As you read this Op-Ed essay by The DC Fishwrap's Dana Milbank about the lack of an "October Surprise" from The *ILK (*Impeached But Not Removed) Lyin' King who was nearly convicted of trying to extort the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky with loss of US military assistance and funds unless the Ukrainian leader provided "dirt" about the likely Dem nominee, Joseph Biden, Jr. If this is (fair & balanced) comprehensive proof of illegal and treasonous abuse of power by the current occupant of the White House, so be it.
[x YouTube]
"The Liar Tweets Tonight" (Parody of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight")
By Roy Zimmerman and The ReZisters, featuring Sandy Riccardi
[x WaPo — DC Fishwrap]
The Real October Surprise Is That Trump And The Republicans Don’t Have One
By Dana Milbank
TagCrowd Cloud provides a visual summary of the blog post below
Eric Trump, a bear of very little brain, had just the thing to help his father.
Trump the Younger tweeted an aerial photo on Saturday of a sprawling luxury estate, writing: “The salary of a US senator is $174,000 per year. This is Joe Biden’s house.” He added, with an eye-roll emoji, “Seems legit.”
It would have been a tough hit on the Democratic presidential nominee — except the property in the photograph is not Biden’s. It hasn’t been for 24 years. He had bought it, dilapidated, in the mid-1970s for $185,000, then, after rehabilitating it over two decades, sold it for $1.2 million.
The only scandal the episode revealed was how desperate President Trump and his allies are to find something — anything — that might change the trajectory of the race at this late stage. After 2016, only a fool would confidently predict the election outcome. But judging from the actions of Trump’s team and Republican lawmakers and candidates, it’s clear they think they’re losing.
They’re attacking Democrats for having hard-to-pronounce names and for allegedly being closet vegans. They’re dropping supposed bombshells about Biden’s past that fail to detonate. And they’re pretending they never liked that Trump guy.
Item: Senator John Cornyn (R-TX), a stalwart Trump ally now in a close race, told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram his relationship with Trump is “like a lot of women who get married and think they’re going to change their spouse, and that doesn’t usually work out very well.” Cornyn, who publicly supported Trump diverting Pentagon funds for a border wall, now claims he opposed it.
Item: Senator Ben Sasse (R-NE), another Trump enabler for four years, excoriated Trump last week because he “kisses dictators’ butts,” “mocks evangelicals” and “flirted with white supremacists” — sentiments Sasse largely suppressed before he feared “a Republican bloodbath in the Senate.”
Item: The New York Times reports that “midlevel aides on the campaign have even begun inquiring about employment on Capitol Hill after the election, apparently under the assumption that there will not be a second Trump administration for them to serve in.”
If Republicans think abandoning ship now will work for them, I’ve got a house in Delaware to sell them. Even as Republicans belatedly decide the USS Trump is going down, they are mirroring his aimless campaign themes in their own races.
In Pennsylvania, where Democrat Eugene DePasquale is poised to oust Representative Scott Perry (R-PA), the National Republican Congressional Committee put up an ad on October 13 attacking DePasquale — for his Italian name. “Eugene DePasquale: Tough to spell,” the announcer intones. The ad also mocks DePasquale’s CrossFit routine with scenes of gym equipment and push-ups.
In Nebraska, where Democrat Kara Eastman is positioned to defeat a Republican incumbent, an ad by the Congressional Leadership Fund (CLF) — the House GOP super PAC — shows the Democrat’s head superimposed over a raw steak. It accuses her of plotting to “get rid of farting cows,” warns she’ll “stick a fork in that Omaha steak” and closes with the announcer asking: “How do you like your tofu?” Fittingly, her opponent’s name is Represenative Don Bacon (R-NE).
Eastman, in a meeting with supporters, had said Republicans are “attacking me like crazy. There’s fliers going out to everybody in the district that I’m a radical socialist.” The CLF cut out all the words except “I’m a radical socialist” and uses that phrase in the ad. Another CLF ad says Eastman wants a “new world where no one eats meat.” And a National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) ad says she wants to abolish cars and air travel and raise taxes to 70 percent.
In Texas, where Democrat Sri Preston Kulkarni has a good shot to flip a Republican seat, the CLF attacks him for attending “notorious desert drug parties.” The “drug party” in question? The annual Burning Man arts festival, attended by tens of thousands.
One Republican congressional nominee in Virginia slams his son to a wrestling mat and repeatedly pins him to show he’ll “put liberal ideas in a headlock.” At one Trump rally, embattled Senator David Perdue (R-GA) makes fun of the name of his colleague, Democratic vice-presidential nominee Kamala Harris. At another, Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) says Biden supporters don’t “particularly like America.”
If it all seems scattered and random (They’re corrupt capitalists! No, they’re socialists! No, they’re anarchists!), consider the direction from the top. Last week, Trump adviser Rudy Giuliani served up his latest Hunter Biden conspiracy theory to Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post. The evidence was so shoddy the main author reportedly refused to put his name on it.
Giuliani must have hoped for an October Surprise. But the real surprise is this: After Trump ransacked the CIA, the Justice Department and the State Department for any morsel of dirt on his opponent, the election is upon us — and this is all he’s got? ###
[Dana Milbank is a nationally syndicated op-ed columnist. He also provides political commentary for various TV outlets, and he is the author of three books on politics, including the national bestseller Homo Politicus (2007). Milbank joined The Post in 2000 as a Style political writer, then covered the presidency of George W. Bush as a White House correspondent before starting the column in 2005. Before joining The Post, Milbank spent two years as a senior editor at The New Republic, where he covered the Clinton White House, and eight years as a reporter with the Wall Street Journal, where he covered Congress and was a London-based correspondent. He received a BA cum laude (political science) from Yale University (CT).]
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