Donald Trump's no defense "defense" - makes stuff up as they go along

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trumps-confederacy-of-dunces/2020/01/29/6616c4fa-42e5-11ea-aa6a-083d01b3ed18_story.html

Maine Writer - So let me get this right?  Dumb tRumph's incompetent defense team is making up excuses about why Donald Trump can't be impeached for committing impeachable crimes.  Is that right?  Ohhhhh boy, the law professors at Harvard University have certainly received a stain on their  highfalutin reputation about this kind of stupid legal strategy.  

Surely I am not alone in recognizing how close the name "Bondi" is to the concept of "Blondie"

This is what Morning Joe MSNBC pundit Joe Scarborough wrote in his opinion published in The Washington Post:

Donald Trump’s confederacy of dunces

A confederacy of dunces stumbled onto the Senate floor this week to launch their bewildering defense of Donald Trump. This misfit band of lawyers brought with them arguments so stunningly stupefying, logic so fatally flawed and a cynicism so brazenly transparent that one suspects Baghdad Bob was viewing the entire spectacle with grudging respect.

On Day One of Trump’s impeachment defense, the president’s team dismissed his personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani as a minor player in the Ukrainian affair. Trump lawyer Jane Raskin said he was little more than a “shiny object designed to distract you.” Never mind that Trump pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to contact Giuliani, assuring him that, “Mr. Giuliani is a highly respected man. He was the mayor of New York City, a great mayor, and I would like him to call you".

Before Trump made the not-so-perfect call that would eventually lead to his impeachment, Giuliani ran frequent strategy sessions from the second floor of the president’s Washington hotel that were focused on getting Ukraine to investigate the Bidens. Giuliani repeatedly pressured U.S. diplomats and State Department employees to push his “drug deal” (as former national security adviser John Bolton described it). At the same time, America’s Mayor kept feeding Trump a steady diet of conspiracy theories that played into the president’s preexisting prejudices against Ukraine. Far from being a bit player and “shiny object,” Giuliani helped build the Democrats’ case for Trump’s impeachment better than anyone else in the president’s inner circle.

If the claims about Giuliani were not preposterous enough, senators were also forced to endure Kenneth Starr’s self-righteous and hypocritical warnings regarding “the culture of impeachment.” Starr had, after all, once run a four-year investigation into obscure land deals, suicide conspiracy theories and intimate sexual details involving President Bill Clinton. Starr would later claim that Clinton’s abuse of power was the “capstone” of his impeachment case, but that did not stop the former independent counsel from mournfully warning senators Monday that “the commission of a crime is by no means sufficient to warrant the removal of our duly elected president.”

If it is true that Trump killed irony years ago, Starr’s opening statement single-handedly exhumed irony’s corpse from its tomb, dragged it across the Senate floor and demolished all obstacles in its path before finally scattering the bones back into the grave, one by one. As Lawfare’s Benjamin Wittes said, “Does Ken Starr know he’s Ken Starr?” That embarrassing performance seemed only to confirm Trump’s previous assessment of the former Clinton prosecutor as a “lunatic” and a “disaster.”

Such insults were never thrown in the direction of Pam Bondi, another member of the president’s legal team. Bondi had safely placed herself in Trump’s good favor by refusing to pursue claims of fraud against Trump University when she was Florida’s attorney general. In 2013, the Orlando Sentinel reported that Bondi’s office was deciding whether to join in the lawsuit against Trump. Four days after the article went to print, Bondi’s reelection efforts were boosted by a $25,000 check from Trump’s foundation. Soon after, Bondi announced she would be not suing the reality TV star.

Such shamelessness in the service of Trump carries with it certain benefits. For Bondi, it was the honor of trotting out the conspiracy theory that then-Vice President Joe Biden had a Ukrainian prosecutor fired for investigating Burisma, of whose board his son Hunter was a member. If it were possible to embarrass the former Florida attorney general, then she would certainly be distressed to learn that Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal dismissed her theory as “discredited” months ago, or that the European Union, the Obama administration and the United States’ closest allies demanded the ouster of the same investigator, in part because his investigation into Burisma had been shelved.

But neither Bondi nor Starr can be shamed. The same holds true of the other attorneys on the president’s incompetent defense team, who sullied their reputations this week defending a shameless huckster, and whom history will judge harshly as those whose dunce routines continued to enable this dangerously unbalanced man.

America must move beyond the 1990s and the Regressive Trump

"...Mr. Trump, saying he was concerned about 'the transnational emergence of almost radical populism, deep anger, a sense of dislocation'.....”- Ken Starr

Donald Trump has not published any cohesive public policies but he contineus to capture media attention on regressive subjects. Even former prosecuter Ken Star understands. 

Kenneth Starr, Who Tried to Bury Bill Clinton, Now Only Praises Him- in The New York Times

By Amy Chozick

Donald Trump has no public policies he can stand behind; rather, he's a muckraker about Secretary Clinton and her considerable accomplishments

An unlikely voice recently bemoaned the decline of civility in presidential politics, warned that “deep anger” was fueling an “almost radical populism” and sang the praises of former President Bill Clinton — particularly his “redemptive” years of philanthropic work since leaving the White House.

The voice was that of Kenneth W. Starr, the former Whitewater independent counsel, whose Javert-like pursuit of Mr. Clinton in the 1990s helped bring a new intensity to partisan warfare and led to theimpeachment of a president for only the second time in the nation’s history.

The presumptive Republican nominee, Donald J. Trump, increasingly seems to be trying to relitigate the scandals that Mr. Starr investigated, dredging up allegations of sexual transgressions by Mr. Clinton to accuse Hillary Clinton — the likely Democratic nominee — of having aided and enabled her husband at the expense of Mr. Clinton’s female accusers.

But Mr. Starr expressed regret last week that so much of Mr. Clinton’s legacy remains viewed through the lens of what Mr. Starr demurely termed “the unpleasantness.”

His remarks seemed almost to absolve Mr. Clinton, if not to exonerate him.

“There are certain tragic dimensions which we all lament,” Mr. Starr said in a panel discussion on the presidency at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.

“That having been said, the idea of this redemptive process afterwards, we have certainly seen that powerfully” in Mr. Clinton’s post-presidency, he continued, adding, “President Carter set a very high standard, which President Clinton clearly continues to follow.”

He called Mr. Clinton “the most gifted politician of the baby boomer generation.”

“His genuine empathy for human beings is absolutely clear,” Mr. Starr said. “It is powerful, it is palpable and the folks of Arkansas really understood that about him — that he genuinely cared. The ‘I feel your pain’ is absolutely genuine.”

For some time, Mr. Starr, a Christian who is now the president and chancellor of Baylor University, a private Baptist school in Waco, Tex., has sought to put his years as a political combatant behind him. After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, some of his associates expressed regret that so much of the Clinton administration’s efforts had been spent fighting those battles rather than addressing the growing threat posed by Osama bin Laden. And in 2010, Mr. Starr told Fox News that he regretted that his investigation of Mr. Clinton had taken so long and that it “brought great pain to a lot of people.”

The panel discussion in Philadelphia was occasioned by the release of “The Presidents and the Constitution: A Living History,” to which Mr. Starr contributed a chapter on Ronald Reagan. The book’s editor, who wrote the chapter on Mr. Clinton, is Ken Gormley, who also wrote the 2010 book “The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs. Starr.”

“It’s sad that the chapter is so rooted in the unpleasantness, as I used to call it, the recent unpleasantness,” Mr. Starr said.

He did not mention any of the current presidential candidates by name in last week’s discussion. But Mr. Starr, 69, alluded to Mr. Trump, saying he was concerned about “the transnational emergence of almost radical populism, deep anger, a sense of dislocation.”

He also seemed to echo Mr. Trump, however, saying, “Our children are not going to do as well as we did or as our parents’ generation,” and pointing to demographic shifts as a source of “considerable instability.”

Then again, Mr. Starr also alluded to the danger posed by income inequality, a central theme of Senator Bernie Sanders’s campaign. “We simply have not adjusted as a society to what seems to be the 1 percent and the 99 percent,” Mr. Starr said.

But it was Mr. Starr’s keening over the coarsening and polarization of American politics that seemed most noteworthy. He did not volunteer any responsibility for it — though Mr. Clinton, who in 2006 accused Mr. Starr of “indicting innocent people because they wouldn’t lie,” might well lay considerable blame at his feet.

A federal judge in the Reagan administration and the solicitor general under President George Bush, Mr. Starr was named independent counsel in 1994, taking over the investigation of the Whitewater real estate venture and the suicide of Vincent W. Foster Jr., a deputy White House counsel. He expanded the investigation to include the Paula Jones lawsuit and the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

Mr. Starr’s conclusion that Mr. Clinton had committed perjury in sworn testimony denying having had “sexual relations” with Ms. Lewinsky eventually led to Mr. Clinton’s impeachment.

“Whether it’s Whitewater or whether it’s Vince or whether it’s Benghazi. It’s always a mess with Hillary,” Mr. Trump recently told The Washington Post.

Mr. Starr now is contending with criticism of his own leadership over Baylor’s handling of sexual assault charges leveled against several of its football players.

In the panel discussion last week, he reached back to an earlier presidency — that of Lyndon B. Johnson. Saying today’s divisiveness “deeply concerns me,” he recalled Johnson’s appealing for comity before a joint session of Congress.

“I remember this so vividly — he said, ‘Come, let us reason together.’ Can we talk with one another?” Mr. Starr said. “The utter decline and erosion of civility and discourse has, I think, very troubling implications.”

He quoted E. Gordon Gee, the president of West Virginia University, as saying, “The world has become a shouting match.”

“There are always places for shouts and strong feelings, but the genius of American democracy and of presidential leadership,” Mr. Starr continued, “is to bring unity out of our diversity. E pluribus unum — out of many, one. And we don’t seem to hear too many voices saying, ‘Let us find common ground.’ "

News media like Good Morning America tries to get to some truth about Never Donald Trump but his surrogates hurt our ears with rhetorical rants rather than answers, as was the case with Corey Lewandowski in a May 24th morning interview.  In fact, there are no substantial Trumponian policies, rather, only lies masked by fear, racism and stoking hate.  Wake Up  America!