Look, I held back when Trump declared he had an “absolute right” to pardon his own big, white, criminal, money-laundering ass. He said it again today on the White House lawn, where the turbines of Marine One were not quite piercingly shrill enough to be as annoying as the noise coming out of Donald’s awful little pie hole, and I was still inclined to let it go. Even though he made this claim in the same breath as assuring us all that he didn’t think he was above the law – even then, I swear to God, I was going to keep my peace. “Let it go for a while” I said to myself, I said “Graeme,” I said, “you gotta stop writing about Trump, it’s getting tedious”. And then, this:
Trump Calls for Russia’s Readmission to G-8
As the Python troupe used to say, Oh, what a giveaway.
The sheer brazenness blows the mind. The obvious sense of impunity. He doesn’t even bother to skulk around in the shadows! Broad daylight in front of the press corps will do just fine! And here we all are talking about investigation of the secret collusion with Russia. Secret collusion with Russia! Whaddayamean, secret? He’s doing it on camera, for Chrissakes, just like when he asked Russia to hack Hillary’s emails during the campaign, and at this point you just have to hand it to Putin, he must really have something on his boy Trump. I mean, there’s obviously got to be some sort of quid pro quo for all that help during the election, and maybe Donald has to do something rather big to make up for his failure to get sanctions lifted, but this? Jesus Beverly Christ, this is a disproportionate payoff, this is giving away the store, it’s Putin’s fondest dream come true. Between this and starting trade wars with the rest of NATO and the EU, Trump is trying to dismantle the Western alliance.
Vlad really has the bloated moron dancing on the end of his string here, and even somebody as craven and stupid as Trump wouldn’t be going whole hog like this if he wasn’t afraid of something. My guess is that Putin and his oligarchs have way more than mere videos of Trump doing nasty things with prostitutes in hotels – I think they’ve got enough dirt on the Trump clan’s years of money laundering for the oligarchs to lock Donald, Donny Junior and Jared up for a thousand years, and maybe Ivanka too. Remember what Bannon said:
You realize where this is going. This is all about money laundering. Mueller chose Weissmann first and he’s a money-laundering guy. Their path to fucking Trump goes right through Paul Manafort, Don Jr and Jared Kushner…it goes through Deutsche Bank and all the Kushner shit. The Kushner shit is greasy. They’re going to go right through that. They’re going to roll those two guys up and say play me or trade me.
Please, God, Mueller is hot on the trail. He must be, he just has to be, even if Manafort, now indicted on additional counts of obstruction for witness tampering, doesn’t flip like a pancake, which by the way, why wouldn’t he? He’s looking down the barrel of a sentence that’ll have him dying in prison, so why wouldn’t he? Why hasn’t he? You think it’s loyalty to the five pounds of shit squeezed into a four pound bag that now sits in the oval office? Does that make sense at this point? Or is it something else, say – what? – say, some Russian mobster has promised him that if he squeals, the death toll won’t stop with Paullie, no, they’re gonna kill his wife, kill his kids, kill his friends, kill his dog, and burn his damn house down. Something like that, maybe. Maybe Manafort doesn’t sing until they get him and his loved ones into witness protection.
This is a mob story, after all.
Meanwhile, Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan and all those other yellow-bellied GOP turd blossoms are sitting there like nothing’s going on. Here we have a President who’s prosecuting an agenda that begins with the neutering of NATO, and probably ends with the dismantling of the entire post-war liberal economic and political order – the whole system that America itself created in order to ensure the ongoing health of the Western World – and the Republicans pretend it’s all just peachy. Meanwhile, Jeff Sessions has his troops ripping the babies out of the arms of asylum-seekers at the border, treating as criminals those who are making thoroughly lawful and above-board pleas for asylum, and it’s all just peachy. Herr Trump claims he has the absolute power to pardon himself, and everything’s just peachy. Does Vlad have the dirt on them too?
Festering boils to all of them. Lethal, agonizing, lingering, festering fucking boils.
Next stop: Singapore, to meet with the murderous Boy Tyrant of the Hermit Kingdom! That’s going to be fun to watch. Don’t worry, you don’t have to, I’ll watch it for you, of course I will. Then I’ll scream about it here, which is about the same as writing it on toilet paper and dropping it over the side of the Queen Mary in mid-Atlantic, but I can’t help myself.
the needlefish 