O Say Can You Please Entry 17

O Say Can You Please Entry 17: Smash Gordon
The Trump White House right now...
Image Source: Twitter (@redrawings)
    No, Mr. President, this is far from fine. This is a sinking ship 500 miles from any land. This is like surviving three lightning strikes. This is a Richter 10 earthquake. This is what it took for America to even have a shot at ousting you. That “this” will be covered on today’s O Say Can You Please.
    Gordon Sondland, Ambassador to the EU, testified today as part of the impeachment inquiry into President Trump. The consensus regarding his testimony is that it was pivotal in the case for impeachment, at the very least. Many a Trump supporter’s bubble should’ve been burst today. In fact, I am decently sure that quite a few were. If you are a Trump supporter whose bubble wasn’t burst, this is your only warning. I’ve got the pin to pop them all.
    Now, I should probably stop stalling and get to the testimony. There is a transcript inserted into a Vox article, and all the information that I’ll state is found there. The first point Sondland makes is that the State Department has been hiding unclassified documents from the House committees in charge of the inquiry. If this is true, this is exactly what Nixon tried to do to cover Watergate up, and we all know how that turned out. I’m not saying that it will end up that way, but it very well could.
    Now, we get to the interesting parts. To open this up, he states that he was basically forced to work on matters relating to Ukraine by the President, and that wording might be underselling it. However, it gets worse because those orders included working with Rudy Giuliani against his will. That way, an opportunity could be made to improve relations with Ukraine. However, the thing with Giuliani was that he had associates at the time who are now under indictment. He then said that he didn’t think -- given what he knew -- that the incredibly illegal thing he was doing was indeed incredibly illegal. He told all the relevant agencies as a result, so at least the procedure was regular.
    Then, Sondland testified that Giuliani’s requests to Ukraine were indeed a quid pro quo. Those requests included that Ukraine’s leader, Zelensky, publicly announce various investigations, including one of the infamous DNC server that was hacked back in 2016. He then talks about how the suspension of aid to Ukraine in August was a bad idea, which it totally was. Then, he decided to report the concerns about a potential quid pro quo to a GOP Senator and the Ukrainians. This proves the legitmacy of the accusations leveled at Trump by the Democrats to a degree. The jury’s still out on bribery, but quid pro quo and extortion did actually happen. This is a bombshell because it means that there’s probable evidence to prove the hypothesis that there is more to this than a bunch of salty Democrats.
    What does this mean for President Trump? Well, let’s just say what happens next probably won’t be pretty. For one thing, the case for actual impeachment just got quite a bit stronger. Now that there is likely real evidence of major wrongdoing, Trump’s presidency may be in jeopardy, especially if the Ukraine incident is deemed to have been bribery. Bribery is explicitly listed in the Constitution as impeachable, so he’s in 50 feet deep if that judgement is reached. If not, he is still in major trouble, but a Republican Senate will almost certainly save him then. Still, Trump’s situation just got a lot more dire.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Up To Date Entry 17: Critical Condition

Image
  Up To Date With Ethan Callender Entry 17: Critical Condition Once again, I can’t fathom how long it has been since the last blog entry. However, I have recently started posting political memes on the blog’s official Instagram. I created this page back in September to promote the blog to who I hoped would be a new audience. Sadly, I haven’t found the time for many consistent entries since then, but perhaps the memes will make the waits between entries more worth it. Pictured below is the most recent, and by far the least partisan, example, with Sen. Joe Manchin getting called out for effectively keeping the filibuster intact. Recently, however, an issue so complex that memes won’t do it justice has inspired me to write my first blog entry in two whole months. That issue is not voting rights, and not related to the filibuster. Rather, it is about critical race theory, an established school of thought long present in higher education. And now, as America’s younger and/or more...
Read more

Up To Date With Ethan Callender Entry 25: Double Manchin

  Up To Date With Ethan Callender Entry 25: Double Manchin Senator Joe Manchin is a Congressman tasked with representing the people of West Virginia. This is no easy task by itself, especially as a Democrat in such a Republican-leaning state. However, Manchin has completely failed at this task in the most spectacular way possible. By rejecting Biden’s Build Back Better plan recently, he is obviously trying to appease the Republicans in the Senate, and yet he has failed to please anybody in either party in this past year. He has become the Senator that both politicians and the masses alike love to hate, and he has even blatantly annoyed and angered President Biden and his administration. How did America get to the point where one maverick Congressman could hold up an entire agenda? What is the deal with Joe Manchin? For one thing, it’s worth noting that Manchin is a career politician with a longstanding reputation for being a rather conservative Democrat. Before joining the Sen...
Read more

O Say Can You Please Entry 16

Image
O Say Can You Please Entry 16: To Tweet or Not to Tweet (That Is Our President)     The New York Times just published an incredibly interesting article on our current President’s history on Twitter . That may not seem very important, but Trump has an extensive catalog of ridiculous tweets. These include -- but are not certainly not limited to -- incidents of bullying, wacky conspiracy theories, and befuddling typos. It’s a dumpster fire of unintentional self-parody, and I (along with many others) see an opportunity to riff on it and wait for the inevitable “#MAGA” comments. Let’s just get on with this.     The article opens by detailing the evolution of “#FakeWhistleblower.” It was first tweeted out by an obscure far-right account that has tweeted in support of the QAnon conspiracy theory . This fringe online movement believes that the world’s elite are all liberal, Satanic pedophiles, and that President Trump is the only one who can stop them from sta...
Read more