So, I am home! In immortal words, often used by me: “Honey I am Home”. Personal Driver, (what and where would I be without him) met me at the airport, rather essential since he had my extra set of keys and I put my set of keys somewhere ‘safe’ in my luggage and cannot find them. I am not unpacked as yet – so their presence is still unknown. But they are there somewhere. I have basically been sleeping since my return. Hours and hours and hours. Personal Driver has called twice to see if I am Ok – I am. It is a miracle that I am – the plane trip back on Emeritus Air was a nightmare, arriving at the airport unbelievable. A miracle to get my luggage and hell, even knowing the owner and paying for my own upgrade did not help. $2300 the upgrade and screaming children reduced the plane to sheer chaos. Staff did nothing to sooth the children and when I attempted – I was made the problem. Not fond of your Air Emeritus – the landing so bumpy and awful that I screamed. Need I remind you all, that I know the owner, well the owner’s son but he has appeared to assume responsibility in Dubai.
Anyway, enough of me and onto Trump.
“The New Yorker, my precious source of information, kept me up to date with things in the following manner.An absolutely brilliant article by Susan Glassner, you shall read of her brilliance. It was only a couple hours into the first day of arguments in the Senate impeachment trial of Donald John Trump when Adam Schiff, the lead House manager prosecuting the case, summed up the day’s proceedings. The Senate’s proposed process for the trial, he said, was simply “ass-backwards,” requiring the House to present its case before considering whether to call witnesses and demand White House documents that Trump has been withholding.
Schiff’s edgy remark caused a jolt in the chamber. Senators who had been nodding off or staring down at their legal pads suddenly looked up. But it turns out that you can swear like that on the Senate floor. Schiff wasn’t even the first person to use the phrase, although David Vitter, the former senator from Louisiana, got in trouble back in 2008 when he did, and he had the remark stricken from the official record. Whether or not it was appropriate, in a stodgy institution that does not even allow reporters to wear denim in its hallowed chamber, Schiff’s remark certainly was incisive and to the point.
But after many hours of debate on Tuesday afternoon and evening, the Republican rules proposed by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell finally prevailed, in a party-line vote, as Schiff knew they would. Backwards it will be. A trial may not be a trial without any testimony, but that is how the Senate will proceed with this one. “Have you ever heard of a trial that doesn’t have evidence? That doesn’t have witnesses?” Zoe Lofgren, another one of the House managers, asked.
The first day of the Senate trial did not definitively answer those questions, which, under McConnell’s rules, will simply be deferred until sometime next week, at which time there may or may not be four Republicans who choose to join with Democrats and call for the blocked Trump Administration witnesses to testify. But Day 1 was not significant because McConnell managed to win on the rules. He had the votes, and everyone knew he would win. Tuesday was a remarkable day nonetheless, and the real news was what the lawyers for Trump finally had to say about the case.
Ever since the Trump impeachment inquiry began, in September, the White House has declined to offer a formal defense, if one excludes all-caps tweets from the accused. But refusing to participate is no longer an option now that the Senate trial is actually happening. Trump’s lawyers not only showed up but very much showed their hands, offering a defense of Trump that was very much like the President himself: loud, intemperate, personally nasty, ad hominem, factually challenged, and often not even bothering to have a tenuous connection to the case at all. When the White House counsel Pat Cipollone and Trump’s personal attorney, Jay Sekulow, addressed the Senate, the volume went up in the chamber; the tone changed. As we watched from the press gallery, it was as if we had become the audience in an entirely different play. Why should there be no witnesses or documents produced in the trial? Listening to Cipollone and Sekulow, it was hard to tell.
They barely used the word “Ukraine” or even bothered to talk much about Trump’s “perfect” phone call with the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, for that matter. They mentioned the Mueller investigation—repeatedly—though that is not a subject of the impeachment articles. They made false claims, including that Republicans had been excluded from the depositions in the House “basement” that were taken by the House Intelligence Committee. Cipollone attacked Schiff by name, in personal terms, within a minute of beginning his first remarks at the trial, which was striking, if not entirely surprising, given that Cipollone is representing Trump, whose campaign is currently marketing on its Web site thirty-four-dollar T-shirts mocking Schiff as a “Pencil-Neck.”
The House managers came prepared on Tuesday with digital slides and graphics. They listed witnesses they’d like to call, such as the former Trump national-security adviser John Bolton, who called the Ukraine scheme a “drug deal,” and documents they’d like to subpoena. They presented video clips, including one of President Trump that they played twice, in which he argued that the Constitution gives him the right to do whatever he wants. But Trump’s legal team did not bother with anything like that. Cipollone and Sekulow had no video clips, no slides. They did not have to. They had the votes.”
So I have just returned from Dubai – a more detailed and intelligent observation will be made with the assistance of CPI BUT Dubai is essentially a dictatorship with an extremely beneficent dictator, but nonetheless a dictator. Beneficient: Benevolent, charitable, altruistic, humane, humanitarian, neighbourly, public-spirited, philanthropic; generous, magnanimous, munificent, unselfish, ungrudging, unstinting, open-handed, free-handed, free, liberal, lavish, bountiful, benign, indulgent, kind; literary bounteous; rare benignant. ANTONYMS unkind, mean..
But then what they do in Dubai is ENFORCE their laws. Therefore no crime, no dirty deeds, no nothing. Stupid USA enforce your stupid laws – laws that you interpret to allow guns and deaths – in Dubai gun control laws that are rigidly enforced. I am back in this country but perhaps not for long. Get it together you idiots. I shall support Elizabeth Warren in her candidacy and do the best I can to do so But if stuck with another fucking loser – it is good bye USA.
