Category Archives: current events

What is a lie?

This is now a legitimate, and urgent, question. It is related to “what is a crime?” The answer to both questions is, in a phrase a popular law professor taught all his students to say first “it depends”. The answer to both questions in the USA, after years of heartily advertised lies — smoking is perfectly safe, burning fossil fuels is perfectly good for the environment, Oxycodone has a magically low risk of addiction, being in a rage all the time is good for your health, never apologizing is a sign of strength — is that as a society we’ve come to accept many knowing lies as possibly true. After all, why would Exxon or Dick Cheney, or the philanthropic Sackler family, or autocratic multi-billionaire Charles Koch lie?

Boof Kavanaugh’s presumably adoring mother provided her hyper-ambitious only child a good framework for evaluating the truth or falsity of claims that come before a judge: “Use common sense, what smells OK, what smells funny, who stands to gain by the claim?” (Martha Kavanaugh is quoted as saying ““Use your common sense. What rings true. What rings false.” which is a slightly weaker vanilla formulation of what I recall Boof saying, I’ll give the former Montgomery County civil court judge the benefit of the doubt here) It’s a pretty good guide for spotting truth or lies, especially if you include “who stands to gain by the claim”. That seems to me the key consideration when listening to a statement that rings a little iffy.

If you go through a large sum of money, quickly and without any apparent cause, someone might conclude you have a gambling problem. It’s not an unreasonable theory to account for blowing through a pile of cash in an otherwise unexplainable manner. If you are pressed by a family member on the loss of the money, and that family member assumes you have a gambling problem, you will need to say something convincing. You press forward tentatively at first, explaining that you had many unforeseen expenses, such as blah, blah and blah, and had borrowed money you had to repay, which necessitated borrowing more money, which meant you spent more of your own money than you’d planned… if the family member seems amenable to these absurdist explanations you clinch the thing by looking her in the eyes and saying “I do not have a gambling problem.” To disprove the lie, you’d have to find the guy’s bookie, or betting slips, or credit card charges at a gambling parlor. Otherwise, who are you going to believe your wild hunch or my sincere explanation about why your wild hunch is completely wild?

We are now living in the Age of Justifiable Lying, you might say. Lying is seen by millions of our fellow Americans as a purely transactional act, part of the price of doing business, if you like. For the first time in American history a losing candidate (of one party) now routinely doesn’t accept the results, charging voter fraud as the cause of their defeat. Glenn Youngkin won a close governors race in Virginia by about 70,000 votes. His Democratic opponent, seeing the margin was insurmountable, conceded Youngkin’s victory. The same margin decided the race in New Jersey, but the Republican refused to concede for days, making noises about likely fraud, until he blinked and finally conceded defeat.

This refusal to bow to so-called reality, of course, comes directly from the man currently in charge of the Grand Old Party. Trumplethinskin [1] announced in the lead up to his reelection loss to Biden that the only way Biden could beat him would be by cheating. The subtext was that urban voters, in areas where coloreds and whites interact daily on a level perhaps not seen in rural areas, where the real American Volk live, are inherently corrupt, hate America and the good old days, are too “woke” to see how wrong they are about everything. So if you give “urban” votes the same weight as rural votes you will never have true democracy in this country and the place will go openly Communist and white people will be put on trial for things like innocently killing Black people because they have a reasonable and legitimate fear of them.

People like me keep pointing at the evidence that there has never been widespread voter fraud in this country. Partisans like the creepy Hans von Spakovsky have made a career of hunting down voter fraud, fancying themselves warriors for justice, modern day Simon Weisenthals. Spakovsky has found virtually no fraud, ever, and you can see his paltry findings in the database of voter fraud he has been compiling, going back decades. You can point at all the evidence you like, but if the lie has more appeal to you, confirms your worldview, then the so-called lack of evidence is just more evidence of fraud.

When evaluating a claim and deciding whether it is true, it often feels better, and is much easier, to go by your gut than by sifting through conflicting evidence and weighing both sides like some kind of scientist. This gut feeling of truth is the essence of the “confirmation bias” we tend to believe anything that confirms what we already believe. It does not negate the importance of facts and reasoned argument based on fact, of course, but at the same time it often clearly does. Try parsing that one.

Here is the recent statement of facts Judge Tanya Chutkan wrote to put her decision about the former president’s right to hide anything that could irreparably harm him (say by subjecting him to criminal liability for planning and inciting a violent attack to stop the certification of votes and overturn the election).

While not material to the outcome, some factual background on the events leading up to and including January 6, 2021, offers context for the legal dispute here. In the months preceding the 2020 presidential election, Plaintiff declared that the only way he could lose would be if the election were “rigged.” See, e.g., Donald J. Trump, Speech at Republican National Convention Nomination Vote at 22:08 (Aug. 24, 2020) in C-SPAN, https://www.c-span.org/video/?475000- 103/president-trump-speaks-2020-republican-national-convention-vote.

In the months after losing the election, he repeatedly claimed that the election was rigged, stolen, and fraudulent. For example, in a December 2 speech, he alleged “tremendous voter fraud and irregularities” resulting from a late-night “massive dump” of votes. See President Donald J. Trump, Statement on 2020 Election Results at 0:39, 7:26 (Dec. 2, 2020) in C-SPAN, https://www.cspan.org/video/?506975-1/president-trump-statement-2020-election-results. He also claimed that certain votes were “counted in foreign countries,” that “millions of votes were cast illegally in the swing states alone,” and that it was “statistically impossible” he lost. Id. at 12:00, 14:22, 19:00.

After losing the election, Plaintiff and his supporters filed a plethora of unsuccessful lawsuits seeking to overturn the results. See, e.g., Current Litigation, AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION: STANDING COMMITTEE ON ELECTION LAW, Apr. 30, 2021, https://www.americanbar.org/groups/public_interest/election_law/litigation/.

The United States Supreme Court also denied numerous emergency applications aimed at overturning the results. Id. In response, Plaintiff tweeted that the Court was “totally incompetent and weak on the massive Election Fraud that took place in the 2020 Presidential Election.” Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump), TWITTER (Dec. 26, 2020, 1:51 PM), https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu /documents/tweets-december-26-2020.

He continued his claim that “We won the Presidential Election, by a lot,” and implored Republicans to “FIGHT FOR IT. Don’t let them take it away.” Id. (Dec. 18, 2020, 2:14 PM), https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/tweets-december-18- 2020. A Joint Session of Congress was scheduled to convene on January 6, 2021, to count the electoral votes of the 2020 presidential election and to officially announce the elected President, as required by the Twelfth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and the Electoral Count Act.

In the days leading up to January 6, Plaintiff began promoting a protest rally to take place hours before the Joint Session convened. On December 19, 2020, he tweeted “Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election. Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!” Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump), TWITTER (December 19, 2020, 6:42am), https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/tweets-december-19-2020.

During a rally, he warned that “Democrats are trying to steal the White House . . . you can’t let that happen. You can’t let it happen,” and promised that “[w]e’re going to fight like hell, I’ll tell you right now.” See Donald J. Trump, Remarks at Georgia U.S. Senate Campaign Event at 8:40, 14:19 (Jan. 4, 2021) in Campaign 2020, C-SPAN, https://www.c-span.org/video/?507634-1/president-trumpcampaigns-republican-senate-candidates-georgia.

On January 6, Plaintiff spoke at the rally at the Ellipse, during which he repeated claims, rejected by numerous courts, that the election was “rigged” and “stolen”; urged then Vice President Pence, who was preparing to convene Congress to tally the electoral votes, “to do the right thing” by rejecting certain states’ electors and declining to certify the election for President Joseph R. Biden; and told protesters to “walk down to the Capitol” to “give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country,” “we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” and “you’ll never take back our country with weakness.” See Donald J. Trump, Rally on Electoral College Vote Certification at 3:33:04, 3:33:36, 3:37:20, 3:47:02, 3:47:22, 4:42:26, 4:41:27 (Jan. 6, 2021) in Campaign 2020, C-SPAN, https://www.c-span.org/video/?507744-1/rally-electoral-collegevote-certification.

Shortly thereafter, the crowds surged from the rally, marched along Constitution Avenue, and commenced their siege of the Capitol. 

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The only way to refute this well-documented statement of fact is to angrily denounce this federal judge as a partisan fucking liar, an obvious BLM terrorist-sympathizer and Trump hater who was not even born in this country! That argument will fly with about 39% of the population, those who believe it’s “common sense” to administer Texas justice to a traitor like fucking Mike Pence.

Here’s Martha Kavanaugh, watching them attempt to crucify her innocent and totally nonpartisan son:

[1] tip of the yarmulke to Stephanie Miller

Nothing ominous here

Just because ultra-nationalist Steve Bannon’s body guard (and everyone surrendering for arrest in a nonviolent crime is entitled to a body guard) is dressed as an ISIS fighter is no reason to get excited. It’s the mercenary’s right as an American to dress however the hell he wants. See First and Second Amendments.

Stephen K. Bannon, former adviser to Donald Trump, arrives at the FBI’s Washington field office to turn himself in to federal authorities
(Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)

Bannon, by the way, is reportedly worth $55,000,000. If his legal defense against hard to refute charges of Contempt of Congress costs him $1,000,000, you’d expect Bannon to brush that sum aside, a small price to pay for the public performance of valor, steadfastness and the ability to look Destiny in the eye without blinking.

Plus, Bannon will likely be able to raise that sum from the generous MAGA suckers Trump already pardoned him for fleecing (allegedly fleecing — alleged by traitor Bill Barr’s partisan anti-Trump DOJ who arrested and criminally indicted Sloppy Steve).

Fortunately for people like Bannon, there are always billionaire’s yachts, in international waters, where a committed, disciplined, history-studying man-of-the-people, white nationalist can unwind and formulate the next part of his evolving long term battle plan.

You Are the Object of a Secret Extraction Operation

The brilliant Shoshana Zuboff wrote an essay published by the New York Times the other day, You Are the Object of A Secret Extraction Operation. It is worth reading and hopefully my “gift” link will allow you to read it on the NY Times website without being blocked by a pay wall. The essay begins:

Facebook is not just any corporation. It reached trillion-dollar status in a single decade by applying the logic of what I call surveillance capitalism — an economic system built on the secret extraction and manipulation of human data — to its vision of connecting the entire world. Facebook and other leading surveillance capitalist corporations now control information flows and communication infrastructures across the world.

These infrastructures are critical to the possibility of a democratic society, yet our democracies have allowed these companies to own, operate and mediate our information spaces unconstrained by public law. The result has been a hidden revolution in how information is produced, circulated and acted upon. A parade of revelations since 2016, amplified by the whistle-blower Frances Haugen’s documentation and personal testimony, bears witness to the consequences of this revolution.

The world’s liberal democracies now confront a tragedy of the “un-commons.” Information spaces that people assume to be public are strictly ruled by private commercial interests for maximum profit. The internet as a self-regulating market has been revealed as a failed experiment. Surveillance capitalism leaves a trail of social wreckage in its wake: the wholesale destruction of privacy, the intensification of social inequality, the poisoning of social discourse with defactualized information, the demolition of social norms and the weakening of democratic institutions.

These social harms are not random. They are tightly coupled effects of evolving economic operations. Each harm paves the way for the next and is dependent on what went before.

There is no way to escape the machine systems that surveil us, whether we are shopping, driving or walking in the park. All roads to economic and social participation now lead through surveillance capitalism’s profit-maximizing institutional terrain, a condition that has intensified during nearly two years of global plague.

Will Facebook’s digital violence finally trigger our commitment to take back the “un-commons”? Will we confront the fundamental but long ignored questions of an information civilization: How should we organize and govern the information and communication spaces of the digital century in ways that sustain and advance democratic values and principles?

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Corporate lawyers like John Roberts (in his previous corporate gig) made formerly voidable one-sided “contracts of adhesion” (take it or leave it, chump) as good as gold in all contracts between individuals and the corporations who require our agreement to their terms of service before we may use those services. It works even for expensive products we buy, like $1,000 smart phones, our use of our own property is dictated by terms that advantage only the corporations providing these miraculous services. As Roberts clairvoyantly saw in crafting his innovative, popular, now standard arbitration clause (by clicking this button you agree to waive the right to sue us in court, no matter what, and consent to pay 50% of the cost of binding arbitration) in the contest for profits, every bit of deference must go to the canny corporation and let the unsophisticated, dumb-ass buyer beware.

As Zuboff shows, in her groundbreaking The Age of Surveillance Capitalism; The Fight for a Human Future At the New Frontier of Power, and again in this essay, the escalating worldwide harm done by the new keepers of the public commons, social media giants, must be mitigated and regulated by democratic lawmakers to protect democracy from the wild, self-regulated pursuit of vast personal fortunes at the expense of all non-market based values.

Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, two poster children for profit over everything (profit uber alles) constantly defend their right to regulate themselves and make as much money as possible while doing so. It is not their job to judge the credulous stupidity of the public when making business decisions. After all, who in their right mind would turn down a fifty million dollar ad buy, even if it was an ad to spread an incendiary lie about a stolen election, a calculated lie debunked in dozens of lawsuits, and one that would predictably lead to outrage and possibly violence? That’s strictly a business decision, something to which the Court has always granted great deference, it’s simply The Business Judgement Rule — courts won’t interfere in corporate business decisions if there is any theoretically plausible money making rationale for them.

Zuckerberg told his executives, prior to the 2016 election (when Hillary was making noises about regulating giants like Facebook) that any government attempt to regulate Facebook would be such an “existential threat” that you have to stand on principle, you “go to the mat”, you go to the fucking mat to defend your right to double and triple your hundred billion dollar personal fortune, sue the government, do whatever needs to be done. The principle? Nothing wrong with greed, you judgmental fucking losers.

Perhaps Zuckerberg is right. 99% of the world is a bunch of crying, bitter, jealous, judgmental fucking losers, doomed to die inglorious asshole deaths after wasted lives spent envying people like him. It’s people like him, the true outliers, visionaries, men of the future, who should, by force of meritocracy and the will of the Free Market, decide what is best for the world. Who would know better than a maladjusted nerd who had become, at a precocious age, one of the richest men in human history?


Fascist-style Populism

Populism is a political appeal to what is popular among the population, and can be of the left or the right. It seems, most usually, and especially here in the US of A, it is harnessed by the right, as in the Koch-funded “spontaneous” “grass roots” Populist Tea Party, a national movement that appeared to spring up over night across the country, in a phenomenon gawked at by mass media as strong proof of a massive popular uprising against the self-proclaimed Hope and Change president, and swept a host of unapologetically angry Tea Party radicals into Congress to transform the Republican party and the US government. What we see on TV, and via social media, becomes our reality.

Just off hand, you might think that populism is good for democracy, the will of the people expressed through a mass movement. It can go either way. Most often populist movements are taken over by demagogues. The ideas are already popular — the government is a bunch of clueless elitist eggheads who don’t share our values. deciding, against our will, what we actually want! Harness this anger and you are a populist. When times are tough, populism swings right, toward authoritarianism. Here is an insightful bit from a discussion with David Sirota on a recent Deconstructed podcast:

So, in other words, human beings being thrown out of their homes, were the foam on the runway for the banks, which really tells you what you need to know about what the overall policy goal of the Obama administration was. They made a decision that they had to save Wall Street which, not incidentally, had given the most amount of money to Barack Obama’s campaign in the history of presidential politics. They made the decision that to save the economy, they had to first and foremost save Wall Street.

Now, maybe you could say it’s not corruption. Maybe you say it’s ideology. Maybe you just say it’s a principled disagreement or a principled belief. And there’s one phrase that that Geithner, I believe it was Geithner, who said: That’s how we saved the economy, but lost the country.

And what’s important to know is how historically anomalous that is from the Democratic Party itself. FDR, not that he was a perfect president, but he came in during an economic crisis. And there’s a lot of evidence — a lot of his quotes, a lot of the things he said — that he understood that if there was going to be a bailout or investments, it had to be bottom up. And he understood that it had to be bottom up for three reasons: It was morally right, people were starving; it was economically a better policy; and then he also made all sorts of statements, saying that this is the way to stop the rise of fascism — that if you do not help the working class in a crisis, then you are creating the conditions for authoritarians and fascists to take advantage of the desperation. And fascism was on the rise in the Great Depression here in the United States!

And so what 2009-2010 leading into the Trump-era suggests is that FDR was right, because the Democrats, the modern version of the Democrats, didn’t do what FDR did. And it ended up creating the conditions for Trump.

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FDR, not that he was a perfect president, but he came in during an economic crisis. And there’s a lot of evidence — a lot of his quotes, a lot of the things he said — that he understood that if there was going to be a bailout or investments, it had to be bottom up. And he understood that it had to be bottom up for three reasons: It was morally right, people were starving; it was economically a better policy; and then he also made all sorts of statements, saying that this is the way to stop the rise of fascism — that if you do not help the working class in a crisis, then you are creating the conditions for authoritarians and fascists to take advantage of the desperation. And fascism was on the rise in the Great Depression here in the United States!

Think of the enraged army of MAGA populists across the country who now routinely call to violently threaten Republican legislators who “disloyally” voted for an uncontroversial bipartisan infrastructure bill they negotiated, a bill that will benefit their communities, a long overdue allocation of resources for the mutual good — and the good of US big business, by the way — that Trump touted when he was president (though he was too busy with other things to do anything about it). According to our right-wing populists, all we really need are strictly constitutional gun laws that respect our sacred Second Amendment right to bring our non-regulated guns wherever we want, as part of goddamned political speech. If you think that’s a problem, cucks, suck lead.

This kind of enraged populism is the necessary precondition for mob rule and autocracy.

Mr. Biden? Mr. Garland? Congress? Senate supporters of the sacred filibuster over the right to vote?

Spoiler from Bezos

You’ve got to love the frankness of this headline question curtly answered in the short blurb below:

Just one more reason certain corporate donors love, honor and host fundraisers for unlovable, dishonorable cartoon coal tycoon/obstructionist Joe Manchin III.

Fair and balanced bipartisanship

Trumpists must not allow anyone in their Congressional cohort to break ranks to vote for ANY bipartisan bill that could politically help the illegitimate, lying, wildly unpopular anti-bipartisan Joe Biden. Purge and punish, it’s the Trump way.

Here is an expert on those things, with an unapologetically opinionated entertainment editorial.

Here’s a version of the same story by the Enemy of the People, the New York Times:

WASHINGTON — One caller instructed Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois to slit his wrists and “rot in hell.” Another hoped Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska would slip and fall down a staircase. The office of Representative Nicole Malliotakis of New York has been inundated with angry messages tagging her as a “traitor.”

Investing in the nation’s roads and bridges was once considered one of the last realms of bipartisanship in Congress, and President Biden’s infrastructure bill drew ample support over the summer from Republicans in the Senate. But in the days since 13 House Republicans broke with their party leaders and voted for the $1 trillion legislation last week, they have been flooded by menacing messages from voters — and even some of their own colleagues — who regard their votes as a betrayal.

The vicious reaction to the passage of the bill, which was negotiated by a group of Republicans and Democrats determined to deliver on a bipartisan priority, reflects how deeply polarization has seeped into the political discourse within the Republican Party, making even the most uncontroversial legislation a potentially toxic vote.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/10/us/politics/republicans-backlash-infrastructure-bill.html

Nice subpoena

[The House January 6 Select Committee] also subpoenaed John McEntee, a young Trump loyalist who had been the former president’s baggage handler before Trump installed him as the White House personnel director, in charge of hiring for the executive branch. McEntee was reportedly present for many of the key conversations around trying to overturn the 2020 election. 

An article today in The Atlantic by Jonathan D. Karl, the chief Washington correspondent for ABC News, calls “Johnny” McEntee “the man who made January 6 possible.” McEntee purged the administration of anyone he did not consider sufficiently—that is to say, totally—loyal to Trump.

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John McEntee, I’ve been waiting for more news about this promising young man. He had MAGA greatness written all over him, think of Matt Gaetz with athletic ability.

When is preventing the administration of justice by every possible means officially Obstruction of Justice?

My friend, after taking my recommendation and reading Jason Stanley’s great short book about the rise of fascism, which follows an identical path everywhere it takes hold, called the book a bit hyperbolic. Two years later, after an angry mob of violent “patriots” overran the Capitol, at the urging of their leader, he laughed when I described a cartoon of us I’d like the discipline and talent to draw. He and I are emaciated, dirty, dressed in striped pajamas, skeletal hands on the barbed wire fence in front of us, staring ahead with dead eyes. The caption: “still think Stanley’s book was hyperbolic?”

Our democracy is like the famous frog, comfortable in the warm, then hot water, until he begins to boil and learns it’s impossible to leap with boiled legs. When something awful happens by degrees it can slip by unnoticed until it’s too late to do anything about it.

Biden’s earnest Attorney General Merrick Garland will not convene a grand jury to investigate the now well-documented plot to overturn an American presidential election. Even though there is a federal statute directly on point.

Garland doesn’t want, God forbid, to look political so he takes no action, even knowing there was a coordinated, multi-pronged plan, involving the former president, members of Congress, several lawyers, a grimly effective fascistic political strategist/podcast host, at least one former military officer, several talking heads of extreme right-wing media, plus the wealthy donors who paid, in dark money, to finance what we now nonchalantly refer to as The Big Lie and the MAGA riot.

Even knowing there was a January 6th election overturn command center, paid for by Trump’s campaign, at a hotel a block from the White House, where several conspirators huddled before and during the violent assault and breach of the Capitol to prevent certification of the 2020 election, Garland’s principled passivity is as supine as the famously supine passivity of the idealistic democratic leaders of the Weimar Republic, during the final days before the Thousand Year Reich.

So scrupulous is Garland about appearing nonpartisan that he won’t even indict Steve Bannon for openly telling Congress, the Department of Justice and the rest of the administrative state he despises to go fuck themselves, stick their subpoena where the sun don’t shine. Nineteen days after the House made the contempt referral to DOJ (Glenn Kirschner’s counting it down), Garland continues to agonize over how to apply the facts (legal subpoena, Bannon “fuck you”) to the law (willful defiance of legal subpoena without legal grounds = contempt).

The recent subpoena for pardoned asshole, admitted perjurer, QAnon promoter and former general Mike “Lock Her Up!” Flynn brings us full circle on Trump’s endless merry go round of obstruction of justice.

When, weeks into the Trump administration, Flynn lied about illegal contacts with Russians, and forgot to disclose, while getting top security clearance, that he was on the payroll of Turkey and likely other foreign governments, Trump was forced to fire him. Then the big guy cornered the FBI director, problematic anti-hero James Comey, and one on one, over dinner, asked him to drop the Flynn thing, Flynn being a good guy and a valued member of Trump’s team. Comey refused, was fired. Flynn was prosecuted, pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI. This was all normal DC politics and the law, playing out pretty much as it always had.

Then as Flynn watched other Trump operatives play coy in legal proceedings, counting on the quid pro quo pardons that Trump continued to dangle for self-proclaimed political ratfuckers like Manafort and Stone, encouraging them to obstruct their own trials, intimidate witnesses, change their stories, playfully threaten a federal judge or two, he realized how stupid he’d been to plead guilty, just because they had the proof of his lies and it would have been worse for him to go through a full trial.

Flynn hired the insane, well-connected right wing attorney Sidney Powell who argued that Flynn had been tricked into his guilty plea by the cunning canards of a cabal of cannibal pedophile cucks. The Department of Justice worked closely with Flynn’s new attorney, a true right wing Kraken superstar (at that time), and they hastened to dismiss all charges against Flynn, claiming now that Trump’s FBI had been compromised by treacherous partisan Democrats who hated Trump and that Flynn had been suckered into lying and then lying about lying.

Trump’s gunsel, Bill Barr, took the extraordinary step of arguing against his own Department of Justice, who had successfully prosecuted Flynn. He did this behind the scenes, as well as publicly.

At the same time, he loudly appointed a Special Counsel to start an investigation into the Mueller “witch hunt” with an eye toward a propaganda coup, that could be announced with great fanfare right before the 2020 election, like Comey’s 2016 game changer about Hillary Clinton. It turned out Durham had turned up an irregularity in a FISA warrant for Trump associate Carter Page, the apparent lie being the omission of the pertinent fact that Page had been a CIA asset or something of that nature. Barr ran with this — if the Page warrant was obtained based on a lie, the whole Mueller investigation was based on pure hatred of Christian Dominionists by Satan worshipping secular cuck anarchist antifa liberals.

Trump successfully obstructed justice during the Mueller investigation, in at least ten separate counts that Mueller could not exonerate him for. He successfully obstructed justice again by having Barr bury the whistleblower complaint about Trump’s shakedown, two day’s after Mueller’s shambling testimony left no doubt that the Mueller investigation had failed to nail him, of the new Ukrainian president for dirt on Joe Biden. Trump was “acquitted” in two separate witness-free impeachment trials, run by his own party, working closely and openly with Trump’s demented defense team.

After lying for months, now a year, about his election loss and conspiring with a cast of pathetic but energetic characters, he fomented a riot to Stop the Steal. He also had a plan to subvert the constitutional order, sought to replace an acting AG intent on following the law, tried to strong arm his loyal vice president to go along with a mad plan to keep control of the government, and when he refused, incited a mob to string the fucking cowardly traitor up.

If you were writing a novel about a corrupt leader obstructing justice, you might be afraid to put this much detail into it, for fear of straining the readers’ willingness to suspend disbelief.

If I were an Australian, with a deep stake in American democracy, Jim Jefferies, for example, I would probably at this point call Merrick Garland a cunt, though I realize that’s not a word we can use here, in the USA, where words fucking matter.

Garland may well be a very principled, judicious, deliberate man, but he’s not a wartime Attorney General ready to deploy the law boldly against seditious conspirators, making them actually obey subpoenas from Congress — for starters, to end the GOP’s seamless obstruction of justice and ensure that fascism is not our immediate fate here in the land of the free and the home of the highly principled.

Mike Flynn is laughing his autocratic ass off now, as the far-right’s Steve Bannon continues to bray from his basement, basking in his open contempt of Congress and law, and the good citizens shudder, wondering when they will finally just take over, put troops and angry mobs of armed vigilantes in the street and the Enemies of the People, and bigmouths like me, into harsh, airless, stinking, sun-baked Joe Arpaio-style prison camps.