The news has reported that in addition to interfering in the US presidential election in favor of Trump the Russian effort is also working to elevated the chances of Sanders winning the Democratic contest for the nomination.

Trump responded to the reports that the Russians are assisting his re-election by dismissing his Director if National Intelligence and replacing him with an ‘acting’ Director reports out a line that is pleasing to his boss’s ears.

From the Sanders’ camp the reaction has varied from accusation that he information was leaked to damage him ahead of the Nevada contest, and if that was the objective it would seem to have failed, to familiar cries of ‘misinformation!’

It bears remembering that the Russians interfered on Trump behalf during the 2016 Primaries and also did the same for Sanders. Setting aside the question if the Russian government finds Trump easier to manipulate the choice of the candidates that the Russians support if quite consistent with this sort of operation.

The goal is chaos. The goal is conflict, using fractures that already exist in our society and culture to set us at each other’s throat. You cannot achieve that with middle of the road candidates but rather with people from the extremes, ideally with polar opposites set against each other. Which is exactly what Trump vs Sanders creates.

So what do you as a supporter of one of these two men do?

The absolute best thing you can do is be calm, be civil, and treat those on the opposing side with respect and courtesy. This is far from easy. I do not count myself as a Sanders supporter and I consider Trump to be a threat to our system of government. He is corrupt, he undermines and violates the rule of law, he exists only for his own enrichment and aggrandizement but that does mean I have to be nasty, cruel, or insulting to those who do not agree with me. I know conservatives who are willing to risk everything I listed above for their personal political objectives, be that gun, god, or gays. They are wrong in assessing the threat that Trump represents and while I will fight to defeat him in November but his supporters I will not disparage and I will not be a Russian asset in their attack on my country. I implore everyone to b the same. Be for Sanders but treat Trump supporters, Biden Supporters, and everyone else honorably and you will be doing your part in defending our country from Putin’s power play without compromising your principals.

It is clear that for Democratic voters the number one priority is defeating Donald Trump in this November’s general election. A great deal of analysis, anxiety, and argument has been devoted to the topic of which candidate has the best odds of achieving that goal. It is naturally a stressful proposition. There are no test runs, no objective measurements that can answer the question ahead of time. There will be one and only one election and the Democratic candidate will either win the required electoral votes or they will fail. People who insist a particular person is the only one that can win the election are engaged at the very least of motivated reasoning, finding the arguments and evidence that produced a desired result versus any sort of analysis that might produce an answer contrary to their already preferred outcome.

The 2016 election turned on less than 100,000 votes in just three states. The Democratic candidate gathered nearly three million more votes from the electorate but only the archaic electoral college decides the victory. If Hillary Clinton with 30 years of political baggage can outperform Trump when he was still principally an unknown, then any of the leading candidates in this cycle can win the White House. Trump has not enlarged his voting coalition and has no grown in the public’s approval. This election may turn on a relative handful of voters in a few key states. It is also possible that the election will not be close, between many people’s distrust of Hillary Clinton and the unwarranted opinion that her victory was a certainty the last elect may have well been lost by the voters who did not bother and who this year may not repeat that error.

I do have an opinion as two which two Democratic candidates are most likely to lose if it is a close election, the two polar opposites, Sanders and Bloomberg.

Sanders as the candidate runs the risk to activating the negative partisanship of Republican voters who are apathetic to Trump but still live in the cold war with its terror of Socialism. Sanders has repeatedly put forth the argument that his candidacy will energize new voters and expand the electorate but so far the numbers do not bear out that point of view. He is doing well but he is not crushing it. There are those who are certain that a Socialist candidate will go down to a crushing defeat, but I think partisanship is a more powerful force and example number one if the Presidency of Trump. Side note: The GOP since the 80s has decried every Democratic candidate and president as a ‘Socialist,’ and now that a self-described one has a real shot at winning the White House their overuse of that attack has blunted that particular sword.

Bloomberg presents the exact opposite danger from Sanders. The Democratic electorate has no taste for billionaires buying the election. With Bloomberg at the head of the ticket there is a very real chance that Democratic enthusiasm will be suppressed with voters staying home or writing in candidates out of protest. If the swing states are close those few voters could, as they did in 2016, by their inaction give the victory to Trump. The unresolved question here is which is the stronger force, the hatred of Trump or Bloomberg.

One of the animating arguments from the Democratic side of this year’s election debates is what to do about college and debt. The cost of a four year or more college education has skyrocketed, and today’s graduates often leave college with the debt equivalent to a home’s mortgage but without the asset of a home. In my view there are two reason why this is not good.

First, these very long-term debts transform high-velocity money into low-velocity. High-velocity money is money that is spent on goods and services while low-velocity is money that primary is used to create more money such as bonds and other financial devices. An economy is comprised of both kinds of money, but it is the high-velocity funds that act as the engine driving economic growth. College graduates at the start of their adult lives are the sort of consumer who buy things that others have made, spending their funds on goods and services that puts money directly into the hands of other who are likely to do the same. However, loaded down with debt their funds get diverted to banks and financial instructions that do use the money but also sock a good deal of it away in interest bearing devices sapping the economic engine of fuel. Making college free rediverts this flow back into the high-velocity economy encouraging growth.

Second, as a nation, as a culture, and as a species we are facing a number of massive challenges. We need better power generation and storage system, we need better access to orbit and beyond, we need better health care treatments and understanding of biology and ecology. We need legions of scientists, technicians, and engineers. Somewhere out there may be the person who has the creativity and the intellect to deal with cancer or other terrible diseases but what if that person or persons is trapped in a segment of society without access to a high-quality education? Not just that person but all of society suffers from their loss. We can’t know ahead of time who may be the brilliant person that with the right education transforms our lives. Our best option for making sure that happens is to increase the number of people who can have those opportunities. Free college, aside from the economic argument I made above, is gambling pennies to win a fortune. I want those breakthroughs; I want those scientists and engineers and artists that inspire because all our lives are made better by them.

Some have argued we should not be subsidizing the college of millionaires by making college free. Well, if giving millionaires kids free college gets me the benefits I outline above well that is worth it in my book but there’s a solution to that as well. Make the free college applicable to state owned universities only. Private schools, all them, this should not apply too. The principal benefits of a school such as Harvard or USC or Yale is the one that greatly favors the individual attending, that is the network of people they become a part of, but the sciences and the knowledge is basically the same. There’s no need to subsidize those school and millionaires can pay full freight to those institutions.

One thing that has become appallingly clear is that without constitutional revisions, and I am not proposing any particular amendments at this time, there will never be a president of the United States removed from office by impeachment.

Three U.S. Presidents have been impeached, Johnson during Reconstruction, Clinton, and Trump. Nixon resigned and avoided his impeachment. This week Senator and former Presidential candidate Mitt Romney made history by becoming the first and only Senator to vote in the guilt phase of an impeachment for the removal of a president of his own party. It didn’t happen for Johnson and it did not happen for Clinton.

Johnson’s impeachment was a purely political affair and from a historical time that does not reflect modern political processes.

Clinton was impeached for committing perjury while under oath, an obstruction of justice. Granted he was set-up, granted the investigation that had started was about a real estate investment and allegation, ultimately unfounded, of fraud and not about his sexual activities, but when asked directly under oath he had a duty, and a legal and moral obligation to be truthful. A citizen was seeking justice and he obstr5ucted it. I was torn over that impeachment because he was guilty but it was also a political vendetta.

Trump quite clearly, quite blatantly, used the vast powers of the Presidency, endangering lives and the interests of the nations, for his own selfish gain. It was an abuse of power, of his office, and of the public trust. Trump’s actions are the very reason what the impeachment clause exists and yet only a single GOP Senator could find the courage to vote ‘guilty.’

The political pressure, prices, and incentives are now simply too powerful to expect senator to vote contrary to the interests of their party.

The greatest political failing of this nation’s founding father was the naïve assumption that the system would function would forming political parties. (Their greatest moral failing is of course slavery, an absolute evil.) The system is designed for power and ambition to check power and ambition, but it assumes that the combatants would be the branches, congress vs executive and not the organizations occupying those branches. The system was not designed for this and increased incentives and penalties of today’s radically polarized politics renders the federal government ungovernable.

During the 2016 campaign Donald Trump famously boasted that he could ‘shot someone on Fifth Avenue’ and not lose a single supporter. While we have no instances of Presidential attempted murder it would seem that Trump was perfectly on target with that pronouncement it is also a useful metaphor illustrating the absurdity of the GOP’s defense of Donald Trump as he faces near certain impeachment.

Let us suppose that Trump did stand on Fifth Avenue and fired a handgun at an innocent person calmly stating that he was going to kill that person, but being unversed the way of guns, he missed and the round going wildly off target and hitting no one.

The GOP defense of Trump starts out that he never shot at anyone, but that falls quickly as witness after witness come forward swearing to the facts that Trump did indeed shot at someone

The GOP then falls back to a defense built around, ‘well, he didn’t intend to kill,’ but again the witness dispel such arguments using Trump own statements that he was going to kill.

Which brings up to the current and most absurd defense.

“Well, he *missed*, no one was hurt so not only is he perfectly okay we should let him keep the gun!”

I have seen, repeatedly and all the damn place that because the Ukrainians didn’t actually deliver then Trump’s crime just goes *poof* and he should be safe from impeachment. Just as with the hypothetical I laid out, attempting to do a bad thing and with intent but doing it badly does not in any way excuse the bad thing.

We have to take the gun away or he will try to shoot someone else, and we must impeach and remove the president for abusing the powers of his officer for personal political gain. This will not happen because in the GOP mind there is no crime so terrible that it can be punished if that in any manner or form benefits the Democratic Party.

I have no doubts that Trump should be impeached and removed from office. Just on the basis of his action dealing with the new Ukrainian President and Trump attempts to get that man and his administration to start an ‘investigation’ whose purpose was to bolster Trump political fortune is enough.

Arguments defending Trump tend to fall into a few camps.

• There was no ‘Quid pro Quo.’ This defense is untenable. For one thing there is growing evidence of the explicit favor-for-favor exchange and do not forget that when the Ukrainian President brought up the desire to purchase particular weaponry Trump responded with “I want you to do us a favor, though.” But setting aside the favor-for-favor even without any pressure campaign at all requesting a foreign power to take official action to damage a political opponent is an abuse of office, plane and simple.
• Trump Did Nothing Illegal. One defensive argument is centered on the concept that asking a foreign power is help in an election is not in itself illegal. I have seen some counter with this with arcane election regulation, that the assistance itself has a monetary value and getting anything of monetary value from a foreign nation or citizen for electioneering is illegal. This may very well be true on the face of it. Just as lying under oath is a crime even if you are set up with malicious intent the perjury remains illegal. However even is something was legal doesn’t mean it removes it from being an impeachable offence. The President has the power to declassify any information that he wishes, but if he did so with a battle plan so that an enemy could act upon it, while the action itself would be legal it would also be impeachable.
• There was No Investigation. This one really tries to lay out a ‘No harm no foul’ excuse as though this were just a pick-up game of basketball between friendly rivals but this is our highest office and the most powerful position on the planet not amateur athletics. Simply because the Ukrainian President did not actually go the microphone and issue the damaging statement that Hunter Biden was under investigation, which would have cleared the way for an entirely disingenuous propaganda campaign, does not mean the attempts to gain that favor is forgotten. Trump abused his office and the position of president to politically personally profit.

It is an irony that the same people who have repeated conspiracy theories for decades about Senator Edward Kennedy seeking Soviet assistance in 1984 to defeat President Reagan are now utterly fine with foreign assistance as long as it helps them. That the same people who wailed and bemoan Obama’s lackluster response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine have no concerns about a man of their party or their political damaging Ukraine’s ability to defend itself in a shooting war with Russia as long it has damages the Democratic Party of the United States of America.

To me it now looks as though impeachment is a foregone conclusion. That is not to say that Trump’s removal from office is assured. If I were to place bets today I would wager that the House passes their articles of impeachment and that the Senate would acquit. With Trump commanding 85% to 90% support within the Republican Party I doubt that there are very many GOP officials willing to publicly cross their party’s popular leader. While I believe that evidence is high and continue to grow that Trump has abused the office of the Presidency for personal political ends I do not think that GOP member are willing to risk getting a mini-trump primary opponent and will take their chances in the general election. At this time and with the current electorate that is the safe political decision, it only sacrifices honor, ethics, and rule of law.

There are many Republicans that feel that Trump is an aberration, a violation of their party’s political norms, a bolt of lightening that makes a loud noise but lives only a brief life and is soon nothing but a memory. This is wrong.

Trump did not spring to head of the party defeating established and hardline conservatives without the battlefield’s terrain well-prepared ahead of his advance. For decades as the GOP pursued power they surrendered again and again their principles. Placing victory as the only goal they advanced lies over truth, they celebrated coarse and degrading slanders of their opponents, and donned an impenetrable cloak of hypocrisy. With decades of such actions it is not surprising that Trump stole their party only that someone like Trump didn’t do it earlier. When Trump is gone, either in defeat in 2020, 2024 (shudder), or by impeachment, the party will not revert to some imagined norm Trump has changed the party without a war to drive his influence from the party it will continue with his imprint.

As the nation hurtles towards Trump’s impeachment, and yes it still may not happen but everyday the odds grow, people look back at impeachment of Clinton and the Democratic gains in the following mid-term elections. People on the left fear impeaching Trump will do the same with GOP gains following the likely failure of removing Trump from office. I think such fears are generally misplaced.

The investigation Bill Clinton started a real estate deal that to many smelled of fraud. Eventually the investigation spun off into his extramarital affairs and the civil suits that followed. When the Starr learned that not only that there was physical evidence of Clinton’s affair and after failing to convince Monica to ‘flip’ on her lover, he set a perjury trap for the president. A trap that Clinton proved willing to leap into when he perjured himself and lied under oath, which produced the charge of obstructing justice that powered the impeachment charges. Clinton’s defender tend to frame the entire thing as ‘lying about a blow-job’ but the facts is that it was perjury, it was under oath, and Clinton was disbarred as a lawyer. However despite the actual violation of his oath the emotional reaction from the general population was one that empathized with Clinton. Many people could see just how easily they would react the same way. There’s a reason why there is a common saying that ‘everyone lies about sex.’ In the end the Republicans came off looking puritanical, petty, and prudish.

What is threatening Trump is wholly different in its emotional tenor. It is not sexual in nature; it does not endear empathic feelings but rather is a direct abuse of his position as president. Even setting aside the heightened partisan culture this scandal is not one where people see themselves in the actions. That is not to say the Senate would remove him from office. No, the GOP base is enthusiastically in Trump’s corner and they will hold their representatives feet to the fire. What I think will not happen is that persuadable people will turn against the Democrats for impeachment. Not on the facts as we currently know them. Such fears should not dissuade officials from doing their duty. Right now around the world US Armed forces personnel are putting their lives on the line for this country and for what it stands for, it is not too much to demand that politicians be willing to risk an office.

And just like Captain Renault in Casablanca  the state of surprise is entirely contrived. Donald Trump strikes me as a person who has never ever been held accountable for any single action or misdeed in his entire life. Credibly accused of draft dodging, tax evading, charity abusing, sexual assaulting, and who knows what else he has escape any serious consequence which has fed his ego, inflated his sense of entitlement, and made this non-drinker drunk with power so it is wholly unsurprising that he has abused the office of president and attempted to get foreign powers to interfere in our elections. I do believe that we are now on the fast track to impeachment, though I seriously doubt that the Republican Senators would cut their own electoral throats and remove him from office. Power and position are far more important than any oath of office and even a pretense of honor.

For about 23 years I was a registered Republican but the growing unhinged base and the party’s embrace of torture while clutching their pearls over equality for LGBTQ persons drove me from the party and every day that Trump remains in power and with better than 85% of the base enthusiastically supporting him I only grow prouder of my decision. I hope that the disaster that results from this administration burns the GOP to the foundation because only then is there any hope of a rational opposition party.