Category Archives: politics smells like meat

How a headline frames the story

This DOJ attorney, Erez Reuveni, was placed on leave by Trump’s DOJ and then summarily fired for being candid to a judge in a federal court.  His only struggle, as an officer of the court, was trying not to lie or be evasive in response to the judge’s questions. Reading it most charitably to ABC, the DOJ did struggle in Maryland migrant case, though Reuveni did not.

Or as the New York Times told it at the time:

Career lawyers representing the government have a long tradition of arguing for the goals of Republican or Democratic administrations, regardless of their personal views. What is different now, they say, is that they increasingly feel trapped between President Trump’s partisan political appointees, who insist on a maximalist approach, and judges who demand comprehensible answers to basic questions.

The most vivid example of this squeeze came on Saturday when one of the department’s senior immigration lawyers, Erez Reuveni, was suspended indefinitely after speaking candidly about the administration’s mistaken deportation of a Maryland man to a notorious megaprison in El Salvador. . .

. . . “Good clients listen to their lawyers,” the judge, Paula Xinis, said.

Instead, the client punished its lawyer. In a letter on Saturday, Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, said Mr. Reuveni had failed to follow orders and instead committed “conduct prejudicial to your client.”

A second senior immigration lawyer involved in the Abrego Garcia case, August Flentje, was also placed on administrative leave for his failure “to supervise a subordinate,” according to two officials familiar with the move.

source

But corporate media like ABC (who already wrote a fat check to Trump to settle a frivolous lawsuit the president brought against them for a truthful on air statement by one of their talking heads), you know they have to be so careful, because access and frivolous lawsuits and extortion and shakedowns and threatened shutdowns and loss of license, and baseless defamation claims, the threat of censorship and the demand to obey an advance and loss of sponsorships. 

Falling into corporate disfavor by alienating the powerful, and vengeful, is suicidal behavior for a corporation.  So you write the headline that frames it in the best light for the guy you just wrote the multimillion dollar check to Trump’s “library” to avoid a lawsuit you could have easily had dismissed. Hence: THE DOJ LAWYER WHO REFUSED TO LIE TO OR STONEWALL THE JUDGE STRUGGLED IN COURT.  

USA!  USA!!!

Trump pardons a corporate “person”, a fellow psychopath

Breaking news: since John Roberts and the Federalist Five ruled that no presidential pardon can ever be questioned in a court of law, Donald Trump gave the first ever presidential pardon to a corporation. Some bitcoin outfit incorporated in the Seychelles that had some trouble with authorities over shady dealings, money laundering, trifles. They got an absolute, blanket presidential pardon. Even if Trump committed a crime in granting the pardon (say he was paid $50M for the pardon by these bitcoin bros), pardons are part of his core presidential powers, so — absolute immunity, even if he took a $50,000,000 bribe to grant the unappealable pardon. Suck on it, cucks.

Meantime, a few words about the modern, American global corporation.  I’m thinking about corporate medicine since a recent run in with a urological corporation, the biggest in the USA, apparently, whose top local branch biller shanked me in the urethra with a rusty ice pick a few weeks ago:

You  can’t avoid the word psychopath to describe the corporate  person.  A psychopath cannot feel empathy or regret and acts only in his own self-interest. Very few psychopaths are serial killers like the ones we see on TV.  Most are charming, determined, ambitious, highly intelligent, strategic, great salesmen, fearless entrepreneurs, CEOs, top surgeons, pundits and the highly focused leaders of many professions. James Fallon, affable neuroscientist and expert in the psychopath’s brain, who discovered he was a psychopath at the age of sixty, lays out the entire constellation of psychopathic traits.  The thing that convinced him he was a psychopath, after the familiar PET scan of that distinct brain and the unanimous answers of all of the people in his life indicating that he was indeed a psychopath, was that he truly didn’t care about the conclusive diagnosis.

In order to understand the nature of corporate medicine, it’s necessary to grasp the essential personality of the Supreme Court-created “person” that is the modern corporation. The case for the psychopathy of corporations is made beautifully in a 2003 documentary called The Corporation, (now available for free on youTube, highly recommended). Corporations possess all the attributes of psychopathic serial killers. These traits, as outlined by an FBI profiler of serial killers, are: callous unconcern for the feelings of others; incapacity to maintain enduring relationships; reckless disregard for the safety of others; deceitfulness: repeated lying and conning others for profit; incapacity to experience guilt; failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors. It is ridiculous to expect the human representatives of such a “person” to “first do no harm” since the entity they serve cannot feel empathy or regret and has only one concern – maximizing profits. It is better to bill for an unnecessary, painful operation without doing any prior tests, and to hurt the patient, than not to bill at all.

A corporate “person” has only one legal duty, according to the Supreme Court, to maximize shareholder profit. To this end a corporate person, unburdened by empathy or regret, often has a high tolerance for what economists call ‘externalities’, the unfortunate downside outcomes of corporate profit-making activities. The price of settling a class action lawsuit from a community downstream whose children are poisoned by lead, or any toxic bi-product of the corporate product, for example.

The corporate “person” is a complete psychopath. Corporate culture encourages the human embodiment of its essential character to rise to leadership positions. The corporate structure keeps every psychopath working for it free from personal liability for anything. Fair is fair. The corporate personality also explains a lot about the severe, mechanical, sometimes deadly, practices of corporate medicine. The awful truth is that we are currently living in the judicially-approved, psychopathic billionaire-created Age of the Corporation, in other words, the Golden Age of Psychopaths.

Attack, deny, lie, declare victory when you lose

The corporate media, a machine to normalize the psychopathy of the powerful, it seems lately, is routinely nonchalant about things that should have the citizens in an uproar. At the time, during the Mueller investigation, there was almost nothing in the news about this game changing “fuck you” from a sitting president. I had to read Trump’s interrogatory answers myself to learn that he had flatly refused to answer Robert Mueller’s final, most incriminating, question.

A Republican Assistant Attorney General appointed Special Counsel Robert Mueller (witch hunter number one) after Trump fired FBI director James Comey for insufficient loyalty when he would not drop an investigation into crimes committed by former Trump national security advisor General Michael “Q-Anon” Flynn. As part of his investigation into the Trump campaign’s many ties with Putin, Mueller wanted to ask Trump questions in person. Trump publicly bragged that he would sit down with that witch hunting traitor fuck any time, that he had no fear and nothing to hide.

It turns out he had plenty to hide and feared a “perjury trap” and so his lawyers negotiated an alternative, he’d answer written questions under oath. His lawyers wrote evasive answers throughout (which he bragged about writing himself) and then, for the final question, a compound question involving Flynn and others at the heart of the 140 documented acts of collusion (not indictable criminal conspiracy, since much evidence had been destroyed and witnesses dummied up) with Putin, Trump wrote . . .

. . . Nothing. . .

The thought that we are twenty odd days out from an election in which these unaccountable criminals, grifters and violent extremists may well be able to pull off the crime they attempted in 2020, stealing a “rigged” election by chicanery, brazen lies and violence, sickens me to my heart. If this fascist coup comes about, on my way to prison, or worse, I will be cursing the fucking New York Times. How hard is it not to be a well-respected equivocating mouthpiece for Nazis?

Fascism is mass submission to a narcissist’s will

It occurs to me how on point the “arguments” of authoritarians are to the “arguments” of narcissists.  They are simple and direct frontal attacks on everything you believe.  They can be summarized as “I am right, only I see clearly, and no matter what you say, fuck you, if you show the slightest defiance I’ll kill you (and everyone you love) and make you regret you were ever born.”   

The essential, deliberate irrationality of fascist argumentation was neatly summarized in a recent conversation between Brian Tyler Cohen and the great Mehdi Hassan.  The Gish Cohen refers to here was a “creationist” who was famous for raising dozens of false arguments in a short time and overwhelming the person he was debating.  Since it is impossible to refute all fifty falsehoods in a given debate, the Gish Gallop leaves the impression in the audience that many of the false statements, since unrefuted, may well be true.  Trump is a first ballot Hall of Fame Gish Galloper and his MAGA cohort, wielding their high pressure firehose of excrement, all regularly use this technique.  Here’s Cohen and Hassan:

Cohen:  … referring to Steve Bannon’s quote about flooding the zone with shit, the writer Jonathan Rausch once remarked “this is not about persuasion, this is about disorientation”. He’s right, when the likes of Trump and Gish engage in the gallop, their purpose is often not to try to win over but muddy the argument for everyone involved so they can bewilder and confuse while hopping from one falsehood to the next…

Hassan:  yeah, and it also has implications far beyond rhetoric, debate, argument.  It also has implications for democracy, Brian.

Cohen:  It destabilizes everything because then you don’t know what’s true …

Hassan:  That’s exactly what facism thrives on.  If you read the works of people like Jason Stanley, they make this point.  The point of the fascist, the authoritarian, why they lie, why they discredit the media, why they don’t want to live in a reality based universe, why they want alternative facts, is not because they want you to believe them over the liberal or the progressive.  They want you to believe no one, they want to leave you confused.  And what happens then?   Then you are more susceptible to the strongman who wants to lead you into the light.

source

If you have ever struggled with a narcissist who angrily blames you for all bad feelings in the world, you have had a direct, bitter taste of the essence of fascism.  Who is the fascist strongman?  A malignant narcissist capable of unimaginable cruelty toward masses of his fellow human beings, someone who has never, ever been wrong about anything, and has a violent mob of fanatical loyalists willing to die to prove it.

Film noir true story of American Nazis during WW II

My mother loved Rachel Maddow, and I like her okay, though I was often annoyed by her coy long-windedness and premature gloating. She was at the top of the food chain at MSNBC for many years and then stepped down to do some independent research and reporting. All I can say is, holy shit, go listen to her report, an eight-part podcast called Ultra. Mind-blowing, fascinating, horrifying, typical, amazing — a film noir acted out in real life by a cast of Nazi loving villains right out of today’s Freedom Caucus.

As Hitler invaded country after country in Europe, in the USA his allies in Congress, the America First Committee, were actively supporting Hitlerism, attacking FDR and his “failed” New Deal and readying the US for Nazi rule. Senators and congressmen gave the Nazi salute at rallies and sent out mass mailings, signed by them, that were written by Nazi propagandists. This continued even once America entered the fucking war against Hitler. The federal trial of some of these insurrectionists, a raucus affair that continued throughout the war, and the angry, defiant, deflecting defenses made by the America First senators and congressmen implicated in the plot… you got to hear this.

I have to say, Maddow tells the story so compellingly, and in such piquant detail, that I don’t wonder that Steven Spielberg has already purchased the movie rights to this story. I wish it was in movie theaters right now. I can’t recommend this podcast highly enough. Here’s a link to the first episode:

https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc-podcast/rachel-maddow-presents-ultra/episode-1-trip-19-n1299374

Here’s their description of Ultra, followed by a bit from the final episode.

Sitting members of Congress aiding and abetting a plot to overthrow the government. Insurrectionists criminally charged with plotting to end American democracy for good. Justice Department prosecutors under crushing political pressure. Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra is the all-but-forgotten true story of good, old-fashioned American extremism getting supercharged by proximity to power. When extremist elected officials get caught plotting against America with the violent ultra right, this is the story of the lengths they will go to… to cover their tracks.

American groups that were getting support and instruction and even funding from the Nazis. American businessmen who were not just personally sympathetic to the Nazi cause — they were finding ways around the law to continue doing business with the Nazis even during the war.

And these American political figures. It turns out, the Nazis had kept meticulous records about which members of Congress were the most help to them, which might be the most help to them in the future after a fascist takeover of the United States, and which were on the payroll or otherwise involved with their senior propaganda agent in America, George Sylvester Viereck.

Hart: Rogge details in great depth, the extent of involvement between members of Congress and George Sylvester Viereck

https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc-podcast/rachel-maddow-presents-ultra/transcript-ultra-vires-n1300885

When trust is gone between two people

When trust is replaced by fear and defensiveness, your relationship is moribund, dead or starkly inauthentic.

Superficial friendship may be the best many people can do. It has its virtues. It rarely, if ever, hurts, it can be easily walked away from, should the need arise. Only a troubled friendship that felt like mutual trust and love over a long time can rip your heart apart.

“You broke my heart,” says one, feeling unfairly blamed for everything bad that happened between them.

“I did not, you just want to blame me and end our friendship.”

Set and match, if the stakes involve anger and a shudder of humiliation that makes honesty way too dangerous.

Psych 101

Traumatic experiences in childhood often have long-term effects [1] on a person’s ability to trust, to form close bonds with others, to be honest. Let’s just apply a little psychology 101 to this needy disturbed, dangerous when wounded guy who’s constantly in the news.

His father was known to be a psychopath. He was a famously hard charging judgmental workaholic who parlayed millions of dollars in government grants and his own great business acumen, and willingness to take risks to keep and pass on every dollar of his money, into a billion dollar empire. The father had little use for his young fuck up son as he was grooming his charismatic oldest son to succeed him. Imagine the psychopathic father’s disappointment when he learned that his heir apparent was not a killer, didn’t have what it takes to take everything from everybody by constantly fighting to the death. So the much younger brother, an incorigible bully with limited smarts and very poor people skills, was eventually chosen and groomed to be a killer like Dad.

You don’t get much love from a psychopathic father, the best you get is approval when you carry out his orders. It’s a hard life for a sensitive young person.

When that sensitive young person was in his period of most intense need for his mother’s love and protection, before he was two, his cool, slightly distant and distracted mother became ill and was out of the house for many months, while her youngest son cried for her and got disgusted looks from psychopath dad when he got home from a long day of making the world in his image.

In other words, the time when this kid most needed love, understanding, appreciation and guidance, he was left alone and made to feel weak because of his whining. Is it hard to understand the kind of adult this hurt little boy would likely grow up into?

Imagine his relief a few years later when he got a younger brother, someone he could take out his frustrations on by tormenting every day. Kind of restored the little fucker’s belief in God.

Look at the rest of this now widely adored, widely despised, infamous, beleaguered rich reality TV star/F POTUS. You can draw a straight line from his early childhood injuries to his total war against anybody inclined in any way to contest his will.

And we are all, here in the United States and worldwide, much the poorer, and our lives much more precarious, than they were before this twisted creature came onto the world scene to prove to his psychopath daddy that he’s not a loser.

Winner!

[1]

Adverse Childhood Experiences, Part 23

The personal roots of “political” rage

When you feel helpless, are in need of the consoling connection to others that all living creatures require, a common response to this desperation is anger.  You derive energy and a feeling of righteousness from galvanizing your hurt into rage.  You can also turn anger on yourself, blaming yourself for feeling helpless, hopeless, weak, abandoned and so forth, but this self-directed rage inflicts even more damage than what has already been done to you.   Turning the anger outward requires only a good story, a good enough story (it can actually be a completely incoherent story), to let you know who is to blame for the pain you are in.   Once you can ascribe blame you’re on your way.

Today’s radical right wing has become expert in keeping the rage turned up all the time.   You feel fucked?   We’ll tell you why — it’s that senile puppet Joe Biden’s fucking fault, like it was Obama’s before him, and fucking Clinton’s before that.   The only time you were watched over tenderly in recent memory, these extremists preach, was under Donald Trump and Dick Cheney.   Radical antidemocratic oligarchs like Charles Koch have no hesitation to use any tactic that works to convince millions that large societal problems aren’t being solved, not because of the zero sum divisive political warfare he has been relentlessly waging for decades, and the lawmaking gridlock their obstructionist tactics have caused, no! — it’s the fault of the fucking communists who have taken over one of the major political parties in the country!   

I suspect that every person susceptible to this “argument” — that everything was, more or less, perfect until these “woke” libtard cucks took over the party of our enemies and are constantly acting like “snowflake” victims, cynically exploiting “identity politics,” to win rigged elections that always favor majoritarian tyranny — has personal reason to be angry.  Focusing the free floating personal anger and anxiety on enemies, who can be blamed, hated and, in a perfect world, publicly executed, is the genius of the radical right, has been all throughout history.  It exploits the feeling of justice we have every time we put a bully on his ass.

On a personal level we can often see the roots of rage quite clearly.   An abusive parent, insisting they never abused anyone.  A rape that nobody in the legal system, unfortunately, is going to be able to do anything about.  That one day hesitation to report the crime proved fatal to the legal case against the rapist fuck.   Indigestible things happen to us sometimes, and those things are food for anger, which, like water, can take on any shape, fit any container perfectly, and is always flowing.   The ratings king of rage, the guy with the puckered brow who just keeps asking innocently leading questions of his gigantic audience, Tucker Carlson, has only recently revealed the partial roots of his always boiling, though jovially presented, “just asking” anger.

For many years, Tucker Carlson was tight-lipped about the rupture [with his mother]. In a New Yorker profile in 2017, not long after his show debuted, he described his mother’s departure as a “totally bizarre situation — which I never talk about, because it was actually not really part of my life at all.” But as controversy and criticism engulfed his show, Mr. Carlson began to describe his early life in darker tones, painting the California of his youth as a countercultural dystopia and his mother as abusive and erratic.

In 2019, speaking on a podcast with the right-leaning comedian Adam Carolla, Mr. Carlson said his mother had forced drugs on her children. “She was like, doing real drugs around us when we were little, and getting us to do it, and just like being a nut case,” Mr. Carlson said. By his account, his mother made clear to her two young sons that she had little affection for them. “When you realize your own mother doesn’t like you, when she says that, it’s like, oh gosh,” he told Mr. Carolla, adding that he “felt all kinds of rage about it.”

All kinds of rage, you know.  Many different forms of rage.  Rage rages, it’s all it can do.  It may rage quietly or loudly, but everything it does is in the service of keeping the righteous feeling of being totally fucking right pumping away.   And, as everybody knows, there are few feelings to equal the satisfaction of knowing that you are totally fucking right and justified, in anything you do to bring justice to the vicious fucks you blame for hurting you.

Being propagandized to in our age of instant information is lazy and stupid

A friend, making the point that the left and the right both live in echo-chambers today, asked me if I believed things I heard from the media sources I generally trust.   I told him I did.   He smiled and rested his case — everybody on both sides faithfully believes the bullshit of their own political side.   I smiled and let it slide, as we were having a nice dinner, and there was no need to further comment on this unending, rapidly escalating, dark money funded march to one-party rule, the open oligarchy that has been plowing ahead for decades here, during our long “culture war”.   It occurs to me that next time we have dinner I have to clarify one thing.

When I read something that surprises me, or hear something that sounds too outrageous, or convenient, to be true, I consult the world’s knowledge base that is in my pocket.   It is so fucking easy to find corroboration or refutation in a few seconds of research by looking at a few disparate sources.   If Democracy Now!, The Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal all agree that certain things actually happened a certain way, it’s a pretty safe bet they happened that way.  

Certain claims are easy to dismiss out of hand, like the brief rumor during Donald Trump’s alarming rise to power that Trump and his friend Sheldon Adelson gang banged a thirteen year old girl — and videotaped themselves doing it.   You wouldn’t put it past men of their high moral standing, maybe, but at the same time, I knew the story was clearly bullshit.   That one I didn’t need to check.   But there are claims that shock, like that all but twelve House Trumpists recently voted against lowering the price of insulin, and those claims are easy to find multiple sources to confirm or refute, or spin according to echo chamber.   Verification takes literally seconds.  Here you go:

So, yes, I generally trust Ari Melber, Mehdi Hasan, Amy Goodman or Glenn Kirschner, when they make statements about reality, or present complex issues.   I generally dismiss the vapors that come out of things like furrow browed TV dinner heir Tucker Swanson Dansby Dickhead Carlson’s puckered blow hole.   Make a false equivalence between these sources of information/disinformation if you like, but also, do an honest ten seconds work before accepting statements from any of those sources and we’ll compare notes afterwards.  Then I’ll join you on your armed trip to that DC pizza place to liberate those child sex slaves Hillary and Barbara Streisand keep chained up there for Tom Hanks to molest and bleed, for his Satanic pleasure.