Snakes on a Plane -- And Under the Capitol Dome

[babylonsister]

http://prospect.org/article/snakes-plane-and-under-capitol-dome


Snakes on a Plane -- And Under the Capitol Dome
Adele M. Stan
July 12, 2017

For the Republican majority, power trumps truth, and they’re all part of the racket.


To call Donald Trump and his administration corrupt and mendacious is to make the most obvious of statements. Too easy, really. Because if Trump and his boys have tread the path toward treason, so too has the entire Republican Party.

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IF MEMBERS OF THE MAJORITY party in the United States Congress possessed an ounce of allegiance to the country whose constitution they’ve sworn to protect and defend, there would be no hearing, at least not now, in the wake of the latest revelations. But the die was cast, one sees now in hindsight, the minute all those righteous Republicans decided not to oppose, in any meaningful way, the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Karoli Kuns reminded us on Twitter, nixed attempts by investigators in September to coax members of Congress to craft a bipartisan report that would alert the American people that the intelligence services of Putin had corrupted the U.S. presidential campaign with a hacking operation designed to damage the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton. If any such report were to be issued, the patriot McConnell threatened to paint it as an attempt by then-President Barack Obama to tilt the election in Clinton’s favor.

In other words, McConnell knew that Putin, the head of state of a foreign adversary, was working to subvert the democratic process. And he was fine with that.

It appears that he still is. From Politico: “The investigation in the Senate's being handled by the Intelligence Committee, and I'm sure they'll get to the bottom of whatever happened,” McConnell told reporters.

snip//

THE JUNIOR MESS is a tricky one for Vice President Mike Pence, who arrived at his present position through the persuasive powers of Paul Manafort, the Trump campaign manager who was later dumped from that role when the Times revealed his work on behalf of Ukraine’s kleptocratic, Kremlin-backed former president, Viktor Yanukovych. Together with the president’s son and his son-in-law Jared Kushner, Manafort met in Trump Tower with Natalia Veselnitskaya, a lawyer close to the Kremlin who has served as a lobbyist for the lifting of U.S. sanctions on the Russian government. The meeting was framed by the intermediary who arranged it as an offer of opposition research on Hillary Clinton conducted by Russian intelligence operatives. It appears that what was requested in exchange was a lifting of the sanctions imposed on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine.

snip//

But the life of a made man isn’t an easy one. Omerta, that code of silence, is a tough one to keep when one has ambitions of one’s own. The limits of Pence’s loyalties will be tested—but likely not by his former Republican colleagues in Congress, who have shown little interest in protecting the republic from the racket now run out of the White House, which operates on a model crafted by the dons of organized crime. For the Republican majority, power trumps truth, and they’re all part of the racket.

[Solly Mack]

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