interesting times

Actually the article was written by a woman, Jill Lapore.  It's snowing this morning and I have to get out of here for the cleaning lady, so instead of gadding about downtown I'll sneak into Barnes and Nobles and read an assortment of books while I sip my Starbucks frappocini (or whatever) from its cool glass bottle.  I think I'll see if they have a good book on the writing of the constitution.  It seems I've read about it before, but there is something about the Founding Fathers where they are always presented as noble and wise and far-seeing and always against a background of red white and blue.  But in reality they surely slopped some of their porridge onto those lacy collars in the morning, and had several tankards of ale in the evening.  I mean they were just like us, and we are, well, pretty sloppy.  There has to be an interesting book on the subject.

I should probably read a book on Bill Clinton's impeachment also. It wasn't all that long ago and I remember myself as paying close attention, but now I can't remember the details.  So I guess the democrats will send a team of prosecutors to the house and Trump will be defended by his own team of lawyers, possibly including his favorite gnome?  Interesting because he is a lawyer's worst client.  He will be constantly contradicting his own lawyers and likely hiring and firing them on a daily basis.  I would hope he did this to the extent that some of his base will desert, but not likely I reckon, but possibly, still looking for some light to shine into the valley of death the dems are charging into.

Moscow Mitch will be trying to shut the whole thing down on some procedural vote with that solid wall of solid reps, but right now it seems like a Herculean task, will he even have the prez's support?  The man loves to get into the arena.  We certainly live in interesting times.

These current open investigations are follow ups to the closed investigations.  They were always going to happen and are not an attempt to build public support.  They will be like all those recent open hearings: five minutes of a democrat raving followed by five minutes of a republican ranting,  Interesting at first like the first time you tune in the Jerry Springer show, but after fifteen minutes throwing chairs gets boring.

The dems want to keep it focused like a laser beam on the quid pro quo,   The republicans want to obfuscate.  Right now they are concentrating on the procedural part, namely that the dem's procedure is wrong, and then they don't even have to discuss the quid pro quo, they can yammer about closed investigations, open investigations, unmasking the whistle blower, exotic debunked conspiracy theories and so on and so on.

But Trump does not like this right now, he wants it to be on the quid pro quo, on his Perfect phone call, and now some reps are going to the fall back, that well,  it was ahem, tacky, but not grounds for impeachment, but that is not good enough for His Trumpness who bristles at any action of his being called tacky.  Everything He does is Perfect, to deny it is like denying The Trinity.  Interesting times.


I am aware of the US army after WW I going after the commies in Russia.  They weren't specifically there to aid the Czech Legion who were also there for some nefarious reason.  Without going to the wiki what I recall was that they could no longer make it back traveling west through Europe so they hijacked a train and rode it clear to the the Pacific Ocean raiding for provisions along the way, and the reds were too preoccupied with the current crisis to do anything about it, but since they were leaving didn't make too much of a fuss about it.

There is another story about the Czechs at the end of WW II.  Armies were roving the land and Prague was ripe for plundering and there was this regiment of Nazi soldiers composed of Russkies who had defected to the Germans with nowhere to go.  They made a deal with Prague where they would protect the city in exchange for letting them camp there.  It worked out pretty good for the Czechs, not so good for the Nazi Russkies who were later slaughtered by the reds, but that was always going to happen anyway.

I'm a little shaky on my facts here, and I should look it up, but right now I have to leave the house to see if I can find a book that has the straight skinny on the founding fathers.