A Big Week Ahead

Hi. This is William, trying to write my first opening post here. The “name” wlp22 is the only way I could get the necessary Word Press account. I really hope that I can do aesthetic justice to Riverdaughter’s attractive site. I know that if I had enough practice here, I could do fine with it, but right now I feel like the sorcerer’s apprentice who could not stop the buckets of water from adding up. So I hope that RD will be kind about this, and of course the many readers who have made this site one of the most literate, interesting and welcoming political blogs on the internet. Not that I frequent many of them, but I’ve looked over the years, and this is the best. Actually, reading this over, it seems to have come out neat and readable, which was my biggest concern, the rest should be fine.

I first learned about this site in 2008 when like many of you, I was doing what I could to get Hillary Clinton elected President. But the whole thing was…well, if I said “fixed,” it would sound like a particular person whom we don’t want to think about too much. Except that this time it WAS fixed, with people running roughshod over the stupid undemocratic caucuses; the DNC chair Donna Brazile simply disqualifying the primary votes in Florida and Michigan; and then at the end, the DNC handing almost half of those delegate votes to Obama, even though he had taken his name off the ballot in Michigan to protect against the landslide loss he would have suffered there, and got about 38% of the votes in Florida.

We all were more than upset by this. There was nothing we could do about it, of course, though many tried. When most of the nascent social media was either jumping up and down with excitement about Obama as some kind of political and cultural symbol who had spent six years in the Illinois legislature, mostly voting “Present,” to avoid taking a stand on bills, and then a year and a half in the U.S. Senate, where he did not attend meetings of his own chosen committee, RD did not get swept up in all of it. And for me, and I think many others, her site was a welcome shelter from the “When was your ‘Coming to Obama’ moment?” nonsense which filled up most of the liberal blogs. Anyway, while it did not change the election results, it still gave much-needed comfort and encouragement to those of us who didn’t buy into all of that, and who strongly believed that Hillary would have been a better President. So that is why I have continued to follow and post on this blog, because such things matter.

Well, now it is 2021, with different challenges. We are about to start our second impeachment trial of Donald Trump! And this one should be fun. We likely will not convict him, because of, well, idiotic and evil Republicans and their myriad of excuses and evasions. I plan to write more about the Republican playbook on how to avoid taking responsibility for anything, and how they will use any fabricated means to reach the ends which are all they care about.

I plan to watch most of the trial, though it probably will start at 6AM PST. But I feel a responsibility to try to watch as much as I can. At least McConnell will not be running it, Schumer will, with new Senate President Pro Tempore Patrick Leahy presiding. I usually mute these hearings when Republicans come on, but this time at least a few of them will be on our side. James Carville predicts that there will be more than 55 Senators who vote to convict. Not 67, but it is not absolutely impossible. Actually, I would settle for a strong presentation of testimony, with videos, audios, and maybe a witness or two. The Republicans have no defense for any of that, except for their ridiculous contention that the Senate cannot try a President after he is out of office, even though the impeachment was during his term, and the trial is only starting now because McConnell said that it would take place after Trump was out of office.

Oh, and supposedly Trump’s lawyers are going to show video of the demonstrations and looting which took place last Summer, as if this had the slightest relevance to the subject of this trial. It would be as if an attorney, his client on trial for murder, showed pictures of somebody holding up a liquor store six months earlier. But that is Republicans for you; logic, relevance, consistency, have no place for them; all that matters is how loud they yell, how impassioned they try to sound, and how many threats of reprisals they can make. It should be an interesting week, and I think that the brave and articulate Congressman Raskin, and the other House impeachment managers, will do a great job.

And I hope that many people will write comments here, or even a word or two about what they liked or didn’t like about the day’s hearings. And that RD’s surgery will go well, and will have a very good result; and that she will be able to sit back and follow the comments and as much of the trial as she can tolerate. And I hope that this post will look readable; and if it does not, I will try to make them more so. I was very fortunate that the computer age came along just when I was finishing graduate school, because i would type all of my papers on the Underwood-Olivetti typewriter which my mother gave to me to use. Had it been computers, I probably would still be writing my exams and trying to make them come out right!