Author Archives: oinsketta
There’s no law against lying for personal and political profit, so there!
A young multi-billionaire’s unfettered right to get even richer vs. sensible protections for a fair and honest election.
Facebook has stated, unequivocally, that political campaigns have an absolute right to lie on Facebook, as much and as long as their budgets allow. Facebook will continue to deliver personally targeted ads that are completely false, sent to influence the demographic most vulnerable to provocative lies that support their feelings of fear, anger and helplessness — “low information voters” — who get their news from places like Facebook. There is no law against it and Facebook claims no responsibility for the damage its massive opinion machine has already done to democracy. Its policy will continue on into 2020, come what may.
It’s true, of course, that there is no general law against lying, unless you lie under oath before a body that can punish you for perjury. There are libel laws that allow people falsely accused of damaging things to take their accusers to court and get public vindication and restitution from the person/entity who slandered them. In a specific circumstance, where deliberate falsehood can be proved to a jury, that’s a law against lying for personal profit, if that lie is detrimental to the reputation of a competitor or critic (and causes monetary harm), but it’s far from a law against lying for profit. There are regulations on the advertising industry that prevent outright lying — the wiggle room in these regulations providing a fertile field for creative geniuses of the advertiser’s art to do interpretative dance in.
As a general principle, as the life-long actions of our current born wealthy president demonstrate, as the dazzling self-made wealth of young Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook demonstrates, lying to become richer or more powerful is no vice. Pettifoggers refer to this kind of transactional lying as “puffery”, a form of extreme manipulative exaggeration that is arguably not actual “lying” lying. Mr. Trump has used this legal term to describe some of the more egregious lying he does from time to time.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg dances around lying, and openly allowing “political” lies to take wing on his supremely influential opinion-sharing web platform, speaking of his true aims as advancing “freedom of speech” and being in the proud democratic tradition of men like Martin Luther King and Frederick Douglass. Zuckerberg knows that his right to unlimited additional billions of dollars (and bear in mind, at age 35 Mark only has a little over $70,000,000,000) depends on nobody regulating his massively lucrative and influential, worldwide business.
Lies are indispensable to ambitious people with shady things to hide. We had a recent president, George W. Bush, whose father was wealthy and influential and, though he supported the American war in Viet Nam, used his connections to get his boy, George, into an elite National Guard fighter pilot unit that would keep him out of combat. The young man was a heavy drinker, also fond of cocaine, and so he didn’t make it back to base for a mandatory medical exam that would have found cocaine in his system. He went AWOL, as one does under such circumstances, and never completed his elite unit National Guard service. His father took care of this for him — it was only many years later, once he was the 43rd president of the United States, that enterprising reporters dug up the story. Dubya never denied it outright, he didn’t have to — the documents the first network report was based on turned out to be forgeries! The lying liberal media! Heads rolled, including the head of the longtime CBS anchorman who broke the story, the underlying truth of which was never disputed. It is more likely than not that the forgeries of actual records (long ago destroyed) were provided to the lying press by Karl Rove, the amoral genius behind Bush’s presidential victory.
When Dubya ran for reelection, against a man who had served with distinction in Viet Nam, his campaign got busy smearing his opponent, John Kerry, a decorated soldier (who had volunteered for combat service) with a false narrative. They hired a team to claim that Dubya’s opponent had served disgracefully in Viet Nam– the truth was, according to these veterans (who claimed to have been on the river patrols with him), that he’d been no hero, he’d been a coward and a liar. The slandered John Kerry, took the high road, instead of confronting Bush about the lies and challenging him to publicly compare his shady military record with Kerry’s record of decorated combat service. Kerry lost the presidential election of 2004, based, in part, on the ferocity of the lying attack by the “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” or whatever the hit squad of political assassins called itself. Kerry also lost because he was perceived as being less of a “man” than Dubya because the wealthy “elitist” Kerry didn’t defend himself against the scurrilous attack on his good character by agents of “man of the people” (and fellow Yale Skull and Bone-ser) Dubya.
Fast forward a few years and we have a compulsive liar in the White House. He literally can’t help himself. It is his reflex to lie, because he needs to constantly convince others, and himself, presumably, that he is the greatest in whatever the topic under discussion is. He knows more about military strategy than the generals, disputes the findings of American intelligence services, refutes the veracity of reporting that shows statements he makes on live TV, brags about his unlimited powers under Article Two of a constitution he has certainly never read and professes expertise in many other things things he knows nothing about.
One thing he does know, probably better than anybody in public life, if you have powerful forces and a ton of money behind you and you lie continually, audaciously and forcefully, you can get away with almost anything — as he has so far.
I won’t say that people who believe Trump’s continual lies are necessarily stupid, though some undoubtedly are. It is the rage and powerlessness so many of us feel in an in-your-face unfair America that Trump exploits with his most incendiary lies, like one seen by five million people on Facebook recently: Joe Biden gave the Ukrainians a billion dollars to cover up the corruption involved in Hunter Biden’s lucrative job in Ukraine. It may not be true, it may be demonstrably false, in fact, but, goddamn it, Biden is a smiling sack of shit! (I may agree with this [1], though it doesn’t convince me that he managed to raise a billion dollars to pay off corrupt Ukrainians to protect his son’s name and his own political career — the claim itself is absurd).
Why does Facebook allow this kind of obvious tinfoil hat conspiracy theory slander, in a paid ad, on its immensely influential platform? Zuckerberg was grilled about this before Congress recently. He managed to avoid giving a single intelligent answer to any of the questions he was asked. He has no answers because — Madam Congressman, I have no legal requirement to give an answer or even a reasonable rationale since, in fact, the law finds, I believe, that I am under no legal obligation, as CEO of the world’s most powerful influence machine, to do anything but tap dance here, under oath, until this very uncomfortable session is over.
Which is true. American deference to billionaire owners of lucrative companies is well-known. Regulation of any kind, the lobbyists for such people and entities have convinced Americans, is inherently “job killing”. Those who propose to regulate industry for the public good, and tax fairly to raise money for programs that improve the lives of all citizens, are misguided at best. “Tax and Spend” was a Reagan era mantra against any elected “liberal” official suggesting the government should tax wealthy people and corporations and use the money to fund things like research into how to avoid the climate catastrophe that is now upon us full-blown a few decades later. “Welfare queens” driving around in Cadillacs and buying multiple mansions on the public dime were the real problem in America, according to the conservative view, not intergenerational poverty, not born multimillionaires like Charles and David Koch spending unlimited sums and using every means possible to shift public opinion to create mass support for protection of their abhorrent privilege.
People with shameful things to hide hate leakers, whistleblowers, rats. A leaking rat secretly recorded Mark Zuckerberg recently as he candidly addressed his troops at Facebook and the CEO’s comments made it into public. Part of the transcript was his response to what would happen to the company if someone like Elizabeth Warren, who expressly seeks to regulate gigantic, unaccountable companies like Facebook, becomes the Democratic presidential candidate and wins in 2020. Zuck said they’d bring a lawsuit against the government to prevent any regulation of Facebook’s incredibly lucrative operation:
“Does that still suck for us? Yeah, I mean, I don’t want to have a major lawsuit against our own government. That’s not like the position you want to be in. We care about our country and want to work with our government to do good things, but look, at the end of the day, if someone’s going to try to threaten something that existential, you go to the mat and you fight.”
What is the thing that is “that existential”? Facebook’s CEO’s absolute God-given American right to make maximum profit by any means necessary. There is no shame in America about a man who has thousands of times more money than he can ever spend if he lives to be a thousand years old from doing everything in his power to get more still. It’s as American as, well, owning other humans to increase your wealth and wiping out people living on land you want for your own.
Like slavery and ‘ethnic cleansing’, the cult of American oligarchs’ (even self-made ones like young Mark Zuckerberg) right to unlimited, unlimitable wealth has to become a relic of a more bestial time — or just stick a fork in any notion of truth, justice and the American way. Trump’s election was largely achieved through his mastery of “Social Media” and his billionaire-backed campaign’s brilliance in securing 78,000 targeted votes in every district needed for their Electoral College victory. Trump in 2020 is, literally, the end of any pretense of democracy in our divided experiment in republican self-rule.
We learn that political advertising accounts for only a tiny fraction of Facebook’s robust profits. That’s clearly not the reason Zuckberg won’t limit unscrupulous politicians’ right to pay to lie their asses off on his platform. That type of lying politician is least likely to want to regulate Facebook, they love Facebook as much as Trump claimed to love Wikileaks when he was a candidate.
The choice between a long, expensive court fight with a government headed by someone who wants to limit the ability of lying demagogues to use an unregulated, hugely influential public platform to come to power and having a lying demagogue in power who will ensure mutually beneficial business as usual? You decide which of those sucks less for Free Speech Mark.
[1] Though my first thought about Biden as a smiling sack of shit is his disgraceful lack of humility and character, decades after allowing Anita Hill to be publicly humiliated in confirmation hearings for Clarence “Long Dong” Thomas, when he called to offer a conditional, weak, politically motivated non-apology to Anita Hill for “what they did to you” and wishing he “could have done more”, which, of course, as chairman of the Judiciary Committee he had been utterly powerless to do. Anita Hill was perfectly right to refuse his insulting “apology”. Fuck him and the horse’s ass the falsely smiling face-lifted, hair-plugged fuck rode in on.
We never study this part of our history
Americans are famously unconcerned with history. Even recent history is quickly forgotten, dismissed as “been there, done that.” The president’s controversial acts are forgotten almost as quickly as he commits them. All that skullduggery detailed in the Mueller Report? Old news! We heard about it already, the president openly and innocently admitted it, the partisan witch hunt completely and totally exonerated the poor guy! We look forward here in America, not back, like Obama so high-mindedly did with state-sanctioned American torture that was rebranded as “enhanced interrogation” for purposes of immunizing American torturers. “We tortured some folks,” admitted the president, citing the best of intentions with which good Americans unfortunately did these admittedly wrong things, and we moved on. America, land of opportunity.
I heard this report, of the hundredth anniversary of a racial slaughter in rural Arkansas, one among many in our bloody history of racial violence, a racist slaughter I’d never heard of. I’m an American who takes history seriously, and I’ve read a good bit of it over the years, but I’d never heard of this particular massacre. Oddly, like the racist bloodbath in Colfax, Louisiana on Easter Sunday eight years after the end of the Civil War, it didn’t appear in any of the books I read in school [1].
The Elaine Massacre took place during the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, at a time when some very fine people (including progressive president Woodrow Wilson) were recasting the history of the Confederacy’s bloody rebellion against the federal government as a glorious lost cause for the highest of ideals. The Civil War, American history students were taught for decades, had not been fought over the constitutionally protected right of the wealthy to own slaves (as every Confederate state’s articles of secession stated) but for “States’ Rights” — local sovereignty, something everyone wants and is sympathetic to. MAGA, baby. [2]
I only know about the Elaine massacre because Amy Goodman reported, on October 1:
This week marks the 100th anniversary of the Elaine massacre, when white vigilantes in Arkansas massacred hundreds of African Americans in one of the deadliest incidents of racial violence in the nation’s history. The massacre began after black sharecroppers attempted to organize with the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America to demand higher pay for cotton. A new memorial to the victims of the massacre was recently unveiled in the county seat of Helena, Arkansas.
Sure, you can look it up now, in the age of instant information, and find the story documented somewhere (but only, of course, if you learn about it in the first place, somehow):
The sharecroppers who gathered at a small church in Elaine, Arkansas, in the late hours of September 30, 1919, knew the risk they were taking. Upset about unfair low wages, they enlisted the help of a prominent white attorney from Little Rock, Ulysses Bratton, to come to Elaine to press for a fairer share in the profits of their labor. Each season, landowners came around demanding obscene percentages of the profits, without ever presenting the sharecroppers detailed accounting and trapping them with supposed debts.
(you will have to overlook the unintended irony of the article’s anodyne title: The Massacre of Black Sharecroppers That Led the Supreme Court to Curb the Racial Disparities of the Justice System — yah, mon, they curbed that shit back in 1923…)
You can also learn things more troubling still, from the same article:
Despite its impact, little about the carnage in Elaine was unique during the summer of 1919. It was part of a period of vicious reprisals against African-American veterans returning home from World War I. Many whites believed that these veterans (including Robert Hill, who co-founded PFHUA) posed a threat as they claimed greater recognition for their rights at home. Even though they served in large numbers, black soldiers “realized over the course of the war and in the immediate aftermath that their achievement and their success actually provoked more rage and more vitriol than if they had utterly failed,” says Adriane Lentz-Smith, associate professor of history at Duke University and author of Freedom Struggles: African Americans and World War I.
And as to the fate of the twelve black men convicted and sentenced to death for the alleged murders of the whites who died in the pogrom (the African-American men were the only ones prosecuted in relation to the Elaine massacre in which virtually all of the victims were African-American), this interesting footnote, from the same article (which leads to the title referred to above):
In February 1923, by a 6-2 margin, the Court agreed. Citing the all-white jury, lack of opportunity to testify, confessions under torture, denial of change of venue and the pressure of the mob, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote for the majority that “if the case is that the whole proceeding is a mask – that counsel, jury and judge were swept to the fatal end by an irresistible wave of public passion,” then it was the duty of the Supreme Court to intervene as guarantor of the petitioners’ constitutional rights where the state of Arkansas had failed.
Tulsa, Oklahoma . We’ve got a couple of years until the centennial of that massive anti-black rampage.
I think about my concern with this American denial of our history and wonder if maybe I’m just oversensitive because of my peculiar family history. My father’s side of the family back in Belarus (then known as White Russia) was wiped out by the Nazis with no trace of what happened to them. My mother’s side lived in a Ukrainian town where local Jews from neighboring areas were assembled in a makeshift ghetto and finally led to a ravine on the northwestern edge of town where several thousand were executed one August night by bullet to the back of the skull. One searches the internet in vain for any listing of this massacre among the many Nazi massacres of World War Two. Go figure.
The family of everybody slaughtered during the Elaine pogrom, the Colfax pogrom, the Tulsa pogrom, surely remembers the people they lost a few generations back, murdered by violent strangers who acted with no fear of legal repercussions. You tend not to forget that kind of thing, if it happens to you.
Forget history at your own peril, my friends.
[1] There was a footnote in the Constitutional law casebook I had in law school to a case called U.S. v. Cruikshank. A single line, citing it as a precedent for a more famous case, the aptly named Slaughterhouse cases. Cruikshank arose out of the organized slaughter of black men, women and children in a rural town in Louisiana. (you will get no sense of the horrific underlying events reading the Supreme Court’s dry, legalistic whitewash that signaled the judicial end of the Ku Klux Klan Act which became unenforceable in light of the Cruikshank decision).
Armed black Civil War veterans were defending ballot boxes in the county seat of rural Grant Parish after the 1872 election (one of the last with wide scale black voting in the former Confederacy until after passage of the Voting Rights Act almost a century later) which was angrily disputed by local whites. Local whites (led by Cruikshank, et al) arrived in droves, an armed militia, with at least one cannon, and committed atrocities including the murder of prisoners who had surrendered.
There was clearly no chance for a fair trial in the state court, so the families of the victims, and civil rights advocates, sued in federal court, under the Ku Klux Klan Act, and things went no better for them there. Cruikshank and the other killers walked, the Supreme Court found the federal charges against the local whites had been inartfully drafted. The little remembered Cruikshank decision set an unshakeable precedent, was instrumental in instituting a century of “states’ rights”, giving local authorities the final say in how to deal with violence against its local troublemaking Negroes and those carpetbagging scoundrels from up north. Here’s the Smithsonian’s account of the Colfax Massacre.
And racist monument makers get the last word, in 1951:
[
2] “Make America Great Again” was one of Ronald Reagan’s several campaign slogans during his first successful presidential run. A young Roger Stone, who has a life-sized image of Nixon’s head tattooed on his back, was part of Reagan’s campaign and profited handsomely afterwards as a pioneering lobbyist with direct access to the highest elected officials he’d help put into office. Stone later became one of Trump’s closest advisers and is, you might recall, awaiting trial for a string of shady dealings on the president’s behalf. Not much has been heard from the provocative loudmouth lately, now that I think of it. Stone’s idol Nixon, incidentally, was the first to refer to an impeachment as a “partisan witch hunt.”
Projection 101
Whenever a certain type of bully is accused of anything, he levels the same charge at the accuser. It is classic projection, the thing feared is denied and projected on to the other person. So we have a reality TV president who is quick with the unfounded accusations (about things that apply to himself) and gleeful in attaching catchy nicknames to his enemies. Crooked Hillary, Lyin’ Ted, Low-Energy Jeb, Ugly Carly.
Shaking down the new, young president of a besieged ally for dirt on his political opponent, fellow thought-challenged dotard Joe Biden? President MAGA is honestly fighting corruption, you corruption loving fuck! Biden is the one who is corrupt, Trump is making America great again!!!
U.S. forces recently hunted down and killed a raping butcher named al Baghdadi. The president had these insightful things to say, in his rambling remarks following the successful mission to capture or kill this terrorist monster:
“The thug who tried so hard to intimidate others spent his last moments in utter fear, in total panic and dread — terrified of the American forces bearing down on him… he died after running into a dead-end tunnel, whimpering and crying and screaming all the way…”
Nobody knows where Trump got this information, there was no audio on the video he saw of the raid, no report of this whimpering, crying, screaming. Never mind, makes a good story for the base who loves this kind of thing, an enemy not only killed but utterly humiliated!
As for the ISIS leader’s followers:
“… the losers who worked with him — and losers they are — they had no idea what they were getting into. In some cases they were very frightened puppies, in other cases they were hard-core killers…”
Losers. Frightened puppies. A bully who spent his last moments in utter fear, in total panic and dread, whimpering and crying and screaming all the way.
Remember those stage directions, we will be seeing them again, if justice is not dead in the Koch Brothers’ anti-majoritarian America.
“High Crimes and Misdemeanors” does not mean “indictable crimes”
This great article explains the crucial difference between an indictable crime and the deliberately flexible constitutional standard “high crimes and misdemeanors” for purposes of impeachment.
The president’s ongoing defense to the impeachment inquiry (and everything else he is busily tying up in courts with his army of lawyers) is that he has not committed a chargeable criminal act, and even if he did (as in shooting someone on Fifth Avenue) he argues that he cannot be arrested, investigated or indicted because of a DOJ opinion stating that a sitting president cannot be indicted.
It’s a simplistic defense that ignores the long history of impeachment, the meaning of “high crimes and misdemeanors” as the Framers used it, and, beyond all that, the ethical standard we hold our presidents to, even the worst of them.
Here’s a paragraph from that article that I found cool, and timely:
Finally, and most pertinently, the House Judiciary Committee approved three articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon: the first for obstruction of justice, the second for abuse of power, and the third for defying House subpoenas during its impeachment investigation. Article 3 obviously did not allege a crime. But even in the first two articles, which did involve some potentially criminal conduct, the committee was at pains to avoid any reference to criminal statutes. Rather, as the committee staff observed in its careful study of the question, “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” is a phrase that reaches far beyond crimes to embrace “exceeding the powers of the office in derogation of those of another branch of government,” “behaving in a manner grossly incompatible with the proper function of the office,” and “employing the power of the office for an improper purpose or personal gain.”
Take a few moments and read the article, by law professor Frank O. Bowman III. Bowman makes his point clearly — that the term of art is deliberately flexible to cover unimagined rascalities. He illustrates his point with numerous historical citations. It’s easy to read, interesting and a very persuasive presentation.
Refusing to comply with Congressional subpoenas is not a crime anyone can be charged with, but it is a ‘high crime and misdemeanor’ for purposes of impeachment where the standard is really abuse of power.
Comparing Trumpists to Nazis
Publicly calling a fellow American a Nazi is generally considered out of bounds in today’s America. It’s as bad as calling someone a nigger, a kyke, a faggot, a cunt or a motherfucker. It’s kind of a credibility destroying deal-breaker here, to call a political opponent a Nazi, no matter how obnoxious, irrational or lawless that political opponent might be.
It’s true that the current president famously compared the FBI and the CIA, U.S. intelligence agencies, to Nazis, but he just says things in anger and nobody gets too excited about his puffery, exaggeration, distortion, lying. He’s a salesman and he’s always selling the one product he has to sell: himself. He’s sui generis, you know, and that’s putting it as elegantly as I can. His evangelical supporters call him a flawed vessel for God’s will, he is definitely that too, I suppose (if you imagine God’s will as those who support Trump do). He routinely gets away with things no past presidential candidate or president ever imagined surviving politically.
But for more responsible public actors, comparing fellow Americans to Nazis is generally out of bounds. After all, the Nazis were directly responsible for the deaths of many millions of people, probably more than 20,000,000 [1] during one of the darkest periods in recent history. The Nazis set up mechanized death camps where they mass-murdered millions on industrial assembly lines. The Nazis were fucking Nazis, the historical gold standard for evil operating under cover of state action. Josef Goebbels said if they won the Nazis would be remembered as history’s greatest benefactors, if they lost– history’s greatest criminals. They lost, kind of, though their fighting spirit fights on in the hearts of those filled with righteous rage for their holy cause.
In limited contexts it’s fine to compare people to Nazis in American politics. In a pinch, to convince Americans to go to war for no reason anyone can comprehend, you can compare Manuel Noriega to Hitler, or Saddam — another “modern-day Hitler” — that’s fine, though it’s generally out of bounds for one American to call another a Nazi. But call a dictator a Nazi, Hitler, then the choice is simple: do you stand up to this Hitler or do you bend your knee like the cowardly Neville Chamberlain?
Beto O’Rourke recently compared the Trump administration to Nazis. He meant they are ruthless, blindly loyal to their unhinged leader, obstructionist, they routinely lie, they incite violence and hatred, they have utter contempt for anything but “winning”, maintaining their grip on power O’Rourke was challenged on the comparison. He had a good response: give me a better comparison.
Personally, I don’t have one. Reading about the Nazi regime, the cult of personality built around the infallible Mr. Hitler, I am reminded over and over of how the Trump administration operates and what it is trying to do, in many cases succeeding in doing. If Trump survives impeachment and is reelected in 2020, American democracy is pretty much over. He will have vindicated the principle that one man, if he is great enough, may flout every law and ethical norm to instill his vision, by force of his will, on the nation he rules. Let’s take a quick stroll through the familiar terrain of his rise and his rule.
Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III was the first U.S. Senator to openly endorse Donald Trump’s candidacy. He stood on stage with Trump, at a time when Trump still was an unthinkably clownish long-shot candidate, and introduced him as the next president of the United States. As a reward for his great loyalty Trump made Sessions, a man too racist to be confirmed to the federal bench, Attorney General, the nation’s top law enforcement official.
Once confirmed, Sessions got busy talking about God, and how he’d crack down on marijuana using the draconian federal laws Nixon wrote, and how Trump answers to a higher power than ordinary politicians and how he must be obeyed, how there was absolutely no racist pattern to voter suppression schemes after the Supreme Court curtailed the Voting Rights Act and so on. He spouted a lot of crap. But when he was called out, in open testimony, under oath, for having been untruthful about his contacts with Russians during the campaign and transition, he listened to ethics advice from the professionals at the Department of Justice and recused himself from the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
Now the story kicks into another gear. Trump was enraged by this “betrayal” by Sessions. Sessions, according to Trump, had not taken a principled stance as required by law and professional ethics, he’d acted like a weakling, instead of being like Roy Cohn, a powerful Pit-bull who’d do whatever was necessary to win, including taking an open, greasy dump on the law (Cohn was eventually, years too late, disbarred for his corruption, but that’s a trifle). Trump humiliated Sessions regularly, mocking him publicly as a wimp, imitating his southern accent, his squeamish fealty to weak-ass “liberal” things like so-called law and ethics.
Then, to be concise in hitting just a few highlights of the way Trump goes about his business, Trump fired FBI director Jim Comey when Comey wouldn’t declare his personal loyalty to Trump and “let the Flynn thing go”. When Deputy A.G., Rod Rosenstein, overseeing the probe into Russian interference in the closely contested 2016 election, was forced to appoint a Special Prosecutor, Trump went ballistic, blaming and eventually forcing Sessions to resign, after making repeated attempts to get Sessions to “unrecuse” and limit the scope of Mueller’s investigation.
Mueller wound up writing a whole volume of his report detailing and analyzing Trump’s many efforts to obstruct justice, though Mueller refrained from drawing any prosecutorial conclusions, pursuant to a DOJ directive and for reasons of bending over backwards to appear scrupulously fair.
Mueller’s investigation resulted in numerous indictments and several convictions of close Trump associates and found “sweeping and systematic” Russian election interference on behalf of Trump. The Republican senate recently released a report coming to the same conclusion: Russians had done everything possible to tilt the 2016 presidential election to the candidate who won.
What to do? Find an Attorney General who will act like Roy Cohn, do whatever is necessary to protect the leader/client. The A.G., after all, in Trump’s view, is the president’s most important body guard. He’s in charge of all law enforcement on a federal level. He says what’s a federal crime and what’s pure commie bullshit and a conspiratorial partisan witch hunt against a totally innocent man. Enter the pathetic porcine puppet of this puerile president [2], a debased lawyer of the Antonin Scalia school, with a God-driven worldview based, perversely, on what he believes Jesus would do — if Jesus was a xenophobic privileged white seventy year-old.
How do you defend a president as apparently corrupt and incapable of not lying as this Donald Trump character? You take his lead, the boss has genius marketing instincts. Trump repeatedly said the Mueller probe was a partisan witch hunt that would totally exonerate him. Barr agreed, made the counter-factual call that the report exonerated Trump of everything. Trump said the vicious partisan “Deep State” traitors who initiated the “politically motivated” investigation (that came to the same conclusions about Russian interference the Republican senate did) to overturn the will of 78,000 strategically perfect voters and their Electors, should be criminally investigated and punished for treason, for being spies! Barr agreed and now Barr’s Department of Justice has initiated a criminal investigation into the Department of Justice.
During Hitler’s “Thousand Year Reich” not a word of the liberal Weimar Constitution was ever changed, once Emergency Powers were invoked pursuant to a Patriot Act-style vote in the German parliament. No change to the democratic blueprint was necessary, everything was down to enforcement by Nazi police, the decisions of Nazi judges in Nazi courts. German law enforcement was headed by Hermann Goering for a while, when he wasn’t too whacked out on drugs, then more sober men like Heinrich Himmler stepped into the void. There is never a shortage of supremely ambitious men to step into fateful roles next to the most powerful men in the world.
Barr starting a criminal investigation of his own agency, in what universe does that seem remotely impartial, fair or just? Only one that I can think of off-hand, though one is, of course, reluctant to call even these lawless motherfuckers Nazis.
[1] World War Two fun facts:
WORLDWIDE CASUALTIES*
| Battle Deaths | 15,000,000 |
| Battle Wounded | 25,000,000 |
| Civilian Deaths | 45,000,000 |
*Worldwide casualty estimates vary widely in several sources. The number of civilian deaths in China alone might well be more than 50,000,000.
[2] tip of the yarmulke to Laurence Tribe for that apt, alliterative aspersion.
Learning or not learning
An old friend was lamenting the other night how many years it has taken him to learn the most basic things about being a kind person. How to overcome the ready reflex to react violently to provocation, for example [1]. I commiserated, that kind of transformation is not accomplished overnight, if at all, particularly if you grew up regularly under attack in a family war zone. On the other hand, struggling to be a more compassionate person is the right thing to do and whatever progress we make benefits those we love as much as it benefits us.
We’re taught many things as children that are not only wrong, but do great damage to our young souls, damage we’re often compelled to pass on to others who don’t deserve to be mistreated. Every abusive person in the world was subjected to abuse as a young person. It doesn’t excuse the asshole behavior, but it makes it understandable. Nobody becomes a bully unless they grew up in fear, humiliated and shamed regularly.
I reminded my friend at one point of something he’d long ago forgotten, a random moment of kindness he had no reason to remember, but one that made a deep impression on me. That moment showed me, more clearly than anything up until that time, that there was a gentle beauty to life that had been largely hidden from me during a combative childhood defending myself against an antagonist who waited until the last night of his life to express sorrow and regret for the lifelong war he’d always blamed me for. The random act of my friends’ kindness opened my eyes to how nurturing and healing real gentleness is.
I reminded my friend of that long ago day at the lake (which I wrote about here) and he had only the vaguest memory of it. He recalled taunting me, at one point, until I laid back on the rock, a crust of bread held between my lips, and waited for the beaked kiss of a hungry Canadian goose. The aggressive birds had surrounded us during lunch, looking for some lunch. He’d been doing it, and laughing as the birds snatched the bread from his mouth, and urging me to try it, but I’d resisted. He called me a pussy in front of two female friends, “PUSSY!” he taunted, and like a true pussy, I put a crust of bread in my lips, laid back and waited for the hungry kiss of a large bird. It was pretty cool. I then reminded him about swimming in the lake and Audrey, who he’d only met that one time, and I fondly praised her as a great girl, talented, funny, cute, sensuous.
“Why didn’t you stay with her?” my friend asked, hearing the obvious affection I had for her.
I explained that at the time I was still way too immature to know how to handle somebody as damaged as Audrey also was. I loved hearing her laugh, her touch, her beautiful singing voice, many great things about her, but I was too big an asshole, still, at age thirty or so, to know how to take care of the parts of her (or myself) that were so broken.
She gave me stern advice one day, late in our friendship, and I resisted what she was telling me. She pressed on, telling me that she wasn’t telling me anything she didn’t also tell herself. I smirked and told her, with a bit too much coldness, that the things she told herself included “put your head in the oven and inhale the gas” and “take the razor blade into the bathtub and end this suffering.” I said, if somebody told me those things, I’d defend myself violently against them.
That wasn’t the point, of course. I managed to reject her advice, and win that little round of an ongoing disagreement, but the cruelty was unnecessary, and damaging. She had struggled against suicide (and I hope never afterwards succumbed to the urge to do herself in, I haven’t heard of her for decades now) and prevailed more than once against a self-destructive tic I could not relate to. Others might kill me, and I’d fight them about that, but I won’t ever raise my hand against myself (unless, perhaps, I am in unbearable pain in the final stage of a terminal disease). Those things might all be true, but it was very mean of me to use them against her like that. At that time I was simply too hardened against critical voices, even if they were right, and too intent on being right.
The world of hurt in Audrey’s heart, the pain that sometimes made her want to die? I had no way to touch it. I could make her laugh, I could make love with her, I could accompany her on guitar when she sang and played the flute, but beyond that, I was pretty much clueless.
What we learn, I don’t know how we do it. I’ve sometimes thought that the things that trouble us most make us think deeply about them (if we are wired that way, denial is probably a more common response) and look for insights into how to have less pain. Pain, of course, is famous for distorting our thinking beyond endurance.
Look at the tens of thousands of deaths of despair every year in America: suicide by gun, drunk driving, drug overdoses. There is no help for this kind of hopelessness in a nation that divides the world into great winners and fucking losers. We can learn to repudiate this false, asshole version of the world, though it is not easy. “Winning” is really about the love and kindness we have in our lives, everything else is deliberately misleading advertising. If you live without much love in your life you know this, if you live with a lot of love, you know this too.
How do we learn anything? I don’t know, even as I know I’ve learned some important things over the years. Some things we learn without effort, because we love them, are fascinated by them, drawn to them, can’t help improving because we are involved in them all the time, curious, thrilled by them. If you love the sound an instrument makes, for example, and how it feels to play that instrument, odds are you will get better and better playing it. If you love to draw, you will draw all the time, and if you do, you will get better and better at it. Writing, same deal. Critical thinking may also be in this category– finding and assembling the facts to figure puzzling things out.
But the really hard emotional stuff — how not to behave like our earliest role models? How not to blame ourselves for the cruelty that’s sometimes inflicted on us? How not to be tortured by fear? How to remain mild, and as kind as we can, even when we feel hurt? Very hard things, all of them.
I don’t know that I have a nice bow to tie this up with. I don’t. Life rarely includes real closure, or black and white changes that are beyond dispute. In our war-torn world, nothing is beyond dispute, if you are willing to fight to the death over it. Our current president is the perfect example of this: never wrong, always justified, always perfect. Angry too, of course, because he is so innocent and lives in a corrupt world with so much wrong, so many enemies unjustifiably hellbent against him, everything so imperfect.
The changes my friend and I discussed the other night are sometimes subtle, other times impossible to see at all. We still react with anger when we feel provoked, but we probably react with less anger at times. We still are unable to do much to heal the hurt in people we love, but we are better at it than we were. We have learned a few important things, after many, many years. I congratulate my friend for this learning, even as I commiserate about the hard road he is on, has always been on. It is, of course, much easier simply to remain an asshole.
[1] If there is a harder trick, for somebody who was subjected to abuse as a child, I’m not sure what it is.
How Not To Worry
Sekhnet, who calls herself a “recreational worrier”, worries that I don’t worry enough.
Now I know that the only way to stop worrying about what might happen is to make sure it doesn’t!
(I’m still not worried about the fact that the knife above would not actually close without leaving a sharp point sticking out of the handle)
The “Deep State”
I first heard this term five years ago during an interview Bill Moyers conducted with a former Republican congressional staffer named Mike Lofgren. Below is a link to that interview and Lofgren’s capsule definition of the Deep State:
Mike Lofgren, a former GOP congressional staff member with the powerful House and Senate Budget Committees, joins Bill to talk about what he calls the Deep State, a hybrid of corporate America and the national security state, which is “out of control” and “unconstrained.” In it, Lofgren says, elected and unelected figures collude to protect and serve powerful vested interests.
“It is … the red thread that runs through the history of the last three decades. It is how we had deregulation, financialization of the economy, the Wall Street bust, the erosion or our civil liberties and perpetual war,” Lofgren tells Bill.
Spokesmen for this powerful Deep State have weaponized the terms for the discussion of anything in America. They have, by crude yet masterful redirection, redefined the term Deep State itself to mean a sinister conspiracy among career public servants, the people of the diplomatic corps, long-serving members of American intelligence and law enforcement agencies, other nonpartisan federal government employees.
“Unelected career bureaucrats” spits our president, referring to disloyal rats who hate the freedom of our greatest citizens to deregulate, financialize the economy, protect criminal practices on Wall Street, limit civil liberties (for dissidents and terrorists) and engage in extremely lucrative permanent war. These unelected career bureaucrats show their hatred by personal acts of disloyalty to the duly elected president. They do this because the Deep State hates our freedom (that part is true, it just depends on whose freedom we are discussing, the 1%’s freedom to acquire unlimited wealth without regulation of any kind or everybody else’s freedom). In the old days we called these evil fuckers what they have been called for eons “The Jews” — the devils who control everything hateful and oppressive in the world.
We have a loud-mouthed, hyper-opinionated president now charging our career public servants with partisan bias and treason and his handlers have seized on the catchy term “Deep State” to describe this organized conspiracy trying to overturn the electoral mandate that swept our democratically elected president into office, with his historically svelte, ingeniously engineered 78,000 Electoral College margin, a groundswell of popular support. This Deep State, says our populist billionaire president, wants to make rats out of loyal partisans, is like the Nazis in its determination to lynch our greatest president — (if not outright put him in a vernichtungslager), illegally demands documents and testimony trying to prove some imaginary crime, acting like a bunch of lawless hooligans. The Deep State, according to our president, is a lynch mob.
Alternative facts, ladies and gentlemen.
A hybrid of the corporate powers (and their unlimited lobbying and political campaign money– they can actually purchase legislators, and are backed legally by long-time corporatists like Chief Justice John Roberts) and the national security state (the expansive secret, sometimes illegal surveillance state exposed by Edward Snowden and his ilk), our actual American Deep State — the public-private partnership for the enrichment of the few– has been in increasingly profitable business for more than a century.
The ongoing use of the American military and covert intelligence agencies in the service of corporate interests is well-known, even if little discussed. As retired Marine general Smedley Butler [1], “The Fighting Quaker”, said after a career fighting in the Philippines, China, in Central America and the Caribbean during the Banana Wars, and France in World War I:
I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer; a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have givenAl Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.
Don’t let the so-called facts fool you. Listen to your duly elected president, who loves you. He loves you! The Deep State is actually the unelected career bureaucrats who are treasonously defying presidential orders to dummy up, give no testimony, provide no documents to Congress. These are disloyal, traitorous people who nobody elected, unlike the best, the most loyal people the president has placed in the most powerful positions in the Executive Branch. Excellent, unimpeachably great people like Mick Mulvaney, Bill Barr, Mike “first in his class” Pompeo, Steve Mnuchin, Betsey DeVos, Rudy.
Who are you going to believe, a brilliant president who lies publicly many times a day, or a bunch of disgruntled Deep State operatives who treacherously defy his orders to show how much they hate democracy? COME ON, AMERICA!
[1] Smedley Butler:
In 1933, he became involved in a controversy known as the Business Plot, when he told a congressional committee that a group of wealthy industrialists were planning a military coup to overthrow Franklin D. Roosevelt, with Butler selected to lead a march of veterans to become dictator, similar to Fascist regimes at that time. The individuals involved all denied the existence of a plot and the media ridiculed the allegations, but a final report by a special House of Representatives Committee confirmed some of Butler’s testimony.
In 1935, Butler wrote a book titled War Is a Racket, where he described and criticized the workings of the United States in its foreign actions and wars, such as those in which he had been involved, including the American corporations and other imperialist motivations behind them. After retiring from service, he became a popular advocate, speaking at meetings organized by veterans, pacifists, and church groups in the 1930s.
Totally Fake News Photo
