The last time a US president endorsed crossing over to the “dark side” to torture terrorism suspects, during Dick Cheney’s time in office, we sent these poor devils (most of them not even charged with any crime) to secret dark sites to be tortured. Calling someone a terrorist is like calling them a pedophile, when someone is accused of either of those things many people recoil at the accusation and don’t really care about proof or what is done to them. To be fair, Obama also ordered the execution, by drone, of an American citizen who’d fled to Yemen, and, several days later, the “accidental” killing of his teenaged son. Neither American was charged with any crime, though they were tried in the agitated court of public opinion and Obama’s spokesmen were despicably coy at press conferences when asked about the extrajudicial killings.
Now we have an administration as close to Hitler’s as possible, modeled on the Führer’s government by American fascist thought leaders on the cusp of realizing lifelong dreams of unlimited power. Personal loyalty to the Leader is seemingly the only qualification for a cabinet position, or any government job, actually. The military has been purged of all generals and other leaders who will not take this oath to a man, rather than to the rule of law; an unqualified, but fiercely loyal, seeming idiot put in charge of the Department of Defense. Inspectors general have been illegally removed across government agencies so there is no oversight of waste, corruption or abuse. Unqualified wealthy donors with glaring conflicts of interest and stunning lack of expertise have been confirmed for cabinet positions on straight party line votes by a supine, razor thin MAGA majority in Congress. Here’s one better, the unvetted racist madman ultra mega-megadonor/government contractor who heads a phantom agency charged with cutting enough money from government to fund generous new tax breaks for the super-wealthy. An actual Nazi.
Now America’s strongman is defying the Supreme Court whose 6-3 radical right judicial fraternity majority he appointed half of. In a 9-0 shadow docket opinion they gave the district judge, whose ruling they affirmed — the man illegally rendered to El Salvador must be returned to the US — a warning about showing respect and deference to the president who appointed a third of them. With this warning about the district court judge’s need to show “deference” in hand, Trump’s DOJ is telling the lower court judge, whose ruling was affirmed 9-0, to go fuck herself.
Here is a succinct account of why Abrego Garcia is in a supermax El Salvador prison for terrorists and the consequences, for the rest of us, of a Hitler wannabe telling a federal judge, acting in accordance with a ruling of the Federalist Society Six (joined by the constitution obeying minority), to fuck off.
When Dick Cheney had terrorism suspects grabbed at airports, off the street, he did so secretly. He sent them to secret torture sites in Poland, Egypt, Asia, places we will never know about. The “genius” of Trump is that he commits his crimes in public, brazenly, secure in his knowledge that millions of angry, screwed Americans love that he does all his violence publicly, without the need to pander to public opinion. It helps that Trump is a psychopath, because he feels neither empathy nor regret. He does not hesitate to throw even his most loyal sycophants into the meat grinder, if it is ever to his advantage. It is always to his advantage to cause pain to someone, it is the only way he can feel whole.
Our hope at the moment resides in us, all of us. Trump’s larger plan is to keep turning up the heat, economically, culturally, politically, and by illegally deporting innocent people to indefinite imprisonment in foreign dictatorships, without a whiff of due process of law, then telling the courts to fuck off, until there is a massive protest he can turn violent as a pretext for invoking the 1807 Insurrection Act. His April 20th [1] wet dream is martial law that will allow his fully loyal military to turn their guns on disloyal American citizens, particularly colored, gay, progressive, justice-minded ones. That’s the dream of every fascist, rule by terror and death to all terrorists, and pedophiles, as well as opposition leaders, dissenters, protesters, intellectuals, readers of banned books, providers of abortions to raped girls, etc. Their right to treat others as they see fit, kidnap, torture, send to a gulag, or privatized concentration camp, to defenestrate, poison or strangle them, is essential to their power and control, the only things that make a “strongman” feel safe.
Trump’s role model, Vladimir Putin, had the man who oversaw the archive of Soviet War Crimes during World War Two arrested on charges that he was a pedophile who had raped his own daughter. The man was imprisoned, the trial delayed, the Soviet War Crimes archive shut down, the records presumably destroyed (the better to rewrite history on the eve of an invasion of Ukraine with war crimes as a major strategic plan). In the end, even in Putin’s Russia, the man charged with pedophilia was found innocent of the charges. In the end, Putin got what he needed, the purge of archives documenting the same crimes his army was committing in Ukraine. Making MAGA great again!
[1] Adolf Hitler was born on April 20, 1889. His 50th birthday in 1939 was celebrated as a national holiday in Nazi Germany, featuring grand parades and lavish festivities. Trump plans the same celebration, complete with military parades, for his 79th birthday in two months. Remember, he’s a young 79, two and a half, to be precise.
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