How about Bezos’s recent Washington Post puff piece calling radical Trumpist Senator Josh Hawley “a fierce defender of the Constitution”?

As noted, the ongoing danger of a Big Lie is the culture of lying it brings about, many other lies must be told to support the Big One. The election was stolen (not true) therefore we have a right and responsibility to bring the thieves to justice (hang Mike Pence!) and no puny police force is going to stop us (Blue Lives Matter!) we love our flags (nothing wrong with our Confederate flag, “n-words”) and some of us will beat police officers with the flagpoles (“when you catch somebody in a fraud, you’re allowed to go by very different rules”).

Today the united position of the GOP is that any claim they ran for their lives on January 6 is a bold-faced lie, they were never afraid of the innocent, totally unarmed (virtually no firearms seized afterwards) law-abiding mob they barricaded the doors against and fled from in terror! They claim there is no need for any investigation — which could have dire political consequences for certain elected officials (like the firebrand from the state of Q) who may have aided the peaceful mob — unless you also investigate the claimed terrorism of Black Lives Matter, antifa and the treacherous machinations of traitor Republicans. You do remember the (rare) rioting Barr and Trump used to bring in federal riot troops night after to restore peace in the first of many “anarchist jurisdictions” that needed pacification after the totally justifiable murder of George Floyd and massive nationwide so-called “peaceful” protests by violent haters!!!

Then we have this sobering (and encouraging) poll about the apparently declining but still prevalent Republican belief that Blacks, antifa and disloyal Republicans stole the 2020 election for Biden (down from 70%, by the looks of it) and some eye-popping number crunching (from Heather Cox Richardson’s latest):

If that 14% contains the politically committed 0.01%, the group that has most of the money in America, well, we see the results every day. You get the “spontaneous” creation of the nationwide Tea Party, Election Integrity laws that make it harder to vote, Stand Your Ground Laws that make it easier to legally kill people you’re afraid of, Anti-Protest Laws that make it a felony to assemble while granting immunity to those who run over now felonious protesters in the street, and for religious types, a solid anti-abortion majority on the Supreme Court to finally end government coercion and ensure maximum liberty, etc.

We’re in one heap of a mess, folks, but I like the direction things are going. With every new detail that comes out about the US under Mr. Trump and his gunsel Bill Barr (check out the Manafort stuff– his actual lies to Mueller are now laid out, un-redacted, in black and white [1]), things look a little better, justice-wise. It is inconceivable to me that honest investigations, grand juries and actual prosecutions will not change the face of GOP politics in the coming months. If only fucking Sinema and Manchin had the integrity of your average turd…

[1]

O`DONNELL: And what was your reaction to what we learned in the newly- unredacted — well, we, the public, learned in these newly-unredacted documents about Paul Manafort dealing with the Mueller investigation and the ways he kept lying to them about Konstantin Kilimnik?

SCHIFF: Well, it`s pretty interesting because in two respects. First, you`re right. It shows Manafort was a bigger liar than we knew, and we knew he was a pretty big liar to begin with. But it also shows the degree of collusion between the campaign chairman for Donald Trump and Russian intelligence.

Here Manafort and Gates, his deputy chairman, are repeatedly giving an agent of Russian intelligence internal polling data, internal strategic documents about their efforts in battleground states and key demographics within those battleground states.

So, you know, this is going on while the Russians are doing a secret social media operation to help the Trump campaign. And so it`s hard to find something more graphic than that in terms of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians and the same Russian intelligence that`s working on the social media campaign.

But what`s also interesting about it is this is now the second federal judge in ordering these things to be unredacted, who has essentially said Bill Barr was misleading the country, misleading the country by saying there was no evidence of collusion, misleading the country by saying that he was compelled to conclude that you could not indict the president on obstruction.

And he`s also — the judge is also saying that essentially Barr has been dishonest with the court about what that memo is about. It`s not about just deliberations.

Apparently it`s about spin. And it`s for that reason, because it`s about how do they spin this pre-decision, this predetermination that they weren`t going to indict the president no matter what — how do they spin that? That`s not something that can be concealed from the public. So it`s interesting at many levels.

source

It is a scary thought, breathing out and never breathing in again. Anxiety often expresses itself in this image — I can’t breathe! — Oh my God! — the breath catching, a rising fear of no more oxygen coming in, not enough oxygen, drowning on dry land as the last bit of sand tics through the hourglass of the long soap opera that was, until a second ago, your life.

I saw only one last breath in my life. It was my father’s. A few minutes earlier he’d sent everyone else away, telling them I’d stay with him, that everything was fine. They went down to have a break, to eat dinner in the hospital cafeteria. My father waited until they were gone and then said “I don’t know how to do this.” I assured him that nobody did, that it would be fine.

The moment of his death, maybe fifteen minutes later, was perfectly captured by some poetic Jewish writer two thousand years earlier: like removing a hair from a glass of milk. His death was entirely peaceful, his breathing gently slowed and finally stopped. His last breath was gone a few seconds before I knew it for sure. One benefit, I understand, of dying from liver cancer, it just quietly shuts everything down, making you more and more tired until you simply…

You might think knowing that we all will die would bring out the best in us, our empathy, our higher nature. It is a humbling thing to understand that every life ends with a last breath, the humblest of us and the mightiest. Sadly, the fearsome inevitability of death leads many to indulge the worst side of themselves. Might as well take as many of these fuckers down as I can before I die in a glorious hail of bullets!

We’re living through a time as bad as any in human history. This is a time of vast human panic, irrationality, fear, rage and hopelessness. There are good reasons to be afraid, to be angry, to feel hopeless. Look at the facts. Heck, just look at the lies.

During a deadly, highly contagious pandemic we had autocrats in several large countries telling their nations that the whole thing was a hoax created by our enemies, only weak people believed it, only the pathetic died from it. It would be over soon. No need to worry. A few million died worldwide, continue to die, whose fault is that? Don’t blame the Strongmen!

Our own exceptional American Strongman, the orange one, simply told the nation it was not his fucking problem, that’s what States’ Rights are for, let the states fight it out, that’s what the Constitution was written for, the Civil War fought over.

A few months later, before and after another party-line acquittal in a “partisan” impeachment for doing nothing but speaking his angry mind, in a masterful show of his epic, childish will, he refused to accept the results of the election. He attacked the counting of the votes cast by the American people, denounced it as fraudulent, tried to convince state officials to change the certified vote tallies.

His case is pretty much air-tight, in his mind: a president who, according to the lying polls, had supposedly never cracked 50% in popularity during his time in office got more votes in 2020 than he did in his landslide of 2016. His vote tally, 74,000,000, almost 47% of the vote, set a record for votes cast for an incumbent, therefore– obviously– he won. He continues to insist he won, in a landslide.

His opponent tallied 81,000,000 votes, and there is no real question about those numbers, so Trump and his myrmidons kept reminding people that this corrupt, lying, sleepy, nefarious puppet of the Chinese Communist Party had stolen the election by nefarious means, exactly as he predicted his opponent would do when he himself was attempting to rig the election (in part by conspiring to limit mail-in voting, smug Louis DeJoy ruthlessly removing urban mailboxes and dismantling high-speed mail sorting machines in cities, backed by hundreds of lawsuits and aided in this anti-theoretical mail fraud campaign by no less than Bill Barr)!

70% of the former president’s steady 39% believe the election was stolen from their man, in fact, more than that — 70% of all Republicans. $50,000,000 was spent on an advertising campaign to convince the credulous that the election had been stolen from Trump, no matter what Republican state officials, and every court Republicans brought lawsuits in, kept saying. Finally, another $3,500,000 was spent to organize the rally the Capitol rioters attended to get fired up right before they marched down to breach the Capitol, like normal tourists, and Stop the Steal on the day the vote for the thieving Biden was being certified and made official.

Outside of the millions Trump milked MAGA nation for, all the dark money that funded this incendiary lie came from secret sources, like the money that funds “climate change skepticism” during a time when we are witnessing new instances of rapidly unfolding climate catastrophe weekly. Among these dark money funders, and possibly the smartest of them, is Charles Koch, an evil zombie who refuses to die. Koch (the surviving Koch Brother — Charles and David beat their other two brothers to a pulp in years of litigation) is the mastermind engineer of the radical right-wing long game.

Koch enjoys plenty of company and generous tax-deductible support among his well-born, fellow-traveler classmates. Their billions make sure the credulity of the masses of “low information” Americans serves the cause of liberty from government coercion. The autistic genius billionaire Robert Mercer, who supported Lyin’ Ted to the end, threw his money, expertise and support behind Trump, when the time came, and Mercer’s support– plus the campaign-saving introductions to Steve Bannon and Kellyanne “Alternative Fact” Conway — was critical to the Mercer family’s new candidate’s success. Their endgame is all the same. Pay no tax, preserve absolute liberty from “coercion”, have a strong, violent police force, and fuck the poor.

Men like these die only after inflicting tremendous suffering on as many of the rest of us as possible. It seems to me that the suffering they inflict means as much to them as the profit they reap from inflicting this harm. We had one of the worst of them, for four years, attacking almost everybody in the world, daily, on his hyperactive Twitter feed. It was quite clear from his angry, vindictive behavior, that no victory was complete for him without somebody he hated being publicly humiliated.

His America longs for the good old days, when a rich guy like him could hire goons to break legs, have a mob string up any charismatic opponent, call in a favor from the military, if things got really bad between him and the workers he was trying to screw out of their pay.

Those great lost days when America was great, before the “political correctness” that has made us a “laughingstock” are what MAGA is all about. A time (before women could vote, apparently) when bitches didn’t need $130,000 bribes to keep their big mouths shut about a great man’s innocent “side-action,” when angry Blacks (ungrateful for not being enslaved AND being allowed to vote) didn’t try to sell this horse-shit about their lives mattering, when politically correct losers didn’t suddenly become “woke” and believe that crap about “all men being created equal”.

Obviously that’s not true, they say, people were never created equal, the men who wrote that owned other human beings, creatures they regarded as inferior. There are such things as genetics, eugenics, blood, soil, glory, after all. Only a weak nation allows itself to be taken over by soft-hearted eggheads who think they know everything, feel superior because they arrogantly feel the “truth” is on their side.

This MAGA type dies, like anyone else, but the worst of them are prepared to do things, like participate in a violent mob to stop an election being certified because their enraged leader lied to them, that more thoughtful people wouldn’t do. They die, no question, as we all do. The only question is how many of us will breathe our last before they’re done fouling the air with misdirected anger, miscalculated vengeance and unquenchable desire for the illusion of total domination?

I don’t know what it will take for Sinema and Manchin to stop behaving like oblivious obstruction-enablers and recognize the filibuster for what it is and has always been– a tool of obstructionist racists, first slaveholders ably assisted by their public servant, and inventor of the Senate filibuster, John Calhoun, and later generations of Dixiecrat klansmen who used it to block all anti-lynching and civil rights legislation. 

The filibuster does not encourage “bipartisanship” as these two asshats keep insisting. It promotes the opposite, particularly when one of the parties embraces the radical “alternate reality” of their enraged leader. As the filibuster is currently constituted, it allows one member of the minority party to block debate on anything not budget-related, with an email. Then it’s 60 votes or suck it if you want to discuss a bill on the Senate floor.

Here’s a point Schumer should make to those two holdouts, today — OK, you don’t want to abolish the filibuster, not ready to go there, fine.  What’s your objection to changing the rule back to what it was just a few years ago — you stand up and talk and when you stop talking, if nobody else from your party immediately steps up, filibuster over?  Why not put the burden back on the party filibustering, instead of the one trying to get on with normal Senate business?

And we add this second change to the filibuster rule — we’ve banned reading the phone book or Dr. Seuss, canceled Green Eggs AND ham, your standing, talking filibuster has to be speeches on the merits of your meritless objection.   

Make those two changes to the filibuster rule and it’s game over for Mitch, Lindsey, Lyin’ Ted, Hawley, Ron Johnson from Wisconsin and their Big Lie embracing ilk.  There is no merit to their positions on anything in the debate over voting rights, the violence of American policing, investigating the January 6 Trump riot, raising the minimum wage, doing everything that can be done to avoid climate catastrophe.

Their objections and obstructions are frequently based on demonstrable lies — as in the ridiculous and dangerous case of their now “peaceful” January 6 non-insurrection. The clown in Congress who recently dismissed the Capitol riot as a normal tourist event is on videotape screaming and crapping his pants as he frantically barricades the door against the peaceful MAGA tourists on that sunny January 6. Those 70 Capitol Police who’ve retired or quit since the peaceful riot? Faint-hearted alarmists who do not know a transformational lie when they see it.

I truly don’t get why that reasonable change to the out-of-control filibuster rules would even be an ask for Sinema or Manchin.

Then again, they don’t pay me the big bucks to suggest these kind of policy strategies.  I hope this will be the issue that finally gets Democrats off their asses to pressure the two “moderate” holdouts to get the filibuster under control. 

If not this issue — a bipartisan investigation to hold the lying propagandists and provocateurs responsible for the riot at the Capitol that stopped the certification of a fair election as members of Congress hid from the peaceful tourists (and later Kevin McCarthy announced that there’s no debate that Biden is the president), truly a matter of Superman’s “Truth, Justice and the American Way” — what issue would be important enough?

Manchin and Sinema could continue to enable Mitch and the slim minority to hold on to its unchecked ability to obstruct until one of the older member of the Democratic caucus finally has a debilitating stroke (as many of us often feel about to have when reading about Manchin and Sinema). Then, that day, hello Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and goodbye filibuster, motherfuckers!

A purge is almost never a good thing, though in the sense of a good vomit after gross overeating or over-drinking, it makes a lot of sense. A new democratic government does well to purge diehard fascist members of the former government, but in general, purges are the work of autocrats who need to periodically weed out the disloyal and make terrifying examples of them. A frightful spectacle of vengeance deters those inclined to think for themselves instead of doing exactly what the leader demands.

When I hear the word purge I always think of the underground chamber where my favorite writer, Isaac Babel, was condemned, after a long stint in prison, one of millions of victims of Stalin’s purges. Babel pleaded with his interrogators, men who worked for Beria [1], Stalin’s chief of torture, to let him just continue writing. Babel’s mock trial was short, only a couple of minutes in that tiny, airless room, after which he was taken from that dark chamber and into a nearby courtyard for a couple of gunshots. A trunk of Babel’s unpublished writings, safeguarded by his friends, disappeared, never to be heard of again. That’s a purge.

Yesterday the GOP purged Liz Cheney from Republican leadership in a basement room at the Capitol, by a voice vote. This shouting out of “yay” or “nay” spared potential embarrassment for any individual Republican who would otherwise be on the record in favor of removing Cheney for the high crime of insisting that a violent riot, caused by Trump, watched worldwide on live television, had taken place on January 6, to support a lie that Trump had won the election in a landslide.

You don’t necessarily want your face attached to a vote to do that, since you can’t predict the future, so you meet in a large room in the basement, in a kind of lynch mob, and do it fast. The “yays” have it, Liz Cheney is purged. The whole thing took 16 minutes.

The problem with a purge that does not actually kill your enemy, as any good dictator knows, is that the opposition tends to organize around leaders who remain unbowed during a purge. Cheney, as hideous as her torture-endorsing right-wing politics are — and she is truly a chip off the old aptly named Dick Cheney — has taken a basic and principled position against perhaps the boldest single lie in American political history. Certainly the boldest lie ever told by a president who sent a mob to stop the certification of an election he lost, and, if they got lucky, lynch his vice president and decapitate the government by taking out the next two in line, Democrats Nancy Pelosi and Patrick Leahy.

“Stop the Steal”, in a nutshell, is the wildly counter-factual idea that Trump had the election stolen from him, by a bipartisan cabal of evil bastards, after four glorious years during which his ruthless enemies continually persecuted him for no reason except their radical hatred, that he actually won the 2020 election in a landslide, as he still insists he can prove.

How much courage does it take for a Republican to admit that the whole Trump thing, with its $50,000,000 ad budget to spread the infuriating lie (an ad buy that ended on January 6), with its $3,500,000 organizing budget to bring a massive crowd to Washington, DC to forcibly shut down Congress and “stop the steal,” is a lie? Trump’s claim that a rigged election was stolen from him is one of his trademark “transactional” lies, this one based on the paranoid fantasy of a former president who cannot accept the reality that he lost an election.

You would not think it would take much courage, but outside of Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, you seldom hear a peep from the Red team to contradict the obvious lie of their vindictive strongman leader. It would be nice to hear from Reince Preibus, John Kelly, Mad Dog Mattis, Sessions, Barr, H.R. McMaster, John Bolton, Chad Wolf, former Trump cabinet members Elaine Chao and Betsey DeVos (both of whom resigned right after the January 6 riot) and many others, on this. The united cowardice and calculation of virtually all Republicans in support of America’s Greatest Lying Loser is hard to fathom.

We are balanced on the rim of an active volcano, all of us, along with our democracy. This is going to remain an ugly fight, but it is a crucial fight, existential.

I take a certain amount of consolation from the actual facts in evidence and from the general rule of actual proof in our legal system. Virtually every lawsuit based on a demonstrable lie must fail, as we saw over and over with the dozens of Trump/RNC election lawsuits dismissed for lack of evidence of their claims. There are very few cases where a judge has the discretion, by ruling narrowly along an ideological crevasse (a Boof Kavanaugh speciality), to rule in support of ideology and contrary to the facts. It must be done with skill to avoid being overturned on appeal (unless you write for an unappealable court, of course, as Kavanaugh now does).

Our legal system is in many ways brutal, openly favoring the rights and privileges of the wealthy, and corporation persons, over everyone else. Criminal justice is applied in a systemically unjust manner that routinely incarcerates small-time criminals (disproportionately “non-white”) while leaving the most powerful criminals free to ply their lucrative trade. There is no legal enforcement of “ethics,” a concept applied on a strictly voluntary basis by anyone with the power to decide whether to abide by ethics recommendations.

For all its flaws, our legal system is bound by rules that even the most partisan judge cannot simply ignore. For example, you can insist on your deeply held opinion that Hillary Clinton is a vicious criminal who needs to be locked up. To lock her up you will need actual proof of a crime.

In the case of Trump and his loyalists, their crimes are many, and now shown with more and more powerful evidence. Now that Trump is no longer a sitting president (even Kevin McCarthy admitted yesterday that Biden is the actual president [2]) he does not have the shield of that OLC memo about not indicting POTUS.

Trump and his followers have been brazen, and relentless, but not always very smart. Even the purportedly brilliant legal mind of Bill Barr was addled, and not always smart, while he served as Trump’s zealous gunsel for the second half of Trump’s term. The entire story of Trump’s seamless obstruction of justice (new chapters written daily, stay tuned!) is now fair game for prosecutors and juries, and more and more facts, previously hidden (as part of the obstruction) are coming to light.

To take one thread as an example:

Former White House Counsel Don McGahn, interviewed under oath by Mueller’s investigators, recounted a shameless attempt by Trump to obstruct justice, followed by an even more shameless attempt by Trump to have McGahn create a lying record, denying that Trump ever made the first shameless ask.

McGahn’s public testimony under oath would have been deadly to Trump during the first impeachment trial (had Pelosi had the wisdom to allow an additional article of impeachment for Obstruction of Justice based, in part, on the ten examples Mueller laid out).

Even though Republicans under McConnell had the power to prevent all witnesses from testifying in the first impeachment “trial”, as they did, after vowing to work closely with Trump’s defense team, no chance could be taken that would allow McGahn (a right-wing zealot in his own right, promoter of Gorsuch and Kavanaugh for Supreme Court) to be deposed or testify. Barr suggested Trump invoke an imaginary all-encompassing presidential immunity that covered anyone Trump had ever talked to from ever testifying to anyone. McGahn’s subpoena to testify was held up in court for two years. Until the other day, when his long refusal to obey the subpoena ended with a deal for McGahn to answer a few questions [3].

We now have published facts that were hidden from Mueller, from the public, some key facts were zealously hidden by our disingenuous former Attorney General. It now is possible, for example, to prove that Trump’s then campaign manager, Paul Manafort, had a direct channel to Putin in his long-time friend Konstantin Kilimnik, and gave the Kremlin important secret polling data that allowed Russia to help Trump most efficiently. The facts are going to continue crushing Trump and his myrmidons in court.

It is dangerous, of course, to underestimate the power of organized rage and blind obedience in human affairs. Our experiment in democracy faces a grave danger from the forces of enraged white grievance and a party that now speaks for that grievance in one voice, “the yeas have it”. This free-floating anger has found an avatar in Donald Trump, an unapologetic hater, a man who will never, ever stop fighting.

It would appear, looking over his public history, that Trump, an angry bully since childhood, lives to fight. This fight-to-the-death-and-beyond spirit appeals to certain underdogs who feel that fighting is their only option. It also appeals to all cynical Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham types who simply attach themselves to what they perceive to be power, in any form. The fight is waged amid the silence of the mass of GOP officials and absurdist claims by little known partisans like Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-GA), who insist, during public testimony, that footage of the “riot” was no different than what could be shot of any tourist group, they were just there enjoying themselves!

By not actually stringing Liz Cheney up yesterday after the mob shouted its approval of her being stripped of her party leadership position, Trump’s followers in Congress may have made a huge mistake. If I had to bet on a Republican presidential candidate for 2024, my money would be on Liz Cheney over DJT. For one thing, it may be very hard, no matter how strong and organized the denial is, for Trump to run against the findings of the eventual January 6 Commission, and the verdicts in state criminal courts of Georgia and New York. Last time Trump had the indomitable Bill Barr fixing everything for him, this time, no such luck for Donnie Bonespurs.

[1]

Naturally when Beria, one of history’s most infamous sadistic torturers and rapists, was eventually arrested (in one of Stalin’s final purges, I think) he cried, screamed and whimpered like a terrified baby. I guess it occurred to him that if “what goes around comes around” is true, he had a horrible death waiting for him. Which he sure enough did.

[2]

“I don’t think anybody is questioning the legitimacy of the presidential election,” Mr. McCarthy told reporters after meeting with Mr. Biden and congressional leaders at the White House to discuss infrastructure spending. “I think that is all over with. We’re sitting here with the president today. So from that point of view, I don’t think that’s a problem.”

source

[3]

The House Judiciary Committee and the Biden administration have struck “an agreement in principle” to resolve a two-year-old fight over a subpoena for testimony from Don McGahn, a former White House counsel to President Donald Trump, lawyers said in a court filing on Tuesday evening.

Trump has not signed off on the deal, however, according to the status report submitted to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. The former president could try to take legal action to block any testimony from McGahn, but the filing from the House and the Justice Department — now under the control of appointees of President Joe Biden — seems to try to head off such a move by noting pointedly that Trump “is not a party to this case.”

source