Sunday, August 26, 2018

Peak Trump: The Swamp Creatures' Cohen/Davis Offensive

Lanny Davis and Hillary
By David Stockman

You can't find a bigger beltway scumbag and Clinton bagman than Lanny Davis. But
Michael Cohen did find him---so now the overt campaign to eject the Donald from his
Oval Office redoubt begins in earnest.

The fact that it is being quarterbacked by Lanny Davis tells you all you need to know. He
represents the politburo of the Deep State and the very Clintonista establishment that

attempted to deep six the Donald's candidacy in the first place via pre-election leaks
from their phony (and illegal) Russia-collusion investigation.

Worse still, when it comes to the pot calling the kettle black it doesn't get more ludicrous
than Lanny Davis coaching Cohen on how to sing compose about Trump's
hush payments to his bimbos. For crying out loud, Davis was Bill Clinton's #1 defender
and round-the-clock media surrogate during the Monica Lewinsky affair.

Even when Bawdy Bill confessed to schtupping Monica in the Oval Office, Davis was a
one-man whirligig of spin, as per this September 1998 story from the Washington
Post:
Lanny Davis is inescapable these days. He's live on "Rivera Live" and "Larry
King Live," crossing swords on "Crossfire," showing up on "The Big Show" and
the Sunday shows, the man who soldiers on in Clinton's defense when no one
else will report for duty. On Aug. 17, the day the president admitted misleading
the country about his affair with Lewinsky, Davis blabbed away on NBC and
MSNBC and CNBC from morning till night. He refused a $2,500 payment,
directing it to his wife's favorite cause, a newsletter for pet adoption.
He's become a minor celebrity, with people stopping him in airports. Some
friends -- including the reporters he assiduously courted as a Clinton aide -- say
he's having the time of his life. Davis's not inconsiderable ego loves the limelight.
But Davis' shameless shilling for Bill Clinton was par for the course-----the essence of
his entire 50-year sojourn in the Imperial City as a fixer, spinner, racketeer and
concierge to the high and mighty.

During that span he was a law school chum of the Clintons, perennial advisor to Dem
pols, omnipresent MSM talking head, beltway PR flack for hire, lead-apologist for Bill
Clinton's tawdry Lewinsky affair and lifetime shill for foreign and domestic special
interests in the guise of that special brand of "law" practiced on K-street.
Needless to say, Davis has never earned an honest dollar in his life; and his smug,
opinionated elitism has never graced the halls of anything that remotely resembles a
productive capitalist enterprise.

In a word, you can't find a more contemptible Swamp Creature than Lanny Davis. It's as
if the very fetid pools of corruption which underlie the Imperial City mustered up their
own designated hitter to take the fight right to the Donald's front door.

In fact, the new Davis/Cohen tag team amounts to still another vector in the Deep
State's unremitting campaign to re-litigate the 2016 election. From the very moment the
race was called for Trump in the wee hours of November 9, Davis had been conducting a
nonstop campaign claiming that Hillary was the real winner---save for the Comey stab
in the back on October 28 and the nefarious Russian campaign to swing the outcome to
Trump.

Indeed, Davis' greasy head as been buried so long between Hillary's withered bosoms
that he recently wrote to her the following encomium:

“The honest to goodness truth is … aside from Carolyn, my four children, and
my immediate family, I consider you to be the best friend and the best person
I have met in my long life.”

So Trump's fixer is now in league with Hillary's devout manservant. You can't say the
Deep State isn't resourceful.

Needless to say, Cohen's indiscretions with respect to filling out loan applications and
faithfully reporting to Uncle Sam his income from his taxi cab ventures and brokering of
Birkin bags amount to petty crimes at best, which are neither here nor there when it
comes to the Donald's alleged perfidies.

More importantly, by the lights of many legal experts, including the renowned and fairminded
Alan Dershowitz, paying hush money does not necessarily violate the campaign
laws if the candidate provided the money himself, which the Donald actually did:

Further, Spakovsky said "a candidate can spend as much of their own money
as they want to—even if it was a campaign-related expense.”
Harvard Law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz, a frequent defender of the
president, made a similar argument.
“You have to show that it’s a crime,” he told “Fox & Friends.” He said it’s “not a
crime” for a candidate like Trump to contribute to his own campaign, and
probably not even a crime to direct someone else to contribute if he plans to pay
that back.
Further, Dershowitz said, “The only evidence that the president did anything
that might be unlawful … comes from a man who’s admitted to be a liar.”
But Davis is up to something far bigger than getting Cohen to sing about the hush
money---that debatable crime is just the pretext. What's really coming down the pike is
that Davis has Cohen primed to compose new fibs and lies about the Russia collusion
hoax.
That much was evident in Davis' out-of-the box interview with the tinfoil-hatted queen
of anti-Russkie hysteria, Rachel Maddow:

"Mr. Cohen has knowledge on certain subjects that should be of interest to the
special counsel and is more than happy to tell the special counsel all that he
knows," Davis told MSNBC on Tuesday.
"Not just about the obvious possibility of a conspiracy to collude and
corrupt the American democracy system in the 2016 election, which
the Trump Tower meeting was all about, but also knowledge about
the computer crime of hacking and whether or not Mr. Trump knew
ahead of time about that crime and even cheered it on.”

Davis then delivered the punch line of his entire Michael Cohen gambit:
"it looks to me like abuse of power which is essential for impeachment."

There you have it. Lanny Davis' Clinton patrons have extracted hundreds of millions
from foreign special pleaders and fraudsters in their endless influence peddling schemes
at the highest levels of government, but the Donald is supposedly ripe for impeachment
because, why?

Because he legally ordered $230,000 be sent to two sleazy blackmail artists who more
than a decade ago apparently volunteered to line his bed sheets.

To be sure, we don't know who was stupider----the Donald for capitulating to their
threats, since the world already knew by October 2016 that he was an all-time
womanizing sleazeball; or the porn star and Playboy model who fell for a self-promoting
New York windbag, as it happened, that didn't have much to offer in either the business
or pleasure departments anyway.

So if you want to know why the Swamp is so fetid, just consider where Davis is
actually taking his Michael Cohen scam. That is, he's actually got the nerve to attempt to
morph Donald Trump's low-life fixer into a heroic truth teller deserving of an
outpouring of financial support from concerned American citizens!

You can't make this stuff up. Davis completed his day of media rounds with a plea for
money from a crowd-funded scam called the "Michael Cohen Truth Fund":
In order to get Michael to be able to help, we need help on this fund,
MichaelCohenTruthFund.com, we ask everybody to help Michael Cohen tell the
truth about Donald Trump."
Even then, it gets worse. It was the single high-point of Trump's presidency---his
courageous summit meeting with Putin to repudiate Washington's dangerous and
unwarranted vilification of Russia---that allegedly brought the red-white-and-blue
blood of patriotic outrage oozing from Cohen's nostrils.

But what unadulterated hog swill.

The faux outrage described below does not come from a rough-and-tumble striver up
from the town of Lawrence on Long Island; it's actually the mark of the Deep State
ruling class that is so desperate for an enemy in order to keep its $800 billion per year
national security gravy train going that it would actually violate the sanctity of America's
electoral process to prevent a rapprochement with Russia.
Playing the "remorseful criminal" card, Davis also told MSNBC that it was
Trump’s meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki that
marked "a significant turning point” for Cohen and encouraged him to come
forward out of concern about the U.S. future. "That shook up Mr. Cohen"
who may be a tax-evading criminal but is first and foremost a patriot.
We don't profess to know exactly how this new Davis/Cohen offensive will play-out in
the months ahead, but the objective is abundantly clear. That is, to breath life back into
the faltering Russian Collusion Hoax, and give Mueller some fresh fodder for his
upcoming Impeachment Report.

If the mid-term elections were hanging in the balance between a Blue Wave of Dem
congressional control or a Blue Ripple cliffhanger that saves the GOP majorities,
the odds have now increased measurably in favor of the former. Either way, Washington
is now descending into a swamp of vicious civil war that has not been witnessed since,
well, the actual Civil War.

And in that context, we do not expect the Donald to take this latest Deep State offensive
sitting down. He's already unhinged, delusional and writhing with bile, bombast and
bunkum.

Accordingly, his misbegotten Trade War will get more fraught, his attacks on the Fed
more wanton and his disregard for the unfolding fiscal calamity more blatant.
By any rational measure that makes the Donald travails a clear and present danger to
the egregious bubble sitting at the tippy-top of the casino's "record" 3,453 day bull run.
Indeed, they are a dagger pointed at the very heart of it because there is absolutely no
way for a bedraggled 111-month old faltering recovery to survive the quadruple threat of
an inflationary Trade War, a normalizing Fed, a hemorrhaging fiscal equation and
an unconstitutional attempt to remove a sitting President.




Except, except.

Wall Street does not even remotely see the Great Financial Crisis 2.0 barreling down the
pike. It has literally become so inebriated by years and decades of Bubble Finance that it
can no longer tell the difference between a weak or strong economy; or realize that 95%
of Q2's vaunted earnings growth was nothing more than the one-time impact of the tax
cut and the rebound from the 2015-2016 earnings swoon.

Indeed, four years ago LTM earnings on the S&P 500 came in at $106 per share in
September 2014 compared to $117 per share for the June 2018 LTM period
when adjusted for the tax change. That's a gain of just 2.5% per annum---and it's
no boom by any conceivable definition of the word.

Nevertheless, right on signal MarketWatch today assured that none of yesterday's
Trumpian contretemps matter---- except booming earnings and robust
economic growth, whether they actually exist or not:

Corporate earnings and the economy still carry more weight with investors
than President Donald Trump’s mounting legal woes.
While the latest turn appeared to boost the threat of impeachment, investors
remained focused on an economy that’s growing at an annualized clip of near
4%, while the unemployment rate stands at less than 4%, said Greg Valliere,
chief global strategist at Horizon Investments, in a note.
 “If the trade wars cool off a little this fall, we still think stocks can grind higher,”
he said. “It’s not a pretty picture here in Washington, but as long as Trump
doesn’t go totally off the rails, investors can compartmentalize.”
Alas, here again is the litmus test---the quarterly GDP at seasonally maladjusted rates
since 2011.

There is absolutely no Trumpian Boom about it---most especially when you recall that
100 basis points of the 4.1% bar for Q2 was owing to Trade War pull forwards on the
export accounts and another 100 basis points was owing to a one-time consumer spendout
of tax cuts funded on Uncle Sam's tapped out credit card.

So Peak Trump is truly at hand. When the Wall Street bubble finally bursts there will be
blood on both ends of the Acela Corridor like never before.

David Stockman was Director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan. After leaving the White House, Stockman had a 20-year career on Wall Street.

The above originally appeared at David Stockman's Contra Corner.

3 comments:

  1. Can I short the 500 yet, huh, can I???

    ReplyDelete
  2. --- Because he legally ordered $230,000 be sent to two sleazy blackmail artists who more than a decade ago apparently volunteered to line his bed sheets. ---

    Moral of the story: don't line your bed sheets with future sleazy blackmail artists. It's far cheaper to stay with your supermodel wife.

    ReplyDelete