Category Archives: current events

Projection 101

Whenever a certain type of bully is accused of anything, he levels the same charge at the accuser.   It is classic projection, the thing feared is denied and projected on to the other person.    So we have a reality TV president who is quick with the unfounded accusations (about things that apply to himself)  and gleeful in attaching catchy nicknames to his enemies.   Crooked Hillary, Lyin’ Ted, Low-Energy Jeb, Ugly Carly.

Shaking down the new, young president of a besieged ally for dirt on his  political opponent, fellow thought-challenged dotard Joe Biden?    President MAGA is honestly fighting corruption, you corruption loving fuck!   Biden is the one who is corrupt, Trump is making America great again!!!

U.S. forces recently hunted down and killed a raping butcher named al Baghdadi.  The president had these insightful things to say, in his rambling remarks following the successful mission to capture or kill this terrorist monster:

“The thug who tried so hard to intimidate others spent his last moments in utter fear, in total panic and dread — terrified of the American forces bearing down on him… he died after running into a dead-end tunnel, whimpering and crying and screaming all the way…”

Nobody knows where Trump got this information, there was no audio on the video he saw of the raid, no report of this whimpering, crying, screaming.   Never mind, makes a good story for the base who loves this kind of thing, an enemy not only killed but utterly humiliated!

As for the ISIS leader’s followers:

“… the losers who worked with him — and losers they are — they had no idea what they were getting into. In some cases they were very frightened puppies, in other cases they were hard-core killers…”

Losers.   Frightened puppies.   A bully who spent his last moments in utter fear, in total panic and dread, whimpering and crying and screaming all the way.

Remember those stage directions, we will be seeing them again, if justice is not dead in the Koch Brothers’ anti-majoritarian America.

 

“High Crimes and Misdemeanors” does not mean “indictable crimes”

This great article  explains the crucial difference between an indictable crime and the deliberately flexible constitutional standard “high crimes and misdemeanors” for purposes of impeachment.  

The president’s ongoing defense to the impeachment inquiry (and everything else he is busily tying up in courts with his army of lawyers) is that he has not committed a chargeable criminal act, and even if he did (as in shooting someone on Fifth Avenue) he argues that he cannot be arrested, investigated or indicted because of a DOJ opinion stating that a sitting president cannot be indicted. 

It’s a simplistic defense that ignores the long history of impeachment, the meaning of “high crimes and misdemeanors” as the Framers used it, and, beyond all that, the ethical standard we hold our presidents to, even the worst of them.

Here’s a paragraph from that article that I found cool, and timely:

Finally, and most pertinently, the House Judiciary Committee approved three articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon: the first for obstruction of justice, the second for abuse of power, and the third for defying House subpoenas during its impeachment investigation. Article 3 obviously did not allege a crime. But even in the first two articles, which did involve some potentially criminal conduct, the committee was at pains to avoid any reference to criminal statutes. Rather, as the committee staff observed in its careful study of the question, “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” is a phrase that reaches far beyond crimes to embrace “exceeding the powers of the office in derogation of those of another branch of government,” “behaving in a manner grossly incompatible with the proper function of the office,” and “employing the power of the office for an improper purpose or personal gain.”

source

Take a few moments and read the article, by law professor Frank O. Bowman III.  Bowman makes his point  clearly — that the term of art is deliberately flexible to cover unimagined rascalities.  He illustrates his point with numerous historical citations.  It’s easy to read, interesting and a very persuasive presentation.   

Refusing to comply with Congressional subpoenas is not a crime anyone can be charged with, but it is a ‘high crime and misdemeanor’ for purposes of impeachment where the standard is really abuse of power.

Comparing Trumpists to Nazis

Publicly calling a fellow American a Nazi is generally considered out of bounds in today’s America.  It’s as bad as calling someone a nigger, a kyke, a faggot, a cunt or a motherfucker.  It’s kind of a credibility destroying deal-breaker here, to call a political opponent a Nazi, no matter how obnoxious, irrational or lawless that political opponent might be. 

It’s true that the current president famously compared the FBI and the CIA,  U.S. intelligence agencies, to Nazis, but he just says things in anger and nobody gets too excited about his puffery, exaggeration, distortion, lying.   He’s a salesman and he’s always selling the one product he has to sell: himself.   He’s sui generis, you know, and that’s putting it as elegantly as I can.  His evangelical supporters call him a flawed vessel for God’s will, he is definitely that too, I suppose (if you imagine God’s will as those who support Trump do).   He routinely gets away with things no past presidential candidate or president ever imagined surviving politically.

But for more responsible public actors, comparing fellow Americans to Nazis is generally out of bounds.   After all, the Nazis were directly responsible for the deaths of many millions of people, probably more than 20,000,000 [1] during one of the darkest periods in recent history.   The Nazis set up mechanized death camps where they mass-murdered millions on industrial assembly lines.   The Nazis were fucking Nazis, the historical gold standard for evil operating under cover of state action.    Josef Goebbels said if they won the Nazis would be remembered as history’s greatest benefactors, if they lost– history’s greatest criminals.   They lost, kind of, though their fighting spirit fights on in the hearts of those filled with righteous rage for their holy cause.   

In limited contexts it’s fine to compare people to Nazis in American politics.  In a pinch, to convince Americans to go to war for no reason anyone can comprehend, you can compare Manuel Noriega to Hitler, or Saddam — another “modern-day Hitler” —  that’s fine, though it’s generally out of bounds for one American to call another a Nazi.   But call a dictator a Nazi, Hitler, then the choice is simple: do you stand up to this Hitler or do you bend your knee like the cowardly Neville Chamberlain?

Beto O’Rourke recently compared the Trump administration to Nazis.   He meant they are ruthless, blindly loyal to their unhinged leader, obstructionist, they routinely lie, they incite violence and hatred, they have utter contempt for anything but “winning”, maintaining their grip on power   O’Rourke was challenged on the comparison.   He had a good response: give me a better comparison.

Personally, I don’t have one.  Reading about the Nazi regime, the cult of personality built around the infallible Mr. Hitler, I am reminded over and over of how the Trump administration operates and what it is trying to do, in many cases succeeding in doing.   If Trump survives impeachment and is reelected in 2020, American democracy is pretty much over.  He will have vindicated the principle that one man, if he is great enough, may flout every law and ethical norm to instill his vision, by force of his will, on the nation he rules.  Let’s take a quick stroll through the familiar terrain of his rise and his rule. 

Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III was the first U.S. Senator to openly endorse Donald Trump’s candidacy.  He stood on stage with Trump, at a time when Trump still was an unthinkably clownish long-shot candidate, and introduced him as the next president of the United States.  As a reward for his great loyalty Trump made Sessions, a man too racist to be confirmed to the federal bench, Attorney General, the nation’s top law enforcement official.   

Once confirmed, Sessions got busy talking about God, and how he’d crack down on marijuana using the draconian federal laws Nixon wrote, and how Trump answers to a higher power than ordinary politicians and how he must be obeyed, how there was absolutely no racist pattern to voter suppression schemes after the Supreme Court curtailed the Voting Rights Act and so on.    He spouted a lot of crap.  But when he was called out, in open testimony, under oath, for having been untruthful about his contacts with Russians during the campaign and transition, he listened to ethics advice from the professionals at the Department of Justice and recused himself from the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

Now the story kicks into another gear.   Trump was enraged by this “betrayal” by Sessions.   Sessions, according to Trump, had not taken a principled stance as required by law and professional ethics, he’d acted like a weakling, instead of being like Roy Cohn, a powerful Pit-bull who’d do whatever was necessary to win, including taking an open, greasy dump on the law (Cohn was eventually, years too late, disbarred for his corruption, but that’s a trifle).  Trump humiliated Sessions regularly, mocking him publicly as a wimp, imitating his southern accent, his squeamish fealty to weak-ass “liberal” things like so-called law and ethics.  

Then, to be concise in hitting just a few highlights of the way Trump goes about his business, Trump fired FBI director Jim Comey when Comey wouldn’t declare his personal loyalty to Trump and “let the Flynn thing go”.  When Deputy A.G., Rod Rosenstein, overseeing the probe into Russian interference in the closely contested 2016 election, was forced to appoint a Special Prosecutor, Trump went ballistic, blaming and eventually forcing Sessions to resign, after making repeated attempts to get Sessions to “unrecuse” and limit the scope of Mueller’s investigation. 

Mueller wound up writing a whole volume of his report detailing and analyzing Trump’s many efforts to obstruct justice, though Mueller refrained from drawing any prosecutorial conclusions, pursuant to a DOJ directive and for reasons of bending over backwards to appear scrupulously fair.

Mueller’s investigation resulted in numerous indictments and several convictions of close Trump associates and  found “sweeping and systematic” Russian election interference on behalf of Trump.   The Republican senate recently released a report coming to the same conclusion: Russians had done everything possible to tilt the 2016 presidential election to the candidate who won.

What to do?   Find an Attorney General who will act like Roy Cohn, do whatever is necessary to protect the leader/client.   The A.G., after all, in Trump’s view, is the president’s most important body guard.  He’s in charge of all law enforcement on a federal level.  He says what’s a federal crime and what’s pure commie bullshit and a conspiratorial partisan witch hunt against a totally innocent man.   Enter the pathetic porcine puppet of this puerile president [2], a debased lawyer of the Antonin Scalia school, with a God-driven worldview based, perversely, on what he believes Jesus would do — if Jesus was a xenophobic privileged white seventy year-old. 

How do you defend a president as apparently corrupt and incapable of not lying as this Donald Trump character?   You take his lead, the boss has genius marketing instincts.    Trump repeatedly said the Mueller probe was a partisan witch hunt that would totally exonerate him.   Barr agreed, made the counter-factual call that the report exonerated Trump of everything.  Trump said the vicious partisan “Deep State” traitors who initiated the “politically motivated” investigation (that came to the same conclusions about Russian interference the Republican senate did) to overturn the will of 78,000 strategically perfect voters and their Electors, should be criminally investigated and punished for treason, for being spies!   Barr agreed and now Barr’s Department of Justice has initiated a criminal investigation into the Department of Justice.

During Hitler’s “Thousand Year Reich” not a word of the liberal Weimar Constitution was ever changed, once Emergency Powers were invoked pursuant to a Patriot Act-style vote in the German parliament.   No change to the democratic blueprint was necessary, everything was down to enforcement by Nazi police, the decisions of Nazi judges in Nazi courts.   German law enforcement was headed by Hermann Goering for a while, when he wasn’t too whacked out on drugs, then more sober men like Heinrich Himmler stepped into the void.  There is never a shortage of supremely ambitious men to step into fateful roles next to the most powerful men in the world.

Barr starting a criminal investigation of his own agency, in what universe does that seem remotely impartial, fair or just?   Only one that I can think of off-hand, though one is, of course, reluctant to call even these lawless motherfuckers Nazis.

 

 

[1]   World War Two fun facts:

WORLDWIDE CASUALTIES*

Battle Deaths 15,000,000
Battle Wounded 25,000,000
Civilian Deaths 45,000,000

*Worldwide casualty estimates vary widely in several sources. The number of civilian deaths in China alone might well be more than 50,000,000.

source

 

[2] tip of the yarmulke to Laurence Tribe for that apt, alliterative aspersion.

 

The “Deep State”

I first heard this term five years ago during an interview Bill Moyers conducted with a former Republican congressional staffer named Mike Lofgren.   Below is a link to that interview and Lofgren’s  capsule definition of the Deep State:

Mike Lofgren, a former GOP congressional staff member with the powerful House and Senate Budget Committees, joins Bill to talk about what he calls the Deep State, a hybrid of corporate America and the national security state, which is “out of control” and “unconstrained.” In it, Lofgren says, elected and unelected figures collude to protect and serve powerful vested interests.

“It is … the red thread that runs through the history of the last three decades. It is how we had deregulation, financialization of the economy, the Wall Street bust, the erosion or our civil liberties and perpetual war,” Lofgren tells Bill.

the interview

Spokesmen for this powerful Deep State have weaponized the terms for the discussion of anything in America.  They have, by crude yet masterful redirection, redefined the term Deep State itself to mean a sinister conspiracy among career public servants, the people of the diplomatic corps, long-serving members of American intelligence and law enforcement agencies, other nonpartisan federal government employees.  

“Unelected career bureaucrats” spits our president, referring to disloyal rats who hate the freedom of our greatest citizens to deregulate, financialize the economy, protect criminal practices on Wall Street, limit civil liberties (for dissidents and terrorists) and engage in extremely lucrative permanent war.  These unelected career bureaucrats show their hatred by personal acts of disloyalty to the duly elected president.   They do this because the Deep State hates our freedom (that part is true, it just depends on whose freedom we are discussing, the 1%’s freedom to acquire unlimited wealth without regulation of any kind or everybody else’s freedom).  In the old days we called these evil fuckers what they have been called for eons “The Jews” — the devils who control everything hateful and oppressive in the world.

We have a loud-mouthed, hyper-opinionated president now charging our career public servants with partisan bias and treason and his handlers have seized on the catchy term “Deep State” to describe this organized conspiracy trying to overturn the electoral mandate that swept our democratically elected president into office,  with his historically svelte, ingeniously engineered 78,000 Electoral College margin, a groundswell of popular support.    This Deep State, says our populist billionaire president,  wants to make rats out of loyal partisans, is like the Nazis in its determination to lynch our greatest president — (if not outright put him in a vernichtungslager), illegally demands documents and testimony trying to prove some imaginary crime, acting like a bunch of lawless hooligans.   The Deep State, according to our president, is a lynch mob.

Alternative facts, ladies and gentlemen.

A hybrid of the corporate powers (and their unlimited lobbying and political campaign money– they can actually purchase legislators, and are backed legally by long-time corporatists like Chief Justice John Roberts) and the national security state (the expansive secret, sometimes illegal surveillance state exposed by Edward Snowden and his ilk), our actual American Deep State — the public-private partnership for the enrichment of the few–  has been in increasingly profitable business for more than a century.  

The ongoing use of the American military and covert intelligence agencies in the service of corporate interests is well-known, even if little discussed.   As retired Marine general Smedley Butler [1], “The Fighting Quaker”, said after a career fighting in the Philippines, China, in Central America and the Caribbean during the Banana Wars, and France in World War I:

I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer; a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have givenAl Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.  

source

Don’t let the so-called facts fool you.  Listen to your duly elected president, who loves you.   He loves you!    The Deep State is actually the unelected career bureaucrats who are treasonously defying presidential orders to dummy up, give no testimony, provide no documents to Congress.  These are disloyal, traitorous people who nobody elected, unlike the best, the most loyal people the president has placed in the most powerful positions in the Executive Branch.   Excellent, unimpeachably great people like Mick Mulvaney, Bill Barr, Mike “first in his class” Pompeo, Steve Mnuchin, Betsey DeVos, Rudy.  

Who are you going to believe, a brilliant president who lies publicly many times a day, or a bunch of disgruntled Deep State operatives who treacherously defy his orders to show how much they hate democracy?   COME ON, AMERICA!

 

[1]   Smedley Butler:

In 1933, he became involved in a controversy known as the Business Plot, when he told a congressional committee that a group of wealthy industrialists were planning a military coup to overthrow Franklin D. Roosevelt, with Butler selected to lead a march of veterans to become dictator, similar to Fascist regimes at that time. The individuals involved all denied the existence of a plot and the media ridiculed the allegations, but a final report by a special House of Representatives Committee confirmed some of Butler’s testimony.

In 1935, Butler wrote a book titled War Is a Racket, where he described and criticized the workings of the United States in its foreign actions and wars, such as those in which he had been involved, including the American corporations and other imperialist motivations behind them. After retiring from service, he became a popular advocate, speaking at meetings organized by veterans, pacifists, and church groups in the 1930s.

source

 

Political moment

Here’s a quick one that speaks for itself, then a word to reassure this agitated patriot:

Major League Baseball is looking into a since-deleted tweet by longtime umpire Rob Drake, commissioner Rob Manfred said Wednesday.

Drake tweeted late Tuesday that he planned to buy an AR-15 rifle “because if you impeach MY PRESIDENT this way, YOU WILL HAVE ANOTHER CIVAL WAR!!! #MAGA2020,” according to a copy of the tweet obtained by ESPN.

The tweet, which was deleted soon after it was posted, followed one earlier in the night regarding the House of Representatives’ impeachment proceedings with President Donald Trump.

The other tweet read: “You can’t do an impeachment inquiry from the basement of Capital Hill without even a vote! What is going on in this country?”

Look, we certainly don’t want another CIVAL WAR, I think we can all agree on that.

Just a few words about this new Republican mantra about a secret star chamber to lynch the president without due process or the slightest chance to defend himself, the one that thirty Trump dead-enders stormed by force the other day to protect non-majoritarian democracy.  The impeachment vote in the House comes after the fact-finding depositions, and after public hearings, and then, if articles of impeachment are adopted,  there is a trial in the Republican majority Senate, where all due process rights are present for the accused.   The fact-finding phase is not the time for the president’s army of private and public lawyers to make his usual full, loud defense.  That time comes once he’s officially impeached.

Depositions are part of most legal proceedings, including impeachments.  There are lawyers for each side present at a deposition.   The prosecution is asking questions to get incriminating evidence.  The defense is objecting to questions beyond the scope of questioning the law allows.   The defense also asks questions that might elicit answers that can be used later to exculpate the person being deposed, or the person they are giving evidence about.  Republicans and Democrats on the committee act as these “lawyers” and both parties are present at these depositions.   Depositions are never public.

These closed door meetings (at one time demanded by Trump for the people he “allowed” to be questioned on a very limited basis, like Hope Hicks) are followed by public sessions with the same witnesses.   Republicans can make all the legal motions they like, right there on TV, can object to everything they find objectionable.  The answers they give in public, under oath, can then be compared to the answers they gave in the sworn, private session.  If their answers change, there is a strong inference of perjury and everybody gets very excited.    Depositions are a way of locking in the truth, particularly for nervous, lawyered up, evasive witnesses concerned about appearing loyal to a powerful official.

What the Democrats in the House are doing now is an impeachment inquiry.   Inquiry, dude.   There will be open, public, televised hearings in the House after this round of depositions.   Then the House will vote on articles of impeachment.  The impeachment proceeding, the trial that decides if the impeached person is removed from office, is conducted in the Senate, presided over by the corporatist jurist, the  self-proclaimed “balls and strikes” umpire, John Roberts.   The president will get all the process that’s due.

Even a fucking Cival Wor Buff ought to know that.   You give the obviously guilty varmint a fair, quick trial and then invite him as guest of honor to a damn neck-tie party!  Yee hah!

Eternal Victimhood

NOTE:  I’ve been thinking, and writing, about other things the last few days, having little to do with the ongoing political shit show we’re all either riveted to or trying our best not to watch.  One or two of these pieces on other, nonpolitical, subjects should come as a refreshing relief to many of my select readers.   I will post these pieces soon, in due time, such as time is ever truly due.  

now, back to the political shit show:

The president, though apparently idolized by a solid, unshakeable 39% or so, is regarded by most Americans as, at best, a self-aggrandizing con-man.   His lying is well-known, his lies are transparently false most of the time.  Thousands of his lies have been documented and debunked while new ones are spouted virtually every time he speaks on any subject.  He simply can’t help it.  It’s kind of his thing.   

At least 61% of Americans find it horrifying that the American president is a compulsive liar.  One was impeached twenty years back for telling just a couple of lies that had nothing to do with the country’s well-being.   When Clinton was impeached it his lying was posed as a stark moral question, a pure matter of character, a man who publicly lies, under OATH!, about having his dick sucked is not trustworthy nor fit to be the president.   Trump’s supporters are more forgiving — OK, he lies sometimes, who hasn’t?, but the larger picture he has absolutely right. 

Personally, I find it not always easy to write or speak about the man without getting angry.   Trump represents everything I hate: a shallow, self-focused, covetous, entitled, grasping, lying bully who cheats and humiliates others in his obsession to prove he’s better than everybody else.  Best of all, he’s always the victim, whenever he doesn’t get his way he screams and sprays his feces over everybody, huffing and crying like a confronted Brett Kavanaugh.  This type always considers themselves the victim of an unfair system rigged against these supremely entitled best of the best.  I see them as malignantly childish.  Trump has never felt regret or remorse, never apologized for anything in his life of obscene and totally unearned privilege. On top of it, he revels in being cruel, as most bullies do.

The president stands accused, among many other serious lapses, improprieties, crimes and derelictions of duty, of holding up promised military aid to a beleaguered ally until their leader agreed to do him certain favors.  Stunningly, one of these favors, as reported in an inexact transcript/summary of the call provided by the White House, involves the debunked and ridiculous conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, hacked the DNC server and Hillary Clinton’s supposedly missing private emails.  (I wonder if he also believes the Ukrainians have the proof the hated woman also personally murdered those American heroes in Benghazi… or proof about that pizza place where she ran the pedophile dating service…)  Trump’s other favor was a simple ask just like the one Mueller totally exonerated him of doing with Putin, asking a foreign leader for help with his domestic political campaign.   He kept new Ukrainian president Zelensky on the hook for weeks as surrogates softened him up,  before eventually calling to tell him to uncover dirt on Joe Biden and his son that he could use against Biden in his ongoing 2020 campaign.

Uncharacteristically, the president quickly released a partial sort of transcript of the hidden July 25th call, and the whistleblower’s complaint (after a bipartisan demand by Congress). He released the documents in an attempt to prove that he has nothing to hide,  is completely and totally innocent of these terrible, spurious charges brought by his vicious, sick, dangerous enemies in an invalid and unconstitutional witch hunt investigation.  

True, according to POTUS, the whistleblower was a fucking liar, and his or her cowardly hearsay complaint, based completely on lies, amounted to treason, and the report, found “credible” and “urgent” (you get what I did there?  those marks mean “bullshit”, LOL!)  by the office that “investigates” such “reports”, should never have been forwarded to Congress (the law that requires this is itself corrupt and arguably invalid) — but still, in the name of full transparency (on which Trump perversely prides himself), the White House released a non-verbatim summary transcript of the president’s perfect call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky.  

According to Trump the call with Zelensky was “perfect”.   To anyone else who read the transcript, and the later-released whistleblower’s complaint, and followed the details of how records of that perfect call were removed from their normal place in the government filing system and concealed in a special top secret server reserved for password-protected national security secrets, that perfection was troubling.  

The call as reported appears to show a direct quid pro quo, which means, in plain English: I’ll do this for you IF you do that for me.  Zelensky says words to the effect of “we need those anti-tank missiles, Mr. President”, to which Trump replies: “I need a favor from you, though.”   As so often, so much can hang on a single word. In this case, the telltale word “though”.   I’ll do that, you need to do this, though.

The Democrats who are investigating Trump for impeachment on probably a dozen grounds, including the strong case for obstruction of justice laid out clearly in Mueller’s detailed, scrupulously nonjudgmental account (and ongoing since), the president’s shamelessly unethical monetizing of public office (“that depends on what your definition of ’emolument’ is”), his routine refusal to obey laws and court orders, suddenly have a clearly smoking gun, handed to them by Trump.   The day after Trump felt the thrill of victory when Mueller, forced to testify, didn’t lay a finger on him in the eyes of the average American, he called another foreign leader to try to make a deal to advance his own narrow political/financial interests.

Adam Schiff, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, gave a fiery statement underscoring the gist of what Mr. Trump’s impeachable offense was in the call to Ukrainian President Zelensky.  This quid pro quo is easy to understand.  It’s also easy to see that this “I help you if you help me” deal was offered not for the benefit of the nation Trump represents but for the benefit of a single political campaign, Trump’s.   It is a clear shakedown easy enough for an unsophisticated person to follow and understand.  The Democrats finally had a nice, plain, easy to understand smoking gun for impeachment.  

And, by the way contrary to the White House mantra-like assertion that there was no quid pro quo, and the Acting Chief of Staff’s televised declaration that it was indeed that, there is no requirement, for purposes of impeachment, that there be a quid pro quo— that’s the John Roberts’ court’s new standard for criminal corruption by public officials.   The quid pro quo would make this a criminal matter, presidents are held to a higher standard than simply not being a convictable felon.  Another example of the lawless Trump and his lackeys moving the goalposts to try to gain any possible advantage, since everybody is against them in this clearly rigged game.  Back to Adam Schiff.

Schiff, if he had it to do over again, would probably read directly from the transcript provided by the Trump White House.   All the damning words are right there to be read aloud by anyone.  The words on the page, as they say, speak for themselves.   At the time of his public announcement, Schiff dramatized them slightly, characterizing them as the ominous words a mobster says to somebody at his mercy rather than the words the president of a powerful country says to the president of a besieged country that is at his mercy.  

“Nice country you got here, shame if anything happened to it… now listen carefully, I’m only going to say this seven more times…” might be a pithy characterization of Trump’s chat with Zelensky, and not inaccurate, but strictly speaking, as a matter of straight up strategy, Schiff should have stuck to the script the president handed him.

Trump and his people, an ever smaller and more fanatical circle, are in an increasingly tight spot politically and legally.  What do you do when the facts against you are damning and the courts, even judges you appointed, are unlikely to rule in your favor on any of your stalling legal “arguments” for your absolute right to prevent all testimony, hide compromising documents and obstruct legal investigations?  Even in the friendliest court, you need to give the judge some legal basis for upholding an “argument”, sadly for POTUS.   What to do?

Attack that fucking liar Schiff!  He said words I never said!  He was lying to America!   Schiff is a liar!   He hates America!  He’s a shifty little Schitt!    Attacking the “conflicted” Mueller — with his military service, all his decorations, long public service, reputation for probity, his famous Boy Scout “integrity”  — worked, it was perfect!   Attack this fucking treasonous California Communist!  

Trump’s most loyal Congressmen obliged.   House Republicans, led by their most extreme members, the “Freedom Caucus”, crafted a motion to censure the lying left wing traitor.

“These actions of Chairman Schiff misled the American people, bring disrepute upon the House of Representatives, and make a mockery of the impeachment process, one of this chamber’s most solemn constitutional duties,” the three-page resolution said.                              

source

The House of Representatives is currently composed of 235 Democratic House members and 199 Republicans [1].    The vote to defeat the motion to censure Schiff went along party lines, with the Republicans losing by a comfortable (or uncomfortable, if you love Donald Trump) margin. 

Schiff tweeted minutes after the vote, “It will be said of House Republicans, When they found they lacked the courage to confront the most dangerous and unethical president in American history, They consoled themselves by attacking those who did.”    

source

Shifty little bastard, idn’t he?  

 

[1]   I almost wrote “235 Democrats”, you know, members of the “Democrat” party, the party of the goddamned KKK, heh.    This is a right wing meme that is now all but ubiquitous everywhere — “Democrat” senator, “Democrat” congress bitch.  The idea appears to be not to let the “Democratic” party assume the mantle of being democratic as opposed to what the Republicans today are:  Liberty-lovers and warriors for non-majoritarian democracy!

 

The Best People

As promised, the president has drained the swamp and surrounded himself with the best people.   The cast in these demanding jobs may have changed a bit over the almost three years of the Trump administration, but the tone set by these excellent people, and their commitment to the president’s great agenda, remains the same.

Critics will say, of course, that Trump’s inexperienced daughter and born wealthy son-in-law, for example,  may not be the best people to handle the many sensitive issues they’ve been tasked to deal with.  Jared Kushner’s long-awaited secret plan for peace between Israel and Palestine remains secret, months after its promised release on the last day of Ramadan.   The hopelessness underlying the nation’s Opioid Crisis has not been touched, the problems of addiction and overdose have not been solved.   Ivanka has been fairly quiet too lately.  But that is the caviling of a nitpicker, these two are the best, American royalty, beautiful living Barbie and Ken dolls with the genius smarts of their great and morally upright parents.

The president’s other people, in  spite of great turnover, are the best and continue to get better.   Bill Barr, for example, is much, much closer to Roy Cohn than the weak Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III ever was.   Barr is a proven pitbull for the president and his agenda.   That’s what the attorney general is supposed to be, the president’s most powerful defender, come what may.   

Critics will carp, of course, and claim that the nation’s top law enforcement official, the head of the Department of Justice (created after the Civil War to enforce the newly amended Constitution),  is not the president’s personal bodyguard and spokesman, but critics will always be critical.  Like scorpions who sting to death the frog that is carrying them across the river, it’s their nature.

The president demands loyalty.  He’s a charming man in private, I have heard, which explains a lot.   He knows how to flatter people he wants to work for him, and how to reward them for good work.   In return, he expects total loyalty.   He is sometimes disappointed in the disloyal acts of people he trusted.   

He learned young, as he explained in a televised interview decades ago, that being too nice is a big mistake, it’s what killed his wonderful older brother Freddy [1]   If you’re too nice, people will screw you to death, which is what happened to Freddy, a person everybody wanted to be around, everyone confided in, a wonderful friend and brother.    Dead because he was too nice, people took advantage of him and that’s what killed him in the end.  [2] 

Sometimes those loyal people around him, in an excess of loyalty, make mistakes.  Mick Mulvaney, his acting Chief of Staff, put his foot in it yesterday in front of a group of probing reporters.   He said the quid pro quo that Trump has been denying in connection to the withholding of military aid to the Ukraine in exchange for dirt on Biden is something people just have to get over.   He sounded impatient that anyone was making a big goddamn deal out of it, saying “we do it ALL THE TIME!”.  As for the G7 being hosted at the Trump-owned Doral in steaming Miami next June, get over that too, Mulvaney told the press.   And no, he said, to a snarky question about the heat and humidity of Miami in June, climate change will not be on the agenda.

That ill-advised press conference will likely cost Mulvaney, a still pugnacious Koch-backed TeaBagger insurgent, his job.   He will still be the best, like Michael Flynn, Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, Joe Arpaio and many other great people, but for purely political reasons he likely has to go.   He will be praised by the president as a very good man as he’s booted out the door.   Watching the sausage being made is never fun.

Quietly, meantime, Department of Energy secretary James Richard “Rick” Perry, one of los tres amigos who dealt with the Ukraine (another was the hotelier who gave Trump’s inauguration a cool million and was appointed ambassador to the EU) is preparing to slip out the door.   This leaves, if my memory serves me, only Elisabeth “Betsy” Prince DeVos and Ben Carson of the original cabinet of the best of the best.    They are certainly excellent people.   

Actually, my memory does not serve me well.   Elaine Chao, Mitch McConnell’s powerful wife, is still Secretary of Transportation,   Sonny Perdue and Wilbur Ross are still heading, respectively, Agriculture and Commerce.  And Steve Mnuchin, of course, is the Secretary of the Treasury.   So actually the turnover has only been something like nine or ten of the original fifteen, only a 2/3 turnover rate.  Critics, of course, will crow about this being a sign of disarray, but it’s not a big deal, cabinets always turn over.

Of course, using skewed numbers and unfair statistics, as is their wont, the dishonest mainstream media distorts this natural trend for high government positions turning over, and states, without a shred of proof, a historically high 78% turnover rate.    You can read a short “article” about it here.

So fake, so fucking fake.  SAD!

 

 

[1]  I saw the clip of the young Trump discussing this as part of a great forty-eight minute BBC documentary called Meet the Trump’s: From Immigrant to President.   It is on Netflix, apparently, I thought I’d seen it on youTube and was trying to provide a link.   The only trace of it in the public domain  is here.

Highly recommended.   And Look who’s on the right in this family photo:

Screen Shot 2019-10-18 at 3.05.57 PM.png

[2]   An alternative explanation is that Freddy’s alcoholism raged out of control due to an unbearable, high-pressure life as the oldest son and expected heir of a demanding, savage, ruthless mogul.   In the end, Freddy drank himself to death while working as a janitor in one of his overbearing father’s buildings.    Drinking too much was likely treated as an intolerable weakness, not something to be confronted, not a sign that he needed help or support of any kind.   The weak die, and they need to.  That’s simply nature in Trumpworld.

 

Normalizing the unthinkable

In culture, especially one dominated by the persuasive arts of advertising (where our brains are actually shaped by ads more than by any other single force) what is acceptable is changed by creating new “norms”.   The Overton Window is moved in the desired direction and the range of what is acceptable changes.   

You don’t start a program of genocide, for example, without first making people truly hate the target population.  Once enough citizens accept that these people are scum, terrorists, criminals, rapists, parasites, an infestation of implacable enemies, it becomes much easier to get them to support harsh measures against the future subjects of genocide.  But the needle is moved one or two tics at a time in the desired direction by small cultural shifts.  Public readiness must be regularly tested to see how far their shifting beliefs have come.

At one time a president couldn’t say the word “bullshit!” in public, for example, now this president regularly thrills loyal campaign crowds with the word.  I’m not squeamish [1] about a fucking word, but, seriously– that’s all the control you have of your “best” words, your fine vocabulary? Oh, well, whatever works, I suppose.  As no less an expert than Herr Josef Goebbels shrewdly observed:

There is no point in seeking to convert the intellectuals for intellectuals will never be converted, and therefore we must yield to the man in the street. The arguments must therefore be crude, clear, and forcible and appeal to emotions and instincts, not intellect.

I was thinking of how this president has normalized lying.   All presidents lie once in a while.  It’s apparently part of the job description.   This president has set a new standard for lying and he’s become famous for openly and unabashedly lying many times a day.  He simply does it, can’t help it.  He’s compelled to lie by some force he can’t control.   And, best of all, everyone seems to now agree that lying, unless you lie under oath (which everybody knows is called perjury), is perfectly fine, perfect, really.  Presidents since Clinton have learned: never speak about a delicate subject under oath.

Lying, which used to be a bug to be concealed, is now a feature to be bragged about.   “So what, everybody lies, you’re lying right now saying that I’m lying, you bullshit-faced liar.  You’re the liar, not me (though, if I wanted to, I could lie much better than you)!  You losers make me sick with your bullshit lies, you’re the worst people, sick and dangerous.  You can all suck my sweaty blank-strap!”

The traitorous enemies of the people at Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post have created a lie tracker.  Type in the subject of a presidential statement, hit the button et, voila, every fact-checked lie the greatest winner in American, yea, world, history has told since becoming our forty-fifth (and possibly final) president.   I haven’t tried it myself, but why not give it a spin?

I guess my point here today is that Mr. Trump and his remaining loyal dead-enders (and yes, I recall that Rumsfeld used this to describe Iraqi “insurgents” who were no happier under a generous democratic US occupation than under that modern day Hitler Saddam who they’d been liberated from) keep returning to the only play they know.  When in trouble – LIE.   If you’re caught lying, lie about the lie and attack the person who caught you lying, the fucking liar.   

BBC report: Erdogan of Turkey read Trump’s childish letter that ended

History will look upon you favorably if you get this done the right and humane way. It will look upon you forever as the devil if good things don’t happen. Don’t be a tough guy. Don’t be a fool!

I will call you later.

and tossed it in the garbage.  Of course, the BBC hates America, the Brits have been our enemies since before 1776 when they tried to bomb our airports.   Take state news with a grain, or better, a box, of salt.   They are fucking liars.  Ask Sean Hannity.

 

 

[1] my favorite dictionary definition.   Squeamish:   exhibiting a prudish readiness to be nauseated.

Why Authoritarians Always Crush Labor Unions as the first order of business

Screen Shot 2019-10-17 at 3.06.50 PM.png

Fascism cannot flourish, in any of its shades, without sewing hatred between citizens along race, gender, class and ethnic lines.  Authoritarianism works by creating a violently US vs. THEM society where loyal citizens know who to lash out at.   

Unions of organized labor, while sometimes problematic (union officials often become middle-men, protecting their own turf and working with the bosses) are also inherently democratic.  If you do the job, and want fair pay, and better working conditions, you forget the “differences” you may have with your co-workers and band together for common interests.  Often you become friends in the process.

Dictators and oligarchs HATE this kind of thing.