Happy holidays, and thoughts on recent events

First, even though it’s been relatively quiet here, I’d like to wish everyone out there who is still following the blog a happy holiday season, as I have in years past. The 25th of December kind of snuck up on me this time around. If you so desire, feel free to come back to the rest of this post after the holidays have concluded. For everyone else, keep on reading…

I have been following recent events, including the long overdue impeachment of DJT (Wikipedia), and as reported by Vanity Fair, the absolutely egregious statements by Mitch McConnell, Senate majority leader. From the latter article, I quote:

McConnell told reporters Tuesday that the political nature of impeachment means he’s not even going to pretend to be fair or impartial on impeachment, no matter what the facts dictate or the oath he swears to uphold. “I’m not an impartial juror,” McConnell said. “This is a political process. There is not anything judicial about it. Impeachment is a political decision . . . I’m not impartial about this at all.” The Senate leader was also fully willing to embrace his hypocrisy when a reporter presented McConnell with a quote he said during Bill Clinton‘s impeachment, in which McConnell supported impeachment witnesses testifying at the trial and said the practice was “certainly not unusual.”

[…] “Everything I do during this, I will be coordinating with White House counsel,” McConnell told Fox News last week, adding that there will be “no difference between the president’s position and our position as to how to handle this.”

This is insane and a complete perversion of any idea of justice. Neither Nixon nor Clinton had the luxury of a Senate with their own party’s majority. But during both of those impeachments, we didn’t have Senators openly saying they couldn’t be impartial (they are sworn to be) or that impeachment is a political process (it’s not, or at the very least not supposed to be). I am counting Nixon’s here, even though he resigned, as the impeachment process did begin.

There’s a reason I have taken to calling Mitch McConnell by the derisive nickname “Yertle the Turtle”. The amount of proposed legislation Senator McConnell has left on the table waiting to be debated is staggering. Most of the bills left to rot have come from Democrats or address liberal causes (common-sense safety laws regarding who can purchase guns, for example). That’s one thing, but perverting the entire system of checks and balances can’t be allowed to go unanswered. If John Cornyn gets re-elected, so be it, but McConnell has got to go.

Moving on, the political situation locally after the general election was, to say the least, a bit of a botch. The runoff wound up being between Sylvester Turner, who I didn’t really like and wanted to replace, and Tony Buzbee, a known DJT supporter who leans right on too many issues and who threatened to fire our police chief on purely political grounds days before the runoff. There were some strong parallels to the 2016 presidential election, where the candidate I really wanted (Michael Boykins in this case, Bernie Sanders in 2016) didn’t make the cut in the previous round, and I had to settle for voting for someone else. In this case, that was Turner; in 2016, of course, it was Hillary Clinton.

The difference this time around, thankfully, is that the candidate I voted for won (in fact, all seven candidates I voted for in the runoff won, the first time in a long time that has happened). I’m not happy with what Turner has done for us. However, the idea of voting for a flaming Republican/conservative was just too much to stomach. Especially one who supported DJT, who is now facing impeachment. (Yes, city of Houston elections are nominally non-partisan, but political party affiliation does come into play at some point anyway.)

Once again, happy holidays, and best wishes for a new year. I’ll try to post more in 2020. For a while, I was too outraged about what was going on to sit down and blog about it. That has gotten better in the past few weeks, as there is now some real hope things will get better.