BOOT! EDGE! EDGE!

Pete set up a campaign office in Cedar Rapids today and tons of people stood in the heat to cheer him on. AND I GOT A T-SHIRT!

Yup!

Happy Presidents’ Day to our first 44 presidents!

To impeach or not

Read the article HERE.

I took advantage of my suddenly commitment-free evening to clear out some articles I’d saved to read for a wintry day. This one is epic in scope—block out A LOT of time to read and fully absorb what it says—but it’s a fascinating primer/refresher on the contextual and procedural mechanics of impeachment and how they’ve played out historically to act as potential case law today.

I didn’t realize the Constitution’s complete listing of impeachable offenses is just “Treason, Bribery, or other High Crimes & Misdemeanors”—which, as you might imagine, leaves itself open for a frustratingly vast ocean of interpretation. I’m also embarrassed to admit I didn’t realize that impeachment is just the indictment half (coming from the House) of the proceedings, which continue with a hearing in the Senate and culminate in removal from office if there’s a guilty verdict. (Also: Of the country’s three impeachment attempts to date—Andrew Johnson, Nixon and Clinton—none resulted in formal removal from office; Nixon resigned before the House vote and Johnson and Clinton weren’t found guilty by the Senate.)

According to this article, trump is beyond the point of needing to be removed from office but so far may not have done enough that can measurably be considered “Treason, Bribery, or other High Crimes & Misdemeanors”—at least not enough worth formally opening up the Pandora’s box of impeachment hearings. I don’t know anything about the author so I can’t account/discount for political bias, but I feel immensely more informed on the foundational elements of impeachment from reading it.

As an additional primer/refresher, the article’s contextual sidebars on the Andrew Johnson impeachment after the Civil War—along with a bit of Wikipedia reading on my own—gave me a more nuanced (and more chronological) understanding of Reconstruction, Jim Crow, Plessy v. Ferguson, and the “separate but equal” doctrines that extended to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

This is a fascinating—albeit long—read, and I encourage you to block out some time to really digest it if you’re at all curious/unclear about the prospect of facing our country’s fourth attempt at impeachment.

In case you can’t watch the shit salad on television tonight, here’s a helpful summary in book form

Show us on the little snowflake doll how her big bad word made blood come out of your wherever, pussy-boy

Seriously. That FACE.

Oh yeah, and Nancy Pelosi becomes two cold, black heartbeats away from the presidency today.

FIXED IT

Great. Now MY phone has been exposed to HIS end-stage syphilis.

It’ll no doubt start yelling at the pudding and deporting the Instagrams soon.

The Hillary/Horse'sAss debate was two years ago today

Facebook memories shows that I live-blogged my color commentary as I watched it. I didn't realize Snifflin' Don's "very good people" blather has been an established through line in the fiction of his presidency.

The highlights:

8:24 pm
Hillary's talking in paragraphs. Donald's just yelling the same interruptions over and over. #SniffingDonald #SniffleGate #TrumpTrainWreck

8:35 pm
"Trumped-Up Trickle Down" gets points for alliteration and conceptual clarity, but it's too rhythmically bumpy to catch on. My money's on "Deplorable Don." #SnifflingDonald #SniffleGate #TrumpTrainWreck

8:44 pm
When did #SnifflingDonald suddenly get interested in infrastructure? That's a four-syllable word. And it's nothing he can electroplate with gold and slap his name on in seven-foot letters. #SniffleGate #TrumpTrainWreck

8:48 pm
"Law and Order"! He finally said it. Now I can mark it off on my bingo card. Next up? My money's on "The Generals." #SnifflingDonald #SniffleGate

9:00 pm
UGH. Here we go again. The NRA is "very very good people and they're protecting the Second Amendment." Since when do "very very good people" insist that "a well-regulated militia" means "citizens with assault rifles"? That's bastardizing the Second Amendment, not protecting it. Only an anus-lipped sociopath would confuse "bastardizing" with "protecting."

9:06 pm
Birther bullshit? Still? It was--and continues to be--a meaningless distraction for people too stupid and lazy to understand NATO. But it does have the bonus benefit of being a convenient code for helping sentient people suss out racists. #SnifflingDonald #SniffleGate #TrumpTrainWreck

9:25 pm
OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG. #SnifflingDonald just spent 90 seconds yelling like a feral boob monkey about his temperament! And also his temperament! Plus his temperament! #SniffleGate #TrumpTrainWreck

9:36 pm
"She doesn't have the stamina," says the guy hemorrhaging snot like a man with end-stage syphilis. #SnifflingDonald #DeplorableDonald #SniffleGate #TrumpTrainWreck

9:46 pm
#SnifflingDonald postulates that the DNC could have been hacked by "someone sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds." What does it matter how much the bed weighs? #SniffleGate #TrumpTrainWreck

2018
Look! I made a calendar that says I didn't rape anybody for a whole month in college! (Oops. That was Kavanaugh. I get my rapists mixed up sometimes.)

It’s been a year

since we lost President Obama and started plummeting from dignified, informed, capable, exemplary leadership to the appalling hourly implosions of integrity and morality that somehow count as adequate ever since. Here’s how I said goodbye:

"Selma to Stonewall."

For nearly a decade and all of an era, my President -- my conscientious, intelligent, egalitarian, accomplished, diplomatic, relentlessly inspiring and unapologetically yes-we-can-ing President -- has brought our nation a mountaintop eight years of dignity and clarity and principled leadership and national apotheosis and -- yes, as promised, as expected, as delivered, as savored day after day after day for two consecutive, exemplary, triumphant administrations -- hope. Calming hope. Inspiring hope. Enduring hope. Presidential hope.

And for the first time in the history of our noble, beautiful, glorious, always-full-of-wonderful-life-changing-promise country, he made me a part of it. A part of the dialogue. A part of the people. A part of the staggeringly hard-fought, always-on-the-front-lines-of-vital-importance equality.

And I am so grateful, Mr. President. So exhilarated. So proud to be a part of your vision. Your promise. Your world.

You have indeed brought us -- all of us, across the country, around the globe -- change we can believe in.

So I thank you. We thank you. You have made us immeasurably, profoundly, everlastingly better.

And though we knew this day would come and you and your family would step down with the grace and respect and dignity that have been the hallmarks of your leadership, it's still overwhelmingly difficult to say goodbye. 

Same, Millard Fillmore. Same.

Toddler twofer!

I know bitchy gossip queens who demonstrate more maturity and impulse control than our dumpster-fire simpleton of a president-in-name-only.

Do. Not. Even.

A pseudohuman who barely qualifies as a rudimentary intellect -- much less a functional president -- is clogging my downtown in a choking effluvium of losers (his favorite projection word!), half-wits and fiercely proud troglodytes for a rally tonight. So I'm wearing my pseudoscience T-shirt in a heartfelt tribute to them that will ironically soar miles over their echo-chamber heads.

I have rehearsal directly across the street from the man-boy rally. There are children in our show and we're all on high alert to protect them from the belligerent trash that is already littering our streets. A friend of mine was assaulted by a group of these rock dwellers as they started to coagulate downtown just hours ago. THE MINDSET OF IGNORANCE AND THE CULTURE OF PROVOCATION THIS HUMAN FILTH FOSTERS HAS ALREADY RESULTED IN THE ASSAULT OF A FRIEND OF MINE WHO WAS JUST WALKING TO HIS CAR FROM WORK.

Fair warning, trump trash: I am bigger than you, I am smarter than you, I loathe you and everything you breathe for, and if you start ANYTHING with any of my friends, show personnel, show kids or anyone else who actually matters tonight, I will finish it for you. I am not a violent person and I will contain the fury you fire up in me tonight unless you even try to start something. Then there are no rules.

You do NOT want to find out how serious I am about this.

You know what I like to do? Hate you.

"My big foreign trip"? "That's what I like to do"? You're a president, not a foreign-exchange student to Mexican finger-painting school.

Sigh.

I miss the days when the media knew how to turn a president into a legitimate national embarrassment and a scandal knew how to be a SCANDAL.

Six marriages. Under God.

Learn how to send a whore to the Vatican here

Thrice (so far!)-married serial-adulterer Donald Trump, who just yesterday bellowed "In America we don’t worship government, we worship God!" to thunderous, effusive cheering at his commencement address at Jerry Falwell Jr.'s "faith-based" Liberty University and who today played golf instead of spending Mother's Day with any of the three mothers of his five known children, is appointing the one-time mistress and now third (so far!) wife of fellow serial-adulterer Newt Gingrich as the United States ambassador to the "faith-based" Vatican.

There are more faith-based family values on the bottom of my shoe than in the entirety of that last sentence.

Oh, Sweetie. Bless your heart.

1. The way you typed this with your chocolate-cake-covered thumbs, you have your surrogates somehow collectively being a very active president. So yes, you totally have an accuracy problem. Just not where you in your delusional narcissism think it is.

2. It's your surrogates' job to provide accurate information about your administration to the press. Not to hide in bushes. Not to yell at black people. If they don't provide accurate information, they can always use the time-honored "let me get back to you" duck and run, which at least gives everyone the impression that they're taking the time to ask questions and do research to be accurately informed while they're most likely stalling for time to find a way to spin your increasingly delusional and bizarre words and actions into a way to blame big black Barack Obama for your catastrophic failings.

3. Speaking of your catastrophic failings, if your surrogates don't have perfect accuracy, either they're incompetent or you are. Which, again, is Barack Obama's fault. Or Hillary's. Or now Comey's! Your hallucinatory little world is filled with wondrous possibilities.

4. "Lots of things happening" is a conveniently passive way of implying your schedule is just packed with important presidenty things, which in the real world do not involve golfing every weekend at tremendous taxpayer expense, locking up your third failing marriage in a gilded New York tower also at tremendous taxpayer expense, being an appallingly absent parent to all your children except the ones who actively sustain your practices of corruption and self-aggrandizement, and desperately changing your lies about why you fired the Republican-appointed, served-under-four-consecutive-presidents, in-the-middle-of-investigating-you-for-corruption FBI director on the national news and THEN by letter while you knew he was out of town instead of being a big brave professional "businessman" president and doing it in person.

5. "Cancel all press briefings"? Isn't that what a despotic dictator would do? I'll give you a moment to ask your presidential surrogates if anyone knows the word despot.

6. Getting back to point #1, your inability to write an accurate tweet makes your proposal to "hand out written responses" is the exact opposite of "the best thing to do."

7. And while we're on the topic of your tweets, they're getting longer and more punctuationy and more desperately-blame-everyone-else-but-yourselfy by the day. You're not fooling anyone but your arrogance; you are unhinged, flying off the rails, and hopefully literally and very soon slamming your smug face into the side of a mountain in a catastrophic crash of your own psychopathy.

8. I loathe you.

9. I loathe everyone who voted for and still defiantly supports you.

10. I loathe you.

[my edits in brackets]

"It is essential that we find new leadership [meaning lackeys who know their place] for the FBI that restores [because I've tirelessly and incrementally destroyed it since the early days of the election] public trust [if people don't trust me it's your fault! and Sally's! and Flynn's! and Hillary's! and Obama's! but never mine!] and confidence [the more people I fire who are investigating me, the more confident people are in me, right?] in its vital [did I say vital? I meant inconvenient] law [I AM THE LAW NOW!] enforcement [I "enforce" the law by firing people who will expose me] mission."

Where to start?

1. You're the PRESIDENT. I'm just a citizen in Iowa. Don't tell ME to intimidate a federal witness in a Senate investigation. Quietly instruct your corrupt administration to do it, like you do in your collusions with Russia. Telling me to do it via Twitter makes you look like you're four and you're trying to make me get your sister in trouble.

2. Besides, if I had access to directly grill current and former members of your administration, in three questions I'd have you under a table in the fetal position sobbing in a terrifying web of your own lies, where it would take every ounce of my self-restraint not to kick you repeatedly in the kidneys.

3. Based on your grammar, I'm beginning to believe you actually ARE four; your tweet as written demands that *I* be under oath when I execute your command to intimidate a federal witness in a Senate investigation.

4. I know this next one is tricky -- and it's hard to master homonyms AND golf, especially when you're worried that homonyms will molest your children in Target bathrooms -- but even children reckless enough to go into Target bathrooms know that it's spelled "counsel." For the record, "council" is defined as "an assembly of women so enamored of your celebrity and your thoughtful use of Tic Tacs that they want you to grab their pussies." Councils traditionally convene in the middle of heavy traffic or at the bases of erupting volcanoes. Don't forget to take off your wedding ring!

5. If classified information "got into the newspapers" and you're tacitly confirming it in this tweet, are you lying about it being fake news or are you lying about not reading it?

6. I think five failures is enough for one tweet tonight. Go home not to your wife, get some rest, and we'll start addressing your personal and professional failings again in the morning after tomorrow's 5:00 am tweet storm.