America Living Dangerously

If you want to hear what I think is probably the best argument for Impeachment Now, I can recommend a video by the Two Alexes of The Duran:

Biden impeachment inquiry gains momentum

Essentially, their argument boils down to this. If America doesn’t deal with the corruption of the Biden Crime Family within some reasonably expeditious time frame—they give until November, 2024—America may well find itself whizzing down the slippery slide, in which corruption has turned the political system into a tool of the Ruling Class. Mercouris says “informal networks” rather than Ruling Class. That works too, I suppose. I’ve excerpted the last seven or eight minutes of the video in transcript form, but if this type of discussion is your thing, you’ll want to listen to the entire 32 minutes—it’s a very good discussion.

Naturally I’m sympathetic to this argument. However, I see a number of problems.

To start with, this whole Zhou corruption business is focused on the presidency. Just look at the involvement of so many Senators and Reps feeding at the Ukraine trough. The problem is, there’s no way that Zhou didn’t simply bring his business with him to the White House from the Senate—he simply scaled it up, as would befit a Vice President. You wouldn’t expect a VP to peddle his influence for the same rates that a senator might charge, would you? I’ve said it many times—America has the best government money can buy. Zhou learned his trade in the Senate.

If this business ever gets to the point of impeachment—which I certainly don’t expect—we will witness the disgusting constitutional spectacle of the pot calling the kettle black. But the point is that the deep systemic corruption of our politics will go unaddressed, because everyone—and conservatives most of all—will have a sort of catharsis over the removal from office of one of the most disgusting creeps ever. The Senate will certainly not take this as a cue to somehow reform itself. America will have been rendered safe for business as usual to continue. The American public will have witnessed the Ruling Class offer up one of their own and will be satisfied. By and large.

But, of course, the most likely event will be that Zhou is forced to resign sometime this fall. That could, if anything, be an even worse result. It could turn out to be a green light for the Judicial Branch to railroad Trump in some really serious way. The nation, by and large, will be well and truly gaslit and will simply say, ‘It’s time to move on.’ Then some non-entity, a creature of the Ruling Class and the Deep State, will be installed in the Oval Office to perform the indispensable duting of the presidency as it has evolved—bill signings, etc. But he will know who his masters are and will follow their directions. A bit like the demon possessed man to which the demons return after having been expelled—the second state is worse than the first. Jonathan Turley will be happy, he’ll say the system works, after all. But we’ll know better.

Maybe I’ll be proven wrong. I hope so. The best case scenario will be for the American people to force their choice of an outsider on the Ruling Class, one who will do his best to sweep out that demon possessed house. Right now Trump appears to be the only such choice.

Anyway, here’s that transcript:

AM: I can't say how this will end, but I can say what the end point of it is. The end point is November 24. If this thing hasn't been cleared up, one way or another, by then, if the president is still in place, if he's not been politically damaged, if he's reelected in November, 2024, then all of this dies. And all the problems in the United States, the cancer that you talked about, it will continue and in my opinion it will metastasize and grow much worse. So they just have just over a year to sort it out.

AC: Is it a stretch to say that the US can't survive another four years of Biden? More of this corruption, this decay? If they don't resolve this issue--Biden, Burisma, Hunter, Ukraine, the conflict--it's all connected. My point is that it's all connected and it predates the special military operation. Forget about Russia! This really isn't a Russia thing. Russia's connected because of its its geography, its history, it's many interests in what's going on in its neighborhood--absolutely! But the business dealings in Ukraine, the corruption, the coup! Yes there's the neocons in there playing their geopolitical chessboard, but it's much worse than that. It's vastly worse than that, because it goes much deeper than all of that.

AM: If you want to understand why the neocons are so powerful it is because they're functioning within a political system which is not itself functioning. Corruption has always existed in the United States, there have been times when corruption has been at very high levels. If you go back to American history, you will know when. But always it has never affected the overall integrity of the system. There's always been people who have been there who have been unaffected, who've been able to push back, who have been able to make the right decisions at the right times, and who are in a position to make those decisions. And that's always kept the the system functioning. I think cancer is a good description, because the point about a cancer is that eventually, if it grows too much, it becomes the system! It actually becomes the way in which political life becomes organized--not just in Washington, inside the Beltway, but across the United States as a whole. We're familiar with that in Greece. I've seen that happen--where corruption ultimately becomes the way in which politics is organized. And to be frank, to say it straightforwardly, if that happens in the United States--and it's closer to that point than it has ever been in its history, I mean, this is far worse than the Tweed ring for example in the 1860s, all the corruptions that the progressives fought against and the run up to the end of the 19th and early 20th century. It's far worse than any of that. If that happens, then the country that exists may call itself the United States, but it is not the United States anymore. It's a system where it's not the Constitution that's functioning. What is functioning is an informal network that may talk about the Constitution but isn't applying it anymore. We've already discussed in many programs how that is already visible and is becoming the case. we did that program, that live stream, with Robert Barnes, in which we discussed the extraordinary nature of some of the cases that have been brought against Donald Trump.

AC: It's very sad, very depressing, to see this unfolding. It really is very frustrating.

AM: It is not just sad, it is the greatest tragedy. It is an absolute disaster to see this happen to the United States, to the republic of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. It makes me want to tear out my hair. But America is living very dangerously now and Americans above all need to need to grasp that fact.