Category Archives: History and Politics

Mike Pence’s new job

Same as his old job (outside of the danger of being lynched for cowardice), he’s a paid right-wing “scholar” and celebrity talking point mouthpiece at the influential right wing think tank The Heritage Foundation [1]. News broke yesterday, like a foul wind, that Pence authored an opinion piece in his employer’s news letter that is being called an “op ed” — a thoughtful discussion of “election integrity” published by the prestigious on-line journal Daily Signal, a publication of … whoa! The Heritage Foundation [2]. Every headline tells their story:

Pence’s scholarly theory, and he’s sticking to it, is that even though the short-lived Trump Presidential Advisory Commission for Electoral Integrity he headed with Voter Suppression champion Kris Koback, found virtually no electoral fraud of any kind in 2016 (when Trump claimed millions of Mexican zombies illegally inflated Hillary Clinton’s large victory among American voters) — the PERCEPTION OF WIDESPREAD FRAUD in 2020 and the attendant lack of faith in the integrity of American elections is the real problem for our democracy. Pence stressed that we must clamp down on states illegally trying to let more people vote without the proper supervision because some voters, in fact millions of them are — may I be politically correct here? — N-WORDS and the people who, falsely, believe that such people should be allowed to vote just like old, angry, wealthy (and/or stupid) white people in rural and strategically gerrymandered enclaves.

The massive Heritage Foundation database on voting fraud, maintained by discredited conspiracy theorist Hans von Spakovsky (leader of coordinated pre-2020 election attempts by GOP secretaries of state to suppress voting in their states) documents fewer than 1 case of voter fraud in every 2,000,000 votes cast since the 1980s.

There is nothing surprising in Pence echoing the lies of his former boss, after all, voter suppression has been a longtime goal of Pence’s party. In fairness to them, their policies (giving tax breaks to the wealthiest, stressing that the poor should shut the fuck up) are widely unpopular. They might be correct in their belief that their only hope for maintaining a stranglehold on power is by trickery, lying, exploiting the raging grievance of masses of evangelized supporters, and cleverly constructed discriminatory voting restrictions to maximize their votes and minimize “DEMOCRAT” [sic] votes. Hell with cleverly constructed voter suppression laws, now that we think of it, even in- your-face ones ought to work with a 6-3 SCOTUS no worries, LOL! They already have the brains of the group, John Roberts, on board!

Is Pence simply calculating and spineless, you ask? The answer is yes, both. Nothing surprising there either– he was one of the heads of Trump’s crack (smoking) White House Corona Virus Task Force, making the announcement last June that his leader had kicked COVID-19 right in the pussy and that the crisis was now over, 400,000 additional US deaths of COVID-19 (and counting) notwithstanding. The real plan, largely successful, was to ignore the uncontrolled spread of the disease to establish herd mentality, as the president stated. They gave it a scientific-sounding rationale by calling their efforts to politicize the infectious air-born pathogen an effort to gain what sticklers call herd IMMUNITY, such as the absolute herd immunity enjoyed by the alpha male in nature who may, even if herbivorous, eat his entire herd for his own survival. In fairness to Pence, science has never been the strong suit of religious bigots.

I keep wondering what would have happened if even more of the Capitol Police force openly sided with the rioters on January 6th. If instead of a hero cop like Eugene Goodman leading guys like Romney and Pence away from the surging, violent mob they’d led the mob to Romney and Pence and others the rioters wanted to fuck up. There might have simply been a good beat down of these cucks and traitors to the Big Lie, there’s no proof that anyone chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” would actually have strung him up. But what if they had? Would anything about the GOP’s continued lockstep march behind Trump’s obscenely naked lie have changed?

I wonder about this the same way I wonder what would happen if the former president who always singles out Black women for special abuse (a two-fer for a misogynistic racist) who angrily called them bitches when denouncing their thug sons who took a knee in protest during the National Anthem, had ever been caught on mic simply saying the word he must have said a million times over the years, to wit: “nigger.” I wonder — would that have been his undoing? Or just another example of Liberal Cancel Culture [3] shutting down God’s Imperfect Vessel merely for giving voice to what everyone of us is constantly thinking. Particularly about spoiled, entitled Black sons of bitch mothers who don’t even have the decency to pretend there’s nothing wrong with unarmed blacks being regularly killed by law enforcement in this country.

What are these enraged son of a bitch maniacs going to do next? Beat cops with flagpoles bearing American flags while chanting “blue lives matter?”

All this said, I have been relieved in recent days at the lack of relevance any of this Big Lie shit seems to have beyond the confines of the Trump/Pence dead-enders ecosphere. Not that his extremist party, strictly speaking, needs him at this point, their fundraising off the Big Lie (stolen election he won in a landslide) is robust. Still, it’s nice that Pence’s master is finally mostly silent.

Even among the extremest of these moneyed fucks, those who attended CPAC’s annual county fair, only 55% percent want Trump to run for president for life in 2024. Even Trump seemed ambivalent about running in 2024. His niece Mary, who seemingly got the brains Trump and his offspring were unfairly denied, predicted that Trump’s decisive loss in 2020 (the election he keeps claiming he won IN A LANDSLIDE) means he will never risk such a humiliation again.

Now we just have to let the many prosecutions and investigations take their courses, and watch to see which ambulance chasers step up to ineptly defend Trump in those suits. The jury in these court cases will unfairly exclude Trump’s co-conspirators and enablers, unlike when he was POTUS. In Georgia, the Extremely Stable Genius’s perfect phone call (his eighteenth try– he doesn’t give up and neither should you!) to his former supporter Brad Raffensberger is being played for a Grand Jury, even as we speak.

Pence? N-word, please!!

[1]

The prestigious right wing think tank has an annual budget of about $80,000,000 (as of 2011) and, though it is a tax exempt non-profit that is not required to disclose its donors, it has a number of right wing luminaries on its board of trustees. These include Rebekah Mercer, Ed Meese and Jim DeMint. Not surprisingly, their position on Climate Change is that it’s bullshit:

The Heritage Foundation rejects the scientific consensus on climate change.[69][70] The Heritage Foundation is one of many climate change denial organizations that have been funded by ExxonMobil.[69][71] The Heritage Foundation strongly criticized the Kyoto Agreement, which was intended to curb climate change, saying American participation in the treaty would “result in lower economic growth in every state and nearly every sector of the economy.”[72] The Heritage Foundation projected that the 2009 cap-and-trade bill, the American Clean Energy and Security Act, would result in a cost of $1,870 per family in 2025 and $6,800 by 2035; on the other hand, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office projected that it would only cost the average family $175 in 2020.[73]

and, as for electoral fraud bearing the need for strict measures to prevent:

The Heritage Foundation has promoted false claims of voter fraud. Hans von Spakovsky who heads the Election Law Reform Initiative at the Heritage Foundation has played an influential role in making alarmism about voter fraud mainstream in the Republican Party, despite no evidence of widespread voter fraud.[74][75] His work, which claims voting fraud is rampant, has been discredited.[76]

and, now, a word from their anonymous sponsors:

In 1973, businessman Joseph Coors contributed $250,000 to establish The Heritage Foundation and continued to fund it through the Adolph Coors Foundation.[77][78] In 1973, it had trustees from Chase Manhattan Bank, Dow Chemical, General Motors, Pfizer, Sears and Mobil.[79]

Heritage is a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization as well as a BBB Wise Giving Alliance accredited charity funded by donations from private individuals, corporations and charitable foundations.[80][81][82] As a 501(c)(3), Heritage is not required to disclose its donors and donations to the foundation are tax-deductible.[81] According to a MediaTransparency report in 2006, donors have included John M. Olin Foundation, the Castle Rock Foundation, the Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation and the Bradley Foundation.[83][unreliable source?][importance?] Other financing as of 2016 includes $28.129 million from the combined Scaife Foundations of the late billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife.[84][85][unreliable source?] Heritage is a grantee of the Donors Trust, a nonprofit donor-advised fund.[86][87][importance?][88] As of 2010, Heritage reported 710,000 supporters.[89]

For the fiscal year ending December 31, 2011, Charity Watch reported that Edwin Feulner, past president of The Heritage Foundation, received the highest compensation in its top 25 list of compensation received by charity members. According to Charity Watch, Feulner received $2,702,687 in 2013. This sum includes investment earnings of $1,656,230 accrued over a period of 33 years.[90]

Heritage’s total revenue for 2011 was $72,170,983 and its expenses were $80,033,828.[91][92]

[2]

The Daily Signal is a conservative American political media news website founded in June 2014. The publication focuses on politics, policy, and culture and offers political commentary from a conservative perspective. It is published by conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation.Owner: The Heritage Foundation Editor: Robert Bluey Launched: 2014

[3]

Ask GOP stalwart Liz Cheney, John McCain’s widow, former Senator Jeff Flake and anybody else in the GOP who found inciting a violent attack on the Capitol on the day the final, ceremonial certification of the election to be a high crime for a president to commit, about the fucking libtards and our vicious, zero-sum cancel culture.

Black Snake vs. White Snake

Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall cautioned those who look at skin color as an indication of a person’s views on social justice to remember that a black snake will bite you just as hard as a white snake. Case in point, this extreme right-wing motherfucker:

His warning to his fellow justices, who recently declined to hear appeals of several baseless Trump/RNC hypothetical voting fraud cases, presumably was that since the Supreme Court failed to act there will be millions of votes cast by angry Black people intent on making his side, electorally, the minority party that it is. They will vote by mail, they will march from churches to cast early ballots on Sunday, they will go door to door and organize to bring out a tidal wave of first time voters and even the most surgical GOP gerrymandering in the world, and the strictest voter suppression laws (GOP lawmakers in 43 states have already proposed more than 250 in the first 56 days of 2021) may not prevent majoritarian hoards from voting out Trump loyalist candidates who serve the greater good that Thomas views as the true America. An American meritocracy of color-blind rugged individualism, a nation where a long history of racism has no bearing on the current opportunities for, or grievances of, those long persecuted.

A longer, more detailed and legally-based description of Clarence Thomas’s warning was found in today’s New York Times, in an op-ed entitled The Supreme Court Is Not Finished With Elections [1]. In essence, the most rightwing justices seek to end the ability of state courts (elected statewide, not strictly subject to partisan gerrymandering) to overrule the will of the state legislatures (voted into office in gerrymandered districts) when it comes to state citizens’ right to vote in federal elections. You know, States’ Rights, one of the bedrocks of American conservatism.

On a note related to the many baseless Trump/RNC cases that were dismissed, many after protracted and expensive court battles, I read this late last night and said, aloud, to no-one in particular, “that’s what I’m talking about!”

Georgia lawmakers, too, are advancing measures to slash mail-in voting to protect against voter fraud, even as two counties in the Atlanta area want attorneys’ fees from Trump and the chair of the Georgia Republican Party for frivolous lawsuits designed to overturn the 2020 election. “Given the number of failed lawsuits filed by the former president and his campaign, petitioners apparently believed that they could file their baseless and legally deficient actions with impunity, with no regard for the costs extracted from the taxpayers’ coffers or the consequences to the democratic foundations of our country,” wrote lawyers for Cobb County.

source

That’s what I’m talking about!

Courts often sanction lawyers for filing lawsuits that are without merit, trumped up cases brought without evidence and with the intent to harass, intimidate or otherwise use the justice system for leverage or sensationalist publicity. These lawsuits are called frivolous and the penalties courts can impose on attorneys who illegally bring such suits not based on evidence include sanctions and fines against the lawyer, subjecting the lawyer to a disciplinary hearing for filing a vexatious frivolous lawsuit and forcing the litigant who used the court as an expensive bludgeon to pay the legal fees for the person he dragged into court without a legally sustainable reason.

I’ve been wondering when one of the dozens of courts who spent valuable time and resources examining and dismissing dozens of baseless Trump/RNC post-election challenges, and the literally hundreds brought before the election with the intent of making it harder for science believers to vote safely during a pandemic, would sanction someone for subjecting the court, the jurisdiction they were suing and the taxpayers, to the time, anxiety, great expense, of a shameless propaganda spectacle, based in speculation, unsubstantiated allegations and the fear-mongering that these frivolous lawsuits caused. You go, Cobb County!

Hopefully there will be dozens more of these filings, and court-ordered repayment of the massive taxpayer resources wasted to defend against these voter suppression attempts by the most unpopular (and most powerful within his minority party, go figure…) ex-president in American history.

In other news, yesterday President Biden signed an executive order saying, in essence, “I’ve got your ‘anarchist jurisdictions’ right here, asshole.” This order reverses a Trump/Barr policy memo that designated jurisdictions that did not unequivocally support Trump as ‘anarchist’ and attempted to deprive us of federal funds. Presidential in the coolest American sense of the word, particularly during a deadly pandemic, that Memorandum of September 2, 2020 (Reviewing Funding to State and Local Government Recipients of Federal Funds That Are Permitting Anarchy, Violence, and Destruction in American Cities).

Jesus, I hope the next Attorney General will not be a partisan hack/attorney/wingman for the president like that goddamned Obama-sycophant Eric Holder! (As one of the GOP Senators, probably Lyin’ Ted, suggested Garland might be). Oh, speaking of Lyin’ Ted, this gave me a chuckle:

Even Republicans who may vote against him praised Garland.

“In two-plus decades on the court, you have built a reputation for integrity and for setting aside partisan interests in following the law,” said Cruz, before noting that the attorney general job is different.

(from “Clinton News Network” report on Merrick Garland confirmation hearing).

Also, time to update, google:

The 84th and current Attorney General is Jeff Sessions, who assumed the office on February 9, 2017. The attorney general serves as a member of the Cabinet of the President of the United States and is the only cabinet officer who does not have the title “Secretary of”..


U.S. Attorney General | C-SPAN.orgwww.c-span.org › organization › Attorney-General

[1]

Remember Bush v. Gore, the case that decided the 2000 presidential election, in which five justices voted to overturn the Florida Supreme Court’s handling of a statewide recount? That decision was based on a theory of equal protection so wacky that the majority opinion insisted that “our consideration is limited to the present circumstances” — that is to say, don’t dare invoke this poor excuse for an opinion as a precedent.

That didn’t stop Justice Thomas from citing Bush v. Gore in his dissenting opinion on Monday, and he did so in a particularly shameless fashion. The language he cited wasn’t even from the Bush v. Gore majority opinion, but rather from a separate concurring opinion filed in that case by only three of the majority justices, who argued that the Florida Supreme Court had violated the U.S. Constitution by substituting its will for that of the state Legislature.

Justice Thomas invoked that minority portion of the decision to assert that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court was constitutionally out of bounds when, citing both the Covid-19 pandemic and the collapse of the Postal Service as its reasons, it added three postelection days for lawful receipt of mailed ballots.

He went on to warn that fraud was “more prevalent with mail-in ballots,” citing as evidence a 1994 Federal District Court case, an article in this newspaper from 2012 and the 2018 Republican ballot-harvesting fraud in North Carolina. Such occurrences, he said, raise “the likelihood that courts will be asked to adjudicate questions that go to the heart of election confidence.” This was the reason, he argued, that the Supreme Court should have taken and decided the Pennsylvania cases before the next election cycle.

In his inventory of ballot fraud, Justice Thomas of course could not refer to fraud in the 2020 election, because there wasn’t any. Not a problem:

We are fortunate that many of the cases we have seen alleged only improper rule changes, not fraud. But that observation provides only small comfort. An election free from strong evidence of systemic fraud is not alone sufficient for election confidence. Also important is the assurance that fraud will not go undetected.

In other words, Justice Thomas would have it both ways: If there was fraud, the court needed to intervene, and if there was no fraud, the court needed to intervene because the fraud might simply be undetected. Despite his disclaimer, the entire structure of his opinion, suggesting that something bad had happened even if no one could prove it, is fairly read as validating the essence of the Trump narrative.

 source

What color snake do YOU prefer to be bitten by?

Saying a long goodbye to Trumpism

I’m trying to turn the page, so to speak, and not tune in on Trump-related news, but it won’t stop for a while (at least until he’s locked up somewhere for any of his numerous crimes) and Sekhnet is addicted to breaking news and follows it daily. So during lunch I got to catch Amy Klobachar and her Republican counterpart at the conclusion of the hearing into why nobody in charge did anything to get reinforcements rushed in while the Capitol was being overrun by heavily armed Q and MAGA maggots (why virtually all 800 beloved, defecation-smearing Trump patriots were allowed to leave peacefully afterwards is still a mystery nobody seems to be touching… I guess the answer is too obvious, the president told them he loved them, and that he felt their pain).  

When committee chairperson Klobachar was done with her closing statement, the Republican committee co-chair thanked her and said he enjoyed the bipartisan hearing. He also thanked the witnesses, for appearing voluntarily and answering honestly, as opposed to (I’m thinking) his Congressional colleagues who threatened to be hostile witnesses who’d use litigation to tie up their subpoenas to testify in Trump’s impeachment trial for years and prolong Trump’s “unconstitutional” “partisan” impeachment circus until their leader’s 2024 campaign was fully underway.

Bipartisanism 101.    Narcissistic symbiosis…

A friend sent me a great print interview with the brilliant Dr. Bandy Lee, a principled forensic psychiatrist I’ve long admired. Lee’s answers nailed several key points about a dangerously impulsive demagogue and his followers succinctly and clearly enough for anyone but a MAGA believer to understand.

The same friend had earlier sent me the results of a recent “study” that found (surprise!) that people who are slower to make neural connections and have a harder time seeing subtle patterns, points and nuance are more easily drawn to extremism, the black and white, Us vs. Them, world of autocracy, jingoism and racism. With that study in the background, this answer is the clearest, shortest explanation of the phenomenon of our boy Trumpie and his mass of very fine, loyal-to-the-death peeps that I’ve ever seen:

What attracts people to Trump? What is their animus or driving force?

The reasons are multiple and varied, but in my recent public-service book, Profile of a Nation, I have outlined two major emotional drives: narcissistic symbiosis and shared psychosis. Narcissistic symbiosis refers to the developmental wounds that make the leader-follower relationship magnetically attractive. The leader, hungry for adulation to compensate for an inner lack of self-worth, projects grandiose omnipotence—while the followers, rendered needy by societal stress or developmental injury, yearn for a parental figure. When such wounded individuals are given positions of power, they arouse similar pathology in the population that creates a “lock and key” relationship.


“Shared psychosis”—which is also called “folie à millions” [“madness for millions”] when occurring at the national level or “induced delusions”—refers to the infectiousness of severe symptoms that goes beyond ordinary group psychology. When a highly symptomatic individual is placed in an influential position, the person’s symptoms can spread through the population through emotional bonds, heightening existing pathologies and inducing delusions, paranoia and propensity for violence—even in previously healthy individuals. The treatment is removal of exposure.

The leader, hungry for adulation to compensate for an inner lack of self-worth, projects grandiose omnipotence—while the followers, rendered needy by societal stress or developmental injury, yearn for a parental figure.

 The description above also fits any cult, abusive marriage or other one-sided power relationship, for that matter.  The leader needs the followers as much as the follower needs the leader, for the deepest and most compelling of psychological reasons.   Narcissistic Symbiosis!   She lays it out in so few words — inner lack-of self-worth, grandiosity (eternal need for praise) meets injured, stressed yearning for a protective parent. 

Also, read Dr. Lee’s great dismissal of the “Goldwater Rule” (shrinks are prohibited from assessing even the craziest public officials unless they’ve first done an in-person evaluation — in which case medical confidentiality rules would seemingly be implicated). The Goldwater (“extremism in defense of liberty is no vice”) Rule is always cited by media pundits and politicians as some holy grail, like a well-settled, universally accepted law that only cranks and criminals try to violate.   It’s a rule made by a conservative professional association — not actually binding on anyone but its voluntary members. 

Groups like the American Psychiatric Association, promulgators of the Goldwater Rule, always remind me that doctors in Hitler’s Germany were the first professional group to achieve perfect Aryan/Nazi membership, under gleichshaltung [“co-ordination”, the process of Nazification by which Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party successively established a system of totalitarian control. Party membership and an oath of personal loyalty to the leader were required to practice any profession or hold any office, just like in the defunct Trump administration.] 

Instead of holding hearings where fine Ever-Trumpers like seditionist Lyin’ Ted Cruz and fist-pumping insurrection-supporter Josh Hawley can pontificate and create soundbytes for extremist media, just set out the details of the long Trump purge, the constant humiliations, vindictive firings and forced resignations, in Trump’s chaotic administration– the replacement of long-time officials of some expertise with ever less qualified loyalists with a proven willingness to do anything their leader demanded. Then, is it really necessary to hold a hearing to figure out why there was no immediate, coordinated response to protect Congress members and their staffs when the Capitol was attacked by a violent, armed crowd waving Trump flags, and Confederate battle flags, and other signs and symbols of resistance to the duly elected government?  The president, depressed that a rigged election had been stolen from him (his rigging didn’t work!) was finally enjoying something, live on TV. Seemed like a sin for any of his appointees and other loyal underlings to ruin the poor guy’s fun!

Well, as Biden said the other day at a press conference — five years of Trump on the news every minute of every day is enough, I’m done talking about him.   I hope…

Here’s Doctor Bandy Lee, from last month’s Scientific American interview:

The ‘Shared Psychosis’ of Donald Trump and His Loyalists


Forensic psychiatrist Bandy X. Lee explains the outgoing president’s pathological appeal and how to wean people from it

Tanya Lewis on January 11, 2021
The violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol Building last week, incited by President Donald Trump, serves as the grimmest moment in one of the darkest chapters in the nation’s history. Yet the rioters’ actions—and Trump’s own role in, and response to, them—come as little surprise to many, particularly those who have been studying the president’s mental fitness and the psychology of his most ardent followers since he took office.


One such person is Bandy X. Lee, a forensic psychiatrist and president of the World Mental Health Coalition.* Lee led a group of psychiatrists, psychologists and other specialists who questioned Trump’s mental fitness for office in a book that she edited called The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President. In doing so, Lee and her colleagues strongly rejectedthe American Psychiatric Association’s modification of a 1970s-era guideline,known as the Goldwater rule, that discouraged psychiatrists from giving a professional opinion about public figures who they have not examined in person. “Whenever the Goldwater rule is mentioned, we should refer back to the Declaration of Geneva, which mandates that physicians speak up against destructive governments,” Lee says. “This declaration was created in response to the experience of Nazism.”


Lee recently wrote Profile of a Nation: Trump’s Mind, America’s Soul, a psychological assessment of the president against the backdrop of his supporters and the country as a whole. These insights are now taking on renewed importance as a growing number of current and former leaders call for Trump to be impeached. On January 9 Lee and her colleagues at the World Mental Health Coalition put out a statement calling for Trump’s immediate removal from office.

Scientific American asked Lee to comment on the psychology behind Trump’s destructive behavior, what drives some of his followers—and how to free people from his grip when this damaging presidency ends.
[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]


What attracts people to Trump? What is their animus or driving force?

The reasons are multiple and varied, but in my recent public-service book, Profile of a Nation, I have outlined two major emotional drives: narcissistic symbiosis and shared psychosis. Narcissistic symbiosis refers to the developmental wounds that make the leader-follower relationship magnetically attractive. The leader, hungry for adulation to compensate for an inner lack of self-worth, projects grandiose omnipotence—while the followers, rendered needy by societal stress or developmental injury, yearn for a parental figure. When such wounded individuals are given positions of power, they arouse similar pathology in the population that creates a “lock and key” relationship.


“Shared psychosis”—which is also called “folie à millions” [“madness for millions”] when occurring at the national level or “induced delusions”—refers to the infectiousness of severe symptoms that goes beyond ordinary group psychology. When a highly symptomatic individual is placed in an influential position, the person’s symptoms can spread through the population through emotional bonds, heightening existing pathologies and inducing delusions, paranoia and propensity for violence—even in previously healthy individuals. The treatment is removal of exposure.

Why does Trump himself seem to gravitate toward violence and destruction?

Destructiveness is a core characteristic of mental pathology, whether directed toward the self or others. First, I wish to clarify that those with mental illness are, as a group, no more dangerous than those without mental illness. When mental pathology is accompanied by criminal-mindedness, however, the combination can make individuals far more dangerous than either alone.In my textbook on violence, I emphasize the symbolic nature of violence and how it is a life impulse gone awry. Briefly, if one cannot have love, one resorts to respect. And when respect is unavailable, one resorts to fear. Trump is now living through an intolerable loss of respect: rejection by a nation in his election defeat. Violence helps compensate for feelings of powerlessness, inadequacy and lack of real productivity.


Do you think Trump is truly exhibiting delusional or psychotic behavior? Or is he simply behaving like an autocrat making a bald-faced attempt to hold onto his power?

I believe it is both. He is certainly of an autocratic disposition because his extreme narcissism does not allow for equality with other human beings, as democracy requires. Psychiatrists generally assess delusions through personal examination, but there is other evidence of their likelihood. First, delusions are more infectious than strategic lies, and so we see, from their sheer spread, that Trump likely truly believes them. Second, his emotional fragility, manifested in extreme intolerance of realities that do not fit his wishful view of the world, predispose him to psychotic spirals. Third, his public record includes numerous hours of interviews and interactions with other people—such as the hour-long one with the Georgia secretary of state—that very nearly confirm delusion, as my colleague and I discovered in a systematic analysis.


Where does the hatred some of his supporters display come from? And what can we do to promote healing?

In Profile of a Nation, I outline the many causes that create his followership. But there is important psychological injury that arises from relative—not absolute—socioeconomic deprivation. Yes, there is great injury, anger and redirectable energy for hatred, which Trump harnessed and stoked for his manipulation and use. The emotional bonds he has created facilitate shared psychosis at a massive scale. It is a natural consequence of the conditions we have set up. For healing, I usually recommend three steps: (1) Removal of the offending agent (the influential person with severe symptoms). (2) Dismantling systems of thought control—common in advertising but now also heavily adopted by politics. And (3) fixing the socioeconomic conditions that give rise to poor collective mental health in the first place.


What do you predict he will do after his presidency?

I again emphasize in Profile of a Nation that we should consider the president, his followers and the nation as an ecology, not in isolation. Hence, what he does after this presidency depends a great deal on us. This is the reason I frantically wrote the book over the summer: we require active intervention to stop him from achieving any number of destructive outcomes for the nation, including the establishment of a shadow presidency. He will have no limit, which is why I have actively advocated for removal and accountability, including prosecution. We need to remember that he is more a follower than a leader, and we need to place constraints from the outside when he cannot place them from within.


What do you think will happen to his supporters?

If we handle the situation appropriately, there will be a lot of disillusionment and trauma. And this is all right—they are healthy reactions to an abnormal situation. We must provide emotional support for healing, and this includes societal support, such as sources of belonging and dignity. Cult members and victims of abuse are often emotionally bonded to the relationship, unable to see the harm that is being done to them. After a while, the magnitude of the deception conspires with their own psychological protections against pain and disappointment. This causes them to avoid seeing the truth. And the situation with Trump supporters is very similar. The danger is that another pathological figure will come around and entice them with a false “solution” that is really a harnessing of this resistance.


How can we avert future insurrection attempts or acts of violence?

Violence is the end product of a long process, so prevention is key. Structural violence, or inequality, is the most potent stimulant of behavioral violence. And reducing inequality in all forms—economic, racial and gender—will help toward preventing violence. For prevention to be effective, knowledge and in-depth understanding cannot be overlooked—so we can anticipate what is coming, much like the pandemic. The silencing of mental health professionals during the Trump era, mainly through a politically driven distortion of an ethical guideline, was catastrophic, in my view, in the nation’s failure to understand, predict and prevent the dangers of this presidency.


Do you have any advice for people who do not support Trump but have supporters of him or “mini-Trumps” in their lives?

This is often very difficult because the relationship between Trump and his supporters is an abusive one, as an author of the 2017 book I edited, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, presciently pointed out. When the mind is hijacked for the benefit of the abuser, it becomes no longer a matter of presenting facts or appealing to logic. Removing Trump from power and influence will be healing in itself. But, I advise, first, not to confront [his supporters’] beliefs, for it will only rouse resistance. Second, persuasion should not be the goal but change of the circumstance that led to their faulty beliefs. Third, one should maintain one’s own bearing and mental health, because people who harbor delusional narratives tend to bulldoze over reality in their attempt to deny that their own narrative is false. As for mini-Trumps, it is important, above all, to set firm boundaries, to limit contact or even to leave the relationship, if possible. Because I specialize in treating violent individuals, I always believe there is something that can be done to treat them, but they seldom present for treatment unless forced.

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Fair is fair!

The Supreme Court ruled today that Mr. Trump’s long hidden financial records, including his tax returns, must be turned over to the Manhattan District Attorney to be presented to the Grand Jury looking into allegations that Trump committed financial crimes. It has taken only four or five months, since lower federal courts rejected Trump’s lawyers’ idiotic, increasingly weak arguments that now private citizen Trump still has an absolute right to hide anything that might prove incriminating. Only a few short months for the Supreme Court to state the obvious, in accordance with its own opinion on the same matter issued in July. Here’s the NY Times today:

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday rejected a last-ditch attempt by former President Donald J. Trump to shield his financial records, issuing a brief, unsigned order requiring Mr. Trump’s accountants to turn over his tax and other records to prosecutors in New York.

The court’s order was a decisive defeat for Mr. Trump, who had gone to extraordinary lengths to keep his tax returns and related documents secret. There were no dissents noted.

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Compare the deliberate speed of this decision (and the going on two years non-decision on whether it is lawful for a president to instruct former subordinates — Don McGahn, John Bolton [1], et al — to defy lawful Congressional subpoenas) with the overnight overturning of the stay of execution of a psychotic federal death row inmate in the days before Trump reluctantly left office after a rigged, stolen election deprived him of his rightful second term as POTUS.

The reasons for this are clear.

In one case, we have the public’s right to know if the president is a long-time felon and the extent of his seeming corruption. A decision like that takes time, and requires extending multiple bites at the legal apple, and every available appeal, to protect Trump’s presumption of innocence. In the case of an immediate decision on state killing, we have the president’s undisputed right to expedite the execution of any condemned federal death row inmate, especially when he is about to leave office.

A several day stay of execution would have been fatal to the president’s unquestioned right to kill anyone he has the legal power to kill. Lisa Montgomery and the others he chose to kill had to die! [2] Imagine the harm to all of us if Biden had extended the stay of execution, or, God forbid, commuted the tortured, heavily medicated murderer’s death sentence to life in prison without parole!

Lisa Montgomery, dead of lethal injection hours after Supreme Court instantly vacated the stay of execution, a week before Trump left office

[1]

You remember the patriotic Bolton, the hero who joined McGahn’s federal law suit to determine whether he had to obey a congressional subpoena, and, months after Trump’s first impeachment, published his tell-all book about the many reasons Trump should have been removed from office

John R. Bolton, the former national security adviser, says in his new book that the House in its impeachment inquiry should have investigated President Trump not just for pressuring Ukraine but for a variety of instances when he sought to use trade negotiations and criminal investigations to further his political interests.

Mr. Bolton describes several episodes where the president expressed a willingness to halt criminal investigations “to, in effect, give personal favors to dictators he liked,” citing cases involving major firms in China and Turkey. “The pattern looked like obstruction of justice as a way of life, which we couldn’t accept,” Mr. Bolton writes, saying that he reported his concerns to Attorney General William P. Barr.

Mr. Bolton also adds a striking new accusation by describing how Mr. Trump overtly linked tariff talks with China to his own political fortunes by asking President Xi Jinping to buy American agricultural products to help him win farm states in this year’s election. Mr. Trump, he writes, was “pleading with Xi to ensure he’d win.” Mr. Bolton said that Mr. Trump “stressed the importance of farmers, and increased Chinese purchases of soybeans and wheat in the electoral outcome.”

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[2]

Montgomery was the 11th prisoner to be killed by lethal injection since Donald Trump resumed federal executions last July after a 17-year hiatus. The president is an ardent supporter of capital punishment.

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Anti-worker propaganda from the world’s richest man

Can’t even read the aggravating New York Times these days without pandemic-profiteer Jeff Bezos continually sticking his expensive free speech in your face (he has the most insistently intrusive ads I’ve seen anywhere, this one popped up over and over as I scrolled through the online NY Times).

First, more than doubling the federal minimum wage, a radical idea only a few years ago, seems only fair. It’s not like the $600/week for a full-time worker is going to make anyone middle class, but the $15/hr. wage will lift millions out of working poverty. Imagine the difference between making $290 a week and $600 a week. If there is concern about bankrupting small businesses, there can be a tax adjustment for small employers, or some other offset, but none of that has anything to do with the Bezos ad about why he’s supporting this pay increase for our lowest paid citizens.

I guess it’s the same reason Bezos hired some heavy hitters from the stable of Charles Koch to fight back against the ungrateful Amazon sweat-shop workers in Alabama, and elsewhere, who are trying to organize to attack Bezos’s absolute right to have a union-free workforce.

Probably the same reason for the massive public relations effort to villainize the fired New York City Amazon warehouse worker who, during the early days of the pandemic, when the virus was ravaging New York City for the first time, organized a strike seeking safety measures in the warehouse he worked in.

Amazon employees who go public with their complaints are likely to lose their jobs. The corporation prohibits its workers from commenting publicly on any aspect of its business, without prior approval from executives.

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It’s not as if 20,000 Amazon workers came down with COVID-19 (that number comes from Amazon itself) or a bunch died of it (nobody can prove those six deaths by May had anything to do with infectious conditions in the crowded warehouses).

A traitorous executive at Facebook released a recording of Jeff’s fellow-billionaire Mark Zuckerberg telling Facebook executives that if the government comes after your company seeking to regulate its operations, its profits, “existential threats”, “you go to the mat” to fight those efforts. You fight like hell, with all the weapons you’ve got, or you’re not going to be one of the ten wealthiest men in the world.

When you are very, very rich, and defending your wealth with top lawyers, public relations teams and advertising is deductible as a business expense, you fight like hell with every means at your disposal not to be taken advantage of by hoards of smelly losers.

You can understand why the freedom loving owners of Texas energy providers would be against coercive regulations that could prevent them from charging $2,000 a day for electricity during a massive, deadly power outage. Supply and Demand, Free Market, motherfuckers.

So, sure, it’s good that the world’s richest man supports a minimum $30,000 a year income for full-time American workers. Nobody should be forced to work for less than that in our wealthy nation. And, yeah, Jeff has long been devoted to seeing the federal minimum wage raised to the same generous $600 a week/$31,200 annually (based on 52 weeks of work) he already voluntarily pays to the vast majority of the full-time workers in his massive workforce. God bless him for it.

Hannah Arendt on “ideology”

I just heard a great discussion with Masha Gessen about the autocrat’s (or cult leader’s) imperative to replace thought and inquiry with unthinking, unquestioning belief, based on an overarching worldview (or “ideology”). No totalitarian leader can come to power without convincing multitudes that debate based on so-called facts, truth, outmoded common agreement about empirical reality — what their eyes and ears may tell them — means nothing compared to the belief system their leader instills in them.   This destruction of belief in “fact” and its replacement with narrative-driving “alternative fact” is a precondition for any takeover by an authoritarian regime (or cult leader, though Gessen didn’t speak of cults, cults and autocracy have the same operating system).

The only sure route to the autocrat’s desired end is by instilling an “ideology,” a belief system that eliminates the need for doubt, instantly invalidates all criticism and cuts off the need for thought, replacing these things with loyal obedience to the inevitable historical imperatives dictated by ideology. The expression of ideology is often reducible to an easily remembered phrase.

Why do thousands gather on January 6th to enthusiastically support the outlandish and many times disproven proposition that there was massive voter fraud among Democrats and an illegitimate communist-puppet president is about to be sworn in? Why do 140 Representatives in the House and a dozen Senators stand to voice this baseless objection to certifying an election that was deemed fair by members of both parties and certified in all 50 states? Because tens of millions are angrily repeating these “ideologically-driven” allegations, tens of millions who voted to keep #Stop the Steal proponents in Congress, and therefore, those allegations of a rigged, stolen election might be true, must now be investigated! Before it’s too late!!!!

Here’s Hannah:

GESSEN: The way Arendt saw Hitler’s ideology – and she wrote about ideology a lot, but not in a way that you probably would intuitively imagine she wrote about ideology. She didn’t write about ideology as coherent thinking or as a system – as a worldview. She wrote about ideology as definitely a bad thing, as a kind of unthinking system.

SHULZ: (As Hannah Arendt) The last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility.

GESSEN: And she broke down the word ideology into its component parts, one idea taken to its logical extreme to derive from this ideological thinking the laws of history, right? So if history is inexorably moving in that direction, then we can help history along. And so they see themselves as agents of history. So then they go start – go about exterminating the other masses because the laws of history dictate that that be done. In the case of Germany, the idea that the Aryan race would come to rule the world…

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Arendt broke down the word ideology into its component parts, one idea taken to its logical extreme to derive from this ideological thinking the laws of history.

With a client’s ideology on trial, and a sufficient number of jurors working with the defense and committed to acquittal, all a lawyer must do is show one incident where the other side is “lying” to prove his case that every enemy of his client is a fucking liar. As Mr. Trump’s lawyer, the sabbath observing David Schoen did with this arguable lie by Adam Schiff [1], who deliberately pronounced the commonly misspelled word “cavalry” in Kylie Jane Kremer’s tweet as “cavalry” [2].

“You see how these filthy, lying socialist Jews do it?” asked last-minute Trump attorney David Schoen, silently, referring to the alleged trickery of his sick and dangerous co-religionist.

Of course, as any Christian knows, and any clever (or even just choleric) Jewish lawyer knows, Calvary was where Jesus Christ was crucified. So, obviously, when talking about the modern day crucifixion of Donald Trump… this Trump supporter clearly meant that the place where Jesus was crucified was on its way. Exclamation point!

You could argue, of course, that in the context of Trump’s December 19 call for a march (no mere protest rally) on January 6, retweeting his “be there, will be wild” promise, the tweet by the person Schiff deliberately and cunningly misquoted could refer to the troops Trump was calling for to march on the Capitol and Stop the Steal (which they, in fact, did).

Of course, “context” is just more lying bullshit, calculated to obstruct and distract, if there is sufficient fervor for your “ideology.” The Trump supporter’s tweet was clearly referring to Our Lord’s crucifixion, which was coming, lying libtards!!!

Meanwhile, in other news, youth around the world are suffering massively from pandemic-induced social isolation. The New York Times reports ‘What’s the point?’ Young People’s Despair Deepens as Covid-19 Crisis Drags On. We philosophical old bastards have years of experience to compare this disorienting, historically unusual situation to, a world before we were all locked down in fear of infection and death. The young have not had as much time to become this philosophical, yet.

[1]

[2]

But this [misspelling] is also a mistake that Trump himself has made. On Jan. 1, promoting the Jan. 6 rally, Trump retweeted a user who also used “calvary” — prompting Merriam-Webster to troll the president by publishing an article on the differences. “Although they begin and end with the same groups of letters, cavalry and calvary are not related in either origin or meaning,” the dictionary company wrote.

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The seeming slipperiness of the truth, and its value

Our defeated ex-president, seizing on the death of a man of great certainty of opinion and even greater influence, around whose neck he’d hung a presidential medal at his last State of the Union, reemerged into the public spotlight, on FOX, to repeat the familiar refrain that he’d won, in a landslide, the election he lost decisively. In support of his ongoing #Stop the Steal campaign he said that this great, recently departed American anti-Leftist had strongly agreed with him, the presidency was stolen from him, from all real Americans. The professionals and experts all know the truth, he said — that the presidency had been stolen from him and from America by a vast cabal of evil, sick, dangerous enemies of the people — the vast Leftwing, Antifa, BLM, Feminist, Homosexual, Liberal Jew media conspiracy.

The charge that he won the election he lost may be untrue, (reasonable people can argue about it, claims Lyin’ Ted Cruz, reasonably) but you have no right to call it a lie when tens of millions honestly believe it’s true that there was massive voter fraud that stole the election from the rightful winner. How dare you call the sacred dead former talk-show host with talent on loan from God a liar?!! Standing up for possible truth is the whole reason more than a hundred and fifty GOP members of Congress united to contest the “certification” of an election that nobody ever proved wasn’t massively fraudulent, the deliberate and systematic theft of an election, by lying traitors, that the “defeated” candidate actually won in a landslide.

Back for a moment to the personal, to the moment when somebody decides you will be in a fight to the death no matter what you think about it, no matter what actions you may take to try to prevent it. Certainty is a powerful force. I’m thinking about an old friend who called to angrily confront me about being unjustly angry after my health insurance was abruptly cancelled, (illegally as it turned out). He then escalated his indignation and challenges week after week, finally, after pressing me to just fucking move on from whatever my grievance was, snapped, cut me off mid-sentence with a snarl and hung up. Then texted me that he was done being reamed by me.

It seems petty, I know, to keep coming back to this same indigestible example of another old friend suddenly become a devoted, eternal enemy. I’m trying to wring something instructive out of the vexation of it. It seems like the lesson has to be more than that we can all convince ourselves of the righteousness of our own actions, once we construct the right frame. It may be no more than that, though that answer is as unsatisfying as the conclusion that homo sapiens are just a petty, quarrelsome, largely irrational species whose history is always written in the blood of the justifiably murdered.

Surely there is something like objective reality. If you have no dog in the fight you are generally able to look at what actually happened, trace cause and effect, and often assess who is basically correct and who seems to have things ass backwards. The answer is rarely that both sides in a heated argument (like the consensus of Climate Scientists versus for-profit Climate Change Skeptics) are equally valid. There is generally more truth, more fact, more data, more thought behind one position than the other. The genius of the long right-wing project to convert the GOP into a radical right-wing party, similar in its essential features to the one-time fringe conspiracy-based John Birch Society cult, described this way, by political scientists Norm Ornstein and Thomas Mann in 2012:

is that today massive, repeated allegations of something, funded by tens of millions of dollars in ad buys to convince people of the allegations, suffice to back and fully justify any political move, including a righteous riot to disrupt the peaceful transition of power in the Capitol. You no longer need a shred of proof, evidence or any discernible facts on your side — the accusation itself is sufficient to fuel the righteous fight to the death.

Proponents of the need to contest the results of an election they claim (without evidence) was massively fraudulent, even after results have been certified fair by bipartisan officials, votes recounted, challenged dozens of times in court, left in place by the courts (for lack of evidence of fraud) need only site the ALLEGATION of fraud, believed by millions, to support their right to contest the election. Regardless, of course, of whether there is or isn’t, or has ever been, actual evidence of significant voter fraud found, even by the Koch-funded Heritage Foundation or Trump’s Presidential Electoral Fraud Commission headed by Hang Mike Pence and defeated voter-suppression expert Kris Kobach.

The project of convincing tens of millions of fraud that didn’t actually happen is vast power at work, and successful propaganda instilling belief in something that is based only on the needs of maintaining that power. It is our job going forward to make a humane case for the 99% as emotionally undeniable as these Koch-funded geniuses have made on behalf of the 1%. It saddens me to see the Democrats resorting to Lincoln Project-style attack ads, which they are now (the Lincoln Project proudly claims credit for Trump turning on his loyal retainer Pence) and I keep thinking there has to be a better way to make the case for fairness, although maybe not at the moment.

Back to the personal. This long-time friend, no matter how clearly I set out my issues, my specific concerns about our long “argument,” insisted that we can’t ever really know what is in anybody else’s head or heart, even someone we’ve known well for half a century.

It seems an untenable and depressing position to me, one that inevitably leads to estrangement, but this man is very smart, an accomplished lawyer, and he rests his case for this unshakeable belief on the fact that in the end, after my many attempts to be analytical and nonviolent in stating my concerns (concerns he repeatedly asked me to clarify, no matter how clearly I’d already made them) I admitted, in a very hurtful way, that I was frustrated, angry and disappointed in his limitations as a friend.

After all, from his point of view, every one of his attempts to make peace was met by my stubborn refusal to simply forgive, even after he made it clear that he truly didn’t understand what he’d ever done to me that was hurtful. Instead, he pointed out, I kept struggling, stubbornly and incoherently, to make him understand what was so “hurtful” about his conduct.

When I hear that Tucker Carlson, for example, said, of the police killing of George Floyd (bracketed by Brook Gladstone’s commentary from her excellent On The Media:

BROOKE GLADSTONE Later that evening, Fox primetime hosts Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity drew on increasingly deranged conspiracy theories to denature the evidence [in the impeachment trial –ed].

[CLIP]

TUCKER CARLSON They’re just flat out lying. There’s no question about that. The question is, why would they lie about this? For an answer, think back to last spring. Beginning on Memorial Day, BLM and their sponsors and corporate America completely changed this country. They changed this country more in five months that it had changed in the previous 50 years. How’d they do that? They used the sad death of a man called George Floyd to upend our society. Months later, we learned that the story they told us about George Ford’s death was an utter lie. There was no physical evidence that George Floyd was murdered by a cop. The autopsy show that George Floyd almost certainly died of a drug overdose. Fentanyl. [END CLIP]

BROOKE GLADSTONE Right. A full autopsy report by Minneapolis police found that Floyd had fentanyl and other drugs in his blood. He also had Covid-19. None of that killed him. His death was ruled a homicide. Maybe Tucker will move on to flim-flam less foul, but why would he? 

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my blood instantly boils.

I don’t often listen to FOX, or Cucker Tarlson (or whatever the well-born, entitled prick’s name is) but hearing him smugly intone a transparent and incendiary lie, calling the story of Floyd’s (who he called “Ford” at one point) homicide a lie, made me ready to fight him, as it was intended to. I immediately felt a violent urge to put my knee on Tucker’s neck and kneel on him for as long as it took him to stop kicking and begging, letting him up a second before his death. The whole FOX/Murdoch right-wing exercise is “triggering the libtards” and thar’s gold in them hills (Rush Limbaugh died with a net worth of over $600,000,000). The Minneapolis coroner who ruled that a grown man, armed with a gun, supported by three armed colleagues, kneeling on the handcuffed George Floyd’s neck for almost nine minutes, the last three after Floyd lost consciousness after begging for mercy and calling out for his mother, had caused Floyd’s death? A fucking liar and traitor, a tool of the fucking lying libs.

Hearing Carlson’s inflammatory hate speech I immediately, and involuntarily, flashed on my former friend’s claim that in spite of the thousands of words I’d written him trying to keep the peace (the first few thousand he thanked me for humbly, for I’d taken pains not cast undue blame on his actions) nothing I had written, in the end, gave him the slightest clue why I was so hurtful to him now.

The truth can slippery once strong emotions creep in, and people we trust can twist it convincingly sometimes, but, call me old-fashioned, I still believe there is a world of cause and effect that can be observed, that some narratives are closer to the truth of what happened than others. I can’t be sure what the root cause of my friend’s insistence that we fight to the death was. Not sure I made all the right moves to try to avoid it, obviously I didn’t, based on the irreconcilable enmity at the end.

But if someone asks you why you are angry, and you tell them you are protesting the long history of too many unarmed black people unaccountably murdered by the police in this country every year, and they respond by calling you a terrorist, dispersing protests with the full force of non-deadly state violence (tear gas, horseback charges, rubber bullets, anti-riot squad phalanxes swinging batons, mass arrests) you might be forgiven for feeling unheard.

“What is the real core issue here?” asked my friend, time after time, telling me he clearly didn’t understand what he did that seemed to have upset me so much. I told him that, in a nutshell, having my expressed concerns met by silence is probably the single most hurtful thing to me, that the attempted negation of my feelings by silence is like kryptonite to me. He stood on his right to remain silent, and on the reciprocal truth that I had no right to expect any different, since nobody can ever truly know what is in somebody else’s heart and mind or why they feel as they feel or do what they do.

“I read everything you wrote, searching in vain for a single clue as to what I’d done that made you so irrationally angry and hurtful to me,” he concluded, resting his case.

I can’t do anything about the gigantic phenomenon of unchallenged far-fetched falsehoods being presented as just good as undeniable truth when it comes to a partisan GOP argument. Greg Abbott, the Trumpist governor of Texas, is angrily blaming the Green New Deal for his state’s deadly weather-related emergency — and fuck your fucking facts, cucktards. The political is personal, of course, and there’s little we can do, outside of hard, slow, resolute work on the long-game of bending the long arch of history towards justice. In our personal lives, our choices are more straightforward.

I can’t do anything about a friend who insists that he will do everything in his power to save our friendship, while standing on his right not to revisit any concern that might make him uncomfortable, or even acknowledge I’ve clearly expressed a single goddamned thing worthy of consideration. In the end I can do one thing in the case of a friend like that — let him make his final arguments, accept his right to remain unchanged, and his verdict, and try not to brood about it whenever I hear a similar case indignantly made by a Tucker Carlson.

Though, I also have to acknowledge the deeply disturbing personal resonance of things like hearing the Rochester cop, while hand-cuffing and pepper spraying the emotionally disturbed nine year-old girl (and the fact that the cop was not immediately fired and prosecuted tells you the race of the child) demanding that she stop acting like a child. “I AM a child!” she replied, stating the obvious, to a brutal asshole who didn’t have the slightest concern for what was true and what was instantly verifiable bullshit. I heard the same from my own father, when I was that age and younger. That I should start acting like a man instead of a fucking child. He apologized about that right before he died, for whatever good that might have done anyone.

Truth and reconciliation, y’all, there is a tremendous value to it. It’s the only path to true healing.

Truth and Reconciliation, GOP style

At last, two of the country’s top Republican leaders finally speak the plain truth, after four solid years of partisan lying, sharp practices and covering for each other’s hypocrisy — and shortly after a partisan acquittal, on a shaky technicality, in Trump’s record second impeachment (in little over a year). Sadly, truth does not seem to have resulted in reconciliation.

MITCH McCONNELL:

“January 6th was a disgrace.

“American citizens attacked their own government. They used terrorism to try to stop a specific piece of democratic business they did not like.

“Fellow Americans beat and bloodied our own police. They stormed the Senate floor. They tried to hunt down the Speaker of the House. They built a gallows and chanted about murdering the Vice President.

“They did this because they had been fed wild falsehoods by the most powerful man on Earth — because he was angry he’d lost an election.

“Former President Trump’s actions preceding the riot were a disgraceful dereliction of duty.

“The House accused the former President of, quote, ‘incitement.’ That is a specific term from the criminal law.

“Let me put that to the side for one moment and reiterate something I said weeks ago: There is no question that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of that day.

“The people who stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of their President.

“And their having that belief was a foreseeable consequence of the growing crescendo of false statements, conspiracy theories, and reckless hyperbole which the defeated President kept shouting into the largest megaphone on planet Earth.

“The issue is not only the President’s intemperate language on January 6th.

“It is not just his endorsement of remarks in which an associate urged ‘trial by combat.’

“It was also the entire manufactured atmosphere of looming catastrophe; the increasingly wild myths about a reverse landslide election that was being stolen in some secret coup by our now-President.

“I defended the President’s right to bring any complaints to our legal system. The legal system spoke. The Electoral College spoke. As I stood up and said clearly at the time, the election was settled.

“But that reality just opened a new chapter of even wilder and more unfounded claims.

“The leader of the free world cannot spend weeks thundering that shadowy forces are stealing our country and then feign surprise when people believe him and do reckless things. [1]

(Of course, the constitution requires, unfortunately, that such an elected official not be held responsible by the Senate, Mitch concludes.)

DONALD J. TRUMP:

“Mitch is a dour, sullen, and unsmiling political hack, and if Republican Senators are going to stay with him, they will not win again,” Trump said in the statement. “He will never do what needs to be done, or what is right for our Country. Where necessary and appropriate, I will back primary rivals who espouse Making America Great Again and our policy of America First. We want brilliant, strong, thoughtful, and compassionate leadership.”

Then the CLINTON NEWS NETWORK continues:

Trump’s call for compassionate leadership came in a petty statement full of ad hominem attacks, including a jab at McConnell’s family, and after years of some of the most vitriolic political leadership in American history. Despite the potshot at McConnell’s family and the insulting characterization of his personality, Trump wanted to lob harsher personal attacks at McConnell, according to a source familiar with Trump’s desires. Trump adviser Jason Miller said an “earlier (version of the) statement was likely tougher. There was never a consideration to make a personal attack, though.” [2]

biased source

Which is why, of course, Mr. Trump refrained from making it a personal attack on another former close ally.

“Anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” — Voltaire

(quoted by Representative Jamie Raskin during the impeachment trial)

[1] Here’s the rest of the immoral, chinless fuck’s self-serving remarks:

“Sadly, many politicians sometimes make overheated comments or use metaphors that unhinged listeners might take literally.”This was different.”This was an intensifying crescendo of conspiracy theories, orchestrated by an outgoing president who seemed determined to either overturn the voters’ decision or else torch our institutions on the way out.”The unconscionable behavior did not end when the violence began.”Whatever our ex-President claims he thought might happen that day… whatever reaction he says he meant to produce… by that afternoon, he was watching the same live television as the rest of the world.“A mob was assaulting the Capitol in his name. These criminals were carrying his banners, hanging his flags, and screaming their loyalty to him.”It was obvious that only President Trump could end this.”Former aides publicly begged him to do so. Loyal allies frantically called the Administration.”But the President did not act swiftly. He did not do his job. He didn’t take steps so federal law could be faithfully executed, and order restored.”Instead, according to public reports, he watched television happily as the chaos unfolded. He kept pressing his scheme to overturn the election!”Even after it was clear to any reasonable observer that Vice President Pence was in danger… even as the mob carrying Trump banners was beating cops and breaching perimeters… the President sent a further tweet attacking his Vice President.“Predictably and foreseeably under the circumstances, members of the mob seemed to interpret this as further inspiration to lawlessness and violence.”Later, even when the President did halfheartedly begin calling for peace, he did not call right away for the riot to end. He did not tell the mob to depart until even later.”And even then, with police officers bleeding and broken glass covering Capitol floors, he kept repeating election lies and praising the criminals.”In recent weeks, our ex-President’s associates have tried to use the 74 million Americans who voted to re-elect him as a kind of human shield against criticism.

“Anyone who decries his awful behavior is accused of insulting millions of voters.”That is an absurd deflection.”74 million Americans did not invade the Capitol. Several hundred rioters did.”And 74 million Americans did not engineer the campaign of disinformation and rage that provoked it.”One person did.”I have made my view of this episode very plain.”But our system of government gave the Senate a specific task. The Constitution gives us a particular role.“This body is not invited to act as the nation’s overarching moral tribunal.”We are not free to work backward from whether the accused party might personally deserve some kind of punishment.“Justice Joseph Story was our nation’s first great constitutional scholar. As he explained nearly 200 years ago, the process of impeachment and conviction is a narrow tool for a narrow purpose.”Story explained this limited tool exists to “secure the state against gross official misdemeanors.” That is, to protect the country from government officers.”If President Trump were still in office, I would have carefully considered whether the House managers proved their specific charge.”By the strict criminal standard, the President’s speech probably was not incitement.”However, in the context of impeachment, the Senate might have decided this was acceptable shorthand for the reckless actions that preceded the riot.”But in this case, that question is moot. Because former President Trump is constitutionally not eligible for conviction.”There is no doubt this is a very close question. Donald Trump was the President when the House voted, though not when the House chose to deliver the papers.”Brilliant scholars argue both sides of the jurisdictional question. The text is legitimately ambiguous. I respect my colleagues who have reached either conclusion.”But after intense reflection, I believe the best constitutional reading shows that Article II, Section 4 exhausts the set of persons who can legitimately be impeached, tried, or convicted. The President, Vice President, and civil officers.”We have no power to convict and disqualify a former officeholder who is now a private citizen.”Here is Article II, Section 4:”The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.””Now, everyone basically agrees that the second half of that sentence exhausts the legitimate grounds for conviction.”The debates around the Constitution’s framing make that clear. Congress cannot convict for reasons besides those.”It therefore follows that the list of persons in that same sentence is also exhaustive. There is no reason why one list would be exhaustive but the other would not.”Article II, Section 4 must limit both why impeachment and conviction can occur… and to whom.”If this provision does not limit the impeachment and conviction powers, then it has no limits at all.”The House’s ‘sole power of Impeachment’ and the Senate’s ‘sole Power to try all Impeachments’ would create an unlimited circular logic, empowering Congress to ban any private citizen from federal office.”This is an incredible claim. But it is the argument the House Managers seemed to make. One Manager said the House and Senate have ‘absolute, unqualified… jurisdictional power.'”That was very honest. Because there is no limiting principle in the constitutional text that would empower the Senate to convict former officers that would not also let them convict and disqualify any private citizen.”An absurd end result to which no one subscribes.”Article II, Section 4 must have force. It tells us the President, Vice President, and civil officers may be impeached and convicted. Donald Trump is no longer the president.”Likewise, the provision states that officers subject to impeachment and conviction ‘shall be removed from Office’ if convicted.”Shall.”As Justice Story explained, ‘the Senate, [upon] conviction, [is] bound, in all cases, to enter a judgment of removal from office.’ Removal is mandatory upon conviction.”Clearly, he explained, that mandatory sentence cannot be applied to somebody who has left office.”The entire process revolves around removal. If removal becomes impossible, conviction becomes insensible.”In one light, it certainly does seem counterintuitive that an officeholder can elude Senate conviction by resignation or expiration of term.”But this just underscores that impeachment was never meant to be the final forum for American justice.”Impeachment, conviction, and removal are a specific intra-governmental safety valve. It is not the criminal justice system, where individual accountability is the paramount goal.”Indeed, Justice Story specifically reminded that while former officials were not eligible for impeachment or conviction, they were “still liable to be tried and punished in the ordinary tribunals of justice.””We have a criminal justice system in this country. We have civil litigation. And former Presidents are not immune from being held accountable by either one.”I believe the Senate was right not to grab power the Constitution does not give us.”And the Senate was right not to entertain some light-speed sham process to try to outrun the loss of jurisdiction.”It took both sides more than a week just to produce their pre-trial briefs. Speaker Pelosi’s own scheduling decisions conceded what President Biden publicly confirmed: A Senate verdict before Inauguration Day was never possible.”This has been a dispiriting time. But the Senate has done our duty. The framers’ firewall held up again.”On January 6th, we returned to our posts and certified the election, uncowed.”And since then, we resisted the clamor to defy our own constitutional guardrails in hot pursuit of a particular outcome.”We refused to continue a cycle of recklessness by straining our own constitutional boundaries in response.”The Senate’s decision does not condone anything that happened on or before that terrible day.

“It simply shows that Senators did what the former President failed to do: we put our constitutional duty first.”

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Trump’s latest Stephen Miller-authored literary turd attacking McConnell and his wife and her family can be found in its noisome entirety here.