Virginia Democratic Mailer Correctly Links Gillespie to White Nationalists

The campaign of GOP gubernatorial candidate Ed Gillespie is having conniption fits because a Virginia Democratic Party mailer correctly links Gillespie to white supremacists. Having viewed many of Gillespie's ads that have definite racist undercurrent to them, combined with his refusal to condemn Donald Trump's apparent embrace of white supremacists in Charlottesville back in August, 2017, and his effort to court Corey Stewart supporters who rallied to Stewart's openly racist and pro-Confederate campaign, I believe that the mailer is accurate.  No doubt some of my Republican "friends" who continue to stick their heads in the sand - or elsewhere where the sun doesn't shine, if you want my candid opinion - will whine and feign false outrage just like Gillespie, but the sad reality is that today's Republican Party IS a racist party and Gillespie - as are AG candidate John Adams and Lt. Governor candidate Jill Vogel - is pandering to white supremacists and religious extremist.  He has no chance of winning without their strong support.  Sometimes, the truth hurts and, if my Republican "friends" do not like being tied to white supremacists, they have two options on November 7th: stay home and do not vote, or vote for the Democratic ticket.  It's really very simple.  If you vote for candidates of a party with a racist, anti-minority agenda, then look in the mirror and face the reality that perhaps you are in fact a racist even if you are not donning KKK robes regularly. The Washington Post looks at the mailer and the GOP's feigned outrage.  Here are excerpts:

Virginia’s heated election cycle is becoming increasingly nasty, with the statewide Democratic ticket sending out a new mailer linking Republican gubernatorial candidate Ed Gillespie and President Trump to the torch-bearing white nationalists who descended on Charlottesville over the summer.

In August, violent clashes between white supremacists in Charlottesville rallying to defend a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee and counterprotestors left one woman dead and two state troopers died when their helicopter crashed.

The mailer features images of both Republican men above a photo of the white supremacists with the text, “On Tuesday November 7th, Virginia Gets To Stand Up...To Hate.”

The back of the literature features a prominent image of Democratic gubernatorial candidate Ralph Northam, along with Democratic lieutenant governor nominee Justin Fairfax and Attorney General Mark Herring, with the message “This is our chance to stand up to Trump, Gillespie, and hate.” All three Democrats approved the ad, and the Democratic Party of Virginia paid for the mailer. Gillespie’s campaign condemned the mailer, which was first reported by the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Northam campaign spokesman David Turner countered that the mailer was fair because Gillespie did not explicitly condemn the president’s response to the Charlottesville unrest. Democrats pummeled Gillespie, a former Republican National Committee chairman, for not joining members of his own party, including Virginia U.S. Reps. Barbara Comstock and Scott W. Taylor, in directly criticizing Trump’s reaction. . . . Ed Gillespie should be willing to call out Donald Trump when he’s wrong and because he won’t, he gives voters a clear choice on Nov. 7.”
 [I]n September, Gillespie began airing ads that aimed to link MS-13 gang violence to Northam, while using images of Latinos in a way Latino groups call racist and inflammatory. And another ad suggests Northam wanted to restore gun rights to violent felons. Both parties are also trading barbs over mailers targeting against Latina candidates.

Oh, and lit's not forget that the entire GOP ticket supports voter ID laws and other GOP efforts to disenfranchise minority voters under the lie of preventing nonexistent voter fraud.   Gillespie, et all deserve the label given to the, plain and simple.

Thursday Morning Male Beauty - Pt 1

Trump Campaign Company Contacted WikiLeaks for Documents Stolen by Russia

Yet another shoe seems to be dropped that further validates the allegations that the Trump/Pence campaign engaged in efforts to collude with Russia in order to damage Hillary Clinton's campaign.  Naturally, as CNN and other real news outlets are reporting on Wikileak's confirmation that the Trump/Pence campaign made contact seeking documents stolen by Russian intelligence from the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign, Der Trumpenführer is launching into full obfuscation mode and is being aided and abetted by the fake right wing "news" sites who are working desperately to concoct faux counter scandals against Hillary Clinton. It goes without saying that the Fox News viewing, racist and Christofascist base of Trump supporters are eating up the lies flowing from Breitbart and Fox News even as Fox News is ignoring damning new evidence against the Trump/Pence, et al.   It is sadly, all part of the right wing cover up effort for Der Trumpenführer.  Here are highlights on the real news from CNN:

The head of a data analytics company linked to the Trump campaign contacted WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in 2016 regarding thousands of Hillary Clinton's emails kept on a private server while she was secretary of state, according to four sources familiar with the outreach.

Alexander Nix, the chief executive of Cambridge Analytica, sent an email to several people including top Donald Trump donor Rebekah Mercer, relaying that he had emailed Assange seeking access to emails from Clinton's private server to turn them into a searchable database for the campaign or a pro-Trump political action committee, two of the sources said.

Cambridge Analytica was hired in the summer of 2016 as part of the Trump campaign's three-pronged data operation, which was led by Brad Parscale and overseen by Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
 The attempt at collaboration raises fresh questions about the willingness of people associated with the Trump campaign to work with Wikileaks for political gain. The site, which publishes leaked documents, released hacked emails in July from the Democratic National Committee and in October from Clinton campaign chair John Podesta. US intelligence has said the Podesta emails were stolen by Russia and handed over to WikiLeaks through an intermediary.

News of the email exchange comes amid federal investigations into whether there was collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Parscale, the Trump campaign's digital director, was interviewed Tuesday by the House intelligence committee as part of that inquiry.

Assange confirmed the exchange in a post on Twitter Wednesday. "I can confirm an approach by Cambridge Analytica [prior to November last year] . . . .

Nix and Cambridge Analytica, which is backed by Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah, did not respond to requests for comment. After the Daily Beast report published, the Trump campaign issued a statement by campaign executive director Michael S. Glassner: "Once President Trump secured the nomination in 2016, one of the most important decisions we made was to partner with the Republican National Committee on data analytics. Leading into the election, the RNC had invested in the most sophisticated data targeting program in modern American in history, which helped secure our victory in the fall. . . . . Any claims that voter data from any other source played a key role in the victory are false."
 The statement does not address contacts between Cambridge Analytica and WikiLeaks. . . . . Parscale downplayed the campaign's connections to Cambridge Analytica, one of the sources said.

He began working for the Trump Organization's digital team in early 2015 before Trump officially announced his plan to run for office. Parscale and employees from his firm, Giles-Parscale, incorporated some staffers from Cambridge Analytica into their data operation.
 In July 2016, Trump called on Russia to find the emails. - "Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 e-mails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press. Let's see if that happens. That'll be next," Trump said in a news conference.

News of the outreach comes after an earlier disclosure that a Republican operative, Peter W. Smith, had been on the hunt for Clinton's missing emails during the campaign. Smith spoke to The Wall Street Journal in May, saying he and the colleagues he enlisted found five groups of hackers claiming to have 33,000 deleted emails from the private server Clinton used during her tenure as secretary of state. He [Smith] said that he determined two of the groups were Russian. "We knew the people who had these were probably around the Russian government," Smith told the Journal. Smith was found dead of an apparent suicide weeks after the interview. Steve Bannon, Trump's former White House chief strategist, was vice president and secretary of Cambridge Analytica until he stepped down to run the Trump campaign in August 2016, according to The New York Times. The Mercers are investors in Breitbart News, the far-right site where Bannon served as executive chairman before he ran Trump's campaign.

Political strategist Roger Stone, Trump's long-time confidant, had boasted during the campaign of knowledge about upcoming Wikileaks publication of damaging documents, at one point telling the Boston Herald Radio that he expected "Julian Assange and the Wikileaks people to drop a payload of new documents on a weekly basis fairly soon. 

Given that more than three  quarters of Trump's claims and statements have been documented to be untrue - lies in common parlance - I put little credence on anything Trump and his sycophants say to deflect attention from their underhanded dealings and possible treason.    

More Wednesday Morning Male Beauty

More Conservatives Need to Refuse to be Complicit in Misogyny

The embodiment of moral bankruptcy

To date, only three Republican Senators have had the moral integrity to begin calling out Donald Trump for what he is in fact: dangerous, unfit, and a bullying demagogue.  The rest prefer to remain silent as Trump trashes America's reputation on the international arena and dangerously escalates the possibility of war with North Korea and/or Iran.  And even despite their growing unhappiness within the GOP Senatorial ranks, legislation and policy changes have moved forward that will harm many Americans ranging from rolling back Obama era regulations that would have allowed consumers to sue big banks to Betsy DeVos' moves to protect scamming private colleges and universities and dismantle special education policies and programs. Among the conservative pundit class and intelligentsia - assuming anything of the sort still remains - the trend is to quietly normalize the abhorrent and "go along to get along."  Meanwhile, civil society and America's future are damaged, perhaps irreversibly,   The question is whether more self-styled conservatives will say "enough" and stop being complicit in the misogyny that is the hall mark of the Trump/Pence regime and today's Republican Party.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at the disturbing situation.  He are highlights: 

In his speech on Tuesday announcing that he won’t seek reelection to the Senate, Jeff Flake denounced the “reckless, outrageous and undignified” behavior coming from “the top of our government.” Earlier the same day, Bob Corker—also retiring—said Donald Trump “debases the country.” In the days to come, George Will will likely say something similar on MSNBC. Charlie Sykes may do so on public radio. Bret Stephens may pen an anti-Trump column in The New York Times.

Notice a pattern? Plenty of high-profile conservatives still passionately denounce Donald Trump. But few still rely on conservative voters, conservative readers or conservative listeners for their livelihood. Anti-Trump conservatism has become a brain without a body. Intellectually, it remains alive; politically, it’s almost dead.

Eight months ago, I suggested that on the subject of Trump, you could divide conservative commentators into three categories. Category one were the Trump loyalists: Breitbart, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Ann Coulter.  Their base is talk radio. They pride themselves on speaking for those plainspoken, dirt-under-the-fingernails conservatives who loathe not only Hillary Clinton, but Paul Ryan. Their chief enemies are globalism and multiculturalism, which they believe infect both parties, and are destroying America from without and within. Their ideological forefathers are Joseph McCarthy, George Wallace and Pat Buchanan, . . .

Category number two were Never Trump intellectuals who worked for non-conservative publications: David Frum, David Brooks, Ross Douthat, Jennifer Rubin.  For them, conservatism is about prudence, inherited wisdom, and a government that first does no harm; they see none of those virtues in Trump.

“In between,” I suggested, “are the conservatives who will tip the balance. Unlike Breitbart and company, they generally opposed Trump during the campaign. Unlike Brooks and company, they serve a conservative audience that now overwhelmingly backs him.” We now know what has happened to this third group. It has all but disappeared.  The conservative commentators who could not stomach Trump have largely left conservative media. . . . . Now ensconced in liberal institutions, these commentators are free to condemn Trump with little fear of retribution.

If Flake, Corker, Will, Stephens, Kelly, and Sykes have chosen their principles over their constituents, a different set of conservatives have done the opposite. Take Ted Cruz. At last year’s Republican convention, he famously failed to endorse Trump. Now he’s so tight with the Trumpians that Steve Bannon has declared him the only GOP senator he won’t try to challenge in 2018. Paul Ryan has largely stopped criticizing Trump, too. The House speaker, who last June accused Trump of “textbook” racism for attacking Judge Gonzalo Curiel, on Tuesday told reporters to “forget about” Corker’s attacks on Trump. According to Ryan, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman accusing the president of leading America “towards World War III” isn’t worth discussing.

Cruz and Ryan may be cowardly, but they aren’t dumb. They know that 80 percent of Republicans approve of Trump while less than 40 percent approve of Republican leaders in Congress. Which means that continuing their previous criticism of Trump would likely to cost them their jobs.

Many journalists and media personalities appear to have followed their constituents as well. Since the election, they’ve toned down their criticism of Trump. Last October, radio talk-show host Hugh Hewitt called on Trump to exit the presidential race. But last month, Hewitt rendered a dramatically different verdict: “All in all, Trump has had a pretty good eight months.”

During the campaign, Glenn Beck compared Trump to Hitler and called him an “extinction-level event” for American democracy. Now Beck’s criticisms of Trump are fewer and milder.

National Review has softened its criticisms, too. Yes, the magazine publishes condemnations of Trump, some of them incisive and eloquent. But its editors have shied away from some of the toughest accusations they made during the campaign. In its January 2016 editorial urging conservatives to oppose Trump, the magazine’s editors warned that his brand of populism contained “strong-man overtones.” But on Sunday, its editor Rich Lowry declared that the Trump presidency has brought “no budding authoritarianism.”

Flake and Corker’s attacks on Trump as they prepare to depart the Senate are part of a larger transformation. Trumpism has taken over the Republican Party and the conservative media, making them less intellectual, more nationalistic, and more bigoted. And that takeover has sparked an exodus of more intellectual, less nationalistic, and less bigoted conservatives into the liberal political and journalistic mainstream. How they remake that mainstream—and are remade by it—will shape American public life in the years to come.

Far to many "conservatives" are placing remaining in power or assuaging their prejudices over decency and morality.   Leading the way, of course, are evangelical Christians who, in my view, are the most morally bankrupt of the lot. 

Putin's Revenge on America

Frontline will be running a two-part documentary “Putin’s Revenge,” that will debut on PBS member stations on two consecutive Wednesdays, Oct. 25 and Nov. 1, at 10 p.m.  The program will look not only at Putin's rise to power in Russia - he is a former KGB operative - and his long simmering hatred towards the United States.  It also looks at Putin's plan to use cyber-warfare against his international foes, a list that has America at the top followed by other western nations, with resentments that stretch all the way back to the presidency of George H.W. Bush.  With American democracy in disarray and civil discourse trending downward even as Donald Trump - Putin's favored presidential candidate - strives to roil the western alliances, Putin must be smiling.  As American retrenches, Russia and China move into the void. All of these events, of course, are contrary to the interest of America and its citizens - even those embracing Trumps calls to racism and bigotry - and make up part of Putin's revenge on America.  A piece in Salon looks at the program and the message Americans need to hear.  Here are article excerpts:

Outwardly the purpose of “Putin’s Revenge” is to walk viewers through the political rise of Russia’s autocratic president Vladimir Putin, which the documentary dutifully does by building its narrative around interviews with Russian journalists and dissidents as well as expert contributions from journalists and biographers covering Putin for such publications as The Atlantic and the New York Times.

But Kirk and his co-writer Mike Wiser inform their biographical map by filtering Putin’s hardline autocratic methods through a psychological profile that draws more than a few parallels — Trump. Putin’s history as a former KGB officer is as common knowledge as that photo of him riding a horse shirtless.

Diluted into a meme long ago, that photo is a small part of a long campaign that began with Boris Yeltsin unwisely handing the presidency over to him in 1999. In part one of “Putin’s Revenge,” which airs Wednesday, Kirk and Wiser expediently trace his campaign to consolidate power to the opening days of what was initially his interim leadership, when he sold himself as a reform and a democrat — with the help of his public relations coach.

Even then, a former Putin advisor tells the interviewer, Putin understood that “everything could be manipulated. Any kind of press, any TV program is all about manipulation. It was decided what TV channels would show what news.”

Viewers who have been keeping up with current events are likely familiar with much of this timeline, starting with demolishing of independently run television studios and Putin’s move to bring broadcast media under government control.

That in itself is telling, as is the familiarity of exiled Russian journalist Masha Gessen and opposition figure Vladimir Kara-Murza, whose claim to fame among American viewers is that he survived two assassination attempts by poisoning. Gessen and Kara-Murza have appeared on a number of American news programs as well as night-time talk shows such as “Full Frontal with Samantha Bee” and “The Daily Show.”

But as “Putin’s Revenge” spells out, they are guest stars in a reality show produced by a man obsessed with image and pathologically concerned about how the world sees him. If the similarity to our thin-skinned president is alarming, it should be.

Kirk and Wiser expand upon this idea in the second half, which frames Putin’s animosity toward the united states as a product of a resentment over a lifetime’s worth of perceived humiliations. The title’s “Revenge” refers to his seething over the actions of a number of American presidents, dating back to George H.W. Bush’s celebration of the Berlin Wall’s fall (when a young Putin was a counter-intelligence agent stationed in Dresden, Germany, which Gessen refers to as “a backwater”).

From there, many moments in recent history were seen by Putin as one slight upon another. Bush’s post- 9/11 and the subsequent topping of Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Muammar Gaddafi in Libya as well as uprisings brewing in former Soviet countries were seen as existential threats. As he centralized power, restoring Joseph Stalin’s national anthem with new words in the process, his quest to make Russia great again became just as much about elevating his standing in the world and deteriorating America’s.

By innovating tactics in cyber warfare and enabling the viral spreading of misinformation via social media, “Putin’s Revenge” posits that Russian interference with American democracy was only a matter of time. Clinton, the latest in a line of old foes, had a questionable reputation among America’s electorate that made her a ripe target. The media’s obsession with the headline-grabbing salaciousness of Trump’s “Access Hollywood” tape drowned out the government’s warning about the hack in October — a warning handled and presented with insufficient urgency, Kirk and Wiser point out.

Frontline’s consistently fulfills its purpose of lining up recent news with history to put current events in a context that’s simple to comprehend. And I suppose “Putin’s Revenge” would be chilling if we weren’t already drowning in apprehensiveness over the dangerous ignorance and instability of our own president, a handy gift to Putin whose thoughtless words enabled and encouraged hackers to attack and exploit our cultural divisions.

“Putin’s Revenge” paints Putin as a spiteful malevolence to sharpen the warning of what we could be facing in the coming campaign cycle. But it also arrives at time when Western media is questioning whether we’re assigning too much power to Putin, as the world’s attention starts to turn toward Russia’s upcoming presidential election.

The only Kremlin- approved challenger so far is a reality TV star and former Russian Playboy model, the daughter of a deceased former St. Petersburg mayor who was one of Putin’s early allies. Everybody understands that election is a sham, and unless Putin somehow decides to relinquish power, he’ll become the second longest-ruler in Moscow, outdone only by Joseph Stalin’s 29 years in power.

Wednesday Morning Male Beauty - Pt 1

Quotes of the Day: Jennifer Rubin and Jeff Flake

Real news outlets - which excludes Fox News and Breitbart - is covered with coverage today that looks at the denunciations of Donald Trump by GOP Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona and GOP Senator Bob Corker.  However, the rebukes actually went beyond Donald Trump.  By extension they applied to every Republican office holder and even to those who voted for Trump and revel in his misogyny and dangerous narcissism.  One of the best summations of this indictment of those who are complicit in Trump's ugliness, bullying, racism and  damage done to America's democracy is in a column in the Washington Post by former conservative columnist Jennifer Rubin.  Here are excerpts:

The message to the GOP and the rest of the country is sobering. If you are going to speak out, as Flake did in a blistering book criticizing Trump, and remain loyal to principles like free trade, immigration and fiscal sobriety, there is no place for you in Trump’s GOP. Moreover, remaining in Trump’s GOP means tolerating, if not enabling, Trump’s noxious mix of dishonesty, bullying, protectionism and racism. It is not a party that tolerates questioning of Trump — or, apparently, our generals. It is not a party that defends the First Amendment or the independence of the courts. 

Many of my Republican "friends" keep trying to keep their heads firmly burrowed into the sand, but the time has come where each of must decide if we are on the side of truth, honesty, morality and decency or  on the side of Trump and the hideous thing that the Republican Party is becoming.

As for Flake's comments today, here are some excerpts via CNN:

We must never regard as "normal" the regular and casual undermining of our democratic norms and ideals. We must never meekly accept the daily sundering of our country - the personal attacks, the threats against principles, freedoms, and institutions, the flagrant disregard for truth or decency, the reckless provocations, most often for the pettiest and most personal reasons, reasons having nothing whatsoever to do with the fortunes of the people that we have all been elected to serve.

None of these appalling features of our current politics should ever be regarded as normal. We must never allow ourselves to lapse into thinking that this is just the way things are now. If we simply become inured to this condition, thinking that this is just politics as usual, then heaven help us. Without fear of the consequences, and without consideration of the rules of what is politically safe or palatable, we must stop pretending that the degradation of our politics and the conduct of some in our executive branch are normal. They are not normal.

It is often said that children are watching. Well, they are. And what are we going to do about that? When the next generation asks us, Why didn't you do something? Why didn't you speak up? -- what are we going to say?
 Mr. President, I rise today to say: Enough. We must dedicate ourselves to making sure that the anomalous never becomes normal. With respect and humility, I must say that we have fooled ourselves for long enough that a pivot to governing is right around the corner, a return to civility and stability right behind it. We know better than that. By now, we all know better than that.

When we remain silent and fail to act when we know that that silence and inaction is the wrong thing to do -- because of political considerations, because we might make enemies, because we might alienate the base, because we might provoke a primary challenge, because ad infinitum, ad nauseum -- when we succumb to those considerations in spite of what should be greater considerations and imperatives in defense of the institutions of our liberty, then we dishonor our principles and forsake our obligations. Those things are far more important than politics.

Acting on conscience and principle is the manner in which we express our moral selves, and as such, loyalty to conscience and principle should supersede loyalty to any man or party. We can all be forgiven for failing in that measure from time to time. . . . . . But too often, we rush not to salvage principle but to forgive and excuse our failures so that we might accommodate them and go right on failing—until the accommodation itself becomes our principle.

I have children and grandchildren to answer to, and so, Mr. President, I will not be complicit. . . . . giving in to the impulse to scapegoat and belittle threatens to turn us into a fearful, backward-looking people. In the case of the Republican party, those things also threaten to turn us into a fearful, backward-looking minority party.

We were not made great as a country by indulging or even exalting our worst impulses, turning against ourselves, glorying in the things which divide us, and calling fake things true and true things fake. And we did not become the beacon of freedom in the darkest corners of the world by flouting our institutions and failing to understand just how hard-won and vulnerable they are. 

When I resigned from the Republican Party more than a decade and a half ago after 8 years as a precinct captain and City Committee member, I did so for the reasons Flake enunciated.   Adhering to principles and morality and Constitutional values always supersedes loyalty to Party.  Yet, that is not the case with a majority of Republicans nowadays. Moral and decent Republicans need to exit the GOP and vote Democrat whenever possible to blunt the hideousness that is flowing through the GOP from the White House down. 

More Tuesday Morning Male Beauty

Democrats Should Embrace Impeachment

The caption of this post is from an op-ed in the New York Times that lays out the argument as to why Democrats should embrace a movement to have Donald Trump impeached.  Like many others, I view Trump as toxic, dangerous and a threat to society.  His only "success" to date is placing a man on the U.S. Supreme Court who believes that the real or feigned religious beliefs of Christian extremists override the nation's laws.  Meanwhile, his Cabinet appointees/henchmen seek to usher in pollution and an unwinding of safety regulations that protect everyday American families.  On the education front, the opponent of public education, Betsy DeVos is undoing 72 different rules that will do harm to special education students and many others.  If this is not all bad enough, Republicans have introduced the following bills in the House of Representatives:

1. HR 861 to Terminate the Environmental Protection Agency 

2. HR 610 - Vouchers for Public Education (which may end free public education as we know it)
3. HR 899 to Terminate the Department of Education (which may lead to greater disparity between states)
4. HR 69 to Repeal the Rule Protecting Wildlife 
5. HR 370 to Repeal the Affordable Care Act 
6. HR 354 to De-fund Planned Parenthood 

7. HR 785 - National "Right to Work" (this one is actually a 'Right to fire you whenever your boss feels like it" law, and it would effectively end unions)

8. HR 83 - Mobilizing Against Sanctuary Cities Bill 

9. HR 147 to Criminalize Abortion (“Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act”) 

But back to impeachment.  Here are column highlights:

Last week, Tom Steyer, the billionaire progressive donor, announced a $10 million campaign calling for President Trump’s impeachment, beginning with a television commercial running in all 50 states. Trump, the spot says, has “brought us to the brink of nuclear war, obstructed justice at the F.B.I., and in direct violation of the Constitution, he’s taken money from foreign governments and threatened to shut down news organizations that report the truth.” Appearing on screen, Steyer asks, “If that isn’t a case for impeaching and removing a dangerous president, then what has our government become?”

It’s a good question. Yet while most elected Democrats probably agree that Trump’s presidency is a nightmare, they’ve been largely reluctant to use the “I” word. The base wants impeachment — according to an August survey from the Public Religion Research Institute, 72 percent of Democrats support efforts to remove Trump from office. But inside the Beltway, calling for impeachment remains strangely taboo.

Some members of Congress are awaiting the results of the investigation being conducted by Robert Mueller, the special counsel, and the case for impeachment may become stronger when his inquiry is complete. Yet whatever Mueller discovers, we have credible reasons for impeachment right now. The Constitution dictates that presidents be impeached for “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”

[L]egal scholars have laid out cases for impeachment based on Trump’s blatant violations of the Constitution’s emoluments clause; his abuse of power in pardoning the former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio; and for passing Israeli intelligence to Russian officials, among other misdeeds. In July, Representative Brad Sherman, a California Democrat, introduced an article of impeachment on the grounds that Trump attempted to obstruct justice by firing James Comey from the F.B.I. Yet he had only a single co-sponsor . . Steyer, a hedge fund manager-turned-environmentalist who spent more than $91 million on behalf of Democrats in 2016, finds this reticence baffling. “What is the calculus to being silent on the most important issue of the day, where it’s absolutely critical to the American people, and it will go on the historical record of what you did or didn’t do?” he asked me. “I don’t understand.” I’ve spoken to Democrats who fear making impeachment too partisan, holding out hope that if Trump’s behavior becomes egregious enough Republicans might join the effort to hold him accountable. . . . And, of course, some on the left believe that a functioning Mike Pence administration would be worse than the dysfunctional Trump regime.

There are strategic merits to all these arguments. But they leave many Americans terrified by Trump’s erratic behavior and incompetence feeling marooned, confused as to why their leaders aren’t treating this presidency like the civic emergency that it is. At some point, we need politicians to address the crisis in front of us.

[A] Republican-controlled Congress has little incentive to act. But even if Democrats retake the House in 2018, Sherman told me, impeachment “would still require a change in public opinion.”

This is why Steyer’s campaign is potentially useful, even if at first glance it seems quixotic. . . . . But Steyer is aiming at movement-building; he wants to reach people who desperately want Trump gone but don’t know what to do about it. “We’re asking electeds to stand up for the right thing, but we’re going to American citizens to ask them to demand it,” he said.

Democrats may wish to return to a less destructive brand of politics, but that’s not an option while Trump sits in the White House.

While he does, we’re all better off if he thinks impeachment is a possibility. “I’m hoping that if Trump is aware that he could be removed, that that awareness constrains him to the extent he can be constrained,” Sherman said. And the best way to show Trump that people are serious about impeaching him is to put the message on television.