Category Archives: History and Politics

The battle to dominate the narrative

We can call this battle to frame the story the war for history, it is also the war for the present and future.   Those victors who get to frame the story win the most important battle in human affairs — the battle for hearts and minds — legitimacy and power.   These storytellers win the most coveted political and personal prize: convincing people to go along with what they say so that their story prevails.   The correct astutely told narrative will either completely justify or absolutely condemn a course of action.   Masses of people are whipped into action or lulled to sleep by a compelling story told just right.  

There is the undeniable reality that we are all soaking in, the facts on the ground, the war is for which story will be accepted as the credible explanation for what we can all see looking around, reading, watching, discussing.    This was driven home to me yesterday during a talk with a friend.

He has largely tuned out the political news these days.   He doesn’t follow developing stories as they are happening.   It is too aggravating, too harrowing, too depressing, too consistently unfair, too troubling.   I understand all that and I share all those feelings.   It is a reasonable response, to not focus on the predictable parade of horrors that are constantly being thrust into our faces under the seal of the President of the United States.  

I’ve taken a different approach recently, having the time and inclination, I watch certain events closely as they unfold.   The drama is endlessly gripping, if also often horrifying.

In the end, watching or not, my friend and I arrive, along with hundreds of millions of our countrymen, billions more worldwide, at the same seemingly inevitable bad place (or glorious place, if you think catastrophic climate change is fake, poor people and immigrants are criminal parasites, pre-existing medical conditions should condemn a middle class person to death, and so forth).   My friend at least spares himself the agony of constantly thwarted hope while watching the driverless car careen towards its inevitable destination.

I understood again,  watching recent events unfold in the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings, how history can sometimes turn on a single unexpected moment, a small detail can change an outcome — things that the best strategists seize on to turn into political narratives that change outcomes.   Here is where storytelling comes in, who is the hero, who is the victim, who is the vicious participant in a vast, well-funded conspiracy?  

The funny thing is that in each opposing story the victim is actually the persecutor and vice versa — since the only information we really have is her claim and his strenuous denial. Anybody else who was there has no memory of that inconsequential summer hang out at somebody’d house, it apparently only meant something to the younger girl who was traumatized there, if you believe her.   The truth is often not zero-sum, one side is 100% right the other side 100% wrong, but a good partisan story makes it seem so. 

If she’s lying, he’s the victim.  If he’s lying, she’s the victim.  Oh, dear, who do you believe?   Who gets the presumption of innocence?   Several others who knew the nominee well in high school and college stepped forward to give further detail about the nominee during the time he was accused by two different women of drunken sexual assault, seeming to corroborate— but, wait, corroboration is bad…. oh, dear!  A secret, limited investigation should put everything to rest.  

In our current tribal cannibal culture only one of the two gets the presumption of innocence, the other one has to disprove a presumption of guilt.  Depending on which zero-sum story you embrace, your view of the facts will be completely different.    Which story makes more sense to you?   Use Judge Martha Kavanaugh’s famous test:  use your common sense, what rings true, what rings false?

There are facts, things that actually happened.  Without witnesses, of course, it’s a matter of faith that people who vow to tell the truth under the penalties of perjury are in fact telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth.   A liar will always try to take advantage of this presumption that people do not lie under oath.   They always do if they know there is no definitive proof that they are lying.

Our current president galvanized a lot of rage and discontent during a carnival-like campaign, spinning a shifting narrative that was dismissed by his many detractors as the inane blathering of an idiot con-man.  His crowds, fond of raising their arms in unison and lustily chanting things like “Lock Her Up! Lock her Up!” are easy to make fun of (from afar, anyway).    In the end this shameless huckster became president by less than 100,000 votes nationwide.  Broken into the individual precincts necessary for his Electoral College margin, his national victory came down to deciding handfuls of votes in a few hundred, or maybe even only a few dozen, shrewdly targeted polling places.  

That fact, that his victory depended on genius analytics, skillful marketing and aggressive voter mobilization in selected counties of selected ‘battleground’ states, contrasts with the wider narrative that he was swept into power by a populist movement, millions and millions of average Americans sick of corrupt American politics, tired of America no longer being great.  The candidate himself frankly described how at first he had dismissed “Drain the Swamp,” considering it a fairly lackluster slogan.   He only changed his mind when he saw how quickly crowds seemed to take to it, how they loved chanting it.   He made it a central part of every rally after that.  What good showman refuses to play one of his greatest hits when the crowd screams for an encore?   

It is sickening to repeat, particularly in a political environment that makes an excellent case against the proposition (and repeatedly, about the existence of truth itself), but facts really do matter.  The largest lesson of his victory in 2016 is not that a plain-spoken outsider with a long history of using the media to promote himself and get massive amounts of free publicity can reach millions of disaffected people, with the help of a few supportive billionaires, and get enough votes to win.  

The more important story is how the powerful people who wanted to consolidate their power in perpetuity, willing to ride even this particular crude, cruel, unsportsmanlike donkey to their larger, long-term goals, got that crucial margin of a few thousand votes exactly where they needed them to put an unqualified fake into the White House and a long-term majority of justices they trained and selected on to the Supreme Court.

Whether Russian hackers hired by Vladimir Putin helped the effort or it was a 100% American initiative, or some combination of both, the outcome is not in question: Mr. Trump got the tiny slice of votes required, exactly where he needed them, for a majority in the Electoral College.  He is legally the president, end of story.

I was thinking of this to watch/not to watch decision in the context of the recent Kavanaugh nomination hearings.   The conclusion was foregone, as my friend wearily pointed out, as we all knew going in.   A partisan Senate with a 51-49 majority, there was no way the majority party’s partisan nominee was not getting confirmed.   Which, of course, is exactly what happened, so all that anxiety about the outcome while the depressing circus ground on was a waste of energy.   But as always, the real drama, and any possible lessons, of the story live in the devilish details that can only be seen by watching closely.

Everyone who saw Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony found it to some degree credible.   She came forward reluctantly, with nothing to gain, in well-founded fear, facing death threats.   She spoke meekly but also with certainty about the details she remembered, including the identity of the drunk teenager who for a few unforgettably scarring moments (for her) made an involuntary sex toy of her.   She even explained how trauma is indelibly stamped on the hippocampus, making a victim’s visual recall of certain specific details highly accurate.   She did not make an irrefutable criminal case against the man who had sexually assaulted her decades earlier, nor was she required to, but she made a very credible case about the events of that day and the identity of the boy who held his hand over her mouth after locking her in a bedroom.  Another woman came forward seeking to testify about another drunken assault at Yale.   A third woman came forward.   The desperate liberal conspiracy in full bloom!

In light of the nominee’s confirmation a few days later, my friend considered Blasey Ford and her compelling testimony ‘collateral damage’, the whole kangaroo hearing so much dirty water down the drain.   Accurate description, of course, in terms of how little effect her testimony wound up having, how her life was destroyed in passing by forces who 100% didn’t give a rat’s cuisse about the truth or falseness of what she said.  

The issue had been reframed: she had not made a credible criminal case that would have stood up to get a conviction in court– plus he denied it 100%, the exact degree of certainty she had about him being the attacker.  A nothingburger!   No need to even look for corroboration, let’s vote!

The issue as she testified was not about making a criminal case, of course, but about shining a light on the nominee’s character, including his willingness to make many misleading and untruthful statements, and the long-time Republican operative’s possibly unjudicial temperament.   Once the nominee denied it all, and the issue was reframed that her testimony didn’t rise to the level needed for a criminal conviction, all that was left to the nominee was to demonstrate his innocence and his judicial temperament.   That he did neither, outside of indignant conspiracy-bashing 100% denials, did nothing to contradict even the reframed story. And, of course, because it was 51-49, no story was actually even required.   Yet we are left with a potent right wing talking point now, good enough for their base, about the Democrats’ self-serving “abandonment of the presumption of innocence.” Their guy was, as always, the only victim here.

Christine Blasey Ford is, absolutely, in the minds of millions, ‘collateral damage’.   You can see right wing women on youTube picking apart her facial expressions as she awaited her public ordeal, about to relive the trauma on live TV– “she involuntarily opened and shut her mouth twice, clear indication that she’s preparing to lie”.   Right wing women jumped on this with both feet, apparently.

My thought was that we should make her name part of a rallying cry to mobilize voters in the upcoming elections.   Make her sacrifice mean something politically, was my thought.   It was this absurd idea I was toying with, in trying to think up ways to support the opposition in the crucial upcoming elections, that caused my friend to try to straighten me out.

I’d described to him how, immediately after she testified, Republicans, including the crew at Fox, were worriedly questioning whether Kavanaugh could survive this totally believable and very damaging testimony.   There was a short period when it appeared that a brave citizen might have been able to stop a political gang bang in progress.  In spite of everything, in spite of 51-49, when they broke for lunch, it appeared the nominee was in big trouble.   Fox was worried and so, reportedly, was the president.

After a long lunch break and presumably a hurried war council, the nomination was saved by angry counter-accusations during which Blasey Ford’s credible allegations, although barely even referred to, were strongly shouted down by one Republican man after another, denounced as part of an orchestrated political hit funded, according to these angry partisans, by millions of dollars from rich liberals. A series of loudly sounding charred pots and kettles, talking about how black the motives of their unprincipled opponents were.  A draw, decided 51-49 (50-48 in the end).

My friend, by not watching the drama as it unfolded and before it came to its preordained conclusion, had no trouble dismissing Blasey Ford as anything but the latest example of another innocent, decent person burned up by the ruthless application of opportunistic partisan politics.    Having seen the proceedings, I believe her name, properly invoked, could be a powerful political rallying cry, get many otherwise apathetic, resigned people to the polls for midterm elections that are typically voted in by only the tiniest slice of our electorate, decided by handfuls of votes. 

I don’t have the phrase yet, and even if I did, I have no way to reach anyone with my ideas.  A few friends might think it a good phrase, if could I coin it pithily, present it winningly, and that would be that. On the other hand, we need to use every persuasive technique at our disposal to change the outcome of enough state elections to return subpoena power to the opposition party.   A 51-49 Senate majority is hardly the expression of democracy that full investigations into widespread government wrong-doing is.   

How is it that a woman can face death threats (ongoing we hear) to testify credibly about a traumatic attack that has tortured her anew since her long ago prep school sexual assaulter was put on the short list to be one of the nine most powerful people in the country, and be effectively shouted down by enraged partisan men ignoring the allegations entirely, and that is the end of it?   I know, I know, 51-49.

But does that inevitable ‘collateral damage’ apply to any woman who comes forward and testifies against a powerful man as credibly as Blasey Ford did?   Collateral damage, sister, if the guy is as connected and powerful as this good, God-fearing Jesuit prep school graduate.    The Jesuits disowned him in their national weekly, but who the hell are they, anyway?  A bunch of self-righteous partisan traitors, if the prevailing story, in all of its many contradictory wrinkles, is to be believed.

We tell the stories we need to tell, privately and publicly.  It is up to fair-minded people of good will to decide which stories are more believable than others.  My own story, for example, is a long tale of seemingly willful refusal to succeed.   I tell it differently, of course, bringing integrity and other fantastic notions into it, but there is a powerful case to be made that I am a deluded, judgmental, viciously opinionated loser who can’t even write half as well as I believe I can.   Luckily for me, it’s not up to me to convince anyone about anything.  

 

Silence!

I learned young, in my cells, the truth that the opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.   Whenever something scary or painful happened to me or my sister, something that cried out for discussion in the home I grew up in, silence was imposed.   “You have to respect my right to ignore your pain,” was my father’s position.   He actually said as much to me explicitly, when we were both adults.    He had his own terrible pain, clearly, which made him very uncomfortable in these situations.    Why did I have to respect his silence?   I lived in his house, he bought me my clothes, my food and everything else.   I suppose that was how his logic worked, though it applied long after the childhood rationale was gone and he’d regret it all bitterly as he was dying.    

Silence is a prerogative of power.   If you have the power, you simply sit, lips pressed together, a silent “fuck you” the most irrefutable response to anything you don’t feel  like talking about, for any reason or no real reason.   That’s power.  Ask the powerful nominee a question he doesn’t want to answer.  He has already spent hours strategizing with the lawyers of the man who nominated him, has vast experience in this process himself as legal advisor on such nominations to a past president.   He is asked a question he doesn’t want to answer.  Clamps his lips together, stares at the questioner with undisguised hostility, knowing he can eventually run out the game clock.  “My answer, sir, is a loud, silent FUCK YOU!” he glares, mouth constricted to the size of a tightly clenched sphincter.

If a powerless person is sexually assaulted in the woods, a hand clamped over her mouth, and there is nobody there to hear her muffled protests– was there a sexual assault?   Come on.   Is this even a question?  

The Constitution was largely silent on the question of slavery.  To many of those who did not immensely profit from the “Peculiar Institution”, chattel slavery was an abomination.  For the rest a virulent racism was encouraged, so they didn’t care about the slaves.  It would not do to enshrine slavery too explicitly in the liberty-granting blueprint for republican democracy written by men who believed that all men were created equal, endowed by their creator with certain unalienable human rights and so forth.  Lawyers are geniuses of this kind of thing, inserting the devilish, controlling details between two commas, bland as all get out.   “… such persons as any of the states now existing shall think proper to admit…” [1]  yeah, there we go– the constitutional basis for the Fugitive Slave Act is authorized by an equally innocuous-sounding clause.  Read the Constitution, it’s not long.  See if you can find the three discrete, discreet phrases making slavery as lawful as anything else a landed white man had a right to.  As a law student it took me a long time to find all three.

Silence!  Those who would be tyrants must become masters of this.   Speaking with a definitive, uncontradictable voice is only possible when no contradiction is allowed.   First thing you do, silence all the investigative journalists.  Then the lawyers of the opposition.   Once these troublesome elements are dealt with, the sailing is much smoother for a tyrant.  Of course, “tyrant” is such a judgmental word.   Can’t we just say Leader?   Or Winner?  

Silence!  Your right to be heard is limited by my right not to hear you, fucker.  If you can make yourself heard, go right ahead.   Let me just put on my state-of-the-art noise canceling headphones and my sleep blinders, ah, that’s much better.  Alone with my own thoughts.   Among them, no thought of taking off my blinders and deafeners.   Scream away in your victimhood, assholes, it’s so much faint white noise to me.

Silence, while sometimes the best response when tempers are hot, more often than not benefits the powerful and the guilty.   The most important single thing required for an unjust scheme to  succeed, without adverse consequences for the hatchers, for any crime to be committed with impunity, is silence.   Silence is golden, literally.

Irrelevant Logic

Advocates for Brett Kavanaugh felt great urgency to get him on the Supreme Court as quickly as possible, for many reasons.    Delay would only allow for more and more basic and uncomfortable questions to be asked, more people willing to testify against him to come forward.   Our brazen president decided to double down [1], have the nominee brazen it out, short delay for very limited, top secret investigation — for the optics of transparency and fairness — then immediate vote and we win.

An exercise in logic for all you non-partisans out there:

Democrats and Republicans alike found Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony credible, and nobody who spoke publicly on either side said they didn’t believe her story, though Republicans were reticent about one particular detail, which was neither corroborated nor disproved by the limited FBI probe.   To a man, the men on the Senate Judiciary Committee who spoke publicly said they believed Blasey Ford’s testimony.   They would have sounded like liars, and insensitive, morally tone-deaf  cads, if they had claimed not to believe her, since she did come across as truthful.  

Keep that thought in mind — credible testimony.  

Now keep this thought in mind:  Blasey Ford’s testimony was, at the same time, part of an orchestrated political hit, a calculated partisan smear against this fine, highly qualified nominee, as the impeccable nominee himself and the indignant Republican men of the Committee all claimed .

Logic?   Truthful, yes, but a smear.  In the end: a wash.  Although, logically, she could not have been testifying truthfully and, at the same time,  been part of a vicious partisan smear against an innocent man.

Basic logic is often collateral damage in our zero-sum post-fact media spin world.  In any case, logic is irrelevant in modern political interpretive dance.

That said, it is important, as a democratic corrective, that Democrats and Independents take the House in the upcoming midterms.   Progressives on the House Judiciary Committee have already informed the president that, once they have subpoena power back, they intend to examine what appears to be Kavanaugh’s untruthfulness under oath during his recent confirmation hearings and his testimony before being confirmed for the federal bench more than a decade ago.    That is the only picture that gives me any solace in this dark moment for the silenced majority, a real investigation into the truthfulness of this smug, petulant, entitled zealot fuck.

 

 

[1] One commentator noted that he was “tripling down” in this case.   This is a characteristic move of our zero-sum winner-in-chief.

Frontier Justice

Murderous violence has often been used to settle issues.   Heretics– burn them at the stake, for the love of God!    Those who publicly oppose what they feel to be injustice– hang a few from lamp posts, the rest will get the message. Most humans are not heroic.   A few brave men who resist enslavement?  No problem, just shoot the first couple who step up, the rest of them will quickly calm down.   Violence is necessary to maintain an institution like slavery, there is simply no other way to enslave masses of people.   Thus it has always been, the status quo enforcing the irresistibility of its rights with deadly force.   In America this violence is sometimes called “frontier justice”, which conjures the image of a “necktie party” in the violent old West, or in the former Confederacy, you know, a group of men running down and stringing up some varmint for one reason or another.

My father, a man brutalized as a young boy early and often, had a dark sense of humor that sometimes bordered on the sadistic.  He smiled as he recounted the story to my young sister and me of an old time Texas judge who sometimes let murderers off the hook but always ordered horse thieves hanged by the neck until dead.   “There are some men,” the judge explained, “who need killing because they are evil.   If you kill one of these men, you are actually performing a public service by ridding the world of them.  When you kill a man who needs killing, I cannot condemn you as a murderer.  On the other hand, I never saw a horse that needed stealing.”  My father chuckled after he related the judge’s witty explanation of his folksy ways.

“Guilty!”  Bang the gavel, drop the mic, a lunger into the spittoon, pour a round of drinks, boys, and then, after lunch when it cools off a bit out there, let’s string up this Negro horse thief on the run from his rightful owner.   Yee hah!  (Unlikely as this particular scenario is, an American judge as principled as this one would not confiscate somebody’s personal property without due process of law.  The slave would be returned to the master. Hanging another man’s rightful property would be theft.  Only a free horse thief was fair game for hanging.)

In the United States today, physical violence is no longer the first response to every threat.   You can achieve a lot just by destroying a career, or using a protracted lawsuit to bankrupt somebody.  It is sometimes referred to, if done thoroughly enough, as ‘economic capital punishment’.  

When Charles Koch, still a secretive man who exercised his influence in the shadows of the many organizations he founded and/or funded, got wind of the book being written by long-time New Yorker staffer Jane Mayer (Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right) he hired investigators to find dirt on her.   There apparently wasn’t much to find.  Undeterred, calls were placed by Koch operatives to the editor-in-chief of the New Yorker, seeking to make enough of a stink that Mayer would be fired.  Presumably without her full-time staff salary she’d be unable to finish her book exposing the long history of the Koch’s increasingly effective influence machine.   Also, if she’d been fired in disgrace from a well-known publication, it would be much easier to discredit her clearly vindictive revelations about people who had done her personal harm.  Win-win for Koch, and of no consequence to him if it didn’t work.   Charles Koch refers to this method of exerting leverage as “upping the transactional costs” for his opponents.

I’m thinking about this today, of course, because the most unabashedly corrupt president of our lifetimes has just hastily placed a second corporatist partisan on the Supreme Court.   This one is an actual strident right wing zealot with a questionable background that should disqualify him.   More immediately,  his present day willingness to lie under oath, about things large and small, should make him ineligible for appointment. Not to mention the supremely un-judicial way he hysterically blamed a well-funded liberal conspiracy for old charges of sexual assault being credibly made against him by a reluctant victim.   During the course of reading a written partisan screed he also excoriated shameless liberals for forcing a vulnerable victim of sexual assault to come forward, against her will, thus ‘defending’ her.   If a piece of shit could talk, he’d sound like Brett.  Other Supreme Court judges may have been as nakedly partisan as Kavanugh, but all others had, at least, the skill to hide their zealotry.

I’m thinking about the $15,000,000 that we know about, in perfectly legal “dark money”, that paid for ads promoting this good Christian family man as a well qualified, impartial and independent judge.   Why bother marketing this particular highly divisive nominee of our highly divisive president to the public?   You have the votes to confirm him, why spend millions on ads to convince the public that he is not, in spite of what is easily seen, an angry partisan and clearly not an impartial and independent anything?   The public has no say in his selection, why spend the millions?

Well, the millions spent on ads probably had some effect.  Americans according to a recent poll disapprove of Kavanaugh only 50%-45%, with five percent apparently having no opinion on the matter.   This high rate of disapproval of a Supreme Court nominee is unprecedented, but think of how much worse it might be without the ads.  It would certainly be worse if there hadn’t been the fawning nationally televised interview on Fox right before the resumed hearings when Christine Blasey Ford testified and Kavanaugh repeatedly choked up about the character assassination he was being subjected to.  

That Fox interview was set up by Trump’s communications director, Bill Shine, former Fox executive, former defender of his boss Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly and other men at Fox who paid off women they sexually abused.   Imagine how much worse those numbers would have been if the ads hadn’t run, if Kavanaugh himself had not blandly admitted, in a self-promoting op-ed that ran in Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal on the eve of the final vote, that, sure he was emotional at the hearing, may have said things that he wouldn’t have otherwise said, but he’s committed to judicial impartiality and independence, if not to integrity.

The millions spent on ads?   That is less than a collective penny to the vastly wealthy donors who anonymously put up the money.  How are they allowed to secretly put up millions to influence the public that way?    Citizens United.   Free speech.  Liberty.  Unlimited liberty, that tree that must be watered with the blood of tyrants from time to time, according to the Author of Liberty, himself born very rich, richer still after marriage.  All the best Americans are born rich, all of them.  If God didn’t love you, why would he have granted you such a blessing?   The rest of the entitled poor people will hate you, sure, but that’s what haters do, wage hopeless class warfare against their betters.  Sticks and stones may break my bones.  Likewise, sputtering rants like this one– ow!   I see your righteousness, boy, and raise you one lynch mob.  What you say now, punk?  Huh?

 

Letter to Jeremy Scahill

Because I sat, utterly voiceless, like almost 300,000,000 other Americans, while the brutal farce of the preordained 51-49 Kavanaugh confirmation was grinding on like a sloppily drunk schoolboy against a girl two years younger, writing this long contemplated proposal to Jeremy Scahill is more urgent than ever.  I had to listen to the likes of David Brooks and Alan Dershowitz insisting that the credible testimony of Blasey Ford and the frustrated, emotional pouting of Kavanaugh was essentially a wash.   A handful of people read my thousands of spewed words on the subject and silently yawned.  

A person is not a writer because he or she writes for hours every day. Being able to occasionally move people with your words is touching, but ultimately, that doesn’t make you a writer.  A person is a writer only if he or she gets paid for writing and the writing is publicly disseminated.   Those are the rules and I understand that more and more clearly as the years go by.

Jeremy Scahill is a co-founding editor and the senior investigative reporter at The Intercept, a publication that describes itself this way:  

The Intercept gives its journalists the editorial freedom and legal support they need to pursue investigations that expose corruption and injustice wherever they find it and hold the powerful accountable.  source

A theme Scahill returns to again and again is historical context.  I salute him for this, and will propose writing a piece from time to time providing historical context, legal context.  Jeremy recently gave an excellent contextual introduction to a discussion of Trump’s repudiation of the Obama-era deal with Iran.   Iran’s distrust for America has direct and hideous historical roots dating back to the CIA directed coup, during the Eisenhower administration, that removed the democratically elected president of Iran and helped install a militarily backed monarchy.   The monarch, the Shah, ruled as Persian monarchs of old did, but with an infamous modern secret police force to ensure obedience to his will.  The Shah was very reasonable about sharing his oil wealth with American oil corporations, in a way that his predecessor, who planned to nationalize Iran’s oil reserves, was not.

Scahill laid this out recently and I was grateful for the primer.  The background is important, it is the only way we can ever see things in perspective, from another point of view, and we so rarely get any background on anything.   The reasons for this are fairly obvious, nuance only complicates things for most people.    The reasons for the long war in Iraq, for example, complicated, complicated!  All you need to know is that freedom is on the march and a modern day Hitler is finally being taken out. 

I’ve been intending to contact Jeremy for a long time to confirm what I recall from his book Dirty Wars— namely, that not only were no charges ever brought against American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki before his execution by drone (this I have independently confirmed), but no evidence of any connection to Al Qu’eada or any other terrorist organization was ever produced, let alone evidence that he was involved in planning terrorist attacks, as alleged by President Obama after Al-Awlaki was executed.  

This story contrasts sharply with the unanimous public knowledge and information available about Al-Awlaki.  Every reference to Al-Awlaki to be found anywhere in print or on the internet (outside of Scahill’s excellent book), including recently at the Intercept (to my surprise and shock), identifies him as connected to Islamic terrorism, a highly placed, influential Al Qu’aeda propagandist, most sources also stating that he was directly involved in planning terrorist attacks.

Truth and context matter, particularly when the execution, without trial or even charges, of an American citizen is authorized by a Democratic president.   The current president, using the identical rationale, and citing bi-partisan precedent, can, entirely at his discretion, place any person, American or otherwise, on the enemy combatants list, the kill list, authorize the secret extrajudicial execution– charges optional.  It would be as easy for him, and, one presumes, as politically inconsequential, as shooting somebody on Fifth Avenue with the added bonus of being completely legal to do, based entirely on his say so under the bipartisan rules for our borderless, timeless War on Terrorism.   The only question is why he hasn’t used this extraordinary power against Amy Goodman and Jeremy Scahill yet (or Stephen Colbert, for that matter, though Colbert’s vast popularity might be a restraining factor).  He’s probably just too busy mocking women who’ve been sexually assaulted and attacking black athletes who protest the ongoing killing of unarmed blacks by police at the moment.  There will presumably be time to take care of his more able enemies during his second term, when all squishiness has been pressed out of American democracy.

Instead of the whole truth we are subjected to a cascade of justifications and bullshit everywhere we turn.   Lying attacks from the president are now too common to and too frequent to take note of, the partisan mendacity of the party Trump leads is the new normal.  The best hope for our survival as a democracy is fearless journalism that exposes the details of the widespread corruption in our government.  It may not be a robust hope, in a nation that rarely reads anything but the screen of their phones, while being taught to chant “lying media” at Nuremberg style rallies, but it’s our best hope.  It may be a quaint and naive notion, in our day of ‘alternative fact’, but the truth of what actually happened matters, even as the untruthful version often prevails.  It would be better, of course, if integrity was a real issue in public life, but, of course, that is hoping for a lot in a superficial, celebrity culture like ours.  So we have fearless journalism.

 Scahill’s investigative journalism has taken him to places like Afghanistan, Somalia and Yemen where he did the hard, dangerous work of talking to a variety of sources, in the government and on the ground, in his search for the truth about American foreign policy.  It turns out “freedom is on the march” is only a tiny sliver of the real story.   I want to ask him if he got additional information after Dirty Wars was published that supports the contention that Al-Awlaki was a terrorist.    

His reporting on Al-Awlaki’s long ordeal at the hands of the FBI was thorough.   The FBI’s repeated interviews found nothing about terrorism, but they turned up personally compromising material they threatened to blackmail him with if he didn’t become an FBI asset.   The FBI blackmail threat was the final straw that made him decide to leave the US.  After his arrival in Yemen he was arrested and spent a long stretch in solitary in a Yemeni prison (extended at America’s behest).   In the end his transformation from moderate American Muslim imam, the go-to Muslim for American TV interviews,  to America’s deadliest enemy who required immediate extrajudicial killing was complete.   Scahill makes the case that Al-Awlaki was strenuously exercising his First Amendment rights as an outraged American citizen and was no planner of terrorist attacks, nor did he have any known connection to that or any other terrorist group.  Still, history remembers his execution as entirely right and proper, up there with the killing of Osama Bin Laden among the triumphs of Barack Obama.

History remembers, curious phrase, particularly in an increasingly distracted nation with a rapidly shrinking attention span, driven more and more by strictly partisan rage.  We are living now in the age when the preservation of human “liberty” trumps everything else.  You are free to be very, very rich and you are free to die of malnutrition based on your poor food choices, your choice.  It’s all about liberty, so choose wisely what to do with your vast inherited fortune.

And with that, I’m pretty sure I’ve exhausted your attention span, dear reader, and so, onwards and upwards!  I’ve just noticed a link at the Intercept for submissions and proposals, I’m going to read up on what I need to do to have something considered for publication there.  (Alas, it is merely an email address– on the other hand, it gives me free rein, like the FBI recently had investigating the charges against Kavanaugh, to make my pitch!)

 

Paid for by…

These wild baboons are playing by reality TV rules.   Alpha males RULE!Screen shot 2018-10-03 at 11.13.01 PM.png

The survey’s not the point, it’s the message that this guy is tough.  The base loves every reminder they can get of how fucking tough their guy is.   Look at him.  Inspires confidence, that confident pose.   Stay on message, the media is lying, so is the evidence of your own eyes and ears watching the battling testimony.   A woman who appears sincere is no more believable than a man your party supports raging in indignant innocence.

The problem is not a cover-up and a mad rush to confirm a candidate of demonstrated bad character, and possibly worse.  The problem is tribalism, the other tribe is insane!

The real problem is the fake news, that liberal conspiracy to undermine the Leader and thwart his will. Like this fake news from the fake New York Failing Fake Times:

As the 1980s ended, Donald Trump’s big bets began to go bust. Trump Shuttle was failing to make loan payments within 15 months. The Plaza, drowning in debt, was bankrupt in four years. His Atlantic City casinos, also drowning in debt, tumbled one by one into bankruptcy.

What didn’t fail was the Trump safety net. Just as Donald Trump’s finances were crumbling, family partnerships and companies dramatically increased distributions to him and his siblings. Between 1989 and 1992, tax records show, four entities created by Fred Trump to support his children paid Donald Trump today’s equivalent of $8.3 million.

source

You decide– are you a real man (that includes you too, ladies) or are you a pencil necked freedom-hating wimp who reads old fashioned newspapers and thinks it’s real news? Take the survey!

 

The Plan to Seize Total Political Control in America’s Third Century

 

While angry partisan hack Brett Kavanaugh snarls about the vast, vindictive, well-funded Left Wing conspiracy conducted on behalf of the Clintons, the people whose plan to put a permanent corporatist majority on the Supreme Court is likely about to come true are laughing into their cocktails.   They’re not laughing at Kavanaugh’s childish performance, that truly doesn’t matter.   They’re laughing in the giddy realization that their sixty year long game is finally bearing such wonderful fruits.  With the beautifully orchestrated 80,000 vote Electoral College victory of a supremely malleable vain, wealthy imbecile and the appointment of their picks for the federal courts that decide what’s constitutional and what’s not, these freedom loving old fucks can finally die in peace, leaving vast, untaxed fortunes to their liberty loving offspring.

 The Left Wing Conspiracy Kavanaugh fulminated against the other day during his tearful denials of sexual abuse alleged against him brought us exactly one president: Bill Clinton.   Clinton moved his Democratic party quite a bit to the right in order to win approval and a second term.   “Our first black president” is as often called the “greatest Republican president of the 20th Century”, and there is a strong argument to be made for that second proposition.   He signed an anti-crime bill that wildly accelerated America’s mass incarceration crisis (for the poor, the wealthy are doing well with privatized prison stock, thank you). He signed off on the repeal of Glass-Steagall, a law put into effect during the Depression to prevent the next massive, speculation-fueled economic disaster, a law that had worked well for 66 years. Within eight years of its repeal, the dismantling of the wall between risky financial investment and government insured consumer banking brought about a vast, predictable economic catastrophe (again, for the middle class and poor– for the already rich, it turned out to be a boon, go figure!). Clinton “reformed” welfare.   He told homosexuals that as long as they keep their mouths shut, they could stay in the military.  His health care plan died on the drawing board.   A real liberal firebrand, Mr. Clinton.  In addition, recall the army of vitriolic enemies who emerged to make names for themselves fighting Clinton’s tyranny and immorality– Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich and a young Brett Kavanaugh among them.

On the far right, the once lunatic fringe has conducted a brilliant long game, learning from their mistakes, perfecting the uses of a public influence machine with many moving parts to normalize their extreme and unpopular views, eventually capturing the Republican party.   By lunatic fringe I mean the founders of the radical right John Birch Society.  Not surprisingly, the fire under these very rich boys was set by the 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Bd. of Education, ruling that the former Confederacy’s “separate but equal” racial segregation of schools (it’s done nationwide, didn’t mean to malign the now solidly Republican southland) was in fact an unconstitutional denial of equal rights and equal protection under the law. The history of “massive resistance” to this belated attempt to enforce the constitutional amendments made to extend equal protection to former slaves and their descendants is a long and ugly one, and ongoing.

In 1958 this small group of very wealthy men, including Robert Welch, maker of Sugar Babies, and Fred Koch, father of the infamous Koch Brothers, organized as the Birchers, sought to fight back against what they felt was federal government overreach.   Their political descendants would make a move toward mainstream respectability by morphing into the Libertarian party, a group that embraces American liberty and opposes all “government coercion”.   The government, they argue, may not coerce integration, segregation or anything else.  The government is, and must always be, merely a guarantor of personal liberty, the only truly precious human value: the right to choose.    

The comical aspect of this assertion was lost on these serious, angry white men, threatened at the very core of their autonomy.  There was nothing funny about what was at stake.  A rich man’s right to choose what to do with his own goddamned money is the only value government should protect.   The rest of you motherfuckers are free to make any choices you like about your own money, and we will defend your right to do that, just don’t ask the government to do anything else for you fucking parasites.

Among these rich guys were some brilliant men, including autocratic Charles Koch, an engineer who used his skill, and some of the reported three hundred million inherited from his father, to vastly increase the profitability of his many family businesses, and his political influence.  They understood they were playing a long game, had to build a lot of infrastructure, institutions that could bring about the endgame they were seeking: permanent freedom, for everyone, from all government interference. It was, as they understood it, tyranny for the government to penalize the wealthy for the benefit of the poor and the useless.  Why should rich people be forced to pay for something they got no benefit from?   It was economically illogical, morally wrong.

The closest to the mainstream these forces ever came, until recent years, was Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater.   He espoused many of their core beliefs.  He lost badly in 1964, to a liberal who would betray the powerful men of the South by passing laws to protect the rights of blacks and poor whites, including the goddamned Voting Rights Act– a deadly threat to those wealthy men who had always ruled the South–  give low cost government-subsidized health care to old people, use the federal government’s newly expanded powers to wage a senseless and futile war on poverty.  

These rich Libertarians soldiered on.  In the mid-1970s they founded their first “think tank”, the Cato Institute.  Funded by Charles Koch, we can probably date their movement’s present day power to this move as much as to any other single choice made in the long course of their ascendance.  Koch realized they must create institutions that could train and graduate a cadre of dependable warriors, men who would not waver, who could forcibly argue their case and withstand the public tyranny of popular democracy.    He learned this lesson from the strategy of Vladimir Lenin, ironically enough. Lenin succeeded in toppling the Czar by creating a well-organized leadership cadre and having a small army of dedicated, loyal believers in place to seize power all over Russia.

The Libertarians ran David Koch as their vice presidential candidate in 1980.    They employed a loophole in the then campaign finance laws — no limit on what a vice presidential candidate could spend of his own money– allowing the Koch network to basically fund the campaign themselves.    Koch and his running mate garnered a mere 1% in the national election.   An accurate reflection of the percentage of Americans who would actually benefit from their program.

Realizing the massive unpopularity of their views, they began relying as much on extra-electoral power as on influencing democratic elections. The real power in America, they realized, is the Supreme Court, final, unappealable arbiters of the law.  The best way to change the hearts and minds of Americans is by taking over every state government in the country.   The state houses, they understood, were the minor leagues for national politicians.   It behooved them to cultivate a constantly replenishing network of up and coming true believers.   For years they focused their electoral strategies on the state level, where there were also, conveniently, far fewer restrictions on how much they could spend to influence these races.

The rest of their story has become more well-known and open in recent years, their confidence about taking their bows publicly has come with their great successes.    They created, among an army of influential organizations, a corporate-legislative partnership called ALEC, active in most states. ALEC provides legislators with model laws they can sponsor, written by legal academics at conservative Think Tanks.   “Stand Your Ground”, the state law that allows someone with a reasonable fear to shoot to kill anywhere he is with his gun, is an ALEC law.  So are laws placing restrictions on voters likely to oppose their carefully vetted candidates.  Many states have voter restriction laws that have been rendered constitutionally inoffensive by a recent Supreme Court decision declaring the racism that formerly motivated such restrictions definitively dead in the US, as shown by the election of a popular black president.  The Court ruled that there is no longer a need for the federal government to restrict or even scrutinize state laws that tend to disenfranchise particular kinds of voters.

When Barack Obama became America’s second black president, the Koch network immediately organized and funded the spontaneous outpouring of popular rage against him, the “grassroots” Tea Party.   In the midterms they spent a fortune primarying moderate Republicans out of office in Congressional elections.   The new, radical Tea Party Congress was tireless in its obstruction of anything Obama proposed, even going so far as shutting down the government during a showdown with the president.   After Citizens United, their corporate avatars were legally allowed to spend as much money as they wanted to get their candidates elected, this unlimited spending was deemed a corporate “person’s” “free speech”.   Finally, a Supreme Court that would advance the rights of the persecuted “persons” who’d been the real victims all along, the eternal, legally-created vampires known as corporations.

These extreme and unpopular right wing views have now influenced several generations of academics, lawyers, and politicians, as well as an industry of self-proclaimed pundits.   Their views have been tirelessly promoted and are now embraced by about a third of average Americans, who tend to vote in a block for politicians who spout these populist sounding principles.   These extremely wealthy men and their corporations are closer than ever before to actually achieving their dream of permanently ending all “government coercion”.  

Who is the government, and who are the goddamned scientists of the world, to say that lucrative corporations are destroying the earth, regulate their profits in the name of trying to slow catastrophic climate change?   A well-funded, cleverly run decades-long campaign has transformed a good proportion of Americans, values voters, into sophisticated “climate skeptics” who doubt the veracity of the world’s scientists and the cynical politicians who cite them, men and women who don’t really care about the earth but want to kill jobs and punish the job creators.  Parasites.  Fucking parasites, all of you.

Welcome to the Supreme Court, Brett, and never be ashamed to embrace the radical values that will protect liberty, free Americans from the tyranny of government coercion and make America great again.

Suggested readings:

Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, by Jane Mayer

Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America by Nancy MacLean 

 

Death Threats

“Work hard, play hard, pray hard, but most of all, be a good guy!” is the motto of Mater Dei, the independent Catholic school Brett Kavanaugh attended as a boy before moving on to Georgetown Prep in ninth grade.   It is a good motto.  If you do all those things, especially the last one, you will be a credit to your loved ones and a gift to your community.     

Georgetown Prep is a Jesuit school (founded in 1789) and if you spend some time on their website you will learn a little bit about the guiding philosophy of the Jesuits. The principles of Ignatian spirituality seem simple and straightforward.  If you believe that God is in every person you meet, you will treat every precious soul you encounter in the gentlest possible way.  Every interaction is a chance to reaffirm your connection with your creator.   I wish, based solely on the beautiful ideas I read under Georgetown Prep’s Spiritual Life tab, that the world operated that way, by the admirably high principles of Ignatius of Loyola. [1]  

I write this on the holiest day of the Jewish year, Yom Kippur.  God is up there with his unfathomably gigantic Book of Life, pondering the fate each of us deserve for the coming year, according to the tradition.   On this day Jews all over the world fast, many also gather in temples, trembling and praying.    I don’t have much use for many parts of the tradition, or prayer, and most of the 613 commandments supposedly ordered by God leave me cold, as do the jealousy and the over-the-top rages of our All-Merciful God expressed in the problematic Good Book.   There is an essence of my spiritual heritage that I take very seriously:  trying to make amends when I know I have caused harm and identifying with the weak, the poor, the powerless, the persecuted.  

The larger point, of course, is that it is very easy for us humans to speak words, to write them, to array them beautifully, powerfully, to argue our most cherished beliefs using them.   The much harder thing is how you actually put those beliefs into action.   No society, no intimate club or family, for that matter, ever boasts of being founded on principles of love, generosity, hypocrisy, secrecy and duplicity.   Everyone loves love, and generosity is a beautiful thing.   The devil, however, lives in the details, the devil loves him some details.  Those sticky details we generally do not discuss, as we extoll the things we love and believe in, steer away from things that stir us unpleasantly.  

Does anything about the beauty of Ignatian principles change if we learn that Ignatius meant that only people who have accepted the divinity of Jesus Christ are imbued with the divine spirit?    What was the role of the early Jesuits, if any, in the infamous Spanish Inquisition?   

On the other hand, Jesuits are known for their intellectual rigor and a commitment to justice.  How can you not want to do justice if you see the spark of God in every person you meet?  

I don’t hold Brett Kavanaugh to the standards of St. Ignatius of Loyola, whatever those impossibly high standards for canonization may have been.   We are all people, with needs, wants, flaws.  I don’t even want to bring the entitled Mr. Kavanaugh into the conversation at all today, or any day.   I dislike his rigid, right-wing partisanship.  I despise his smug evasiveness, the way he appears to think he’s the smartest man in the room.  I think he is pretty clearly, in the vernacular, a piece of shit as a spiritual person, at the very least a hypocrite (based on his rulings and the tiny fraction of his writings we’ve seen).   It appears to me he learned nothing from the Jesuits but making arguments.  But that is between him and Jesus, and not my place to even opine about.

But you are a federal judge, after attending all the finest schools money can buy, after membership in the right wing Federalist Society, after being an extreme partisan lawyer working to impeach and convict a so-called liberal president for lying about a blow job, then a partisan lawyer advising the Bush/Cheney White House during some troubling years of torture, kidnapping, illegal wiretapping, extrajudicial murder, transfer of wealth to the wealthiest,  attempts to shred the social safety net, initiation of an endless, borderless war against those, everywhere, who hate our freedom, and as a federal judge. appointed by the extremists you worked for, you rule, in virtually every case, for the rights of the powerful and against the rights of the weak.  Not very goddamned Christian of you, I’d say.

Donald Trump’s people figured out exactly which districts they needed to win to prevail in the Electoral College.  They got those crucial districts, every one of them.   The number of votes, maybe 100,000 (he won the 16 electors of Michigan by a whopping 10,740 perfectly placed votes, a 0.23% margin), don’t matter, he won, even if he also lost nationally by nearly 3,000,000 votes.  Fair and square, he won fair and square under our current federal election rules, let’s even stipulate to that.   In office Trump has appeared to be mostly a jackass, OK, always a jackass.  Not only tone deaf and morally retarded, but a compulsive liar who only seems comfortable when bragging outrageously to adoring campaign rally crowds.  He can’t help himself.

As long as Trump is in office doing their bidding the lunatic fringe of the Republican Party, the true believers, will ride that donkey as far as he will take them.  He has already delivered uber-conservative Justice for Life Neil Gorsuch (Georgetown Prep, class of ’85 — Kavanaugh, class of ’83), appointed a record number of other Federalist Society endorsed federal judges, rammed through a generous tax break for our nation’s wealthiest.  The rest of the Republicans will ride him hard, as far as he goes before hubris blows him up.   Our politicians are not known for showing great integrity, or any devotion to principles higher than staying in office, sad to say. 

The Koch Brothers understand the nature of our democratic system and have been playing a long game, with no expense spared to tilt the playing field the way it advantages them most to tilt it.  If you control all state governments and the Supreme Court, the small group that decides what is legal and what is illegal as far as the law of the land, that’s pretty much checkmate.

If you don’t believe that, look at the aftermath of the Civil War.   Amendments were added to change our constitution from one that legally protected the rights of slaveholders to one much closer to the inspiring words of the Author of Liberty (and father of several mulatto slaves) that this nation was “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”  Endowed by our creator, of course, with unalienable rights and so on.   The most important of the three wartime amendments, the Fourteenth, was intended to extend the protections of the federal government to the citizens of every state, particularly in the former slave states that had recently taken up arms against the United States.  In other words, the 14th amendment was enacted to make sure no state could infringe anyone’s rights as an American citizen.   The federal government would intervene to protect those rights, under laws made pursuant to the 14th Amendment.

Enter the Supreme Court, six years after the 14th Amendment was ratified.  They made the “intent of the framers” of the Fourteenth Amendment clear in a way those framers, less than a decade earlier, could never have imagined.   For almost a century after the Supreme Court was done ruling on it, the Fourteenth Amendment was rendered useless to citizens subjected to every kind of indignity and brutality under cover of state law.  During the century the 14th amendment was in a judicially induced coma for individuals, it was used, exclusively, by corporations, to establish their rights as persons, just as important in our democracy (to the Robber Barons and their impeccable ilk) as those unvindicatable rights of the many anonymous persons who were being lynched, terrorized, paid unfair wages, re-enslaved under state law, etc.  

The Supreme Court gets the last word, and that word can last for a hundred years before it is corrected, generations later, by activists backed by brilliant and dogged lawyers who successfully fight to overturn precedent.

The Supreme Court gets the unappealable last word in our democratic scheme. An openly anti-democratic president is attempting to pack the court with his extreme choices before the curtain comes down on his corrupt administration.   Trump got into office with glib promises to make everybody’s head spin about how much we are all winning.   Things are not looking great for the persecuted billionaire populist at the moment, people close to him have been disloyally turning on him during a long witch hunt by a disloyal Republican named Mueller.  There is no time to waste, not a penny of political capital to be squandered.  He needs to get this second Supreme Court appointment done in record time, before the midterms that his party could lose bigly.  Getting a second extreme right wing judge on to the Supreme Court would do wonders for energizing his base, making their heads spin.

The confirmation hearing for Kavanaugh was arranged with extreme haste, scheduled for the first available slot.  A ridiculous and unprecedented 90% of Kavanaugh’s documents were not given to the Judiciary Committee for inspection. There were probably things in there better for the Committee not to see before questioning him, before voting to confirm him.   42,000 pages of his documents were made available to the Committee three hours before the hurried hearings began (technically delivered the evening before, they took many hours to download on government servers).  The main thing was to confirm him fast.

Now a woman steps forward, reluctantly but bravely it seems, to testify that the prep school aged Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her.  Her claim appears to be credible, it did not come up only recently, she has been suffering with the traumatic memory for some time, spoke to a marriage counselor about it in 2012.  Immediately after the woman came forward a letter signed by 65 women who encountered Kavanaugh when he was at the all boys prep school appeared on the judicial committee’s website, praising his sterling character, his great respect for women, how unthinkable it is that he might ever have tried to rape anyone.  You can read that letter now, the link is at the bottom of this list of public documents on Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination  (go to September 7 for the Kavanaugh list, Letters Received, the last one is this letter).

There is nothing in it for Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, except to prevent a man of questionable character, and perfect extreme right wing bona fides from being appointed to the highest court for life.   A Supreme Court Justice who will, among other things, provide the deciding vote to overturn the federal right of a woman to choose what to do about her pregnancy, from making unappealable right wing decisions on the Supreme Court for the rest of her lifetime.   Think of the 14th Amendment.  Every civil rights case in the country since 1963 has been brought under a law enacted to enforce the 14th Amendment, but for the previous ninety years– y’all shit out of luck, losers.

Not every young man has tried to rape someone, it takes a certain type, even if he is stumbling drunk.   The percentage of such types may be slightly higher in elite private schools, perhaps, where such youthful indiscretions are dealt with discreetly in-house, if they ever come up at all, to preserve the young man’s options later in life, but I don’t believe even among students of our finest schools most young men at some point attempt rape.  It takes a special kind of boy, who grows into a certain kind of man.  A dick.

The Republicans on the Judiciary Committee insist they are being incredibly fair to the woman who claims she was victimized so many years ago by a young would-be rapist of sterling character.   They’ve set up an immediate session for her to give her sworn testimony against the sworn rebuttal of the next Justice of the Supreme Court.   They are being very generous, they claim, letting her immediately confront her alleged victimizer, and doing it in a way that won’t unfairly hurt the man’s chances of being immediately confirmed before the midterms.  They are certainly being generous, the 85 year old asshole chairman, Chuck Chuck Bobuck Grassley and the equally hoary 84 year-old Orin Hatch, with their intimidation, bullying and ultimatum making.

Recall, the other day these same Republican toadies were refusing to make Kavanaugh answer questions about the alleged sexual assault under oath.  Then, in the interest of every appearance of fairness they said both the alleged victim and the alleged assaulter would both be under oath, on the earliest possible date, Monday, September 24, as long as she responds in full, with her complete written testimony, by 10 a.m September 21.  Fair is fair.  Need to keep this fine Christian’s confirmation on schedule, we’re on a tight schedule as the president may need another ally on the high court, an undefeatable block of right wingers not subject to appeal or being voted out, very soon, to rule in his favor on his potential troubles..

Meantime Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s lawyers have made the next move in the chess game.   They are demanding an FBI investigation to have an independent opinion on the credibility of Dr. Ford’s accusation.  This is exactly what Hatch and Grassley publicly endorsed in the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas situation– a required FBI investigation, something that apparently would take only a few days.   Trump announced blandly that the FBI doesn’t do these kinds of investigations, “they don’t do that, that’s not what they do”.  Turns out he was talking out of his ass.  The FBI regularly does these kinds of background investigations, they generally take only a few days.   The current chairman of the committee said loudly in 1991 that this was the only proper way to conduct a hearing of this sort, after an FBI investigation.  But things have changed for the doddering old fuck, now there is tremendous urgency to get the finest man ever nominated for the Supreme Court immediately into his new robes.

SO UNFAIR!   If Trump doesn’t get Kavanaugh in there by the midterms, he will lose face, a lot of political capital, his base will be deflated instead of energized right before this crucial election that could decide his fate, the fate of what he was sent to Washington to do.  So fucking unfair!  Fake news, fake accusers, fake outrage, fake hypocrisy, fake fakeness!!   Amonynous, really, an ominous cowardice.

Of course, living in the violent charnel house that is now the USA, Dr. Ford has predictably  received credible death threats from violent partisan morons.  Her family had to move out of their house, is now in hiding.  But fair is fair, you come to the Senate first thing Monday morning, Dr. Ford, and we’ll see who the country believes in a high-pressure, nationally televised swearing contest, you, the so-called victim of long ago attempted drunken sexual violence or the wonderful family man, girl’s basketball couch and believer in Christian and American values, the defender of all that is holy and good, the impeccably pedigreed Brett Kavanaugh.

They have to get this confirmation done before anything else bad happens in the days leading up to the fast approaching midterms.   Their slim majority in Congress could be washed away in this shit storm midterm and who can say how much mortal peril America’s fetuses would be in then, if Democrats controlled the Senate, without another true believer on the Court?!   What kind of accuser is this, who needs some kind of external assurance of a fair chance to be heard before she will rush across the country to Washington D.C. go toe to toe, on live national television, with someone poised to be one of the most powerful men in America?!!   HOW DARE SHE.

When Anita Hill took the stand to accuse Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment, Thomas was expected to receive ninety confirmation votes in the Senate.  The men on the Senate Judiciary Committee (all men) treated Anita Hill very badly, accused her of erotomania, treated her as a hostile witness.  In the end, even after the shitshow of dickish behavior by the Committee toward Anita Hill, Thomas was confirmed 52-48, the smallest margin for a Supreme Court nominee in a century.  

Today there are several women on the Judiciary Committee (all Democrats) and the questioning of Christine Blasey Ford, should it take place under these artificially pressurized terms, will have a much different tone than the hostility Anita Hill faced.  Donald Trump can get away with his in-your-face misogyny, people expect it from him, it’s his brand, he’s a pig (and a very useful idiot, in the short run, to the billionaires who made sure he won the Electoral College).   Chuck Grassley, Orin Snatch and John Cornyn will get no such pass if they try to act like dicks, it won’t play well, except to the 38% who think Trump is doing a heck of a job.  

There are six Republican Senators in the Senate today (though we only hear of two, Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, the rest are from the former Confederacy, Nebraska and Iowa, and so impervious to moral suasion it would appear).  If only two or three of them are moved by the testimony of a woman almost raped by an entitled preppie now about to assume the nation’s most powerful lifetime post, deciding what rights women will have… well, you can do the math.  

I am looking forward to the next scene in this soap opera.  I think these pious men of the right, and the women who support them, may be overstepping here in this #metoo moment.  I am hoping Christine Blasey Ford and her lawyers make the right chess moves and keep this partisan hack off the Supreme Court.  If she does, Dr. Blasey Ford will be remembered as a national hero.   A live national confrontation about character and decency is our only hope, at this perilous moment for our democracy.

 

 

[1]  What little I just learned about this sainted 16th century leader of a Catholic society created to defend the Pope’s infallibility contained not a shred of the spiritual legacy discussed on the Georgetown Prep website, but that’s a secular version for you.   What to make of this picture?   The man was a soldier for Christ, clearly, or… maybe not.

Ignatius_of_Loyola_(militant).jpg

Should any of the following disqualify him for sainthood, after the devoted work he later did for his Lord?

As a young man Íñigo had a great love for military exercises as well as a tremendous desire for fame. He framed his life around the stories of El Cid, the knights of Camelot, and the Song of Roland.[12] He joined the army at seventeen, and according to one biographer, he strutted about “with his cape slinging open to reveal his tight-fitting hose and boots; a sword and dagger at his waist”.[13] According to another he was “a fancy dresser, an expert dancer, a womanizer, sensitive to insult, and a rough punkish swordsman who used his privileged status to escape prosecution for violent crimes committed with his priest brother at carnival time.”[14] Upon encountering a Moor who denied the divinity of Jesus, he challenged him to a duel to the death, and ran him through with his sword.[13] He dueled many other men as well.[13]

Would This Surprise You About Brett Kavanaugh?

I mean, you can look at the bland expressions on rapey mama’s boy Brett Kavanaugh’s smug potato of a face and feel you know exactly what kind of entitled, self-interested, amoral partisan, preppie, fratboy fuck the man is.  But, of course, that’s only my prejudice talking.   Now we have details from the Intercept that shed more light on the questionable character of this evasive soon-to-be unappealable jurist.  Rapey fucking mama’s boy.

Does it matter that Kavanaugh’s political and judicial mentor, a disgraced former federal judge named Alex Kozinski, the guy who set up Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court clerkship with Anthony Kennedy and showed him how the judicial appointment game is played, was forced to step down in the face of sexual harassment accusations from fifteen women?   Kozinski resigned in 2017, after decades showing mentee and close friend Brett Kavanaugh the ropes.  I think their relationship matters, because Kavanaugh is not forthcoming about their close association, seems to have lied about certain details, and because the chairman and Republicans on the Senate Judicial Committee don’t want to hear anything about it in their rush to confirm this true believer before the midterm elections. NOTHING TO SEE HERE!

I am looking forward to the hurried session to put to rest accusations that a seventeen year-old Brett Kavanaugh, along with drunken Georgetown Prep friend Mark Judge, today a popular right wing writer, held a fifteen year-old down, hand over her mouth as he attempted to get her one piece bathing suit off her.   You get the familiar chorus of indignant partisans high-mindedly defending Kavanaugh against this credibly alleged long ago showing of extremely bad character, of criminally bad manners,”who among us has not tried to rape a pretty girl when we were drunk back in high school?”

I am looking forward to the chance, no matter how remote, to see a smug, lying partisan hack with powerful friends, revealed, based on the content of his character, as the unfit piece of shit he actually is.   Particularly after reading his 2009 Law Review Article, a love letter to any future president who might be heedless and criminally inclined enough to appoint somebody like Kavanaugh to a lifetime post on the nation’s Supreme Court. 

Tendentious detail: current tuition for four years at Georgetown Prep, an exclusive Jesuit finishing school for the sons of the elite of Washington (and beyond): $148,860, exclusive of other fees.   If you board there, as many boys do, the price goes up to $241,120.    Just my hate speaking.  Nothing to see here.

1924

1924, the year my father was born, was the height of the reborn Ku Klux Klan, the Second Klan as it had sometimes called (the hateful organization took a nap until Woodrow Wilson came into office, it appears).   Klan membership reached a peak of  almost two and a half million the year my father was born, in a nation of 114 million.   One of the Klan’s pet projects, restricting immigration, was made law in the 1924 Immigration Act, then known as the Johnson-Reed Act. [1]  

Luckily for the baby who’d grow up to be my father, his mother-in-law and father-in-law had arrived from the Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union, which they referred to from lifelong habit as Russia, in 1921 and 1923.   His own mother had come over from Belarus on the eve of World War One.   Outside of those parties, and the mysterious man who was found to marry my maternal grandmother and contribute DNA to the fetus who’d grow up to become my father, everyone left behind in Europe was killed.   Without a trace.  

The closest thing to a trace I found of any of them was a reference in a New York Times travel piece to tiny fragments of crushed bones blowing from the side of a ravine on the north end of Vishnevitz.   Those were fragments of the bones of those taken to that ravine, forced to lie down and shot.   The next group was forced to lie on top of the dead and wait for their bullet.   I read, in the online Yizkor book of Vishnevitz, what happened to those poor Jews in the months leading up to their eventual slaughter that August night in 1943, any surviving members of my mother’s large family among them, some of the most horrific details I’ve ever read.   No word was ever reported about the fate of the muddy little hamlet across the Pina River from Pinsk where my father’s mother’s family was killed.  The hamlet itself left no trace on modern, or even contemporary, maps.  Like it never existed at all, except that my great uncle and my grandmother were both born and raised there.

My father’s father was never able to make a living in the teeming slum of New York’s Lower East Side in the mid 1920s.  Uncle Aren, older brother of my father’s mother, took the family up to Peekskill where he supported them.   In those years before the Great Depression hit, my father’s family was among the poorest in Peekskill.   When the stock market crashed and suddenly everyone worldwide was scrambling for jobs and food, my father’s family fortunes fell further still.

My father grew up in what he always called ‘grinding poverty’.  A poverty as unimaginable as life in that muddy hamlet south of Pinsk in the days before darkness closed in forever, as hard to truly picture as the march to the Ukrainian ravine where everyone was to be killed.   Growing up in dire, humiliating poverty left deep scars in my father’s life.   His identification with the poor and the powerless was no pose, no effort for him, it was in his blood.   That he instilled this identification with the poor and the powerless in his children strikes me as pretty remarkable, as neither my sister nor I ever experienced even a moment of want in our lives.

When FDR proposed a Second Bill of Rights, Freedom from Want was a right of American citizenship, a human right. [2]   Those who profit from poverty, which allows employers to have every advantage in the workplace, would not move one more step toward this Communistic anti-democratic freedom from want business.   Without want what kind of limp whip are you holding over the pathetic masses who have no choice but to eat the crap that is served them, in whatever portion the boss deems fit.  Shoot, we’re a country founded on slave labor and indentured service of various stripes!

In 1924 there were no Child Labor Laws, no Minimum Wage laws, no forty hour work week, no agency overseeing workplace safety, no national right of collective bargaining.  In 1930, if things had been better economically, my six year old father could have started a Dickensian life as a gainfully employed urchin.   There was no law to prevent it, until he was fourteen.   The Fair Labor Standards Act was New Deal legislation enacted in 1938. [3]  It was the first time rules were set restricting child labor, setting out a pathetically inadequate minimum wage, a forty hour work week and many other things we now take for granted.

As I dig through some of the history surrounding my father’s life it is hard not to see unsettling parallels to the world as it is today.   Immigration, and restricting it, is suddenly a popular talking point on the right.  Racism, apparently, is nothing to be ashamed of or shy about expressing as these same cynics sell the idea of Making America Great Again.    Restricting the rights of workers, with state laws like Right To Work (think “Arbeit Macht Frei“), only doing what’s right by the job creators.   Giving huge tax gifts to the wealthiest humans and corporations while millions of American children live in dire poverty and two hundred million more adults are one twist of fate away from homelessness — only fair.  Blaming immigrants for the deep troubles inflicted by America’s greediest and most ruthless on the rest of us– fair is fair.  As Groucho once ad libbed, during an argument with the Italian accented Chico, “I rest my case, restrict immigration!”

On this eve of the holiest day in the Jewish year it strikes me that my father’s life is also a reminder that racism is a very common evil.  Jews sometimes dwell on anti-Semitism, as well we might, but it is one more form of racism.  It has a venerable and twisted history, yes, it has certain features that seem unique, OK, but it is made of the same material that all racism is made of.   Fear and hatred, used by the greediest and most ruthless, to focus anger away from them and on to a people that can be bullied, menaced and, in certain emptily cathartic moments, killed.    Racism is always the same.  It is used to keep the powerless divided.   It works like a charm, better than a rabbit’s foot in the old watch pocket.

 

[1]   “The Immigration Act of 1924 limited the number of immigrants allowed entry into the United States through a national origins quota. The quota provided immigration visas to two percent of the total number of people of each nationality in the United States as of the 1890 national census. It completely excluded immigrants from Asia.”   source

[2]  The economic freedoms were the right to a decent job that provided income for food, clothing and leisure, the farmer’s right to a fair income, freedom from unfair competition and monopolies, a right to housing, medical care, social security and education.  A quaint and dreamy list, by today’s more rugged standards, proposed toward the end of FDR’s life and quietly consigned to the footnotes of history, as here.  

[3] The FLSA establishes minimum wage, overtime pay, recordkeeping, and youth employment standards affecting employees in the private sector and in Federal, State, and local governments. Covered nonexempt workers are entitled to a minimum wage of not less than $7.25 per hour effective July 24, 2009. Overtime pay at a rate not less than one and one-half times the regular rate of pay is required after 40 hours of work in a workweek.      source