Sessions and a word about who your friends are

Jeff Sessions is out. We are now in a very critical phase. Trump is like a cornered animal. He’s going to have to face Democrats come January and considering how much they’ve been forced to give up, they are going to want to get to the bottom of what happened in 2016 and what Putin has on Trump. It’s a national security issue, in addition to uncovering the corruption.

So, we can expect Trump to do everything he can think of to protect himself and his family. “Firing” Sessions is just the first domino to fall. Trump has until January to shut Mueller down and change the subject.

But the day will come when Democrats are able to check the president. That can’t be avoided.

This is the time I think we should consider who our friends are. There’s a real possibility that both Trump and Pence are implicated in corruption that rises to the level of high crimes and misdemeanors. As much as I think Nancy Pelosi is a savvy and effective politician, I don’t think even she wants to take over the White House under these circumstances. It would be very chaotic and destabilizing for the country.

Just remember that, oh you Republican lurkers. Democrats are not necessarily the enemy. Robert Mueller was appointee by a Republican. Rod Rosenstein is a Republican. Indeed, all the high profile justice department officials are Republicans. The investigation and indictments to date haven’t had any hands of a Democrat on them. They haven’t been able to call witnesses or subpoena anything for two solid years while this investigation has gone on.

It has all been Republicans.

Right now, we’re not too fond of Republicans for good reason. But occasionally, we get one or two in the right places who have integrity and want to let justice prevail, even if their own side is involved.

And there are plenty of Democrats who do not want to rock the global markets or alliances or ruin the economy by doing what might look like a coup to the Trump supporters.

The people we should encourage are the ones who want to stop the chaos now before it spirals out of control. They’re the ones who want a smooth transition of power that involves the least amount of instability.

Those are our friends, regardless of party affiliation right now.

The ones who want to take it all down with them when they fall are not.

I’ll take it.

I watched the results pour in until Conor Lamb won then I couldn’t take it anymore and spent the rest of the evening watching BBC Queen documentaries.

Kudos to Nate Silver and the other data analysts at FiveThirtyEight for getting it right. Yes, it sucks to lose even more seats in the senate but this was a very difficult year for Democrats to pick up seats. And now we can see the institutional bias of the founding fathers baked right in. The map is wildly out of sync with the country at large.

Somebody recommended this Ron Suskind op/ed in the NYTimes yesterday about the backlash from 2008 and I’m going to recommend it to you. It’s about how we got to this place where we are barely holding on to our democracy by the thinnest of threads. He places a lot of blame on the forces that got Obama elected and what a poor politician he actually was.

No, no, don’t try to rewrite history. He might have been cool, suave and debonnier and I think it’s great that we finally had an African American president. But he was the wrong POLITICIAN for the time we lived through and that was clear from the very beginning of the primary campaign.

And here’s another thing about Obama that did us no favors: he weaponized the word “racist”. It became a dirty word that his campaign threw at his own side when any one of us dared to step out of line and disagree with him on policy or anything, really. He took the punch out of that word. Because when everybody is a racist, nobody is. It gave a lot of real racists license to start practicing again. We here at The Confluence still have the word “racist” in the list triggering the moderation queue. I did that because I saw no reason why we should have had to defend ourselves when our differences were based on a whole myriad of other issues. Banning that word is what kept this site alive. Racism itself was still a real and ever present danger that got trivialized in 2008.

That was the legacy of the Obama campaign in 2008 on the Clintonistas who bore no ill will towards African Americans but who recognized that the use of that word was intended to shut us up and force us into line. We came back to the Democratic Party eventually but there were millions of “old coalition” Clinton supporters whose anger was manipulated by the founders of the Tea Party and they eventually became Trump Supporters.

Then there was the Republican strategy to capture Congress in perpetuity by winning state houses and gerrymandering the Congressional districts, something that we are only now starting to claw our way back from. Where was the DNC when the Republicans started making headway in this regard during Obama’s terms? In Chicago. Stuffed full of highly paid consultants trying to figure out how to get regular Americans to sign up for what turned out to be a discount coupon for healthcare with a lot of “cannot be combined with other offers” in fine print. Think of all the people who lost their homes to foreclosure during Obama’s terms.

I could go on but I did actually go on for 8 years like a voice screaming in the wilderness. The actual events and aftermath of the 2008 primary will eventually be written, probably by someone like Suskind or Michael Lewis but in the meantime, we have to live with it.

Our quest stands on the edge of a knife. Stray but a little and it will fail. Democrats don’t have a lot to work with here but they are charged to do the best they can for the next two years when hopefully some of the rest of the country comes out of its spell.

Our morning music fits the times we live in. Take it away Queen:

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Tweet du Jour from Man in the Hoody:

https://twitter.com/maninthehoody/status/1060013853579177985?s=21

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Say what you will about her but Nancy Pelosi gets a lot of credit for pulling this off in the House.

As does Hillary Clinton who encouraged so many women to Run For Something.

Republicans hate them because they’re powerful.