I know I’ve said it before, but Hillary Clinton needs to find a safe haven somewhere. Some island nation with tropical breezes and no extradition treaty with the USA. Trump’s coming after her. At bottom, that’s what it’s all about, this Justice Department criminal investigation into the original FBI probe of Trump’s 2016 election campaign collusion with Russia.
Trump lost the popular vote to Hillary and he’s never going to let that go. Fan away the smoke of the Steele dossier, the firings of Comey and McCabe and Sessions, the threats of indicting Obama and Mueller and CNN and MSNBC for treason, and there sits Hillary, the focus of his rage. You watch.
Seriously, though … wait, I was being serious … I keep coming back to a New York Review of Books article written by journalist Masha Gessen the day after the 2016 election, titled Autocracy: Rules for Survival. Gessen lived under autocratic governments most of her life, and is known for her reportage on Vladimir Putin’s Russia. I’ve quoted sections of her article in previous blog posts, summarizing her warnings about what’s to come under Trump. Her warnings about what now has, in fact, come.
Here are a couple of prescient paragraphs from Gessen’s article I have not quoted here before. Keep in mind, she wrote this in November 2016:
Trump rally crowds have chanted “Lock her up!” They, and he, meant every word. If Trump does not go after Hillary Clinton on his first day in office, if he instead focuses, as his acceptance speech indicated he might, on the unifying project of investing in infrastructure (which, not coincidentally, would provide an instant opportunity to reward his cronies and himself), it will be foolish to breathe a sigh of relief. Trump has made his plans clear, and he has made a compact with his voters to carry them out. These plans include not only dismantling legislation such as Obamacare but also doing away with judicial restraint—and, yes, punishing opponents.
To begin jailing his political opponents, or just one opponent, Trump will begin by trying to capture members of the judicial system. Observers and even activists functioning in the normal-election mode are fixated on the Supreme Court as the site of the highest-risk impending Trump appointment. There is little doubt that Trump will appoint someone who will cause the Court to veer to the right; there is also the risk that it might be someone who will wreak havoc with the very culture of the high court. And since Trump plans to use the judicial system to carry out his political vendettas, his pick for attorney general will be no less important. Imagine former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani or New Jersey Governor Chris Christie going after Hillary Clinton on orders from President Trump; quite aside from their approach to issues such as the Geneva Conventions, the use of police powers, criminal justice reforms, and other urgent concerns.
Yes, we all should have seen this coming. And now it’s happening, right in front of us, and who or what is going to stop it? The Democratic majority in the House of Representatives? Don’t make me laugh.
Okay, I know y’all hate it when I bring up good and evil. It makes people uncomfortable and we can’t have that. Kind of like yesterday in New York City when a few women confronted Harvey Weinstein at an event where he was present, and were booed and escorted out. I hear ya, so let’s turn to less troublesome topics:
The wind woke us early this morning. Mister B, on his walk, acted as if he’d never experienced wind before, continually turning his face into it, looking for the source. As soon as he pooped, which he forced himself to do far before we got to his normal spot, he started tugging against the leash. I gave him the lead and he pulled us straight back to the house.
The back patio’s a mess, but that happens every time the wind blows, and we’ve seen worse. Nothing’s been blown into the pool, at least so far, and I expect as the day warms up the wind will lessen. I’d taken an old door out of the garage and propped it against the house, planning to put it on sawhorses to use as a temporary table during the kitchen remodeling project. The door blew down in the wind, narrowly missing a stack of leftover flooring tiles from 18 years ago, when we tiled the kitchen, family room, bathrooms, and hallways. That would have been bad, because they’re discontinued tiles. They’re going to have to replace some tiles when they put in the new kitchen, so it’s a good thing we saved the leftovers from earlier. Otherwise we’d have to put in all new tile and there’d go the budget.
Donna and Polly have emptied most of the kitchen cabinets. Everything’s going in the living and dining rooms, where it’ll be stacked on tables (and our old door). Remodeling starts Saturday with the installation of a new kitchen window. The rest of the work starts Monday. It’ll be an adventure. And I’m sure I’ll hate every minute of it.