When I’m old and gray and lounging by the fire I will think back on that day, of things the man said, and couldn’t say, {maybe} and will it be a turning point? Well, course I hope I have much better things to look back on, but I do believe that testimony had a bunch of threads that once pulled have a great potential to unravel everything Trump has so carefully secreted away for decades. I think so, but I don’t have a crystal ball.
To be honest, I understand Cohen’s of the world, the Trumps, the ones who are far more complex than the rest, as I lived with one for 4 years. I learned the hard way how dangerous it is to misjudge them, underestimate them, you can easily be misled, and so it is with skepticism I watched the Cohen Hearing.
Matthew 7:5 KJV
5: Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.
I’m not generally a religious person, but I kept hearing those biblical words in my head every time a GOPeeper poked his head up. Bears remembering, even though they seem just completely lost; to be honest, I almost feel sorry for them.
Perhaps for me, the biggest take away was that the old guard, those old white men who think they still run the show are mere “whitewash” in this new Congress. No, in fact, real change won’t happen in America till they can finally scrape away these toxic politicians with their racist backward lead paint ideas and thinking, tired rhetoric and holier than thou BS they trot out that rings completely and utterly hollow.
We are the hollow men
T.S. Eliot
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;
It will be via the younger members of Congress that change will happen, the new guard will be those who drag the dusty wings of democracy from the sewer of these old hollow men. In spending their precious time in attacking Cohen as a liar, they, the GOP members of the committee, completely missed his warning, and to their peril.
They were warned, and not one single Republican can say when the walls come tumbling down, and eventually, they will fall, not one of them can say they were not warned that defending this man could very well mean their doom.
Everything the 45th touches is doomed, the man has left a wake of bodies behind, of those he’s trashed. A time of reckoning is on its way, I believe, and it will be important for them to perhaps re-align their loyalties soon in order to protect their stinky white bums. I don’t know why they think their destiny will be any different from the man who sat before them.
If this hearing is any gauge, they are not there yet.
But, they may just choose to go down with the ship, and I’m sure a lot of Democrats are grinning ear to ear at the prospect of a complete collapse of the GOP.
Everyone but them seems to understand that Trumps like a big wrecking ball, and he is so far emboldened in his own greatness, so far up on his high horse that when he finally comes tumbling down it will be catastrophic and dangerous for everyone around him – Cohen is just the canary in the coal mine.
Because if reports are accurate, the Trump “organization has never had a proctology exam like it’s about to get,” Bloomberg’s Timothy O’Brien told me shortly after watching Cohen’s testimony [ AXIOS ].
Here’s what Trump’s businesses face:
ibid
Five House committees (Financial Services, Intel, Judiciary, Oversight, Ways and Means) plan to look at Trump’s business deals and finances.
The state of Maryland and the District of Columbia are suing Trump, alleging he violated the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution by taking gifts from foreign governments through his properties.
The New York attorney general has a lawsuit against the Trump Foundation, alleging Trump misused his charitable foundation in a “shocking pattern of illegality.” Cohen may have bolstered that case yesterday.
The Southern District of New York has dealt with Trump Organization executives in its investigation of Cohen.
And that’s the tip of the iceberg.
They disregard Cohen at their peril, the man has a lot more he could lose, and he could have just kept his trap shut and quietly skulked off to jail and licked his wounds and went on with his life. But he didn’t. Instead, he agreed to testify, meaning he has just ratcheted up the trolls and bots and trash the trump loyalists are going to throw at him, endangering his family more than they are already, for what purpose? What does he gain? A book deal? Made for TV movie? And, em, what’s their point? That he’d lie even more and risk spending the rest of his life in prison? For a book deal? That’s a bit lame.
I mean, this guy risked everything for a 72-year-old man still worried about his SAT scores, as Jimmy Kimmel quipped last night, do they really think he’s going to sit there in front of them again and lie?
Notice they didn’t once try to defend Trump, cause they know they couldn’t, they all know full well what their president is, and what he is not. The only choice they had been to attack Cohen’s credibility, and they blew and the blew, and they tried to blow his testimony down, and they failed.
The effect was to make an unsympathetic man modestly more sympathetic. Republicans committed the classic cross-examination blunder: They gave the witness the opportunity to further explain his harmful direct testimony. They provided Cohen with one slow pitch up the middle after another, letting him repeat the cooperating witness’s go-to explanation like a mantra: I did these bad things so often and so long because that’s what it took to work for your guy. I have seldom seen a cross-examination go worse.
The Atlantic – Republicans Committed the Classic Cross-Examination Blunder –Ken White [ Attorney and former federal prosecutor ]
So yesterday was not a complete write off for me, as it was a snowy day and staying in watching the heads on the GOP spin in place was amusing, least for a bit, and significant historically. And the aftermath of this should prove to make for very interesting days and weeks ahead, as the hollow men, those old white guys with their dead eyes, we watch like zombies trailing after that madman of mayhem, seemingly oblivious to what their loyalty to him will get them.
But they were warned.
by PaulaB 