A Different World

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Never-Trump senator from Arizona, retiring.  Blasts Trump for setting a bad tone in politics.

The Washington big-shots still don’t get it.  We didn’t vote for Trump because he was crass, we voted for him even though he was crass.  We voted for him because he wasn’t Jeb or Mario or any of the other appeasers quietly going along with Hillary’s coronation.  We voted for him because he was willing to push back against the endless slanders issued by Democrats, the media, academia and Hollywood against ordinary, decent, law-abiding, hard-working, tax-paying Americans.

Trump is not the swamp, senator, he’s the guy we hired to drain the swamp and you’ve been standing in his way.  Don’t let the door hit you . . . .

Joe Doakes

Hard to pick who to like less.

47 thoughts on “A Different World

  1. Flake got elected during the Tea Party wave, but, once he got in, he became a traitor to the movement.

    Among his failings, he voted against defunding both Obamacare and Planned Parenthood. He complained about what the GOP has become, yet he’s part of the problem.

    Good riddance I say.

  2. I really like how he (a) spoke against Trump while (b) refusing to do the one thing he could have done to stop him–staying in the Senate. Flake’s well-named, but he’s no dummy, and he’s simply trying to put lipstick on the pig that he’s either electorally doomed, or the fire simply isn’t in the belly anymore.

  3. K-Street Paydays beckon Flake – he doesn’t like begging for money, he’d rather Demand it.

  4. When Flake was elected to congress back in ’03 he promised to self limit to 3 terms the time he’d spend in the job. He had a change of heart on that promise and stayed as a rep till ’13 when he won the senator seat. Like so many once he got a taste for Washington he wasn’t going to let it go until the handwriting was on the wall that he’d likely be called home by the Arizona voters. Seems he’s going to bang the drum some before he grabs the greyhound and heads for home.

  5. Hired and fired in four months. Unlike the long and storied history of the Clintons and the Podesta’s.

  6. No smoking gun for you, Emery!
    How much is Mueller paid to bag low-hanging fruit, anyhow?
    I’m not a lawyer and I could have indicted Manafort and Papadopolous. Or Podesta, it goes without saying.

  7. Keep in mind that Papadopolous, the Trump campaign aid and foreign policy advisor, who pled guilty to lying to the FBI, was arrested in July. This is the end of Oct…He has been a cooperating witness for months.

    A new definition of MAGA:
    “Many Are Getting Arrested.”

  8. As long as “many” = 2.
    Manafort has been saying for months he would be indicted — he knew that he was the low hanging fruit. He will be a tough nut to crack, by all accounts.

  9. Now we here that Tony Podesta today resigned from his lobbying company in lieu of being investigated by Mueller.

    Emery, will he become part of your new MAGA definition?

  10. I wonder what Trump was thinking when he hired Manafort, who had for years made a successful living running disinformation campaigns to make despots look good?

  11. Well, what did they get right here? No links to Trump, no corroboration of the Steele dossier, clear links to Hilliary and the DNC….sorry Emery, but the MSM have not exactly been covering themselves with glory, and they’ve fallen for a LOT of nonsense.

    And now the Podesta group appears to be linked, which again, points directly back at the Democrats and even Barack. MDAGA, one might hope and pray.

  12. Emery: “It’s amazing how much the “fake news” gets right, isn’t it?”

    Well CNN may have been right about an indictment today. But they had to get an illegal leak of the GJ indictment to get there.

  13. If Americans truly wanted the swamp drained, they would give Mueller a 10 year special investigation in Washington with a unlimited budget. Both parties would have people indicted. And I have no doubt he would do a fine job.

  14. Well, he certainly did back when he had the first evidence of wrongdoing regarding Russia back in 2009 and 2010, didn’t he, Emery? Oh, wait, that one didn’t get legs because the obvious target of the investigation would have been Secretary of State Hilliary Clinton and her boss. My mistake!

    Sorry, Emery, but Mueller’s record, and Comey’s, and Rosenstein’s, does not inspire confidence that this investigation is going to be anything but a witch hunt.

  15. BB, you’re beginning to sound like the partisans who whined about the GOP Benghazi “witch hunt”.

  16. No, Emery, it’s simply that amazingly, Mueller and Comey didn’t find anything even worth a grand jury when it was issues that might have embarrassed Obama–not fast & furious, not the IRS, not Benghazi, not Clinton’s meeting with Lynch on the tarmac, not Clinton’s storage of classified information, nothing–and now they’re building a case more or less off of not filing a required form, and not apparently related to any allegations against the President except for the possibility of squeezing out information from someone just convicted of lying to investigators.

    It’s a pattern.

  17. Two things:
    1) Trump had as his campaign chairman (Manafort) a man who had allegedly served for years as an unregistered foreign agent for a puppet government of Vladimir Putin, a man who was allegedly laundering remarkable sums of money even while running the now-president’s campaign, a man who allegedly lied about all of this to the FBI and the Justice Department.
    2) A member (Papadopoulos) of Trump’s campaign team admits that he was working with people he knew to be tied to the Russian government to “arrange a meeting between the Campaign and the Russian government officials” and to obtain “dirt” on Hillary Clinton in the form of thousands of hacked emails — and that he lied about these activities to the FBI. He briefed President Trump on at least some of them.

    Things are only going to get worse from here.

  18. Yes, Emery, I believe that the testimony of a man convicted of lying to investigators is going to have HUGE credibility before a court. Just YUGE.

    Notice, by the way, that the thing Mueller wanted to keep secret remained secret. The rest seems to be sneaking out to the press. This suggests….ahem….that the leaks are intentional.

  19. It is hard to overstate how locked down the Mueller probe has been. When an investigation reaches a certain point defense attorneys become involved. They are not barred from talking to reporters the way the prosecution side is. There are far fewer leaks than past probes. We don’t know where this is headed. Neither does anyone else.

  20. “Things are only going to get worse from here.”

    Yes, yes they are. If you’re a Dem.

  21. “It is hard to overstate how locked down the Mueller probe has been.”
    Manafort said he was going to be indicted. Someone leaked indictment timing to CNN. It may be that there is nothing to leak, no BOOM! may mean no bombshells.

  22. There are two dimensions to today’s indictment that are hard news and do not require speculating about who is next.

    Hard evidence. First, the Papadopoulos guilty plea is a plea agreement signed by the participant and the document names three Trump campaign officials:  “…three more senior, unnamed officials with the Trump campaign, whom the plea refers to separately as a “high-ranking campaign official,” a “senior policy advisor,” and a “campaign supervisor.”  Accordingly, the federal prosecutors know the names of these officials. So the links between the Trump campaign and efforts to collude with Russians close to or part of the Russian government are now factual, not speculative. Therefore, President Trump’s tweets about no collusion are false. This also means that there are three more persons to be revealed–one presumes at a future date and possibly with their own signed plea agreements. 

    So one ring of evidence being assembled looks like a stack of plea agreements signed by Trump campaign officials. One can further infer that the Mueller prosecutors have troves of documents and there will be many witnesses who will have to be truthful about their testimony or risk having to plead guilty to lying to federal investigators. 

    Sleazier than Watergate. With regard to Paul Manafort, his indictment, and future trial if it comes to that, are a huge headline about the tawdry money corruption surrounding Trump personally and the Trump campaign and a host of Trump officials. Manafort is like the teapot to a new Teapot Dome scandal. And the more Trump tweets about all of this, the more he repeats in front of the public the sleaze and corruption of Washington’s pay-to-play money politics. The money laundering and tax evasion also might touch close to home for many others in the Trump entourage. The Republican Congress has to be increasingly uneasy about the fatal attractions of its relationship with Trump.

    Next year’s headlines look to be a parade of gridlock on the policy front, failing wars abroad, and lurid charges from investigations and judicial proceedings. 

  23. Emery, the guys that Papadoulos named would have been the other guys invited to a meeting that never occurred, a meeting that had it occurred would have (like Obama’s pre-election jaunts to Europe and Asia) broken no laws. The only way those guys get indicted is if Mueller has information indicating they lied to his investigators, which would depend on his investigators asking specifically about a meeting that never occurred.

    It’s possible, I guess, but I’m not betting my lunch money on it.

  24. As long as “many” = 2.

    Well, eTASS-BFL-SPM has always had a problem with math and logical constructs..

  25. My, my… eTASS-BFL-SPM is so fired up he had to get both of his sock puppets to address this thread. Alas, both sides of his mouth are blowing hot air, and not much more. This is Scooter, all over again. Only Manafort will be putting up a fight and I hope will take Podesta along with him.

  26. I suspect Mueller knows that the path to unmasking Trump is through money laundering, tax evasion and other illegalities. The law allows people to mask their identities when they purchase real estate through LLCs. The whole industry is an invitation to corruption and Trump invented the category.

  27. And yet, sock puppet #1, after 6 months of investigation and millions of taxpayer dollars down the drain, a partisan hack with a conflict of interest have not been able to unearth a scintilla of evidence in the matter he was supposed to investigate. Not… A… One… But absence of facts never stopped you from leaving in a fantasy world. You are indeed a product of complete and utter brainwashing by people whose tenets included “Show me a man and I will find you a crime”. Ha! You probably think I am giving you a compliment! Keep on, cupcake. Can’t wait to see what sock puppet #2 will come up with. Or will you have to register another one to spread your lies and innuendo?

  28. Emery, I’m going to offer another possibility; Mueller is becoming painfully aware that after over a year of FBI investigation and his office’s investigation, he’s got bupkus except for this, and he’s desperate for scalps to hang from his spear.

    Plus, if indeed the law allows one to hide one’s identity in overseas transactions, as you claim, you have just revealed a big part of Paul Manafort’s defense strategy. One does not have to like his work with despots or his millions of dollars in clothing and jewelry to realize that Bob Mueller has an uphill battle to convict here.

  29. BB, tell me, how long do you “believe” it’s been since Mueller’s investigation started?
    (hint: 5/17/2017)

  30. Emery, the FBI investigation started in July 2016. It was only transferred to Mueller’s office this year. So yes, with a whole bunch of moves of dubious ethics, it’s been over a year with nothing to show for it except for a couple of charges of lying to investigators and failing to file required forms. If that is a showstopper, we should all be in jail.

  31. BB, do not confuse eTASS with facts. He gets ornery when faced with facts. He gets confused and flustered and has to pour over his talking points to see far he has to move the goal posts and deflect before responding. So it will take a while. You have time to grab a beer and watch Astros send Dodgers packing.

  32. I have to say I like the Mueller approach. No empty BS, just quiet, professional work with solid deliverables. Pretty much the exact opposite of the Trump approach (no results, just constant BS).

  33. solid deliverables

    Well, a turd knows when he sees another. It’s like shooting trolls under a bridge. Truly. What a maroon.

  34. Emery, indictments on “failure to provide required paperwork” are solid deliverables in an investigation that purports to be investigating foreign meddling in our elections? Are you )(*&)(&)( serious? You might as well say that a homicide detective is doing his job well because he gave me a speeding ticket.

  35. Okay, you’ve convinced me. Let recalibrate my position:
    I don’t think it’s illegal to use information provided by somebody else, even if that somebody else is a foreign power. It’s illegal to ask them to steal the information or to aid them in so doing, and it’s illegal to pay for the information with money or promises, but those are going to be hard to prove. Collusion requires knowledge or cooperation in an illegal act. Simply publishing information provided free of charge by somebody who illegally obtained that information isn’t necessarily collusion. If The Economist or WikiLeaks published excerpts from Democratic party emails (which they did) obtained as a result of Russian hacking, only the Russians have committed a crime. Trafficking in stolen goods is not a crime if the goods are information of public value. It will be hard to nail anyone in the Trump campaign for that. The indictments handed down are for lying to the FBI and crimes committed before the campaign. They’re trying to get somebody to testify to collusion or quid pro quo in return for a reduced sentence, but it’s quite likely that there was no collusion in the hacking and no promises made. The Russians probably approached the campaign after the hacking was already complete. It’s hard to believe that the Trump campaign masterminded any of the Russian attempts to sway the election, because they just don’t seem competent enough. This all just makes the Trump campaign odious, not criminal.

    It is odious to take assistance from a foreign power as part of an election, but half the country thought that publishing the Pentagon Papers was ethically dubious and only the Rand Corp. employee who leaked was guilty of a crime. Half the country, including many Sanders supporters, thinks that the Democratic Party emails were worth publishing. The press released the emails in any case, not the Trump camp. Odious does not rise to the level of treason, or to any other crime. If there’s no crime here other than the crime of hacking by Russian spies, Muehler will only succeed in being a nuisance to Trump, while perhaps enlightening us as to how Russia tries to influence foreign elections through legal and covert means.

    I’m not defending the Trump campaign’s actions. I just don’t see this investigation threatening Trump.

  36. tl;dr – here is a quick summary:

    Let recalibrate my position: = Moving the goal posts.

    Going from “Trump the Grand Colluder” to I just don’t see this investigation threatening Trump.

    That is all. Short and sweet and proving yet again how illogical, unscrupulous, dense and intellectually dishonest eTASS-BFL-SPM is.

  37. Emery: “odious?? odious?? Given your rant you’ve gone from unserious to just plain blithering.

  38. Scott, more like from blithering to dithering. And that is on top of being odious and dubious. Again, providing more and more reason to tl;dr everything and anything he says. And of course, once you ignore the rants, everything else eTASS-BFL-SPM says are lies and innuendo.

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