“He that lieth down with dogs shall rise up with fleas.”
There are many ways to say it but that’s the way Benjamin Franklin scribed it in his “Poor Richard’s Almanack” in 1739. It means that if you hang around with bad people you will become just like them or, almost as bad, fall victim to the reputational risks that surround them.
Our parents cautioned all of us as children to be careful about the company we keep. They must have been Ben Franklin devotees. Their generation actually read books.
I couldn’t help consider this warning as I listened to Lev Parnas, a man of questionable status and current indictee on campaign finance charges, spill the beans on Rudy Giuliani and President Donald Trump on “The Rachel Maddow Show” on MSNBC this past Wednesday night.
I know, I know, there are many people who refuse to watch anything other than Fox News, and to those willfully ignorant folks I say what I always say: “Turn the channel” and open your eyes and ears. You would be surprised to know that there is a reality beyond Fox that actually includes facts. And this particular set of facts shared by Parnas pins what the Government Accountability Office now says was a violation of federal law directly on the White House.
That brings me to the second part of Ben Franklin’s warning. The part about waking up with fleas. You see, a flea is an insect that has no wings so it can’t fly away. It just jumps from one animal to another. But what it does when it lands is astonishing. It gains its life force and its ability to continue the species by sucking the blood from its host.
It appears to me that if Parnas is telling the truth — always a caveat when dealing with parasites — then both Rudy and President Trump are in for some difficult times ahead. As are the Republican senators who are now stuck with Trump’s impeachment papers and finding it ever harder to sweep them under those fancy rugs in their U.S. Senate offices.
You see, lying down with the likes of Giuliani and The Donald has its risks. You can attract fleas like Parnas who, when confronted with a host that will no longer willingly give his blood, will quickly jump to another in an effort to sustain their own life.
That appears to be exactly where Parnas is right now and what he knows, what he can show and how much proof he can provide is a clear and present danger to the Trump presidency.
What is interesting about this turn of events is that none of this was known — at least not publicly — until recently. If the Democratic members of the House of Representatives knew what Parnas knew, they sure didn’t let on. They impeached Trump, that’s for sure, but they did it without what appears to be the most damning evidence.
But now that the public is aware of Trump’s direct involvement in what the GAO — not the Democrats — says is a crime, how does anyone, especially U.S. senators sitting in judgment, ignore what their eyes see, their ears hear and their noses clearly smell?
The stench of lawlessness by this administration cannot be ignored by the Senate because the American voter now knows the truth — or, at least, Parnas’ truth — which has not been refuted.
I suppose that is what the trial in the Senate that starts this week should be all about: finding out what is and what is not true.
So far, the Republicans in the Senate are content to let this all slide, and perhaps that will be the case. If you have 51 votes in the Senate you can make your own truth. But what you can’t do is unring that bell that is ringing ever so loudly in the ears of America that proclaims a different truth — yes, the truth that is based on facts and not the fiction of a propaganda machine designed to keep a large part of America in the dark.
I don’t know if what Parnas is saying is true but I do know that the Senate, sitting in the impeachment trial of Donald John Trump, has the power, the authority and the constitutional responsibility to make that determination.
This is no longer about a political party trying to cover the backside of a president of its own political persuasion. This is about a country ridding itself of a bunch of fleas, parasites, which have infested the body politic and which can no longer afford to give them the lifeblood of our democracy.
I have no illusions about what will happen in the U.S. Senate, just like I have no illusions about how the voters will respond in the 2020 election.
Most people hate fleas and the harm they can inflict. The path toward a healthy democracy has never been clearer.
Brian Greenspun is editor, publisher and owner of the Sun