The Democrats Have No Narrative…

Jan13

This article from The Intercept really nails a crucial truth corporate Democrats consistently miss. It lays out the reasons Pelosi and Schumer’s awkward response to the president’s untruthful prime-time address blaming Democrats for his own shutdown (while throwing red meat to his base ) was a strategic and narrative nullity for the opposition party.

Trump, for all his doddering and his idiotic compulsive lying, consistently tells a grim and angering story that galvanizes the pain of many of his non-wealthy supporters. He always passionately points the finger (dishonestly, of course) at who is to blame (and away from those who are really to blame). His narrative speaks to these desperate Americans in a visceral way that resonates strongly with what they are living: you are being fucked, BIG TIME.

The establishment Democrats, in contrast, are busy fact-checking and pointing out the worst of the president’s almost uncountable lies. As with Hillary Clinton’s lackluster and self-satisfied campaign, they have no consistent counter-narrative (understandable because they can’t alienate their biggest donors who benefit handsomely from the status quo). The leading Democrats are neoliberals, comfortable with the setup that makes them rich and powerful while, on Main Street and every side street, that same setup completely screws millions, even the vast majority, of working class Americans.

Trump is, of course, lying when he insists, moronically, that illegal immigrants are the biggest threat to America and that a caravan of dangerous murderers can only be restrained by a multibillion dollar wall and military force. It doesn’t matter that he’s lying about facts when he pokes effectively at the helpless rage of millions of Americans struggling with abject despair, killing themselves in increasing, record-breaking numbers with drugs and guns, not to mention by drunk driving and self-inflicted diseases of hopelessness like obesity. He always gives them a story, coherent or not, that enables them to focus their rage at being disposable.

Read this article, it is a clear and insightful analysis of what the fucking Democrats should be doing, the story they need to tell and how a couple of the more courageous leftist ones are already clearly setting out that reality-based story.

The Limited Reach of Government Reports

Jan12

Our 45th president is erratic, impulsive, wanton, vain, untruthful. Still, 40% of the country, polls tell us, think he’s the greatest thing since the flush toilet. Nothing the former eight year-old millionaire can do will deter his base from believing that he speaks for the little people and is actively making America great again (whatever the hell that glittering slogan might mean).

Presumably more than 50% of the nation is anxiously awaiting the report by former FBI director Robert Mueller that will be written at the end of a now almost two year investigation into Trump’s alleged ties with Russian election meddlers and his octopus-like business relations with many shady characters. Mueller has indicted several of Trump’s close associates as well as a raft of Russians, got guilty pleas, a conviction or two, several are cooperating with Mueller, a few of these close Trump associates were actually sentenced to prison time for serious crimes.

The majority of Americans who are waiting for Mueller’s report are hoping that Mueller will drop the hammer on the president and force Congress to end his reign. This is probably a hope that will be disappointed. There is an even chance that Americans will never get to even read the report or learn more than a summary of its contents. There are undoubtedly many reasons for millions of us to want this president out of office; keep in mind that it is probably a mistake to put too much faith in the silver hammer of the Mueller report, no matter how often liberal pundits and people like Nancy Pelosi tell us “wait for it… wait for it… here it comes…. wait for it!!!”

Millions of us are distressed by the way Trump constantly attacks others, peddles a stream of wildly shifting untruths, openly admires dictators, defends vicious policies like family separation, applauds racists as fine people, appoints right wing extremists to lifetime judicial posts, wealthy incompetents like Betsey DeVos to cabinet positions, ignores real national and world crises while creating false emergencies, takes heroic steps to increase income and wealth inequality, recently took almost a million US government workers and their families hostage (in addition to millions more who depend on government services and are being fucked big time while the most powerful man in the world throws his tantrum) and too many other bad things to jam into one long sentence.

These words of warning should come as no surprise: faith in government reports is often a recipe for cruel disappointment. A few years ago a long belated, vast report on America’s torture policy under Cheney-Bush was compiled and read by members of Congress. The 6,700 page report detailed a widespread American government-sanctioned practice of medieval horrors committed by Americans and American proxies, sometimes against “rendered” (kidnapped) persons innocent of any connection to any crime [1]. Cheney’s lawyers crafted a secret memo that laid out the legal defense for the torture program. The report notes that the CIA lied about the extent of the program [2]. The brutalities described in the report should have landed the architects of the program in front of Congressional committees, if not prosecuted for war crimes. Nothing of the sort ever happened. In fact, one of the most enthusiastic participants in the program, a CIA agent known by her colleagues as “Bloody Gina”, an agent known to have destroyed video evidence of the “enhanced interrogations” she oversaw, was appointed by this president, and confirmed by his party’s Senate, as CIA director. She’s hard at work right now.

Where is this gigantic torture report now, you ask? There is one copy we know of that has not been destroyed, it is preserved in Barack Obama’s presidential library, but it is under seal for the next twelve years. It is unclear how many of its heavily redacted pages will be made public in 2028.

One of the most famous government reports ever was the investigation into John F. Kennedy’s assassination. The commission that investigated it was headed by Supreme Court justice Earl Warren. As Chief Justice, Earl Warren, an Eisenhower appointee, was a force for social justice during his term (October 5, 1953 – June 23, 1969). He was hated by the extreme right, the John Birch Society (including Fred Koch, father of the two far right billionaire zombies who have done so much to make America great again for liberty) screamed for his impeachment. He was widely seen as a man of integrity, but his Warren Commission Report concludes that one former marine, acting completely on his own, with a faulty rifle, fired three shots into the moving target of JFK’s head, bullets that magically made all kinds of twists and turns, including into the body of Texas Governor John Connally. Woody Allen referred to the Warren Commission Report as a work of fiction, playing it for laughs. It is unlikely we will ever get closer to the truth of who else was working with the ‘lone gunman’ who was killed a couple of days later while in police custody by another lone gunman, though a later Congressional investigation nobody today recalls found evidence of conspiracy. [3]

Donald J. Trump, with his gut instinct for survival, is doing everything he can to put people in place to make sure any damage from Mueller’s findings is blunted, kept in the shadows, kept from public view. Who knows what will be included in the report, or how hard Mueller will bring the magical hammer down on this amoral president? My only point here is that there is an even chance that we will never know.

My larger point is that it is upon every one of us whose consciences are most enflamed to organize to become part of the change we’d like to see in the world. “Hope and Change” ain’t going to do it, any more than “MAGA”, even though Obama may or may not have preserved the last copy of the torture report.

[1] The case of Maher Arar, a Canadian architect grabbed in an American airport and rendered to Syria where he was tortured for over a year, on completely mistaken intel, is one every school child should learn (but one I fear none will learn). Talk about the unlearned lessons of fucking history.

[2] The Guardian article linked above includes this nice paragraph:

Through an investigation that lasted more than six years, the Senate intelligence committee found that the CIA’s torture was far more brutal than the agency had told the Bush administration or Congress, and that the agency had lied about the program’s contours and effectiveness. It found unequivocally that torture produced no valuable counter-terrorism intelligence. President-elect Donald Trump has repeatedly expressed a desire to make the CIA engage in torture once again. (link)

[3] Wikipedia:

A later investigation, the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) agreed with the Warren Commission that the injuries that Kennedy and Connally sustained were caused by Oswald’s three rifle shots, but they also concluded that Kennedy was “probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy”^[4] as analysis of a dictabelt audio recording pointed to the existence of an additional gunshot and therefore “… a high probability that two gunmen fired at [the] President.”^[5]^[6] The Committee was not able to identify any individuals or groups involved with the possible conspiracy. In addition, the HSCA found that the original federal investigations were “seriously flawed” with respect to information-sharing and the possibility of conspiracy.^[7] As recommended by the HSCA, the acoustic evidence indicating conspiracy was subsequently re-examined and rejected.^[8]

Death Squads

Jan7

Trying to take a break from the coverage of our petulant president’s vain and self-created “crisis”, his vanity project of a gigantic wall, and his unprecedented use of extremist “Tea Party” tactics, a president vetoing a bipartisan bill in order to force a government shutdown hostage crisis, I wake up today thinking about death squads, damn it.

History is written in blood, much of it, and that blood is rarely the blood of kings, lords, popes, princes of industry and finance. The tree of liberty, according to an eloquent slave owner who rebelled against British tyranny, is supposed to be occasionally watered with the blood of tyrants and patriots, though it’s often hard to sort the tyrants from the patriots without a scorecard. The tally of blood spilled is probably a few dozen tyrants against millions and millions of voluntary and involuntary patriots, not to mention millions of innocent civilians caught in the crossfire. Tyrant blood is very, very expensive, it turns out; the rest of our blood, incalculably cheap.

It’s easy to see how this works, it is done the same way over and over throughout human history. You create a story in which people who think like you, or who belong to your identity group, are good, and people who don’t think like you, or don’t look like you, are evil. Then it’s all black and white. You can send troops in to clear things up, kill the evil people while lovingly protecting, even sacrificing their own lives, for their brothers and sisters in arms. Somebody called this selective empathy, and it’s a good way to think of it, infinite mercy for my beloved siblings, only death and destruction for evil motherfuckers like you.

In the war zones in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, it was often impossible to know who was “good” and who was “evil” just by looking, and often the only glimpse you got, seconds before somebody’s death, was fleeting. The population was mixed, like every population is, many of them simply trying to avoid death during a war, enemy and friend were often impossible to tell apart. That at least two of the three major recent American wars were based on lies, or faulty but often chanted theories (the Domino Theory, WMD) makes it even worse, but not that much worse.

War often brings a nation together, no matter how much we learn about it afterwards, no matter how cynical the calculation was, no matter how deadly and destructive war always is. Dubya Bush had very low popularity numbers until, after the attacks on 9/11, he became a war time president. His popularity soared. A war time president is usually popular, particularly in a nation where military service is not mandatory and anybody who doesn’t want to die or be maimed in war can safely stay out of it. Would I put it past this grandiose, increasingly beleaguered autocrat to start a war to goose his popularity above 40% ? I’d put nothing past him, how could I? I’d be surprised if he didn’t launch something huge.

Why Death Squad? It’s how unpopular governments always maintain power, through brutality and terror. You, priest, you gave a powerful speech talking about how strongly Jesus would denounce our regime’s torture and disappearance policies? How about we crucify you to the door of your church, padre, for everyone to see how effective those policies actually are? You want to save poor children? How about we leave a pile of them, drenched in blood, at the feet of your crucified body?

I have friends who sometimes poke me about seeing Nazis everywhere. I come by this wariness somewhat honestly. The town where my grandparents, my mother’s parents, came from had a mixed population with about 4,000 Jews, few survived the cold winter of 1942 and the final deadly night in August 1943, when the Nazis decided their fate.

The town was in the Ukraine. The Poles controlled it for many years, and Ukrainians, who remained nationalistic, worked with the Poles. World War One was rough in that town, and then, after the Russian Revolution, the Red Army marched into the area and put up the flags of the USSR. The Ukrainians hated the Russians who, in turn, once Stalin came in, starved literally millions of Ukrainians to death, right before World War Two was underway in earnest.

My grandparents got the hell out while the getting was still possible. My grandmother came to America in 1921, my grandfather in 1923. It was a good thing, because in 1924 strict immigration quotas were put into effect, reducing the numbers from that area to a tiny trickle.

Then my mother was born, in the Bronx, and my father, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. As they grew up the world was marching inexorably through the Great Depression toward the second act of the Great War. Stalin starved millions of Ukrainians to death while taking all their grain. Hitler launched his invasion of the USSR. German troops marched eastward, and behind his troops, einsatzgruppen, death squads. These death squads were mobile units of the Security Police and SS Security Service that followed the German armies to Poland in 1939 and to the Soviet Union in June, 1941. They rounded up and shot partisans, intellectuals and any Jews they encountered. They experimented with gassing, using carbon monoxide from their trucks and vans, but it was inefficient and there were just too many people to kill that way.

Have your captives dig a huge ditch, have the people stand next to it, their clothes neatly piled somewhere else, and take aim at their heads, which pop like pumpkins or melons if you hit them just right. It was a hard job and even dedicated SS men had a hard time doing it for very long. It was the kind of work that could drive a person mad, no matter how strongly that person believed they were doing the right thing.

In my grandparents’ town in the Ukraine the einsatzgruppen were not, apparently, involved when the time came to cleanse the town of its remaining Jews . By August 1943 you had trains running constantly eastward toward huge industrial killing facilities. Jews would be concentrated in various ghettos and camps which would eventually be liquidated by sending them to death camps in long trains of cattle cars. From the Nazi perspective this was a much better arrangement all around, what with the millions of Jews who needed to be eliminated. Then there were small pockets of Jews, in fairly out of the way places, like the survivors of my grandparents’ town.

So the Jews of this Ukrainian town were forced to build a fence between their new ghetto and the rest of the town, while the Nazis took a few hostages, including a brother or nephew of my grandmother’s, to ensure the job was done quickly. The Jews were persecuted, starved, frozen, beaten, many died during the harsh winter of 1942-43. Everybody left in my grandmother’s family, and my grandfather’s (and each was one of seven siblings) was eventually marched to a ravine on the northwestern edge of the town, one night in August 1943. There local Ukrainians, under the guidance of SS officers, took care of the surviving Jews, in the way that killers “take care” of their victims. They acted as an ad hoc death squad, while the SS supervised.

None of this was ever discussed in our home. My grandmother drank to excess as she got older, my grandfather was fearful and sometimes a little withdrawn, but they were otherwise fine. I learned nothing from them, or from my parents, outside of the indigestible fact that everyone left behind in Europe had been killed. It would be decades before I’d get the details, from an indispensable web site, which collected (and translated) the eye witness accounts of survivors, including an account of the schools in that town by a first cousin of my grandfather’s, a guy named Henry, who lived in Baltimore and who I met more than once when I was a kid. His wife was named Goldie.

There was also, amazingly, this account, by either my grandfather’s youngest brother, or, more likely, a nephew. Identified only as Y. Through an amazing, twisted series of misadventures, he was spared the fate of everyone in his family, outside of my grandparents and Henry, who must have emigrated around the time my grandparents did. A horrific story, the wartime experiences of Y. Mazur, but he lived to tell it, went back to his hometown and, after a long court fight, got paid for the family home and made his way to the new state of Israel. I had no idea.

I have searched in vain, as have other family historians, for the exact location of my maternal grandmother’s town, in the marsh south of Pinsk. Wiped from the map without a trace, along with everybody there, like thousands of small hamlets where poor Jews made their homes in that part of the world.

So it never leaves me, the very real idea that when a death squad comes, you’re fucked. There is literally nothing you can do, outside of trying to escape. By the time the death squad is on its way, good fucking luck to you, collateral damage. If a maniac wants to kill you, they usually will. Particularly if it’s nothing personal, you understand.

Compare and Contrast

Jan4

This polarization in American life, so similar to the vicious divide that led to the Civil War, has been escalating for the last thirty years as the fucking Koch Brothers and their accursed ilk get closer to their eventual reward — and toward their mad political goal of limitless liberty for everyone, even if it means the destruction of the planet itself. You have as much liberty as you can afford to buy, what could be more American than that? The petulant, immature man they have as president now doesn’t have to be asked to do their bidding. He has the same interest in unfettered liberty they do. He too was born with $400,000,000 worth of liberty.

Was there a time when there was still a bit of decency left in American bare knuckles politics? You can argue that during the start of Reagan’s term there was still some, a little bipartisan recognition that some compromise is sometimes a good thing. Look what happened to Reagan’s Supreme Court pick Douglas Ginsburg and let’s contrast it to the recent confirmation, by the slimmest margin since 1881, of partisan team player and conservative Republican party insider Brett “Justice” Kavanaugh. The following summary is from Wikipedia:

On October 29, 1987, President Reagan nominated Ginsburg to the Supreme Court of the United States to fill the vacancy created by the retirement of Lewis Powell,^[1]^[2] which had been announced on June 26.^[14] Ginsburg, age 41, was chosen after the United States Senate, controlled by Democrats, had voted down the nomination of Judge Robert Bork after a bruising confirmation battle which ended with a 42–58 vote on October 23.^[15]

Ginsburg’s nomination collapsed for entirely different reasons from Bork’s rejection, as he almost immediately came under some fire when NPR‘s Nina Totenberg^[16] revealed that Ginsburg had used marijuana “on a few occasions” during his student days in the 1960s and while an assistant professor at Harvard in the 1970s. It was Ginsburg’s continued use of marijuana after graduation and as a professor that made his actions more serious in the minds of many senators and members of the public.^[17] Ginsburg was also accused of a financial conflict of interest during his work in the Reagan Administration, but a Department of Justice investigation under the Ethics in Government Act found that allegation baseless in a February 1988 report.^[18][1]

Due to the allegations, Ginsburg withdrew his name from consideration on November 7,^[4]^[5] and remained on the Court of Appeals, serving as chief judge for most of the 2000s. Anthony Kennedy was then nominated on November 11 and confirmed in early February 1988 as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court.^[19]^[20]

In contrast, here is the essence of Brett Kavanaugh’s indignant, winning response to allegations of drunken sexual impropriety. He characterized the testimony of Christine Blasey Ford, who had accused him of drunkenly locking her in a room, lying on top of her, groping her and trying to remove her clothes during a high school party as nothing more than part of:

“a calculated and orchestrated political hit, fueled with apparent pent-up anger about President Trump and the 2016 election, fear that has been unfairly stoked about my judicial record, revenge on behalf of the Clintons and millions of dollars in money from outside left-wing opposition groups.”

Ginsburg, confronted with the unseemly fact that he liked marijuana, an illegal drug particularly reviled by conservatives (many of whom stated at the time that they’d still support his nomination), withdrew his name from consideration for the Supreme Court and remained on the federal bench until he retired many years later. Kavanaugh, confronted with allegations of bad conduct and bad character, had a dedicated team working hard to make those allegations go away.

We have the burnt kettle calling the pot black here. Kavanaugh, in fact, engaged in a calculated and orchestrated public relations campaign to save his good name and his lifelong dream of unappealable judicial power. The night before his hearing he appeared on Fox News with his family, portraying himself as a God-fearing life-long choir boy. He wrote an op ed in the Wall Street journal defending himself against the left wing smear campaign. When, after Blasey Ford testified credibly and his confirmation seemed to be in doubt, he came back snarling, snorting and swinging, fueled by apparent pent-up anger over the fucking liberal conspiracy against good men like him. His judicial record, and his record at Dubya Bush’s White House, both redacted by about 90%, were carefully hidden from the Senate Committee and the public. His hatred of the Clintons and all they stand for, stemming from his diligent work as a partisan assistant to Independent Counsel Ken Starr, had been bolstered by millions of dollars in money from outside right-wing opposition groups and fellow extreme right travelers. He freely admitted that he has always liked beer, even as he raged and resisted any real investigation into the allegations against him.

Rage in a man is now considered a good thing in a political confrontation, if you rage on behalf of Justice and Liberty and have the votes behind you to get your way. Clearly Kavanaugh did that, and won his appointment, albeit by the slimmest margin in 137 years. Much has been lost since the appearance of impropriety standard was clear to everyone and innocent men sought to clear their names rather than rage incoherently against their accusers.

I know it may be far down the list of things to be investigated in this most corrupt of administrations, but I’d love to see that lying fuck subpoenaed to testify before the House Judiciary Committee, confronted with his plainly untruthful testimony in confirmation hearings going back to when Dubya first put loyal Brett on the federal bench.

[1] Note that Ginsburg was found innocent of the financial conflict of interest months after he withdrew his name from consideration for the Supreme Court.

Racism vs. Humanism

Dec14

I know that I’m not boldly going out on any kind of moral limb by saying that racism, a creation of fear and rage and perhaps mankind’s most popular eternal justification for hatred, is irrational. I mean, internally, racism is not a system that makes sense. One obvious reason is that it requires making blanket pronouncements against millions of people you’ve never met, just because they fit a certain ethnic or “racial” demographic, which is just ignorant. I don’t mean to sound judgmental, God forbid, but racism, on it’s face, doesn’t pass the ‘what the fuck, are you a desperate, clueless fucking imbecile?’ test.

Many racists will at some point encounter a member of the hated race who will do him some kindness, maybe save his life, donate a vital organ or something, or just go out of his way to extend some unexpected kindness to the racist. Here is the beauty of racism, if it is ardent and staunchly enough held. A good racist will appreciate the human individual in question and conclude “well, I thank him, he’s one of the good ones. I guess that proves those (insert racial slur) have at least one decent one among them.”

If the racist begins to question his belief, based on a few individuals who refute the stereotype, the whole thing starts to unravel. His fellow racists will disown him as some did when Donald J. Trump, whose credentials are otherwise pretty strong, “gave his daughter to a Jew.”

You want consistency in a racist’s “thinking”? Good luck, sister. Adolf Hitler himself, poster child for muscular, mass murdering, evangelizing, yea, charismatic racism, with racist credentials so impeccable that he’s an idol to haters more than seventy years after he finally blew his brains out, made a few exceptions. It is well known that every top Nazi had a Jew or two he knew to be a decent chap. “Don’t put a finger on Max Grossman,” a top SS officer would order, “Max is under my protection.” Max might have been the SS guy’s brave platoon leader in World War One, or had done some other great service to the SS guy, maybe he was the likable, discreet, self-effacing brother of the Jewish woman the SS guy was having a long, secret affair with.

Would it blow your mind to learn that Hitler himself had a list of Jews not to be touched, as he was insanely rounding up and mass murdering every Jew he could find anywhere? [1] It wouldn’t have blown my mind, really. Nothing about the “philosophy” of racism makes much sense and one should expect no real consistency in a belief system that is based on visceral ignorance. Of course, if somebody saves your life, most people will not kill that person. If you have an admired teacher you love, you’d tend to spare her while putting everybody else into cattle cars rattling off for slaughter. A doctor who saved your mother’s life, fine, don’t put her in a gas chamber. This is sometimes called “common decency” a trait long exhibited among humans.

But here is a mind blowing fact about the versatile Mr. Hitler. That widely admired totalitarian psychopath (we are living in a renaissance of Mr. Fucking Hitler and his type) had a list (we learn from Hannah Arendt’s wonderful Eichmann in Jerusalem) of a few Jews who were not to be harmed, even as the rest of their detested “race” were exterminated like insects. A few names, ja.

That insane bastard had the names of three hundred and forty Jews on his fucking Do NOT Exterminate list! 340 Jews! On Hitler’s list! (Arendt, 133).

Do not touch a hair on their poisonous heads or you will dance until you die from a length of piano wire. Do you know how agonizing a death hung by thin, sturdy wire is? Adolf could show you a few movies of his enemies, their stupid gyrations in slow, comical, climbing death. Hitler, toward the end, apparently loved nothing more than watching the reels over and over, his enemies slowly choking to death as they kicked their feet and jerked, and soiled themselves. Humiliating deaths! Ha! Who is laughing now, asshole? So, you kill one of my 340 pet Jews, you will know my wrath. Be warned.

Hitler didn’t have to say it twice, or even spell it out, for the Fuhrer’s every spoken word had the force of law (Fuhrerworte haben Gesetzeskraft) (Arendt, 148).

If the law you must live by is the word of a violent and insane racist apt to say and do literally anything … good luck to you, Bozo.

I called this post Racism v. Humanism. Humanism, a belief (I say, off the top of my humanistic head [2]) that humans can discover higher truths and solve even terrible problems by the application of rational thought, research and common effort. Most human beings down through the ages, unless filled beyond bursting with fear, rage and ritualized hatred, would chose humanism over racism, everything else being equal. Humanists see the best in our fellow humans; racists imagine the worst. Humanism works toward a common future for humanity that does not include our mass extinction. Racism, not so much.

[1] While also, of course, being willing to kill millions of non-Jews, collateral damage, if you will, in his war to purify Aryan blood and make the world safe for the whitest of easily suckered white mongrels.

[2] A humanistic head that also requires me not to talk exclusively through my ass. Finding more information took less than three seconds. Jeeves gives us this more detailed definition of Humanism:

an outlook or system of thought attaching prime importance to human rather than divine or supernatural matters. Humanist beliefs stress the potential value and goodness of human beings, emphasize common human needs, and seek solely rational ways of solving human problems.

Democracy is for racists too

Nov8

In Florida’s gubernatorial election, the white candidate told Floridians who might be considering a vote for his rival, the black mayor of Tallahassee, “not to monkey this up.” The race was close, quite possibly would have gone the other way if the 1.4 million disenfranchised Florida voters a disproportionate number of whom are black, had the right to vote restored after serving their sentences. This lifetime ban from voting dates to an 1838 Florida constitutional provision tweaked thirty years later, after the Civil War, to comply with the letter of the amended U.S. Constitution while ensuring blacks did not take over the government. Florida is one of the few states who have this kind of lifetime disenfranchisement law, a law that affects almost a quarter of Florida’s black voters. The law was abolished by Florida voters in the election a few days ago, by a fairly robust margin. Now the next time a white candidate urges Floridians to “not monkey it up” there is a better than even chance he will have his racist ass monkeyed up at the polls.

Democracy, of course, is for racists too. The president called himself a nationalist during at least one of his many recent televised Nuremberg-style campaign rallies. At a combative press conference after his party lost the House of Representatives and there was a swing of governors that virtually evened the national map, a black female reporter asked the president if calling himself a nationalist didn’t embolden white nationalists. The president dismissed the question: “I don’t know why you’d say that. It’s such a racist question.” He repeated the phrase “racist question” in that tic-like way of his, repeating a good tasting talking point for emphasis, several times. This fellow knows something about racist questions, they were part of his father’s review process for apartment rentals until the Fair Housing Act made race-based discrimination a federal crime.

Racism is not a uniquely American problem, though our version of it has impressively exceptional roots. Not every country enshrined race-based slavery in its founding democratic constitution, protected the liberties of the owners of other people, inferior people, at law for almost a century, fought a bloody war to preserve or abolish it, instituted racist laws and had a century of terrorism against the formerly enslaved race winked at by local law enforcement. You want American Exceptionalism? Look no further than our history of racism at law and its kissing cousin, de facto racism. Let’s not talk about what Andrew Jackson’s fortune made in slavery and land speculation, the Indian Removal Act or the Chinese Exclusion Act, let’s move on.

On October 24, 2018 two African Americans, Maurice Stallard (69) grocery shopping with his grandson, and Vicki Lee Jones (67), walking to her car, were shot to death by a 51 year-old white racist named Gregory Bush. Bush had lost his right to have a gun after violence in his home, but he’d had that right restored. Easier to get your gun back than your vote, apparently. We say this man “allegedly” shot the two to death at Krogers, after trying and failing to enter a locked black church, though he was seen killing them by many witnesses. The famous presumption of innocence, you understand. He gets his right to a fair trial, no mob is going to take him out and lynch him just because he murdered a couple of people, or somebody said he did, anyway. That wouldn’t be American! They are still puzzled about why the racist fuck killed two black people, they’re investigating, you know.

Because we Americans have a five second attention span, the story of the racist murder of two random black people in Kentucky was wiped off the screen by the revelation, the very next day, that a staunch supporter of the president had sent pipe bombs to more than a dozen notable enemies continually railed against by the president. Two days later another maniac walked into a synagogue and started spraying bullets, leaving eleven dead, including a woman who was almost 100 years old. It struck me over and over that Maurice Stallard and Vicki Jones’s murders were not included in the tally of recent hate crimes. Merely being shot to death while grocery shopping with your grandson, or in the parking lot outside the Jeffersontown, Kentucky supermarket, well, bad shit happens, I guess. Hard to keep track of it all! There was a mass shooting in a club in California the other day, too bad all the people there didn’t have guns to shoot the shooter.

Now our slippery nationalist president is on the ropes as he lies about his great recent victory in the midterms, during which his party lost their majority in the House and only held on to the Senate because Republicans only had nine seats in play while the Democrats had twenty something, and several of those states had gone handily to the president in 2016. He was snarling at reporters, seemed to be feeling desperate, fired the Attorney General he’s been mocking and humiliating for the last year or two and is poised to make some daring, desperate gangster moves. He’ll be OK, we all know, because he’s pretty much a delusional psychopath who has never been accountable for a single fuck up in his life. It’s the rest of us we should be worried about.

Voting Machines vs. ATMs

Nov6

There are reports of Democratic votes being changed to Republican votes by electronic voting machines in Georgia and Texas, two closely watched races. Amid record early voting by young people and “people of color”:

… Politico is reporting glitches with voting machines in Texas and Georgia have caused some votes for Democrats to be switched for the Republican candidate or deleted. Experts have said the error is a technical malfunction. Voters and civil rights groups in Texas and Georgia have filed complaints in what are two of the most closely watched states this midterm election. source

This fucking shit again?

You will never get an extra twenty from an ATM, and you almost always will get a receipt, but the same company’s voting machines… well, it’s not so simple, you see. In 2000 a company called Diebold made many of the voting machines, they also made the ATM I used to use at my local bank. Diebold argued trade secrets and proprietary information when investigators wanted to look at the software of their suspect voting machines. The executives of Diebold were unabashed conservatives, big Republican donors, and their proprietary software occasionally displayed a glitch that counted a Democratic vote as a Republican one. Shit happens. If their banking machines had dispensed an extra twenty here and there, Diebold would have been out of business. I always thought the easy cure was paper receipts showing the actual votes, like a detailed ATM receipt, one kept in a lock box at the local voting place, the other copy taken home with the voter. Then machine counts and paper receipts could be compared to verify actual votes. Of course that ain’t going to happen.

In 2000, in south Florida, my father cast his vote for Al Gore on a computerized voting machine. The screen read “click here to confirm your vote for George W. Bush”. My father had bought a computer a few years earlier and knew to look for a “back” arrow, or “undo”. He found a way to return to the previous screen, voted for Gore again and this time it offered him the choice of finalizing his vote for Gore. “At least I had minimal computer skills,” he said afterwards, “how many 75 year-old Broward County Democrats do you suppose wound up involuntarily voting for the candidate they had gone to vote against?” A fair question we’ll never know the answer to.

In Georgia and Texas, two very keenly watched battles are unfolding on election day and there are “technical glitches” in both states coincidentally resulting in fewer Democratic votes and more Republican ones. It is 18 years on from the historically suspect 2000 election and they are still fucking around with people’s votes. I won’t go into the recent criminal (and partisan) 5-4 decision by the Supreme Court that the Voting Rights Act of 1965, made to enforce the often scoffed at Fifteenth Amendment passed almost a century earlier, no longer needs enforcement because we are now a post-racial society who had an illegitimate Muslim president whose father was an African. Racism at law is over, said the Court, and then every state with a racist, or simply Republican, legislature passed new voting restrictions that disproportionately affected minorities of every kind.

“People don’t have faith in our democracy,” cynics point out. So do clear-eyed realists. It’s hard to have faith in a pinball machine that always shows TILT. The Koch brothers, whose fifty year long game is finally paying off bigly, run ads on Yankee games that brag about Koch Industries’ commitment to a level playing field where everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed. Could be a glitch in the ad copy, they might have meant a “leveled playing field.” When you push big, unpopular ideas that sodomize all but the privileged few, born booted and spurred to ride the rest of us, it is best to make sure your people cannot be easily turned out of power when their hideous faces become too grotesque to endure.

Click here to confirm your vote for Mr. Hitler. Have a nice day, and thank you for voting, your vote is very important to us!

Facts Actually Exist

Oct24

For example, these reasonable questions from the autocratic leader of Turkey all reference facts, things that actually exist or don’t exist. These questions seek important details about things that happened in the real world, things that can be examined, things that will determine which story about the events is more true than the others:

“Why did 15 people gather in Istanbul the day of the murder? Who did these people receive orders from?” he asked. “Why was the consulate opened not immediately, but days later, for investigation? When the murder was obvious, why were inconsistent explanations given?”

“Why is the body still not found?” source

These are all things that can be investigated and verified — did fifteen security men arrive in Turkey at 3 a.m. and leave for Saudi Arabia again at the end of the same day, after the murder? Who gave the order to kill a prominent Saudi citizen who had been critical of the young Crown Prince, to kill him in the consulate? Why was the consulate closed for days after the hit? Were inconsistent stories told by the Saudis? Where is the body of the man accidentally and tragically killed after he allegedly started a fist fight against the fifteen security men in the consulate?

Not surprisingly, our leader had a different spin on the apparent guilt of the Saudi Crown Prince. In a curiously framed paragraph in the Washington Post (where Khashoggi worked for the last year) he is quoted as describing the Saudi hit as a bungled job:

Speaking in the Oval Office, Trump skewered the Saudis, saying, “They had a very bad original concept, it was carried out poorly, and the coverup was the worst in the history of coverups.” He added, “In terms of what we ultimately do, I’m going to leave it very much — in conjunction with me — I’m going to leave it up to Congress.” source

Nice skewer job, sir. Now we are led to a series of alternative thoughts, taking us away from what appears to be a brutal premeditated murder ordered from on high and into the realm of pure imagination. A very bad original concept– they should never have killed that traitor in the consulate, that was just stupid, an ill-conceived idea. You kill him elsewhere, any mobster’s preschool grandson could tell you that you don’t kill him in your own house! Carried out poorly — you don’t leave a blood spattered consulate that takes days to clean before investigators can be let in, you don’t saw up the body there, for Christ’s sake! You drive a car in and secretly take the body out intact, wrapped in plastic, in the trunk, even if you have to wait until dark. You certainly cut him up somewhere else. Sheesh… The coverup was the worst, the worst! You don’t wait weeks to make up a story that is not a bit credible, you do that immediately and you tell it over and over and over, as many times as necessary. Then you say “I’ve told you this a hundred times, that’s it. Now you treacherous fake news vampires are just being deliberately disrespectful. You want what that Saudi big mouth got? LOL!”

I don’t know what happened in Istanbul, outside of the fact that a man from the wealthy and powerful elite of Saudi society, banned from writing in Saudi Arabia by the new Crown Prince, was killed in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. I also know that his body has not been found. Bad concept, bad execution (bad pun intended), bad coverup.

I also don’t know what happened in a house in a wealthy Washington D.C. suburb more than thirty years ago, between a drunk prep school junior and a freshman girl, out of her depth at that little impromptu gathering nobody else even recalls. I believe the sickening detail of the laughter of the drunken preppies after one of them held her down and the other later piled on. It makes sense that this moment would be indelibly imprinted on the hippocampus of the traumatized young woman.

Applying Judge Martha Kavanaugh’s famous rule for judges– ‘use your common sense, what has the ring of truth? what rings false?’ it appears that a premeditated murder of a critical journalist was committed on behalf of the young medieval crown prince of Saudi Arabia and that the trauma the woman remembers happened pretty much as she told it. Her explanation of why she was certain of the identity of her attacker rang true.

Of course, the president is excellent at answering these questions, he does it effortlessly. The Saudis did a full investigation of their badly planned, terribly covered up murder of a very disloyal guy who had it coming. The Supreme Court justice gave a very strong denial, very strong, and it turns out nobody could confirm anything that woman said, which proves she was lying.

In each case, one question remains above all others when trying to discern the ring of truth from the ring of falsity. Who stands to gain the most from the story being told the way it is? Who has the weightier motive to tell the particular story they tell? Who has the more convincing concept, execution and cover-up, to put it in the president’s purely transactional terms?

Storytelling 101 — part six

Oct23

Stories, we humans need them for many reasons. They make us feel better about contradictions that are otherwise impossible to reconcile. They bolster our ideals, confirm our worst doubts, or clinch the deal on the things we already know. They cause us to walk forward, united with brothers and sisters, millions of them, not alone in a terrifyingly cold universe. We do not live random, meaningless lives that end in inevitable death, we are part of a larger story, connected to our ancestors, our living loved ones, our lives nurturing the lives of those who come after us. There is great comfort in a good story.

It was a bit of a shock to hear the story today, three weeks after the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, told by the dictatorial leader of Turkey, speaking to his parliament and the world beyond. Erdogan announced unequivocally that the journalist had been the victim of premeditated murder in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. He asked pointedly where the body of the murdered man is.

Our president has been very coy about this whole affair involving our cherished Saudi allies, telling Americans that we have to wait for the Saudi investigation into the alleged murder to be complete, so that we have all the facts. Meanwhile, he dispatched the U.S. Secretary of State, and more recently the Secretary of the Treasury, to Riyadh and CIA Director Gina Haspel to Istanbul.

It may be an odd thing, to some of us, that the president was waiting for the alleged murderer to finish investigating whether they had committed a murder, but in the rush of ongoing chaotic events, there hasn’t been much time for most people to even consider this troubling story. Besides, POTUS reminded us, the sacred democratic presumption of innocence was once again being discarded by people rushing to find someone they don’t like guilty until proven innocent. Very unfair! It’s not like the Saudi royal family is in any way comparable to the hoards of Mexican rapists surging toward our own borders.

The president compared this lynch mob mentality of those who feel the Saudis should be accountable for their crimes (including, of course, massive war crimes against the poorest nation in the Middle East) to the people who insisted there should be a full investigation into the multiple terrible allegations against innocent choir boy Brett Kavanaugh, or at least into the most credibly detailed of them. A mob, a violent angry mob, motivated by tribal bloodlust, satisfied with nothing but the fatal lynching of a good man, a good tribal monarchy, presumed guilty until proven innocent, in the president’s telling.

The president was not wrong to make the connection between the aftermaths of the murder of Khashoggi and the allegations against Kavanaugh. There were credible stories in both cases to check out and investigations to be concluded. In Kavanaugh’s case a quick investigation proved he was innocent, at least to the satisfaction of these who mattered in the 51-49 vote. In the murder of Khashoggi, after a few weeks of thorough investigation, the Saudi story was that the chubby sixty year-old journalist and critic of the thirty-three year old Crown Prince got pugnacious and decided to take on the fifteen armed men who were tasked with merely ‘interrogating’ him. He resisted, starting a fist fight, and was, unfortunately, well, he died during the altercation.

Subtle, but valuable, that passive voice. In law school we were actually instructed about the only proper situation for a lawyer to use the passive voice. If your client’s knife, in your client’s hand, was plunged into the heart of the now dead man, you can’t deny it, exactly, but you can soften it with the passive voice. The knife, admittedly belonging to my client, was plunged into the heart of the victim. Sounds so much better than the active voice since it highlights not the act itself, but facts that are not in dispute, facts that appear to damn your client. So in the belated Saudi spin on Khashoggi’s last moments alive, it’s not that he was killed, so much, as that he, unfortunately, died. Why wait more than two weeks to admit that the journalist was dead? We had to investigate everything very, very thoroughly. Where is the body? No fucking idea.

Stories rule, in every situation we can think of. Whose story do we believe? Which story makes more sense? Which story moves us more? I was practicing my writing with a new nib last night and decided to copy Lincoln’s famous 272 word Gettysburg Address. The poor Irish immigrants who were drafted into the slaughter to reluctantly fight for the Union — and die gruesome deaths, by the thousands– were transformed in Lincoln’s immortal rhetoric into ‘honored dead’ devoted to that cause ‘to which they gave the last full measure of their devotion’. That their sacrifice not be in vain, Lincoln said in his marvelous short speech, should be our work going forward as we pursue Liberty in the nation dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

He gave that moving speech, appealing to the better angels of our nature [1], almost 155 years ago (it’ll be 155 years exactly on November 19th). We have come very far since then in becoming a land honestly and tirelessly devoted to true liberty and equality for all. Or we have come a few halting steps, and taken many more steps backwards. Which is the more inspiring story? Not much of a contest, I’d say.

It is, of course, like this in personal life too. A man who has a long history of lying, stealing and committing fraud, a man who made death threats against his own wife and children in a moment of rage– well, your view of him will depend on which story you believe, based on your relationship to him. He has a warm, loving side too, is a supremely sensitive reader of the moods and needs of everyone around him, he has a good heart. He is a loving father, the death threats were a one time thing, he was very desperate! The story becomes tricky only if you try to reconcile the two indisputable yet jarringly contradictory sides of this fellow. For his part, the man will never admit he did anything wrong. Either you have love in your heart or you’re a vicious asshole, is his position.

The facts, we often think, matter. This turns out to be a quaint belief. The story is the only thing that matters. Was Lincoln lying about the heroic dead who so nobly gave their lives that we might have a more just nation? He was telling the story that needed to be told so that we did not conclude the massive number of American dead and dismembered had been merely a sickening instance of the intransigent, inhuman greed of a powerful few unleashing a river of American blood to protect their right to have complete control of their way of making a living, a way that makes most of us shudder today.

Likewise, if you put your friend in an unfair, untenable, even vicious situation, forcing him to convince you that he did not deliberately, or thoughtlessly, jeopardize your most sacred relationship, there is a way to put it that sounds infinitely better than that. “That thing in the car” you can call it, if you confronted him in a car. Now then, it was referred to directly. It was a thing, like many other things. Then you fucking overreacted and blew it up into this huge justification of why you can never fucking forgive me, you judgmental fucking piece of shit! You’re dead! You’re fucking dead!!!

As always, it’s all in how the story is told, my friends.

[1] “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.” source

Working out the puzzle

Oct13

An idea popped up last night as I was trying to improve my handwriting in the little drawing book I always keep in my back pocket.

20181012_042601 (1).jpg

We Americans have been locked in an endless argument, as we so often are, about who is the victim and who is the perpetrator. Cops, in cheap novels, always call the alleged perpetrator “the perp” as when they walk him, handcuffed and awkwardly trying to hide his face, past a phalanx of news photographers. While the shame of the perp walk is deliberately inflicted, because that’s what you do to a stinkin’ skel, the identity of the victim (or “vic” in these same dime store books) is often protected, because every protector naturally has sympathy and protectiveness for the vic.

All the vic did was be someplace where the perp showed up. The vic just provided a vulnerable target for the perp, a malefactor who in most cases would have done the same to just about anyone who could serve the same need. The vic just happened to be the one this time. Sucks to be the vic. Walk into the wrong room and — boom! Traumatized for life by a scumbag.

This argument rages in public and in private. I myself have been, it appears, recently turned from vic to perp because of my stubborn refusal to pretend I wasn’t treated badly several times by an old friend. The actual crime is not forgiving the old friend. The guy said sorry, even if he did the same thing again a couple of times afterwards. Actually, he also defended why he was right in the first place and said he had only apologized because I seemed hurt and mad. He is currently the deeply wounded, vulnerable party and I am the arrogant, unforgiving hypocrite, so you might want to take the rest of this, as always, with a few large grains of coarse salt.

We saw this hoary debate about who is the perpetrator and who is the victim raging throughout the recent horror show of our latest Supreme Court confirmation hearings. The only thing both sides agree about regarding the hearings is that they were a despicable circus and a national disgrace. Men of great discernment and integrity, respected intellectuals like David Brooks and Alan Dershowitz, told us after hearing the testimony of the two alleged victims, Christine Blasey Ford and Brett Kavanaugh, that our opinion of who was more truthful depended entirely on which tribe we belong to.

There was apparently nothing more at issue during the hearings as far as the judge’s qualifications for a lifetime appointment to the nation’s highest court aside from whether he drunkenly committed sexual assault on a girl two years younger than him while they were both in high school. An insignificant younger girl none of the other teenagers at the home where they were drinking during an impromptu gathering while the parents were away even recall, apparently. Sometimes history narrows to a point like this one.

Let’s assume for a moment that Kavanaugh was an innocent man and the victim of a vicious coordinated political hit, as he angrily insisted he was. Some people get righteously angry when they’re accused of shameful things, we all can understand that, it proves nothing about a person’s innocence or guilt that he reacts with rage instead of humility to a terrible accusation. If this inflammatory accusation of atrocious behavior (and a criminal act) was concocted out of thin air by George Soros and the Clintons for nakedly political reasons, Kavanaugh had every right (if not every reason) to be outraged. So let’s put his rage about the accusations to the side now, shall we?

Not every innocent person calls for a full investigation of the facts to prove their innocence, to clear their good name. One reason an innocent person may not want to undergo an FBI investigation into specific allegations of something he never did is because you never know what other unfortunate facts a deep investigation into a specific, long ago time in your life might uncover. Suppose you had been nothing more than a clandestine (to your parents and teachers) heavy drinker back in your high school days— would you want that made public as you were about to be confirmed for a seat on the highest court in the land? Of course not.

Accepting those two scenarios about Kavanaugh’s righteous anger at the accusation and his, and his Party’s, resistance to a full FBI investigation to clear his name, it is possible to understand both reactions as guiltless displays of human feeling. Construed this way they constitute no proof that he was hiding anything, or had anything to hide, or had ever hid, or continues to hide, anything. For the sake of argument, let’s give Kavanaugh the benefit of the doubt on his demeanor under pressure, the “presumption of innocence” his defenders get so worked up about when it was rudely denied him during the rush toward a quick FBI probe.

Next we come to the substance of Mr. Kavanaugh’s actual defense, which was submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee in writing the day before Blasey Ford testified. You can read his complete written denial here, as it was submitted to the Committee the day before both victims testified. The most muscular and effective allegations about how he was the one being victimized were left out of the first draft of his statement. He wisely omitted them from the written statement he gave to the Committee, why give your determined enemies a chance to organize themselves against your best attack? He added these powerful touches to the statement he passionately delivered on national TV:

This has destroyed my family and my good name. A good name built up through decades of very hard work and public service at the highest levels of the American government.

This whole two-week effort has been a calculated and orchestrated political hit, fueled with apparent pent-up anger about President Trump and the 2016 election. Fear that has been unfairly stoked about my judicial record. Revenge on behalf of the Clintons. and millions of dollars in money from outside left-wing opposition groups.

This is a circus. The consequences will extend long past my nomination. The consequences will be with us for decades. This grotesque and coordinated character assassination will dissuade competent and good people of all political persuasions, from serving our country.

And as we all know, in the United States political system of the early 2000s, what goes around comes around. I am an optimistic guy. I always try to be on the sunrise side of the mountain, to be optimistic about the day that is coming.

But today, I have to say that I fear for the future. Last time I was here, I told this committee that a federal judge must be independent, not swayed by public or political pressure.

I said I was such a judge, and I am. I will not be intimidated into withdrawing from this process. You’ve tried hard. You’ve given it your all. No one can question your effort, but your coordinated and well-funded effort to destroy my good name and to destroy my family will not drive me out. The vile threats of violence against my family will not drive me out.

You may defeat me in the final vote, but you’ll never get me to quit. Never.

source

If you are a Republican partisan, or even a right wing radical with no allegiance to any particular political party who is simply eager to have a reliable Supreme Court vote for your views, you were roused by these words. An innocent man, attacked by vicious, well-funded partisan enemies, forced to defend a spotlessly good name forever besmirched by a godless conspiracy of people without honor, shame or any sort of morals. Good for him! To someone impressed by him these lines will sound like a kind of sweet, infinitely just music:

People worried about your long record as a Republican operative, your troubling and heavily redacted partisan past, your consistent twelve year judicial record, your evasiveness and surliness during the hearings, the many misleading and false answers you gave, the haste of your controversial appointment, will not be reassured by these words, of course. The words you spoke in portraying yourself as a saintly victim make you sound like an angry partisan and the farthest thing from the impartial, independent arbiter you claim to be, but that’s not the point. Fuck those people!

Just one thing troubles me. Are the American Bar Association, the dean of Yale Law School, retired Supreme Court justice and lifelong Republican John Paul Stevens, the many classmates coming forward to corroborate stories of your heavy drinking and occasional abusiveness while drunk all also part of this vast, vindictive well-funded left wing conspiracy?

Even more ominously, what in God’s name could have possibly possessed the Jesuits, the famously fair-minded and intellectually rigorous Catholic sect that founded and run the elite prep school you attended, to take part in this calculated and orchestrated political hit by outside left-wing opposition groups? For the love of God, Brett, how could these defenders of the faith have so treacherously, so faithlessly, abandoned you? How did the left-wing conspirators recruit even the politically nonpartisan Jesuits? A truly devilish bit of partisan treachery. I read about it in this AP account:

The Jesuits took an even stronger stance. Following Thursday’s testimony by Kavanaugh and his accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, the magazine of the Jesuit religious order in the United States publicly withdrew its endorsement of Kavanaugh. An editorial in America Magazine declared that “this nomination is no longer in the best interests of the country.”

Kavanaugh was a student at Georgetown Preparatory School, a Jesuit high school, when the alleged assault took place.

The editorial doesn’t attempt to parse whether Kavanaugh’s or Ford’s testimony was more credible. But it concluded that “in a world that is finally learning to take reports of harassment, assault and abuse seriously,” the nomination must be abandoned.

“If Senate Republicans proceed with his nomination, they will be prioritizing policy aims over a woman’s report of an assault,” it states. “Were he to be confirmed without this allegation being firmly disproved, it would hang over his future decisions on the Supreme Court for decades and further divide the country.” [emphasis mine, ed.]

The magazine had previously given Kavanaugh a full-throated endorsement, stating that his addition to the Supreme Court may furnish the fifth vote needed to overrule Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that legalized abortion nationwide. The Catholic Church firmly opposes abortion.

That original endorsement editorial concluded that “anyone who recognizes the humanity of the unborn should support” Kavanaugh’s nomination.

The reversal is significant given that Kavanaugh has cited his Catholic faith and Jesuit education in defending himself against Ford’s accusations. In his opening statement Thursday, Kavanaugh twice referenced his years as a student at Georgetown Prep.

source

The Jesuits’ editorial stated that unless Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations were firmly disproved doubts would hang over Kavanaugh’s future decisions and further divide the country. Fortunately for Judge Kavanuagh he was nominated by a man who doesn’t know how to lose. As far as firmly disproving all doubts, the FBI did it in less than five days. Disproved by all nine witnesses who didn’t recall anything bad about the nominee! Give the man his robe. Next case! Suck on that, Jesuits!

Jesus, it is so hard to keep your faith in a world as corrupt as this cruel place!

gratuitousblahg

warning: gratuitous fucking f-word & (c) E. Widaen 2012-2026

Category Archives: History and Politics