Beyond Outrage

The most loathsome animal ever to slither into the White House has now taken the presidency deeper into the sewer than it has ever been before.

By firing the director of the FBI, under the given circumstances and for such obviously phony reasons, the hollow narcissist who conned an entire country has all but acknowledged that he not only compromised his office, but he probably committed treason. Director James Comey, for all his flaws and shortcomings, was getting uncomfortably close to the smoking gun; he had to go.

Those Washington insiders who call Trump's action "Nixonian" are demeaning Nixon: not even Tricky Dick's infamous Saturday Night Massacre can touch Orange Boy's cynical sleaze in this case.Nixon abused his power by seeking to end an investigation into a tawdry domestic burglary committed by his agents to improve his chances of re-election.  He never made a dishonest dime from it.

Orange Boy is abusing the powers of the presidency to keep hidden far, far larger crimes against the people in order to engorge his personal fortune.

He has refused to divest.  He refuses to release his tax returns.  He is hiding things; big things; big, bad things.  

Already his agents and nominees to key posts have been found to have had suspicious dealings with Russia.  The racist attorney general had to recuse himself from the ongoing Russian investigations, although he gleefully participated in the decision to fire Comey.  Orange Boy’s original nominee for national security advisor, Michael Flynn, was fired because he was up to his ears in back-door foreign deals.  Two army secretary nominees had to withdraw.  Never in history has a new president nominated so many unfit people to so many high posts in government.  Far too many of them have been confirmed.  Science, public lands, public health, public services — every good thing done by or on behalf of national government for the last 80years — have been sacrificed on the altar of Trumpian greed.

And now this.  In spite of himself, our Inspector Clouseau was closing in on the ugly truth, and the little dictator fired him.

What else to expect from someone whose mentor was Roy Cohn?  Roy Cohn!  The very same Roy Cohn who earned his doctorate in demagoguery at the right hand of Joe McCarthy himself. The Roy Cohn whose bullying, cheating, dissembling  once befuddled the entire army hierarchy. The Roy Cohn whose empty legal offices in New York still reek of the graft, calumny and slime that got him disbarred.  That Roy Cohn, mentor to our so-called president.

The investigative journalist David Cay Johnston has adroitly assembled the record of how Orange Boy built his fortune through alliances with mobsters, deals with drug kingpins, platoons of labor goons, litigation, double crosses, contract reneging, cheating of little guys like laborers and small contractors.  He’s using the same methods now on an international scale.

Contrarian pundits would have us believe that the Russia investigations were hysteria rooted in old Cold War propaganda, warmed over for new times.  That is simply false.

This is serious concern about backdoor mortgaging of the presidency to a foreign power — any  foreign power — for the personal profit of the Trumps, at the risk of the national interest and security of the United States.

That smells like treason.  Of course it has to be properly investigated. By an independent prosecutor with broad powers to subpoena and require testimony under oath. Now.