And, as promised (though minus the input of the ethics team he promised to consult, and then immediately fired) Musk (Elon Mullosk, as a friend called the slimy bastard recently) restored his fellow übercitizen Donald Trump to Twitter. For Trump to go back on Twitter is to abandon his failing Truth Social but for him not to return to Twitter is to forgo a giant megaphone, which isn’t his way. An excellent op-ed in the NY Times made some great observations:
As someone who has been studying Mr. Trump’s Twitter use since before he was elected president, I believe that his return would mean the heightened spread of both misinformation and disinformation, the proliferation of degrading and dehumanizing discourse, the further mainstreaming of hate speech and the erosion of democratic norms and institutions. But there is something else: Mr. Trump’s return to Twitter could escalate the likelihood of political violence.
Simply put, if you are surrounded by dry kindling, add an accelerant and light a match, conflagration is the predictable outcome. . .
. . . Twitter and Mr. Trump represent a dangerous fusion of form and content. Social media generally and Twitter specifically lend themselves to simple, urgent, unreflective and emotionally charged communication. When the message is one of intolerance and violence, the result is all but certain.
If I get mad at you, it’s because you’ve hurt me badly, have never tried to make amends and I have a good goddamned reason to be hurt and angry after months of your denial and defensiveness.
If you get angry at me, no matter when, it’s because you are being fucking unfair and vicious, for your own sick, irrational reasons.
What is hard to understand about any of that? Could it be clearer?
Now, all you have to do is convince the eye witness who loves you that what they saw, what you experienced, actually happened. Since everyone has their own perspective, aren’t we reallyall arguing that we’re better than the person who claims we treated them badly, that our point of view is more valid than theirs? Isn’t everybody just equally right in their feelings?
No. There are objective things that actually happen prior to and in the aftermath of somebody getting angry. Focus on those, compare how each party acted. Things that actually took place won’t lie to you, no matter how emotionally compelling a spin is placed on them.
One of the most maddening things in life is being subjected to a double standard. I get to act this way, and you have nothing to say about it, but if you act the same way, I will righteously fucking destroy you. It happens between parents and children, probably much more frequently than it should. The parent says: I am an adult and if I call someone a fucking piece of shit it’s because they deserve it, if you ever fucking talk like that I’ll wash your filthy mouth out with a bar of soap, you understand that, asshole?
Democrats, as a party, play by the rules, most of the time, and they try to govern by promoting solutions to real problems. Republicans play only to win, having come to regard the rules as weapons to be used against their political enemies, harnessing the rage of angry citizens to manipulate them. Democrats are the last remaining democratic party in our duopoly, Republicans openly want a one-party state and an above the law strongman to lead our oligarchy. When a Democrat expresses anger, about anything, particularly if she’s a woman, particularly a woman of color, Republicans attack in a rage, morally scandalized that some loudmouthed bitch feels entitled to such terrible unAmerican anger. When a Republican is angry it’s because of the horrible people who hate our country, and spit on Christ, that send them into a righteous temper tantrum. You can observe this cycle daily in the 24 hour news — Republicans vow to take terrible revenge if vengeful Democrats plan to do something they hate. Democrats generally apologize for saying intemperate things, or more often, just remain as quiet as most Republicans.
Now that we have had an ever-defiant, litigious, openly, proudly, corrupt Republican president, the double standard is more grotesquely in-your-face than we’ve ever seen in this country. The reputation of the Department of Justice that protected Trump’s colleagues and went after Trump’s enemies under first Jeff Sessions (too racist to get a seat on the federal bench, try to picture that) and eventually the most corrupt AG in American history, Bill Barr, is being rehabilitated under the scrupulous Merrick Garland. In Trump speak: Garland has weaponized the DOJ for Democrat [sic] vendettas against innocent and great Americans, with more witch hunts and refusal to give him a pass for trying to overturn a stolen election, inciting totally justifiable mob violence to overturn that election, stealing (and selling) top secret government documents and petty so-called crimes like that.
Trump’s great strength is using brazeness and every possible delay to avoid accountability for things most of us would be in prison for, waiting for our trials. Garland’s great weakness is not wanting to look unfair. That’s a guy Trump can play like an out of tune violin.
Merrick Garland, obeying the time honored democratic/judicial norm of avoiding the “appearance of impropriety”, seems to have just granted the corrupt former president the strategic delay he always seeks, for the sake of avoiding the appearance of political bias. He announced it would be unfair, days after an election that largely repudiated the march toward autocratic one-party rule, to continue to investigate a man who just declared himself a presidential candidate, since Garland serves another man who has stated his intention to run in 2024. He said this extraordinary circumstance necessitated the appointment of a famously impartial Special Counsel to conclude whether Trump broke the law, when he plotted to overturn an election he lost, when he unleashed a crowd to lynch his loyal vice president and decapitate the line of succession, when he stole and sold sensitive government documents as he was leaving the White House under protest.
Recall the sequence of events that led to this extraordinary announcement by Garland, who could not have appeared impartial to partisans who have already vowed to impeach him if he’d appointed Kraken lawyer Sydney Powell as Special Counsel (as Trump was reportedly considering, making her Special Counsel to overturn the 2020 election) or Judge Aileen (heavily for the guy who appointed me) Cannon. Merrick Garland’s DOJ spent well over a year politely negotiating with a famously untruthful demagogue who special prosecutor Robert Mueller concluded he could not exonerate for obstruction of justice. Trump claimed complete and total exoneration, as did his Attorney General, supremely corrupt culture warrior Bill Barr. After losing re-election by over 7,000,000 votes, and by the identical historic landslide (in his estimation) Electoral College margin he’d bragged about winning in 2016, Trump launched a mutli-tentacled conspiracy to stay in power, including coordinating slates of fake electors in several states he lost, repeated illegal attempts to change vote counts, threatening, cajoling and trying to influence public officials, putting innocent poll workers in danger of his mobs by lying about their crimes, by name, fanning an infuriating lie about a stolen election, inciting a violent mob to stop the certification of his loss, kill his Vice President and decapitate Congressional leadership, and lying about it all regularly at rallies he has been holding since. Also, when he left the White House he took with him hundreds of classified government documents.
After about a year of bad faith negotiations, with Garland’s DOJ, after subpoenas were ignored, after Trump’s attorney signed a false declaration that all the records NARA sought had been returned, the DOJ got a search warrant, searched Mar-a-Largo on August 8th and recovered a trove of papers the president illegally possessed and kept in unsecured areas of his resort/home. How many more secret documents he still has, in places not described in the legal search warrant, or how many he’d already sold to Putin, Saudi Arabia and anyone else with a lot of money, the US government is not sure.
A few weeks after the August 8th “raid” on his resort made MAGA nation mad as hell, his attorneys went to the federal courthouse 70 miles up the coast to get an emergency injunction in front of a judge who Trump had appointed after he lost the election. She loyally did her benefactor’s bidding, preventing the government from reviewing its own documents and illogically appointing a Special Master, though she was overturned once on appeal regarding the Executive branch’s right to look at its own classified documents. She is certain to be completely overturned some time next month. But she bought the boss at least four or five months of delay, which is how quid pro quos (no longer strictly illegal under a recent Supreme Court ruling) work. The investigation into the evidence seized on August 8th has been hamstrung by protracted legal wrangling over which of its own documents DOJ may review.
Now we have Garland’s announcement that, to avoid the appearance of impropriety in this special and unique case, he has handpicked a guy known for prosecuting Democrats and Republicans alike, who will make the final call about whether Trump needs to be prosecuted for crimes, including the seemingly open and shut one where the search warrant yielded massive evidence of the crime suspected — wait, that call will still be Garland’s, under DOJ procedures. Since Mueller was unable to charge Trump, he also was scrupulous in bending over backwards to be fair — he could not seem to accuse him of something the president would not be able to defend himself against — and so his famous but forgotten “if we could exonerate him, we would, but we cannot” or whatever his famous but forgotten formulation was in the report Barr and Trump crowed was a complete and total exoneration, with Barr investigating the corrupt oringes of the Mueller probe for several years afterwards (Biden’s DOJ allowed it to continue for almost two years, it probably is still going on, along with a now two year federal investigation into the infamous Hunter Biden). [1]
Republicans, who by a robust handful of seat majority in the 435 member House of Representatives, hold the purse strings in the new Congress, have vowed to defund the Department of Justice’s clearly vindictive investigation and possible prosecution of Trump and henchmen, already pardoned by Trump for other crimes. Why should men who sat in a command center at the Willard Hotel as the riot was unleashed on Congress be treated like common criminals by a political party that murders babies, after raping them, and drinks their blood? Defund the DOJ! And you can take that threat to the bank, Merrick. Your best best was following the facts and the law without fear or favor. Being afraid of looking “political” made you as political as it gets, boss. Now Nancy Pelosi has to scramble to ensure your funding before the lame duck session of Congress ends and you have a narrow Trumpist majority already promising hellish revenge amid constant televised investigationsthat law-abiding public servants will dutifully attend and endless, baseless, headline grabbing impeachments.
No double standard here! It’s just power. Nothing personal, but a lot of you motherfuckers need to be locked up, now that we have the gavel, bitches!
These, of course, are the first two hits you will find looking up “Mueller report on exonerating Trump”. The first is from the official government website of a sitting Republican Congressman who was active in planning the January 6th rally and rejection of certified electors during the joint session of Congress that day, ALLEGEDLY:
The Mueller Report completely exonerates President Trump and his team. “It is a travesty that my Democrat colleagues are now doing their best to disregard the Mueller investigative team that they put so much faith in for the past two years. They will now continue their own witch hunt to attempt to impeach President Trump.
Mueller Never Had a Good-Faith Basis to Pursue President Trump. The fizzling out of the corrupt Mueller investigation is great victory for the rule of law and our constitutional republic. Here is the statement I issued in response Attorney General Barr’s initial summary of the special counsel’s report. The long, national nightmare is over …
When someone you love acts in a way that activates trauma in you, it’s not just having your feelings hurt. Trauma is more like being electrocuted. Chemicals flood your body, fight, duck, flight, run, scream, crawl, what the fucking fuck?!! Help! Help!!! But, just like when you were helpless earlier in your life, there is no help. You are back in the exact terrifying moment, facing the implacable violence that seared the trauma into you when you were too little to protect yourself. Flung in a disorienting instant back to a time when you were helpless against a brutal force much more powerful than you. The essence of trauma is that it is terrifying and you must somehow face it alone. You can’t save yourself from it, and nobody else will either. Trauma is in a class by itself in terms of psychic pain.
If I accidentally traumatize you by losing control of myself, and find you shaken in your soul, my apology is a first step, at best. The apology is the beginning of the healing story, not the end. To reassure you I will have to demonstrate better self-control going forward or you will be perfectly right to find my apology worse than meaningless, my threat ongoing.
You won’t believe my apology, you’ll recall similar angry things I’ve done to you before, particularly if I continue to tell you that any pain you claim I cause you is your own fault, every time, that I only react that way because you make me do it. The old wife beater’s/bully’s defense, “I wish you hadn’t made me do that to you, why do you keep makingme hurt you?”
We are all weak, flawed, imperfect, limited, even disabled in various ways. Those of us who are not narcissists (who see themselves as either perfect gods or unbearably worthless pieces of shit) or are otherwise crazy, do our best to be kind, to not do things to others that we hate done to us. We don’t always succeed, but our goal is to be kind, to listen and reassure people we care about when they are suffering.
If we’re damaged enough as children we face a mountain of hard work to climb out of the traumas of our past, to avoid replicating them, inflicting them on others, but many spend their lives climbing.
Some traumatized people sincerely believe that change is impossible. In the cases I’m familiar with it is the immenseness of their pain that convinced them of the impossibility of change.
None of us are good at sitting with painful feelings. Without sitting with pain, looking at it carefully, we have no hope of learning how to proceed, outside of keeping busy all the time, running, hopping, jumping, doing anything to avoid being alone with our feelings. Many people in pain, who have the money, seek a good therapist to help them through the difficult challenge of developing the insight to change harmful behaviors. A good therapist is a great comfort.
Others just want peace, and calm, and people to accept them exactly as they are,unfixable flaws and all. And it is also true, if you can’t accept somebody’s weakness, you really can’t be friends with them. Those same people who need unconditional acceptance of their flaws are often very judgmental, have unshakable, harsh opinions of others and are experts at denying or justifying even the most cruel things they may do. When confronted they will say whatever they need to say in the moment to defend themselves, telling lies they may contradict a moment later in their desperation to avoid feeling blame for acts they may be ashamed of. They may tell you they were mistaken, that they can’t help it, both understandable human frailties, and that you are being cruel to them, that they simply need to be loved without conditions.
Anger is probably a human’s hardest emotion, up there with grief and fear. It leads to insensitivity, nastiness, beatings, lynching, mass murder. Anger is also inevitable when, however patient you try to remain, there is no mercy shown, no understanding given, no acknowledgement of your right to feel hurt by thoughtless treatment. “You hurt me, too, asshole, what makes that OK?,” is not a recipe for reconciliation. That kind of response may cause you to raise your voice, say something mean, get ready to fight, no matter how much you may cling to trying to remain mild. When we are hurt, we need reassurance. If we get stern insistence that we are wrong to be hurt, to need to talk about it, it is the oppositeof reassuring.
But some people can’t help themselves. They may feel bad, on some level, but they are truly unable to resist redoubling the old beating when somebody appeals for their mercy by making themselves vulnerable. Vulnerability is their worst nightmare. No mercy for weak, vulnerable, fragile bitches! Nothing scares someone who is terrified of being vulnerable more than somebody laying their heart bare to them.
Here is therapist Bessel van der Kolk, with a succinct, insightful description of trauma.
Compromise is finding a middle ground that, while it may not solve the worst of the conflict, at least makes things better. It moves each person toward the other enough that each side can feel they got something they needed. It is not perfect, in terms of everyone getting everything they want, but a good compromise gives you something essential that you weren’t getting before. Compromise is a starting point for rebuilding trust. It also restores faith in reason’s (with compassion) ability to solve otherwise intractable problems. It’s a necessary first step back to healthier relations, once things have deterioratedbadly enough to require negotiation.
If your complaint is that you were blamed unfairly, got 100% of the blame when at most 50% was your share, and the blame was insisted on over and over during a year of emotional withdrawal, accusations, threats, framing everything as a war you cannot win (hi, Dad!) a compromise saying “OK, fine, you were only 50% to blame for our little impasse” is probably not enough of a compromise to satisfy you, unless you are very easily satisfied. For one thing, you have no reason to trust that next time you won’t experience the same thing, with the identical maddening aftermath.
A long, tense negotiation to get what should have been given to you at once, something like the benefit of the doubt based on a long friendship, only after a year of fighting (if you consider months incommunicado to be a form of fighting), is unlikely, after a year of senselesswarfare, to produce a compromise to undo the harm of that long war. Getting an apology from someone, after months stubbornly posed in the same judgmental position, is like getting an expensive get well card a year after you get out of the hospital and are fine.
Most of us are bad at apologizing. The most important part of the apology is recognizing the pain you caused somebody else, empathizing with why what you did was hurtful. If the same thing had been done to me, I’d be hurt too. Without this crucial component, and telling the other person we were wrong, and asking for forgiveness, a formal apology is a pose for prigs. The prig [1] can later say “I fucking apologized to you, you unforgiving fuck!” and once again feel likethe righteous victim.
An apology that doesn’t recognize the harm done is a poor excuse for an apology. An apology that does not contain a promise not to repeat the same hurtful behavior is very, very weak tea (piss, actually). What gives an apology the power to heal is the sincere concession that you would have been just as hurt as the person who is upset about what you did, if the roles had been reversed. Without this recognition of the other person’s right to be unhappy, you have only the meaningless shell of an apology.
Instead of real apology, many try to argue there is no need for any such thing, since what hurt you wouldn’t have hurt them and is so much water down the drainanyway, so long after the fact. You see, ha ha, I’m doing it to myself now, it doesn’t hurt! You see, I am strong and not hurt by things like that, normal people aren’t, you sad weakling. This “I’m strong and wouldn’t have been hurt by that” line calls to mind Wanda Sykes beautiful takedown of right-wing blowhard Sean Hannity who bragged that he could take being waterboarded, would never be broken by the “enhanced interrogation” technique. Sykes said “please, I could break Sean Hannity in a minute, just put him in a middle seat in coach, that punk would be singing in sixty seconds.”
As long as a failure of empathy is desperately defended to the death, I’m pretty sure there is no compromise that can bridge the inflamed gulf between two people. Continuing to assign blame, no matter what, instead of demonstrating real empathy, is a sign that nobody is going to emerge from the negotiation with what they need. If the party responsible for at least 50% of the hurt puts “fine, I’m 50% responsible, but you’re still wrong, too” on the table, that’s about that for our negotiated compromise.
Be ready to be pleasantly surprised by an offer of real compromise, but remember, too, the real world we live in.
[1] A prig is a person who shows an inordinately zealous approach to matters of form and propriety—especially where the prig has the ability to show superior knowledge to those who do not know the protocol in question.Wikipedia
CNN — In a forthcoming memoir about his time in office, former Vice President Mike Pence recounts a conversation he had with Donald Trump.
Here’s the key bit, from an excerpt published in the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday:
“Texas Rep. Louie Gohmert and other Republicans had filed a lawsuit asking a federal judge to declare that I had ‘exclusive authority and sole discretion’ to decide which electoral votes should count. ‘I don’t want to see ‘Pence Opposes Gohmert Suit’ as a headline this morning,’ the president said. I told him I did oppose it. ‘If it gives you the power,’ he asked, ‘why would you oppose it?’”
“If it gives you the power, why would you oppose it?”
If you had only one quote to understand Trump and how he views the world, that would be a pretty good one.
If you badmouth friends, judge them, withhold the benefit of the doubt, keep silent, express grievances, make excuses for all your actions, accuse, blame, lie and stick to your lie, people will eventually begin to avoid you.
Being straightforward, constant and willing to listen is a much better way to resolve conflict.
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