We need to hold Trump and ALL his accomplices accountable!

Michael Pompeo, our Secretary of State, reminds me of Hermann Goering.

They’re both big, fat men, saturated with the grease of steak and pork, and infatuated with their own power. Self-confident, smirking, and morally adrift, they revel in their power; both are propped up by sinister bosses: Hitler for Goering, Trump for Pompeo.

We all know how Goering ended up: dead, by his own hand. He swallowed a cyanide capsule he had hidden in his jaw, the night before he was to be hanged for war crimes and crimes against humanity, in Nuremberg. We do not yet know Pompeo’s fate. But when the trials occur for the Trump regime’s abuses of power, obstruction of justice and other crimes, I fully expect Pompeo to be among those brought before the Court.

Dozens of Nazis were executed following the Nuremberg and other post-war trials and hearings. Hundreds more were sent to prison, in a process the Western allies deemed “de-nazification.” The Nazi party itself was outlawed in Germany. This was a harsh but necessary process; Nazism, whatever successes it might have achieved during its early period, metastacized into a cancer that invaded, not only Germany but the entire planet; Nazism had to be eradicated, to prevent it from being a future threat.

In the same way we have got to eradicate the Republican Party. It no longer is a political party, in the sense America in which has understood “political parties” for more than 200 years. It has degenerated into a cult, and a criminal cult, at that: the Scientology of politics, or maybe Branch Davidians is a more apt metaphor. Led by a madman, followed by mindless lemmings willing to commit any crime, and undermining every decent American value, this cult has to be stopped.

And so, to trial for Pompeo. But just as Goering was not alone in that Courtroom in Nuremberg, so Pompeo will sit in the dock along with his fellow co-conspirators: Attorney-General Barr; Vice President Michael Pence; the reptilian Rudy Giuliani; Trump’s lieutenants in the Congress, the rogue Mitch McConnell and the incompetent, amoral Kevin McCarthy; the evil (there’s no other word) Stephen Miller, the regime’s Julius Streicher; and a host of others. I’ll leave it to Adam Schiff to determine the precise list of defendants.

As part of our de-Republicanization process, we must teach the school children of America to rediscover our country’s fundamental values and understand how and why Republicans sought to destroy them. The “how” is easy: seize power, take over the courts, demean and delegitimize political opposition, control the media, and stir up the masses. This was Hitler’s playbook; we’ve seen it all before.

The “why” is more curious. To amass power, surely, but to what end? The Republican Party is not united in ideology. A good part of it is evangelical, Pentecostal or Roman Catholic, wanting to turn America into Jesus-land while they await his second coming and trounce their enemies: Jews, Muslims, atheists and so on. But a good many Republicans have contempt for evangelicals (I count Trump among them, although he has to pretend to like them); they have other motives than religious ones: corporate motives, to enrich themselves. There’s also the psychological phenomenon of wanting to be a winner, which is very powerful in politics; everybody wants to be on the winning side, even if all they get from it is bragging rights.

That’s why UkraineGate is such a tipping point. Up until now Trump has held the winning hand; he’s gotten to dictate the narrative; all Democrats could do was respond. Not any more; now, Democrats control the narrative, and all Trump gets to do is respond—not very artfully, so far. He’s now threatening Civil War, a threat we should all take extremely seriously. A year or so ago he said (I paraphrase) “I have the gun owners and the cops on my side.” That may well be true. So did Hitler; well, “gun owners” weren’t a major force back in 1930s Germany, but the police were; and Hermann Goering and, later, Heinrich Himmler took them over, in Hitler’s name.

So The Resistance is getting interesting. Trump thought he’d beaten us back after the Mueller Report flopped. Ha ha. He was mistaken—badly, historically, embarrassingly mistaken. We were not beaten, we were not abashed; we stayed in the hunt. I, myself, was often annoyed because Nancy Pelosi wouldn’t sanction impeachment. Now, in retrospect, she was right. UkraineGate has made the job of impeaching Trump much, much easier. He will be impeached; and if he thinks the Republican Senate has his back, he would do well to remember that even his own Senators loathe him privately.