Ordinarily, in a democracy, government officials with a conflict of interest — like the law they are about to pass will immediately make them much wealthier — must step aside in matters where their personal gain is at stake and their self-interested vote looks corrupt. Conflicts of interest can also be used to compromise government officials, to blackmail them and pervert their very mission. Nominees are generally vetted for these conflicts, though the exercise is often pro forma. Think no further than hawk beaked coal baron Joe Manchin who served as chairman of the Senate Committee on Energy and National Resources and what conflicts fueled that supercharged asshole’s decision making. Or Dunning-Kruger poster boy Jared Kushner.
Judges are held to an even higher standard regarding conflicts of interest, the appearance of impropriety. If an ordinary citizen can reasonably doubt the impartiality of the judge in a given case, that judge must step aside and let a more objective judge rule on the case. This “appearance of impropriety” standard binds all judges, outside of the nine most powerful judges in the country, the ones who make unappealable rulings on what is constitutional that set the law for generations. The lack of ethical requirements for these nine is perhaps our greatest national example of raging institutional narcissism.
Speaking of raging narcissism — if you grow up as the child of a wealthy psychopath and are a self-made millionaire by the time you enter third grade (the psycho transfers a couple of hundred thousand a year to each of his children’s accounts as part of his tax avoidance scheme) you may honestly believe that, because you are so great, that you have the right to the final say on everything. If you inherit the lucrative family business and in that family business your word is final, that reinforces your belief that you have the right to the indisputable last word on everything in every setting. The hallmark constellation of narcissism is never being wrong, always blaming others, fighting every conflict to the death, lest you, the innocent victim, be destroyed.
The Espionage Act says that a private citizen who takes classified documents and shares them has violated federal law and must be imprisoned. You say “witch hunt” “liars” “adrenochrome drunk pedophile freaks” “commies” “nasty, smelly women” “illegal DEI hires” “sick, dangerous fanatics hellbent on irrational revenge” “CRT” “MAGA” “Lady Gaga’s dick” etc. You get your handpicked openly partisan judge to rule that the Special Counsel law is unconstitutional (in your case only) and that the illegal indictment must be tossed out with prejudice, et, viola!, back to your golden childhood dream of omnipotence. Although your judge’s constitutionally irrational ruling should have been immediately overturned, the appeals court in the circuit where Clarence Thomas is the presiding judge decides to simply wait indefinitely to make a ruling one way or another.
When you become president again, in the first election since 2016 that, amazingly, with your enemies and persecutors in power, wasn’t rigged and corrupt, why would you suspect that you had ever been mistaken in anything? Your 6-3 Supreme Court ended the compelling criminal cases against you ruling that you sometimes have to commit crimes as president to rule effectively, and that you get a preemptive Supreme Court created pass for every crime committed while acting in your core, official capacity (to be decided by that same 6-3 majority), and also in any grey zone (as when you are a private citizen) so why would you worry about committing crimes as part of your core responsibilities as president, CEO and Commander in Chief?
Civil Service law? Fuck that, fire all of them, let them fight it out for next five years in court, the taxpayers will pay for my lawyers. Oversight officers to protect the public against fraud, waste and abuse? Fuck them, all fired, even ones I appointed. Ethics enforcement? Get a fucking life, cuck! Medical care and food for the children of poor people, paid by funds already allocated by congress? Those little fuckers should have been born better, who gives a fuck how many of them have to go fuck off? International aid to people in desperate situations all over the world? USA! USA!!! Fuck them, let them beg their own dictators. Department of Justice officials investigating crimes the president believes were acts of heroic patriotism? Fire every one of those sick fucks. Department of Education? Don’t you mean department for teaching lowlife n-words to read? Abolished, like Abraham Lincoln did. Etc.
This paragraph from Heather Cox Richardson sums up the irrationality being shoved down our collective throats by a collection of handpicked American Nazis:
Today, when asked about Musk’s conflicts of interest as he reviews federal spending while also receiving more than $15 billion in federal contracts, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that Trump had already promised that “if Elon Musk comes across a conflict of interest with the contracts and the funding that DOGE is overseeing, that Elon will excuse himself from those contracts.” Donald Kettl, a scholar of public policy, told Dana Hull of Bloomberg: “I don’t know of any other case, anywhere, in which an individual could determine for himself whether he had a conflict of interest. In fact, self-determination of a conflict of interest is itself a conflict of interest.”
I guess the scholar of public policy, who makes an excellent point about self-determination of a conflict or interest being itself a conflict of interest, forgot about Alito and his wife, Thomas and his wife, Roberts and his wife, whoever paid off Kavanaugh’s debts or bought Gorsuch’s land right after he became a Supreme Court justice.
Irrationality is giddily ascendant, in the service of our most openly corrupt, and dancing on the grave of cause and effect, fairness, common sense, reasonable discussion, reading, writing, arithmetic. We are living in the Age of Narcissistic Will, and there is no age more conducive to the most brutal atrocities you can picture in your nightmares. There is no moment in history when it is more necessary to keep rationality alive and expressing itself clearly. Let us all try to do that every day, shall we?
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