“I don’t think it’s Ok”

Reposting this reply from Adam Schiff to the Republican demand that he resign as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.

He speaks for me.

I say this to the President, and his defenders in Congress:

You may think it’s okay how Trump and his associates interacted with Russians during the campaign.

I don’t.

I think it’s immoral. I think it’s unethical. I think it’s unpatriotic. And yes, I think it’s corrupt. pic.twitter.com/nTdgRVfssQ

— Adam Schiff (@RepAdamSchiff) March 28, 2019

That went well.

Last night, Stephen Colbert announced that a consensus poll by fivethirtyeight found that the number of people who believed the president regarding the conclusions of Mueller’s investigation soared from 41.9% to 41.9%.

We should take some comfort in this. While it looks like there will always be a certain fixed number of people who will willingly believe whatever their chosen leader tells them, no matter how soft, weak, duplicitous, callous and criminal he is, there will be about 60% of Americans who are going to see through his sleight of hand.

Note that this doesn’t mean that 41.9% of Americans are stupid. Some of them might well be stupid and can’t think their way out of a paper bag. But I bet that they are the minority. No, the reason the 41.9% believe the stale orange marshmallow peanut has something to do with their personalities or the way they were raised or something like that. Who knows what happened to them for their consciences to become so fungible that they can be morally compromised by Donald Trump. Maybe its a failure of imagination because if I were really counting on a dictator to save me from the unwashed masses, I’d want someone who’s at least 80% compatible with my moral philosophy, is wise and is as hot as Viggo Mortensen.

Maybe there is something in it for the 41.9%, like power or connections or wealth. Or the average Trumper is just easily frightened. Mostly, I think Trumpism gives them the opportunity to feel better about themselves in some way. We can’t know why these people are so willing to screw the rest of us by clinging to Trump so tenaciously, like a wad of toilet paper to whatever extends the metaphor for you.

The rest of us know that there’s a massive coverup going on, that the underlying evidence of wrongdoing in the Mueller report must be worse than we ever imagined, and that efforts to suppress and cleanse the Mueller report before it reaches congress really does seriously matter. It would have been better for Trump if the full report had been released. At least he could have mounted a vigorous defense of whatever was in it.

But you can’t defend yourself against a vacuum and the absence of evidence doesn’t mean evidence of nothing. Which means that for the other 60% of us, the Barr letter has confirmed what we suspected.

He’s a crook. He’s a national security risk. The Mueller Report will show it. To the non-41.9%, it matters.

We didn’t just fall off the turnip truck.

************************

“I’m not pitching this very well, am I?”

Says Lloyd Evans of JW Survey in his interview by John Dehlin of Mormon Stories. In this second part of a three part interview, Lloyd and John compare Jehovah’s Witnesses vs Mormon theology and discuss such weighty topics as:

Do people poop in paradise?

Will you get your dead pet back in the resurrection?

What conclusions would the scouting team from the Starship Enterprise come to when they encounter a planet full of hot young sexless vegetarians?

Did Jesus’s body ascend into heaven or just his spirit and if only his spirit, what happened to his body?

And is 18th century ignorance bliss?

I never laughed so hard about the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Or Mormons. Not to be missed.