Category Archives: Grey Lady

Loyalty to Kashyap, not the Constitution

A highly problematic report from the highly problematic New York Times:

It’s no longer a gratuitous comparison, MAGA is, in every essential way, the National Socialist German Workers Party who had such stupendous success during the early years of World War Two.  The requirement of a personal loyalty oath to your superior officer (see, e.g., Führereid or Führer Oath) flows directly from the Führerprinzip, the irrefutable idea that all authority and power flows downwards from the infallible Leader through his chosen chiefs.  It is supported by that old motto of the Third Reich, Führerworte haben Gesetzeskraft, “the Leader’s word is law” since the Leader is the ultimate expert on every subject.  

You don’t advance in this hierarchic, loyalty-based system where you may never question orders unless you accept that you’ll be punished severely if you disagree with the boss — on any grounds.   Principled dissent,  or — as some might claim — acting on conscience, or in obedience to constitutional limits of power, forbidden.  Defiance of authority is a fatal violation of the loyalty oath you are duty-bound to keep, in an authoritarian party.   If part of your duty is to faithfully tell any lie you’re required to tell (and now, as then, there is required language you must always use when asked certain questions — Sprachtregelung [1]) , then you are part of a  totalitarian regime.

Make no mistake, these grossly unqualified, radically ambitious extremists in charge of Trump’s federal government are National Socialists, our own homegrown modern American Nazis (though the FBI director’s immigrant parents both emigrated from Uganda, Kash is a birthright citizen, for the moment).   Motivated by personal ambition and a blind willingness to do whatever they’re asked to do, these guys, Kashyap, Pete, RFK Jr., Kristi, Pam, Marco, Tulsi and so on, will do whatever their Leader, and Stephen Miller, tells them to do.  The same goes for the slim majority in Congress and Charles Koch’s Supreme Court super-majority.

Right now a few Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee face an agonizing decision about who to believe and who is lying.  A whistleblower, a recently fired (for candor to the judge, as an officer of the court), highly respected, fifteen year nonpartisan employee of the DOJ who has now corroborated the main allegations of his complaint — or the president’s recent criminal lawyer and former acting AG, current nominee to a lifetime appointment to the federal appeals bench.

What we know about Emil Bove III is that he’s a fierce and unapologetic Trump loyalist who represented the president in all the weaponized criminal witch hunts against the Leader. More recently, as Acting AG in the present administration, he appeared personally in federal court to deny that there was a quid pro quo to drop federal charges against corrupt-looking NYC mayor Eric Adams in exchange for Adams giving ICE access to the sanctuary city. He also told the judge that even if there had been a quid pro quo, the court still couldn’t stop DOJ from dismissing the indictment against Adams.  Bove told the Senate Judiciary Committee, under oath, that he can’t recall if he told his lawyers to be evasive and obstructive in court or to simply ignore court deadlines and orders, like Judge Boasberg’s order not to send 230 non-criminal immigrants to a terrorist torture prison in El Salvador.  

At least one  GOP senator may have a hard choice to make, because the Boss really, really wants his bellicose myrmidon, which proved over and over that he’s willing to lie for him, on the Supreme Court when Alito or Thomas leave.   We’ll have to keep an eye on this one. 

A loyal man who never violated his oath

[1] Sprachregelung is a German language term meaning “speech code”. It refers to a formal or informal agreement, or order, that certain things should be expressed in specific ways in official communications by an organization or by a political entity. It can also cover such concepts as agreed “lines-to-take”, talking points, and the exertion of message discipline. An example came in January 1945 when Ribbentrop sent emissaries to contact the Western Allies in Sweden and Switzerland, aiming to negotiate a separate peace; they carried with them a list of Sprachregelungen to ensure they gave the same message. Wikipedia

Grey Lady, gaslight, bad smell…

Nobody in the Grey Lady’s perceived social class, of course, will be severely hurt, although poor people will, we mean “may”, may be fucked pretty hard by this brazen giveaway to the nation’s wealthiest and most greedy, at the expense of things like health care and sufficient food for certain “underprivileged” children and adults.  

From the headline it’s a little easier to believe there is no reason to fear the post-Constitutional vision these determined anti-democracy maniacs pursue to end majoritarian tyranny, as they call it. It may end badly, but many might become even richer!

Judge Luttig vs. NY Times editorial board

There is reality, sometimes quite grim, and there is spin, sometimes comforting for the squeamish and overwhelmed, regardless of how ridiculous it is. Here is a highly respected conservative judge’s take on a lawless Trump administration for comparison to the New York Times’s account of the same crime spree.

From Heather Cox Richardson:

In a piece in The Atlantic today, respected conservative judge J. Michael Luttig noted that for all of Trump’s insistence that he is the victim of the “weaponization” of the federal government against him, “[i]t is Trump who is actually weaponizing the federal government against both his political enemies and countless other American citizens today.”

Luttig warned that Trump is trying to end the rule of law in the United States, recreating the sort of monarchy against which the nation’s founders rebelled. He lists Trump’s pardoning of the convicted January 6 rioters (which he did with the collusion of Ed Martin), the arrest of Judge Dugan, which Luttig calls “appalling,” the deportation of a U.S. citizen with the child’s mother, and the “investigation” of private citizen Christopher Krebs.

“For not one of his signature initiatives during his first 100 days in office does Trump have the authority under the Constitution and laws of the United States that he claims,” Judge Luttig writes. Not for tariffs, not for unlawful deportations, not for attacks on colleges and law firms, not for his attacks on birthright citizenship, not for handing power to billionaire Elon Musk and the “Department of Government Efficiency,” not for trying to end due process, not for his attempts to starve government agencies by impounding their funding, not for his vow to regulate federal elections, not for his attacks on the media.

The courts are holding, Judge Luttig writes, and will continue to hold, but Trump “will continue his assault on America, its democracy, and rule of law until the American people finally rise up and say, “No more.”

And rising up they are.

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The New York Times takes a more nuanced view of Trump’s second term:

The building of this coalition [to oppose a Trump dictatorship, which the Times apparently calls for] should start with an acknowledgment that Mr. Trump is the legitimate president and many of his actions are legal. Some may even prove effective. He won the presidency fairly last year, by a narrow margin in the popular vote and a comfortable margin in the Electoral College. On several key issues, his views were closer to public opinion than those of Democrats. Since taking office, he has largely closed the southern border, and many of his immigration policies are both legal and popular. He has reoriented federal programs to focus less on race, which many voters support. He has pressured Western Europe to stop billing American taxpayers for its defense. Among these policies are many that we strongly oppose — such as pardoning Jan. 6 rioters, cozying up to Vladimir Putin of Russia and undermining Ukraine — but that a president has the authority to enact. Elections have consequences.

[From a New York Times May Day editorial, entitled — There Is a Way Forward: How to Defeat Trump’s Power Grab.]

“and many of his immigration policies are both legal and popular. “

Many are legal (which means some, or as many, or more, are not). Legal and as popular as racism, xenophobia, misogyny or homophobia. Hmm. Well done, Grey Lady!

As for the legitimate victory Mr. Trump achieved fairly, he got 77,284,118 votes while in every state controlled by MAGA voting for presumed non-Trump voters was systematically suppressed. As a threshold matter, we do well to recall George Carlin’s brilliant observation about the limitations of normal intelligence, and what that means for 50% of us.

There was also a nationally successful 2024 effort, in every MAGA controlled state — as the USPS delivered 20,000,000 less mail-in ballots than in 2020– to suppress the vote in a dozen different ways to make sure a maximum number of votes for the Orange Turd were recorded while all others were not cast.  Houston County, Texas, for example, a gigantic county with a population of 4.2 million, had one drop box, a plan to limit drop off voting that Republican governors feverishly hatched in a dozen secretive meetings with Koch’s private Heritage Foundation and failed at implementing in 2020. Hence, the need for fake electors and a riot at the Capitol.  

Say it again with Michael Luttig, Grey Lady:

“For not one of his signature initiatives during his first 100 days in office does Trump have the authority under the Constitution and laws of the United States that he claims,” Judge Luttig writes. Not for tariffs, not for unlawful deportations, not for attacks on colleges and law firms, not for his attacks on birthright citizenship, not for handing power to billionaire Elon Musk and the “Department of Government Efficiency,” not for trying to end due process, not for his attempts to starve government agencies by impounding their funding, not for his vow to regulate federal elections, not for his attacks on the media.

Grey Lady, pitch perfect

From a New York Times May Day editorial, entitled — There Is a Way Forward: How to Defeat Trump’s Power Grab. Here they describe a few of his despicable acts of vengeance against a nation that rejected him by a large margin in 2020.

He has fired federal workers without the 30-day notice that the law requires.

Doesn’t this also mean he fired federal workers illegally? Can’t say it, can you?

He has tried to cut university funding by citing antisemitism without following the established procedures for such civil rights cases.

“Such civil rights cases?” More accurately: he has threatened universities, and unilaterally withheld their federally funding, on transparently baseless grounds.

He has issued executive orders punishing law firms for invented wrongdoing.

Well, no problem with that one.

I did have a real problem with this earlier paragraph:

The building of this coalition [to oppose a Trump dictatorship, which the Times apparently calls for] should start with an acknowledgment that Mr. Trump is the legitimate president and many of his actions are legal. Some may even prove effective. He won the presidency fairly last year, by a narrow margin in the popular vote and a comfortable margin in the Electoral College. On several key issues, his views were closer to public opinion than those of Democrats. Since taking office, he has largely closed the southern border, and many of his immigration policies are both legal and popular. He has reoriented federal programs to focus less on race, which many voters support. He has pressured Western Europe to stop billing American taxpayers for its defense. Among these policies are many that we strongly oppose — such as pardoning Jan. 6 rioters, cozying up to Vladimir Putin of Russia and undermining Ukraine — but that a president has the authority to enact. Elections have consequences.

The Grey Lady’s normalizing characterization of Trump’s ridiculous performance as president with a massive mandate is, to say the least, cherry-picked. His many destructive acts, his administration’s rampant lawlessness and contempt for truth, his unqualified, lie-spouting loyalist appointees in crucial positions leaving America open to ridicule and worse, the president’s unprecedented and well-earned unpopularity, all left out of the Grey Lady’s delicate balancing act, their attempt to treat a psychopath as a perfectly normal president just doing the job like any other duly elected president.

To take one example — did he win the election fairly? We all seem to accept it, in the name of affirming democracy as expressed at the ballot box, but to me the jury is out after every MAGA state suppressed voting with new laws making it harder to vote, Trump being the sole Republican to win in several swing states, and Russia literally calling in bomb threats to Democratic districts on election day. Also, I saw no reporting whatsoever (except for mine) on the 20,000,000 less mail-in ballots delivered by the Trump megadonor postmaster in the first election since 2008 when mail-in voting didn’t increase.

Then I read a line like this and just say “fuck you” and turn away:

We understand that Mr. Trump’s defenders believe that Democrats started this cycle by prosecuting him, and there are reasonable arguments against some of those cases.

We understand that the New York Times represents a certain well-invested segment of the status quo, so what else are they going to say? Still, the words “fuck you” ring in my head when I read this kind of pandering nonsense in the journal of record. “His defenders defend him against what they call political persecution and they make some reasonable arguments.” Can you give us one?

Heh, of course you can’t.

In other news that’s fit to print:

The Face of MAGA

The conspiracy theorist/far-right influencer, Laura Loomer, is able to get Trump to fire experienced, nonpartisan national security officials she deems disloyal to MAGA. The perfect face of MAGA, this portrait was published by the New York Times the other day, as part of an editorial about the damage Trump and his myrmidons have done in the first hundred days.

Also in the New York Times, among a full spectrum of legal experts weighing in on Trump’s enactment of Project 2025:

The impression of a constitutional crisis is misleading. That impression was initially created by overreaching district judges selected by plaintiffs, who obtained temporary victories and leveraged those victories in the media. If there is a crisis, it does not arise from the actions of the administration but instead from a slew of highly aggressive judicial decisions that have transgressed traditional legal limits on the relationship between the judiciary and the executive branch — limits the courts respected during the Biden administration.
— Adrian Vermeule, professor, Harvard Law School [1]

[1] Wikipedia: A convert to Catholicism, Vermeule has become an advocate of integralism, a form of modern legal and political thought originating in historically Catholic-dominant societies and opposed to the Founding Fathers’ ideal of division between church and state. Integralism in practice gives rise to state order (identifiable as theocratic) in which the Common Good has precedence over individual autonomy, the value prioritized by American democracy. Rather than electoral politics, the path to confessional political order in integralist theory is “strategic ralliement“, or transformation within institutions and bureaucracies, that lays the groundwork for a realized integralist regime to succeed a liberal democratic order it assumes to be dying. The new state would “exercise coercion over baptized citizens in a manner different from non-baptized citizens”.[11][12][13]

Grey Lady boldly headlines Trump’s lies…

Alternate reality, based in a faith-based world of alternative facts, admittedly, is also, applying basic common sense and language usage, a lie, and a deliberate “distortion” of reality (more accurately, disinformation), but what are you going to do, especially when that alternate reality TV show shit seems to be working (he won the popular vote, everyone seems to agree) and is backed by virtually all of our greatest and most principled billionaires?

When news reporters feel they have to take sides, where do you draw the line? You can see the distinguished Grey Lady’s editorial dilemma.

The Grey Lady politely opines

There are many things you can say about the US president riffing out an insane and illegal plan, pulled out of Bibi Netanyahu’s hateful ass and not run by any of Trump’s “advisors”, to forcibly evict millions of residents from Gaza and convert their former land into beachside condos for the wealthy. One thing, of course, is that it is an obvious distraction from what his illegally “empowered” financial benefactor, active neo-Nazi supporter and partner in crime, Elon “Stable Genius/Visionary” Musk has been doing with illegal data hacks, blanket agency lockouts, illegal agency closures and so on.

The Grey Lady notes that Trump is “unbound”, presumably because the party he took over, now serving the John Birch Society’s core values, controls all three branches of government, with a newly created, illegal fourth branch, pulled directly out of Charles Koch’s ass, led by an immature, vindictive, transgressive billionaire psychopath government contractor, running roughshod over law and democracy. OK, “unbound” sounds better than “unhinged” or “insane”, shows a bit of editorial restraint when describing the leader of the free world. I can take unbound, though, “untethered”, which means the same thing, carries a much more accurate connotation.

The “improbable idea” is another matter entirely. Unless it is perfectly fine to forcibly remove two million besieged Gazans from their densely populated, largely destroyed, longtime home. Improbable that Trump would be able to simply round them up and, as the Turks did to the Armenians a century ago, send horseback killers to bullwhip them into rivers and the sea to drown. Improbable unless Trump gets to build the beautiful concentration camps of his dreams, and equip them with machinery to make undesirable people simply disappear. Perhaps Elon Musk is working on this logistical challenge right now, in moments stolen from his main goal — colonizing Mars.

Sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words. Here’s Trump’s White House chief of staff’s reaction to hearing unbound Trump’s improbable idea being broadcast live to the world, off the cuff, as the attention-starved rogue ratings hog so enjoys doing.

I didn’t find this telling photo of Susie Wiles, Trump’s soon to be former White House chief of staff, listening to his insane, er, improbable, plan to turn Gaza into a real estate development paradise, in the Times. It speaks volumes about how insane the improbable, unbound guy she works for is.

The New York Times, I have no words for how despicable the influential news source is, and how instrumental it is in preserving the ugly, unsustainable status quo we are living in right now. For every important investigative piece they publish, you can see dozens of daily examples of their bias for leaving things exactly the way they are. Why rock the boat when rich people are already getting so much bad press? It’s as though the 99% are making some kind of moral case that it is wrong for one greedy psychopath to have 400,000 million dollars while millions of his neighbors live in poverty and precarity.

Certain stories have only one reasonable response

We like to think that there are two sides to every story. Many times there are way more than two sides. The truth can be very slippery to get a grasp on, particularly when compelling stories that contradict each other are told. There are some stories, however, that almost anyone, weighing the events fairly, will relate to as true.

Some stories are not complicated in the least, if you look at them clearly. If you ask one or two people, or ten, likely they will all have exactly the same response that you did.

I think of the daughter who accused her father of wanting to fuck his son’s girlfriend, after he defended the girl as a good match for his son who made his son happy, in spite of what the daughter thought of the girl. The father was pissed off, felt disrespected, gave his twenty four year-old daughter a piece of his mind. Afterwards his wife told him he was out of line, that their daughter was just trying to be funny. I’ve yet to meet anyone who has agreed with the wife’s assessment that the girl was joking and believed the father had no reason to feel hurt by the remark.

There are some stories that simply don’t have two equally compelling sides or a lot of nuance. Sometimes a story has one demonstrable truth — for example, a three hour violent riot filmed and broadcast in real time, with more than a hundred injured police officers taken to the hospital. There is of course a counter story, in this case that the riot we all watched was, actually, “legitimate political discourse.”

The second story, to be remotely true, must discount the violence that injured outnumbered law enforcement, the breaking and entering, mass criminal trespass, vandalism, the necessity of heroic actions by a few policemen to allow lawmakers to flee the threats to their lives, the gas masks, the gallows and all the rest. One can’t believe the second story without dismissing a huge trove of evidence we all witnessed.

We can, of course, discuss which of these stories is closer to true, and millions will be compelled by one side or the other, but what actually happened is the deciding factor in which story is closer to true.  You can spin a story, as the studiously both-sides New York Times has become so adept at doing, but that is not the same as presenting an intelligible story that doesn’t make both sides, no matter how ridiculous one side is, seem equally plausible.  During legitimate political discourse, for example, people are rarely, if ever, injured en masse or taken to the hospital with grievous injuries. 

Here are two nice headlines for illustrative purposes, from our beloved journal of record

MAGA judge appointed by Trump, nothing political here
One person’s complaint was based on lies, the other’s was based on facts on the ground right now

Some stories are not complicated in the least, if you look at them clearly. If you ask one or two people, or ten, likely they will all have exactly the same response that you did.

A surgeon described to me a ten to twenty minute procedure that involves no cutting, merely the stretching of a constricted structure by a method called dilation.   A little shaving of the place the structure inserts into may be required, he said, but he could only tell that once he was looking through a scope during the procedure.   The procedure he described was much less invasive than the one I was expecting to have and without a side effect I was dreading.  I was relieved. 

A few weeks later when I got the presurgical papers, dilation was not included among the procedures I was scheduled to have.  There was a surgical resection described (likely the shaving he’d referred to) and the possibility of something called a cold knife urethrotomy.  As I’d never heard of this procedure, I looked it up.  Here’s what the device looks like:

I was concerned about this unannounced change of plans.   The risks associated with slicing with a urethrotome are not inconsiderable. The odds of success appear to be depressingly low.  I needed to talk to my doctor.  The corporation the doctor works for, a subsidiary of the the nation’s largest, and presumably most lucrative, corporate provider of such medical services, does not allow patients to directly speak to their doctor.  My need for this procedure is close to an emergency level, but I had to finally cancel the fucking surgery today, as there is no way to give  informed consent without knowing the risks and benefits of a surgical procedure I was never told about.

This outcome is what I mean by certain stories have only one response.  Any patient, or friend of a patient, hearing surgery A proposed, getting notification of surgery B, would have questions of the surgeon.  It is not the result of PTSD, trauma, the experience of abuse or being bullied that would make someone need an answer to this question.  It is the nature of the questionable behavior that makes the question necessary.

It is like having to inform a loved one that they had no right to punch you in the face when they were drunk.   There aren’t multiple sides to this story.  If the loved one tells you to shut up, they were drunk, it only happened three times in fifty years, it doesn’t change the essential nature of the story.  You are not wrong to either need this talked through to ensure it never happens again, to not see this person again, or whatever the solution you need is.  It’s not like there are two equally compelling sides to the story, outside of the question of how you let it happen a second and third time.

Corporations were ruled to be people by a corporatist United States Supreme Court. The kind of person a corporation is has all of the characteristics of a psychopath. Here’s a checklist from the excellent 2003 documentary The Corporation, which lays out the case in a manner so irrefutable it will make your spine tingle.

You can see the entire movie here, on YouTube, for only the cost of having to skip the infernal corporate ads inserted every ten minutes.

Your spine will tingle at the recognition that we are all prey and the corporate person, an eating machine without any other consideration, has virtually no constraints on its appetite.

Pete Hegseth

The New York Times reports the details of the incident that caused Fox News host and defender of Navy SEAL war criminal Edward Gallagher [1], Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominee to head the Department of Defense, to pay an undisclosed amount of money to a woman in exchange for a non-disclosure agreement.

Trump himself couldn’t have done it better. Perfect agreement! 

The salacious details don’t matter (read the NY Times account anyway), the agreement is ironclad and absolutely nothing wrong happened, per the agreement and the undisclosed sum of money paid to settle the matter and keep it private forever (see NY Times account).

In other news, Matt Gaetz, also totally innocent and viciously persecuted by angry, name-calling libtard cucks armed with disgusting leaked private details of Mr. Gaetz’s personal life, cleared the way for Aileen Cannon’s appointment as Attorney General of the United States of America.

[1] Gallagher was turned in by his fellow Navy SEALs after, among other things, witness accounts that he stabbed a wounded teenaged Iraqi prisoner to death, and posed with the corpse, holding the cadaver’s head by the hair (as one does). A military tribunal convicted Gallagher of posing for a photograph with a corpse and texting the photo to friends. Gallagher was outraged. So was Hegseth, who became his powerful advocate. Trump gave Gallagher a full pardon. A perfect pardon! As all presidential pardons now are, according to the Federalist Society Six. Here are some of the now irrelevant details about the accusations against Gallagher:

Gallagher was accused of multiple offenses during his final deployment to Iraq and during the Battle for Mosul. The most prominent accusation and the best-attested to was the murder of a prisoner of war, a war crime.[9] Khaled Jamal Abdullah, a captured 17-year-old fighter of the Islamic State, was being treated by a medic.[12] According to two SEAL witnesses, Gallagher said “he’s mine” over the radio, then walked up to Abdullah and allegedly proceeded to stab him with his hunting knife without explanation. Gallagher and his commanding officer, Lieutenant Jake Portier, then posed for photographs of them standing over the body with some other nearby SEALs. Gallagher then text messaged a friend in California a picture of himself holding the dead captive’s (ISIS) head by the hair with the explanation “Good story behind this, got him with my hunting knife.”[9][13]

Prosecutors alleged that Gallagher’s sniper work during his 2017 deployment became “reckless” and “bloodthirsty”.[5] He allegedly fired his rifle far more frequently than other snipers;[5] according to testimony, the other snipers in the platoon did not consider him a good sniper, and he took “random shots” into buildings.[1] Other snipers said they witnessed Gallagher taking at least two militarily pointless shots, shooting and killing an unarmed elderly man in a white robe as well as a young girl walking with other girls.[5] Gallagher allegedly boasted about the large number of people he had killed, claiming he averaged three kills a day over 80 days, including four women.[1] Gallagher also was reportedly known for indiscriminately spraying neighborhoods with rockets and machine gun fire with no known enemy force in the region.[9]

A charge of obstruction of justice was brought against Gallagher for alleged witness intimidation. According to the claim, Gallagher allegedly threatened to kill fellow SEALs if they reported his actions.[5] The Navy cited his text messages as attempting to undermine the investigation, with messages sent to “pass the word on those traitors”, meaning cooperating witnesses, and to get them blacklisted within the special warfare community.[9][1] This resulted in him being confined in the brig for a time with heavy restrictions on his ability to communicate, although this confinement was later lessened.[5]

Gallagher was also charged with nearly a dozen lesser offenses.[5] Some of these charges, such as flying a drone over a corpse, were dismissed during preliminary hearings.[14]

According to the original Navy prosecutor Chris Czaplak, “Chief Gallagher decided to act like the monster the terrorists accuse us of being. He handed ISIS propaganda manna from heaven. His actions are everything ISIS says we are.”[6][5] Gallagher’s lawyer, Phillip Stackhouse, alleged the accusations were without foundation and came from a small number of disgruntled SEALs who could not meet Gallagher’s leadership demands. The accusations against Gallagher were recorded to be fabricated by teammates that started a mutiny in the SEAL platoon.[5]

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