The Middle-Aged Genius’s Guide to Almost Everything 40 – “They are mere words, and words can be molded until they clothe ideas and disguise.”
January 30, 2020
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We’re in impeachment season. What is going on?
Rick Rosner: Okay, impeachment consists of two parts. The House, which consists of 435 representatives, votes to have a trial on the Senate. The trial in the Senate has been going on for the last week or so. Tomorrow is when the Senate votes on whether to allow witnesses to testify before the Senate.
The Republicans who want this over with want to vote Trump as “not guilty” as fast as possible, especially without witnesses, because the former Secretary of State, John Bolton, has said that Trump was engaging in a quid pro quo.
He was holding up military aid to Ukraine. Unless, Ukraine investigated Joe Biden and his son, in order to hurt Joe Biden’s electoral chances for the coming presidential election. So, there’s never been any question.
Trump wouldn’t come up with enough votes to find him guilty. It means 2/3rds, which means 20 out of 53 Republican senators would have to vote Trump guilty. That would never happen. There has been some hope that damaging testimony from Bolton would be allowed.
But it’s looking very iffy at this point. I think the hope is with the democrats trying to – as they have tried to do – make Trump and the Republicans look so bad that he can’t get re-elected. It’s hard at this point to know whether that is going to work.
I looked up the odds. The odds-makers say Trump has a 57% chance of getting re-elected, which is shocking to people who aren’t Trump supporters. There are more Trump haters than there are Trump supporters. But not necessarily enough that he will not get re-elected.
If he is exonerated by the Senate, people are afraid of what he will do. Because he will be further emboldened. He gets to be more and more of a dick the longer that he is president. The hope initially was that being the president would tamp him down and make him behave with dignity.
But that hasn’t happened. This is the first time in US history that an evil guy has been elected president. Or that there are evil people flat-out evil people in key positions. Trump is evil. Mitch McConnell is evil.
Outside of the U.S., Putin is evil. I don’t know whether Boris Johnson is evil or a person whose agenda is not good. Berlusconi, as far as I know, when he was running Italy, was evil. It was kind of thought that democracy was good at keeping evil at bay.
But we never had this number of evil people run for high office. It is combination of new media and terrible people.
[End of recorded material]
Authors[1]
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Editor-in-Chief, In-Sight Publishing
Footnotes
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