Erick Erickson: We Need a Special Prosecutor

It is very rare that right wing pundit Erick Erickson and I agree on much of anything.  Yet in an op-ed Erickson makes the case that it is crucial that a special prosecutor be appointed to investigate Der Trumpenführer's ties to Russia and precisely what transpired in all of the communications between his campaign and Russian intelligence.  Erickson doesn't know if Trump, et al, are guilty or not but argues that only a independent prosecutor can get to the bottom of things and set the stage for the nation to move forward on important issues. I have to agree.  If Trump proves guilty, let things fall where they may.  If not, at least the American public can move on without having doubts about a traitor in the White House.  Personally, I suspect that Trump is guilty and needs to be exposed and dealt with extremely harshly.  Ditto for his accomplices.  Here are op-ed highlights:

The press has long reported that Paul Manafort, President Donald Trump's one-time campaign manager, had ties to Russia. Rick Gates, who worked for Manafort at the Republican convention in Cleveland, was named as an "agent of a Ukrainian oligarch" in a 2011 lawsuit. Likewise, Carter Page, a Trump adviser, had ties to Russia.

The intelligence community, through a series of leaks, made clear that members of the Trump campaign had been in contact with Russian agents. Given the pre-existing ties, it begs the question if those contacts were about Trump and the presidential campaign or other matters.

Perhaps there is something to the allegations. Perhaps not. Perhaps, given holdovers from the Obama administration, some in the intelligence community have a vested interest in trying to sabotage Trump's agenda. A few reports in Washington suggest intelligence agents who supported former President Barack Obama's deal with Iran made it their mission to undermine Gen. Mike Flynn as national security adviser.

There is a lot of speculation, but only a few things are known for certain. We know about the Trump campaign staff ties to Russia. We know about the leaks from the intelligence community. We know there is thus far no evidence of collaboration. We know Democrats are convinced Trump urged Russian cooperation in stealing the election. We know Republicans are convinced members of the intelligence community resistant to change and reform are trying to undermine the president.

We know that Trump won the presidency by winning several states with less than one percent of the vote, which means Democrats have every incentive to raise doubts about the president. We know Trump, based on his own tweets, no longer trusts the intelligence community. We know that members of the intelligence community have previously leaked information to put both Obama and former President George W. Bush on defense.

Given this knowledge, we know this situation is going to breed further distrust. A president must be able to trust the intelligence community. The American people must be able to trust the president won his election without foreign assistance. Americans do not trust Congress, and no congressman has any incentive to get to the truth if it means he is unable to advance his own self-interest.

The logical course here is for Attorney General Jeff Sessions to appoint a special prosecutor in a limited capacity to examine two questions. First, did the Trump campaign collaborate with Russian intelligence to undermine Hillary Clinton's campaign? Second, is the intelligence community leaking information in order to undermine Trump?

Until these questions are answered, the partisan feuding and allegations are only going to get worse. The president's distrust of the intelligence community is going to get worse. That, in turn, will jeopardize the safety of the American people.

The American people deserve better than this. A special prosecutor with no partisan agenda would be the best means of obtaining the truth of the matter. Sessions, for the sake of both the American people's trust in the president and the president's trust in the intelligence community, should appoint a special prosecutor quickly.

Erick Erickson: Republicans Owe Bill Clinton an Apology

There are few websites more right wing and anti-Obama than Red State -  generally never agree with its position on anything.  Yet it is amazing to see that wild reaction at Red State to Donald Trump's position as the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party. Select headlines for today include the following:

RUBIO COMPARES TRUMPTO 3RD WORLD STRONGMAN - Rubio’s comments may seem like the words of an angry former foe, but the accuracy of them should worry you.

LYIN’ DON: TRUMP JUST TOTALLY MADE UP THE STORY THAT HE TALKED TO MARCO RUBIO RECENTLY - Late Friday night, Marco Rubio advisers not only denied that he was supportive, but flat out stated that no such conversation took place at all.

And no one is more vocal about his horror of a potential Trump presidency than the site's editor, Erick Erickson, who despite his extremism on many issues, seems to recognize that the Trump candidacy reveals the utter hypocrisy of those in the GOP supporting him.  In a piece on another blog, Erickson lets loose and make the statement that, if the GOP will support Trump, then the party owes Bill Clinton a major apology for what it did during the Monica Lewinsky witch hunt and impeachment spectacle.  This indictment applies in particular to "family values" crowd who are now embracing a thrice married, serial adulterer as the GOP standard bearer.  Here are column highlights:

The predicate act to Bill Clinton’s impeachment was his affair with an intern and his lying to cover it up. Republicans said the President of the United States is not above the law and lying under oath to obstruct justice is an impeachable offense.

Seventeen years after Republicans impeached Bill Clinton for covering up an affair, they are handing their party over to a man who has openly bragged about his affairs. On the day the Republicans first meet in Cleveland, Donald Trump will be taken to court for allegedly defrauding hard working Americans through Trump University.

What voters have already learned about Donald Trump during the primaries should give them pause. Many of his business dealings have left others worse off while he has played the bankruptcy courts to keep going. While investors in various Trump enterprises lost money, Trump made fortunes.

On the campaign trail, Trump was more a pathological liar than Bill Clinton ever was. He smeared his opponents, their wives, and their families. He embraced 9/11 trutherisms that George Bush was to blame for the attacks, he peddled malignant, false stories about Ted Cruz’s father, and few Republicans ever called on him to account. Many gave him passes on the lies they would never give to Bill Clinton.

Republicans owe Bill Clinton an apology for impeaching him over lies and affairs while now embracing a pathological liar and womanizer. That apology will not be forthcoming. In fact, for years Republicans have accused the Democrats of gutter politics and shamelessness. Now the Republicans themselves have lost their sense of shame.

As Marco Rubio withdrew from the Republican primary in Florida, Trump supporters showed up to heckle him as he was giving his withdrawal speech. In South Carolina, a Trump supporter refused to help a disabled woman who had been in a car wreck because the woman had a Bernie Sanders sticker on her car. The man actually said he thought the Lord came to him. But these people have learned this behavior from their party’s new political leader.

If so much were not on the line, it would be somewhat humorous to watch. But the Supreme Court hangs in the balance; the relationship between the states and federal government hangs in the balance; and our relationship with our allies hangs in the balance. All of these things are at stake and the party that fancies itself as the grown up party has handed itself over to a huckster with a cult of ill behaved children.

Angry voters made a terrible miscalculation in the Republican primary. They presumed that the rest of the nation shared their anger. They were wrong and now, with so much on the line, the Republicans will field as their Presidential nominee the least popular Presidential candidate in American history. God save the republic.

Those deserving the harshest condemnation, of course, are the supposed "godly Christians" who, like the modern day Pharisee cited by Erickson, who have taken hypocrisy to new heights and revealed the utter moral bankruptcy of the Christofascist base of the Republican Party.  Their support of Trump makes it clear that they are nothing more than animus filled racists and zealots.  I sincerely hope that Trump's candidacy once and for all makes it clear that fundamentalist Christians deserve no deference or respect! 

RedState Editor Erick Erickson Compares Gays to Paris Terrorists

Want proof of the delusional insanity of the Christofascists and their GOP political whores?  Look no farther than Erick Erickson (pictured at left), editor of the far right sir, RedState, who in a bout of verbal diarrhea compared gays to the murderers who killed 12 and wounded many others in Paris.  The offense committed by gays?  The firing of Kelvin Cochran, the Chief of the Atlanta Fire Department, who refused to cease forcing his self-published anti-gay book on subordinates despite orders that he stop doing so.  The irony is that Erickson fails to see that it is he, and his fellow Christofacists, who share the same mindset of the shooters in Paris who are the real terrorists in this country.  Here are excerpts from Erickson's rant:

A publisher published something that offended. It mocked, it offended, and it showed the fallacy of a religion. It angered.

So the terrorists decided they needed to publicly destroy and ruin the publisher in a way that would not only make that destruction a public spectacle, but do it so spectacularly that others would think twice before publishing or saying anything similar.

The terrorist wants to sow fear. The destruction of an individual is not just meant to be a tool of vengeance, but a tool of instruction. It shows others what will happen to them if they dare do the same. It is generates self-regulating peer pressure. Others, fearing the fall out, will being to self-police and self-regulate. They will silence others on behalf of the terrorists. Out of fear, they will drive the ideas from the public square and society will make them off limits.

It is not because the ideas are bad, but because the ideas offend a group that can destroy and tear down.

So when a publisher published something that mocked and offended a group prone to offense at such things, something had to happen.

The terrorists did what had to be done to publicly destroy and ruin the offender.

So they demanded the Mayor of Atlanta fire the Chief of the Fire Department for daring to write that his first duty was to “glory God” and that any sex outside of heterosexual marriage was a sin.

And the terrorists won in Atlanta.

I continue to ponder how someone gets this deranged/mentally ill.