Author Archives: oinsketta

GOP an increasingly militant antigovernment party, predating their first insurrectionist president

Today’s J6 Committee hearing really fleshed out the irrefutable (except on an orchestrated procedural technicality) arguments heard at Trump’s second impeachment. In order to support the former president, it is necessary to subscribe to the wild lies of Sidney “no reasonable person would have taken me seriously” Powell, the My Pillow guy, John Eastman, Steve Bannon, Rudy and Mike “I said the Fifth” Flynn.

After decades of determined, organized, well-financed effort to undermine democratic institutions Americans have lost faith in our government to solve problems. This distrust culminated in the presidency of an unhinged idiot performer who plays people around him with a reptilian instinct to win at all costs. Dana Milbank lays out the largely successful GOP effort to activate and weaponize American distrust of the government they systematically disabled.

For three decades, as the Republicans transitioned from a limited-government party to an anti-government party, GOP leaders have seen political advantage in undermining Americans’ confidence in their institutions, and in sabotaging the functions of government. . .

. . . It began with Newt Gingrich’s instructions to Republicans on how to refer to Democrats (and the government) in 1990: “Traitors.” “Corrupt.” “Cheat.” “Decay.” “Failure.” “Incompetent.” “Abuse of power.” As the era of government shutdowns, default brinkmanship, hostage-taking, name-calling and mindless obstruction was just beginning, Vice President Al Gore presciently remarked: “The Republicans are determined to wreck Congress in order to control it — and then to wreck a presidency in order to recapture it.”

McConnell played a major part in the sabotage, and not just with his extravagant intransigence toward legislation and nominees, highlighted by the theft of a Supreme Court seat in 2016.

https://wapo.st/3nXOgPT

insight?

When I was in my late twenties, visiting the farm of my parents’ best friemd, Arlene, she laid a great truth on me. As we watched the sun set one evening she said:

“You feel like you disappointed your parents, like you’re responsible for their unhappiness. I love your parents to death, as you know, they’re my best friends, but they are both very unhappy people. They just are, they were that way long before you were born. Their unhappiness has nothing to do with you, there is nothing you can do to change it, the burden of it is not something you need to carry through life.”

Though what she said sounds obvious to me now, it was like she’d reached up and pulled a string to turn on a light in the universe.

That understanding was an immense help to me, comparable to my father’s older first cousin Eli, years later, describing how he witnessed his beloved Aunt Chava grab the thick, burlap covered cord for her steam iron, from a drawer behind her seat at the kitchen table, and whip little Irv across the face with it.

“In the face?” I said.

“Yep, over and over,” said Eli.

“Jesus,” I said, “how old was he?”

“However old you are when you can stand on your two feet without falling over,” he said, with limitless sorrow. He saw it many times after that, and he said that over time all she had to do was rattle the drawer where she kept the whipping cord and young Irv would stand at rigid attention, staring at the ground, trembling, waiting for the whipping to start.

State laboratories of autocracy

Because there were stringent laws against lobbyists directly influencing federal legislators with things like lavish vacations, expensive meals. nice gifts and so on, the Koch network focused on state legislators in the various states, since there are no analogous laws about not bribing them. An organization like the American Legislative Exchange Council drafts model laws like Stand Your Ground, that are distributed at legal corporate/legislator party vacations paid for by the dark money donors of ALEC.

Fast forward 40-50 years, and Robert Reich gives you a succinct picture of how American autocrats have seized control of a majority of the state legislatures and a 6-3 anti-democracy Supreme Court that is poised to give Republican state legislatures the unappealable last word on who won the federal elections in their state.

“keep in mind, Trump reads transcripts”

Like everything else in MAGA world, the claim is bullshit.   Trump can barely read a teleprompter and only does so when he thinks it will help his “brand” to stumble through prepared comments.  Whether he reads or not is beside the point, the message in “Trump reads transcripts” is that you can’t hide from the wrath of this destructive, vindictive maniac, even if what you truthfully reveal is only written on a page somewhere.  The bold lies of MAGA world are central to its popularity, its legitimacy!  You can’t argue so-called truth with people happy with any lie that helps their cause, and who are openly calling for the killing of their hated enemies.

Against this determined onslaught we have a 79 year-old moderate chosen by his party as our leader in this perilous moment.  Joe Biden promised to give his heart and soul as president.  He probably has.  His heart is clearly broken and his soul appears to be inconsolable too.  He is blamed, by virtually everyone, for worldwide inflation, for the “failure” of all his promises to make it past the sacred, inviolable filibuster, supported to the death by two of his slim 51-50 Senate majority, nullifying all initiatives.  There’s nothing sacred about the filibuster.  Remember how nonchalantly fucking Mitch McConnell changed the sacrosanct filibuster rule to install a “51-49, suck it” fully MAGA Supreme Court majority after denying Obama’s nominee a hearing and leaving Scalia’s seat open for Gorsuch.   And, of course, cramming Christian cultist Amy Coney Barrett down America’s collective throat to make it “6-3, suck it” while votes were being cast in the 2020 presidential election.  Quite the little shit sandwich, with supremely entitled, angrily hissing victim of left wing revenge conspiracies, Boof Kavanaugh, in between.

Biden seems to live in his memory as much as in 2022.   He probably remembers having coffee with Mitch McConnell years back and coming away with the impression that Mitch wouldn’t stand by silently as others tried to lynch the first mulatto president.   He still believes a calm, steady approach appealing to decency is best, that Reason always wins over blind hatred (true in the long run, perhaps, but not in the short run).   He acted in accord with this belief when appointing calm, steady, cautious Merrick Garland as AG, with the perfect poetic justice of the moderate Supreme Court candidate the GOP fucked out of a hearing leading prosecutions of those who trampled American democracy, restoring bipartisan faith in American justice and democracy.

American justice has most often been carried out by violence.   Frontier justice, Texas justice, Home Rule justice, States’ Rights justice.  Lynch mobs that support their leader’s view of things always act with impunity.  The simpleton’s nuanced logic runs this way:  deadly violence to keep the peace is justified when the good guys with the guns control the violence, otherwise common criminals would run roughshod over all of us.   Police routinely arrest white mass murderers and quietly take them into custody, they also fill Black traffic law violators, or those suspected of such violations, with bullets from time to time.  A literal lynch mob storms the Capitol, armed to the teeth, organized, led by paramilitary hate group members.  The cry of the violent is always “Justice!“

So, yeah, by all means, keep in mind that Trump reads transcripts, just like he reads his second favorite book, The Bible.   The book he kept at his bedside, according to his first wife, was the Collected Speeches of Adolf Hitler.   Hitler knew a thing or two about how to get things done.   How the will, exerted as mightily as possible, can overcome all obstacles, all logic, all so-called decency, overcome all hesitation, all so-called moral qualms (conscience being a Jewish invention, according to AH).  Find men who believe you were sent by God Himself, an infallible man of destiny.  When the moment calls for a screaming temper tantrum, rage, that’s how you bend people to your will.

The answer to a screaming temper tantrum, of course, is firmness, logic, and sometimes, a good hard slap.  If the tantrum is by a president insisting on his right to take illegal action, the good hard slap is enforcement of the laws he and his allies violated.   It is the enduring shame of the human race that we have so often been herded by groups of wilful men operating in a blinding rage, opposed by good people bound by moral qualms.  When Trump finally goes to his reserved seat in the smoking section of Hell, the radical party of born-wealthy men like him will continue to exert its infuriated will.  After all, what good is having all the money in the world if you also can’t make everyone in the world do whatever you tell them to?

Paul Waldman nails the vile absurdity of Originalism

As we’ve seen recently, the American right has found in the framers an extraordinarily effective tool with which they can roll back social progress and undermine our democracy. It may have found its most ridiculous manifestation in the tea party movement that emerged when Barack Obama was president, when people started prancing around in tricorn hats and every Republican was supposed to have a favorite Founder. But today it has gone from an affectation to a weapon, and a brutally effective one.


We saw it in the recent Supreme Court decisions that supercharged the legal philosophy of “originalism” on abortion and guns. Reproductive rights, said Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., are neither found in the explicit words of the Constitution nor “deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions,” so they don’t exist as rights. As for states that want to regulate guns, said Justice Clarence Thomas, only regulations that have “a distinctly similar historical regulation” from the 18th century will be allowed. The America of 1789 becomes a prison the conservative justices can lock us all in whenever it suits them.

Originalism was a scam from the start, a foolproof methodology for conservatives to arrive at whatever judicial result matches their policy preferences: Cherry-pick a few quotes from the Federalist Papers, cite an obscure 1740 ordinance from the Virginia colony one of your clerks dug up, then claim that scripture leads us inexorably to only one outcome.

https://wapo.st/3PkMPXJ

How is prosecuting witness intimidation political?

When Cassidy Hutchinson testified to the J6 Committee under oath last week (a sin for present day Republicans), the committee revealed written attempts to get Hutchinson to “do the right thing” and to “remain loyal”.  The tweets, likely sent under direction of her former boss Mark Meadows, made philosophical observations about what a shame it would be for a nice young woman like her to… etc.  The witness tampering, and obstruction of investigations of extreme national importance, is ongoing.   

Witness tampering is a felony that carries a twenty year prison sentence.   The punishment is twenty years because the crime is such a serious threat to the rule of law.  If you can freely intimidate all witnesses and get their memories to disappear in all relevant areas, the administration of justice stops dead.  You have the rule of the mob, free to intimidate anyone who calls them a mob.

The only thing political about not prosecuting witness intimidation is a paralyzing fear that the other side will somehow use the prosecutions politically.   

During Trump’s first impeachment trial, the former president (who won reelection in a landslide, necessitating the peaceful, legal, patriotic protest of January 6th…) tweeted thinly veiled threats against people who were testifying truthfully about his attempts to get the president of Ukraine to announce a fake investigation into Joe Biden’s son.  He threatened witnesses publicly and in real time, as they were testifying in public hearings on television.   He also swiftly took revenge on witnesses and family members of witnesses for testifying truthfully.  He took his revenge lap right after impeachment failed, days after jury foreman Mitch McConnell announced he was working closely with the president’s defense team (Patsy Baloney, Federalist Society superlawyer and future White House counsel among them) to get the impeachment farce quickly dismissed.

For years prior to that hearing, and up to the present day, Trump’s standing order to anyone in his party receiving a Congressional subpoena is to tell Congress to shove its subpoena, and they’ll fight it out in courts until the clock runs out.  That’s a novel and brazen approach to lawful, compulsory subpoenas, sir.   The DOJ, headed first by Jeff Sessions and later by the supremely unprincipled Bill Barr (hell of a bagpipes player, I’ve heard) was clearly fine with all of their boss’s obstructive tactics, even the plainly illegal ones (someone has to prosecute crimes or they’re just partisan allegations of crimes).  Trump’s handpicked political operatives at DOJ were all on team MAGA, all shared the same goal of turning the clock back to the days before that Commie Supreme Court desegregated the schools, allowed women the final choice about whether to give birth, gave civil rights to homosexual perverts, due process protections to (presumed guilty) ordinary people arrested for crimes and gave the state’s blessing to the vile practice of miscegenation, race-mixing.

Fabulous piece of shit Jared Kusher comes to mind.   A C student in his private school, he attended Harvard after his billionaire father, Charles, made a two million dollar donation to that institution.  Now Jared is smart!  Charles Kushner was involved in some illegal activity, he juggled money between companies he owned and signed false papers on behalf of partners to make larger than legal political contributions (to Democratic candidates, funnily enough).   They had him dead to rights, the state’s main witness being his brother-in-law.

Charles Kushner didn’t get where he is by coloring between the fucking lines.  He hired a professional scumbag to set up a meeting between a hooker and his brother-in-law.  The hooker was good, picked the witness up and brought him to a hotel room rigged for video recording.   Charles brought the tape to his sister and told her if her husband didn’t dummy up the video would be all over the fucking internet.   His sister may have been wearing a wire, the case against Charles Kusher was now about a much bigger deal: witness tampering.

We know the prison sentence for the felony of witness tampering is twenty years.  Billionaires, however, usually get a steep “best people” discount on the rare occasions they’re sentenced for crimes.  Charles was sentenced to two years, served fourteen months, presumably because his behavior was so good.  Jared never forgave fellow piece of shit Chris Christie for prosecuting his innocent father.  Charles eventually got a pardon from Trumpie, no doubt one of the many Jared had his nose buried in while the planned coup d’etat was being feverishly enacted all around him while he was so busy working on a stack of pardons that he had no idea of any plans.  He told J6 investigators he was too busy working on pardons to listen to people like Patsy Baloney whining about Trumpie’s proposed, allegedly illegal plans.

Pardon me for this rant.   I’ve extended every benefit of the doubt to Joe Biden, not my first pick among the Democratic candidates, nor even my tenth.  Under the horrific circumstances, I think he’s doing a decent job.  I extend the benefit of the doubt to Merrick Garland, a methodical, capable prosecutor probably building a complex and difficult racketeering case (RICO) against Trump and his myrmidons, as he tries to restore public faith in the impartiality of the DOJ.  I’ve heard RICO cases are not hard to win, but are also, unless perfect, not hard to get thrown out on appeal.  Clearly it would be a fatal disaster if Trump was about to be locked up as a political mob boss, appealed and had the case overturned.  Seen that way, it is understandable, and smart, that Garland is building a careful, airtight case against a criminal syndicate.   

But if Garland doesn’t bring prompt prosecutions against people we know are actively committing the felony of intimidating witnesses to cover the gigantic criminal ass of the most prodigious liar the world has ever known, what the fuck?  What the fucking fuck, Merrick?