Sunday, February 18, 2024

Wow, what a week

Sometime around rapist Donald Trump's first term in office as president of the United States, a friend of mine said that one of the reasons he voted for him was because Trump was clearly such a successful businessman, which was a particular quality this country really needed.

I tried to point out in my rebuttal that Mafia Don had had several bankruptcies by then and how was bankruptcy a skill set we needed in the presidency?

I thought of all this when, on Friday, New York Supreme Court Judge Arthur Engoron ordered the odorous rapist to pay a fine of  $355 million for fraud, specifically for fraudulently misrepresenting financial figures to get cheaper loans.

A pre-judgment interest covering the dates he received benefits from his fraud adds another $100 million to the overall fine.

That's a lot of dough.

All of this comes on the heels of Mafia Don being required to pay writer E. Jean Carroll $83.3 million for defaming her. It's not easy to lose a defamation case. Mafia Don managed to pull it off twice against her. It's Carroll, incidentally, whom a judge ruled was violated sexually by the rapist Trump.

Anyway, add it up. That's around a half billion dollars in fines. What a businessman.

I suspect the rapist will find a way to skate around this. He almost always does. He plans to appeal Engoron's ruling, of course. But his miraculous Houdini-like escape will come when a foreign entity – Saudi Arabia, perhaps, or Putin's Russia's – surreptitiously puts the money in the rapist's account to pay the fine, leaving Mafia Don solvent still.

It's how you undermine democracy.

•   •   •

We also learned on Friday that Russian dissident and Putin opponent Alexei Navalny was found dead in the colony in which he was imprisoned as a result of "sudden death syndrome." Yep. Sudden death syndrome. That's the official cause of death coming from Russian authorities.

There's a lot of sudden death syndrome in Russia these days, what with political poisonings and dissidents falling out of windows from Moscow high rises.

In a world of conspiracy theories, let me offer this: I think Putin found this to be an opportune time to murder Navalny, especially with the Republicans in Congress doing all they can to halt further financial and military aid to Ukraine, the sovereign nation in which Russia invaded and is involved in a brutal war. Thanks to the rapist's Republicans, it's a perceived show of American weakness for Putin. Now was the time to strike and rid himself of the annoying Navalny.

Hey, it's a small world, and it's getting smaller. Everything is connected and it's easy to draw a line from Putin to Navalny's death to the war in Ukraine to obstructionist and recalcitrant Republicans.

 It's how you undermine democracy.

•   •   •

In something of an invisible story, we learned on Thursday that a former FBI informant, Alexander Smirnov (geez, more Russians) has been indicted by the Justice Department for lying to Special Counsel David Weiss, who is investigating the so-called Hunter Biden/Burisma scandal.

Smirnov allegedly lied to Weiss about Hunter Biden, thus putting the Republicans'  ongoing impeachment inquiry against President Joe Biden into question.

The GOP was counting heavily on Smirnov's testimony to help impeach Joe Biden, but now all of that seems to be in question. What a clown show.

Republicans are so beside themselves that they are now calling for an investigation of the FBI.

When nothing goes right, investigate the agency that protects you. It's not the first time Republicans have called for this when something explodes in their faces.

That's how you undermine democracy.

 



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