Category Archives: History and Politics

Trumpism at its bitter heart

I sometimes wonder why the poor whites of the Confederacy fought to the death in a war for the wealthy that their neighbors who owned enough slaves (twenty) were exempt from fighting in. It turns out one big reason is that the Confederacy was ruthless in hunting down and executing deserters. The same beefed up patrols that hunted down runaway slaves hunted down “disloyal” white men who would not fight and die to defend “home rule”. The leaders of the Confederacy kept it simple: this is a war to defend our noble way of life, uplift the white race and keep the inferior race where it belongs. If you are a traitor to our glorious cause we will hunt you down, kill you and perhaps also burn your family home to the ground.

Life is damned complicated, which is one reason a system that simplifies the world, no matter how grotesquely, is so appealing to so many. There has always been a large wedge of the US population that has no interest in nuance, cause and effect, the reverberations of history recurring like a bad meal. They want to keep what they have, get more, be entertained and believe what they want to believe and you can kiss their asses over whether what they believe is “correct” or not.

Covid-19? Obviously a deadly scam run by Joe Biden and the Chinese Communist Party, first to steal the election from the Man of the People who actually won in a landslide, then to tyrannize the population into abject surrender to the coercive government. Global warming and so-called climate catastrophe? So much liberal fucking bullshit, these regular new record high temperatures, killer storms, droughts, floods and so-called wild fires are just nature being nature. These themes resonate with desperate people who truly do not give a fuck about anything but “winning”. What do they actually win? Membership in the winners’ circle, cuck.

Not that long ago, in this great nation, people assembled to be entertained and uplifted by the public torture and murder of some purportedly demonic bastard, most often Black. We couldn’t make laws to outlaw this popular entertainment because all federal bills to criminalize lynching were filibustered or vetoed in the interest of maintaining power relationships just the way they were between the races. Politicians in areas where lynching was popular knew that allowing a vote to make this wildly popular sport a federal crime would kick their career in the nuts, not that they’d ever dream of supporting this kind of federal overreach, not after fighting a long and bloody war for “States’ Rights”.

The following is from a long, excellent discussion of the roots of American fascism. The author notes that “Fascism was always about entertainment, however: the deep root of its poison was that it made hatred entertaining.”

Public lynchings in the United States, at which thousands sometimes gathered in the early 20th century, functioned as a spectacular display of white power that terrorised the black population and exhilarated white audiences with a sense of their own racial superiority. But they were sold as amusement. Lynchings were often advertised ahead of time in the local press and on neighbourhood flyers, just as a funfair or circus might have been. Sometimes street vendors sold popcorn and other snacks.

Lynchings were the violent obverse of folk traditions such as minstrelsy that had long unified white crowds over the degradation of black people. Whether through ostensibly comic mockery or overtly sadistic violence, both were performed for the pleasure of a crowd enjoying its political dominance by dehumanising other people. The forms that lynching took included not only hangings, but public torture, dismemberment, castration and burning alive, sometimes for hours. Spectators took photographs that circulated openly in the mail as postcards, and collected body parts as souvenirs. It was all just another carnival.

That lynching was a barbaric form of mass entertainment was perfectly clear at the time. The influential journalist HL ­Mencken observed as early as 1917 that lynchings were a local “sport” that took “the place of the merry-go-round, the ­theatre, the symphony orchestra and other diversions” in larger communities.

Within a few years, movie theatres were advertising Westerns with a “special added attraction” of exciting footage showing the “Klu Klux Klan in Action” during a “midnight initiation”. In 1934 the New Yorker published a cartoon that showed a grandmotherly white woman holding up a small girl in a large crowd in front of a burning house while excitedly telling her neighbour: “This is her first lynching.”

Then, as now, groups like the Klan were motivated not purely by racial hostility, but by a sense of economic grievance they had been encouraged to understand in terms of race. In a 1926 pamphlet called “The Klan’s Fight for Americanism”, the Klan’s imperial wizard argued that the organisation’s members were the “average citizen of the old stock” motivated by “economic distress” who found themselves “increasingly uncomfortable and finally deeply ­distressed” as “the assurance for the ­future of our children dwindled. We found our great cities and the control of much of our industry and commerce taken over by strangers, who stacked the cards of success and prosperity against us.” But the Klan was also itself a money-making venture, a pyramid scheme populated by grifters and hucksters, literally setting up stalls at state fairs so that racial violence and economic ­resentment could make a buck [1].

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Racism, xenophobia (fear of “others”) and cultural and economic resentment continue to be great for the old fascist bottom line. One of Trump’s most glorious “fuck you” pardons (which the DOJ should challenge as corrupt and integral to his seamless pattern of ongoing obstruction of justice, quid pro quos for the silence and perjury of criminal co-conspirators like Stone, Manafort and Flynn) was of Steve Bannon, arrested (by the US Postal Service!) aboard a Chinese billionaire’s yacht for fleecing a crowd of loyal Trump supporters out of their hard earned money in a fake “Build the Wall” campaign.

Welcome to the winners’ circle, chumps.

The Fuhrer walks little girl to gas chamber

[1]

Of course, don’t try teaching any of this ugly history in Florida, Texas or any other GOP-controlled Covid hotspot state. There are new laws, in these “Right To Work” states that will put you out of a job right quick if you bad mouth the Klan, or the Texas Rangers, who began their existence chasing down and killing Comanches, Kiowas, Apaches and Mexicans who were on disputed (by the Texans) Mexican territory. Texas justice, y’all. Who doesn’t get excited at a good old neck tie party?! Don’t try peddling this kind of dogshit (see below) in Texas!

Despite the fame of their deeds, the conduct of the Rangers during this period (post-Reconstruction] was illegally excessive. In particular, Leander H. McNelly and his men used ruthless methods that often rivaled the brutality of their opponents, such as taking part in summary executions and confessions induced by torture and intimidation [20] . . .

. . . The Rangers were responsible for several incidents, ending in the January 28, 1918 massacre of the male population[23] (15 Mexican men and boys ranging in age from 16 to 72 years) of the tiny community of Porvenir, Texas, on the Mexican border in western Presidio County. Before the decade was over, thousands of lives were lost, Texans and Mexicans alike. In January 1919, an investigation launched by Texas lawmaker José Tomás Canales found that from 300 to 5,000 people, mostly of Hispanic descent, had been killed by Rangers from 1910 to 1919, and that members of the Rangers had been involved in many acts of brutality and injustice.[24] The Rangers were reformed by a resolution of the Legislature in 1919, which saw the special Ranger groups disbanded and a complaints system instituted.[25]

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What is wrong with the NY Times?

America’s journal of record, the venerable Grey Lady, has a consistent tic that drives me mad. It also undermines the paper’s famous credibility and detracts from its often excellent investigative reporting. The tic is unrelated to the paper’s commitment to good writing (most of the material in the New York Times is well-written) — it is a determination to appear objective at all costs that often teeters into misinforming readers. Here are two examples that leaped out at me the other day and grabbed me by the throat.

The article, entitled Former Acting Attorney General Testifies About Trump’s Efforts to Subvert Election begins:

WASHINGTON — Jeffrey A. Rosen, who was acting attorney general during the Trump administration, has told the Justice Department watchdog and congressional investigators that one of his deputies tried to help former President Donald J. Trump subvert the results of the 2020 election, according to a person familiar with the interviews.

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It is very good news that Rosen is speaking, voluntarily, to the Inspector General of the DOJ and a Senate Committee. Only good can come from Rosen confirming details of the depths that Trump was willing to go to to preserve his reign.

The article goes on to describe a Trumpist in the DOJ, Jeffrey Clark, who was working directly with his master to overturn the results of the 2020 election so that Trump could illegally remain in power. Acting AG Jeffrey Rosen, Clark’s boss, asked Clark not to have further meetings with Trump alone. Clark continued to meet with Trump alone. The DOJ had announced, under Barr and under Rosen, that they had found no fraud on a level that could have changed the outcome of the presidential election. Clark pressed the DOJ to change its position to give traction to Trump’s Big Lie about the stolen election he claims to have won in a landslide. Clark drafted a letter to Georgia officials based on this unfounded lie, that he asked Rosen to sign. The New York Times:

Mr. Rosen also described subsequent exchanges with Mr. Clark, who continued to press colleagues to make statements about the election that they found to be untrue, according to a person familiar with the interview.

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“statements that they found to be untrue“

His colleagues “found them to be untrue” these statements Clark was pressuring them to make?

Clarification? Clark wanted them to make statements that the DOJ had investigated and found to be false, baseless, not based in evidence? Statements that some in the DOJ “found to be untrue”? An honest disagreement between colleagues in these highly charged partisan times? The Times, setting new standards for anodyne exposition? Seriously.

Then, as far as clarity, good writing, elegance of language in the service of informing readers:

He also discovered that Mr. Clark had been engaging in unauthorized conversations with Mr. Trump about ways to have the Justice Department publicly cast doubt on President Biden’s victory, particularly in battleground states that Mr. Trump was fixated on, like Georgia. Mr. Clark drafted a letter that he asked Mr. Rosen to send to Georgia state legislators, wrongly asserting that they should void Mr. Biden’s victory because the Justice Department was investigating accusations of voter fraud in the state.

Such a letter would effectively undermine efforts by Mr. Clark’s colleagues to prevent the White House from overturning the election results, and Mr. Rosen and his top deputy, Richard P. Donoghue, rejected the proposal.

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Idea for the copy editor, change one word to make this sentence more clear and more accurate:

falsely asserting that they should void Mr. Biden’s victory because the Justice Department was investigating accusations of voter fraud in the state.

Look, it was false because the DOJ was not investigating accusations of voter fraud in the state when Clark wrote the letter. It was false because Clark knew that there were no ongoing investigations. It was knowingly false, because, in spite of knowing it, and three recounts in Georgia, Clark tried to get his boss to sign the false letter. I understand the Times may want to avoid implying intent on the part of Mr. Fucking Eichmann Clark, but “wrongly” is ambiguous, open-ended and just plain misleading. There are many reasons a person can be wrong, knowingly lying is only one.

Medal for most squeamishly anodyne sentence in the article, with a star for contortion:

Such a letter would effectively undermine efforts by Mr. Clark’s colleagues to prevent the White House from overturning the election results, and Mr. Rosen and his top deputy, Richard P. Donoghue, rejected the proposal.

Or, perhaps just a tad more accurately

The false letter Clark wanted his boss to sign would have put the acting AG on record as knowingly lying to overturn the election Mr. Trump continues to falsely insist he won, in a fucking landslide.

Come on, Grey Lady, we want to believe you’re better than this…

Here’s a roadmap for the Justice Department to follow in investigating Trump

Opinion by Laurence H. Tribe, Barbara McQuade and Joyce White Vance [1] from the August 5, 2021 Washington Post:

As evidence of Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election mounts, the time has come for the Justice Department to begin, if it hasn’t already, a criminal investigation of the former president’s dangerous course of conduct. Attorney General Merrick Garland has worked to restore the badly frayed public trust in a nonpartisan DOJ. But failing to investigate Trump just to demonstrate objectivity would itself be a political decision — and a grave mistake. If we are to maintain our democracy and respect for the rule of law, efforts to overturn a fair election simply cannot be tolerated, and Trump’s conduct must be investigated.

The publicly known facts suffice to open an investigation, now. They include Trump’s demand that Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger “find” 11,780 votes to declare he won that state’s election; Trump’s pressure on acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen as well as Vice President Mike Pence to advance the “big lie” that the election was stolen; the recently revealed phone call in which Trump directed Rosen to “just say the election was corrupt, [and] leave the rest to me,” and public statements by Trump and associates such as Rudolph W. Giuliani and Rep. Mo Brooks on Jan. 6 to incite the mob that stormed the Capitol.

None of these facts alone proves a crime beyond a reasonable doubt, but together they clearly merit opening a criminal investigation, which would allow prosecutors to obtain phone and text records, emails, memos and witness testimony to determine whether Trump should be charged

One possible charge is conspiracy. It is a federal crime for individuals to agree to defraud the United States by interfering with governmental functions. Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III included such a conspiracy in his indictment against the Internet Research Agency, alleging the Russian group engaged in a conspiracy aimed at “impairing, obstructing, and defeating the lawful functions” of government agencies.

An investigation could also explore whether Trump agreed with others — Giuliani, Brooks and possibly members of his inner circle — to obstruct Congress’s function of exercising its statutory duty to certify the election results on Jan. 6. By using disinformation to sow unfounded doubt, Trump and his allies may have tried to induce members of Congress to vote against certifying the election results, creating enough chaos to throw the election to the House, where Republicans controlled a majority of state delegations.

Another plausible charge is obstruction of an official proceeding. The relevant statute makes it a crime to corruptly obstruct, influence or impede any official proceeding or attempt to do so. Agreeing with others to obstruct the Jan. 6 vote certification for a wrongful purpose and the commission of any act in furtherance of that agreement would suffice to prove a violation, putting Trump at the heart of a conspiracy, with his public statements and tweets constituting overt act

A related but distinct charge is the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, “RICO,” which has often been used beyond its original intended target of organized crime. To prove RICO, the DOJ would need to establish that Trump was associated with an enterprise affecting interstate commerce, such as the office of the presidency, and committed at least two racketeering acts. One such act is extortion, which encompasses transmitting a threat to harm another’s reputation with intent to extract something of value. Trump’s conversations with Raffensperger, in which he suggested the secretary of state might have committed a crime and “that’s a big risk to you,” could fit that definition.

Equally fit charges for investigation include violating the federal voter fraud statute and coercing federal employees to violate the Hatch Act by working to advance his political candidacy. Trump’s well-documented efforts to pressure state officials not to certify Biden’s election could run afoul of the voter fraud law, which prohibits anyone from defrauding the residents of a state of a fair election by tabulating false ballots, although Trump might argue that he believed he had won in those states.

Likewise, Trump’s pressure on Rosen to “just say the election was corrupt” could run afoul of the Hatch Act’s criminal provision, which makes it “unlawful for any person to intimidate, threaten, command, or coerce” a federal employee to “engage in … any political activity.” It doesn’t get much more coercive or political than pressuring your attorney general to declare an election corrupt without proof.

Two other potential crimes that merit investigation are inciting insurrection and seditious conspiracy. Both statutes appear to fit the facts, but the DOJ might hesitate to bring charges because of possible defenses. For instance, even though language intended and likely to incite imminent violence meets the Supreme Court’s test for unprotected speech, a court might conclude that Trump’s exhortations to the crowd do not rise to that level of incitement and are protected by the First Amendment.

The bottom line is this: Now that Trump is out of office, the DOJ’s view that sitting presidents cannot be indicted no longer shields him. Attempted coups cannot be ignored. If Garland’s Justice Department is going to restore respect for the rule of law, no one, not even a former president, can be above it. And the fear of appearing partisan cannot be allowed to supersede that fundamental precept.

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[1]

Laurence H. Tribe is Carl M. Loeb University Professor emeritus and a professor of constitutional law emeritus at Harvard Law School. Barbara McQuade is a law professor at the University of Michigan Law School and the former U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan. Joyce White Vance, the former U.S. attorney in Alabama, is a professor at the University of Alabama School of Law.

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Why is Jeffrey Clark an American Eichmann?

After Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, by a healthy 10% margin in the popular vote (81,000,000 to 74,000,000) and the identical, “historic” Electoral College “mandate” that Trump got vanquishing Crooked Hillary in 2016, the Orange Polyp went to work. According to his playbook, announced before the election, he never committed to the peaceful transition of power, if he lost. His loss, he said, could only result from massive communist/BLM/antifa/pedophile cannibal fraud. He still claims to have won by a “landslide”, an alternative fact most Republicans apparently take as true.

The former president was often dismissed as unhinged, delusional, crazy, and a compulsive liar. Of course, the faithless said the same about Adolf Hitler. Both men had the talent and charisma to convince millions of their unhinged delusions. What is keeping America from greatness? Mexican rapists, in caravans, bringing drugs — and China, Jina! Wait, also Muslim terrorists who hate our freedom. Also, sexed up women getting abortions whenever they want. Also, black people who are angry for no fucking reason even though America kisses their asses every day out of liberal guilt for something nobody ever even did to them. Poor people and cripples, bitter about being losers, who expect the government to give them money for nothing. Etc. With Hitler, it all boiled down to the Jews – get rid of the poisonous Jews and Aryans live happily ever after. With the elites who find Trumpism useful, all of the above, but also, mostly the Jews, and those who think, for whatever crazy reason, that it’s not the fucking Jews. Or, to put it more bluntly, whoever we can pin our own crimes on.

As a Jew whose large family was almost completely exterminated in the Nazi era, I am prone to see Nazis among supremely ambitious people who are merely extremely prejudiced and unprincipled. Is Lyin’ Ted really a Nazi? Give the boy a chance, I say, and he’ll do whatever needs to be done for his party. Mitch McConnell? The impartial juror who announced he was working closely with Trump’s defense team to quickly end the farce of a trial in the Senate where no witnesses or testimony would be allowed, the guy who rammed religious extremist Coney Barrett on to the Supreme Court days before the election? Please. Jim Jordan? He speaks to the president “all the time, yes, I spoke to him on January 6, sure I did, but, you, heh… now that you ask when I talked to him on the 6th… heh… ahumenuh humena humena…”. Alabama representative Mo Brooks, in his bullet proof vest, exhorting an armed crowd to go to the Capitol and fight for America, after organizing three White House strategy meetings for his fellow Congressional presidential election challengers prior to January 6 to plan for the big day? I shouldn’t call Brooks a Nazi, he might merely be a high-spirited klansman, for all I know.

While all this seditioning was going on (and it is still going on big time as AG Merrick Garland methodically works to prove the DOJ is now non-political again) we now know, with proof from newly released DOJ memos and other documents, that Trump made a continuous effort to use the DOJ to overturn the 2020 presidential election in states Trump lost (Congressional races won by the GOP in the same elections would not be challenged, no fraud there). Bill Barr, a conservative Christian culture warrior who served as historically shameless, bellicose gunsel for Trump, announced, after blusteringly promoting massive voter fraud allegations for months, that there had been no fraud on a scale that would have changed the election results anywhere. Then, with a final wet kiss to his former master, Barr resigned to spend Christmas with his family (and presumably to avoid future prosecution for seditious conspiracy to commit the insurrection that was being planned).

The lackeys at the top of the DOJ resisted Trump when he asked them to merely announce the election had been corrupt, in spite of the fact, established by the DOJ’s own investigations, that it had not been, and let him and Brooksie, and Jordan, and a few other hearty fanatics, “take care of the rest”. Then, in his moment of need, Trump found his loyal American Eichmann, Jeffrey Clark, right there at DOJ. Like Eichmann, Clark was ready, willing and able, to promote any lie that might be useful to his Leader.

Clark drafted a letter for the acting-AG to sign, informing Georgia officials that they had a legal responsibility to obey the will of the Republican state legislature, not the courts, not the election boards, not the fatuous arguments of cynical liberal constitutional law liars who clearly were involved in the corruption that stole the election from the rightful winner. This letter is part of the public record now, and Barr’s successor, to his credit, refused to sign it (to his discredit, he kept his mouth shut about, and gutlessly tap-danced around, the whole ugly insurrectionish episode).

There was a standoff, a la Trump’s old reality TV show The Apprentice, Clark, his audition letter in hand, arguing to be made AG so he could sign it, with the rest of DOJ leadership threatening to resign. Trump decided not to risk the resignation of DOJ leadership and called Georgia instead, finally getting through, on his 18th try, on January 3, to ask the fellas there to give him a break and find the stinkin’ 11,780 votes he needed, and then proceeded with his desperate last stand, the January 6 MAGA riot to “stop the steal”.

Eichmann, the man who kept the trains rolling to the death camps, packed to capacity, was a man of modest intellectual gifts, an incomplete high school education and a talent for bureaucracy. Clark, an accomplished attorney, graduated from college and law school, had a distinguished legal career at one of the world’s top corporate law firms, fighting for ultra-conservative causes and making enough money and powerful right wing contacts that he is set for life (he’s now Chief of Litigation & Director of Strategy at New Civil Liberties Alliance, a self-described young and vibrant organization focused on restoring the historically more robust civil liberties long enjoyed by federal and state citizens—liberties that have come under fire with the rise of the modern “administrative state.”) He’s fighting for “civil liberties” like the right not to be forced to wear a fucking mask by an overreaching government. American Nazis always find well-paying jobs with like-minded, right wing billionaire-funded outfits fighting for their version of liberty and justice.

Hannah Arendt painted an unforgettable and insightful portrait of this kind of ambitious, mindless, true believing public servant in her masterpiece Eichmann in Jerusalem. He is supremely ambitious, does what he’s told, never questions his superiors, proceeds with absolute faith and unwavering belief in the rightness of his cause, knows the millions he loads on to trains are going to death camps, steels himself and does his duty no matter what.

Not to torture this comparison beyond the plain fact that both men, Eichmann and Clark, were ready, willing and able to do whatever was needed to advance their beliefs and their careers — and serve their masters. Of Eichmann, Arendt noted the lack of what we usually call “evil” in his CV and pointed out how he reflected a chillingly modern concept of evil, flowing directly and inexorably from a hateful belief system implemented on a mass level by an unblinking loyalist bureaucracy. From the intro:

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As for what most of us call “conscience,” the Nazis, like the current GOP, had that shit covered. For Nazis conscience was, as Hitler himself had said, a debilitating “Jewish invention.” Conscience, they believed, made people weak and vulnerable and must be rooted out of the Nazi soul, like any vestige of human empathy that did not serve the Leader’s vision. For the current GOP? I don’t know, you tell me.

American Eichmann, Jeffrey Clark

Sickening

Clark’s anti-democratic treachery was already known and reported on back in January. Insurrection moves fast, democratic adjustment to insurrection moves with deliberate, lawful slowness.

The NY Times (January 24, 2021):

Justice Department colleagues said they were shocked by Mr. Clark’s embrace of the president’s falsehoods and plan to oust the acting attorney general in an effort to overturn Georgia’s election results.

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Jeff Clark is the newly established Chief of Litigation and Director of Strategy for the nonpartisan New Civil Liberties Alliance. NCLA is a young and vibrant organization focused on restoring the historically more robust civil liberties long enjoyed by federal and state citizens—liberties that have come under fire with the rise of the modern “administrative state.”

Before joining NCLA, Mr. Clark was dual-hatted as the Acting Assistant Attorney General of the Civil Division at the U.S. Justice Department from 2020-2021, as well as the Senate-confirmed 35th Assistant Attorney General of the Environment and Natural Resources Division (ENRD) from 2018-2021. ENRD is a component of the Justice Department with an illustrious, more-than-a-century’s worth of history. He has personally appeared in every federal Court of Appeals. . .

. . . During his two periods of service inside the federal government, Mr. Clark focused on how to implement Federalist 51’s vision of “oblig[ing the government] to control itself.” Now at NCLA, he will focus on enforcing, from the outside, the constraints of the Constitution and the laws on the government.

Interspersed with his government service, Mr. Clark was a partner at the international law firm of Kirkland and Ellis LLP, where he practiced general appellate litigation, environmental law, and administrative law. Moreover, Mr. Clark has also worked in numerous substantive areas of law, ranging from labor law, to class actions, to intellectual property, to bankruptcy, and to products liability.

(from his Linked in profile)

Nicely laid out far right scheme to own American democracy

This all needed to be openly debated for decades, and laws made to thwart this well-organized, massively funded, largely successful plot by America’s most cynical billionaires to maximize and ensure their hereditary privileges in perpetuity. It was done in secret until around the time of Obama, The Tea Party and Birtherism hit the news and the scales finally, decisively tipped in their favor..

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse lays it all out clearly and succinctly in a short presentation.

You can only rationally counter this argument by KULTUR!

In this short clip Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) makes an excellent point about the “socialism” of wildly popular Medicare (even in its current no eyes, no teeth form) and Social Security (and by extension the Veteran’s Administration, Medicaid, Welfare, Disability Insurance, etc.) Forget the YouTube title and the hero shot of the giant Orange Polyp, there is barely a mention of the disgraced former would-be dictator. Durbin’s simple, well-stated point can only be refuted by an angry mob of freedom lovers shouting USA! USA!!! as their remaining privileges and immunities of citizenship are stripped away by the zero sum fascists they’re cheering for.

Note on American “politics” to a friend overseas

As for the Orange Polyp, things are finally closing in on him.   There is now proof of three meetings he attended with a dozen Congressional lackeys to plan the spontaneous (ad budget to promote the lie that he won was a modest $50,000,000) January 6 “protest” that degenerate, Negro commies made to look so bad by dressing as a violent white MAGA mob and putting dozens of cops in the hospital, with help from the FBI, a dead Venezuelan socialist and other nefarious traitors, freedom haters and never-Trumpers.   I really don’t see how he and his insurrectionist buddies get out of this one.   

The impeachments were a joke, because, although strong cases were presented each time, his loyalists are so shameless and so terrified of his sadistic wrath they’d acquit him (after a trial with no witnesses, where the foreman of the impartial jury announced he was working closely with the defense) of publicly raping and eating a five year-old, but courts are a different matter.  Even the zealot judges he appointed from the list given to him by the extreme right wing legal fraternity (The Federalist Society the Koch-funded Nazis call themselves) ruled against him in hundreds of cases — a couple even ripping him new assholes.   Evidence or lack of it still rules in court and there are very few cases in which a judge can safely rule against the evidence (and those are mainly on the unappealable Supreme Court where the majority wins no matter how asinine their opinion). The numerous cases against Trump do not favor him.

Not to say he won’t bring a lot more pain on a lot more people before he’s done– and if they don’t prosecute him soon it may well be too late for all of us, AMERCA WHILL B GREAT AGIN, but it really looks like the tide is finally starting to turn against the enraged giant baby.   The shit in his diaper doesn’t smell quite as sweet to many who used to pretend to love sniffing it, to coin a disgusting phrase.

Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur

The similarities between famous authoritarian regimes of the past and the Trumpist push toward autocracy are remarkable. The eternal lying is one thing, and it is seemingly integral to the fascist idea: making people doubt and despise evidence that points away from the infallibility of the Leader and letting the Leader have the last word in everything. The goal of a fascist regime is to make the majority of the population see the world through the special fascist lens. That lens presents everything in a light most beneficial to Party and Leader. I think it’s fair to call that lens “culture.”

Those who seek an honest accounting of American history, an open discussion of things like racism at law here in the USA, are often disparaged as “culture warriors”. When I hear culture warrior I always think of Bill Barr, the most pugnacious public example (excluding right wing cable TV and radio ‘personalities’) in recent memory. Barr has a rigid religious worldview in which he and his fellow believers represent good and all critics are evil, depraved, corrupt degenerate atheists.

Blacks and people of conscience turn out in the millions to protest the routine police mistreatment, violence toward and occasional killing, of unarmed minority citizens, (after one outrageous example of cold-blooded murder captured on video in its entirety). Barr warns them that if they expect protection from the police they’d better start showing some fucking respect. Calls them ‘anarchists,’ godless anti-fascists, denies there is anything close to systemic racism in policing, threatens them with the full power of the State if they continue to protest, and so forth.

Culture is how you see the world, what you cherish, how you expect others to behave. In some cultures playing music loudly in a beautiful public space is a generous service to others who might enjoy the same music. Other cultures regard this as an aggressive intrusion on nature and privacy. Freedom from tyranny is a value in most cultures, defining what exactly freedom is, and what constitutes tyranny, varies from culture to culture.

You can phrase certain forms of coercion in a way that makes them sound very much like freedom, or like the worst form of tyranny. I learned in high school that words like “freedom” and “tyranny” are “glittering generalities” — they sound great but mean very little on their own. A mask mandate during a raging pandemic is tyranny, or prudence, depending on the culture you belong to.

The real political battle in the USA, and in many parts of the world, is over culture, since your view of culture determines everything. Culture is a powerful weapon in the hands of political hucksters and ambitious, partisan conmen, just the mention of a deadly threat to our “culture” and way of life galvanizes crowds. There is a huge, lucrative industry enlisted in the fight over culture, market testing resonant catchphrases (“death tax,” “death panels,” “climate alarmists,” “right to (fetal) life”). The idea is to phrase everything in a way that will make people agree with you, and “owning” your enemies, while ideally simplifying the discussion to whose culture will prevail.

“My body, my choice,” depending on which culture you are part of, is either a declaration of a woman’s right to decide whether to give birth or of a patriot’s right to resist a vaccine, not be forced to wear a mask, to be able to freely spread a so-called pandemic to whoever the hell he wants to spread it to.

When thinking about Trump and the GOP, all roads seem to lead back to Germany and Herr Hitler, who was a Trump-like rock star to millions of Germans. Listening to some “alternative factual” dissection of culture and current events by a member of MAGA nation, I flashed on the old Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur, the original Nazi outfit that fought the war for control of German culture. Though its organizer, Alfred Rosenberg, may have been a less adept a Hitler ass-kisser than others in the ambitious, highly competitive, jealous Nazi hierarchy (particularly Josef Goebbels, who soon took jurisdiction over Nazi culture), the group did its work from 1929 (a few years before Hitler took power, think culture champion Rush Limbaugh) until it was eventually absorbed completely into other Nazi agencies eight or nine years later. Rosenberg, the thinking man’s Nazi, nonetheless held high office in the Nazi hierarchy to the end and, for all his hard work, was eventually executed after the Nuremberg tribunal ruled he’d committed crimes against humanity [1].

What was the work of the Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur? As you might expect, fighting a war for how Germans saw the world. For example:

Degenerate jungle music. Here is a cartoonishly unhuman Negro, wearing a Jewish star, making hideous jazz music that is obviously degenerate and not fit for good German ears. The Nazis banned jazz (though the Gypsy jazz of Django Reinhardt in occupied Paris was prized by many SS officers) and launched a massive national campaign against degenerate visual artists, displaying the works of Picasso, Matisse, Chagall and a bunch of German-Jewish degenerate artists in a wildly popular traveling museum art show.

Real Germans, citizens of the Third Reich learned, loved realistic, idealized depictions of Aryans, healthy, strong and happy. This kind of art is known as Heroic Realism and is often used by autocrats for propaganda purposes. Odd note, the Entartate Kunst museum show of degenerate art in Nazi Germany was the most well-attended art show of all-time, until the Metropolitan Museum in NYC mounted the wildly popular Treasures of King Tut exhibit a half century later.

High ranking Nazi Hermann Goering (who owned a large collection of plundered Entartate Kunst) famously said “when I hear the word culture I reach for my gun.” Indeed.

The Poisonous Dwarf, Nazi Minister of Public Enlightenment, J. Goebbels, in a chipper mood

[1]

The author of a seminal work of Nazi ideology, The Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930), Rosenberg is considered one of the main authors of key Nazi ideological creeds, including its racial theory, persecution of the Jews, Lebensraum, abrogation of the Treaty of Versailles, and opposition to what was considered “degenerate” modern art. He is known for his rejection of and hatred for Christianity,[2][3] having played an important role in the development of German Nationalist Positive Christianity.[4]

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Nothing to see here! What about Pelosi??! Ashli Babbit??!

An unaccountable crime scheme never ends until the perpetrators are charged, arrested, prosecuted and convicted. The former president, an insane giant baby, angrily rants and his party stalwarts cower, doing whatever he says, no matter how insane or babyish (though, in recent days, more cracks in this united facade are showing). For the most part, publicly, it’s Whatever you want, Mr. Insane Giant Baby, sir!

“Sir, they say, they always call me ‘sir’, which is funny if you think about it…” notes the Insane Giant Baby with that winning fake smile.

You had virtually every leader of Trump’s constantly changing 2016 campaign team (with the exceptions of Jared and Kellyanne) arrested and/or briefly locked up for various crimes, including working directly with Russian intelligence officers and fleecing Trump supporters of millions of dollars (with a fake Build the Wall website), several convicted of perjury and other crimes, most pardoned by the man they loyally worked for. The same goes for at least five members of the former president’s cabinet, referred for criminal investigation, none charged by the Trump DOJ. This is not normal, as they used to say.

You had four years and counting of seamless obstruction of justice by the sitting president using the DOJ as his personal legal cover-up team. Inauguration Committee chairman Tom Barrack was investigated for serious crimes (similar to those committed by QAnon advocate and martial law/MyPillow enthusiast Mike Flynn) by the Department of Justice under Jeff Sessions and/or Barr and never charged with anything. Using the same evidence reviewed by Trump’s personal DOJ, Barrack has been indicted and is facing many years in prison if his criminal case goes to trial. The tax returns Trump fought so doggedly to hide, that the DOJ now says Trump’s DOJ and Steven Mnuchin illegally refused to turn over to Congress? Nothing to see! Personal! Nobody’s business, NANCY PELOSI, ASHLEY BABBIT, POWERFUL PEDOPHILE CANNIBALS, LIARS, ENEMIES, COMMUNISTS, DR. SUESS, MR. POTATOHEAD!!!!

The other day, apparently because Trump, frenetically trying to fix the “fake” election results, did not get around to classifying all DOJ notes and memos in the waning days of his presidency, when he was super busy trying to stay in power by any means necessary, some incriminating notes of a conversation he had with the corrupt Bill Barr’s successor as interim-acting AG (after even Barr had to bail) are now public. These contemporaneous notes show Trump had actual knowledge that he was lying about the election he lost, as he and his most ardent followers continue to brazenly do. Trump knew the truth, he just wanted the DOJ’s help to sell the lie.

This proof that he had knowledge that he was lying about the election shows his clear criminal intent for the many illegal actions he took, an intent his followers, especially Barr, kept obfuscating while they were all busily obstructing justice. At minimum they show Trump’s corrupt intent in, most recently, promoting his Big Lie, including $50,000,000 spent on ads (how is this not a big thing?) and countless calls (at least one recorded and heard by the public) and meetings during his unhinged “charm offensive” trying to pressure state Republicans to overrule their states’ voters.

Barr had already informed Trump, in a heated private exchange, that Trump’s continued claims of election fraud, and a rigged, stolen election were “bullshit.” Though Barr provided one last enthusiastic reach-around in his letter of resignation (“you are the greatest of all-time, sir, and the most passionately loved and admired compulsive liar in American, yea, world history. Your member is enormous and millions worship you”) he went on the record then and now as saying the election had not, in fact, been stolen. There had been no fraud, he concluded, on behalf of the DOJ, on a level that would have changed any election result. Too little and way too late, after all of Barr’s truly herculean efforts to shield Trump from accountability for anything, but even he left the sinking Trump administration before he could be directly tied to the attempted violent coup his boss was openly planning.

The “incriminating” notes, taken by the acting assistant deputy to then brand new interim-acting AG Jeffrey Rosen, show Rosen again informing Trump that there was no evidence of a rigged, corrupt or stolen election. The conversation took place on December 27, shortly after Barr left and ten days before the January 6 MAGA riot. Rosen corrected Trump’s false and mistaken claims. When Trump claimed there was a 68% miscounted vote/fraud rate in Michigan, Rosen corrected his number, it was actually a 0.0063% miscount rate, Sir, less than one hundredth of a percent. A small math error, fortuitously in his own favor, Trump’s rate was more than 10,000 times more than the actual rate. Anybody can get confused by decimals.

Trump remained undeterred with his political appointees, continued to try bending them to his will. The note quotes Trump’s response to being told by Rosen that the DOJ cannot just “snap its fingers and overturn the election results”. The Insane Giant Baby said he understood that, all he wanted was for the DOJ to do him a favor, though:

“just say the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me and the R. congressmen”

“These notes reveal that a sitting president, defeated in a free and fair election, personally and repeatedly pressured Justice Department leaders to help him foment a coup in a last-ditch attempt to cling to power,” Laufman [a former DOJ official] said. “And that should shock the conscience of every American, regardless of political persuasion.”

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At this point, the war-weary American conscience is pretty darned hard to shock and there are always appeals and legal delays that can be employed by Trump and his myrmidons until there is a GOP majority in Congress again. Biden appears to believe (and is betting American democracy on that belief) that keeping Americans safe from the pandemic, giving them security, help with poverty, providing millions of jobs, repairing our crumbling infrastructure and starting the hard work of slowing catastrophic climate change will convince committed anti-fact fanatics to no longer support the Insane Giant Criminal Baby they faithfully adore. The moderate American president seems to actually believe that the results of his popular programs will speak for themselves, without a real need to overturn dozens of GOP voter suppression laws in many closely fought “battleground” states, laws that leave the final counting and certification of votes in the unchallengeable hands of GOP partisans. In less than a hundred days, after all, Biden’s legal experts will issue their report about the constitutionality of increasing the number of federal judges (no controversy, Congress can actually do it any time, absent the filibuster), including unpacking the 6-3 Federalist Society Supreme Court. What’s the rush? Americans aren’t that stupid… surely they’ll understand the radical Democrat commies improved their lives…

As for the seriousness of the new revelations about our criminally-inclined former Teflon Don and whether they will prompt any federal action?

I can hear the demented argument of former civil libertarian Alan Dershowitz, opining that, perhaps, had this been known at the time, while Trump was in office (where he could not have been legally prosecuted, even for murder, according to a generous reading of a famous memo) the notes might have, arguably, been a convincing part of a larger argument that the president had knowingly abused his power to spread a self-promoting lie and facilitate illegal efforts to make it the “truth”, although, as Trump’s first impeachment and second impeachment demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt, abuse of power, by itself, is neither a high crime nor a misdemeanor if the powerful abuser is known to be supremely vindictive, petty and sadistic, and has at least 50 votes in the Senate.

Now, some will say that this new “note” by Jeffrey Rosen’s deputy is much ado about nothing. EVERYBODY knows Trump lies, thousands of times as president, many, many, many times since he lost the election he tenaciously claims, without any evidence, that he won. Everybody knows you either love Trump unconditionally or hate him without boundaries. Those who love him admire his unbeatable ability to say “fuck you” to anybody, at any time, with no consequences. Those who hate him consider him a deadly cancer on decency and democracy. Who’s to say who’s right?

The stodgy New York Times printed an editorial the other day, entitled, circumspectly enough “ Trump and His Allies Still Aren’t Telling the Truth about January 6th” (Trump and his Allies are still lying about January 6th might have seemed biased, right?) contrasting numerous counter-factual GOP talking points to the truth as established by actual evidence and the fact that it actually happened. It was an impressive collection of fact and often absurdist alternative fact, but, of course, it proves nothing to those millions who are convinced that had faithless Brad Raffensberger and other powerful RINOs, including Trump’s loyal but spineless VP, homophobic lapdog Mike Pence, had merely done the right thing, finding Trump ONE more vote than Biden in each of the several swing states Trump “lost”, we wouldn’t be having this annoying fucking discussion now, while vicious Satanist cannibal child-fuckers like “affable” Communist Tom Hanks are running free and gleefully unaccountable for monstrous crimes they continue to blissfully get away with (sorry, Tom, but, you know people are sayin’… ‘sir’ they say ‘Tom the actor is not a good guy’).

It’s been said many times lately, prominently by justice-obsessed former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner, that the ongoing GOP authoritarian insurrection will not be halted until its leaders and organizers are charged, arrested, tried and convicted. Elected insurrectionists, who seem to have played key roles in the lead-up to Trump’s MAGA riot (and its follow-up), still loudly talking shit, must be held accountable and, if merited, forced off the political playing field, that much is clear.

The proof of Trump’s criminal intent is there, Trump’s actual intent in his many criminal undertakings since losing the presidency can be easily established by deposing Barr, Rosen and his deputy assistant. It is beyond question that Trump knew he was lying when he sought extra-legal help overturning a fair election, he refers to others he enlisted, Mo Brooks organized three pre-January 6 strategy meetings with at least ten other elected Republicans, and still they persist, “doubling down” on the Stolen Election Lie at every opportunity.

We must all hope (those of us who are not Trumpists) that the water in the pot that is slowly heating now under the Giant Insane Angry Baby and some closely related frogs will get hot enough, soon enough, to make some of his loyal, betrayed co-conspirators start making deals to get out of the bouillabaisse, soon.

Why not take a one-month vacation now, Congress, you’ve certainly earned it! Nothing of great importance that won’t wait a month or two, or six, or … whatever.