Them ol' Whitaker Blues

SEIG HEIL, MEIN TRUMPH!
`

"These are no ordinary times."

 

Eleanor Roosevelt

It didn't take der Donald very long to fire Jeff Sessions as attorney general. Anyone paying even moderate attention knew that the dirty old psychopath would do the deed after the midterms were over; but even as blatant a cynic as I was surprised at the speed with which it was carried out. Scarcely a day after the polls closed across Idiot Nation, poor old Jefferson Beauregard was sent a'packin. Trump never attempted to conceal his reasoning: Sessions had recused himself from oversight of Robert Mueller's investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign's possible conspiracy with a hostile foreign government to subvert the election process. Trump saw this as an act of disloyalty. Had he been smart (which, of course, he isn't) he could have saved himself a wee bit of face by saying that he gave Sessions the old heave ho because he is, in non-debatable fact, the most incompetent, racist attorney general in a century or more. He didn't. I guess he couldn't bring himself to even feign compassion for any minority.

Which brings us to Mathew Whitaker. For the past fourteen months he has been serving in the Department of Justice as Sessions' chief-of-staff. During that same period he's been unethically putting himself out in the public as a regular contributor to CNN. Several times he has come out publicly, not only on television, but in print against the Bob Mueller inquiry, at times referring to it as "a witch hunt". This is not something a paid employee of the justice department should be doing. He has already made his hostility to the investigation into the 2016 campaign quite public. The very fact that he's been chosen to replace Sessions is, in itself, an act of obstruction of Justice on Trump's part. It's the same reason he appointed a hapless stooge like Brett Kavanaugh to replace Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court. Brett had said in an article he wrote for some law review that a president has the right to pardon himself. His selection was a foregone conclusion - as was Whitaker's.

There's a little problem with Whitaker’s “appointment” and that is the constitutional fact that an attorney general just can't be installed willy-nilly by the chief executive. He or she needs to be approved by the senate - a fact that Trump has either forgotten, or is unconcerned with. Either scenario is a distinct possibility. By now it is embarrassingly apparent that the president of the United States could not pass a seventh grade civics class if his life depended on it. Or - and this is more likely - he doesn't give a shit about the United States Constitution. In the twenty-two months he's occupied the Executive Mansion, he’s made that fact abundantly clear too many times to count.

Whitaker potentially has the has the power to sweep the crimes of the Trump Mob under the historical rug for generations - although not forever (you can't escape the cold and objective judgment of history). It's being said that we have entered a constitutional crises. That's incorrect. We've been in a constitutional crises since twelve o'clock noon on January 20, 2017 when this unhinged jackass entered the house that was once occupied by Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. The only difference is that this week, that crises went up a notch - a huge fucking notch.

Ain't this something?

Tom Degan

 

SUGESTED READING:

 

First Lady of the World

From The Rant, 11/14/12

This week marked the fifty-sixth anniversary of the passing of Eleanor Roosevelt. She shouldn't be forgotten. Sometimes I get the sinking feeling that she is. I wrote this one six years ago:

https://tomdegan.blogspot.com/2012/11/first-lady-of-world.html?fbclid=IwAR1G_vgVVhmhnECb6nNvtvUG7Elms6cVId8mAUKi0KlqFtieeWv-YAvbmdM

We let her go to our own detriment.