Coherence in the face of brutal, incoherent force

In a habeas corpus case last month, a district judge in West Virginia, Joseph Goodwin, granted the release of a poor devil illegally rounded up, denied due process, rendered, and unlawfully imprisoned for a civil immigration violation in a privately owned detention center by Stephen Miller and ICE. The judge wrote this crystal clear condemnation of the lawless behavior of DHS, and freed the illegally detained man. The writing is beautiful and the legal analysis is consistent and completely coherent.

Antiseptic judicial rhetoric cannot do justice to what is happening. Across the interior of the United States, agents of the federal government—masked, anonymous, armed with military weapons, operating from unmarked vehicles, acting without warrants of any kind—are seizing persons for civil immigration violations and imprisoning them without any semblance of due process. The systematic character of this practice and its deliberate elimination of every structural feature that distinguishes constitutional authority from raw force place it beyond the reach of ordinary legal description. It is an assault on the constitutional order. It is what the Fourth Amendment was written to prevent. It is what the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment forbids.

The Petition for Writ of Habeas Corpus filed by Petitioner Anderson Jesus Urquilla-Ramos, [ECF Nos. 1, 26], brings just that circumstance before this court as a discrete case and controversy. This court will decide it as such. But I will not pretend, through careful procedural language, that what is at issue here is a technical question of statutory interpretation. The overarching issue is whether the federal government may deploy anonymous agents to seize persons on American streets and highways for civil violations, without warrants, without identification, and without any process before or after. The Constitution does not permit that. The remainder of this opinion explains why.

In our constitutional republic, governmental force derives its authority from the Constitution. But that authority is not unlimited. The Government’s power is legitimate only because it is derived from the People and exercised through law by identifiable public officers answerable to the public and to the courts. The structure of the Constitution guarantees visibility. Both the officer and the force he employs are traceable to authority delegated by the People and subject to the limits imposed by law. When the Government uses force against the public, the citizen can recognize the officer as a lawful representative. The public can evaluate the act. The judiciary can later review it. Every stop, arrest, detention, and use of force can be tested against the Constitution’s protections. Not so here.

For these reasons and the reasons that follow, Petitioner’s Amended Verified Petition for Writ of Habeas Corpus (“Petition”), [ECF No. 26], is GRANTED. The court FINDS that both his Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures as well as his Fifth Amendment right to due process have been violated. Immediate release is the only relief sufficient to remedy Petitioner’s unlawful detention.

The judge grants relief to the illegally imprisoned man in no uncertain terms:

Therefore, the Petition for Writ of Habeas Corpus, [ECF No. 26], is GRANTED. Petitioner is ORDERED released immediately from civil immigration custody. Respondents are PROHIBITED from re-arresting and detaining Petitioner absent significant change in circumstances to justify detention or subject to the determination of a neutral and detached
decisionmaker.

The court DIRECTS the Clerk to send a copy of this Memorandum Opinion and Order to counsel, any unrepresented party, and the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of West Virginia.

The court further DIRECTS the Clerk to post a copy of this published opinion on the court’s website, http://www.wvsd.uscourts.gov.

Judge Goodwin’s entire decision is here, well-worth a read. Thanks to Hawk for pointing this out on youTube.

Shit sandwich

I love the way the New York Times implies that Trump, who is as empathetic and ethical as his long-time friend Jeff, really wanted to, and actually did, give masses of Americans significant tax breaks, when 99% of the tax cuts went to people who are already billionaires. You’ve got to love the poker face on that Grey Lady…

Putin uses Trump as a sex toy

The classified military documents the cash-strapped Trump most likely sold to trusted buddies like Putin, Mohammed bin Bonesaw and others probably helped the Russians give Iran the exact locations of strategic targets. The Art of the Deal, yo.

It’s the incoherence, stupid

Lying is one thing, and it’s a bad thing, most of the time. Without trust, there’s not much basis for dialogue or friendship. You can lie to spare someone’s feelings, but outside of that, it’s hard to think of a good lie. The truly corrosive thing in human relations is incoherence. If someone insists on an incoherent version of events, no communication is really possible with that person. The only healthy course of action is to understand you’re dealing with someone who is incoherent and disengage.

You can never persuade an incoherent person to listen to nuance or to compromise based on shared reality because their need to believe what they believe is impervious to reason. They are incoherent because they have no emotional choice but to believe what they believe, 100%. Doubt would crush them, because, in any dispute based on what is really going on, they have no ammunition, outside of a blind, angry insistence that they’re right. Being wrong in any detail of anything is an intolerable humiliation they will never submit to. In a war with such brutal stakes, incoherence is truly their only play.

I’ve had the misfortune to know many of these motherfuckers over the course of my long life. Some have been very good companions, everything is fine with them, as long as you’re conciliatory. You can laugh with them, enjoy a good meal, go on an adventure together, until any conflict arises. In the event of any kind of disagreement, unless you drop it immediately and pretend it never happened, you get a childish insistence that what happened never happened, they don’t remember, or understand, or that you’re a liar, or that they might have been lying when you quote them as saying they might have been lying, that they never called you a liar and certainly never said they might have been lying, etc. It can make your head spin when these creatures really get going.

I knew an old lady, 98 now (same age my mother would be if she was alive), since I was her son’s best friend in fourth grade, who often insisted on things that were incoherent. She had to believe, for example, that the nightmarish marriage her son fought in for almost thirty years was completely the fault of his insane ex-wife. It was one of those conflicts, you know, where only one person is to blame for all the ugliness and the other, the innocent party, simply made the mistake of engaging with someone who was a violently enraged lunatic. There was no reason, in the old lady’s version, for the furious wife’s rage, outside of her own troubles. Her husband had absolutely nothing to do with it, even if he was passive aggressive, habitually untruthful, a provocative weasel, etc.

In the end I did the only thing possible in the face of an insistence on an insane worldview. After hearing the same insane insistence that I must forgive even people incapable of regret, empathy or apology, I stopped taking her calls and wrote her a note which I put in the mail. Her response was a classic, a close variation on the one you will always get from someone who insists incoherence by way of the last word is simply fine and dandy and there will be no further discussion of the matter. I put the perfectly polished turd of her last word in a frame, nobody I know ever phrased it more to the point:

Incoherence, when it comes from the most powerful man in the world’s most powerful country, is truly fucking horrific.

This morning, Trump’s social media account once again blamed U.S. allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) for not joining his war, although NATO is a defensive alliance, designed to respond to an attack. The account posted: “Without the U.S.A., NATO IS A PAPER TIGER! They didn’t want to join the fight to stop a Nuclear Powered Iran. Now that fight is Militarily WON, with very little danger for them, they complain about the high oil prices they are forced to pay, but don’t want to help open the Strait of Hormuz, a simple military maneuver that is the single reason for the high oil prices. So easy for them to do, with so little risk. COWARDS, and we will REMEMBER! President DONALD J. TRUMP.”

This afternoon, Trump told reporters: “You know, we don’t use the strait…we don’t need it. Europe needs it, Korea, Japan, China, a lot of other people, so they’ll have to get involved a little bit on that one.” He also said: “I think we’ve won, we’ve knocked out their Navy, their Air Force. We’ve knocked out their anti-aircraft. We’ve knocked out everything. We’re roaming free. From a military standpoint, all they’re doing is clogging up the strait. But from a military standpoint, they’re finished.” . . .

. . . Aware that [Trump’s impulsive] war is historically unpopular, Republicans in Congress are refusing to exercise any oversight of the Pentagon and the White House. Megan Mineiro of the New York Times reported today that Republicans don’t want to expose disapproval of the war and so are simply cheering Trump on in public. Rather than holding public hearings that would allow the American people to hear the administration’s justification for the war and plans for its execution, as Democrats demand, Republicans are permitting the administration to inform Congress as it wishes, behind closed doors.

“You don’t want to show that kind of division to your enemy when you’re in the midst of a war,” Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) told Mineiro. “I don’t have a problem with the administration avoiding showing our enemy that they don’t have 100 percent support of the Congress.”

“They’re holding news conferences,” Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) told reporters last week, so there is no need for official hearings.  source

See, as long as FOX NEWS CHANNEL is covering the ongoing story, there’s no reason for debate in Congress. Unite behind the Commander-in-Chief or make yourself liable to the punishment for treason. Debate only aids our enemy, whoever that might be, and the Commander-in-Chief is the only one who determines who is an enemy and who deserves death, so stop being disloyal and just support our troops. So-called intellectuals, and so-called pragmatists, always insist that men of action have to explain themselves. That is the fatal liberal error of history, according to devotees of the incoherence of the will.

If your boss demands you lie, you’d better lie

This first point has nothing directly to do with lying for your boss, but Glenn Kirschner raised a horrific point about the leadership of the current Department of Justice. They are all Trump’s former criminal or impeachment lawyers. As the president’s former personal, criminal lawyer, someone like #2 at DOJ, Todd Blanche, is required by law to keep any criminal information he has about the president secret. Attorney-client privilege prevents Trump’s lawyer from divulging anything he knows about his client’s criminal history, the only exception being if the client reveals to his lawyer that he intends to commit an act of violence, or other serious future crime (though the 6-3 MAGA Supreme Court has given this president broad immunity to commit, and discuss, crimes as president).

If Trump told Blanche anything about any crime the DOJ is now investigating, Blanche has a legal duty to protect his former/present client by remaining mum. Clearly this creates a glaring conflict of interest and should have prevented confirmation of Trump’s criminal and impeachment lawyers to top positions in the DOJ. Conflict of Interest has gone the way of Abuse of Power, Obstruction of Justice, the Emoluments Clause, the Espionage Act, the Privacy Act, the insurrection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and all norms related to government under the lawless reign of America’s most resolutely self-interested president.

The Department of Justice concealed three of four FBI memos detailing interviews with a woman who testified credibly about being forced into sex acts, at age fourteen, by an older adult Donald Trump. The memos, when they were released, at the demand of the president’s opponents, were heavily redacted. The fact that the woman was called in to give her story on four occasions strongly suggests that the FBI found her credible. Between interviews three and four she was almost run off the road while driving and had received death threats. Neither Epstein or Trump were/are beyond that, Trump threatens to kill people all the time, politically, career-wise and with physical death. He has killed thousands of “scumbags” in just the first year of his second term. She decided against doing a fifth FBI interview since it appeared very unlikely that any kind of justice would result from her complaints, which she’d been making for years by then.

Under oath in front of a House Committee, a combative Pam Bondi (Trump’s former impeachment attorney, lobbyist for Hamas funder/Kushner benefactor Qatar and protector of Epstein in Florida for years as Florida AG) asserted that there is no evidence in the Epstein files that Trump did anything criminal. Ted Lieu (D-Ca) shot back that she was lying, the FBI interviews are evidence that Trump may well have committed criminal acts. Bondi angrily warned him not to accuse her of a crime (perjury, which she’d just committed). He stood his ground.

Under oath in front of a House Committee a combative Pam Bondi (Trump’s former impeachment attorney, lobbyist for Qatar and protector of Epstein in Florida for years as Florida AG) asserted that there is no evidence in the Epstein files that Trump did anything criminal. Ted Lieu (D-Ca) shot back that she was lying, the FBI interviews are evidence that Trump may well have committed criminal acts. Bondi angrily warned him not to accuse her of a crime (perjury, which she’d just committed). He stood his ground.

Evidence may not be dispositive proof that a crime was committed, but it is evidence that Trump may well have done something that Bondi, Blanche, Pirro, Habba, Halligan, etc. will continue to lie about, on mass media and under oath. If they want to keep their jobs, working for the world’s most shameless and prolific liar, they have to lie. None can answer the question “did Joe Biden win the 2020 election?” without some kind of grotesque semantic contortion that does not include the word “yes.” That is a condition of employment under the world’s most powerful, compulsively lying maniac. Kristi Noem let it slip that Trump knew about her waste of $220,000,000 on an ad campaign that paid her friends and that was it for ICE Barbie.

After Pam Bondi’s closed door meeting with the House Committee that subpoenaed her for an April deposition, she and Todd Blanche (there as her lawyer, one supposes) were met by reporters in the hall. To be clear, the law required her to release all files by December 19, 2025, with redactions only to protect victims, not any of the powerful men who traveled in Epstein’s criminal orbit. The DOJ is in clear, ongoing violation of this law. Let that sink in. This ensued after the sham “briefing” that Democrats walked out of after an hour:

But even as she defended her handling of the files, Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche acknowledged problems with the document release itself — an admission that added fuel to the controversy.

“I think it was less than 1 percent error,” Bondi stated about the botched release of files during a press gaggle, before quickly turning it over to Blanche.

“Yeah, no, that’s right,” Blanche said. “We said from the beginning that any mistakes that were made, and there should be no mistakes.” He emphasized that corrections were made as soon as issues were flagged.

Blanche repeated they fixed the mistakes “immediately” several times before stammering, “And so of course we don’t ever want to do anything to re-victimize anybody that was victimized by the horrible crimes of Mr. Epstein. But, but, and we didn’t. And we didn’t.” source

In fairness to Blanche and Bondi, the only really glaring mistake they made, aside from illegally withholding millions of documents they are legally required to disclose, massively redacting the released files in ways that violate the law, and fighting every step of the way to withhold anything that could incriminate anyone associated with Mr. Trump, including, and especially, Mr. Trump, was to release the names and nude photos of a bunch of underaged girls who were victimized by Epstein and his associates. It’s harsh, according to Blanche, to call that innocent mistake, corrected as soon as it was called to the DOJ’s attention by survivors — right after everyone who wanted to was able to download the embarrassing nude photos of young teenager sex abuse survivors (child pornography), and their names — re-victimizing anyone. As super-lawyer Todd Blanche himself said “But, but, and we didn’t [re-victimize anyone]. And we didn’t.”

Lying is a job requirement, for those working for a man who lies with almost every utterance. Tulsi Gabbard, former liberal Democrat, friend of Syrian mass murderer Bashar al-Assad and defender of Russian war criminal Vladimir Putin, was confirmed, on party lines (plus John Fetterman, the worst public ambassador people with mental illness have had for a long time) as the Director of National Intelligence. In this capacity she advises the president on national security threats. Under oath the last few days she insisted it was the president, not her, who makes the final assessments on what is or is not an imminent national security threat. Her deputy director resigned after Trump attacked Iran based on an national intelligence threat assessment that did not show Iran posed any imminent threat to the United States. Gabbard wants to keep her job, as she further demonstrated when she freelanced by going down to Georgia to watch the FBI seize boxes of 2020 ballots from Fulton County, based on an extremely shabbily supported search warrant.

Heather Cox Richardson gives a much more thorough, better account of some of the recent lies being told by people who work for the most mendacious world leader since the very stable genius who ran Germany from 1933 to 1945, when, hiding in a bunker, he poisoned his wife and shot his dog and himself. Here’s Heather, with last night’s letter.

Assholes assume everyone is like them

If you are the kind of person who cheats at games, you assume everyone else is cheating, that’s why you have to. Apply this to any asshole behavior and you’ll find the same thing. We “wise apes” (homo sapiens) rarely do anything without feeling completely justified. How do you lie about people legally in the country being savages who eat good people’s dogs and cats? Your enemy would do the same thing, to gain an advantage, if they had the cojones, el huevos. If you rig elections, it’s only because your enemies are rigging elections, otherwise how else would they win?

Trumpism, like the ethos of our own religious white Christian slaveholders, is the perfect illustration of this principle. The slaveholders used overwhelming violence, well-armed militias and the threat of death to keep the slaves in line because if the slaves ever got free they would, according to their innocent masters, mercilessly massacre all the people who committed what they felt were atrocities against them. For that reason, the terrible vengeance an enslaved people would rightfully seek, the masters had to be extremely violent.

Old Mr. Day of Love himself told the crowd he was whipping up to peacefully storm the Capitol to gently convince reluctant members of Congress to declare him the winner of an election all evidence, and several of his closest advisers (including giant human turd Bill Barr who used the word “bullshit” to describe the baseless election fraud claim) said he’d decisively lost:

“When you catch somebody in a fraud, you are allowed to go by very different rules. So I hope Mike has the courage to do what he has to do, and I hope he doesn’t listen to the RINOs and the stupid people that he’s listening to.”

source

This little piece, repeated by MAGA spokespeople from time to time, reminded me of that timeless human principle, that wrongdoers always justify themselves by accusing everybody else of doing the same thing, in their position.

Let’s leave aside the fact that the Trump administration is continually pursuing baseless prosecutions, without any evidence of wrongdoing, with their weaponized, scofflaw Department of Justice, a department that also routinely defies court orders.  And not to apply logic to an unfounded and false statement, but the FBI in the lead-up to the 2020 election was under the control of Trump enabler Bill Barr’s Department of Justice.  

They had just suicided Jeffrey Epstein so he’d be nice and quiet about his long friendship with his longtime running buddy President Trump.  There was, literally, nothing to see there — both guards were gone and the cameras were out when he suddenly died — a series of regrettable fuck ups, as Barr shrugged when the threat of Epstein was gone. Who exactly would have weaponized these “untrue and sensationalist” claims?   Trump’s enemy former FBI director James Comey had been dismissed years earlier, he couldn’t have done it.  Hugo Chavez, perhaps?

We are to believe that all the heavily redacted Epstein files that have been released are all totally kosher, in accordance to the Epstein Files Transparency Act, signed into law, veto-proof, by Mr. Trump.   The names and nude photos of underaged Epsyein victims revealed to the public, oops, DOJ said they were under pressure to release files and mistakes happened (though no abusers’ names were mistakenly revealed).   The three million pages Blanche and Bondi refuse to release?  Well, the EFTA has no criminal enforcement provision, so fuck you.  The president has nothing to hide (it’s not like he’s hiding his entire educational record or anything like that).  How dare you question the most transparent administration in the history of the world?! 

In fairness to the serially immoral, criminally insane Mr. Trump, he assumes anyone would do the same, act exactly as he knows he has to act, so he’s just doing it before somebody can do it to him. If you had evidence of your own crimes, wouldn’t you do everything possible to hide them? Come on, be honest.

Do not panic, induced despair is the main tool of Nazis

Though he lied about it at the time, obviously, the Hitler book the totally non-racist Mr. Trump had on his nightstand was not Mein Kampf, as some reported, but The Collected Speeches of Adolf Hitler. Trump is not known to be much of a reader, I suspect the Hitler tome was just there to remind his wife, Ivana, who she was married to. Anyway, the German strongman had nothing on our American Dictator On Day One. Though I got lots of shit for comparing Trump and his hand-chosen cast of freakishly cynical, ambitious, amoral shapeshifters to Nazis, I get less shit about it today than a couple of years ago.

I’ve always been fond of long sentences. Why place a period to end a thought you’re still thinking when you can use a comma, you know, sometimes an em dash — and continue on indefinitely; when in doubt, why not a semicolon? Anyway, here’s one of the longest English language sentences I’ve ever seen, and it’s a beauty in its catalogue of recent inhuman cruelty and incoherence. It’s written by a self-identified human named Gene Weingarten.

In the last two weeks alone, Donald Trump has destabilized the Middle East, turned the United States into a pariah state, killed more than a hundred little girls by mistake then denied he had done it and then admitted he might have done it but he didn’t know for sure because he hadn’t bothered to look into it, caused gas prices to spike by 25%, enabled Israel to commit atrocities against Lebanon, begged for military help from our historic allies whom he had previously insulted and alienated, and then threatened to punish those same allies if they don’t help him, said many in the media were “guilty of treason” for not cheerleading his benighted, unpopular war, gloated about having castrated the fourth estate, proudly identifying his conquests by name in a social media post …

… declared the Iran war over, then not over, and then over, again, then said that we had “totally demolished” a key Iranian oil facility, but added that he might bomb it a little more “just for fun,” continued pardoning his cronies and white-collar felons whose crimes have already wiped out nearly $2 billion in victim repayment and taxpayer recovery for various frauds, said that a former U.S. president he wouldn’t name had told him he regretted not bombing Iran first, but all four living former presidents immediately denied having said it, saw his approval rating plummet like a flapping turkey dropped from a helicopter, said he might “take” Cuba, revealed that his administration was considering withholding HIV aid to Zambia “on a massive scale” unless that impoverished country gives us access to their copper, cobalt and lithium stores … and played at least four rounds of golf.

According to my research, at 286 words the passage above was the longest single sentence ever written in a Substack newsletter.

Also, just an aside, in researching that item about Trump threatening widespread death to Zambians, I discovered that The Wikipedia entry devoted exclusively to DonaldTrump’s racist views is significantly longer than the Wikipedia entry for The Korean War.

These psychopaths (self-obsessed, manipulative, always ready to lie, lacking any ability to empathize) want you to believe their power is absolute, unchallengeable, the strongest force in the universe. They control their lackeys through transactional bribes, promises of unlimited opportunities for power and corrupt self-enrichment; their followers by lying promises they have no intention of keeping, and; all others by terror.

Terror is the main weapon of fascists. If they can keep masses of citizens in constant confusion, perplexed, anxious, in fear for their physical safety, the lives of their loved ones, they have a tremendous advantage. Like all bullies, pushing an incoherent claim to the right to make others do what they want, they are also very fragile. Defiance drives them insane. It is important, in these dangerous times, not to give in to the despair they are laser focused on instilling. There is nothing at all inevitable about their transforming the United States into a permanent one party fascist police state, though that’s clearly their goal. They are fucking up massively and spectacularly, over and over, in spite of controlling all three branches of the federal government. Every election, every poll, every utterance by any of them, demonstrates the unpopularity of their cruel grift, over and over.

FCC chairman Brendan Carr can’t cancel broadcast licenses for stations that don’t kiss an insane president’s ass passionately enough. He performs that threatening dance, on Elon Musk’s social media platform, to please his enraged master. Pete Hegseth can openly announce his intention to keep committing war crimes, and kick out photographers who don’t get his makeup and lighting right, he’s still ordering war crimes to be committed. Kristi Noem can’t keep her job, no matter how incompetently she did it, once she announces Trump was in on her $220,000,000 emergency vanity project that enriched her friends and her. The same holds for every one of Trump’s fire breathing lickspittles. Things are very, very bad when creatures like Stephen Miller and Jared Kushner have more power and influence on world affairs than Congress, than anyone confirmed as a member of Trump’s cabinet.

Remember that all of these people were chosen by the Very Stable Genius for their incompetence for their respective jobs. They were hired based solely on their fawning obedience to the master’s will, their ability to gratify his need for praise, and the destruction or weaponization of every federal administrative agency they oversee. The rightwing billionaires who pay for Trump’s campaigns have long been determined to destroy the “administrative state.” They are getting what they paid for, at the moment.

Trump, like his German hero of a century ago, believes he is an infallible genius in all matters. He’s a genius at conning about 35% of the country, he has an undeniable talent for that, got to give the handsome rascal his props there. His boy, the Austrian corporal with the little mustache, shared that genius for moving crowds of his aggrieved countrymen to passionate ecstasies of rage and religious fervor. Outside of that, their outsized talent for lying and throwing tantrums terrifying to their inner circles, and their recklessness, there is little remarkable about either one. True, Mr. Hitler racked up impressive numbers in the mass murder department, but that doesn’t make him a genius. Nothing that Mr. Trump has done so far suggests he will get the chance to match those numbers, though he may well try, and with the nuclear code and his thirst for murder, who knows?

The desperation of the deteriorating Mr. Trump is evident in his obsession with the election he lost, still insisting he won. He’s now trying to force the Senate to pass a bill for him to sign into law that will disenfranchise about half of the voting population. Massive voter suppression on a national level is his only hope for avoiding what is coming for him and his party.

If not voter suppression he must again provoke his followers to commit mass violence he can blame on antifa. That or stage a mass death terrorist attack on a sanctuary city in the US. He is perfectly capable of doing both of those things, as he’s already shown on his infamous Day of Love in January 2021. It would not be wise to bet against his willingness and ability to have his lackeys organize a false flag terrorist attack, if pressed. As always for his type, he must maintain power at all costs. Otherwise, it’s… crap, it just won’t go away, will it?

Take courage, my fellow humans, from Lawrence O’Donnell

Traitors, treason, execute them all!

Look at it from President Trump’s point of view. He has been totally up front with everybody about what kind of person he is, and about 35% of the country still loves him, unconditionally. He could, literally, have his masked agents execute peaceful civilians, in their car, restrained face down on the pavement, trying to run from a masked mob of heavily armed agents, and they’d still vote for him. He could promise lower gas prices and no new wars, get over 70,000,000 votes, and then, when necessary, start to carpet bomb Iran (excursion, not war, excursion!) declare immediate victory in the war, and watch as the price of gas spiked. Then righteously vent epic fury that traitorous Europeans and Chinese will do nothing to open the strategic choke point, the Strait of Hormuz

As the president knows very well, the world is a cruel and unfair place. If you don’t get your enemies first, and keep punching, kicking and shooting them while they’re down, they will eventually surround and kill you. That’s why the Iran Excursion is existential for the president. You don’t need a business degree from Wharton to know any of this.

In his first term, he surrounded himself with unreliable people. His first Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, listened to the advice of the DOJ’s Office of Ethics (ethics, for fuck’s sake!), because he’d lied, in the Senate, about his contacts with Russia. Ethics (fucking ETHICS!) told Sessions his involvement in investigating Trump’s ties with Putin had a clear appearance of impropriety — and like a coward he recused himself and refused to un-recuse. By stepping away from the investigation, Sessions paved the way for the traitorous Robert Mueller, who then accused Trump, basically, of ten counts of obstruction of justice, while also totally exonerating him from the Russia Hoax. After his total exoneration Trump publicly humiliated Sessions, and later destroyed what was left of his political career. He had other disloyal, traitorous, selectively “ethical” assholes in his first administration, and they leaked terrible lies about him. Lessons learned, mistakes he would not repeat next time.

An oath of personal loyalty to the president, demonstrated by an ability to angrily lie publicly in any situation, (along with iron-clad nondisclosure agreements), would ensure Trump’s second administration would run much smoother than the first. With Kristi Noem, a posing pinhead, in charge of Homeland Security (along with FEMA and the TSA), Pete ‘no quarter, no mercy’ Hegseth, a misogynistic alcoholic sadist, in charge of the Department of WAR, Kashyap Pramod Patel, enraged author of a children’s book praising a Godlike Trump, leading the FBI, and a pliant, cherub-faced white Christian fascist as Speaker of the House — what could go wrong in squashing protests, intimidating enemies foreign and domestic, dominating the legislative branch, sodomizing the Constitution, and so on? Appoint your criminal and impeachment lawyers to head the Department of Justice and who can touch you? Only the fucking media, with their constant lies and fake news. That’s where loyalist Brendan Carr, partisan head of the FCC, comes in.

The New York Times, often named by name as among the worst of the worst by the president (along with the lickspittle Bezos-owned Washington Post, not currently licking quite enough spittle), reported on the attack on mass media with uncharacteristic urgency, and fewer qualifiers than usual. The gist is that Brendan Carr is openly threatening broadcasters with the loss of their licenses, for failure to serve the public good, if they report lies about the president’s perfect, already historically successful, meticulously planned and war gamed non-war excursion in Iran. Carr is equally outraged about the lie that Biden “won” in 2020, but that’s another story. The Times (from link above):

The goal seems to be pressuring journalists to back off critical coverage of the war effort, or to at least encourage the public to second-guess reporting that runs counter to the administration’s preferred narrative. And the effort has gone well beyond words.

Mr. Trump’s top media regulator, Brendan Carr of the Federal Communications Commission, issued an explicit warning to broadcast television networks on social media, writing that “hoaxes and news distortions” could lead to the revocation of licenses for local stations, a threat that Mr. Trump said he was “so thrilled to see.”

Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, doing what she does so well:

[She] said in a statement on Monday: “The media has been undeniably biased and negative in its coverage of President Trump and Operation Epic Fury. Anybody with eyes and ears can see this.”  

So true, so fucking true, Karoline, it brings tears to the eyes, and also to the ears. Anybody with eyes and ears can see this!

Another [Trump] post blamed Iranian AI and disinformation for stories that he said are “FAKE and, in a certain way, you can say those Media Outlets that generated it should be brought up on Charges for TREASON for the dissemination of false information.” He reiterated support for Carr’s attack on the media and insisted he won the presidential election “IN A LANDSLIDE.” source

Obviously.

Rupert Murdoch: devoted public servant

Brian Tyler Cohen, with a nationwide chorus of fair and balanced analysis of the spike in gasoline prices, “short term pain for long term gain.” You betcha.

HUNTER BIDEN!!!!

Mr. Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law, has spoken with potential investors in recent weeks about raising $5 billion or more for Affinity Partners, his investment firm, according to five people with knowledge of the talks who were not permitted to speak publicly about the discussions.

As part of the fund-raising effort, Affinity’s representatives have already met with Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, which invests the proceeds of the kingdom’s vast oil reserves, two of the people briefed on the discussions said. PIF is led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who has formed close ties with Mr. Kushner and the Trump administration. . .

. . . The efforts show the blurring of the lines between public service and private profit-seeking during Mr. Trump’s second term [1]. Only a few weeks ago, in his role as Mr. Trump’s “peace envoy,” Mr. Kushner met in Geneva with Iran’s foreign minister. The U.S. and Israeli bombing campaign in Iran began shortly after those meetings concluded without a deal on Iran’s nuclear program.

Mr. Kushner, 45, also spearheaded the Trump administration’s successful efforts to extract hostages from Gaza and negotiated between Russia and Ukraine in an attempt to end their war.

In January, Mr. Kushner traveled to Davos, Switzerland, as part of the official U.S. delegation at the World Economic Forum, where he unveiled the Trump administration’s plan for a “New Gaza.” source

I know, what about Hunter Biden and the Biden Crime Family? Why didn’t Merrick Garland prosecute him for his fishy ties to a Ukrainian oil company? THE DOJ WAS WEAPONIZED, OBVIOUSLY.

Meanwhile, Jared’s epically furious father-in-law is selling the glorious game of the already won, hole-in-one, home run, slam dunk Iran War to his gamer fanboys. USA! USA!!!!

[1] Note the classic deployment of the passive voice, blurring the line of how the line has been blurred and by whom, if anyone. Later on, though the Times correctly puts Kushner’s unofficial title of “peace envoy” in quotes, it makes the ambiguous statement that the pinhead Kushner “spearheaded the Trump administration’s successful efforts to extract hostages from Gaza and negotiated between Russia and Ukraine in an attempt to end their war.” You’ve got to love the even-handedness of the Grey Lady in giving Kushner his props. Our way of life, and our current excellent condition on the world stage and here at home, would not be possible without her graceful, line blurring contortions of fairness in the name of someone’s version of the truth.

Be fair, any powerful war criminal would make the same demand

For starters, a bully always looks to provoke others, weaker than him, to fight back. This gives the bully the righteous excuse to rightfully retaliate. Trump sought, by unleashing masked, untrained goons, in full riot gear, to rough people up, break car windows and deploy tear gas on peaceful protesters, to provoke a violent response that would enable him to dominate the streets with the military. His attack on Iran, as illegal an act of unprovoked war as Cheney’s war on Iraq, likely has the same larger aim. Get Iran to retaliate with terrorism in the US, then, bingo, September 11, a new Patriot Act (probably already waiting at the Heritage Foundation) and soaring, intoxicating new emergency powers for Trump. Toward that end, he seeks preemptive immunity from the International Criminal Court for war crimes he’s busily committing now.

The 2025 Nobel Peace Prize recipient (he got the winner to give him her prize), Donald J. Trump, is threatening the International Criminal Court to back the fuck off and stop trying to accuse righteous Christian Americans of committing war crimes in various completely necessary excursions to ensure world peace. If the ICC had existed in their time, both Hitler and Stalin would have done the same, rest assured. Trump is just the first US president with the massive balls to do this, (hence the need for the 2,000,000 square foot Trump-Epstein ballroom where the East Wing used to be — finally a place where he can feel comfortable spreading his legs with those unfeasibly gigantic balls).

After the atrocities and massive death toll of World War Two (estimated at 70-85 million– including 40-50 million civilians), and widespread war crimes committed during that war of mass murder, idealists around the world pressed for and created the International Criminal Court. Those who massacred civilians would now be held accountable for crimes against humanity, under international law. Mass murderers of civilians selected by ethnic group would be prosecuted for the newly coined crime of genocide.

Not long ago (when I was in law school, during the last years of the twentieth century) many international law experts were optimistic about the rule of law prevailing among the nations of the world. They believed this even though Reagan had already rejected the ICC’s jurisdiction over Americans and Israel and a few other countries had done the same. Modern day Nazis had other ideas about this so-called rule of international so-called law. Look what our boy Trump has to say about this stupid court:

War criminal Pete Hegseth [1], Secretary of Indiscriminate and Absolute Lethality (not pansy-ish “legality”) keeps bellowing about the right to execute enemy combatants, or suspected drug smugglers, or anyone else deemed a danger, or a potential danger, even if they’re wounded, disarmed, incapacitated or surrendering. (See, nobody has prosecuted the agents who executed Alex Pretti while he was restrained face down on the ground… so, what are YOU going to do about it, bitches?) Hegseth said the US will not be bound by “stupid rules of engagement” and will “give no quarter to our enemies” (it’s also a war crime to kill people who are surrendering) so murdering like it’s a video game is cool again. The Department of Lethality posts video game-inspired little movies about the glorious war in Iran, with mad respect to the American service members who may, theoretically, be dying as a result — “as often happens in war” as POTUS sagely notes.

And while we’re talking about complete immunity, total impunity, pre-emptive exoneration, here’s POTUS:

Last night, Trump posted on social media: “We are totally destroying the terrorist regime of Iran, militarily, economically, and otherwise, yet, if you read the Failing New York Times, you would incorrectly think that we are not winning. Iran’s Navy is gone, their Air Force is no longer, missiles, drones and everything else are being decimated, and their leaders have been wiped from the face of the earth. We have unparalleled firepower, unlimited ammunition, and plenty of time—Watch what happens to these deranged scumbags today. They’ve been killing innocent people all over the world for 47 years, and now I, as the 47th President of the United States of America, am killing them. What a great honor it is to do so! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP” source

“Watch what happens to these deranged scumbags today.”

[1] See, for example, his order for a “double tap” strike to kill South Americans clinging to the wreckage of their sinking boat after a drone strike destroyed it, killing everyone else aboard (and sending any evidence of the crime they were never charged with to the bottom of the ocean). See also his recent U-boat torpedo sinking of an Iranian vessel returning from the Indian Ocean, and then letting the survivors drown. The Tomahawk missile that made a direct hit on an Iranian middle school, killing 170 girls the same age as Epstein’s victims? Not his problem. He’s not going to be restrained by no stupid rules of engagement! He’s maximally lethal, yo. No quarter for the godless enemies of Christ! Like it says on his arm: Deus Vult.