2019: The Year We IMPEACHED THE MOTHERF*CKER

Fuck yeah we did.

We did it! Just need to put down a quick marker right here in this series of New Year's Eve posts, because we. fucking. did. it .

Let's go back to the beginning of the year, when incoming Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib got "caught" on tape saying, "We're going to impeach the motherfucker!"

Congresswoman @RashidaTlaib tells cheering crowd that Trump impeachment coming “We’re going to go in and impeach t… https: //t.co/UnHfiiGctm

— Jon Levine (@Jon Levine) 1546574300.0 

She wasn't wrong.

Maxine Waters and a couple of other reps like Al Green have been talking impeachment forfuckingever, but in 2019 we. fucking. did. it.   

Did we say we fucking did it yet? We. fucking. did. it. 

We thought it would be after the Mueller Report came out, but that was too many pages for Americans to read and too many words and too many crimes, they just all ran together. It wasn't an easy story for Democrats to tell, especially when Attorney General Bill Barr was able to get out in front of his pal Robert Mueller's work product, by openly lying to the American people about what was in it for weeks before he released a redacted version of it, which Americans, again, proceeded to not read.

Nancy Pelosi liked to say Trump was "self-impeaching," and we never thought it was the best line because it didn't make immediate sense to a lot of people. But we started to see what she meant on September 5, when the Washington Post editorial page (the editorial page!) broke some news, declaring, "Trump tries to force Ukraine to meddle in the 2020 election." (That was the headline.) A week later, House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff angrily broke his own news that there was a whistleblower complaint, and it was being illegally withheld from Congress by the (acting) Director of National Intelligence.

On September 19, Wonkette wrote "What Did Trump Promise To The President Of Ukraine? Or Russia? Or, You Know, Whomever?" (That was the headline.) News was trickling out that the whistleblower complaint involved a "promise" Trump made to a foreign leader, but that foreign leader hadn't been identified. Wonkette figured out who it was, in a post where we offered several possibilities, in order to give ourselves cover if we didn't turn out to be right about the thing we were 100 percent sure we were right about.

In fact, we listed Ukraine as the first possibility. Again, let us be clear that we wrote this BEFORE it all came out:

One of the calls Trump had with a foreign leader around the time in question that the Post does not mention is a phone call with the president of Ukraine on July 25. Reportedly he and Volodymyr Zelenskiy talked about Zelenskiy's parliamentary victories and "ways to strengthen the relationship between the United States and Ukraine, including energy and economic cooperation." Also: "Zelenskiy thanked Trump for keeping and strengthening sanctions against Russia, which annexed Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula and backed separatists in eastern Ukraine, kicking off a five-year war that has killed around 13,000 people."

HERE'S THE THING ABOUT THAT!

Donald Trump just the other day finally stopped holding up $250 million in already approved military aid to Ukraine, aid specifically to help Ukraine fight against Russia, which he was trying to strangle in its crib for what we imagine were pro-Putin bullshit reasons. He only unfroze it because Congress -- Dick Durbin and Lindsey Graham in particular -- forced him to, just like in the past he's only signed Russian sanctions because Congress forced him to. He finally lifted the hold last Wednesday, which was September 11, two days before Adam Schiff went public with the existence of the whistleblower complaint. (And reportedly the State Department is sweetening the pot for Ukraine with another $140 million in aid, maybe!)

Trump does not generally support Ukraine's resistance efforts against Russia, and he does generally support Putin's "annexation" (what a stupid euphemism that is for INVASION) of the Crimean peninsula. He runs around all the time, including at the recent G7, talking about how Putin was only kicked out of the G7 (then the G8) because he "outsmarted" Obama, when it actually was international punishment for the Crimean invasion. At other times, he's essentially argued that Putin has a right to that land, because after all, those people speak Russian, so Putin must be the real boss of them.

So what might Ukraine be able to do for Trump? Have you heard of ... UKRAINIUM ONE? AKA the fake "scandal" Rudy Giuliani has been traveling the world trying to encourage Ukraine to "investigate," as Trump has been essentially demanding the Ukrainian government open a fake investigation in order to prove "corruption" by Joe Biden? (It is such a complicated and convoluted and stupid story, but if you need to crash-course, Liz has been writing about that too. It's a made-up claim that Biden somehow forced Ukraine to stop an investigation and fire the prosecutor looking into a company his idiot son Hunter was on the board of.) Also Giuliani wants Ukraine to FESS UP and say its government only paid Paul Manafort blood money in order to do Deep State plots against Trump, God, who even knows what that senile old shitstain is talking about.

Trump has been all but saying out loud that Ukraine doesn't get the cash unless it investigates Biden, because Trump is apparently terrified of Biden, so we can absolutely see a scenario where Arty McDeals tries to Art of the Deal his way into bribing Ukraine into ratfucking Biden for him, in exchange for not cutting off this particular aid that Putin wants cut off. There have been   hints in the media that Trump brought up the Biden situation with Zelenskiy. [...]

Did the whistleblower witness or see a closely guarded read-out of Donald Trump offering an explicit quid pro quo to the president of Ukraine, wherein he'd release aid and maybe add some new aid, despite his real father Vladimir Putin's best interests, in exchange for Ukraine meddling in the 2020 election to benefit Trump?
That could be it!

HOLY SHIT THAT WAS IT! And to see just how right we were, Wonkette has a suggestion, it is a good suggestion, it is the best suggestion, it is a perfect suggestion, and it is ...

 READ TEHT RESJA;KSDJKJASDFJAISDFSDJTREANSRIPRt!!11!1!! 

And the rest, as they say, is history that is still ongoing. We'll touch on this in another New Year's Eve post, but we want to be clear that this was the scandal that could have brought the entire Democratic caucus, with a remainder of a couple idiots and Tulsi Gabbard, around to the idea of impeachment. "Hello, he is literally trying to steal the 2020 election in front of our faces. No, really. Oh my god he just fucking confessed, hoooooolllly shit ."

We have no idea how the impeachment trial in the Senate will play out, whenever Speaker Pelosi decides it's time to hand the articles over to Mitch McConnell. We have a lot more shitshows to contend with before this is over.

But again, we did it. We impeached the motherfucker. AND MAYBE WE'LL DO IT AGAIN. 

Happy New Year, y'all!

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See you every hour on the hour till midnight. Because you like it like that.