Category Archives: History and Politics

Double Standard

One of the most maddening things in life is being subjected to a double standard.   I get to act this way, and you have nothing to say about it, but if you act the same way, I will righteously fucking destroy you.  It happens between parents and children, probably much more frequently than it should.  The parent says:  I am an adult and if I call someone a fucking piece of shit it’s because they deserve it, if you ever fucking talk like that I’ll wash your filthy mouth out with a bar of soap, you understand that, asshole?    

Democrats, as a party, play by the rules, most of the time, and they try to govern by promoting solutions to real problems.  Republicans play only to win, having come to regard the rules as weapons to be used against their political enemies, harnessing the rage of angry citizens to manipulate them. Democrats are the last remaining democratic party in our duopoly, Republicans openly want a one-party state and an above the law strongman to lead our oligarchy.   When a Democrat expresses anger, about anything, particularly if she’s a woman, particularly a woman of color, Republicans attack in a rage, morally scandalized that some loudmouthed bitch feels entitled to such terrible unAmerican anger.    When a Republican is angry it’s because of the horrible people who hate our country, and spit on Christ, that send them into a righteous temper tantrum.   You can observe this cycle daily in the 24 hour news — Republicans vow to take terrible revenge if vengeful Democrats plan to do something they hate.  Democrats generally apologize for saying intemperate things, or more often, just remain as quiet as most Republicans.

Now that we have had an ever-defiant, litigious, openly, proudly, corrupt Republican president, the double standard is more grotesquely in-your-face than we’ve ever seen in this country.   The reputation of the Department of Justice that protected Trump’s colleagues and went after Trump’s enemies under first Jeff Sessions (too racist to get a seat on the federal bench, try to picture that) and eventually the most corrupt AG in American history, Bill Barr, is being rehabilitated under the scrupulous Merrick Garland.  In Trump speak:  Garland has weaponized the DOJ for Democrat [sic] vendettas against innocent and great Americans, with more witch hunts and refusal to give him a pass for trying to overturn a stolen election, inciting totally justifiable mob violence to overturn that election, stealing (and selling) top secret government documents and petty so-called crimes like that. 

Trump’s great strength is using brazeness and every possible delay to avoid accountability for things most of us would be in prison for, waiting for our trials.   Garland’s great weakness is not wanting to look unfair.  That’s a guy Trump can play like an out of tune violin.

Merrick Garland, obeying the time honored democratic/judicial norm of avoiding the “appearance of impropriety”, seems to have just granted the corrupt former president the strategic delay he always seeks, for the sake of avoiding the appearance of political bias.   He announced it would be unfair, days after an election that largely repudiated the march toward autocratic one-party rule, to continue to investigate a man who just declared himself a presidential candidate, since Garland serves another man who has stated his intention to run in 2024.   He said this extraordinary circumstance necessitated the appointment of a famously impartial Special Counsel to conclude whether Trump broke the law, when he plotted to overturn an election he lost, when he unleashed a crowd to lynch his loyal vice president and decapitate the line of succession, when he stole and sold sensitive government documents as he was leaving the White House under protest.

Recall the sequence of events that led to this extraordinary announcement by Garland, who could not have appeared impartial to partisans who have already vowed to impeach him if he’d appointed Kraken lawyer Sydney Powell as Special Counsel (as Trump was reportedly considering, making her Special Counsel to overturn the 2020 election) or Judge Aileen (heavily for the guy who appointed me)  Cannon.   Merrick Garland’s DOJ spent well over a year politely negotiating with a famously untruthful demagogue who special prosecutor Robert Mueller concluded he could not exonerate for obstruction of justice.  Trump claimed complete and total exoneration, as did his Attorney General, supremely corrupt culture warrior Bill Barr.   After losing re-election by over 7,000,000 votes, and by the identical historic landslide (in his estimation) Electoral College margin he’d bragged about winning in 2016, Trump launched a mutli-tentacled conspiracy to stay in power, including coordinating slates of fake electors in several states he lost, repeated illegal attempts to change vote counts, threatening, cajoling and trying to influence public officials, putting innocent poll workers in danger of his mobs by lying about their crimes, by name, fanning an infuriating lie about a stolen election, inciting a violent mob to stop the certification of his loss, kill his Vice President and decapitate Congressional leadership, and lying about it all regularly at rallies he has been holding since.  Also, when he left the White House he took with him hundreds of classified government documents. 

After about a year of bad faith negotiations, with Garland’s DOJ, after subpoenas were ignored, after Trump’s attorney signed a false declaration that all the records NARA sought had been returned, the DOJ got a search warrant, searched Mar-a-Largo on August 8th and recovered a trove of papers the president illegally possessed and kept in unsecured areas of his resort/home.  How many more secret documents he still has, in places not described in the legal search warrant, or how many he’d already sold to Putin, Saudi Arabia and anyone else with a lot of money, the US government is not sure.   

A few weeks after the August 8th “raid” on his resort made MAGA nation mad as hell, his attorneys went to the federal courthouse 70 miles up the coast to get an emergency injunction in front of a judge who Trump had appointed after he lost the election.  She loyally did her benefactor’s bidding, preventing the government from reviewing its own documents and illogically appointing a Special Master, though she was overturned once on appeal regarding the Executive branch’s right to look at its own classified documents.  She is certain to be completely overturned some time next month.  But she bought the boss at least four or five months of delay, which is how quid pro quos (no longer strictly illegal under a recent Supreme Court ruling) work.  The investigation into the evidence seized on August 8th has been hamstrung by protracted legal wrangling over which of its own documents DOJ may review.

Now we have Garland’s announcement that, to avoid the appearance of impropriety in this special and unique case, he has handpicked a guy known for prosecuting Democrats and Republicans alike, who will make the final call about whether Trump needs to be prosecuted for crimes, including the seemingly open and shut one where the search warrant yielded massive evidence of the crime suspected — wait, that call will still be Garland’s, under DOJ procedures.   Since Mueller was unable to charge Trump, he also was scrupulous in bending over backwards to be fair — he could not seem to accuse him of something the president would not be able to defend himself against — and so his famous but forgotten “if we could exonerate him, we would, but we cannot” or whatever his famous but forgotten formulation was in the report Barr and Trump crowed was a complete and total exoneration, with Barr investigating the corrupt oringes of the Mueller probe for several years afterwards (Biden’s DOJ allowed it to continue for almost two years, it probably is still going on, along with a now two year federal investigation into the infamous Hunter Biden). [1]

Republicans, who by a robust handful of seat majority in the 435 member House of Representatives, hold the purse strings in the new Congress, have vowed to defund the Department of Justice’s clearly vindictive investigation and possible prosecution of Trump and henchmen, already pardoned by Trump for other crimes.   Why should men who sat in a command center at the Willard Hotel as the riot was unleashed on Congress be treated like common criminals by a political party that murders babies, after raping them, and drinks their blood?   Defund the DOJ!   And you can take that threat to the bank, Merrick.  Your best best was following the facts and the law without fear or favor.  Being afraid of looking “political” made you as political as it gets, boss.  Now Nancy Pelosi has to scramble to ensure your funding before the lame duck session of Congress ends and you have a narrow Trumpist majority already promising hellish revenge amid constant televised investigations that law-abiding public servants will dutifully attend and endless, baseless, headline grabbing impeachments.

No double standard here!  It’s just power.  Nothing personal, but a lot of you motherfuckers need to be locked up, now that we have the gavel, bitches!

[1]

Mr. Mueller’s report states that “while this report does not conclude that the president committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him” on the obstruction of justice issue.    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/24/us/politics/mueller-report-summary.html

These, of course, are the first two hits you will find looking up “Mueller report on exonerating Trump”.  The first is from the official government website of a sitting Republican Congressman who was active in planning the January 6th rally and rejection of certified electors during the joint session of Congress that day, ALLEGEDLY:

https://biggs.house.gov › media › press-releases › mueller-report-exonerates-president-trump

Mueller Report Exonerates President Trump | Congressman Andy Biggs

The Mueller Report completely exonerates President Trump and his team. “It is a travesty that my Democrat colleagues are now doing their best to disregard the Mueller investigative team that they put so much faith in for the past two years. They will now continue their own witch hunt to attempt to impeach President Trump.

https://www.judicialwatch.org › mueller-report-exonerates-president-trump

Mueller Report Exonerates President Trump | Judicial Watch

Mueller Never Had a Good-Faith Basis to Pursue President Trump. The fizzling out of the corrupt Mueller investigation is great victory for the rule of law and our constitutional republic. Here is the statement I issued in response Attorney General Barr’s initial summary of the special counsel’s report. The long, national nightmare is over …

Heather November 10, 2022

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

. ▷  LISTEN

Two days after an election in which the Republican Party attacked the Democrats for inflation, today’s consumer price index data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that inflation is slowing more quickly than expected. It rose just 0.4% in October, making the rate over the past twelve months also come in lower than expected at 7.7%. 

The stock market had its biggest jump since 2020, with the different indexes observers use to measure the market all rising. The Dow Jones Industrial Average jumped more than 1,200 points, or 3.7%; the S&P 500 jumped 5.54%; and the Nasdaq Composite surged 7.35%, the best it has done since March 2020.

In a statement, President Joe Biden promised to continue to work to get prices down but noted that his policies are having an effect. “[O]ur economy has reopened, new jobs are being created, new businesses are growing, and now, we are seeing progress in getting inflation under control—with additional measures taking effect soon.”

Then Biden appeared to reach out to Republicans interested in forging a way forward from their party’s politics of the recent past, while also recalling that for all their complaints about inflation, their only plan to fix the problem was to cut taxes for the wealthy again. Virtually no economist said cutting taxes would help inflation, and many said such a policy would actually make inflation worse. 

Biden said: “I will work with anyone—Democrat or Republican—on ideas to provide more breathing room to middle-class and working families. And I will oppose any effort to undo my agenda or to make inflation worse. We are on the right path—we need to keep moving forward to build an economy from the bottom up and the middle out.”

Biden appeared to have wind under his wings, though, as with this recent vote of confidence he looks forward to the rest of his term. The 27th United Nations Climate Change conference is being held right now in Egypt, and the U.S. administration today announced a new policy for dealing with climate change. Arguing that climate change and the shortages and damage to supply chains it brings create significant financial risk for the government (that is, taxpayers), it advanced a plan to use the federal government’s power as the world’s largest buyer of goods and services—over $630 billion in the last fiscal year—to address climate change.

It would require any federal contractor who gets annual contracts worth more than $7.5 million a year to disclose their greenhouse gas emissions, explain their climate-related financial risks, and set emissions reduction targets. 

Climate change is a key issue for Gen Z, who came out for Biden strongly on Tuesday, but Biden’s other major initiative on their behalf ran into trouble today as U.S. District Court Judge Mark Pittman, a Trump appointee, declared Biden’s student loan relief program illegal. The government has already appealed. 

Meanwhile, the counting of votes continues, with control of both houses of Congress still unclear.

What is clear is that there is a war erupting in the Republican Party. After former president Trump surged to an unexpected victory in 2016, there appeared to be a sense in the Republican Party that he had figured out how to mobilize previously unengaged voters to deliver victories to the Republican Party, and established Republicans increasingly rallied to his standard. 

But he has led the party to defeat now for the third time. In the 2018 midterms, Republicans lost control of the House, with Democrats picking up 41 seats. In 2020, of course, he lost the election, as well as control of the Senate. And while this year’s outcome is not yet clear, the Democrats have had one of the best midterm performances in recent memory. Suddenly, Trump no longer seems to have a magic formula. 

White nationalist Nick Fuentes told his audience that the solution to the fact Republicans are in a minority and keep losing elections is to establish “a dictatorship.” “We need to take control of the media or take control of the government and force the people to believe what we believe or force them to play by our rules.” 

Others seem to think the answer is just to dump Trump, although as Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) warned Republicans in his closing argument in Trump’s first impeachment trial: “If you find that the House has proved its case and still vote to acquit, your name will be tied to his with a cord of steel—and for all of history.” 

That his star is tarnished became clear today not just on cable television and Twitter, where right-wing users complained about his hand-picked candidates, and in Pennsylvania, where Republicans were stung by the loss of a Senate seat, but also on media owned by right-wing kingmaker Rupert Murdoch. Today the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal noted Trump’s perfect record of electoral defeat and said: “Trump is the Republican Party’s Biggest Loser.” 

Apparently stung, Trump unleashed a furious rant on Truth Social, claiming credit for DeSantis’s start in politics. It included an astonishing claim: “I was all in for Ron, and he beat Gillum, but after the Race, when votes were being stolen by the corrupt Election process in Broward County, and Ron was going down ten thousand votes a day, along with now-Senator Rick Scott, I sent in the FBI and the U.S. Attorneys, and the ballot theft immediately ended, just prior to them running out of the votes necessary to win. I stopped his Election from being stolen….” 

This is an apparent reference to the 2018 election that put DeSantis in the governor’s chair rather than his Democratic opponent Andrew Gillum. The race was very close: just 32,463 votes out of 9 million cast, about 0.4%, separated the two candidates. Considering what we now know about Trump’s approach to election results, a claim to having rigged the 2018 Florida election was one heck of a statement. Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo noted that even though Trump “is a pathological liar… this requires some explanation, if only a clear and definitive confirmation that this did not happen.”

Pundits are already suggesting Florida governor Ron DeSantis as a replacement for Trump as a presidential candidate in 2024. This is terribly premature. If, in fact, the party is going to move beyond the Trump years, it seems it might well not turn to DeSantis, who, among other things, is still under investigation for flying a plane load of legal migrants to Martha’s Vineyard, an act not just cruel but possibly illegal. 

There will be plenty of time to worry about 2024. 

In the meantime, Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris spoke to a Democratic National Committee Event today at the Howard Theatre in Washington, D.C. Harris told the audience members that their work sent a message to the entire world: Our democracy is intact…. [T]his what it looks like…. Some Democrats won and some Republicans won. That is what happens when more than 100 million Americans participate and vote in free and fair and open elections…. And the people in this room and around our country made that possible by standing up for basic American values: freedom, liberty, and the rule of law.  And I believe when you know what you stand for, you know what to fight for.”

Biden told the attendees that Democrats “beat the odds” in the midterms “for one reason—this is not hyperbole—because of you…. I really mean it…. You believed in the system. You believed in the institutions. You fought like hell for it. And that’s the most important thing that happened, in my view, in this election. It was the first national election since January 6th, and there were a lot of concerns about whether democracy would meet the test.” 

“It did. It did. It did.”

—

Notes:

NBC News @NBCNewsWATCH: “If you find that the House has proved its case and still vote to acquit, your name will be tied to his with a cord of steel — and for all of history.” Rep. Schiff makes his closing argument to senators in the impeachment trial of President Trump. 8:31 PM ∙ Feb 3, 2020589Likes172Retweets

Nick Fuentes Says the Results of the 2022 Elections Prove ‘Why We Need a Dictatorship’

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© 2022 Heather Cox Richardson
548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104
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Gladiators versus philosophers

Gladiators, the successful ones who survived battle to the death after battle to the death, apparently became celebrity superstars in the Roman Colosseum. In an oligarchy with widespread slavery and poverty, the spectacle of superstar gladiators fighting to the death was the reality TV, the bread and circus, of its day. Passionate crowds were mesmerized and forgot their own troubles screaming at the carnage and voting for life or death at the end of the contest. The power of life or death!

There were also philosophers, scholars and historians in ancient Rome. There was little glory, or money, in any of that, so the intellectuals pursued what they did out of their own passion for knowledge. But they made the average hungry Roman feel stupid — who cares about what’s in a dumb book if you don’t know how to read? Bring on the mighty death defiers!

Which would you rather watch, a vicious battle to the death between heroic gladiators, with savage wild beasts on chains leaping at them to tear them apart, or some boring fuck droning on and on about stupid things you can’t even understand?

Capitalism remembers these important lessons from antiquity. They have been repeated in every epoch, are being repeated right now. It is rage. fear and passion — and courage in the face of death, and bold lies about courage in the face of death, if you lack that courage — that sway gigantic crowds of angry people with easily stirred eternal grievances.

People who think things through generally prefer peace to the hellscape of war. Even warmongers envision peace after the war is won. Eternal peace is every religious person’s vision of Heaven.

Men of action prefer action. Which is more exciting to see, a hard punch in the fucking face, or a thoughtful person thinking and speaking quietly?

Let us hope the iron law of capitalism has not made imbeciles of us all in a land where thoughtful people with the power to do so hesitate to punish open corruption and criminality that threatens everybody, seemingly cowed, while the fans of people powerful enough to remain always above the law arm themselves and prepare for mortal combat to decide what is justice.

I still think human decency and common sense wins, I think it wins tomorrow’s election too, but, if I’m wrong, I’ll see y’all in concentration camp.

Trump’s powerful, yet delicate, lawsuit against totally unfair NY AG

Stable Genius At Work. More political genius from the smartest man to lead a violent political movement since the Führer himself. Got to love this shit. The guy is truly sui generis. His ever-changing crew of lawyers may get fed up, quit, call him nuts, but he doesn’t pay them (unless the RNC ponies up their fees) and just gets new ones.

His latest batch of legal luminaries filed this in Florida state court, the other day, against the New York State Attorney General, after an argument against filing that the boss won. Smarter legal minds than my own have no explanation for this, outside of five dimensional chess in an alternate universe. Here are a couple of nice bits, apparently dictated by the smartest man in the world himself.

This lawsuit means he’s mad as hell, as he was as a baby, a child, a young juvenile delinquent, his father’s reluctant second choice, serially bankrupt business genius, leader of an enraged political movement. Oh, well, I guess he’s got a plan for his Grand New Party!