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 …

This is the strong man the party of Lincoln is currently pinning its presidential hopes on, Orange Polyp permitting.

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.

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!

The aim of propaganda is the same today as it was when, hundreds of years ago, a Pope first came up with the idea of telling a compelling story, in all the languages of the known world, to propagate the One True Faith.  Motivated by true faith in the absolute truth, armies are capable of waging endless holy war. 

Propaganda is the same as ever, except that the techniques have greatly improved and the means of spreading and receiving it are now in everybody’s pocket, charging next to our beds to be seen as soon as we open our eyes.  Plus, we in the West are primed for propaganda and the non-critical thinking it produces.  We live in a culture where, since our earliest memories, we are bombarded by countless ads targeted directly to people our age, as we grow up.  We learn to mostly tune out ubiquitous ads (at great cost to our attention spans and ability to think critically), but ad-makers learn to influence us anyway.

A short history of American propaganda/advertising was laid out in season three of a great podcast called Drilled [1].  The skinny version is that Edward Bernays (see episode 6 summary [2]), the brilliant nephew of Sigmund Freud, arrived in the US prior to World War One and worked for Woodrow Wilson’s Committee on Public Information, the propaganda department tasked with making American men enlist to gloriously fight the enemy in a ridiculous war. They whipped up enthusiasm for The War to End War, The War to Make the World Safe for Democracy (and the war to ensure that American bankers did not lose a shit load of money if Britian and France lost the war).  Bernays distinguished himself with his astute psychological understanding of what motivates humans to fight to the death. Hitler was a great admirer of their ruthlessly effective propaganda and modeled his own propaganda on their zero-sum approach.

After the war Bernays brilliantly applied these same psychological techniques to commercial advertising, which he styled Public Relations.  He is regarded as the Father of Modern Advertising and became wealthy and very well-respected as an American thought leader.   One of his great coups was immensely increasing the market for cigarettes by making it a matter of asserting liberty, freedom and equality for women to smoke.   He also made a tidy sum helping the Oil Industry clean up their filthy image and advance their profit-driven interests.  

Why do millions of people believe plain, easily disproved lies?  They are exposed to nothing but propaganda, 24/7, personalized to tickle and outrage their prejudices.  We all want to be right and we respond best to what makes us feel justified, confirms our biases.  If the actual facts don’t support our views, fuck the facts!  Millions will never hear another side of the story, or the “facts” of the case.   That is by design.  Who decides what people will hear?  Billionaires who buy the public forum and reap vast profits from angry traffic on that forum.  Fair is fair.  Get the government out of our bedrooms!

If the 82 year-old husband of a top Democrat, second in line for the presidency, is assaulted with a hammer by a MAGA maniac looking to cripple the man’s powerful wife, right before a crucial election,… here’s an idea!  The 82 year-old is a randy old adulterous homo (and who does Christ despise more than one of those?) who got into a fight with a gay prostitute!!! Take that, libtards!  Click to retweet!  Click!!!  If you love Jesus, and hate homos, for the love of God, click!  I OWN Twitter, bitches!

This is the power of propaganda, boys and girls.  Where there is no dispute as to the facts — SF police witnessed the “alleged” hammer attack by a MAGA man who smashed a glass door to break into the house of his gay “client” — we can create one by sowing a distracting narrative millions will embrace.   Virtually no election fraud ever found in the US?   THAT DOESN’T MEAN THERE IS NOT A TON OF ELECTION FRAUD, YOU LYING FUCKS!   World burning up, wildfires, droughts, floods, apocalyptic killer storms every season?  BURNING FOSSIL FUELS IS GOOD FOR THE EARTH, YOU FUCKING COMMIE RATS!

And so forth.

I am nauseously optimistic about the 2022 midterm election.  I think, however the propagandists spin it, that a vast majority of Americans are sickened by the openly defiant MAGA march toward fascism.  I think triumphant American fascists (who represent at best 39% of us)  did an in-your-fucking-face victory dance a few months too soon after a zealot like Ginni Thomas (likeliest culprit) leaked Alito’s insane Christian Dominionist/medivalist draft to lock in a nakedly partisan, patriarchal, theocratic opinion clawing back 50 years of hard fought constitutional protection for half of the population.  Women, and men who care about women (most men, believe it or not), should be fucking outraged.   

There are two ways to vent outrage in today’s USA — one is by rioting to prove your lies are TRUE, the other is by voting and getting others to vote, in numbers too big to rig.  I’m hopeful that millions of first time voters, and formerly indifferent voters, are going to turn out to say HELL, NO! to American autocracy.  This is my hope in spite of knowing the diabolical power of propaganda/advertising and endless, lying attack ads.

53 or 54 actual democracy-focused Democrats in the Senate, maintaining even a slim majority in the House, and we have a decent shot to head off the criminals who openly defy all norms and all laws in the name of a higher calling: absolute power for the already obscenely privileged.  As one of their right-wing forebears famously put it (I paraphrase slightly)  “extremism in the cause of owning the fucking blood-drinking, child-molesting, godless commie, fascist Left is no vice.”   Nah, not in our democracy, assholes.

[1]  Here’s the link: https://www.drilledpodcast.com/s3-the-mad-men-of-big-oil/

[2] from Drilled:

Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, coined the term “public relations” when propaganda started to become a negative term. His specialty was using psychological know-how to manipulate the masses and orchestrate cultural shifts in his clients’ favor (clients like Standard Oil, the American Tobacco Company, and General Motors). A few decades later, W. Howard Chase built onto that foundation with the idea of issues management—predicting an industry’s potential issues, and manipulating political, social, and cultural forces to neutralize them. Chase is responsible for one of the best-known examples of greenwashing, the so-called “crying Indian ad,” which introduced the idea of “litter bugs” and individual responsibility for pollution. Transcript