New Orleans     It was a news explosion on every possible platform:  radio, television, and print.  It’s a wonder it didn’t “break” the internet, as the saying goes.

Paul Manafort, the former campaign chairman for President Trump, was found guilty in court of eight charges involving all manner of tax, bank and other fraud.  At almost the time Michael Cohen, President Trump’s personal lawyer was in court pleading guilty to bank and tax fraud, and, more importantly, having made payments intended to affect the results of the 2016 election to a porn star and a former Playboy model mistress of Trump’s and having done so with his knowledge and by his direction.

When a grifter and a fixer go down simultaneously how can the gang’s boss escape the long hand of the law and the roaring and fickle fates of political winds?  We’ve all watched the “Godfather” movies and a hundred other gang films.  We know once the shoes start dropping, the rest of the cheap suits start running and going to the mattresses.

Speculation is soaring.

After a hundred years without an impeachment trial in the post-Civil War era, we have now seen Richard Nixon resign under the threat of proceedings and Bill Clinton barely survive formal impeachment charges.  Now the same charges, seen as quixotic when proposed earlier by Houston’s Congressman Al Green when he pressed for a vote in the House, will be grist for the daily mill and a prominent theme from right, left, and in-between in the mid-term elections.   Stephen Bannon, another controversial, right-wing member of the Trump gang, is arguing that the mid-terms should be a plebiscite on the question of impeachment.  No doubt Democrats will pick up that theme as well.

Then there’s the question of indictment.  Normally, if someone is found or pleads guilty to doing something criminally at the direction of another, credibility questions aside, they would be called to a grand jury and likely indicted so that any potential criminality could be sorted out in a trial.  Lawyers on all sides, including the Justice Department, past and future, and law professors of all stripes and flavors are divided on whether a sitting president can be indicted while in office.  Nixon was an unindicted co-conspirator and that was enough to force him out in Watergate.  Some are arguing that status is Trump’s now without the paperwork.

Who knows, but there’s one thing that is very, very clear:  there isn’t just blood in the water now, there are dead bodies floating in it.  Bluff and bluster won’t be enough to disguise the fact that Trump is in terrible legal and political trouble.

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Please enjoy Loretta Lynn’s Wouldn’t It Be Great.

Thanks to KABF.