The Sure Way To Get Rid of Donald J. Trump

The Democratic Party is currently in a tizzy trying to agree internally on the best way to be rid of U.S. president Donald J. Trump. A faction of the party's Congressional Representatives in the House want to impeach Trump, even though there is no hope of getting the Senate to vote to convict Trump and thus remove him from office, since this requires a vote by two-thirds of the members in that body, and virtually no Republican Senators can be expected to vote to convict their party leader, who is overwhelmingly popular with Republican voters. (Republicans currently are a majority in the 100 seat U.S. Senate.)

The other faction among the Democrats say the only way to remove Trump is by victory in the 2020 presidential election. But that too is problematic. There are 25 Democrats vying for the party's nomination, which surely will create confusion and result in a nominee lacking great stature. Plus, the GOP (Gang Of Plunderers) consistently steals elections, for president, senators, state governors, by underhanded and illegal means. They have even resorted to assassination to grab control of the Senate, as occurred with the murders of Paul Wellstone and Mel Carnahan.

This subversion by the GOP of what little democracy there is in the U.S. has been going on for two decades, and the Democrats never make a peep about it or lift a finger to counter it. Instead they have spent the past three years promoting the gigantic hoax that Russia had a major influence on the 2016 election, that it massively interfered, and that it constitutes an ongoing "threat to our democracy."

Can a political party get any lamer than that?

So with impeachment not a viable method to remove Trump from power, and the Democrats' sorry record in electoral politics, one must consider other alternatives.

So herein, A Modest Proposal.

I was musing on the life of another headstrong and ambitious individual who ruthlessly grabbed the top rung of power in an empire: Julius Caesar, Emperor of Rome.

Caesar, a ruthless general who slaughtered an estimated million people in his conquest of Gaul, committing innumerable atrocities to facilitate the Roman Empire's seizure of the area and the subjugation of its people by such methods as chopping off all the hands of male inhabitants who dared resist being conquered, made himself Emperor by marching into Rome with his army, "crossing the Rubicon" river, as the phrase memorializing his power grab has it.

A group of Roman Senators decided to eliminate this dictator, and did so by luring him onto the Senate floor, where they dispatched him with daggers. The story goes that with his dying breath he rebuked one of the assassins whom he had considered loyal, with the words "Et tu, Brute?" ("And you, Brutus?" by which Caesar meant, even you?)

I thought: what a classy way to free the nation of Trump if Senators would emulate their Roman counterparts of two millenniums ago!

Just imagine the scene: Trump, lying on the floor of the Senate like a beached whale or mortally wounded buffalo, his blood oozing out in an expanding puddle on the marble floor, his killers standing over his body in their expensive suits, observing their handiwork.

If he has any sense of classical history- and he went to "good" schools, so he should- the words on Trump's dying lips could be, "Et tu, Mitch?"

But no way Republican Senators would turn on Trump, whom they fear. Their "base" would surely avenge such treachery against their idol. And they have guns, lots of guns.

So what would Trump gasp out as he lay dying? "Et tu, Chuck?" That makes no sense. He doesn't expect loyalty from Schumer. And Schumer, being a Democrat, is far too timid and compromised to take bold action, ever. So we wouldn't get the wonderful historical bookend, the reverberation from millenniums past, that would make this so satisfying. Besides, the Democrats are renowned for their cupidity, so surely that would stay their hands.

I suppose we'll just have to see if the Democrats let the Republicans steal another presidential election through chicanery, voter suppression, and the like, as they did in 2000, 2004, and 2016.

And if the Democrats "lose" again, they'll just pretend that RUSSIA did it! BLAME IT ON RUSSIA!! THEY'RE UNDERMINING OUR DEMOCRACY!! In fact, they are already preparing the ground to blame an upcoming loss on Russia, running around saying that the "threat" is "still there," and that Trump is "doing nothing to protect our democracy." Various media propagandists and secret police types peddle the same lurid threat-mongering.

It's contemptible and pathetic.

Trump better hope past is not prologue. Sometimes bullies end up badly.

The Wise Emperor Takes His Bodyguards With Him To The Senate

Beware the Ides of March, O Emperor! (Or of April, May, June, etc.)

FBI Finishes Another of Its Specialties, A Sham "Investigation" That Is Actually A Cover-Up

Under pressure from the public, the media, and Democrats, in that order of concern, Trump ordered the FBI on September 28 to conduct a limited "supplemental" background check as an addition to their previous checks that failed to report on Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh's debauched, violent youth.

Kavanaugh has undergone previous such checks in order to work in the Bush White House on sensitive political programs (such as torture) requiring lying and stealth, and when Bush rewarded him by planting him on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, the second most important court in the U.S. that in practice has the final word on many vital matters. (The Supreme Court refuses to even consider 90% plus of the cases litigants attempt to appeal to it. Contrary to popular delusion, one CANNOT "appeal all the way to the Supreme Court." Take four months of vacation time a year, the "Justices" only accept about 90 cases a year for review. And most of those are of minor import.)

The FBI was given just a week to carry out this latest whitewash. It finished two days early, on October 3rd. Senate boss Mitch McConnell then said there would be a vote by the full Senate on October 5th. The single copy of the FBI report would be reviewed in a "secure" room by a few Senators at a time, who would have to memorize its contents. (No cellphones or cameras allowed.) McConnell averred that this was "plenty of time" for the 100 Senators to review the report! ("The" media reported this absurdity matter-of-factly, as if there was nothing wrong with it.)

The FBI only interviewed 6 people: 4 friends of violent criminal Kavanaugh, a friend of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford's ( whom he attempted to rape when she was 15), and Deborah Ramirez, who was molested by Kavanaugh at Yale University. (He shoved his bare genitals in her face.) The FBI ignored a list of 20 corroborating witnesses provided by Ramirez. They also failed to interview Kavanaugh or Dr. Ford. (Sparing Kavanaugh from committing a felony by lying to the FBI, which carries a five year prison sentence. Not that he would have been prosecuted. Unless the Democrats somehow take over the executive branch by winning the presidency. Kavanaugh's squirming evasions when asked repeatedly by a Democratic Senator on the Judiciary Committee if he would call for an FBI investigation clearly shows he is well aware of the peril of talking to the FBI.)

The FBI specializes in sham investigations when state crimes need hiding. Examples includes the CIA assassinations of John Kennedy (1963), Robert Kennedy (1968), Martin Luther King, Jr. (1968), its own massacre of the Branch Davidian cult in Waco, Texas, and numerous political assassinations and other crimes.

U.S. broadcast media has once again done a tremendous disservice by omitting the critical details and instead making it a "he said- she said" story. Not only Kavanaugh vs. Ford, but Republicans vs. Democrats. Republicans say enough time has been wasted (McConnell, and the awful Senator Lindsey Graham, a vicious, rabid cur), Democrats say the investigation was superficial and the vote is being rushed.

McConnell is the same guy who prevented the previous president, the Democrat Barack "The Drone Assassin" Obama from filling a Supreme Court vacancy for almost a year. Which makes McConnell's talk of "wasting time" and his rush now all the more galling. That vacant seat was filled by Trump appointee Neil Gorsuch, the spawn of Reagan EPA head and zealous anti-environmentalist Anne Gorsuch Burford.

Of course Kavanaugh was just one of 25 interchangeable, extreme reactionaries on the list of Supreme Court candidates the loathsome Federalist Society handed to Trump to pick from. Interesting that Trump chose a fellow sexual predator. He must have sensed a kindred soul. It has also been reported that Kavanaugh has lately adopted a "legal theory" of presidential immunity from prosecution- interesting, since he had exactly the opposite attitude when he was a henchman of Kenneth Starr's in Starr's Get Clinton operation. But I guess we must await a greater legal mind to come up with some legerdemain to show why Democratic Presidents should be subject to prosecution but not Republican ones.

Republicans Implacably Determined to Implant a Second Sex Offender on the Supreme Court

We now have credible assertions that Brett Kavanaugh was involved in drugging and gang-raping young women. This is the fourth claim of sexual "misconduct" ("the" media's preferred euphemism for his crimes) against Kavanaugh.

When (or if) he joins Clarence Thomas on the high court, there will be two known sex offenders in effect making laws. Both Thomas and Kavanaugh are extreme misogynists who are champing at the bit to repeal what is left of the weak "right" that women have to terminate their pregnancies instead of being treated as chattel and forced to bear children against their will.

The GOP (Gang Of Plunderers) from their chief, Donald J. Trump, himself a known serial sex offender and adulterer, on down, have responded by attacking the accusers, calling their painful recollections "smears" (a word Trump used and was echoed by Senate boss, the loathsome Mitch McConnell of Kentucky) and avowing that they refuse to "ruin" Kavanaugh's "life" by NOT implanting him on the Supreme Court! (This from reactionary dog, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, on one of the Sunday morning bourgeois political propaganda TV shows September 23.)

So far, we've had Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, who Kavanaugh and his crony Mark Judge tried to rape when she was only 15. This is documented by therapist's notes from 2012. We have a letter from an attorney to Judiciary Committee member Dianne Feinstein, the senior Democrat on the Committee, about complaints from Federal employees against Kavanaugh, which Feinstein suppressed, as she suppressed Dr. Ford's information, refusing even to brief other Democratic Senators when they asked for the information.

Then there was a woman who described Kavanaugh's drunken assaults at Yale University, which included him thrusting his exposed genitals in her face.

Now we have a sworn affidavit from Julie Swetnick, who has a security clearance which she would


lose if she committed perjury by making a false claim. She relates Kavanaugh's involvement in drugging and gang-raping women.

The Republicans' response with each new expose of Kavanaugh has been shriller and more vicious attacks on the accusers, smearing them as politically motivated liars. (Part of their smearing is accusing the victims of "smearing" Kavanaugh, inverting reality.)

Much of "the" media, and not just Murdoch's Minions at Fox "News," are slanting their "coverage" in a sexist, misogynist direction. I will have more on this later.

So the United States under Trump is forcefully erasing what social progress there has been in recent years. Meanwhile, Facebook, Twitter, youtube, and Spotify, in the name of cracking down on "divisiveness," are banning and censoring progressive voices (as well as Alex Jones, the only one banned that "the" media mention). But the divisions are not creations of critics. They are real and fundamental aspects of U.S. society. It is the aggressive attacks on human rights by the reactionary power structure that causes divisions in the U.S., NOT Russian trolls or botnets- contrary to Democratic Party, corporate media, and secret police absurd assertions. Recall that Obama's "Director of National Intelligence," James "Pinocchio" Clapper, commissioned a custom "intelligence report" attacking the likes of RT and Abby Martin for "creating division" in America! What demented, demonic scapegoating by a pathological system!

Your next Supreme Court Justice: Unconvicted Felon Brett Kavanaugh

In the Self-Proclaimed "World's Greatest Democracy," the Candidate With the Most Votes Just Lost

Democrat Hillary Clinton won more votes than Republican Donald Trump, but Trump won because of one of the U.S.' peculiar institutions, the "Electoral College." Presidents are actually elected by "electors," as per the U.S. Constitution. There are 538 of these electors, apparatchiks of the two ruling political parties. Clinton may end up with 2 million more votes than Trump after California is fully counted. (Clinton currently is ahead by 1 million.) But the so-called "popular vote" isn't what elects a U.S. president. The Electoral College vote does, and Trump won there, because he won enough of the 50 states to win a majority of the "Electors." [Later in this essay I explain the system in detail.]

This is the FIFTH U.S. presidential election in which the winner lost. It happened previously in 2000, 1888, 1876, and 1824. In fact, in 1824, the "winner," John Quincy Adams, didn't win the popular vote OR the Electoral College vote.

You would think the need to change this anti-democratic system would be obvious. Apparently it's not obvious to the elites who wield power.  The Democratic Party, having lost in 2000 and 2016, you'd think would be calling for change. But it isn't. Instead its two current leader, Obama and Clinton, immediately called for all citizens to fall in line behind Trump, to respect the "democratic process" and genuflect before the nobility of "our democracy." Obama immediately rushed to invite Trump to the White House and pledged to do his upmost to achieve a smooth transition of power and help Trump have a "successful" presidency.

Needless to say, their rivals, the GOP (Gang Of Plunderers) doesn't return the favor. Trump repeatedly announced his intention to claim he was cheated if he lost the election. ("The system is rigged, Folks!" was one of his repeated lines in the weeks before November 8.) And when Obama was elected in 2008, the Republican Senate leader, Mitch McConnell, announced at the outset that his number one priority was to make sure Obama had a failed presidency. (The U.S. corporate media doesn't want anyone to remember these things, so they don't mention them.) Newt Gingrich, a smarmy opportunist who has attached himself like a barnacle to the Trump ship, practiced the same sort of "politics of destruction," trying to delegitimize the Democratic Party. But it goes back even further, to the post World War II GOP strategy of redbaiting Democrats, which is how Richard Nixon got elected to Congress and to the U.S. Senate, before Eisenhower elevated him to the vice presidency. Even earlier, in the 1930s, reactionary Republicans acted as ideological police against Democrats.

Those who genuinely oppose not just the racist, reactionary, deformed narcissist Trump and the horrible anti-human policies of the GOP, but those of the Democrats and this entire oppressive system cannot look to the Democratic Party to lead an opposition. The top Democrats have already announced their intention not to oppose Trump and the GOP agenda! (Harry Reid doesn't count as he is retiring.) They won't even block the arch-reactionaries Trump has vowed to elevate to the Supreme Court, even though the Republican Senators blocked Obama from filling the Antonin Scalia vacancy for almost a year. The Democrats in general knuckle under to every GOP power play. Plus, the Democrats are a corporate imperialist party that fundamentally opposes real changes in the U.S. system.

Why some people have a hard time seeing this is baffling. The history of the Democratic Party since the extreme racist Woodrow Wilson, who inaugurated the modern U.S. police state with the Espionage Act and the Palmer raids, makes it crystal clear that Democrats are no allies of true progressives. [In fact the Democratic Party was the party of white racism from the 19th century until the 1960s.]

I'm sure almost no non-Americans, and probably most Americans, don't understand the Electoral College. Therefore, here is an explanation.

The U.S. Constitution as originally written set up this crazy system, part of the conscious design to maintain elite class control over political power. In other words, the U.S. was created as a oligarchy, not a democracy. Originally only white male property owners could vote in the U.S.- not even all white men! Women could not vote until 1920, which means as of today they could vote during less than half of U.S. history, and Southern blacks not until the 1960s, with the exception of a few years immediately after the Civil War ended in 1865.

Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution set up the Electoral College. The Xii Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1804, tweaked the College a bit. The Constitution calls for state legislatures to choose the Electors who in turn would vote for U.S. President and Vice President. But problems, such as deadlocked legislatures that couldn't decide on Electors, caused all the states except South Carolina to allow white men generally to vote for the Electors by 1832. South Carolina finally threw in the towel on state legislators having sole voting power for president in 1860, the same year that state became the first state to secede from the U.S., in December.

By the way, for 125 years state legislators picked their states' U.S. Senators, until 1913, when the XVII Amendment switched to "popular" election of U.S. Senators.

Today there are a total of 538 Electors. The Democratic Party and Republican Party choose the Electors. The American people are actually voting for these rival slates of Electors, unbeknownst to them.

These 538 party loyalists actually elect the president. Each state is apportioned a minimum of 3 electors. The number of electors per state corresponds to the number of a state's U.S. Congress people. As each state has two Senators and at least one Representative in the House, each has at least 3 electors. California, the most populous state and thus the state with the most House Representatives in the U.S. Congress, has 55 Electors. With 435 Representatives and 100 Senators (2 per state), that equals 535 Electors. The 3 remaining Electors were granted to the District of Columbia in 1964, 188 years after the United States was declared, when the residents of the capital city of the "World's Greatest Democracy" were finally allowed to vote.

The reason the "popular" vote and the Electoral College votes can differ is quite simple. All but two states gives 100% of their electoral votes to whoever wins the popular vote in the state. They don't have to do this, they could apportion the electoral votes according to the popular vote percentages, as this is entirely up to the individual states. But that is what they do. So say one candidate gets 55% in enough states to win a majority of electoral votes, but only 35%, say, in states he/she loses. They would have fewer "popular" votes nationwide, but a majority in the Electoral College.

The actual election by the Electoral College will occur this December, when the Electors meet in their respective state capitals and in the District of Columbia to vote. Not all of themn are legally bound to vote according to their state's popular vote, but since they are disciplined party hacks, they will. Trump is expected to receive 290 votes (270 required to win) and Clinton 228. The over 7 million votes that went to other candidates (including write-ins not on the ballots) get zero Electoral Votes, as if they don't exist. (The establishment media never mentions these votes, contributing to their invisibility.)

The U.S. territories Puerto Rico, Guam, U.S. Virgin Islands and Northern Mariana Islands, get no votes from the Electoral College because they aren’t states and they don’t have a special Constitutional amendment to recognize them. 4.4 million U.S. citizens live in the territories, a population almost equal to the total of 6 states.  (There are 4.5 million combined in North and South Dakota, Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska, and Delaware.)

Other people who can't vote are millions of people convicted of felonies in states that strip such people (mostly blacks) of the right to vote permanently.

If no candidate wins a majority in the Electoral College, the House of Representatives votes for the next president, and the U.S. Senate for the vice-president. Which in practice would mean the controlling party in each chamber would pick its own party's candidate, barring some weird political deal. This happened just once, in 1824.

In the very first U.S. presidential election in 1789, there was only one candidate- George Washington. See how "democratic" the U.S. was even at the very beginning? I found an interesting article that describes how U.S. presidential politics has really been a battle between competing elites from the very start- and indeed is still today. [1] Rival gangs of rich people and corporate interests cluster around the two oligarchic parties and compete with each other for state power. They use demagoguery and dishonest propaganda slogans and
"ideas" to psychologically manipulate various sectors of the populace to vote for them.

Here is the breakdown of the "popular" vote and the prospective Electoral College tally. Notice that over 7 million voters who voted for someone other than the two candidates of the two-party dictatorship don't count at all, as they get zero Electoral College votes.

http://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/national.php

Here is a useful historical timeline from Wikipedia.org ["Voting rights in the United States." Footnotes at Wikipedia.]

                                            Milestones of national franchise extension

Abolition of property qualifications for white men, from 1792 (Kentucky) to 1856 (North Carolina) — see: Jacksonian democracy.[5]

Citizenship in both the United States and U.S. States by birth or naturalization, 1868 — see: Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Non-white men, 1870 — see: Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Direct election of Senators, 1913 — see: Seventeenth Amendment to the United States Constitution gave voters rather than state legislatures the right to elect senators.[11]

Women, 1920 — see: Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Native Americans (for all who did not already have the vote, which nearly two-thirds did[12]), 1924 — see: Indian Citizenship Act.[13]

Residents of Washington, D.C. for U.S. Presidential Elections, 1961 — see: Twenty-third Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Poll tax, 1964 — see: Twenty-fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution, prohibiting imposition of poll tax in federal elections.

Protection of voter registration and voting for racial minorities, later applied to language minorities, 1965 — see Voting Rights Act of 1965; this has also been applied to correcting discriminatory election systems and districting.

Poll Tax, 1966 — see: Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections, 383 U.S. 663 (1966), prohibiting imposition of poll tax or property requirements in all U.S. elections.

Adults between 18 and 21, 1971 — see: Twenty-sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution,[14] were granted the vote in response to Vietnam War protests which argued that soldiers who were old enough to fight for their country should be granted the right to vote.[11]

Requirement that a person reside in a jurisdiction for an extended period — 14th Amendment; Dunn v. Blumstein, 405 U.S. 330  (1972).[15][16][16]

Washington, D.C., for restoring local elections such as Mayor and Councilmen, after a 100-year gap in Georgetown, and 190-year gap in the wider city, ending Congress's policy of local election disfranchisement started in 1801 in this former portion of Maryland, 1973, — see: D.C. Home rule.

United States Military and Uniformed Services, Merchant Marine, other citizens overseas, living on bases in the United States, abroad, or aboard ship, 1986 — see: Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act.[17]
Finally, here's an interesting paragraph from the Federal Government's National Archives and Records Administration webpage on the Electoral College:

Reference sources indicate that over the past 200 years, over 700 proposals have been introduced in Congress to reform or eliminate the Electoral College. There have been more proposals for Constitutional amendments on changing the Electoral College than on any other subject. The American Bar Association has criticized the Electoral College as “archaic” and “ambiguous” and its polling showed 69 percent of lawyers favored abolishing it in 1987. But surveys of political scientists have supported continuation of the Electoral College. Public opinion polls have shown Americans favored abolishing it by majorities of 58 percent in 1967; 81 percent in 1968; and 75 percent in 1981.

Well, so much for democracy and the "will of the people."

For more details on the Electoral College, see the following:

"U.S. Electoral College: Frequently Asked Questions," National Archives and Records Administration.

"Electoral College, (United States)," Wikipedia.org.

"Breaking down the US elections: Your biggest questions answered," RT, November 8, 2016


1] "Presidential Elections," History.com, website of the History Channel cable TV channel. Oddly for a corporate entity, I've found the articles there mostly pretty objective.