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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsWhy the President Must Be Impeached... The Swamp is Not Going to Drain Itself
Rebecca Solnit: Why the President
Must Be Impeached
The Swamp is Not Going to Drain Itself
By Rebecca Solnit
The other evening, when the air quality had become too poor to go outside because my state was burning, sitting in a window facing another of those apocalyptic red suns going down wed gotten used to here, on the week that the president unleashed more coal on the world and thus more of the climate change driving the trouble that afflicted oceans and upper atmospheres and, while the wildfires burned the lungs of asthmatic children, I turned again to the chaos and destruction emanating from the White House.
The commission of a crime is not normally the coverup for another crime, but if they keep them coming, its hard to keep your eye on any one or keep track of them all, or so it seemed on that day last week when the president had tweeted out some white supremacist bullshit about South African land expropriation, which maybe distracted people from the fact that about 36 hours earlier his fixer and lawyer had named him as a coconspirator in a felony; it was one of hundreds of racist dogwhistles and shouts hed broadcast while some people waited for evidence that he had said the n-word as though his constant insults to black people from Maxine Waters to LeBron James to Congressman and civil rights hero John Lewis and his attacks on Latinos and immigrants and voting rights were not enough, for it was also a day that the White House had, with a tweet, turned the murder of a young white woman into an attack on undocumented immigrants even though the alleged murderers immigration status was unclear and there had been a more recent and more spectacular murder by a native-born straight white man, who killed his pregnant wife and daughters and dumped the little girls bodies in oil tanks belonging to his employer, Anandarko Petroleum, that no one made into an indictment of that murderers category, because collective punishment is never for straight white men (and should not be for anybody).
But you couldnt stay focused on the racism alone with the many kinds of destruction which also, at times, felt like a distraction from the crimes, and that the law was getting closer to the crimes was clear, as was the presidents fear, for he had put out another of his all-caps tweet at 1am the night before about collusion and witch-hunts, those constant refrains of his, because his lies were the only transparent thing about his administration.
He was a man who was forever lying and whose lies could not help but point toward the truth he was anxious about trying to cover up, incapable of leaving alone, like a murderer returning to the crime scene, like a dog returning to its vomit, like an elephant in the room, stomping and roaring (and I often thought of him as being something like a bull elephant that state of enraged excitement called musth, with his staff trying to herd him away from his most destructive impulses while fearing getting trampled, for the news was forever full of stories of their attempts to gingerly dissuade, to nudge away, to redirect, to correct, and of all the ways they worked around him, and the fact that he is ignorant, incompetent, and often out of touch with what is legal and eager to violate the law, a state that would disqualify any other office holder, and even his statement after the Cohen verdict, that I have seen it many times. I have had many friends involved in this stuff. Its called flipping and it almost ought to be illegal, was not only the language of gangstersTrump goes full Gotti Vanity Fair put itbut oblivious about why presidents shouldnt talk like gansters about opposition to cooperation with the federal government, though that remark too had no obvious repercussion).
It was the week that the Washington Post got tired of calling his lies misstatements and untruths and got down to saying lie in an article also noting that he had committed, by their count 4,229 lies during his time in office.
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beachbum bob
(10,437 posts)anchor around the neck of GOP for the 2020 blue tidal wave too