Author Archives: oinsketta

Braying, strutting and attacking sometimes impresses the weak

I just watched a Republican Congressman named Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) angrily hector John Dean, who was in Congress yesterday to testify about the mechanics and progression of the 1973 Nixon impeachment.   He upbraided Dean without pause and spent some time emphasizing that Dean was a convicted perjurer.   Dean had lied under oath to obstruct justice in order to protect his boss and himself, before he signed an immunity deal to testify truthfully against Nixon.  The short intro to John Dean is that perjured himself while obstructing justice to defend Nixon before becoming a “rat” for the feds, not a very rosy thing for Trump supporters to consider at this moment. 

Jordan had good reason to avoid the details of what Dean had lied about — he harped on Dean’s perjury to undermine anything Dean might have to say.  How could anyone trust a man who had already been convicted of perjury?   Why should anyone listen to a known, convicted liar.   The real scandal, Jordan thundered finally, is that the Judiciary Committee is not investigating why the Russia election meddling investigation was started in the first place.   (This is a Republican talking point, say what you want about ’em, they stay on message).   

Think about that for a second.   Jordan angrily interrupted Jerald Nadler when he spoke after Jordan’s time was up.  Nadler was chiding Jordan, and admonishing the rest of the Republicans, that he would not tolerate anyone casting aspersions of the witness.  Jordan behaved like bullies always behave, angrily interrupted Nadler to insist that he’d cast no aspersions on the goddamned liar and then yelled  “you’re wrong!” when Nadler again said that he’d cast aspersions on John Dean.   If you want to feel a little sick to your stomach (or be inspired, if you wear a red MAGA hat)  watch the exchange for yourself.

To answer Jordan’s central point: the investigation began because there was a strong appearance that Russia coordinated with members of the Trump campaign and actively meddled in the 2016 election to try to get Trump elected.  Mueller provided ample evidence of these things in his report (what he could not prove were all the elements of criminal conspiracy). 

In a democracy, a foreign adversary’s ability to influence an electoral outcome, particularly in a presidential election, is seen as bad, something to make sure doesn’t happen again.   That is why it has to be investigated when there are multiple signs it may have happened.   When an FBI director is fired, legally, because he won’t close down an investigation that could compromise or undermine the president’s legitimacy (a corrupt purpose for the  firing), it is entirely reasonable to begin an independent  investigation. 

Mueller, a lifelong Republican, ultimately protected the president with obscure legalistic language that did many double negative contortions not to not provide conclusions that were not unharmful to POTUS, even as he found massive Russian interference, many involvements with the campaign and indicted a bunch of Russians for their role in it.  He took a last public opportunity to warn again of the danger of more Russian interference in the 2020 election.  The Mueller report describes something like 140 documented instances of coordination between the Russians and people in Trump’s campaign.  But that means nothing to the team that controls the Senate and the veto.

Jim Jordan ended his session with one giant, already asked and answered rhetorical question for John Dean (barked out to impress the audience of one all Republicans seem to be playing to):  why isn’t the judiciary committee investigating the origins of the partisan Mueller witch hunt?  (which, paradoxically, according to the unintendedly ironic lawyerly arguments of Bill Barr, basically exonerated the president).  Barr’s DOJ, by the way, is supposedly investigating the origins of this traitorous Deep State conspiracy against Trump.

Let’s take a step back.   Why do people fight counter-factually, irrationally like that?  To win.   Winning is the only point of being in it, this type believes, if you’re not in it to win, you’re a loser.   There is no more important value than winning, and if you believe there are other factors to consider, other values, it just proves you’re a loser.  People who compromise are weak, they’re suckers, ultimately losers.   We play hardball and we win, we won,  you lost, fuck off and die, loser!   Nice game, asshole.

This attitude is childish and destructive in the way an angry child’s tantrum can turn deadly if the enraged kid has easy access to a deadly weapon.  Call me old-fashioned, but I still believe how you play the game and your sportsmanship (as it was called in the old sexist days) is more important than being willing to do anything, including cheating, to win.   

I’m not saying Trump cheated to win, but I’m not saying he didn’t not cheat.  If I had confidence that he didn’t not cheat, I would so state.   We simply have no ironclad, bullet-proof, beyond a reasonable doubt proof either way, outside of the reasonable doubt provided by his abrasive, defensive personality and the lies he tells daily, the thousands he has told since becoming president.  To which, to be fair, Republicans have a good answer:

“NOTHING ILLEGAL ABOUT THAT!!!  NO LAW AGAINST A PRESIDENT CONSTANTLY LYING, NO LAW, YOU FUCKING COMMIE FUCK!   PROVE ITS A CRIME TO LIE WHEN YOU’RE NOT UNDER OATH, AND YOU HAVE EVIDENCE, SMOKING GUN EVIDENCE, AND PROOF THAT HE TOOK AN ACTUAL LEGALLY BINDING OATH BEFORE ANY OF HIS SO-CALLED LIES!!!!  YOU GOT NOTHING!!!   WE WIN!”

And let me also say, there is nothing untoward, unethical or illegal about having a team of quants create algorithms to pinpoint exactly how many districts in swing states must be won in order to win the all-important Electoral College vote.  It’s a smart thing to do, in a system like ours, designed to be overseen by those who know the importance of compromise with slaveholders.   

The Trump team engineered the Electoral College victory brilliantly, on behalf of Mr. Trump and billionaire math genius Robert Mercer, a former Lyin’ Ted Cruz supporter, who likely organized, funded and oversaw the effort.  The 78,000 votes needed in those four states were targeted brilliantly and achieved the aim of winning the needed Electoral College votes.   Game over, Trump president, whatever the homosexuals and transexuals in California and New York may think about the “popular vote” they rigged by showing up, along with those millions of dead Mexican “voters”.  Nothing illegal or unethical about Trump’s  win, nothing whatsoever.   

Sometimes it is helpful to see political and historical disputes in the context of personal clashes we experience.  I recently found myself in an alarming situation with an old friend who is suddenly enraged at me, implacably so.    The only real cause I could find, after trying to figure out where this stream of angry attacks was really coming from, is that this fellow has low self-esteem which is, apparently, enflamed by my smug sense of maturity.   That’s the same kind of thing that plagues Donald Trump every time he erupts into his rages.   

Because an “inferiority complex” always makes the sufferer feel at an unfair disadvantage in the world, for whatever reason, they attack.   It makes them feel strong, proactive, vital and masculine to punch, kick and scream at those they feel belittle them.   I recall days before I started questioning my own frequent anger when the adrenalized, righteous fury I felt was a kind of drug.   A very addictive drug.  It’s exhilarating to feel righteous and aggressively fighting your abuser.  Not a good long-term strategy for living a calmer, better life with others, but certainly an appealing option in the short-term.

The personality profile of someone who feels like a “loser” usually includes collecting grievances, assembling an airtight prosecutorial case against anyone  who, for whatever reason (or sometimes no reason that survives any scrutiny) makes them feel worse about themself, and going on the attack, armed with this list of unforgivable offenses.      A person who feels shame and humiliation is often ripe for manipulation by people who play to their sense of injustice.

Unscrupulous demagogues find fertile ground in the shame and humiliation of their audience.  These beaten people need something to galvanize their resistance to unbearably painful emotions about themselves.    Hitler was famous for his insistence that Germany had been humiliated, “stabbed in the back”, by ruthless, cunning  Jews who orchestrated the undefeated German army’s capitulation at the end of what was then called The Great War.   Yelling to crowds of unemployed, hopeless, angry, desperate, impoverished, shame-filled Germans he gave them a potent, intoxicating sense that he would make Germany great again, avenge this Jewish betrayal once and for all, that the enemies of Germany would be hanging from lamp posts, etc. 

It wouldn’t be like me not to add that Mr. Hitler won approximately the same percentage of electoral support, less than 40% of the German voting public, at the Nazi party’s electoral peak,  as Mr. Trump won and keeps, using a similar strategy of manfully exploiting the psychological vulnerabilities of his audience.   

You feel hopeless and betrayed, and ashamed, because your job is gone.  It’s nothing personal, on one level, there are millions in the same boat as you, but still, it hurts a lot.   Global corporations have no allegiance to country, they make things wherever workers can be hired most inexpensively, or automate away your job, to increase their profit margin.   This is good business for investor returns and the corporate bottom line, bad for workers who have to try to find several shit jobs to replace the lost decently paying ones that are never coming back to America, no matter how great Trump makes America again.   

It makes you angry, as it should [1], that nobody is watching out for you, that people with obscene wealth are taking your job and shitting on your life because they can.  No reason on earth not to be angry about that.  Who did that to me, goddamn it?!!  I would like to punch them in their fucking smug faces!

Enter Trump, with every reason you could want for your anger.  He fingers the real culprits to the appreciative roar of the crowd at his perpetual campaign rallies.

Fucking Mexicans, Muslims, Democrats, you see, they’re all in on it, they’re in it with the so-called transexuals and the homosexuals that Jesus Christ Himself abhors.  And turncoat Republicans like Mueller who is a disgrace and a traitor, no matter that he totally exonerated me.  And freedom-hating scientists who claim all the burning fossil fuel and massive deforestation and the meat industry are increasing carbon in the atmosphere, fuck those lying communist hacks too.   Oh, yes, and the blacks and hispanics are out of control, completely out of control, American cities are war zones, total disasters, in addition to being Sodom and Gomorrah.   Mobs of traitors and enemies of the people are trying to organize to illegally overthrow the greatest winner our country has ever had as president.   A man with, by the way, by far, the largest penis of any American president, a whopping male member the size of all previous presidential penises combined.  Prove any of that’s not true, you disloyal treasonous, traitor fucks!

I know you are, but what am I?

 

[1   The only good use for anger is as motivation.  Like a sharp pain that sends you to a doctor who diagnoses the problem your body is trying to tell you about with the pain.   Anger is a huge subject, of course, and among the most important to consider, but fuck trying to go into that any further in this footnote, yo. 

Ancestors erased from memory

 

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The only thing I know about these family members (at least I think they’re family members, I found these four photos dated 1927 to 1938 in a shoebox of black and white photos after my father died) is that every one of them who was alive in November 1942 was definitely dead by the end of November 1942.    I am awaiting translations of the inscriptions on the back of each, written in various Yiddish handwritings, as undecipherable as cuneiform to me.  The translations will hopefully give a clue or two about who each person was.

All dead in a massive international pogrom, victims of one of the countless mass killings in those crazy days when Nazis occupied virtually all of Europe.   Incidents of mass murder sadly consistent through the ages, continuing as we speak.  Yesterday there was a similar massacre in Mali, over a hundred slaughtered.

The expressions on these faces seem to ask “how many American school children are taught about the two day Tulsa, Oklahoma pogrom of 1921?”

A “racial” massacre perpetrated by enraged racists, like so many others over the years, approved by local law enforcement.   Like all others done by our countrymen it has been erased from collective memory (such as it is here) because, well, it does tend to make America look like the same kind of barbaric shithole that Belarus was for Jews back in those dark hopeless days.   Like every other place where mass killing is winked at by the authorities, for a time.

 

 

The Poison is Always the Same

There are certain people, tormented by painful needs they have no insight into, who lash out at others as a way of trying to feel better about their own gnawing sense of inadequacy.  This terrible sense of worthlessness was instilled in them when they were children by equally damaged people.   It is possible to largely recover from this kind of mistreatment, but it takes a lot of work.  The only time many damaged souls feel equal to a world they believe is otherwise crushing them is when they are fighting to dominate others.   Injecting poison into others is as close as they come to mastering situations they feel are beyond their control, confrontations they feel at a fatal disadvantage in.

The poison is always the same.   The need to deliver the toxic bite always comes from the righteous feeling of being a victim.   Only defending themselves, you dig, from stronger, more vicious predators.  They have no choice, you understand, because they believe they’re always under attack, and at an unfair disadvantage, and are only doing what is right, what anyone in their position would do.

This toxic cycle is sadly common in human affairs.   The toxic type has only one response to everything: injecting more poison.   We’ve become familiar recently with the term “doubling down” in our partisan politics.   It is a gambling term with wide application in human affairs — it means, according to the first google hit,  “to strengthen one’s commitment to a particular strategy or course of action, typically one that is potentially risky.”   If you seem to be wrong, if anyone questions you, double down — come at them twice as hard.  A strong, angry denial is a much better plan of attack than allowing the possibility that you might have made a mistake, done something wrong, share some blame for the ugly situation you find yourself in.

People with very low self-esteem often feel called upon to fight, to never relent or admit the possibility of even partial fault, to never see another person’s point of view, to constantly double down on the poison.  We can intellectually understand the factors that may have made them this way, a scalding feeling of inferiority, self-hatred, being unloved, but that understanding is little protection against the pain of their bite.   The poison is always the same.

My best advice, whenever possible, avoid this type like you’d shun a whiff of anthrax or the AIDS virus smeared on an open cut.   The poison is always the same. There is really no antidote other than expelling the noxious shit.   It takes time and work to get it all out of your system, I can tell you from experience.   Given the choice, once you recognize this type at work, move away as expeditiously as possible.   These poor motherfuckers simply cannot help themselves.

If one of them, God forbid, becomes the most powerful person in the world, be resolute and strong in removing them from power.

A few thoughts from Mueller’s Volume II summary of the obstruction case (he refrained from making) against the president

Here are some of Mueller’s own carefully chosen words, from his executive summary of Volume II — Obstruction of Justice.   I have broken them into smaller paragraphs, and inserted comments, to aid in the mastication and digestion of a few key points.

Overarching factual issues. We did not make a traditional prosecution decision about these facts,

Because, according to Mueller, regulations obliged him to obey the OLC opinion about not indicting a sitting president and fairness prevented charging him when the president would have no opportunity to immediately clear his good name,

but the evidence we obtained supports several general statements about the President’s conduct.

Several features of the conduct we investigated distinguish it from typical obstruction-of-justice cases.

First, the investigation concerned the President, and some of his actions, such as firing the FBI director, involved facially lawful acts within his Article II authority, which raises constitutional issues discussed below.

At the same time, the President’s position as the head of the Executive Branch provided him with unique and powerful means of influencing official proceedings, subordinate officers, and potential witnesses—all of which is relevant to a potential obstruction-of-justice analysis.

Second, unlike cases in which a subject engages in obstruction of justice to cover up a crime, the evidence we obtained did not establish that the President was involved in an underlying crime related to Russian election interference.

Although the obstruction statutes do not require proof of such a crime, the absence of that evidence affects the analysis of the President’s intent and requires consideration of other possible motives for his conduct.

It was this second point that Bill Barr chose as the center of his supremely lawyerly but plainspoken talking points, his best (and only) grounds for defending Trump against the weight of the evidence in the Mueller Report.   

According to Barr, Mueller “acknowledged” that the President had been “angry and frustrated” about the unfair investigation of an innocent man– and so his “intent” — a key to obstruction and criminal conspiracy as well, cannot, according to Barr,  be proven to be corrupt, or obstructive, beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law– therefore— since any innocent man would have, arguably, acted the same way the president did:   NOTHING TO SEE HERE.

Third, many of the President’s acts directed at witnesses, including discouragement of cooperation with the government and suggestions of possible future pardons, took place in public view.

That circumstance is unusual, but no principle of law excludes public acts from the reach of the obstruction laws.

If the likely effect of public acts is to influence witnesses or alter their testimony, the harm to the justice system’s integrity is the same.  

Every time details of Trump’s pattern of acts to thwart investigation into himself and his administration emerge, the public groans “we heard that one already!  He tweeted it!”.   FOX thunders “old news!  already litigated!”     Here Mueller reminds America that the many likely obstructive acts detailed in his report are no less obstructive if done by tweet.

Although the series of events we investigated involved discrete acts, the overall pattern of the President’s conduct towards the investigations can shed light on the nature of the President’s acts and the inferences that can be drawn about his intent.

In particular, the actions we investigated can be divided into two phases, reflecting a possible shift in the President’s motives.

The first phase covered the period from the President’s first interactions with Comey through the President’s firing of Comey. During that time, the President had been repeatedly told he was not personally under investigation.

Mueller writes briefly about the original investigation, based on allegations of collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign, and triggered by the firing of FBI director James Comey when he wouldn’t let the “Flynn thing” go, and then the need to expand it when the president began actively trying to thwart the investigation at every turn. 

This is the crux of Mueller’s unspoken (but carefully laid out) case against Trump– willful and ongoing obstruction of all legal investigations involving him.   Trump’s furious response to the investigations kicked into higher gear once the Special Counsel was appointed to conduct his “witch hunt.”

Soon after the firing of Comey and the appointment of the Special Counsel, however, the President became aware that his own conduct was being investigated in an obstruction-of-justice inquiry.

At that point, the President engaged in a second phase of conduct, involving public attacks on the investigation, non-public efforts to control it, and efforts in both public and private to encourage witnesses not to cooperate with the investigation.

Judgments about the nature of the President’s motives during each phase would be informed by the totality of the evidence.

The totality of the evidence looks pretty bad here, if you add it all up, and points to an unwavering and corrupt intent to obstruct legal process, a felony.   

The number of close associates of the president who were fired, who quit, resigned, were implicated in unethical behavior, indicted, convicted, locked up, the many ongoing (and redacted) investigations into Unindicted Donald and numerous associates, do not appear to be factors in the presumed-innocent president’s favor.  Nor does his blanket, openly contemptuous refusal to obey any and all subpoenas and his standing order to everyone with pertinent information not to speak to Congress.  

Or, we can go with Bill Barr’s generous, loyal, exculpatory view:   

The president’s motive was, as Mueller himself “acknowledged,” that the president was (righteously) angry and frustrated, which anyone would have been in the president’s position, particularly if they knew they were innocent.  The president, said Barr, has been proven as innocent, of everything, as viciously villainized pious Christian girls’ basketball coach and scrupulously fair Justice Boof Kavanaugh himself, unfairly besieged on every side by enraged, irrational partisan spies and traitors, funded by a cabal of wealthy extreme leftwing freedom haters,  who don’t base their actions on fact and reason, but on irrational hatred of a good and unfairly, illegally, attacked man whose only crime is trying to restore lost greatness to our divided nation.  As Jesus Christ Himself desires, most ardently.

Here is  Mueller’s immediate written reaction to Barr’s purposeful misinterpretation of the findings of his investigation, which Barr only withheld from public view for less than a month, while he pressed on with his false and misleading narrative about Mueller’s findings.  In common language Mueller’s short letter boils down to: dude, why are you lying?

You decide which side of the scale the totality of the evidence that Trump obstructed (and continues to obstruct) justice comes down on, now that you’ve considered both sides.   You have a strong summary denial, on one side, and hundreds of pages of sworn testimony and doggedly uncovered unflattering facts on the other.  

And more than a thousand former federal prosecutors, from both parties, signing a letter that asserts the obvious: but for the fact that this man is the president, he’d have been indicted on several counts already, based on the evidence that Mueller laid out.

As for who is to make the final determination on holding a colorably corrupt president accountable to the rule of law, Mueller wrote:

The conclusion that Congress may apply the obstruction laws to the President’s corrupt exercise of the powers of the office accords with our constitutional system of checks and balances and the principle that no person is above the law.

Public Service Announcement

To make it as easy as possible to understand the necessity for holding our unaccountable rogue president accountable, in the only constitutional way remaining, I provide three links.   

The first is a two minute clip that shows how radically public opinion can change as more information is provided live on TV.   It goes on to a short, compelling presentation of the importance, in a democracy, of nobody being above the law.   It’s cued up for you here.

Few Americans are going to read a 448 page report to decide if Trump deserves to be impeached or not.   Here is the summary Bob Mueller prepared for Bill Barr to release, a day or two before Barr wrote his own “summary” that spun the findings “no collusion, no obstruction, basically exoneration.”  Scroll down to Volume Two on obstruction, the cover-up.  A ten or fifteen minute read that will reward your time by fleshing out the evidence and giving you hope about justice ultimately prevailing.    It also contains some fascinating details and is a very easy read.  

The third item to consider is Mueller’s remarkable one page letter to Barr, his boss.  It was written in response to Barr’s deliberate public distortions of Mueller’s findings and politely but firmly says “what the fuck?  You are fucking lying, dude!”

Here is a copy of the letter on FOX News.   Ooops.  Nothing to see here, but spin (you can actually read it, but you have to figure out how).

Here is a direct link to Mueller’s March 27 letter to Barr, written as soon as Barr started publicly distorting the substance and findings of the Mueller report. 

A concerned citizen doing what he can to keep fellow citizens informed by facts, rather than enflamed by inflammatory talking points repeated over and over and over.

Pop and violence

My grandfather, who my sister and I always called Pop, was a physically strong man.   Trim and powerful into his eightieth (and last) year, his large hands could open any jar easily and he could show you his strength whenever you asked him to, just by squeezing your hand.  Those big hands were always very gentle whenever they touched my sister or me, he never hurt us for more than a second, to make his point when we pressed him.  When we asked Pop if he was always strong he’d tell us about his youth back in Russia. 

“They couldn’t put a finger on me!” he’d often say gruffly, meaning the many local Ukrainians, the goyim who periodically went nuts and started beating and raping Jews.  He got along with the goyim, he told us, would take a wagon out to their farms and deliver goods, and he’d drink with them.   He dressed like a Russian, he had blonde hair and pale blue eyes, he looked Russian.   They respected him.  More on this later.

The one story that stayed with me, and will stand in for all others, was about the time the wagon Pop was driving, a horse drawn flatbed that carried groceries out to the surrounding farms, broke a wheel.   To replace the wheel they needed to jack up the wagon, prop it aloft for as long as it took to do the work.  They were in the middle of nowhere when the wheel shattered and they had no way to prop the wagon up while the work was done.   So Pop lifted the wagon off the ground on the side with the broken wheel.   He held it up on his shoulder until his companion pulled off the broken wheel and replaced it with a good one.   Then they went on their way.  All in a day’s work for Pop.   To hear Pop talk about his youth, he was one strong, silent, tough young Jew.

One night when my sister and I were quite young Pop babysat for us.   We were older than babies, probably six and four, or maybe eight and six, but that’s always the word that’s used, isn’t it, babysit?  Pop was in the kitchen, right next to the dining room, and my sister and I began to argue in the dining room.   Things escalated quickly.  Pop came out to intervene just as I grabbed my sister by the neck and started choking her.  (My sister usually did just fine in physical and psychological battles, no worries, gentle reader).   I don’t remember Pop putting a hand on either of us to separate us, I think it was his pure horror that made me drop my hands, made my sister and I instantly stop fighting.

Pop was so upset he retreated to the kitchen and started throwing up in the kitchen sink.  My sister and I felt so bad we left the rest of our fight for the next time.  There would always be time to continue our intermittent war, I guess we both reasoned, we were concerned about Pop who couldn’t seem to stop crying.

Many years later my sister and I were having lunch with Pop in the apartment in Miami Beach.   Our grandmother had just narrated how Pop had gone next door to talk to their neighbor, a tough-talking old Jew both of them suspected (possibly because he always bragged about it) had been a Jewish gangster in his earlier years in Brooklyn .   When the guy didn’t answer the door, and Pop could see him through the screen door, sitting in his usual chair, Pop tried the door, found it open and walked in.   He found the neighbor dead.

“Wow, Pop, you must have been shocked.  Weren’t you scared, standing there next to your friend’s dead body?” my sister asked.   

Pop scoffed.   “A dead man, to me?” he said, and flipped the cloth napkin on the table with the back of his hand.    My feelings about a dead man, his gesture said, are not even worth the couple of words it would take to dismiss them.   

I knew, even as a boy, that “one day the letters from Europe just stopped coming”.  The coins Pop’s father sent to my mother, and the Russian stamps, stopped in 1942, when my mother was 14.   She used to practice her Yiddish writing to the grandfather she’d never meet.   Nobody would ever meet him.   

Along with the rest of Pop’s family the old man was marched (if he’d survived the privations of a year of hellish ghetto life– his home had been designated the eastern edge of the ghetto), by local Ukrainian goyim who couldn’t put a finger on Pop, supervised by Nazis who regarded Jews as dangerous, gigantic insects, to a ravine on the northwestern edge of town.     

Eyewitnesses describe the ravine, raked in preparation by local Ukrainians, the softened earth waiting to receive layer after layer of dead Jews.  I have read the chilling testimony, by those who saw the execution and somehow lived to talk about it.  Fragments of bone from this killing place blow in the wind to this day, skitter across the dry ground, according to someone who visited and wrote about the town for the New York Times not long ago.

I never wondered, once I learned, as a boy, that the rest of Pop’s family (but for one I learned about recently, apparently as strong and tough as Pop, who survived the war in a series of harrowing Russian prison camps after being accused of disloyalty as a draftee in the Red Army) had been made to vanish, how somebody as strong as Pop could be so full of fear, and sometimes prejudice.    They hadn’t put a finger on him in Russia, perhaps, but that was as much pure, dumb luck as anything about Pop’s impressive physical strength.

Three comments from a reader

I rarely get comments on this sparsely read blahg.  Yesterday I got two.  I had an email for each, asking if I approved the comment for “publication”.  The comments were from the same person.  I read the first, and then the second.   The second email had this red warning banner at the top:

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I see now that I have a third comment from Boxerpaws.   So I’ll answer them all here, to err on the side of safety.  I hope you read these replies, my friend, and thank you for your comments.

The comment on  this post

the IRS would have busted Pres Trump if they had found any wrongdoing. What Fred Trump did or didn’t do is irrelevant.

The IRS has a special unit that deals with the tax returns of very wealthy citizens.   Over the years they collected a tiny amount of money from Fred for his under-reporting income, undervaluing assets and other tax mistakes or violations.  Young Donald and his siblings were lifetime beneficiaries of Fred’s tax avoidance schemes and certainly knew, as adults, that he was fraudulently funneling money to them using fake corporations they were officers of, and his other tax dodges.   Did you read the massive NY Times investigative piece?  The Failing NYT was never sued by the president’s many lawyers, in spite of the threat printed in the article itself. 

President Trump will not produce any financial documents … because?   There is every appearance that the president is lying about the longest tax audit in American history.  His appeal of a judge’s decision in the Deutsche Bank case is another example of him being “the most transparent president in history”.  He has been known, on occasion, to lie.  This is something you have to admit, I think.

Also Fred, in old age, had lawyers summon Donald and the other siblings to make sure now President Trump’s plan to become sole executor of Fred’s wealth never happened.   Don’t forget how many times Fred had thrown in tens of millions ($400,000,000 in today’s dollars) to insulate his reckless (or audacious, if you prefer) son from multiple business disasters.

Your comments on this post

“Barr did what Mueller asked, but he waited a few weeks before releasing anything from Mueller.”  Barr had no requirement to release it at all. He released it both for public consumption and Congress.

OK.  But as the sentences that follow the quote point out, during those weeks Barr waited, with Mueller’s fully redacted executive summary and a letter from Mueller disputing Barr’s conclusion of “no collusion, no obstruction, exoneration” in his hands as of March 27, Americans were deliberately misled by Barr.   The narrative that Americans absorbed in the course of almost a month of redacting, in the absence of the details of numerous incidents of obstruction of justice that were laid out in the report (and in the executive summary) was false.  

Have you read the Mueller summary outlining the ten or more examples of obstruction ?  It’s a ten minute read, all Americans should read it.

Mueller told Barr in the presence of witnesses that the DOJ ruling that a sitting Pres cannot be indicted had no bearing on his decision. So which time did Mueller lie? The first time to Barr et al or the 2nd time at his ‘presser’. 2. there is no LAW stating that a sitting Pres can’t be indicted. It amounts to a DOJ guideline. Nothing more,nothing less. IF a sitting Pres couldn’t be indicted for a crime he could rob a bank/murder his wife and get away with it as long as he was in office. Use your head.

Let’s assume that Barr was telling the truth, and witnesses can verify that Mueller lied to him over and over at a meeting when he said under no circumstances could he have indicted President Trump using the evidence compiled in his report.   How does that change anything dozens of witnesses said, under penalty of perjury, in Mueller’s report?   Also note that Trump and Barr are the only two people we know of ever to accuse Republican Eagle Scout Mueller of dishonesty. 

Do we assume, if Mueller lied to Barr about that policy decision, and even falsely claimed that a certain regulation required him to abide by the OLC guideline about indicting a sitting president, that he’s lying about everything in his report, including all of the sworn testimony of many witnesses?  

If so, doesn’t the same assumption apply to President Trump, who sometimes lies?

The standard for impeachment is not the same as for a criminal trial — they do not have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the president committed crimes.   To remove an impeached public official from office they only have to show, to the satisfaction of the American people and 65 Senators, how he abused his power to undermine our constitutional system.

As candidate Trump himself observed, he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and not lose any supporters.  This seems to be the case, if you ignore all the findings in the Mueller Report and focus only on whether Mueller lied to Barr about one key point during a closed door meeting.  

Let us turn to President Trump’s strong refutation of the Mueller report. Here is the president’s strong case that Mueller is a vicious enemy of his, with a giant “conflict of interest”.  

How am I not using my head?

Thanks again for these comments.

 

Pathetic Porcine Puppet

The president clearly has nothing to hide.  That’s why he is suing Deutsche Bank to prevent them from turning over his subpoenaed financial records, having his Secretary of the Treasury refuse to provide other subpoenaed records and preventing everybody who ever worked for him (excluding the close associates who have been convicted of crimes and are serving prison time) from cooperating with Congressional investigations.  A clear sign that the man is a victim of vicious, inhuman partisans who only want to bring him down for no reason at all!

Enter the shameful new Attorney General, the man Laurence Tribe accurately called a “pathetic porcine puppet of a puerile president”.   Barr speaks clearly, even under oath: yes, the president is right to think that spies were illegally gathering information against him as he ran for president.  Yes, Mueller basically exonerated him, although his DOJ is “investigating” whether Mueller and his team conducted an illegal investigation of the president.  

Then, always on message,  he said this on CBS, immediately after Mueller reiterated that everything Congress needs to protect our democracy is written in his unread report:

“Sometimes people can convince themselves that what they’re doing is in the higher interest, the better good.  They don’t realize that what they’re doing is really antithetical to the democratic system that we have.”

Dig it, you smug and true-believing disgrace.

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