Category Archives: current events

A Fitting Outcome

The president revealed to a gaggle of reporters yesterday that he has been taking hydroxychloroquine for the last couple of weeks, even though he keeps testing negative for COVID-19, in the tests he gets regularly.   

President Donald Trump: “Good things have come out about the hydroxy. A lot of good things have come out. And you’d be surprised at how many people are taking it, especially the frontline workers, before you catch it. The frontline workers, many, many are taking it. I happen to be taking it. I happen to be taking it.”

Reporter 1: “Hydroxychloroquine?”

President Donald Trump: “I’m taking it, hydroxychloroquine.”

Reporter 2: “Right now?”

Reporter 3: “When?”

President Donald Trump: “Right now, yeah.”

Reporter 3: “Yeah, when?”

President Donald Trump: “Couple of weeks ago, started taking it.”

Reporter 4: “Why, sir?”

President Donald Trump: “Because I think it’s good. I’ve heard a lot of good stories. And if it’s not good, I’ll tell you right: I’m not going to get hurt by it.”

source

 

Hydroxychloroquine is the antimalarial drug  FOX and Trump were enthusiastically promoting a while back as a COVID-19 cure, even though the drug was untested for that use.   Since then:  

Multiple studies have concluded that hydroxychloroquine is not an effective treatment for COVID-19 and can in fact have dangerous side effects, including a high risk of cardiac arrest. The FDA issued a warning about self-medicating with the antimalarial drug last month following Trump’s repeated remarks touting its effectiveness. On Monday, Fox News host Neil Cavuto warned viewers about the dangers posed by the drug just moments after the president’s remarks were broadcast.

Neil Cavuto: “If you are in a risky population here and you are taking this as a preventative treatment to ward off the virus, or, in a worst-case scenario, you are dealing with the virus and you are in this vulnerable population, it will kill you.”

source

The president will, no doubt, deal with the traitorous Neil Cavuto later, and I have nothing more to say about that.   Why get involved?   

I just point out, if this is a rare instance when our president is not lying (and we note that he is almost always compelled to lie), and he is actually taking this drug that is known to cause cardiac arrest — “O, sir, to willful men the injuries that they themselves procure must be their schoolmasters,” as the Bard had a wicked woman say insightfully of a stubborn fool in one of his greatest plays.

It is most likely that Mr. Trump is lying about taking ‘the hydroxy’, since much of what he says is a lie.   He is, famously, unable to stop himself from lying  about most things (except, presumably, the size of his perfectly adequately-sized penis).   He’s almost certainly lying about his use of hydroxychloroquine, but, forgive me if I do not give him a pass for this lie that will — as surely as a studied drug noted to cause heart attacks in  vulnerable patients causes heart attacks  — kill people who follow his lying example.

The actual fascist in charge of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, an angry militarist and former member of a coup whose only regret about the coup that ended democracy in Brazil for a time a few decades back, is that top coup leaders did not follow his advice and do what was necessary to keep power permanently: execute perhaps 20,000 dangerous intellectuals, leaders and activists.    Now Bolsonaro, who dismisses the virus and opposes quarantine efforts,  is also touting hydroxychloroquine as a miracle cure, as his country is currently number three worldwide for coronavirus infections and death.   

We’re number one.  Putin’s Russia is number two.  Number three is fascist ruled Brazil.   Way to go, boys.

You could say it would be fitting for these three, denying the deadly virus is a threat, claiming they are personally impervious to it as they force millions to be exposed and many to die from it, contracted the virus and were incapacitated, unable to stand at a podium and spread the contagion of their ignorance and hatred.   

Say Jair and Donald both actually were taking “the hydroxy”, prophylactically, and Vladimir too, and suppose all three suddenly had the symptoms the lying FDA has warned of.   Imagine the worst– all three clutching their chests, striking a heroic pose, perishing of cardiac arrest.  A fitting outcome?

The freedom-loving Americans who refuse to remain locked down, insist on going out, getting back to work, to play, who will die in larger numbers than if they followed the advice of our best experts — same deal.   If half of the people who would vote for Trump, Bolsonaro, Putin, all follow their leaders’ advice, go out, contract the deadly disease, die — a fitting outcome?

I am too prejudiced to judge that fairly.  Perhaps you can.

 

The Lincoln Project

There were Republicans, not that long ago, who held conservative views but were able to act in a bi-partisan way when a larger public good was at stake.    That party is pretty much gone.   Trump’s Republican party is a party of die-hard extremists to whom partisan power is the only end.    Mr. Trump demands complete loyalty to himself and to whatever idea pops into his fertile brain.   He is prone to championing sometimes wild conspiracy theories and often confidently relies on “alternative facts” to back them up.   Members of his party are on notice that they’re expected to have his back, no matter what, on pain of swift, public reprisal by the president.  The Lincoln Project is a group of conservative Republicans determined to end Trumpism.

The Republican Senate released a report that documented extensive Russian electoral interference, in all fifty states, on behalf of their presidential candidate in 2016.   The report detailed, as did a House report, and special counsel Mueller’s report, that this pro-Trump Russian electoral interference occurred in 2016, is ongoing and sophisticated [1].  The president continually refers to this well-documented Russian help he received as a HOAX and promises to punish the perpetrators of this traitorous hoax that infuriates him, as it appears to call the legitimacy of his historically narrow victory (78,000 votes in 3 states) in 2016 into unacceptable question.

The Republican senate has voted as a bloc to block any meaningful safeguards against massive Russian interference in the 2020 election.   It makes sense, if you are purely partisan, to want to preserve any advantage you have for remaining in power.   If Putin wants Trump, who are American Trumpists to argue with that — it’s win-win, no?   Plus, as Mr. Trump freely admitted on national television, allowing every American to vote is a ridiculous Democrat idea, creates a huge, unfair disadvantage for Republicans, they’d never be elected to anything ever again if everyone was allowed to vote, according to the president.

I’ve been gratified to see a conservative group calling themselves The Lincoln Project (Lincoln was the first Republican president, at a time when the party was anti-slavery) running very hard hitting ads against the extreme direction their party has taken under Trump.   In fairness to history, Bush-Cheney were not that much better than Mr. Trump, but at least they were sneakier and somewhat less brazen — and they didn’t have the benefit of a Senate majority leader as unprincipled as Mr. McConnell (his historic reign started in 2015).   

The Lincoln Project spots harness the brilliance that Republicans have shown, in recent years, in crafting ads to influence electoral outcomes.  With any luck, the efforts of these principled conservatives will cancel out ongoing, increasingly sophisticated Russian efforts to influence the outcome in November 2020 and help us avoid four more years of irrational, required fanaticism under Mr. T.   God help us all if they don’t.

Here is one of the many the Lincoln Project has produced:

 

 

 

[1]  Not everyone will have the stomach for this chilling article about the extent and skill of Russian election meddling and our unaddressed vulnerability to it—  (by Franklin Foer, staff writer for The Atlantic)  and Putin’s endgame of destroying democracy in America by sowing division, discord and distrust for democracy itself — but it is grimly fascinating, and important.  

Fantastic History Lesson — highly recommended

I salute Jeremy Scahill for his excellent podcast Intercepted, and for his most recent one in particular.   Best history lesson I’ve had in a long time.

Americans are famous for not knowing much about our history, not caring about what happened here, or anywhere else. twenty years ago, five months ago, a hundred years ago, two hundred years, five hundred — what difference could the past possibly make now that it’s over?    We are, as a society, pretty much doomed, as in that classic phrase about the lessons of history, to repeat the same mistakes over and over if we neither care about nor learn from the triumphs and calamities of the past.   

This looking back works in trying to improve our personal lives too, of course, weighing our present decisions against the way past decisions turned out, good and bad.   History, the unfolding of what happened in the past under certain conditions, is our best (and really only) guide to what might happen under similar present conditions.   A study of well-reasoned history can point us to what we need to do differently this time to avoid an unwanted result.

Jeremy Scahill is a hard-nosed journalist with a keen interest in history.  He always places his stories in the larger context of what came before.   It is impossible to understand complex situations without the insight that only historical context provides.    News story: man savagely beats up another man, is in turn savagely beaten by angry mob.    Does the context matter?  Most people would say it does.   

Factoid:  one hundred and fifty seven years ago (almost eight score and seven years ago) Lincoln freed the slaves.   Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 is one of those shorthand markers, like 1492, 1620 and 1776, that most American school children are taught about, memorize.   These dates serve as magical, isolated moments of the past when great things happened.   1492 Columbus discovers America, Protestant pilgrims fleeing religious persecution land on a rock in the New World in 1620, Thomas Jefferson proclaims all men created equal in 1776, Lincoln frees the slaves 1863.  Knowing these widely tested Cliff’s Notes factoids is knowing virtually nothing about anything that happened in 1492, 1620, 1776, 1863.

The discussions Jeremy Scahill had the other day with two Pulitizer Prize-winning authors, historians and Yale professors David Blight and Greg Grandin, are the most illuminating and fascinating expositions of American history I’ve heard in a long time.   I cannot recommend listening to this hour highly enough.

Jeremy’s most recent Intercepted podcast is called What Reconstruction and the New Deal Can Teach Us About What Comes After the Pandemic Presidency [1].  David Blight lays out the history of Reconstruction, the years after the Civil War, in a way I’ve never heard before (and I have done some reading and research about this era). 

For example:  Lincoln’s position was that the states that seceded from the Union and took up arms against it had not had a constitutional right to secede and therefore there was no need to formally readmit them to the Union after the war.   The position of the slain president’s militant party in Congress was that no state who took up arms against the government could be readmitted to the Union without swearing allegiance to the newly amended U.S. Constitution.  That amended constitution reflected the decisive outcomes of the Civil War.   

The U.S. Constitution  now explicitly outlawed slavery (with exceptions, of course),  guaranteed that states could not abridge the rights, privileges and immunities of federal citizenship (with massive, Supreme Court imposed, restrictions, of course), and guaranteed the right to vote to male former slaves (with exceptions, of course).   

The tension between these positions, Lincoln’s and Congress’s (Lincoln’s, of course, would have meaningfully evolved as the master politician worked), White Supremacist President Andrew Johnson’s and Congress’s,  winds up at the heart of the eternal “States Rights” controversy, left unsettled by our bloodiest war, an angry debate that rages to this day, as the current president urges quarantined citizens of Blue States to take up arms against tyrannical  government restrictions on their liberty.

Greg Grandin, in discussing the humane innovations of the New Deal,  picks up this characteristically American notion of liberty as freedom from coercion.   Andrew Jackson, our current president’s favorite (a man who would have prevented the Civil War, had he lived long enough, according to Trump) made his fortune as a slave trader.   He was marching a column of chained slaves to market in 1811 when he was stopped by a government regulator who asked to see his papers.   This coercive demand outraged the hot-tempered Jackson, who refused to show this bureaucrat any papers and conducted a year-long campaign (Old Hickory was also a lawyer) that resulted in the firing of the regulator. 

The principle, according to Jackson, was that he, a Free White Man, had the absolute right to be free of government coercion (as opposed to the human chattels he was lawfully marching to market, of course).  The same principle is advanced by Libertarians and many Republicans today:  liberty consists in freedom from all government coercion.

The demands of the present crisis we face are almost unbearable to consider.  Great imagination will be required to find solutions to the several gigantic, deep, deadly problems we face.   Looking at examples from history, of things that worked well and things that failed spectacularly, is more important in this moment than in most historical moments.   We need the inspiration of historical leaps of collective creativity that brought about better things.  If not now, when?  If not us, who?

 

 

[1]  The  Intercept’s description of the discussion:

THE 2020 ELECTION is six months away, more than 80,000 Americans have been killed by coronavirus, and official unemployment is inching toward 20 percent. This week on Intercepted: An in-depth historical look at some of the great crises in U.S. history and how the president, Congress, and social movements have responded. David Blight, Yale history professor and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom,” discusses the era of Reconstruction, the swift dismantling of its hard-fought gains, and the enduring power of white supremacy. As Joe Biden talks of building a presidency in the spirit of FDR and the New Deal, Greg Grandin, whose book “The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America” won the 2020 Pulitzer in nonfiction, discusses the battle for the New Deal, who was left out of its gains, and analyzes what such a program would look like in the aftermath of the Trump presidency.

Transcript coming soon.

 

Defender of Democracy

Judge Emmet G. Sullivan, the federal judge presiding over the Mike Flynn case, the prosecution Bill Barr has now decided was launched by possible criminals in his own department, took a bold, creative and highly principled step in considering the DOJ motion to drop the Flynn prosecution.  The DOJ request is unprecedented, a bit of supreme creativity by innovative provocateur Bill Barr; never has someone who pleaded guilty under DOJ prosecution had the case against them dismissed.    Judge Sullivan counter-moved with equal flair.   I salute a judge who stands up for the rule of law this way.   Principled individuals in positions of power are democracy’s only defense against unprincipled individuals in positions of power. 

Flynn’s new defense team, working closely with Barr’s DOJ, insisted to Judge Sullivan that he had no choice but to dismiss the case against their client.   As a matter of law, this may be so.   If the prosecutor drops the criminal case, the case is over.   Flynn’s lawyers told Sullivan that the proper venue for those who have a critique of the DOJ’s admittedly novel move (kidding, they didn’t admit the move was novel, why would they?) is the op-ed page, a place where critics are free to whine and carp about the DOJ’s unappealable decision to their hearts’ content.   The law, they said, is clear.   DOJ prosecutes, DOJ can end prosecution at any time, for any reason– case closed.

Op-ed, you say?    Retired Judge John Gleeson (another judge with a reputation for a sturdy spine) had co-written an op-ed in the Washington Post the other day, very skeptical of the way Barr has suddenly reversed the DOJ’s stance on a close Trump ally who pleaded guilty under oath to lying to the FBI about illegal contacts with foreign governments.    It turns out Flynn didn’t lie to the FBI once, he lied repeatedly, that the FBI gave him numerous opportunities to correct his lies, Flynn continued to lie.  Flynn admitted his guilt under oath, claimed God had told him to repent, move on with his life.   Now, with a new legal team, Flynn claims he was misled by his original legal team into taking the guilty plea, he actually didn’t mean to admit jack shit, he wants to withdraw his guilty plea, retract his sworn statements to the court.   

This presents an interesting legal question:  did Flynn commit perjury when he swore that he had lied to the FBI and then changed his story to say he never meant to admit lying to the FBI?  To simplify this sticky legal conundrum, Barr decided to simply step in and dismiss the case against Flynn.   Judge Gleeson is apparently not convinced that Flynn is not now guilty of the separate felony of perjury.   Judge Sullivan wants to hear more from Judge Gleeson about Flynn’s possible perjury and other issues.  He appointed Gleeson to oppose the Justice Department’s motion to drop the Flynn prosecution.   Much better than even the fiercest op-ed, I’d say!

You can read the lying New York Times story at this link, for more details.

The Opposite of Love

The opposite of love, it is said, is not hate — it’s indifference.   I think this states a profound reality– it is a very cruel fate to experience utter indifference to your suffering.    There is little difference, to the person suffering, between deliberately inflicted cruelty and that inflicted by nonchalant indifference to your suffering.   

Love and hate are related by a strong feeling towards another — indifference is the absence of any human connection whatsoever.  Indifference utterly erases the humanity of the subject of its neglect in a way that even hatred does not do.  Not to defend hatred, of course, but I’m trying to make this distinction between love and indifference as clear as possible.

It can be illustrated by a famous historical example.   The debate took place between former prisoners of the Nazis and former prisoners of the Soviets about which form of cruelty was worse.   The Nazis were known for expressing hatred and contempt for their captives, deliberately humiliating prisoners, subjecting them to sadistic treatment.    The Soviets were known for their utter indifference — to prisoners freezing in extreme cold, losing digits and limbs to frost bite or gangrene, to prisoners dying of disease or starvation.   The Nazi jailers made their hatred known, the Soviets made their indifference plain.   The verdict: pick your poison, both will kill you just as dead.

In comparing an administration that singles out a despised class of people for harsh treatment, as in babies ripped from their mothers’ arms at the border and sent to cages far away, with one that actually murders those babies in front of their mothers — well, obviously, the one that actually kills the children in front of the parents is worse.   

Though, of course, that’s not a thought that offers much consolation to the mother of the infant who is snatched and sent far away, never to be seen again.

The Unseen Toll of the Plague

I am starting to notice that people, in general, are getting quite emotionally frayed, which is not surprising, given what we are all up against.  The emotional strain from our fear and anxiety comes out in a variety of ways as we are cooped up and isolated from each other and from most of our habitual pursuits and distractions.   Do not underestimate the effect of having our habits disrupted, particularly having our most beloved distractions taken away from us.

I am expecting the acting out of frayed nerves to hit the public sphere in a big way soon — understandably desperate people doing increasingly crazy things.  As worrisome as death from COVID itself is, these sometimes twitchy attempts to cope with pressures virtually no-one alive has ever had to deal with, these changes to our perceptions of the word around us, are another cause for concern. 

This already scary, disorienting situation is much more upsetting because we have a terrible two year-old and his hand-picked loyal henchmen spouting an endless fountain of counter-factual … whatever it is that comes out of their “mouths”.

We Americans live in a very competitive society, divided into winners and losers.   It is more divided now than at any time since the Gilded Age that followed the great economic devastation in the decades after the Civil War.   Our greatest winners have spent fortunes over decades to convince significant numbers of the losers that the most important thing in life is freedom from the tyranny of a coercive government that wants to seize your liberty.   It is an easy myth to promote, easy for the average citizen to relate to, since interactions with government bureaucracies are almost always frustrating.   I found myself snarling at the screen when I logged on to the IRS website for a couple of simple answers last night.

If you are wealthy you don’t need any help from the government.  You need the government to leave you and your wealth alone.   If you are threatened by a flood, a fire, an earthquake, an angry mob, lose your home, get cancer — and you are not wealthy — you will reasonably want help from the government you pay taxes to. 

We have had a social safety net in our wealthy nation for almost a century.   Before we had the New Deal social programs there was no tax-supported retirement system (Social Security), no limits on child labor, no limits on the hours employers could demand of workers, no minimum wage, no protections against sudden impoverishment (Welfare) and so on.  

You can argue that having such things, and a much better public health system, are net goods for society.   People are less afraid, less insecure, feel more supported and connected when they operate in a system that has some kind of safety net to catch the many who sometimes fall.   These social protections would seem a good thing for the wealthy as well:  people who are not desperate are much less likely to take to the streets in violent mobs.

Of course, this is all communistic poppycock to most inheritors of vast fortunes, to the outliers who acquire billions by their own initiative.  To them the only value is liberty, freedom from coercion.  We are fine, just leave us alone.  Just do what we do– dream big, work hard and be successful. 

Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared are good examples of this winner work ethic.  They work hard, are super-confident, and aggressive in pursuing their dreams.  It doesn’t hurt that both started with millions of dollars from their parents, and up-and-running business empires to run, but don’t discount their genius!   Do not dare discount their genius.

Knowing that great people like Ivanka and Jared are working hard to make sure we’re all safe should be a comfort, if you are an idiot — or insane.

Just sayin’.

 

Schematic of Psychotic Injustice Barr/Flynn edition

I am not a psychiatrist, so I use “psychotic” in the ordinary, generic way, to mean shockingly sick, destructive and otherwise not susceptible to reasonable discussion.

Check out the schematic of this latest unappealable Trump/Barr Department of Justice reversal of logic and legal fact.   Granted, Barr dropped the case against the admittedly guilty Mike Flynn to please the most destructive and unreasonable two year-old ever to hold the world’s most powerful office, but, still.   Strikingly disturbing, when you consider it boiled down to it’s essence, the counter-factual  way the current “victors” are rewriting history in real time and peddling it to the credulous.

Barr’s reasoning is simple: no Flynn crime/plea/conviction, no need to fire Comey over refusal to drop Flynn probe, no need for Sessions’ recusal, no need for the appointment of a Special Counsel to investigate Trump.  No problematic Mueller Report, no grounds for partisan impeachment, end of story. Trump innocent of any and all hints of anything but being the greatest ever.

The facts of the story Barr has tried to rewrite are easy enough to follow:

General Mike Flynn, who led the chants of “Lock Her Up!   Lock Her Up!” at Trump rallies (and also at the RNC, if memory serves) was made National Security Advisor by Donald Trump after Trump won the 2016 presidential election.  

Prior to Trump’s assumption of power in January 2017, during the transition period when the Obama Administration was still in power, Flynn spoke to the Russian ambassador, assuring him that in spite of Obama’s sanctions and the Justice Department’s ongoing investigation into later well-documented Russian interference for Trump in 2016, that Russia-US relations would be fine once Trump was sworn in.

News of this illegal conversation reached Vice President Mike Pence, who questioned Flynn about it.   Flynn lied to Pence, assuring him that he’d never had any contact with the Russians.   Pence repeated this lie on national TV.   Pence subsequently learned Flynn had lied to him.   Trump, with great reluctance, fired Flynn for lying to Pence.   He explained the necessity to fire Flynn, a wonderful man and a hero, to a saddened nation via Twitter.

There had been an ongoing Department of Justice investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, sunce the summer of 2016.   Mitch McConnell had successfully intimidated Obama out of making a public announcement about the government’s concern (well-founded, it turned out, and amply documented now, in several official bipartisan reports) with widespread Russian interference in the 2016 election.  The news of the DOJ investigation into pro-Trump Russian meddling would not break until after the election was over [1].   

Now Trump, as president, asks everyone else to leave the room and asks FBI Director Jim Comey if he has his undivided personal loyalty.   He tells the uncomfortable Comey that Flynn is a good guy and that the FBI needs to drop this “Flynn thing,”  as a show of good faith toward the new administration.    Comey balks.   Trump fires and attacks Comey.  Comey, according to Trump, is a very sick and dangerous man.

Jeff Sessions, Trump’s Attorney General, is caught lying under oath in the Senate (by then-Senator Al Franken) about his own contacts with the Russian government during that same transition period.    Sessions seeks the advice of the DOJ Ethics lawyers and correctly recuses himself from overseeing the Russia election interference investigation.   He could not have ethically supervised a probe into a matter he had lied about his participation in.  The appearance of impropriety would have cast a foul stench of bias over any investigation.  For perhaps the only time in his professional life, Sessions did the right and honorable thing.  Trump was furious at this betrayal by the weak, disloyal Sessions and repeatedly attacked him.

Assistant A.G. Rod Rosenstein now headed the DOJ investigation of Russian interference.  Within days of the Comey firing he was pretty much forced to appoint a Special Counsel, the well-respected, straight-shooting, devoutly Republican Robert Mueller III.  On May 17, 2017, when Trump found out about the appointment of the Special Counsel, he had a shit fit in the Oval Office, saying that he was fucked, his presidency was over, that a president can’t do his job once an investigation like this started.   He then lashed Sessions at length for his cowardice under fire, for his failure to loyally protect Trump from the Deep State traitors that surrounded him.

Mueller’s investigators interviewed Flynn.   Flynn had already arranged an interview with the FBI, and lied to them essentially the same way he’d lied to Pence. Flynn cooperated with Mueller’s investigators, with the understanding that it would help him avoid the maximum sentence for the crime of lying to the FBI.   Flynn was prosecuted for a federal crime and pleaded guilty, twice, under oath.

So, to recap.  No Flynn lies about his own misconduct, no demonstrable Pence lie on TV, no firing of Flynn, no need for the special favor from the sick and dangerous Jim Comey, no firing of Comey,  no recusal by weak A.G. Jeff Sessions in overseeing the quiet, ongoing Russia investigation — most likely never any Robert Mueller investigation.   

Now the game for Trump is, as it was when Mueller concluded he could not exonerate Trump for obstruction of justice (a felony, boys and girls),  to take the findings of Robert Mueller and dismiss them as the unprincipled accusations of a partisan coward too weak to do his job, which was to fully uncover the hoax of the false  claim that the Trump campaign had actively coordinated and colluded with Russian agents and to completely debunk the scurrilous innuendo that just because Trump was in a fury to end the Mueller probe, tried numerous times to do so, in fact, successfully obstructed justice (due to much perjury and destruction of documents, insufficient evidence of criminal conspiracy uncovered) … well, nothing to actually see here.

In other words, complete and total exoneration by the witch hunters determined to destroy Trump no matter what.

The story Barr and FOX immediately started repeating was that so-called Eagle Scout Mueller and his team turned out to be a Never-Trump sleeper cell working for Obama, the Mexicans, the Muslims, disloyal Jews, Hindus, the Clintons, George Soros, the traitorous Deep State, the Fake News and so on.

So, by dismissing the charges against a man at the center of the Mueller probe, who twice, under oath, admitted his guilt about lying (and lying multiple times, ruling out accidental untruth) about his illegal contacts with Russians, the lynchpin of the whole anti-Trump enterprise falls away leaving: NOTHING.  

A big, fat, Bagpiper Bill Barr-sized HOAX.   Communists, everywhere, we are upping the danger alert to RED.  RED!!!  VERY DANGEROUS!!!  Buy duct tape!  Return to work!   Save America from those who hate our freedom!!!! 

 

 

[1] Note: McConnell has staunchly resisted any and all efforts to protect the 2020 election from this ongoing interference, set out in great detail in Robert Mueller’s report (as well as House and Senate reports)  since it was favorable to his party, resulting in the historically great administration of  the unimpeachable Donald Trump, the best friend the radical right-wing has ever had in office.    Suck it, LOSERS.

 

Nazi Fuck of the Week

The honor this week goes to one of the smartest, angriest and most contemptuous of this extremist group we have in power right now.   He has pushed the justice envelope farther than any before him, demonstrating in the process how smoothly he combines the most salient traits of Hermann Goering (the contemptuous bully) and Josef Goebbels (the cunning, contemptuous propagandist).   Bravo, Bagpiper, take a bow, you beefy Nazi fuck.

Barr from politico.jpeg

Barr worked in government alongside fellow right-wing zealots Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld in the years after Nixon’s disgraceful resignation under threat of bipartisan impeachment.   Congress and the Court put limits on presidential power, because we’d had a president who lied about not being a crook, abused the powers of his office to attempt to brazenly obstruct justice and so forth.  

These fine, ideological men, Barr, Rummy, the aptly named Dick Cheney, were among a powerful core of super conservatives who believed it was totally unfair of the other branches, the so-called Checks and Balances, to limit the powers of the Unitary Executive, the most important man in government, the equivalent of the corporate CEO, just because one was unfairly caught in criminal activity, repeatedly lied about it and was unconscionably disgraced and forced to resign.

Barr was as adamant as the others that the powers of the president (if he was of their political persuasion, of course) could not be limited in any way.   It was a long-time dream of these hierarchically thinking men of power that in any just system you have an all-powerful boss, and his loyal supporters who are well-rewarded, and the rest just do what they’re fucking told and be happy about it or shut the fuck up.  In Germany they had a phrase for this, for life under their infallible CEO boss from 1933-45: fuhrerworte haben Gesetzeskraft: the leader’s word has the force of law.

Prior to the new president’s inauguration in 2017, the incoming National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn, contacted the Russian government and told them not to worry about Obama’s sanctions for their election interference, that they’d work things out once Trump was in power.    Then he lied to Vice President Pence, told him he’d had no contact with the Russian ambassador or anyone else.   Pence repeated the lie on national television.    Pence later confirmed Flynn had lied to him.   Trump fired Flynn, with regret, for lying to Pence.  

Meanwhile, it turned out, Flynn had also lied to the FBI when they questioned him in connection with their investigation into now well-documented Russian interference on behalf of  Trump in the 2016 election.   Flynn was referred for prosecution by Robert Mueller III (Bobby Three Sticks), and twice pleaded guilty in federal court, under oath, to lying to the FBI.  

He stated while making his pleas that God had told him he must take responsibility for his actions, plead guilty, make amends and move forward with his life.   Then Trump started having regular shit fits on twitter, FOX got involved.

Sean Hannity made the case that even though Flynn volunteered to be interviewed by the FBI, that it was arranged days in advance, and conducted in Flynn’s office, that Flynn had been viciously trapped.   The FBI, FOX argued, had set Flynn up.  For one thing, they never told him lying to the FBI was a federal crime, and they deprived him of the right to counsel.  Every skel and scumbag in the world, charged with a crime, gets the right to a lawyer, but not Flynn.   The irrational hatred of Trump, you see, went so deep in the Deep State, they were berserk and venegefully determined to get Flynn, no matter what.   Made sense to Hannity, to Trump, to Barr, to Flynn.  Trump began randomly tweeting about what a great, unfairly victimized man Flynn was.

This outpouring of support, rational or not, caused Flynn to stiffen his spine.  He got a new legal team, and attempted to withdraw his two guilty pleas.  He’d apparently heard further from the God he prayed to, the one who at first told him he had to be accountable for the crime he’d committed, and that God, on reconsidering, apparently, told him the Deep State had persecuted and trapped him, like Judas and the Romans did to Jesus Himself, and Flynn resolved that he’d go to hell before allowing himself to be sentenced to prison for a “crime” he realized now he did not even commit.  He wanted to withdraw both of his guilty pleas.  After all, is loyalty a crime?   Is love of country a crime?   Is protecting the president a crime?

Barr recently decided Flynn had been crucified long enough.   He directed a motion be made to the court that was about to sentence Flynn. the DOJ moved to dismiss the case “in the interests of justice.”   Hermann Goering is high-fiving our attorney general from his grave.   What a ballsy move, comrade!   In your fucking faces, Social Justice losers!  

Then comes the real kicker, Barr’s in-your-face contempt of everything he claims to stand for:

Barr told CBS News he believes the Justice Department’s “duty, we think, is to dismiss the case.”

“A crime cannot be established here. They did not have a basis for the counterintelligence investigation against Flynn at that stage,” Barr said.

When asked if Flynn lied to the FBI, Barr responded, “Well, you know, people sometimes plead to things that turn out not to be crimes.” [2]

Barr insisted Thursday that he wanted the dismissed charges to “restore confidence in the system” and show people “there’s only one standard of justice.”

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Barr also said, with his trademark pugnacious smirk — ah, I’ll let the Daily Beast tell it, they put it nicely:

Trump had previously hinted that he was considering a pardon for Flynn. After denying he was doing Trump’s bidding, Barr was asked how history would remember this move.

“History is written by the winners, so it largely depends on who is writing the history,” he said with a sly smile.

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Naturally, Barr, who has never been able to refrain from gloating as his evil enemies fume, also said other provocative things, with a glint in his steely eye, which is one more reason he is our top Nazi Fuck of the Week:

Barr insisted Thursday night that he was not dragging politics into his decisions, suggesting the real bias at work was against Flynn, who had pleaded guilty in 2017 to lying to FBI agents in an interview about his conversations with the Russian ambassador.

“I want to make sure that we restore confidence in the system. There’s only one standard of justice,” Barr told CBS News. “It’s sad that nowadays these partisan feelings are so strong that people have lost any sense of justice.”

Asked whether he was doing Trump’s bidding, Barr said: “I’m doing the law’s bidding.”

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“Sad,” you understand, “that nowadays these partisan feelings are so strong that people have lost any sense of justice.”   And, by people, of course, I refer to you eternally angry, damned to hell godless evildoing partisan losers.

Barr decided the interests of justice detemined that Flynn was the victim, as Trump is always the victim, as Barr himself has always been the victim.  Their type are understandably sick and fucking tired of being victimized by merciless partsan hacks just because they answer to a much higher calling than the average powerless loser.   They will not stand for it!   NOT ANY MORE!

I will give Neal Katyal the last word, the piece he wrote with fellow Georgetown law professor Joshua Geltzer, really puts Barr’s latest atrocity against justice into stark perspective.   They call it THE APPALLING DAMAGE OF DROPPING THE MICHAEL FLYNN CASE.   Appalling it truly is.    Our experiment in democracy has now been concluded, please continue to hold…

 

 

 

[1]  The legal basis for the interview with Flynn, was laid out with irrefutable legal precision by Mary McCord, the acting assistant attorney general who reviewed all the paperwork in the case.   Her clear, concise Op Ed is entitled BILL BARR TWISTED MY WORDS IN DROPPING THE FLYNN CASE.  HERE’S THE TRUTH.

[2] As for Fuckface himself:

Trump has also naturally praised the DOJ’s decision, telling reporters Thursday that Flynn is an “innocent man” who is now “an even greater warrior.” “He is a great gentleman. He was targeted by the Obama administration and he was targeted in order to try and take down a president, and what they’ve done is a disgrace, and I hope a big price is going to be paid,” Trump said.

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