Category Archives: politics smells like meat

Good summary and analysis of Trumpism

I’ve been trying to take a break from this creature, our mad president, think about something a little deeper than this sad and destructive man’s desperate need to be the most important angry two year-old in the world. It’s hard to do, especially since he can still, literally, blow up the world and there’s really nothing that can stop him (as he prioritizes the federal executions of several black men and a heavily medicated mentally ill woman who was serially raped for her entire childhood). We learn that he had the insane conspiracist Sidney Powell back to the White House Sunday night, for Kraken’s sake. He has shown over and over that he is capable of unspeakable things in the service of his damaged ego.

Because history fascinates me, I listen to a couple of history-based podcasts. One I rarely miss is Robert Evans’ “Behind the Bastards” a gleeful telling of the stories of some of history’s most repulsive and destructive creatures. Evans recently featured Roy Cohn, a peach, and Robert Welch, intellectual force behind the John Birch Society, and the other moral godfather (along with Cohn) of Donald Trump. The Welch/John Birch Society episodes, along with an excellent documentary on Showtime about this great entertainer:

once again made this connection for me:

Robert Welch, the candy tycoon who along with Charles Koch’s father Fred and a few other extreme “libertarian” types, founded the John Birch Society in 1958 (galvanized by the “activist” Supreme Court ruling that segregation was unconstitutional).   These extreme right wing conspiracy theorists were considered an embarrassing lunatic fringe by other Republicans throughout my childhood. Their unapologetically extremist candidate, Barry Goldwater, lost in a landslide in 1964.   Then Reagan (who got 489 of 538 Electoral College votes in 1980!!) embraced and normalized a core of their belief system (particularly when it came to racism, wealth and Communism) for his fellow Republicans. Then we had Gingrich, Cheney, Barr and co. et, voila! — the current Republican party. Under this Orange Menace, we have a full-blown John Birch Society Republican party marching in lockstep, menacing traitors in their midst, as their kind always does… No conspiracy too wild for America! Democrats rape children and drink their blood, take that to the bank, losers. A testament to the staying power of big “ideas”…

Now, to the title of this post. A friend sent me a recent article from the Atlantic, an excellent post mortem on Trumpism, which, like a super zombie from a low-rent horror movie, is unlikely to ever truly die. Here are a couple of insights from the author, George Packer. He mentions LBJ’s lie about the Gulf of Tonkin “incident” (to justify escalation of the American war against Vietnam) and Nixon’s trying to cover up the Watergate break-in as examples of standard presidential lies.

But these cases of presidential lying came from a time when the purpose was limited and rational: to cover up a scandal, make a disaster disappear, mislead the public in service of a particular goal. In a sense, Americans expected a degree of fabrication from their leaders. After Jimmy Carter, in his 1976 campaign, promised, “I’ll never lie to you,” and then pretty much kept his word, voters sent him back to Georgia. Ronald Reagan’s gauzy fictions were far more popular.

Trump’s lies were different. They belonged to the postmodern era. They were assaults against not this or that fact, but reality itself. They spread beyond public policy to invade private life, clouding the mental faculties of everyone who had to breathe his air, dissolving the very distinction between truth and falsehood. Their purpose was never the conventional desire to conceal something shameful from the public. He was stunningly forthright about things that other presidents would have gone to great lengths to keep secret: his true feelings about Senator John McCain and other war heroes; his eagerness to get rid of disloyal underlings; his desire for law enforcement to protect his friends and hurt his enemies; his effort to extort a foreign leader for dirt on a political adversary; his affection for Kim Jong Un and admiration for Vladimir Putin; his positive view of white nationalists; his hostility toward racial and religious minorities; and his contempt for women.

…So a stab-in-the-back narrative was buried in the minds of millions of Americans, where it burns away, as imperishable as a carbon isotope, consuming whatever is left of their trust in democratic institutions and values. This narrative will widen the gap between Trump believers and their compatriots who might live in the same town, but a different universe. And that was Trump’s purpose—to keep us locked in a mental prison where reality was unknowable so that he could go on wielding power, whether in or out of office, including the power to destroy.

…For his opponents, the lies were intended to be profoundly demoralizing. Neither counting them nor checking facts nor debunking conspiracies made any difference. Trump demonstrated again and again that the truth doesn’t matter. In rational people this provoked incredulity, outrage, exhaustion, and finally an impulse to crawl away and abandon the field of politics to the fantasists.


For believers, the consequences were worse. They surrendered the ability to make basic judgments about facts, exiling themselves from the common framework of self-government. They became litter swirling in the wind of any preposterous claim that blew from @realDonaldTrump. Truth was whatever made the world whole again by hurting their enemies—the more far-fetched, the more potent and thrilling. After the election, as charges of voter fraud began to pile up, Matthew Sheffield, a reformed right-wing media activist, tweeted: “Truth for conservative journalists is anything that harms ‘the left.’ It doesn’t even have to be a fact. Trump’s numerous lies about any subject under the sun are thus justified because his deceptions point to a larger truth: that liberals are evil.”

source

And, as Dear Leader Mr. Trump himself once famously said: God bless these United Shayyysssh…

Science Fiction Trump-style

Embarrassing and frustrating as it is to live in a nation where 74,000,000 votes were cast by citizens who wanted to reelect the worst president in US history, a man we benignly refer to as a transactional narcissist (and even a malignant narcissist), and as inured as I am to it, mostly, sometimes an item in the news just hammers me in the face. There was the recent revelation of a massive Russian hack of American government and businesses (Pompeo announced it was Russia, Trump tweeted “fake news” it was probably China, LOL!), the lie immediately told by Trump’s recently inserted loyal appointees at the Department of Defense about an “agreement” to suspend national security briefings with the Biden transition team (for the Christmas break), the Senate majority’s partisan refusal to provide help for tens of millions of suffering Americans as Merry Christmas 2020, and a tidal wave of American homelessness, approaches (while Mitch and friends doggedly fight for more corporate Christmas gifts), our steady, upward succession of new, daily world records for COVID-19 infections and deaths (as emails come out that deliberate infection of millions was Trump’s plan all along), our raging president is delusional in his bunker, still wildly insisting all this news is complete bullshit. I digested all that, to the extent one can. Then, a nonchalant hammer to the old face:

On Friday, we learn, Trump had Mike “Lock Her UP!” Flynn and his insane attorney Sidney Powell at the White House (with demented Trump dead-ender Rudy Giuliani participating by phone) for a powwow on how to keep Trump in power in spite of a pesky election loss of over 7,000,000 votes (and a 74 vote Electoral College margin) and no path remaining through the courts or Congress.

General Flynn, you will recall, was fired (with regret, by Mr. Trump) for lying to Mike Pence about illegal contacts with the Russians and then was prosecuted and admitted guilt in federal court, for repeating that lie to the FBI and a couple of other little white lies he needed to tell in order to get security clearance for his job as National Security Adviser. But otherwise, a fine and upstanding patriotic American hero! Trump always says what a good guy Flynn is. He ought to know.

Sidney Powell, you may recall, took over Flynn’s federal case and sought to have his guilty plea thrown out. Working closely with Bill Barr, her collaboration with the Bagpiper led to Barr withdrawing the charges against Flynn (Flynn’s several lies, Barr decided, were “immaterial” and therefore non-criminal — the real criminals were the partisan liars at the FBI who illegally trapped him into lying). Barr attempted to have the case dismissed without allowing the judge to hold a hearing before dismissing the case (the law allows a judge to hold a hearing if he’s not satisfied by the papers submitted). Barr and Powell insisted the judge instantly dismiss the case, as a matter of law. When the judge refused they sought a writ of mandamus, an extremely rare form of relief only given when no other legal avenue remains, to force the judge to dismiss the case against Flynn, along with his two guilty pleas. They got the writ, from a Trump appointee, on shamelessly partisan quasi-legal grounds (judge was trying to unconstitutionally “usurp” presidential power by demanding legal reasons for dismissing the case) that were overturned immediately when the judge appealed her ruling.

With a hearing on the horizon, in which DOJ lawyers would have to explain the dirty-looking, unusual DOJ about-face in suddenly hurrying to let the president’s pal off the hook, Trump pardoned Flynn unconditionally. Flynn immediately repaid this quid with his pro quo, giving fiery speeches, peppered with QAnon shout outs, about Trump’s greatness and the need to keep him in power no matter what millions of (colored fuckers, ugly women, lazy poor people, homosexuals, abortionists, elite child-molesting cannibals, fucking Commies and other) anti-American freedom-haters might think about it. Flynn is a good guy, remember, one of the best people Trump has ever collected, and certainly very loyal to the president.

Meanwhile, QAnon spouting attorney Sidney Powell, who threatened to release a biblical “kraken” [1] of a lawsuit to bring the entire fraudulent election and the vast blood-drinking, child raping cannibal conspiracy to steal Trump’s presidency crashing down, was fired by Trump’s campaign for being too insane even for them. Like all the other election lawsuits Team Trump brought, Powell’s were dismissed as baseless, releasing the mythical kraken, it turned out, was all in her fevered imagination. She was finally deemed too fucking crazy to be part of even this lunatic squad of suicide bomber Trump lawyers and was publicly renounced by Giuliani, who is something of an expert on lunatic suicide bomber Trump lawyering.

Powell still appeared regularly on right wing TV and internet shows, but only the most gullible and enraged took any of her raving seriously. Mike Flynn began calling for Trump to impose martial law and stay in power, claiming martial law had been declared 64 times and was nothing out of the ordinary.

Friday:

Makes sense, no? Appoint batshit crazy partisan Sidney Powell as “Special Counsel” (really, really special) to get to the bottom of this vast conspiracy, involving not only Trump haters everywhere but (and here’s the devilishness of this sick, dangerous anti-Trump conspiracy) every judge (including many Trump appointees) who heard every case related to Trump’s effort to overturn the election. Speaking of batshit crazy:

The New York Times added, because they are the best at this sort of touch:

A White House spokesman, Ms. Powell and a spokeswoman for Mr. Giuliani did not respond to requests for comment.

I ask you, fellow citizens, why would they respond? To the lying New York Times? Are you friggin’ serious?

Look at the crap they see fit to print!

[1]

The kraken is a legendary sea monster of gigantic size and cephalopod-like appearance in Scandinavian folklore. According to the Norse sagas, the kraken dwells off the coasts of Norway and Greenland and terrorizes nearby sailors. 

Wikipedia

Evil Morons and “Herd Mentality”

The story is now out, with details (and documentary evidence), about how Mr. Trump and his unqualified appointees chosen for their unquestioning personal loyalty to the tyrannical asshat from Queens (along with their skill at stroking his delicate ego), continually lied about their efforts to control the deadly pandemic that is now raging out of control in the US.

The Trump administration’s regular attacks on the pandemic mitigation advice given by all medical experts were apparently motivated by their united embrace of an alternative “theory” (remember “Birtherism” is also a theory, as is “Libertarianism”) about how to beat the pandemic: infect everyone to bring about herd immunity (or “herd mentality” as a Trump Freudian slip rendered it on live TV).

Stupid people blindly ambitious and loyal to the stupidest, vainest, most vindictive man ever to be president, deliberately pursued a strategy of mass infection. Mass infection with a deadly, highly contagious disease science currently has no cure for. Because, you know, politics, power, prestige, career, obscene, untouchable wealth, DUH!

We set new records yesterday here in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, for infections and deaths from this monster, COVID-19. As reported in the Lyin’ New York Times (official enemy of the people):

Officials across the United States on Wednesday reported the highest daily number for new coronavirus since the pandemic began, as well as the most deaths in a single day.

New infections were put at 244,365, and deaths at 3,607 — nearly 500 more than the record set only a week ago. The previous case record, 236,800, was set last Friday (though a reporting anomaly in Texas made it appear still higher.)

The latest figures capped day [sic] on which health experts warned Americans, buoyed by the rollout of a vaccination campaign, that it is far too soon to abandon common-sense precautions for halting the spread of the virus.

source

Now we know, with emails in their own words, to confirm our worst suspicions, that these imbeciles appointed by our petulant blob of unaccountable presidential prerogative actually pursued a secret, deliberate mass infection agenda. These accursed cretins actually wrote to each other spelling out their master plan to ignore science and let the vast majority of Americans go for broke.

I am not trying to insult unintelligent people, there are many who are kind, gentle, generous, loving. Intelligence, goodness and decency have no direct correlation. Many very smart people are vicious pieces of shit (Bill Barr pops to mind, though he may also be mentally ill [1]). The kinds of supremely ambitious idiots I have in mind are those who are just smart enough to know how to ingratiate themselves to corrupt and powerful idiots who will lavishly reward them with unearned positions of power and prestige far beyond their competence (Betsy DeVos, honey, I’m seeing your dazzling smile).

Someone observed recently, comparing increasingly foolish and deluded highly placed Trump dead-enders to high Nazi officials, that few would have had any chance of promotion except in a regime where blind loyalty to a barking mad leader, and the ability to shamelessly gratify The Leader’s ego, were the chief prerequisites for advancement. Trump does not have the best people. He does not even seem to have average people.

Now, the reservoir of rage inside threatens to overflow its banks and wash over me. I read about these stupid bastards and their blind, murderous idiocy and it fills me with anger, and despair over the cultivated stupidity of millions of my fellow Americans — and an individual’s powerless to have any effect on any of this.

An election cannot change any of these ugly facts. Not when the national leaders of the party that won the election keep expressing the high-minded, simplistic idea that we just need to get back to “normal” and everything will be fine.

Everything won’t be fine, not without constant organizing, mobilization and activism by those of us who believe in more than just an increasingly corrupt status quo that makes millions more feel comfortable while leaving millions of children hungry every night as the earth continues to be destroyed and our citizenry immiserated for the profit of supremely deserving men like Charles Koch, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos.

The election of Biden will not bring back any of the 300,000 dead (and rapidly counting — 3,607 means 2.5 dead of COVID EVERY MINUTE yesterday), many of whom, perhaps half or more, did not have to die horrible, solitary deaths, but for the depraved indifference of Mr. Trump and his idiot lackeys.

Let us also remember that this is an oligarchic administration that truly had no business being in office, and would not have in an actual democracy. Trumpism was narrowly elected in the Electoral College (78,000 votes in MI, WI and PA combined gave Trump the presidency), the Electoral College being the electoral savior of otherwise defeated minoritarian right-wing candidates. That archaic memento of the Peculiar Institution gave us two bloody, destructive imbecile presidents within sixteen recent years, both of whom lost the vote of citizens by considerable margins (the former by less than half a million, the latter by almost 3,000,000).

We are relieved, those of us who embrace the label anti-fascist, that our great nation did not descend into autocracy. The president is still trying to bring that about, but it’s not happening, not yet, not under this unfunny clown, anyway (Pompeo and Christie are the new hopes for a one-party Leader, I suppose — at least in their own grasping minds).

Trump abdicated and disclaims any and all responsibility for the mass death on his watch, especially now that he’s lost, as his party blocks monetary and food relief for millions of suffering Americans. Trump, Pompeo and company continue to actively spread the deadly infectious pandemic with holiday super-spreader parties. Republican leaders are also actively sabotaging Biden’s presidency as they hatch a comeback in a RED WAVE in 2022, based on Biden’s Socialistic failures and the many thousands more who will die of COVID, hunger and homelessness on his watch.

We must take solace in the consolation that our “institutions” have held.

It is some consolation (and nothing to sneeze at) that courts did not renounce the rule of law, as the Senate majority, the majority of Republicans in the House, the president and his remaining myrmidons all have. Fortunately, the election was not close enough for Amy Coney Barrett to be able to cast the deciding vote, or for other Trump appointees to the federal bench to do anything for their benefactor but follow the actual laws of our “nation of law”. Laws under which the lawless, even if supremely powerful, must sometimes lose.

It is some consolation that numerous Republican state officials across the country did what the majority of House Republicans did not — accept the election results after certifying (and in some cases recounting, more than once) the votes in what they confirmed was a fair election. They risked the rage of a vicious madman and should be acknowledged.

But is there any real consolation in people simply doing what they swore a public oath to do? Isn’t that the minimum we should demand of public servants? This is how far we have slipped as an experiment in democracy, we are much closer to an experiment in fascism.

A recent rampage by “Proud Boys” on the streets of our nation’s capitol, raising hell over a “stolen election” that every official everywhere has confirmed and certified, was a frustrated attempt at a pogrom. They’d probably have loved to do more killing, hoping to stir up a justifiably violent reaction by anti-racists that would have allowed their Leader to declare an insurrection, invoke the Insurrection Act, martial law and a Trump seizure of absolute power.

Even Trump’s hero, Mr. Hitler [2], could not have pulled that one off in the US in 2020. Hitler could not have come to power with only a small contingent of this kind of violent asshole willing to break heads for him. We just got lucky with that one.

Germany during Hitler’s rise had literal armies of angry veterans (freikorps), right-wing students and humiliated nationalistic sons of the unemployed, on the streets, everywhere, by the hundreds of thousands, ready to violently disrupt protests, bash people in the face, bloody their fists, stab, shoot, string up political enemies. As in similar situations here, the cops often stood by in sympathy, allowing them free rein to intimidate and beat up their hated pro-democracy enemies. In that climate of regular street battles, it was a matter, for the shrewd Mr. Hitler, of making sure his shock troops were more violent than anyone else and seizing leadership of this gigantic mass of enraged, violent Germans. Within a short time, they were all Nazis, marching under the swastika, winners. Seig Heil!

We don’t currently have that widespread, wildly popular ground game by disaffected, enraged men, feeling hopeless except when taking up arms and banding together to put some hurt on people they hate. If big changes are not made by this incoming administration, starting with prosecuting sedition and other high crimes by highly placed Trumpist democracy deniers, we can expect the forces of reaction to keep reacting, more and more violently.

We also need government programs, like the Works Progress Administration (WPA) that FDR put into place (by executive order), to give meaningful jobs, a decent future and a real connection to the larger community to millions of potential troops for the next would be American autocrat.

If we don’t learn to work together, and look out for each other and our common interests, the future is violent.

Clearly, crimes against democracy have to be vigorously prosecuted, and new laws put on the books to prevent the unaccountable corruption of a man like the “totally exonerated” Mr. Trump (so what if he abused power and acted in contempt of Congress? 51-49, suck it, cucks!), and other future fascistic shenanigans by narrowly elected officials and their unqualified interim appointees.

Biden won the Electoral College by a comfortable margin and the popular vote by 7,000,000 — margins not seen by any candidate defeating an incumbent since FDR ousted Herbert Hoover in 1932. A solid win, a mandate for democracy, you might say.

Half the country, and the vast majority of Republicans, believe that Biden is as illegitimate as the Kenyan secret-Muslim that he worked for, the corrupt and evil spying divider that Trump’s DOJ is still investigating with Bill Barr’s ongoing John Durham Investigation into “Russiagate”.

These loathsome creatures do not sleep. They plan, they create and fund ideological think tanks and employment societies, buy TV and radio stations, newspapers, airwaves, bandwidth, buy political candidates, “primary” moderates out of office, fund astroturf “mass movements” like the “grassroots” Tea Party that brought many maniacs into Congress (and more recently, Q-Anon adherents and a religious cult member Supreme Court justice).

The bulk of these folks are some of the stupidest and most selfish motherfuckers the world has ever known, but their sheer numbers, and determination, make them a force to reckon with. Ask any of the 3,607 Americans who died yesterday, at a rate of better than two a minute, on the Loser-in-Chief’s petulant lame duck watch.

[1]

[2]

The only book we are relatively sure our reading-challenged top student president ever read (or at least browsed) was the collection of Hitler’s speeches he kept by his bedside at his triplex penthouse apartment atop Trump Tower.

Well-said, Heather

From Heather Cox Richardson’s most recent Letters from an American:

But, although 62% of American voters say the election is “over and settled” and it’s “time to move on,” Trump continues to insist that he won the election. In the face of the Electoral College confirmation of Biden’s win, this position increasingly seems a ploy to raise money. Even as the Electoral College was voting, the Trump campaign filed yet another lawsuit challenging the outcome of the election.

It has lost 59 of 60 court cases, and the Supreme Court last week refused to hear a case in which Trump planned to argue that mail-in voting in swing states that voted for Biden—but not the states that voted for him—injured Republican voters in Texas.

He loves the taste of Donald!

Perhaps not completely surprisingly, the most shamelessly corrupt AG in history got in a few last long, loving ass-licks in the resignation letter he wrote to his beloved boss, taking leave of the most shamelessly corrupt American president ever to soil the office. Here’s an excerpt, which can serve as a super effective emetic:

…I am proud to have played a role in the many successes and unprecedented achievements you have delivered for the American people. Your 2016 victory speech in which you reached out to your opponents and called for working together for the benefit of the American people was immediately met by a partisan onslaught against you in which no tactic, no matter how abusive and deceitful, was out of bounds. The nadir of this campaign was the effort to cripple, if not oust, your administration with frenzied and baseless accusations of collusion with Russia.

Few could have weathered these attacks, much less forge ahead with a positive program for the country. You built the strongest and most resilient economy in American history – one that has brought unprecedented progress to those previously left out. You have restored American military strength. By brokering historic peace deals in the Mideast you have achieved what most thought impossible. You have curbed illegal immigration and enhanced the security of our nation’s borders. You have advanced the rule of law by appointing a record number of judges committed to constitutional principles. With Operation Warp Speed, you delivered a vaccine for coronavirus on a schedule no one thought conceivable – a feat that will undoubtedly save millions of lives…

Your 2016 victory speech (followed shortly by the American Carnage speech) in which you reached out to your opponents and called for working together for the benefit of the American people was immediately met by a partisan onslaught against you in which no tactic, NO MATTER HOW ABUSIVE OR DECEITFUL, was out of bounds. The nadir of this campaign was the effort to cripple, if not oust, your administration with

“frenzied and baseless accusations of collusion with Russia“

Barr’s hopefully last official words on the well-documented collusion detailed in several government reports, including the five volume, Republican-chaired, senate intel committee report, perhaps the most deliberate and devastating catalogue of coordination between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence of them all.

Impressive, how many lies this zealot can pack into a few sentences!

I suspect I’ll have a few more thoughts about this consummate motherfucker and bootlicker in the coming days.

Reality Check, maybe

The world’s single nation record for COVID-19 infections in a day was set not long after the presidential election. The NY Times reported:

A little more than a week earlier we’d broken the 100,000 case a day barrier (and they said it couldn’t be done!). I attribute this shattered record to all the contact, all over the US, that resulted from the Trump/Kremlin lie that mail-in ballots were tickets to widespread fraud and all the propaganda and Republican voter suppression that sent millions to stand on lines to cast vote in person. In places like Texas, poll workers were not required to wear masks and they could force voters to take off their masks in order to vote. Freedom, you know…

Today we nonchalantly eclipsed that sad-ass record again with a non-record 207,000 new cases (and an impressive 2,259 deaths from COVID, not a record but nothing to sneeze at!)

Check out this graph and think of how hard this dangerous, lying child, our Winner-in-chief, is still fighting to make this skyrocketing mass death on his heedless watch simply go away as he scrambles, hideous as a late stage Roy Cohn, to avoid all responsibility for anything in his long, narcissistic life of unlearned lessons.

During the years of the Cheney/Bush administration the octogenarian mother of a friend showed up at dinner one night sporting a BUCK FUSH button. Right on, sister! TRUCK FUMP!

The so-called truth about the so-called election (as of yesterday, anyway)

Clicking links can be tedious, I know. So, as a service to the reader in a hurry, a few highlights from the traitorous Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s website (as of yesterday — subject to deletion upon discovery by the president’s most loyal men and women). All this information is apparently still online today.

You can click on the CISA website’s URL HERE for more details about each of these thoroughly debunked rumors/Trump barking points. Most of these debunked rumors have useful resources below including links to the laws and practices that protect and ensure each of these things. A quick scroll through this list should probably do the trick, though.

Or, as is your inalienable right as an American anti-masker type, simply ignore this seditious “reality-based” list, as millions of our other countrymen, including 18 state attorneys general and 106 House members, are currently on the record doing (though in the guise of a lawsuit on other grounds not covered here).

 Reality: Ballot handling procedures protect against intentional or unintentional ballot destruction.

  Rumor: Ballots can easily be destroyed without detection, preventing them from being counted.

 Reality: Voting systems undergo testing from state and/or federal voting system testing programs, which certify voting system hardware and software.

  Rumor: Voting system software is not reviewed or tested and can be easily manipulated.

POST-ELECTION

 Reality: Robust safeguards including canvassing and auditing procedures help ensure the accuracy of official election results.

  Rumor: A bad actor could change election results without detection.


 Reality: Voter registration list maintenance and other election integrity measures protect against voting illegally on behalf of deceased individuals.

  Rumor: Votes are being cast on behalf of dead people and these votes are being counted.

 Reality: Variations in vote totals for different contests on the same ballot occur in every election and do not by themselves indicate fraud or issues with voting technology.

  Rumor: More votes in one contest than other contests on the ballot means that results cannot be trusted.

 Reality: The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) do not design or audit ballots, which are processes managed by state and local election officials.

  Rumor: DHS or CISA printed paper ballots with security measures and is auditing results as a countermeasure against ballot counterfeiting.


 Reality: Election results reporting may occur more slowly than prior years. This does not indicate there is any problem with the counting process or results. Official results are not certified until all validly cast ballots have been counted, including ballots that are counted after election night.

  Rumor: If results as reported on election night change over the ensuing days or weeks, the process is hacked or compromised, so I can’t trust the results.

 Reality: Provisional ballots are counted in every election regardless of result margins.

  Rumor: Provisional ballots are only counted if there’s a close race.

 Reality: In some circumstances, elections officials are permitted to “duplicate” or otherwise further mark cast ballots to ensure they can be properly counted.

  Rumor: Witnessing election officials marking ballots means that fraudulent voting is taking place.

 Reality: Election night results are not official results.

  Rumor: If election night reporting sites experience an outage, vote counts will be lost or manipulated.

 Reality: A defaced or manipulated election night reporting webpage would not impact counting and certification of official results.

  Rumor: If the election night reporting webpage is defaced or displays incorrect results, the integrity of the election is compromised.

 Reality: Malicious actors can use fake personas and impersonate real accounts.

  Rumor: If a social media account claims an identity, the account must be run by that person or organization.

 Reality: Cyber actors can “spoof” or forge email sender addresses to look like they come from someone else.

  Rumor: I received an election-related email that looks like it came from a certain organization, so the organization must have sent it.

PRE-ELECTION

 Reality: Some voter registration data is publicly available.

  Rumor: Someone possessing or posting voter registration data means voter registration databases have been hacked.

 Reality: Online voter registration websites can experience outages for non-malicious reasons.

  Rumor: An online voter registration website experiences an outage and claims are made the election has been compromised.

 Reality: A compromise of a state or local government system does not necessarily mean election infrastructure or the integrity of your vote has been compromised.

  Rumor: If state or local jurisdiction information technology (IT) has been compromised, the election results cannot be trusted.

 Reality: Malicious actors can fake manipulation of voter registration data to spread disinformation.

  Rumor: Videos, images or emails suggesting voter registration information is being manipulated means voters will not be able to vote.

 Reality: Safeguards are in place to prevent home-printed or photocopied mail-in ballots from being counted.

  Rumor: A malicious actor can easily defraud an election by printing and sending in extra mail-in ballots.

Reality: Safeguards are in place to protect against fraudulent voting using the Federal Write-In Absentee Ballot (FWAB).

  Rumor: A malicious actor can easily defraud an election using the Federal Write-In Absentee Ballot (FWAB).

ELECTION DAY

 Reality: Election officials provide writing instruments that are approved for marking ballots to all in-person voters using hand-marked paper ballots.

  Rumor: Poll workers gave specific writing instruments, such as Sharpies, only to specific voters to cause their ballots to be rejected.

 Reality: Voters are protected by state and federal law from threats or intimidation at the polls, including from election observers.

  Rumor: Observers in the polling place are permitted to intimidate voters, campaign, and interfere with voting.

 Reality: Safeguards are in place to protect ballot secrecy.

  Rumor: Someone is claiming to know who I voted for.


 Reality: Polling place lookup sites can experience outages for non-malicious reasons.

  Rumor: If polling place lookup sites experience an outage, election infrastructure must have been compromised.

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Now, it’s true that outside of all this obviously partisan palaver, there is still the totally plausible chance that there was massive voting fraud and coordinated irregularities in ANARCHIST JURISDICTIONS that deprived our greatest, most handsome, smartest, most charismatic, most sexually attractive, BEST FRIEND OF THE GODDAMNED COLORED RACES SINCE “HONEST” FUCKING ABE president of his rightful second term (just as a baseless WITCH HUNT deprived him of a fully effective first term, and the Chinese/Democrat virus HOAX unfairly hurt him too). You can believe unhinged “reality alarmist” traitors at some government agency nobody ever heard of or… or…

Only one final thing I have to say on any of this, to Mr. Trump, the shady AG of Texas (under indictment since 2015), the other dozens of loyal-to-the-death elected Republican Trump zealots who signed on to the Texas AG’s idiotic “lawsuit” delivered to Amy Coney Barrett and her five Federalist Society colleagues on the Supreme Court:

Black, Brown, Urban, “Minority” Votes Matter (and count just like your’s), you racist motherfuckers, whatever you might sincerely, fervently, strongly believe to the contrary.

Exhaustion is the whole point

It’s exhausting to witness the president’s inexhaustible commitment to denial, every day, every moment — the now reclusive Winner-in-Chief grimly insistent that he WON, now more than a month after he lost the election. You can restrict yourself to catching the news once a day and there it is. Lame duck tweets “#OVERTURN” — 17 state attorneys general join shady Texas AG in petition to Supreme Court to overturn certified election results in four other states. You think, well, “overturn”… Trump’s admitting he lost, isn’t he? No need to overturn the results of an election you won, right? No matter. He makes a brief appearance on camera and shambles away in the middle of hanging a presidential medal around somebody’s neck. You watch the short clip, the camera pans over to the medalist, suddenly alone in the middle of the Oval Office. The man gives the camera a big WTF? shrug. He shrugs for all of us.

It’s hard to focus the mind on anything else, I find, while this rabid man persists in soiling everything his office, his nation, is supposed to stand for. As our country sets a world record for COVID-19 deaths in a single day, surpassing the total killed by terrorists on 9/11, the defeated president is focused only on somehow invalidating the ballots of millions of Americans. We are literally in the middle of a seemingly eternal war between demonstrable fact, upheld by actual laws, and FUCK YOU YOU GODDAMNED FUCKING FUCK!

Tech giant youTube puts a link to a government website debunking all rumors of a stolen election under every video [1]. You click on it (accidentally in my case) read a bit and wonder how the government officials at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency who maintain this so-called fact-based website are still on the job under the reflexively vindictive master of the purge.

Let me try to take our minds off the immediate shit show for a moment with this little game. Take any fact you like, let’s go with a historical one. Abraham Lincoln was a Republican, the party’s second ever candidate for president [2]. The sharply divided Democratic party in 1860 (it ran different candidates in the north and in the south) was dominated by pro-slavery racists, certainly in the slave states. Today you will hear the talking point, from in-your-face right-wing provocateurs, that the Republican party is the party of equality, the party that emancipated the slaves, and the Democratic party is the party of the Ku Klux Klan.

Look at any presidential election map since Nixon’s 1968 victory. The entire former Confederacy is painted solid red, for Republican. Since the Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s (and LBJ, signing these bills into law knew he was crippling his own party in the former Confederacy), and Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” of dog whistling racism to bigots to get votes that would have gone to his challenger George Wallace, the party of the aggrieved white man is the former party of Lincoln. Wallace, we learn, pursued an electoral strategy similar to Trump’s — throw the lost election to the House of Representatives [3]! Fuck, there he is again…

Impossible to escape from this ubiquitous, attention-obsessed, emotionally frail egomaniac and his loud-mouthed fans. Hard to even remember that in 40 days his replacement will be sworn in. Just using the word ‘replacement’ in that sentence puts the cadence of those fine young chanting men into my head “Jews will not replace us!” It’s exhausting to anyone who believes reason and logic are still indispensable to the human experiment in not destroying all life on the planet.

Exhaustion is the whole point of the infernal exercise.

[1]

from the “traitorous” Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency website:

#PROTECT2020 RUMOR VS. REALITY

Mis- and disinformation can undermine public confidence in the electoral process, as well as in our democracy.  Elections are administered by state and local officials who implement numerous safeguards to protect the security of your vote pursuant to various state and federal laws and processes. This resource is designed to debunk common misinformation and disinformation narratives and themes that relate broadly to the security of election infrastructure and related processes. It is not intended to address jurisdiction-specific claims. Instead, this resource addresses election security rumors by describing common and generally applicable protective processes, security measures, and legal requirements designed to protect against or detect large-scale security issues related to election infrastructure and processes. 

You can learn more about mis- and disinformation from CISA’s Countering Foreign Influence Task Force. Click an icon below to go directly to that section.

[2]

History little recalls the nation’s first Republican presidential candidate. Most of us will need a search engine, and less than a second, for the answer to that trivia question:

John C. Frémont ran as the first Republican nominee for President in 1856 behind the slogan “Free soil, free silver, free men, Frémont and victory!” Although Frémont’s bid was unsuccessful, the party showed a strong base. Abbreviation: GOP (Grand Old Party) Political position: Center-right to right-wing
History of the Republican Party (United States) – Wikipedia

[3] Wikipedia:

Former Governor of Alabama George Wallace ran in the 1968 United States presidential election as the candidate for the American Independent Party against Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey. Wallace’s pro-segregation policies during his term as Governor of Alabama were rejected by most. The impact of the Wallace campaign was substantial, winning the electoral votes of several states in the Deep South. Although Wallace did not expect to win the election, his strategy was to prevent either major party candidate from winning a majority in the Electoral College. This would throw the election into the House of Representatives, where Wallace would have bargaining power sufficient to determine, or at least strongly influence, the selection of a winner.

Although Nixon ultimately won a majority of 301 electoral votes (270 being a majority), Wallace’s effort put the chance of a brokered electoral college relatively close. For example; had he won South Carolina or Tennessee (falling less than 50,000 votes short) and had the Democratic ticket won either Illinois or Ohio (trailing the Republican one by around 100,000 votes in both cases) Nixon would have ended up with a plurality but not a majority, and the election would – for the first time since 1824 – have been thrown to the House of Representatives.

They want to be Nazis so bad…

I confess, I don’t really understand the strong authoritarian urge of the party of Trump, certainly not among so many in his base who get so little from this openly corrupt, self-serving man. I don’t get the impulse to march in lockstep behind a violent “strongman”. I know that Trump has a painful compulsion to “win” at any cost and a need to inflict maximum pain on others as he does it. It’s hard for me to think of him as not floridly psychotic, a flailing, desperately self-obsessed, addled maniac with pronounced sadistic features.

He truly, sincerely, strongly doesn’t care that perhaps twice as many Americans have died, and are dying, of COVID-19 than if he had taken any reasonable steps to slow its spread, anywhere along the way. He doesn’t even bother to show up at meetings of his pandemic task force, hasn’t for months. He is unconcerned about mass American death, even in areas that voted for him in great numbers, and doesn’t even pretend to give a damn. But what’s up with his lickspittle accomplices? Lindsey Graham? Little Marco? Lyin’ Ted? Moscow Mitch? All the rest?

The vast majority of Republicans in Congress have been silent in the face of Trump’s unhinged coup attempt (his won-lost record in “legal” challenges since the election is now 1 and 49). The Washington Post surveyed congressional Republicans recently and found only 27 out of 249 would admit that Joe Biden won the election. Historian Heather Cox Richardson provides a historical precedent for this kind of cynical Republican power play, from America’s last Gilded Age [1].

When pressed for comment about Trump’s refusal to admit defeat these powerful Republican election results deniers keep repeating their idiotic talking point: Trump has every right to attack and use every means he can think of to try to overturn an election he honestly believes he rightfully won. They all seem to have swilled the Kool-aid Alan Dershowitz offered in a deranged defense of Trump at his rigged impeachment [2]: even if Trump is wrong, if he honestly believes he’s right to do something, and is doing it for what he truly feels is the good of the country, how can his actions be against the law?

Incoherence is perfectly cool among this type of true believer. Mail-in voting is ripe for massive fraud, repeated Barr, Trump, Graham, Putin — bolstered by no evidence but Barr’s conclusory “common sense”. Preventing massive mail-in voting fraud was the theory behind making it hard for people in cities to vote by mail, removing and dismantling high speed mail-sorting machines and pulling mailboxes off the streets. This fantasy of mail-in voting fraud is the basis on which Trump attacked the solid 7,000,000 vote, 306 Elector majorities for Biden. Republican voters in the do-or-die Georgia runoff are now urged by their president to vote by mail. Do not trouble yourself about the contradictions: just do it!

One of the candidates in the upcoming Georgia runoff that will decide if we have a working democracy again soon or more of the Grim Reaper’s mirthless obstruction, Kelly Loeffler, who joined fellow ardent Trumpist senator David Perdue in demanding that the Republican Attorney General of Georgia step down (for his part in the fraud that stole the election from Trump?) was asked “Yes or no, Senator Loeffler, did Donald Trump lose the recent presidential election?”

“You know, President Trump has every right to use every legal recourse available, it’s unfortunate that the focus is on a debate about who won the election when this process is still playing out …. and president Trump has every right to every legal legal recourse… The president has the right to pursue every legal recourse to make sure this was a free and fair election in Georgia… The president has every right to every legal recourse, and that’s what’s taking place…”

The system is corrupt, the election in Georgia was rigged, your votes have been stolen, and Trump is trying to reveal this and overturn the fake results certified now three times by traitorous top Georgia Republicans — now get those absentee ballots in, Georgia Republicans, to enable Mitch McConnell, with an unchallengeable one vote majority, to fuck up Biden like he hogtied that illegitimate secret Muslim son-of-a-bitch so-called president!

Since all politics is local, angry Republicans with the power to do so may intimidate and punish enemies real and perceived with the full force of the law.

From Heather Cox Richardson:

This morning in Florida, about 10 armed law enforcement officers raided the home of former state data scientist Rebekah Jones and seized her computers, phone, thumb drives, and hard drives. Jones was fired from her job at the state Department of Health for insubordination in May when she apparently refused to manipulate data about coronavirus to downplay state infections at a time when Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was eager to reopen the state. Jones had built the state’s Covid-19 dashboard, and after she was fired, she continued to compile and post coronavirus updates on her own.

An investigator with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement filed an affidavit saying that someone had hacked the state emergency management system to send a text to about 1,750 people with the message: “It’s time to speak up before another 17,000 people are dead. You know this is wrong. You don’t have to be part of this. Be a hero. Speak out before it’s too late.” The affidavit said the text came from an IP address connected to Jones’s house, and the affidavit was the reason for the search warrant that led to the raid. Jones denies having anything to do with the text, and noted that it went out on the official channel about the time that five of the eight team leaders at the DOH were fired in what she described as a purge.

source

Purges, it’s what fascists and bulimics do. Proof, shmoof, move on, nothing to see here, you vicious turds. The reason the Trump loyalist, COVID-denying governor of Florida’s forces raided the fired scientist’s home?

she apparently refused to manipulate data about coronavirus to downplay state infections at a time when Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was eager to reopen the state. Jones had built the state’s Covid-19 dashboard, and after she was fired, she continued to compile and post coronavirus updates on her own.

and from that same Letter from an American:

Despite the coronavirus crisis, the Trump administration continues to put its energy into trying to overturn the 2020 election.

Having won only once, Trump today lost his 49th legal case, when lawyer Sidney Powell, who was recently dismissed from Trump’s campaign legal team, lost yet again in her attempt to get the results of the 2020 election thrown out. In Georgia, Judge Timothy Batten, who was appointed to the bench by President George W. Bush, rejected a lawsuit to overturn Biden’s victory in the state. “They want this court to substitute its judgment for that of 2.5 million Georgia voters who voted for Joe Biden,” Batten said, “and this I am unwilling to do.”

Nonetheless, tonight we learned that Trump reached out to a third state to try to enlist the support of Republican officials to overturn the election results. The office of the speaker of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, Bryan Cutler, confirmed that the president twice called to try to get Cutler to “fix” what he claimed were “issues” in Philadelphia. Cutler was one of about 60 state legislators who asked Pennsylvania’s congressional delegation to object to Pennsylvania’s Electoral College votes when they are brought before Congress on January 6, 2021, an effort that might cause a fuss but is unlikely to do much else. Trump has also unsuccessfully pressured officials in Arizona and Georgia to change their state’s votes.

Don’t worry. This is all perfectly normal. It happens in every society that goes authoritarian.

[1]

note this parenthetical:

(among other things, [Republicans] added six new states to the Union to pack the Electoral College).

Also today, the Washington Post printed the results of its query to all 249 Republicans in the House and Senate, asking them who won the 202 presidential election. Only 27 of them are willing to acknowledge that Biden won. Two Republicans insist that Trump won the election, all evidence to the contrary. The rest of them—220 of them—refuse to say who won.

This is a big deal. This was not a close election. Biden currently has over 7 million more votes than Trump, and has won by 306 to 232 in the Electoral College. And yet, Republican leadership is permitting Trump to undermine our democracy. Try to imagine any past Republican president doing what Trump is doing, and you can’t. But today’s Republican lawmakers are standing to the side, permitting Trump to poison our democracy.

To what end? Why are Republicans accepting this anti-American behavior from Trump?

It seems to me they are unwilling to risk losing Trump’s voters in the future because they are determined to regain power. They don’t much care about our democracy, so long as they have a shot at keeping Trump’s people on their side. But then, again, to what end? If Republicans regain power in 2022 or 2024, what will that look like? Do we have any reason to think they will then begin to defend our democracy? Do we have any reason to think they are interested in anything but even more legislation that moves wealth upward?

We have been in a spot much like this before. In 1884, Americans turned against the Republican Party because it had abandoned its support for ordinary Americans in favor of the industrial leaders who put money into Republican lawmakers’ political war chests, as well as into their pockets. Voters put Democrat Grover Cleveland into the White House, the first Democrat to hold the presidency since James Buchanan was elected in 1856.

Horrified, the Republicans flooded the country with stories of how Democrats were socialists who would attack the rich by ending the legislation that protected businesses. If Democrats continued to control the government, Republicans said, they would destroy America. In 1888, they suppressed Democratic votes and created modern political financing as they hit up businessmen for major donations. Despite their best efforts, voters reelected Cleveland by about 100,000 votes, but Republicans managed to eke out a win for their candidate, Benjamin Harrison, in the Electoral College. Harrison promised a “BUSINESSMAN’S ADMINISTRATION,” and indeed, in office, he and his men did all they could to cement the Republican Party into power so it could continue to defend business (among other things, they added six new states to the Union to pack the Electoral College).

But voters still didn’t like the Republicans’ platform, which seemed more and more to funnel money from hardworking Americans upward into the pockets of those men who were increasingly portrayed as robber barons. In 1892, they voted for Cleveland in such numbers they couldn’t be overridden in the Electoral College. Voters also put Democrats in charge of Congress, both the House of Representatives and the Senate.

And that is the moment I cannot help thinking about today. Faced with a legitimately elected Democratic government, Republican leaders deliberately sabotaged the country. They swamped the media with warnings that Democrats would destroy the economy and that men should pull their capital out of stocks and industries. Foreign capital should, they said, go home or face disaster. Money began to flow out of the country and stocks faltered. When financiers begged the Harrison administration to shore up the markets in the face of the growing panic, administration officials told them their job was only to keep the country afloat until the day of Cleveland’s inauguration.

They didn’t quite make it. The economy collapsed about ten days before Cleveland took the oath of office, saddling the new president with the Panic of 1893 and very few ways to combat it. Republicans had deliberately sabotaged the country in order to discredit Cleveland, then demanded he honor the demands of financiers to stabilize the economy. Caught between a rock and a hard place, Cleveland tried to work with moneyed interests to combat the depression and promptly split his own party. The country roiled as out-of-work Americans despaired, some of them marching on Washington, D.C., to demand the government do something to address their plight.

The Republicans went into the 1894 midterm elections blaming the Democrats for the crisis in the country. They won the midterms in what remains the largest seat swing in the history of the House of Representatives. Then they claimed that, with Republicans back in power, the economy was now safe. They papered the country with media announcing that the panic was over and people should reinvest. The panic was over, and a Republican president won in 1896, once again insisting the Democrats were socialists, but this time adding that the past four years had proved the Democrats could not run the economy.

There is no excuse for the silence of Republican lawmakers as their president attacks our democracy. But there might be a precedent.

source

[2]

How’s this for Nazi-style justice?

The president hired an Attorney General who auditioned for the job by opining that the foundation of the Mueller probe was fatally flawed– and who, once on the job, dismissed the findings of the investigation as the work product of waffling, illegally spying partisans who had, in spite of massive efforts, found nothing on the president. The president was eventually impeached over an illegal quid pro quo that was witnessed by multiple officials who were on the call . The transcript of the “perfect” call that his own people released showed he withheld military aid to get a foreign leader to announce an investigation that would damage his political opponent. The call was heard in real time by many, some (like Mike Pompeo) lied about it, some testified truthfully, under oath. The president was impeached by the House who sent the articles over the the Senate for the trial.

Mitch McConnell, the head juror, immediately announced that the impeachment was a desperate and unfounded purely political attack by a party angry that its “witch hunt” had turned up no hint of wrongdoing by the president. The jury, he said, would work closely with the president’s defense team to acquit the president of all charges as quickly as possible. McConnell announced this on national TV. No witnesses or new evidence of presidential wrongdoing (which was gathering almost daily) would be allowed at the trial. We’ll hear from the desperate, lying Democrats, he promised, and then we’ll acquit our president of all the fake charges. We have the votes, bitches.

Once the “trial” was over, Trump began purging everyone who had testified against him under oath. He took revenge on everyone and their brother, literally, as it turned out.

Pardon Me, Sir, The American Rule?

There was no federal anti-lynching law for the many decades large numbers of people were being lynched in the USA. This was because a sizable block in the Senate truly believed that certain people needed to be dragged off, tortured and strung up, or mutilated and set on fire while still alive. Legally sanctioned terrorism was a way of life in certain areas, an integral part of maintaining “law and order”.

If there was not even a federal anti-lynching law for so many years, why would you expect an anti-discrimination law to stop the racist application of government programs? It was not until after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, during the upheaval of the “Civil Rights” Movement (Malcolm X, El-Hajj Malik El-Shabbazz, correctly called these Human Rights) that federal anti-discrimination legislation, like the Fair Housing Act of 1965, was signed into law to halt some of the more pernicious practices of genteel, wealthy racists.

The wealthy, genteel or not, have always seen to making laws that enforce their privileges. That’s why having money in the United States is often the difference between a long life and a short one. My father, born into terrible poverty, was part of a generation of American veterans of the Second World War who were able to get a free college education and a low cost housing loan and, with hard work, emerge from poverty into the middle class. The program was called the GI Bill.

I read recently that in New York State, of the thousands of these GI Bill housing loans and low-cost mortgages that were made to veterans who bought houses (and amassed an inheritable estate), only a handful (11, I think) went to black veterans. Black veterans applied for these benefits, they were legally entitled to them, they just didn’t get them. Renting a decent place to live was the same way, no law really prevented a racist owner from telling black or brown people (or anyone else he simply didn’t like the looks of) that the vacant apartment they’d looked at was, unfortunately, no longer available.

Donald Trump’s father made the bulk of his fortune exploiting the post World War II home building explosion. He was an expert at profiting from government subsidies that incentivized the building of affordable housing, he made many millions from these government programs. The government put conditions on these highly subsidized deals, the housing had to be affordable, widely available to working people. There was just a wink, an understanding, about renting to what were then called Negroes, Spics (Puerto Ricans), Kikes (poor Eastern European Jews), Wops (darker Southern Italians), “Ethnics’ of every stripe. Trump’s father had a policy against renting to such ‘unsavory’ types and there was no law against it, until the Fair Housing Act.

Donald was 19 when the Fair Housing Act became law, already (having successfully dodged the draft and the deadly jungles of Vietnam) being groomed to take over his father’s empire (an empire he’d sell at a loss after the old man died, in violation of the dead man’s wishes, but that’s another story).

The younger Trump sat next to his father during the government’s case against Trump Properties and watched an unscrupulous master (eventually, too late, disbarred and indicted) named Roy Cohn work his magic. Cohn first countersued the Department of Justice for defamation of the Trumps (who, although they honestly hated the people they refused to rent to, arguably had every legal right to be selective in processing tenant applications). Eventually the Trump’s signed a settlement with the government, admitting no wrongdoing in marking applications “C” (for “colored”) and rejecting every applicant with a “C” on their folder, and agreeing to allow supervision by federal authorities to ensure future compliance with the Fair Housing Act, a law they did not admit they had violated.

It was an eye-opening, intoxicating victory for the young Donald Trump. He went on to become possibly the most litigious man in history, with over 3,500 lawsuits (before becoming president) and literally hundreds since (at least 300 prior to the 2020 election and, at last count, 43 since — his record in those Stop The Steal! cases is 1 win, 42 losses).

The simplest explanation for why Trump is involved in all this protracted litigation is The American Rule. We learned about this in law school, and many of us were shocked to learn it, though, after you think about it for a moment, it makes perfect sense.

In most countries, if you bring a weak lawsuit designed primarily to vex, harass, cow, intimidate, delay, bully, pauperize, manipulate, exploit or outright cheat another person, and you lose the case — or withdraw the suit after bankrupting your opponent with legal bills or otherwise proving your point — you must repay the legal fees of the person you brought to court. In most places this repayment of what can sometimes be vast legal bills is part of the principle of making the person “whole” after they suffer a legal injury. The American Rule is all about “fairness”– each side is responsible to pay its own costs in court and the winner may not be compensated by the loser for legal fees, except in specific, fairly rare cases.

As the inheritor of vast wealth, Trump, history’s greatest beneficiary of the American Rule, has never had any problem financing every possible lawsuit imaginable. Many of these expensive lawsuits are deductible as business expenses and, over decades, he has profited handsomely from the delays, favorable settlements and the bankrupting of hated adversaries. As the sitting president, and rightfully feared head of the Republican Party, he no longer has to finance his own lawsuits, that burden falls on we the taxpayers (for cases brought by Sessions’s and then Barr’s DOJ), his donors and the Republican National Committee war chest.

There are many things in life that are plainly wrong, although not, strictly according to the written law, illegal. Men like Donald Trump are experts at exploiting the fact that it is impossible to write down enforceable prohibitions of every form of evil and abuse.

The Supreme Court ruled against Richard Nixon when he claimed executive privilege in his attempt to withhold evidence during his impeachment. They ruled the same way against Bill Clinton when he tried a similar thing during his impeachment. Trump, advised by the equally unscrupulous Bill Barr, made the same arguments Nixon and Clinton lost in their attempts to hide evidence of their wrongdoing. Trump’s many defenders said Trump was only doing what other impeached presidents had done (conveniently omitting any reference to the legal outcomes or the elemental principle of justice behind them).

The Supreme Court would eventually have to rule against Trump’s absurdly broad claims of limitless immunity too. Only in Trump’s case — delay was the key. What he did in openly obstructing the impeachment may be found, in the end, to have been unlawful, but it worked! When the Supreme Court eventually rules that it was illegal for Trump to block all legally issued subpoenas for testimony by his employees, current and past, on the grounds of an inviolable expansive blanket protective presidential immunity (Barr’s genius concept), Trump will be involved in some other lucrative scam (or in prison for tax-related crimes).

Presidential pardons are about to burst forth in a gusher. The president’s right to grant pardons is practically unlimited, though self-dealing pardons may be subject to review, particularly the pardon of a presidential co-conspirator in federal crimes, like Louis DeJoy. Or the faithful Rudy Giuliani, if he survives COVID-19, for his role in the long pattern of mutually beneficial shady, illegal political shenanigans/business deals in Ukraine that led to his old friend’s impeachment.

Jared Kushner, perhaps the greatest walking illustration of Hannah Arendt’s ‘banality of evil’ (a completely ordinary idiot can do very evil things, if he has the power to do them), will be at the front of the line for a full presidential pardon. Jared is totally innocent, the president will announce, but because the sick, vindictive radical left Democrats are so intent on revenge after stealing the election, nothing Jared did while in power, no profits he personally made while a government employee (a reported $82,000,000 last year, along with First Daughter Ivanka), may be investigated, no crimes, even if evidence is found, prosecuted. The pardon will most likely protect Jared in all related federal lawsuits — good luck in state courts, JK.

The most unprincipled and stupid of Trump’s accomplices will all certainly get pardons– as long as they’ve been loyal to their famously disloyal boss. Pardon me, folks, but this is just another expression of the American Rule.