The war over what is real is constantly being fought by partisan advertisers and influencers of all stripes.On one level it is what all of us do whenever we try to persuade someone to see things from our point of view. On the political level, it gets kind of crude sometimes.
For example, there are always a few clearly marked “Blacks for Trump” posers seated directly behind the great orange man as he orates, proving, of course, that the angry demagogue is no racist. To hammer this home it is good to have messaging like this out there, I suppose, inserted into the unsuspecting viewer’s YouTube suggestions.
It strikes me as highly unlikely that Biden ever foolishly claimed that Trump, though openly racist, was our first racist president. Most of the early presidents were slaveholders, more than one more recent president was in open sympathy with the Ku Klux Klan. Biden surely knows this, but why let the fact that he never said it stand in the way of making a hateful meme about him?It’s all about owning him, like Thomas Jefferson owned Sally Hemings.
So, since it is a war, fire must be strategically returned. I thought this was a pretty good one, with a big plus that it is hard to actually dispute based on the facts.
Americans, as a people, are not super interested in history, the past is old, tired, boring, we love updates, the latest, new and improved. Because we pay so little attention to events of the past, and history is often so superficially taught, we live through familiar echoes of it all the time that many are unaware ever happened in the human experience. The current rise of angry, armed, violence-threatening contrarians who shout “NO, Hell NO!” in unison, no matter what the underlying question is (if the question is posed by a perceived enemy) is regularly repeated, worldwide, throughout history. If you hate Jews, and a Jewish epidemiologist urges you to take precautions against a highly infectious and deadly disease, this mob has a ready answer, a regional variation on “fuck you, Jew. How about a noose for the good doctor? What say ye, fellas?” The same goes for anybody who contradicts the “populist” leader’s message.
We have these Hallmark greeting card style themed history months here, a sad American attempt to provide an inkling of historical perspective,a nod towards correcting historical injustices. February is now Black History Month, and even though it has largely been preempted this year by the racist shenanigans of Trump’s base, as the legal hot water gets hotter for the daring old man in the yellow hair, we get some programming and mass media coverage of overlooked Black achievements in American history, as well as infamous stories of long ago racist atrocities we have somehow never been told. There is Women’s History Month, a month devoted to the progress of a crucial half of the human species. You can add Immigrants History Month, LGBTQ History Month, Workers’ History Month, Corporate History Month (these vampires are people too, just like you and me, ask John Roberts), Billionaires’ History Month, etc. Every interest group and demographic can get a slice of a month for the promotion of their history (though some, including Women and Blacks, have more of a right to it than most, very important struggles, stories and lessons that everyone should know).
But here’s my idea: History Month. Every day during that month another celebrity (from across the political spectrum, such as it is here) would go on prime time TV (repeated on demand and forever on the internet) and deliver a short, snappy factual account of some illuminating aspect of American or world history. Teachers would discuss it the next day in class. It would increase interest in history, and awareness of its lessons, if done right. Why not?
Though there are radically different “historical” views of events (January 6th — riot or peaceful protest) there are not radically different facts, there is documentary evidence on which a more or lessreliable story can be based. You have Putin’s old KGB Firehose of Falsehood, employed by Sloppy Steve Bannon and the regular and “alt” right, which deliberately overwhelms a society with wild, distracting lies and crazy conspiracies — the only antidote to that high pressure hose of diarrhea is clarity, one subject at a time, laid out clearly and calmly.
I see the objections, we are too divided, extremists have seized control of history, everything is weaponized, the firehouse is too powerful, propaganda is too sophisticated, even when it seems incredibly stupid. These are all reasons we need a history month, the restoration of the Fairness Doctrine (abolished by Reagan in his pursuit of Morning in America and Making America Great Again) and a renewed focus on public discourse. Many in their silos will tune out this attempt to agree on the basic cause and effect of history, but many others will learn and begin to consider things they never thought about. When people know the actual choices they face in a democracy, based on what happened the last time these ideas were tried, things tend to be more intelligently decided. My two cents, as someone with an abiding interest in the past — and the future.
Clear legal analysis from Jennifer Rubin in a recent Washington Post, laying out the reasons Judge Amit Mehta’s recent ruling against the strained claims of our obsessive ex-president is bad news for 45. Mehta ruled that Trump is not immune from a lawsuit under the 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act, which provides punishment for conspiracy to deprive parties of their Fourteenth Amendment rights. Here that violation was done by intimidating officials and preventing them from carrying out their legal duties. The op ed,Trump’s legal problems are about to get much worse, is well worth a read.
Of the angry ex-president’s argument that he is absolutely immune from the lawsuit since he was acting in his official capacity as president when he whipped up an angry mobhe’d assembled, Judge Mehta set out several ways the rally and riot were beyond the scope of presidential duties:
[Trump] repeatedly tweeted false claims of election fraud and corruption, contacted state and local officials to overturn election results, and urged the Vice President to send Electoral ballots back for recertification. The President communicated directly with his supporters, inviting them to Washington, D.C., to a rally on January 6, the day of the Certification, telling them it would be “wild.” He directly participated in the rally’s planning, and his campaign funded the rally with millions of dollars. At the rally itself, the President gave a rousing speech in which he repeated the false narrative of a stolen election. The crowd responded by chanting and screaming, “Storm the Capitol,” “Invade the Capitol,” “Take the Capitol right now,” and “Fight for Trump.” Still, the President ended his speech by telling the crowd that “we fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” Almost immediately after these words, he called on rally-goers to march to the Capitol to give “pride and boldness” to reluctant lawmakers “to take back our country.” Importantly, it was the President and his campaign’s idea to send thousands to the Capitol while the Certification was underway. It was not a planned part of the rally. In fact, the permit expressly stated that it did “not authorize a march from the Ellipse.” From these alleged facts, it is at least plausible to infer that, when he called on rally-goers to march to the Capitol, the President did so with the goal of disrupting lawmakers’ efforts to certify the Electoral College votes.
as to Trump’s First Amendment claim:
Having considered the President’s January 6 Rally Speech in its entirety and in context, the court concludes that the President’s statements that, “[W]e fight. We fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” and “[W]e’re going to try to and give [weak Republicans] the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country,” immediately before exhorting rally-goers to “walk down Pennsylvania Avenue,” are plausibly words of incitement not protected by the First Amendment. … It is reasonable to infer that the President would have known that some supporters viewed his invitation as a call to action …
So, when the President said to the crowd at the end of his remarks, “We fight. We fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” moments before instructing them to march to the Capitol, the President’s speech plausibly crossed the line into unprotected territory.
The list of the Orange Polyp’s crimes, even just since the end of the tempestuous four years of his Thousand Year Reich, is impressive. Because he’s done them publicly, and never been held accountable for any violation of law, he’s pushed back the line on what a president can “legally” do.
We easily forget that at one time a president publicly telling all subpoenaed witnesses into his misdeeds to just not show up, to defy legal subpoenas and fight them in court until the clock runs out, would have been grounds for obstruction of justice charges. The media hardly blinks when it is revealed that Trump took classified documents out of the White House (and destroyed many others during his tumultuous term) when he sulked off to Florida, something that would previously have been front-page news day after day, amid calls for a Special Prosecutor.
Recall that before his first impeachment he made it “normal” to intimidate a witness testifying in Congress (in an inquiry into what became his first impeachment) in real time, as she was testifying. “Marie Yavonovich is going to go through some things.” That was after Rudy, working with buddies Lev and Igor (both quietly being prosecuted, or perhaps already having taken pleas) orchestrated the corrupt outster of the sitting US Ambassador to Ukraine, a diplomat with impeccable credentials, amid threats on her life. They did this as part of a plan to get Ukrainian president Zelensky to announce a fake investigation into Biden’s son, pursuant to a perfect phone call to him. At orders of Trump, who really didn’t know anything about it, but Rudy had told him “Igor says this bitch has to go” and Trumpie gave his hyenas the word to smear Yavonovich and then he fired her. In the preceding couple of sentences alone there are probably several different felonies, foran ordinary president.
The delay in prosecuting Trump for anything (although the legal walls do seem to be closing in on America’s classiest former president) is frustrating, with all the crimes he appears to have committed just since he lost the election in 2020. The only reassuring legal take I heard was from former DOJ prosecutor Joyce Vance explaining how long it takes to build a racketeering case under RICO that can’t be undone on appeal. RICO allows prosecutors to show that a mob boss making seemingly innocuous statements like“things could get bad for her” is the same as an order to do bad things to her. It is apparently not hard to indict and convict under RICO, but, according to Vance, it’s also not hard for a team of smart lawyers to get a RICO conviction dismissed on a hundred technicalities. So maybe Merrick Garland really intends to bring an airtight RICO prosecution against MAGA man and his capos, in which case, we’re only about a year or two away from a big announcement. Hopefully Garland won’t be announcing it from the glitzy new Trump Auschwitz.
As Lyin’ Ted snarled at the mild-mannered Garland in a Senate hearing: what’s the country coming to when you can’t even give an innocent, Constitutionally protected Nazi salute to a bunch of liberal kikes and woke n-words at a School Board meeting?
The major mass media (the organized, lockstep right’s phantom “liberal” corporate media) has been instrumental in bringing our democracy to the doorstep of open, proud, defiant, vengeful fascism. Sometimes it’s done in-your-face, but most of the time it’s subtle, framing, omitting, pretending objectivity, sometimes to the point of absurdity. Here are three headlines from the influential Washington Post:
Plays right into the narrative, Americans want the “center” and those who endorse programs that bring children out of poverty (thanks to Manchinema four million young beneficiaries of the Child Tax Credit immediately returned to poverty when they blocked the Democratic Build Back Better bill) and fund long overdue measures to protect us all from devastating climate catastrophe — those are far LEFT ideas that, according to the moderate centrist narrative (both Manchin and Synema — “moderate centrists”), a radical minority is trying to ram down our throats, a la Amy Coney Barrett. OK, fine, Jeff Bezos owns the newspaper, after all.
Heh, there we go. The GOP and Manchinema blocked DEBATE (filibuster doesn’t just block a vote, it cuts off all public debate in the Senate) on increased IRS enforcement funding to bring the billions of dollars tax cheats steal every year (mostly wealthy ones — poor ones always pay, with interest and massive penalties) back into the public fisc. The larger goal of the right is to de-fund and cripple the administrative state, to “shrink government small enough to drown in a bathtub.” They’ve been working hard at it for decades. The sole remaining plank of the GOP platform (outside of whatever the big Orange Guy wants) is lowering tax for the wealthiest among us, because, you know, fair is fair. At midnight during the last session of the Bush-Cheney Congress they passed a law making the US Postal Service fund retirement benefits for all employees, even those employees not yet born. It immediately put our public mail service billions in debt. The results: predictable. The moral: private corporations rule and the government is the problem to be solved. Sure, that’s what democracy is all about, ask impartial corporate lawyer John Roberts.
How does this happen, in a chamber where McConnell got rid of the filibuster to ram through illegitimate Supreme Court picks? Fuck if I know, but again, the headline suggests that Democrats are fearful cucks who cannot even use their majority to fill important government vacancies, like the Fed. Again, who is controlling the narrative here?
And two from the New York Times. The first is from an article on the rising pedestrian death toll from drivers speeding, running lights and stop signs. The only drivers ever pulled over by police for such infractions seem to be drivers of color who have a tail light that’s out, and we only hear about these traffic stops when they turn deadly, usually for the people in the stopped car. The authors and Times editors are apparently unaware that the massive disruption of a once a century pandemic, with an insane would-be American strongman whipping up citizen outrage, has increased anxiety, anger and insanity among many of us. A walk in this quiet neighborhood often features cars racing on side streets, running stop signs, traffic lights, roaring with seeming rage (have many drivers actually removed their cars’ mufflers?)
The Times takes it usual objective, highly intelligent tone, after describing how it is easier to be aggressive in a car than face to face. I have to say, I love this sentence:
Then we have Susan Collins (R-Maine), the bipartisan defender of Trump (he learned his lesson after the first impeachment), and Boof Kavanaugh (he is actually much more moderate and less intemperate than he seemed when hissing and snarling about a dark money funded far-left partisan plot to ruin his life) penning an op ed for the Times that was a surprisingly well-written case for fixing the broken Electoral Count Act. In tandem with Judge Luttig’s recent op-ed (Luttig was the judge January 6 legal mastermind, and Fifth Amendment-citer John Eastman clerked for) these conservatives make a strong case for fixing the problematic law that Trump tried to drive a convoy of trucks through after losing the 2020 election.
Then we get the Susan Collins tell, a bit of inaccurate but precise-sounding (“relitigating”) language to describe the filibuster that cut off all discussion of restoring the Voting Rights Act that her party unanimously reauthorized in 2006, before the black guy became president, and then had the Supreme Court overrule the 98-0 Senate and a Republican president, because, well, a black guy had become president. The proposed laws were not litigated once (again, thanks to Manchinema, the greatest blue obstructionists money can buy), but, here’s pinhead Susan (and this one I can’t blame the Times for):
Follow this brief illustrated timeline, if you will. It starts with Michael Flynn, US General, retired, Trump’s first National Security Advisor. Trump fired him 22 days in for lying to Mike Pence about illegal contacts with Russia, lies he later repeated to the FBI, as he had previously done on his security clearance filings that neglected to mention he was on the payroll of Turkey and Russia. Trump asked James Comey to do him a favor and give this good guy a pass by not investigating him, Comey refused and Trump kicked his ass to the curb, leading to the Mueller Witch HUNT.
Stephen Miller, hateful troll, was one of very few Trump insiders who was there at the president’s side the entire four years of Trump’s Thousand Year Administration.
Bannon, Trump’s master tactician, was fired for getting too much attention for being “Trump’s brain”– the boss had already revealed that the way to be the smartest man in the room was to hire the best people, as long as they were dumber than you.
Bill Barr was an exception, being very smart, and something of a magician, he made the damning conclusions, and the many incriminating details, of the Mueller Report vanish into thin air. Amongother feats of legerdemain he also did hisdamnedest to orchestrate a lawyerly, shamelessly partisan withdrawal of Flynn’s guilty plea for perjury, before the Big Guy pardoned Flynn outright. In the end, Barr bailed as the roof was blowing off the booby hatch, and it was another Trump-appointee,
Jefferey Clark, who stepped up to take the reins and promote any lie Trump wanted on DOJ letterhead, to create pressure to throw out the votes in states Trump lost. Clark later had a few months of projectile diarrhea that made it impossible for him, for medical reasons, to appear beforethe House Select Committee on the Trump riot to invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
Rudy, one of Trump’s best buddies, who brought several of the post election Stop the Steal court cases that Trump lost, had previously traveled to Ukraine to meet Paul Manafort’s old friends among the Russian oligarch-connected Ukrainians, and with Lev and Igor, Mafia Rave and Fraud Guarantee, dig up some smut on Biden’s surviving son. His lawyers are currently negotiating the scope of his voluntary cooperation with the ongoing House witch hunt.
Convicted felon PaulManafort knew every corrupt official and oligarch in Ukraine and Russia from his years grooming the corrupt, Russian oligarch-backed Viktor Yanukovych to become president of Ukraine. As the GOP-chaired Senate Committee Report revealed, Manafort worked closely with Konstantin Kilimnik, Putin’s guy, during his time as Trump’s campaign manager. Roger “Ratfucker” Stone, another pardoned felon, worked closely with Oath Keepers now under indictment for seditious conspiracy, among other things they guarded his grotesque person on January 5th and 6th. The baseless Democrat [sic] witch hunt continues!
the third guy here, also pardoned by Trump, isJared Kushner’s criminal dad
Meanwhile this smiling John McEntee fellow was promoted from Trump’s bag man, body man, to Czar of loyalty to Trump, working closely with the wife of Clarence Thomas to root out insufficiently loyal Republicans throughout the West Wing and beyond.
In happier days, and for most of Trump’s term, he was well protected by the powerful, unscrupulous Senate majority leader, now, like so many others Trump feels have betrayed him, his enemy.
In the end, he was left with crackpot theories about the Twelfth Amendment and the Hail Mary of the “Green Bay Sweep” (and coordinated riot) to overturn the 2020 presidential election (oddly, all the other Republicans elected on the same ballots were immune to the massive, coordinated, bipartisan anti-Trump fraud), this guy invoked his Fifth Amendment right countless times and is fighting the release of thousands of possibly incriminating emails. Here’s the latest on him, from Heather Cox Richardson:
Lawyer John Eastman, who produced the infamous memo with a blueprint for Pence to overturn the election, has claimed that he cannot produce the documents the January 6th committee has subpoenaed because of attorney-client privilege. The judge overseeing the case has ordered him to document those attorney-client relationships by February 22.
Bill Barr left in place the stern-looking, arch conservative, Christian dominionist DOJ Special Counsel John Durham (who Trump praises as “Robert Durham”) to get to the corrupt oringes of the Mueller investigation total witch hunt. Durham has been at it longer than Mueller was (traveling with Barr to Italy, at one point, in search of smoking gun proof of the distractionary partisan witch hunt theory), and had found approximately zilch, though FOX and friends are running hard with the story of his single seeming revelation, a shaky theory about Hillary spying on Donald in the White House before he was even president (and they’re in a hurry to exploit this “bombshell,” ignored by the leftist mass media, before that indictment likely gets dismissed next week). Why this right wing fucknutis still on the “case” is one of the enduring mysteries of American politics.
Bannon was in the Willard Hotel war room on January 5th and 6th, back in the command center of Trump’s brain, with Rudy, pardoned felon Bernard Kerik, Fifth Amendment and shaky attorney-client privilege citer John Eastman and some of the other best people.
And Mike Flynn, the good guy who started the whole shit show (after leading chants of “Lock Her Up!” at the Republican National Convention back in the day), has not been restored to active service for the court martial the Q-Anon general so richly deserves (and which Glenn Kirschner made a strong case for). He’s out there exercising his First Amendment right to advocate martial law, the essential white Christianity of this exceptional nation, the truth of Q’s droppings, to talk absolute shit about whatever pops into his head.
Conservative operative and former federal judge J. Michael Luttig, one of the lawyers who advised Pence not to go along with Trump’s crackpot plan to overturn the 2020 presidential election, wrote a powerful piece about what Congress must do to close loopholes in the Electoral Count Act before Trumpists can drive a caravan of trucks through it in 2024. An excellent analysis of the law and the vividly demonstrated determination of the Clear and Present Danger to use any means necessary to aggrandize himself, get back into power and stay out of prison.
Luttig also wrote an op ed in the New York Times while “Bagpiper” Bill Barr was trying to dismiss Mike Flynn’s guilty plea to being a serial perjurer and a disgrace to his oath to the Constitution. Luttig defended Barr, and Flynn, and Judge Rao, author of the rabidly partisan pro-Trump decision (overturned on appeal) and everybody else connected to protecting the fearless leader and his loyalists.
He seems to have changed his tune a bit recently, in light of Trump’s increasingly unhinged lashing out at democracy itself, after inciting his January 6th riot. The other day Luttig expressed his changed view, quoted by Heather Cox Richardson:
Today, former judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit J. Michael Luttig, a Republican, said: “For the past six years, I have watched and listened in disgust that not one single leader of ours with the moral authority, the courage, and the will to stand up and say: ‘No, this is not who we are, this is not what America is, and it’s not what we want to be,’ has done so.”
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