effort to look upscale. One of the books was a bound volume that looked like an old smaller version of a volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica. It was, in fact, a 1914 volume of The National Geographic. Perhaps, Nat Geo was published like the Encyclopedia before it went to it’s monthly format? Most interesting was that many of the article were similar to today’s. There was a picture of a Piping Plover, an article about going down the Grand Canyon, another on Turkey with pictures of Constantinople (it wasn’t renamed Istanbul until 1934). There were pictures of Tikrit and the beautiful gardens of Aleppo. It’s a much different world now.

Then a little something popped up on Facebook. A mime saying McConnell had taken money from the Russians. I have heard rumblings like this for awhile. I’ve had my suspicions. Some on the fringes of the intelligence community have said this for a long time. They are often proven right, months later when CNN, or MSNBC have “Breaking News” that they just discovered this sort of thing. Also the New York Times, which tends to be ahead of the pack on these kinds of stories. (No wonder Trump hates them!)

So I did some nosing around and found a story from 2017 that the Dallas Morning News entitled “How Putin’s oligarchs funneled millions into GOP campaigns.” The story has been updated this year. To understand perhaps why the Republican establishment isn’t doing anything about Russian interference this article sheds light as to why. When I say “sheds light” I’m not talking a little pen flashlight; I’m talking 1500 Watt candle power type light.
It turns out that the Republican party and various individual elected Republican officials have been taking huge sums of money from Russians. They’ve even changed the laws to make it legal and to hide their donors so that it is even easier to take their money. The players are the same names that keep cropping up in other contexts. You’ve got the Russian oligarchs, watched and manipulated by Putin. There are the elected officials, their PACs and campaign funds, the shadowy underhanded dirty Republican and conservative gophers, and the people in the Trump orbit. The guy that stuck out for me was the fellow who wrote “Clinton Cash.” Steve Bannon had mentioned that book with Ari Melber as being all the opposition research they needed to go after Clinton.
The book was written by a guy who has made a career of going after the Clintons for decades. The allegations made in the book are spurious and were driven by Bannon and Breitbart, and by Fox. (In fact when I put into google “Clinton Cash” I got a reference to three interviews on Fox dated January, March and June of this year; with the titles: “ ‘Clinton Cash’ author talks DOJ probe of Clinton Foundation” on two of the clips and he later headline “ ‘Clinton Cash’ author reacts to IG report on email probe.”

It should also be remembered that Bannon used a bunch of non-profits to produce conservative political documentaries (all of which skirts legality). “Clinton Cash” being one example, based on the book. It should also be pointed out that the book had to undergo multiple edits for egregious errors and the author was forced to admit that he had no “smoking gun,” but rather a bunch of unfounded claims with little or no backup.
What does seem to be clear is that The Clinton Foundation took in a lot of money to use for good around the world. Did they take a little for themselves? Maybe. Chelsea had a salary. Compare that with say Ivanka and her outright grab for herself behavior. The Clinton Foundation has improved conditions and addressed problems around the world, what have the Republicans done with their money? Clinton Cash tried to paint the Clintons as corrupt. They appear to be scouts in the face of what is going on now.
At the same time Bannon was pushing the movie Clinton Cash and the right wing websites were attacking Hillary, Mitch McConnell was taking in millions from the Russians. Let that sink in for a second.
Who else was in on the money grab? Steve Mnunchin, Marco Rubio, Lindsey Graham.
It seems the Russians tried to give a little money to W and got rejected, but Trump? No problem, they took millions. So did McConnell, right after seeing intelligence reports telling him the Russians were interfering.
What did the Republicans do about all this? They changed the regulations and laws so that it was easier for Russians via intermediaries to give them money, and for the Republicans to hide the fact that they got the money.

And who are the Russians in question? The usual suspects: Deripaska, Vekselberg, and a new player – Blavatnik. There are also the underlings with dual citizenship or related to the Russians but holding U.S. citizenship: Intrater, Shustorovich, Kukes. These people gave “small” donations (e.g. $41,000 etc. Small by their standards) before 2016. But in 2016 they ramped up into the millions to Republican Pacs and the Trump campaign. Why? Why, indeed.

In other disturbing judicial proceedings. Remember that the Supreme Court ruled in the case of former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell that it’s okay to do pay to play and quid pro quo arrangements because otherwise how could they do their job? (This raises the question of ‘what is their job?’ at least it does in my opinion. Remember McDonnell’s wife tried to leave the State Mansion with the silverware! I mean. Really?)

So what we have is the typical Republican playbook writ large by conservative operators. They attack the other side all the while doing the same thing, but much worse. I’ve been talking about the money aspect. We could talk about the sex side of things, and it’s the same. They yell about Bill’s six blowjobs while they are busy having affairs, divorcing one wife for another, etc.

Here is the link to the Dallas Morning News article:
https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/commentary/2017/12/15/putins-proxies-helped-funnel-millions-gop-campaigns

Here is the link to the Bannon media sources for Clinton Cash:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/how-bannons-multimedia-machine-drove-a-movement-and-paid-him-millions/2017/04/09/203df1ce-197b-11e7-855e-4824bbb5d748_story.html

1,000 Days to Go

PS A view of the picturesque gardens of Aleppo, circa 1914. (source: National Geographic)