To impeach, or not to impeach

[pbrower2a]

(10-11-2019, 01:49 AM)Classic-Xer Wrote:

(10-11-2019, 12:10 AM)taramarie Wrote: Btw consider this before saying anything that one of my best friends ran away from home because her parents did not accept her being a lesbian. We lived right next door to each other for years and then one day I found an ambulance was dragging out her body and putting her in an ambulance. I knew she was depressed but had no idea she would do what she did. She gassed herself in her car and deliberately killed herself. For years I tried my best to be of support but in the end the lack of support and the shaming for just being who she was was too much for her. So do consider this before typing a response. I lost someone near and dear and have heard what it is like first hand and had to see her body taken away.

I knew a gal in high school who killed herself for the same reason as your friend. I knew a guy in high school who killed himself the same way as your friend but did it for a different reason. I now another guy (my best friends older brother) who I knew my entire life who killed himself the same way as your friend for a different reason. You may want to consider all these experiences as well.

Rejection by people whom one used to believe accepted you unconditionally and then turned against you completely because one is homosexual? Having been in a time in which I contemplated suicide (family assets necessary for me to start over as my father went into a nursing home and facing the prospect of having to live in which my sole purpose in life would be to suffer for people richer than myself, living in a community that I have outgrown in every way but financially, and knowing that nothing matters in America except wealth and bureaucratic power? All that kept me from killing myself was the fear of Hell. 

America has debased itself badly as the economic elites have accumulated complete power only to toy with us on occasion with a Clinton or Obama to offer some hope that politics can change something. Then comes Donald Trump who dredges up the worst in human nature in America on behalf of the rich-and-powerful. The people who really rule us seem to hold onto the belief that the sole reason for the existence of the rest of us is to enrich and pamper those elites in return for bare existence... and as a reward, the current opiate of the masses, disposable mass low culture that people must replace almost as if it were last-year's clothes (if one is middle class) or the clothes from two or three years ago (if one is poor). 

I grew up in a time in which many people still practiced the ethos of "make-it-do-or-do-without", which is good for ensuring that one can keep a savings account to meet a glaring need and ultimately to make retirement more comfortable than otherwise. I have nice book, music (classical), and movie collections... and I think people would be richer, at least emotionally, if they looked to real culture instead of the derivative and expendable stuff that a commercial society pushes as if it were a drug-trafficker offering heroin.

We are in a messed-up time because we are no longer able to get more happiness by making, selling, and using more stuff. Basic needs remain, but such activities as farming, energy extraction, clothing manufacturing, and the building of low-income housing are not particularly lucrative. What used to be desired luxuries are now often junk due to a glut. 

...back to Donald Trump. I knew that he would be a disaster because he made promises that could only bring conflict. Although paradoxes are always possible, blatant contradictions can never reconcile. We get such a warning from Kafka to a lesser extent and Orwell to a greater extent, and we ignore those two only at the risk of missing the sagest advice from the twentieth century. Donald Trump does Newspeak, probably without knowing that he does so. Well, Orwellian Newspeak turns discourse on anything into sheer madness. There was truth before Trump and there will be truth after him. Impeachment is not for offense of mass sensibilities or for administrative incompetence; it is instead for malfeasance, including corruption and other crime. Impeachment is a duty when the President's misconduct is as egregious as it seems to be. Note well: the impeachment itself is a collection of charges analogous to a criminal indictment. Innocent people have been indicted and acquitted. Nothing of which President Trump is said to have done is yet proved in any court of law. But there is the stench of rotting flesh in the trunk.