Misty drizzle this early Wednesday on California’s north coast as the latest rainstorm winds down — maybe sunshine tomorrow.
Big splash across the news-wires last night
(BuzzFeed):
A dossier making explosive — but unverified — allegations that the Russian government has been “cultivating, supporting and assisting” President-elect Donald Trump for years and gained compromising information about him has been circulating among elected officials, intelligence agents, and journalists for weeks.
…
CNN reported Tuesday that a two-page synopsis of the report was given to President Obama and Trump.
Our worse fears realized…
(Illustration: ‘President Trump,’ by Jonathan Bass, found here).
Right now as I work my laptop, T-Rump is holding a press conference on all this shit, and more, and the wonder how the asshole has the gall to stand up after the ugliest pre-presidency run-up ever. He started off by lying about the Fiat-Chrysler deal, right off the bat.
Interesting to see if the shithead can handle real-time questions — “All fake news…”
Although all the shit contained in the dossier, supposedly a collection of memos written over a period of months, was unverified, reports of it, and the briefing given T-Rump and Obama, were at the top of multi-media news platforms. BuzzFeed published the whole thing, found at the link above.
So far, the ‘sensual,’ nasty take-away — via Raw Story:
“According to (a source), where s/he had been present, Trump’s (perverted) conduct n Moscow included hiring the presidential suite of the Ritz Carlton Hotel,” the documents claim, “where he knew President and Mrs. Obama (whom he hated) had stayed on one of their official trips to Russia, and defiling the bed where they had slept by employing a number of prostitutes to perform a ‘golden showers’ (urination) show in front of him.”
Beyond a gag-reflex reaction to that shit, there’s also Ukraine connection — decent summary at DailyKos last night
Odd this shit hits the airwaves hard just as President Obama delivers his farewell speech from Chicago — he will be missed.
In terms of our presidency, historian Andrew J. Bacevich at TomDispatch last Sunday indicated the horror ahead:
Finally, as a complement to these themes, in the realm of governance, the end of the Cold War cemented the status of the president as quasi-deity.
In the Age of Great Expectations, the myth of the president as a deliverer from (or, in the eyes of critics, the ultimate perpetrator of) evil flourished.
In the solar system of American politics, the man in the White House increasingly became the sun around which everything seemed to orbit.
By comparison, nothing else much mattered.
From one administration to the next, of course, presidential efforts to deliver Americans to the Promised Land regularly came up short.
Even so, the political establishment and the establishment media collaborated in sustaining the pretense that out of the next endlessly hyped “race for the White House,” another Roosevelt or Kennedy or Reagan would magically emerge to save the nation.
From one election cycle to the next, these campaigns became longer and more expensive, drearier and yet ever more circus-like.
No matter. During the Age of Great Expectations, the reflexive tendency to see the president as the ultimate guarantor of American abundance, security, and freedom remained sacrosanct.
…
Coarse, vulgar, unprincipled, uninformed, erratic, and with little regard for truth, Trump was sui generis among presidential candidates.
Yet he possessed a singular gift: a knack for riling up those who nurse gripes and are keen to pin the blame on someone or something.
In post-Cold War America, among the millions that Hillary Clinton was famously dismissing as “deplorables,” gripes had been ripening like cheese in a hothouse.
Through whatever combination of intuition and malice aforethought, Trump demonstrated a genius for motivating those deplorables.
He pushed their buttons.
They responded by turning out in droves to attend his rallies.
There they listened to a message that they found compelling.
…
Not that Trump had anything to say about whether freedom confers obligations, or whether conspicuous consumption might not actually hold the key to human happiness, or any of the various controversies related to gender, sexuality, and family.
He was indifferent to all such matters.
He was, however, distinctly able to offer his followers a grimly persuasive explanation for how America had gone off course and how the blessings of liberties to which they were entitled had been stolen.
He did that by fingering as scapegoats Muslims, Mexicans, and others “not-like-me.”
…
Note, for example, that his mandate is almost entirely negative.
It centers on rejection: of globalization, of counterproductive military meddling, and of the post-Cold War cultural project.
Yet neither Trump nor any of his surrogates has offered a coherent alternative to the triad of themes providing the through line for the last quarter-century of American history.
Apart a lingering conviction that forceful — in The Donald’s case, blustering — presidential leadership can somehow turn things around, “Trumpism” is a dog’s breakfast.
A full-fledged nightmare coming…