Non-traditional weekend self-care open thread

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Well, if you've followed me these odd-three-years or so, you know that on the weekend I eschew anything weighty and give you music. But what occurred at the dying of the day Friday is too delicious to pass up.

During William Taylor's testimony on Wednesday, he let drop a new piece of information. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland took a call from Donald Trump in a restaurant in Kyiv, in which one of Taylor's aides overheard Trump averring that he didn't give two farthings about Ukraine, but only about getting dirt on Joe Biden.

That aide, David Holmes, gave a deposition Friday night to the House Intelligence Committee, and whoo boy, was it a doozy. As detailed in the New York Times, following up on a scoop by CNN:

An official from the United States Embassy in Kiev confirmed to House impeachment investigators on Friday that he had overheard a call between President Trump and a top American diplomat in July in which the president asked whether Ukraine was going to move forward with an investigation he wanted.

The official, David Holmes, testified privately that he was at a restaurant in Kiev, Ukraine’s capital, when he overheard Mr. Trump on a cellphone call loudly asking Gordon D. Sondland, the American ambassador to the European Union, if Ukraine’s president had agreed to conduct an investigation into one of his leading political rivals. Mr. Sondland, who had just come from a meeting with top Ukrainian officials and the country’s president, replied in the affirmative.

“So, he’s going to do the investigation?” Mr. Trump asked, according to a copy of Mr. Holmes’s opening statement posted by CNN and confirmed by The New York Times.

Mr. Sondland, a wealthy hotelier and political donor turned ambassador, told Mr. Trump that President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine “loves your ass,” and would conduct the investigation and do “anything you ask him to,” according to Mr. Holmes’s statement.

After the call ended, Mr. Holmes asked if it was true that the president did not care about Ukraine. Mr. Sondland, he testified, agreed. According to Mr. Holmes’s account, the ambassador said Mr. Trump cared only about the “big stuff.” Mr. Holmes noted Ukraine had “big stuff” going on, like a war with Russia.

But Mr. Sondland had something else in mind. He told Mr. Holmes he meant “‘big stuff’ that benefits the president,” like the “Biden investigation” that his lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani was pushing for, because they affected him personally.

I mean, come on, guy! There aren't smoking guns any longer; there are smoking artillery barrages.

No doubt, Holmes will testify to all of this in public, as he already has in closed door session. At some point, as more mafioso malfeasance comes out, even the most caustic Republican will have to realize that not only is Trump toast, but that if they continue to enable him, their fortunes will also sink into the quicksand. Sure, in Arkansas or Kansas (and maybe not in Kansas) they may survive. But this will do nothing but drive suburban women even further away from the GOP, giving Democrats a 100-seat majority in the house in 2020, and put the Senate at risk, not to mention the presidential contest. The GOP has no good options, and it's completely of their own doing. It was so wedded to power that it gave its soul to a goddamned moron. It counted on Americans being equally moronic. We're not. We turned out to be much more decent than they gave us credit for, because they had sold their souls to Satan long ago.

As I've written before, we can thank the Goddess that our first major brush with a fascist putsch has turned out so badly for the fascists. But unlike the recovery of the Nazis after 1923, we aren't Weimar Germany. We have a centuries-long tradition of democracy and of speaking truth to power. Too many of our citizens would vote for Hitler were an (R) behind his name. The majority of us aren't like that. We will come out of this dented, but wiser. And we won't take our liberties for granted, because they can be taken away at any moment.

So stand fast, patriots. Care for yourselves, and those around you.

(By the by, if you've appreciated our coverage and analysis this week of all things impeachy, consider giving a donation on that button up yonder. Scotch ain't free. I know, I've been shot down.)