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Understanding Trump’s Obstruction
In order to prove obstruction of justice, a prosecutor must prove corrupt intent. This intent to thwart an investigation can be hard to prove [1], though, unless you are a supporter of the president’s, it is pretty clear that the president’s actions were (and are) motivated by the lifelong scofflaw’s desire to block anything he thinks could harm him.
I found this podcast, an episode of NPR’s Embedded (which I’d heard when it came out) fascinating to listen to again. Particularly in light of the additional information that Mueller’s investigators uncovered about Trump’s mood and behavior on finding out that he was under investigation.
We now know that on May 17, 2017, the president was greatly alarmed to learn that a Special Counsel had been appointed, in spite of his firing of National Security Advisor Mike Flynn and, when he wouldn’t let the Flynn investigation go, fucking Jim Comey. The president’s famous words to Sessions, McGahn and others in the Oval Office should really be more famous:
“Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my presidency. I’m fucked!”
Clearly the words of an innocent man, arguably, but no matter. With a slight majority in the Senate the man has no fear of being removed from office, no matter how much evidence is stacked up against him by any real and theoretical House investigations. Trump’s policies endear him to wealthy conservative campaign financiers, particularly his huge tax gift to America’s wealthiest and most deserving and his packing the federal courts (with the indispensable help of zero sum obstructionist Mitch McConnell, who refused to let Obama fill vacancies as they came up) with conservative, Federalist Society-vetted jurists. These accomplishments, by themselves, are enough reason for Republicans to hold the line, even if Articles of Impeachment emerge from the House, even if the evidence of Trump’s corrupt intent and ultimate guilt of obstruction of justice and other crimes is overwhelming.
Like I said, this February 2018 podcast is fascinating to hear. It lays out a pretty decent case for the president’s corrupt intent and shows cause and effect quite clearly. I know this is all considered OLD NEWS, particularly for a populace trained to respond only to BREAKING NEWS, but it is important news. It is also important EVIDENCE. It’s amazing how strong a case is laid out by this investigative team more than a year before the Mueller Report fleshed out much of this with sworn quotes from witnesses and participants.
From Mueller we learn that on May 17th Sessions received a call from his deputy A.G., Trump appointee Rod Rosenstein (who, after Mueller filed his ‘inconclusive’ report, resigned with obsequious curtsies to Trump) informing him that he had appointed a Special Counsel. Sessions informed Trump, who promptly lost his shit. Trump felt betrayed by two men he’d handpicked and appointed to lead the Justice Department, men he’d trusted to be loyal and protect him.
Trump yelled at loyal Alabama racist Jeff Sessions for following DOJ ethics advisors instead of being Trump’s loyal consigliere, his Roy Cohn, his Robert Kennedy. In Trump’s mind Sessions traitorously refused to undo his recusal, a failure that allowed a “witch hunt” against him to continue. This witch hunt jeopardized Trump’s presidency and aggravated Trump no end. Sessions clearly honored the legal standard for recusal — the appearance of impropriety — in Sessions’ case a glaring appearance of impropriety. Trump snarled at Sessions about how he failed to protect Trump from first Comey and now Mueller. After lambasting Sessions he returns to his predicament:
“Everyone tells me if you get one of these independent counsels it ruins your presidency. It takes years and years and I won’t be able to do anything. This is the worst thing that ever happened to me.”
From Mueller report, page 290.
Clearly the same words would possibly be spoken by an innocent man, arguably, but Trump’s actions after uttering these words point strongly to consciousness of guilt, his corrupt intent.
Around this time he casually admitted on TV that he would have fired Comey (who pressed on investigating Mike Flynn’s contacts with Russia and his perjury to FBI investigators) without the letters he had Rosenstein and Sessions write (letters that recommended Comey’s firing based on his mishandling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails). Trump intended, several times over the course of the Special Counsel’s investigation, to fire Mueller and shut down and/or obstruct the investigation. He did this in numerous ways, as laid out in Mueller’s executive summary, the one Bagpiper Bill Barr refused to release for several weeks, a month. The president made his intention to end the “witch hunt” clear over and over, as reported in Mueller’s report, as described in the Embedded podcast more than a year before even Barr’s summary of Mueller’s report was released.
Only a rare genius of obstruction and evasion like Bagpiper Bill Barr could spin his boss’s corrupt-looking intent as the innocent, totally understandable motive of a wrongly accused man angry and frustrated about a partisan witch hunt. But that spin would come a year after this great podcast came out.
Here is the host of the Embedded podcast:
MCEVERS: People who believe Trump obstructed justice say he basically tried to influence, slow down or even stop the Russia investigation in his interactions with Comey and with some other people. And the deal with obstruction is even if the Russia investigation turns up nothing on Trump – if there’s no there there, as Trump and his party insist, he can still be found to have obstructed justice. Like, you can obstruct a thing that doesn’t turn out to be a thing. Trump supporters say the idea that he obstructed anything is ridiculous. And they say Trump’s just an unorthodox president who does things like a New York City real estate developer. We should say right here at the beginning that Trump’s lawyers declined our request for an interview.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MCEVERS: So what we’re going to do today is lay out a bunch of key moments over the first year of Trump’s presidency – basically, everything we know that could be considered evidence of possible obstruction – a lot of these big, major news stories that pop up on your TV and your news feed – so that when you hear the next headline about obstruction of justice, you’ll know what it means because this part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, this is the one that some legal experts say might actually be adding up to a case against the president.
The host asks the DOJ correspondent to define obstruction of justice:
MCEVERS: (Laughter) All right. To start off with, why don’t you just do what you can to describe what is obstruction of justice?
JOHNSON: So what it means is to attempt to impede or hinder some kind of investigation – a congressional investigation, an FBI investigation, a Justice Department investigation – with corrupt intent. So the law says you don’t have to succeed in derailing the investigation. You just have to try. But the key words there are corrupt intent – some kind of bad purpose. And it can be hard to prove that. Not everybody comes out and says I am firing this person because I want to jam up this investigation which is targeting me or my children. So you have to try to prove, if you’re a prosecutor, some kind of pattern of behavior and also a good reason – a good reason to tell the judge and eventually the jury about why this person would work so hard to jam up a federal investigation. That’s what an obstruction is.
Once again, apply Boof Kavanaugh’s mother’s judicial philosophy (I paraphrase):
Use common sense. What smells true and what smells like a pile of Bagpiper Bill’s steaming scats?
[1] recall that Bagpiper Bill Barr decided, and publicly insisted, that Trump’s intent was the intent of an innocent man honestly wishing to be done with a baseless partisan witch hunt against him and that his anger and frustration (both “acknowledged” by Mueller) were the proof of his innocence.
As was the case with the crying, angry, frustrated Boof Kavanaugh, unfairly crucified by left wing fringe billionaires who manufactured a story about a drunk prep school boy falling on to a younger girl and grabbing at her clothes.
Perspective and Losing It
Perspective:
I am a grown man, sitting in my shorts, tapping at a computer pretending I am a writer, though I make no effort to market and monetize my work. A tiny handful of people ever read even the very best things I write here. It is easy to see me as a sadly overgrown perpetual kid with an overactive imagination, childishly playing at being a serious adult writer. This is the case, of course, with anyone who doesn’t actively compete in the actual professional marketplace to find an audience and get paid for what is actually hard work. I write to communicate with others, I don’t write purely for myself, but this blahg is the next best thing (to writing purely for myself). My name is not even attached to these pieces. WTF?
I set up this blahg years ago (2012) in order to gain access to what turned out to be a very disappointing archive of so-called source material for Manning Marable’s problematic late 2011 biography of Malcolm X. Without giving it any thought, I set it up under my cat’s name, Oinsketta, and that is the author’s name you will see displayed here instead of my own. I don’t know how to change that, haven’t even really exerted myself to find out if it’s possible to change it. Even if you like these posts you will have to do some work to even figure out my name, something every writer in the world must promote.
All that is true. On the other hand, I generally see it from another perspective.
I live a contemplative life. It is not an ideal life for everyone, but my inner world is quite compelling to me. I can honestly say I don’t know what it feels like to be “bored”. I play guitar, ukulele and guitarlele (a very cool little six string guitar with a high voice– a 4th above guitar range) just about every day. Music is an important part of my life, playing it, keeping steady time, making each note ring as true as I can. I draw and lately have been practicing an idiosyncratic kind of calligraphy. I cannot refrain from this long graphomaniacal habit, nor do I know what to do with the output, and so every place I sit I am surrounded by an uncombed tangle of drawings. Both of these things, I guess, are forms of meditation. I think about nothing in particular as I play, and that is a beautiful thing.
When I write I am writing for you, the reader. I have something in mind whenever I sit down and I try to make it as clear as I can. I focus my thoughts in the most concentrated way I know, cutting through vagueness as well as I am able, editing with care to eliminate confusions that careless words can create.
There is value in the exercise for me, independent of the possible value to anyone who reads these posts, unrelated to money or fame. I am silently thinking out loud, really, when I sit here tapping out my thoughts and feelings. I have no need to burden people I know with something that vexes me, once I write it out to my satisfaction here. If someone is interested in my view I can send them a link. Writing itself, in order to put your thoughts in order, is a useful practice. I recommend it. We all know how to use words, this is an excellent use of words.
Most days this second way of thinking of my situation is my perspective as I sit down to write.
Today I just feel like a listless, immature 63 year-old asshole sitting in my shorts, writing nothing, for no reason, for nobody.
Luckily for me, I know this feeling will pass the next time I sit down with something burning me to work through and set out as clearly as I can.
Weekend Diversion
Since virtually no American (including me) is going to read the entire 448 page Mueller Report, a group of well-known Americans have decided to bring some of Mueller’s key findings to the public, dramatizing the report by reading juicy sections of it aloud. These Hollywood stars are doing a “table read” of sections of the report, bringing the words quoted on the page to life. Check the short clip out HERE, cued up for you. Kevin Kline plays Mueller and John Lithgow does Trump.
You can also peruse a searchable PDF version of the Mueller Report HERE . Many of these lines the actors read in the above clip come from page 290, on action packed May 17, 2017, the day Mueller was appointed Special Counsel, a day close presidential confidante Hope Hicks testified (to Mueller, not Congress, Trump’s lawyers saw to that) that she saw the president in a state she’d only seen him in once before, the day the “You Can Grab ’em by the Pussy” tape was released by Crooked Hillary. [1] May 17, 2017, months before the shameful 5-4 Supreme Court majority was cemented by the 51-49 confirmation of Choir Boy Boof Kavanaugh.
Ah, you know what? It’s the weekend, and I know how lazy we hardworking Americans are, so, no worries — here you go:
This was a problem, sir, but thankfully, with the removal of the weak Sessions and the genius appointment of skilled evader/obstructionist William “Bagpiper Bill” Barr, you have solved it– brilliantly.
There’s also this clear five minute hit piece by more of the desperate, spoiled Jewish-controlled Hollywood elite. Will it never end?
If you liked that one, here’s the follow-up about Obstruction.
Have a great weekend!
[1] In fairness to the president, it’s not like there are a hundred women accusing him of sexual assault, it’s not like a Bill Cosby situation. Remember, it is a mere twenty-two women — (all, according to the accused, vicious, lying, low IQ, ugly women who wish someone as handsome and powerful as Trump would flatter them with some sexual interest. It doesn’t take Bill Barr to spin that one for you!)
Pogrom (and the ignored lessons of history)
Pogrom: Kishniev and the Tilt of History by Steven J. Zipperstein
A pogrom, google informs those who’ve never heard the word, is “an organized massacre of a particular ethnic group”. The second clause of the top definition reads “in particular that of Jews in Russia or eastern Europe.” The word comes from Russian, Russia was where pogroms, organized attacks against Jews, often erupted in the early 20th century. Synonyms (and I’m quoting): massacre, slaughter, wholesale slaughter, mass slaughter, mass killing, mass murder, mass homicide, mass execution, night of the long knives, annihilation, extermination, decimation, carnage, bloodbath, bloodletting, butchery, genocide, ethnic cleansing, megadeath, More.
A pogrom is when a group of people who hate another group of people organize and storm into the hated community, run amok and brutalize the hated group. They smash windows, loot shops, burn down homes, beat and kill, rape, get drunk, laugh, whoop, shoot, stab, strangle, pummel to death, set on fire. During a pogrom the authorities generally look on benignly, allowing events to unfold as they will.
Not to complicate things here, but a pogrom is exactly what happened, for example, in Tulsa, Oklahoma May 31 through June 1, 1921 when the prosperous black community of Greenwood was invaded, looted, burned to the ground, dozens of blacks (perhaps as many as 300) were murdered, ten thousand were left homeless and many of the now homeless survivors were interned, by armed men deputized during the organized attack who also took part in it, in a makeshift prison camp in the “pogrom’s” immediate aftermath.
It is a sickeningly familiar if easily forgettable horror story (America pretty quickly forgot about the massacre in Tulsa, for almost a century). Think of the horrific tales of the Janjaweed (“evil on horseback”) in southern Sudan. They ride into a village of the group they hate and rape, massacre, slaughter, commit carnage, butchery, ethnic cleansing. The Rohingya [1] in Myanmar are another ethnic minority that has been catching hell in recent times, stateless souls fleeing by the tens of thousands, victimized by government supported pogroms and ethnic hatred, villages on fire.
I have always found it particularly grotesque that humans don’t stand as one against this kind of atrocity, instead arguing about which ethnic group has endured the worst of it. We are quite tribal, apparently. Our attitude toward a particular slaughter varies by how much we identify with the victims, or the perpetrators. Our memory of various atrocities is shaded by the degree of our particular historical amnesia. Americans are famously obtuse about anything that happened in the past, even a few weeks back.
But I am stepping on the story, which is an astoundingly told history by a writer and historian named Steven J. Zipperstein. I’d heard of the 1903 Kishniev pogrom, one of many carried out against Jews in Russia in the Age of Pogroms, the most famous of them. Zipperstein’s book is the most readable history I’ve ever encountered.
Looking for the notes I took while reading the library’s copy of this great book (eluding me so far) I opened his book at random, looking (in vain) for my usual minimally invasive pencil marks in the margins for passages that I wanted to find again– and was immediately again sucked into the pages of the story. Zipperstein tells a complicated and sprawling history in a smooth, narrative way we seldom see in a history book. The beauty and immediacy of Zipperstein’s detailed, seamless telling is the most striking aspect of this great book.
My first thought when I finished reading it was to write to Zipperstein, tell him how blown away I was by how the book placed this particular, haphazardly famous pogrom into a broad historical context (as any great history must do) and did so with breathtaking narrative sure-footedness. In turning the book over I noticed that I’d been beaten to the punch by other, much more famous, writers who appreciated Mr. Zipperstein’s amazing facility for uncovering and telling a story,
“It tells us the horror that occurred street by street, butchery by butchery– with gripping clarity and admirable brevity” opined novelist Philip Roth. Historian Deborah Lipstadt added “Written with the insight of an impeccable historian, his account– which will intrigue scholars as well as the widest array of readers– can be seen as a harbinger of what would come but four decades later.” Timothy Snyder adds: “Structural grace and clear prose allow a lifetime of historical meditation and a decade of multilingual research to reach virtually any reader interested in Jewish, Russian, and, indeed, American history.”
The book is admirably brief, just over two hundred pages. The clarity of the writing is gripping. The insights follow so quickly one after another that a reader without his notes (as I am) is at a loss to even conjure many of them (though I’ll try). The writer puts the story, brilliantly, within the reach of virtually any reader.
The organized slaughter of Jews in remote, provincial Kishniev, we learn from this account, became famous because, the Kishniev communications liaison for the World Zionist Congress was there when the pogrom began and immediately took off by train for a neighboring town where he began sending off telegrams. News spread far and wide as fast as possible in 1903 and newspapers worldwide, notably Hearst’s vast news syndicate, arrived in Kishniev in the immediate aftermath of the pogrom. Photos of the murder and devastation were immediately on newspaper front pages worldwide.
A star journalist, Michael Davit, writing from Kishniev. kept the story on the front page of Hearst’s influential paper for days. Davit went on to write Within the Pale: The True Story of Anti-Semitic Persecutions in Russia, a definitive account of Russian Jewish life. Kishniev became the subject of Zionist poet Hayim Nachman Bialik’s most famous poem, In The City of Slaughter. The image of the Kishniev pogrom was a potent symbol and organizing tool for Zionism. It was held out as an irrefutable proof that Jews could no longer live in lands where they could be freely butchered while local authorities looked the other way.
We all know how the larger story of the Jews of the Pale turned out, an army marched through the region just four decades later and completed the mass killing of virtually every one of the area’s Jews. That knowledge only deepens the horror of this intimate portrait of one particular pogrom. A bit from the book, at random:
With horror and puzzlement, Jews here would speak of the friendly, at least benign, relations between Jews and non-Jews that had existed prior to the violence; interactions, they said, that had been more casual and less encumbered here than elsewhere in the city. In this neighborhood, with few pretensions and where workaday relationships — Jews often hired non-Jewish laborers as well as maids or artisans — were more likely to slide into friendships, it was more typical than elsewhere in Kishniev for gentile neighbors to take risks to save Jews. Hence it was not rare for Jews fleeing rioters to run into the courtyards or homes of non-Jewish neighbors, with the expectation of being hidden.
Then again, it was also not uncommon for neighbors to slaughter or rape neighbors, and frequently with an astonishing indifference to suffering. The interplay between familiarity and ferocity was replicated in grim incident after incident. Victims of rape and beating were known to call out the names of their assailants. One raped woman spoke afterward of having held her rapist as a baby in her arms. The sons of a local shoemaker — the two boys hid behind a stove while their father was beaten and murdered — recognized the killer as a neighbor whose shoes they had recently repaired.
This immediately reminded me of translated witness narratives by Jewish survivors of the 1943 massacre in Vishnivetz, the little town my grandparents came from. In these accounts Jewish women pleaded for mercy from Ukrainians they knew well, begging them by name. One very pregnant woman with a child in her arms pleaded in vain to a Ukrainian “reptile” (and not one of the worst, according to the witness) named Vasye, begging him to at least spare her tiny child. Vasye did not spare anyone. Such was the “interplay between familiarity and ferocity” and the “astonishing indifference to suffering” in that part of the world. [2]
It is well-known (by those who know…) that the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the bible of anti-Semites, translated into dozens of languages and continually in print since its appearance early last century (we’re told it is second worldwide in sales to the actual Bible) played a huge role in the proliferation of pogroms after its appearance around 1903. The long ago debunked (but nonetheless often cited) book purports to be a verbatim account (largely plagiarized from a French satire written decades earlier) of the diabolical meeting of Jewish leaders (once a century, at midnight in the old Jewish cemetery in Prague, as in Umberto Eco’s brilliant novel) at which they (we) lay out their (our) infernal plans for world domination.
Zipperstein details the story of locally influential anti-Semitic Kishniev publisher Pavel Krushevan and his apparent role in creating the famous Czarist forgery, which first appeared serialized in his paper around the time of the Kishniev pogrom. In Zipperstein’s account Krushevan is strikingly reminiscent of Umberto Eco’s insane protagonist in The Prague Cemetery.
There a dozens of fascinating discoveries in the pages of this book. In passing, describing what he does not include in this account, Zipperstein tells us
Not examined in this book is Kishniev’s impact on the politics of the Jewish Socialist Labor Bund, then the largest Marxist group in Russia. This influence, while undoubtedly significant, proved too difficult to substantiate, given that the Bund’s keen preoccupation with the pogrom was silenced by its insistence on its internationalism.
Among other things, the Kishniev pogrom, it turns out, played a significant role in the creation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Anna Strunsky, a radical Jewish woman and William English Walling, her wealthy, white Southern Christian Socialist husband, recently returned from a visit to post-pogrom Kishniev, were in the middle of the formation of the NAACP. Hot damn. Maybe those Czarist secret police forgers who wrote the Protocols were right about those sneaky Elders of Zion!
[1] Doesn’t this look sickening, reduced to a footnote (even leaving out details of the vicious persecution, referred to here blandly as the “crisis”)?
The Rohingya people are a stateless Indo-Aryan ethnic group who reside in Rakhine State, Myanmar. There were an estimated 1 million Rohingya living in Myanmar before the 2016–17 crisis. By December 2017, an estimated 625,000 refugees from Rakhine, Myanmar, had crossed the border into Bangladesh since August 2017. Wikipedia
Myanmar: ~400,000 (November 2017)
India: 40,000 (September 2017)
Bangladesh: 1,300,000+ (March 2018)
United States: 12,000+ (September 2017)
Saudi Arabia: 500,000 (October 2017)
Indonesia: 1,000 (October 2017)
[2] (from eye witness testimony)
While he was hiding, the reptile Vasye, a Vishnevets resident who lived near the Jewish homes, came armed with a gun and leading Avraham Shimkovits’s daughter, the one who was married to Motye Grinberg, Shimon the Soldier’s son.
[Page 65]
He was leading her as if he were escorting a prisoner on trial. The woman was in the last months of pregnancy and carried a baby in her arms. The baby cried and twisted in her arms out of fear and nervousness. The woman was very tired; she faced Vaske, her neighbor of many days and years, and spoke.
“Vasye,” she said. “Look, Vasinke, look at my condition. I’ve never harmed you. Have mercy on me and my baby, have mercy, Vasinke.”
The reptile didn’t answer. He moved back as if he wanted to measure her with his eyes, and with unusual calm, he aimed the gun at the baby’s mouth, shot him, and quieted him. The boy convulsed, collapsed, and fell from her arms… she passed out and went into labor. When the killer saw the newborn coming into the world, he aimed his gun and killed him the minute he was born… him and his mother.
Propaganda versus actual facts on the ground
Let me say at the start: if someone holds a view that is not based on rationality — an irrational view — the calm, friendly presentation of every reasonable reason in the world to see the issue otherwise will not change that view, in most cases.
A lifelong racist is unlikely to change his views just because one, two, even ten people from the hated race impress him greatly. This is a famous bypass of Reason we can see clearly in this historical example: every major Nazi had a list of “good” Jews to be spared the “Final Solution” or any part of it. This was a Jew they personally knew, liked and protected. Mr. Hitler himself had 340 Jews on his personal list! [1] “Doesn’t mean we don’t utterly hate the vicious, race-poisoning Jews and want to exterminate every last one of them and their despicable babies, wipe out their accursed seed, just leave Max alone, Max is cool.”
If something as common as “racism” [2], which can be rationalized but which does not have a rational basis, is immune to reason and persuasion, then we can conclude that much else about human behavior is. Belief, after all, requires faith that one is correct. Belief and faith are often not based on any facts one can verify. Faith, some people say, is superior to Reason because while Reason limits one to provable theories that the limited human mind can test, only Faith can bind us to the ineffable, the unexplainable and immortality itself. Faith-based arguments, famously, cannot be undermined by appeals to mere human logic.
There is a good argument for faith. Humans need faith. I don’t sneeze at faith. It is absolutely essential to “keep the faith” (as my father used to say) when times are bad. When a person loses faith she loses hope and without hope all that’s left is helpless resignation to the shit show in progress. We have faith that people who profess to love us actually do, that when things get bad they will act the way we believe they will, the way they’d want us to act toward them if they were in trouble.
I am not arguing against faith, not at all. I am not saying human Reason is the end all of the human experience or any kind of infallible guide to human behavior (though, often it is our best option). There is a universe of things the brilliant homo sapiens (“wise ape”) mind has only guesses about. Mental health is one of them as are the realms that cannot be detected yet by the senses or by even the most sophisticated instruments we have designed.
Homo sapiens are famous for acts of mass insanity. The concept of WAR was invented by the wise ape, after all. Let’s not get too hopped up about this “wise ape” shit, our history is bloodied by plenty of mindless, stupid, destructive practices too. Mass killing done in the name of “Reason” and oceans of blood spilled in the name of defending “Faith”.
My aim here is to show that often facts on the ground tell one story clearly while propaganda convinces people of another, usually invented, story entirely. That’s where I’m headed, for whatever the exercise might be worth today.
I learned, during a talk with a friend from down south the other night, that his experience in the military, particularly when he was stationed in Germany, wiped away any traces of racism he may have had after years of segregation in his home town. Overseas the group he hung around with, joked with, sought out, played music with, drank with, were the Americans. That included Americans of types he did not know well or at all from where he grew up, types he wouldn’t even have encountered in This home state, Mexican-Americans, Chinese-Americans, Iranian-Americans, etc. His service in the army left him more of an American, in the proudest sense of the word, than when he went in.
Institutions like the military can have a democratizing effect. Labor unions (whatever their faults and corruptions) perform the same function. They place people of diverse backgrounds on common ground, united for a common, larger purpose. No logic or reason is involved in the transformation of personal prejudices, just give a group of people a challenging common goal and you can see the great naturally equalizing effect. Not every two members of these groups will become friends, rivalries and hatreds between individuals will emerge — but these things will, for the most part, no longer be based on anti-group prejudice.
We have facts on the ground, actual facts that can be verified — like captured children sleeping on the ground under foil emergency blankets in locked enclosures they are locked into, areas supervised by armed guards. We imprison these children because they are “illegals”, have entered the United States illegally, or perhaps are the children of asylum seekers, there has been little clarity provided for their detention beyond the president’s repeated assertion that America is full and that we have no room for these little illegals and their criminal parents.
Trump’s followers get angry when these detention centers, like Fort Sill, Oklahoma, which was an “internment camp” for Japanese Americans immiserated and locked up during the Second World War, are referred to as concentration camps. They could be called “penal camps”, perhaps, because the children are alleged to be little criminals (“illegals”) and their detention is part of their punishment (which explains why sanitary conditions for these masses of kids appear to have been an afterthought, if any thought was given to their health and safety at all [3]). They could be called “detention” or “internment” camps, would that be OK? It is also fair, judging by what similar enclosures for people of a certain type who were collected behind barbed wire and prevented from leaving by armed guards have been called all through recent history “concentration camps”.
The word got an understandably bad name from the fucking Nazis. And I know the song: we are sick of being gratuitously and unfairly compared to fucking Nazis! Protecting our borders from illegal aliens makes us Nazis, now?!!! FUCK YOU!
OK, OK calm down.
The Nazis gave concentration camps a bad name, assuredly, but concentration camps are not DEATH CAMPS. The first camps the Nazis built were concentration camps, armed shit holes in which to collect and intimidate their many classes of enemies. In those camps prisoners were bullied, humiliated, sometimes brutalized, occasionally killed, but the concentration camp was a collection point for detained enemies. It is easy to think of these Nazi concentration camps as the same as death camps, but the Nazi innovation of the vernichtungslager was, at the time and as far as we know until today, a purely unique Nazi idea.
It’s the image of the death camp is what gets so many Americans worked up over calling these detention centers for children “concentration camps”. The Nazi death camp was a mechanized killing center with state of the art gas chambers and crematoria for disposing of the murdered bodies sent over from a network of concentration camps. I get why people are angry when they think these internment centers for filthy, stinking little illegal aliens are being compared to death camps. I understand why it is easy to weaponize the use of the term “concentration camp” to underscore what you feel to be an unfair attack.
Common sense is not so common, as Sekhnet’s mother often told her. An easy answer if not always a sufficient answer.
Propaganda changes the subject from whether what we are doing to children (and entire families) at our southern border comports with our American ideals about protecting the weak to whether a pushy progressive politician is a fucking disgusting piece of shit for comparing our mild policy of reasonable deterrence to Nazi mass killing!
Mueller Report. Are you going to believe a 448 page report that Mueller says speaks for itself, presents a trove of evidence and explains why he could not exonerate the president of possible obstruction of justice or the constantly repeated, supremely unambiguous mantra “no collusion, no obstruction, complete and total exoneration” ?
Propaganda spins the “message” of the Mueller report by packaging, branding and marketing it to as many Americans as possible as a particular thing, as NOTHING TO SEE. Ten detailed instances of the president’s apparent attempts to obstruct justice are reduced by America’s top law enforcement official to a single, clear message “no obstruction.” Mueller did not find Trump guilty of obstruction, according to Bill Barr, he simply laid out various scenarios while avoiding responsibility by wimping out and leaving it to his boss to make the hard call. Barr made the hard call, which pleased the president greatly, and loser Democrats still want a do-over! Like the fucking loser babies they are.
Propaganda makes the entire ground slippery, for even the most sure-footed. The great Amy Goodman, a brilliant, painstaking journalist and advocate of democracy, stated today that the Mueller report found “no collusion” with Russia. That is the phrase so often used it has become interchangeable with “could not make a legal case for criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia.” Are the two things different? “Collusion” is not a crime that can be charged against an American citizen, “criminal conspiracy” is.
As Mueller states in his report, one reason he could not determine that the Trump campaign had been engaged in a criminal conspiracy with Russia is that his investigators were often lied to, key documents were destroyed, highly placed individuals simply refused to speak to investigators or submit written answers to written questions. “No collusion” is a significant distortion of what the Mueller report says about the more than 100 instances of proven coordination between members of the Trump campaign and agents of the Russian government.
Yeah, I’m speaking to the choir, a barbershop quartet-sized choir. If you are reading this you probably agree with much, if not all, of what I am saying. Few who believe, in spite of all the evidence, that Mr. Trump is a great man who only wants to make America great again will read past a few remarks here. They believe that Mr. Trump didn’t need the job because he’s already rich and powerful beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, that he’s sacrificing his own happiness to be a public servant. They are not going to sit there and read beyond my first smart-ass Jew criticism of the confused, dithering, incoherent, self-serving massive pile of lies and his blind followers. [4]
I am more sensitive to this kind of misdirection than many people, get more worked up than most about propaganda that distorts things we can see with your own eyes. All through my growing up difficult questions were routinely dodged, often brutally, by a brilliant but tormented father who employed all manner of techniques to not only not answer anything that made him uncomfortable but to make me feel like an asshole for even posing the questions. As he was dying my father apologized profusely for this practice, but by then I was almost fifty years-old and my oversensitivity had been long ago instilled.
Propaganda comes in many forms. Often simply omitting a terrible fact or two, in the manner of the famous Grey Lady’s reporting on certain difficult subjects over the decades, is good enough. Tie goes to the runner! Nothing to fucking see here!
Think carefully, friends. I have faith in your powers of reason.
[1] Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 133.
[2] I use racism in its most generic sense. Only an anti-Semite would call the Jews a “race”. Mexicans (even the rapists) are not a “race”, nor are “Muslims” or “liberal cucks”. Racism, which America has practiced since long before its founding, is a fabulously pliable notion and a powerful way to keep the ignorant divided and suspicious of their fellow human beings, the easier to manipulate and rule them.
[3] Many of the children visited by outside lawyers and advocates do not have access to washing facilities of any kind. Their unchanged clothes stink, they have not been able to wash their clothes or themelves in days, in some cases weeks. They are not given toothbrushes to brush their teeth or sinks where they can even wash their faces. Older children are expected to care for younger ones. They are being treated the way one treats one’s enemies. Pretty much the way the inmates in every concentration camp have always been treated.
[4] Looking for the exact number of Jews on Mr. Hitler’s special list in Hannah Arendt’s masterpiece (see note 1 above) I came across this evocative description, by Eichmann, of blind obedience based on unquestioning faith in a leader:
Eichmann, with his rather modest mental gifts, was certainly the last man in the courtroom to be expected to challenge these notions [“superior orders”, “law”] and to strike out on his own. Since, in addition to performing what he conceived to be the duties of a law-abiding citizen, he had acted upon orders — always so careful to be “covered”– he became completely muddled and ended by stressing alternatively the virtues and vices of blind obedience, or the “obedience of corpses,” Kadarvergehorsam, as he himself called it.
Arendt p.135
A Few Notes on Fascist Politics
My copy of Jason Stanley’s excellent, short book How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them is on its way back to the library. While reading it I wrote about the book in some detail HERE. Before I turn it in for others to read (noting that free public libraries are one of the great institutions of democracy) I’d like to share some additional notes, which follow his ten points of fascist politics.
MYTHIC PAST: We once were great, then we were weakened by our eternal enemies, we will struggle to become great again.
PROPAGANDA: if you can control the information and the spin that the public gets, the battle for public opinion is largely won. Stanley wrote the book a couple of years ago, so he doesn’t give the following example (but I can):
An investigation reveals troubling evidence of wrongdoing by the president. The president hires a new Attorney General to take control of the situation, which is threatening to spiral out of control for the president. The new A.G. does not release the fully redacted summary of the report that is given to him by the investigator. Instead the new A.G. announces that since the investigator “punted” and didn’t make a charging decision (for reasons the A.G. conveniently ignores) he has been forced to make the hard call on the mass of evidence contained in the report. That call is “no collusion, no obstruction”.
“No collusion, no obstruction” is the only news the public has until a month later, when the A.G. releases the redacted report and the investigator’s own summaries. By then, most Americans believe the president has been completely and totally (or at least largely) exonerated by a nothing-burger investigation. Even though there is a massive trove of evidence that looks very incriminating to the president.
Even though the last lines of the Report say if the investigator could have exonerated the president in the face of the weighty evidence against, him he would have exonerated him. The investator determined that he could not exonerate him.
Barr: No matter.
Propaganda is always simple, nuance is hard and tricky. Who are you going to believe, someone who confidently says “I never lie” or a person who writes 448 dense pages of legalese examining the evidence behind that assertion in excruciating detail?
ANTI-INTELLECTUAL: rigorous intellectual debate tends not to support fascist politics or the policies of fascism. Everywhere fascism triumphs intellectuals and open debate have been removed from the public sphere. Stanley writes (of the removal of certain books and subjects from university curricula):
The priorities here make sense when one realizes that in antidemocratic systems, the function of education is to produce obedient citizens structurally obliged to enter the workforce without bargaining power and ideologically trained to think that the dominant group represents history’s greatest civilizational forces. Conservative figures pour huge sums into the project of advancing right-wing goals in education. For example, the Charles Koch Foundation, just one of the conservative foundations in the United States funded by right-wing oligarchs, alone spent $100 million to support projects largely devoted to conservative ideology at around 350 colleges and universities according to some sources.
and
Throughout Mein Kampf, Hitler is clear that the aim of propaganda is to replace reasoned argument in the public sphere with irrational fears and passions.
UNREALITY: believe half of what you see, none of what you hear, and everything the leader says. There are facts and there are also, more importantly “alternative facts”.
This disorienting storm of falsity, and distortion of language itself, is a deliberate tactic of fascist politics. Stanley discusses the liberal concept of “the marketplace of ideas” where good arguments will, through the use of reason and persuasion, drive out bad arguments. At least that’s the theory.
The argument for the “marketplace of ideas” presupposes that words are used only in their “descriptive, logical or semantic sense.” But in politics, and most vividly in fascist politics, language is not used simply, or even chiefly, to convey information but to elicit emotion.
and of special, sickening relevance to our current political situation:
…citizens look to politics for tribal identification, for addressing personal grievance, and for entertainment. When news becomes sports, the strongman achieves a certain measure of popularity. Fascist politics transforms the news from a conduit of information and reasoned debate into a spectacle with the strongman as the star.
HIERARCHY: This applies to groups as much as to individuals in fascist politics, which, as Stanley’s title conjures, divides the world into us (good) and them (bad). Members of the inferior “them” groups are the ones citizens of the superior “us” group may freely take out their frustrations on.
In the day to day politics of fascism, on a personal level, loyalty to the leader is the most important element to rising in the fascist “meritocracy”.
VICTIMHOOD: Stanley begins the chapter describing President Andrew Johnson’s veto of the Civil Rights Act of 1866. Johnson vetoed it on the ground that
“this law establishes for the security of the colored race safeguards which go infinitely beyond any that the General Government have ever provided for the white race.” As W.E.B. Du Bois notes, Johnson perceived minimal safeguards at the start of a path toward future black equality as “discrimination against the white race.”
The fascist in group is always the fully justified, righteous victim of the angry out group.
LAW and ORDER: This slogan stands in for the idea that law will be used to preserve and protect the desired order.
A healthy democratic state is governed by laws that treat all citizens equally and justly, supported by bonds of mutual respect between people, including those tasked with policing them. Fascist law-and-order rhetoric is explicitly meant to divide citizens into two classes: those of the chosen nation, who are lawful by nature, and those who are not, who are inherently lawless.
Stanley focuses on the explosion American incarceration where people of color are disproportionately arrested, convicted and sentenced. Law and Order is a slogan that resonates much stronger than “we are afraid, as Jefferson was, of the righteous rage of a race on whose neck we have kept our foot for centuries.” Nixon exploited this powerful, racially charged euphemism in his presidential campaigns (his “southern strategy”) as have virtually all right-wing politicians since.
SEXUAL ANXIETY: Fascist politics is patriarchal, with the strongman leader as the hyper-masculine father of the nation. Demonizing anyone who deviates from this vision of mythic order is a common element of fascist politics.
SODOM AND GOMORRAH: cities, which tend to be places where diverse populations live and work, and differences are tolerated, even embraced, are seen in fascist politics in stark contrast to the country, where the mythic national purity they extoll still prevails. Stanley cites a few counter-factual lines from one of Donald Trump’s campaign speeches:
“Our African-American communities are absolutely in the worst shape that they’ve ever been in before, ever, ever, ever. You take a look at the inner cities, you get no education, you get no jobs, you get shot walking down the street.” And yet during this time, cities in the United States were enjoying their lowest rates of crime in generations and record low unemployment. Trump’s rhetoric about cities makes sense in the context of a more general fascist politics, in which cities are seen as centers of disease and pestilence, containing squalid ghettos filled with despised minority groups living off the work of others.
ARBEIT MACHT FREI: “Work Will Set You Free” was the false promise on the gates of places like Auschwitz where slave laborers were routinely worked to death. Hard work is a trait of “us”, laziness and parasitism are traits of “them”. It is not a stretch to argue, in a fascist society, that vicious, life-sapping parasites should be worked to death.
Stanley spends some time laying out the fascist hostility to organized labor. In labor unions workers of various races, backgrounds, genders, sexual and political orientations have common goals: better working conditions, fair pay. These shared goals tend to unite working people who fascists seek to keep apart, exploiting their differences to create the hierarchic caste system necessary for a fascist regime.
Mr. Hitler again, from Mein Kampf, calling the kettle black in the way of fascist leaders everywhere, projecting on to their enemies exactly what they are doing:
“[The Jew] is gradually assuming leadership of the trades-union movement– all the easier because what matters to him is not so much genuine removal of social evils as the formation of a blindly obedient fighting force in industry for the purpose of destroying national economic independence”
Stanley demonstrates that fascist politics is more effective under conditions of stark economic inequality.
I note that while the many of the wealthy captains of Germany industry were initially alarmed and horrified by Hitler’s rise, as many of their counterparts here in America were by Trump’s ascendance, they soon found their profits rising, their wealth greatly enhanced and their privileges well-protected. The most unscrupulous of the German businessmen availed themselves of Hitler’s generous offer of very low cost slave labor. The SS charged $1 a day for death camp prisoners who could, literally, be worked to death making products for Germany.
It has long appeared to me that slave labor (as long as their slavery can be kept secret) is the ultimate dream of corporate bottom-liners. Corporate employers in Nazi Germany had the perfect situation, hard working very low cost employees who spent their nights in death camps and, obviously, no labor unions. Hitler abolished them shortly after taking office, after allowing organized labor a last May Day parade in 1933 — he outlawed collective bargaining and the right to strike.
This rascal we have now as president, I have to say, seems to check every box of fascist politics. He is not alone, as the party he has seized leadership of has been steadily heading this way for the last few decades. Hard to blame them, really. The vast privileges of the inheritors of immense intergenerational wealth are threatened by the notion of things like a social safety net, a commitment to pursuing our common goals (like preventing the destruction of our biosphere) and fulfilling the basic human needs of citizens great and small. The exponents of fascist politics, a politics of division, have expertly used people like Mitch McConnell and Mr. Trump while enlisting widespread support for otherwise unpopular policies that only help the already powerful.
God bless these United States, man.
To Muse or Not to Muse
Thinking something over because it perplexes you is not everybody’s path to happiness or a better life, I understand. Contemplating a troubling mystery is not for everyone, you have to be pushed toward it, it takes a certain turn of mind, a predisposition, an odd kind of luck, even. In my own life, because of the things I suffered when I was young (and the ongoing sufferings we all must sometimes endure) I find myself looking for patterns, clues, examples from the past that point to a better way, less friction with others and more peace within myself. The lessons of the past, as they are called are food for thought, if not always delicious food. I’d like to think that as I’ve aged I’ve somehow become wiser and more merciful than I was as a confused, angry teenager. Any improvement I’ve made has been the result of wrestling with things that trouble me.
My feeling is that if you get no insight into the things and situations that cause you pain you will always be in pain for the same reasons you always were. Your reactions will remain unchanged and those reactions will fuel the behavior of others toward you. The philosopher Moms Mabely is sometimes credited with the pithiest statement of this: “if you always do what you always did, you’ll always get what you always got.”
The only way, it seems to me, to avoid getting what you always got is if you learn to do things differently than you’ve always done. In other words, doing that difficult thing: learning what you need to do better from the experiences of the past. Hard fucking work, no doubt, and, though I try not to judge, I often have a hard time respecting people who don’t even make the attempt to learn from their mistakes. Such people are never wrong, no matter what. If you look back with even a small amount of honesty it’s not that hard to see when you’ve impulsively done something that hurt someone or made things worse, justified by a shaky rationale conceived in anger or something like it.
I had a close friend for many years who was extremely bright and also very angry. Because he was so angry, on such a fundamental level, pretty much everyone he ever knew eventually became a rival, an adversary and finally a hated enemy. Not long ago, when his mother died, his older brother emailed, asking me to reach out to him after informing me that I was his brother’s only friend.
I took this news philosophically, as I hadn’t spoken to the guy in more than a decade, after finally realizing there was little I could do to remain friends with someone as implacably angry as he was. Our few emails back and forth after his mother’s death illustrated quickly that nothing had changed in his world– he was still and always the victim, and angry and defensive about it. Because he is a smart and articulate person he also made a brilliantly baroque case that the world, including me, was wrong and he alone was right. Zero sum game, black or white, no nuance or possibility that anything could be any other way — you dig?
Because of the damage done to him as a child, however it had happened, he constantly relived variations on the trauma in every relationship he had. He lived the ‘repetition compulsion’, casting others in the roles of people he blamed for his persecution, a series of putzes he at first thought were very cool, and then playing out the identical senseless drama of betrayal time after time. Each of these future putzes, every one of whom he put great hopes in, came to reveal the same awful thing — that they were complete and unredeemed fucking assholes.
I found this fascinating, and also, very, very disturbing and ultimately defeating. His resistance to any kind of insight into his behavior was fierce. He was convinced, in each case, that he had been viciously wronged, had been completely blameless and absolutely justified in acting exactly as he had, at every step. Each one of his stories was predictably the same — initial admiration, disillusion, betrayal (often violent) — and yet he was compelled to repeat the same aggravating three act drama every time.
If you pointed out the similarities between the new story and every other one, or ventured the opinion that any of it had anything to do with his unattainable expectations of others and his own behaviors justified by his unexpressed anger, he’d become furious, since he was the least angry person he’d ever met.
We like to think that we’ll always have our favorite people in our lives. Sometimes we keep old friends, and some people seemingly manage to keep all of their friends, but other times things like resentment, anger, envy, competitiveness and irrational things that bubble up and are hard to put a finger on wind up prying people apart.
Anger is among the hardest things we all have to deal with. Do we have a right to be angry? Quite often we do. We all live in an aggravating world, in a misguided and often vicious and violent culture. In my own life, both of my parents were quick to anger. There was a lot of yelling in the little house my sister and I grew up in. I don’t hold this against my parents anymore.
I don’t say that lightly, it took me many years to truly understand that if they had learned to deal with their feelings of disappointment, frustration and helplessness, they would not have treated my sister and me the way they did. They did the best they could, but neither ever obtained much insight into how damaging uncontrolled anger is.
As a child, if you can’t learn something like how to deal with frustration and anger from your parents, you are up against a hard game. You have to find teachers, make many, many mistakes, have many fights, accept insights wherever you find them, become your own teacher in how to do better dealing with difficult emotions, difficult people.
I’ll end with the only simple, useful thing I’ve learned for sure. There are certain people who, once they become angry at you, will never stop being mad at you, no matter what you do. An apology won’t work, whatever you’ve done is unforgivable because it is characteristic of the kind of bad person you are. Conversation will not lead anywhere better, there is nothing you can say or do that will lead toward mutual understanding or forgiveness once you are put into this unredeemable category. When you find every attempt to make peace thrown back on you, the only thing to do with this type is to walk away.
I’ve learned this painful lesson only after understanding that the only other choice is a bad one– to make a kind of false peace by accepting that you are an offensive asshole unworthy of being treated any better than the way this angry person is prepared to treat you. If you are ready, in the interest of “peace”, to accept a view of you distorted by someone’s anger as some kind of truth, you’re setting an inevitable trap for the future.
A trap you must continue to live in, harshly judged, awaiting whatever you “deserve”. This kind of bogus peace will almost always come back to bite you sooner or later, when your past offenses will be dredged up as proofs against you, and in the meantime, you must accept the unacceptable as the best you can get. The only choice, once mutual peace is off the table, is leaving the room, closing the door.
On one level, you could call what I am advocating the same thing my unhappy, angry friend who lived in a world of discarded putzes did, but I will try to explain how it’s different. We both justify our actions as the only thing to be done, yes. We both come to see the differences between us and the other as an unbridgeable divide. We both write the other party off as dead. There is no coming back from death, not in this life.
The only difference is that I believe that I make every effort to give a friend the benefit of the doubt, make many attempts to make peace before finally taking up the sword and cutting the guy’s head off. It’s a big difference to me, a willingness to try to see the other person’s point of view, to apologize, to seek reconciliation. To talk instead of fighting– at least until talk proves itself senseless, anyway.
My friend’s drama was always the same unalterable scenario. He’d acted in good faith, been generous, thought the other person was reciprocating, then there were warning signs, he tried to correct course, he was viciously betrayed. You can see this as similar to what I have laid out, but there is a key difference. Unlike me, he was never at fault, in any way, ever. Kind of like our current president and many badly damaged people one encounters.
I have many times realized that I’ve said or done something hurtful to somebody I care about. It is natural to do this from time to time, no matter how hard we try to be perfect, particularly if we were raised by people who often spoke out of anger before they gave themselves time to consider the better thing to say. People who are angry enough to rage at somebody don’t always have the ability to admit they were wrong, even later. When there can be no acknowledgment of a hurtful mistake the cycle of ill will is complete, if you remain within the radius of harm.
When I become aware I’ve hurt somebody I’ve learned to move quickly to reassure them of my friendship, apologize, seek forgiveness. I’ve found that people who value you in their lives are quite ready to forgive. I extend this forgiveness to anyone who shows the humility to express genuine sorrow for some hurtful thing they’ve done. It is not easy for people to make themselves vulnerable to somebody else, particularly in our kind of win/lose culture, I appreciate the difficulty and respect those who can. [1]
Look, this attitude about seeking and extending forgiveness does not make me Jesus Christ, not by a long shot. When someone behaves badly toward me, refuses to acknowledge any role in our subsequent conflict, and escalates things aggravatingly every time I try to make amends, I have the same initial response that virtually any toxic male in our violent culture has. My first feeling is violence, punch my antagonist hard in the mouth to make him shut up. Just stop the fucking noise. If you are only capable of making things worse with your righteous, enraged bullshit and whining, for the love of Christ, just shut up.
I don’t chide myself for this feeling. The feeling is understandable and the reflex was planted deep, long before I was old enough to have any say about it. A feeling is different than an action. You can feel a violent emotion without acting on it, though it takes work and time to learn to disconnect the two things. I never was one to hit people (my vicious words always did the trick) and I haven’t had a physical fight with anyone in many years. I’ve made some progress in controlling what my anger at first compels me to do. And yet, the feeling can’t be denied, I can’t pretend I’m not provoked to feel that way, once I am provoked. Each of us has our breaking point.
The only thing we can do when a feeling like this is choking us is to make a better decision than smashing somebody’s face. I’m not going to hit this infuriating person in the mouth to make his maddening sounds stop, no matter how strongly I feel the desire to.
I’ve learned to take a breath, as many breaths as I need, walk away, think (perseverate, if you like), recover as much of my better nature as I can. If there is no way to peace with someone who is acting unreasonably, provocatively, secure in his right to rage, at a certain point you have to accept it and keep away from that person.
Once I come to this unfortunate acceptance, after exhausting my efforts to defuse things and make peace, there is only one more thing I have to do. I don’t necessarily advocate it or defend it, but it is the best I can do in these situations, considering the angry environment I come from.
I reach deep into my well-worn tool kit. I set out in words the precise thoughts that will do the most direct harm to the person who can’t stop attacking. I write these thoughts out in detail, politely and firmly but without mercy or any hope of reconciliation (since there is none, as already demonstrated by the failure of all apologies one can muster).
I employ that maddeningly superior tone that unchallengeable masters of the universe always use when addressing drones. In each paragraph I cooly remove another arm, a leg, set them side by side on the table. My last lines sever the head, which I leave beside the limbs. Now it is finally quiet.
In the end the violence is about the same as punching someone hard enough to make them shut up, but the beautiful quiet afterwards is nice and there is no danger of prosecution.
It is not exactly peace, and a terrible loss is still there, along with the sadness that comes with a great loss, but the knowledge that this kind of pugnacious anger will no longer come at you from this particular person– in my mind, better than giving in and socking somebody. No matter how much they might actually deserve it.
[1] The kind of apology that does not help is what Harry Shearer calls the if-pology. “If I did something wrong, then I’m sorry.” Think of Joe Biden’s decades-belated variation on the classic if-pology, delivered to Anita Hill recently — I feel sorry for what they did to you, and for whatever part you may think I may have played in what they did to you. An apology Anita Hill was right to dismiss.
An apology, to be meaningful, must acknowledge the hurtfulness of the specific thing that one is sorry about and contain some sort of promise to try not to do it again.
Compare that to the kind of apology I was given right before an old friend I finally had to behead told me he loved me and that I, therefore, had to be his friend.
“I already apologized to you, so I don’t know what you want from me. You think I did something to you, which I didn’t, and so no matter how many times I fucking apologize, you are too much of a rigid, angry and unloving fucking asshole — who can never admit to being wrong, I might add — to even hear it”
And then, as though proving his point, I could not find it in my heart to accept his apology.
Time for Trump to show some balls
I’ve got to take Trump’s side here for a minute, if only to play debutant’s advocate.
People are in the news again openly attacking Roger Stone and Paul Manafort, two innocent and loyal men (one unjustly imprisoned for seven and a half years under fake federal charges by supporters of criminal Hilary Clinton) who are being openly persecuted by liberal cucks and so-called judges. They are being ruthlessly crucified in the lying liberal media! A whole lot of nothing about them repeatedly violating gag orders and nickel and dime crap like that. Isn’t it illegal, according to the Constitution that liberals love to hide behind, to stop someone’s freedom of speech? Talk about unfair double standards…
Here’s the thing, Mr. President. You have your Roy Cohn, why are you not letting slip the dogs of war? A.G. Barr has already done this exact thing before, he did it to nail the lid closed on the so-called Iran Contragate conspiracy theory. PRE-TRIAL PARDON (google Caspar Weinberger indictment). Barr can make you look good, and strong, and unhesitating in the face of vicious attack. Pardon these two innocent men before it’s too late for either of them. Do it BEFORE any further completely illegal, partisan guilty verdicts come down.
If Manafort is convicted on NY State charges (and thank God your justice department was able to intervene to keep him out of NYC’s shithole Riker’s Island prison), well, it’s bye bye Paul. A presidential pardon only works for so-called federal crimes. Roger Stone is another stand up guy who has helped you a lot. Are you just going to let him twist in the wind, with a gag around his mouth? Do something, man. It’s time to show some real balls and put this whole disgusting, illegal witch hunt to bed once and for all.
Another idea: Absolute Pardon! Everybody who is under investigation, indictment, suspicion, everybody in contempt of subpoenas of all kinds, anyone who could theoretically be called to testify or produce documents of any kind: ABSOLUTE PARDON! Think about it. There had never been a pretrial presidential pardon for anyone, let alone someone indicted for felonies, until Bill Barr brilliantly broke new ground! [1]
Ask Bill Barr if there are any limits on the powers of the United States President. He will tell you, plainly, that there are not — unless limitations are placed under explicit, written, orders from Jesus Christ Himself.
[1] More on presidential pardons HERE
Hope Hicks answers to Congressional committee “inadequate”
Hope Hicks, a young woman who was one of candidate and president Donald Trump’s closest aides (she served as a top White House press official) appeared before the House Judiciary Committee last week. She “testified” for eight hours, with five attorneys (two personal, two White House, and one from the DOJ. The DOJ? WTF?) present to advise her, and, according to the transcript of the closed door meeting, gave inadequate (NO) answers to 155 questions. The White House lawyer objected each time, claiming she was immune to testifying about anything that happened during the presidency of the most transparent president in history.
Her name appears in the Mueller Report more than 180 times. She was, for a long time, known as the president’s closest confidante. Her testimony could go a long way toward illuminating the president’s state of mind and his intent in the days he first began trying to shut down the Mueller investigation.
Although, of course, current Attorney General Bill Barr has already taken care of the issue of president’s completely, unimpeachably non-criminal intent. He famously excused the president’s many guilty-appearing actions as the understandable anger and frustration of an innocent man unfairly attacked by traitors and spies. And Bill Barr, we all know, is an honorable man.
Hope Hicks spoke, under oath, to Mueller’s investigators about Trump’s rage when Robert Mueller was appointed Special Counsel on May 17, 2017. He was, according to Hicks, who saw the president immediately after his outburst at Jeff Sessions in the Oval Office, as upset as she’d ever seen him.
The only other time she saw him as distraught, she told Mueller’s vicious partisans, was when the completely out of context, innocent Access Hollywood pussy grabber tape came out toward the end of the 2016 campaign. When Sessions told the president that Trump himself was now under investigation, Trump apparently said “I’m fucked.” before lashing out at Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III:
According to notes written by Jody Hunt—then chief of staff to Attorney General Jeff Sessions—Trump “slumped back in his chair and said, ‘Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I’m fucked.’”
“The President became angry and lambasted the Attorney General for his decision to recuse from the investigation, stating, ‘How did you let this happen, Jeff,’” the report continues, paraphrasing Hunt’s notes.
Sessions himself told the special counsel that Trump said, “’You were supposed to protect me,’ or words to that effect,” according to the report.
“’Everyone tells me if you get one of these independent counsels it ruins your presidency,’” Trump continued, per the report. “’It takes years and years and I won’t be able to do anything. This is the worst thing that ever happened to me.”
source (obviously Breitbart, FOX and The Stormer cover this material differently)
OK, truthfully, between you me and the lamp post that any one of Trump’s treasonous enemies could be hanging from (in Trump’s perfect world) — the Democrats are reaching here. Hicks was close to the president, true, and told Mueller that the president was very angry that Jeff Sessions would not protect him, as Roy Cohn [1] (who was disbarred toward the end of his despicable life) always had. But, seriously, is that any reason to put her in position to commit perjury to protect the man she owes her career to? (She’s now an executive at the company that owns FOX news).
Let us not forget, Hope Hicks gave those Democrat traitors on the Judiciary Committee a legal sounding reason for not answering anything they asked. She cited “Absolute Immunity” a perfectly legal sounding term one of Trump’s more creative (and brazen) lawyers pulled directly out of his Roy Cohn-like homophobic ass. Will this novel yet legal sounding reason for giving inadequate sworn testimony stand up in court? Only if Boof Kavanaugh has the final say.
Although, even Boof would probably be constrained by the long held, indisputable legal principle that says once a privilege is waived (as Executive Privilege was waived for Hicks once the then White House employee voluntarily spoke under oath to Mueller) it cannot be reasserted.
The fucking law again! So goddamned unfair! Where is Roy Cohn when you need him?!!!
[1] (recycled footnote from here)
Because when I have any doubt about a factual assertion I make here I do a quick and easy fact check, I asked google “was Roy Cohn a homophobe?” He was, many sources agree. Here is one of the results that came up in about one second, a marvelous little summary of the career of this malevolent creature, a career I highlighted in a footnote scroll to the bottom of this one for two excellent treatments of this evil fuck:
Roy Cohn – RationalWiki
Sep 5, 2018 – Roy Marcus Cohn (1927–1986) was a lawyer, a rabid anti-communist, a closeted homosexual and homophobe, a Jewish anti-Semite, …
Some readers (Jews in particular) might find this review of two biographies of Cohn the reviewer waded through, disturbingly fascinating.
(above) the self-hating Roy Cohn, living picture of Dorian Grey.
