Category Archives: History and Politics

Dehumanize those you wish to destroy

If you see the pleading humanity in the eyes of someone who simply wants to live, you will have a harder time driving a bayonet into him, even selecting his home for a remote controlled missile strike.   Thus, in order to have successful war, and an effective army, you must dehumanize the persons you are about to kill. Those you are about to wipe out must be seen as an inhuman enemy, if you are to kill them without hesitation.  Without the crucial step of dehumanizing the enemy, you are going to have an army with a lot of fucking qualms.   It is common sense to make them hate the dehumanized enemy first, War 101.

This dynamic of dehumanization is not limited to physical war, of course.    It applies, in an increasingly visceral way, to politics in our divided world.   The humanity of the opposing side is amazingly easy to dismiss, particularly when tempers flare.   We believe it is a human right, in a wealthy, industrialized country, to have enough food to eat, sufficient clothing and a place inside to sleep every night.   You believe that people with mental problems, living in poverty, isolated and unable to thrive for one reason or another, are not quite as human as those of us who are not homeless.   We believe that care must be taken to protect the weakest among us.  You believe the weak should learn to be as strong as the rest of us, it is a matter of principle, liberty and life choices.

We can go on and on with the examples.  The fossilized fucking Koch brothers, Charles and David, can smile their grotesque rictus grins now as they prepare for eternal life, to see how far to the merciless side they and their privileged ilk have swung the public discussion about rights and humanity in America.   Tax is equated with murder, liberty trumps every other value — to a man like Charles, born to great wealth who then went out and earned billions of dollars.   I cannot see the humanity of these two motherfuckers, no matter how many philanthropic endowments David seems to make.  

Yet, even these two prime pieces of shit are as human as you or I, presumably.   They have things they love and care about deeply, people and places they are very attached to.  They feel pride and shame, fear and boldness, happiness, sorrow; sometimes they must feel humility, gratitude. 

Like the rapists who keep surging over our borders, in search of young girls and boys to rape.   Like the vicious murderers who mass along the Gaza border with Israel, surging toward the fences and screaming the most hateful things, expressing their deadly wishes with molotov cocktails on kites.   Like those who support Trump/Hillary and all they represent.

If you think calmly, for even a moment, you will see the sickeningly idiotic fallacy of each of the examples in the paragraph above.

For every Mexican rapist who comes to the U.S. border there are many thousands of people, humans, merely seeking a less desperate life.  The vast majority never rape, would never think of doing such a thing.   Yet, they can be painted as rapists, drug smugglers, killers, wetbacks, Spics, Beaners, ass-dickers, what have you.   See?  Then any reasonable person would support using any force necessary to keep these sick fucks out of our great nation.

Same with the Palestinians who are being shot with live ammunition for massing along the Gaza/Israel border every week.   They are not desperate, not living in isolation and generations of poverty– they are all hate-filled terrorists that Israeli snipers may take out with impunity.   The Israeli defense minister proclaimed as much when he approved the use of live ammunition against the masses of Gazans who come to the border fence to rail against Israel’s policies.   All terrorists, not a single one a human being with any human need like any of ours!

Same with those who support a rather angry, harsh president who lies publicly many times every day.   It’s hard for someone like me to remember that these people are as human as I am, as human as people I love and care about.   Every one of them has a compelling reason to overlook the man’s many flaws, see only the greatness he promises to deliver.   Which is a very human thing to do, see the best in somebody, in the face of their large and glaring flaws.  

I can’t see the good in Trump, I think of him as a very dangerous, supremely damaged and self-serving man-child.    I have to look hard to see the humanity of those support him, those who come forward to sing his praises.  I can’t often do it, all I want to do is make them shut up when they open their mouths to explain why a greed-driven, unapologetic, compulsive liar president is actually a great thing for American democracy.

Same with those who voted for Hillary.  I held my nose to vote for her, as did many I knew, but there were people who truly thought she’d make a great president.   Human hopes were placed on her by other humans.  The whole process, very human.

But, fair is fair, it is truly hard to hate if you constantly see the humanity of the person you are supposed to destroy.   Dehumanization is the only humanly possible way to do that.   The enemy must always be nothing like us, he must be motivated only by vicious, inhuman desires.   Otherwise, we’d be constantly killing ourselves and members of our own tribe, and how much would that suck?

 

Again, no law was broken! Witch hunt!

The great Jane Mayer recently reported on the close cooperation between Fox (former home of Fair and Balanced news [1]) and the Trump administration (MAGA!  MAGA!), starting during the campaign (and even decades earlier, actually).  She makes the case that the popular cable news channel is an indispensable ratings-driven propaganda megaphone for Trump.   It’s a problem for American democracy that Fox (whose business model, constantly stoking the fear and rage of its demographic to maximize ratings — the same engine that drives Trump’s political machine) often casts the decisive vote on Trump’s actual policies.  Fox increasingly plays to its demographic base, which is identical to the president’s base.  She writes:

The White House and Fox interact so seamlessly that it can be hard to determine, during a particular news cycle, which one is following the other’s lead.

Terry Gross’s great recent interview of Jane Mayer is here (along with a link to the New Yorker article, The Making of the Fox News White House).

The report details the many key ways Fox helped presidential candidate Trump and the ongoing symbiosis between the administration and the powerful right wing cable news channel.   She describes the long relationship between Trump and Fox owner Rupert Murdoch, an arrangement that dates back to the NY Post days in the seventies when Donald helped Rupert sell papers while building his own billion dollar brand as a gold-plated rascal on Page Six.  [2]

Mayer’s article includes an account of how Fox News buried a blockbuster, game-changing news story on the eve of the 2016 election.  A young female Fox reporter had months earlier uncovered the Stormy Daniels story, Donald stepping out on Melania to have sex with a porn star, shortly after Melania gave birth of Barron.   One reflexively adds — allegedly — though the $130,000 payment and non-disclosure agreement the adult film star signed suggest that something Trump didn’t want anyone to know about went on.  The Fox reporter’s well-vetted story was stalled by editors for months and finally killed, much to her dismay, eliminating any unwanted October surprises.   The reason the reporter, Diana Falzone, was finally given, days before the election, was that “Rupert wants Donald to win”.   [3]

But I ask you, playing devil and advocate both– what law was violated by Trump’s friend’s news channel not airing the destructive news that the president was unfaithful to his wife and paid hush money to keep it quiet?   What law, you merciless bastards?  Reporting the story would have certainly tipped a very close election (between America’s two most widely hated candidates) and probably cost Trump the election, so why would his friend report it?   Again, what law was broken?

I know, I know, “character”, “morality”, “we don’t expect our presidents to be outright in-your-face scumbags,”  blah blah blah.   Those arguments are the last refuge of losers who have nothing, NOTHING!    As for Fox on-air personality Sean Hannity speaking at Trump’s final rally before the 2018 midterm elections — Hannity is not a news guy, he’s on the Fox entertainment side.  He can entertain any idea he wants, support any cause.   He loves Trump, he’s a free American freely being free.   Again, you merciless pricks, WHAT ACTUAL LAW DID HE VIOLATE?

Yeah, I know you America haters will jump on this bit about soon to be former White House Communications director (and former Fox executive) Bill Shine, about the many pay outs to settle sexual harassment suits at Fox:

Shine wasn’t personally accused of sexual harassment, but several lawsuits named him as complicit in a workplace culture of coverups, payoffs, and victim intimidation.  [4]

Again– what law?   What specific law?   You got NOTHING!

Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side is a brilliant and horrifically detailed exposition of America’s recent “rendition” and “enhanced interrogation,” our secret kidnapping and torture program.   The book was, if I recall, a best-seller.    Her more recent Dark Money, equally compelling, equally best-selling,  is a detailed history of the more than forty year Koch Brother struggle to make their father’s extremist anti-majoritarian vision of democracy the credo of the modern Republican party.   These great books should be part of every discussion of recent American history.  

Of course, there is no law that anybody in America needs to know history, or be fair, or balanced, or even rational.   Show me the fucking law, fuckface!

 

[1] As Jane Mayer quietly points out:    (That motto was retired in 2017.)

[2]  Yeah, of course, another fucking footnote… quoted from the article:

Trump became famous, in no small part, because of Rupert Murdoch. After Murdoch bought the New York Post, in 1976, he was introduced to Trump through a mutual acquaintance, Roy Cohn, the infamous legal fixer, who, as a young man, was Senator Joseph McCarthy’s chief counsel. Cohn saw the potential for tabloid synergy: Trump could attain celebrity in the pages of the Post as a playboy mogul, and Murdoch could sell papers by chronicling Trump’s exploits.

[3] Jane Mayer writes:

When Shine assumed command at Fox, the 2016 campaign was nearing its end, and Trump and Clinton were all but tied. That fall, a FoxNews.com reporter had a story that put the network’s journalistic integrity to the test. Diana Falzone, who often covered the entertainment industry, had obtained proof that Trump had engaged in a sexual relationship in 2006 with a pornographic film actress calling herself Stormy Daniels. Falzone had worked on the story since March, and by October she had confirmed it with Daniels through her manager at the time, Gina Rodriguez, and with Daniels’s former husband, Mike Moz, who described multiple calls from Trump. Falzone had also amassed e-mails between Daniels’s attorney and Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen, detailing a proposed cash settlement, accompanied by a nondisclosure agreement. Falzone had even seen the contract.  

[4]   Jane Mayer:

But at least four civil lawsuits against Fox have named Shine as a defendant for enabling workplace harassment. One of these cases, a stockholder lawsuit that Fox settled in 2017, for ninety million dollars, claimed that Ailes had “sexually harassed female employees and contributors with impunity for at least a decade” by surrounding himself “with loyalists”—including Shine. The suit faults Fox for spending fifty-five million dollars to settle such claims out of court.

 

The Curse of Fairness

Justice Louis Brandeis, among others, pointed out that when we consider what is just we are thinking about what is fair.   Justice is fairness.   Fair enough.    You want someone you are arguing with to admit it when something you say is fair.   “That’s a fair point,” is a concrete step toward agreement.    Children, at a certain age, are obsessed with fairness.   They are right to be, fairness is manifestly better than unfairness.  Sadly, it’s a childish idea that is soon slapped out of young heads by the observable world around them.   The world, by and large, doesn’t really give a rat’s armpit about fairness.   By that I mean that the powerful, who have the option to enforce extremely unfair arrangements, are almost never shy about doing so.

So we have American billionaires, citing their liberty, who cry that raising their tax rate (radically cut by recent Republican presidents) by 2% is as inhuman as placing them in Auschwitz.  OK, in fairness, it was one American billionaire, probably having a very bad day, who publicly carried on that way.   The rest of America’s billionaires  shook their heads, it made them all look bad, even if it was hard for many of them to disagree with the sentiment.  

The American discussion of fairness has been shaped by the beneficiaries of an increasingly unfair arrangement.    In the name of freedom and liberty for all, some compromises must occasionally be made.  The CEO of Amazon, for example, acceded to the until recently unthinkably radical idea that American workers should be paid a minimum of $15 an hour.   Fair is fair.  Nobody who works for the richest corporation in the world should work for less than $600 a week, or almost $30,000 a year, before taxes.   So although he does not allow unionized workers, collective bargaining or other basic mechanisms of what a kid might think of as fairness,  he stepped up and paid Amazon workers the $15/hr.   He continues to make almost $9,000,000,000/hr but, then again, he is an amazing American genius, so, why are we talking about childish things like “fairness”?

Many intractable problems could be solved by investing billions to fix them, poverty being one of them.  It would require a real commitment, and the best ideas of how to do it–  a large scale multifaceted government program, job training, low cost public colleges, affordable housing and so on, but we could eradicate poverty in the wealthiest country in the world, if we were dedicated to doing it.  The same goes for slowing the catastrophic climate disruption we are already seeing.   It will take a commitment, and a lot of money, but it can be done.

America has always had unlimited funds for war (whether justifiable or not) but peace is harder to justify spending money on. A hundred million for the president (whoever he or she happens to be) to launch a massive missile attack against an airbase somewhere?   No problem at all, the blank check is already in your pocket, Mr. President, ma’am.   A hundred million to continue funding a program to make sure the elderly can afford heat in the winter?   Well… why can’t the old fucks just put on an extra sweater, a scarf and a hat?  If they weren’t morally weak or  criminally stupid they would be rich enough not to need the subsidy, right?

(You can fact check me here and  here and see how full of shit my numbers are.)

The discussion is always arranged to make certain ideas– like the vaunted Free Market– sound just and reasonable, while others– like renewable energy and a sustainable rather than extractive economic model— are the mad ideas of crazy radicals (as a $15/hr minimum wage was two or three years back).   The Free Market subsidizes many vastly wealthy corporations and industries to the tune of many billions annually.  How exactly is it free?   No matter, renewal, sustainable— just crazy talk you crazy commie bitches!

I heard this bit from Rupert Mudorch’s FOX mocked the other day by one  of our most successful late night comics.   In a discussion of raising revenues by increasing taxes on the ultra-wealthy, something apparently supported by most Americans, a Fox host fought back the idea in  a laughable but honest way.  The reason 70% of those polled by Fox favor raising taxes on the very rich is that there is a creeping ideology of “fairness” that is about to become an electoral force when these little bastards reach voting age.  

Schools have apparently been teaching children fairness for years, and it has distorted a whole generation’s values!   You can read most of the weak ass “discussion” below. [1]

The idea expressed by Louis Brandeis and others, that justice and fairness are the same thing, is deeply, intuitively true.   Eisenhower appointee Earl Warren apparently believed the same thing, and acted on it as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court from 1953 to 1969.   He steered the court to numerous decisions based on common decency and fairness.  He was not shy about what his project was– increasing fairness and justice at law, sometimes relying on the court’s equitable powers– the power to go beyond the law to fashion relief that’s fair.   He got landmark decisions on the Civil Rights of all Americans, took stands to protect workers’ rights, the rights of the poor, the weakest among us.   Warren’s court was one of the most liberal in American history.   This, naturally infuriated many. 

In an excellent, very readable Law Review article called  Justice-as-Fairness as Judicial Guiding Principle,  author Michael Anthony Lawrence writes:

At the same time, many Warren Court decisions were hugely controversial, upsetting the settled expectations of those who benefited from long-entrenched governmental biases and practices. The ubiquitous “Impeach Earl Warren” [2] billboards seen throughout the countryside during the late 1950s and the 1960s reflected the underlying efforts of laissez-faire conservatives to overturn aspects of the New Deal, which began a quarter century earlier. The intensity of the political opposition to the Court’s newfound commitment to fairness and equality was matched only by the infamous pre-Civil War Dred Scott case a full century earlier. To this day and through the decades, conservative jurists, academics, and others have bemoaned the Warren Court’s “lawlessness” and lack of principle.

Laissez-faire conservatives are generally wealthy and content with the status quo, as long as it zealously protects their particular privileges and immunities, their inalienable liberties in the pursuit of happiness.  Laissez-faire [3]  is a French term that translates to “go fuck yourself”.  “Leave it alone” is the mantra of these liberty loving conservatives, unless, of course, the thing you are leaving alone is an honest societal commitment to basic fairness.   Too much fairness is unfair to the most privileged beneficiaries of a system that favors unfettered liberty above all else.   Unfair tyranny over the few by the many!  Stinking majoritarian hoards!

 

[1]  SANDRA SMITH (CO-HOST): There is — what seems to be, a movement against capitalism in this country. This is a piece in Politico, just published: “Soak the rich? Americans say go for it.” In this piece — it talks about how recent polling is showing that the American public is increasingly on board with raising taxes on the rich. As evidence, we pulled up this latest Fox News poll on the issue, whether Americans support raising taxes on the wealthy, on incomes over $10 million. Those that are in favor of that, 70 percent, Charles. Over a million dollars in income, 65 percent are in favor of raising taxes.

CHARLES PAYNE (FOX HOST): The idea of fairness has been promoted in our schools for a long time. And we’re starting to see kids who grew up in this notion that fairness above all and now they are becoming voting age and they are bringing this ideology with them. In the real world, though, you have places, very progressive states like in New York where you have the governor saying, hey, 46 percent of — the 1 percent pay 46 percent of the taxes. Last year in California, the governor, you know, [former Gov. Jerry] Brown said the 1 percent pay 48 percent of the taxes. Let’s not go back to that well anymore. So there’s a practical, realistic idea about this and there’s the ideological, hey I’m going to — it’s the right thing to do. It doesn’t work. But I will say capitalism has to do a better job defending itself….

source

[2]  My footnote:

“Impeach Earl Warren” was embraced by Fred Koch, charter member of the John Birch Society (once the lunatic fringe of the far right) and father of the accursed octogenarian brothers Charles and David Koch, men whose life’s work has been to make the lunatic fringe of the extreme right mainstream.    How proud ruthless Fred would be of these two highly successful motherfuckers!

 

[3]  Google translates the French term laissez-faire into English as laissez-faire.  Nice work, boys.  (without the dash it is rendered as “let do”)

here’s a generic definition of the English term:

lais·sez-faire/ˌ    lesāˈfer/   noun
  1. a policy or attitude of letting things take their own course, without interfering.
    • ECONOMICS
      abstention by governments from interfering in the workings of the free market.
      “laissez-faire capitalism”
    • synonyms:  free enterprise, private enterprise, individualism, nonintervention, free-market capitalism, private ownership, market forces, deregulation

 

Dear Jeremy (second try)

 I’ve been following your journalism since Dirty Wars, was happy when The Intercept launched and  I look forward to your excellent podcast every week.   A major theme of your work is providing historical context, something deliberately erased here in the Land of the Free and the home of purposeful amnesia.   Your five minute recap of American involvement in Iran, prior to an episode about current US-Iranian relations, for example, was immensely helpful in setting the stage for that reporting.  

I have an idea for The Intercept– a well-vetted, searchable historical context archive that can be linked to in any pertinent discussion on the site.  For example, a hyperlink to a concise biography of Elliott Abrams to be dropped into any discussion touching on the administration’s appointment of that Death Squad architect as Special Envoy for Regime Change in Venezuela.  This would include the exact substance of the specific crimes the current AG wrote Bush’s pardon of Abrams for.   That link, in turn, would take an interested reader to a short history of US involvement in Central America.   I think this context archive would be a valuable resource for readers.

Not to say, of course, that the project of history writing is uncontroversial.   The Daughters of the Confederacy, or whatever they were called, spurred the rewriting of the history of the Civil War early in the twentieth century and the Dunning School’s racist views were the dominant narrative for decades.   No longer a story about a war to preserve the federal union, or to end the “Peculiar Institution”, the war and the end of Reconstruction (“bayonet rule”) were gloriously recast with the chivalrous Klan as saviors of the persecuted south.  This narrative was laid out  in Woodrow Wilson’s favorite film The Birth of  A Nation, you know, “history written in lightning”.   Tendentious history is as familiar as “Making America Great Again” or any of the other hollow slogans that sway masses of credulous consumers to one form of civic self-harm or another.

On the other hand, of course, history is based on events, things that actually happened/happen.  I share your belief that a contextualized telling of events based in hard fact and multiple witness testimony is crucial.  The telling may be highly distorted to advance a particular agenda or closer to what actually took place.  It’s an uphill fight here in America, to make the often painful past plain, but as you frequently remind readers and listeners, it’s impossible to understand the present without an awareness of these events and the consequences that flow from them.  

There are a number of great books, and great reporting, whose authors are often viciously attacked by the forces exposed in those accounts.  At the same time their findings are never seriously impugned and threatened lawsuits do not come to pass because the accounts are well-researched and truthful.   Truth is still a complete defense to libel and slander in America, though I recall President Fuckface (all respect) promised to do something about that when he was on the first leg of his now perpetual campaign.

We occasionally read excellent, troubling books, even best-sellers, like Dirty Wars, Dark Money, Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman, deservedly well-decorated books like Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains, that lay out, in great and hideous detail,  things done in our names.   A million people buy them, they are well-reviewed, briefly discussed, later randomly found by interested readers here and there.   A digest of the findings of important books like these would be an excellent resource, and part of the archive I’m proposing for The Intercept.   A category for History (or Context), alongside Politics, Justice, Technology, National Security, Environment, World.

In a nation where facts are increasingly laughed off as bullshit, and are seen as less and less central to seeking or retaining political power (particularly when set against snappy branding and relentless marketing), millions of us still cling to the idea that facts are important, that history is vital to know.    The horrifying story of what was done to Maher Arar in our names should not be a footnote, a bit of arcana known only to a few interested parties on the left.  His “rendition” and torture (and the US dismissal of his case against our government)  should be a widely known object lesson about the destructiveness of extremism, the danger of government opacity.  The details of this kind of story are available all over the internet, if one even knows to look for them.   I’m suggesting a one stop shop where this kind of information, placed in context, can be found easily.  I believe it would be a great service to democracy.

We can hear detailed, learned, expert discussions of something like the Fourteenth Amendment, as I heard recently on a podcast from the National Constitution Center, where a key fact, like the judicially imposed 90 year coma of the amendment, for civil rights purposes, is barely mentioned.   I only knew the details of this almost century-long coma because of a year of research I did while a law student.  The deliberate suspension of the amendment as a personal right of action was barely touched in the Con Law casebook we all yawned our way through.    I listened to the podcast thinking “what the fuck?”  It went on to my list of WTF notes to write, along with dozens to the impeccable Grey Lady and her ilk.   Corporate personhood, it turns out, was the main, almost sole, beneficiary of  Fourteenth amendment jurisprudence during the almost century of its judicially induced deep sleep.  

The Intercept would be a great place to be able to find a link to this, in any story about reparations, or police shootings, or lynching, or voting rights.   The framers of the amendment were alive, and their “original intent” well known when the Supreme Court put the amendment, and the federal laws made to enforce it, into an unappealable juridical coma, less than a decade after the end of the Civil War.  Talk about “what the fuck?” 

I’ve long had a question for you.    Reading Dirty Wars when it came out I was struck by the detailed story of Anwar al-Awlaki you laid out.  It made the US citizen’s unappealable extrajudicial death sentence even more horrifying to me.   In the American press, and literally everywhere you search today, you will see him described as a top al-Qaeda propagandist, sometimes number two man of the terrorist outfit.  You need to search for a while to confirm that the American military and justice sector have no comment on whether he was actually charged with any crime before his extrajudicial execution (a neat way of admitting he wasn’t).    Reading your book I came away with the feeling that his increasing radicalism had been driven by a long campaign of US sponsored persecution here and in Yemen and that no connection had ever been shown between him and any terrorist group.   He appears to have been killed for his forceful exercise of our First Amendment rights.  Have you learned anything since writing the book that makes you believe otherwise? 

Anyway, Jeremy, apologies for this long letter.  If you are interested in this idea, I’d be happy to discuss it with you any time.   You can reach me (here).  Strength to your arm, keep up your important work.   Meanwhile, if you can enlighten me on the Anwar al-Awlaki query, I’d be grateful.

Canary in the Coal mine and Felix Sater

Kurt Vonnegut compared creative types to the canaries British coal miners used to carry into the mines to detect odorless poison gases like carbon monoxide.    When the tiny-lunged bird keeled over in his cage the miners knew it was time to get out of there.   (This practice was apparently stopped in 1986 when electronic sniffers replaced the wee birds).  Vonnegut meant by this comparison that those who fret and worry about communicating to others are often more prone than the rest to succumbing to the invisible deadly gases that are looming to kill everyone.

In an age when the kind of straightforward information in the paragraph above can be found by anyone with internet access and a few seconds to spare, why do we have so much plainly bogus news?   How can lies be fed to us so consistently, so brazenly, with no consequence for the liars?   We are busy living lives of quiet, increasingly hectic desperation in a dangerous world on the brink of massive catastrophe.   WE DO NOT HAVE TIME TO WASTE!  Time is MONEY! Wasting money is a sin.   (As our over 500 billionaires know so well).

It is quaint, I know, to find history fascinating, as I do.   It all flashes by so fast, after all, it’s hard to take note of it.   Did you know, for example, that there is a twenty year-old Supreme Court case, Clinton v. Jones, holding that there is no bar to suing a sitting president in federal court for acts done before he was president?    You could look it up, as Casey Stengel used to say.   [1]

I knew that Clinton’s lies under oath in that case (about sexual relations with a former intern called as a witness by Paula Jones’ attorneys, though she didn’t meet Clinton until years after the president exposed himself to Jones) were the basis for his impeachment.  I remembered (and heard again recently on a Showtime documentary) that the case was dismissed, suggesting then Arkansas governor Clinton did not show his dick to Ms. Jones.   I don’t ever recall hearing that Bill Clinton paid former employee Paula Jones more than $850,000 to end the sexual harassment lawsuit, suggesting strongly that he did something very wrong.  [2]

I don’t know why the intricacies of this world are so intriguing to me, but they are.   I had a friend who attends services and Bible study at the Chabad of Port Washington.   In 2010 and 2014 Port Washington Chabad’s Man of the Year was a wealthy Jew named Felix Sater.   Sater lost his broker’s license after slashing a guy’s face and breaking his jaw in a bar.   He spent a relatively short time in a minimum security prison for the felony assault.   A few years later he pleaded guilty to fraud in a couple of massive financial scams, and gave evidence against his co-conspirators to stay out of prison (and keep his fortune).  

Since he was barred from finance he got into another lucrative line of work, real estate development, and was partners with our current president in at least two massive development deals.  He was the money man for Trump SoHo and the liaison with Russian officials for the planned Trump Tower Moscow.  I’ve been wondering about this nefarious little fucker for about two years, since I first heard of him.  Congress is going to talk to him next week.  He will be under oath, too.

It is so easy to get the outline of the facts these days, but SO MANY FACTS!  [3]

The president is a liar, he can’t help himself.  He’s apparently always been this way.   Everybody knows it.  His defenders say that he never promised not to lie, so there’s that.  Plus, his lies are always in the service of making the country great again.  Plus, he frankly calls “bullshit” on people who call him a liar.  Plus, there’s no law against lying, unless you lie under oath.  If the president ever lied under oath, like the disgraced Bill Clinton, we don’t have the proof of that, and, anyway, if he got away with it doesn’t it just show how smart he is?  He’s not like other people.   He is the president of the United States and the richest, most successful man in the world!

If he paid off a couple of women he had extra-marital sex with to dummy up about it in the final days of his presidential campaign, whose business is that?  Many Americans wouldn’t have voted for him if those stories came out, if he didn’t pay off these women.   He basically had to pay them to shut up or he would have lost the presidential election, because Americans are so judgmental about this kind of thing.   Felony, shmelony!   USA!   USA!!!!

Have we ever had a compulsive liar as president? That would take some digging to know for sure, but I don’t think we ever did.  There have been several total shitbird presidents, without a doubt, but our current guy seems to be setting a prodigious record for lying.  And, most impressively, he’s doing it in an era of almost instant fact checking that can show the lies in real time.   His defenders will point out that he has never been convicted for lying, so shut up, nothing to see here.

It’s morning in America, boys and girls, and history is being written in the blood of those who hate our freedom, their innocent neighbors and a million fucking canaries.    The stories we read about it, so many of them, cunning and deadly as that gas that so often fills my own beak.

 

[1] Clinton v. Jones, 520 U.S. 681 (1997), was a landmark United States Supreme Court case establishing that a sitting President of the United States has no immunity from civil lawlitigation, in federal court, against him or her, for acts done before taking office and unrelated to the office.[1] In particular, there is no temporary immunity, so it is not required to delay all federal cases until the President leaves office.[1]

[2]   Wikipedia:

As a consequence of his conduct in the Jones v. Clinton civil suit and before the federal grand jury, President Clinton incurred significant administrative sanctions. The Independent Counsel considered seven non-criminal alternative sanctions that were imposed in making his decision to decline prosecution: (1) President Clinton’s admission of providing false testimony that was knowingly misleading, evasive, and prejudicial to the administration of justice before the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas; (2) his acknowledgement that his conduct violated the Rules of Professional Conduct of the Arkansas Supreme Court; (3) the five-year suspension of his license to practice law and $25,000 fine imposed on him by the Circuit Court of Pulaski County, Arkansas; (4) the civil contempt penalty of more than $90,000 imposed on President Clinton by the federal court for violating its orders; (5) the payment of more than $850,000 in settlement to Paula Jones; (6) the express finding by the federal court that President Clinton had engaged in contemptuous conduct; and (7) the substantial public condemnation of President Clinton arising from his impeachment.   source

[3]    Wikipedia:

Felix Henry Sater (born Felix Mikhailovich Sheferovsky; Russian:Фе́ликс Миха́йлович Шеферовский; March 2, 1966) is a Russian-American former mobster, convicted felon, [6] real estate developer and former managing director of Bayrock Group LLC,[7] a real estate conglomerate based out of New York City.  Sater has been an advisor to many corporations, including The Trump Organization,[8] Rixos Hotels and Resorts, Sembol Construction,Potok (formerly the Mirax Group), and TxOil.

In 1998, Sater pleaded guilty to his involvement in a $40 million stock fraud scheme orchestrated by the Russian Mafia,[9][10] and became an informant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation and federal prosecutors, assisting with organized crime investigations. In 2017, Sater agreed to cooperate with investigators into international money laundering schemes.[11]

During the 2015-16 American presidential campaign, Sater worked with Michael Cohen, former attorney for The Trump Organization, to broker a deal to build aTrump Tower Moscow, asserting to Cohen that he could boost Trump’s election prospects through his Russian contacts. He is scheduled to testify publicly before the House Intelligence Committee on March 14, 2019.[12]

(and a few details:)  

Felix Sater has been described as a career criminal due to his links to organized crime.[30][31][32][33][34] In 1991, Sater got into an argument with a commodities broker at the El Rio Grande restaurant and bar in Midtown Manhattan. He stabbed the man’s cheek and neck with the stem of a cocktail glass, breaking his jaw, lacerating his face, and severing nerves, creating a wound that would require 110 stitches to treat. Sater was convicted of first degree assault, and spent 15 months in minimum security Edgecombe Correctional Facility in New York City before being paroled.[35][4][23] 

In 1998, Sater was convicted of fraud in connection to a $40 million penny stock pump and dump scheme conducted by the Russian Mafia[9][10]involving his company White Rock Partners. In return for a guilty plea, Sater agreed to assist the FBI and federal prosecutors as an informant in organized crime.

In 2009, he was sentenced to pay a $25,000 fine and served no prison time. As a result of his assistance, Sater’s court records were sealed for 10 years by Loretta Lynch, then the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York. Lynch’s decision to seal his records was discussed at her 2015 Congressional confirmation hearings to become attorney general; she stated that Sater provided “information crucial to national security and the conviction of over 20 individuals, including those responsible for committing massive financial fraud and members of La Cosa Nostra.”[36][37][38][39]

The Financial Times, citing five sources with knowledge of the matter, reported that Sater had agreed to cooperate with investigators looking into an international money laundering scheme involving Viktor Khrapunov, a former government minister in Kazakhstan. Khrapunov, who now lives in Switzerland, has been accused by the Kazakhstani government of embezzling millions of dollars and is wanted by Interpol.[11]

Sater received multiple subpoenas to produce documents and be deposed in the case against Mukhtar Ablyazov who is alleged to have defrauded BTA Bank of up to $5 billion as chairman.[40] Ablyazov’s alleged fraud is one of the biggest cases of financial fraud in history.[41]

Involvement with Trump Organization during presidential campaign   [edit]

The Trump Organization pursued a luxury hotel and condominium project in Moscow—dubbed the Trump Tower Moscow—during the Trump presidential campaign. This project was facilitated by Michael Cohen, then an attorney for the Trump Organization, and from January 2017 to May 2018 Trump’s personal attorney. Trump signed a nonbinding “letter of intent” dated October 13, 2015, to proceed with the project.[42] The letter, also signed by Russian investor Andrei Rozov, was forwarded to Cohen by Sater. He boasted to Cohen about his connections to Vladimir Putin, saying in an email to Cohen on November 13, 2015, “Buddy our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it. I will get all of Putins [sic] team to buy in on this. I will manage this process.” He also asserted that he had secured financing for the project through the Russian state-owned VTB Bank, which was under sanctions by the United States government.[43]BuzzFeed News reported on March 12, 2018, that Mueller’s investigators had questioned Sater,[44] and on April 13, 2018, reported that a former Russian spy had helped secure financing for the project.[45] In 2010, Sater was provided business cards describing himself as “Senior Advisor to Donald Trump” with an email address at TrumpOrg.com.[46] In a 2013 sworn affidavit, Trump said “If [Sater] were sitting in the room right now, I really wouldn’t know what he looked like,”[47] and in 2015 he stated “Felix Sater, boy, I have to even think about it. I’m not that familiar with him.”[48] Sater is scheduled to testify publicly before the House Intelligence Committee on March 14, 2019.[49]

Personal life[edit]

Sater resides in Port Washington, New York. He has three daughters.[50][51] Felix Sater was a member of the Chabad of Port Washington and was named their Man of the Year in 2010 and 2014.[52][53] In November 2017, Sater put his home inSands Point, New York on the market for $2.5 million.[54] The home sold in February 2019 for $2.03 million.[55]

 source  

Witch hunt! Notes and details

I have written harshly about  the president from time to time.   It is partly in reaction to his frequent, reckless spouting of “alternative facts” and partly the hard-line partisans he appoints and the damaging policies he promotes.   Still, like all Americans, he deserves a fair trial, so let me point out that nothing has ever been proved about this man or his character that disqualifies him as commander-in-chief.

You can say paying $25,000,000 to defrauded customers of his now-defunct Trump University is an admission that one of his self-named companies committed fraud on a large scale.   The jury’s out (of the picture), the settlement terms are not public, or if so, are very boring, outside of the amount he paid (“pennies on the dollar”) and that he admitted no wrongdoing in settling the class actions [1].

You can attack his now shuttered Trump Foundation the same way.   You are free to draw any conclusions you want, but they are not legal conclusions, nobody is going to jail.

This is even more true for the assumptions flowing from the criminal convictions of several of his confidants, including his longtime personal lawyer and his former campaign manager.  

His “fixer” Michael Cohen  was convicted of tax evasion, illegal campaign contributions and lying to Congress.   How any of this has anything to do with his boss, Mr. Trump, has yet to be shown.  It is a huge leap, to say that the CEO of a closely held family business, even one famous for its CEO making every decision, was involved in any of the illegality his unprincipled personal lawyer is going to prison for.

The same goes for his one-time campaign manager, Paul Manafort.  He’s been convicted of tax fraud and bank fraud and made his situation worse by lying to federal investigators, violating his deal with them by sharing details of the ongoing Mueller probe with the president and his lawyers.   Sure Manafort pleaded guilty to “conspiracy to defraud the United States” and witness tampering, but how does this make Mr. Trump guilty of anything?   Manafort was Trump’s campaign manager for only two months, for godsake!

It may look suspicious, sure, that Manafort had many dealings, continuing through the short time he was managing the Trump presidential campaign (for free), with Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska, the man known as Mr. Putin’s favorite oligarch.   Is it illegal now to be friends with a Russian billionaire?

It may be illegal to commit bank fraud, to commit tax fraud, to tamper with witnesses, to lie to federal investigators.  It might be stupid to violate the terms of a deal with the Special Counsel, but, again, what does any of this have to do, specifically, with Donald J. Trump?  Just because some of these illegal acts appear to have been done to benefit Mr. Trump, why is that his fault?

Also, it’s not as though Trump is such an outlier as president, every president does things some people think are bad.  

Ronald Reagan’s two terms were clouded by the illegal sale of arms to Iran that illegally funded the Contra death squads (“freedom fighters”) in Central America, though he was personally untouched by it (due, in part, to his affability and the increasing perception that he was senile).   Reagan retained his popularity and his successor were generous with presidential pardons that pretty much neutralized the scandalous conspiracy, undertaken in the name of freedom by a small group of patriots like the current head of the NRA, Oliver North.  

One of George HW Bush’s last acts as president was pardoning Iran-Contra principal, former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, on the eve of a trial that would have likely implicated Bush in the illegality.  

Bill Clinton signed off on the end of Glass-Steagall, resulting in the financial disaster a few years later.  He signed bills that tightened already strict Welfare qualifications and vastly increased the incarcerated population of the United States.  He also, famously, lied under oath about a series of blow jobs he received while president.   Thanks to Ken Starr’s diligent, unredacted report, posted on-line, children in America also learned that their perjury-committing president also inserted an unlit cigar in the young woman’s vagina, and then lewdly put it in his mouth.

George W. Bush brought back torture and turned worldwide sympathy for the US after the 9/11 attack to worldwide fear of the US, after he unleashed the perpetual, borderless War on Terror, starting with the invasions and long-term occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.   He was the first American president to maintain an active kill list and execute suspects extrajudicially, by drone.   His administration engaged in widespread illegal surveillance of millions of Americans and covered this up.   He cut taxes to the rich, unsuccessfully lobbied to end Social Security and left office with a record low approval rating.

Barak Obama used the 1917 Espionage Act, more than all past presidents combined, to threaten and intimidate the press.   He also gave wonderful speeches about the importance of government transparency and accountability.  He expanded George W. Bush’s international secret drone war, killing suspects and civilians in many countries.   Obama was the first to cooly execute American citizens without trial, or even charges.  He gave speeches that warmed the hearts of millions while always serving his corporate and financial constituency.   He gave a good speech as he lied to the people of Flynt, Michigan about their toxic drinking water being perfectly safe to drink (and pretending to drink it, to the horror of his Flynt audience and later during his press conference).   Obama used executive orders more than most presidents (and, in fairness to him, he had rigid, amoral Mitch McConnell and a hard-line “tea party” Congress to impede him every step of the way), even once invoking emergency powers.

So, just because Trump has been closely associated with a large number of people indicted for felonies, and a few convicted for serious crimes, doesn’t automatically make him a bad person or a guilty one.  It’s easy for someone like me to hate the rich, and revile their unaccountable privilege.   The president deserves a fair trial, and hopefully a long prison sentence. 

The question of whether he can pardon himself, preemptively (as in HW Bush’s pre-trial pardon of Caspar Weinberger, who could implicated him in the criminal conspiracy), is an interesting one that Boof Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch (Trump’s replacements for the less doctrinaire Merrick Garland) will consider fairly, as will Attorney General William Barr, the impartial legal mind who helped George HW Bush with the pardons of Elliott Abrams, Caspar Weinberger and other defenders of freedom (whatever Congress may have said about the illegality of their specific acts)  back in the winter of 1992.

As always, we are a nation of laws, not lynch mobs, except as needed.

 

[1]  USA Today:   

Trump claimed as a candidate that he “never” settled lawsuits, and would not do so in the case of Trump University. “That’s why I won’t settle,” Trump told MSNBC in 2016. “Because it’s an easy case to win in court … How do you settle a case like that?”

But Trump entered settlement talks days after the 2016 election, agreeing to pay the millions under terms that let him admit no wrongdoing.

 

If now is not the time to get political, when is the time?

Germany, 1932, my fellow Americans.   Bury your head in distraction at your own peril, and your children’s.

The unthinkable becomes normalized by endless repetition through a giant, stinking megaphone.  If the lying mass media was actually publishing fake news about the president, the litigious, thin-skinned dotard-in-chief would have multiple front-page lawsuits against the many libeling liars who regularly, if measuredly, contradict his strikingly alternative facts, his often outright lies.  

How about the failing New York Times writing in detail about his unethical father’s many frauds to avoid paying tax, so he could pass $400,000,000 on tax-free to his little self-made second son?   Didn’t the president win a huge lawsuit and put those lying fucks out of business?  Yeah, he did, I remember that now.  That’s why the NY Times no longer publishes their failing scandal rag.

National emergency?   Seriously, your recent thirty-five day long Christmas and well into the new year temper tantrum wasn’t taken seriously enough, boss?  You want real emergencies?   How about 1,200 school children shot to death, at school, during the one year since the Valentine’s Day mass-murder at the high school in Parkland, Florida; a thousand times that number, the survivors, best friends of the victims, traumatized for life.     Dead veterans, dead by their own hand, in unthinkable numbers, year after year, heroes we thank for their service, dying out of despair, succumbing to hopelessness.   More Americans dead of opioid overdoses last year than died in car crashes and all alcohol related accidents, or even shot to death.  Climate catastrophe already delivering one deadly, devastating hundred or five hundred year storm after another, while one part of your administration denies the findings of another part (the scientists).  How about pick one of those actual emergencies, boss?

The sudden “National Emergency” of a below-average (forty year low) annual number of attempted illegal border crossings at our southern border — you are certainly shitting us, vindictive, pouting, brazen, scheming, floundering Mr. President, sir.   (Interested readers really should read the transcript linked here to see what a national disaster this “emergency” by presidential fiat could become.)  

Of course, if you can get away with this gambit, sir, declaring an emergency you admit is not urgent to circumvent the democratic will of the so-called People expressed through their so-called elected representatives in Congress, the future suddenly looks much brighter for you, Mr. President, sir.   An emergency order banning public protest, recruiting and funding so-called Death Squads in Venezuela (Elliott Abrams is the perfect experienced man for this job, as you know, sir), or anywhere, really, banning whatever you perceive as a threat to your power. Go for it, sir.

Many people see this guy as the villain of the worst Batman movie of all-time, a falsely inflated 39% on Rotten Tomatoes.   Raining revenge from a gold tower named after himself, recruiting iron-willed Turtleman and other powerful extremists to secure a record number of  loyal Federalist federal judges appointed for life to support his autocratic whims and subvert the will of the 71% who think his movie sucks and he is the worst comic book villain of recent memory. A villain who scrawls his comically large signature on executive orders he himself freely ignores.

Trump signed an executive order stating that people working in his administration must not have been lobbyists for any part of the two years prior to their appointment.  His new Secretary of the Interior is in violation of this order, Trump has absolutely no problem with that.  

As for the predecessor Interior Secretary, Ryan Zinke, he was forced to resign in disgrace amid numerous scandals and investigations  — but it didn’t take the former governor long to slither into a lucrative post at a top DC lobbying firm (that’s Washington, DC, not DC comics, sadly).    Not long at all, in fact.  Like a couple of months.  

Zinke is a lobbyist for the same high powered Washington firm as Trump’s former (and later angrily fired, by Don Jr.) campaign manager — the one who isn’t headed for prison, or an Elliott Abrams style presidential pardon (speaking of current AG William Barr, who worked on that and five other pardons including a pre-trial pardon for an accused Iran-Contra principal who likely would have implicated George HW Bush during his trial [1]), the former campaign manager not convicted of serious crimes, and subsequently lying to the Special Prosecutor after making a cooperation deal with him. 

Amy Goodman spoke to a man today who pays close attention to this sort of thing and heads an organization fighting this kind of rogue shit.  He said this (after analyzing and laying out the real dangers if the president is able to get away with this groundless, cynical Emergency Decree):

ROBERT WEISSMAN: Well, this is one of just the most amazing, but now normalized, features of the Trump administration. What we’ve seen, in agency after agency, is they have a scandal at the Cabinet level, the Cabinet official is forced out, and he—it’s always been a he—is replaced by a lobbyist. So, their response to ethics challenges in the Trump administration is to hire lobbyists who worked on the agency that they’re now going to be in charge of.

That happened at EPA, where there’s a coal lobbyist in charge, replacing Pruitt. It happened at HHS, the Health and Human Services Department, where Tom Price was replaced by a former executive of a drug company; and now at the Department of Interior, where an oil lobbyist comes in to take over for Ryan Zinke, who, as you just mentioned, by the way, leaves the department and goes and becomes a lobbyist himself. This guy, Bernhardt…  source

If you’re not paying attention to politics now, not getting involved in organizing to oppose this lying, authoritarian grifter, his slimey ilk and all they stand for — what on Jesus Christ’s good, green earth is it going to take?

 

[1]  

The Republican independent counsel [Lawrence Walsh] infuriated the GOP when he submitted a second indictment of Weinberger on the Friday before the 1992 elections. The indictment contained documents revealing that President Bush had been lying for years with his claim that he was “out of the loop” on the Iran/Contra decisions. The ensuing furor dominated the last several days of the campaign and sealed Bush’s defeat at the hands of Bill Clinton.

Walsh had discovered, too, that Bush had withheld his own notes about the Iran/Contra Affair, a discovery that elevated the President to a possible criminal subject of the investigation. But Bush had one more weapon in his arsenal. On Christmas Eve 1992, Bush destroyed the Iran/Contra probe once and for all by pardoning Weinberger and five other convicted or indicted defendants.

source

Boof Kavanaugh writes the dissent

The lying bully who, one must assume, told his ultra-right wing nominee, during the nominee’s day long visit to the White House immediately prior to the hearing where Christine Blasey-Ford testified, to fucking man up and face down the women accusing him of serious impropriety if he wanted to be on the Supreme Court, showed his great compassion during the State of the Union by attacking states who have enacted laws to protect a woman’s right to abortion.  He described the monsters in New York who recently cheered in delight (according to POTUS) a new law protecting the horrific practice of ripping beautiful babies from their mother’s wombs moments before birth, depriving these living, feeling, beautiful babies of ever getting to share their love and their dreams with the world.

This is a well-worn right wing pander to religious Christians who believe abortion is murder, no matter what– even to save the life of the mother–  and vote en masse for politicians who speak this clear “Pro Life” language.   I doubt that any woman ever decides to have an abortion casually.   It is likely a wrenching decision each time, more so in a late term abortion when the decision must be excruciating.   Of the 1% of abortions that are late term, virtually all involve extreme danger to the life of the mother or fetal anomalies that ensure the newborn will not survive.   Yet, for the pandering partisan, the question is always starkly black and white, reduced to an immutable religious belief, the direct command of Jesus Christ himself.   God has spoken about the eternal souls of the unborn, who will spend eternity in hell unless born and baptized.   As for those precious souls after they’re born, well, you bitches are kind of on your own.   As the icon Ronald Reagan famously said “the right to life ends at birth.”  

The president advocated for these feeling, beautiful babies, as we’d want anyone to, in the abstract like that.  “Let us work together to build a culture that cherishes innocent life,” somebody wrote for the president and he delivered the line to thunderous applause.   When the applause died down he added another nicely written line: “and let us reaffirm a fundamental truth, all children, born and unborn, are made in the holy image of God.”  As always with this president, there is the jarring and obvious disconnect.  The lives, rights and feelings of “illegal” children forcibly separated from raping, terrorist, drug smuggling parents at our southern border, well… that’s totally different, nothing innocent, cherishable or holy about those alien invaders.  

Though he didn’t mention those traumatized children of asylum seekers, for obvious reasons, his position is well known: those fucking animals need to be kept in cages, while good Christian fetuses must be protected from blood thirsty “humanists” at all costs (though until recently branding himself as a conservative Trump supported a woman’s right to choose, oddly enough).   The young alien children locked up in warehouses are just getting what they deserve.  Same for those little fucks in Yemen dying of preventable diseases and malnutrition — Saudis pay a lot of money for American weapons, BILLIONS, it creates millions of American jobs!  Same for poor kids here, they should have had the sense to be born to rich families!

The lying nominee, one Boof (“flatulence”) Kavanaugh, who artlessly equivocated about Rowe v. Wade being settled law, predictably voted yesterday to uphold a Louisiana law, almost identical to a Texas law held to be unconstitutional in 2016,  that would have made abortion all but unavailable to poor women in Louisiana (rich ones can always fly to a neighboring state or country where the procedure is legal and safe).   When the new voice of reason on the Supreme Court, corporatist Chief Justice John Roberts, joined the four non-Federalist Society endorsed justices in finding the anti-abortion law does not yet meet constitutional standards, Boof wrote the dissent.   Should be an interesting read.

I have many reasons for hating fucking Boof.   For one thing, he’s a prevaricator.  That is, a person who speaks falsely, a liar. a person who speaks so as to avoid the precise truth, a quibbler, an equivocator.   He engaged in cant, misdirection, cavil, ad hominem attacks, glaring silences as the clock ticked, partisan rants, tears.  He invented new definitions for things he was embarrassed about on his prep school yearbook page, like “boof” (the practice of imbibing alcohol through a tube placed in the rectum — or, as he defined it, flatulence) and “devil’s triangle” (sex involving two men and a woman, or, in his words, a drinking game involving three tiny shots of beer, you know, senator, like Pope, Donkey, Whore, or Tits and Two Dicks?).  He explained that claiming to have banged Renata (a signatory of the letter from affluent women attesting to his impeccable character)  was actually a reference to how proud and honored he’d been to have chastely danced with her once and been allowed to give her a kiss (she hotly denied this).  

And, sure, he quietly passed out from beer, just beer, like anybody does.  He remembers everything, he said confidently, 100%.   He was never a black-out drunk or had any kind of drinking problem.  Were you a black-out drunk, senator bitch?   My fucking wife is a Christian, OK?!!!

As for the traumatized woman who, with nothing whatsoever to gain and everything to lose (and who, along with her family, has paid a steep personal price), testified about his traumatizing behavior, well… she was just part of a calculated, orchestrated, well-financed Clinton-backed cabal of extremists who hate him because he loves God and his family and doesn’t believe any of that godless crap they preach.   As for the official Catholic publication in America removing their endorsement of him, or the similar American Bar Association position that, in light of these serious allegations, Boof needed to remove his name from nomination– George fucking Soros!

Boof Kavanaugh is the personification of pugnacious, whining, unaccountable privilege.  Just like the man who provocatively nominated him ahead of many equally qualified ultra-conservative candidates who were not also complete assholes.  Then, when multiple credible accusations about his character and judicial fitness were raised, the man who nominated him did the only thing he knows how to do: double down.  Boof then did the best he could to angrily convince the country, in a strikingly petulant and nonjudicial manner, that he is not exactly what he strongly appears to be.  He only had to convince a couple of Republican senators, actually, and he did “at least a good enough job” (as he said about his testimony before Soros and co. hired this liar for hire to smear his good name)  to get a narrow, party line nod.

It is more likely than not that a collegiate Boof drunkenly thrust his dick in a woman’s face at a party in Yale — the FBI never enquired or talked to the many witnesses who came forward to talk about the incident.   It seems probable that Boof and his friend Mark, another committed beer drinker, while in their elite prep school, locked a younger teenager in a room and groped her while drunkenly trying to remove her clothes.   He fell off her at one point and she made her escape, amid the uproarious laughter of her gleefully inebriated attackers.  His face drunkenly hovering over her’s and this laughter are indelibly imprinted on this now adult woman’s hippocampus.  Nobody who heard her testify believed that she was lying.   The only out was a lie about her being paid to spin a false story by those who hate our freedom.    Boof wrote the speech about that himself, laying out the vast partisan conspiracy against him, vicious people intent on destroying his life.

Boof writes the dissent in support of  the first anti-abortion law to come before him on the Supreme Court.   A woman has no rights to abortion in Louisiana because, blah blah blah.  The constitution says so.  So does Jesus Christ himself.   So do I.

Once our corrupt, lying president is out of office, however that comes about, his angry turd will remain on the bench of the Supreme Court for the rest of that young turd’s life.   What do we do about that?

The Usefulness of the Passive Voice

“The passive voice should be avoided,” we are told by those who use the thing they warn against to warn us of things.   The passive voice states things in a neutral sounding way — as if they just happened, not as if somebody affirmatively did the thing being passively described.   First year law school students are taught that there is only one situation in which it is desirable to use the passive voice, making an argument to defend a guilty client.   

If your client has without question done wrong, use the passive voice to describe the wrongdoing.  He stabbed somebody, and this is a fact you can’t argue away; to maintain your credibility as his defender you must admit it.  So use the passive voice, in passing, to admit this damaging fact while defending him.   Law students are instructed, in a case like this, to bury the unavoidable admission in the middle of a paragraph otherwise favorable to your client, and phrase it in the passive voice.   “…the victim was stabbed with my client’s knife…” reads much better than “admittedly, my client repeatedly stabbed the victim”.

The passive voice is used reflexively in such situations by ordinary citizens, it is ubiquitous in non-apologies.  It phrases a reality in a way that puts no emphasis on who did what, places no blame or burden on anyone for their actions.   Refer to the hurtful incident as “that thing that happened”, a misunderstanding, not something anyone did to anyone.   Shit happens, asshole!

Jeremy Scahill, in today’s Intercepted podcast, illustrating longtime US callousness about killing civilians anywhere, played a clip of anti-fascist Trump resister former Secretary of State Madeline Albright (then US Ambassador to the UN) talking about the dire US supported sanctions against Iraq.   The sanctions, started under recently lionized president George H.W. Bush and continued for 13 years by Bill Clinton and Bush II, until after the second U.S. invasion of Iraq, had disastrous effects on the people of Iraq, though they had little effect on the rulers and the wealthiest Iraqis.

Wikipedia:  High rates of malnutrition, lack of medical supplies, and diseases from lack of clean water were reported during sanctions.[27] In 2001, the chairman of the Iraqi Medical Association’s scientific committee sent a plea to the BMJ to help it raise awareness of the disastrous effects the sanctions were having on the Iraqi healthcare system.[28]   

It appears undisputed that per capita income of Iraqis fell by more than 80% during the first few years of sanctions, and that most Iraqis were rationed 1,000 calories of food a day, good for weight loss, bad for overall health, particularly the health of growing children.  There was also a high incidence of diarrhea in children, never a good indicator of a child’s prospects. [1]

In answer to Lesley Stahl’s “loaded” question about the sanctions on a May 12, 1996 segment of CBS’s 60 Minutes (a question that used the passive voice) then Ambassador Albright gave a reply she quickly regretted giving on national TV. 

Stahl: We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, are… is the price worth it?

Albright: I think this is a very hard choice, but the price, we think the price is worth it.

Of course, it turns out we were dealing with master propagandist Saddam Hussein who shamelessly, grossly inflated the child death totals.  It is likely that less than half that number of children died, probably less than a quarter of that inflated total, perhaps no more than a tenth of that horrific number.   Notice that the previous sentence nonchalantly uses the passive voice, the children simply “died”, nobody did anything to them.  

It is likely that as a result of the UN Security Council sanctions, backed by US military support, even less than fifty thousand Iraqi children were killed.   To put it more clearly: we probably killed far fewer than 50,000 Iraqi children, directly or indirectly.   Other estimates and three later UN studies put the number much, much lower, even suggesting that no additional children were killed by the crippling sanctions.  

Besides, everybody knows Saddam was a fucking liar!    Madeline Albright said she’d been ambushed by Lesley Stahl (who won an Emmy for that segment) and used to spread Saddam’s unconscionable propaganda.

Say the UN sanctions enforced by US military might had killed a mere thousand Iraqi babies.   That discounted price would be worth it, wouldn’t it?   Especially in light of the great benefits achieved by the sanctions.   Believe that and I’ll tell you who you voted for in 2016 (either candidate, actually).

I made the mistake of listening in on some of the president’s rambling, predictable State of the Union speech last night.   What shocked me was the continual roar of the crowd in Congress.   The roar was continuous, a wave as irresistible as the frenzied cheering at one of Trump’s exciting campaign rallies.   I was half-waiting for a chant of “Seig Heil!” to break out, because that’s how ecstatic the crowd sounded, rising to roar their approval of even the most dubious claims the practiced liar was making.  

Then the president modulated his voice into its most conciliatory sounding tones to announce the record number of women in the US workforce, including the record number of women who had been elected to Congress (most of them running hard against his policies and him personally).  The crowd of government officials went wild.  The newly elected women, most of them dressed in white and sitting in a bloc, rose to acknowledge the indisputable fact that women, who the president stated work in 58% of the new jobs created in America last year, now comprise nearly 23% of the federal legislature.

Then, as the women stood, it happened.  The chant began, as robustly as at the most passionate Trump rally in the shattered heart of Trump country.   Our elected officials began a full-throated chant of “USA! USA!” and I felt the vomit rising in my throat, had to shut that shit off.   As I walked I began to wonder how many Venezuelan children are going to have to die so that we can have freedom on the march again?

 

[1]     Wikipedia:     Shortly after the sanctions were imposed, the Iraqi government developed a system of free food rations consisting of 1000 calories per person/day or 40% of the daily requirements, on which an estimated 60% of the population relied for a vital part of their sustenance. With the introduction of the Oil-for-Food Programme in 1997, this situation gradually improved. In May 2000 a United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) survey noted that almost half the children under 5 years suffered from diarrhoea, in a country where the population is marked by its youth, with 45% being under 14 years of age in 2000. Power shortages, lack of spare parts and insufficient technical know-how lead to the breakdown of many modern facilities.[29] The per capita income in Iraq dropped from $3510 in 1989 to $450 in 1996, heavily influenced by the rapid devaluation of the Iraqi dinar.[29]

Iraq had been one of the few countries in the Middle East that invested in women’s education. But this situation changed from the late eighties on with increasing militarisation and a declining economic situation. Consequently, the economic hardships and war casualties in the last decades have increased the number of women-headed households and working women.[29]

Mind skittering, crablike, over the littered ocean floor

Learned a neat Django lick from Robin Nolan on youtube, a riff that uses several of the classic chord embellishments Django probably invented.  After re-reading a few pages of one of Charles Johnson’s books, and being struck by the line in his paragraph bio that he was, among other things, a cartoonist, I looked him up online. Johnson is a brilliant writer I’ve long admired, he’s admired by everyone else too, it emerges. Read The Middle Passage or Dreamer and you’ll see what I mean.   Read his biography on Wikipedia and you’ll say “no wonder the man writes like a genius.”   Who knew he started as a prolific young cartoonist who has been practicing martial arts and studying Eastern religions for the last fifty years, taking a few years to get a PhD in philosophy?

Earlier today I’d heard about the overturning, on Tenth Amendment grounds (states retain all rights not enumerated for the federal government), of the 1916 Keating-Owen Child Labor Act, the federal government’s first attempt to regulate child labor by invoking its powers under the Commerce Clause.   Since the product of child labor goes into the stream of interstate commerce, the law signed by Woodrow Wilson stated, federal law overrules any state state law that allows employment of any child younger than fourteen, or working someone between fourteen and sixteen for more than eight hours a day, nor can employers start the child’s working day before six a.m. or end it after seven p.m. [1]  The law went into effect September 1, 1917 and was in effect for nine months (nice irony there in the law lasting the gestation period for producing a new child laborer) before the Supreme Court struck it down in Hammer v. Dagenhart.  

That case was brought by the Roland Dagenhart, father of two Dagenhart kids who worked with him in a North Carolina cotton mill, six days a week from sunrise til ten p.m.    Roland stood to lose a lot of income if his young children were not allowed to work with him.    The Supreme Court, in 1918, agreed, on multiple grounds, that the Child Labor Act was repugnant to the Constitution.  

Oliver Wendell Holmes dissented, and his view would carry the day more than twenty years later when Hammer v. Dagenhart was overruled (paving the way for federal intervention in civil rights cases using the Commerce Clause).    After all his legal arguments, Holmes added (according the Wikipedia):

“But if there is any matter upon which civilized countries have agreed – it is the evil of premature and excessive child labor.”

Civilized countries, oh boy, there we go again!   We can’t torture, we can’t make six year-olds work all day, and into the night, to help support their families, we can’t use poison gas in warfare any more, we can’t decide who will, and who won’t use our public bathrooms, can’t lynch uppity, guilty troublemakers who threaten the peace by offending our morals, we can’t even use the damned n-word anymore!   Hand me my MAGA hat, boy, there’s work to be done!

My mind skitters and I see the worried faces of several people, over dinner last night, furrowing their brows over what they see as the certainty of another four years of Trumpocracy after the 2020 election.   They saw their fear clearly as inevitable, Americans are credulous idiots, we elected him, nobody can beat him.  Look what he did to the rest of that busload of Republican nominees before the bully juggernaut steamrolled his way to the candidacy, then the presidency!   

Look at history, also.   We may learn little from it, but we sometimes take a good lesson here and there.   In 1918 the Supreme Court decided child labor was a matter for each state to rule on.   By 1941 there was a widely supported federal statute regulating child (and all) labor on the books for several years (my father, born in 1924, was 14 when the Fair Labor Standards Act went into effect) and a Supreme Court decision specifically overruling the 1918 ruling that employing seven year-olds for 16 hours a day was perfectly fine if an individual state said it was perfectly fine.  The new principle was that the federal government could intervene in state practices whenever interstate commerce was affected.  This nation still, every so often, uses law to fix a longstanding injustice or take down a major league asshole or a president who is a crook.

Things change, although the pendulum of history, which is supposed to swing regularly from reform to reaction and back, has been as stubborn as a French Bulldog straining toward reaction during most of my lifetime, but– looky here.   Slavery is today unthinkable in the USA (though it’s still practiced worldwide, apparently, and convict slave labor is a problem here too, for convicts), so is putting seven year olds to work sixty hours a week in factories (though it’s done in places seeking competitive advantage with the global psychopaths who pursue a morals-free bottom line).   Common things, things we take as given, change in the minds of people and nations.     The difficult part is persuading people of the right way, the civilized way, the enlightened way.   We have twelve years to figure it out, climate scientists tell us.  Hard work ahead.

I sit here every day, trying to talk sense to myself as I tap these keys.  It is sadder than a lot of things, I suppose, this writing out my thoughts for my own use, but also less sad than many things.   I don’t ponder how sad or happy it is, I think only of its value to me, its possible use to others.   The mind skitters, I pick up a calligraphy pen and write a few words, which delights my senses in another way.  I pick up the guitar, at the ready in a stand right by where I write.   Let me practice that Django riff again, get it under my hands, up to speed.  Play it in another position, another key, there you go.

How my life looks to others, I have little sense of that.   A mystery, no doubt.  Is a life really less mysterious if you go to work everyday, do a job, get money, buy things, spend $200 a seat to see a living miracle on Broadway, put another $100 on the card to have a nice dinner after that?  That too is a mystery, like much of this arrangement here.  

Is it any wonder, not doing those seemingly reasonable things, that I sit here today, mind skittering like a hopped up crab on the littered sea bed, vying with a million other hopped up crabs?

 

[1] The Keating-Owen Act of 1916 prohibited interstate commerce of any merchandise that had been made by children under the age of fourteen, or merchandise that had been made in factories where children between the ages of 14 and 16 worked for more than eight hours a day, worked overnight, or worked more than sixty hours a week