How To Buy An Impeachment

It is a truth now universally acknowledged that the very rich usually get what they want from elected politicians.

And so if a hedge fund billionaire wants Donald Trump to be impeached, he'll  spend whatever it takes to make his dream come true. Just ask Democratic mega-donor Tom Steyer, who's already forked over $10 million for TV ads to inform the already converted that Trump needs to go. He's spending another 10 mil or so on social media ad buys, or at least 10 times what the Russians allegedly invested in order to magically propel Impeachy Don directly into the White House. And if you only count the $10,000 that Russian troll farms spent on Facebook ads, the total Steyer ad buy would amount to a whopping 20 times of that foreign expenditure.

Still, his impeachment campaign doesn't come anywhere close to the $5 billion worth of free TV coverage  which Trump got from the mainstream media during his endless campaign, nor the $2 billion in estimated cash raised by the Clinton machine.

But thanks to the power of even lesser - but still obscenely excessive - cash, Steyer is also getting plenty of free press to boost his ad campaign investment, most recently in a prominently-placed column by the New York Times' new hire, Michelle Goldberg. It's so awesome what tens of millions of dollars will do to "control the narrative" with little to no independent reporting even needed from the stenographer in question.

All Michelle Goldberg had to do to write her column was to elicit a little confirmation bias from other Democratic operatives and "thought leaders" who operate in Steyer's cash-rich political milieu. These experts are here to urge the cash-needy Congressional Democrats to get off their hands for a change, and hold out those hands for all the great ideas and policies and outcomes that progressive billionaires have to offer them. They should then absolutely embrace their donors impeachment.

Why wait for Robert Mueller to complete his criminal investigation into the Trump Empire's wheelings and dealings? Goldberg scrolled down the Times's speed-dial list to find out:

But as the Harvard Law scholar Cass Sunstein, author of the recent book “Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide,” told me, that doesn’t mean Congress can impeach only a president who is caught breaking the law. “Crime is neither necessary nor sufficient,” said Sunstein, who emphasizes that his book is not about Trump. “If the president went on vacation in Madagascar for six months, that’s not a crime, but that’s impeachable.”

If you're going to use an establishment Democrat as the main supplementary source of your piece, you must also plug his book while letting him deny that he is plugging his book and also letting him deny that his book is even about Trump. This makes your column seem very plausible, and nowhere close to the Russian propaganda spreading its tentacles into our hearts and minds on a daily basis. It also artificially limits the "terror" that US citizens feel, restricted to only Trump and Russia as the roots of all evil.

  "And the best way to show Trump that people are serious about impeaching him is to put the message on television," sagely concludes Michelle Goldberg.

My published response:

Before they think about impeachment, Congress should take the keys to the nuclear code right out of his little hands. They should stop spending 70% of their time raising money, and start passing emergency legislation which rescinds the unitary executive powers instigated by Dick Cheney. They should repeal the Patriot Act at the earliest opportunity, strengthen shield laws for reporters, and rescind the blanket authorization for military force they give to presidents every single year, with virtually no serious debate.

The same congress critters who clutch their pearls over every last Trumpian faux pas just handed his perpetual war machine three quarters of a trillion dollars to play around with.

Senior Senate leaders Chuck Schumer and Lindsay Graham both admitted in recent days that they had no idea we had nearly a thousand troops in Niger, and at least six thousand in other African countries. Huh?

So methinks that Donald Trump isn't the only guy who isn't up to the job. The way the Pentagon and the CIA and corporations run roughshod over the legislative branch, you'd think they were only a millionaire social club whose job is to go on TV and complain helplessly when they aren't begging us to elect them to just two more years, six more years, a lifetime's worth of years.
 And while Mr. Steyer's heart might be in the right place, he exemplifies the dangerously outsize power that billionaires now have in running the country.

And then there's Mike Pence. God help us all.