I’m not a Political Scientist or Anything...But I think Donald Trump may be in Trouble Here.

Uh oh.

So finally, finally, Trump has been implicated, under oath, of breaking the law.  Cohen has stated in no uncertain terms that he was directed, by "The Candidate", to violate campaign finance law and pay hush money to a playboy model and a porn star with the purposes of influencing the election.

And it's all, I find, rather anti-climatic for me.

It just feels disappointing in a way, doesn't it?  We are 1 year, 215 days, 5 hours, and maybe 30 minutes or so into this shambolic administration (at least, according to -- and I shit you not -- howlonghastrumpbeenpresident.com).  Almost the entire time there has been so much smoke that says collusion and conspiracy, and if it's true, if he actually did it, wouldn't it kind of be amazing? Not by any means good, and not as impressive as eating a whole wheel of cheese, maybe, but still...diabolical.  And in 20 years we'd be like "wow, he really did pull it off, didn't he?  He was terrible, you may as well have elected my cat president, if my cat was a TV-watching diet coke guzzling womanizer who's mind was stuck in the mid 1980's. But all the same he and his little team of waspish cronies pulled it off and nearly brought us to our knees". 

I mean, here's Trump, the man who must win at all costs, selling his soul to the Devil (or maybe rather refinancing the mortgage on it for the third time) to emerge trumpumphrant in an election.  And here are the Russians, who are so ingenious in their own sort of brutal way, butt fumbling into solid gold - a chance to finally bring the west crumbling to its foundation by engineering the election of a Reality TV Star.  The two parties meet, shake hands, get the measure of each other, and hatch a cockamamie scheme to steal the 2016 election that even the A Team would be proud of: intricate, precise, meticulously engineered, with a chance maybe to blow something up; and in the middle of it all is Trump, playing the buffoon populist to the crowd so no one can see him for the suave political operator he actually is, deftly pulling levers behind the scenes with an unlit cigar clenched between his teeth.

But no.  Instead, Trump's reckoning may finally come down simply trying to cover up some sordid extramarital affairs.  It's an old, old, stupid story of pasty, doughy, entitled rich men.  And it's not at all surprising either.  Of course Trump cheated on his wife, of course he cavorted with McDoughal and Clifford Ltd.  He's Donald Trump! Did you expect anything less???  And when those two women saw their chance to cash in (and, please, I think we should give them their money; if I was offered $130,000 dollars just to eat dinner with the man I would think twice about it, and that price is going way, way up if even one stitch of clothing comes off...) they took it, and Trump did what he always does and tried to buy their silence.

And in the normal world of Donald Trump this is perfectly legal, and he's probably done it plenty of times.  But in the world of Donald Trump the candidate it is not, as the rules preclude this kind of thing.  He has been implicated in breaking the law, and then in trying to cover it up he has been possibly obstructing justice.

Will Trump be impeached?  I am not so sure.  Yes, it is the only way, at this point, to hold him accountable for his actions, and by all means he should be.  But impeachment is a political act, and while the House of Representatives may have the votes to kick off the Articles of Impeachment, I am not sure 2/3 of the Senate will actually vote to remove the man while he remains so popular among Republicans.  Of course that assumes that Trump, in a fit of anger, doesn't do anything really stupid, like fire the AG or DAG, or pardon Manafort, or try to shut down the Mueller investigation or start burning books or something like that.

Still, the walls are closing in.  This is not, I believe, the only crime Trump has ever committed, and it certainly shows that he has no ethic at all outside of his own self promotion.  It may be time to make a deal with the master of all deal makers.

So I'm happy to report that I am working out a plan that might get Trump out of a jam and the nation out of a real mess, so that we can all come together to start putting out the dumpster fire that has engulfed our Once Happy Republic.

Because if Trump can be the president (It's still kind of hard to believe we did that, guys) then I can be a political scientist/expert negotiator/savior of the country.

...I'm Back!

Don't call it a comeback!  It's a blog back!  It's the real thing!  It's happening! 

So after a long hiatus I desired to fire up the old blog again, for a number of reasons, but chief among them is the notion that if the world is going to burn down around me, I may as well grab a fiddle and get up on the roof.

There is so much to catch up on, so much has happened, and I'm not in blog shape.  My fingers are stiff from not typing, I'm sluggish, I'm slow, and my wit is dull.  It's going to take a lot of chicken chasing to get back into fighting trim - though I have never been very quick on my feet in an argument; in a rhetorical knife fight I usually reach down into my pocket and pull out a kazoo, which of course is not going to cut it.  

So to kind of kick things off, I'm not adverse to cutting corners and using a prompt.  No cheating, first click totally random, the prompt is....

What are the values you cherish even though they run counter to societal values?

Come on!  You've got to be kidding me.  That is like some kind of prompt for a college essay, or a question that your therapist might ask you.  It is not a prompt for an old, unsuccessful, out of practice blogger trying to kick some dust of his writing boots.  

But I try to be an honorable man so...

You know?  I really respect people who have a love of cheese, but not for those cheeses that are easy to love, like your chedders, your mozzerellas.  I'm talking about people that really love those stinky, funky, fusty cheeses; your Stiltons, your Stinking Bishops, your Époisses de Bourgogne, the ones that I simply cannot appreciate, the ones that really remind you that are basically eating something that came out of a cow's udder that has been allowed to go bad in a very, very precise way.  

So that is not really a value of my own.  The respect I feel for these brave individuals is a value, I suppose, but that is hardly counter cultural.  But the point of a writing prompt is not necessarily to answer the prompt but merely to see where the muse, the spirit, the chicken, leads.  

Today, it has led to cheese.  

And there, we will have to simply let it be.  The worst thing you ever write, are those things left unwritten.  I think this blog post challenges that maxim, but I think you get the idea.  

Until later, 

Nick