Perhaps, but all of the smart, dark, right-wing money, at this second, is on the Orange Polyp and his loyalists, by a nose, in a midterm already being fueled by hate and threats of further violence, amid litigation challenging new voter suppression laws in the fourteen states (and counting) now actively making it harder for people in cities to vote [1].
If it was me donating the big bucks to keep the GOP firmly in the driver’s seat, I’d be looking to base the operation on a genius just a little bit more stable.Maybe someone who hadn’t had his “university” and his “charity” both shut down for fraud? Just spitballing here.
This photos doctored, I LOOK GREAT!Biden’s a walking cadaver.
[1]
Between January 1 and May 14, 2021, at least 14 states enacted 22 new laws that restrict access to the vote. The United States is on track to far exceed its most recent period of significant voter suppression — 2011. By October of that year, 19 restrictive laws were enacted in 14 states. This year, the country has already reached that level, and it’s only May.
We recently had a primary in New York City for mayor, several district attorneys (including the one that will almost certainly be prosecuting Trump, Inc.), public advocate, comptroller and a few other positions. In a moment when democracy is under ruthless attack, on the ropes, face swollen, one puffy eye closed, a mix of snot and blood dripping out of the nose, we New York voters had very little information on the individual candidates we were asked to choose between.
The few debates were not super enlightening, articles of substance about the candidates were hard to find. There was a flood of large format, glossy, paid advertising from the candidates, choking the old mailbox. Some of the material contained things that ruled out a given candidate, like the endorsement of a certain well-known Nazi-type, but the rest of the Democratic candidates all sounded like true champions of equality, justice and decency.
As always in the primaries, you take your best shot at voting for a candidate that seems to represent your views, knowing that almost certainly you will get some corporately selected piece of shit to hold your nose and vote for in the actual election, even in an anarchist jurisdiction like New York City. Politics, as we know, is a nasty business, driven by expensive advertising, largely attack ads stirring up fear and loathing and let the best brand marketing win!
The lack of information continues. The last update on the close, important Manhattan DA race was four days ago when 83.9% of the precincts reported the day after of the primary and the top two candidates were separated by less than four percent, the margin of error. One of the two has already said she will not recuse herself from any investigation involving her big campaign donors and wealthy close friends. What could go wrong?
A digression, one of the candidates in these primaries was my best friend from kindergarten, a guy I have only seen once since then, some time in first grade when our mothers arranged a surprise play date. My mother and I walked up the hill from the turnpike and there was a woman and a boy in the distance, near our house. When we recognized each other (he must have known what he was there for, he was standing in front of my house) we began to run toward each other, like in romantic, slow motion commercial from back in the day, hugged and started laughing. The guy was attending a yeshiva, I was still in our old school. His mother, who turns out to still be alive (at 95, I think) and a Cuban Jew, made the first meat sauce I’d ever tasted. Man, it was delicious over spaghetti. My mother began making it after that and to this day, when Sekhnet’s tomatoes are ripe, I make it with vegetarian “meat”[1]. Thanks to rank-choice voting I was able to vote for my old buddy, though he wasn’t my first choice, based on what I could make out of his positions.
I keep thinking, and writing, as though the facts of the case are really the central deal, that most voters actually care, spend the time to learn about the candidates and use the best information they can get to make an informed choice, select the best people for elected office.
If it was not clear before now, it is now perfectly clear — in the war of whipped up emotions vs. dry, fact-based intellect, passion wins over any form of logic. In politics, in advertising, in the world as we know it. As Mr. Hitler clearly, and approvingly, set out in his otherwise rabidly raving Mein Kampf, a lie works best when it is bold, infuriating and repeated over and over. When a Big Lie is exposed as a total fabrication designed to enrage people, call the fucking liars who exposed it the ACTUAL BIG LIARS, their lie about the lie is the BIG Lie — call for their execution!
We recently had a president who, weeks before the election, secretly paid off two women to dummy up about sex the NY Times characteristically notes they “allegedly” had with the guy. You always pay $130,000 for a non-disclosure agreement for someone who alleges to have had extra-marital sex with you, why wouldn’t you? It’s just standard caution, especially for a politician. Then, also right before the election, his fraudulent “university” was shut down, a tiny, pennies on the dollar, $25,000,000 settlement paid out to defrauded students in NY, with no admission of wrongdoing. (Also, once he was president, his fraudulent charity was shut down, for illegal expenditures of charitable contributions, but, you know, seriously, who among us hasn’t had a fraudulent charity shut down?).
We’ll give him a pass on whether there was anything fishy (or illegal) about 140 known contacts (collusion, sure, chargeable criminal conspiracy? insufficient evidence found) between his campaign and a hostile foreign government. This hostile foreign power openly favored him and released information intended to damage his already hated opponent at key strategic moments (“Grab ’em by the pussy” meet “Hillary’s fucking emails!!!”). We’ll pretend he was exonerated by Mueller for obstruction of justice as well, that his attempts to change the results of an election he lost were just what any real winner does when people say he lost, that it’s normal for a competitive white man to send a violent mob to disrupt the final certification of an election that infuriated him, an election he actually won “in a landslide”.
Ordinarily payments by an adulterer to silence paid sex partners, a finding that your “university” was a fraud, as well as your charity, would be enough to do a certain amount of damage to your candidacy. Yes, it was the perfect storm in 2016, the most hated (though exciting) man in American politics running an aggressive, sometimes ugly, campaign against the most hated (though competent) woman in American politics. A plague on both of their houses, and we are stuck with the bill.
And still I sit here, virtually every day, after reading, listening to a few podcasts, watching a few people I respect in the media, trying to coherently set out the details of what is going on around us, as if coherence is even still a thing in America.
Many people I know feel this practice of mine is a form of masochism, since there is so little you can do about any of it, why keep feeding on the toxic details? We know what the GOP has finally become, the radical, anti-democratic party of obstruction of government. We know the despicable, unprincipled players well, Mitch, McCarthy, Lyin’ Ted, Lindsey, et al, a pack of craven, cynical shitbirds stinking to the heavens. Does it surprise us on Wednesday when they confidently say the opposite of what they said Monday? When they make a solemn vow in 2016 that they break, without consequence or remorse, when the time comes to do the opposite? Are we sad, and sickened? Sure, about 60% of us are.
I like to think we are not doomed, not hostages to those whose enflamed passions will not allow them to look at the larger picture, ratchet down the rage and help us all attend to the massive problems we all face. I prefer to believe that most of us are inherently decent people, no matter how many millions might be easily misled. Most people don’t like liars, crooks, smug, provocative pussy grabbers. We need to keep our focus, and not look away, there is a lot of work ahead if we’re to save ourselves from the worst of us.
The earth is on fire, under water, rocked and ravaged at every turn. There is massive poverty, even in the richest nations on earth, particularly in ours. People still die because they can’t afford the medical treatments that routinely save and extend the lives of wealthy people. Citizens in some areas can’t drink their lead-infused drinking water without taking dire health risks. Our military veterans, “thank you for your service”, kill themselves at a rate of 600 a month. People die every day because police claim they are rightfully in fear of their lives, even when the person they are afraid of is handcuffed and lying face down on the pavement. Women, will you ever get the Equal Rights Amendment added to the fucking constitution?
Like I said, I like to think we are not doomed, pretend that my own doom is likely not a done deal. It is our privilege to be optimistic, to look at the worst and see the possibility of a better outcome, until all of our privileges, and our breath itself, are revoked. And if they are revoked tomorrow, let us live today with a full appreciation of this miraculous beauty and our great potential for goodness, in the face of the ugly as the worst sin you can imagine.
what?
[1]
To make it with meat, add chopped fake meat (or the real stuff, if you insist) to the skillet when you are caramelizing the onions, garlic and peppers/carrots. You want to sear it a bit (brown it, as my mother would say), before you add the tomatoes and start cooking it into sauce.This gives the sauce maximum deliciousness.The simple recipe is here.
“Given Mr. Trump’s reckless actions after losing the 2020 vote [1], and the violence they spurred, the newly released emails are unsurprising. But consider that fact for a moment:
It is unsurprising that the president of the United States leaned on the Justice Department to help him try to steal an election.
The country cannot forget that Mr. Trump betrayed his oath, that most Republican officeholders remain loyal to him nonetheless — and that it could be worse next time.”
you people are all fucking losers, you deserve “president” Biden
[1]
Among these reckless actions:
repeating the baseless, infuriating lie that the election was rigged against him and riddled with bipartisan fraud, spending $50,000,000 in advertising to promote this lie, denouncing the numerous courts that found he’d produced no evidence of voter fraud or irregularity, firing the federal appointee who certified the election as fair and clean, attacking Republicans in various states he lost for not overturning election results, leaning on state voting commissions to overturn the election, making calls (18) to at least one Republican state Secretary of State asking him to give him a break and just “find” a total of one more vote than he lost by, calling for and promoting a Stop the Steal rally in front of the White House, with a march to the Capitol to “Stop the Steal,” on the day a joint session of Congress would ceremonially award the Electoral College votes to Biden, and officially make him winner of the presidential election, encouraging anger at the “cowardly” “traitor” Mike Pence who was refusing to be bold, break the “law” and declare Trump the winner, as his crowd stormed the Capitol and chanted “Hang Mike Pence!” with a gallows erected outside, Trump, watching the mob advance inside the Capitol on live TV, tweeted:
etcetera
When he was impeached for these dangerous, unconstitutional actions, he denounced the “partisan” impeachment as a desperate ploy by partisan, witch hunting fraudulent [cannibal pedophile] losers.etc.
Now there are a bunch of new voter suppression laws, in states Trump lost, to make sure what he demanded be done by Trump-loyal state legislators to reverse the election results last time can now all be legally done next time.
Where is the moderate, judicious Attorney General Merrick Garland on all of this? On the obstruction of justice case laid out by Robert Mueller? He hasn’t really taken a public position on the seriousness of this threat to democracy.
Alvin Bragg and Tali Farhadian Weinstein are in the lead as the votes are being counted several hours after the polls closed.We learn, with a key new fact unreported by the New York Times:
Farhadian Weinstein recently made waves by donating $8.2 million to her own campaign, more than all the other candidates have raised, combined.
We got a ton of large format campaign cards from Tali Farhadian Weinstein, one of the Democratic Primary candidates for Manhattan District Attorney. That is the office that will be hopefully prosecuting the former president and present danger, Mr. Trump in the coming months. It’s also the office that let Ivanka and Don Jr. skate a few years ago for some arguable fraud in connection with the Trump SoHo.
Tali has the bones of a compelling story, her family having fled tyranny and oppression in Iran. The Voter Guide gives us this capsule biography:
Tali Farhadian Weinstein (D)
Farhadian Weinstein, who came to New York from Iran as a child, is a professor of law and most recently served as general counsel for the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office. Previously, she worked as a federal prosecutor.
Then I learned the reason she was able to send us so many glossy campaign ads (and show up daily in ads in the New York Times) is that she is married to a hedge fund guy and he and his friends have a shit ton of money. The NY Times:
Ms. Farhadian Weinstein has raised more money than any of her competitors, including $8.2 million she gave to her own campaign.
Asked if she would recuse herself from any case involving one of her donors, she said she would not.Presumably there is no reason to, since she is scrupulously fair, having escaped oppression as a girl.
The standard for recusal, of course, is “the appearance of impropriety”, though it is often interpreted as a subjective standard with plenty of wiggle room — it is difficult to force anyone to recuse themselves. A big warning flag went up for me when she told the interviewer there was no reason for her not to oversee the prosecution of one of her big donors, if it came to that.
Then we learned the 45 year-old first registered as a Democrat in 2017.
Then we got this mysterious attack ad, aimed at knocking out the two men running for Manhattan DA, one of whom happens to be apparent co-front runner Alvin Bragg.
In politics, increasingly, people do whatever they need to do to win, to gain and retain power. Attack ads seem to work, particularly when they arrive close to election day. They scare people, make them angry, make them go to the polls to vote against the sick, sneaky bastard who was attacked.
The strategy is tried and true, but it was not clear that Tali Farhadian Weinstein had sent the card savaging the two men in the DA race. Sekhnet and I read the card several times before the eagle-eyed Sekhnet found what we suspected was likely the case (it is in fairly small print under the address, extreme right above): Paid for By New Yorkers for Tali.
This is from the end of an interview with a writer named Clint Smith about Juneteenth that Amy Goodman conducted on Democracy Now! on Friday.Juneteenth recently became a federal holiday, over the nay votes of fourteen GOP sticklers . Though, in fairness to them, it was fewer than the number (21) who opposed gold medals for the outnumbered officers who defended the Capitol on January 6 and FAR less than the number (all but six of them in the Senate) who opposed the formation of a bipartisan commission to investigate the MAGA riot. The new national holiday commemorates the day in June 1865, two months after the Confederacy surrendered — and two months after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln — that enslaved Blacks in Galveston, Texas learned that they’d been freed more than two years earlier.
AMY GOODMAN: Clint, before we end, you are an author, you’re a writer, you’re a teacher, and you are a poet. Can you share a poem with us?
CLINT SMITH: I’d be happy to. And so, when you’re a poet writing nonfiction, that very much animates the way that I approach the text. And so, this is part of the — this is an adaptation or an except from the end of one of my chapters, that originally began as a poem that I wrote when I was trying to think about some of these issues that I brought up.
[reading] Growing up, the iconography of the Confederacy was an ever-present fixture of my daily life. Every day on the way to school, I passed a statue of P.G.T. Beauregard riding on horseback, his Confederate uniform flung over his shoulder and his military cap pulled far down over his eyes. As a child, I did not know who P.G.T. Beauregard was. I did not know he was the man who ordered the first attack that opened the Civil War. I did not know he was one of the architects who designed the Confederate battle flag. I did not know he led an army predicated on maintaining the institution of slavery. What I knew is that he looked like so many of the other statues that ornamented the edges of this city, these copper garlands of a past that saw truth as something that should be buried underground and silenced by the soil.
After the war, the sons and daughters of the Confederacy reshaped the contours of treason into something they could name as honorable. We called it the Lost Cause. And it crept its way into textbooks that attempted to cover up a crime that was still unfolding; that told us that Robert E. Lee was an honorable man, guilty of nothing but fighting for the state and the people that he loved; that the Southern flag was about heritage and remembering those slain fighting to preserve their way of life. But, see, the thing about the Lost Cause is that it’s only lost if you’re not actually looking. The thing about heritage is that it’s a word that also means “I’m ignoring what we did to you.”
I was taught the Civil War wasn’t about slavery, but I was never taught how the declarations of Confederate secession had the promise of human bondage carved into its stone. I was taught the war was about economics, but I was never taught that in 1860 the 4 million enslaved Black people were worth more than every bank, factory and railroad combined. I was taught that the Civil War was about states’ rights, but I wasnever taught how the Fugitive Slave Act could care less about a border and spelled Georgia and Massachusetts the exact same way.
It’s easy to look at a flag and call it heritage when you don’t see the Black bodies buried behind it. It’s easy to look at a statue and call it history when you ignore the laws written in its wake.
I come from a city abounding with statues of white men on pedestals and Black children playing beneath them, where we played trumpets and trombones to drown out the Dixie song that’s still whistled in the wind. In New Orleans, there are over 100 schools, roads and buildings named for Confederates and slaveholders. Every day, Black children walk into buildings named after people who never wanted them to be there. Every time I would return home, I would drive on streets named for those who would have wanted me in chains.
Go straight for two miles on Robert E. Lee, take a left on Jefferson Davis, make the first right on Claiborne. Translation: Go straight for two miles on the general who slaughtered hundreds of Black soldiers who were trying to surrender, take a left on the president of the Confederacy who made the torture of Black bodies the cornerstone of his new nation, make the first right on the man who permitted the heads of rebelling slaves to be put on stakes and spread across the city in order to prevent the others from getting any ideas.
What name is there for this sort of violence? What do you call it when the road you walk on is named for those who imagined you under a noose? What do you call it when the roof over your head is named after people who would have wanted the bricks to crush you?
It is an unsettling thing to watch a right-wing movement move to an extreme position and appropriate so many of the tactical tics of, say, the Nazis.
When the Nazis controlled the mass media in Germany it was easy enough for the party to get their unchallengeable message across to every citizen. They had a network of spies who informed on disloyal citizens, anyone privately critical of the one-party narrative. These traitors met with harsh, often gruesome fates. In many cases, they were turned in by their own true believer Nazi children, loyal members of the Hitler Youth (Hitlerjugend).
An example of a debatable Nazi talking point, Jews had to be destroyed because they were responsible for the war. Hitler had invaded Poland, unprovoked, because of the Jews. The Jews, you see, were said to be a highly infectious disease that had to be eradicated. Every vice in the great German nation you could think of was a result of poisonous Jewish devilry. The only way to purify the blood of the Aryan Reich and make Germany great again was to exterminate this Judaic bacillus. The news was dispensed day after day in a way that made this controversial “theory” seem not only entirely reasonable but in urgent need of immediate action (or “aktion” in Nazi-speak).
If you get your news from FOX (Rupert Murdoch), or from even more extreme right-wing sources, One America News Network (OANN) or Newsmax, you get a version of reality very much at odds with the facts that can actually be established by things like court verdicts, bipartisan election certifications, real-time videos, written statements, spoken statements, sworn statements made under the penalty of perjury.
In the MAGA telling, the January 6 MAGA riot, for example, was not the result of a long, well-funded, long-planned campaign based on the lie that Trump won in a landslide and that communists, anarchists, anti-fascists (imagine how sick that is!) insane lying, violently rioting Blacks, angry radical Democrats and disloyal, lying Republicans had rigged the election against him, it was a spontaneous show of completely understandable patriotic fervor.
The 140 Capitol Police officers supposedly injured by this crowd of peaceful protesters? Never happened, radical left propaganda. OK, injured cops are speaking up, showing up in Congress to testify. Well, it may have happened, but it was not Trump fans but terrorists from antifa and BLM who did all the damage, viciously attacked the police, who all supported Trump 100% and kissed and hugged the actual peaceful Trump supporters, who behaved like normal tourists (who’d smoked crack or crystal meth a moment earlier). Actually, wait, it was an FBI false flag operation to make Trump, who actually won in a landslide, look like the inglorious loser he will never be!
A logical question I heard some pundit ask the other day: if the FBI staged this evil thing to make Trump look like a treasonous, seditious loser, wouldn’t you want a complete and thorough bipartisan investigation into the fucking FBI? Not the case with the lockstep GOP — they have learned from recent Trump/McConnell/Barr history. They want any finding about the January 6 “riot” to be dismissible as a complete and total “partisan witch hunt” and they know their solid 39% will believe that theory no matter what the radical partisan Democrat liars try to produce as “evidence”.
It is, of course, a mistake to look for logic in any of this. Just like the average disgruntled German who listened to Nazi media broadcasting every evening and came to believe as indisputable fact whatever was confidently repeated several times, the average American who gets only one political opinion, the same talking points echoed endlessly, will never even consider the likely notion that, if Trump indeed was lying about all the traitors who rigged the election against him, the dozens of lost lawsuits dismissed for lack of evidence of the rigged election, the expenditure of $50,000,000 to advertise the lie that he’d actually won, organizing a mass gathering to physically Stop the Steal and prevent the peaceful transition of power, and gave a fiery speech immediately before the riot that incited an already angry crowd to break through police barricades, fight the police and storm the Capitol, forcing legislators and their staffs to run for their lives, as the law abiding mob did $1,400,000 worth of damage to the building, maybe . . . Trump didn’t actually win in a landslide.
No matter. As we see from history, authoritarians rely on certain things, primarily blind obedience from their followers, who are inclined to believe whatever supports their view of a world run by vicious enemies who are mercilessly screwing them and need to be fought without mercy. Another common feature of authoritarian mobs is ready, justifiable, righteous violence against these rightfully hated enemies. This violence encourages obedience, or fearful silence, which also helps.
The one thing that every right-wing movement has in common is an unshakable belief in a strongman, an infallible leader with the will to destroy all of their despicable, dangerous enemies. In the case of Trumpism, that leader is Trump. As Trump’s German born grandfather [1] might have said:
The leader is always right.
The Führerprinzip (German: [ˈfyːʀɐpʀɪnˌtsiːp] (listen); German for ‘leader principle’) prescribed the fundamental basis of political authority in the Government of Nazi Germany. This principle can be most succinctly understood to mean that “the Führer‘s word is above all written law” and that governmental policies, decisions, and offices ought to work toward the realization of this end.[1] In actual political usage, it refers mainly to the practice of dictatorship within the ranks of a political party itself, and as such, it has become an earmark of political fascism.
Trump’s entrepreneurial grandfather, Friedrich Trump, trained as a barber, was deported from Germany for fleeing to avoid military service (and tax evasion when bringing in his American-made fortune). Interesting bit from Wikipedia:
As he had emigrated to America in order to evade conscription, the Bavarian Government stripped Trump of his citizenship and permanently banished him following an investigation. As a result, Trump and his family returned to the United States. He became a U.S. citizen in 1892.
I would like to be able to think about other things, write about things I love, things that cause me wonder — like the mischievous, versatile diminished chord — but most days, living in Berlin 1932, when 39% of my countrymen believe anything their leader tells them, the Bizzaro world where the “Big Lie” is the one told by people who claim the former president is lying about having won the 2020 election in a landslide, I’m transfixed by the steady stream of revelations of every horror one would expect at a historically perilous moment like this one. Trump is the US manifestation of the “autocratic” (fascist) monster that is rearing its deadly, racist, nationalistic head worldwide, in Poland, Brazil, Hungary, Turkey, Russia, the Philippines, India and so forth. If this country is to be any kind of bulwark against autocracy, our Department of Justice has a lot of work to do, and not much time to do it.
Every day there is more evidence of the depraved indifference, and cowardly cynicism, of one of our two major political parties. They are concerned only with consolidating power and making the country a minority run one-party state. The leaders of the other narrow majority party (though they represent a sizable majority of voters) do not show resolute courage very often, either. We have constant new proofs of the reality TV superstar former president’s corruption, megalomania and destructiveness. Every day, of course, we wait for a moment of possible accountability for past crimes. A reckoning for these crimes is the only way to avoid the clear and present danger the out-of-control violence stoking superstar presents.
Here is the latest, a trove of insane post-election emails from Trump’s final White House Chief of Staff, a former Tea Party Congressman and a founder of the Freedom Caucus, trying to get the acting Attorney General, the man who headed the DOJ briefly (after even Trump gunsel Bill Barr jumped off the sinking ship with other survival-oriented rats) to file a conspiracy- based Supreme Court lawsuit to try to overturn the election results. The Washington Post editorial:
MANY REPUBLICANS want the nation to ignore and forget President Donald Trump’s poisonous final months in office — the most dangerous moment in modern presidential history, orchestrated by the man to whom the GOP still swears allegiance. Yet the country must not forget how close it came to a full-blown constitutional crisis, or worse. Tuesday brought another reminder that, but for the principled resistance of some key officials, the consequences could have been disastrous.
The House Committee on Oversight and Reform on Tuesday releasedemails showing that the White House waged a behind-the-scenes effort to enlist the Justice Department in its crusade to advance Mr. Trump’s baseless allegations of fraud in the 2020 election. On Dec. 14, 10 days before Jeffrey Rosen took over as acting attorney general, Mr. Trump’s assistant emailed Mr. Rosen, asserting that Dominion Voting Systems machines in Michigan were intentionally fixed and pointing to a debunked analysis showing what “the machines can and did do to move votes.” The email declared, “We believe it has happened everywhere.”
Later that month, Mr. Trump’s assistant sent Mr. Rosen a brief that the president apparently wanted the Justice Department to submit to the Supreme Court. The draft mirrored the empty arguments that the state of Texas made to the court before the justices dismissed the state’s lawsuit. Piling on the pressure, then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows also dispatched an email asking Mr. Rosen to examine allegations of voter fraud in Georgia. A day later, Mr. Meadows apparently forwarded Mr. Rosen a video alleging that Italians used satellites to manipulate voting equipment. These were just some of the preposterous White House emails claiming fraud in arguably the most secure presidential election ever.
To his credit, Mr. Rosen rebuffed the White House’s entreaties to deploy the Justice Department’s vast powers on behalf of Mr. Trump’s lie, adding his name to the roster of honorable state and federal officials who showed fidelity to truth and duty at that crucial moment. Some have paid with their jobs. Republicans committed to the “big lie” are gunning to replace others, including those with vote-counting responsibilities. If Mr. Trump or another candidate again presses false fraud claims, many Republican officials may find it more difficult to resist the pressure to back the lie — or, indeed, may eagerly participate in advancing it.
Given Mr. Trump’s reckless actions after losing the 2020 vote, and the violence they spurred, the newly released emails are unsurprising. But consider that fact for a moment: It is unsurprising that the president of the United States leaned on the Justice Department to help him try to steal an election. The country cannot forget that Mr. Trump betrayed his oath, that most Republican officeholders remain loyal to him nonetheless — and that it could be worse next time.
The dynamic 47 year-old extremist freshman member of Congress made a ridiculous and hateful comparison last month between officials who mandate the wearing of masks during an infectious airborne pandemic and the Nazi perpetrators of “The Holocaust” who forced Jews to wear “gold stars”. Mask wearing mandates, in her opinion, are the same as what the Nazis did when they forced Jews to wear stars and operated death camps where millions were killed (and the passive voice used).
Asked about her headline grabbing comment afterwards, she did what her savvy fundraising type always does, she “doubled down” to delight her contrarian base. Making someone wear a paper mask is the same as Hitler himself forcing you to wear a gold star, gassing you and shoving your corpse into an oven, so there! Fortunately for her, the party she aspires to lead is very tolerant of this kind of arguable hate speech, the First Amendment (for their speech) is almost as sacred to them as the Second Amendment.
A few weeks later, for some reason, she visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC. It is a moving exhibit, as you walk from room to room, floor to floor, you experience the various stages of the mass murder over the course of those horrific final Hitler years. First you are put in a special category, your civil rights stripped away, state sanctioned violence increases. Then you lose your citizenship and are stateless, without the protection of any national government. Then you’re forced to move into crowded disease infested ghettos. Eventually they put you into overstuffed cattle cars and ship you East, where, if you don’t die during the brutal trip, you will either be worked to death or immediately gassed.
Sekhnet and I will never forget the room full of shoes and the mountain of human hair shorn from victims and put to all sorts of uses by the industrious Nazi state. There is a large photo of a woman on the wall, a victim of the Nazis, with a beautiful soulful face, one of her dark eyes not quite aligned with the other. Her face is particularly haunting, staring sightlessly over this room of shoes and hair. The freshman Congresswoman from Georgia was apparently also moved by her walk through the museum.
Then she stepped in front of the cameras to apologize for making the mistaken comparison between mask mandates and Hitler’s insane mass murder project (and doubling down on that comparison, one assumes).
Not easy, to admit being wrong, to express sorrow for a public statement. Many people find it almost impossible to do this, even in their personal lives. Many in her party have never done it, will never do it. Rather than being seen as a sign of humility and sensitivity, apologizing is seen in our culture as an admission of weakness and the cultural reflex against admitting fault is strong. So, you’ve got to hand it to her, she summoned the integrity to admit she was wrong, acknowledge that there really was a deliberate, mechanized Nazi mass murder of millions (contrary to the doubts many of her supporters might have about it) and that perpetrating the Holocaust was much worse than forcing people to wear masks in crowded public places to slow the spread of a highly infectious disease. It had been a mistake, she said, to compare the two things.
That said, the Democrats, in her opinion, are still acting like a bunch of Nazis, with their dangerous “national socialism,” but she was wrong to compare mask mandates to that terrible event that was the crowning glory of the Nazi regime.
Still, you know how unforgiving fucking liberals are. There’s no satisfying some of these loser bastards. Here’s Stephen Colbert:
I try to be fair, so here is the noxious Nazi piece of shit’s apology for her mistake, as edited by Forbes (you won’t see her smiling assurance that Democrats are still Nazis — oh, that doubling down was in response to a reporter’s smart-ass question, after she delivered her heartfelt written apology):
Here is the Washington Post’s take on her learned remarks about the party of powerful Jewish pedophile cannibal Satanists being Nazis:
Despite the name, the Nazi party was not a socialist party; it was a right-wing, ultranationalist party. Even so, Greene told attendees at the rally in May: “You know, Nazis were the National Socialist Party. Just like the Democrats are now a national socialist party.”
Asked Monday about that statement, Greene declined to disavow it and instead renewed her criticism of Democrats.
“You know, socialism is extremely dangerous, and so is communism,” she told reporters. “And anytime a government moves into policies where there’s more control and there’s freedoms taken away, yes, that’s a danger for everyone. And I think that’s something that we should all be wary of. … I’ll never stop saying we have to save America and stop socialism.”
It is certainly frustrating waiting for justice to be applied to our former (and future, and present, if you ask him) president. We are a nation of laws, we are told, and most laws are absolute for most of us. Obstruction of justice, which the law-is-for-chumps Mr. Trump did at virtually every turn, is a federal crime that he needs to be prosecuted for and convicted of.
I’m not sure what is taking the Fulton County DA so long about prosecuting the former president for his clear violation of Georgia criminal law. If you listen to the tape of Trump’s 18th post-election call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger, with the Georgia law in front of you, it is hard to imagine how any lawyer would be able to defend Trump against the charge that he committed every illegal act listed in the law in his attempt to influence election results, using threats, cajoling, joking, personal appeals to convince the fellas to find him a lousy, stinkin’ 11,780 votes, one more than needed, to give him the state. The search “status of Fulton County, Georgia criminal case against Trump update” brings up March 2021 “updates”, as does every related search. Nothing since then. WTF, y’all?
Since childhood, Trump has never been held accountable for anything, which is why he behaves the way he does. He has never paid a price for anything that wasn’t immediately forgiven or reimbursed by somebody else. His numerous bankruptcies, for incompetent management of a string of business ventures, did not harm his gold-plated luxury brand or his personal fortune. The tax avoidance schemes of his father, of Trump himself, though brazen, are perhaps typical of plans used by the super-wealthy to avoid the payment of taxes. There may be nothing criminal about what appears to be a long history of Trump tax fraud. There may be tax-related criminal charges coming, assuming the Manhattan DA, who let Trump and his children off for their apparent fraud in connection with the Trump SoHo a few years back, makes good on getting an indictment and conviction this time.
We are a nation of laws, and you violate them at your own risk. I know that I am paying about as much in penalties as Trump paid to the IRS in total tax for 2017. I’m being punished for being a year late filing my 2019 taxes. The fine, about the amount of tax I owed (and paid) is on an income perhaps one hundredth of what the former president’s was. Unlike Trump, I have no appeal of that fine under the law. Interest is being added for every day I am late paying the full amount. I can argue all I want, I just have to pay the outrageous, disproportionate (it’s as large as the tax bill I paid — a 100% penalty rate) non-negotiable fine. Fair or not, it’s my punishment for breaking the law and an indelible lesson to me going forward. It is a mistake I don’t plan to make again.
As for Trump, since he never learned a lesson like this, he knows as much now as when he was an out of control five year-old bullying his mom.
Here are some selections from the Boston Globe series making the case that we cannot ensure democracy going forward unless we prosecute our norm, rule and law busting former president (who claims to still actually be the president, Biden is a cheating liar, as illegitimate as the Birther President, Biden’s radical pal, ask any of the tens of millions of the base who believe this). The short Boston Globe series approaches the corruption and irregularity of the troubling Trump presidency from several angles, asking some basic questions along the way.
Is a president, deep in debt ($400,000,000 of it coming due very soon, from Mr. Trump) who continues to operate his businesses (having his sons run them), while fighting to hide all financial records, an obvious target for crafty foreign manipulators to take advantage of? The Globe gives a few examples:
Take Saudi Arabia’s payments to the Trump Hotel, which totaled $270,000 between November 2016 and February 2017. Those payments came just a few months prior to Trump finalizing one of the largest arms deals in US history with the kingdom. He also later went on to protect the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, after the brutal killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. “I saved his ass,” Trump bragged to the journalist Bob Woodward, in reference to bin Salman. “I was able to get Congress to leave him alone. I was able to get them to stop.”
To avoid these kinds of conflicts of interest (Saudi Arabia is also a longtime tenant in Trump Tower) the Globe advocates for two laws (you listening, Kyrsten? Joe? Dianne Feinstein? [1]). One is a law requiring a sitting president to divest from all of her businesses when taking office (generally done, but not by Trump). The other is the mandatory production of tax returns for all candidates for the presidency (another tradition Trump ignored). Pretending to be under audit for five years would no longer be a lawful excuse for a presidential candidate refusing to produce tax returns. The tax returns would show who the candidate got paid by, who he owes money to and whether it is likely he is a crook.
Nepotism, a mark of autocracy and monarchy everywhere, while technically illegal for US government appointees, arguably does not apply to appointments by the president and vice president. It can be accomplished if one finesses the law a little, for example, by not paying wealthy appointees a salary for their public service, even as that service may also enrich them in many other ways, as Ivanka and Jared’s experience as public servants illustrate. Loss of salary is the current penalty for violating the anti-nepotism law, so if you forgo a salary to make a lot more money while in office, well… nobody’s business, under our current laws. The reason for a stronger anti-nepotism law is clear.
That distrust [of officials appointed by nepotism] would be justified. Filling up key government posts with close relatives of the president, for example, will probably result in a staff that’s more loyal to the president than they are to government institutions, or even to democracy itself. Nepotism is also unlikely to produce the most competent government; Kushner, for example, was profoundly unqualified for his wide-ranging role, and the American people paid the price when he took a leading role in the Trump administration’s coronavirus response. . .
. . . When Trump hired Kushner, some legal scholars argued that the president does not have to abide by the federal anti-nepotism statute. That’s why, in order to ensure that this degree of corruption does not take place, Congress should pass a bill to make explicit that the president cannot appoint a relative to any official government post, even if they forgo a salary. In the event that a president’s relative is widely perceived to be the best qualified for a certain role, that appointment should require a waiver from Congress so that the candidate can be evaluated on their merits. Appointments of family members should be the exception, not the norm.
Obstruction of Justice while in office, anyone?Protected, as Mueller concluded, by an Office of Legal Counsel memo, from the days of Nixon, that advises the DOJ against indicting a sitting president for any crime. So, even if you can’t exonerate him in the face of an impressive amount of evidence, you also cannot accuse him of obstruction either, since that would be unfair to the guy who wouldn’t be able to defend himself until out of office. What’s a law-abiding Boy Scout Special Counsel to do?
Right out of the gate, Donald Trump appeared to break the law and brazenly admit it to the entire nation — not with remorse but with pride and conviction. Within four months of being sworn in, Trump fired FBI director James Comey, which the White House insisted was a decision rooted in Comey’s mishandling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private e-mail server. But Trump rebuffed his Department of Justice’s line of reasoning in a television interview with NBC, saying that he was planning on firing Comey because of the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. . .
. . . It might sound reasonable to say that indicting a sitting president could pose political problems — and potential national security risks — because a criminal trial would effectively incapacitate a president. But an indictment does not necessarily mean that the president has to sit through a criminal trial. That could always be postponed until a president leaves office. In that 1973 memo, the rationale for not indicting a sitting president, even if all proceedings are deferred until they are out of office, rests merely on the perceived damage the image of the office of the president might endure. “The spectacle of an indicted president still trying to serve as chief executive boggles the imagination,” the memo said.
A greater spectacle, however, is a reckless, authoritarian president who is seen on the world stage bending the rule of law to his will. That’s why presidents should be indicted for crimes that they commit, with their trials postponed to when they leave office. Had Mueller been able to operate under a guideline that allowed for Trump’s indictment, the former president probably would have faced legal accountability for his early acts of obstruction of justice. That, on its own, could have deterred him from obstructing justice later in his presidency, as he did during his first impeachment inquiry.
So while presidents should not, for logistical reasons, be required to be a part of a criminal trial while in office, they should not be immune from indictments. Because until presidents can be indicted, they will always be, by definition, above the law.
Corrupt presidential pardons given as part of a quid pro quo, a dangled pardon in exchange for lying to protect the president from criminal or civil liability, need to be overturned, and explicitly outlawed. The pardon power has generally been used to correct injustices, Trump wielded his pardon power in a characteristically “transactional” way, arguably to obstruct justice in several famous cases (Stone, Manafort, Flynn, Bannon, etc.).
But Donald Trump has proved that a president can use his pardon power not as a corrective for injustice but in exchange for political and personal favors — or even as a tool of coercion or manipulation — and get away with it. In stark contrast to his immediate predecessor, Trump granted clemency to only 237 people. And though some of those acts of clemency included commuting unjustly long sentences for minor offenses, over 100 of them, according to the Lawfare Blog, were granted to people who either had personal connections with the former president or advanced his political cause. Trump was hardly the first president to use his pardon power nefariously, but his blatantly corrupt use of it should be a wake-up call to lawmakers of both major parties that executive clemency must be reformed to limit its potential for abuse.
Boston sucks! Boston sucks!
[1]
The senior senator from California, on why she sees no need to fix the filibuster rule:
“If democracy were in jeopardy, I would want to protect it,” she told Forbes on Wednesday. “But I don’t see it being in jeopardy right now.”
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