Every few years the NY Times, without breaking character, cracks me up with their deadpan delivery. Here is the latest example, from their recent article on being sued by Donald Trump for the paper’s allegedly “deranged hatred” of Donald Trump. The distracting temper tantrum packaged as an incoherent $15,000,000,000 lawsuit was summarily dismissed by the judge for lack of an actual legal theory. Here’s the Grey Lady, from the day she was sued:
The complaint also took issue with the endorsement of Kamala Harris by the editorial board of The Times in September 2024, describing it as “deranged” and criticizing the editorial board’s arguments.
Mr. Trump has sued The Times on a previous occasion, without success.
In 2021, Mr. Trump sued the paper over a series of articles that investigated his finances and tax records. (Ms. Craig and Mr. Buettner were two of the reporters who wrote them.) The suit was dismissed in 2023 and Mr. Trump was ordered to pay The Times’s legal expenses.
In addition, in 2020, his re-election campaign sued for libel over an essay in the Opinion section titled “The Real Trump-Russia Quid Pro Quo.” The lawsuit was dismissed in 2021. . .
In an effort to prove “malice” against Mr. Trump, the lawsuit cited more than a dozen articles from The Times dating back to his first term in office that it claimed “maliciously and falsely portray him as dishonest, erode public trust in him and tear down his achievements.”
The lawsuit also claims that the defendants “baselessly hate President Trump in a deranged way.”
The lawsuit also claims that the defendants “baselessly hate President Trump in a deranged way.”
Indeed.
Hatred is fine, according to the Hater-in-Chief, unless you oppose, or even question, anything about him, in which case you are hating in a deranged way. Rare to get this level of clarity from the boss.
George Mason University, the home of the Antonin Scalia School of Law, for fuck’s sake, home base for the Heritage Foundation, with professorial chairs endowed by Charles Koch and friends. Black president, Dr. Gregory Washington, is being pressured by Trump’s minions to apologize for comments he made about the importance of diversity hiring in 2020 and 2021. You see, the Civil Rights Act was racist, according to the persecuted U.S. president (and his boiling “brain”, Jewish Nazi Stephen Miller), presumably because it failed to recognize that only rich white men can be true victims of vicious, systemic racism. You can’t make this shit up, as one of Trump’s supremely flexible appointees stated in chastising the school president in a recent official statement:
The Education Department’s assistant secretary for civil rights, Craig Trainor, upped the pressure in a statement last month, saying Dr. Washington “waged a university-wide campaign to implement unlawful D.E.I. policies that intentionally discriminate on the basis of race,” the statement said, adding, “You can’t make this up.”
Unfortunately, you can’t make this up. However, everywhere you look our low IQ, increasingly demented mad leader is making himself less and less useful to the billionaire tech fascists who put him into power. How do you like this headline?
First another reminder: there is absolutely no connection, beyond years of purely superficial, 100% transactional friendship between Donald Trump and convicted procurer of underaged “prostitutes” Jeffery “Hoax!” Epstein. Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Suspected drug smugglers, you get that? I think you’re a drug smuggler, you make me suspicious, I’m a very stable genius, I can kill you and everybody around you, who I also suspect is a drug smuggler. I’m Duterte! [1] I will kill you! This is a turn on Alan Dershowitz’s incoherent defense of the big guy at one of his impeachments (subsequently written into US law by the Koch Six): if the president truly believes he has a good reason to violate the law, he can’t be punished for that.
Note the NY Times characteristic Nazi-tolerant delicacy in framing this obscenity — the issue in their subhead is not, God forbid, that this is clearly the alarming claim of a dangerously unhinged, murderous, dictatorial psychopath. The last guy who did it is in front of the International Criminal Court. We, at the Grey Lady, note that it appears to be problematic to treat criminals (who have been convicted after a trial) as enemy combatants, although, admittedly, the power the Orange polyp claims is to treat suspected criminals (no trial, nothing but my suspicion and your death!) as wartime combatants — and summarily kill them, as he did to eleven people on a boat the other day.
We are living in the shit, boys and girls, and the NY Times is innocently helping. For every important article highlighting grotesque fascistic excess by this desperate regime, we get several mealy mouthed headlines like this, to keep things fair. To not piss off an obviously insane, revenge-twisted maniac to take some kind of profit crushing retaliatory action, one supposes.
[1] Mr Rodrigo Roa Duterte, born on 28 March 1945 and a national of the Republic of the Philippines. President of the Philippines, Mayor of Davao City, and allegedly the founder and head of the Davao Death Squad (‘DDS’), at the time of the relevant conduct.
Allegedly responsible for the crime against humanity of murder, committed on the territory of the Republic of the Philippines between 1 November 2011 and 16 March 2019 in the context of the ‘war on drugs’ campaign. . . On 12 March 2025, Mr Duterte was surrendered to the International Criminal Court after being arrested by the authorities of the Republic of the Philippines in accordance with the warrant of arrest.
Jair Bolsonaro, who managed, with the help of right wing judges, to have his popular opponent jailed for fake corruption charges right before former insurrectionist Bolsonaro was elected president of Brazil, (“lock him up! lock him up!”) lost his reelection bid after one term (to the man he locked up). Then, advised by Steve Bannon, he tried a January 6 style overthrow of the election results, and immediately (while still president) fled to the US for health reasons. He’s now on trial for his crimes against the constitution of Brazil. Courtesy of the Grey Lady:
He didn’t appear in court because of poor health, his defense team told reporters outside the courthouse. Ahead of the trial, one of his sons told a Brazilian news site Mr. Bolsonaro had been suffering from debilitating hiccups that the former president attributes to complications from a stabbing attack on the campaign trail in 2018.[1]
Trump’s “illegally” (subject to unsigned shadow docket order by the Federalist Six) imposed 75,000% tariff on Brazil when it stubbornly refused to halt the totally unfair persecution of democratically elected Hall of Fame hiccupper Jair Bolsonaro who had the presidency illegally stolen from him by communists and intellectuals in 2022 and didn’t do anything Trump and his people didn’t also do, literally, perfectly, legally, in the months prior to, and on, the Day of Love, January 6, 2021. Many people, billionaires and poor people alike, love dictators!
[1]
Mr. Bolsonaro, 70, has been under house arrest, wearing an ankle monitor, for weeks. Then, over the weekend, Brazilian authorities tightened security measures, placing police officers around his home amid worries that he may try to flee and possibly seek refuge at the U.S. Embassy near his home.
Prosecutors accuse Mr. Bolsonaro and seven members of his inner circle of overseeing a vast conspiracy to cling to power after his defeat at the polls in 2022, seeking to overturn the results, trying to enlist the military in their plot and drafting plans to poison Mr. Bolsonaro’s rival, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who is now Brazil’s president.
Mr. Bolsonaro and the other defendants face criminal charges, including the “violent abolition of the democratic rule of law” and “coup d’état.” If found guilty, Mr. Bolsonaro could be sentenced to more than 40 years in prison.
Note, the scrupulously fair to Nazis NY Times (see my upcoming post for more chilling details) presently does not allow me to easily attach a “gift” link to their articles. This is a new innovation, I was able to attach a gift link yesterday. If you have a subscription to the NYT, you can read the rest of the article, perhaps now you can even without one. The gist of the article is in this footnote.
How much nicer is her headline and lede than something I’d write after the same events? It is such a higher tone to resist making a reference to his famous “concept of a plan”, “alternative truth” and “fake news witch hunt!”.
or, as someone with far less class than the ever classy NY Times (me) would style it:
Incompetent dictator aspirant, following fascist playbook, relies on empty spectacle to obscure lack of governing skills and nefarious antisocial agenda.
Trump rolls out red carpet on US soil, and applauds, for spymaster, kleptocrat, political assassin, kidnapper of 20,000 Ukrainian children, orderer of mass graves for civilians, multifaceted war criminal, his idol, his Excellency, the President of Russia.
vs.
Which headline takes us closer to the challenging truth we needto grasp, before we are among the enemies being rounded up?
Do not be intimidated by the constant threatening roars of a would-be dictator and the cruelty of his incompetent lackeys. A lot of things have to line up for one of these weak bastards to become an actual authoritarian leader of a longtime democracy, no matter how badly they may want to be one. The man who dictated The Art of the Deal to his ghostwriter appears a less and less likely American Putin.
Our boy just got Epsteined by Putin up in Alaska, which Trump said the other day was part of Russia. It might as well have been, Putin stepped up to the mic and began speaking in Russian before his host, the American president, could get a word in. “Next time in Moscow,” said Trump’s murderous, kidnapping, war criminal buddy Vladimir, in English, with a little smile, pantsing Trump again at the end, getting the last word as well as the first. Here’s how the NY Times laundered the story on its front page:
Heh, just a couple of old pals who couldn’t agree about how to end the unprovoked slaughter one of them is committing on the sovereign territory of a neighbor. Got to love that Grey Lady.
Meanwhile, DC gets its illegally removed chief of police back, and the guy who threw the Subway sandwich at the ICE agent, who Pam Bondi fired and wanted locked up for 8 years, is going to have an excellent wrongful termination case against DOJ, if he feels like bringing it. Everything these MAGA zealots do is for the optics, and they keep screwing the optics up. The horror of Epstein’s crimes, and Trump’s repeated lies about releasing the files, and the attempted cover up of those lies, are not going anywhere. His reflex to constantly double down keeps making his position worse. What does Trump say about the teenage girls who were victimized and traumatized for life by his teenager raping, blackmailing, best buddy Jeff? The so-called victims, he claims, are Democrat plants who are trying to make him look bad, and getting paid to lie about him, a guy whose redacted name is only in the Epstein files a few hundred times, at most. America’s greatest winner is always the most tortured victim ever, nobody has ever suffered like him.
In a democratic republic the first step to seizing absolute power is getting the right person elected to a high enough office to claim dictatorial power when the time is right. Having organized, violent shock troops on the ground, beating up political opponents also helps. Exploit a national emergency to pressure parliament/congress into immediately passing a law enabling unfettered emergency executive powers. Election, violence, emergency, enabling act granting absolute power, police state, et voila, dictatorship.
Here’s a textbook case, though, keep in mind, it was during a worldwide Depression and shaky, liberal German democracy was less than twenty years old (in contrast to a 227 year-old emergency powers law Trump is currently exploiting in his bid to be an authoritarian).
In the 1932 German elections Hitler’s Nazi party, with organized shock troops actively beating up opponents in street battles across Germany, captured a plurality in the Reichstag with a solid Trumpian 37% of the vote. The arrangement the other far right parties made when Hitler was appointed chancellor left him supposedly well under the control of the president of Germany, 85 year-old Paul von Hindenburg. Hindenburg, as president, had the absolute right to fire Hitler, who came into the government demanding the dissolution of the parliament (Reichstag) and passage of an Enabling Act to allow him extra-constitutional powers. Hindenburg refused, until after the Reichstag was set on fire on February 27, 1933, and in an atmosphere of Nazi intimidation, the Enabling Act was passed by the Reichstag, and signed into law by Hindenburg. Chancellor Hitler now had emergency powers and democracy in Germany was over. The Nazi party, soon the only legal party in Germany, was able to rule unopposed under the Enabling Act, without having to touch another word of the Weimar constitution. When Hindenburg died the following year, Hitler combined his office with the presidency and declared himself Führer. The rest, sadly for humanity, is history.
Think of the sweeping extra-constitutional emergency powers contained in the massive Patriot Act signed into law here six weeks after the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001. Bush and Cheney were not yet in position to become dictators, because our democratic checks and balances were still intact. American fascist billionaires got to work fixing all annoying impediments to permanent one party rule. But all the stars have to come into alignment before their dream can come true, including having an ideal front man as dictator. Is the increasingly faltering Trump really the man for the job? Peter Theil’s handpicked best boy, repellant chameleon JD Vance, clearly isn’t.
All of the illegal and extralegal Article II powers Trump has claimed in his second term are based on fake “emergencies” that supposedly trigger these constitutional exceptions to congressional and judicial limits on the Executive’s power. None of these are actual emergencies, but if the 6-3 Koch Supreme Court allows you to continue wielding emergency powers, until they eventually rule on the actual merits of the individual cases against invocation of each specific emergency power, and if Congress, even by one vote, doesn’t stop you — emergency powers it is!
Fucking 19 year-old Big Balls, the most famous of Musk’s hackers who infiltrated government databases, fired civil servants and deleted whole agencies that threatened Musk with investigation, gets assaulted in DC at 3 a.m. by a pack of teenagers? Emergency Powers! Federal law enforcement in the streets of burning criminal cesspool DC! (where, as Kashyap announced recently, violent crime is at a 30 year low). Members of a violent Venezuelan gang present in the US? Emergency War Powers, under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, based on the Tren de Aragua invasion! Mass ICE arrests and planeloads of asylum seekers and other dangerous committers of misdemeanors sent, without any kind of judicial process, to an El Salvadorian torture prison, to Sudan, for indefinite imprisonment. Now he wants to do the same to citizens for the crime of homelessness. He’s had his federal goons seize their tents in DC, throw their meager possessions into garbage trucks. Being poor and smelly is an unpardonable crime. Trade imbalances with foreign nations? National economic emergency! Congress loses all power over taxation! What’s the logic of Trump’s solution, tariffs? Tariffs for everyone! Article II. China will pay for them, Mexico will pay, build big beautiful tariffs in every city, like walls, or lobbyists!
It’s hard to think that any of this incoherent bullshit will actually fly, as baseless and stupid as so many of the Trump administration’s moves have been. Trump said, prior to being elected the first time, that in order to always be the smartest man in the room, important for a certain kind of boss, he surrounds himself with people who are not as smart as him. Imagine how smart Pete Hegseth, Pam Bondi, Kashyap Pramod Patel, Kristie Noem and the rest of them must be. I take the tragically insecure Trump at his word about his hiring genius, and he seems to be demonstrating that principle every day. If nobody in his administration is smarter than him, and he’s neither very stable nor that much of a genius, his word, like his idol Mr. Hitler’s, remains the last lying word on all policy, in which case, in the long run, our democracy should be OK.
Now Trump is planning to install the first of them on the Supreme Court.
There are many other horror stories going on at the same time: mass killing and war crimes in Gaza, in Ukraine, a determined and insane plan to bring the US back to the age before there was any regulation of predatory capitalism, the deliberate erasure of history, the deliberate destruction of essential government services, incoherent denial of science and disease control, rage against those who would protect the environment, poverty and the pain associated with it about to explode in the wealthiest country in history, inhuman treatment of humans in our country who are trying to obey our laws, called “illegals” and brutalized by masked goon squads when they appear for court hearings, or simply go to work, violence and hate crimes on the rise as a result of these brutally unpopular policies.
The news cycle is currently dominated by arguments about Jeffrey Espstein, infamous pedophile and sex trafficer, a onetime close friend of Trump’s, found dead in one of Bill Barr’s jail cells (the night after Epstein’s lawyers found their client in fairly good cheer), and the DOJ’s refusal to release the vast files it has on the powerful sex trafficker’s clients and victims. The super-rich, politically connected dead pedophile’s ultra-wealthy girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, is the only conspirator ever charged in connection with a criminal conspiracy victimizing countless girls and young women that saw over 4,700 wire transfers to the pedophile/sex trafficker amounting to over $1,000,000,000 (in only one of several banks he had money in) [1].
Trump’s criminal DOJ recently issued a short memo concluding: nothing to see here. The shit show is vast, deliberate, relentless. Number Two in the DOJ, Trump criminal attorney Todd Blanche, is set to visit Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell in prison, certainly to make her an offer in exchange for her principled silence if Congress manages to subpoena her. Nothing to see here. The Supreme Court said the president is allowed to commit crimes, as long as he uses his official chain of command to order those crimes in performance of his core duties. What? You got a problem with that?
Here’s one small but key circus act, playing out against the hideous backdrop of an openly criminal administration whose Department of Justice leadership are Trump’s top criminal and impeachment lawyers.
I am referring, of course, to Emil Bove III, Trump’s 44 year-old pick to replace one of the aging far-right hardliners on the 6-3 Trump majority.
The Grey Lady has annotated Bove’s letter to Acting US Attorney for SDNY, Danielle Sasson, accepting her resignation and snarling at her like the bully he is known to be. Sasson was the principled Trump-appointee who tendered her resignation rather than do Bove’s unjust, unethical, illegal bidding (dismiss criminal case against NYC mayor Eric Adams, without prejudice, allowing it to be prosecuted any time Adams didn’t do his part of the quid pro quo).
Bove, sounding more like a defense lawyer for Adams than a top Justice Department official, demeans the process by which a grand jury indicted the mayor, saying they had done so based on a “one-sided” and “partial” presentation of the evidence.
You can scroll through the annotations, there are maybe a dozen, to get a pretty good picture of Mr. Bove’s, eh, character. He’s on Trump’s one man short list to fill Alito or Thomas’s smelly seat before the midterms. Senate to vote on his lifetime seat on the federal bench any day now. His nomination left the Judiciary Committee last week on party lines, 7-6 when Grassley cut off questioning of Bove, called for a vote, and Democrats walked out.
Bove is a real modern day Roy Cohn.
clickez above for the rest
[1] From Senator Ron Wyden:
The file shows Epstein used multiple Russian banks, which are now under sanctions, to process payments related to sex trafficking. A lot of the women and girls he targeted came from Russia, Belarus, Turkey and Turkmenistan. You shudder to think about the kinds of people who must have been involved in trafficking these women and girls out of those countries and into Epstein’s web of abuse.
Again, these are all potential leads the Department of Justice ought to be digging into. This is about years and years of international sex trafficking. None of this is a hoax. None of it is a scam. It’s insulting to the intelligence of the American people when Trump and Bondi say there’s nothing here to investigate.
He’s doing that because he knows, because people are saying, big strong people with tears running down their faces and calling him “sir”, that global warming is a communist hoax.
That or he is honoring one of the few promises he has ever kept. The one to his fossil fuel donors, give me a billion and I’ll end all regulation of your profits.
Emil Bove III, supremely loyal Trump criminal attorney, is, unless several Republicans find their spines, about to be confirmed for a lifetime seat on the federal appeals bench, with a party line majority of 51-50 or so. That would put the relentless, unprincipled 44 year-old Trump warrior, Trump’s present day Roy Cohn, in position to take ethically compromised Samuel Alito’s or Clarence Thomas’ smelly seat before the midterms, when he could be confirmed 51-50.
Bove is, not to put too fine a point on it, a straight up evil fuck. Significantly, Bove lacks candor. A lawyer, as an officer of the court, has a duty of candor to the court. Bove (as made explicit in a 2/5/25 memo from Pam Bondi the day after she was confirmed as AG, quoting Executive Order, Ending the Weaponization of The Federal Government (Jan. 20, 2025)) instructed DOJ subordinates to fuck candor to the fucking court if the court was not letting DOJ carry out the policies and directives of Mr. Trump.
A prevaricating, stonewalling lawyer is bad, unethical, an enabler of evil practices and subject to disbarment in the rare case where the stars line up correctly. If a dishonest lawyer works for the Department of Justice, it’s very dangerous, for justice and democracy. Imagine the harm a federal appeals judge without candor can do to the faithful administration of justice. Try to imagine a harm an unappealable Justice without candor, or the capacity for remorse (a feature of moral weaklings in a fascist regime) would not be capable of doing.
Here are a few highlights from the resignation letter of Trump appointee, acting US Attorney for SDNY, Danielle Sasson, on being instructed, by then acting AG Emil Bove, to conditionally drop the charges against NYC mayor Eric Adams in exchange for Adams’ agreement to allow ICE raids in New York City. The letter was sent to Pamela Jo Bondi, Attorney General of the United States. Bondi apparently accepted the resignation of this principled Trump appointee:
You and I have yet to meet, let alone discuss this case. But as you may know, I clerked for the Honorable J. Harvie Wilkinson III on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, and for Justice Antonin Scalia on the U.S. Supreme Court. Both men instilled in me a sense of duty to contribute to the public good and uphold the rule of law, and a commitment to reasoned and thorough analysis. I have always considered it my obligation to pursue justice impartially, without favor to the wealthy or those who occupy important public office, or harsher treatment for the less powerful.
I therefore deem it necessary to the faithful discharge of my duties to raise the concerns expressed in this letter with you and to request an opportunity to meet to discuss them further. I cannot fulfill my obligations, effectively lead my office in carrying out the Department’s priorities, or credibly represent the Government before the courts, if I seek to dismiss the Adams case on this record. . .
. . . Rather than be rewarded, Adams’s advocacy should be called out for what it is: an improper offer of immigration enforcement assistance in exchange for a dismissal of his case. Although Mr. Bove disclaimed any intention to exchange leniency in this case for Adams’s assistance in enforcing federal law,[1] that is the nature of the bargain laid bare in Mr. Bove’s memo. That is especially so given Mr. Bove’s comparison to the Bout prisoner exchange, which was quite expressly a quid pro quo, but one carried out by the White House, and not the prosecutors in charge of Bout’s case. . .
. . . Moreover, dismissing the case will amplify, rather than abate, concerns about weaponization of the Department. Despite Mr. Bove’s observation that the directive to dismiss the case has been reached without assessing the strength of the evidence against Adams, Adams has already seized on the memo to publicly assert that he is innocent and that the accusations against him were unsupported by the evidence and based only on “fanfare and sensational claims.” Confidence in the Department would best be restored by means well short of a dismissal. As you know, our office is prepared to seek a superseding indictment from a new grand jury under my leadership. We have proposed a superseding indictment that would add an obstruction conspiracy count based on evidence that Adams destroyed and instructed others to destroy evidence and provide false information to the FBI, and that would add further factual allegations regarding his participation in a fraudulent straw donor scheme. . .
. . . For the reasons explained above, I do not believe there are reasonable arguments in support of a Rule 48(a) motion to dismiss a case that is well supported by the evidence and the law. I understand that Mr. Bove disagrees, and I am mindful of your recent order reiterating prosecutors’ duty to make good-faith arguments in support of the Executive Branch’s positions. See Feb. 5, 2025 Mem. “General Policy Regarding Zealous Advocacy on Behalf of the United States.” But because I do not see any good-faith basis for the proposed position, I cannot make such arguments consistent with my duty of candor. N.Y.R.P.C. 3.3; id. cmt. 2 (“A lawyer acting as an advocate in an adjudicative proceeding has an obligation to present the client’s case with persuasive force. Performance of that duty while maintaining confidences of the client, however, is qualified by the advocate’s duty of candor to the tribunal.”). . .
. . . I remain baffled by the rushed and superficial process by which this decision was reached, in seeming collaboration with Adams’s counsel and without my direct input on the ultimate stated rationales for dismissal. Mr. Bove admonished me to be mindful of my obligation to zealously defend the interests of the United States and to advance good-faith arguments on behalf of the Administration. I hope you share my view that soliciting and considering the concerns of the U.S. Attorney overseeing the case serves rather than hinders that goal, and that we can find time to meet.
In the event you are unwilling to meet or to reconsider the directive in light of the problems raised by Mr. Bove’s memo, I am prepared to offer my resignation. It has been, and continues to be, my honor to serve as a prosecutor in the Southern District of New York.
Here’s a short excerpt from Emil Bove’s acceptance of Danielle Sasson’s resignation letter (nicely annotated by the Grey Lady) in which he suspended lawyers working for Sasson and told her they’d all be investigated for disloyalty to the Boss and flagrant violation of Executive Order 14147.
On January 20, 2025, in Executive Order 14147, President Trump established the following policy: “It is the policy of the United States to identify and take appropriate action to correct past misconduct by the Federal Government related to the weaponization of law enforcement.” In a February 5, 2025 memorandum setting forth the Department’s general policy regarding zealous advocacy on behalf of the United States, the Attorney General stated:
[A]ny attorney who because of their personal political views or judgments declines to sign a brief or appear in court, refuses to advance good-faith arguments on behalf of the Administration, or otherwise delays or impedes the Department’s mission will be subject to discipline and potentially termination, consistent with applicable law.
Your Office was not exempted from the President’s policy or the Attorney General’s memorandum.
Here is a former AG Merrick Garland’s October 4, 2021 memorandum, duly rescinded by Pam Bondi in footnote two of the Führerwortes haben Gesetzeskraft [1] memo of 2/5/25. It is now officially and explicitly NOT the policy of the totally, like not-weaponized Trump DOJ that: the Department is steadfast in its commitment to protect all people in the United States from violence, threats of violence, and other forms of intimidation and harassment.
[1] Führerwortes haben Gesetzeskraft “the Leader’s words have the force of law”
That’s one way of looking at it, I suppose. Musk’s AI creation, Grok, recently expressed religious veneration for the greatest human/deity in history, Adolf Hitler. Hitler famously said “conscience is a Jewish invention”. I don’t know if Mr. H. was right about that, I do know that iron-willed repression of conscience was necessary for the men originally tasked with the liquidation of Jews, men, women and children, and others deemed undesirable by Mr. Hitler. Members of the einsatzgruppen, the death squads, regularly developed drinking problems, suffered nightmares and mental breakdowns after shooting countless civilians in the head and forcing locals to bury the dead in trenches. They had a high burnout rate and had to be replaced regularly, which (along with the bullets needed for battles everywhere) was one impetus for a mechanized Final Solution.
Part of the far-right’s (not very coherent) critique of “wokeness” is that it is empathy run amok, turning victims of the “woke virus” into performatively empathetic weak prey animals unaware of the true Darwinian nature of the world where only the ruthless can triumph morally. The New York Times published a brilliant op ed by Jennifer Szalai on the Christian right’s condemnation of empathy as practiced by most of the rest of us. An excellent discussion, with some great insights from, and into, my hero, Hannah Arendt. Not surprising that Hannah made an excellent contribution to Jennifer Szalai’s analysis of this perverse Christian nationalist condemnation of empathy.
Here’s a taste:
The Death of Thinking
The death of thinking, in fact, was what Arendt worried about in her work on totalitarianism. When she reported on the trial of the Nazi official Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, what struck her was his “thoughtlessness.” At one point Eichmann declared that “he had lived his whole life according to Kant’s moral precepts” — a claim that was particularly outrageous to Arendt, who elsewhere wrote about Kant’s concept of the “world citizen.” Such citizenship was not, she maintained, a matter of “an enormously enlarged empathy” but something more rigorous: “One trains one’s imagination to go visiting.”
Click on the image below for the piece, gifted to you by The New York Times, which owns it, I’m just providing them a free ad.
Here’s some interesting and important material on the “judicial temperament” of Trump’s favorite unprincipled legal Pitbull, Emil Bove III, from an op ed in today’s New York Times. Bove is about as MAGA as they come, apparently deeply drawn to the intoxicating scent given off by America’s Greatest Winner Ever, or, at least, what he can get by loyal proximity to Jeffrey Epstein’s close friend.
In 2018 a defense lawyer, speaking on behalf of a group of colleagues, including several former prosecutors, wrote to a supervisor in the U.S. attorney’s office complaining about Mr. Bove’s “unprofessional and unethical” behavior. One former assistant U.S. attorney quoted in the email said that Mr. Bove was “a prosecutor version of a drunken driver — completely out of control” and that Mr. Bove was “quick to bully and threaten.” Still another said that he “seems totally hung up on a power trip.”
That complaint was followed by an incident that appeared to vindicate these warnings, when a federal judge dismissed a prosecution supervised by Mr. Bove after a request from the U.S. attorney’s office. In the case, which involved charges that the defendant had evaded sanctions imposed on Iran, the judge found that prosecutors had attempted to bury exculpatory evidence and then lied to the court about the matter. The misconduct was so severe that the U.S. attorney’s office, even after a jury verdict in its favor, chose instead to end the prosecution.
Then a group of his colleagues complained that Mr. Bove showed uncontrolled anger and was abusive toward subordinates, and they asked that he be demoted from a supervisory role. Mr. Bove was not demoted, but he decided to leave the U.S. attorney’s office shortly after that, in 2021.
Unlike many of his colleagues in the Southern District, Mr. Bove found a soft landing not at a major New York law firm but at a midsize firm in suburban New Jersey. In short order, though, Mr. Blanche asked Mr. Bove to join him in a new venture: a tiny law firm devoted to the criminal defense of Mr. Trump.
At his confirmation hearing, Mr. Bove portrayed his decision to defend Mr. Trump as an act of courage. “All manner of evil and negative consequences were sort of foisted and thrown at Todd and I regularly as we had to make a decision, and many others didn’t have the courage to make to stand up for what was right,” he said. He added, “That was a decision to fight for what was right and fight for the rule of law.” Mr. Blanche and Mr. Bove lost Mr. Trump’s criminal case in Manhattan, but as far as their career fortunes were concerned, they won big, securing themselves their next jobs. . .
. . . Mr. Bove fired about two dozen federal prosecutors in Washington who had brought cases against Jan. 6 rioters, and he endorsed the view that these prosecutions [he himself prosecuted many of the J6 cases] were a “grave national injustice.” Asked at his hearing whether Joe Biden won the 2020 election, Mr. Bove conceded only that Mr. Biden was “certified” as the victor.
Sound about right for a lifetime seat on the federal appeals court, one step away from replacing Alito or Thomas, after their perfectly legal (6-3, suckers!) prospective and retrospective blanket lifetime pardons from Trump? Even a flagrantly criminal pardon, sold to the highest bidder, is cool, as long as the president does it in his official chair at the Resolute desk. So saith the MAGA Six. Emil Bove III would certainly agree. That’s called judicial temperament in MAGA world.
Boof, displaying judicial temperament at his confirmation hearing
gratuitousblahg 