As the Times op-ed editor ended his piece defending publishing the satire:
Larry David, in a provocation of his own, is arguing that during a single dinner or a private meeting, anyone can be human, and it means nothing in the end about what that person is capable of.
I love that while MAGA Pete Hegseth was standing in front of his kids angrily defending himself, (right sideburn down past the bottom of his ear, the other cut short), for at best sloppiness with national security (under normal circumstances violations of the Espionage Act) he had a moment of real human emotion. Listen to how his voice goes up after he delivers the word “disgruntled” to describe his three top advisors that he fired and blamed for being “leakers”. He sings those words in a high-pitched, childish tone, wonderful to hear from our Christian white nationalist Secretary of Defense. If you’re Putin, that is.
I understand now why my sister, as a girl, was always terrified of “scary clowns.”
God’s will, baby, can’t argue with that.
This DOJ attorney, Erez Reuveni, was placed on leave by Trump’s DOJ and then summarily fired for being candid to a judge in a federal court. His only struggle, as an officer of the court, was trying not to lie or be evasive in response to the judge’s questions. Reading it most charitably to ABC, the DOJ did struggle in Maryland migrant case, though Reuveni did not.
Or as the New York Times told it at the time:
Career lawyers representing the government have a long tradition of arguing for the goals of Republican or Democratic administrations, regardless of their personal views. What is different now, they say, is that they increasingly feel trapped between President Trump’s partisan political appointees, who insist on a maximalist approach, and judges who demand comprehensible answers to basic questions.
The most vivid example of this squeeze came on Saturday when one of the department’s senior immigration lawyers, Erez Reuveni, was suspended indefinitely after speaking candidly about the administration’s mistaken deportation of a Maryland man to a notorious megaprison in El Salvador. . .
. . . “Good clients listen to their lawyers,” the judge, Paula Xinis, said.
Instead, the client punished its lawyer. In a letter on Saturday, Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, said Mr. Reuveni had failed to follow orders and instead committed “conduct prejudicial to your client.”
A second senior immigration lawyer involved in the Abrego Garcia case, August Flentje, was also placed on administrative leave for his failure “to supervise a subordinate,” according to two officials familiar with the move.
But corporate media like ABC (who already wrote a fat check to Trump to settle a frivolous lawsuit the president brought against them for a truthful on air statement by one of their talking heads), you know they have to be so careful, because access and frivolous lawsuits and extortion and shakedowns and threatened shutdowns and loss of license, and baseless defamation claims, the threat of censorship and the demand to obey an advance and loss of sponsorships.
Falling into corporate disfavor by alienating the powerful, and vengeful, is suicidal behavior for a corporation. So you write the headline that frames it in the best light for the guy you just wrote the multimillion dollar check to Trump’s “library” to avoid a lawsuit you could have easily had dismissed. Hence: THE DOJ LAWYER WHO REFUSED TO LIE TO OR STONEWALL THE JUDGE STRUGGLED IN COURT.
It is a terrible thing to be a lawyer for a crazed, antisocial serial criminal with no impulse control who is also a compulsive liar. In a court of law, where rules, facts introduced as evidence and actual laws applied to those facts decide the merits of the case, it is difficult to legally defend someone who keeps changing their lying arguments and continually implicates themselves and their accomplices with careless, incriminating public statements. If the criminal defendant is a braggart who cannot stop publicly taking credit for things that are flagrantly illegal, your nightmare as a lawyer gets worse still.
Here in the USA, the Constitution is the source of all law binding the federal government, and through the application of the Fourteenth Amendment, every state government as well. No government entity in the United States may deprive a person of life, liberty or property without a notice of its intent to do so and a hearing at which the accused may be heard. This is called due process, the requirement of legal notice and an opportunity to be heard before any punishment is imposed.
The process you are due, as someone in the United States legally (or illegally, for that matter) is — you must be charged with a crime and then given the opportunity to be heard by a judge before you can be imprisoned, fined, have your property seized, be deported, etc.
The president had his myrmidons round up a few hundred seemingly random Hispanics, shave their heads, put them into orange jumpsuits and chains. They then staged a photo op, marching these supposedly dangerous criminals onto a plane to be flown to a notorious penal colony-style prison in El Salvador. They staged a photo op on the other end, of these men deported without due process, or any process at all, actually, being marched off to the overcrowded supermax “terrorist” prison in El Salvador.
The family of one of these men, Abrego Garcia, a legal resident married to an American citizen, raising an autistic five-old child as well as two kids from his wife’s previous relationship, made an emergency motion in federal court to have him returned to the United States. According to the testimony, Garcia has been, as most poor immigrants are, a model citizen, with protected status here because of credible threats of violence and death by gangs in El Salvador.
You may be familiar with the self-contradicting piece of doggerel offered by the Trump administration in federal court to justify its actions, what I call the Nazi line about this case. Call it the MAGA line if you like, but read a few histories of Mr. Hitler’s Germany and you will see no difference in technique. Garcia was deported due to “administrative error” the administration admits, yet, Trump’s DOJ and all of his spokesmen and surrogates insist Garcia is also a member of the violent MS-13 gang.
Important thing to remember, MAGA arguments, like Nazi arguments, do not need to make any sense in the conventional sense of the word sense. Picture the poor bastard lawyer who’s got to make this ridiculous clerical error/ but still terrorist, argument. He’s got to argue this in front of a judge not disposed to ignore the plain text of the US Constitution in order to approve clearly illegal actions by a flagrantly lawless government of lackeys serving a vengeful and ignorant madman.
Check out what he is forced to say, this poor bastard Trump DOJ lawyer. When I read this out loud to Seedj she said, “he’s not going to be in that job very long .” I have to give this man props for his candor.
Surprisingly, the Justice Department lawyer representing the government in this case said that even he wasn’t provided evidence.
“I am also frustrated that I have no answer for you on a lot of these questions,” said Erez Reuveni, an assistant director in the Justice Department’s Office of Immigration Litigation. “The government made a choice here to produce no evidence.”
At one point, Xinis asked to see a 2019 immigration warrant for Abrego Garcia, to which Reuveni replied, “I do not have that order. It is not in the record.”
Reuveni said he has also asked his government clients why they couldn’t return Abrego Garcia to the U.S.
“When this case landed on my desk, I asked my clients that very question. I have not received to date an answer that I find satisfactory,” Reuveni said, and even asked Xinis before her ruling whether he could have 24 hours to persuade administration officials to return Abrego Garcia to the U.S. without a further court ruling.
“I would ask the court to give us, the defendants, one more chance to do this,” Reuveni said. “That’s my recommendation to my client, but so far that hasn’t happened.”
Ultimately, the judge ruled against the Trump administration, which is not likely to go over well considering that the U.S. has a $6 million deal with El Salvador to accept prisoners, brokered by Secretary of State Marco Rubio. But at the very least, there’s hope that Abrego Garcia, a married father of a child with autism, can receive justice and return home.
It’s hard to overstate how stupid this painfully awkward “genius” Nazi psychopath (apartheid South Africa’s military service evading Elon Musk) actually is. I hate to kick an unstable, abusive, bullying, anti-worker, “anti-woke,” antisocial warrior while he’s crying, but why not? I may be suffering from PDS, Psychopath Derangement Syndrome, but, if I’m not mistaken, these two shorts showcase this one’s particular, eh, genius, as well as his charming speech impediment:
Below, if you have the stomach for it, is a nice, weepy illustration of how brittle the myth is that obscene wealth makes someone a “winner”, unlike the tens of millions Americans who work multiple jobs every day to afford health care for their families. Winner or whiner, you be the judge, jury and executioner. What a despicable idiot punk… not surprising that his Nazi grandfather, Joshua Haldeman [1], relocated the family from Canada to South Africa a few generations ago, after grandpaw’s idol lost World War Two. Presumably 1950s Canada wasn’t bigoted enough for his refined taste in racial and eugenic matters.
[1] (from Wikipedia link above) During that time [1943-1948], Haldeman formally made statements discouraging the publicizing of the prevalent antisemitism in [his] party.[18] However, he also gave a speech defending a decision by a party newspaper to publish the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an antisemitic fabrication claiming an International Jewish conspiracy to rule the world. In his speech, Haldeman said “that the plan as outlined in these protocols has been rapidly unfolding in the period of observation of this generation.”[1] He would later claim apartheid South Africa was leading “White Christian Civilization” against the “International Conspiracy” of Jewish bankers and the “hordes of Coloured people” he claimed they controlled.[1] . . .
. . . Weeks after the Sharpeville massacre on 21 March 1960, Haldeman self-published The International Conspiracy to Establish a World Dictatorship and the Menace to South Africa, a 42-page response to the massacre. The United Nations passed Resolution 134, the body’s first official condemnation of apartheid and the beginning of decades of diplomatic isolation. Later Haldeman self-published a second book alleging international conspiracies: The International Conspiracy in Health targeted fluoridation, vaccinations, and health insurance.[1][22]
Marks [former top vaccine regulator, Dr. Peter Marks, who submitted his resignation today after being given the choice to resign or be fired] said that although he was willing to work with Kennedy on his plan to review vaccine safety, “it has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the Secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies.”
And truthfully, what psychopath could possibly desire less than that?
There is literally no limit to how stupid, vicious and incompetent psychopaths like father of 13 (all by IVF) Musk, his front man DJT and their young, unprincipled anti-government hackers (on the payroll of the government) are. I went on to the Social Security website to download my 1099. In order to log in I needed an email sent to me with a security code. Here’s the email that came from ssa.gov:
Google says: you can’t trust a message from Social Security, proceed with caution, red flag, red flag!
Apparently you can pick up one of these MAGA hats in Greenland or Canada. God bless these United Shayyssssh.
I’m going to take a break from thinking about my vexing personal situation, worries about a suddenly intermittent ability to pass bloody urine since an unnecessary urethral surgery done by a master salesman so confident he felt no need to do a single pre-surgical test, to muse a bit about another dangerous psychopath everyone in the world knows, and a good percentage of the world hates.
Those who hate him, or course, suffer from a special mental illness his handlers have cooked up (a regurgitated version of [Dubya] Bush Derangement Syndrome from the pre-Obama era), so we can, fairly and honestly, consider him universally loved, perhaps even intergalactically so.
(Why should I be required to show more courage than Columbia University, ABC, Disney, Chuck Schumer, bumbling numbskull John Fetterman, the Republican-led Congress, various law firms the president has threatened? Only one reason, actually: not to obey a wannabe American Hitler and his stinking horde in advance, fighting fascism fucking 101, brothers and sisters. I know well how many of the dead the original Hitler caused to be slaughtered (full disclosure, I may have an ax to grind, dozens in my family were killed by Elon’s and Don’s Herr H.), his one small fault now reduced by many to merely hating Jews a little bit (and who doesn’t? [1]), though the well-documented history of his impressive mass murder score is being erased, possibly by Musk employee Big Balls himself, as I tap this keyboard)
Anyway, sorry for the distraction. I was going to show you a picture, which I display under the for now robust protections of free expression provided by the First Amendment, which may soon be banned, even criminalized as “domestic terrorism” by Elon “Free Speech” Musk, enemy of unelected bureaucrats, and Pam “Too Corrupt to Serve in Trump’s first term” Bondi. Here you go:
Now these two photos of the same man are equally handsome, a fair minded person might say. One wears makeup, had painful scalp reduction surgery (which caused him to violently assault his first wife, who’d suggested the plastic surgeon who left him in agony) and spends twice the average worker’s annual income every year in hair dressing to make himself look tall and tan and young and lovely as the Girl From Ipanema. The other, non-cosmetically enhanced head merely reflects the results of 78, going on 79, years of life’s inevitable changes.
We live in a culture of illusion/deception by advertising, with a focus on youthful beauty, and Trumpie is touted as a genius because he has played to this illusion/deception “like nobody’s ever seen.” Leave aside the well-known fact that the man is a compulsive liar. There are other ways to refer to someone who constantly spouts falsehoods (see — NY Times, Washington Post, LA Times, CBS, NBC, ABC, FOX, Völkischer Beobachter). In the law there is a distinction between “puffery” — making exaggerated claims of one’s own power to intimidate an adversary that do not cross the line into outright lies — and making false statements under oath or as an officer of the court (all lawyers who appear before judges are considered officers of the court) which are punishable as perjury. I apologize, insincerely, for this perverse insistence on drawing logical and semantic lines in the sewage we are all ankle deep in during Musk/Trump 2.0 Triumph of Wanton Irrationality Crusade.
The entire billionaire funded reactionary right-wing project of the last several decades, now in full stinking flower, has been to destroy meaning, to nullify rationality itself. Our current age of irrationality makes actual dialogue or negotiation between political opponents impossible since an irrational argument, asserted loudly and repeatedly, is just as good, for purposes of swaying public opinion, as a detailed, fact-based one that logically and completely refutes the other based on a body of what was once called incontrovertible evidence. Today, these irrational monsters controvert and crowds cheer, it’s not a problem at all.
This “the only the reality is what we say it is” leaves only constant warfare between hated enemies, rather than the sometimes contentious policy debates integral to a functioning democracy. Nazis don’t want democracy, they want Nazism, duh. You are either a woke snowflake who hates everything the rightful oligarchs of America stand for, OR, a courageous and fearless patriot who wants to turn America back to the paradise it was before insane deep state regulations destroyed the ability of Robber Barons to make, and keep, unregulatable wealth and operate as they saw fit, for the benefit of themselves and their poorly paid virtual slaves alike.
I was hoping for something a bit more profound today, and frankly I’ve disappointed myself. It’s hard to get out of your own feelings about being injured, physically and psychically, by a master salesman psychopath by writing about another one we are all sickeningly familiar with, or in love with his carefully manufactured false image (those who do not suffer from the widespread plague of TDS). His image again, please:
This thin-skinned stable genius strongman was recently bitterly crying over an official portrait of his, hung somewhere in 2019, that shows him looking a bit fat, bloated, an unhealthy color more like the unretouched one above than the carefully beautiful John Boehner-toned one he projects every day (he bragged that he was prettier than Kamala Harris, you be the judge, carefully…). The portrait’s painter, according to the strongest, most secure man in the free world, is a hack who is losing her skills, a bitch, probably an abortionist, sick, dangerous, a deranged enemy lunatic pet-eating sickie who deliberately tried to humiliate the world’s most handsome man after making Obama look so much more handsome than she made him look. Or, perhaps she’s just a portraitist who faithfully painted what she saw.
What do I know? The best I can do is something like this self-pitying self portrait as a partially crucified Picasso with pissbag and stylish, crucifix-coordinated shorts.
[1] By the way, according to Hannah Arendt’s short, encyclopedic primer on the original Nazis, Eichmann in Jerusalem (Penguin edition, 2006, p. 133), Hitler himself had a list of 340 Jews on his personal “don’t touch Moishe” list.
Once you realize a person is prone to lying, trust is often a self-destructive option. Until you see this pattern of untruthfulness clearly, the question of trusting or not trusting can be tricky. I think humans want to trust the people around them, this appears to be a default setting. We homo sapiens are a communal, if also often communally irrational, species, after all, and community is based on trust.
When you’re a helpless infant you have no choice but to trust the people taking care of you. This trust is rewarded if you’re nurtured with care. Trust can be shattered forever if you learn you’ve been continually pissed on by your caretakers and told to shut up and stop whining about a little rain falling on your head. Most of us have upbringings that fall somewhere in between. Knowing when to trust and when not to trust is often only learned by hard experience. We put our trust in somebody, in their expertise, and sometimes that trust is revealed to have been misguided. The question: how do we know in advance that we can trust someone?
We tend to trust people, I suppose I generalize from my own habit, who are relaxed, friendly, show a sense of humor, make the proper sympathetic facial expressions, and react reassuringly, when you express concerns. The obvious problem is that these are all the behaviors of the best conmen and almost all manipulators and compulsive liars.
I’m thinking about this because I had a consultation with a friendly, reassuring, good humored and very likeable urologist back in August. We left the office very impressed with him. He assured me that during the tests I was going to have two weeks later I’d be under comfortable “conscious sedation”. I was relieved to hear that since having devices shoved into your penis is not always comfortable, and is usually done without any palliative measures. The standard line is that most patients tolerate it. You wince a bit, maybe groan, at the insertion, and the rest is fairly tolerable. But I was glad to know I’d be sedated, the better to wince less, and maybe not have to grunt.
When I arrived for the tests, and asked about the conscious sedation, his nurse expressed frustration that he always tells his patients they will receive conscious sedation when his office NEVER gives conscious sedation, does not even have tranquilizers they can give patients. She said he probably thinks it makes his patients more relaxed. I didn’t need to convince her that learning, at the moment of your test, that the doctor lied to you is the opposite of relaxing. I endured a ninety minute ordeal with this gentle, determined nurse, as she tried, unsuccessfully to insert catheters into my urethra to drain my bladder for the test.
The doctor came in, sweaty and smiling, and asked how I was doing. I told him I was wondering what happened to my conscious sedation. He had a fit, denying he’d ever said that, essentially calling me a fucking liar. In that moment I knew I was done with this asshole, and managed to remain the adult in the room. I quickly calmed the angry baby down and got him back to business. He told me he wouldn’t do further tests, telling me my urethra was already irritated enough for one day.
Then he wrote a detailed report, which I got a copy of and which was sent to all of my doctors, not mentioning the unsuccessful catheterization, but stating “patient tolerated procedure well.” It then gave detailed findings of two tests this motherfucker never did. He billed Medicare for them, and I got bills and a statement from Medicare confirming the charges and what they paid. Medicare did not seem concerned about the fraud, it was virtually impossible to report it, even as determined as I was to.
My next urologist was also affable, smiling, quite chill, with a sense of humor and all the other indicators of a nice guy you could trust. He was openly horrified by the doctor’s false report I presented to him and suggested I contact HR at the place his unethical colleague worked. (No doctor is going to suggest a disciplinary complaint to the state licensing board). He did no tests, described a non-invasive surgery that should correct my urinary problem, I postponed the procedure once to have a fuller discussion of it. He gave me a detailed theory for why this procedure was better than the standard alternative, which I’d had years earlier, to great life changing effect. I had the procedure Thursday and left the hospital with a catheter and piss bag on my leg, as is common after this kind of surgery.
There was a complication when I removed the catheter the next day as instructed. I was unable to urinate at all. After 4 hours with a full bladder, and the constant urge to urinate, I wound up in the ER where I was “fast tracked” and it only took another 3 hours to have the painful urgency to piss out 600 ml of urine relieved by a new catheter.
I was sore, irritated and in need of advice afterwards and called the number the urologist had smilingly touted as a 24/7 doctor on call, no worries. I left increasingly agitated messages. Five messages and five hours later, at 2:45 a.m., I got a call from a bot, instructing me to go to an ER and have the ER doctor contact their on-call doctor.
I called again when I woke up and got a fairly quick call back from the surgeon himself. He sounded indignant to have been defamed the way I’d spoken of him in my increasingly agitated messages. He told me I had a poor recollection of our detailed conversations prior to the surgery. I was in a pissing contest with a skunk, only my piss was dribbling slowly into a leg bag. I asked him why he hadn’t done any pre-surgical tests before doing what seems, at the moment, and in light of what he told me after an unnecessary surgery. He was able to see with the scope that, contrary to his prior test-free opinion, there was no scarring from the previous procedure and that I’d likely need the original procedure repeated soon in any case. ) He told me he had the notes of recent tests from my previous urologist, the tissue of lies he had attached to my file in the hospital. He made numerous other excuses and told me how busy he was doing Saturday surgeries at another hospital. I sensed there was not a trace of his winning smile on his face as he defended himself and his perfect recollection.
So, quite naturally, as an irritating drip of urine intermittently leaks through the painfully re-inserted catheter into the leg bag, I am musing about trust, when to trust, who to trust, if you can ever trust someone who is employed by a demanding bottom-line driven psychopath, which is what every corporation is. After all, this guy is the director of his clinic, part of a chain across the US, the largest corporate provider of high quality, infallible, humane, patient-centered urologic care. You can read all about it on their fucking website.
Or just listen to their compassionate on-call doctor, who phones you personally at 2:48 a.m., a mere five hours after your first of five distress calls.
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