We can finally end 2016 today
There are only two choices. Will we move into a brighter future or sink deeper into the Trump era?
“Yeah, it looks like 2016 is never going to be over.”
That was the comment from CNN reporter Evan Perez as he broke the news that Bill Barr had appointed John Durham special counsel to investigate the origins of the investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. That appointment assured that a baldy political operative could continue a baldly political investigation into all of Donald Trump’s favorite targets, especially Hillary Clinton, even after Trump was evicted from the White House.
This happened even though a comprehensive Inspector General investigation into the investigation (we’re in M.C. Escher land here) found no evidence of any FBI conspiracy against Donald Trump. That finding made a lot of sense because the FBI, led by bumbling Boy Scout Jim Comey, did more to elect Donald Trump than anyone else on Earth. And despite having no crime, no predicate, and no clue of what he was doing, John Durham carried the weaponization of the Department of Justice that Donald Trump had begun under Bill Barr into Joe Biden’s presidency.
The result was two acquittals that ruined two lives and wasted endless amounts of time and money, all to provide content for Fox News.
This is just one Costco sample of how 2016 has never ended. Spin down another aisle, and you’ll see the press still doing its best to turn Trump’s dictatorial ramblings into cohesive arguments. Look behind you, and you’ll see a stolen Supreme Court rewriting the Constitution to give Trump a glide path to dictatorship.
That last example shows how 2016 can never really end, not until we either luck out and get to replace two MAGA Justices (unlikely) or expand the Court (hard but necessary). But so much of what we’ve been through in the last eight years can be eased and put behind us with the defeat of Donald Trump at the polls on November 5th. The sounder the defeat, the better.
All spring, I’d been trying to persuade Marcy Wheeler to turn her Ball of Thread series on how America has been dragged to the brink of fascism into a podcast to expose it to as many people as possible. However, the “Absolute Immunity” hearing in the Supreme Court, when Trump’s attorneys argued that he could send Seal Team 6 after his political opponents as an “official” act with no Constitutional consequences, inspired her to get started.
We’ve created something that I do not believe exists anywhere else—and I’ve searched because I have to find tons of source material! It’s a history of the last eight years told from the perspective of someone dedicated to preserving the rule of law. You probably know a lot of it, but I’m learning more about what I missed in each episode. And no one has put it together this way.
I promise you there’s no better summation of the Mueller Report and how Bill Barr killed it than Marcy put together from the top of her hear.
We’re just about up to the 2020 election and deep into how Trump turned ratfucking his enemies into an official act of the executive branch. Next, we get into the horrific targeting of the president’s son for sport. And what’s shocking is how numb most of the media is to it all.
Trump’s hatred of the Constitution and democracy and individual freedom—especially for women, immigrants, and LGBTQ people—has permeated the Republican Party and has been sold to the rest of us as something we must accept or risk alienating ‘half the country.” But today, we can prove the lie in that scam. Yes, tens of millions of Americans want a dictator who sends a mob to lynch his running mate. That’s terrible. But we know far more don’t want that. And today, we’ll find out just how many of us are ready for 2016 to end as much as it possibly can.