Category Archives: History and Politics

Fighting Helplessness

I was so distressed before the 2018 midterm elections that I determined to go into a neighborhood where a Democratic candidate was in a real fight for Congress and speak to voters, try to influence even a few undecided voters in a tight race.   I found the race in nearby Staten Island.   The Democratic candidate was Max Rose.  Rose was running against — it was too perfect, you’ve got to check this out (and I have to do a little quick research for the details of this next paragraph):

The Republican he was running against was Dan Donovan, Jr., former law and order DA of Staten Island and an ardent Trump supporter.    Donovan won a special election to take over Republican Congressman Michael Grimm’s seat when Grimm left Congress after his indictment for a string of felonies (he eventually served an 8 month prison sentence after pleading guilty to a single felony count and acknowledging– without pleading, oddly– that he had committed several others) [1].    Grimm emerged from prison and challenged Donovan in the 2017 Republican primary to get his seat back.   Donovan ran hard to the right of Grimm, out-Trumping the Trump-loving Grimm, and won a hard fought primary battle against his Republican predecessor.   Now he was facing an unknown Democrat, thirty-one year old Afghan War veteran Max Rose, in the general election.

I remembered Dan Donovan from the Eric Garner murder on July 17, 2014, Donovan was the DA at the time.   OK, calling it “murder” may be a bit incendiary — the medical examiner ruled Garner’s death a “homicide” —  let’s go with that.   Donovan wrote the unreturnable indictment for Daniel Pantaleo — the officer accused of (and videotaped) applying a chokehold to the much larger Garner, who repeatedly pleaded “I can’t breathe” until he stopped breathing — and submitted it to a Staten Island grand jury that would never indict a policeman on the charges Donovan asked them to vote on.   No criminal indictment against the officer who killed Garner was returned.    Pantaleo has been on desk duty for the five years since the homicide, drawing his regular $100,000 plus salary as a New York City policeman.   

In recent NYPD departmental hearings there was a vigorous legal debate by regulation-parsing lawyers over the legality of the precise hold Pantaleo applied to bring down the much larger man, a black man with a history of arrests, even a few convictions.   The hold, without dispute applied by Pantaleo, that resulted in the homicide of Eric Garner.    Garner was a large black man known to illegally sell “loose” cigarettes from packs that did not have valid tax stamps on them, allegedly refusing to be arrested and dragged to a cell on a hot day, for a second time.   A known criminal who was also known by locals as a laid back gentle giant and a peacemaker.

If you want to get really worked up about the sickening injustice surrounding the killing of an unarmed man who was not at the time engaged in any illegal activity, or posing any other threat to anyone, read Matt Taibbi’s gripping long-form report I Can’t Breathe: A Killing on Bay Street.  The details will make your blood boil, unless you believe that a large black man with a criminal history deserves to be taken down, every time, with or without cause, even if the result is, tragically, a “homicide” by police.  Among a host of brutal specifics, the detail of the man who videotaped the homicide on his phone, Ramsey Orta, being the only person to face justice in relation to the homicide investigation, is mind-fucking.  Orta was facing up to sixty years in prison, at one time, for post July 17, 2014 drug charges and possession of a .25 caliber handgun.  [2] 

A state case was never brought against officer Pantaleo, but there was talk about the Department of Justice bringing federal charges against the aggressive officer whose actions had resulted in homicide, basically the choking death of a much larger man arguably “resisting arrest”.  That talk ended yesterday.   

Enter Bagpiper Bill Barr (on a break from gently bagpiping his master’s increasingly sweaty balls, one assumes) who ordered the U.S. Attorney from the Eastern District of New York, the office contemplating bringing federal charges against the death-causing policemen whose actions resulted in the homicide of Eric Garner, to stand down.   The U.S. attorney said:

“Let me say as clear and unequivocally as I can that Mr. Garner’s death was a tragedy,” Richard Donoghue, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said at a news conference. “But these unassailable facts are separate and distinct from whether federal crime has been committed. And the evidence here does not support charging police Officer Daniel Pantaleo with a federal criminal civil rights violation.”

source

 

All roads lead back to Mr. Trump, the undisputed non-racist, scrupulously honest leader of his lockstep Republican party.   Trump is, of course, not the cause for any of this — not directly.   He is the toxic chicken coming home to roost, the logical outcome of decades of unprincipled and very effective conniving by some very determined, very wealthy “job creators”.  He is a symptom, like projectile vomiting or explosive diarrhea, not the disease itself.   A herpes zoster on the genital politic, we might say.

A feeling of helplessness is a motherfucker, I’m here to say.   Time to get serious about impeaching this deserving, largely unqualified 78,000 vote (0.0006% mandate, yo)  Electoral College president.   He may be a symptom, but he is an especially ugly one and he will be hard for the unyielding extremists who support him, and have put all their faith in riding his stinking coattails, to replace on the 2020 ticket.   It is also past time to start making some fundamental, and long-overdue, changes in our recently faltering experiment in democracy.  Either that or we should all go back where we came from…

 

[1]  Wikipedia gives us the skinny on Grimm:

On April 28, 2014, Grimm was charged by federal authorities with 20 counts of fraud, federal tax evasion, and perjury.[2] On December 23, 2014, he pleaded guilty to a single count of felony tax fraud, and “acknowledged committing perjury, hiring illegal immigrants, and committing wire fraud”.[3]After initially vowing to retain his seat, Grimm announced on December 30, 2014, that he would resign from Congress effective January 5, 2015.[4] On May 5, 2015, Daniel M. Donovan, Jr. won the special election to replace Grimm. On July 17, 2015, Grimm was sentenced to eight months in prison for tax evasion.[5] He began his prison term on September 22, 2015 after a brief delay for medical treatments.[6]

On October 1, 2017, Grimm launched a campaign to attempt to win back his old House seat in New York’s 11th District.  On June 26, 2018, he lost in the Republican primary.[7][8]

source

[2]  written some time in 2015 (no attribution in original post)

In the last year, Orta’s life has been upended. He has been arrested three times since August 2014. The first, for criminal possession of a handgun he allegedly tried to give a 17-year-old, came a day after Garner’s death was ruled a homicide by the city’s medical examiner. In February [2015], he was arrested again on multiple charges of selling and possessing drugs. The third came on June 30 [2015] when he was accused of selling MDMA to an undercover cop. A lab test later showed that the alleged MDMA was fake and the charges were reduced.  All told, Orta is facing more than 60 years in prison if convicted on all charges.

(He eventually pled guilty and took a four year sentence)

source

Asking Unanswerable questions

I’ve long had the intrusive habit of asking of what often seem to be unanswerable questions.   They’re not unanswerable because there is no explanation, no cause and effect that can be laid out, no illuminating reasons that can be produced to get closer to the truth of what’s actually going on. 

They’re unanswerable because they are fucking hard questions, the true reasons are ugly reasons, and great forces are arrayed to make sure they are answered only in self-serving, inadequate ways, like Mr. Trump’s (no reply submitted) reply to Mueller’s last long, compromising written question about the actions of his disgraced former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn.   

The real answer will often cause more trouble than its worth — to those who have something to lose by it.  The anodyne answer (like the ones the New York Times specializes in) is always preferable, though it’s usually only a partial answer that, while accepting the status quo as the way it should pretty much be, makes no trouble.   Except that it also provides no real clue about anything but how important it is not to make trouble if you want everything to continue pretty much as it is.

I get that I seem to be acting as though humans are mostly rational creatures, animals who use sophisticated tools and logical means to enjoy the many wonders of nature and live in harmony with our miraculous world.  A clever person could say it’s illogical to proceed as if logic ruled the world.   Indeed, the world, we can see at a glance, is clearly not ruled by Reason.   That doesn’t invalidate thoughtfulness as the best we can do in a world often ruled by selfish, enraged brutes.    Understanding is always a net gain, it seems to me, as is honest connection to others.

I also understand that my clinging to “understanding” is an emotional thing, stemming from my childhood need to feel heard and addressed.   Not to say some explanations are not far better than others, only that in seeking them feathers will often be ruffled and emotions raised to the boiling point.   I grew up in a home where that happened regularly.   Some of my parents’ outbursts were understandable to me, I’d touched a raw nerve I had reason to know would be raw — but some were just rage doing what rage does — raging.    What the hell is up with rage?

After our father died, my sister used a great phrase to describe a force that decisively shaped his life (and to a large extent our mother’s as well).  “Shame-based” she said, and it’s a phrase that explains a lot.   The main characteristic about shame is that it compels the sufferer to hide that painful emotion, to rationalize, defend, develop plausible sounding explanations for actions that are not always easy to justify, and often, to lash out violently at others.

Shame is a powerful force in world history.   Adolf Hitler spoke directly to the shame and thwarted national pride of his audience.  He spoke magic words to larger and larger crowds of desperate, angry Germans after Germany’s humiliating defeat in World War One and its submission to a harsh and destructive treaty.  According to the self-taught Mr. Hitler, the German army had never lost the war, not at all; Germany had the greatest military in the world, but it been savagely betrayed, you see, it was stabbed in the back.   No reason to feel national humiliation, the punitive Versailles diktat was heaped on a great and victorious nation by vicious, scheming, inhuman traitors, you understand.   Inferior traitors who continue laughing at Germany, traitors whose laughter will turn to whimpers and screams when we turn the tables!!!

Shame is the source of much rage and violence.    The need to hide shame and act out to keep it hidden is behind many of the terrible stories of savagery we see, many tragedies that unfold before us.  Shame leads directly to abuse, in its many forms. 

 A few years back I heard a great interview on this subject with a psychiatrist named James Gilligan who’d spent many years in prisons working with violent offenders.   He put his finger on shame as the common denominator for violent acts of domination, horrible things done out of a sense of being “disrespected”.    You can read his article on the subject here.    Every sadist was once humiliated, and the reaction to that humiliation is often expressed in a desire to humiliate others.   The vicious cycle (literally) is turned harder by the fact that we tend to blame ourselves for our shame, and for the sometimes shameful things we sometimes do to avoid further shame, which makes everything ten times worse.    

There is a great scene in the movie Goodwill Hunting that vividly illustrates the first step on path away from shame  — addressing the pain and forgiving the self for feeling it.    The psychiatrist, played by Robin Williams, finally get’s through Will’s (Matt Damon) resistance to gaining real insight.   The young man is clearly in pain, and his nerves are painfully exposed after he lays out the violence of his childhood, the terrible punishment inflicted on him by a brutal parent for no reason.    Williams tells him “it’s not your fault”.   The statement is undeniably true — the kid is not responsible for the uncontrollable violence of his angry drunk father.   Will tries to nonchalantly acknowledge this, but he is only retreating back to his tough guy pose.   The shrink, not going to miss the opening, tells the kid again “it’s not your fault.”   He keeps repeating this statement, in the face of his patient’s rising emotions.    In the end the young man breaks down in the older man’s arms and it’s a moment of great progress in his treatment.

Of course, it’s a Hollywood movie.  We know all about successful Hollywood movies — they are pretty much mostly bullshit.   Every time a couple has sex on screen — they come together.   Every time a victim gets a gun, she shoots her sadistic victimizer dead in the final scene.   The poorest characters live in beautiful homes.   Violence is cathartic, makes everything better.   Plus, for good measure, showing a naked woman or man is much more offensive, for purposes of ratings, than showing people being shot, blown up, smashed in the head with baseball bats.    Still, the essence of that scene between Robin Williams and Matt Damon crystalizes something deep and true.

We tend to blame ourselves, which increases our sense of being worth less than others who, aggravatingly,  do not seem to blame themselves.   Except in rare cases, nobody shows us how not to blame ourselves when we feel guilt, or regret, or shame — or rage, for that matter.   It’s our fault we are (slug in your pet fear here).   The poor, generation after generation of these hard-pressed fuckers, have only themselves to blame for their poverty.   After all, hard work and determined ambition is always rewarded in a free nation like ours — just look at all the successful people who worked their asses off to become celebrities!    Surely the poor can grab ahold of their own bootstraps and perform the physics-defying feat of lifting themselves off the ground by their own heels.   Even the metaphor is absurd — but no worries, the image is good enough for our purposes.  Our purpose, to sum it up, is “fuck you.  It’s not me, not us, not the way we do things here, it’s you, asshole.”

So it is down the line with superficial, stupid answers to troubling questions.   Husband, finding himself in a tight spot, as a result of unsuccessful embezzling and numerous lying attempts to cover up his crimes, about to declare bankruptcy he’s kept secret from everybody, suddenly threatens mass murder– stabbing, beheading and killing by fire — of his entire family.   What the fuck?  “He was under unbearable pressure!”  Decades later, the wife who never left, dismisses the homicidal raging as an isolated thing that only happened once.   Her children, two of the intended victims, must never know about the shameful, terrifying episode.   She can’t understand why she still has tremendous anxiety, even though her life is objectively pretty much stress-free, though, admittedly, she does blame herself for the low self-esteem that prevented her from leaving her volatile, serially untruthful husband.

A woman tells you, after a few glasses of wine, that she has always hated everybody.   Present company excluded, she adds with a wan smile, realizing how bad that categorical statement must have sounded.   We all laugh about it, admit that we hate most people too.   Then, over time, it emerges that this woman does hate EVERYBODY– present company now included.  Doesn’t talk to her brother or sister, rages at her children, is in a constantly escalating war with her husband, etc.  She hates everybody because, when it comes down to it, her life is shit and she hates that too– and, most unbearable of all,  it’s all her own fault.

A guy praises and thanks his old friend, offering to do him a favor he then, without explanation, decides not to do.   When questioned about this change of heart the guy explodes — “this is the last straw, you demanding fuck, I don’t owe you shit, I don’t owe you an explanation, you pushy fucking fuck!    I love you, man, but we have a gigantic personality conflict here, so maybe better if you just fuck off and die.”   The guy, on some level, must know he’s overreacting and trashing a long friendship over what seems to be a pretext, but, for whatever reason, it feels good for him to rage at this guy.   Certainly better than feeling whatever shame is behind his emotional outburst.

In any of these cases, the facts don’t speak for themselves.   The true causes are murky and, most likely, shame-based, as my sister said of our father’s frequent outbursts.   The wife whose husband threatened to kill everyone would need, at minimum, a sincere apology from her murder-threatening husband before they could move on together in their lives.    The woman who says she hates everyone is reaching out, clearly in pain, feeling isolated, no matter how justified her feelings of hatred may otherwise seem to her.  The guy who loves his friend would, it seems, extend a tiny benefit of the doubt rather than attacking, but, who’s to say?

You probe these kinds of shame-based scenarios at your own peril.  As we have seen over and over, many people would rather punch you in the face than look squarely at something that causes them shame, or even discomfort.   Turn on the news and you will hear the latest “social media” attack by a powerful man whose overbearing, inhumanly demanding, brutish father (and loveless, materialistic mother) instilled in him a lust to blame others as loudly as possible as the better alternative to dealing with the lifelong terror of shame and a deep sense of his “inadequacy”.   Better to put three, four and five year old enemies in prisons, let them stink and catch all the diseases unsanitary confinement produces, then brazenly lie about their conditions of captivity, than realize your entire life is based on unbearable desperation not to feel the shame inflicted on you by relentless sadists, no?

Nothing Illegal About Being A Racist

Our ever marketing distractor-in-chief Donald J. Trump pooted out some racist tweets about four women in Congress (all “women of color”) the other day.  He wrote that if they hate his America so much they should go back to the corrupt shit holes they came from if they don’t like it here.   Three of the four would go back to Michigan and the Bronx, but no matter. 

Mitch McConnell and his pragmatic ilk were quick to defend Trump’s racist tweets against those who call the Orange Menace a racist — McConnell pointing out that, in his view, at least one of the president’s targets is an anti-Semite and that there’s a lot of overheated language on both sides.   Lindsey Graham adorably piled on “we all know that AOC and this crowd are a bunch of Communists, they hate Israel, they hate our own country, they’re anti-Semitic, they’re anti-America, they’re Socialists, they’re anti-Semitic, they stand for all the things most Americans disagree with.”  I like the way the proud single white southern man twice makes the claim that they hate Jews.  Tip of the yarmulke to you, Lindsey!    Let’s do that one again, a little bit louder, now:

Lindsey Graham adorably piled on “we all know that AOC and this crowd are a bunch of Communists, they hate Israel, they hate our own country, they’re anti-Semitic, they’re anti-America, they’re Socialists, they’re anti-Semitic, they stand for all the things most Americans disagree with.” 

White supremacists love this shit (Trump’s racism, not Graham’s Jew shit, of course), and Trump was no doubt widely applauded by a solid core of his base for taking no shit from these uppity colored bitches.   As take-a-bullet-for-the-Unitary-Executive Bagpiper Bill Barr would be among the first to point out — there is no law against an American being a racist, outside of certain limited laws that proscribe discrimination based on race and national origin.

Like the Fair Housing Act, for example.  Trump’s father took millions in free government money, subsidies and tax abatements, for building affordable housing for middle class workers.  Fred Christ Trump had a reputation for racism — though there’s no proof that his arrest at a Klan rally in 1927 was because he supported their racist, xenophobic views — it was well-known that he wouldn’t rent his apartments to blacks or Hispanics, or to any people not his preferred shade of white.   

There was also no law against this racist practice during the years he had his agents mark the application folders of  colored applicants with a “C” to identify which prospective tenants would be rejected.   A free country, Fred Christ was free to do what he liked with his property, in spite of the millions in tax abatements and subsidies he got from the government to build his middle class housing units, presumably for everybody.

Then there was a new federal law, the Fair Housing Act, enacted to end racist discrimination in housing rentals and sales, that suddenly made Fred Christ Trump’s long practices illegal.  So UNFAIR!   Enter Roy Cohn, rabid public homophobe and promiscuous closeted homosexual (who died of AIDS he claimed to his last breath was cancer), and his $100,000,000 counter-suit for defamation against the Department of Justice.   

Cohn settled the case without obtaining a penny for the Trumps (which would have been impossible — after all, truth– that the Trumps had been discriminating in the rental of housing on the basis of race and national origin– is an absolute defense to defamation in American courts) but  also, significantly without admitting the Trumps did anything wrong, ever.

At the same time the Trumps made no admission that they had been violating the Fair Housing Act,  page after page of the settlement is the Trumps’ agreement to scrupulously abide by the letter and spirit of the law, and to instruct their agents in nondiscrimination, make them take classes, take out newspaper ads for vacancies (stating explicitly that Trump properties followed the Fair Housing Act) and so forth.   The curious can see the entire “no admission of guilt” settlement HERE. [1]

The son of Fred Christ Trump is clearly not qualified to be the president, not by work or life experience, not by temperament, not by intelligence or basic competence in anything but self-promotion.   He has long been a boastful scofflaw, the biggest beneficiary of his father’s nefarious tax avoidance schemes and outright frauds.   

The president continues to obstruct justice, as he had when he fired Comey for not “letting the Flynn thing go” (and had Sessions and Rosenstein write memos outlining why Comey had to be fired, before boasting on TV that he didn’t care about the memos, he was going to fire Comey anyway for this “Trump-Russher thing”) as he had when he ordered White House counsel McGahn to fire Mueller, and then ordered him to write a memorandum saying the president had never ordered him to fire the Special Counsel.  As he did when he held on to the rejected resignation letter from Sessions as leverage against the surprisingly principled (in terms of recusal, anyway) little racist, and lied to his chief of staff about whether he still had the letter.    As he continues to do with his new Roy Cohn, Bagpiper Bill “how dare you call me bagpiper!!” Barr and the assertion of a blanket protective privilege over everyone and everything that might publicly compromise him or call his asserted “exoneration” into question.  

Trump is a racist, no law against that, but, seriously, in 2019, what the fuck?   They argue in Congress whether its an impermissible slander to condemn a president who acts like a racist, a president who strongly denies he’s a racist.

Trump never had a job he had to apply for, since he took over his brutal father’s lucrative housing empire (sold at a great discount after Fred Christ died, against the old man’s wishes that his life’s legacy never be sold).  Trump lost money in every business he ever had, was bailed out by his father time and again, declared bankruptcy more than once.   He lost billions in the course of his failed career as the Artist of the Deal, but then played the world’s biggest winner on a staged “reality” TV show that went on to fascinate millions of viewers.   He’s a compulsive liar, a loser and– it must be said again, a fucking racist troll.

He made racist attacks on many people over the years, particularly women, (his long Birther-in-Chief gig and taking out full page ads calling for the execution of five boys falsely convicted and later exonerated were two of his most famous, though women were not specifically involved) and as president called black NFL players sons of bitches (and their mothers, of course, bitches) but THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NO PROOF THAT HE EVER CALLED ANYONE A NIGGER!  (no matter how much they deserved it!)  Now he has done the next best thing, telling four progressive “non-white”  female congress members . via Twitter, to “go back where they came from!”   His crowds now chant “Send Her Back!” at the mention of the Somali-born Ilhan Omar.    His party unites to say Trump is not a racist, nor were his comments about those America-hating colored bitches racist, though his admirers know better. 

Comedian George Lopez said it best, and most succinctly, “fuck that puto“.

 

[1] an example, from the settlement

For two years after the entry of this Order, defendant shall notify the Open Housing Center of the New York Urban League, 150 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York, 10003, of every fifth available apartment in each apartment building owned and/or managed by the defendant which has a black tenancy of less than ten percent at least three days prior to placing that apartment on the open market. During this three-day period, the Open Housing Center shall have the opportunity to refer qualified applicants to the defendant for the purpose of renting the apartment. All applicants referred by the Open Housing Center shall provide the defendant or its representative with an appropriate identification which will serve to advise the defendants that such applicant has been referred by the Open Housing Center pursuant to this subsection. After three days if no qualified applicant referred by the Center has filed an application seeking to rent the apartment, the apartment may be placed on the open market to be rented in defendant’s normal business custom without regard to race, color, religion, sex or national origin.

Aktions and Trump

Piecing together what we thought we knew about the location of the hamlet in the Belarusian marsh our grandparents came from, my cousin and I settled on a spit of land across the Pina River from Pinsk.   It fit the descriptions we had, though it was not marked on any map anyone could find [1].   Assuming that’s where they lived, it is a simple matter to find out the dates of the Pinsk Aktions, the Nazi mobilizations to round up and liquidate the local population, and we always assumed it was on those dates that the Nazis killed everyone in our family who had not made it to America by 1923 or died before those terrible dates.

Aktion is what the Nazis called these round-ups and “liquidations”.   They’d assemble all the undesirables, the poisoners of the genetic pool, the deadly enemies of the people, down to the tiniest children, and lead them off to their deaths.   An aktion usually involved a bunch of men with guns and a large ditch, sometimes dug, at gunpoint, by the victims.   

The men who did the killing during an aktion, the einsatzgruppen, had a famously hard time, many became alcoholics and drug addicts.   This is one reason the Nazis mechanized the process, to spare their people the horror of what it was necessary to do.  There were simply too many enemies of the people to be killed and it is hard for a human being to shoot dozens, if not hundreds, of unarmed civilians day after day.    No matter how strongly one believed in the ultimate justice of what one was doing.   How many children can you murder before it gets to you?

I would not put that question to our president.   I seriously don’t think the suffering or even the death of an illegal Mexican rapist child means anything to him.   Look at the evidence.  He’s got untold numbers of children from Central America in child prisons, dirty, disease infested, cramped, unhealthy child prisons.  Concentration camps, actually (and recall, these facilities are not nearly as bad as Death Camps where actual mass killing was carried out).   Concentration camps.   For children.   

His spin is that these kids have it great, much, much better than in their shithole countries, even if the food and sanitary conditions are sometimes not fantastic.  Whatever he’s been ordered by federal courts to do about this brutal policy of family separation, he clearly doesn’t give a shit.   Neither do the people running these brutal facilities where kids are not allowed to wash, where they sleep on the floor, where disease proliferates, where every sort of abuse is winked at.

Recently the president has been making a lot of noise, for the benefit of his angry base and to fire them up about his reelection campaign (which began the day he was inaugurated, before a historically gigantic crowd of supporters), about rounding up millions of these illegal alien fuckers and doing whatever is necessary to get these sons of bitches out of our country.  OUT!  NO MORE ROOM!   OUT!   BACK TO YOUR SHITHOLE COUNTRIES, LOSERS!

The president often behaves like an angry psychopath.  His people love it!   He was planning his nonlethal aktion for the July 4th weekend, then decided not to politicize the day, just having military jets fly over him as he made a patriotic speech.   But now he announces it’s going to happen, as promised, a massive round up of perhaps millions, simultaneously in more than ten cities where they are hiding these filthy, violent criminals.   His base, crazed with inchoate fear and hatred that Trump understands intimately, loves this kind of macho no prisoners theatre.

When journalist and legal American resident Jamal Khashoggi was lured to the Saudi embassy where he was strangled and dismembered on the orders of MBS of the Saudi Arabian monarchy, Trump was sympathetic.  To his killers.   He changed his tune over and over as the various transparent lies of MBS and his people came out.  “Well,” he said thoughtfully, “MBS is denying it very strongly, very strong denial.  So, you know.”    Even when it was shown beyond a shadow of a doubt that Saudis close to MBS planned and carried out the grisly execution, Trump shrugged. It was hard to think that Trump wouldn’t love to be able to have some of these fake news enemy of the people fuckers given the old Khashoggi treatment.

You know, without the illegal leaks, and the people who won’t shut up, and the laws, and the courts, the unfair courts that only get it right when they dismiss a suit against Trump for lack of standing or some other technicality, and the press, the goddamned disloyal press — oh, and subpoenas and so-called legal process — but especially the press, the media, with their constant airing of very unfair facts, and photographs, and videos and interviews with lying, disloyal people who won’t shut up, who think they are fighting for some kind of justice (fake justice) there would be no problems.  Trump and his people know what to do.   Get rid of all the fucking illegal immigrants.   Is that too much to ask?

Without the goddamned lying media, A.G. Bill Barr’s (arguably) false public statement:

Nonetheless, the White House fully cooperated with the special counsel’s investigation, providing unfettered access to campaign and White House documents, directing senior aides to testify freely, and asserting no privilege claims. 

would be an unchallengeable slam dunk, don’t you see?  Only an enemy of the people would point out that access to campaign and finance documents was extremely fettered, that key witnesses lied or refused to testify, that the president submitted only to written queries and answered each one pleading no memory before finally simply refusing to answer at all, that senior aides and others were and have been forbidden from giving further testimony (NO DO-OVERS, LOSERS!) and that a flimsy protective privilege for all testimony and documents related to the redacted Mueller report has been asserted, on fucking Bagpiper Bill Barr’s written advice to the president.

It’s hard to think that someone as childishly impulsive and transactional as Trump wouldn’t jump at the chance to silence a particularly vicious “enemy of the people” by any means he could get away with.  This is a man who paid off women he probably paid to have sex with, had them sign non-disclosure agreements and fought them to a standstill in the courts.  This is a man who repeatedly called for the execution of five NYC boys who were completely exonerated of the crime they were convicted of.   Kill them anyway.  This is one sick puppy.

This planned nonlethal aktion against “illegals”– I’m sure Trump is wishing it could be something even more dramatic.   Imagine the polling numbers if he could actually go on TV and shoot a few of these raping fucks in their ugly, desperate faces?

 

[1]  It turns out, according to a Belarusian geneologist named Yuri that my cousin hired,  the shtetl was not across the Pina from Pinsk, but 40 something kilometers east, closer to Stolin (Plotnitsa being the closest town on a map).  There was, of course, an aktion there too.   The Nazis were nothing if not thorough.

Bagpiper Bill’s increasingly desperate defense of Donald Trump

Weeks before releasing any part of Mueller’s report (including the redacted summary Mueller had provided to Barr, along with the report) suddenly squirrelly (details below) Bill Barr defended the innocent, unfairly persecuted Unitary Executive this way:

There is substantial evidence to show that the president was frustrated and angered by his sincere belief that the investigation was undermining his presidency, propelled by his political opponents and fueled by illegal leaks.  [1]

You’ll have to take my word that this is a verbatim transcript of what the skilled and highly principled evasionist/obstructionist said in explaining that the president was understandably angry and frustrated, as anyone would be, by his sincere belief that he was innocent and being persecuted.   I transcribed this from an audio recording, made a few months back when I heard it excerpted again on Preet Bharara’s podcast, Stay Tuned with Preet.   (I can tell from the background music that Preet played the clip, it’s possibly from  the 3/25/19 episode).

According to Barr, if someone (in his party) has a sincere belief (like Boof Kavanaugh’s that he was never drunk enough to fall on a younger woman and paw at her clothes, or drunkenly thrust his penis in another woman’s face at Yale) then THAT SHOULD BE ENOUGH.   What do you people want?   He had a sincere belief that his enemies wanted to harm him.   How do you expect him to feel?  Of course he was furious, and frustrated, who wouldn’t be?!   They were going to undermine him, and his political opponents were ready to pile on, and things we classified top secret, because they were harmful to him, were illegally leaked by sinful traitors who wouldn’t know loyalty if it came up and buggered them!

We have all noted that in these kinds of disputes (Trump vs. the lies of the partisan Mueller report that totally exonerated him) facts and Reason are easily cast aside in our bloodthirstily tribal culture.   It’s emotions that matter, get people worked up enough to go to the polls, where, if they are not black, or hispanic, or young, or in college, or old, or transexuals, or activists, they can easily cast their votes to Make America Great Again.

We want to undercount millions that the constitution requires be enumerated every ten years because — WE ARE DEFENDING THE VOTING RIGHTS ACT!  Yes, that’s right.   We are defending the federal law that says states cannot discriminate against citizens who want to vote because of race, or to favor a more racist political party, as has been, admittedly, done in our past, particularly, but not only in, the states of the former Confederacy, for a century or more.   That’s why we don’t want to count inhabitants of hated ethnic and social groups who may or may not be citizens.   To protect the right of all Americans, not only Democrats, to vote!

The Federalists on the court all liked this reason, found it good enough to pass Supreme Court scrutiny.  Only John Roberts (now the “swing vote”, God help us) pointed out that the administration’s “reason” for asking a citizenship question on the 2020 Census appeared to be contrived, and counter to the evidence.   Roberts suggested that a sensible reason, no matter how flimsy, would have sufficed, but this Voting Rights Act “reason” had the smell of the thing Boof Kavanaugh’s mother warns judges to be wary of, in using their common sense to separate likely truth from likely crap.   In response to the Supreme Court’s decision, the fury on FOX and the president’s tweets, Barr fired the DOJ legal team who had argued the case and tried to replace all the lawyers.

Of course the reason Roberts and the others rejected 5-4 was obviously bullshit.   The administration has made every attempt to suppress votes, even establishing a short-lived commission (headed by famous supporters of voter suppression laws, former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach and the irreproachable Mike Pence), to prove that Hillary Clinton’s three million popular vote majority was based on massive nationwide voter fraud.  Opposition to  Trump’s Advisory Commission on Election Integrity was widespread and bipartisan. 

It wasn’t just Democrats who were resisting. Mississippi Republican Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann said that when he received the data request, his response would be to tell the commission to “go jump in the Gulf of Mexico and Mississippi is a great State to launch from.”       source

The commission had been set up to investigate the fraudulent votes of three million dead, sneaky, illegal Mexicans that Trump tweeted about.   We can’t have millions of zombie voters here in the land of the goddamned Voting Rights Act!   Trump disbanded the commission after a few months (they found no evidence of this army of dead voters) but… nothing to see here!   We now fully support the goddamned Voting Rights Act!   How does this argument smell to you?  Not for nothing footnote (from the same source) [2].

Back to suddenly squirrelly Bill Barr.  Barr, like Trump, initially said he had no problem with Robert Mueller testifying (Trump also initially claimed he supported releasing the entire un-redacted report, if memory serves me).    Barr said Mueller’s testimony would only confirm his judgment that the report, since it did not explicitly state that the president was guilty but only detailed many, arguably, highly suspicious actions by the president, exonerates the president of all wrongdoing.  Barr read the report carefully and is as well aware as any reader of the disturbing findings throughout.  Barr knows that his definitive, public relations winning “interpretation” is an outright lie. 

Even if Mueller doggedly sticks to the four corners of the report, as he has vowed to do, and as he has always done in the past when testifying, there is a lot that, if simply read aloud by Mueller on live television, is extremely damaging to Barr’s/Trump’s creative narrative of exoneration.   Mueller states unequivocally in clear prose that his report does not exonerate Trump, certainly not of his past and ongoing obstruction of justice.   Exoneration and Case Closed is Barr’s story, and he’s sticking to it, desperately.

Barr has been providing sound bytes to the media the last few days, as we all wait for the televised July 17th Mueller testimony.  Barr told the world yesterday that if Mueller doesn’t like being under subpoena the DOJ will have his back if he doesn’t want to testify.    The DOJ is also trying to bar (Barr) closed door Congressional Committee testimony by two former DOJ employees, both of whom worked for the Special Counsel, who are scheduled to appear voluntarily.   NOTHING TO FUCKING HIDE HERE, YOU FUCKING IRRATIONAL HATERS!!!  It is routine for a former employer to forbid former employees from doing things!

Barr has reason to be squirrelly.   He auditioned for the Attorney General job with an impressive, unsolicited legal memo supporting the arguable legality of whatever the Unitary Executive feels he has to do.   He was evasive during his confirmation hearings, protesting his long friendship with and great respect for Robert Mueller, a man whose findings he promised to honor, a man he quickly threw under the bus when those findings turned out to be problematic for the Unitary Executive.   He lied to the American people about Mueller’s duty under the present “Special Counsel” statute (which apparently bound him to the OLC memo prohibiting indictment of the president) and announced that since Mueller had been indecisive, as judge and jury he, the A.G., was exonerating Trump and holding on to the report for a month or so to let that message sink in.   NOTHING TO SEE HERE!.  Which is why we have to cover it up in every possible way.   What don’t you irrationally angry liberal ass-dicking Christ-haters not understand about fucking CASE CLOSED!!!

To some true believers, Bill Barr is a man of unwavering principle and devotion, a devout Catholic conservative who believes that Christ infallibly guides him in this world of darkness.  To me, Barr is a dangerous fanatic, whether or not he would have been a fantastic lawyer for Torquemada and the devout, pious Christian torturers of the holy Spanish Inquisition.

 

[1]  The full paragraph, from right before Mueller spoke on the day he resigned:

Yet, as he said from the beginning, there was in fact no collusion. And as the special counsel’s report acknowledges, there is substantial evidence to show that the president was frustrated and angered by his sincere belief that the investigation was undermining his presidency, propelled by his political opponents and fueled by illegal leaks.   Nonetheless, the White House fully cooperated with the special counsel’s investigation, providing unfettered access to campaign and White House documents, directing senior aides to testify freely, and asserting no privilege claims.    source

click here for a perfect example of but one part of that full cooperation Barr lied about

 

[2]   from the rabid communists at fake news NPR:

One of the five Democratic members died in October as well, and a researcher for the commission was arrested on charges of possessing child pornography.

Bagpiper Bill– NEW LOW

This amazing guy, handsome Bagpiper Bill Barr, keeps topping himself.    He is a dangerous true believer, and very smart.  What he believes in, apparently, is the divinity and absolute moral authority of Jesus Christ and the absolute, unchallengeable power of the wealthiest Americans, particularly right-wing presidents.   He protects the Unitary Executive no matter what.

He did this for George H. W. Bush when Bush’s  involvement (denied by Bush for years) in the Iran Contra Scandal was about to be revealed during the trial of prodigious notetaker Caspar Weinberger.   Barr was spectacularly creative, crafting a pre-trial pardon for Weinberger that prevented the compromising notes from ever becoming public and closed the cover on the scandal forever.  He also orchestrated the pardons of everyone else who’d been caught in the scandal, to ensure that the lid was nailed shut.

He did this for Donald Trump when he first promised to protect him and then twisted the findings of Robert Mueller’s investigation into arguable (though counterfactual) complete and total exoneration.   He did this by arguing to America that any innocent man would be angry and frustrated, as Trump was, and would do whatever he was in his power to end the torment.   Another term for this doing of whatever is in your power to end what you perceive as persecution: obstruction of justice.

Bagpiper Bill indicated yesterday that he would recuse himself from the federal sex trafficking prosecution of longtime child sex impresario billionaire Jeffrey Epstein.  Epstein had a taste for young girls, 14, 15, 16, and he had the money and power to have a parade of them come to his mansions, disrobe, oil him up, with all that followed.  He did this countless times.   

Epstein was prosecuted by federal prosecutors in Florida, under then federal prosecutor Alex Acosta (Trump’s current Secretary of Labor) and, pursuant to a secret plea deal (negotiated by a legal “dream team” including Alan Dershowitz and Ken Starr), pleaded guilty to a single prostitution charge and was allowed to work six days a week as long as he consented to spend nights, and Sundays, at a minimum security prison — for thirteen long months.   The original charges for the wealthy sexual predator carried about 40 years of prison time for the serious crimes Epstein was charged with.

Was the deal a scandalous miscarriage of justice?   Certainly.  Then there’s the inconvenient detail that the law requires prosecutors to inform victims before any deal with the perpetrator is signed– but Acosta didn’t inform anyone until the deal was done [1].    You know, Jeffry Epstein, whatever else he is, is a power broker, he’s not some random black kid smoking a joint on the street.  He hung out with Trump, Clinton, Alan Dershowitz and many other powerful and famous people.  He flew them places on his private jets and was apparently a generous host.

Federal prosecutors are now about to try Epstein again, on behalf of many other girls he had take off their clothes, oil his naked body up as he pleasured himself and felt them up.   The feds found piles of nude photos of these girls at his Manhattan mansion.   

Bagpiper Bill announced yesterday that since he had once worked at the law firm that defended Epstein in the prior sex trafficking case, he was recusing himself from supervising this federal prosecution.   

Barr had another conflict he didn’t mention, another appearance of impropriety — Barr’s father, while head of the elite Dalton School, had hired an under-qualified Epstein to teach high school math.

Today a spokesman for Bagpiper announced that Barr will not recuse himself from the prosecution of Jeffrey Epstein after all.   This is presumably because during the years of boisterous girl chasing friendship between Trump and Epstein there may have been compromising photos taken of the two of them, with a couple of young beauties.  Or perhaps it is just protection against possible sworn testimony that Trump had simply enjoyed nude photos of the underage girls, taken home copies of his favorites.   You never know with Trump, anything, literally, could be true.   (We know Trump enjoyed, and bragged about, barging into the changing room for the Teenaged Miss America pageant he hosted).   

It is not worth taking chances, for Defender Barr– better to be present to decide exactly what evidence becomes part of the case, making sure to shield our Sexual Predator-in-Chief, the Unitary Executive, the living spokesman for Christ Himself, from any possible liability for anything.

Truly a shameful day, even for a law-toting blowhard as debased as Bagpiper Bill.

 

[1]   Alex Acosta addressed a room full of reporters and answered questions about the light slap on the wrist Epstein got in the non-prosecution deal Acosta oversaw.  He is by far the most impressive Trump appointee (not a very high bar, granted) and acquitted himself well at the news conference, even if he spent the entire time justifying himself as smoothly as you please.   

You’d be impressed, if you didn’t know he approved a tender, playful, secret slap on the wrist for the wealthy serial child abuser.  You’d think he was very candid in answering all questions.   Surprisingly intelligent, especially for a Trump administration official — although, it must be noted, he gave not a hint of an apology for his shameless secret deal with a serial child molester, nor more than a sniff of sympathy for the many young girls his well-connected friend literally screwed.

How to argue against putting innocent refugees in concentration camps

What to do when your government is criminalizing asylum seekers, brutalizing children, cramming them into unhealthy cages where disease proliferates as abuses by guards are ignored?   With, of course, a rotating cast of government officials that continues to lie about this brutal mistreatment of innocent “others”.   This, from today’s Democracy Now! broadcast:

In Washington, D.C., 18 Jewish activists with the group Never Again Action were arrested on Capitol Hill Tuesday as they protested against the jailing of migrants and called on lawmakers to shut down the detention camps and defund ICE and CBP.

Protester: “Congress once again voted to increase funding to ICE and CBP by passing a supplemental funding bill to send $4.6 billion to bankroll the criminalization, detention and deportation of those seeking refuge on our southern border. We thank the 95 representatives who voted against funding hate, and say ‘shame’ to the 305 representatives”—

Protesters: “Shame!”

In a statement, Never Again Action said:

 “As Jews, we know what the separation of families, the covert rounding-up of people and the creation of concentration camps can lead to. We refuse to wait and see what happens next.”

They also said:

“We know what happens when people unaffected by crises act as bystanders and look the other way. We will not stay silent while our historical trauma is weaponized to distract from the terror that our government is unleashing on immigrant communities.”

(emphasis mine)

source

A fascinating hour, well-spent

I didn’t intend to listen to this entire reading of the Obstruction “counts” of the Mueller Report, but it is fucking fascinating.   Every American should hear this. 

It’s called “A Search for the Truth in Ten Acts”.   Each act is a separate instance of the president’s obstruction of justice.

There is no doubt, after hearing  these readings, that Mr. Trump acted, throughout the investigation into his corrupt acts, with corrupt intent.  The intent needed to sustain obstruction of justice charges.

1  President Trump asked the FBI director to shut down the investigation into National Security Advisor Michael Flynn

2  President Trump said he fired FBI director Comey because of the Russia Investigation

3 President Trump ordered White House counsel Don McGahn to fire Robert Mueller   

4  President Trump attempted to curtail the Special Counsel’s investigation 

5  President Trump prevented the public disclosure of evidence 

6  President Trump wanted Attorney General Sessions to “unrecuse” from the Russia investigation   

7  President Trump directed White House counsel Don McGahn to create false documents that covered up the truth from investigators

8  President Trump tried to discourage Campaign chairman Paul Manafort and National Security Advisor Michael Flynn from cooperating with the Special Counsel’s investigation 

9  President Trump encouraged Michael Cohen to lie about Trump Tower Moscow

10  President Trump tried to get his longtime lawyer Michael Cohen not to cooperate with the investigation.   

Check it out.

Since the actions reported in the Mueller report President Trump has continued to behave like a guilty man.  He forced Jeff Sessions to resign (for not protecting him), made an interim appointment of an unqualified loyalist A.G. (without Senate confirmation), appointed a well-known obstructionist Unitary Executive zealot as A.G., he and his A.G. made repeated false, self-serving assertions about the findings of the Mueller report, his A.G. suppressed the report for a month while they spun the findings,  at his A.G.’s advice Trump asserted a flimsy protective privilege claim as part of a strategy to run out the clock, he publicly instructed subordinates and former employees to defy all subpoenas, continued to defiantly tweet obstructive messages, attacked Mueller and the Special Counsel’s team as “very sick and dangerous [criminals]”, has continued to insist the he is the completely innocent victim of a witch hunt.   A witch hunt that completely and totally exonerated him.   The man is an irrational, ethics-free, perpetual victim.   A national embarrassment and an international threat.

The motherfucker desperately needs to be impeached.  If you still don’t believe me, listen to the reading of the charges by Mueller.

Frederick Douglass on the 4th of July

This is the guy President Trump noted is getting a lot of overdue recognition, presumably gaining ‘followers’ on twitter.  Frederick Douglass, an American genius, born a slave, died around the time the first Trump arrived on these shores, too late to make a fortune from slavery. 

Douglass gave a fiery speech on July 5, 1852 (almost nine years before first shots of the so-called Civil War) that the great James Earl Jones reads (and Democracy Now! seems to broadcast every July 4).    Happy Belated Birthday, America.

Not a concentration camp!

Screen Shot 2019-07-08 at 12.34.31 PM.png

You may have a better name than concentration camp for this kind of mass detention, shown in a photo apparently, released (for some reason) by the Department of Homeland Security.   The scene above could be from any old concentration camp, as far as I can see.   Pod 2, indeed.

Take a moment to consider that the word Homeland was never used to describe The (eh..) United States of America before the attacks of 9/11/01.   Naomi Wolf pointed out the origin of the word in her Bush/Cheney era book warning about creeping fascism.   The word was recycled by self-styled American patriots who got the idea from real fascists; the Nazis called their land die heimat.   

USA!   USA!!!