Category Archives: current events

Would This Surprise You About Brett Kavanaugh?

I mean, you can look at the bland expressions on rapey mama’s boy Brett Kavanaugh’s smug potato of a face and feel you know exactly what kind of entitled, self-interested, amoral partisan, preppie, fratboy fuck the man is.  But, of course, that’s only my prejudice talking.   Now we have details from the Intercept that shed more light on the questionable character of this evasive soon-to-be unappealable jurist.  Rapey fucking mama’s boy.

Does it matter that Kavanaugh’s political and judicial mentor, a disgraced former federal judge named Alex Kozinski, the guy who set up Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court clerkship with Anthony Kennedy and showed him how the judicial appointment game is played, was forced to step down in the face of sexual harassment accusations from fifteen women?   Kozinski resigned in 2017, after decades showing mentee and close friend Brett Kavanaugh the ropes.  I think their relationship matters, because Kavanaugh is not forthcoming about their close association, seems to have lied about certain details, and because the chairman and Republicans on the Senate Judicial Committee don’t want to hear anything about it in their rush to confirm this true believer before the midterm elections. NOTHING TO SEE HERE!

I am looking forward to the hurried session to put to rest accusations that a seventeen year-old Brett Kavanaugh, along with drunken Georgetown Prep friend Mark Judge, today a popular right wing writer, held a fifteen year-old down, hand over her mouth as he attempted to get her one piece bathing suit off her.   You get the familiar chorus of indignant partisans high-mindedly defending Kavanaugh against this credibly alleged long ago showing of extremely bad character, of criminally bad manners,”who among us has not tried to rape a pretty girl when we were drunk back in high school?”

I am looking forward to the chance, no matter how remote, to see a smug, lying partisan hack with powerful friends, revealed, based on the content of his character, as the unfit piece of shit he actually is.   Particularly after reading his 2009 Law Review Article, a love letter to any future president who might be heedless and criminally inclined enough to appoint somebody like Kavanaugh to a lifetime post on the nation’s Supreme Court. 

Tendentious detail: current tuition for four years at Georgetown Prep, an exclusive Jesuit finishing school for the sons of the elite of Washington (and beyond): $148,860, exclusive of other fees.   If you board there, as many boys do, the price goes up to $241,120.    Just my hate speaking.  Nothing to see here.

Truth or Consequences

“We’ll take Consequences, please, for forty years.”

“Birchers, Birthers and the Tea Baggers, they switched names but it’s the same people,” Bill Maher said the other night on his show, referring to the lunatic fringe in America, a constant in American political life, ready for any right-wing idea, no matter how in your face idiotic.  Pithily put by Mr. Maher, I thought, and well worth a look.

The John Birch Society, founded in 1958, was an extreme right wing lunatic fringe group of people like Fred Koch, father of the two prevailing Koch Brothers.   It was the signature radical right ring conspiracy group of the twentieth century.  “Koch Industries makes products people use and is dedicated to a level playing field where everyone has an equal opportunity for success,” claims the television ad of the descendants of Fred Koch.  When Charles and David Koch were very young their father hired a Nazi as their nanny, literally, she went back to the Fatherland after Hitler took France.   Fred Koch had done some important work for Mr. Hitler prior to the war, building a refinery that provided  the German luftwaffe with the high-octane fuel it needed to support Mr. Hitler’s blitzkreig.  Fred Koch shared many of the famous German autocrat’s cherished beliefs about humanity and tried to influence his fellow Americans to adopt reasonable policies about unlimited wealth, personal freedom from government tyranny and so forth.  He died before he could do more to advance his important mission, but two of his sons took up his cause and did excellent and effective missionary work, until very recently behind the scenes, over the course of more than 40 years.

The Birthers were largely racist ignoramuses of the far right who tried to attack popular president Barack Obama’s legitimacy by claiming the records of his birth in Hawaii were fake, that Obama was born outside of the United States and therefore that his presidency was illegal under the constitution, his so-called presidency a gigantic liberal fraud against America.   This was reminiscent of Bircher claims that conservative president Dwight D. Eisenhower was a secret, or possibly unwitting, agent of the Commies.  

You see, the main thing is giving angry lunatics an actual thing to rally around, to chant, even if that thing is easily demonstrable bullshit.  “Build the Wall! Build the Wall!” “Lock Her Up! Lock Her Up!”   “USA!  USA!!!”   “Nobel Prize, Nobel Prize!”  “Block that Kick! Block that Kick!”  “Blood and Soil!  Blood and Soil!” — the words themselves matter much less than the popular channeling of violent mass emotion and the bonding communal catharsis it provides.

The heirs of the John Birch Society created a massive public influence machine that transformed lobbying, think tanks, foundations and academia before galvanizing the raw populist power of the “Birthers” to form a national anti-liberal grassroots movement of American patriots called The Tea Party, or as the ever-puckish Bill Maher calls these angry, gullible idiots, the Tea Baggers.   So popular and widespread was this spontaneous mass protest against the illegitimate tyrant Obama, apparently, that it was on the news every night, their colorful and passionate protests televised from every corner of our great nation, during much of the early days of the illegitimate mulatto’s reign.   The candidates who spoke their fiery anti-government words and identified as Tea Baggers swept into Congress in the midterms, funded by Dark Money speaking loudly — and anonymously– under the newly expanded First Amendment the Court created in Citizens United.

Funded, it emerges, by the fabulously wealthy sons of an original Bircher, the Tea Baggers were the creation of strategically brilliant people who, while probably not Birthers themselves, used the rage of Birthers to ignite a national shitstorm that served their purposes of opposing all government regulation and making sure an extreme, corporatist Supreme Court was put in place to protect the rights of the wealthiest and most deserving from the hoard of entitled parasites that do not even deserve prison cells, if we’re going to be brutally honest about it.

So, truth or consequences?  Ultra-right-wing federal judge for life Brett Kavanaugh was not on Trump’s original Federalist Society (think John Birch) list of possible Supreme Court nominees.   Turns out, shockingly, that Trump was lying when he guaranteed he would only appoint someone off that original list.   Kavanaugh’s name was placed at the top of a new list after Trump was presumably read a pertinent excerpt from Kavanaugh’s 2009  law review article  where the judge reverses his former positions about presidential power [1].  Now he believes, as opposed to when he was pressing for aggressive prosecution of sitting president Bill Clinton for lying about a blow job, (not to mention when he was secretly advising Bush and Cheney about the legality of torture, extra-judicial execution, kidnapping and so on) that the president should be immune from prosecution, subpoena, or even investigation, while sitting as president.    The job is just too hard to do that the president must be shielded from the trying distractions as civil or criminal investigations, Kavanaugh wrote thoughtfully.   Instead of “I have changed my beliefs on this 180 degrees since my partisan days working for Kenneth Starr” he wrote, demurely lawyerly, slimily,  “this is not something I necessarily believed in the 1980s or 90s”.  No shit, Sherlock.

Kavanaugh suddenly went to the top of the embattled Trump’s list, for some reason, presumably more than his dependable vote against investigation of the president and his belief in expansive presidential  pardon powers.   All of the judges on the Federalist Society list would appear to be vetted as reliable votes against a woman’s tenuous constitutional right to an abortion, so the Roe v. Wade part is probably not a big thing, though Kavanaugh has signaled clearly that he thinks Roe is a decision that a future court could legitimately overturn.  

It’s hard to imagine that nominating Kavanaugh wasn’t part of Trump’s long sales pitch to get Anthony Kennedy to step down now to give Trump another Supreme Court pick [2].   Kavanaugh had been Kennedy’s clerk (as had ultra-right wing black hole Neil Gorsuch) and Kennedy apparently trusted him to continue his legacy.  It is said that Kennedy himself suggested Kavanaugh.  I understand Kennedy’s son at Deutsche Bank, a man with business dealings with Trump Inc., also became part of the negotiations during the Artist of the Deal’s long deal-making dance with Justice Kennedy.  [3] 

Kavanuagh, unlike Kennedy, who, for all his conservatism was at least not overtly homophobic or misogynistic (hence “swing vote”), is unlikely to ever be a swing vote on anything, unless his right wing colleagues have a moment of moral awakening and appear in danger of voting against any part of the John Birch agenda incarnated in the absolutist views of the clear-eyed, fair-minded Koch Brothers and their impeccable ilk.   Kavanaugh will likely be confirmed 51-49, fair is fair, democracy means majority rule and fuck all that overheated liberal palaver about a true democracy always protecting the rights of minorities.  Fuck minorities.  51-49, get a stadium chanting that, along with “In Your Face!  In Your Face!”    

There is some new urgency now to get Kavanaugh confirmed right away.  A disloyal partisan agent has suddenly come forward, actually outing herself yesterday, claiming that a drunken teen-aged Kavanaugh held her down and pressed his hand over her mouth as he fumbled to remove her one piece bathing suit so that he could grind against her to better effect.  Another traitorous, ideologically-driven bitch like Anita Hill, a professor with a personal ax to grind, and personal problems, taking it out on a great man, a great, powerful, persecuted white man (in the case of Kavanaugh).   

Anita Hill testified about unwanted sexual advances her former boss at the EEOC (talk about ironies) made toward his attractive young subordinate.  The spin among the faithful men of the Judiciary Committee (who to a man treated Hill like a hostile witness, even avuncular Joe Biden did) was He Said/She Claims: inappropriate and uninvited sexual attention, perhaps, or maybe Hill had a mad, schoolgirl crush on her powerful boss and dreamed up all the sexy stuff? Hmmm?  Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac, as Henry Kissinger famously said, perhaps speaking from unthinkable experience.

With Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas,  Thomas claimed indignantly, since he is a black man, that subjecting him to answering Hill’s ridiculous sexual allegations made him the victim of a “high tech lynching”.   Sadly for the minorities of America that lynching was unsuccessful, and the victim has been on the court for decades now.  As Thurgood Marshall (who endured a year-long confirmation battle with segregationists before he finally took his seat on the Supreme Court) noted about blacks who suck up to powerful white racists, “there’s no difference between a black snake and a white snake. They’ll both bite.”

Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who says she was sexually assaulted as a teenager by drunken classmate Brett Kavanaugh and his friend, will be viciously and personally attacked, worse than Anita Hill was, have no doubt.  It will come out that she has seen a psychiatrist, the crazy broad, has severe personal problems, has admitted going to marriage counseling (wink, wink!), voted Democratic in every election since High School, admitted to smoking marijuana, has read The Communist Manifesto, hates our freedom, is a liar who took a fake polygraph test about her Kavanaugh allegations, administered by a Fellow Traveler (Commie-speak for a fellow Commie).   She has a vagina!   She is disgusting!   The good, virtuous, upright family man Kavanaugh, who comes from great stock, whose mother was a judge, is her victim!   The accusation is ancient history, can never be proved, by her own admission, her own admission!  It should never be mentioned, in the name of decency, for fucksake, besides, the Statute of Limitations has run out literally decades ago.  The Statute of Limitations!   HOW DARE SHE?!!!  Her daughter is a slut, her husband is a promiscuous homosexual (who buggers the occasional male goat, see attached GIF), she brazenly showed young Kavanaugh the provocative outline of her breasts and vulva in that clingy bathing suit.  What was he supposed to do, a red-blooded American boy, and drunk like that?  And if he later lied about it?  SO?!!! What is your fucking point?  His friends all back him up, swore he wasn’t lying, and we have a letter from 65 women who knew him in High School all saying he never once groped them or tried to pull their clothes off or even kiss them against their will.  He was a perfect gentlemen, these 65 non-partisan women all agree, PERFECT.  HOW FUCKING DARE YOU?!!!  Right on the eve of his historically expedited confirmation!  Very fucking convenient, freedom haters!

Get the stadium crowd ready to rumble!   “Lock her up!   Lock her up!!!!”  And God Bless these United States of the Birchers, Birthers and Baggers.   38% lunatic support for unreasoning American values is good enough for their gerrymandered purposes.  51-49 in the Senate, Fair is fair!  Fair is Fair!   Democracy!  Democracy!   USA!   USA!!!!!

 

[1]  Kavanaugh writing in 2009:

Having seen first-hand how complex and difficult that job is, I believe it vital that the President be able to focus on his never-ending tasks with as few distractions as possible. The country wants the President to be “one of us” who bears the same responsibilities of citizenship that all share. But I believe that the President should be excused from some of the burdens of ordinary citizenship while serving in office. THIS IS NOT SOMETHING I NECESSARILY THOUGHT in the 1980s or 1990s. Like many Americans at that time, I believed that the President should be required to shoulder the same obligations that we all carry. But in retrospect, that seems a mistake.

Looking back to the late 1990s, for example, the nation certainly would have been better off if President Clinton could have focused on Osama bin Laden without being distracted by the Paula Jones sexual harassment case and its criminal investigation offshoots.  To be sure, one can correctly say that President Clinton brought that ordeal on himself, by his answers during his deposition in the Jones case if nothing else. And my point here is not to say that the relevant actors—the Supreme Court in Jones, Judge Susan Webber Wright, and Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr—did anything other than their proper duty under the law as it then existed.

But the law as it existed was itself the problem, particularly the extent to which it allowed civil suits against presidents to proceed while the President is in office. With that in mind, it would be appropriate for Congress to enact a statute providing that any personal civil suits against presidents, like certain members of the military, be deferred while the President is in office. The result the Supreme Court reached in Clinton v. Jones —that presidents are not constitutionally entitled to deferral of civil suits—may well have been entirely correct; that is beyond the scope of this inquiry. 

and

In particular, Congress might consider a law exempting a President—while in office—FROM CRIMINAL PROSECUTION AND INVESTIGATION, INCLUDING FROM QUESTIONING BY CRIMINAL PROSECUTORS OR DEFENSE COUNSEL.  Criminal investigations targeted at or revolving around a President are inevitably politicized by both their supporters and critics. As I have written before, “no Attorney General or special counsel will have the necessary credibility to avoid the inevitable charges that he is politically motivated—whether in favor of the President or against him, depending on the individual leading the investigation and its results.”

he also writes, somewhat comically now:

AS FOR JUDICIAL APPOINTMENTS, STRUCTURAL CONSIDERATIONS FAVOR A MORE INTENSIVE INQUIRY BY THE SENATE.   Article III judges are appointed for life and—unlike executive branch officials— are not subordinate to their appointing presidents.   That changes the constitutional dynamic.

full article

 

[2]   In fact, as The New York Times reports, the 81-year-old’s announcement was the culmination of a carefully orchestrated 17-month campaign by the Trump administration to remake the Supreme Court before the 2018 midterms, when there is an outside chance that Republicans could lose their majority.

source

[3]     [Trump] cultivated a relationship with Justice Kennedy’s son, Justin, who worked closely with the Trump Organization in his role at Deutsche Bank as the global head of real-estate capital markets, according to the Times.

see above

One two punch for 9/11

JOHN BOLTON: Today on the eve of September the 11th, I want to deliver a clear and unambiguous message on behalf of the president of the United States. The United States will use any means necessary to protect our citizens and those of our allies from unjust prosecutions by this illegitimate court. We will not cooperate with the ICC [International Criminal Court], we will provide no assistance to the ICC and we certainly will not join the ICC.

AUDIENCE: [Applause]

JOHN BOLTON: We will let the ICC die on its own. After all, for all intents and purposes, the ICC is already dead to us.

AMY GOODMAN: John Bolton also threatened to directly target judges at the ICC.

JOHN BOLTON: We will respond against the ICC and its personnel to the extent permitted by U.S. law. We will ban its judges and prosecutors from entering the United States, we will sanction their funds in the U.S. financial system and we will prosecute them in the U.S. criminal system. We will do the same for any company or state that assists an ICC investigation of Americans.

AMY GOODMAN: During his speech, John Bolton also announced that the Trump administration would close the Palestine Liberation Organization’s office in Washington in response to a Palestinian effort to push the ICC to investigate Israel for war crimes.

JOHN BOLTON: The Trump administration will not keep the office open when the Palestinians refuse to take steps to start direct and meaningful negotiations with Israel. The United States supports a direct and robust peace process, and we will not allow the ICC or any other organization to constrain Israel’s right to self-defense.

AMY GOODMAN: Palestinian diplomat Saeb Erekat criticized the move.

SAEB EREKAT: We were notified unfortunately that they will close the office and lower the Palestinian flag. This is an affirmation of the U.S. administration’s determination to continue its process of blackmail and extortion and undermining the peace process and the two-state solution. They have cut all humanitarian aid.

source

When you have angry people who believe their imagined view of life is more compelling than what is actually happening in the world — you get this kind of madness.   The U.S. wants peace and prosperity for everyone, and we will kill you if you stand in our way.    The infuriated John Bolton, a rash man who loves war, ladies and gentlemen.  Working with fellow savage warrior (not that the younger version of himself or anyone he knows would ever die in the wars he supports) our current president.  

Peace be upon you, and may whatever you worship protect you from the merciless designs of such men.

Persecuted Rich White Men

Bill Maher uses the term “whiny little bitch” to refer to our massively sensitive (when it comes to his own feelings) president’s constant complaining about the world’s unfairness toward him.   It is the prerogative of rich white men to complain; that there are other people richer than them, that taxes are unfair, that the roads they drive on should not be partially paid for by their wealth.    We just take this for granted, it is the way it is.  Simple.   Money talks and you shut the fuck up.

Of course it’s easy to pick on rich white men who whine about unfairness.   Low hanging fruits, you sassy bitches!   They can’t help it.   Why be so judgmental just because they tend to be greedy, entitled, overbearing in-your-face assholes?   They are winners.  Isn’t it kind of automatic for losers to resent winners?   Automatic or not, that’s exactly what I’m doing, a loser being a reflexive hater, but I can explain.

I just saw a piece detailing the reasons why powerful TV executive Les Moonves was finally fired by his corporate overlords.     He apparently forced a few women to perform oral sex on him, exposed himself to others, threw at least one against a wall, damaged careers and professional reputations of women who hurt his feelings by refusing his unwanted sexual advances.   Moonves is a man with a beautiful wife much younger than he is.   You’d think… never mind.   He’ll be OK, one suspects, with his severance package worth over $100,000,000, luckily for him (skillfully, really) his lawyers made sure there was no “morals clause” in his employment contract.   Isn’t his ignominious ouster from a position of power punishment enough for his widely alleged shitheadedness?

It’s not really about sex, the abuse of power that hyper-sexualized alpha apes like Moonves exhibit.   Rape, it is said, is about power, rage and domination, not about sex at all.  Forced sex is used to express rage, to demean the victim, to increase the raping asshole’s damaged sense of self-esteem.   Rapists and other sexual predators are not romantics, they’re the opposite.   It’s easy to dump on the evil bastards, of course, and I won’t stoop to it.   Fuck them is all I can really say about it at the moment.

Outside of the realm of sexual abuse, we have many institutionalized abuses that are far too lucrative to ever halt, or even seriously question.   Racism comes to mind.  It’s big business.   Always has been here.   You capture and import a gigantic workforce with all the rights of cows, sheep, pigs.   The good looking ones you can screw whenever the urge moves you.   You can work them to death, in the manner of slave laborers cheaply rented out by the SS to far-sighted, bottom line focused German corporations during World War Two.   

A decade after the Civil War you can put a law meant to protect the rights of freed slaves into a deep, unappealable judicially induced coma for ninety years (I’m thinking here of the Fourteenth Amendment, reduced for a century to protecting three or four limited federal rights [1]).   Why not?  The Ku Klux Klan has rights too, after all.   Nobody can appeal a Supreme Court decision, no matter how morally repulsive it might be.  Law of the land, boys and girls, decided by nine unsmiling Americans appointed for life, like supremely impartial family guy Brett Kavanaugh, overruling, with a one vote majority of their peers, explicit legislation by pointing to some imagined higher principle that nobody can question.

I’m thinking of the financial disaster of 2008, and the inevitable next one.   The 2008 massive upward redistribution of wealth was in the making for years.  George W. Bush made speeches encouraging people to find the American Dream by owning their own homes.  Profiting off people getting mortgages they couldn’t pay wound up being a gigantic windfall for financial industry profiteers.   Unsophisticated consumers who wouldn’t have qualified for the gigantic loans soon began defaulting on their mortgages, the rate they had been paying suddenly “ballooned” as they sometimes do in that industry.   This tsunami of debt was an additional windfall, unscrupulous highly paid geniuses figured out there was a way to make a killing by repackaging the debt, creating investment opportunities buying and selling slices of it (tranches, don’t you know?), having those opportunities falsely rated triple A, the safest investments around.    Everybody was in on it.   It was massive fun for a while, certain super wealthy people made shitloads of money.   Then it all collapsed.

The government, reviled by super-rich financial titans as tyrannically trying to stifle the Free Market whenever an attempt is made to regulate anything, was forced to come up with enormous stacks of tax-payer money to rescue financial institutions that were “too big to fail”.  Unlike you and me, who have the freedom to fail every day, the absolute freedom to move from a home to a cardboard box somewhere any time our luck turns bad, these gigantic money making enterprises could not be allowed to fail.  The world economy would have gone into the toilet.

We get all this.   We have State Capitalism here, the government enables this kind of profiteering because it’s good for the economy.   The economy being a synonym for the gigantic roulette wheel that is the Stock Market.   Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen.  Pick right and you will do well.  Pick badly and you have nobody to blame but yourself.   Who could begrudge the rescued financial giants the record $135,000,000,000 compensation they paid themselves in 2009?   It’s not as though any of them were caught in a random stop and frisk with a joint in their pocket.   These super important men are too big to jail, or fine, or even prosecute.   Be reasonable, boys and girls.   We all know the set up.

We cannot imagine it any other way.  This is by design.   This is what freedom looks like in the land of the free and the home of the brave.   If you are a liberal, wise-ass senator given to asking tough, probing questions at confirmation hearings, and your hand falls in the wrong place on a female body during one of a thousand campaign photo ops, your own high-minded, corporately funded party will force you to resign as a sexual predator.  If you are a powerful, avowedly apolitical executive who just happens to like having your dick sucked by any woman you find attractive, well, allowances can be made.  You see, this is the Free Market, really.  It’s free until it’s time for loser suckers like us to pay for it.

One of the cardinal rules of wealth is never risk your own money.   Our president, who doesn’t grasp much, who is, in the words of a sassy comedian, a “whiny little bitch,” knows this.  Witness the billions he personally saved during his multiple business failures, his serial bankruptcies.   Even he knows that fundamental rule of wealth: let the fucking suckers suck on not getting paid, avoid taking a dime out of your own pocket at all costs.   

Of course, I should not really be writing this today.  It is the first day of the Jewish year today, year 5779 since God created the world (I know).   Many of my co-religionists are in synagogue (that’s a Greek word for ‘shul’) today praying to the all-merciful Creator who gave us all free will, the Free Market and every other freedom.    Whether God is a desperate creation of humans born into an often terrifying world that ends in each of our inevitable deaths is not my place to speculate about today.   Only actions matter.   It is what we do, not what we espouse, that matters. 

I can believe with all my heart, with all my might and all my soul, that we have a duty to our fellow creatures never to mistreat them.    If I  mistreat them in spite of this fervent belief, well, call me what I am.  That is all we can ask of our fellow creatures, to live by our highest ideals.  Unless, of course, they are rich white men, the most unfairly persecuted group on God’s polluted earth.  We are morally obliged to give those freedom-loving involuntary fellatio connoisseurs a pass every time.  Fair is fair and hard to picture it any other way.

 

[1]  The Supreme Court decided that the Fourteenth Amendment was not intended by its framers (only a few years earlier) to make the protections of the Bill of Rights applicable to the States (it was, and currently is).   The Court restricted the 14th Amendment to the enforcement of the rights to use navigable interstate waterways and ports, to freely migrate from state to state and to be protected on the high seas.  Civil Rights were, according to the Court, completely at the discretion of the States and not intended to be protected by the federal government under the 14th Amendment.  Civil Rights violations by the states could not be challenged via the 14th Amendment, or in any other way, for almost a century.  A century of terrorism at law for unlucky former slaves and several generations of their descendants.

Here’s a bit of the sickening, neutral and impartial sounding cavil of the famous 1873 Slaughterhouse cases that decided the scope of the Fourteenth Amendment a few years after it became part of the post-Civil War constitution:

Was it the purpose of the fourteenth amendment, by the simple declaration that no State should make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States, to transfer the security and protection of all the civil rights which we have mentioned, from the States to the Federal government? And where it is declared that Congress Shall have the power to enforce that article, was it intended to bring within the power of Congress the entire domain of civil rights heretofore belonging exclusively to the States?

All this and more must follow if the proposition of the plaintiffs in error be sound…. [T]he effect is to fetter and degrade the State governments by subjecting them to the control of Congress in the exercise of powers heretofore universally conceded to them of the most ordinary and fundamental character….

We are convinced that no such results were intended by the Congress which proposed these amendments, nor by the legislatures of the States which ratified them.

— Slaughterhouse Cases: 83 U.S. 36, 77–78 (1873)
“[T]he effect is to fetter and degrade the State governments by subjecting them to the control of Congress in the exercise of powers heretofore universally conceded to them of the most ordinary and fundamental character…”
Jesus, wasn’t that exactly the reason our divided nation had just fought the Civil War, to decide that question?

 

The states that seceded from the United States and took up arms to defend the rights of their wealthiest to own slaves were forced, after their military defeat, to ratify the wartime amendments as the price of getting federal money to rebuild their destroyed infrastructure.   As the Court reasonably points out, why would the legislatures of such States agree to federal protection of the rights of their former chattel, chattels they’d spent rivers of blood and gold to keep in slavery?   

In the more objective light of hindsight, and ongoing racist practices from coast to coast, we say to the former slave states and their ilk: you lost the fucking bloody war you started, you goddamned racist motherfuckers!   Losers walk.  Traitors too, with malice toward none.  Now take down your proud flags of treason, too, even though the 14th Amendment protects your First Amendment right to fly them.

“Perjury Trap”

The only person who has to fear a “perjury trap” is someone who can’t control his lying.   A person with things to hide, given to lying to get himself out of trouble, to distract, to divert attention from their actual deeds, is the likeliest victim of a ‘perjury trap’.   A person whose deep sense of shame and inferiority will cause him to reflexively lie when any probe gets close to that shame and fear walks right into a perjury trap.   “Perjury trap” think about that phrase.   It’s an admission that the person going to testify under oath is a compulsive liar, no?

It’s not surprising that the best Rudy Giuliani can do for his friend the president is cough up the talking point of a “perjury trap”.    He appears to be as demented as his buddy when he speaks on right wing talk TV in defense of the often insane- seeming statements his friend makes.  Giuliani likes to appear to be a ‘stand up guy’, and so he talks tough, and loyal.    I will not let the president put himself in a no-win situation where his lies will have legal consequences, no way!   Perjury Trap! Fuck that.   We’re going to hit Mueller’s investigation with both barrels.

It is a tribute to the times we live in that this curious phrase appears to be good enough for purposes of telling Mueller to fuck himself on right wing TV.   “My client is a well-known and prodigious liar, as well as a master of puffery and the world’s smartest genius.   I’m not going to subject him to perjury charges in an obvious perjury trap.  Why would I place him in a situation where he could go to jail for lying?    He does what he does, I do what I do.  The truth is a completely separate question and your truth may not be my truth, or the president’s.   You see what I’m saying?”

When Trump was asked the other day about the short jail sentence for an aide named George Papadopolpous, who perjured himself, he prevaricates a bit, mentioned Flynn, out of the blue (another former close associate who is talking to Mueller) and ended with a curt, smart-sounding “perjury trap.”   It’s good to be on the same page as your lawyer.

By the way, PBS did its best, prior to the 2016 elections, to alert people to the perjury trap the nation was about to fall into, thanks to ingenious work by one campaign identifying and winning a few dozen crucial districts to get the Electoral College while the other campaign did a victory dance on the fifty yard line the night before the election.  Check this 4:16  piece out, though it may also make you holler a bit.

 

Committee Classified

Brett Kavanaugh is an extreme right wing rich man’s dream Supreme Court justice. He rules for corporations, almost every time.  He does not necessarily think a woman’s right to an abortion should be constitutionally protected across the country (although what business that is of extreme right wing rich men is a mystery to me).   He consistently rules against consumers, employees, the disabled, voting rights, the environment, the air we breathe, the water we drink.  He rules for gun manufacturers and the Scalia-created expansive view of the Second Amendment.   He has no problem with the right to own an arsenal of assault weapons being constitutionally protected.  He has no comment about his involvement in the Bush Administration’s torture program, though he admitted he probably worked with John Yoo, author of the torture memo, in the days after 9/11 when it was “all hands on deck”.  He could not promise to recuse himself from any case involving the investigation into Trump, even after probably, and improperly, speaking with Trump’s lawyers about the Mueller investigation.

Kavanaugh has a perfect score on every issue dear to bottom-line conservatives.  Some of his writings and opinions are so far to the right, and presumably so repugnant to most average Americans, that they have been classified and are being kept from public view, in the interest of getting him confirmed as quickly as possible without an undue uproar about his actual beliefs.   You can be sure of these beliefs, since he was recommended highly by the ultra-conservative Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation, endorsed by every other organization of their type. He brazens it out, as his predecessors have learned to do.  One important qualification for our nation’s top court would appear to be brazenness.   This quality enables him to blandly pretend that the issue of a president claiming the power to pardon himself and to refuse to comply with judicial subpoenas is purely hypothetical.

Kavanaugh has long been a partisan conservative.  He was one of Kenneth Starr’s most aggressive assistants during the historically partisan investigation that led to the impeachment of an American president for lying under oath about a series of blow jobs he received from a White House intern.   Since then American presidents have prudently stopped speaking under oath.   Kavanaugh, whose deference to the wishes of conservative presidents is well-documented, worked in the George W. Bush White House when Bush refused to testify under oath, quite possibly advising him on that matter.  George W. Bush would not speak under oath to the 9/11 Commission, a commission whose work he fought for a long time.   Bush and Cheney eventually negotiated a deal, they’d jointly attend a secret session where they’d speak to the Commission on terms of complete secrecy.    No notes or recordings were allowed, no oaths were administered, no promises to be truthful were made, the Commission agreed to say nothing about the meeting.  Nothing to see here! Including, fourteen years later, whatever Brett Kavanaugh might have had to say about it, he was a lawyer at the White House [1] in the years before Bush appointed him to the federal bench.

This seemingly guilty behavior, lawyering up on terms that offer absolute protection from any possible liability, has been normalized, but it was, until recently, a ballsy move for a politician to invoke complete secrecy, and preservation of the right to prevaricate or outright lie, without legal consequences, in a matter of extreme public interest.   It makes them look guilty, for one thing.   Blanket classification of politically embarrassing matters appears to be profoundly anti-democratic, since the public, theoretically, has a right to be fully informed on such matters.  

Brett Kavanaugh appears fine with this enhanced secrecy as he brazens out his confirmation questioning by Democrats who don’t have the votes to stop his confirmation.   He went to the top of the nominee list when the justice he clerked for, Anthony Kennedy, was persuaded to retire so that Trump could immediately get another Supreme Court pick.  It is hard to imagine that his replacement, by a clerk he trained, was not part of Trump’s discussion with Kennedy about preserving his legacy on the Court.  

Kavanaugh has written, since his days aggressively pursuing the investigation into the perjurer Bill Clinton, that the president should be immune from prosecution, even investigation, during the performance of the duties of our nation’s highest office.   Very handy, for a president under investigation, whose personal lawyer and former campaign manager are already heading to prison, to have another friendly ally on the bench of the Supreme Court as he seeks to continue working “outside the box” to Make America Great Again.

Unfortunately for the rest of us Americans, and for our jurisprudence going forward for at least a generation, there is little any of us can do to influence the outcome of this confirmation sham, or even to get thousands of pages of compromising writings by Kavanaugh released prior to his confirmation and appointment .   Kavanaugh’s rushed confirmation and appointment to a seat on the nation’s final arbiter of what is legal and what is illegal, will give the sitting president a long-term partisan majority to rule on every matter pertaining to his administration.   The rush is no accident, the Republicans are in a hurry.  If Kavanaugh is confirmed next week (it would likely be a new record for a speedy appointment [2])  he will be seated in time to make rulings during the crucial midterm elections.   If there is an emergency ruling on some voter-related issue during the elections, Kavanaugh and Gorsuch will decide it.   If there is a subpoena served on our historically prolific liar in chief, to testify in the “perjury trap” he’d be surely caught in, according to his supporters, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh will decide whether he must obey it.

Until the Republicans changed the rules after Gorsuch’s nomination fight to ensure that a 51-49 majority was inviolable, a filibuster would have been possible to delay this fait accompli.   Prior to 2017 the opposition party could engage in a filibuster that took 60 votes to overcome.   Now a 51-49 majority is inviolable, absolute.    Nothing to see here!   This is American partisan democracy at work.  Suck on it, losers.

Oh, yes, Committee Confidential.   I think this too may be a new innovation by the famously shameless partisans on the Republican side of the aisle.  Under pressure more Kavanaugh writings were released to the Senate Judicial Committee members, after vociferous public demands for more of the classified documents by Democratic members of the committee.   They were released on the condition that the American public, the voters, never learn of their contents.  There was an email about Racial Profiling that Kavanaugh wrote, apparently reflecting his reflexive right wing thinking on the matter.  Cory Booker asserted that he’d be making the email public, and take the consequences.  A Senator named John Cornyn, an apparent dickhead from Texas, seemingly sitting in for the chairman, reminded the angry Democrats on the committee that such opinions were Committee Confidential and would be disclosed to the public at the rule-violating committee member’s peril.  Cornyn read the rule severely, threatening Senator Cory Booker with expulsion from the Senate.  It appears to have been a wholly blustering threat.  [3]

What business is it of the American voting public if the lifetime appointee believes, for example, that Racial Profiling is a perfectly acceptable way for law enforcement to protect us from the ravages of our long, ongoing race war?    Or if he believes that a woman who gets pregnant, or a girl who is raped, must give birth, no matter what, if the laws of her state forbid abortion?    What kind of country we are living in will be decided by Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, even if Trump, who won the democratically dubious Electoral College by a historically small number of votes (about 80,000), is impeached, tried, convicted, sent to prison, he will leave his illegitimate mark on our nation for at least the rest of my lifetime, if not everyone on the planet’s.   He will leave his indelible stain as he goes down fighting, to the death. 

 

[1]   After the 2000 U.S. presidential election (in which Kavanaugh worked for the George W. Bush campaign in the Florida recount), Kavanaugh joined the administration and was a central figure in its efforts to identify and confirm judicial nominees.[3]

[2]  The Republicans have a very short window to get Kavanaugh his seat on the Supreme Court in time to join them before the midterms.  The new term starts the first Monday of this coming October, October 1.

Before 1981 the approval process of Justices was usually rapid. From the Truman through Nixonadministrations, Justices were typically approved within one month. From the Reagan administration to the present, however, the process has taken much longer. According to the Congressional Research Service, the average number of days from nomination to final Senate vote since 1975 is 67 days (2.2 months), while the median is 71 days (or 2.3 months).[13][14] Some believe this is because Congress sees Justices as playing a more political role than in the past.[15] The perceived politicization of the process has drawn criticism. For example, columnist George F. Will termed the defeat of Robert Bork’s nomination “unjust” and, more generally, that the nomination process does “not delve deeply into the nominee’s jurisprudential thinking.”[16] Supreme Court nominations have caused media speculation about whether the judge leans to the left, middle, or right.[17] One indication of the politicized selection process is how much time each nominee spends being questioned under the glare of media coverage; before 1925, nominees were never questioned;[18] after 1955, every nominee has been required to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee and answer questions; and the hours spent being grilled have lengthened from single digits (before 1980) to double digits today.[19]

source

[3] Cory Booker’s bold challenge to be censured or expelled from the Senate for violating the Committee Confidential rule made good television.  Unfortunately for fans of Senator Booker, he’d allegedly already received clearance, the night before, to disclose the contents of the email before his television moment of great principled bravery .    This is according to the Kavanaugh ally in charge of the release of any or all the controversial documents.  Booker’s office had no comment (Booker give his side here). Snakes everywhere, Mr. President!

Majority Rules

Like a two year-old with a shit filled diaper triumphantly proclaiming ownership of the sandbox, the party with the commanding 51-49 majority in the Senate plunges forward in its quest to quickly confirm another extreme right wing corporatist partisan as our next Supreme Court Justice.   The stakes are high, a second appointment for Trump and the Kochs, as criminal investigations close in on the ethically exempt president:  a permanent extreme right corporatist majority on the Court for the first time since the Great Depression.   The nominee sits, face as bland as a potato, waiting for the hurried sham hearing to proceed, as the minority party, the losers, appeals to the chairman for basic fairness and integrity.   Loyalists for the majority party keep making points of order, insisting the hearing not be interrupted or delayed for any reason.

The chairman, Chuck Grassley, tasked with getting this done before the midterms two months away [1], bristles at the challenges to his fairness and integrity, in the face of a strong argument he and his party lack both.   42,000 pages of documents regarding this nominee were delivered to senators the night before the confirmation hearings.  Documents requested by Chairman Grassley himself have not been produced, the minority senators claim.  Presumably these are among the 100,000 pages deemed too incendiary to release, Kavanaugh memos written while he advised George W. Bush on judicial appointments and vetted candidates, being withheld under some convoluted version of Executive Privilege.  A privilege, incidentally, that the Executive in question, George W. Bush, explicitly waived recently, in the interests of transparency and the appearance of fairness.

The Democrats don’t point it out, trying simply to get time to read the 42,000 pages before the confirmation hearing, but the nominee was a well-known right wing partisan activist and did some potentially compromising things in his zeal during the Clinton impeachment and in the Bush/Cheney White House.   There is also his record, as a judge under Merrick Garland, in cases involving employers and employees, consumers, the environment, of voting, in split decisions, against the public interest 87% of the time .   Nothing to see there!  Today, in spite of his salacious interest in Bill Clinton’s sex life and the impeachable offense of Clinton lying about the blow jobs, and his aggressiveness prosecuting this terrible crime, that Mr. Kavanaugh believes, and has written, that, as a general principle, the president is largely above the law and should not be distracted by investigations during the performance of his duties. Convenient, no?   Moved the corporate ass-kisser to the head of the Koch brother’s list of conservative jurists ready for the top job.

The chairman pretends to consider Corey Booker’s appeal (the two women who sought to intervene moments earlier were both ignored by the chairman) for an adjournment to read the redacted, 42,000 page record.   Then Grassely responds, gravely and respectfully, to Mr. Booker.  How dare the minority party interrupt my hearing to try to take advantage of my sense of integrity!   My integrity is absolute, as is that of my party, my president, my president’s revolving cast of advisors and cabinet members, no matter how many might have been forced from their positions, indicted or convicted in recent weeks. 

Senator Grassley listened respectfully to the female senator from Hawaii, Mazie Hirono, who expressed concerns about the unprecedented step of requiring judicial committee members to pre-submit their questions for the candidate for screening, by telling her politely to shut the fuck up.  Grassley, although pompous, appears not to be the sharpest knife in the drawer (not that he needs to be, 51-49 as it is), as when he admits, in response to Senator Leahy’s concern that the claim of Executive Privilege (a claim not asserted by the Executive himself in this case) must be resolved before any hearing is held, that he could answer all these minority questions “but I think if I answer those questions it’s going to fit into the effort of the minority to continue to obstruct and I don’t think that’s fair to our judge, it’s not fair to our constitutional process… blah blah blah.” [2]

 

All Chairman Grassley had to say was “I know you are, but what am I?”  As every two year-old knows, 51-49 is a majority, a commanding majority.   Might makes right.  49% has no right to interrupt while the 51% is telling it to eat shit.   Get your spoon and fucking dig in!   Simon says!  And say “God bless our sacred constitutional democracy and our infallible leader” as you shovel it down, assholes.

 

[1] Forget here, if you can, that the illegitimate Kenyan Muslim’s pick for Supreme Court, a well-respected moderate named Merrick Garland, Chief United States Circuit Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit,, was short circuited by partisan Republicans who insisted the People should decide, since a presidential election was about a year away when Antonin Scalia suddenly died.  You can’t have an appointment so close to an election, the majority party insisted, before they insisted the opposite, with a fraction of the time left on the clock and as investigations against the president continue:  we have to have this hearing before the looming midterms!   So the People can speak!

The haste here, of course, is that the 51-49 majority enjoyed by the party of Trump could possibly disappear in a matter of weeks as we await the will of the People on this matter.   Their leader, a prodigiously untruthful autocratic oligarch, might even face impeachment, or worse!   Time is suddenly, very much, of the essence if we are to have a solidly right wing Supreme Court for the next few decades.   This emergency began with the suddenly negotiated retirement of the so-called Swing Vote, the conservative Anthony Kennedy, a man who voted with the zealots most of the time, but unaccountably, was not homophobic or openly misogynistic.   Forget all this, it is irrelevant.  Fake controversy ginned up by lying partisan twats like me. NOTHING TO SEE HERE!  God bless America.  USA!   USA!!!

[2] Grassley goes on to answer Senator Leahy’s concern about what the administration has to hide among Kavanaugh’s writings while he advised President George W. Bush, when he served as advisor on judicial appointments.    White House counsel speak under an expectation of confidentiality, said Grassley, as do all lawyers to their clients.   If this was not so, a memo using language that could be taken out of context and used to destroy a candidacy, such as “I recommend we press the nigger/bitch/kyke hard on whether they support the murder of the unborn,”  or a suggestion to, say, demand photos of President Clinton’s penis, flaccid and erect, to be used as exhibits during his impeachment, would never have been written, depriving the Executive (or in the case of Clinton’s impeachment, Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr, who Kavanaugh zealously advised) of the full, frank range of partisan opinions to which he or she is entitled.  Confidentiality demands no less.

As for the 42,000 pages of documents delivered to the committee the night before the hearing, the only requirement, according to Grassley, was that they be delivered before the hearing, and they were.  End of story, whiners.  The Republican members of the judicial committee managed to read all 42,000 redacted pages, suck it up, obstructionist minority party.   If you can’t manage to do your homework, don’t blame the diligent students who did.

Notes about the Law

The years immediately before World War One, then known as The Great War, were known in America as the Age of Optimism.  Progressive idealism was on the rise, but it is, of course, more complicated than that.  Woodrow Wilson, a progressive in many ways, was also sympathetic to the Ku Klux Klan and was mesmerized by D.W. Griffith’s Birth of A Nation, a film glorifying the Klan as modern day knights and saviors.  The Klan was merely doing what was right, bravely defending the south’s honor, particularly the honor of its white women,  against the savage Negro, unaccountably vindictive, brutal and prone to raping, according to the film.   “History written in lightning” gushed Wilson after screening the film at the White House.  Klan membership soared during the Age of Optimism.

This “Second Klan” was also instrumental in the passage of the constitutional amendment that resulted in Prohibition, allying itself with the anti-immigrant wing of the temperance movement.  The Klan burned down bars, beat up or lynched distillers, tippling Italians, Jews, Negroes, what have you.    Meantime Wilson was drumming up American support for the glorious adventure in Europe with the brilliant, cynical, highly effective Committee for Public Information, also known as the Creel Committee, headed by the foremost advertising genius of the day, George Creel.   The progressive Wilson also passed the now infamous Espionage Act of 1917, a law designed to gag his political opponents.   A few years later, at the height of Klan membership (over 2 million proud, card carrying, sheet wearing assholes) the Immigration Act of 1924 was passed, restricting immigration. 

The Age of Optimism would not survive the colossal carnage of The Great War and the events that followed.   It was replaced by the Roaring Twenties, the modernist overthrow of the old ways in an era of wild stock market speculation that could create sudden wealth.   This was happening against the backdrop of widespread lawless consumption of recently criminalized alcohol.   Organized crime was born and criminal fortunes and empires built attendant thereto, then — The Great Depression.  Oh, well.   The generals of our eternal War on Drugs do not see any connection, no lesson of history to be learned here.  Oh, well.

   ii

I heard an interesting discussion of the history of the Fourteenth Amendment, on a non-partisan podcast by the National Constitution Center.  Two constitutional scholars discussed the creation and passage of the post Civil War amendment that ensures no state can deny any American the full rights, privileges, immunities and equal protection of the law.  Neither the scholars nor Jeffrey Rosen, CEO of the Center, mentioned the ninety year judicially imposed coma of the Fourteenth Amendment.  I think they should have.   The Supreme Court nullified the amendment and supporting laws less than ten years after the Fourteenth Amendment became the law of the land.. 

I originally thought “racist Supreme Court judges, the same bitches who decided the sickeningly slavery embracing Dred Scott case in 1857 decided the fate of the 14th Amendment”.  A quick query on google, to Wikipedia, showed me that the Supreme Court had a different composition by 1873 and that a new majority voted to nullify the 14th Amendment’s protections.   Men did not live that long back then.   The second majority ruled that the amendment and its protections simply did not apply, for a convoluted series of uninteresting judicial reasons, to the states of the former confederacy, or to any state.  

Writing for the majority one justice declared that, in any case, the white slaughters who brought the cases against Louisiana were not even the intended beneficiaries of the amendment.   Former slaves were, and as for them, the Negroes were done being the “special favorites of the law” after almost a decade of freedom.   Not until an 1868 enforcement law made under the Fourteenth Amendment was revived in the federal case brought against the Klan members who killed Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman in Mississippi, almost a century after its Supreme Court nullification, was the 14th Amendment ever enforced as originally intended.

The aptly named Slaughterhouse Cases that signaled the end of enforcement of the Fourteenth Amendment are often described quite blandly, as in this circumspect example:

The Slaughterhouse Cases represented a temporary reversal in the trend toward centralization of power in the federal government. More importantly, in limiting the protection of the privileges and immunities clause, the court unwittingly weakened the power of the Fourteenth Amendment to protect the civil rights of blacks.   source

Temporary (only ninety years or so).  Unwittingly.   Like  Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, like the recent 5-4 Supreme Court ruling that enforcement of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 is no longer necessary, since racism is now officially dead here in the USA!  USA!!!!   As proven by the election of an illegitimate Kenyan Muslim to our nation’s highest office.  USA!   USA!!!!  Nothing to see here.  History is fake.  Get Kavanaugh in there before the Republicans commanding 51-49 majority in the Senate is overturned in the upcoming elections.   Hurry, hurry!   

An Excellent Short Discussion of Depresssion

Johann Hari, writer of the excellent dissection of the drug wars, and drug addiction, called Chasing the Scream,  gives a short, remarkably common sense description of why we feel depression and anxiety.   Check it out here. 

We seem unable to grasp the simplicity of so many perplexing human riddles.   A person who feels loved, has a place in the world, work that is appreciated and a life without terror is unlikely to be chronically depressed or anxious.   It is the brutality of our tyrannically Free Market, a forum of endless, unfair competition,  that isolates us and fills us with dread of a bleak future.  There is no safety net.  Not for losers, safety nets are for winners.   Get over it, motherfucker, fear and insecurity is good for our bottom line.   Pick up your prescription over there.   NEXT!

Melancholia, Anyone?

Live with sorrows long enough and they will sometimes gather and swoop down in a wave of melancholia.   Allowing these sorrows to gather and swoop is something I have done since childhood.   It is familiar, somewhat understandable and without any terror to me at this point in my life.    I know the drill and accept it now, there is no sense fighting melancholia.   It has its seasons.  It is best just to slowly go with it, it arrives to make you consider your life a bit.

The semi-hollow body electric guitar you love to play, with that genius little looper that allows you to stomp, play, stomp, play along with your first track, stomp, add a second track, has no appeal when melancholia descends.   “Fuck it, maybe later,” you think to yourself, passing the guitar and looper on your way upstairs to tap these words.

There are cures for melancholia, of course.   You needn’t passively suffer from the blues, blues you don’t even have the energy to play or sing.   You can call a friend, if you have one.   The world is less lonely when you are talking to a friend.   You can go for a walk, or a bike ride, though your mood will accompany you, at least for the first part.   You can go shopping.  It’s what we’ve been taught since childhood, buying something new will cheer you up.  It works for millions of happy consumers everywhere, even if what you buy soon turns out to be crap.   You can read a book, watch TV (and we are in a renaissance of television at the moment), devour content in dozens of electronic forms. You can distract yourself until the cows come home, and when the cows get home, you can distract yourself some more.  It’s called entertainment, be entertained.   Yo, there are also anodynes, many of them handy, like eating something tasty, though the relief of that is momentary at best.

It doesn’t take melancholia to make you notice the brutality of the set up. We are told that statistically the odds of being killed by somebody else have never been lower in human history, unless you live in one of the many dangerous killing spots currently smoldering on the earth.  Of course, the odds of dying by your own hand, intentionally or inadvertently, have never been higher, are actually, for the first time in human history, more likely than your odds of being killed by somebody else, but that too is just a statistic, you dig.   We may, arguably, have a suicide epidemic in the greatest country, the most exceptional nation, the world has ever known.  Add the more than 72,000 overdose deaths from opioids last year to the tens of thousands accomplished by Second Amendment enthusiasts with their instrument of choice, add in drunk driving deaths, and murders by car, your goddamned vehicular homicides, and you start to get an impressive number of dead Americans.   We don’t need to talk about these motherfuckers really, they are not only losers, but dead losers.

This notion of winner and loser is a sick one I should pick at a bit here, just because this idiotic worldview is at the source of so much human misery.   You are a winner at the moment you win the lottery, a matter of pure luck, just as you are a winner when your Nazi-loving father dies and leaves you $300,000,000, another kind of lottery, albeit one you have paid dearly for by having a Nazi as a father.   Still, these are momentary victories, like every win is.  

That is the key thing: winning and losing are happening constantly in every life.  They go by other names, good luck and bad luck, providence and accursedness, good randomness vs. bad randomness.  Work is involved, of course, in preparing for victory.  I don’t discount the amount of hard work necessary to win a competition, nor do I necessarily shrink from it.   The thing I want to get across here is that winning and losing are relative and transitory, think about it even for two seconds and you will grasp that piece too.

The greatest baseball players in history, in their greatest all-time record-setting seasons, lost 60% of the time they went to bat. [1]   They were out more times than they succeeded.  An impressive majority of the time they were losers.  A 40% success rate, for Shoeless Joe Jackson, Rogers Hornsby, Ty Cobb, Ted Williams, was a season for the ages, a .400 season.  A small handful of historically elite players have ever achieved that.   Babe Ruth, the greatest hitter of them all, by many estimations,  made it to a personal best of .393 one year.   Anyone hitting .350 today is having a season for the ages, but still– losing more than they are winning.     Winning is a relative term, unless you understand this you are a loser.   Even if you understand it, you are still a loser, as often as you are a “winner”.

We’re told there is an attitude that winners have, an ineffable quality that makes them winners.  I think of the greatest American exemplar of winning, a man who has won every contest he has been involved in (by his account, anyway), including the greatest prize for an American winner, the presidency of the United States.   Being the world’s greatest winner means that you have conquered the game, are at the top of your game, on top of the world.   No reason to be angry, or peevish, oversensitive or insanely needy — you’re a great winner and therefore happy in a way a loser will never be.  

Still, check the man out.   Five a.m. rage tweets lashing out at the unfairness of his envious, unfair persecutors,  an inability to be truthful except in rare, unscripted moments (“I could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and these gullible morons would still support me”) a life of manifest unhappiness and gnawing insecurity, behind a gaudy front of blustering compensatory over-confidence, for the world’s greatest winner.  What’s up with that?  You want to be a winner like him?  Go for it.  Start with choosing the right dad.

The winner/loser game has one measuring stick: wealth.  If you are rich you have won.  Except, of course, that there are always other motherfuckers richer than you (some have vast, interest generating hereditary wealth, going back generations), which is a goad and a motivation.   Being filthy rich is no longer enough, to be a real winner you have to be richer than Jesus Christ and his father combined.   The Greeks used to have myths about foolish humans sucked into this thing called hubris.  The insatiably greedy Midas got the gold touch, and that was the end of him.   His food turned to gold, when he wiped his ass that turned to gold.  He was done.  [2]  The Midas touch, which we think of as the gold standard of good luck, turns out to be one of the more clever curses of the gods.  I always loved the Yiddish curse:  may you be very successful in business, may you become very rich and build a mansion of a hundred rooms — and may the devil chase you from room to room.

Of course, I am a bitter man, melancholic today or not.  I tend to think of winners like the fucking Sackler family, several generations of doctors who have evolved into a clan of fabulously wealthy drug pushers under the corporate name Perdue Pharmaceuticals.   It turns out they researched which areas of this great country were most plagued by drug abuse, specifically opioid abuse.   They targeted these ravaged, hopeless areas where despair was rampant and options few, coal mining country, rust belt, foreclosed farm communities, etc., with trained doctors, nurses and pharmaceutical reps claiming that their patented product, Oxycontin, had an “exquisitely rare” chance of addiction “less than 1%” (a number they pulled out of their collective, corporate asses).   The Sacklers made billions upon billions marketing this highly addictive patent protected anodyne poison to America’s most desperate while addiction and overdose deaths predictably sky-rocketed.   Winners vs. losers, yo.

Civil suit after civil suit against Perdue Pharma resulted in nothing but wasted legal fees and shrugs all around, and anger and despair for the loved ones of those now dead from the exquisitely well-marketed opioid.   You can’t prove the lying corporation killed your boy, ma’am, nor can you make them pay you shit for his death.   It was the drug addict’s own damned fault, after all.   Nobody held a gun to his dumb head and forced him to overdose.  De minimis non curat lex, sir.

The U.S. Attorney in Virginia finally brought a criminal case against Perdue Pharma.  In 2007, after a series of negotiations (pre-dementia Rudy Giuliani was brought in to do his magic for Perdue) the parties agreed to a plea deal where the corporation, charged with a series of felonies, pleaded guilty to the single felony of “criminal misbranding” a crime that had been committed continuously for six or seven years by then.   Three executives took misdemeanor charges.  Justice was done, as well as it ever is done to extremely wealthy malefactors.

In a nation that was not insanely racing against death by trying to acquire everything in sight, and blindly worshipping those who can,  this would not appear to be a reasonable, fair or just outcome.   At the very least this gigantic corporate drug dealer, after “criminally misbranding” its deadly anodyne and profiting obscenely from its crime, with deadly consequences for hundreds of thousands (and counting), would have to lay out the cash to set up rehab and treatment centers in every area they had targeted to sell their lucrative, criminally mislabeled product.   That’s not how it works in the land of winners and losers.   We don’t punish the powerful here.   What kind of message does that send?   We punish the weak, send them to private, for-profit prisons.  They are losers anyway.  Yo, be serious!  Punishing losers equals corporate profits: win win!  

Not to say this hideous picture is all bad.  In the impoverished West Virginia town of 400 that received 9,000,000 tablets of Oxycontin one year, many were able to keep their noses just above poverty by selling the pills, which go for up to ten bucks a piece.  The free market, being free.

I am content with the things I own.  The guitar I love cost a few hundred dollars, a fraction of the price of the one the Chinese factory skillfully recreated.   I am a good enough guitarist that I “deserve” a guitar costing many times more.  I don’t need it.   Do you understand what I am saying?  Owning a $5,000 or $10,000 guitar would be lovely, sure, but I don’t need it.  Can you grasp that?   It is worthwhile to grasp a thing like that.  Otherwise, in the words of an ex’s Hindu guru, you are like a deer, dying of thirst as you chase a mirage of water.

Our failure here is a failure of imagination.   We fail to imagine the many real possibilities that would make the world a more decent and merciful place for all but the richest and most psychopathic among us.   We simply cannot imagine the great philanthropists of our age, the finest people, folks like the Sacklers, ever being held accountable for any crime they may or may not have committed.   “Criminal misbranding”, I mean, how bad a crime is that really, in the hierarchy of felonies?    It’s a fraud perpetrated deliberately year after year to the harm and death of tens of thousands, but it has to been seen in context.    The Sacklers donate wings to museums, they endow professorships, they are culturally generous with their billions.   The men who paid themselves a record $135 billion in compensation in 2009 after almost causing the second worldwide Great Depression by their systemic, highly lucrative, fraud, same deal.   Does it really help anyone to put these kind of folks in prison?  Aren’t they really too big to jail?   Seriously, am I suggesting that such fine people deserve to be held accountable for the petty crimes they may, arguably, commit?  Unimaginable, the luxury prisons we’d have to construct to house such fine people.

Our failure of imagination, in this nation where we are trained from birth to be passive consumers,  makes us replace the universe of possibilities with the world we have in front of us.   You see, there is no way, in a free country, to make sure no children are raised in dire, hopeless, life crushing poverty because…. the Free Market.   Communism obviously failed, was put out of business and taken off the map by the only form of social organization that makes sense, that truly reflects human nature, Capitalism.    

We reduce many undreamed of possibilities to our famous imagination crushing false dichotomy.   If you hate Capitalism as it is practiced today, as it has always been practiced, then you are a Communist, by definition a discredited loser.  History proves how much you suck.   Winners win, losers whine, suckers walk.  Freedom is on the march.  Democracy equals capitalism, winning equals fabulous wealth, end of the story, boys and girls.  Koch Industries, sponsors of the NY Yankees, makes products you use and are dedicated to a level playing field where everyone has an equal opportunity.   They say so in their own ad.   Nothing else to see here.  Bird Wins [3].

This is a world of losers, friends, every one of whom will die without any hope of eternal, corporate style, life.   Losers with costive imaginations, hemmed in by mass-marketed external reality.   That’s a peevish and dumb way to put it, ‘costive’ being an old-fangled word for constipated.   Imaginings are not shit, of course, though they are constantly shit on.   Neither are they all good, some in fact, would benefit from not have been shitted out at all.  

We are led to imagine that all the problems in the world caused by runaway, unregulated capitalism are the fault of illegal aliens and refugees, poor people sneaking through our porous borders to rape and murder, while bringing illegal drugs in.   Many are, quite possibly, terrorists who hate our freedom.   Imagine that!   All of our problems, caused by those ruthless, relentless fucks, millions of them, lawlessly overrunning our once great nation like cockroaches.   At one time, even now in many parts of the world, in some of the best parts, the best parts, my people get the blame.  The fucking Jews.   If Hitler had finished his important work every ignorant racist fuck in the world would now be a king, once the goddamned colored people were dealt with the same way. It’s only a matter of will, of winning.  

Happy Labor Day, my hard laboring friends.   Get out there and take advantage of your day off and your freedom to save big at malls all over this great land.   They’re practically giving the wonderful stuff away.   Go, go, go!  If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to slouch over to my guitar and see what comes out.  [4]

 

 

[1] for the quibblers, sure, their On Base Percentage for those seasons, the times they walked added to the times they had base hits, means that these baseball immortals, in their greatest seasons for the ages, only lost maybe 50% of the time.   Call me pisher.  

[2]  OK, fine, the Greek myth makers gave greedy King Midas a reprieve and his story a laudable moral.   Ecstatic about his new gold touch he hugged his beloved daughter, she turned to gold and he broke down.   He begged the gods to take the curse away, and they did.  Midas lived a life of generosity when his touch stopped turning everything he loved into gold and died beloved of his people.

[3] Bird Wins was the title of a book I once tried to write.  The title referred to the flashing sign in the Chinatown Arcade on Mott Street, mercilessly announcing that the tic tac toe playing chicken had beaten its human opponent again.   The bird went first, and always played to thwart a victory.   I doubt anybody, ever, beat the goddamned chicken, though many probably tied.   Bird Wins stands in for all fixed games, rigged contests, manifest abuses of the gullible and earnest alike.  

[4]  I‘m So Tired, it turns out, by the fookin genius John Lennon.