We can but hope for a repeat; though more actual punishment.
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My first thought: “Too bad this breaks out while Last Week Tonight is on break. I can’t imagine what John Oliver and his team would have made of it.”
Yeah, I’m a bit jaded.
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It sounds like amateur hour, doesn’t it? This type of thing reminds me of the coup plot in Equatorial Guinea. A bunch of wealthy white dudes form a boys’ club, come up with some secret handshakes and codewords, and play pretend for a while. The Trump administration will play coy with them, the boys’ club will imagine it has tacit approval to do some poorly conceived cloak and dagger work, then the administration will throw it under the bus at the first sign of political inconvenience. It will end with some of their hirelings going to prison and near-embarrassment for the guys at the top.
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This is the same kind of reasoning that led to the list of about a hundred people that the Clintons were supposed to have murdered, something still taken as gospel by large numbers of regular Infowars listeners and other sophisticated voters.
Trump is odious in more ways than I can count. I’m sure he has destroyed lives, even if only by irresponsible decision-making and cheating his suppliers. I’m also sure that if the US goes full-on fascist, he’ll be happy to sit on his imperial golden throne and chuckle while the blackshirts go to town on his political enemies.
But the idea that – before becoming president(*) – he sanctioned or subcontracted cold-blooded murder doesn’t really fit with my picture of the man. I may be giving him and capitalists generally too much credit, but I think that the practice of businessmen murdering their enemies is relatively rare, at least in the US. Even someone as sociopathic as Trump will recognize that the payoff is too small, the risks too large. If you hire someone to kill for you, that person holds your entire future hostage. Trump is too addicted to ‘winning’ to take any risks that he can’t just walk away from (preferably leaving someone else to pick up the tab).
(*) Since becoming president, of course, he’s had access to the full power of the state’s murder apparatus, and has doubtless signed off on plenty of lethal operations. But that’s usually considered a different matter.
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I don’t know. It all sounds a little too “Mission: Impossible” to be real. As the Washington Post recently discovered, there are people shopping crazy stories to try to discredit legitimate news sources.
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When Oliver comes back in February (or if he comes back for a special episode should Trump leave office before then) HBO is going to need to give him the entire evening to cover all the stuff that’s hit the fan since his hiatus started.
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It is fairly easy for me to imagine that not everybody invited to the meeting turned out to be “down with that.” In fact, it is easier for me to imagine that than to believe that Prince would be able to assemble a large group of people that were.
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I was thinking more along the lines of Viktor Yanukovych’s Titushky.
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Ah, but what Trump may not realize is that he could only pardon US federal convictions. A lot of shenanigans are crimes in other jurisdictions. Murder would be a local charge in most cases, for example.
First off, most of his likely targets spend a lot of time in DC – which is Federal jurisdiction. Besides that, it doesn’t really matter whether the pardon really works as long as the guys with blood on their hands think it will.
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liberate tutemet ex inferis
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And Betsy DeVos is the daughter-in-law of Amway billionaires Richard and Helen Devos, who gave a large endowment to the Young America’s Foundation, which pays to parachute alt-right shit-speakers like Milo on universities.
A very in-bred, intertwined family.
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As distinct from Germany in 80 years ago, or the USA periodically (e.g. Irish, Freemasons, Catholics, Chinese, and of course blacks and Jews. Hardly a complete list.)
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“Pompeo” is some dudes name? I thought it was a made up insult, like PETUS.
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The high tech pods they are using remind me of this one:
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Well, this supports what we were taught in my high school biology class about the effects of inbreeding…
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This is interesting but is there another source to collaborate the what is stated by The Intercept?
Except that, if the pardon doesn’t work, they may be willing to testify against Trump in exchange for a plea bargain…
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