Unscrupulous prosecutors are now going after the small family business of the former president, the Orange Polyp, for allegedly cutting corners (and keeping two sets of books) the way any hugely successful business does to pay less tax. The man is out of office, out of power, all he does now is appear at rallies to continue insisting that the 2020 election was stolen from him and that he will ruin anyone in his party who says otherwise.
He is still immensely popular among his solid 39% base, he works closely with the RNC (who supported him in him in his literally hundreds of fruitless anti-voting suits) and his party leaders and foot soldiers obey him unconditionally, but otherwise, it’s not like he’s an active threat to democracy, unless the laws passed in many states based on his transparent but galvanizing lie about rigged elections work as designed and his candidates win majorities in both houses in 2022. Of course, that scenario is about as likely to happen as thousands descending on, and hundreds overrunning, the US Capitol building in the belief that they’ve been deputized to stop an injustice in progress by their lawful president.
Look, to be honest, the only thing they actually have on him are that his “university” was a fraud, though he didn’t have to admit it when he shut it down and paid only $25,000,000 to settle the case. They also have the fraudulent charity he ran, a charitable foundation that gave almost no money to charitable causes and was shut down after negotiations with vengeful NY State authorities.
Paying off a porn star for silence about having sex with her right after your wife gives birth? Nothing, at worst a technical violation of some kind of campaign finance law nobody ever heard of. Hundreds of pious Christian pastors defend him for that bit of prudent adultery, not nearly as bad as what God’s other flawed vessel, Kind David, did when he sent Bathsheba’s husband off to die in battle so he could possess the woman he coveted. And the union between King David and Queen Bathsheba gave us King Solomon, so, God indeed works in mysterious ways!
The rest of the accusations agains the Orange Polyp are all just allegations: his perfect call to Ukrainian president Zelensky asking for a political favor, arguably a tiny bit imperfect, his call to Georgia Secretary of State Raffensberger to get him to “find” 11,780 votes, that might have crossed a line, even violated a local Georgia law that makes it a crime to try to influence an election outcome. The fact is, they have nothing really concrete and airtight on the guy. Sure he’s on tape doing everything possible to get Raffensberger to change electoral results that have already been recounted and certified, but why wouldn’t he do that?
Sure, some “evidence”-based court may find differently at some point, after other indictments begin rolling out (hello, Fania Willis in Fulton County, GA!) but at least 74,000,000 of our fellow Americans believe that these cases will all be witch hunts, like the toothless witch hunt Mueller headed (he found nothing, less than 140 points of collusion with Russia, no collusion!), and the second so-called impeachment over simply making a speech that supposedly set off an “insurrection”, because when you’re a big star they let you get away with all these nickel and dime “offenses” they are trying to throw at the former celebrity pussy-grabber.
The rule of law is crucial to the administration of justice. Which is why these partisans have no business trying to come up with supposedly legal ways to get this guy. His trial, if any, should only be in the court of public opinion. If the public repudiates him, his ratings will go down and he will have less influence, that’s the way Free Market democracy is supposed to work, after all.
It’s not like he actually did shoot somebody in the face on Fifth Avenue (which, by the way, the law would have allowed him to do, without consequences, had Pence done his fucking job and made him president for life). People are always so brutally unfair to the true prophets of their age! They crucified Jesus, just for speaking God’s truth, and they’re trying to crucify this guy, just because he may have lied a few thousand times. Sheesh.
A six-month Times investigation has synchronized and mapped out thousands of videosand police radio communications from the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, providing the most complete picture to date of what happened — and why.
By The New York Times June 30, 2021
In the six months since an angry pro-Trump mob stormed the U.S. Capitol, immense efforts have been made not only to find the rioters and hold them accountable, but also — and perhaps more important — to dig into the details of Jan. 6 and slowly piece together what actually happened that day.
Congressional committees have looked into police and intelligence failures. The Justice Department has launched a nationwide investigation that has now resulted in more than 500 arrests. And while Republicans in Congress blocked the formation of a blue-ribbon bipartisan committee, House Democrats are poised to appoint a smaller select committee.
Even now, however, Republican politicians and their allies in the media are still playing down the most brazen attack on a seat of power in modern American history. Some have sought to paint the assault as the work of mere tourists. Others, going further, have accused the F.B.I. of planning the attack in what they have described — wildly — as a false-flag operation.
The work of understanding Jan. 6 has been hard enough without this barrage of disinformation and, hoping to get to the bottom of the riot, The Times’s Visual Investigations team spent several months reviewing thousands of videos, many filmed by the rioters themselves and since deleted from social media. We filed motions to unseal police body-camera footage, scoured law enforcement radio communications, and synchronized and mapped the visual evidence
Here are some of the major revelations.
Multiple Points of Attack
We pinpointed at least eight locations where rioters breached and entered the Capitol building — more than were previously known. The scenes revealed the extent of the rioters’ disregard for the law as they surged violently around the building’s perimeter and, eventually, inside.
The police were outnumbered and responded differently at various breach points, allowing rioters to break through doors using weapons like crowbars or, in some places, to simply walk through as the police stepped aside.
The multiple breaches also revealed the Capitol’s vulnerability. Despite locked doors and, in certain places, thick windows, rioters without specialized equipment were able to break in instantly in some places.
A Delay Turns Deadly
In the Senate, proceedings to certify the election results were halted almost immediately when a building-wide lockdown was called after the first breach by rioters. But we found that it took much longer for the House of Representatives to do the same. This delay appeared to have contributed to a rioter’s death.
Instead of evacuating, members of the House sheltered in place and resumed their work even as rioters overran the building. Speaker Nancy Pelosi was rushed to safety, but Representative Jim McGovern took her place presiding over the session. He told us that Capitol building security staff had said it was safe to resume.
Eventually, the House session was halted and members began streaming out of a rear door guided by security personnel. Rioters had arrived at almost the same moment, just on the other side of a hallway door with glass panels. They became incensed at the sight of the evacuating lawmakers — a situation that could have been avoided if the lawmakers had left before the mob arrived.
Ashli Babbitt, a Trump supporter and follower of the QAnon conspiracy theory, tried to climb through one of the door’s broken windows toward the lawmakers. A plainclothes Capitol Police officer charged with protecting the House shot her once through the upper chest. The wound was fatal.
The Makeup of the Mob
One of the biggest questions hanging over the aftermath of Jan. 6 was whether the riot was planned and carried out by organized groups.
By identifying and tracking key players throughout the day, we found that most — even some at the forefront of the action — were ardent, but disorganized Trump supporters swept up in the moment and acting individually.
The first person to enter the Capitol building, for example, was a 43-year-old husband and father from Kentucky named Michael Sparks. He has no known affiliation with any organized groups. Ray Epps, an Arizona man seen in widely-circulated videos telling Trump supporters on multiple occasions to go into the Capitol, also seemed to have acted on his own.
Yet we also found that the crowd did include members of groups who seemed eager for a confrontation, like well-organized militias and far-right groups including the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys. This proved to be a combustible mix. In the videos we analyzed, they can be seen with baseball bats and body armor, and coordinating with one another using radios. On several occasions, a calculated move by a more organized actor — for example, a Proud Boy identifying a weakness in the police line near a set of stairs — set off a surge by the mob.
Evidence collected by the F.B.I. suggests that the Proud Boys in particular were aware that they had inflamed the mob of ordinary people — and may have intended to do so in advance. Just before the assault, one Proud Boy leader wrote on a group chat on Telegram that he was hoping his men could incite the “normies” to “burn that city to ash today” and “smash some pigs to dust.” Then, after the riot, another Proud Boy leader wrote on Telegram: “This is NOT what I expected to happen. All from us showing up and starting some chants and getting the normies all riled up.”VISUAL INVESTIGATIONS: Our investigative journalists use evidence that’s hidden in plain sight to present a definitive account of the news. Get an email as soon as our next Visual Investigation is published.Sign Up
Domino Effect
By synchronizing footage from both sides of the Capitol building, we were able to establish how crowds on each side interacted with one another.
We tracked the movement of a group of rioters from the west side of the Capitol — which faces the National Mall and absorbed most of the attendees arriving from Mr. Trump’s speech — to the opposite eastern side.
The eastern crowd had remained largely behind the barricades, but all that changed with the arrival of rioters from around the side of the building. This more violent group was the trigger that put the entire mob over the edge, spurring them to push easily through a line of officers and surround the Capitol on every front.
Echoing the President
Most of the videos we analyzed were filmed by the rioters. By carefully listening to the unfiltered chatter within the crowd, we found a clear feedback loop between President Trump and his supporters.
As Mr. Trump spoke near the White House, supporters who had already gathered at the Capitol building hoping to disrupt the certification responded. Hearing his message to “walk down to the Capitol,” they interpreted it as the president sending reinforcements. “There’s about a million people on their way now,” we heard a man in the crowd say, as Mr. Trump’s speech played from a loudspeaker.
The call and response didn’t stop there. We found evidence of his influence once the violence was well underway. In one moment, a woman with a megaphone urged rioters to climb through a broken window by asking them to “stand up for our country and Constitution” — echoing the language in an earlier tweet from Mr. Trump. In another, as the police were pushing to clear the mob off the building, a rioter screamed at officers: “I was invited here by the president.”
Taking Back the Capitol
One unanswered question when we began this investigation was how the police managed to reclaim the Capitol building from the mob. We found that once officers increased their numbers, armor and crowd-control weapons, clearing the rioters happened quickly and effectively.
The footage revealed that officers cleared several locations in less than an hour after being reinforced by local Metropolitan Police, Virginia State Police and other local and federal agencies that arrived with more manpower and authorization to use more powerful crowd-control weapons.
It’s a stark contrast to what we saw during the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020, when federal officers were on scene from the start, already equipped with riot gear and authorized to use higher levels of force. Law enforcement’s relatively quick success in clearing the Capitol building once reinforcements arrived shows how the rioters might have been stopped far earlier with a different level of preparation — possibly preventing fatalities, countless officer injuries, over $30 million in damages.
There was another difference between the Capitol riot and those connected to this summer’s racial justice protests: Very few people who broke into the Capitol were arrested at the scene. Most were allowed to leave the building, forcing the F.B.I. to track them down later and take them into custody — a process that is still continuing today.
In light of the wide acceptance of Trump’s Big Lie (that his “landslide victory” was stolen by a bipartisan conspiracy against him), by tens of millions of Americans, it would appear that making a winning argument based on evidence and what you can actually prove, from a practical, tactical point of view, is a thing of the past — at least to a good 40% of our fellow citizens.
The real Big Lie, according to Trump, is that that everybody beside him, and those completely loyal to him, is lying about the rigged election he actually won in a “landslide.” The truth, Tump insists, is that a landslide victory was illegally stolen from him by massive voter fraud and a wide-ranging bipartisan conspiracy to deprive him of his rightful office and illegally install the illegitimate Joe Biden as the “president”. Hence, the rioters who stormed the Capitol January 6 had, as they believed, every right to be enraged, to fight like hell to protect their country and do what their president insisted was their patriotic duty — fight like hell to stop the steal of democracy in progress in the Capitol.
Not that long ago, facts (things that can be shown to have actually happened, things that are witnessed, that people swear to, that are recorded on cameras from multiple angles) supporting each side of an argument were weighed before deciding who was right and who was mistaken. Now, for purposes of American politics, one need only repeat the party line (“alternative facts” work beautifully), loudly and without deviation, and the “perception” of truth will do just fine for that loud minority of Americans.
If a violent mob unleashed by your party’s leader attacked you and threatened to kill your vice president, who, arguably, deserved to be punished for his cowardice and treachery, after all, you must say that there never was a lawless mob and nobody threatened violence against anybody. Anybody who says there was an armed, angry mob, 140 injuries to police, five deaths and threats to Pence and other elected officials is a bald-faced liar! Case closed, loser!
If a sitting president’s deliberate, months long, coordinated, well-funded attempt to violently stop the peaceful transition of power at the last possible moment doesn’t demand a fact-based reckoning, and accountability for the organizers and inciters of the violence, we all might as well just wait to be told where to report for re-education.
Facts still mattered in American court cases, in arguments over public policy, in basic agreement about what is reality and what is delusion, in our very recent history… (this doesn’t necessarily apply in the unappealable Supreme Court, of course, that non-political body Justice Breyer defends the impartiality of… [1])
It’s easy to forget important facts when a powerful firehose of ever more violent bullshit is constantly flooding our perceptions. Remember how Trump mega-donor Postmaster William DeJoy openly removed hundreds of mailboxes from urban areas and ordered urban high speed mail sorting machines dismantled? These moves were targeted to minimize the mail-in votes of Democrats. DeJoy was ordered to put the mailboxes back, but the high speed mail sorting machines could not be replaced, they were literally in a million pieces, already shipped somewhere to be sold for scrap. Sorry.
Polls showed Democrats were much more likely than Trump anti-maskers (future anti-vaxxers) to vote by mail during a pandemic. Trump and his mega-donor then made every effort to eliminate as much mail-in voting as possible, as he and Barr continued to spread furor with unfounded, evidence-free claims about fraud-rife mail-in voting, setting the stage for #Stop the Steal and the January 6 MAGA riot. (After the damage was done Barr claims to have told Trump the voter fraud business was “bullshit” and that he’d “suspected” that was the case even as he ordered — and announced — federal investigations of criminal voter fraud).
Trump won in 2016 by 78,000 votes delivered in key Electoral College districts in three states. One of them was Pennsylvania which he won by less than 1%. He could improve his odds of winning greatly in 2020 if he could eliminate a sizable percentage of anti-Trump votes in swing states where voting is always close. His party’s chances of winning elections are tied directly to voter suppression, particularly after Trump lost an election where he had the second highest number of votes cast, all-time, in an election that set the record for voter turnout, (during a pandemic, mind you).
Candidate
Year
Party
Popular vote
Joe Biden
2020
Democratic
81,268,924
Donald Trump
2020
Republican
74,216,154
Barack Obama
2008
Democratic
69,498,516
The sixty baseless lawsuits challenging the 2020 elections brought by Trump and the RNC were famously all dismissed, often for lack of evidence. Sometimes forgotten is that before the 2020 election Trump and the Republican National Committee brought literally hundreds of lawsuits to stop forms of voting they felt would put them at a disadvantage. One was a federal suit in western Pennsylvania challenging the state’s plan to expand mail-in voting, and drop boxes, for an election during the second wave of a deadly pandemic. The judge ordered Trump/RNC to produce evidence of their claims that these long-used methods of voting would introduce massive fraud into the election. If they did not produce evidence, the judge ordered, they must state that they have no evidence.
The federal judge, J. Nicholas Ranjan, had been appointed by Trump and for a time it looked like he was bending over backwards not to dismiss the case. He wasn’t, as it turned out.
The Trump/RNC’s legal team’s initial response to Judge Ranjan’s order (which granted the state of Pennsylvania’s motion demanding evidence) by Trump’s attorneys was (according to Reuters):
The Trump campaign says the ballot drop box invites fraud. The federal judge asked the campaign to provide evidence of actual fraud, but the campaign declined, arguing it did not have to do so in order to win the case.
In the end Trump’s lawyers obeyed the judge’s order by submitting several hundred pages, screenshots and stories from Breitbart, FOX, OANN, Newsmax and similar outfits, alleging massive fraud, without presenting any actual evidence of widespread fraud. Even the right-wing non-profit Heritage Foundation’s zealous crackpot documenter of voter fraud, Hans von Spakovsky, has found a statistically insignificant number of actual voting fraud since 1984.
When Judge Ranjan finally dismissed the Trump/RNC case he wrote that since Trump and the RNC were likely to file an appeal, that he would explicitly lay out the law supporting every facet of his dismissal, basically appeal-proofing his dismissal of the evidence-free lawsuit. He did so over the course of more than 100 pages.
“Frivolous suit” is the usual term for a lawsuit submitted without any credible evidence in support. These lawsuits are designed to harass, intimidate, bully, bankrupt and they are deeply frowned on by American courts. Law students are taught that lawyers who submit frivolous lawsuits abuse the legal process, violate their ethical obligations as “officers of the court” and are subject to sanctions including disbarment.
Millions of Americans are waiting, without much hope, for the legal consequences of this wave of frivolous, evidence-free Trump lawsuits that created the “perception” that there was massive voting fraud because an angry, powerful man who has never lied told us it was true, and filed countless lawsuits. Suspending Rudy’s law license seems a few hundred wrist slaps too few.
Where the Trump-appointed J. Nicholas Ranjan demanded actual proof of fraud, the 6-3 Federalist Society majority on the Supreme Court (5 of the 6 appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote) had no such scruples before ruling in favor of their party. The “perception of fraud” was good enough for Samuel Alito to rule that perception of fraud alone is sufficient reason for, admittedly partisan voter suppression laws you can’t actually prove were passed with anything but good old partisan intent. It’s the quiet Nazis you’ have to watch out for, the silently smoldering ones, particularly when they’re protected by a robust like-minded majority of extremists.
Even (or especially) in a country where a good 40% of voters are entirely faith-based, rather than reality-based, facts need to be known. Thousands of enraged Trump supporters violently assaulted the Capitol to Stop the Steal. The procedure for calling in the National Guard had been changed by “federal officials” shortly before the riot, delaying the deployment of waiting troops that quickly stopped the riot when they arrived, four hours too late to prevent the multiple breaches of the Capitol. When the National Guard arrived, and surrounded the crowd, the riot was quickly over and, instead of the arrest of every rioter, the rioters were allowed to go in peace, no harm no foul. They celebrated their triumph, they actually did stop a joint session of Congress, and posted selfies and videos that got many of them arrested weeks later.
It is too simple a point to make that had this been a crowd of angry Black people, January 6 would be remembered as the day police and National Guard massacred hundreds of American citizens in front of the Capitol.
We are to be consoled, six full months later, that perhaps as many as half of the violent “protesters” who breached the Capitol that day and beat down police officers are facing charges for things like trespassing. Merrick Garland is no radical, after all. Now, calling for an investigation of this violence, planned and incited by the former president and several sitting Congressmen, aided and abetted by multiple senators, is a political hot potato in a land where facts are as malleable as the clay God originally formed into the first man.
On the other hand…
It may be that in following an unhinged but popular leader the now extremist GOP may have finally sealed its fate — no matter how many voter suppression laws they pass, their over the top extremism may be punished at the polls by voters determined to vote, and organizing to defeat the laws designed to disenfranchise them. Heather Cox Richardson provides a great historical echo for that proposition. It may be that, like celebrity psychopath Al Capone, it will be the former president’s greed, cheapness and true belief that he is untouchable, even for shooting someone in the face, that brings him, and his whole criminal empire, down. I can hear his faithful, should that day arrive: “For that? For that?!!!”.
For those who have the stomach for the hideous facts, here’s the NY Times visual account of Trump’s January 6 MAGA riot, very well-done — the video is harrowing [2].
“My experience of more than 30 years as a judge has shown me that, once men and women take the judicial oath, they take the oath to heart,” [Breyer] said last month in a lecture at Harvard Law School. “They are loyal to the rule of law, not to the political party that helped to secure their appointment.”
Justice Stephen G. Breyer warned on Tuesday that expanding the size of the Supreme Court could erode public trust in it by sending the message that it is at its core a political institution.
Just because a partisan majority held that partisan gerrymandering was no longer the Supreme Court’s concern, that the 1965 Voting Rights Act reauthorized 98-0 in the Senate could be stripped of its enforcement power, that unlimited dark money in political campaigns is protected speech, (and most recently, that partisan voting laws enacted to give one party an advantage, based on a “perception” of fraud, were fine, absent concrete proof that the targeted voters were impacted directly — and deliberately — on the basis of race or another constitutionally protected category [1]) doesn’t mean the 6-3 majority is partisan.
Calling the Supreme Court partisan, or accusing justices of being “political” just because all six conservatives support and adhere to the ideology of the same right-wing, corporatist legal fraternity, the Federalist Society, is a grievous insult to the integrity of the court, insists apolitical Justice Stephen Breyer.
Meanwhile, the thoughtful moderate Joe Biden lets his committee of academics (appointed with all deliberate speed on April 9, 2021) complete their six-month deliberations before they announce whether or not they think the 6-3 highly partisan Supreme Court majority is enough of a threat to democracy to add four more independent-minded justices to the mix.
And fair-minded Stephen Breyer continues to insist, no matter what decisions his six ideologically united colleagues make, that the Court never takes politics into consideration — even when one party (whose presidents appointed all six of the 6-3 bloc) appears to be on the ropes, and headed for extinction, if widespread, targeted voter suppression is not immediately ruled kosher, legal and unappealably constitutional in every swing state.
BUILD THAT WALL! BUILD THAT WALL!!!!
[1]
Wikipedia hasn’t updated its Voting Rights Act page to reflect the recent decision that the 6-3 majority found Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (even inadvertently discriminatory voting laws are prohibited if they have a disparate impact on certain citizens) unconstitutional, but this is pretty good:
The pending case Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee (2021) is expected to evaluate the applicability of Section 2 in the wake of the decision of Shelby. The case involves a challenge to a set of Arizona election laws and policies that the Democratic National Party asserted were discriminatory towards Hispanics and Native Americans under VRA’s Section 2. While lower courts upheld the election laws, an en banc Ninth Circuit reversed the decision and found these laws to be in violation of Section 2. The question of Section 2’s applicability is the crux of the case at the Supreme Court.[159]
During oral arguments on March 2, 2021, Michael Garvin, an attorney representing the Arizona Republican party, was asked by justice Amy Coney Barrett what interest the party had in invalidating the Arizona voting restrictions, to which Garvin replied, “Because it puts us at a competitive disadvantage relative to Democrats.”[160][161][162]
Robert Reich nailed it very succinctly the other day:
Understandably, those who extract billions in profit from the earth in a way that is destroying it do not want any radical change to some commie regenerative, “sustainable” forms of energy production. Fortunately for them, they are served by very able lobbyists and lobbyist/legislators (and a 6-3 corporatist Supreme Court) who will make sure this dreaded Marxist plan for “sustainable energy” is thwarted at every turn.
“We have the fossil fuels you all love, the infrastructure all in place to search for more, suck it out of the earth, pipe, refine and distribute it — the occasional heat-wave or five hundred year storm be damned — and we’re going to extract every last drop from under the earth and the seas, and the remaining polar ice caps, and you’re going to love it. Fossil fuel is what makes this country the greatest on earth. USA! USA!!! Live free or die!”
And, truly, what argument do any of us have against that?
Yesterday Bill Cosby was released from prison after the Pennsylvania Supreme Court threw out his conviction for aggravated indecent assault (drugging and raping) against Andrea Costand (one of sixty women who made the same allegation against him) because of a due process violation. Why is the guilty as hell Cosby, who the sentencing judge described as a “sexually violent predator,” celebrating his freedom today? Bruce Castor, Jr.
Incriminating testimony Cosby gave after a promise of immunity from criminal prosecution was used against him in his criminal prosecution. A pretty serious violation of the old aggravated indecent assaulter’s constitutional due process rights. It’s not easily graspable how this could have happened, how a guy who was 100% guilty, as he admitted under oath, got out of jail, but it is easily explainable, and it comes down to two words: Bruce Castor (Jr).
Back in 2005 when Andrea Costand originally came forward to accuse Cosby, then Pennsylvania prosecutor Bruce Castor Jr., put out an unusual news release about his judgment call that there was “insufficient evidence” to prosecute Cosby for the crimes he was accused of (and, years later convicted of). Castor announced he’d made Cosby a verbal promise of immunity from criminal prosecution, meaning Cosby would have to testify under oath in Costand’s civil suit against Cosby.
Without the immunity from prosecution Cosby could have exercised his right against self-incrimination to refuse to answer incriminating questions during the civil suit deposition. Cosby wound up paying this particular victim three million dollars in the civil suit, so there’s that. He also incriminated the shit out of himself in the deposition.
On the other hand, because prosecutors used his incriminating testimony to secure his criminal conviction, after the state promised him immunity for that same crime, he wound up holding a get out of jail free card, courtesy of Bruce Castor Jr.
A more prudent prosecutor would have qualified Cosby’s immunity, to enable the government to prosecute him later if it obtained new evidence, for example, but Castor didn’t do this.Castor, in fact, fucked up.As former federal prosecutor Barbara McQuade wrote in today’s New York Times:
When I worked as a federal prosecutor, I was cautious about making promises because I knew they were binding. With rare exception, my office refrained from making promises to decline charges against someone because of the very real possibility that additional evidence of guilt could emerge. Our hands would be tied if the person had relied on that promise in any way. If we agreed to bring no further charges against someone as part of a plea deal, we included in the plea agreement the caveat that the promise was limited to information that was currently known to the government.
When I heard Castor’s name yesterday, and that he was to thank for Bill Cosby’s freedom on a technicality having nothing to do with his actual guilt, a little bell went off, the name sounded so familiar. Wikipedia to the rescue:
On January 31, 2021, Castor was appointed to take the lead for Donald J. Trump‘s defense team for his 2021 impeachment trial, alongside criminal law practitioner David Schoen.[4] Castor’s opening arguments on February 9, 2021, were widely reported to be confusing and rambling.[54][55][56] Trump was reportedly “furious” about Castor’s “rambling, almost somnambulant defense.”[57] Texas Republican U.S. Senator John Cornyn commented, “The president’s lawyer just rambled on and on” and “I’ve seen a lot of lawyers and a lot of arguments, and that was not one of the finest I’ve seen.”[54] Castor for his part suggested the former President did not criticize his performance. “Far from it,” he said.[58]
It fucking figures, doesn’t it? The best people, nothing but the best people…
I guess the only mystery is why former president for life Donald Trump didn’t pardon his fellow celebrity pussy grabber, the hilarious Mr. Cosby. Would have really triggered the libs!
Last year in the US we set a new record (since the CDC began compiling these numbers) for drug overdose deaths of despair, 92,000. Depression that leads to suicide is sometimes described as rage turned against the self. There is certainly a loss of hope before someone slips the needle into their arm, takes just one or two more highly addictive pain pills, trying to make the psychic pain stop.
There are certainly reasons for great concern, despair and anger, even if we can’t always be sure of the direct cause of either of these destructive emotions. The news is more and more nightmarish, more and more a reflection of Trump’s vision of American Carnage, of our current dystopia. Our planet is heating up, polar ice caps are melting faster than predicted, sea levels are rising, devastating climate catastrophes are increasingly regular occurrences — and, not long from now, there will be tens of millions of climate refugees with no food and no place to go. Poverty rages in even the most prosperous countries; the disparity in wealth here in the USA is as great as it was right before the Stock Market Crash of 1929. Health outcomes for Americans, who pay the highest rates for medical insurance/care anywhere in the world, are mediocre, tens of thousands of us die preventable deaths every year. In spite of our country’s great wealth, our infant mortality and maternal mortality numbers are up there with much poorer nations. While tens of millions suffered during the worst months of a pandemic, American billionaires, sometimes capitalizing on this widespread misery, increased their wealth by more than a trillion dollars. A trillion dollars, a thousand billion, looks like this $1,000,000,000,000.00. It was generated for a few hundred of America’s richest in about a year.
We watch all this horror and injustice more or less helplessly as politicians, well-paid by various industries, and serving at their pleasure, wrangle. If you are on the left you are angry that, in our current political culture, with corporate moderates (and some rigid extremists) firmly in charge of the political process, no progress can be made to fix any of these longterm, worsening problems — no matter how pressing the emergency is (think daily American gun massacres). If you are on the right you know exactly who to be angry at — the fucking liberals of the overbearing nanny state who keep failing to fix anything, despise Liberty and Freedom, hate the Free Market, are making things a hundred times worse for everybody and who should just keep their mouths shut and go back to the shithole countries they came from if they hate our freedom so much.
We are not alone with a front row seat to this maddening power-driven shit show. Worldwide nations are roiled by angry demagogues, many gain control of populous nations, speaking directly to the boiling rage of their most agitated citizens. Hindus are roused to stop taking shit from Muslims, Muslims from certain countries are banned from flying into other countries, rage against Mexicans is stoked, rage against immigrants, rage against homosexuals, urban elites, rage against an imaginary cabal of powerful Satanist cannibal “Democrat” pedophiles, rage against so-called cooler heads urging us to talk to each other honestly, based on the best facts we can get, if we hope to solve mutual problems.
The rage is real, we can all feel it sometimes, as well as the deepening despair the inability (or unwillingness) of our elected representatives to act together to address any of this causes daily. We are, as they say, outraged regularly. The outrage is weaponized. What makes you feel a little better? Guy in a MAGA hat likes it when a libtard gets called out, enraged, humiliated, it makes his day. Anyone not wearing a MAGA hat gets a bit of schadenfreude when some MAGA person makes a fool of herself, gets called out, makes it worse trying not to apologize in a way that will hurt her fundraising. Does this meaningless sideshow help us solve any of the vexing problems that we all face? Rhetorical tic, that dumb question, obviously the sideshow is a fucking sideshow to make us forget what is really going on.
I’m going to Physical Therapy to try to get my arthritic knees to work better, have less pain, get back into better shape. The guy who runs the place has FOX blaring on a TV in the exercise room. The other day I was on the stationary bike and he sat next to me and asked if I’m a fan of Larry Kudlow. I told him I don’t know much about Kudlow, asked if he was a Queens boy (we were sitting in Queens, a block from where I grew up, near where he grew up, less than a mile from Frederick Christ Trump’s former mansion on Midland Parkway). He didn’t know, though, now that I mentioned it, he detected a little New York accent in Kudlow. “He worked for George W. Bush, and for President Trump,” he informed me. Within a few seconds we established that I am not a fan of Trump, and that the owner of the thriving PT practice is a conservative. He doesn’t like everything about Trump, and he didn’t agree with some of the things he did, but believes that Trump definitely did some good things as president, he said.
I determined to remain pleasant and decided not to ask how big a tax break he got from The Donald. I asked him instead if he thought Trump was the best leader of the conservative movement. He was coy in his answer. I said “leave aside everything else, just the fact that his university was shut down for fraud, and he paid a $25,000,000 settlement right before the election, and that when he was president his charity was shut down for fraud. Doesn’t that tell you maybe you should want someone more trustworthy to lead the party?”
He wasn’t sure, he smiled as though maybe I had a point, didn’t say much. I decided to try one more question. “Can we agree that there is a criminal justice problem in the country, in addition to disparities of wealth determining the outcomes of cases, that black and brown people are many times more likely to wind up in prison than whites?”
He could not totally agree, or actually, well, what he said was “isn’t it nice that we can have a pleasant conversation about politics, even though we are on different sides politically?”
I agreed that it was, not bothering to point out that he had no answers to either of the questions I’d asked him. That is one of my perennial problems with talking to people on the right, those who avidly watch FOX and similar outlets and get their worldview set out for them every day. No answer to direct questions, only parrying counter narratives, often boldly false ones.
During the Cheney/Dubya years I tried to resolve a long email debate with a onetime friend of my father’s, radically leftist when I knew her decades ago, who’d had a “political awakening” (and a religious conversion, the blonde midwesterner was now Jewish) and now was a politically “independent” extreme right-winger. She had initiated the conversation about politics because none of her former liberal friends would talk to her any more and she wanted my honest feedback, as an old friend, to see what common ground we could find. She also hoped, by the sheer strength of her irrefutably moral position, to convert me to her way of thinking (this she did not announce at the start).
The discussion had been infuriating and exhausting, because she had an instant right wing talking head non-answer to everything. The racial disparity in arrests and sometimes deadly police violence against people of color? She shot back an angrily written piece, by a then “hot” right wing provocateur, about how blacks murder each other in atrocious numbers. How did this answer my question? She’d sent it, she said, to open my eyes about the propaganda I’d been exposed to that made me think police regularly use force on blacks for no reason. Clearly, she’d changed her view of America’s most persecuted race since her days singing protest songs and marching for Civil Rights, and living with a fellow Mensa member from Haiti.
Toward the end of this agonizing exercise I asked her one question, about torture. I may have gotten this idea from David Bromberg, a singer and multi-instrumentalist Sekhnet and I both like.
In every show he does a song inspired by the Rip Van Winkle story, a guy wakes up after being asleep for twenty years and doesn’t recognize the world. Bromberg, during a musing instrumental interlude, makes a few political remarks, he’s a progressive-seeming fellow with a good sense of humor. This night in Town Hall, as he fingerpicked a background to his remarks, he began musing about some of the worst things Cheney/Bush were doing [1] a guy in a military jacket rose behind us and called for him to stop with the politics and get back to playing music. Bromberg looked at him thoughtfully, said “we torture people now? We torture people?” and went back to singing.
I wrote her something similar, it may have been a two part question. Why are we at war in Iraq, a country with no connection to al-qaeda and no WMD? How do you justify torturing people, many of whom had nothing to do with terrorism, people who had been turned in by personal enemies for large cash rewards?
Iraq she’d have to get back to me on, she wrote (she needed to research the issue). As for torture, what we were doing to these terrorists was not torture, it was fully justifiable and certainly not deadly, we were just standing up for ourselves, speaking to them in their own language, to protect us all from having our throats cut in our beds — as one right wing friend of her’s predicted would happen to me one day, to shut my big, liberal, New York Jew lawyer mouth, a Muslim jihadist would break into my house and cut my goddamned throat, in my bed, because people like me are friends of the terrorists but terrorists don’t care about any of that, they’d slit my throat in a second.
If the crazy old bastard had said that to my face, of course, I might have been tempted to shiatsu massage his sweaty mug with my knuckles. I don’t do that kind of thing, and it has been a long project of mine to learn to avoid reacting with anger, but, seriously? That is an answer to my question about how the greatest democracy in history justifies endlessly detaining and torturing captured Muslims?
If you can’t get a serious answer all you can do is remain pleasant until you can walk away. Not very satisfying, for someone who hopes to solve problems and come to an understanding, rather than agree that we can never agree because we are loyal to radically different views of the world. Infuriating, in fact. The fury is the heart of the entire right wing exercise (as the enraged right-wing always says of the left, and Blacks– whew! so fucking angry!). The beauty of emotion-driven righteousness is — no thought or a working through of actual facts is ever required of you.
“You call me childish? I know you are, but what am I? Make me! Make me!”
So the rage is out there, and it’s very real, and potentially very destructive, as is despair. There are good reasons for anger and feelings of hopelessness, when, as a friend sang the other night “meet the new boss, same as the old boss” and added that Biden was just cleaning out the ashtrays and burying the bodies, that business would proceed largely as usual. I agreed that in terms of the Department of Justice’s actions so far, it certainly seems to be the case. You want real change? You have to stop shopping at the same store that keeps selling you the poison that’s killing your family. But it’s the only store in town, an aggravating, maddening problem.
Oh will you please shut the fuck up?
[1]
That Trump’s predictable cruelty and petty vindictiveness makes Dubya Bush (America’s second worst president — and arguably a war criminal) look like a decent guy always reminds me of the no-brainer hypothetical about who would you rather live under, Hitler or Mussolini? No contest, give me the bragging, strutting, blustering Italian fascist any day, if those are the only choices. The only people who pick Mr. Hitler over Mr. Mussolini are, literally, very fine Nazis — on both sides, on both sides!
As corrupt, partisan, untruthful culture warrior William Pelham Barr embarks on his rehabilitation tour, I heard a great capsule summary of Barr’s career as Trump’s penultimate Attorney General. It was delivered by this guy:
“This is the Attorney General who interfered with the deployment of the Mueller Report, he interfered with the whistleblower in the Ukraine case, he interfered in the Mike Flynn prosecutorial decisions, in the decisions around Roger Stone, he interfered with the events of Lafayette Square, he interfered with the firing of the SDNY top prosecutor. All of those things Bill Barr was happy to do. Bill Barr was also happy to go tell Wolf Blitzer that there were reasons to question the integrity of the mail ballot. He was happy to cross all those lines, so the suggestion that he wasn’t willing to cross one final line to kneecap and topple our democracy by undermining the election, look, give the guy credit for that, but I mean… it’s not much credit in terms of his career at the Department of Justice”
The quote is from the video below, which is worth checking out. Former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner points out that from the moment Barr, head of the DOJ, told Trump that his department had fully investigated and Trump’s claim of voter fraud was “bullshit”, Trump had clear knowledge that he was lying about the election. This would establish the criminal intent, mens rea, behind his actions when he continued to falsely insist (as he does to this day) that there was massive bipartisan election fraud (Republicans like the disloyal, runt governor of Georgia and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger were in on it!!!) that stole his landslide victory from him and when he organized and provoked a crowd to storm the Capitol to stop a joint session of Congress from certifying his loss.
How does Trump reward over-the-top loyalty? By calling for his devoted poodle, Mike Pence, who finally refused to break the law in an ill-planned attempt to usher in a Trump dictatorship, to be hanged by the traitorous neck until dead. Trump had done no less to the loyal Jeff Sessions, he mocked him and gloated after supporting Tommy Tuberville’s successful ouster of Sessions in the Republican primary. What kind of schmuck listens to frigging “ethics” advice in business or government?
There is a great outcry now, among Republicans and right wing screaming heads on cable, over curricula that does not emphasize only the glorious, totally non-racist, non-sexist, never the least bit genocidal, history of our exceptional land. A hastily written term paper to this effect, making the case that America’s White Christian values are the essence of our remarkable nation’s values and the source of all justice and freedom, was posted by Trump’s 1776 Commission right before the former president left office, an office he never conceded losing. I laughed when I read that the day after he was sworn in, Biden immediately took that shit off the internet and disbanded the “Commission”.
Now we have fascistic governors like that scary clown in Florida basically mandating the teaching of similar ahistorical bullshit and giving teachers, students and universities loyalty tests as the basis for funding and pay. The rallying cry among these history “purists” is against Critical Race Theory.
Their angry critique is based on three things:
it is clearly critical, right there in the name, which, obviously, makes it bad.
It has Race in the name, which makes it racist, on its ugly face, right there in the name.
It is a theory, meaning that it makes an argument based on history, facts, law and logic and requires a strong, well-informed counter-argument to refute — or it needs to be cancelled in its entirety as racist and critical.
No matter that it is taught in graduate schools, and began as a legal theory in law schools (to explore elusive but prevalent areas of systemic injustice) and has nothing to do with what is taught in public elementary, middle and high schools is immaterial (as Barr later characterized the lies fellow Trump loyalist Mike “Q” Flynn pleaded guilty to telling the FBI), it is still CRITICAL, it is RACIST and, worst of all, it is a THEORY.
Readers of history will recognize a rhyme or two with moments of great division in our shared past. A generation after their beloved pappies, brothers and beaus heroically fought the tyranny of a government intent on destroying their way of life, by outlawing chattel slavery, the Daughters of the Confederacy embarked on a project to glorify what they rebranded as the Lost Cause.
We never fought for slavery, their story went (whatever our articles of succession may have said otherwise), we fought for honor and glory and the right of each state to decide for itself how it wanted to live. History books were written to reflect this story and curricula were introduced in schools to teach this quaint revision of history (during decades of racism at law all over the country which included countless lynchings and filibusters of anti-lynching laws). The monuments to the insurrectionists, slave masters, West Point trained murderers of surrendering Black troops began to be erected during this period, as these determined, history-conscious old women, many of whom had inherited slavery-based fortunes, were starting to die off.
By the time these influential women were all dead the story stuck firmly in the classrooms of the former Confederacy and beyond: the South had fought the glorious Lost Cause for States’ Rights and Freedom, no matter what lying n-words and their mindless radical supporters might say to the contrary. It was never remotely about race, you irrationally angry n-word loving whiners!
Yet in the LIBERAL press you can read a paragraph like this, from an op-ed last week:
The former Confederates had failed to build a slave empire, but they would not accept the demise of white man’s government. As the former Confederate general and subsequent six-term senator from Alabama John T. Morgan wrote in 1890, democratic sovereignty in America was conferred upon “qualified voters,” and Black men, whom he accused of “hatred and ill will toward their former owners,” did not qualify and were destroying democracy by their mere participation. Disenfranchising them, therefore, was not merely justified but an act of self-defense protecting democracy against “Negro domination.”
Imagine the outrage of that to decent “white” people, that former slaves bore
“hatred and ill will toward their former owners”!
Can you imagine the temerity of those formerly owned democracy destroyers, those savage tyrants?
The writer of that op-ed called his piece The Cruel Logic of the Republican Party, Before and After Trump. Cruelty is often the point of the politics of division (and, yes, Tucker, back in 1890 the racist party was the Southern Democratic party, replaced by the post-Civil Rights Act GOP that turned the former Confederacy solid red on the electoral map). The current Republican party is cruel, in its logic and operation, and in how it deals with anyone it regards as an enemy.
Cruelty works, to inspire terror, rage and cringing loyalty. A reputation for cruelty is a powerful thing. When you are known for being deliberately cruel, you inspire fear as you make people angry (or dead, for that matter). Cruelty infuriates your opponents and critics, who then begin whining and attacking, proving that they are the problem not you. It is the childhood sadist’s tic, I keep poking you in the ribs, harder and harder, until you slap me, then I scream “MOM!!!” and you get a whuppin’.
Here’s historian Heather Cox Richardson, from last night’s installment of her long letter from an American, a curriculum Florida governor Roaring Ron DeSantis (or DeathSantis, as many Floridians call him for his stellar pandemic response) would have her fired for teaching in a publicly funded Florida school:
Trump’s Big Lie has a number of elements that echo the argument behind the organization of the Confederacy in 1861. Like the Confederates, the Big Lie inspired followers by calling for them not to destroy America, but to defend it. The insurrectionists of January 6, and those who continue to insist the election was stolen, do not think of themselves as domestic terrorists, but as patriots in the mold of Samuel Adams.
“Today is 1776,” Representative Lauren Boebert (R-CO) tweeted on January 6.
The Confederates, too, believed they were defending America. In February 1861, even before Republican President Abraham Lincoln took office on March 4, 1861, lawmakers for the Confederate States of America wrote their own constitution. It was remarkably similar to the United States Constitution—copied from it verbatim, in fact—except for three key changes that they believed made the original constitution better: they defended state’s rights, denied that the government could promote internal improvements, and prohibited any law that denied or impaired “the right of property in negro slaves.”
Confederate leaders convinced ordinary white men in the southern states that defending the expansion of human enslavement would be defending the nation against the “radicals” who valued the principles of equality outlined in the Declaration of independence.
On the basis of that powerful patriotism, they took their states out of the Union shortly after Lincoln was elected president, hurrying to secede while tempers were hot.
But, once they declared an insurrection, they found it hard to keep up enthusiasm for it. Confederate leaders approved the firing on Fort Sumter in April 1861 in part because interest in creating a new nation was fading. The new nation that had seemed exciting and inspiring in the holiday gatherings after the election seemed a little silly in the spring, when attention turned to planting. Sparking a crisis made sure that southern whites did not abandon the Confederacy. And, once the war had begun, white southerners were committed. Wars are far easier to start than to stop.
Trump’s insurrection seems to be facing the same waning enthusiasm that Confederate leaders faced. Saturday night, at his first large rally since January 6, Trump spoke at Wellington, Ohio, about 35 miles west of Cleveland. While attendees responded to his complaints about the election, many left early. Today Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT) told CNN’s Jake Tapper, “there’s a growing recognition that this is a bit like [professional wrestling]. That it’s entertaining, but it’s not real. And I know people want to say, yeah, they believe in the ‘Big Lie’ in some cases, but I think people recognize that it’s a lot of show and bombast. But it’s going nowhere. The election is over. It was fair….let’s move on.”
Today Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT) told CNN’s Jake Tapper:
“there’s a growing recognition that this is a bit like [professional wrestling]. That it’s entertaining, but it’s not real. And I know people want to say, yeah, they believe in the ‘Big Lie’ in some cases, but I think people recognize that it’s a lot of show and bombast. But it’s going nowhere. The election is over. It was fair….let’s move on.”
There was also the recent Atlantic article with new remarks from Trump’s former loyal gunsel, devout and unprincipled culture warrior Bill Barr. Barr is a gigantic piece of shit I will have to return to soon, unfortunately, because … he’s a gigantic piece of shit who enabled Trump to stay in office by lying about Mueller’s findings, helped his Unitary Executive continue to skirt laws and obstruct justice by employing every legal and public relations trick to spin things Trump’s way throughout his tenure as America’s most openly partisan and truth-challenged AG.
Even Barr bailed when it became clear Trump was determined to overturn the fair election by any means necessary. Even after Barr spent months stoking fears of a massively fraudulent mail-in election and announcing a series of criminal investigations into traitors like Robert Mueller and his zealots, and investigations of alleged voting corruption right up through and immediately after the election. Barr didn’t leave out of principle, he left because he knew his boss was in the process of willfully committing crimes, including incitement to insurrection, that Barr didn’t want to go to jail for.
The Bagpiper is piping a different tune about “obvious” massive mail-in voting fraud these days:
But, rather than looking like heroic patriots [the January 6 MAGA rioters currently on trial], they increasingly look like dupes. Barr’s effort to rewrite his actions is a good indication of which way he thinks the wind is blowing. When he left office shortly before the election, he wrote a glowing letter to his former boss promising to update him “on the Department’s review of voter fraud allegations in the 2020 election and how these allegations will continue to be pursued,” and promoting the rhetoric of those pushing the Big Lie: “At a time when the country is so deeply divided, it is incumbent on all levels of government, and all agencies acting within their purview, to do all we can to assure the integrity of elections and promote public confidence in their outcome.”
Today’s article told a different story: “If there was evidence of fraud, I had no motive to suppress it. But my suspicion all the way along was that there was nothing there. It was all bullshit.”
gratuitousblahg 