Monthly Archives: October 2018

Happy Halloween!

In honor of this great pagan holiday, a few snippets from the life of our grotesque pumpkin-colored leader, a man who is always dressed, and coiffed, for Halloween.

The president is always poised to counterpunch, as he was taught to do by belatedly disgraced, too-late disbarred gay homophobe Roy Cohn [1].   Cohn impressed on the young Trump that the best thing to do when accused or attacked is to hit back much, much harder.   The Department of Justice accuses you of violating the Fair Housing Act by not renting government subsidized apartments to blacks, hispanics and other lowlifes?    You countersue the DOJ for defamation:  $100,000,000, fuckers! Now watch those sweaty weasels at the DOJ start backpedaling.  

Here is the president’s reaction to the pipe bomb sent to CNN:

Screen shot 2018-10-31 at 1.04.47 PM.png

Who is really to blame for this bomb?  The fucks at lying fake news deserved it, earned it, and if they don’t stop reporting my lies, FAST! they’re going to get more of what they deserve.  

In the blitzkrieg of bullshit that marks the insane Trump/Cohn counterattack strategy, it is quickly on to the next controversy to erase the previous ones — poor families fleeing poverty and death in Honduras constitute a deadly invasion force that must be repelled by the U.S. military!!!   His son-in-law is a Jew, his daughter converted, his most loyal and rabid anti-immigration assistant Stephen Miller is a Jew, so how can anyone hold him, an unabashed nationalist, responsible for the murder of Jewish globalists in that synagogue where they didn’t have the good sense to post armed guards as the Second Amendment clearly allows?

The shit bombs fall so prolifically from the president’s mouth that much of it goes unremarked on.   His assessment of the brutal Saudi torture and execution of a journalist in their consulate: bad concept, bad execution, terrible cover-up, should have earned him at least a bloody nose.   Nothing, as always for this supremely untruthful entitled man made a multi-millionaire as a child by his foolish-risk enabling dad.

I didn’t get a chance to comment on this wonderful bit of drollery from the normally reserved New York Times.  The Times exploded Trump’s self-made billionaire lie by showing, in excruciating detail, the long pattern of his father Fred’s lawless manipulations to avoid tax laws and the lifetime gifts totaling about $400,000,000 to his idiotic, preening, serially failing son.  

Nobody cares, those who dislike him already now have the facts about his perhaps most massive lie and his base knows he lies, but so does the NY TIMES!   The failing, lying New York Times!!!   The Times report is the result of massive research, based on 100,000 documents, every detail examined, vetted and every claim, no doubt, combed through by a careful legal team.   

The Times describes a company the Trumps set up, one of many, to pass Fred’s fortune on to his children tax free.   This particular company was created to grossly inflate Fred Trump’s expenses for building supplies and pass the “profits” on to his children.   It was a relatively simple scam, if a boiler cost Fred Trump $5,000, this company would charge Fred’s company twice that and his kids would keep the difference.   In the middle of the section describing this fraudulent business, the Grey Lady drops this:

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Then the article simply continues describing the fraudulent company, without any comment on this bullshit threat by one of the president’s army of aggressive lawyers.   To those who love the president this threat vindicates them, like the strong denials by Saudi murderers or the president’s problematic extremist Supreme Court nominee.   See — the lying NY Times is lying!!!   To those with even the slightest critical ability, the failure of the president to sue the Lying New York Times (also known by many of his staunchest supporters as the Jew York Times) means the lawyer’s threat was as empty as many of the threats and promises the lawyer’s supremely litigious client has made over the years.

Happy Halloween, y’all!

 

[1]  Because when I have any doubt about a factual assertion I make here I do a quick and easy fact check, I asked google “was Roy Cohn a homophobe?”  He was, many sources agree.   Here is one of the results that came up in about one second, a marvelous little summary of the career of this malevolent creature, a career I highlighted in a footnote scroll to the bottom of this one for two excellent treatments of this evil fuck:

Roy Cohn – RationalWiki

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Roy_Cohn

Sep 5, 2018 – Roy Marcus Cohn (1927–1986) was a lawyer, a rabid anti-communist, a closeted homosexual and homophobe, a Jewish anti-Semite, …

‎Anti-communist crusader · ‎Mob lawyer · ‎Downfall

 

How A Consistent Asshole Responds

At the risk of stirring a simmering caldron of shit among the handful who will read these words, I must quote part of our president’s reaction to a maniac with a gun killing eleven of the people who had gathered for a religious service in Pittsburgh.

President Donald Trump: “If they had protection inside, the results would have been far better. This is a dispute that will always exist, I suspect, but if they had some kind of a protection inside the temple, maybe it could have been a very much different situation, but they didn’t.”   source

If you have one answer to every question, and only one thought every time you open your mouth (winning, I need to win, I cannot lose, I will not lose!), you will utter NRA talking point drivel like this when the country needs a steadying hand after another explosion of murderous racist hatred.   The president did call for the death penalty for the mass shooter.   That’s consistent.   You kill killers, that’s just common sense for a guy like Trump.  He advocated the same for the guys eventually exonerated in the brutal attack and rape of that jogger in Central Park.

If you support the president he’s absolutely right.   He said kill the killer, which is right.  He said if those Jews had armed guards in the temple they could have only lost a few before their guards shot this guy to death.   Presumably that would have been fine, you know, or, if not fine, a far better result.  Unfortunately, you know, these liberals didn’t have armed guards, because they’re against the Second Amendment, so they died.  SAD!  

Also, of course, this latest outburst of prejudice-fueled deadly violence by another one of his more fevered supporters has nothing to do with the president’s steady stream of vile hatred enflaming rhetoric.   The uncle of presidential advisor Stephen Miler, the nephew being the suspected author of much of the president’s most virulent anti-immigrant rhetoric, (I’ll get to this Nazi another time), had this to say about the president’s steady incitement of hatred against the “other”:

Mr. Trump has made it his policy to vilify and dehumanize Hispanics, Muslims, nonwhites, calling them subhuman animals that are infesting our country like so many insects or rats. Make no mistake about it: This is the same kind of propaganda that is identical to the racist rants at Nazi Party rallies in Germany in the 1930s. Now Trump spews the same poisonous messages to his supporters and claims innocence when this inflammatory vitriol is sprayed over society. He claims innocence now that this political gasoline catches fire and people get hurt and killed. [1]   source   

Trump, a self-made millionaire by the age of nine, has cunningly branded himself a man of the common people, a man of the finest people, the very best of America. Make no mistake about it.

With such a steady and powerful fire hose of bullshit pumping out emotionally charged distraction 24/7 it’s easy enough not to dwell on the president’s cold-bloodedly evil assessment of the Saudi torture and dismemberment of the still complaining (even as they worked on him with the bone saw) journalist Jamal Khashoggi.   The president’s eventual conclusion about the murder, after weeks of publicly weighing Saudi billions for American munitions against their right to dismember political opponents, was that “they had a very bad original concept, it was carried out poorly and the cover-up was the worst in the history of cover-ups.”  

Bad original concept, carried out poorly, the cover-up sucked.    Now they have to quickly try and execute a bunch of people to prove they are innocent, you know, a better concept, to actually execute those responsible, though not, of course, themselves — they strongly denied responsibility so we have to presume they are completely innocent and the people they execute are guilty — PRESUMPTION OF INNOCENCE, you vicious bastards!   We’ll never know who came up with the original bad concept, carried it out so poorly, were so stupid about the cover-up. We can never know, which is SAD! At least the killers can be killed, so there’s some justice for the accidentally killed journalist’s family.

One of the few truthful things this man has said since rearing his artfully concealed bald head as a presidential candidate was that his followers are so angry, so easily manipulated in their rage, so unconcerned with their candidate’s transparent lying, that he could go out on Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and they wouldn’t care.   They wouldn’t care.  Am I right?  Am I right?

 

[1] Jewish SS man Stephen Miller’s uncle also said this:   

I regard Mr. Trump as a hopeless moral imbecile, indifferent to the deadly consequences of his inflammatory conduct.

and this:

So, I am particularly horrified and angry about the cynical political exploitation of poor people trying to escape from oppression. We can’t solve all the problems in the world, but we can certainly—the United States is a large, powerful, wealthy country, very good at absorbing immigrants, as you can determine just by going out in the street and asking anybody you see, where did their family come from originally. We’re great at absorbing immigrants. And we need to do our duty to help people who are desperately fleeing from horrible conditions, as my family did a hundred years ago.

Schematic of the previous post

A complicated, difficult dynamic can be reduced to simple terms.   This process is sometimes referred to as reductionism, which has come far from its original scientific/philosophical meaning of breaking a complex issue into its simplest component parts to understand its workings.  

In our modern political version of reductionism a long, complex history can be summarized in an easily understandable, if simplistic, concept:  liberty, or betrayal, or treason. Traitors have long been executed in front of cheering crowds, their heads set on pikes as a warning to anyone who might be thinking of challenging power.   The individual guilt or innocence of the decapitated party is far less important than the effect on the rest when a traitor meets a grisly end.

For most purposes in the larger world, the party with the loudest megaphone will define what is going on.   For example, Americans angry about a recent national disgrace involving a controversial Supreme Court appointment can be called an angry mob.   An angry mob can be dismissed, they are clearly irrational assholes.   The underlying events that made millions so angry?   Wah, wah, wah.

My old friend who felt disrespected by my late arrival has his story about the end of our long friendship, confirmed in its harshest detail.   Widaen told me he disrespects me!    

Widaen, for his part, had another story, my old friend simply doesn’t seem able to stop provoking me.  He seems intent on making me angry.   He surely sees that he’s aggravating me, or placing me in a brutally unfair position, and when I protest, he doubles down.  Gives a meaningless apology, to end the conflict, and then continues on the same way as if we’ve never discussed things.

There are facts, actual events, underlying this dispute, but those facts are in dispute.   If they are in dispute, they’re not really facts, are they?   

This is the self-justifying idiocy of the world.   If you find any mental construct to support your position (if there is a dispute, can there actually be “facts”?), you’re golden, just keep doubling your bet.   In the case of my once good friend, he was able to justify his own actions, become the victim of my brutality and get the sympathy of those who know us both.  

I think a lot of conflict between people who are close (and tribes and nations, for that matter) can be traced to lack of insight, a lack of actually listening to what the other party needs.    

My friend’s refusal to empathize with the feelings I expressed became impossible for me to tolerate. Ultimately it’s impossible to respect someone who lives in denial about how his actions affect others.   His years of constant fights with his wife?   Nothing to do with my disrespect for him!    

The good news, as far as I can make it out, is that insight can be developed.   There are things baked into us that are hard to change, but change is the nature of the universe, us included.   If you develop just a bit of insight, we can continue to talk. You need to have just a little insight, to have a good friend like me.

“You arrogant, pretentious fuck,” I can hear the words foaming on my once good friend’s lips.   My point is no less true.

Provoking vs. Disrespecting: anatomy of a fatal falling out

I will use a personal story to flesh out a mechanism that commonly leads to violence and sometimes death.  It is a mechanism that is particularly ubiquitous in this black and white zero-sum society we are living in at the moment.  It is the reduction of a complicated story to a simple, primary concept, like betrayal, or loyalty.   One party wins all, the other loses all, or it’s mutual destruction — fine, everybody loses and everybody wins, sort of.

In this particular personal anecdote no punches, kicks or bullets were exchanged, though both sides wound up feeling hurt and completely justified in their final anger at the other.  Every person who knows my once good friend, including two who claimed recently to love me, has cut me dead, which is as bad as the underlying impasse with a guy I’ve known since fourth grade.   In some ways it’s worse, more painful, this tribal closing of ranks after an ultimatum to forgive without condition or forever be seen as the vicious loveless party persecuting a weaker man. 

This is an aggravating story Sekhnet, who tries her best to take care of me, urges me to somehow put out of my mind every time I mention anything connected to it.   I don’t know how that’s done, until I am done working through it to my satisfaction.   A gnawing, vexing story untold is just a fucking tumor in waiting, as far as I can see. There is nothing I can do about a lying sociopath president or a lockstep political party who seems to have, with alarming speed, acquired a taste for the inside of their new leader’s ass, but this situation with an old friend I can wrestle with directly.  I believe it also sheds light on our larger problem as a culture, which comes largely from partisan oversimplification and a mass failure of empathy.

The common response to a fight is to take sides, be loyal to your people.  They call this tribalism now, reminding all of us homo sapiens that when it comes to war, we jump with those closest to us.  Loyalty has been elevated to the highest value, they used to call this kind of reflexive patriotism “my country– right or wrong” — you defend whatever America does because you’re American.   Somewhere far down the list of civic virtues, after loyalty, are being analytical, and fair-minded, and trying to find the causes of friction and the best solutions for difficult problems, including interpersonal troubles like I had with an old friend recently.

My mother always expressed frustration, even anger, at her daughters’ children’s seeming ingratitude.   My sister (my mother’s daughter) always expressed frustration, even anger, that her mother could not just give with grandmotherly generosity without demanding a “thank you”.    I always thought that a skilled mediator could convince my sister to teach her kids to say “thank you, grandma” when grandma gave them something.   This simple act would have gone a long way toward reducing tensions, but they were both too angry, and too stubbornly committed to being right, to ever go to a mediator.   Each one dismissed the idea of mediation as something the other would never agree to do.

Sekhnet reminds me of all the other things I should be worrying about, instead of this intransigent former friend who is too hurt and angry to make peace.   I have worry enough to cover these other things, and have made appointments, or at least calls, about all but one of them. [1]   Seems funny, in light of these other immediate worries, that I’m returning over and over to the sad and now sickening falling out with a friend of more than fifty years, but here we go.   On the other hand, this is the only vexation I have any chance of getting closer to solving today.

Much violence among armed teenagers is over the issue of perceived disrespect.  “He dissed me,” more than one violent young man will say in complete justification of why the person he shot needed to get shot.   Disrespect is a fundamental blow that we are taught not to tolerate.   For purposes of my friend’s case against me, I explicitly told him I don’t respect him and I gave several specific reasons why I don’t.   It would seem to be case closed for our friendship.  

I disrespected my friend, first by my actions and then by explicit words, and that’s all she wrote.  If you don’t respect someone it’s impossible to be friends with them.   End of story.   There is no coming back from this.   It’s as bad as lack of trust, lack of mutuality, lack of empathy, lack of affection.   There is nothing else to tell, many would say, closing the case, though I will tell the rest, as is my way.  The details may be useful in seeing how this sort of irrefutable tribal conclusion is often reached.   

What I was seeking from my friend, by the way, was that when he saw me getting aggravated as he pressed ahead in some conversation — the reddening of my face, the clenching of my arms and hands, the gritted teeth, the labored breathing, the other universal signs of approaching anger, plus my words to that effect — that he could take his foot off the accelerator, apply the brakes a little and change direction.   He was increasingly unable to do this in recent years, as his own life got more and more stressful.

During our last discussion my friend told me, three separate times in the course of about twenty minutes, that he felt disrespected by me.  He felt this because I had been ninety minutes late to meet him for an important discussion to try to save our failing friendship.  He told me at once, and slightly sheepishly, that he knew the feeling was irrational, since we’d been loose about the time, and he’d declined to accompany me on the errands that took longer than planned so that we could meet at the original time.  This talk was important to him and he’d saved the entire day for it, from two pm on.  

He told me we could meet at any point, true, but still, I didn’t show up until almost 3:30 and ninety minutes is past the border line for disrespect.  It was even worse when you start the clock at 1 pm, which was my initial suggestion, making me a full one hundred and fifty minutes late.   It was true, he said, that I’d called as soon as I knew I was going to be late, spoke to him from the middle of a traffic jam on the Grand Central, and that each time I called he’d reassured me that he wasn’t, for once, under any particular time pressure. He’d told me not to worry, in fact.   All this was true, he said, and so it might seem irrational to me that he felt disrespected, but there it was.  Ninety minutes.  It’s hard to ignore ninety minutes.

The second time he told me how disrespectful I’d been to him, about ten minutes later, he was in the middle of denying that he had provoked me again recently, intentionally or unintentionally.  He told me that he’d only apologized to me in the most egregious previous instance because I seemed so peeved.   He had actually been in the right, he told me, to insist in the face of my rising aggravation, on the annoying thing he’d been insisting on me hearing, for a second time in a week, as it turned out.   In fact, he added, he’d do the same thing again, if it came to it.  

I was just wrong, he said, to see what he’d done as provocation.  He is not provocative, he is actually a lifelong peacemaker by nature, and besides, I was the one who’d behaved disrespectfully toward him and was now not accepting his most recent apology.  Ninety minutes, he reminded me, more than enough time for my disrespect, intended or not, to sink deep inside of him.

This line of counter-attack is familiar from my childhood.  My father liked to reframe everything away from whatever I was concerned about to a discussion of my terrible temper, how angry I always was.  When I was young, this used to piss me off pretty quickly, the abrupt pivot from what I needed to talk about with my father to the general subject of my crazy anger.  Once I got mad, I lost any chance to talk about anything.  “You see,” he’d say with a smug smile, “this is exactly what I’m talking about.  The People rest, you’re irrationally angry again.  You really have a fucking problem with your violent fucking temper.”    

My father did me a favor, in a roundabout way, since by the time I was a middle aged man this kryptonite became a weaker and weaker weapon against me.   It took years of work, but years well-spent, in my opinion.

My disrespected friend, on the other hand, had been actively taught never to show anger.   Anger is a threatening emotion, particularly to someone raised never to express it by word or conscious deed.  “I was taught to swallow it,” his mother told me recently, “avoiding conflict at all costs is how I was raised.   My mother used to tell me to use any means necessary, including creatively altering any details of what happened that could possibly make anyone mad.  The only supremely important thing, according to my mother, was avoiding confrontation.”  

I experienced a few untruths from this now very old woman over the more than fifty years I’ve known her, but I never held that personality quirk against her.  She’s a lovely woman, outside of that.   I spent hours on the phone with her last month advising her about a very aggravating and frightening situation I must keep secret.   That’s the other piece about her approach to anger, fear, shame — really emotionally explosive things must always be kept secret.

The son is like her in some fundamental ways.   His occasional bending of the truth was something I just accepted as a regrettable feature.   I always felt I could trust him about the big things, in spite of his tendency to be less than truthful at times about small things.   Funny that this equivocation was never a terrible issue in my friendship with him, I guess because our affection went back to childhood and since I always felt I could trust him in the larger sense, I never worried when he did that dance he sometimes does to try to make sure everybody is happy.   I suppose I never questioned his motivations when he was being less than honest, it was for the sake of avoiding what he saw as an inevitable confrontation, I could always see that.  

Now here we were in a real confrontation, and his dance was not at all endearing nor did it give me any reason for optimism.   He simply could not admit, beyond saying the words “I’m sorry”, that he’d been wrong to blame me, based on a casual remark made to his wife in passing, for willfully, or recklessly trying to destroy his long-troubled marriage.   I was his oldest friend, and I tried my best to help him get the full context to that particular, unfortunately weaponized remark.  

I was not at all angry at the pointed accusation, odd to say.  I was on the spot, I was concerned, there was a slight tightness in my gut, I felt under pressure, but I wasn’t angry.  Seeing him in such distress I did what I could to try to help him.  It took an hour or more to get things to a reasonable place that he could offer to his wife and their therapist in explanation of his oldest, closest friend’s alleged treachery.

When I was finally done with that he asked me if I harbored anger at him, conscious or unconscious, and told me I’d never once in our long relationship ever admitted I was wrong, had never apologized to him about anything.   These are faults I work on not having, when I become aware I’ve hurt a friend I do my best to make amends as soon as I can.  He brought up a thoughtless thing I’d apparently done to him years ago and I told him I was wrong and apologized, for what it was worth.

As soon as I was done telling him how sorry I was he accused me, based on something “someone in his family” had disclosed to him, of insultingly treating him like a helpless child.   The vexing information he complained of being spilled by a family member (there are only three possible candidates) was something I later realized that I myself had told him months earlier.   It was quite an emotional trifecta in his car that afternoon.  It took a few days before it began to strike me as an unfriendly, and unfair, assault on my character and my friendship.   My friend kept telling me how impossible his life was, worse than ever, the pressure on him was unbearable.  I told him we needed to talk face to face, that things between us were very bad.

Now I was in a suddenly aggravating conversation, doing what I could to try to save a friendship that was hanging by a thin, fraying thread.   The conversation was hard work, because he’s very smart and quite capable of putting up a strenuous emotional and intellectual fight.   His position was that he’d apologized to me already, about everything, including that “thing in the car”, and that it appeared to him that I was unforgiving, unreasonably demanding more than an apology.   “I apologized to you already, but my apology apparently wasn’t enough for you,” was his opening line to this conversation we needed to have to better respect each other’s feelings if our friendship was going to survive.  

In his defense, I’m pretty sure he honestly does not see himself as capable of expressing vehement hostility.   That, he likely believes, is my area of expertise.  I am the one who expresses anger, after all.    All of his efforts in interpersonal relations are intended to keep the peace, make peace, be a mediator between angry people.  In the short term, his efforts sometimes work, two angry people kiss and make up.   Long term, his record is not as good — as nobody’s can be when “peace” is based on persuading everyone to let bygones be bygones and a polite agreement that everybody loves each other.  That’s not how love, or anger, actually works.  In any event, the impasse between him and me is a special case and he really couldn’t be expected to make peace with someone as angry and unforgiving as I apparently am.   Plus, of course, the disrespect, how do you get past that?

In the end, the third time he brought up the disrespect, about five minutes after the second time, I finally lost it.  Outside of provoking me, I have no other theory for why he kept mentioning this perceived feeling of being disrespected.  I snapped.  I told him he was right to feel disrespected, that I don’t respect him, not the way he treats people, not many of the choices he’s made in his life, not his inability to empathize, to be honest about his feelings, to have any insight into his anger, to make a meaningful apology.   If you apologize for hurting somebody, I said, and you continue to do the same hurtful thing over and over, your apology is a shit apology.   A lie.   A meaningless fucking lie, dude.    

It may be worth mentioning here that we spoke for another four or five hours after that.   We talked quietly, but in circles, each trying our best to somehow rescue our deeply wounded friendship.   Oddly enough, he seemed to calm down and fight much less after making me explode at him.

 My childhood friend now spends a lot of time studying the ancient wisdom of Judaism with an orthodox rabbi, though he chose not to contact me during the Ten Days of Repentance, a time when Jews are supposed to make amends with people they know they’ve hurt.   Feeling the aggrieved party (victimhood is one of the most frequently and potently weaponized feelings in Trump’s America) I am sure he contented himself praying for his soul and the souls of his loved ones.   I thought about this falling out, blamed entirely on me for my inability not to be provoked by what I falsely claim is provocation, extensively during those ten days and beyond.  

I heard a rabbi talking about apology, atonement and forgiveness.   A fascinating seven minute segment on On The Media (click here for the excellent conversation) .  The rabbis apparently require someone seeking forgiveness to apologize at least three times before they can give up with the human and atone before God.   Element number one of an apology is empathy– I know you’re hurt, if someone had done to me what I did to you I’d be hurt too, just like you are, I’m sorry I hurt you, I’ll try my best not to ever do it again.   Remove empathy and you have only the empty form of an apology:  I see you’re hurt and waiting for an apology, so I’m sorry, can we just move on now?

Can we just move on, you merciless fucking irrationally hurt self-righteously enraged prick?

Think about any member of his family who might want to keep in touch with me– impossible.   There is a huge cost to taking sides against your own family, going against the current of your tribe’s strong feelings, even in a small way.  This conflict in the soul when a person opposes the will of the tribe has been the stuff of drama forever.  First, it is seen by those who trust you as disloyal.   Second, if you are critical of the accepted tribal story your head can be next on the chopping block, you see how upset everyone is.   Best to say nothing.  

I have a friend fond of quoting his grandfather’s aphorisms, gleaned from the teachings of the rabbis.  One of our favorites is “yaffa shteeka leh cha-chameem”   beautiful is silence to the wise.   Dig it.

 That said, the only hope we humans have, if we truly seek to change things for the better, is looking as deeply and dispassionately as we can into things that are sometimes, frankly, terrifying.  It is easy to resolve conflict in your own mind by reducing something to a simple scenario.   Few scenarios are actually as simple as we easily convince ourselves they are.

 

[1]  I have a CAT scan of my kidneys, bladder and ureters early next week, then a camera on a long stick up the penis into the urethra to look for the source of a large blood clot, gross hematuria, some emergency dental work I need to set up and a bit of fancy footwork to do playing the insurance odds, by the December 15 deadline to buy health insurance for 2019, trying to learn before then if I’ll need another $88,000 infusion of chemotherapy for my eventually life ending kidney disease.  

Facts Actually Exist

For example, these reasonable questions from the autocratic leader of Turkey all reference facts, things that actually exist or don’t exist.  These questions seek important details about things that happened in the real world, things that can be examined, things that will determine which story about the events is more true than the others:

“Why did 15 people gather in Istanbul the day of the murder? Who did these people receive orders from?” he asked. “Why was the consulate opened not immediately, but days later, for investigation? When the murder was obvious, why were inconsistent explanations given?” 

“Why is the body still not found?”    source

These are all things that can be investigated and verified — did fifteen security men arrive in Turkey at 3 a.m. and leave for Saudi Arabia again at the end of the same day, after the murder?  Who gave the order to kill a prominent Saudi citizen who had been critical of the young Crown Prince, to kill him in the consulate?  Why was the consulate closed for days after the hit?   Were inconsistent stories told by the Saudis?   Where is the body of the man accidentally and tragically killed after he allegedly started a fist fight against the fifteen security men in the consulate?

Not surprisingly, our leader had a different spin on the apparent guilt of the Saudi Crown Prince.   In a curiously framed paragraph in the Washington Post (where Khashoggi worked for the last year) he is quoted as describing the Saudi hit as a bungled job:

Speaking in the Oval Office, Trump skewered the Saudis, saying, “They had a very bad original concept, it was carried out poorly, and the coverup was the worst in the history of coverups.” He added, “In terms of what we ultimately do, I’m going to leave it very much — in conjunction with me — I’m going to leave it up to Congress.”  source

Nice skewer job, sir.   Now we are led to a series of alternative thoughts, taking us away from what appears to be a brutal premeditated murder ordered from on high and into the realm of pure imagination.   A very bad original concept– they should never have killed that traitor in the consulate, that was just stupid, an ill-conceived idea.   You kill him elsewhere, any mobster’s preschool grandson could tell you that you don’t kill him in your own house!   Carried out poorly — you don’t leave a blood spattered consulate that takes days to clean before investigators can be let in, you don’t saw up the body there, for Christ’s sake!   You drive a car in and secretly take the body out intact, wrapped in plastic, in the trunk, even if you have to wait until dark.   You certainly cut him up somewhere else.   Sheesh…   The coverup was the worst, the worst!  You don’t wait weeks to make up a story that is not a bit credible, you do that immediately and you tell it over and over and over, as many times as necessary.   Then you say “I’ve told you this a hundred times, that’s it.  Now you treacherous fake news vampires are just being deliberately disrespectful.  You want what that Saudi big mouth got?  LOL!”

I don’t know what happened in Istanbul, outside of the fact that a man from the wealthy and powerful elite of Saudi society, banned from writing in Saudi Arabia by the new Crown Prince, was killed in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.  I also know that his body has not been found.   Bad concept, bad execution (bad pun intended), bad coverup.

I also don’t know what happened in a house in a wealthy Washington D.C. suburb more than thirty years ago, between a drunk prep school junior and a freshman girl, out of her depth at that little impromptu gathering nobody else even recalls.   I believe the sickening detail of the laughter of the drunken preppies after one of them held her down and the other later piled on.  It makes sense that this moment would be indelibly imprinted on the hippocampus of the traumatized young woman.

Applying Judge Martha Kavanaugh’s famous rule for judges– ‘use your common sense, what has the ring of truth?  what rings false?’  it appears that a premeditated murder of a critical journalist was committed on behalf of the young medieval crown prince of Saudi Arabia and that the trauma the woman remembers happened pretty much as she told it.   Her explanation of why she was certain of the identity of her attacker rang true.

Of course, the president is excellent at answering these questions, he does it effortlessly.  The Saudis did a full investigation of their badly planned, terribly covered up murder of a very disloyal guy who had it coming.   The Supreme Court justice gave a very strong denial, very strong, and it turns out nobody could confirm anything that woman said, which proves she was lying.    

In each case, one question remains above all others when trying to discern the ring of truth from the ring of falsity.    Who stands to gain the most from the story being told the way it is?   Who has the weightier motive to tell the particular story they tell?   Who has the more convincing concept, execution and cover-up, to put it in the president’s purely transactional terms?

 

Storytelling 101 — part six

Stories, we humans need them for many reasons.   They make us feel better about contradictions that are otherwise impossible to reconcile.   They bolster our ideals, confirm our worst doubts, or clinch the deal on the things we already know.  They cause us to walk forward, united with brothers and sisters, millions of them, not alone in a terrifyingly cold universe.   We do not live random, meaningless lives that end in inevitable death, we are part of a larger story, connected to our ancestors, our living loved ones, our lives nurturing the lives of those who come after us.  There is great comfort in a good story.

It was a bit of a shock to hear the story today, three weeks after the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, told by the dictatorial leader of Turkey, speaking to his parliament and the world beyond.   Erdogan announced unequivocally that the journalist had been the victim of premeditated murder in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.   He asked pointedly where the body of the murdered man is.    

Our president has been very coy about this whole affair involving our cherished Saudi allies, telling Americans that we have to wait for the Saudi investigation into the alleged murder to be complete, so that we have all the facts.    Meanwhile, he dispatched the U.S. Secretary of State, and more recently the Secretary of the Treasury, to Riyadh and CIA Director Gina Haspel to Istanbul.    

It may be an odd thing, to some of us, that the president was waiting for the alleged murderer to finish investigating whether they had committed a murder, but in the rush of ongoing chaotic events, there hasn’t been much time for most people to even consider this troubling story.   Besides, POTUS reminded us, the sacred democratic presumption of innocence was once again being discarded by people rushing to find someone they don’t like guilty until proven innocent.   Very unfair!   It’s not like the Saudi royal family is in any way comparable to the hoards of Mexican rapists surging toward our own borders.  

The president compared this lynch mob mentality of those who feel the Saudis should be accountable for their crimes (including, of course, massive war crimes against the poorest nation in the Middle East) to the people who insisted there should be a full investigation into the multiple terrible allegations against innocent choir boy Brett Kavanaugh, or at least into the most credibly detailed of them.  A mob, a violent angry mob, motivated by tribal bloodlust, satisfied with nothing but the fatal lynching of a good man, a good tribal monarchy, presumed guilty until proven innocent, in the president’s telling.

The president was not wrong to make the connection between the aftermaths of the murder of Khashoggi and the allegations against Kavanaugh.   There were credible stories in both cases to check out and investigations to be concluded.  In Kavanaugh’s case a quick investigation proved he was innocent, at least to the satisfaction of these who mattered in the 51-49 vote.   In the murder of Khashoggi, after a few weeks of thorough investigation, the Saudi story was that the chubby sixty year-old journalist and critic of the thirty-three year old Crown Prince got pugnacious and decided to take on the fifteen armed men who were tasked with merely ‘interrogating’ him.   He resisted, starting a fist fight, and was, unfortunately, well, he died during the altercation.  

Subtle, but valuable, that passive voice.   In law school we were actually instructed about the only proper situation for a lawyer to use the passive voice.   If your client’s knife, in your client’s hand, was plunged into the heart of the now dead man, you can’t deny it, exactly, but you can soften it with the passive voice.   The knife, admittedly belonging to my client, was plunged into the heart of the victim.   Sounds so much better than the active voice since it highlights not the act itself, but facts that are not in dispute, facts that appear to damn your client.   So in the belated Saudi spin on Khashoggi’s last moments alive, it’s not that he was killed, so much, as that he, unfortunately, died.  Why wait more than two weeks to admit that the journalist was dead?   We had to investigate everything very, very thoroughly.  Where is the body?   No fucking idea.

Stories rule, in every situation we can think of.  Whose story do we believe?  Which story makes more sense?   Which story moves us more?   I was practicing my writing with a new nib last night and decided to copy Lincoln’s famous 272 word Gettysburg Address.    The poor Irish immigrants who were drafted into the slaughter to reluctantly fight for the Union — and die gruesome deaths, by the thousands–  were transformed in Lincoln’s immortal rhetoric into ‘honored dead’ devoted to that cause ‘to which they gave the last full measure of their devotion’. That their sacrifice not be in vain, Lincoln said in his marvelous short speech, should be our work going forward as we pursue Liberty in the nation dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.  

He gave that moving speech, appealing to the better angels of our nature [1], almost 155 years ago (it’ll be 155 years exactly on November 19th).   We have come very far since then in becoming a land honestly and tirelessly devoted to true liberty and equality for all.   Or we have come a few halting steps, and taken many more steps backwards.   Which is the more inspiring story?   Not much of a contest, I’d say.

It is, of course, like this in personal life too.  A man who has a long history of lying, stealing and committing fraud, a man who made death threats against his own wife and children in a moment of rage– well, your view of him will depend on which story you believe, based on your relationship to him.   He has a warm, loving side too, is a supremely sensitive reader of the moods and needs of everyone around him, he has a good heart.   He is a loving father, the death threats were a one time thing, he was very desperate!   The story becomes tricky only if you try to reconcile the two indisputable yet jarringly contradictory sides of this fellow.   For his part, the man will never admit he did anything wrong.   Either you have love in your heart or you’re a vicious asshole, is his position.    

The facts, we often think, matter.  This turns out to be a quaint belief.  The story is the only thing that matters.   Was Lincoln lying about the heroic dead who so nobly gave their lives that we might have a more just nation?   He was telling the story that needed to be told so that we did not conclude the massive number of American dead and dismembered had been merely a sickening instance of the intransigent, inhuman greed of a powerful few unleashing a river of American blood to protect their right to have complete control of their way of making a living, a way that makes most of us shudder today.

Likewise, if you put your friend in an unfair, untenable, even vicious situation, forcing him to convince you that he did not deliberately, or thoughtlessly, jeopardize your most sacred relationship, there is a way to put it that sounds infinitely better than that.  “That thing in the car” you can call it, if you confronted him in a car.  Now then, it was referred to directly.  It was a thing, like many other things.   Then you fucking overreacted and blew it up into this huge justification of why you can never fucking forgive me, you judgmental fucking piece of shit!   You’re dead!   You’re fucking dead!!!

As always, it’s all in how the story is told, my friends.

  

[1]  “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”    source

Worth knowing by heart

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This is from Isaac Babel’s  immortal short story Guy de Mauppassant, perhaps the greatest story ever written about the love of reading and writing.  

These line below were set forth by a less skilled craftsman, but they are good enough.  They worked.  They’ve been rattling through my head a lot since I heard them recently.  I need to set them down to study them a bit.

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I know, I know.   A dead horse, a dead horse, stop whipping!   I jotted these lines down the other day.  I will explain.   I am using a pen and ink a lot lately, because I suffer from graphomania, an idiopathic, little understood and apparently incurable condition.  [1]   I need to make marks on paper sometimes, it can become urgent.   It’s good to have a few words handy to practice, otherwise the words are completely random and the pages look a little batty.  

So these words were handy, since I noted them the other day, and I used them to practice my handwriting and try to master the new pen I need to dip into ink in order satisfy my graphomania.  My graphomania has gotten worse over the years.  I become quite desperate if I ever find myself without a good writing implement   and some nice paper [2].   So, anyway, because I like to have a passage handy to write, unfortunately, I seem to have chosen this one.  

While we’re here, let’s examine the banal and unconvincing nature of each element of this half-assed non-defense.   These lines were passionately delivered in opening remarks by someone defending himself against charges that he is an angry partisan, an evasive lawyerly crafter of arguably non-perjurious but deliberately misleading answers given under oath [3], and also, of course, to drive home a strong, full-throated, sometimes tearful blanket denial of every detail of every allegation mercilessly made by those tools of the Clintons and George Soros — never drunk, never disrespectful, never out of control, never  did anything bad, ever!

Let us take them line by line:

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This is standard for any political conspiracy theory — an elite of smart, powerful people making devious calculations to advance their goals and then skillfully orchestrating the actions of a group of disparate conspirators in what amounts to a mob style rub-out, an assassination.    I give him points for the two words used like that, calculated and orchestrated, they underscore how much thought and planning go into this kind of partisan torture and execution of an innocent opponent.

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The first of these assertions blames the pitiful losers for being so doggoned enraged and desperate they’re prepared to believe ANYTHING that could discredit a good private school boy who has led a storybook life and is a wonderful dad and husband.  Their pent-up rage, you understand, makes them irrational, hysterical, capable of insanely justifying any viciousness you could imagine.   They are mad, nuts, blinded by anger, in a blind rage, a blindly raging mob, because they’re losers.  

This kind of in-your-face violent talk about pent-up anger plays great to the Trump base– anything that makes a libtard cuck look like a loser is gold for this fist pumping MAGA demographic.

The fear that has been stoked about his twelve year federal judicial record is real. It is based on his actual record.   So he takes pains to insert “unfairly”, to show that he is the victim of a coordinated effort to make him look bad.   Here they go again, the haters, unfairly stoking unreasonable fear.   He asserts the fear has been unfairly stoked, though he says this in passing without pause, on his way to his next serial accusation.  

But if we pause to have a look at his judicial record on the federal bench we would see a straight line of decisions and dissents that are the proof of the staunchness of his political bona fides.   He grew up a Federalist Society member, he resigned briefly, for the optics when he was up for appointment to the federal bench by G. W. Bush, and then rejoined the Federalists as soon as he was informed it was no breach of any kind of judicial ethics to be a member in good standing of an ideologically pure libertarian legal society.  

His judicial record reflects his belief in a particular notion of American liberty– business should not be fettered, nor any citizen, corporate or human, coerced, nor is business often unduly accountable to people it may harm, in the service of the common good,  corporations are persons with rights and feelings as important, and often more important, than individual human plaintiffs or groups advocating on behalf of the environment, worker safety, non-discrimination, voting rights and so forth.

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This is the bit that reveals, more than any other part of his long angry opening, what an insanely partisan fuck this man is.  After clerking for Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, upon the recommendation of disgraced former federal judge Alex Kozinsky [4], he assisted Ken Starr in the far-ranging investigation that led to Bill Clinton’s famous perjury charges for lying about oral sex in the White House, perjury that was used as the grounds for his impeachment.   Kavanuagh was one of the most extreme and zealous of Starr’s advisors.  He urged Starr to aggressively press Clinton under oath, without a break, as the best way to get him to slip up and say something that could be used for a perjury charge. Talk about hypocrites… He references the second Clinton too, Hillary, one of the most divisive and hated personalities in American politics.   She has reason to hate him too, according to his tribe, because Trump beat her, because she sucks and because she’s an angry, vindictive loser bitch.

The rest of Brett Kavanaugh’s independent, impartial legal career was no less partisan.   After his work with the Independent Counsel Ken Starr he worked for the Bush/Cheney campaign and was one of the lawyers who successfully prosecuted Bush v. Gore which stopped the Florida recount and led to George W. Bush being declared president by a 5-4 majority on the Supreme Court in a special one-off decision that instructed posterity that it could not be cited as a precedent.  He then worked loyally for the Bush White House and Bush appointed him to the federal bench a few years later.   Virtually every piece of controversial legal advice he ever gave President Bush was classified and off-limits during his confirmation hearings.  Deemed top secret by his friend who got to make the final call on every document.

There has never been a time in his ambitious, well-connected life when he has been impartial or independent, especially when it comes to his strong activist political ideology, his deepest convictions.

But we really should take him at his word, when he speaks to Fox News during the hearings, on the eve of his accuser’s testimony, or when he writes an editorial in the Wall Street Journal about his impartiality and independence on the eve of the Senate Judiciary Committee vote to send his name to the full Senate, and tells us again that he is not only an impartial judge, but independent.   He amply demonstrated both of those things in this articulate denial of the fake charges against him.   The People rest.

 

[1] See Confessions of an Aged Graphomaniac, E. Widaen (coming soon to a university press near you),   This book combines writing with a generous portion of visual art and graphics.

[2] In the days before we finally had to put the beloved Baron down I finally broke down and paid $160 for a fountain pen.   It was a beautiful pen with a unique, soft, flexible nib, and I began immediately working on writing in a more elegant hand.   It was a pure pleasure to write and draw with that soft, flexible nib.  Sadly but predictably, my graphomania worsened with this beautiful flexible nib fountain pen always in my shirt pocket.  After six months, the nib — the part that actually makes the marks on paper —  was irreparably ruined and replacing the delicate nib would cost at least $140.   I was too bitter to even consider this, but later found readily available Speedball C-4 nibs that, if dipped in ink, could make a line very similar to the beautiful flexible line of the defunct $160 pen.  The Speedball rig costs about $5.

[3]  One seemingly petty example to stand in for many:  asked by Senator Whitehouse for a definition of the term “Devil’s Triangle” on his printed yearbook page, he invented a drinking game of that name.  Any search of the internet would show a definition for the term that was a sexual act, two males one female.   Kavanaugh made up a drinking game by that name that was nowhere referenced on the internet, the repository of the world’s accumulated knowledge, fact and opinion.

Almost as soon as he was done falsely testifying, a new Wikipedia page was suddenly on-line, describing a drinking game similar to the one Kavanaugh had just made up.   The authors of LikeWars, a recent investigation into the weaponization of social media, were interviewed recently on Fresh Air.  Here is a link to the interview.  

According to them, Wikipedia was updated to include the fanciful new drinking game by someone connected to the House of Representatives.   Apparently, because every computer and location have a particular IP address and some other location data indicators, it could be determined that the new Wikipedia information had been uploaded by somebody sitting in the offices of the House of Representatives.

One data point, lost among billions in lightning paced cyber space, but fuck.   Talk about your calculated and orchestrated political hit squad work!   Nice going, Team Brett!!! 

[4]   Wikipedia:   Alex Kozinski (born July 23, 1950)[1] is a former United States Circuit Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, where he served from 1985 until announcing his retirement on December 18, 2017, after a growing number of allegations of improper sexual conduct and abusive practices toward law clerks.[2] Kozinski was chief judge of that court from November 2007 to December 1, 2014.

During his tenure as a court of appeals judge, he has become a prominent feeder judge. Between 2009–13, he placed nine of his clerks on the United States Supreme Court, the fifth most of any judge during that time period.[13] He has been particularly successful placing his clerks with Justice Anthony Kennedy, for whom he had himself clerked.   

Impartially disproving an accuser’s lies

If you are confronted with an accusation about yourself that makes you look really bad, there is a way out.   The first thing to remember is that if you apologize, it’s over.  You’re guilty.  Done.   So, rule number one, never apologize for anything, even if they have videotape.  You can always argue the tape was an extremely well-financed forgery, a complete fake.

That goes to rule number two of what are sometimes called Roy Cohn’s rules or Roger Stone’s rules.   These are the rules the president lives by as well, he imbibed them at the breasts of these two father figures.   Rule one is admit nothing/never apologize.  Rule number two is counterattack twice as hard.
You do this by going on the offensive.   Two women testify that you did aggressive, sexually fucked up things to them when you were drunk.   It goes without saying that they are liars, so there is no reason to dignify those infuriating charges.   Say something like this, as you snort in righteous, barely containable anger, the women peddling these vicious lies are part of:

 

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Once you have established this new story line, everybody on your team merely has to double down.  You have fired up your base, they will begin swinging their clubs for you.   The skeptics and critics will always cavil, try to show illogic, etc., but if you have the money and the votes– fuck them, seriously.

The third thing you have to do, after doubling down, is keep repeating your talking point.   The Democrats have no shame, they made a circus of the hearings, they denied the nominee the presumption of innocence that every accused criminal is entitled to under our system of law.   They hate the presumption of innocence, they are a lynch mob, an enraged out of control mob.  A mob of ruthless, lying haters!

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Justice Kavanaugh said he wrote this opening statement himself, a powerful refutation of  all the many false charges that he’d ever done anything wrong while drunk as a teenager.  I take that claim, like many of his other statements, as worthy of skepticism.   In fact, I can affirm under the penalty of perjury that I wrote the above words.   You can see they are in my handwriting.

Seriously, though, Stephen Miller seems to have had a hand in its composition, as does the philosopher Sean Hannity.   Rush Limbaugh may also have given some editorial input.

The president is very generous with the presumption of innocence, for those who publicly kiss his ass, as well as for those whose power he respects.   A strong, powerful denial is as good as a full investigation, a trial in a court and full exoneration, if you’re someone he loves.  The inadvertent murder of a Saudi journalist, dismembered in the Saudi embassy in Istanbul?   According to the AP, the president had this to say: “You know, here we go again with, you know, you’re guilty until proven innocent.  We just went through that with Justice Kavanaugh.  And he was innocent all the way.”   Again, another witch hunt, like with the unconscionable Democrat torture of Brett Kavanaugh who also forcefully and strongly denied everything.  Hey, he fucking denied it!   The Saudi’s completely denied it.    So what if they accidentally did murder a critical journalist working for the Washington Post?   So?  What don’t you get about a strong, powerful denial?

Oh, yeah, now I can go after Horseface.  A loser.   I’m not a baby.  No baby!  No puppet. You’re the puppets, you’re the puppets!    

Unfortunately, you can’t make this shit up, boys and girls.

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can you spot the typo in this second version of the statement I wrote?

Et tu, Fox News?

So much for fair and balanced, sheesh.  What’t the world coming to?   It’s like they’re deliberately ignoring the detailed instructions media gets for photographing the president.  These instructions go back decades, a friend in news once had a copy of them.  They were quite specific.  Lighting is key, as is shooting him from the side where he has a full, thick head of hair and never, NEVER, shooting him from the bald side!    FOX?  Really?  This is how you have the president’s back?

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