Author Archives: oinsketta

What would the führer do? (Part 3)

A party wholly in service to the damaged ego of one man does shit like this (described with uncharacteristic lack of squeamish ambiguity by the Grey Lady):

Neguse: What is the specific constitutional crime that you’re investigating?

Reschenthaler: Well, we’re having an inquiry so we can do an investigation and compel the production of witnesses and documents. 

Neguse: And what is the crime you’re investigating?

Reschenthaler: High crimes, misdemeanors and bribery.

Neguse: What high crimes and misdemeanors are you investigating? 

Reschenthaler: Once I get time, I will explain what we’re looking at and I will make the equivalency of the last impeachment. 

Transcript from House Rules Committee “debate” from MediasTouch

Just ask yourself, would the führer, before he had the legal power to kill anyone he hated, have had his myrmidons do anything differently?

Semi-comical

But also serious as yer proverbial heart attack

DOJ has defendant Trump’s personal phone from January 6, 2021, after its disappearance and years of concealment (can you say obstruction, boys and girls?) along with all relevant Secret Service and White House, Homeland Security and Department of Defense phone calls and text messages from before, during and after the permitless parade to, and deadly riot at, the Capitol.

And here’s the big guy himself, calm and credible as can be, in his most reasonable and persuasive tones, from a month ago. He was asked about the propriety of weaponizing the government against his enemies.

They’ve taken a President who’s very popular, I got 75 million votes, much more than that I believe.  No president’s ever got that many votes, and they’ve taken that number of people, and I think you can double it or almost you can triple it in terms of the real, the feeling.

“But we’ve watched it for a long time and it’s not unique, but it’s unique for the United States.  Yeah  If they do this, they’ve already done it, but if they want to follow through on this, yeah, it could certainly happen in reverse. It could certainly happen in reverse.

What they’ve done is they’ve released the genie out of the box, you understand that. They’ve done something that nobody thought would happen. They’ve taken a President who’s very popular, I got 75 million votes, much more than that I believe.  No president’s ever got that many votes, and they’ve taken that number of people, and I think you can double it or almost you can triple it in terms of the real, the feeling. You can’t do that, you can’t go after people.

You know when you’re President, and you’ve done a good job and you’re popular, you don’t go after them, so you can win an election. They’ve done indictments in order to win an election. They call it weaponization and the people aren’t going to stand for it. But yeah, they have done something that allows the next party, I mean if somebody, if I happen to be President and I see somebody who’s doing well and beating me very badly I say “go down and indite them”. 

What would the führer do? (Part 2)

It’s not hard to imagine what a an autocrat would do in any given situation, just ask yourself “what would the führer do?”

Picture meeting the führer, someone given to extreme temper tantrums when opposed, prepared to throw himself on the floor, shriek, kick his feet, bite the legs of the chairs, the carpet, sob, threaten, perform a terrifying, disorienting display of insane need for total dominance. Not to mention a violent vindictive streak and deep personal pleasure taken in the fatal suffering of his enemies.  

Then picture ever disagreeing with or contradicting that titan of will. Imagine that kind of shameless, insane, vengeful, murderous asshole, that personality, in charge of an entire nation.  It’s very easy to imagine what the führer would do in any given situation just as it’s easy to imagine what Jesus would do, or Buddha, or any prophet or person of righteousness you’d like.

Fascism is the dream state of the powerful narcissist, because under fascism, the will of the leader, and those who benefit from the leader’s will, is the only law of society and society’s only value. Charles Koch’s dream world, the dream of his loveless father fucking Fred Koch, who, as he created his psychopath sons, built the oil refineries for Hitler’s Luftwaffe, and Frederick Christ Trump, the highly successful psychopath who exploited government incentives after World War II to build middle-class housing, and then along with his filthy ilk, forced the creation of the Fair Housing Rights Act in 1965, which he fought with all his might using the Devil’s own Roy Kohn, alternately humiliating and supporting his own second choice idiot son Donald, all the while. 

Fascism is the dream state of any psychopath who dreams, joylessly, of bending the world to his insane will.

Happy 75th, Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Seventy-five years ago today, on December 10, 1948, the United Nations General Assembly announced the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). 

At a time when the world was still reeling from the death and destruction of World War II, the Soviet Union was blockading Berlin, Italy and France were convulsed with communist-backed labor agitation, Arabs opposed the new state of Israel, communists and nationalists battled in China, and segregationists in the U.S. were forming their own political party to stop the government from protecting civil rights for Black Americans, the member countries of the United Nations nonetheless came together to adopt a landmark document: a common standard of fundamental rights for all human beings.

The United Nations itself was only three years old, having been formed in 1945 as a key part of an international order based on rules on which nations agreed, rather than the idea that might makes right, which had twice in just over twenty years brought wars that involved the globe. In early 1946 the United Nations Economic and Social Council organized a nine-person commission on human rights to set up the mission of a permanent Human Rights Commission. Unlike other U.N. commissions, though, the selection of its members would be based not on their national affiliations but on their personal merit. . .

. . . The U.N. official noted that the commission must figure out how to define the violation of human rights not only internationally but also within a nation, and must suggest how to protect “the rights of man all over the world.” If a procedure for identifying and addressing violations “had existed a few years ago,” he said, “the human community would have been able to stop those who started the war at the moment when they were still weak and the world catastrophe would have been avoided.”

Drafted over the next two years, the final document began with a preamble explaining that a UDHR was necessary because “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,” and because “disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind.” Because “the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,” the preamble said, “human rights should be protected by the rule of law.”

Heather Cox Richardson

Truth and Reconciliation

Reconciliation is a beautiful thing. After a bitter struggle, if the two sides can regain trust in each other, reconcile and live in peace, it is the greatest example of redemption imaginable.

What makes reconciliation so difficult is the necessity for truth, the requirement that what causes the pain between the parties is addressed, so that there can be real resolution of the bitter conflict.  Without truth, reconciliation is one side agreeing that anything bad that caused the strife is better forgotten than actually addressed and rectified.

Certain things can’t be rectified without tremendous willingness to forgive on the side of the person wronged. No matter how great the willingness, truth is always an essential ingredient of real reconciliation.  Without an honest back and forth there can be no real meeting of the minds, no chance for true redemption.

If I lynched your brother, no matter how badly I felt about it afterwards, I still lynched your brother.   If we want to have reconciliation and I insist that at the time I lynched your brother I was completely right to do it, that story will never be reconciled with what you need after I lynch your brother.  

If I tell you to get over that unfortunate thing that happened to your brother, (distancing myself from my actions with the passive voice, as first year law students are taught to do when they have to admit an inconvenient fact), we have nothing: no truth, no reconciliation.

We can’t heal from an injury inflicted by someone else unless that injury is addressed, unless we have some assurance going forward that the same actions that caused the injury won’t be repeated. Humans usually get very defensive after they lose control and do something atrocious, they would rather not look squarely at something terrible they may have done when they lost control. 

Much easier to forget, justify, split hairs about it, tell you to get over it, blame you for being unforgiving if you don’t get over their little mistake or their long pattern of consistently similar little mistakes.

When the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa worked, former apartheid torturers cried in guilt for what they publicly acknowledged they’d done to their victims. Sometimes the victims would be so moved by the showing of remorse that there would be tears all around and actual reconciliation in the face of deep, deep regret, after honesty that had to be painful as hell, but no real peace comes without truth. 

The harder that truth is to admit, the more essential it is that it be sincerely acknowledged aloud for peace to follow.  Without truth, reconciliation is as empty as any political slogan you can think of.

Criminal co-conspirator Speaker of the House tries again for the boss

[Yesterday], Johnson supported Trump’s message about January 6 when he said that he was making sure the faces of rioters are blurred in the surveillance footage. “We have to blur some of the faces of persons who participated in the events of that day because we don’t want them to be retaliated against and to be charged by the DOJ [Department of Justice] and to have other, you know, concerns and problems,”  he said. Johnson’s spokesperson quickly walked back the comment, saying Johnson meant to say that faces were blurred to prevent “all forms of retaliation against private citizens from any non-governmental actors.” 

(Heather Cox Richardson)

This cherub-faced little extremist asshole was running around the Capitol days before the January 6th riot/insurrection, urging his colleagues to sign on to an amicus brief to support corrupt Texas tough guy AG Ken Paxton’s grotesquely unconstitutional ploy to the Supreme Court to deny the right of several states Biden won to send their legally certified electors to Congress on January 6th.

Here’s just a reminder, from the evidence–based world, of what the insane former president is charged with in relation to disrupting Congress on January sixth.

It’s no wonder incendiary lies, threats of violence and retribution and cheap theatrics are the staple of Chrump’s 2024 campaign. It’s all he’s got, it’s all he’s ever had, and along with daddy’s fortune, it’s all he’s ever needed.

Judge Chutkan’s denial of absolute criminal immunity for Trump sings

So says Glenn Kirschner. Glenn’s not wrong, here’s a nice bit, with a link to the rest:

Perhaps no one understood the compelling public interest in the rule of law better than our first former President, George Washington. His decision to voluntarily leave office after two terms marked an extraordinary divergence from nearly every world leader who had preceded him, ushering in the sacred American tradition of peacefully transitioning Presidential power— a tradition that stood unbroken until January 6, 2021. In announcing that decision, however,Washington counseled that the newfound American independence carried with it a responsibility. “The very idea of the power and the right of the people to establish government presupposes the duty of every individual to obey the established government.” Washington’s Farewell Address,S. Doc. No. 106-21, at 13 (2d Sess. 2000), available at https://perma.cc/E5CZ-7NNP. He issued a sober warning: “All obstructions to the execution of the laws,” including group arrangements to “counteract” the “regular deliberation and action of the constituted authorities, are destructive of this fundamental principle.” Id. at 14. In Washington’s view, such obstructions would prove “fatal” to the Republic, as “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”

In Washington’s view, such obstructions would prove “fatal” to the Republic, as “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”

The entire ruling is here

First Amendment right to lie

Right wing billionaire Elon Musk, enemy of unions and any kind of regulation on wealthy businessmen, piously styles himself a First Amendment absolutist any time the increasing hate speech on his social media site is reported on. Musk and his determined ilk peddle the myth that white men are viciously singled out as the most oppressed victims in society. If hate-filled lies that tend to stoke violence are limited by the government, say by requiring warnings to be posted on inflammatory conspiracy posts with no basis in fact (as finally happened on Twitter just before the January 6 riot), Musk and his persecuted minority are placed at a great disadvantage in the war for everything.

The freedom to lie, and enrage alienated masses with a long list of grievances real and imagined, is crucial to the right wing’s cherished dream, so close they can taste it, of a tiny minority of our greatest and most deserving citizens controlling everybody else now and forever. Hammer on woke elites, majoritarian tyranny, blood drinking pedophiles, eternally scheming Jews, murderous Muslim fanatics, homosexual groomers, raping, infectious disease-carrying, blood poisoning, illegal immigrants and so on and you have a chance of keeping the lynch mob whipped up enough to do your bidding. Truth and accurate reporting are these guy’s worst nightmare.

If your chance of winning an argument depends on lying, as is the case almost any time you have a conflict with someone who can never be wrong, and your ability to lie is being limited, in the name of some squishy abstract principle like “fairness,” you will fight like hell or you won’t have a grandiose dream of perfection and enraged superiority anymore.

Death during life, a grim tragedy

When people you love, who you’ve long celebrated with and comforted in their time of sorrow, who have supported you when you most needed them, all turn their faces away, stop listening to you, tell you to shut up if you need to make an uncomfortable point, insist the problem is you needing to talk about something painful and dark, it is a little foretaste of your own death.

When we are in pain the first thing we need from those closest to us is for them to listen, to hear, to understand why we are suffering. If you are forcibly silenced, on the threat of expulsion from the community, you either meekly accept your muzzling, and live a bullied, depressed, greatly diminished life, or continue trying to make yourself heard. If you persist, with a righteously angry crew that can never be wrong, you will get to experience that special foretaste of death while you and your loved ones are, for the moment, all very much alive.