Category Archives: History and Politics

“High Crimes and Misdemeanors” does not mean “indictable crimes”

This great article  explains the crucial difference between an indictable crime and the deliberately flexible constitutional standard “high crimes and misdemeanors” for purposes of impeachment.  

The president’s ongoing defense to the impeachment inquiry (and everything else he is busily tying up in courts with his army of lawyers) is that he has not committed a chargeable criminal act, and even if he did (as in shooting someone on Fifth Avenue) he argues that he cannot be arrested, investigated or indicted because of a DOJ opinion stating that a sitting president cannot be indicted. 

It’s a simplistic defense that ignores the long history of impeachment, the meaning of “high crimes and misdemeanors” as the Framers used it, and, beyond all that, the ethical standard we hold our presidents to, even the worst of them.

Here’s a paragraph from that article that I found cool, and timely:

Finally, and most pertinently, the House Judiciary Committee approved three articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon: the first for obstruction of justice, the second for abuse of power, and the third for defying House subpoenas during its impeachment investigation. Article 3 obviously did not allege a crime. But even in the first two articles, which did involve some potentially criminal conduct, the committee was at pains to avoid any reference to criminal statutes. Rather, as the committee staff observed in its careful study of the question, “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” is a phrase that reaches far beyond crimes to embrace “exceeding the powers of the office in derogation of those of another branch of government,” “behaving in a manner grossly incompatible with the proper function of the office,” and “employing the power of the office for an improper purpose or personal gain.”

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Take a few moments and read the article, by law professor Frank O. Bowman III.  Bowman makes his point  clearly — that the term of art is deliberately flexible to cover unimagined rascalities.  He illustrates his point with numerous historical citations.  It’s easy to read, interesting and a very persuasive presentation.   

Refusing to comply with Congressional subpoenas is not a crime anyone can be charged with, but it is a ‘high crime and misdemeanor’ for purposes of impeachment where the standard is really abuse of power.

Comparing Trumpists to Nazis

Publicly calling a fellow American a Nazi is generally considered out of bounds in today’s America.  It’s as bad as calling someone a nigger, a kyke, a faggot, a cunt or a motherfucker.  It’s kind of a credibility destroying deal-breaker here, to call a political opponent a Nazi, no matter how obnoxious, irrational or lawless that political opponent might be. 

It’s true that the current president famously compared the FBI and the CIA,  U.S. intelligence agencies, to Nazis, but he just says things in anger and nobody gets too excited about his puffery, exaggeration, distortion, lying.   He’s a salesman and he’s always selling the one product he has to sell: himself.   He’s sui generis, you know, and that’s putting it as elegantly as I can.  His evangelical supporters call him a flawed vessel for God’s will, he is definitely that too, I suppose (if you imagine God’s will as those who support Trump do).   He routinely gets away with things no past presidential candidate or president ever imagined surviving politically.

But for more responsible public actors, comparing fellow Americans to Nazis is generally out of bounds.   After all, the Nazis were directly responsible for the deaths of many millions of people, probably more than 20,000,000 [1] during one of the darkest periods in recent history.   The Nazis set up mechanized death camps where they mass-murdered millions on industrial assembly lines.   The Nazis were fucking Nazis, the historical gold standard for evil operating under cover of state action.    Josef Goebbels said if they won the Nazis would be remembered as history’s greatest benefactors, if they lost– history’s greatest criminals.   They lost, kind of, though their fighting spirit fights on in the hearts of those filled with righteous rage for their holy cause.   

In limited contexts it’s fine to compare people to Nazis in American politics.  In a pinch, to convince Americans to go to war for no reason anyone can comprehend, you can compare Manuel Noriega to Hitler, or Saddam — another “modern-day Hitler” —  that’s fine, though it’s generally out of bounds for one American to call another a Nazi.   But call a dictator a Nazi, Hitler, then the choice is simple: do you stand up to this Hitler or do you bend your knee like the cowardly Neville Chamberlain?

Beto O’Rourke recently compared the Trump administration to Nazis.   He meant they are ruthless, blindly loyal to their unhinged leader, obstructionist, they routinely lie, they incite violence and hatred, they have utter contempt for anything but “winning”, maintaining their grip on power   O’Rourke was challenged on the comparison.   He had a good response: give me a better comparison.

Personally, I don’t have one.  Reading about the Nazi regime, the cult of personality built around the infallible Mr. Hitler, I am reminded over and over of how the Trump administration operates and what it is trying to do, in many cases succeeding in doing.   If Trump survives impeachment and is reelected in 2020, American democracy is pretty much over.  He will have vindicated the principle that one man, if he is great enough, may flout every law and ethical norm to instill his vision, by force of his will, on the nation he rules.  Let’s take a quick stroll through the familiar terrain of his rise and his rule. 

Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III was the first U.S. Senator to openly endorse Donald Trump’s candidacy.  He stood on stage with Trump, at a time when Trump still was an unthinkably clownish long-shot candidate, and introduced him as the next president of the United States.  As a reward for his great loyalty Trump made Sessions, a man too racist to be confirmed to the federal bench, Attorney General, the nation’s top law enforcement official.   

Once confirmed, Sessions got busy talking about God, and how he’d crack down on marijuana using the draconian federal laws Nixon wrote, and how Trump answers to a higher power than ordinary politicians and how he must be obeyed, how there was absolutely no racist pattern to voter suppression schemes after the Supreme Court curtailed the Voting Rights Act and so on.    He spouted a lot of crap.  But when he was called out, in open testimony, under oath, for having been untruthful about his contacts with Russians during the campaign and transition, he listened to ethics advice from the professionals at the Department of Justice and recused himself from the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

Now the story kicks into another gear.   Trump was enraged by this “betrayal” by Sessions.   Sessions, according to Trump, had not taken a principled stance as required by law and professional ethics, he’d acted like a weakling, instead of being like Roy Cohn, a powerful Pit-bull who’d do whatever was necessary to win, including taking an open, greasy dump on the law (Cohn was eventually, years too late, disbarred for his corruption, but that’s a trifle).  Trump humiliated Sessions regularly, mocking him publicly as a wimp, imitating his southern accent, his squeamish fealty to weak-ass “liberal” things like so-called law and ethics.  

Then, to be concise in hitting just a few highlights of the way Trump goes about his business, Trump fired FBI director Jim Comey when Comey wouldn’t declare his personal loyalty to Trump and “let the Flynn thing go”.  When Deputy A.G., Rod Rosenstein, overseeing the probe into Russian interference in the closely contested 2016 election, was forced to appoint a Special Prosecutor, Trump went ballistic, blaming and eventually forcing Sessions to resign, after making repeated attempts to get Sessions to “unrecuse” and limit the scope of Mueller’s investigation. 

Mueller wound up writing a whole volume of his report detailing and analyzing Trump’s many efforts to obstruct justice, though Mueller refrained from drawing any prosecutorial conclusions, pursuant to a DOJ directive and for reasons of bending over backwards to appear scrupulously fair.

Mueller’s investigation resulted in numerous indictments and several convictions of close Trump associates and  found “sweeping and systematic” Russian election interference on behalf of Trump.   The Republican senate recently released a report coming to the same conclusion: Russians had done everything possible to tilt the 2016 presidential election to the candidate who won.

What to do?   Find an Attorney General who will act like Roy Cohn, do whatever is necessary to protect the leader/client.   The A.G., after all, in Trump’s view, is the president’s most important body guard.  He’s in charge of all law enforcement on a federal level.  He says what’s a federal crime and what’s pure commie bullshit and a conspiratorial partisan witch hunt against a totally innocent man.   Enter the pathetic porcine puppet of this puerile president [2], a debased lawyer of the Antonin Scalia school, with a God-driven worldview based, perversely, on what he believes Jesus would do — if Jesus was a xenophobic privileged white seventy year-old. 

How do you defend a president as apparently corrupt and incapable of not lying as this Donald Trump character?   You take his lead, the boss has genius marketing instincts.    Trump repeatedly said the Mueller probe was a partisan witch hunt that would totally exonerate him.   Barr agreed, made the counter-factual call that the report exonerated Trump of everything.  Trump said the vicious partisan “Deep State” traitors who initiated the “politically motivated” investigation (that came to the same conclusions about Russian interference the Republican senate did) to overturn the will of 78,000 strategically perfect voters and their Electors, should be criminally investigated and punished for treason, for being spies!   Barr agreed and now Barr’s Department of Justice has initiated a criminal investigation into the Department of Justice.

During Hitler’s “Thousand Year Reich” not a word of the liberal Weimar Constitution was ever changed, once Emergency Powers were invoked pursuant to a Patriot Act-style vote in the German parliament.   No change to the democratic blueprint was necessary, everything was down to enforcement by Nazi police, the decisions of Nazi judges in Nazi courts.   German law enforcement was headed by Hermann Goering for a while, when he wasn’t too whacked out on drugs, then more sober men like Heinrich Himmler stepped into the void.  There is never a shortage of supremely ambitious men to step into fateful roles next to the most powerful men in the world.

Barr starting a criminal investigation of his own agency, in what universe does that seem remotely impartial, fair or just?   Only one that I can think of off-hand, though one is, of course, reluctant to call even these lawless motherfuckers Nazis.

 

 

[1]   World War Two fun facts:

WORLDWIDE CASUALTIES*

Battle Deaths 15,000,000
Battle Wounded 25,000,000
Civilian Deaths 45,000,000

*Worldwide casualty estimates vary widely in several sources. The number of civilian deaths in China alone might well be more than 50,000,000.

source

 

[2] tip of the yarmulke to Laurence Tribe for that apt, alliterative aspersion.

 

The “Deep State”

I first heard this term five years ago during an interview Bill Moyers conducted with a former Republican congressional staffer named Mike Lofgren.   Below is a link to that interview and Lofgren’s  capsule definition of the Deep State:

Mike Lofgren, a former GOP congressional staff member with the powerful House and Senate Budget Committees, joins Bill to talk about what he calls the Deep State, a hybrid of corporate America and the national security state, which is “out of control” and “unconstrained.” In it, Lofgren says, elected and unelected figures collude to protect and serve powerful vested interests.

“It is … the red thread that runs through the history of the last three decades. It is how we had deregulation, financialization of the economy, the Wall Street bust, the erosion or our civil liberties and perpetual war,” Lofgren tells Bill.

the interview

Spokesmen for this powerful Deep State have weaponized the terms for the discussion of anything in America.  They have, by crude yet masterful redirection, redefined the term Deep State itself to mean a sinister conspiracy among career public servants, the people of the diplomatic corps, long-serving members of American intelligence and law enforcement agencies, other nonpartisan federal government employees.  

“Unelected career bureaucrats” spits our president, referring to disloyal rats who hate the freedom of our greatest citizens to deregulate, financialize the economy, protect criminal practices on Wall Street, limit civil liberties (for dissidents and terrorists) and engage in extremely lucrative permanent war.  These unelected career bureaucrats show their hatred by personal acts of disloyalty to the duly elected president.   They do this because the Deep State hates our freedom (that part is true, it just depends on whose freedom we are discussing, the 1%’s freedom to acquire unlimited wealth without regulation of any kind or everybody else’s freedom).  In the old days we called these evil fuckers what they have been called for eons “The Jews” — the devils who control everything hateful and oppressive in the world.

We have a loud-mouthed, hyper-opinionated president now charging our career public servants with partisan bias and treason and his handlers have seized on the catchy term “Deep State” to describe this organized conspiracy trying to overturn the electoral mandate that swept our democratically elected president into office,  with his historically svelte, ingeniously engineered 78,000 Electoral College margin, a groundswell of popular support.    This Deep State, says our populist billionaire president,  wants to make rats out of loyal partisans, is like the Nazis in its determination to lynch our greatest president — (if not outright put him in a vernichtungslager), illegally demands documents and testimony trying to prove some imaginary crime, acting like a bunch of lawless hooligans.   The Deep State, according to our president, is a lynch mob.

Alternative facts, ladies and gentlemen.

A hybrid of the corporate powers (and their unlimited lobbying and political campaign money– they can actually purchase legislators, and are backed legally by long-time corporatists like Chief Justice John Roberts) and the national security state (the expansive secret, sometimes illegal surveillance state exposed by Edward Snowden and his ilk), our actual American Deep State — the public-private partnership for the enrichment of the few–  has been in increasingly profitable business for more than a century.  

The ongoing use of the American military and covert intelligence agencies in the service of corporate interests is well-known, even if little discussed.   As retired Marine general Smedley Butler [1], “The Fighting Quaker”, said after a career fighting in the Philippines, China, in Central America and the Caribbean during the Banana Wars, and France in World War I:

I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer; a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have givenAl Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.  

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Don’t let the so-called facts fool you.  Listen to your duly elected president, who loves you.   He loves you!    The Deep State is actually the unelected career bureaucrats who are treasonously defying presidential orders to dummy up, give no testimony, provide no documents to Congress.  These are disloyal, traitorous people who nobody elected, unlike the best, the most loyal people the president has placed in the most powerful positions in the Executive Branch.   Excellent, unimpeachably great people like Mick Mulvaney, Bill Barr, Mike “first in his class” Pompeo, Steve Mnuchin, Betsey DeVos, Rudy.  

Who are you going to believe, a brilliant president who lies publicly many times a day, or a bunch of disgruntled Deep State operatives who treacherously defy his orders to show how much they hate democracy?   COME ON, AMERICA!

 

[1]   Smedley Butler:

In 1933, he became involved in a controversy known as the Business Plot, when he told a congressional committee that a group of wealthy industrialists were planning a military coup to overthrow Franklin D. Roosevelt, with Butler selected to lead a march of veterans to become dictator, similar to Fascist regimes at that time. The individuals involved all denied the existence of a plot and the media ridiculed the allegations, but a final report by a special House of Representatives Committee confirmed some of Butler’s testimony.

In 1935, Butler wrote a book titled War Is a Racket, where he described and criticized the workings of the United States in its foreign actions and wars, such as those in which he had been involved, including the American corporations and other imperialist motivations behind them. After retiring from service, he became a popular advocate, speaking at meetings organized by veterans, pacifists, and church groups in the 1930s.

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Eternal Victimhood

NOTE:  I’ve been thinking, and writing, about other things the last few days, having little to do with the ongoing political shit show we’re all either riveted to or trying our best not to watch.  One or two of these pieces on other, nonpolitical, subjects should come as a refreshing relief to many of my select readers.   I will post these pieces soon, in due time, such as time is ever truly due.  

now, back to the political shit show:

The president, though apparently idolized by a solid, unshakeable 39% or so, is regarded by most Americans as, at best, a self-aggrandizing con-man.   His lying is well-known, his lies are transparently false most of the time.  Thousands of his lies have been documented and debunked while new ones are spouted virtually every time he speaks on any subject.  He simply can’t help it.  It’s kind of his thing.   

At least 61% of Americans find it horrifying that the American president is a compulsive liar.  One was impeached twenty years back for telling just a couple of lies that had nothing to do with the country’s well-being.   When Clinton was impeached it his lying was posed as a stark moral question, a pure matter of character, a man who publicly lies, under OATH!, about having his dick sucked is not trustworthy nor fit to be the president.   Trump’s supporters are more forgiving — OK, he lies sometimes, who hasn’t?, but the larger picture he has absolutely right. 

Personally, I find it not always easy to write or speak about the man without getting angry.   Trump represents everything I hate: a shallow, self-focused, covetous, entitled, grasping, lying bully who cheats and humiliates others in his obsession to prove he’s better than everybody else.  Best of all, he’s always the victim, whenever he doesn’t get his way he screams and sprays his feces over everybody, huffing and crying like a confronted Brett Kavanaugh.  This type always considers themselves the victim of an unfair system rigged against these supremely entitled best of the best.  I see them as malignantly childish.  Trump has never felt regret or remorse, never apologized for anything in his life of obscene and totally unearned privilege. On top of it, he revels in being cruel, as most bullies do.

The president stands accused, among many other serious lapses, improprieties, crimes and derelictions of duty, of holding up promised military aid to a beleaguered ally until their leader agreed to do him certain favors.  Stunningly, one of these favors, as reported in an inexact transcript/summary of the call provided by the White House, involves the debunked and ridiculous conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, hacked the DNC server and Hillary Clinton’s supposedly missing private emails.  (I wonder if he also believes the Ukrainians have the proof the hated woman also personally murdered those American heroes in Benghazi… or proof about that pizza place where she ran the pedophile dating service…)  Trump’s other favor was a simple ask just like the one Mueller totally exonerated him of doing with Putin, asking a foreign leader for help with his domestic political campaign.   He kept new Ukrainian president Zelensky on the hook for weeks as surrogates softened him up,  before eventually calling to tell him to uncover dirt on Joe Biden and his son that he could use against Biden in his ongoing 2020 campaign.

Uncharacteristically, the president quickly released a partial sort of transcript of the hidden July 25th call, and the whistleblower’s complaint (after a bipartisan demand by Congress). He released the documents in an attempt to prove that he has nothing to hide,  is completely and totally innocent of these terrible, spurious charges brought by his vicious, sick, dangerous enemies in an invalid and unconstitutional witch hunt investigation.  

True, according to POTUS, the whistleblower was a fucking liar, and his or her cowardly hearsay complaint, based completely on lies, amounted to treason, and the report, found “credible” and “urgent” (you get what I did there?  those marks mean “bullshit”, LOL!)  by the office that “investigates” such “reports”, should never have been forwarded to Congress (the law that requires this is itself corrupt and arguably invalid) — but still, in the name of full transparency (on which Trump perversely prides himself), the White House released a non-verbatim summary transcript of the president’s perfect call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky.  

According to Trump the call with Zelensky was “perfect”.   To anyone else who read the transcript, and the later-released whistleblower’s complaint, and followed the details of how records of that perfect call were removed from their normal place in the government filing system and concealed in a special top secret server reserved for password-protected national security secrets, that perfection was troubling.  

The call as reported appears to show a direct quid pro quo, which means, in plain English: I’ll do this for you IF you do that for me.  Zelensky says words to the effect of “we need those anti-tank missiles, Mr. President”, to which Trump replies: “I need a favor from you, though.”   As so often, so much can hang on a single word. In this case, the telltale word “though”.   I’ll do that, you need to do this, though.

The Democrats who are investigating Trump for impeachment on probably a dozen grounds, including the strong case for obstruction of justice laid out clearly in Mueller’s detailed, scrupulously nonjudgmental account (and ongoing since), the president’s shamelessly unethical monetizing of public office (“that depends on what your definition of ’emolument’ is”), his routine refusal to obey laws and court orders, suddenly have a clearly smoking gun, handed to them by Trump.   The day after Trump felt the thrill of victory when Mueller, forced to testify, didn’t lay a finger on him in the eyes of the average American, he called another foreign leader to try to make a deal to advance his own narrow political/financial interests.

Adam Schiff, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, gave a fiery statement underscoring the gist of what Mr. Trump’s impeachable offense was in the call to Ukrainian President Zelensky.  This quid pro quo is easy to understand.  It’s also easy to see that this “I help you if you help me” deal was offered not for the benefit of the nation Trump represents but for the benefit of a single political campaign, Trump’s.   It is a clear shakedown easy enough for an unsophisticated person to follow and understand.  The Democrats finally had a nice, plain, easy to understand smoking gun for impeachment.  

And, by the way contrary to the White House mantra-like assertion that there was no quid pro quo, and the Acting Chief of Staff’s televised declaration that it was indeed that, there is no requirement, for purposes of impeachment, that there be a quid pro quo— that’s the John Roberts’ court’s new standard for criminal corruption by public officials.   The quid pro quo would make this a criminal matter, presidents are held to a higher standard than simply not being a convictable felon.  Another example of the lawless Trump and his lackeys moving the goalposts to try to gain any possible advantage, since everybody is against them in this clearly rigged game.  Back to Adam Schiff.

Schiff, if he had it to do over again, would probably read directly from the transcript provided by the Trump White House.   All the damning words are right there to be read aloud by anyone.  The words on the page, as they say, speak for themselves.   At the time of his public announcement, Schiff dramatized them slightly, characterizing them as the ominous words a mobster says to somebody at his mercy rather than the words the president of a powerful country says to the president of a besieged country that is at his mercy.  

“Nice country you got here, shame if anything happened to it… now listen carefully, I’m only going to say this seven more times…” might be a pithy characterization of Trump’s chat with Zelensky, and not inaccurate, but strictly speaking, as a matter of straight up strategy, Schiff should have stuck to the script the president handed him.

Trump and his people, an ever smaller and more fanatical circle, are in an increasingly tight spot politically and legally.  What do you do when the facts against you are damning and the courts, even judges you appointed, are unlikely to rule in your favor on any of your stalling legal “arguments” for your absolute right to prevent all testimony, hide compromising documents and obstruct legal investigations?  Even in the friendliest court, you need to give the judge some legal basis for upholding an “argument”, sadly for POTUS.   What to do?

Attack that fucking liar Schiff!  He said words I never said!  He was lying to America!   Schiff is a liar!   He hates America!  He’s a shifty little Schitt!    Attacking the “conflicted” Mueller — with his military service, all his decorations, long public service, reputation for probity, his famous Boy Scout “integrity”  — worked, it was perfect!   Attack this fucking treasonous California Communist!  

Trump’s most loyal Congressmen obliged.   House Republicans, led by their most extreme members, the “Freedom Caucus”, crafted a motion to censure the lying left wing traitor.

“These actions of Chairman Schiff misled the American people, bring disrepute upon the House of Representatives, and make a mockery of the impeachment process, one of this chamber’s most solemn constitutional duties,” the three-page resolution said.                              

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The House of Representatives is currently composed of 235 Democratic House members and 199 Republicans [1].    The vote to defeat the motion to censure Schiff went along party lines, with the Republicans losing by a comfortable (or uncomfortable, if you love Donald Trump) margin. 

Schiff tweeted minutes after the vote, “It will be said of House Republicans, When they found they lacked the courage to confront the most dangerous and unethical president in American history, They consoled themselves by attacking those who did.”    

source

Shifty little bastard, idn’t he?  

 

[1]   I almost wrote “235 Democrats”, you know, members of the “Democrat” party, the party of the goddamned KKK, heh.    This is a right wing meme that is now all but ubiquitous everywhere — “Democrat” senator, “Democrat” congress bitch.  The idea appears to be not to let the “Democratic” party assume the mantle of being democratic as opposed to what the Republicans today are:  Liberty-lovers and warriors for non-majoritarian democracy!

 

The Best People

As promised, the president has drained the swamp and surrounded himself with the best people.   The cast in these demanding jobs may have changed a bit over the almost three years of the Trump administration, but the tone set by these excellent people, and their commitment to the president’s great agenda, remains the same.

Critics will say, of course, that Trump’s inexperienced daughter and born wealthy son-in-law, for example,  may not be the best people to handle the many sensitive issues they’ve been tasked to deal with.  Jared Kushner’s long-awaited secret plan for peace between Israel and Palestine remains secret, months after its promised release on the last day of Ramadan.   The hopelessness underlying the nation’s Opioid Crisis has not been touched, the problems of addiction and overdose have not been solved.   Ivanka has been fairly quiet too lately.  But that is the caviling of a nitpicker, these two are the best, American royalty, beautiful living Barbie and Ken dolls with the genius smarts of their great and morally upright parents.

The president’s other people, in  spite of great turnover, are the best and continue to get better.   Bill Barr, for example, is much, much closer to Roy Cohn than the weak Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III ever was.   Barr is a proven pitbull for the president and his agenda.   That’s what the attorney general is supposed to be, the president’s most powerful defender, come what may.   

Critics will carp, of course, and claim that the nation’s top law enforcement official, the head of the Department of Justice (created after the Civil War to enforce the newly amended Constitution),  is not the president’s personal bodyguard and spokesman, but critics will always be critical.  Like scorpions who sting to death the frog that is carrying them across the river, it’s their nature.

The president demands loyalty.  He’s a charming man in private, I have heard, which explains a lot.   He knows how to flatter people he wants to work for him, and how to reward them for good work.   In return, he expects total loyalty.   He is sometimes disappointed in the disloyal acts of people he trusted.   

He learned young, as he explained in a televised interview decades ago, that being too nice is a big mistake, it’s what killed his wonderful older brother Freddy [1]   If you’re too nice, people will screw you to death, which is what happened to Freddy, a person everybody wanted to be around, everyone confided in, a wonderful friend and brother.    Dead because he was too nice, people took advantage of him and that’s what killed him in the end.  [2] 

Sometimes those loyal people around him, in an excess of loyalty, make mistakes.  Mick Mulvaney, his acting Chief of Staff, put his foot in it yesterday in front of a group of probing reporters.   He said the quid pro quo that Trump has been denying in connection to the withholding of military aid to the Ukraine in exchange for dirt on Biden is something people just have to get over.   He sounded impatient that anyone was making a big goddamn deal out of it, saying “we do it ALL THE TIME!”.  As for the G7 being hosted at the Trump-owned Doral in steaming Miami next June, get over that too, Mulvaney told the press.   And no, he said, to a snarky question about the heat and humidity of Miami in June, climate change will not be on the agenda.

That ill-advised press conference will likely cost Mulvaney, a still pugnacious Koch-backed TeaBagger insurgent, his job.   He will still be the best, like Michael Flynn, Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, Joe Arpaio and many other great people, but for purely political reasons he likely has to go.   He will be praised by the president as a very good man as he’s booted out the door.   Watching the sausage being made is never fun.

Quietly, meantime, Department of Energy secretary James Richard “Rick” Perry, one of los tres amigos who dealt with the Ukraine (another was the hotelier who gave Trump’s inauguration a cool million and was appointed ambassador to the EU) is preparing to slip out the door.   This leaves, if my memory serves me, only Elisabeth “Betsy” Prince DeVos and Ben Carson of the original cabinet of the best of the best.    They are certainly excellent people.   

Actually, my memory does not serve me well.   Elaine Chao, Mitch McConnell’s powerful wife, is still Secretary of Transportation,   Sonny Perdue and Wilbur Ross are still heading, respectively, Agriculture and Commerce.  And Steve Mnuchin, of course, is the Secretary of the Treasury.   So actually the turnover has only been something like nine or ten of the original fifteen, only a 2/3 turnover rate.  Critics, of course, will crow about this being a sign of disarray, but it’s not a big deal, cabinets always turn over.

Of course, using skewed numbers and unfair statistics, as is their wont, the dishonest mainstream media distorts this natural trend for high government positions turning over, and states, without a shred of proof, a historically high 78% turnover rate.    You can read a short “article” about it here.

So fake, so fucking fake.  SAD!

 

 

[1]  I saw the clip of the young Trump discussing this as part of a great forty-eight minute BBC documentary called Meet the Trump’s: From Immigrant to President.   It is on Netflix, apparently, I thought I’d seen it on youTube and was trying to provide a link.   The only trace of it in the public domain  is here.

Highly recommended.   And Look who’s on the right in this family photo:

Screen Shot 2019-10-18 at 3.05.57 PM.png

[2]   An alternative explanation is that Freddy’s alcoholism raged out of control due to an unbearable, high-pressure life as the oldest son and expected heir of a demanding, savage, ruthless mogul.   In the end, Freddy drank himself to death while working as a janitor in one of his overbearing father’s buildings.    Drinking too much was likely treated as an intolerable weakness, not something to be confronted, not a sign that he needed help or support of any kind.   The weak die, and they need to.  That’s simply nature in Trumpworld.

 

Normalizing the unthinkable

In culture, especially one dominated by the persuasive arts of advertising (where our brains are actually shaped by ads more than by any other single force) what is acceptable is changed by creating new “norms”.   The Overton Window is moved in the desired direction and the range of what is acceptable changes.   

You don’t start a program of genocide, for example, without first making people truly hate the target population.  Once enough citizens accept that these people are scum, terrorists, criminals, rapists, parasites, an infestation of implacable enemies, it becomes much easier to get them to support harsh measures against the future subjects of genocide.  But the needle is moved one or two tics at a time in the desired direction by small cultural shifts.  Public readiness must be regularly tested to see how far their shifting beliefs have come.

At one time a president couldn’t say the word “bullshit!” in public, for example, now this president regularly thrills loyal campaign crowds with the word.  I’m not squeamish [1] about a fucking word, but, seriously– that’s all the control you have of your “best” words, your fine vocabulary? Oh, well, whatever works, I suppose.  As no less an expert than Herr Josef Goebbels shrewdly observed:

There is no point in seeking to convert the intellectuals for intellectuals will never be converted, and therefore we must yield to the man in the street. The arguments must therefore be crude, clear, and forcible and appeal to emotions and instincts, not intellect.

I was thinking of how this president has normalized lying.   All presidents lie once in a while.  It’s apparently part of the job description.   This president has set a new standard for lying and he’s become famous for openly and unabashedly lying many times a day.  He simply does it, can’t help it.  He’s compelled to lie by some force he can’t control.   And, best of all, everyone seems to now agree that lying, unless you lie under oath (which everybody knows is called perjury), is perfectly fine, perfect, really.  Presidents since Clinton have learned: never speak about a delicate subject under oath.

Lying, which used to be a bug to be concealed, is now a feature to be bragged about.   “So what, everybody lies, you’re lying right now saying that I’m lying, you bullshit-faced liar.  You’re the liar, not me (though, if I wanted to, I could lie much better than you)!  You losers make me sick with your bullshit lies, you’re the worst people, sick and dangerous.  You can all suck my sweaty blank-strap!”

The traitorous enemies of the people at Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post have created a lie tracker.  Type in the subject of a presidential statement, hit the button et, voila, every fact-checked lie the greatest winner in American, yea, world, history has told since becoming our forty-fifth (and possibly final) president.   I haven’t tried it myself, but why not give it a spin?

I guess my point here today is that Mr. Trump and his remaining loyal dead-enders (and yes, I recall that Rumsfeld used this to describe Iraqi “insurgents” who were no happier under a generous democratic US occupation than under that modern day Hitler Saddam who they’d been liberated from) keep returning to the only play they know.  When in trouble – LIE.   If you’re caught lying, lie about the lie and attack the person who caught you lying, the fucking liar.   

BBC report: Erdogan of Turkey read Trump’s childish letter that ended

History will look upon you favorably if you get this done the right and humane way. It will look upon you forever as the devil if good things don’t happen. Don’t be a tough guy. Don’t be a fool!

I will call you later.

and tossed it in the garbage.  Of course, the BBC hates America, the Brits have been our enemies since before 1776 when they tried to bomb our airports.   Take state news with a grain, or better, a box, of salt.   They are fucking liars.  Ask Sean Hannity.

 

 

[1] my favorite dictionary definition.   Squeamish:   exhibiting a prudish readiness to be nauseated.

Why Authoritarians Always Crush Labor Unions as the first order of business

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Fascism cannot flourish, in any of its shades, without sewing hatred between citizens along race, gender, class and ethnic lines.  Authoritarianism works by creating a violently US vs. THEM society where loyal citizens know who to lash out at.   

Unions of organized labor, while sometimes problematic (union officials often become middle-men, protecting their own turf and working with the bosses) are also inherently democratic.  If you do the job, and want fair pay, and better working conditions, you forget the “differences” you may have with your co-workers and band together for common interests.  Often you become friends in the process.

Dictators and oligarchs HATE this kind of thing.

How the Trump campaign (and Russia) used Facebook to win in 2016

From a recent interview Terry Gross did with Christopher Wylie,  former research director for the voter profiling outfit Cambridge Analytica, later acquired by Steve Bannon, with financing by Libertarian billionaire Robert Mercer, who threw his support to Trump after Lyin’ Ted dropped out of the race.  The work of this data-mining company was of incalculable value to Trump’s surgically precise 78,000 vote Electoral College victory in November 2016.

Here’s a bit of how the deal worked, how the Bannon-run Trump campaign mobilized marginal, alienated voters to cast their anger-fueled votes for plain talking Man of the People Donald J. Trump:

TERRY GROSS:   My guest became a whistleblower, exposing the role of the British voter profiling company Cambridge Analytica in the Trump presidential campaign and the Brexit campaign.  Christopher Wylie revealed how the company had harvested the information of tens of millions of Facebook users and combined that with other data to create psychological profiles and then use those profiles to target people susceptible to disinformation, racist thinking and conspiracy theories.   Cambridge Analytica then helped shape the disinformation narratives and pushed them out.

Wylie also revealed Cambridge Analytica’s links to Russia. Wylie had the documents and tapes to back him up.  He’d served as Cambridge Analytica’s research director for a year-and-a-half, then quit in 2014, disturbed by the direction it started taking after Steve Bannon became a major player in the company.

CHRISTOPHER WYLIE:  The basis of Cambridge Analytica’s work was essentially to take large amounts of highly granular data about each individual voter in the United States – a large bulk of that came from Facebook, but it came from many sources – and to look for patterns in that data to essentially infer different psychological attributes and, from that, to find target groups of people, particularly on the fringes of society, who would be more vulnerable to certain kinds of messaging.   They focused a lot on disinformation; They targeted people who were more prone to conspiratorial thinking.

And they used that data and they used social media more broadly to first identify those people and then engage those people and really begin to craft what, in my view, was an insurgency in the United States.

GROSS: Feeding them disinformation, sometimes conspiracy theories in support of the Trump campaign.

WYLIE:   Yes. And more broadly, you know, the – when Steve Bannon took over, he wasn’t just concerned about particular elections. He followed sort of this notion of the Breitbart doctrine, which is that politics exists downstream from culture – so don’t just focus on the day-to-day politics, try to actually make an impact on an enduring change in culture because politics will just flow from that.

GROSS:  When you say when Steve Bannon took over, he had a big role in Cambridge Analytica and then became campaign manager for Trump.

WYLIE:  Yes, he did. He found us in London. He convinced a billionaire to acquire the company, and then he transformed that company into, you know, a set of tools that he would be able to use to, in effect, manipulate a certain segment of the American voter population.

source

Is anything unclear about this pattern?

Let’s try to keep this as simple as possible, to show Donald Trump’s consistent pattern of behavior as it goes to his motives.  A pattern of behavior can be used to establish corrupt motive– if the person does the same suspicious looking thing every time he is challenged you can infer the motive from that behavior. 

The current Ukraine drama/scandal is pretty easy to follow.  Trump, feeling elated after Mueller’s live testimony didn’t move the needle a tick about the findings of the investigation, called the newly elected president of the Ukraine the very next day to ask him for a favor: dirt on one of his top political rivals for the 2020 presidency.  The appearance of impropriety shocked several administration officials enough to make them hide the records of the call.   A whistleblower report about the call, vetted, found credible and urgent and legally required to go to Congress within a week, was buried on orders of Mr. Trump’s top people.   Since then Mr. T has vowed over and over to resist this new shameful, vicious, desperate, illegal and unconstitutional witch hunt against him.    The question is: did Mr. Trump act with corrupt motive or merely, as Barr insisted in regard to his repeated efforts to shut down the Mueller investigation, as an innocent man understandably outraged by the vicious unfairness of his enemies? 

I will take the high road today and resist starting the pattern prior to Mr. Trump’s presidency.  It would seem dirty and gratuitous to mention, for example, Trump’s well-known infidelity to each of his three wives — his affair with Marla Maples while married to Ivanka, the affairs while married to Maples, the dalliances with the two women he paid off to dummy up about sexual trysts they had while third wife Melania was recuperating from childbirth.  Bad, bad and bad– but NOT ILLEGAL.   Don’t worry about legal/illegal, though, let’s just look at the pattern of behavior.   Forget I mentioned this, or the large eve of 2016 election payouts to a Playboy model and a porn star (a quid pro quo— more than $100,000 each in exchange for non-disclosure agreements) that were at the center of what landed longtime Trump fixer Michael Cohen in prison.

November 2016, Donald Trump is elected during an investigation of Russian meddling in the election.   This meddling would be detailed in  Mueller’s report and later confirmed in a bipartisan Senate report that also documented what Mueller called “sweeping and systematic” Russian attempts to influence the outcome of the election in favor of Mr. Trump.   

Trump was adamant in his denials of knowing anything about Russian help and insisted he was clearly joking when he looked into the television cameras and said “Russia, if you’re listening…” and then asked for the Hillary Clinton emails that magically were produced, hacked by Russians, a few hours later.  Plus — in fairness to DJT–  lifelong Republican partisan witch hunter Mueller was unable to find sufficient evidence of a chargeable criminal conspiracy between Trump’s team and Russia, numerous incidental indictments and convictions notwithstanding.

Now, follow the events after Trump is elected president.   National Security Adviser Flynn lied about speaking to the Russians about lifting sanctions during the transition period.   He apparently lied to Mike Pence and then to the FBI.   Trump immediately fired him.   In Flynn’s defense, and as Sean Hannity makes clear, the FBI trapped Flynn, they never told him he needed a lawyer or that lying to the FBI was a federal crime.   Total entrapment!   I’ve excerpted a section from an AP analysis that puts a lot of flesh on the hideous bones [1].   

So first big scandal of his new administration had this response from Trump: have somebody write an email denying the White House had anything to do with Flynn’s lying or his talks with Russia about lifting sanctions for election meddling.   (see bottom of FN 1]

Flynn is out and, to Trump’s disbelief, the FBI simply won’t let it drop.   Trump meets alone with FBI director James Comey, tells him Flynn’s a good guy, asks him to drop the investigation.   Comey is taken aback, tap dances a bit, makes detailed notes of the troubling conversation on his ride home.  Trump fires Comey to end the Russia witch hunt thing, as he later nonchalantly says on TV and claims as his prerogative.  But not before having AG Sessions and Deputy AG Rosenstein (the man soon to be in charge of the Mueller investigation) write letters urging him to fire Comey for his unfair handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation.  

THE PATTERN:

The firing of Comey, while legally within the president’s sole discretion, raised flags when Trump met with Russians in a closed door oval office meeting the following day.  When Sessions told Trump the DOJ had opened an investigation into the president’s possible obstruction of justice, Trump, after a moment of despair, lashed out.    He ordered White House Counsel Don McGahn to fire Mueller, he later ordered McGahn to write a memo saying the president never ordered him to do it.   He also drafted Corey Lewandowski for purposes of getting Sessions to “unrecuse” and shut down Mueller’s probe.  Trump repeatedly tried to curtail the scope of  Mueller’s investigation.  POTUS prevented the disclosure of evidence and testimony, even refusing to answer the most pressing of the written questions his legal team was at a loss to answer without perjury.   

He later, at AG Barr’s recommendation, argued blanket presidential immunity to resist all subpoenas for anyone he’d ever had contact with.  Trump, before publicly humiliating Sessions and obtaining his forced resignation, repeatedly pressured him to “unrecuse” and put a lid on Mueller.   Trump tried to dissuade Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort, both facing slam dunk charges of lying to investigators,  from cooperating with Mueller, dangling pardons if they remained loyal.   He had encouraged Michael Cohen to lie about the Trump Tower Moscow project, which continued well into the presidential campaign.   

Before the Mueller Report was finalized the president put a new Attorney General in, a man who’d auditioned for the job by pledging loyalty and protection to the Unitary Executive, to act as his unappealable spokesman and fixer.   Barr, the most openly corrupt AG this country has ever had, lied about Mueller’s findings while throwing dirt on Mueller’s good name and vowing to investigate the investigation itself.   Since then, muscular attempts by Trump dead-enders to resist all subpoenas for documents and testimony.  The latest is eight pages of Trump’s temper tantrum over the impeachment inquiry, thinly disguised by a shameless White House lawyer as a legal argument for why Congress can’t compel Trump to do shit.

What is unclear about this pattern?  How does it show anything but corrupt intent?   How do AG Barr, and Mr. Hannity, explain it away today?

Stay tuned.

If you’d like a dramatic guided tour of just the obstruction outlined in the Mueller report, you’ll find it here.    Here’s a nice quick guide to Trump’s lies about his perfect call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. 

 

[1]  The story [that Flynn had lied to him about discussing the lifting of Obama’s sanctions with Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak] shook Pence, who had been in the dark. A review of Justice Department documents sealed it. Flynn couldn’t have just forgotten. He had lied. McGahn and Priebus told Trump he had to fire Flynn.

That weekend, Flynn flew to Mar-A-Lago with the president. On the plane back to Washington on Feb. 12, Trump asked him whether he lied to Pence. Flynn said he may have forgotten some things but denied lying. “OK. That’s fine,” Trump responded. “I got it.”

The next day, Flynn was out.

Priebus delivered the news. In the Oval Office, Trump embraced Flynn and shook his hand. “We’ll give you a good recommendation. You’re a good guy. We’ll take care of you,” he said.

Flynn had spent just 25 days as national security adviser.

Trump had lunch with former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie the next day, which was Valentine’s Day. “Now that we fired Flynn, the Russia thing is over,” Trump told him. Christie burst out laughing. No way, he said.

“What do you mean?” Trump responded. “Flynn met with the Russians. That was the problem. I fired Flynn. It’s over.”

Flynn is going to be like “gum on the bottom of your shoe,” Christie said.

___

In the Oval Office later that day, Flynn was still on Trump’s mind. The president was being briefed by his top national security team. That included FBI Director James Comey, who Trump was intent on making part of “his team.”

As the meeting wrapped up, Trump cleared the room and asked Comey to remain behind. “I want to talk about Mike Flynn,” Trump said, according to Comey. There was nothing wrong with Flynn’s calls with the Kislyak, he said, but he had to fire Flynn for lying to Pence.

“I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go,” Trump said, according to Comey. “He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.”

Comey awkwardly sidestepped the issue. But over the next few weeks, Flynn remained on Trump’s mind.

Trump praised him publicly. Privately, he turned to McFarland, who had covered for Flynn before. On Feb. 22, 2017, McFarland, now the deputy national security adviser, was asked to resign. But Priebus and Bannon, who conveyed the message, suggested it came with a soft landing. The president could make her ambassador to Singapore.

The ask came a day later.

As reporters questioned whether he directed Flynn’s Russia contacts, Trump told Priebus to have McFarland draft an internal email saying that the president didn’t order Flynn to discuss sanctions with Kislyak.

source

 

The First Draft of History

We currently have a president, in his great and unmatched wisdom (if he does say so himself), who is as prudent as a petulant two year-old who feels he’s being unfairly singled out for punishment when all he did was take a tiny dump in the punchbowl.   He was obviously joking when he pulled his diaper down to let one fly! No sense of humor, his aghast parents.   The other day the artist of the deal made a deal to allow the Turkish autocrat to wipe out our allies in the war against ISIS, the Kurds in northern Syria, the army who did the actual fighting against the ISIS “Caliphate”.  If Trump wasn’t an EXTREMELY stable genius, we might have reason for concern that his seeming unilateral impulsivity is hurting our international reputation beyond repair.

I’ve been thinking lately about the age of the child in each of us, when certain reflexes get frozen into our adult personalities.    In my father’s case, as he was dying, he told me his life was basically over by the time he was two years old.  He lived almost eighty more years, his life basically already over.  He had good reason to feel that way, but still.  Then I think about the lessons he taught me, directly, and also by his tragic example, about history.   Whenever you can, he told me, find primary sources– and always put the date on anything you clip from the newspaper, it will come in handy years from the date you first read it.

Journalism, which is what many of these pieces I’ve been writing lately amount to, is correctly said to be the first draft of history.   For proof, look no further than this dusty magazine cover from April 15, tax day, 1974.   The cover article is a nice secondary source for digging into the story of the unraveling of Nixon’s presidency.  

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I’d forgotten all about this story, probably because I never saw it in the first place.  I was picking peaches on a kibbutz in Israel when the news broke here in the USA. Gone for a year, I missed the entire drama of the downfall of Tricky Dick Nixon.  He had a tax scandal?   Flipping to the article I see he underpaid his taxes by a gigantic sum of 1971 dollars, had apparently been doing so the previous few years too.

Jesus, I thought, looking at the pie charts of what Nixon paid and what he should have paid, plus penalties, this is why our current president, a man of great and unmatched wisdom, is so keen to have his lawyers use any means necessary to block disclosure of his tax records.  Of course!   No way to make someone look bad as quickly and dirtily as showing he’s a tax cheat.

In Nixon’s case, his resignation came after a long, determined fight against a mounting army of determined enemies, some from his own party, brandishing “smoking gun” evidence of his wrongdoing.   He had tried to cover up his involvement in the break-in to the office of his political enemy (a guy he handily defeated in a landslide, so the break-in had been totally unnecessary) a criminal act he probably gave the green light to, and arranged payments to silence the burglars he had hired to break into the Democratic headquarters at the Watergate complex. He’d gone on television to assure America that this investigation into him was a witch hunt (though he didn’t use that word, as far as I recall).  He explained to America that he was honest, not a crook, and that everything he did was on the up and up.   America eventually came to understand he’d been lying, was not honest, was a crook, that everything with Nixon was not on the up and up.

Jane Mayer reminds us that one of the diehards in the Nixon administration was a young man named Roger Ailes [1], Nixon’s media consultant who dolled the candidate up for TV and made him more telegenic and ‘likable’.  Ailes later was the driving force (before he resigned in disgrace, outed as a sexual predator) behind the mass media antidote to “fake news” — FOX news, fair and balanced.   In the event of a future Watergate scandal against a right wing president, this influential network stands ready to rumble, to set people straight in a way that was impossible when trusted Communists like Walter Cronkite, Huntley and Brinkley and their ilk dominated the network airwaves and manipulated public opinion against great Americans like Richard Milhous Nixon.

And so we have the FOX attack machine, running full time attacks (as well as the numerous paid ads the re-elect Trump people are running) against any critics of the president, claiming that the claims against this president of great and unmatched wisdom are being unfairly, even illegally, prosecuted by a bunch of sore loser Commie extremists who lost the 2016 election fair and square, by more than 78,000 votes in every key district needed for Trump’s historic Electoral College mandate.  

I think again of the great advice about fair judging that Justice Boof Kavanaugh [2]  got from his mother:  ‘Use your common sense. What rings true? What rings false?’

 

[1] Wikipedia on Ailes:

His pioneering work in framing national campaign issues, capitalizing on the race-based Southern Strategy and making the stiff Nixon more likable and accessible to voters was later chronicled in The Selling of the President 1968 by Joe McGinniss.[8]

[2] Wikipedia:

Eighty-three ethics complaints were brought against Kavanaugh in regard to his conduct during his U.S. Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Chief Justice John Roberts appointed a special federal panel of judges to investigate the complaints. In December 2018, the judicial panel dismissed all 83 ethics complaints, concluding

that while the complaints “are serious,” there is no existing authority that allows lower court judges to investigate or discipline Supreme Court justices.[188]