Month: March 2019

The Intelligence Community Is Atwitter About Friday Indictments…But What’s Going On?

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

I keep seeing chatter from people online about something big happening on Friday vis-a-vis Mueller and inducements. The interesting thing is it’s coming from intelligence community people online.

It makes you wonder what they know and who they think will be indicted. Given the purview of Mueller’s investigation, it makes you think that maybe it’s someone big. Someone really big, like Don Jr. Or maybe even Jared Kushner.

Whomever it is, it would be someone so big that things could come to a head pretty quick. Like, Trump starts to fire and pardon everyone he feels he needs to pardon to survive. One thing is, I continue to think not only has the distance between what the public knows to be true and what the House Democratic leadership is willing to do has grown to an unstable distance, I also believe that the conditions are for actual violence to occur from the Right. I could see a scenario whereby someone whack job blows up, say CNN or The New York Times once the impeachment process begins, then Trump turns around and uses that as some sort of Reichstag Event.

Or, put another way, the country is tearing itself apart in a macro sense, the likes of which hasn’t been seen since before the Civil War. One thing I would like to observe, however — the big difference between the late 1850s and today is the military. If there was some sort of crisis as impeachment began to pickup steam, the ostensibly apolitical military might be the thing that keeps the country together in the end.

Maybe not in the way we would prefer, but they might just do it.

Rather than people leaving the military for individual states like they did during the Civil War, if there was some sort of legitimacy crisis on the part of the Federal government, it’s likely the military would setup a junta of sorts for a few months to let passions subside. That, in fact, might be the really strange manner in which we actually slip out of what seems like a pretty inevitable civil war. The military simply won’t allow that to happen and in exchange, civilian control would end for a time being.

But anyway, back to the matter at hand — whatever may be about to happen, the IC things they have a heads up. For them to be so excited, it probably means someone, somewhere in the Mueller office has been gossiping with the IC.

I still, however, have my doubts that anything at all will drop Friday.

We’ll see, I guess.

Life During Cold Civil War Time

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

When I was a young man, I was completely obsessed with the Reagan Era Iran-contra scandal and I think there’s a real chance that the clusterfuck that is the Trump Administration will go that way,

In fact, I will go so far as to say that unless some outside force happens that we can’t really predict at this point, all this talk about impeaching Trump is going to fade into talk about if he is able to preserve his “legacy” in 2024. I just don’t see any endgame at this point, but whenever I struggle to see one, the least likely scenario is one where Trump is actually removed from office.

I would go so far as to say that unless No Deal Brexit really does cause a historic global economic slowdown, there is literally nothing politically a this point that will prevent him from leaving office Jan. 20th, 2025. I say this because the only historical political event I can equate modern America to (or at least the center-Right part of it) is Vichy France.

What I mean by this is Vichy France was a really strange situation where otherwise honorable people hated their political opponents so much that they acted in a really weird way. And, I think if you keep that in the back of your head along with what happened with Iran-contra, the idea that Trump will never face any real political consequences makes a lot of sense.

It seems pretty clear to me that unless No Deal Brexit crashes the global economy in some meaningful way AND we manage to get Trump’s impeachment into the Senate by August 2019, Trump’s going to be on the campaign trail in 2024 for whatever young, passionate, competent ideologically-based would-be tyrant he manages to pick to succeed him.

In general, I have no faith in the American political system to correct itself in any meaningful way and sketching out the next 20 years, I would say that not only is it unlikely a center-Left presidential candidate will win, if they do it will likely be a fluke AND there will be, by that time, a real MAGA deep state that will do everything in its power to undercut them.

That doesn’t even begin to address the fact that we’re long overdue for a real crisis, as opposed to the long string of self-owns that the Trump Administration seems to generate.

It seems as though the only thing standing between America and a pretty dark dystopia is Trump is old and incompetent along with the general unpredictability of the macro “dead hand of history.” Clinton winning in 1992 was a fluke if you look at general trends. It seems as though it takes 8 years for the opposition party to develop an effective leader to have a real chance of flipping the White House. And that only works because the seat is open.

America is no longer either a “republic” or a “constitutional democratic republic.” It is a plutocracy that only doesn’t slide into a Roman Empire situation because of the general temperament of its populace. I’ve come to believe that there’s a real possibility that Gen. Mattis might have to step in at some point to resort order during a period of unprecedented instability in American government.

I say this because the American Military is not only so well respected but is also the sole institution existing that has an absolute belief in the traditional American concept of the rule of law. As such, if there happened to be any real crisis as to who was running the country, I could see a consensus developing for Gen. Mattis to act as something of a caretaker while things got sorted out.

And that’s one of the happier scenarios.

The United States is zooming towards a Second American Civil War for no other reason than the Right’s rhetoric is so surreal that there might come a point where they believe if they lose the presidency for any reason that that, in itself, is enough reason to attack the center-Left is a violent manner. At that point, I would again note that the American Military probably would have to step in until civian rule could again be established.

The American constitutional system is so rotting and corrupt that there are some existential issues that it simply can’t address. These massive issues put together are, in my view, equal to slavery in the 19th Century.

I have no easy answers, folks. This is all going to go down within the next 20 years, if not much, much sooner. In fact, the argument could be made that Trump, by definition, is preventing the Right from killing people in the streets. Or not. I don’t know. I’m just nervous.

The Great Political Conundrum Of 2019

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

We’ve officially entered that strange twilight period in the Trump Era when on the face of it, we know Trump faces some existential threats to his administration, and yet the Democratic leadership of the House is sitting on its hands for various reasons.

The divide between what we know and what Democrats in the House are willing to do politically is beginning to grow so deep and large that whenever things snap back into place, it could be pretty astonishing.

What I mean by this is — while the House Democratic leadership is beginning to look into the vast amounts of crimes and abuses of power on the part of Trump, they continue to wait for the ostensibly “objective” Mueller Report to “force their hand” on the matter of impeachment. For various macro reasons, they feel as though only after the Mueller Report is released can they actively move to impeach Trump.

Alas, I fear that’s going to be quickly seen as quaint thinking soon enough. I have long believed that the moment the House begins to do its job, the political momentum for impeachment will race out the gate. The issue, of course, is about 37% of the electorate — the people who elect Republicans and vote for them in primaries — is so cult-like in their support for Trump that it would be some outside force, not anything that Trump may have done that would ultimately lead to his impeachment and potential conviction in the Senate.

Ultimately, it will be the economy. If No Deal Brexit happens and the consequences of it are as bad as we fear, then that, no anything Mueller may report to Congress, will be what drives Trump out of office.

And that doesn’t even begin to address the cold hard political fact that if Trump’s fate isn’t actively being decided in the Senate by August 2019, we’re going to have to wait for “the people to decide” in 2020. And, as we all know, America is now a corrupt autocratic plutocracy, not a democratic constitutional republic and as such, Trump is likely to cruise to a fairly easy re-election.

If Trump is re-elected in 2020 (which as of now looks like a political absolute certainty) he will likely go full autocrat and pardon everyone he needs to pardon and get his proxies on TV to say, “the people have spoken, they don’t care, let’s move on. Besides, shouldn’t we be at work with Iran by now?”

And, yet, there may come a point between now and August 2019 when a tipping point occurs and there simply is no escaping the absolute need to impeach Trump in the House. The worst case scenario in the Senate being, of course, that they will punt the whole thing and not even take up the articles of impeachment against Trump in the first place.

So there’s a very real possibility that the absolute worst case scenario for all involved is Trump eludes conviction in the Senate, he gets re-elected and then the economy tanks in a massive way…and even though his approval rates drop down to the flat earthers, Qanon believers and anti-Vaxxers, there simply will be no political will to do anything about it and the entire country will grind to a halt for about three years until we start fighting over Trump’s “legacy” in 2024.

What’s worse, should the good guys “win” and Trump be somehow miraculously convicted in the Senate, I believe Trump won’t physically leave the Oval Office without the “assistance” of Federal Marshals. In that case, it would be the most devastating domestic event in American history since 9/11.

I guess what I’m saying is I have no idea what the endgame to all of this is and there are a lot of real nasty ones you can think up. It could be that all things considered our best bet is some sort of extreme version of Iran-contra whereby we all know Trump should be impeached and convicted and somehow that is enough to maybe, just maybe allow a progressive liberal to be elected in 2024. (If we still have elections at that point.)

But if you literally use that as political history roadmap, it’s not exactly all that encouraging — Bush won in 1988 and Clinton only won because of the dead hand of history. Given that the youngest of the Baby Boomers won’t start to die for another 20 years, there’s a good chance it won’t be Trump who finally pushes until to a “managed democracy” like Russia, but his younger, more competent and indological successor.

On That Scifi Concept Of Mine Someone Is Probably Going To ‘Steal’ And Develop

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

I vacillate back and forth between panicking that someone’s going to use that crude scifi first act scene summary I wrote to write a screenplay and wondering why that would be all that bad for me, in the long run.

There are three major reasons why I put that scifi concept aside in favor of what I’m working on now.

First, it was all conceit.
I could never figure out any characters, so I kept writing and re-writing the scene summary. The concept was amazingly great, but it was all concept and no characters.

Second, I didn’t have the resources.
The universe I constructed around that scifi novel was so enormous that only about eight or more books would have properly given it the treatment it needed. And the better storyteller I became, the more I realize the internal logic of a novel, as opposed to a movie, demanded I learned a huge amount about a lot of topics that I barely knew more than a Wikipedia entry’s worth of information about.

Third, where it was set.
I wanted to write a really personal story about the general area where I grew up and the more I worked on the project, the more I realized I probably needed to set it somewhere different. By doing that, of course, I would probably be set back months, if not years, as I learned enough about the geography of the new place.

Regardless, the point is it’s very possible some hack is using that crude scene summary I posted during the process of developing that original scifi novel to write a screenplay. It will hurt if they do that, but I would like to think somehow, someway, my connection to that product might garner some attention and help my career long-term.

Idle Mulling On Why We’re Probably Never Getting Rid Of Trump

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

People who are opposed to Trump often times miss some basic facts about modern American political life, chief among them being that as it stands it is nearly impossible to hurt Trump politically in any traditional sense.

In other words, Trump has a base of about 35% and it’s not going anywhere.

Ever.

Trump is so obsessed with placating the CPAC base that what was once MAGA ideology is now bordering on a theology. The distance between Trump literally being an American Fuhrer for that base is, well, pretty finite at this point.

So, I saying that if you sketch out the future given what we have on hand now, we aren’t going to be fighting over impeachment in 2019, we’re going to be fighting over Trump’s “legacy” in 2024.

There’s a pretty good chance that in the end, the whole thing is value free. It’ll be as if Trump never existed. He, of course, is likely to damage basic political discourse in America for the rest of my life, but should a progressive liberal win the presidency in 2024, the now-MAGA “deep state” will do everything in its power to destroy him or her while at the same time former MAGA Republicans will act like everything they did in defense of Trump is “old news and they were just trying to get elected.”

As long as the economy continues the way it is, Trump is a king, an emperor, and elected dictator. For about 35% of the electorate, Trump could literally declare himself God King of the United States and all people like me would get from MAGA is cry-laugh emojis.

The only possible existential threat the Trump Administration faces at this point is something like No Deal Brexit will be sufficient shock to the global economy that Trump will go from a base of 35% to maybe 20%. But even then, Trump’s not going anywhere.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that all our worst fears about Trump could be proven absolutely right AND the economy could collapse and the only way he leaves office before 2025 is Republicans in Congress begin to believe they would have a better chance keeping the executive if Pence was the incumbent.

That’s it. That’s all I got.

Trump’s combination of zero shame, an absolute craven desire to put self-interest ahead of the needs of the nation and the religious devotion of his base is more than enough to keep him in office even if he strangled someone, anyone, in Times Square, married Ivanka, gave the nuclear codes to anyone interested, whatever, you name it.

Trump. Is. Not. Going. Anywhere.

All I can say is I hope the political fates prove me wrong. I really do. But Trump is such an absolute avatar for the feeling of disenfranchisement for a lot of white America that, well, the only reason why I stay angry is I can’t help myself.