Category Archives: History and Politics

through-lines with some of the best people

Follow this brief illustrated timeline, if you will.    It starts with Michael Flynn, US General, retired, Trump’s first National Security Advisor.   Trump fired him 22 days in for lying to Mike Pence about illegal contacts with Russia, lies he later repeated to the FBI, as he had previously done on his security clearance filings that neglected to mention he was on the payroll of Turkey and Russia.  Trump asked James Comey to do him a favor and give this good guy a pass by not investigating him, Comey refused and Trump kicked his ass to the curb, leading to the Mueller Witch HUNT.   

Stephen Miller, hateful troll, was one of very few Trump insiders who was there at the president’s side the entire four years of Trump’s Thousand Year Administration.

Bannon, Trump’s master tactician, was fired for getting too much attention for being “Trump’s brain”– the boss had already revealed that the way to be the smartest man in the room was to hire the best people, as long as they were dumber than you.   

Bill Barr was an exception, being very smart, and something of a magician, he made the damning conclusions, and the many incriminating details, of the Mueller Report vanish into thin air.  Among other feats of legerdemain he also did his damnedest to orchestrate a lawyerly, shamelessly partisan withdrawal of Flynn’s guilty plea for perjury, before the Big Guy pardoned Flynn outright.  In the end, Barr bailed as the roof was blowing off the booby hatch, and it was another Trump-appointee,

Jefferey Clark, who stepped up to take the reins and promote any lie Trump wanted on DOJ letterhead, to create pressure to throw out the votes in states Trump lost.  Clark later had a few months of projectile diarrhea that made it impossible for him, for medical reasons, to appear before the House Select Committee on the Trump riot to invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.   

Rudy, one of Trump’s best buddies, who brought several of the post election Stop the Steal court cases that Trump lost, had previously traveled to Ukraine to meet Paul Manafort’s old friends among the Russian oligarch-connected Ukrainians, and with Lev and Igor, Mafia Rave and Fraud Guarantee, dig up some smut on Biden’s surviving son.  His lawyers are currently negotiating the scope of his voluntary cooperation with the ongoing House witch hunt.

Convicted felon Paul Manafort knew every corrupt official and oligarch in Ukraine and Russia from his years grooming the corrupt, Russian oligarch-backed Viktor Yanukovych to become president of Ukraine. As the GOP-chaired Senate Committee Report revealed, Manafort worked closely with Konstantin Kilimnik, Putin’s guy, during his time as Trump’s campaign manager.   Roger “Ratfucker” Stone, another pardoned felon, worked closely with Oath Keepers now under indictment for seditious conspiracy, among other things they guarded his grotesque person on January 5th and 6th.   The baseless Democrat [sic] witch hunt continues!   

the third guy here, also pardoned by Trump, is Jared Kushner’s criminal dad

Meanwhile this smiling John McEntee fellow was promoted from Trump’s bag man, body man, to Czar of loyalty to Trump, working closely with the wife of Clarence Thomas to root out insufficiently loyal Republicans throughout the West Wing and beyond. 

In happier days, and for most of Trump’s term, he was well protected by the powerful, unscrupulous Senate majority leader, now, like so many others Trump feels have betrayed him, his enemy.

In the end, he was left with crackpot theories about the Twelfth Amendment and the Hail Mary of the “Green Bay Sweep” (and coordinated riot) to overturn the 2020 presidential election (oddly, all the other Republicans elected on the same ballots were immune to the massive, coordinated, bipartisan anti-Trump fraud), this guy invoked his Fifth Amendment right countless times and is fighting the release of thousands of possibly incriminating emails.  Here’s the latest on him, from Heather Cox Richardson:

Lawyer John Eastman, who produced the infamous memo with a blueprint for Pence to overturn the election, has claimed that he cannot produce the documents the January 6th committee has subpoenaed because of attorney-client privilege. The judge overseeing the case has ordered him to document those attorney-client relationships by February 22.

Bill Barr left in place the stern-looking, arch conservative, Christian dominionist DOJ Special Counsel John Durham (who Trump praises as “Robert Durham”) to get to the corrupt oringes of the Mueller investigation total witch hunt. Durham has been at it longer than Mueller was (traveling with Barr to Italy, at one point, in search of smoking gun proof of the distractionary partisan witch hunt theory), and had found approximately zilch, though FOX and friends are running hard with the story of his single seeming revelation, a shaky theory about Hillary spying on Donald in the White House before he was even president (and they’re in a hurry to exploit this “bombshell,” ignored by the leftist mass media, before that indictment likely gets dismissed next week). Why this right wing fucknut is still on the “case” is one of the enduring mysteries of American politics. 

Bannon was in the Willard Hotel war room on January 5th and 6th, back in the command center of Trump’s brain, with Rudy, pardoned felon Bernard Kerik, Fifth Amendment and shaky attorney-client privilege citer John Eastman and some of the other best people. 

And Mike Flynn, the good guy who started the whole shit show (after leading chants of “Lock Her Up!” at the Republican National Convention back in the day), has not been restored to active service for the court martial the Q-Anon general so richly deserves (and which Glenn Kirschner made a strong case for).  He’s out there exercising his First Amendment right to advocate martial law, the essential white Christianity of this exceptional nation, the truth of Q’s droppings, to talk absolute shit about whatever pops into his head.   

God bless these United Shaysssh.

Volodymyr Zelensky footnote

After the 2014 Ukrainian revolution, Viktor Yanukovych abandoned his office and fled the country. He was subsequently impeached, and replaced by Oleksandr Turchynov as the Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada, who serves as acting president when the office is vacant. Early presidential elections were held on 25 May 2014 and won by Petro Poroshenko; Poroshenko was inaugurated as the fifth president on 7 June 2014. On 18 June 2015, Yanukovych was officially deprived of the title of President of Ukraine.[2]

After defeating Poroshenko, the comedian Volodymyr Zelensky was inaugurated as the sixth and current president of Ukraine on 20 May 2019.

where the facts and the law take us

Merrick Garland promised on January 5th, 2022 to follow the facts and the law wherever they take us, excluding no one from the operation of our laws by reason of power or wealth. Glenn Kirschner lays out a grievous tale of two arguably identical crimes, one petty (carrying a three month prison sentence) the other massive, pervasive, ongoing and part of a long pattern of corruption and obstruction of justice– with profound national security implications.

In the first case, prompt prosecution, conviction and sentencing. In the second case, not so much…

Here’s Glenn, in the description of his most recent youTube video presenting the law as it regards the mad former president:

In an astounding double-standard of justice, the Department of Justice issues a press release today, February 11, 2022, announcing that a federal employee named Asia Janay Lavarello removed classified documents and was just sentenced to 3 months in prison, whereas Trump removed classified documents (documents that were classified “top secret” as compared to those improperly handled by Ms. Lavarello, which were classified as “secret”), yet Trump is not held to account.

Here is a step-by-step comparison of the two cases, showing how there are two standards of justice at work in our nation.

Note: in the video, I mispronounce Ms. Lavarello’s name as “Laravello.” Apologies to Ms. Lavarello.

Not learning history

History, as we see in the times we’re living in, is often as much a political propaganda tool as an objective story about what happened and why it happened. That is not to say that there isn’t more insightful and less insightful history out there, but the enterprise of creating and writing history can be as fraught, prejudiced and sometimes mad as any other human endeavor.

Take the history of Ukraine in the last hundred years or so. Seventy-nine years ago, on a hot August night, the families of my grandmother and grandfather, including all the children and babies, were marched to the edge of the Ukrainian town where they had lived for generations and were not to live anymore. Under the supervision of the SS, Ukrainians killed them, along with a couple thousand other Jews, in a massacre that’s not even recorded in the annals of such atrocities. My grandmother and grandfather, who left twenty years earlier, were the only survivors of their once large families. It left me with a bad impression of Ukrainians, but there was a big piece of the story I didn’t know.

Twenty years or so earlier the Red Army, which included a young chronicler named Isaac Babel who perfectly recorded the cadences of my grandparents’ neighborhood, liberated the downtrodden of the Ukraine including its Jews. My grandmother, being an idealistic teenager, immediately embraced the international vision of workers overthrowing centuries of ignorance, superstition and hatred and working as one toward a more just future. She left for the US a few years later, and two decades later Ukrainian reactionaries killed everyone in her family.

There had always been anti-Semitism in Ukraine, as in most parts of Europe, Khmelnitsky, Ukrainian nationalist hero, was also infamous among the Jews for leading horseback slaughters of Jews. There is a town named after him, not far from the little town my grandparents lived in. But here’s the piece of the story I didn’t have until recently.

Josef Stalin, psychopath and father of socialism in one country, the Union of Soviet Republics (Russia and basically colonies of Stalin’s Russia), deliberately starved several million Ukrainians to death just a few years before the Nazi invasion of that part of the world. Ukrainian nationalists naturally took the side of the Nazi liberators over fucking Stalin, which likely accelerated their hatred and made many of them even more willing to slaughter communist dupes en masse. Jews and Communists were at that point inseparable in their minds.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, oligarchs stepped in to rule over the populations of the various new states. One of the preferred candidates of the Russian-favoring oligarchs in Ukraine, a brute named Viktor Yanukovych, was groomed by Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort (who went on to work closely with an agent of Putin’s named Kilimnik to help get Trump elected). The corrupt Yanukovych was forced from power in 2014 by a spontaneous revolution of Ukrainians. He fled to Russia for the protection of his Russian oligarch sponsors. Four years later, Ukrainians elected a young Jewish comedian with a law degree, the new president Trump tried to shake down for some dirt on Biden in that perfect phone call.

How my grandmother would have laughed celebrating the inauguration of Volodymyr Zelensky, on what would have been her daughter’s 91st birthday!

So now Trump’s backer, former KGB spook and Russian oligarch, Vladimir Putin, is poised to invade Ukraine again, hopefully put his boy Yanukovych back in power. Read the recent history, if you have the stomach for it. That Mudoch’s FOX and the American right is pretty much backing Trumpie’s mentor Putin in this dispute among strangers should tell you all you need to know as you open the pages of a reputable history book.

And let us hope an old-fashioned style bloody war does not sweep across that long suffering stretch known as Europe’s Breadbasket, or anywhere else.

Sloppy Steve, visionary global fascist, still chief strategist of Trumpism

February 14th 2022, Glenn Kirschner, former federal prosecutor reminds us, is the statute of limitations deadline for filing obstruction of justice charges based on the Mueller report which documented at least ten fairly clear-cut instances of obstruction by the Orange Polyp. The obstruction case about which Mueller wrote that it was unfair to accuse the president of while he couldn’t actually charge him, but that he also could not exonerate him for. This is what Bill Barr judged to be complete and total exoneration of Trump.

Seeing as Trump’s obstruction of justice is seamless and ongoing, using legal, quasi-legal and extralegal means, as illustrated most recently in his ignoring the Presidential Records Act (after ascertaining, no doubt, that there is no real penalty for violating it, with the usual caveat that covering up a crime is a separate felony) it would seem the statute of limitations should not be a factor in charging him with obstruction of justice, Merrick.

Someone who has never been held accountable for anything in his life understandably believes that accountability is only for fucking losers. Plus, he has the best people.

Council for National Policy member Steve Bannon, whose billionaire patrons the Mercers threw their support behind Trump as the last candidate standing, for example. The Mercers introduced the canny authoritarian Bannon (and fellow CNP member Kelleyanne Alternative Fact) to the Trump campaign. In exchange for the CNP’s help, Trump, who truly believes in nothing, agreed to appoint Federalist Society judges to the bench, limit his religious advisory Council to only Protestants, cut taxes on the super-rich and support a variety of other far-right positions.

Bannon was one of the keys to Trump’s narrow, surgically crafted Electoral College victory, but was soon fired by the thin-skinned Trump when he became known as Trump’s brain. Trump dubbed Bannon Sloppy Steve. And, yet, three years later, it was Sloppy Steve who sat in a suite in the Willard Hotel, the command center for the January 6th insurrection, who later told the House Select Committee on January 6th that it was illegitimate and to go fuck itself with its subpoena, and who’d secured a pardon from Trump on Trump’s last day in office. Pardoned, you know, for making a little money by ripping off the most loyal, and most credulous, of Trumps die-hard 39%. As you do.

Legitimate political discourse, baby.

Madness, anyone?

Those who believe in the End Times have much reason to celebrate: a mass death pandemic has driven people to extremes, street crime is on the rise, after two years of surprising restraint by the criminally inclined, the earth is experiencing an unprecedented number of climate catastrophes, the anti-Christ leads one of the two major political parties in the longest running democracy in the world, armies of angry believers, driven by infuriating lies, are on the march all across the globe.   It’s a great day for those who believe a Messiah will return to cast unbelievers into eternal hellfire while the faithful go up to heaven for an endless celebration.

The rise in crime is an interesting one, it has taken a long time to burst forth, given the nation’s pain, deprivation, desperation, the fact that most people are wearing the identity-obscuring highwayman masks anyway.  Crime, defined by statutes, is written by our best citizens. Crime enforcement is famously selective.  Wealthy citizens are allowed to negotiate deals most of the time, the poor never are allowed to negotiate anything but how many years they will spend locked up (and the “deals” are marginal there).  White men who commit deliberate voter fraud are given a stern talking to, and probation, a Black woman with a felony record, apparently cleared to vote by local officials, is sentenced to five years in prison for voter fraud.  Anyone who finds such things clearly racist is clearly the racist.  Up is down, black is white, if you believe your own eyes, you are a traitor. 150 police officers were injured, maimed, during “legitimate political discourse” that halted the constitutional business of Congress, so what is your point if you are a cop who lost an eye?

Unless you believe this raging chaos is a harbinger of the coming Apocalypse, it’s natural to believe we are pretty much fucked.   No matter how much evidence comes out — about the rapidly approaching point of no return with our fossil-fuel doomed planet, about the deliberate indifference to the hundreds of thousands who die deaths of despair from highly lucrative opioids, from guns, about the 98X higher likelihood that you will die of Covid-19 if you are not vaccinated, about the ignorance that comes from banning and burning books, from the parliamentary trick that cuts off all DEBATE of any issue that one party deems inconvenient (anti-lynching bills, voting rights bills, Human Rights bills), about the destructive force of an internet platform that spreads lies to billions in its influence, to a mad criminal blowhard who is still blowing as hard as he can, with every breath — there is no accountability for any of the open crimes of the super-rich and well-connected.   The only cause for optimism, if you are given to monkish superstition, is that all those who deny Christ will be finally and forever cast into the pit of hell, while believers will go on to eternal, joyous life in heaven.  For the rest of us: a mental health crisis.

Which is not to say that madness and a belief that all this horror is actually good news, as it heralds the prophesized return of Jesus Christ, are mutually exclusive.  Many mentally ill people are fervent believers.  Many other mentally ill people do not believe in an all-powerful, all-loving divine being who, though He loves humanity as His greatest creation, tolerates torture, starvation, rape, murder and all the rest.  The line between madness and sanity turns out to be blurry as hell, highly permeable.   

“The Truth,” quoted Christopher Walken, in a great interview with him in the NY Times, “is good, interesting is better.”  Madness?  Fuck if I know. 

Dueling honor codes

Jon A. Shields titled his recent guest essay in the New York Times (which the NYT teased as What Donald Trump Understands About Honor) How Trump’s Brutish Code of Honor Explains His Feud With Liz Cheney. He contrasts the strict honor cultures of the orange brawler from Queens and Liz Cheney, the well-born daughter of (the embodiment of human evil) the aptly named Dick Cheney. To Trump, any defeat is a humiliation that must be avenged to the death. To Cheney, the eyes of history are watching and honor demands a principled response to something like the drumbeat of treason.

Beneath the surface of their honor feud lurk clashing understandings of political ambition. Unlike Mr. Trump, Ms. Cheney is seeking the esteem of future generations by doing what’s in the public interest even if she is cast out of office for doing so. Ms. Cheney told a Wyoming paper that just moments before her fellow Republicans pushed her out of House leadership, she warned them “that history was watching.”

Mr. Trump, meanwhile, is so loyal to his narrow code that he lacks even the theory of mind to understand Ms. Cheney’s ambition. For him, losing any contest is always dishonorable because it tarnishes his reputation as a strongman. Hence, his enduring fixation with ratings, polling and the “stolen” 2020 election. It’s also why he asked Marine Gen. John F. Kelly, “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?” as they stood over the graves at Arlington National Cemetery, according to reporting in The Atlantic.

What Donald Trump Understands About Honor

It’s not intuitive to picture a man without honor living by an inviolable, if crude, honor code, the “honor code” of a lying, vindictive sore loser, but there you go. The guest essay provides pretty good description of dueling honor codes representing higher and lower motives for two ugly, largely similar worldviews. Two sides of a very grim honor coin.

Fed Soc Follies

The other day Mike Pence gave a speech to the Federalist Society, the Koch-funded legal fraternity that spawned the united 6-3 Trump Court majority, finally stating the obvious:  Trump was wrong, the Vice President does not have the legal right to overturn election results.   

Had he made this statement a year ago, hats off to a man of integrity.   This career ass-sniffer, backed by the Kochs for his entire obsequious career, once again wreathes himself in shame as he insults the intelligence of the American public, this time by telling the simple truth, belated by a hate-filled year.


Also addressing the Federalist Society’s annual meeting, though his speech was given secretly, Fed Soc alum Neil Gorsuch.  Last year’s keynote speaker was Federalist Society member Samuel Alito, who also spoke at the members only event in secret.  You want secrecy for your totally non-political speeches in front of a partisan legal fraternity you belong to, it’s common sense!  Look what happened to Crooked Hillary for speaking frankly to Wall Street!

Meanwhile, the Republican National Committee censured both of its members who traitorously insist on calling the MAGA riot a riot (when, obviously, the only Blacks involved were law enforcement) uniting behind the idea that investigating the insurrection is “a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse,” as you do, if you’re a Nazi (or klansman), and snarling lynch mobs united behind a proven lie are merely a preferred form of legitimate political discourse [1].

The rightwing legal establishment (as opposed to MAGA nation) is positioning itself to pivot, once the Trump dead-enders are, possibly, brought to justice, fully outed, disgraced, hopefully prosecuted and convicted for the seditious conspiracy they participated in.  Note that Trump was as useful an idiot to the far right as he was to his friend Mr. Putin, though the craven Pence’s speech might signal his master’s usefulness is nearing an end. Mainstream movement conservatives will continue marching on with their larger plan, to capture a permanent majority, particularly on the federal bench, a dependable activist majority that will rule in favor of the best of society and against that pesky 95% that causes all the problems here in the land of the free and the home of the brave. 

[1]

Trump to Pence: “You can either go down in history as a patriot, or you can go down in history as a pussy,” Trump to Pence: “If these people say you had the power, wouldn’t you want to?” Pence: “I wouldn’t want any one person to have that authority,” Trump to Pence: “But wouldn’t it be almost cool to have that power?” Trump to Pence: “You don’t understand, Mike. You can do this. I don’t want to be your friend anymore if you don’t do this.” Trump to Pence: “If you don’t do it, I picked the wrong man four years ago … You’re going to wimp out.”

Reader: The Founding Fathers Loathed the Filibuster — Diane Ravitch’s blog

A reader who identifies as Quickwrit posted the following comment about the filibuster. For most of our history, debates in the Senate could be used to delay consideration of a bill, even to kill it. But the filibuster was not written into law until 1917. Our Founding Fathers would agree that “contemptible” aptly describes Manchin, […]

Reader: The Founding Fathers Loathed the Filibuster — Diane Ravitch’s blog