Sessions the newest hypocrisy most foul; but do Trump’s people care?
“Crooked Hillary” went the cries. “Lock her up,” they chanted. They accused her of manipulations and profiteering; berated her for using her private email and especially her shady ties to foreign leaders. So as Donald Trump’s presidency rolls into its 100 days dragged down by an unprecedented amount of corruption for a new administration, with Jeff Sessions simply the newest appointee in the hot seat, the only question is this: Does anybody on Team Trump even care?
Jeff Sessions lied under oath. This isn’t an opinion; there is video of him, during his confirmation hearing, telling Sen. Al Franken that he “did not have communications with the Russians” during 45’s run. And now it has been revealed that he did, in fact, meet with Russia’s ambassador to the US in July and September. He will claim that it was as a Senator, not as a Trump surrogate. He will ignore the calls he made to impeach Bill Clinton when his reasoning was simply that lying under oath is an impeachable offense; that is, old AG Jeff Sessions will reject calls made by his younger self now that they involve him. The Wall Street Journal (a right-leaning publication Trump has not yet called fake news) has just reported that Sessions in fact used his campaign funds to travel to the RNC where he talked to the ambassador. While he said it was to discuss things as a representative of the Senate Armed Forces Committee, he also discussed Trump’s campaign. Which the “Hillary is the queen of conflicts of interest” people should be disgusted by as, well, a conflict of interests.
Ironic that Jeff Sessions, a man rejected by the Senate from a Federal Judgeship decades ago because he was too racist; a man who wants to bring back the waste of funds and resources spent on enforcing anti-marijuana laws that have no basis in science nor any proof of efficacy; a man who has built a career on embracing bygone stances of racism and the destruction of individual rights; ironic that this man may be brought down by a couple blatant indiscretions tied to Trump’s shadow (not shadow anymore) corner man, Vlad Putin. Not that this is new; there was the Flynn-Russia tie, that led to his rejection. There’s Trump’s campaign manager who just admitted that he also talked to the Russian ambassador at the RNC.
Then there’s the story about Pence using his private email (which was hacked) when governor of Indiana. This wouldn’t even be a story if Hillary’s use of a privately protected server wasn’t a cornerstone of 45’s attacks on Hillary Clinton and should be given the same amount of weight that Hillary story deserved — very little. Except for the fact that it further highlights the hypocrisy of the current administration.
But let’s be honest, nobody who matters when it comes to making things right cares. Right now there are a lot of people who love 45 and video footage could come out tomorrow of Trump and Putin splitting a half dozen Russian prostitutes with giant bags of Trump campaign dollars on the bed while watching the US intelligence feed on a big screen with Mike Pence licking his chops in the corner and 45’s supporters will say ” That’s what it takes to bring back jobs and keep us safe. Just give him a chance.”
President 45 is a wildcard, the least experienced candidate who won the presidency solely thanks to an anarchist vein running through disillusioned Americans, a political strategy best likened to the old philosophy espoused by malcontents of “If I can’t be with her, nobody can.” If democracy won’t work for me, let it all burn to the ground. And there are also a lot of people still running on the high of electing a man all the experts said was ill-equipped for the job and who believe that his talents as a real estate mogul will transfer to creating jobs in places he’d never deign to visit. Trump’s populist wing will be disenchanted when things don’t get better (and likely get worse) over the next couple years. And the Republican establishment in Congress and the Senate, who showed their distrust and dislike for the man until they realized he could manipulate the masses better than any of their buttoned-down asses ever could, don’t know how to handle the man. Certainly, they’ve learned that they don’t have the foxy savvy to engage him in the public arena, where he’s convinced a large chunk of America that facts are merely inconvenient hurdles. Hell, even right now Trump’s tweeting that America should investigate Sen. Chuck Schumer’s ties, a blatant misdirection to an irrelevant topic that anybody with half a brain would see as a bid for cover from a desperate man. But 45 is unlike any American leader we’ve ever had.
With Sessions, Trump’s shit has again hit the fan but the fan for now has resigned itself to taking all the shit heaped at it on the hopes that the orange man will come through with a screwdriver and some industrial polish and make it like new. Give it two years, when the proverbial fan can no longer deny that it’s buried in a pile of human excrement, and then bring up a well-researched treasure trove of the countless geopolitical indiscretions committed by these men to destroy American democracy for their own profit; that’s when Trump and his contingent will be rode out of town on a flaming rail. Until then, I can’t see our hue and cry doing much. Maybe it’ll get Sessions kicked out of the AG seat. But I’m sure 45 will find another monster to take his place and appeal to the disenfranchised forgotten of white working class America.
Then again, there’s a good chance this won’t even lead to Sessions’ resignation. General Flynn’s mea culpa was a black eye; 45 isn’t a man accustomed to accepting two. And Trump knows a secret: He doesn’t have to listen to anybody. Just call it fake news and say the real criminals are the ones leaking information, even though during the campaign he was quick to applaud the Hillary leaks and even ask Russia to dig up more. Hypocrisy and provable denial of facts and colluding with foreign powers and lying under oath, things that under former presidents would have been considered impeachable offenses (or at least worthy of distrust), just don’t seem important to the only people who can truly kick the man out of the White House, the purveyors of popular opinion who’ve stormed the Republican party and the lawmakers accustomed to suckling at the government teat of anti-liberal outrage for so long they don’t know what to do when that strategy backfires on them (well Paul Ryan just keeps rambling on about repealing Obamacare as even Mitch McConnell is getting cold feet because now that Obama is out and the racists have realized repeal could lead to them being uninsured, they’re good with the ACA). Many US citizens are perfectly content to put their party before America as a nation, calling themselves patriots as they ignore the death of one standard democratic procedure after another. Such is the state of the nation right now, a whirling dervish of blindly loyal sheep sitting atop a pile of excuses for any crime the president or his cronies may have committed. The sooner we liberals realize that, the sooner we can start working on a new strategy to take back the country formerly known as the United States of America. Hammer and tongs won’t work right now.
