By Hank Edson
When it comes to reasons why the United States Congress should impeach Donald Trump, I generally stay away from the issue of Trump's alleged collusion with Russia for three reasons:
First, Trump's contacts with Russia go back decades and almost certainly establish his participation in a criminal enterprise of money laundering and other Russian mafia related crimes. Therefore, we can't be sure what the evidence "in plain sight" actually indicates is going on. It is all certainly grounds for impeachment, but it is not necessarily evidence of "collusion." The collusion part draws assumptions that I have not seen anyone convincingly establish with proof. One thing that we see again and again is how the cause of the people is undermined when a wrong basis for prosecution is asserted and suddenly the entire legitimacy of the prosecution is called into doubt as a result of that one error. We have multiple grounds for impeachment, but Russian collusion is the most uncertain.
Second, if there is a lot of evidence in "plain sight" of Trump's improper contacts with Russia, it is also true that there is a whole, whole lot of McCarthyist "red baiting" propaganda going on that is being used to the advantage of the Democratic Establishment. Here are two good examples: First, by stoking fury over Russian collusion, the DNC has entirely shifted public focus from the it's own possibly criminal conduct in rigging the Democratic primaries, that came to light as a result of the Russian hacking. Second, progressive political candidates are now regularly being linked to Russian interference in the corporate mainstream media which corporations have in turn direct links to establishment candidates. There was ample evidence of collusion between the corporate mainstream media and the DNC and the Clinton campaign in 2016. The Red Scare over Russian meddling in the election is again being used with careful coordination between the media and the establishment of the party. This is as in "plain sight" as any of Trump's collusion, but also as hard to prove with actual evidence. I'm not going to be manipulated into giving any more juice to this anti-democratic red scare manipulation happening on behalf of the Establishment just because this same red scare tactic is being aimed at Donald Trump.
Finally, third, we need to define what "collusion" is. My definition for collusion in the context of accusations about Trump, the Russians and the election, flows from the question, what were they colluding in trying to do? The answer is: they were trying to achieve a different result than what the vote would have been if they did not do anything at all. That's why we are all up in arms. But, just as the founding fathers were anti-democratic and self-serving in 1776 when they rebelled against the denial of their equal rights under the crown, but then turned around and withheld those rights from the property-less, women, slaves, and anyone not among the top 10%, so too here are many hypocritically up in arms about collusion that "achieved a different result" than the one they wanted, at the same time they could care less about collusion that "achieved a different result" than the one the voters would have voted for had no one interfered.
When we define "collusion" the way I do, as "trying to achieve a different result than what the vote would have been if they did not do anything at all," then the LEGAL expenditure of big money campaign finance is the most outrageous, most criminal conduct causing the greatest deviation from the result that would have been what the voters voted for had these expenditures not been made. Such campaign finance misconduct has now has been proven beyond a doubt to have more of an impact on the result of the election than your vote or mine. Moreover, more than 70% of Americans in 2016 thought the 5 Super PAC funds relied on by Clinton and legalized under Citizens United should have been illegal. Clinton's Super PACs colluded to overthrow the vote far more than the Russians did. And then we have the DNC's rigging of the primaries, also clearly exposed with hard evidence. This too was collusion to overthrow the vote. And then there are a whole host of activities the Clinton campaign, and all kinds of other shady organizations, Koch owned, AIPAC, the NRA, and otherwise, that worked hard to influence and overthrow the vote. Paid trolls creating fake twitter accounts, all kinds of stuff.
If you ask me, we have 2 BIG CANCERS in our society right now: One is Trump and the Second, which is far more serious, is the Oligarchy's Overthrow of the Vote. To my thinking, it does a huge disservice to the interests of democracy to mix up impeachment, which is the cure for the first cancer, with collusion arguments that ignore and thus hide the Oligarchy's collusion to overthrow the vote.
For this reason, I will not make arguments about impeaching Trump based on collusion until Mueller announces he has the evidence to prove it. And even if, and hopefully, when he does that, I will be treating collusion as a special case that should not be treated the way our founding fathers treated "equality", meaning for their own interests, but no body else's. If we are truly up and arms about collusion, we have to, if you ask me, always state what is the harm: Namely, It is unacceptable to overthrow the vote. And then we have to do a methodical review that identifies in order from largest to smallest each contributor to the overthrow of the vote and tackle each in order from greatest to least. In that procedure, Russia will not even be in the first five that need to be addressed. Thus, if we are manipulated into reacting out of a decades old fear of the "other" that Russia represents, and so only want to prosecute "collusion" involving Russia, then we end up serving the game plan of the oligarchy, which is a death warrant for the planet in an era of climate crisis. There's no point trying to save the planet, if we allow ourselves to be manipulated by the Oligarchy from focusing on the fact that it is by far the biggest and most dangerous cancer we face. We can impeach Trump already without collusion. Our failure to do so has nothing to do with Mueller not yet having given us the evidence. We should not let the oligarchy, however, make us think Trump is the source of all our problems.
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