Category Archives: History and Politics

Jeffery Epstein — blackmail billionaire

There were as many as 1,000 girls, in a pyramid scheme (get some of your junior high school classmates, bring ’em to Epstein’s, earn $400 each) who were sexually exploited, and harmed for life, by “financier” Jeffery Epstein over several decades. These abuse survivors are calling for release of the Epstein information the Department of Justice is hoarding. This material most likely includes the videotapes master blackmailer Epstein compiled as kompromat for shakedowns of wealthy, public men, as well as compromising photographs of adult men (Trump for one, mentioned by Michael Wolff who was shown the Polaroids by Epstein) with topless teenagers confiscated from his safe.

It could all be released today, of course, if Trump ordered it. Even after the Trump DOJ closed down the Biden DOJ’s investigation claiming there was nothing in the files to predicate further investigation. This was right after Trump’s weaponized DOJ flagged Trump’s own name thousands of times in an emergency FBI audit involving 1,000 agents working 24 hour shifts to comb through the entire file. A parliamentary trick, a discharge petition, worked, once the House was back in session, and, after months of shut downs by Trump and MAGA Mike, the House voted 427-1 yesterday, and the Senate, by unanimous consent, to release the files that Trump could order released today, without votes in the House, Senate, a veto, an override of the president’s veto, a claim that the files about the Democrat [sic] “hoax” are part of an ongoing criminal investigation into Bill Clinton and Rosie O’Donnell, and yet another emergency application to the Supreme Court.

Something I’ve been thinking about every time I hear how rich and influential “financier” Jeffrey Epstein was. You never hear about the source of Epstein’s fabulous wealth and influence. He was a high school graduate with a head for numbers, first hired as a teacher by Bill Barr’s father who ran an exclusive Manhattan private school, after Epstein lied about his education — and the charmer was kept on after the lie was exposed. Epstein’s genius appears to have been gaining access to and influence over very wealthy and influential white men, and getting large sums of money from them.

Occam’s razor — the simplest explanation is usually correct — suggests that the source of this super wealth was blackmail. Epstein was a psychopath with a well-known sexual preference for “barely legal” (in the hideous phrase of former Trump antagonist Megyn Kelly) girls around 14-15 years old, but who looked younger than their years. Every room in his various mansions was wired for sound and video. Many rich and influential men, and a few women, were his guests, friends and shot the shit with him via text, phone and while enjoying his hospitality. You connect the dots.

Cooperation with Nazi types never goes well for anybody

third in a series of consecutive daily texts to Chuck Chuck BoBuck

Senator Schumer:

Some still find it hyperbolic to compare MAGA to the Nazi party.  This critique is made by people unfamiliar with the Nazi seizure of power, the cast of characters involved and Germany’s lawless, violent lurch to Nazism.  A longtime student of the history of the Nazi rise to power (Mr. Hitler and company killed almost my entire family back in Europe) I can point to a number of reasons the comparison of the Trump administration to Hitler’s is directly on point.  

Understanding what we are facing in “MAGA” (aka GOP, John Birch Society, Kochtopus, Project 2025) demonstrates the abject futility of trying to negotiate with this type.  Only organized, unified resistance, without fractures, or compromises by ‘moderates’, the ruptures that made Weimar liberal opposition fail, can overcome the plans these hyper-motivated American fascists have been carrying out for decades.

“The Leader’s word has the force of law” (Fuhrerworte haben Gesetzenkraft) — Trump claims Article II as the complete justification for virtually all of his unlawful actions including his usurpation of Congressional powers delegated by Article I.   He has a doctrinaire 6-3 “Unitary Executive” Supreme Court that agrees with him, on an emergency basis, almost every time one of his unconstitutional, abusive assertions of power is challenged.

Trump has purged the government and civil service, replacing qualified long serving officials and experts with those who publicly profess complete loyalty to his every lie.  The Nazis made membership in the party, and proof of “Aryan blood”, requirements for practicing all professions in Germany.   A personal oath of loyalty to Hitler replaced the standard military oath.

Trump had a volume of Hitler’s collected speeches at his bedside when he was married to Ivana.  He refers to enemies as illegals, vermin, dangerously sick people, blood poisoners.   He is a racist demagogue with a thirst for killing.   Recall the lame duck rash of executions of federal death row inmates he ordered before he was dragged out of the White House kicking, screaming and stealing classified documents, after fomenting a violent attack on the Capitol to overturn the certification of an election he lost.  Consider his ongoing war crimes in the Caribbean and Pacific, extrajudicially executing “drug dealers” to provoke a war with Venezuela, his bombing of Iran, his willingness to starve millions of Americans to advance his “agenda”.  

There is also Trump’s Sprachregelung (“rules for how to properly refer to unpopular things”).   Hitler’s government prescribed what words could be used, always anodyne terms for things like “killing” “liquidation” and so on.  Here we have “efficiency”, “anti-corruption”,  “patriotism,” “drain the swamp.” “transparency,” “Democrat traitors” and so on.  These framings cover the deliberate destruction of careers, further immiserating the already challenged, increasing homelessness, desperation, violence, allowing starvation and increasing preventable medical deaths.  All desirable and useful outcomes for President Project 2025 and his dream of a rebellion by poor people and the imposition of a police state.

Project 2025 has unleashed a massive force of heavily armed ICE agents, masked, out of uniform, executing SA (Brown Shirt) street tactics against non-violent civilians.  He is spoiling for forceful reactions from protesters of these abuses, and the general precarity he has raised to almost unbearable levels, to justify a police state he controls completely.  Your vote, and a few other Democratic votes, allowed him the obscenely massive budget for this unaccountable paramilitary arm of MAGA, in the name of keeping the government open.

He is building an immense bunker under the Epstein/Marie Antoinette Ballroom after illegally demolishing the East Wing.  It’s hard not to imagine what will take place down there if democracy, we all hope, prevails over American fascism — a remake of the final scenes of that great German movie Downfall.   Hopefully he won’t set off a nuclear holocaust before he exits the scene, an option Hitler didn’t have but surely would have taken.

Joseph Goebbels (1943):   “We will go down in history as the greatest statesmen of all times or as their greatest criminals”    (Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 22)

You seem to believe that Democrats can find common ground, and bipartisanship, with American Nazis, their Congressional allies, and a dictatorial president who will not condemn praise of Hitler and “jokes” about gassing those who need killing.   As the kids used to say: WTF?

You’re in a supremely difficult no-win situation.   It is time for you to step aside as Senate minority leader and let new, bold, leadership take the reins to give us the best shot at defeating this “movement” before you and I meet in a cattle car, newly stateless and off for “resettlement” somewhere, treated with the most solicitous of sonderbehandlung in our final days.

Your constituent,

Eliot Widaen

The NY Times protects Trump, because… both sides

And, by the way, if Bill Clinton, or anyone else, got a “happy ending” massage from a fourteen year-old girl at Jeffery Epstein’s blackmail emporium, he should face the consequences. That Bubba was the greatest Republican president of the twentieth century doesn’t give him a pass for being a pervert.

But check out the NY Times, not reporting on a story that would have opened an ugly can of worms, a can recently reopened, as Trump was coming down that golden escalator or at any other time. First, a nice illustration of the Grey Lady in action.

Heather Cox Richardson:

In a 2015 email, Epstein gave tips on stories about Trump and girls to then–New York Times financial reporter Landon Thomas Jr. When others asked Thomas for stories, Epstein wrote: “Have them ask my houseman about donad [sic] almost walking through the door leaving his nose print on the glass as young women were swimming in the pool and he was so focused he walked straight into the door.” In another email, Epstein offered “photso [sic] of donald and girls in bikinis in my kitchen,” and Thomas urged: “I am serious man—for the good of the nation why not try to get some of this out there.”

But a story revealing this information did not appear in the New York Times before the 2016 presidential election or afterward. . .

. . . Despite how explosive these documents [a trove of creepy email] were, they do not appear to be the end of the story. They came from the Epstein estate, but the files from the FBI investigation into Trump have not yet been released. Whatever is still outstanding appears to be even worse than what we have seen, as evidenced by Trump’s frantic attempts to stop the discharge petition.

With the House back at work, Johnson had little choice but to swear in Grijalva. The ceremony was scheduled for 4:00.

In the hours before that deadline, the president tried to get one of the four Republican representatives who had signed the discharge petition to remove their signature. He appeared to focus on Nancy Mace (R-SC), with whom he tried to connect by phone, and Lauren Boebert (R-CO), whom he invited to meet with him in the White House Situation Room, which is equipped to prevent recording.

“CNN reported that Attorney General Pam Bondi, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, and FBI director Kash Patel joined Trump and Boebert at the meeting.”

When asked about the meeting, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters: “Doesn’t that show the level of transparency when we are willing to sit down with members of Congress and address their concerns?” For his part, Trump took to social media to call the released documents an attempt by Democrats to bring up the “Jeffrey Epstein Hoax” to deflect from “how badly they’ve done on the Shutdown, and so many other subjects.” He urged “any Republicans involved” to be “focused only on opening up our Country, and fixing the massive damage caused by the Democrats!”

source

Since then, of course, the criminally insane Dementor-in-Chief ordered his former lawyer and lobbyist for Qatar, Attorney General Pam Bondi, to open an investigation into DEMOCRATS who had connections to pedophile / sex trafficker/ blackmailer/ criminal mastermind Jefferey Epstein, who was found dead in federal detention during Trump’s first term. The loyal AG promptly obliged, appointing another Trump toady to head the investigation.

Now she can self-righteously claim that all the files that she decided didn’t sustain any further criminal investigation, according to her and FBI director Kashyap Patel, must now remain under seal because they are part of an ongoing criminal investigation of any Epstein associate not named Trump. That Trump’s name appears 2,000 times in the 20,000 pages of recently released emails? Hoax. The “Epstein hoax”, “created by Democrats”, according to MAGA-man, apparently was built around a kernel of truth that his DOJ is now determined to get to as they prepare to indict and prosecute the guilty parties.

This is transparent obstruction of justice by Trump, who had his DOJ comb through files that contained his name thousands of times and then close the investigation into Epstein that Biden’s DOJ had initiated. Obstruction of justice is a crime. Trump, as the Unitary Executive, may legally commit crimes as long as he does them in concert with other government officials — exercising his core duties as POTUS (see Trump v. US). As Trump himself famously said: God Bless these United Shayssssssh.

What is your vision for the future of democracy, Chuck?

Senator Schumer:

The immutable vision of the far right goes back to the “Planters” and their genteel slave society, but its current enactment has more recent roots.  Seventy years ago the far-right was outraged by “judicial activists” on the Supreme Court who threatened to overturn centuries of social tradition when they found, 9-0, that “separate but equal” was unconstitutional.  Several wealthy reactionaries soon founded a political movement that eventually morphed into MAGA, funded by “Libertarian” billionaire money, today as it was then.  

These reactionaries have the same vision and aim today as when the then-fringe John Birch Society was launched by Charles Koch’s father and a few wealthy comrades in 1958 —  a return to a mythical golden age of society-wide freedom, unregulated oligarchy with a robust police state to deal with malcontents. 

They have always had the same set of self-serving, destructive policies they’re intent on enacting no matter what the vast majority of Americans need or want.   After polling 1% in the 1980 presidential election, they’ve doggedly connived through nonelectoral means to get their grimly unpopular vision for America enacted as law.  They’ve done this by any means necessary.   They created countless influential “think tanks” (like the prestigious Heritage Foundation, creator of Project 2025), networks of nefarious nonprofits, a vast public influence operation (aided by fellow travelers like Rupert Murdoch), as well as the doctrinaire far-right judicial fraternity and career ladder that trained and promoted most of their 6-3 Supreme Court majority.  

The law and Constitution have been swallowed time and again by 6-3 rulings, increasingly on the fast-tracked (for POTUS) shadow docket — no record, no debate, no signatures, no reasoning or explanation, except Article II and “The Unitary Executive”.   Issues the majority doesn’t want to touch are deemed “political questions” and the Supreme Court may not hear arguments about those.   We know very clearly what the values and vision of this group of six people is.  It perfectly reflects the values of their political party and its wealthiest donors.

The right has never made their vision for America clearer than under the current president, a vile man who brings out the worst in everyone and licenses his allies’ and followers’ lowest impulses.  As much as he might personally disgust many of our over 800 billionaires, nobody has been more useful to them than this crass, greedy, corrupt, criminal, violence loving, easily manipulable fellow billionaire.

What is your vision of America’s future, Charles Schumer?   

What is the democratic vision of the eight who fell on their swords for that bipartisan vision of what democracy requires?   Is there any common vision of our democratic future among corporate Democrats, outside of somehow retaining power?  

You don’t win elections by pointing to a party acting like actual Nazis — deliberately and defiantly starving your own citizens, children and other poor people, and rushing to the nation’s highest court to enforce the leader’s right to starve children —  and saying “we’re the good guys”.   You especially don’t cooperate with the party acting like actual Nazis.  Bipartisanship is a relic of a bygone age, by design of the party acting like actual Nazis.  There is no such thing as cooperation with Nazis, it never ends well for anybody involved.   In this regard I’ll mention only two names:  Jeff Sessions and Mike Pence. 

What is your vision for the future of our democracy?  I ask this seriously.

Should you and I find ourselves in the same cattle car, I’ll make sure to introduce myself to you.

Meantime, my question remains:  what is your “moderate” vision for American democracy going forward, and how do you square it with this recent Democratic betrayal of tens of millions of our fellow citizens, all of the most vulnerable among us?    I ask this sincerely and hope one of your staffers will write me a thoughtful answer.

Your constituent,

Eliot Widaen

Two visions of the Future

A word to my bold and beholden senator, Chuck Chuck Bobuck, a living case study of what went wrong with a two party system where virtually all old school politicians are bought and paid for by the same corporate interests (Schumer is also the poster child for cringing surrender, for those partisans out there):

Keep in mind, no matter what horrors they inflict on others, people like Trump (narcissistic psychopaths, demented or not) are ALWAYS the only victim. If 42,000,000 Americans legitimately fear hunger as their SNAP (supplemental nutrition assistance, averaging under $200 a month) money is taken from them, in the weeks before Thanksgiving, there is only one victim here — the poor Leader. What about the Leader’s feelings? He’s very, very sensitive! Much more sensitive than a crying baby who has to go without formula, with her parents’ rightfully freaking out, so the Big Guy can “win” a war to the death with his enemies. You see how this works? You see how this works, Chuck?

Autocracy 101 — why these folks are Nazis

“We have the right to disregard the Constitution because we act according to what we think the law, and reality itself, should be.”

This is rule number one if you want to overthrow the constitutional order — no court case that we lose, no court order from any court, binds us to anything but more agitated grievance and the threat of inflicting more mass desperation (right on time for Thanksgiving, you ungrateful, “entitled”, poor people!) and state violence. These things are done to turn up the heat on the population until they are provoked to riot and then, voila!, the desired police state.

You’ll have to pardon me for calling these folks Nazis, but there is literally no daylight between these murderous zealots [1] and the original and extra crispy German versions from the 1930s. Many young Republicans (and every old fascist) can’t even denounce Hitler, they feel he got a bad rap just because he didn’t get to finish his work properly. Some joke about how much they love Hitler. Arguably as sick a joke as the one about playfully gassing people who don’t vote for them, equally fucking hitlerious. It’s just, you know, 35 year-old kids being kids…

How many brown kids under age five did you murder today, JD?

[1] Project 2025 used the richest man in the world, unelected (and generally despised) Trump/MAGA world record megadonor humanoid Elon Musk, to kill so far over 600,000 poor people (and counting, at over 2,000 a day) in foreign countries by illegally ending USAID. The world’s richest psychopath said he was cutting waste, fraud, abuse and corruption (his areas of greatest expertise) with his crack hit squad of Big Balls and company. What did USAID do? Wikipedia:

In the twenty years from 2001 to 2021, USAID saved a yearly estimated range of between 4.1 and 4.7 million lives, with a yearly estimated subset of between 1.2 and 1.7 million children under five saved.[17]

The brutality of actual history

Hannah Arendt once said that life would be so beautiful, if it wasn’t for history. History has always been written in the blood of meek people by evil fucks. True history is the damnedest thing and real progress against its oppressive weight must be fought for every day by people claiming their right to common decency.

The consistent, exploitative cruelty of human history is the reason rich people don’t want their kids to hear the real history of what their ancestors did to other people. It’s why they invent myths to protect the beneficiaries of past brutality from the horrific reality their benefactors inflicted on others for their own profit. Here’s a powerful example of why actual history hurts so much.

Right Answer to a Clown Question

Just as you can say a quick dash to the Emergency Room is “inconvenient” rather than a frightening, often terrifying, medical ordeal, it’s possible to state everything in a way that advances your argument.  This is known as framing, it’s a common technique in sales and bullying.  At its most extreme, it is The Big Lie, a cynical tactic that was perfected during Hitler’s audacious and influential experiment in shaping mass opinion.

A reporter asks a House Democrat how much more pain it will take for the American people before Democrats stop shutting the government down and simply sign on to a “clean continuing resolution” to pass Project 2025’s agenda, with the unreliable promise that Republicans will finally negotiate,  after all the Heritage Foundations demands are met and all leverage surrendered.  

Representative Joe Neguse (D-CO), with a real-time masterclass on how to, literally, flip the script.   Excellent answer, sir!

Corporate mass media is, tragically for an informed citizenry, run by corporations and their human alter egos.  Virtually every one of these super powerful “persons” is a psychopath.  They have no empathy, they demand their right to own everything, are reckless with the well-being of others and they lack all capacity for remorse.  In a word, monsters, destructive creatures without souls. 

Shari Redstone, intent on selling what she inherited for $8,000,000,000, and scrupulous about not alienating an insane, vengeful president’s bullying FCC chair, sold her father’s once highly respected news channel to Trump megadonors,  billionaire father and son team.  They, in turn, paid a provocative right-wing influencer, Bari Weiss, $150,000,000 for her web-based news/opinion service and placed her in charge of editing the news for CBS/the new owners of CBS.   Prior to Shari Redstone finalizing her multi-billion dollar deal, with the blessing of Trump’s loyal FCC, CBS agreed to pay Trump $16,000,000  for editing a 60 Minutes segment featuring his 2024 opponent Kamala Harris (as every outlet always edits every interview).   Here’s part of what ran on Bari Weiss’s 60 Minutes the other night.   Talk about living in the Age of Incoherence.

Why did Trump pardon the richest man in cryptocurrency, the guy who paid $2 billion dollars to Trump’s sons? Because he didn’t know anything about the guy, except that he got only a 4-month sentence. Apparently he didn’t know anything about the 50 million fine he was ordered to pay. Apparently all Trump knows is he has every right under Article Two to pardon whoever he wants, including the most depraved criminals in the world, as long as he has something to gain from pardoning them.

The personality type that can’t be negotiated with

I’m an old man, about to go into my seventh decade walking this brutal, miraculous earth. I only recently learned a truth so simple it seems embarrassing that it could have taken me 67 years to learn. I have well digested it the last few years, while writing hundreds of pages I hope to soon wrestle into a salable manuscript. Here is the condensed version of my belatedly learned lesson.

There are people, traumatized early in life, who develop a rigid personality that renders them unable to show vulnerability, see their role in conflict, change themselves for the better or acknowledge when they’ve hurt people. They live in terror of reliving the crippling humiliation they were subjected to in their earliest days. To protect their brittle egos they insist they cannot be wrong, always blame others for any conflict, escalate the conflict by silence, threats, lies, word salad, every means necessary. They are prepared to fight to the death, against their closest friends, to prove they are never wrong. My father was this way (minus the lying, he was too skilled to need to outright lie). It is a terrible way to go through life, but it is also a fairly common personality type.

They can be charming, funny, playful, sensitive, sometimes generous, they can see nuance, sometimes, but you can’t negotiate with them once there is any kind of disagreement or an expression of hurt that makes them feel imperfect. You can’t find compromise with someone who can never be wrong, they are always your victim — you are the merciless one, not them. They fight with the desperation of a hurt child terrified of further unbearable shame.

We have the grotesque living example of a movement of people guided by these principles: never wrong, blame others, lie, fight to the death over any conflict, no matter how small. Think of cherub-faced fake Christian extremist MAGA Mike Johnson and other creatures of blind ambition like him. They are convinced of their righteousness (or at least play the part), can’t see things from any other point of view (that would require empathy), have no hesitation to lie if confronted with wrongdoing (since they can’t be wrong, and therefore have a right to lie), have a harshly punitive stance toward perceived enemies while being super understanding and lenient to criminal friends, people who simply “made a mistake” but are otherwise loyal.

Politics is not my point here. I’m trying to point out the universal characteristics of this common, extremely harmful, and contagious, personality type. A personal example, then:

Our closest friends of many decades, a couple I’ll call Flack and Gina, planning to celebrate the younger one’s 65th birthday in Europe, were hit with bad news. Covid-19 canceled their fabulous birthday trip at the last minute. They made alternate plans, a week alone together in Vermont and then five days in a spacious cabin with their longtime closest friends, me and Seedj.

When we arrived something was hanging in the air, tension between them, which escalated day by day. Apparently the carefree week in Vermont had not left them feeling refreshed and carefree, they were clearly at odds, keeping their distance from each other, both expressing hurt the other had caused. The tension and passive aggression increased day by day, as I went about my normal business of trying to make them laugh and being conciliatory. I had no understanding that it was already too late for our friendship, I’d witnessed their shameful rage at each other and the sado-masochistic nature of that rage. By the time we left the rented house, after they ate a large breakfast and hadn’t prepared so much as a cup of coffee for me, we were no longer friends.

It had all been my fault, you see, in my irrational need to eventually express frustration with what I couldn’t simply accept like a loving friend, I’d finally resorted the fucking f-word, a blow that sent them both reeling toward the fainting couch. It was entirely my fault that the long weekend had ended badly. They’d been very hurt by my irrational anger. My frustration had nothing to do with one of my oldest friends glaring at me with silent hostility for long minutes after feeling “defied”, her husband trying feebly to explain why she had “her back up” followed by a humiliating forced apology from her the next morning, after I’d had a sleepless night, hyper-adrenalized and unable to keep my eyelids closed. She told me with great shame that she was sorry I’d been so aggressive and threatening toward her that I’d made her act that way, she could have done better but I got her back up. Not exactly the healing apology one might hope for from a loved one.

They had to completely rewrite history to avoid shame. What I had seen and experienced never happened at all. I’d never witnessed cruelty, silence, distance and raging passive aggression between my two closest friends, that never happened, it existed only in my sick, judgmental, unloving brain. They had a new story, that blamed me for everything, put things in persepective. I could accept their story, and remain their friend, or insist I hadn’t been the cause of all the conflict and take a flying fuck at a rolling donut. The weekend had been wonderful, with no tension at all, they demanded I acknowledge, until I’d exploded with a curse word for no reason at all, thus ruining what had been a perfect five days.

You can apply this same “reasoning” to many things happening in our society today. It’s called reframing. Take something as undeniably ugly and traumatizing as hundreds of years of American chattel slavery. Not all bad, say the re-framers, slaves learned skills while being raped, whipped and degraded — and talking about slavery unfairly makes innocent white Christian kids feel bad about their ancestors, which is the real harm of slavery. The January 6th riot that sent 140 injured police to the hospital? Biden’s fault, Pelosi never called the National Guard, FBI provocateurs, CIA goons, the crowd that broke into the Capitol were innocent, meek, patriotic tourists, not violent rioters, “woke mind” virus, a stolen election, treason, sick, dangerous maniacs on the far left trying to bend the nation to their evil will. Government shutdown, the second one orchestrated by Trump and his allies? Not the Republicans’ fault, we promised the billionaires and corporations a huge increase in their wealth, too bad selfish poor people are so irrationally angry about other people’s success!

Once you notice an inability to compromise, a constant need to escalate conflict, to blame others for their own actions, a refusal to ever acknowledge being wrong, or see anything from another person’s point of view — game over. No compromise is possible with someone who can never be wrong, and blames you for making an unfair issue about being supposedly hurt by them.

You can’t go to mediation with someone, as Flack and Gina demanded we do, if there is no agreement about anything that happened to create the conflict. To me, I’d been attacked savagely and blamed for merely trying to help ease the tensions between my tormented friends. To them, I’d unfairly maligned the perfection of their deep, loving, human relationship, refused to acknowledge that Gina had simply made a “mistake” after I made her feel attacked– and she had apologized! — I was the problem, due to the unhealable damage done to me as a child and my unforgiving nature. A mediator would surely help me see that, they insisted.

Of course, a mediator only has the facts and feelings the parties bring to mediation. Successful mediation depends on a mutual desire, and ability, to be honest, compromise and move toward the other person’s needs to solve a conflict. The most brilliant mediator in the world is helpless if the parties don’t agree on anything that caused the conflict. Nonetheless, desperate people who can never be wrong will weaponize everything available in order to prove that the other person was wrong.

The application of this observation to our current political impasse is hard to avoid. In the individual case it is crucial to understand that when you’re dealing with someone who can never be wrong, there is no way to solve problems with them, outside of uncritically accepting their stilted view of reality. You will eventually learn that even if you do, the past conflict will inevitably continue to escalate until the relationship is finally destroyed. You have to get away from them, uproot them from your life. Not a political solution to the creepy billionaire-financed division between Americans, but a good starting point in knowing who you can reason with, work things out with, and who rigidly demands absolute obedience to whatever they need.

To this type, an appeal to empathy is an intolerable challenge to their projected perfection. Appealing to their empathy is a direct statement that they lack empathy, a mortal insult that must be avenged. If you love the person, you will tend to overlook the early signs of this personality. You do so at your peril, because every bit of mistreatment you tolerate in the name of friendship sets the baseline for what they are allowed to do to you. Once you complain, you break that sacred compact, blindside them with new demands and become an enemy who must be destroyed.

Why the Orange shit-bomber keeps Congress shut down

There are several compelling reasons, including enabling President Project 2025 to make unilateral, “plenary” decisions on everything in government (illegal demolition breaking a promise, another mass firing spree, $40,000,000,000 to his fascist buddy in Argentina, $172,000,000 for Kristi Noem’s two private jets, $250,000,000 for the Marie Antoinette Ballroom, $230,000,000 for him, restitution for the Biden witch hunts), since he alone is up and running, having ordered MAGA Mike to shut everything down and keep lying that the Democrat (sic) party is to blame.  Trump’s criminal behavior can’t be questioned (see 6-3 Trump v. US), not the destruction of the east wing of the White House, not the international war crime of murdering now at least 34 unarmed noncombatants he has designated narco-terrorists, also not the release, pardon and hiring of countless heavily armed January 6th rioters, in masks, employed by ICE to act as Trump’s lawless shock troops in American cities. 

Number one on this grotesque giant baby’s list of concerns is delaying/preventing the release of the infamous Epstein files. Recall that Kashyap Pramod Patel reassigned 1,000 FBI agents to 24 hour shifts to search for and delete Trump’s name from the files, proving the Orange Polyp had absolutely nothing to hide. Adelita Grijalva, vote number 218 in the House to get release of these files, elected a month ago, has had to sue Mike Johnson and the Hump administration to get sworn in so she can represent her majority Hispanic constituents.

MAGA Mike, a brazen liar as relentless and prolific as the man he loves, has spouted a series of angry talking points, making as much sense as his demented, mad boss. He blames Pelosi, Democrats and a series of demons, as evil as the personal ones that keep the cherub-faced liar up sweating at night. PBS, who his boss defunded in the “clean budget”, notes, of Johnson’s month of stonewalling the swearing in of a duly elected member of Congress:

On April 2, Johnson swore in Republican Reps. Jimmy Patronis and Randy Fine, both of Florida, less than 24 hours after they won their special elections, during a pro forma session.

Johnson says the circumstances were unique because the House had unexpectedly gone out of session that day. Patronis and Fine had already arranged for their families, friends and supporters to be in Washington.

Fuck that twerp puto.

Meantime, in a cosmic bit of timing, the memoir of Virginia Giuffre, an Epstein sex slave who ended her life at 41 (demonstrating once more that the harm of being raped lasts forever) came out the other day. Here’s a slice:

Giuffre writes, quote, “In my years with them, they lent me out to scores of wealthy, powerful people. I was habitually used and humiliated — and in some instances, choked, beaten, and bloodied. I believed that I might die a sex slave,” she said. Virginia also details how she was forced to have sex with Prince Andrew three times, beginning when she was 17. Virginia also said she was beaten and raped by a “well-known prime minister.”

Virginia Giuffre died reportedly by suicide earlier this year in Australia at age 41. Nobody’s Girl was completed just before she died. In the book’s foreword, her collaborator, Amy Wallace, describes an email from Virginia shortly before she died that read in part, quote, “The content of this book is crucial as it aims to shed light on the systemic failures that allow the trafficking of vulnerable individuals across borders. It is imperative that the truth is understood and that the issues surrounding this topic are addressed, both for the sake of justice and awareness. In the event of my passing, I would like to ensure that Nobody’s Girl is still released,” she said.

source

I hope to God that the “well-known prime minister” was not fucking Bibi Netanyahu (oy! it appears to be former prime minister Ehud Barak…). Could things get any worse for the Jews right now? Could there be more fuel for antisemites? If a Jewish prime minister was one of Epstein’s “partying,” girl beating, minor-raping buddies, how much worse for the Jews would that be? Not bad enough we have an actual fucking Jewish Nazi, psychopathic vampire Stephen Miller, in charge of vilifying, humiliating, terrorizing and harshly punishing people guilty only of being brown, speaking Spanish and being hardworking day workers. As Mafia strongman Meyer Lansky observed, “it’s hard to be a Jew.” Dig it.