Someone close to me is close to someone who routinely lies to her. It is very uncomfortable for me to see her in this position, since if you can’t trust somebody you rely on, how can you trust them — or rely on them? The lies have not been small or infrequent, they are regular, big and sometimes about things of great importance.

Once, trying to be supportive, a few years back, I asked how this person (who I can’t stand) was doing.

“How would I know?” she said, wearily.

Point taken. I no longer ask her how the untruthful fellow is doing.

I’ve been watching the often excellent legal analyses of former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner on youTube. I began to notice his insightful take on law and justice during Mr. Trump’s attorney, General Barr’s, attempt to finally do what fired FBI Director James Comey would not do — make the “Flynn thing” go away.

Mr. Trump’s former National Security Advisor General Mike Flynn, we recall, was fired by Mr. Trump after it came out that Flynn had lied about illegal contacts with the Russian ambassador, lies that VP Mike Pence then repeated as true on television. Flynn then lied to the FBI about lying, eventually pleading guilty as part of a plea deal that involved admitting other lies (involving payments from Turkey and Saudi Arabia).

Trump was outraged at the persecution of this good, loyal man (Flynn had led the “Lock Her UP!” chant at the RNC) and made his outrage known, in speeches and via twitter. Eventually, AG Barr decided that the crimes Flynn had pleaded guilty to were not actually crimes after all — and that he’d been trapped into lying by liars and likely criminals — and Barr now seeks to dismiss the DOJ’s case against Flynn outright.

Kirschner has been fiercely following every detail of Judge Emmet Sullivan’s principled stand to get a coherent explanation for this seemingly politically motivated DOJ reversal — the highly unusual dismissal of a prosecution after a guilty plea. Naturally, Judge Sullivan is vilified on FOX as an “abjectly biased” politically corrupt judge persecuting the wrongfully prosecuted, innocent General Flynn out of political animus, something Ronald Reagan surely never suspected of Sullivan when he appointed him to the federal bench in 1984 [1].

Anyway, good people, on all sides, one supposes. Back to Glenn Kirschner — he has been questioning whether the president even has the coronavirus at all or whether it is merely a stunt to refocus and change a political narrative that is going very badly for the president lately in the weeks that will decide if he is re-elected or becomes a criminal defendant at more than one trial.

Kirschner keeps insisting that he won’t believe Trump is sick unless he hears it from a reputable source, like Anthony Fauci. He has been pointing out the many contradictions and abrupt changes in the official reports of how sick the president actually is. Many of these constantly shifting comments from the president’s spokespeople have been ridiculous, even in the age of Trump.

What we know is limited: Mr. Trump took no test Tuesday night before his debate with Joe Biden, his close associate Hope Hicks, who he’d been campaigning with, had symptoms and tested positive Wednesday, he then met with big money donors on Thursday, shortly before (or possibly after) his positive covid test result came back. When was his last negative test? When did his symptoms start?

I didn’t really get why Kirschner was so exercised on this point — or what the upside of Trump pretending to be very sick could be– until yesterday. I kept wondering what Trump has to gain by claiming to have been felled by the coronavirus he has been downplaying for months.

Kirschner explained yesterday, after Trump checked himself out of the hospital, pulled off his mask and stood on the White House balcony in his bare-chested Putin on horseback moment. Trump smiled his infectious smile, or a game attempt at his infectious smile, no less infectious for being less than 100% convincing. He looked tired in that short appearance for the cameras; haggard, his eyes smaller than usual and red.

The first part of Kirshner’s point about Trump’s actual medical condition was the obvious “how would we know?” There is nobody of any credibility remaining around the president, outside of Dr. Fauci.

The second part, which I just got, is the strongman propaganda value of an indomitable president refusing to be dominated by a deadly disease. If Trump is hospitalized with serious enough COVID symptoms to need steroids, oxygen, experimental monoclonal antibody treatment, then — in only three days– has a miraculous recovery, shouldn’t we all believe in miracles just a little more than we already do? The miracle is much easier to pull off if the recovery was after a non-illness, it stands to reason.

Just because somebody has lied many times, by long habit, by reflex, and insists that people lie constantly on his behalf, that doesn’t mean that they can’t be telling the truth now.

Call it a miracle if you want. Some people will call “bullshit!” — others will see the will of God, working in divinely mysterious ways, through this most imperfect of imperfect vessels.

[1]

They discuss the politically corrupt Flynn case on FOX

The taxpayer-funded Public Broadcasting System posted this video on youTube less than two weeks ago! Less than two weeks ago!!!! Six nasty minutes about Mr. Trump’s childhood and his time at the military academy — revolting. Watch it for yourself, and tell me it is not disgusting.

Apparently there’s even more, the rest of the full episode, of their socialist propaganda HERE.

Defund the police? Defund PBS!

This Channel 13 treatment of the lone dissent in an 8-1 1883 Supreme Court ruling that declared there was no further need for laws to protect freed slaves deserves its own post. It’s a public television teachers’ guide to the principled dissent, by the one Supreme Court justice who had owned slaves, to the near unanimous decision nullifying the 1875 Civil Rights Act, the so-called Civil Rights Cases.

The discussion is a great illustration of how a principled dissent (see Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s in that recent 5-4 voting restriction ruling in Wisconsin) can become the vindicated voice of the future, speaking to a grave judicial mistake being made in the present.

But first, an example of a recent partisan dissent, shamelessly written purely to support a desired political outcome, from a recent 7-4 voting decision in Arizona (a case that will be reviewed by the US Supreme Court, some time after the 2020 election):

Judge Fletcher [writing for the majority] added that “there is no evidence of any fraud in the long history of third-party ballot collection in Arizona.”

In a pair of dissenting opinions, four judges wrote that the state’s restrictions were commonplace, supported by common sense and applied neutrally to all voters [the majority points out, using evidence, that poor, urban voters– predominantly Democratic– are disproportionately affected –ed].

In one dissent, Judge Diarmuid O’Scannlain, writing for four judges, said lawmakers were entitled to try to prevent potential fraud. “Given its interest in addressing its valid concerns of voter fraud,” he wrote, “Arizona was free to enact prophylactic measures even though no evidence of actual voter fraud was before the legislature.”

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The state legislature has a right to enact measures to restrict voting in this way, in the interest of preventing fraud, wrote the dissent,

“even though no evidence of actual voter fraud was before the legislature.”

Principle: lack of actual evidence should not impede a judicial finding when the finding benefits a political party that has the votes to ignore the lack of evidence.

Back to the lone principled dissent in the Civil Rights Cases. Justice Joseph Bradley writing for the majority stated the position of the US Supreme Court:

“When a man has emerged from slavery, and, by the aid of beneficent legislation, has shaken off the inseparable concomitants of that state, there must be some stage in the progress of his elevation when he takes the rank of a mere citizen and ceases to be the special favorite of the laws, and when his rights as a citizen or a man are to be protected in the ordinary modes by which other men’s rights are protected.”

Ruling in the “Civil Rights Cases of 1883”

Here is the story of the prescient dissent, which had it been written for the majority, would have greatly improved American prospects for a just and equitable society over the next 137 years (though, arguably, less immense, selectively distributed wealth would have been created):

POWE
The opinion ends with Justice Bradley saying, “There comes a time when, after the emergence of slavery, a person must take on the role of mere citizen and cease being a special favorite of the law.” And what the Court is announcing then is, “Reconstruction is over. You’re just like anyone else.”

NARRATOR
There was only one justice who refused to join the majority. He was a starch-collared, fundamentalist Presbyterian and former slave holder from Kentucky named John Marshall Harlan. He was also the only justice who’d seen slavery and Reconstruction up close.

As attorney general of Kentucky just after the Civil War, Harlan had been a vocal opponent of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments. He’d been among the office holders who stirred white rage against freed slaves. In Harlan’s hometown of Frankfort alone, there were 64 catalogued acts of white supremacist terror against freed blacks and their political allies. When Harlan saw the bitter fruit of his politics, he’d been shamed.

PRZYBYSZEWSKI
Even though he was raised as a white supremacist, raised as a slave holder, at the same time he firmly believed that his father had been an honorable white man, that he had never abused power. That may be a myth, but that’s what he believed. And he wanted to live up to that kind of honor. And so people threw his history back in his face. And he said, “I would rather be right than consistent.”

GILLMAN
The Northern members of the Court could talk in generalities about how the freedmen had become equal in the eyes of the law, and no longer needed the special help of the federal government. But Harlan knew better. He knew the predicament that blacks faced in the South. And he knew that civil rights could not be protected simply with the abstractions of the language of equality — that civil rights required the federal government to give the aid that was necessary.

NARRATOR
Harlan determined to dissent in the Civil Rights Cases and to dissent loudly, but once he began to write, he found himself paralyzed … until his wife pulled from storage a strange memento the Harlans had bought: the inkstand Chief Justice Roger Taney had used to write his infamous Dred Scott decision, a decision in which he had observed that blacks had no rights a white man was bound to respect.

PRZYBYSZEWSKI
She cleaned it. She filled it with ink and she put it on his desk so that when he came home from church one Sunday it was sitting there. And in effect, what she was reminding her husband was that the Dred Scott case needed to be undone.

AMAR
Harlan’s dissent in the Civil Rights Cases says, we the Court protected the rights of slave masters and upheld congressional laws protecting slave masters. And now, when the Constitution has been amended to protect the rights of former slaves, we’re striking down congressional laws designed to enforce that right. We are not treating the former slaves with the same kind of generosity that we once treated slave masters, and that’s hypocrisy.

GILLMAN
Harlan is that one voice on the Court that still embodies that previous commitment that was made just a few years earlier to that goal, to the goal of racial equality. But the rest of the country, and the Court, had moved on.

KLARMAN
The country doesn’t want to continue with this experiment in coerced reform of race relations in the South. And I think the Supreme Court is basically putting its stamp of approval on that. They’re saying the national government is not going to intervene anymore in Southern race relations. We are restoring home rule on the race issue to the South. We’re gonna return to the status quo, which is: upper-class whites in the South get to decide what race relations are gonna look like.

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