Category Archives: current events

The Grey Lady, late to the party and weak

It was big news across the nonauthoritarian-leaning side of the internet the other day when the NY Times finally published an article about the many signs of Trump’s seeming mental decline (not to mention his blooming psychopathy) and his apparent unfitness for office, headlined:

Trump’s Speeches, Increasingly Angry and Rambling, Reignite the Question of Age

With the passage of time, the 78-year-old former president’s speeches have grown darker, harsher, longer, angrier, less focused, more profane and increasingly fixated on the past, according to a review of his public appearances over the years.

Fair enough, as far as they go in their detailed chronicle of his more and more demented statements as he campaigns to become president again, presumably by a combination of voter suppression, a surgically precise, razor-thin Electoral College win, strategic support from a corrupt and incompetent postmaster general, various MAGA election officials, MAGA state legislatures and MAGA state courts, his friends in Congress, The Heritage Foundation, The Federalist Society, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Robert Mercer, Ginni Thomas, General Flynn, Q, X, a corrupt 6-3 MAGA Supreme Court and, in a pinch, an army of angry low flying monkeys desperate to avenge the Confederacy’s inglorious military loss in 1865. 

The Grey Lady steers gracefully clear of violating anything like the sacred Goldwater Rule (no public comment on elected official’s dangerousness by mental health experts unless the elected psychopath in question agrees to be publicly psychoanalyzed) [1]. It quotes several who know the Republican candidate well and appear to think he’s just fine.

The Grey Lady also does not comment directly about how increasingly insane his rantings are. They simply provide many examples so an intelligent reader can draw the inference, if they so choose, that the man who says these things is dangerously insane, rather than a serious world leader for this perilous moment in human history. The Grey Lady seems to tastefully avoid (she’s nothing if not tasteful) the most hateful and violence-inspiring things trump constantly spews. Then she muses:

The former president has not been hobbled politically by his age as much as Mr. Biden was, in part because the incumbent comes across as physically frail while Mr. Trump still exudes energy. But his campaign has refused to release medical records, instead simply pointing to a one-page letter released in July by his former White House doctor reporting that Mr. Trump was “doing well” after being grazed by a bullet in an assassination attempt.

Yo, Grey Lady, you leave out an obvious and immense part of why Biden was hobbled by fears about his age and you sell your influence short. Former president trump’s mental capacity was never written about negatively in the news section of the paper, as Joe Biden’s was, hundreds of times on the front page of the NY Times. Joe Biden’s every stutter and misstatement was amplified and questioned, his fitness for office constantly questioned, in news reports and editorials. Trump’s clear cognitive decline has been tastefully not spoken of (on the rationale that him being an inanely riffing, opinionated, fact-free asshole is not news) while the Grey Lady’s scrutiny of every Biden gaffe, stutter and misstatement was a major factor in Biden being forced to abandon his candidacy after a highly accomplished presidency.

One more, then you can go read the catalogue of trump’s idiocy yourself, at this gift link.

A 2022 study by a pair of University of Montana scholars found that Mr. Trump’s speech complexity was significantly lower than that of the average president over American history. (So was Mr. Biden’s.) The Times analysis found that Mr. Trump speaks at a fourth-grade level, lower than rivals like Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who speaks at an eighth-grade level, which is roughly average for modern presidents.

It’s a tic, I suppose, to miss no opportunity to prove their unflinching fairness by once again pointing out that Biden too is, vocabulary and speech-complexity-wise, unfit for the presidency.

Are you smarter than a fourth grader? If so, read the NY Times with a critical eye for these fucking tics. The Grey Lady is all atwitch in these twitch-worthy times.

[1] OK, can’t resist one more. Note the Grey Lady’s lack of specificity, or an embedded link, in its reference to the recent conference of an anonymous group of mental health, national security and political experts whose 2017 New York Times bestseller the New York Times (in conjunction with the American Psychiatric Association,) successfully removed from public discussion during the trump presidency (and since):

Polls show that a majority of Americans believe he is too old to be president, and his critics have been trying to focus attention on that. A group of mental health, national security and political experts held a conference at the National Press Club in Washington last month on Mr. Trump’s fitness. The Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group of former Republicans, regularly taunts him with ads like one calling his debate with Ms. Harris “a cognitive test” that he failed.

My first note to Dr. Bandy Lee

This was my first comment to Bandy Lee, a few days earlier. At the end is a link that explains why I think Ryan Reynolds would be a good person for her to contact (assuming he shares our concern with the unthinkable possibility of a violent madman becoming “president” again, against the will of the majority of voters).

What you have to say is so important, so crucial, to protecting our society. I learn something new from every interview you do and every article you publish.

I wish you would have your media team put out 15 to 30 second shorts that could go viral. Take one great point at a time and just present it to the camera. No undecided voter could remain undecided after hearing what you and your colleagues have to say about the clear and present dangerousness of Trump and his myrmidons.

I’ve been thinking you bury the lede when you save this for paragraph two:

At no time has mental fitness in leadership been more important. Yet, at no time have we had a presidential campaign where mental fitness has been a more precarious issue.

Keep up the good work, and please, please, create some short clips that can become memes. This is, sadly, the age of information and public relations we live in. Although it couldn’t be further from our purposes, check out this short for an example of the power of well-wielded social media: https://youtube.com/shorts/cesrZd73sQY?si=26eefs5di6eb3e9X

At another point I suggested this very compelling story I’ve heard from her, which she told in about half a minute:

Your story about the American Psychiatric Association gagging public discussion of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump might make an excellent illustrative short. 

A powerful psychopath feeling under attack, in a position to reward a US government-funded organization with a record allocation and a new $10,000,000 headquarters in DC, who then rewards them for their favor, ably put into effect by no less than the venerated/hated NY Times, gagging all experts by publicly enforcing the association’s own voluntary rule as if it was federal law.  

That story of the “inviolable” Goldwater Rule, and its always clear political intent, and how it was used to silence the experts to the advantage of the dangerous, powerful psychopath, is too good not to be shared by millions before the election.    

The story of that Trump-facilitated nationwide gag order of professionals acting out of a duty to warn of imminent danger is the perfect illustration of how this malignant type gets away with this open corruption. 

Help Bandy Lee’s message go viral!

Bandy Lee is a forensic psychiatrist who has great, and highly relevant, expertise from years working with violent psychopaths. Feeling that she had a professional duty to warn, based on her observations of newly elected President trump, she convened a 2017 conference on the Dangerous Case of Donald Trump. Lee and twenty-six highly respected colleagues, including Robert J. Lifton (author of, among other works, “The Nazi Doctors”) published The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, NY Times best-seller and invaluable primer on malignant narcissism. I recommend that book to everyone.

Trump’s allies were able to marginalize the indispensable guide to Trump’s pathology and largely remove it from public discussion. The conservative American Psychiatric Association, ably aided by the powerful NY Times, attacked and vilified the book as a clear violation of the APA’s Goldwater Rule.

That rule (binding only on members of the APA, but treated as an inviolable federal law) states that, no matter what public evidence exists, psychiatrists are forbidden from offering their informed opinions about any public person they have not personally interviewed — and may publicly draw psychiatric conclusions only if the person in question authorizes it.

In other words, the Goldwater Rule states that, if an angry psychopath in a position of public power is cool with public discussion of their rage and unslakable thirst for revenge, after personally consulting with a shrink, only then may the psychiatrist publicly speak about it.

Bandy Lee is brilliant, courageous, articulate and she has a CRUCIAL message that would wake up millions of undecided voters, if they were exposed to it. She has assembled great experts, and recently held a second conference on trump’s dangerous unfitness at the National Press Club [1]. What she has not been able to do is disseminate her message widely, in a way succinct enough for the average distracted, traumatized, non-intellectual American voter to digest, or even encounter.

Bandy Lee’s website is http://www.bandylee.com. Her Substack newsletter is at https://bandyxlee.substack.com/. You can read her detailed assessments and hear long form interviews at those sites, along with a video of the full recent conference. Sadly, you will never encounter her CRUCIAL information in a short, shareable form that could (and should, and MUST) go viral.

I URGE ANYONE READING THIS to put on your thinking cap and find a way to recruit a Ryan Reynolds, or some other genius of social media manipulation, for help getting Bandy Lee’s crucial message out to millions, particularly as it could well be the deciding factor for the “undecided” voters out there.

As I wrote to her on Substack:

Corporations (including a democratic forum like Substack) control most communication in the US, one way or the other.  There are only two ways to influence mass public opinion, both engines for disseminating persuasive information/content, true or false, are problematic.  

The corporate mass media news and editorial narrative leaves out context, engages in false equivalencies, allows lies to air unchecked, consents in the destruction of norms, normalizes pathology, etc.  Profit-driven mass media, whose only motive is financial gain, exerts tremendous influence on most Americans, particularly older voters.

“Social Media”, odious and divisive as it also is, is a powerful driver of public opinion, for better and for worse.  A meme is born when it hits quick, memorably makes a good point, and makes people want to share it.  Billions of shares of a video featuring a memorable dance to a song called Gangnam Style.

I don’t know how to use social media myself, as I’ve learned again recently trying to get answers for why trump appointees Louis DeJoy (slow the mail, cut costs) and Joseph Caffari (Homeland Security IG who, uh, accidentally let all January 6 secret service evidence be irretrievably destroyed) are still in positions of power, but there are geniuses in the field of internet marketing with expertise in how to create viral short videos.  Talk to the folks at Meidas Touch about how to make important, individual points in shareable 30 second bytes.   

Your expert insights need to be set out in short, shareable videos.  If undecided voters are exposed to your message, it’s hard to believe many would vote for trump.   You should be in touch with the Lincoln Project, for example, their take on your main points about Trump’s dangerousness, coming from experts in violent pathology assisted by experts in propaganda, would get wider exposure.  Talk to Anthony Davis about creating some shorts from your interviews with him, I have seen many 30-60 second sections of those talks that would make great shareable shorts.   We need 30 second clips of some of your best points, points that can instantly be shared. Millions of people need to hear them!

Your best-selling book The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump is an indispensable primer for understanding the personality type capable of pathological violence.  That we have a presidential candidate for a major political party possessing all the clear warning signs of destructive rage, on steroids, is CRUCIAL for undecided voters to know.  

Trump’s brand is violence, fighting, oppositionality, never admitting fault or defeat.  A classic psychopath.   He’s already fomented criminal violence in his name that he’s promised pardons for, as well as constant threats of, and pardons for, future violence.   His handpicked (by his handlers) Supreme Court majority recently ruled that his pardons may not be questioned or appealed, even if they are offered for sale.

Blah, blah, blah. . . Dr. Lee is busy and I haven’t heard back from her.

On the well-funded extremist right, they always march in lockstep, speaking in one voice, defiantly repeating the same disproven lies over and over until they wear people out. On the non-fascistic side of the spectrum there are a million voices, ten million shades of nuance, and those diverse and personal messages have neither the persistence nor the compelling public force of a unified, infuriating talking point grunted over and over and over and endlessly amplified by mass media.

Bandy Lee correctly diagnoses the danger we face right now — Trumpism is a public health emergency, like the recent pandemic. Trump contagion (which, to be fair, emanates as much from Charles Koch, Leonard Leo, John Roberts and their filthy ilk as from their current performative avatar, the Orange Polyp, himself) has made millions admire and imitate his lowest impulses, impulses he cannot control. This way lies rage, more and more violence and eventually mass murder, guaranteed.

Want a nice factoid? In 2014 there were 912 antisemitic incidents in the United States, a number that has gone up every year since Trump’s (oops, trump’s) 2016 election — last year there were 8,873 reported antisemitic incidents [2]. I would assume all hate crimes in the US have increased in similar numbers, remember the violent aftermath of trump’s witty, peaceful Kung Flu call to violence?

You want to argue about whether Trump is dangerously, violently insane, an American Hitler or not? Put him in back power, surrounded by loyal MAGA appointees, wait a couple of years and — guaranteed, I’ll meet you in a death camp somewhere (if we’re lucky, that is). It took the actual Hitler twenty full years, from his violent attempted coup, to the opening of the first true Nazi death camps. All these creatures need is time.

[1] Bandy Lee, earlier today:

The theme of our conference was that fitness is not a subjective, partisan, or even political “opinion” but a scientific finding based on extensive research, clinical experience, and uniform application of medical standards to military officers, officers handling nuclear weapons, surgeons, and executive officials.  The consensus at the conference was that mental fitness is critically important for the U.S. presidency and that Donald Trump is decisively unfit.  It should become widely known that Trump’s mental unfitness has now been objectively measured in multiple ways; that mental health expertise is critical to explaining what he is and is not capable of doing; how dangerous it is to have a mentally unfit person in a position of power; and how his psychological dangers can quickly spread into social, cultural, and geopolitical dangers, by rendering domestic legal and political institutions, and global balances and alliances ineffectual.

source

[2] Reporter Bob Garfield, in a particularly brilliant post, includes this:

The preemptive blame, of course, is meant to both intimidate Jewish voters and rally the violent among MAGA faithful, such as the ones who attacked the Capitol over his 2020 “stolen election” lies, such as the “very fine” neo-Nazis who marched in Charlottesville chanting “Jews will not replace us,” such as the mass murderers who shot six Jews to death at a deli in Jersey City, NJ, such as Robert Bowers, guilty of gunning down worshipers in Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018, such as the perpetrators of 8873 antisemitic incidents in the United States last year alone (in 2014, the year before Trump’s first presidential campaign, there were 912, and the number has risen every year since), such as the Proud Boys, Goyim Defense League, Blood Tribe, Ku Klux Klan, QAnon, Black Hebrew Israelites, Atomwaffen Division and other hate groups.

source

Debunking just one MAGA lie

As MAGA prepares to once again fight like hell (or they won’t have a country anymore) their lawyers have filed dozens of election challenge cases already [1]. As their ilk does for every other lost cause or lie, they have a simple (if false) answer about all those court cases they lost last time:

All MAGA election-related cases were dismissed not on the merits, but on procedural grounds, like lack of standing.

Even if this were true — it is not — lack of standing is a fatal flaw in a lawsuit, as is failure to state a legally coherent complaint (supported by evidence). In order to win a case a party must have standing — an actual provable injury the court can address — in order to proceed.

The scumbag Attorney General of Texas brought a case to the Supreme Court, signed on to by legal eagle MAGA Mike Johnson and more than a hundred MAGA legislators, seeking to overturn voting results in several states Trump lost in 2020. Even the MAGA Six had to acknowledge that Texas had no standing to bring this case limiting what other states could do. Nor did any of the loyal legislators, led by MAGA Mike Johnson, who signed on to the law suit to do their master’s bidding, have even the remotest theory of standing to act as “friends of the court”.

It is easy to forget the hundred plus lawsuits the RNC and Trump brought prior to the 2020 election, to try to suppress voting by Democrats. Take the sickening, desperate case of Trump v. Boockvar in Pennsylvania. In that case Trump 2020 and the RNC cited purely speculative harms they might have suffered if absentee voting was allowed to take place as planned during the peak of the pandemic. They laid out for the court the specter of theoretical, massive fraud never remotely seen in US elections.

They submitted no evidence to support their claim (there was none), yet the judge, a Trump appointee from the Federalist Society list, did not dismiss the case. He ordered them to produce evidence. They produced a big box of printouts and screen shots from Fox, Breitbart, Der Sturmer, Die Volkischer Beobachter, The New York Post, OANN, “evidence” the judge eventually detailed and dismissed. I followed the case on the electronic docket, one of more than 100 frivolous cases the litigious fucks filed before the 2020 election. Nobody was reporting on these cases and it was aggravating to me at the time.

In the end, I was relieved that the young federal judge, J. Nicholas Ranjan, not only dismissed the case in the end, but took an additional hundred pages to make his dismissal appeal proof. You can read about his dismissal of the case here.

It’s always war to the death with Nazi fucks like these. The SS continued fighting to the death while Hitler was in the bunker, raging and getting ready to shoot his beloved German Shepard. Let’s hope today’s fight to the death continues to remain more figurative than literal and that more Ranjan-like holdings are written by defenders of our constitutional democracy.

perfect shot ear, perfect!

[1]

The R.N.C. is leading a broad network of conservative legal groups in the effort. Mr. Trump’s allies, including his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, took over the committee last March, placing Ms. Bresso in charge of the legal operation and promising a more aggressive strategy. After the 2020 election, the party’s lawyers had at times refused to participate in Mr. Trump’s legal campaign, forcing him to rely on a collection of outsiders who filed cases rife with errors and false claims. Several Trump lawyers have since been criminally charged.

Among them is Christina Bobb, who is now senior counsel on the R.N.C.’s election integrity team. Ms. Bobb recently suggested that she was braced for more litigation after Election Day.

“I’m kind of holding my breath for that,” she said on a recent podcast. “I think we’re in probably, at least litigation-wise, as good of a place as we can be before the election.”

(NYT link above)

To fanatically faithful supporters, this is drivel

Heather Cox Richardson reports:

On Sunday, a bipartisan group of 741 national security leaders—some of the biggest names in the field—endorsed Harris. “To the American People,” they wrote. “We are former public servants who swore an oath to the Constitution. Many of us risked our lives for it. We are retired generals, admirals, senior noncommissioned officers, ambassadors, and senior civilian national security leaders. We are Republicans, Democrats, and Independents. We are loyal to the ideals of our nation—like freedom, democracy, and the rule of law—not to any one individual or party.

“We do not agree on everything, but we all adhere to two fundamental principles. First, we believe America’s national security requires a serious and capable Commander-in-Chief. Second, we believe American democracy is invaluable. Each generation has a responsibility to defend it. That is why we, the undersigned, proudly endorse Kamala Harris to be the next President of the United States.

“This election is a choice between serious leadership and vengeful impulsiveness. It is a choice between democracy and authoritarianism. Vice President Harris defends America’s democratic ideals, while former President Donald Trump endangers them.

“We do not make such an assessment lightly. We are trained to make sober, rational decisions. That is how we know Vice President Harris would make an excellent Commander-in-Chief, while Mr. Trump has proven he is not up to the job.”

source

Traumatically low self-esteem

As psychiatrist James Gilligan, who spent years working with violent prison inmates, observed: all violence is an attempt to replace shame with self-esteem. It is an illuminating and important insight.

How does a child turn into a violent sadist? By being traumatized at the hands of those they relied on, beyond the ability to trust anyone, beyond hope of self-esteem. They internalize this hopeless, isolated, humiliation and must inflict violence on others to get a twinge of what feels to them like self-esteem. The suffering and helplessness of their crushed victims confirms for them that they are powerful after all, to be respected, and feared.

In one sense this seems obvious, after years watching the nonstop sickening performance of a thin-skinned, whining “strongman” who controls one of our two major political parties, banished all critics and bent it to his perverted will. He perceives violence carried out in his name as love, as he observed on January 6 when the “patriotic” mob of political martyrs were forced, by a massive bipartisan cabal of his cheating enemies, to attack Capitol police. He’d never seen so much love, he tweeted, as when his people were passionately injuring dozens of cops in his name.

It is true of any narcissist who is far enough on the scale to behave psychopathically. They literally cannot help what they do, though that’s no excuse for their predictably treacherous behavior. They are compelled by a desperation someone not traumatized to the extent they are can ever fully comprehend.

These creatures need to feel the power of hurting others, otherwise they feel utterly worthless. The humiliating feeling of being undeserving of love motivates monstrous behavior. The attempt to gain self-respect, respect and love by dominance, fear and manipulation is, as Gilligan points out, a misguided attempt to replace shame with self-esteem.

I point this out because knowing this basic mechanism of all abusers is important, if you are faced with one of these supremely destructive assholes. Once you see abusiveness in your personal life, say nothing (appeals to empathy or fairness are futile with these assholes) but put maximum emotional distance between yourself and one of these hopeless, reflexively harmful humanoids.

A Short history of this spasm of American Fascism

Although she makes no reference to the oligarchic designers, and prime beneficiaries, of the Republican strategy, increasingly shameless since the 1980s “Reagan revolution” of divide, enrage, terrify and exploit, Heather Cox Richardson writes as succinct a summary of how the Charles Kochs and their filthy ilk, aided by the Leonard Leos and their filthy ilk, orchestrated the fanatical chaos of our current political moment:

In the 1980s, radical Republican leaders set out to dismantle the government that regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, promoted infrastructure, and protected civil rights. But that system was popular, and to overcome the majority who favored it, they began to tip the political playing field in their direction. They began to suppress voting by Democrats by insisting that Democrats were engaging in “voter fraud.” At the same time, they worked to delegitimize their opponents by calling them “socialists” or “communists” and claiming that they were trying to destroy the United States. By the 1990s, extremists in the party were taking power by purging traditional Republicans from it.

And yet, voters still elected Democrats, and after they put President Barack Obama into the White House in 2008, the Republican State Leadership Committee in 2010 launched Operation REDMAP, or Redistricting Majority Project. The plan was to take over state legislatures so Republicans would control the new district maps drawn after the 2010 census, especially in swing states like Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. It worked, and Republican legislatures in those states and elsewhere carved up state maps into dramatically gerrymandered districts.

In those districts, the Republican candidates were virtually guaranteed election, so they focused not on attracting voters with popular policies but on amplifying increasingly extreme talking points to excite the party’s base. That drove the party farther and farther to the right. By 2012, political scientists Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein warned that the Republican Party had “become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

“It [the GOP] is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

source

and my plan

Don’t forget John Roberts

From Heather Cox Richardson yesterday, on the long judicial coup run by the cunning, privileged owners of the activist extremist party that is now calling itself MAGA (see, also John Birch Society):

In 1986, when it was clear that most Americans did not support the policies put in place by the Reagan Republicans, the Reagan appointees at the Justice Department broke tradition to ensure that candidates for judgeships shared their partisanship. Their goal, said the president’s attorney general, Ed Meese, was to “institutionalize the Reagan revolution so it can’t be set aside no matter what happens in future presidential elections.” 

That principle held going forward. Federal judgeships depend on Senate confirmation, and when McConnell became Senate minority leader in 2007, he worked to make sure Democrats could not put their own appointees onto the bench. He held up so many of President Barack Obama’s nominees for federal judgeships that in 2013 Senate majority leader Harry Reid (D-NV) prohibited filibusters on certain judicial nominees.

McConnell also made it clear that he would do everything he could to make sure that Democrats could not pass laws, weaponizing the filibuster so that nothing could become law without 60 votes in the Senate. . .

She then details McConnell’s right-wing judiciary appointment mission, and how he removed the filibuster for Supreme Court justices, when the time was right, to get a couple of 50% supported nominees on to the court, after denying Obama his constitutional right to nominate a replacement for Antonin Scalia eight months before the 2016 election.

. . . Throughout his tenure as Senate majority leader, McConnell made judicial confirmations a top priority, churning through nominations even when the coronavirus pandemic shut everything else down. Right-wing plaintiffs are now seeking out those judges, like Matthew Kacsmaryk of Texas, to decide in their favor. Kacsmaryk challenged the FDA’s approval of the drug mifepristone, which can be used in abortions, thus threatening to ban it nationwide.

Meanwhile, at the Supreme Court, Trump appointees are joining with right-wing justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito to overturn precedents established long ago, including the right to abortion. 

source

Don’t forget America’s most partisan balls and strikes umpire John “Corporations get to say ‘go fuck yourself'” Roberts. How does this smiling corporate shill, who schemes behind the scenes, votes in every key case with the right-wing fraternal order of the Federalist Society block, and has authored some of its most infamous decisions, get a pass from even someone as brilliant as Heather? How is he, the man who, although he didn’t vote with the other four to kill Roe v. Wade, gleefully signed on to nullify the power of federal regulators, keep an insurrectionist on the ballot in Colorado and immunize criminal acts committed by a criminal president, among other MAGA endorsed rulings, still seen as somehow “moderate” or an “institutionalist”?

Look no further than his infamous decision in Shelby County v. Holder when he ruled that enforcement of the Voting Rights Act, which he acknowledged righted a historical injustice, was no longer necessary. His argument is bland and pristine: Congress relied on forty year old data when they reauthorized it, so me and four Federalist Society diehards are undoing their uninformed, undemocratic activism. True, except that he was lying about the forty year old data, as it turns out. As I wrote when I read the decision:

Only when you read Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s dissent (another magnificent piece of clear, precise legal and moral logic) do you realize the audacity of the Roberts majority’s legal sleight of hand. You learn that the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act was passed, after 21 hearings and 15,000 pages of evidence of ongoing discrimination in the states under preclearance, by a vote of 390-33 in the House and, after further debate, 98 to 0 in the Senate. Reading the John Roberts decision you’d have no reason to suspect that President George W. Bush signed the reauthorization into law a week later, as Ginsburg writes:

recognizing the need for “further work . . . in the fight against injustice,” and calling the reauthorization “an example of our continued commitment to a united America where every person is valued and treated with dignity and respect.” 

Nah, says John Roberts, we’re going back to that golden time when the wealthy land owners, the ancestors of our greatest billionaire donors and close friends, made all the decisions for the USA.  Dignity and respect, after all, are just words, and ridiculous ones when applied to those who deserve neither. Strike three, bitches.

I began writing this yesterday, and today the Gray Lady herself chimes in on Roberts. Here’s how he teed up the question posed by the Roberts court in Trump v. US:

The justices instructed lawyers from both sides to address a broad question: “whether and if so to what extent does a former president enjoy presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for conduct alleged to involve official acts during his tenure.”. . .

. . . On April 25, the justices and the lawyers in the case gathered for oral arguments in the courtroom, across the street from where the Jan. 6 rioting had taken place three years earlier. The clamor from the Capitol attack had been audible from inside the court building, former employees recalled in interviews, and afterward, security sharply increased and fences shielded the building.

During the arguments, however, several conservative justices said that they wanted to focus not on what had happened that day, but on broader legal questions.

“I’m not discussing the particular facts of this case,” Justice Alito told the courtroom.

“I’m not focused on the here and now of this case,” Justice Kavanaugh said. “I’m very concerned about the future.”

“We’re writing a rule for the ages,” Justice Gorsuch said.

For the Thousand Year Reich, no doubt.

Here’s a bit about Roberts’s fundamental dishonesty:

One footnote left scholars wondering whether former presidents could ever be prosecuted for taking bribes. An N.Y.U. professor was startled to discover that the opinion, which leaned heavily on Nixon v. Fitzgerald, a 1982 case on presidential immunity, truncated a quote from that decision, changing its meaning.

Verdict: Federalist Society stalwart and Nazi fuck.