Nice.  

JAN. 28 “The coverage about me in the @nytimes and the @washingtonpost has been so false and angry that the Times actually apologized to its dwindling subscribers and readers.” (It never apologized.)

FEB. 4 “After being forced to apologize for its bad and inaccurate coverage of me after winning the election, the FAKE NEWS @nytimes is still lost!” (It never apologized.)

FEB. 6 “The failing @nytimes was forced to apologize to its subscribers for the poor reporting it did on my election win. Now they are worse!” (It didn’t apologize.)

MARCH 29 “Remember when the failing @nytimes apologized to its subscribers, right after the election, because their coverage was so wrong. Now worse!” (It didn’t apologize.)

APRIL 12 “The New York Times said the word wiretapped in the headline of the first edition. Then they took it out of there fast when they realized.” (There were separate headlines for print and web, but neither were altered.)

APRIL 29 “They’re incompetent, dishonest people who after an election had to apologize because they covered it, us, me, but all of us, they covered it so badly that they felt they were forced to apologize because their predictions were so bad.” (The Times did not apologize.)

For what it’s worth, you can read the definitive list of recent arguably untrue presidential claims (the biased NY Times calls them “lies”, SAD!) here.

The sad fact is that facts don’t win many arguments here in America.   Superior debating skills don’t win American political debates.   We are predisposed to take in facts that agree with our worldview and dismiss, or be impervious to, ones that contradict it.  Humans are emotional beings who will charge into enemy fire if they are whipped up the right way. Americans may be more emotional than many humans, to judge from our elections.  Then again, a glance at the rest of the world and all bets are off on that theory.  Author George Lakoff makes a series of excellent points on the central role of emotions in American politics and the shrewd and effective strategy of the right wing, you can read them here.  

Even as I watched Gore whup Dubya in presidential debates, I realized, thanks initially to a friend’s insight, that I was watching something millions of Americans were not focusing on.  People found Dubya folksy and likable, they wanted to have a beer with the affable alcoholic.  Gore was wooden, and overly intellectual.  After Dubya lost the debate, he strutted on the stage, looking like he’d just kicked ass;  Gore looked exhausted, hunched over gathering up his papers.  “Look at them now and tell me who won,” my friend said to his family.

Recently Hillary made one excellent, nuanced, irrefutable point after another (at least irrefutable by Trump) as Trump smirked, stalked and called her a nasty woman.  Polls after the debates between the most hated and second most hated presidential candidates in history showed few minds were changed, no matter who may have made the more intelligent showing  in the “debate”. Americans were watching a talent show for a winner to believe in and a loser to vote off the island.  Americans were tuned into attitude, confidence, body language– ineffable things that resonate emotionally.  

When Hillary restrained herself as Trump vented, which I found admirable and poignant to watch– a woman is simply not allowed to betray her annoyance, let alone publicly tell a sexist blow-hard to just shut the fuck up — she was still seen as a nasty woman by those who hated her.  You had to admire Trump, he cut through to the truth, those who hated Hillary said– she is one nasty woman.

Bush and Cheney had a terrible first term.  Among many bad things, they ignored specific advance intelligence about the attacks of 9/11, the US suffered a devastating mass murder, they invaded Iraq based on a campaign of lies, they let bin Laden and the core of Al Qu’eada escape at Tora Bora, they resisted formation of a Committee to investigate 9/11 for a long time and then acted like a couple of guilty perps by refusing to take an oath to tell the truth (no oath, no perjury– fatal mistake swearing an oath, Bill “Perjurer” Clinton), insisting on giving their testimony together in a room where no notes or recordings could be made of what they said.  

The 2004 election should not have been close after that first term, with the disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan raging with no end in sight, but the principled Democratic candidate came off like a walking cadaver, cautiously hewing to the terrible truth and refusing to dignify the lies of an easily refuted smear campaign against his decorated military service.  President Bush, who had used his father’s position to evade military service in Vietnam, and left the National Guard before his tour ended,  somehow managed to campaign like a heroic war time commander-in-chief.

Americans don’t want the terrible truth, we want to feel good about ourselves!

When the tide of the 2004 presidential election was swung by millions of “values voters”, Christians who believed God told them to hate homosexuals (the Bible says kill them, after all), people who turned out to vote so that God’s law would not be violated by the homosexuals who controlled the Left, I got a long whiff of which way this country was headed.   The Hope and Change Obama’s campaign promised, so desperately needed, proved to be mostly hope.  The change we got was the normalization of radical anti-democratic changes made by Cheney and Bush, justified by their endless, borderless military campaign against Terror.   More and more Americans came to realize we are basically screwed, powerless and screwed, represented by money-compromised media stars concerned mostly with being reelected.   Then we got the canny reality TV star, the genius of confident, boastful self-promotion the American way, the smiling populist billionaire servant of his fellow billionaires.

As Lakoff points out, as I’ve been frustrated to witness for decades now, the right frames every debate.   I have never understood why every time a Republican says “Death Tax” a Democrat does not say “Paris Hilton Tax” and add that it only effects a handful of spoiled, super-rich kids.    “Climate Change Skeptic” is a label that has been useful in making cynical people, or absolute morons in complete denial, look intelligent and creating a controversy where there is none.  After all, skepticism is part of critical thinking while those alarmed about the rising sea levels and catastrophic weather patterns are “alarmists.”

 “Right to Life” should be countered with “Right to Decency” or something, indicating that a girl should never be forced to give birth to her rapist’s baby.   Those fetuses have a right to life that ends at birth, as Ronald Reagan famously said.  They are not guaranteed anything but the life of an unwanted child.   Abortion is not a casual choice for any woman, it is often an agonizing one, I would think– but no discussion of pros or cons is possible when God says every abortion is murder, while actual murder between humans walking on the earth must be carefully considered according to who kills whom.

Lakoff notes that the regulations Republicans hate as “job killing” should be reframed as “protections” by Democrats who want to protect the air, the water, worker safety, the social safety net.   Every time the Republican rails against big government regulations, the Democrat should extoll these vital protections against greedy predators.  Sadly, Lakoff’s recommendations have never been much heeded by politicians on the left.  

When former Vice Presidential candidate turned Fox News “pundent” Sarah Palin screamed about “Death Panels” during the debate over Obamacare, why did Obama not go on TV and call bullshit, give a 30 second explanation of hospice care?   Make mention of the 45,000 Americans who die every year for lack of health insurance.   Those on the left side of the political spectrum are left with the demonstrable facts while the right has learned to stir the raw emotions with memorable, galvanizing buzzwords.  The left has the facts, bully for them for being actually right so much of the time.  How’s that facty, righty thing working out for you, Democrats?   I fell into the same trap the other day when writing about Trump’s lawyer, Marc Kasowitz.

While factually true, it was a partisan framing job, pure and simple.   My account focused on selected embarrassing episodes in a skilled lawyer’s long career.  Kasowitz is a millionaire many times over, paid more in a day than most Americans make in a month.   He wins cases, he loses cases, some are draws, some he cuts great deals for.  Like any lawyer, he has to play the cards he’s dealt.  Could he make the sexual harassment allegations against Bill O’Reilly go away or negotiate Fox out of firing him?  No, not under the circumstances he walked into.  But he got O’Reilly paid, lottery-winner bucks, and you can be sure he had O’Reilly write him a fat check.

How do I know that the $25,000,000 settlement he negotiated to end the fraud case against Trump and Trump University was not an excellent deal for Trump? The facts speak for themselves:  a presidential candidate settled a huge fraud case against him right before the election and still managed to become the president.  Who is the smart one now?   Likely not a dime of the 25 million came from Trump’s own deep pockets, that is also likely Kasowitz’s doing.  

Regardless of the ultimate outcome of the case, wiseass Bill Maher got a public comeuppance, as far as Trump’s people saw the lawsuit.  So what if Trump ultimately withdrew the arguably frivolous lawsuit?  That wasn’t in the news.   Trump’s threats to sue people he doesn’t like, or who have claims against him, have probably worked as often as they haven’t.  The New York Times may not have given Trump the apology Kasowitz demanded, but they pretty much have kept quiet.   But there I go again… the facts.

So we have the facts, a deck of cards that can seemingly be infinitely shuffled. Facts themselves are now in dispute here in Breitbart’s America, but let’s stick to what we can agree are facts.  Depending on which card is on top, how they are played– there goes the conversation.   It’s maddening to see politicians avoid directly answering questions, pivoting straight to their focus group tested talking points.   It doesn’t matter if it’s maddening or not, they would be stupid not to learn the skill.  No matter how clumsily they do it, it is better than wading into candor that will come back to bite their head off in a negative campaign ad.  We call them “attack ads” and they are ubiquitous and often very effective in deciding elections.

Why are we in the situation we are in the USA?   My simple one word answer? Advertising– the entire culture, not only the economy, is based on the irrefutable, reductive genius of it and how it serves the bottom line.  The most skillfully advertised product wins– that is the fact.  That includes, clearly, the long, expensive ad campaigns that decide how we select the leaders we wind up hating or believing in, no matter what the sullen facts may have to say about the matter.

I’ve always been a sucker for international respect for anti-torture treaties.   Few things are more horrifying to consider than the intentional state-sponsored infliction of severe and prolonged suffering done in the name of some holy cause.   I think of the brutal Spanish Inquisition, inquisitors torturing people in the name of Christ until they admitted they did not believe in the divinity of the Prince of Peace, Jesus Christ, or that they did.  

The research shows that torture works very well as hideous punishment, badly for any other purpose, such as extracting reliable information.   People under torture will eventually say whatever their interrogators want them to say, to make the torture stop.  Torture does not work as a way to extract actionable intelligence.  The classified Senate report on our recent torture program concludes as much.

International law became quite explicit, and unanimous, in rejecting all forms of torture, including cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of prisoners, after the atrocities of World War Two.  Japanese officers were punished for water-boarding Americans and Australians.  Water-boarding would no longer be tolerated in the civilized world, although it had been widely employed by the U.S. in its war against Philippine “insurgents” after the Spanish-American war.

This rejection of torture by the civilized world also applied specifically to medical personnel who oversaw or participated in torture or sadistic medical experiments.   Doctors, who had taken the Hippocratic Oath to first do no harm, were prosecuted at Nuremberg for the harm they had done in the name of their causes.  Nazi doctors. Talk about your oxymorons.  

We had a couple of these motherfuckers who became multi-millionaires, on the U.S. taxpayers dime, testing their theories of torture and “learned helplessness” on detainees suspected of involvement with, or knowledge of, terrorist activities.   They actually travelled to “Black Sites” to test out the techniques personally on experimental victims.   The ACLU has brought a lawsuit against these dedicated, can-do psychologists.  You can read the details here.

Few villains deserve prosecution more than these two generously remunerated former military psychologists, Mitchell and Jessen.   OK, maybe Dick Cheney, tenured constitutional law professor John Yoo and federal judge for life Jay Bybee, the primary architects and theoreticians of our recent, extensive, still mostly top secret, torture program.  Like “collateral damage” is so much more refined than “massacred civilians”, the term “enhanced interrogation” is so much more dignified than “torture”, don’t you think?  Here is John “More Patriotic Than You” Yoo’s infamous “legal” definition of torture, signed off on by now federal judge Jay “Otherwise Anonymous Fuckface” Bybee:

Torture, according to that memo, “must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.” Yoo also advised that for mental pain or suffering to amount to torture, “it must result in significant psychological harm of significant duration, e.g., lasting for months or even years.”     source

The ACLU lawsuit, Salim v. Mitchell, brought on behalf of two torture survivors with the requisite years of severe PTSD, Suleiman Abdullah Salim and Mohamed Ahmed Ben Soud, and the family of Gul Rahman, a man killed by his American torturers (he died, according to the complaint, “as a result of hypothermia caused by his exposure to extreme cold, exacerbated by dehydration, lack of food, and his immobility in a stress position.”) is proceeding in the United States District Court in Washington D.C.  As of January, 2017 it was scheduled for trial on June 26, 2017.  

While I am speaking of torture, check this out, from Judge Quackenbush’s January ruling in the case, rejecting Mitchell and Jessen’s arguments that the case against them must be dismissed, as a matter of law, for lack of jurisdiction.   (Defendants are the two innovative, torture-endorsing, torture-performing psychologists)

The Defendants’ instant Motion was filed on November 18, 2016, and contends the Military Commissions Act (“MCA”), specifically 28 U.S.C. § 2241(e)(2), deprives this court of jurisdiction over “non-habeas detention-related claims” brought by an alien when the alien was determined to have been properly detained by the United States as an “enemy combatant”. (ECF No. 105, p. 1). Plaintiffs’ Response (ECF No. 12) contends the MCA does not apply for two primary reasons: 1) Defendants are not military servicemembers or government employees or agents, but are independent contractors; and 2) none of the three Plaintiffs were determined by an executive branch tribunal to have been properly detained as an enemy combatant. (ECF No. 120, p. 1).   source

The law is tortuous, and sometimes torturous, chockablock with the devilish details.  For purposes of this lawsuit, if the Defendants could prove they were acting as agents of the United States, the case against them would have to be dismissed under the law the ACLU seeks to use against them — as long as the plaintiffs were also ‘enemy combatants’.  The judge, in dismissing Defendants’ claim that they were agents of the United States, and therefore asserting the court’s jurisdiction over them under the law, used a slightly salty phrase I liked: 

It is telling the Defendants, who wish to establish the nature of the legal relationship between themselves and the Government, did not cite to the contracts in their Motion.  

The judge concludes:

Defendants have not established, based on the record submitted with the Motion to Dismiss, they were “agents” of the United States.

As for whether or not the plaintiffs (torture victims) were enemy combatants, and therefore not protected by the law they seek to use against the rogue psychologists, the judge wrote:

Plaintiffs argue the determination must be made by a military tribunal, a Combatant Status Review Tribunal (“CSRT”), to trigger the jurisdiction-stripping portion of the statute.  Defendants argue no tribunal finding is required, and appear to argue any reference to an individual as a “combatant” in a governmental memo, or reference to affiliation with a hostile organization, suffices.

Getting a little tingle of foreshadowing on which way the Court is leaning?

None of the three Plaintiffs was determined by a Combatant Status Review Tribunal to be an “enemy combatant.”

Therefore, Defendants’ Motion to Dismiss rejected, Defendants are subject to the court’s jurisdiction and this particular law applies to them.  Game on.  Trial, for evils done over a decade ago, starts Monday.  At least that’s what the judge wrote in January, 2017.   For the latest on the progress of the case, this was recently posted by lawyers for the plaintiffs.  Apparently there is going to be some oral argument on the ALCU’s motion , on behalf of torture victim plaintiffs, on July 28.

I think of all the things one learns not to say.   We refrain sometimes because people close to us will be hurt.  If I reminded someone of their spouse’s vehement threat to kill her parents, burn the house down with the kids in it and kill her and then himself, it would register, to her, as a kind of betrayal.  I don’t wish to betray, so I keep my mouth closed about personal, highly volatile things like this, to the extent that I can.

Sometimes we refrain from speaking candidly because of fear.  There will be reprisals, maybe, repercussions.  Fall-out we are not ready for.  Fear is often not reasonable, in fact, it’s rarely reasonable.   Unreasonable fear is one of the most prevalent reasons people remain silent, even in the face of terrible things going on around them.  The silence of good people, it has famously been said, is all that’s necessary for evil schemes against the weak to flourish.

Sometimes we dummy up because we’ve done something wrong and dummying up is the smart thing for a bad hombre to do when confronted.   Anything I say may reveal that I fully intended to commit the bad thing I did, so I will say nothing and instruct everyone around me to do the same.   We have the Fifth Amendment here in America, a Constitutional privilege against self-incrimination.  

Among cherished freedoms guaranteed in the Bill of Rights, pleading the fifth is up there with our right to have and use as many guns as we want to.  That’s the Second Amendment, for those keeping score at home, the one about well-regulated militias.   The right to free speech, freedom from religious bullying, freedom of the press, freedom to peaceably assemble to demand things from the government, those First Amendment rights liberals are so proud of… over-rated if we are going to Make America Great Again.  In fact, read it and weep, liberals:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

This administration is under attack, as they try to make America Great Again and abridging certain freedoms of the press has become a priority for them.  The Press, declared a lying enemy of the American people by our Birther president, has sometimes been vicious in its assessments of the president.   It constantly and unfairly reprints the president’s tweets, which is none of their damn business, that’s a private conversation between the president and his followers.  The media reporters in the White House press corps insist on not only asking questions, and sometimes very tough ones, but demanding the right to follow-up questions.  

The administration is making some changes to the parameters regarding the press and appropriate questions, as well as streamlining clumsy new procedures for ensuring all those embarrassing public tap dances by administration spokespeople are not recorded and constantly replayed on the merciless liberal media, posted on the internet by anonymous, free-lance people like me who like to ridicule the powerful and unaccountable.  

They are working on new rules for what the press may report on, what they may broadcast, and what must keep secret from the public.  White House communications are now reportedly being exchanged using an encryption app that periodically auto-deletes inter-staff communications, to avoid a scandal like the one that plagued Crooked Hillary with all those emails on her personal server she had to destroy.  The app they are using is called Confide  and you can get a more detailed report here.

Another thing that people who feel under attack, or subject to criminal or civil charges, always do is “lawyer up.”   We have the right to hire a lawyer to defend our good name, our assets, our very asses.  Everyone has a right to hire a lawyer for any legal purpose.  I am not judging Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III for hiring a lawyer, nor am I judging Jared Kushner for hiring a lawyer.   Anyone in their position would do the same.   I am also not judging the president, or assuming he is guilty of anything, just because he hired some lawyers.   I’m judging him for other reasons, it’s hard not to, but he is clearly being prudent in hiring himself a legal team.

I don’t question his choice of someone like Marc Kasowitz*, nor would I think of suggesting that the president values loyalty over competence.  After all, Mr. Kasowitz is a highly successful $1,500/hour lawyer who has been defending Mr. Trump for years.   Mr. Kasowitz has other famous clients, he defended Bill O’Reilly against sexual harassment charges (as he has the president) as well as OJSC Sberbank, Russia’s largest bank (not charged, to my knowledge, with sexual harassment).  

Mr. Kasowitz represented Mr. Trump in connection with bankruptcies, casino restructuring and divorce proceedings.   He filed a multi-million dollar suit against Bill Maher for breach of contract when his client proved that neither of his parents were orangutans and Maher, in clear breach of his public oral offer, which Trump accepted by providing proof neither of his parents were orangutans (creating a legally binding contract, according to the suit), refused to donate the millions he promised to donate on Trump’s behalf.   That lawsuit was a complete success, one could claim.  More recently Kasowitz demanded an apology to Trump from the notorious NY Times (refused) and argued that the president should be immune from sexual harassment charges filed against him until Mr. Trump leaves office.  Kasowitz also represented Mr. Trump in the Trump University fraud case and negotiated the recent negligible $25,000,000 settlement as payment in full to victims of that bogus business.  

I don’t know where to go with this, except to note that we’ve had many bad, corrupt-looking, sometimes criminal psychopaths in the White House over the years.  And that this one, as far as my reading of the histories of our spotty experiment in democracy goes, appears to be the worst of them.

*    more on the dynamic Marc Kasowitz here.

Talking points are not enough at this time.  Words have been reduced to funny sounds, signifying whatever the spin doctors say they now signify, regardless of whatever they may have meant five seconds ago. What we need now are good puking points.  Here  are a couple of quick ones, from American hero Amy Goodman.  

I can hear the clucking, so what if 198,000,000 information-rich American voter profiles were placed on-line for weeks by the Republican National Committee’s voting analytics data mining branch, Deep Root Analytics?  So what?  James “Toxic Turd” Mitchell and Bruce “Dickface” Jessen, psychologists paid tens of millions by Cheney and Bush to design the American torture program?  Ancient history, so what?  The U.S. appears to be currently participating in, or is at least complicit in (we deny it), the interrogation and torture of  detainees in Yemen today?  So what?  If it’s even true, the president is only keeping a campaign promise to do a lot worse than water-boarding.  They fucking hate our freedom.  What should we do, tickle ’em?

Ah say, Ah say, boy