“In each case the president-elect is inviting an interpretation that his behavior is treasonous. The federal crime of treason is committed by a person ‘owing allegiance to the United States who . . . adheres to their enemies, giving them aid or comfort,’ and misprision of treason is committed by a person ‘having knowledge of the commission of any treason [who] conceals and does not disclose’ the crime.”
And now we are brought back to—and must update—John Harington’s sixteenth-century couplet:
“Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason?
“Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason.”
Except perhaps Ambassador Shattuck.
“By denigrating or seeking to prevent an investigation of the Russian cyberattack Trump is giving aid or comfort to an enemy of the United States, a crime that is enhanced if the fourth explanation applies—that he is in fact seeking to cover up his staff’s or his own involvement in or prior knowledge of the attack.”
One other note about the ambassador. He is not a desk jockey. He went to Bosnia in 1995 and personally gathered evidence of the genocide there, and he helped the United Nations establish international criminal tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia.
We may shortly need international criminal tribunals for this country.
“In light of these circumstances, Trump should seek to clear the air by endorsing the proposed investigation of the Russian hacking scandal. For him to continue to deny Russia’s cyberattack and resist the investigation invites a specter of treason to hover over the president-elect.”
Trump—president-elect or not; presidented or un-presidented, if you will—and still, in the assessment of Ambassador Shattuck, inching closer and closer to the textbook legal definition . . . of traitor.
SOCIAL SECURITY
Post date • WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 21
We all know why Donald Trump is doing this.
He has an ego that would make Napoleon blanch and a power lust that would make Stalin back off.
His pimp, Vladimir Putin, has something on him.
He’s crazy.
He sees stuff.
Or—best-case scenario—he just exploits. Everyone and everything.
He’s the parent to whom the kid shouts out in the middle of the night, crying, “There are monsters under my bed,” and he says, “You are correct, there are monsters, and only I can save you from them, but first turn over your allowance. And sign this nondisclosure agreement, and don’t ever think or say or tell anybody that, in fact, I am the monster.”
Trump, by now—we get.
But why are the Banana Republicans who—as recently as two months ago—showed brief, ever-fading signs of standing up to Trump . . . why are they doing this?
Why are they becoming the Vichy government who sold out France during the Nazi occupation? Why are they lining up to become Quislings, collaborating with the Germans and helping kill their fellow Norwegians? Why are they applauding a Russian attack on America?
Well, clearly they were standing up to Trump only because they were afraid—afraid he would lose.
Once they won, they saw power, and, as Eric Blair wrote, “we are interested solely in power, pure power . . . No one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. . . . The object of power is power.”
Mr. Blair published, of course, under the name George Orwell.
Still, it’s not just about abstract power for the Banana Republicans, for the mercenary monsters like Paul Ryan. There is a specific reason they are backing Trump—for now. Until he shows signs of losing again, at which point they will kill him and eat him.
For Republicans who think they are using Trump . . . Trump is perpetual chaff.
I’ve mentioned chaff before.
It’s metal debris used by bombers and missile crews and pilots to confuse radar. And Trump spews it, every day, every hour, every minute, and as hard as we try, you and I can’t avoid all of it.
And so, while he’s enraging people by appointing a secretary of labor who hates labor, and a secretary of housing who hates housing, and a secretary of energy who once campaigned for president on a promise to dismantle the Department of Energy.
While he’s doing all these other Eric Blairish things . . . and while we’re raging about ambassadorships reportedly being offered as quid pro quos to get bigger acts at the inaugural, or how the self-dealer-elect is going to stay on as an executive producer of one of the worst shows ever on television, and while we pull out our hair because the self-dealer-elect’s last campaign manager, who I’m beginning to think may be a witch, says he’ll do that in his spare time . . .
While all that chaff is flying, the Banana Republicans are going on a stealth offensive. They have to reveal themselves sooner or later, if only to signal to the corporations who own them that, yes, the fix is in, and ownership will be getting what they prostituted the government for.
For Paul Ryan, “sooner or later” turned out to be sooner.
Two Thursdays ago, a man named Stephen C. Goss wrote a letter to a man named Sam Johnson, and in so doing, he let the cat out of the Banana Republicans’ bag.
Mr. Goss is the chief actuary of Social Security—the man who has to assess the impact of the economy and legislation, and basically everything, on the future not only of Social Security but of those who receive it.
And the man he wrote to, Mr. Johnson, is the Republican congressman from the Third District of Texas, who is chairman of the Ways and Means Committee’s Subcommittee on Social Security. And on the eighth of this month, Mr. Johnson introduced bill H.R. 6489, “The Social Security Reform Act of 2016.”
Mr. Goss’s letter is sixteen pages long, plus thirteen more pages of tables and graphs and the kind of calculations that nearly caused me to flunk out of Senior Math in high school, and, but for the generosity of my teacher, Gerry Murphy, I’d be in my forty-second-consecutive year trying to graduate from high school.
But it’s Mr. Johnson’s bill that matters.
It explains why the Republicans are abetting the idiot-elect.
Mr. Goss’s letter explains how deeply Johnson and Paul Ryan and all the other corporate whores intend to plunge the knife into the back of Social Security and especially those hardworking fools of Middle America who actually believed the net impact of a Donald Trump presidency would be more money for them and not, you know, poverty in their old age.
The gist is—they’re screwed.
Social Security—not just Medicaid and Medicare, on which it’s always open season in Republican-land—Social Security would be gutted.
Not only no more money going into Social Security—but actually less money going in.
And massive cuts to money going out in Social Security checks.
Some cuts starting as soon as December 2018.
Cuts for people now getting Social Security.
Cuts for people yet to get Social Security. Cuts to the Social Security Trust Fund, designed to meet shortfalls when the baby boomers start to get Social Security.
Hell, money taken from the Social Security Trust Fund, cuts made beyond what could ever be necessary to avoid shortfalls, in order to . . . reduce income taxes for rich people.
If you’re making around $50,000, your Social Security check would be cut between 11 percent and 35 percent. Almost everybody would see their check drop by at least 10 percent.
This bill—or some lesser new version of it that the Banana Republicans would introduce next year, in which, instead of being stabbed to death, you’d just die more slowly by bleeding to death—that’s why Paul Ryan and the Republicans are supporting Trump.
Ordinary Americans, particularly those Trump voters who will have taken this Social Security–cut knife and managed to stab themselves in the back with it, will be watching whatever Trump is doing at the moment—at som
e point, his version of Daffy Duck drinking a gallon of gasoline, a bottle of nitroglycerin, a pile of gunpowder, and a glass of uranium 238 and then lighting a match—while in the background, the Republican House and the Republican Senate, now full subsidiaries of the corporations who were able to buy this country after the Citizens United decision, will destroy Social Security so the rich can get even richer by stealing a billion dollars, one dollar at a time. And our part-time president will take a quick look away from his Twitter feed to sign where they tell him.
*
Close your eyes for a second.
Imagine you’re on a ship that has just sunk, quickly. You have popped up to the surface next to a large, empty lifeboat, stocked with provisions, two oars, and room for several dozen people.
What you do next defines—to me—mankind.
There are generally two responses. In the first, you get in the lifeboat, assess exactly how many other people can safely fit in and how long you all can last, and you begin to pull in other survivors still in the water, trying to bring in women and children and injured, but also people to help you help them and row the boat.
In the second response, you get in the lifeboat, assess exactly how long you could last if you ate all the food by yourself, and then you pick up one of the oars and start swinging it at the other survivors still in the water, killing them if possible, to make sure you are the only one in the boat.
The first response makes you a liberal, also known as a human being.
The second response makes you a conservative.
Open your eyes now.
*
Surprisingly, as seen in the Banana Republicans’ Social Security play . . . it now turns out . . . there’s a third response.
In this one, you actually help a couple of other survivors into the lifeboat. And then, as they’re leaning over the side trying to help pull up others, you kill them with the oar, and then you steal their wallets off their dead bodies so you can make a profit off them.
That third response?
That makes you Donald Trump.
Chapter 6
JANUARY 2017
WHAT DID TRUMP KNOW AND WHEN DID HE STOP KNOWING IT?
Post date • WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 4
He said, “You’ll find out on Tuesday or Wednesday.”
He said he knows a lot about hacking.
He said he knows about the hacking of the Democratic National Committee and other computer systems, “things that other people don’t know.”
“What do you know,” he was asked, Saturday night, “that other people don’t know?”
“You’ll find out,” he said confidently, “on Tuesday or Wednesday.”
But Tuesday night he tweeted that the intelligence briefing on Russian hacking—he put insult quotes around “intelligence” and “Russian hacking”—had been delayed until Friday, positing “perhaps more time needed to build a case. Very strange!”
Later Tuesday night, CNN reported that there had been no hacking review scheduled for Trump by the CIA director nor the director of national intelligence.
NBC reported that there was one . . . but it had always been scheduled for Friday.
Independent journalist Marc Ambinder reported that there was a scheduled briefing that was delayed from last week by the family emergency of one of the intelligence officials, that the White House would get it Wednesday, congressional leaders Thursday, and Trump Friday—and it was identical to what he would have heard last week.
Trump has said nothing except to again attack other Americans and to again pretend he knows everything, and Wednesday morning to—incredibly—again take sides with Julian Assange, who is an enemy to this country and an enemy to democracy everywhere and at best a de facto Russian agent.
“Julian Assange said ‘a 14 year old could have hacked Podesta’—why was DNC so careless? Also said Russians did not give him the info!”
And quoting Fox News: “Julian Assange on U.S. media coverage: ‘It’s very dishonest.’ #Hannity More dishonest than anyone knows.”
The dishonesty here is all Trump’s—with the criminal Assange and the cretin Hannity as fellow travelers.
*
We—the American people, the victims of Trump’s disloyalty and his deranged attempt to position himself as the only person who knows the truth—have found out nothing in the four days since Trump began to play his ridiculous, dangerous, un-American game.
We still have no idea what those things are that he supposedly knows, that other people don’t, nor who told them to him.
And we are waiting.
*
This was not just his usual boast, not just his usual dismissal of this country’s intelligence services, not just his usual lie about the intelligence community and the Iraq weapons of mass destruction—which was not failed intelligence, but rather intelligence manipulated and altered and falsified and turned on its head by the Bush administration.
This was a man, not three weeks before taking power, insisting that this country should not investigate what the Russian dictator did to our election, a man demanding that the rest of us, from John McCain to me, need to “get on with our lives,” a man suggesting—again (he also said it in July)—that the best response to hacking that might have altered the course of history was to stop using computers and go back to using messengers.
This is a man, on the eve of ultimate power in our country, still insisting that Russia is right and America is wrong, and that he knows “a lot about hacking” and he knows “things that other people don’t know” and “you’ll find out on Tuesday or Wednesday.”
Trump’s silence through Tuesday and then Wednesday and now—based on his tweet—presumably through Friday leaves him very few ways out of his ludicrous boasting . . .
Unless by Friday you have forgotten this.
His incoming press secretary—Sean Spicer—already so far in over his head that he needs a scuba suit—flailed around the other day trying to walk back Trump’s boast and suggest that the tinpot-tyrant-elect was really talking about conclusions he had reached from classified briefings. This excuse might have worked if Trump had not spent so much time explaining that he doesn’t attend, need, nor worry about classified briefings.
“You’ll find out on Tuesday or Wednesday.”
Well, we haven’t.
*
Of course, even if we had found out, even if we yet do find out, Trump will still have painted himself into an impossible corner—just a different corner.
About the hacking: “I know things that other people don’t know.”
Who told you, Trump?
If it’s from American intelligence briefers—you said you didn’t believe them.
If it’s from American intelligence briefers—why are you revealing, or merely referencing, secret classified information weeks before you are legally permitted to do so?
If it’s not from American intelligence briefers—who was it?
Was it Vladimir Putin?
Did he tell you that Russia didn’t hack the DNC and try to swing the election so it would have you in office?
How long did Putin know?
How long has it been since he told you?
Did he tell you this before the election?
Why have you not told America?
Why did you not tell America even last Saturday night? Or Tuesday, instead of another tweet worthy of a snot-nosed teenage boy?
Did Putin tell you not to tell us?
Why did you agree to conspire with Putin to conceal this evidence, even if it’s only been since last Saturday?
Did you inform American intelligence of what Putin told you?
If so, how quickly?
*
What if the things you know that other people don’t, Trump, were not told to you by American intelligence
or by Putin?
Who . . . then?
How do they know?
Who told them?
Why have you not told America what they knew?
*
Is your hacking source General Michael Flynn?
Who reads and believes and disseminates conspiracy theories—bluntly, insane conspiracy theories—about pedophilia and Sharia law and Democrats ritually drinking body fluids?
Is your hacking source Julian Assange, who is a thief and an anti-American operative, and has long since lost any credibility among conservatives or liberals?
Is your hacking source Alex Jones, the radio nut? Who believes Sandy Hook never happened? And the dead bodies were child actors?
Is your hacking source the National Enquirer? Which you quoted when it claimed that Ted Cruz’s father was involved in the Kennedy assassination?
Is your hacking source the individual you have repeatedly cited as a computer expert? Your ten-year-old son?
*
Or—your hacking source, and the things you know that other people don’t know, and the part about Tuesday or Wednesday, and the part of a delayed briefing that was reportedly never scheduled—did you just make them up because you thought we were all too stupid to expect you to deliver?
*
In the summer, Trump insisted the election was rigged.
In the autumn, the intelligence community revealed conclusions that maybe he was right.
In the winter, Trump insists we must not have hearings to see whether the Russians subverted our freedoms by remote control.
In a tux on New Year’s Eve, Trump insists about the hacking that “I know things that other people don’t know” and “You’ll find out on Tuesday or Wednesday.”
In a peevish tweet on Tuesday night, he describes a briefing that may or may not have ever been scheduled being delayed—when it may very well have been delayed by him—and throws up another accusatory smoke screen by writing, “Perhaps more time needed to build a case. Very strange!”
So now we need to have not just hearings about the hacking. We need hearings about what Trump meant last Saturday night, what he knew, why he promised to reveal it, and why he is concealing it now.
Trump Is F*cking Crazy (This Is Not a Joke) Page 19