Glenn Kirschner hits the nail on the head with this report about NY County DA Alvin Bragg’s refusal to release the resignation letters of his two top Trump prosecutors.
“A lack of governmental transparency is corrosive to public confidence in our institutions … we really need some signs of life from our law enforcement and our prosectorial agencies because the inaction coupled with a lack of transparency is demoralizing and disrespectful of We The People … we the voters.”
We all practice selective denial, it’s part of the human condition. One philosopher observed that the greatest miracle we humans perform is living every day as though we are not going to die. My denial often takes the form of procrastination, it is much easier to put off a difficult thing than to tackle it directly.
There are many forms of denial, including the most dramatic: in your fucking face denial. This is the denial some insist on when confronted with anything painful or something we fear would make us look insane, or make us ashamed. This is the kind denial we defend until death, bracing ourselves against all proofs that are advanced against it.
The denial of bullies, who make a public show of hiding their terror, is an infamous kind of denial. “I’m not afraid of you, asshole, I’ll fucking kill you and dance on your fucking face. Tommy, take care of this piece of shit.”
Denial, clearly, is a powerful force in politics, as we see Putin’s forces marching to kill as many as necessary in the name of deNazifying and demilitarizing a neighboring country Putin has long sought to annex. We see it in sickening excess in the party the Koch network built over decades transforming the conservative, big business friendly GOP into the openly authoritarian John Birch Society/Trump party.
Trumpism is the American triumph of denialism. Racism? Never fucking happened, N-word. Yeah, I fired a top advisor for lying, a man who repented and pleaded guilty to perjury, then I had DOJ move to have the charges dropped, pardoned him and had him in the bunker at the end as a top advisor urging me to impose martial law after I was illegally declared the loser in my reelection bid. So? My campaign worked closely with a foreign power who favored my first and second bids to be president, why wouldn’t I gloat that all the elements of criminal conspiracy with that power could not be proved, as I legally pardoned those who lied to hide the most incriminating evidence? A bunch of sick liars claim I extorted a promise from a foreign leader militarily threatened by my foreign supporter, and that I violated U.S. law in the process, but I insist the call was not only OK, it was “perfect”– I was entitled to gloat after complete and total acquittal by my party. Covid was a hoax designed by never-Trumpers to rig an election against the greatest American leader of all-time, no precautions needed, I assured a terrified nation that the so-called pandemic would miraculously end soon, which it did. Supposedly lost a rigged election by eight million clearly fraudulent votes, an election I not only won (no proof needed, denial is powerful shit), but won in a landslide. “We fight, and if you don’t fight like hell you’re not going to have a country left” was not urging anyone to march down Pennsylvania Avenue (“I love Pennsylvania Avenue”) to fight like hell, it was meant as a metaphor about freedom.
My mother was prone to flying into fits of anger at times. She’d go from perfectly calm to ready to smash your face in the space of a few seconds when she felt provoked. I got good at avoiding and defusing these flashes of anger toward the end of her life, but I always recognized this readiness to become enraged in my dear mother. I knew better than to bring it up directly, she’d sooner box my ears than admit she ever got angry. I saw this in others I’ve known over the years, ready to become enraged, stubbornly set in their righteous anger, and most of those folks would vigorously deny they had been angry at all, reminding me that I was the enraged asshole who keeps bringing up anger, not them.
The beauty of denial is that you can just deny it. “So you deny that you denied the charges against you, in spite of the videotape of you denying it?” “Yes, I vehemently deny it.” Case closed. As Trump pointed out after Muhammed bin Salman had Jamal Kashoggi strangled and dismembered, the billionaire medieval prince had strongly denied any involvement, what more needs to be said?
Joe Biden, president of the United States of Marketing, Polling, Branding and the Roulette Wheel of the Stock Market, will be delivering the State of the Union in a day or two. We hear, in the horse race handicapping mass media, that, in spite of doing an objectively decent job, in the face of united and often vicious obstruction, Biden’s popularity numbers are in the toilet, his favorables almost as unfavorable as Trump’s were at his peak of popularity. The solid 39% who love Trump will not be dissuaded in that love by any so-called facts presented by so-called smart people. The real reason they love him is the permission he gives them to rage about their grievances, no modern president ever let them embrace and cherish their anger, fear and hatreds as Trumpie has.
Biden’s unfavorable numbers situation is largely a creation of the mass media, as was Trump’s rise to “normalcy” and a brilliantly engineered Electoral College victory in an election he otherwise lost by three million votes. Biden can deliver the greatest State of the Union in history, the pundits and pollsters will have the final say about how it went, Americans will log-in to give a thumbs up or thumbs down, like the millions who decide the fate of contestants on American Idol or Dancing with the Stars, and the verdict will be in.
Here is the opening of Trumpie’s third State of the Union, delivered around the time he told Bob Woodward, on the record, that the coronavirus was a deadly, highly infectious disease, much stronger and more contagious than the worst strains of the flu. As he appointed various inexperienced, non-medically trained loyalist pinheads to lead the “fight” against the pandemic, he kept telling Americans that covid-19 was a commie hoax, part of a vast plot to defeat him in the upcoming rigged election and that it would be gone, magically, in a few months, if everyone would just ignore it. Look at these strong action words from the 2020 State of the Union (STRONG!):
the incredible results:
jobs are booming
incomes are soaring
poverty is plummeting
crime is falling
confidence is surging
and our country is now the international laughing stock I always said it was, chumps! We are thriving and highly respected again, and my member is over nine miles long, bitches.
Thankfully, and in spite of the agonizingly slow grinding of the creaky gears of justice for the rich and powerful, the Eternal Litigant’s days as leader of anything but the White Power movement are, and I say this with confidence even as I cringe with a small bit of nausea, most likely over. I say “most likely” to hedge my bets, in the event that a few years from now I am writing these squawkings from a gold-plated Trump De-education center. It is likely, when the NYS Attorney General is done, that the Trump Organization will go the way of Trump University, Trump Steaks, the Trump Taj Mahal, Trump Airlines, Trump vodka, Trump condoms, the Trump Charitable Foundation and all the rest of the artist of the deal’s scams.
The dish will be served very cold, and many thousands had to die unnecessary deaths to fully prepare the dish, but… you know what vengeful people say about the best way to serve that bitter dish. Couldn’t happen to a more deserving psychopath.
Meantime, hopefully Biden will deliver a State of the Union as strong as the action-word filled turd state of the union delivered by his compulsively lying predecessor. Used to be lying was a bad thing, I seem to recall. Anyway, I’ll be looking for the media spin on Biden’s speech, it is sure to annoy the fuck out of me.
It sometimes seems that we will never see an end to this long fought Koch-network financed hellscape we live in today (though we will). A desperate, destructive imbecile con man still has tens of millions who believe in him, and the pernicious, often ridiculous, myths that enable his unprincipled ilk. The January 6th committee is now looking at evidence of the angry squabbles behind the scenes among organizers of the Ellipse rally the morning of Trump’s riot. I love the ending of this article, though it is also quite horrible.
In the middle of the afternoon on Jan. 6, Pierson sent another set of texts to Meadows, according to records gathered by the committee.
“Note: I was able to keep the crazies off the stage,” she texted at 2:40 p.m. “Glad it fought it,” she added.
By that time, the mob of Trump supporters had violently descended on the Capitol.
Sarah Lazarus with some of today’s news
Putin on Friday urged the Ukrainian military to overthrow its own government and agree to a peace deal, calling Ukrainian political leaders a “gang of drug addicts and neo-Nazis.” (Your daily reminder that Zelensky is Jewish. Also, here’s the head of Odessa’s main synagogue tearfully fleeing Putin’s “de-Nazification” operation.) But that proposal seems like a wild misread of the situation: Russian troops have lost momentum in their push toward Kyiv, according to a senior Pentagon official, because Ukrainian forces put up a much fiercer fight than Russia had anticipated.
https://mailchi.mp/crooked/2-25-22
Uncanny, really, the guy who worked seven years getting Putin’s guy elected president of Ukraine, then, working for free, got Trump past the RNC, while making introductions between Trump’s people and Putin’s people, then leaving the campaign when it looked like he was colluding with Russia, which he was, as Little Marco’s committe documented. Paul Manafort never gets the credit he deserves for all this, he has had a huge hand in shaping world events. Thank you, Paul!
Arendt’s observation that Adolf Eichmann, rather than being an inhuman monster, was actually an ordinary man of at best average intelligence who believed the aberrant culture of Nazi Germany was completely normal and behaved accordingly, was regarded as radical, even heretical, in 1964. Events have proved her thesis sickeningly correct, (see, for example, Jared Kushner.) From the introduction of her masterpiece Eichmann in Jerusalem.:
Evil need not be committed only by demonic monsters but, with diastrous effect, by morons and imbeciles as well, especially if, as we see in our own day, their deeds are sanctioned by religious authority.
And here it is in the beautiful reading of Wanda McCaddon:
I don’t see why he would, which is to say, of course, I don’t see why he wouldn’t. In fact he did, as the National Archives has confirmed. What could go wrong with a transactional, money hungry, deeply in debt, beleagured, compulsive liar having a trove of top-secret national security information for over a year in his private villa? What could go wrong?
Colbert I. King lays out the answers in a piece he calls What worries me most about the classified information discovered at Mar-a-Lago (link below).
Vladimir Putin launches a full scale military assault, on three fronts, a blitzkrieg, if you will, to “liberate” the people of Ukraine from an illegal “junta” that “seized control” after ousting Putin’s guy Yanukovych, the Russian oligarch-backed brute Paul Manafort spent years grooming to be Putin’s man in Ukraine.
Putin has announced plans to “de-Nazify” Ukraine, since the little Ukrainian Jew who was elected president in 2019 only got 73% of the votes cast in an election as corrupt, according to Putin, as the one that elected Joe Biden in 2020. Talk about yer Kremlin firehose of falsehood.
It’s tempting to to tell Putin “de-Nazify yourself first, motherfucker.“
gratuitousblahg 