On the one hand, the movement to impeach the President began the moment he was elected; it is clear that the prior administration put steps into place, and left some stay-behind loyalists, precisely to figure out how to take down the incoming administration. Examples include Sally Yates, the so-called 'whistleblower' whom I won't name mostly because his name is too long to type, the FBI/DOJ lovers, and so forth and so on; the executive order allowing the alleged evidence on Russia to be promulgated much more widely than usual; the ongoing FISA applications to continue to allow spying on the incoming administration. Given the level of commitment, it's hard to imagine they will wave off now.
On the other hand, if this goes to the Senate, they lose control of it. Republicans get to subpoena witnesses and ask whatever they want of them. Ukraine seems to be where many of the bodies are buried: not just Hunter Biden but Nancy Pelosi's son, Mitt Romney's son, John Kerry's son all have similar jobs, and Biden's success at using aid-money as a lever to force them to fire that prosecutor netted the replacement who torpedoed Paul Manafort during the height of the 2016 election, while Manafort was the Republican campaign manager. I wouldn't want to draw attention to Ukraine with the 2020 election just around the corner, not if I was an establishment politician.
So will they pull the trigger? At The Hill, Jonathan Turley wonders.
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I'm going to be a bit contrarian. I think you're looking at this by the logic of actually removing Trump from office via impeachment. I think at least Pelosi and the senior Democrat leadership (or what passes for leadership) have taken it as a forgone conclusion that the Senate will never vote to remove Trump absent a live boy/dead girl revelation that they are never going to get (and even then it would be a close vote). Pelosi has to go through with this. She's keeping up a sham appearance of waffling but that's mostly to pretend the process has any fairness and might result in impeachment being voted down. All of the Dems know that despite all the talk about how those moderate Democrats that flipped the House were elected to do the work average Americans want done, the people writing the checks and manning the phones were doing it so there would be a Democrat majority to impeach Trump. They can't afford to disappoint those activists after three years of claiming the walls were closing in and that roadrun.. I mean, Trump wasn't gonna get away this time. I think they believe they can play what happens in the Senate to their favor by presenting the process as biased, too focused on Biden's corruption, and when the final vote comes down claim that it's just Republicans closing ranks around Trump. I think they might even think that it could boost their chances of picking off a weak GOP senator or two by tying them to Trump.
The activists are certainly enjoying the moment. Still, if they wanted a show, why pick the venue most likely to expose all this profiteering and malfeasance by public officials and their families? On the general principle of "we don't $*** where we eat," I'd have thought they'd have picked a ground very far from Ukraine for this display.
In fact, if I were staging the show, I'd have done it on Trump self-enriching by (e.g.) allowing the USAF to stay at his hotels. You could have your failure theater there without endangering the gravy train, or risking exposure of a whole set of corrupt practices.
Even CNN admits that Trump Turnberry is an even drier hole than the Ukraine thing is going to be.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/12/politics/trump-organiation-hotel-air-force/index.html
"We reviewed the vast majority the 659 overnight stays of Air Force crews in the vicinity at Glasgow Prestwick Airport between 2015 and 2019. Approximately 6% of those crews stayed at the Trump Turnberry," a US Air Force official told CNN Thursday.
The official added that "the review also indicated that about 75% of the crews stayed in the immediate vicinity of the airfield and 18% stayed in Glasgow."
According to Air Force statistics between 2015 and 2019, Air Mobility Command aircraft stopped at Prestwick a total of 936 times, 659 of those stops involved overnight stays.
The number of overnight stops at Prestwick has steadily increased: There were 40 in 2015, 75 in 2016, 116 in 2017, 208 in 2018 and 220 through August 2019.
The Air Force says the reason for the air field's increased usage derived from flight directive issued to mobility crews in June 2017, which it said was "designed to increase efficiencies by standardizing routing locations, with Prestwick being among the top five locations recommended for reasons such as more favorable weather than nearby Shannon Airport, and less aircraft parking congestion than locations on the European continent."
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I guess I don't have a good answer about why the Ukraine. My speculation would be that they really would have preferred to go after obstruction but Barr really killed that when he didn't buy off on the misstatement of DOJ policy as not allowing an indictment decision on a sitting President. They tried to revive the Russia thing until Mueller's abysmal testimony torpedoed that, then would have taken up the Stormy Daniels-Cohen hush money payments as campaign finance violations until Corey Ledondowski took down Nadler's pants on live TV. At this point they were grasping at straws. At least with the Ukraine thing being in Schiff's Intelligence (oxymoron alert!) committee they could keep the witnesses safely off live TV until all the testimony got coordinated.
Even CNN admits that Trump Turnberry is an even drier hole than the Ukraine thing is going to be.
I didn't say it was a gusher. I said it was a better stage, because it keeps the eyes away from where the bodies are buried.
I guess I don't have a good answer about why the Ukraine. My speculation would be ...
I don't understand it either. It's so bad a decision that I wonder if it isn't being driven by some law of perversity, that eternal law by which 'evil will oft evil mars.'
Certainly there are much better stages, and this show has played on them already, and folded at intermission every time. The Democrats have moved off Broadway to the equivalent of dinner theater in Hoboken. The only conclusion I can draw is that they realized they are screwed even worse by giving up now than they are by making a Hail Mary attempt.
While Turley is a bit opaque, you could certainly read his article as indicating that he expects this to go to the Senate and for the impeachment to be rejected by them.
Even if they won't pull the trigger, I will. They cannot resist the celestial fate, not any more.
Still, if they wanted a show, why pick the venue most likely to expose all this profiteering and malfeasance by public officials and their families?
Because this is the Divine manifesting itself by using Light to expose the truth under humanity's darkness. This is not a human "plan", except the Deep State is getting royally messed up as a result of trying to fight the End Times. All those Deep Underground military and civilian bunkers aren't going to do the m any good.
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