Enough with Susan Collins

From Esquire, by Charles P. Pierce:

Responding to remarks by House Republican minority leader Kevin McCarthy, which had addressed everything but the matter at hand, Pelosi referred to the evidence released on Tuesday regarding Lev Parnas, Rudy Giuliani’s old running buddy, who, Pelosi noted, “was recently photographed with the Republican leader.”

“The president considered [congressional funds] his private ATM machine I guess and said he could say to the president he could make, “do me a favor.” Do me a favor? Do you paint houses, too? What is this, do me a favor?”

And yes, in case you were wondering, and as proof of her current pop culture bona fides, the Speaker of the House just inferred that the President* of the United States might just be the equivalent of a mob boss.

However delightful those moments might have been, along came Susan Collins later Wednesday afternoon to burnish her reputation as the wettest wet blanket in the Senate.

“I wonder why the House did not put that into the record and it’s only now being revealed. Well, doesn’t that suggest that the House did an incomplete job then?”

It is not possible that the senator is this dumb. The House didn’t add the Parnas evidence into the record until this week because a court hadn’t allowed its release until this week.

What I think is that Collins thought she had a good thing going with her do-si-do about leading a group of Republicans who might just vote to allow witnesses, which would have given her some good-government cover in a trial she felt would end in acquittal anyway. This is consonant with her entire political career, which has been demonstrated to be utterly useless in the face of a lawless president*. Now, though, a flood of evidence demonstrating the president*’s guilt is inundating the Congress and the news, and it threatens to sweep away Collins’s careful middling of her obvious constitutional duties, and she doesn’t like it very much. Enough with Susan Collins. I mean, god almighty, enough.

A Couple of Quick Takes from the Impeachment Hearing

By Ann Telnaes, from the Washington Post:

 

 

My view:  Someone needs to buy Jim Jordan a jacket. Remember when they gave Obama shit for wearing a tan suit because it wasn’t “respectful” enough? This guy always looks like the founder of the Waffle House.

My Bet Is on Rudy

Young Rudy Giuliani Defends Himself

From the New York Times, written by the hilarious Teddy Wayne:

1951. Seven-year-old Rudy Giuliani is caught by his mother with his hand in the cookie jar and crumbs around his mouth.

MRS. GIULIANI: Rudy, I told you not to eat the cookies!

RUDY: You said, “Don’t not eat the cookies.”

MRS. GIULIANI: I didn’t say that.

RUDY: You just admitted “I didn’t not say that.”

MRS. GIULIANI: You’re adding “not” to sentences to make them mean the opposite.

RUDY: (laughs boisterously) I’ve listened to hundreds of maternal statements, and it wasn’t until the third time I replayed what you said in my mind, because there’s no way to easily record conversations in the current year — 1951 — that I heard the “not.” And even if your original statement is what you didn’t not say it wasn’t not, could you actually prove that I ate multiple cookies?

MRS. GIULIANI: No, but that’s beside the —

RUDY: Being told “don’t eat the cookies” and eating a single cookie isn’t a federal crime, correct?

MRS. GIULIANI: We’re moving the goal posts from “I didn’t eat the cookies” to “I ate a single cookie, which isn’t a federal crime”?

RUDY: Who tipped you off to the alleged cookie theft?

MRS. GIULIANI: Your cousin.

RUDY: Cousin Michael’s been a known liar and a tattler for years.

MRS. GIULIANI: Two days ago, when he swore you didn’t finish the apple pie cooling on the window sill, you said he was “an honest and honorable cousin.”

RUDY: That was before he made these ridiculous allegations. What kind of scoundrel watches his cousin eat a pie off a window sill?

MRS. GIULIANI: So you’re confessing that you did eat the pie?

RUDY: Hypothetically, when in fact I wasn’t there, and also there never was a pie. Or a window sill.

 

1955. Eleven-year-old Rudy enters a classroom.

TEACHER: I think you cheated on your math test.

RUDY: (laughs boisterously) My dog ate my homework.

TEACHER: What does your dog eating your homework have to do with cheating on a test?

RUDY: You’ll have to ask the dog, except the dog refuses to speak. (pauses) Another dog was involved.

TEACHER: Another dog? How many does your family own?

RUDY: One. Two? (Bonks own head with fist several times.) Six.

TEACHER: You have six dogs?

RUDY: Is that a federal crime in the year 1955? So, with 16 dogs, what are the odds one of them didn’t eat my homework?

TEACHER: I still don’t see how eating the homework has anything to do with cheating on the test.

RUDY: Well, now we’re discussing two different cases here: the eating and the cheating. Did one of the dogs present at the eating also participate in the cheating, which never took place?

TEACHER: I’m sending you to the principal’s office.

RUDY: The principal has to submit a list of questions to me. If and when I approve of his scope, I can give him 20 minutes between lunch and recess.

TEACHER: You’re the one in trouble. You don’t get to make up the rules.

RUDY: Ten minutes. Five. The meeting’s off.

1959. Fifteen-year-old Rudy is cornered in the school bathroom by a bully.

BULLY: I saw you talkin’ to my girlfriend, Giuliani! Don’t deny nothin’ or I’ll cream ya!

RUDY: (scared) O.K., it was me.

BULLY: You admitted it! Get ready for a knuckle sandwich, Giuliani!

RUDY: By “it was me,” I mean that I first spoke as myself, then I quickly dressed as your girlfriend so it would look like I was talking to her.

BULLY: Why would you dress up like my girlfriend, Giuliani?

RUDY: For a joke; we have such rigidly constructed gender roles now that wearing the clothes of the opposite sex produces a subversive comic tension, as in the contemporary movie “Some Like It Hot.” For instance, you refer to me by my surname, as bullies in the 1950s tend to; you wouldn’t if I were female.

BULLY: You think dis is funny, Giuliani?

RUDY: Look, I have no idea, others seem to, and my guess is that it will be humorous for a while, even for national political figures, but in about 60 years our views on gender will evolve so that cross-dressing will no longer be as shocking and, when played for cheap laughs, may even be regarded as offensive.

BULLY: You’re trynta distract me from givin’ you a lickin’ by theorizin’ about the roles of gender and fashion in society, Giuliani!

RUDY: (laughs boisterously as he gets beaten up)

Rudy Giuliani, Bless His Heart

From Politico:

The core argument of Giuliani’s media appearances was that there was no campaign money involved in the payment to Daniels and therefore there would be no campaign violation.

But during a Thursday morning interview with “Fox & Friends,” Giuliani alluded to the idea that campaign considerations played into the October 2016 payment to Daniels.

“Imagine if that came out on October 15th, 2016, in the middle of the, you know, last debate with Hillary Clinton,” Giuliani said. “Cohen didn’t even ask. Cohen made it go away. He did his job.”

Even Donald’s tie wants to distance itself from Giuliani.

Rudy, I Bet You Threw Up a Little in Your Mouth When You Said That.

From Rudy Giuliani (a noun, a verb and 9/11):

“A lot of this talk is just silliness coming from Washington or coming from the Clinton campaign,” Miller said. “And I’ve got to give the Clinton camp credit. They’ve done a pretty good job of working their contacts in the media, you know, pushing a lot of this.”

“Not all networks and news outlets are quite as fair and balanced as Fox News,” he added.