Category Archives: politics smells like meat

Biden Derangement Syndrome during a Pandemic

Would I rather have Joe Biden in the White House right now instead of Donald Trump?   Absolutely, you bet your life.  Biden believes in science, and funding things like the Center for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health, he’d have agencies up and running full-steam ahead to deal with this possible pandemic in a way that someone who doesn’t believe in science, or facts, or anything else is incapable of.   

Trump right now has a 29 year-old vetting everyone in government for personal loyalty to Trump.   Trump recently appointed his loyal poodle, a religious extremist whose greatest previous achievement was trying to “cure” young people of homosexuality, as the man in charge of controlling the spread of a potentially mass killing disease.   Way to go, for a dictator in waiting, though few Americans seem reassured to have Mike Pence as the Pandemic Czar.

That said, would I rather have Joe Biden in the White House in 2020 than Elizabeth Warren, or Julian Castro, or Kamala Harris, or Bernie Sanders or Stacey Abrams or any number of other progressive Democrats?  Absolutely not.  Biden is the corporate candidate of the status quo, the smiling centrist deal-maker who worked closely with former segregationists and gets along with everybody.    Biden’s legacy is working cheerfully with the right, cooperating in hideous policies, like pushing for Cheney’s war in Iraq, like humiliating Anita Hill when he was the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee (and having the gall to “apologize” to Hill decades later, telling her “I wish there was more I could have done…”).   

Where does the myth of Biden’s “electability” come from?   Recall that in his 1984 and 1988 presidential runs the famous gaffe machine totaled (combining 1984 and 1988 delegate numbers) less than one percent.  0.008%. to be exact.  And he’s more than thirty years older and even less nimble on his clumsy feet now.   Trump, who only has to refrain from actually shitting on the debate stage to “win”, will mop the floor with the confident moderate dotard who insists he will beat Trump “like a drum.”  Hey, Biden already proved he’s a winner, garnering almost one percent in those two primary runs…

Speaking of one percent, here’s a fun one.  Put one billion in your calculator. Assume the least sophisticated billionaire in history, on a full-time IV of his favorite pleasure drug, has his money in a series of FDIC insured bank accounts making 1% interest.  Tap those numbers in and you will see what even this idiot earns in simple interest in one year:  $10,000,000.   Almost a million a month, not bad for a complete dope!   Of course, at 5% the annual earning would be $50,000,000 and at 10% a neat $100,000,000, but, of course, those are just numbers.  No reason to get excited.

Well, that’s about it for me today.   Biden Derangement Syndrome has got me down, even as I’m very glad the smarter version of Trump is out of the race, only $500,000,000 down.  Of course, that piece of garbage, Mayor Mike, is now throwing his vast wealth behind Biden, and why wouldn’t he?   Biden will make everything like it was under the golden age of his black best friend Barack Obama — hopeful, and changey-ish, if you don’t look too closely at either of those things, and best for you if you are a very high roller.   

Democrats are one of two American corporately funded parties, bought and paid for by big donors.   The Democratic establishment is so terrified of what most Americans want that they will do anything to avoid having a candidate committed to long-overdue institutional change.  No reason to begin correcting fundamental injustice in our nation, no reason to highlight solving the escalating climate crisis that is already well underway.   

A “moderate” Democrat like Biden will make sure the big things stay the same, maximum privileges for the already privileged and whatever trickles down to the “takers,” the rest of us, who feel so entitled to the generous handouts we get from a government that needs to be restrained from viciously coercing the “makers”.   The corporate Democrats require a candidate who will not lead a discussion of what justice, public health, public safety, democracy, the rule of law, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness actually looks like.   

We are a nation of passive spectators, consumers, doomed to vote for whoever the corporations approve, whichever candidate is best branded, rebranded (in the case of Biden) and most expertly marketed. [1]   Not the way we were all taught about democracy, which is always a struggle.

 

[1]   Again, I was surprised and relieved that the best ad campaign $500,000,000 can buy didn’t convince many people to vote for the autocratic Mike Bloomberg, whose hideous leadership we already saw in action when he was NYC mayor, when he bent the law to maintain power for an illegal third term.   Good for that sad, ruthless fuck, and the good people of American Samoa, who voted him five delegates (more than Biden had in either 1984 or 1988).

The Corporate Brain

First thing to understand–  they’ve got the whole world, in their hands.   Corporations.   We live in a global corporatocracy [1], whatever else is also going on.

There are rules we must understand, living under the rule of “persons” accountable only to shareholder profits.  One is to know the kind of “person” a corporation is:  a psychopath — incapable of empathy, remorse, or moral reflection.  The corporate “person” has one legal interest: the bottom line, increasing stock value for its shareholders.   A corporate person will only do the right thing (like paying to remediate its own negligence, or even intentional defiance of existing laws) if targeted by law enforcement and, after exhausting every legal appeal, being ordered to comply by a court of law.   Since corporations spend a fortune on armies of lawyers and lobbyists to influence the drafting of every law that could have an impact on their profits, good luck there, Charlie.

Two is to understand the nature of the corporate brain — it is purposefully segmented into as many unrelated subdivisions as needed to shield the larger organism from harm.  This is a deliberate device to protect the corporation, in part by exhausting the consumer, who must often speak to many unrelated segments of the corporate brain to try to get a reasonable answer, or redress of any kind.  I provide two examples from my recent, ongoing experiences with two random corporations.

Brand new Dell computer does not perform an essential function, seeing my cellphone as a hotspot.   It sees other nearby hotspots and wireless networks, but it cannot find the only network I can use to connect to the internet.  The computer is under warranty so correcting this defect should not be a major problem.   

Except that Dell has compiled a legally unassailable list of specific exemptions from their limited warranty.  They have me run all the diagnostic tests on the brand new computer and, after an hour or so, tell me that there is no problem with the computer’s hardware, and that therefore the problem, which appears to be a software configuration error, is “out of warranty.”   Not to worry, they tell me, Dell has a paid service that can fix the problem for me.

As is typical in corporations, “Warranty” has no way of communicating with “Out of Warranty”, and therefore has no way of informing a customer that 3 years of “out of warranty” service costs $239, plus tax, a more limited version of this “premium” support goes for $169 and a one-time fix will set you back $129.  The customer can only learn these prices after another long wait on hold.   The customer must listen to a loop of ads for wonderful Dell products and services, while waiting to learn the price, and submit to being thanked over and over for how important their business is to Dell.

Enough reason never to deal with this particular corporate motherfucker ever again, but at the same time, Dell is merely on the vanguard of maximizing profits through express warranty limitations.  Corporations can make a lot more money by making customers pay to fix built in problems than by covering their repair for free.  They hire legal geniuses like now-Justice John Roberts, creator of the arbitration clause, to exclude the most expensive repairs, even of Dell’s own design flaws, from the limited warranty.   “What don’t you understand about the word ‘limited’, sir?   All of the limitations are explicitly set forth in the thousands of words of our warranty, which we will send you for free.”

The beauty is, there is nothing you can do.  It’s all legal and ironclad.  Put the computer back in the box, scrawl “FUCK DELL” on top and bring it back to the store.  (I would advise not scrawling “FUCK DELL” on top, it could void the return and force you to pay at least $129 to be able to use the brand new computer).  Caveat emptor, asshole.

Healthfirst, the corporation I pay for health insurance, told me, on January 22, and again on January 24 (after their internal “appeal”), that my insurance had been terminated for my failure to pay a “binder” payment during a once-a-year ten day “grace period.”   They also informed me that under the law they had no obligation to inform me of this “grace period” before terminating my policy.    Then, on January 28, another department in Healthfirst called to tell me that my insurance had never been terminated and apologized for their “mistake.”  

Since then I have been trying to find out what the law actually is.  No state or federal agency has any idea why I was cut off and why I was reinstated.  Nobody can point me to the section of the law that made Healthfirst reverse its unappealable termination.   None can confirm which of the various complaints I submitted resulted in the overturning of Healthfirst’s original determination.

Finding and publicizing the short answer would provide a valuable service for my fellow citizens, screwed by the thousands exactly as I was.   To put it simply: what protections against termination without notice do patients have under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, Obamacare?   You know, the federal law the right wing has been rabidly trying to abolish since it went into effect? [2]

I finally got a letter of explanation from Healthfirst, in an envelope marked “Grievance and Appeals”.  It was entitled “Notice of Grievance Resolution”, as though on February 14 I had contested Healthfirst’s decision to restore my health insurance after terminating it weeks earlier.   The notice states that my insurance was properly terminated for my failure to pay the binder during the ten-day grace period.  It states that my insurance had never been terminated, as confirmed by the call I received on January 28 apologizing for Healthfirst’s “mistake”.

Why this corporate change of “heart”?   That, sir, is nobody’s goddamned business.  Please continue to hold, your business is very important to us.

 

 

[1]  Wikipedia:

Corporatocracy is a recent term used to refer to an economic and political system controlled by corporations or corporate interests. The concept has been used in explanations of bank bailouts, excessive pay for CEOs as well as complaints such as the exploitation of national treasuries, people and natural resources. Wikipedia

[2] The law itself is now finally under reconsideration by the Supreme Court, in light of a federal court striking down the “mandate” that was upheld by one vote when John Roberts found this requirement of Obamacare constitutional.  Keep your helmets on, my fellow hostages.

A Note on Joe Biden

With his impressive “firewall”, support from black voters in the South Carolina primary, Joe Biden won his first primary as a presidential candidate, by a large margin over second place finisher Bernie Sanders.   Moderates Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg both dropped out of the race and threw their support to Biden, as did Beto O’Rourke and other high profile Democrats. [1]

Comedian Jimmy Kimmel noted last night that Biden’s South Carolina victory was his first primary win, ever.  I recall Biden had received scant support in his previous presidential runs, in 1984 and 1988.   I looked it up.

At the 1984 Democratic National Convention Biden got one delegate,  0.03% (three hundredths of a percent) of the necessary delegates.  

In 1988, Biden doubled the number of delegates to two,  0.05% (five hundredths of a percent) of the delegates he needed for the nomination.

Just sayin’…

I know everyone in the moderate, establishment wing of the Democratic Party is united in its determination to keep Bernie Sanders from being their candidate (that applies to a lesser extent to Elizabeth Warren, who I have always loved), because America, although on the brink of a second civil war, is considered not ready for bold changes and most Americans are said to hate Socialists of all kinds, and many don’t like Jews either, but… Biden?   Really, man?   Joe can’t even remember the deadpan punchline to “we hold these truths to be self-evident” … “that all men and women (as Biden added) are… you know the rest…”

Seriously?

 

[1] Meanwhile, billionaire Republican Mike Bloomberg has already outspent his remaining Democratic rivals 10:1 on advertising alone, passing the half billion dollar mark recently.  He is almost up to having spent 1% of his fortune to become the Democratic presidential candidate. He will probably spend up to 5% of his personal wealth ($3,400,000,000.00) for his dream job.

For the Love of God, America

After a funeral yesterday we all sat in a restaurant having lunch.   The gentle fellow across from me reported how easy it was to deal with Medicare, one simple statement, everything pretty straightforward.   I asked if he thought it a good idea to have a similar health care system for people before they reached sixty-five. He said he did, but how are we going to pay for it?  A second later he began excoriating Sanders and Warren and I saw that we were nearing the end of a real conversation. At this Sanders/Warren prompt there was a chorus of nearby voices stating how imperative it is we vote Trump out in 2020 (that chorus was joined by a Trump 2016 voter.)  

As far as the current health insurance regime for millions, Obamacare, my interlocutor agreed it was absurd to be given a menu without prices and to be billed six weeks later, as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act allows providers and insurers to do.

The buffet most of us were having cost $49 per person, as the waitress readily told us.   Imagine if no price was given and our host simply had to wait six to eight weeks to be billed and learn that the price was $400 per person, and there was no recourse.  That’s the price, deadbeat.  If you have premium level buffet insurance, the price will be $49 per person, but, sadly, you did not take precautions.  Caveat emptor, bitches.

On January 8 I had the first of four endovenous ablations in my legs.  It had been deemed medically necessary and insurance had approved the procedures.   There was, of course, no way to know the price in advance, as per the impressively opaque 906 page Patient Protection Act.   On January 22 I was informed by Healthfirst, the company that I pay for my ACA insurance, that my insurance had been terminated.  This meant I’d be responsible for the full, non-insured price of the first treatment, whatever it turned out to be.  Several days later I managed, by very hard, stressful work and sheer luck, to get the unappealable termination of my insurance overturned.   Insurance would pay after all.

My sickening fight with the insurance company, with every state, local and federal agency, the stonewalling at every turn, another story for another day.   It is ongoing and seemingly will never have an end, until I arbitrarily give up.  The citizen has, according to everyone, no right to know the exact provision of the Patient Protection Act that protects him from the unappealable acts of a health insurance company that are later deemed “mistakes” regarding a wrongful termination of insurance.  OK, I guess that’s some form of democracy, if you’re lucky enough not to be violently sodomized by it. [1]

Anyway, the other day I got the Explanation of Benefits for the first of four ablation treatments.   The full, retail price: $5,460.    The Allowed Amount: $1,572.  My copayment, already paid: $25.   Multiply this hefty sum by four and you will understand that the insurance company had thousands of compelling reasons to terminate my policy, if given the chance.   Without insurance, the cauterization of those two leg veins would have cost over $21,000.   That’s why all Americans need health insurance, to be protected against bankruptcy if one survives the medical challenges themselves.

Which is why, of course, Mr. Trump, who promised better, cheaper, universal health care for all Americans back in 2016 has fought so hard to bring us Trumpcare. Cheaper, better, covering all Americans, brought to us all by Mr. Trump (born American and college graduate, unlike Obama!) and the incorruptible, unconquerable wall of Republican Senators and a vast army of lobbyists and “donors”.  USA!   USA!!!

 

 

[1]  I am always pointing out to the reps I am appealing to for help that I support the ACA, voted for Obama twice, realize Obamacare is a halting, but significant, step forward and that the tweaks needed to make it work better — like every other large government program got in its first few years of administration as problems were discovered–  were all prevented by a partisan lynch mob working with a klanlike zeal to prevent the n-word president from having a second term and then making sure he was able to accomplish nothing in his second term but the divisive election of a White Supremacist successor who would do his damnedest to wipe Obama’s record from history.   I get all that, but still.

CBS delivers free, powerful informercial to Trump 2020. USA! USA!!!!

The clips of Democratic candidates shouting over each other during their recent South Carolina debate, seemingly deranged, divided and unable to even listen to each other’s positions, was delivered by CBS to the Trump 2020 campaign.  That the live-TV fiasco was the failure of CBS to properly moderate the debate?   Whoopsie-daisy!    It’s not that we like Trump, don’t assume we like him, it’s just that he’s so goddamn good for our bottom line!

Les Moonves, forced to resign from his job as head of CBS when multiple sexual abuse allegations against led to the determination that he is a fucking pig, famously said the networks were not giving Trump all this free airtime because they liked him.  He raises ratings.   Advertisers like him because audiences love him, and that makes CBS coffers fatter.   “He may not be good for America, but he sure is good for our shareholders!” or something like that was Les’s comment.   A year or two later Les had to make due with a smaller exit package, as his $120,000,000 golden parachute was clawed back by CBS since Moonves was fired “for cause.”   (I was unable to find out what happened with his attempt to get it back through arbitration)

Meanwhile, CBS appears to have set no rules for its candidate debate, issued no warnings for repeated interruptions, did not cut the mic of anyone who persisted in shouting down and talking over somebody else>  The result: plenty of footage of unruly candidates, forced to jealously vie for air time, snapping at each other.   The footage provides a valuable free campaign bonanza for Mr. Trump’s billion dollar advertising, media and disinformation teams.

And God bless these United Shayssssh…

 

Perspective on Unlimited Campaign Money and (self-funded) Billionaire Presidential Campaigns

Just to make this one perplexing fact about our political system a bit more clear.  

One billion dollars is a thousand million dollars.  It looks like this:  $1,000,000,000.00.    

Mike Bloomberg, for example, has about this amount of money:  $60,000,000,000.00.  

He plans to boldly spend at least $500,000,000.00 in paid campaigning by “Super Tuesday” when more than a dozen states are simultaneously in play, along with 33.8% of delegates nationwide..  He is already closing in on that half billion number, having passed $350,000,000.00 already.  Take out your calculator.

If candidate Bloomberg spends $500,000,000.00 for ads and staff to help him win maximum delegates toward the Democratic presidential nomination on Super Tuesday, what percentage of his fortune does he spend?

To divide those numbers, first move the 5 of $500,000,000 over five places. You can see at once what an insignificant fraction that half billion actually is to someone with sixty billion.  If it was $600,000,000, we could see at a glance the percentage of sixty billion would be about 1%.

Placing the numbers into a calculator gives us our mathematical answer:  .0083%   One half a billion dollars equals .0083% of Mike Bloomberg’s personal fortune.  That’s a shade under 1%.   If he felt like spending a billion, that would be 1.66% of his personal fortune.  An unprecedented $5,000,000,000.00 presidential campaign expenditure would be 8.3% of his wealth.

For the equivalent for the “average” citizen, with $10,000 in savings, that $500,000,000 Bloomberg expenditure is $83.   Chump change by any calculation.  If you have $1,000 the equivalent amount would be $8.30 — it would hardly break the bank.  On a personal fortune of $100 it would cost you 83 cents.

As far as the rest of the story on Mike Bloomberg, a man who bought a third NYC mayoral term after being blocked by term limits, I will return here eventually for a full treatment of Mike Bloomberg, a vicious, smooth-talking,  weasel-dicked motherfucker.  As for what Bloomberg will do as president, I can confidently tell you he’d be basically Trump with a brain.

American history master Robert Caro observed that the only accurate way to tell what somebody would do if they had power is to watch them exercise power when they actually have it.   LBJ had all of his segregationist buddies fooled for all those years, during his climb, as he built his national Senate majority,  when the time came he betrayed them all by signing legislation to once again enforce century-old constitutional rights for Coloreds.  LBJ paid a big price, politically and personally, but, as Caro points out, signing that equality and expansion of the New Deal legislation was what he wanted to do all along, if he ever got the power to do it.  The proof is that, in spite of the tremendous forces against it, he actually did it when he had the power to.   Politicians will do and say almost anything to get votes and campaign funds, it’s what they do in power that tells you what you really need to know before you cast a ballot.   We have a fat book here in New York City on Mike as mayor of New York City, pretty much a piece of shit from start to finish.  I have a few details that I’d like to have more well-known (and will do in coming days).

I heard a pundit say, correctly, that this longtime Republican, Bloomberg, should be spending his vast fortune to secure the Republican nomination against Trump.   Mayor Mike knows that would not be possible in the fearful cult of Trump that is currently the Republican party.   So he runs as a Democrat, with the advantages of a demoralized, terrified Democratic electorate,  a compliant mass media squelching meaningful public discussion of social and environmental justice during the presidential campaign, a desperate, willing DNC (one that won’t even allow the candidates to debate the best ways to deal with the escalating climate crisis) and unlimited funds, from his own money that he made entirely by himself, with no help from anybody.  

Realpolitik, baby, the name of Mike Bloomberg’s sickening game.   The practical art of attaining and wielding power divorced from moral, ethical, ideological or any other consideration, outside of gaining and maintaining power.  Only in 2020 America, kids.  Where the 1% can spend less than 1% to become a serious contender for heavyweight champion of the world.

 

 

 

This is Just the Way it is

Things are just the way they are.  Most people believe that since we’re largely helpless to change even the most oppressive things about our lives, particularly the gigantic ones well beyond our influence, it’s best to simply develop a stoic attitude.   It’s one thing to imagine a better world, it is a much harder thing to figure out how to bring about positive change to bring us closer to that imagined better world.  Best to accept that this is just the way it is, we are powerless to change anything, however ugly and unjust some of the details of it might be.  The best we can do is develop the serenity not to be tortured by injustice, we are taught.

Would the life of the average American be much more secure if nobody had to worry, on top of the fear over a life-threatening health challenge, about going bankrupt and becoming homeless if they get cancer or are grievously injured in a car crash?  Sure, but IT’S SO COMPLICATED!  Jobs lost, destroying lives, gigantic private companies out of business, almost two million jobs for health insurance middlemen and middlewomen lost forever… what if you like your doctor and a socialist death panel doesn’t allow you to see her?  How will socialized medicine work?  Who will decide?  Won’t millions still die while waiting to see a doctor?  Isn’t socialized medicine a disaster everywhere else in the world?  I don’t want to die.  I have good private health insurance, why should I jeopardize that, etc?

I don’t minimize any of these complications.  Those two million people will have to be retrained, and paid while they learn new job skills.   Some could probably be employed by the government administering the program that will be replacing their jobs.  How to make the transition to a better health care system is a real discussion, it will take some hard work to find workable solutions to real problems. Is it unimaginable to live in a country where nobody has to make the unthinkable choice between losing their home and seeking treatment for a deadly disease?  I don’t think so.  Particularly since every other wealthy nation has that kind of system already.

I tend to put much of America’s pessimism about positive change down to the billions spent in the corporate media to convince us that the way things are is simply the inevitable result of freedom in a democracy.   We are influenced by the often pernicious myths we are fed every day, in ads, in the way news stories are presented (what facts and voices are excluded from the conversation), by a skilled group of well-paid talking heads, speaking persuasively over corporate media, telling us how things actually are.  

Listening to this stream of persuasion we come to believe things,  Most of us succumb to this wall of inevitability that is presented to us.  Things like: it is inevitable, of course, that the boldest and the brightest, if they work hard enough, will succeed.    That the accident of your birth will be a huge factor in whether this is true or not will not be mentioned.   Though there is, by objective measure, less social mobility here in the USA than in most other wealthy nations (born poor die poor and born rich die rich are pretty much the rule, with notable famous exceptions that can be cited to “disprove” this rule) we all prefer to believe that the American Dream is attainable by anyone who works hard enough.    You can work very hard at McDonald’s, but the rewards will not be as great as if you are working very hard (or even hardly working) as the youngest executive at your dad’s billion dollar company.  [1]  That’s simply the way it is, the way it has always been, grow up and get over it, loser.

This quickly heating frog soup water we are all marinating in is, to a large extent, the result of irrefutable corporate logic.  Corporations have armies of lawyers and lobbyists, as well as public relations geniuses, making sure that the law favors their profit-driven activities, for reasons the public can understand as philanthropic.   If there is a regulation that will cost a corporation millions to comply with, a team of top shelf lawyers is sent to court to fight its enforcement.  I have a friend who spent his legal career dutifully, and skillfully, fighting this army of lawyers in case after case in federal court.  He went to court over and over to get a judge to order a US government agency to enforce its own laws, in each specific case he was forced to argue.

There was a regulation that stated that a corporation could not engage in this practice (that was destroying a habitat, dumping toxic waste, whatever) without first doing these other things that ensured certain protections for the rest of us.  The corporation had not done these things, the facts made clear.   The law was clear.  So, at the end of litigation, were the loopholes uncovered by the army of corporate lawyers who’d proceed to drive the bulldozers through those loopholes.

We learn, because corporations, unlike us, have no feelings, no conscience, are incapable of moral judgments about anything outside of the best way to increase profits for shareholders, that it is futile to fight these monsters.  Those of us who persist in these kind of draining, one-sided battles, insisting on our “rights” (the express limitations of which are, after all, excruciatingly spelled out in the corporately drawn contracts we are forced to accept) are considered by many to be masochists madly tilting at windmills.   The corporation will almost always win.  Getting the benefit of your bargain with them, if they are intent on shortchanging you, will require superhuman patience and resilience.  Best to avoid!  Take your screwing, go have a nice dinner, go watch a comedy.

The alternative?  The new computer you bought does not perform one essential function?  Call the company, speak to polite men in India, have them run the diagnostic tests on your computer.  Wait for them to tell you that your computer has passed all the required diagnostics.  The problem is not from the “hardware”, it is a “software configuration” problem that is expressly excluded from the warranty.   They will provide a paid service to fix it, if you’d like to be placed on hold to learn more about this service.  You can’t be told the price, because the corporation does not let the technicians at the “out of warranty” department communicate that information to the warranty department.  Why is this feature out of warranty?   We will send you the warranty, sir, you can read its 15,000 tiny words for yourself.  Believe us, sir, we’d like to help, if we could.  And as to the paid service, don’t worry, the paid service is “take it or leave it”, you needn’t pay anything if you don’t like the price.

If you are willing to endure however many hours will be required to solve the problem with your otherwise nifty new computer, you can learn, eventually, that the company was misstating their warranty policy for a brand new computer. As one would hope, everything about the computer, including the configuration of the original software, is under warranty for a certain period.   No need to pay the $239 for premium out of warranty service, $169 for premium limited out of warranty service or even the $129 for a one-time fix.  Not your financial responsibility to pay the company for fixing a bug that came loaded on to their brand new machine.  No need to endure a long, aggravating hold to learn the fixed prices for this service!

Of course, the psychic price you will generally be asked to pay to learn this may be unreasonably high for most people.  I wound up screaming in uncontrollable anguish near the end of an entire frustrating day, mostly on hold, listening either to an annoying loop of upbeat muzak or to endlessly repeated ads for the computer company.   My life was temporarily ruined by my exertions yesterday, in a real sense.  Sekhnet is not talking to so far me today.  Even though the last call of the day came with good news.  My complaint had been escalated, the computer will be fixed free of charge, nobody should have been put through what I was yesterday and the night before.  Apologies all around.

Of course, I had to remember and deploy the word “escalate” before reaching this resolution.  The last supervisor I spoke to, while empathetic and apologetic, was unable to really do anything for me.  She regretted this and apologized again for her inability to be more helpful.   Until I reached into my expanding corporate lexicon and pulled out the magic word “escalate”.  Yes, that was something she could do, she would escalate my complaint.  Shortly after my issue was “escalated” I got a call back from someone who could actually solve the problem.  Like magic, after only a handful of hours of frustration.  Just the way it is.

 

 

[1]   My grandparents arrived in America twenty years before the Nazis wiped out everyone else in their families.   Jared Kushner’s grandparents were in Europe during those nightmarish Nazi years and managed to survive and reach America.   My grandparents worked very hard, every day.  Jared’s grandparents also worked very hard every day.  It would be impossible to say which couple worked harder. Jared’s grandparents started with two dollars between them, the unlikely story goes.  A generation later: billionaire owners of a real estate empire.   My grandparents, who I assume came with more than two dollars between them, died owning a one-bedroom apartment in Miami Beach and not much else.  C’est la vie, baby.

The Role of Malice in our Culture

The phrase “politics of resentment” has been used to describe the bravura style of mass influence employed by demagogues Mussolini and Hitler who harnessed the grievances and resentment of people screwed by the powerful.   What does a resentful audience respond to?  Strong expressions of undisguised malice.

We will hang these traitors from lamp posts!   (huge applause)   We will punish each of these sick and audacious criminals with a slow painful death!  (chant)   We will not let these rapists get away with their crimes against the innocents among us!  (grunts of approval)  The day of our long-denied vengeance has finally arrived!  (fists pump)  Lock her up!  (chant) etc.

Malice is all that remains when every other imaginable avenue of improving a situation is blocked.   You could call malice a  moral failing, a failure of imagination, or a character flaw, but it has its psychological uses.   Malice, which is aggressive and directed outward toward a hated enemy, is seen by most people as a more vital emotion than hopelessness, an inward focused depressed admission of defeat in a rigged game.  

Malice gives the illusion of power.  You say I’m powerless?  FUCK YOU, YOU FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT, I’LL KILL YOU!    Feels better than “Jesus, you’re right, there really is nothing I can do after being fucked the way I was…” doesn’t it?  An illusory feeling of manliness, since malice, which feeds on a sense of worthlessness, only diminishes a person, though it’s seen preferable to an admission of hopelessness to most people, I suspect.

Arguing based on malice, which easily takes Reason out of the discussion, explains a lot about our politics today.  Mr. Trump is a master of malice.  He comes by his maliciousness the old fashioned way– hopeless envy of others.   He comes by this honestly.   He was not his father’s first choice to run the family business.   He was a spiteful little bully, and not the smartest of the five children, by a long shot.  The first born, dad’s favorite, was not cut out to be the ruthless steward of his father’s fortune, he broke his father’s heart and died a broken man himself.  The fourth born, the second male in line, the spiteful little bully who kept acting out, was sent away to military academy to learn self-discipline and to “man up”, then kept out of the wartime draft by a powerful father who was grooming him, relentlessly and demandingly, to take over his empire.    

Mr. Trump squandered everything his father gave him, more than $400,000,000 in today’s dollars.  Then he tried to take control of the family fortune before his father was dead (he was deep in debt and needed the money).  His father exerted himself one last time, had his lawyers stop his impetuous and hotheaded son from wasting the rest of the family fortune.  When the old man died, Mr. Trump ignored his father’s wishes that the Trump properties stay in the family and sold off his father’s entire empire at a loss.  He needed the money.  Taking a hit of a few hundred million did not seem that big a deal, in light of the circumstances.  He and his sisters and little brother all did very well, the proceeds of the sale, although the properties were sold at a steeply discounted price, made all of them very, very wealthy.  Vast wealth is never enough for someone filled with malice.

Trump has to realize, on some level, that he is not a very good businessman.   He was a blustering snake oil salesman, trying one scam after another to increase his fortune, to shore up his losses in bad deals and foolish decisions in his other businesses.  He was a failure in every business he set up, declaring bankruptcy several times.  He had the fabulous good luck of “Reality TV”.   At the time he was approached by TV producers about fronting a show about his fabulous life he admits he was virtually broke.  Pointing to a homeless bum on the street near Trump Tower he reportedly told his daughter Ivanka (according to them both) that he was basically in the same boat as that worthless fucker.

Then he got to play his dream version of himself on TV.   A winner who never made a wrong move, ever.  A sought-after mentor to the most ambitious contestants on his zero-sum winner-take-all show.   He was transformed, by “reality TV”, from a wealthy attention seeking jackass to an icon of American success, America’s greatest winner.  Millions watched him play this character on TV, waited for him to deploy his winning catch phrase every week as he eliminated another contender to be his apprentice.  Somehow “you’re fired” resonated with millions of downtrodden Americans who apparently lived vicariously through Trump’s gold-plated persona.  Go figure.  Building this carefully stage managed image of himself as the smartest businessman in America was his greatest achievement.   He owes his great success to a great network television production team and to his own his ability to harness and channel malice.   At malice, he is simply the best.

The Brutal Politics of US vs. Them

Yale Historian Timothy Snyder, author of the 2016 On Tyranny,  has been all over media lately, analyzing our ravaged nation’s rapid slide toward open autocracy.   His quote on the lesson of history resonates strongly with my own view on the matter — since the future is entirely an exercise, to those who still insist on our agency as citizens of a democracy, in imagining possibilities, informed by knowledge of the past:

[H]istory does not repeat. But it does offer us examples and patterns, and thereby enlarges our imaginations and creates more possibilities for anticipation and resistance.[19]

I recently saw his 2018 talk at Harvard on youTube.  Snyder lays out the recent history of the politics of US vs. THEM, the dividing line of current Western politics (not only in the U.S. but Hungary, Turkey, UK, Brazil, India, etc.)  He discusses how a politics based on defining friend and enemy, (with the appropriate treatment for each category), is antithetical to  the democratic goal of a rules-bound politics of consensus, a system of institutions and laws designed to protect the weak and restrain the impulse of the powerful to favor friends and punish enemies. 

Snyder cites our increasing reliance on the internet as the biggest single factor fostering this Us and Them oversimplification of the world and the rightward distortion of our politics.  He argues that the unreal online world of the internet has been the biggest single factor in flattening a complicated three dimensional world into a largely self-affirming two-dimensional one.   

Rather than increasing our critical abilities, with our unprecedented access to the total accumulated information of the world, our online lives have flattened our range of exploration by instantly and robotically providing us opinions and glosses that affirm our preconceptions.   The internet now serves us personalized content tailored to what the algorithms know we already prefer.  The hours most of us spend on online every day deaden our ability to reason our way to conclusions based on actual facts, real things that actually happened in the real, three-dimensional interactive world.  Time spent online, in a virtual cocoon of like-minded opinion, also saps our will to meet other humans in the real world to strategize with and take concerted action with.  

In cyber space it is easy to magnify certain things while disappearing others.  In an immersive cyber world it is fairly easy to erase the very real problems confronted by the actual humans who make up the abstract, hated “Them” — rendering “them” nonexistent.  Millions of desperate refugees fleeing real atrocities and climate disasters in far away countries?  Their existence and their terrible dilemmas can easily be erased on the internet, reducing them solely to their emotional use in tropes, memes and bots shaping “our” opinion toward “them.”

If you stay in your internet silo the chances for real-world participation start to seem less real than the stimulating and addictive interactions (with humans or bots, one never knows) you can constantly have on-screen.   I had a dramatic example of this recently, in trying to leave the online space for human interaction in the real world.  I was disappointed by the website of the large militant Brooklyn and D.C-based nonprofit clearinghouse that I’d visited with great anticipation that it would provide local options for live participation in the struggle to retain democracy. The end user (me) was offered no possibility of live interaction with other human activists, only online petitions and donation buttons. There were also great press releases about the many successes by this well-funded group in fighting back against oppressive policies.   Leaving me with only online options for “action”.

To complicate matters, and make the determination of what is fact and what is fabricated bullshit supremely hard, on-line there’s no way to know which comment is from a like-minded human being (or one you don’t agree with) and which is simply a comment fabricated for influence, generated per algorithm, expressed and personally delivered by a bot. The influence of this false “Us” is huge.

The human troll plays an outsized role in political outcomes on the internet as well.  The troll can sit anywhere in the world.   Snyder gives the example of Michael Flynn and Russia, how Flynn found himself citing numerous Russian troll- bots for definitive answers to questions of American political opinion.

Our addiction to the cyber world is, at this moment in time, moving us toward a fascistic view of the world as the battlefield for eternal war between irreconcilable enemies, away from increased liberalism or the interconnectedness humans require to solve perilous ecological and economic challenges.

In order to understand the potential of the internet to move toward greater human understanding and freedom we need to see it through the lens of history. Snyder says.  The printing press (driver of protracted religious warfare) and the radio (instrumental in the rise of fascism) were at first very destructive social forces as well.   The current polarizing power of the internet can be fixed over time, perhaps, but it is best to understand and be wary of its outsized power to evoke and affirm strong feelings to drive political outcomes.  At present human emotions are being manipulated by robots, mechanized entities brought into “existence” by coders.  This is a one way transaction in evoking strong feelings from targeted humans, since the robots stoking these feelings are incapable of any feelings at all.

Snyder calls for the  “revalorization of factuality” — the notion that it’s actually heroic to analyze and understand the world based on facts, discoverable in the three-dimensional world, easily compressed into unreality in a two-dimensional world.   The project of all tyranny begins in the destruction of “fact” in favor of a strong, emotional call to fight an inhuman enemy.   Good local news coverage by independent reporters, increasingly hard to come by, is one antidote to this trend that Synder singles out as something essential to support.  He urges us all to subscribe to and support our valued news sources.

The US and Them distinction powerfully cuts across all discussion, debate, every chance of human understanding.   It’s hard to even have a discussion about justice without immediately falling into one of two artificially drawn political camps. 

A recent email I wrote discussing institutional injustice, opposition to it and the debate between moderate incrementalists vs. urgent “justice delayed is justice denied” types (especially in the context of acting to save the planet before it is actually uninhabitable), and my strong sympathy for the latter, convinced an old friend that I had to be “all in for Bernie”.  This immediately caused him to fear an ugly confrontation with me, as he’s had with other Sanders-supporting friends lately, since he feels the only pragmatic and realistic thing is to hold one’s nose and vote for whoever the DNC selects as a candidate, rather than dogmatically fighting for what can never be.   Trump, he says (and I don’t disagree), must be defeated if we are to avoid truly terrible outcomes and it’s as simple as that.

So instead of he and I being able to have a reason-based back and forth discussion of principles, we are instantly reduced to arguing about our feelings towards the mass-marketed individual celebrity horses in a zero-sum celebrity horse race, covered mainly by dishonest brokers serving a profit-driven corporate agenda. 

Here, of course, with no intention to do it, I’ve indicated my preference for a Sanders or Warren, who openly point out and have plans to attack institutional injustice, and my extreme distaste for a “moderate” like Bloomberg [1] or Biden.  As we are simplemindedly taught to do here, on the politically “reasonable” side of the aisle, nobody’s totally right, nobody’s totally wrong, the main thing is to defeat a dangerous would-be autocrat and his powerful backers, let’s split the difference and have someone “electable” who won’t upset anybody as much as a “radical” harping on vast, long-time inequalities of opportunity.   It’s US vs. THEM after all, and the main thing is not to let those Nazi fuckers cheat, and win, again.

A rant full of sound and fury mostly,  a fearful cry of pain and frustration at the powerlessness we all feel as isolated citizens with extremely limited say (we’re not corporations, after all) staring at our screens for hope, or at least affirmation.   The best thing to do to deny Nazis their ultimate triumph, is to fight them where they stand — based on superior and infinitely more moral ideas about the future of humanity.  The enemies of progress, those who want to turn the clock back to 1953, stand strongly online, to be sure, but they also stand everywhere else.   We need to gather together and stand against them in the real world (he said firmly, online).

 

[1]  Mike Bloomberg is a supremely foul piece of shit that we in New York City got to see close up for three terms (though non-billionaire mayors are limited to two terms).   I will lay out some of this motherfucker’s more alarming “peccadillos” in another post.

A Cabinet of Sycophants and Acting-Idiots, Bill Barr edition

Donald Trump, as part of the unsolicited expert advice he gave to businessmen while he was campaigning for the presidency in 2016, advised would-be titans of industry to surround themselves with people less intelligent than themselves.   This way, he pointed out, you can always literally be the smartest man in the room, an important advantage for the boss.  Particularly if you’re the boss of a family business given to you by a demanding and ruthless father who never really had faith in your smarts.

In office, Trump’s been as good as his word, if we add the important caveat that if you are smarter than the smartest man in the room, you must hide your intelligence behind heroic loyalty to even the boss’s most idiotic and indefensible whims and policies. 

This caveat, obviously, does not apply to people like Betsey DeVos.  It applies directly to the most dangerous man in America: Bagpiper Bill Barr.   Follow the chain of events:

When, on May 17, 2017, after lawfully firing FBI director James Comey to end the Russia thing and the Flynn thing, and, obviously, the Comey-loyalty thing,  the president was confronted with the awful news that traitorous Acting A.G. Rod Rosenstein  (who stepped into the role after AG Sessions followed the advice of DOJ ethics lawyers and correctly recused himself from the Russia investigation — his recusal was seen by most lawyers and legal observers as mandatory) had appointed a Special Prosecutor, Trump was beside himself.

“Oh my God,” a note-taking witness quoted Trump as saying, “This is terrible.  This is the end of my presidency.  I’m fucked.”   He became angry and lambasted A.G. Sessions “How could you let this happen, Jeff?”   Trump said “Everyone tells me if you get one of these independent counsels [sic] it ruins your presidency.   It takes years and years and I won’t be able to do anything.  This is the worst thing that ever happened to me.”   source

To grasp the full weight of these words, here is John Lithgow’s excellent dramatic reenactment. 

The Mueller Report, Volume Two, details the undeviating pattern of presidential actions intended to obstruct the investigation into presidential obstruction of justice.   Don McGahn, Trump’s White House counsel, refused to fire Sessions, as he was asked to do by the president, and refused to write a knowingly false letter for the files at the president’s request, a letter denying that Trump had ever asked him to fire Sessions.  Trump pressured Sessions, accepted Sessions’ resignation letter, refused the resignation, but held on to the letter for leverage against his disobedient but very loyal AG.   

He called on several other people, including the pugnacious Corey Lewandowski who was not in the government at that time (a “back-channel,” just like unofficial Rudy in Ukraine), to deliver coercive messages to Sessions about his refusal to “unrecuse” and to fire the Special Counsel.  That his servants did not carry out his orders was later used by the president’s defenders to justify the lawfulness of Trump’s actions under the absurdist rationale that mere attempted crime is not a crime.   After all, as every schoolchild knows, there’s no such crime as attempted murder.

Trump later lawyered up and (following new AG Barr’s advice in a letter that was published) asserted a ridiculously broad and audacious privilege (one that would require a major 5-4 Supreme Court reversal of strong unanimous precedent if Trump’s claim was to be upheld) against ever, under any circumstances (including during his impeachment), allowing testimony or evidence that could be adverse to his interests in remaining the Unitary Executive and the businessman most well-shielded from investigation in the world, as long as he remains POTUS.   

Volume Two of the Mueller Report was a catalogue of the president’s seamless pattern of guilty-looking actions to obstruct an investigation into his obstruction of justice, a pattern that contained all the elements for sustainable obstruction of justice charges.  Take a few moments to go watch a bit of that marvelous dramatic reading of the Mueller Report, Volume Two.  Mueller famously wrote that he could not exonerate Trump of obstruction of justice, even as he was prevented, by an OLC legal directive, from charging him with a crime, regardless of the seeming weight of the evidence that Trump had actually done what the sworn witnesses said, as long as Trump was the sitting president [1].   

Enter Bill Barr, the new AG, the man who took the AG job just in time to make the Mueller findings disappear, as he’d promised to in his published audition for the job.  There were calls for Barr to resign the other day after some public, transparently partisan presidential DOJ ass-licking on Barr’s part (no judgment, Barr clearly just likes the taste).  1,100 former federal prosecutors had signed a letter calling for his resignation, citing his unfitness to oversee all federal law enforcement.   I went on-line to read their letter.   

The letter that came up first was another letter signed by more than 1,100 former DOJ prosecutors,dated May 6 2019.  It was a reaction to Barr’s lies about the findings of the Mueller Report as well as at least one lie to Congress,    That letter, which will be familiar to many, is here.

As for lying to Congress, Barr famously pretended, under oath, not to have received the politely indignant letter Mueller sent him immediately after Barr publicly, and deliberately, mischaracterized the findings of Mueller’s report.  Barr claimed he had no knowledge of how Mueller felt about Barr stating that Mueller’s report had, basically, completely and totally exonerated the president, an innocent man whose innocence completely justified all the lawful actions he took to try to end the baseless investigation into his obstruction of justice.   Mueller had written Barr with his strong objections to Barr’s mischaracterization immediately after Barr’s public dismissal of Mueller and his findings.   So?

Barr’s successful obstruction of public knowledge of what Mueller’s report actually contained about Trump’s obstruction of justice made the contents of the report a dead letter in the public mind.  Nothing to see here.  Just angry, loser partisans going after an innocent and all-powerful man, based on their own crippling loser inadequacies.   

Mueller’s fully-redacted summary of Volume Two, which was made available to Barr along with the report itself, was withheld by Barr for a month while Barr’s own “summary” publicly substituted its far-fetched story-line for the one Mueller’s sworn witnesses had told under oath. 

Mueller, by all accounts a good and honest man, a Boy Scout who believes in the rules,  is said to have shit the bed by writing his report with the prissily ornate disclaimer-laden legalistic prose that requires a law degree to parse (read the report, counselor!) , and in a real way he certainly did.   

At the same time, as was his charge, Mueller also preserved a trove of eyewitness testimony and other evidence, indicted and secured the convictions of several of the president’s closest associates (Flynn, Manafort, Cohen and Stone come to mind).   In a functioning participatory democracy, one whose chief law enforcement officer is not an unprincipled God-fearing toady, Mueller’s report would have performed the duty that had been entrusted to Mueller’s team, by turning over an impressive pile of evidence and letting the facts speak for themselves to the American people and the branch of government responsible for checking a president who abuses the powers of his office.

Barr’s disinformation campaign to squash Mueller’s findings to protect the president was so successful it convinced iron-willed Nancy Pelosi, the most powerful Democrat in the country, that most Americans are already too brainwashed, too stupid, or both, to understand the immense gravity of the facts Mueller set out, the ones Barr successfully made to disappear.   She made a political calculation and restricted the impeachment to very limited, much weaker grounds, although there was the planned benefit of a relatively straightforward, easy to follow story, Trump’s shakedown of the new president (of a country nobody in America can find on a map [2]) to get dirt on a political rival. 

In my mind, Pelosi used her outsized power (which I compare to Moscow Mitch’s awesome power in the Senate — in neither case does it speak well of democracy to have a single strongman in each House speak for the will of the People) to silence the voices of anyone who argued for a third article of impeachment — Obstruction of Justice, a federal crime-in-progress by our untouchable, lawyered up Boss-in-Chief.  In the context of a three year continual process of obstruction and abuse, of court processes as well as subpoenas from Congress and attorneys general all over the United States, the president’s actions in Ukraine actions could be seen in their proper perspective, as part of an ongoing pattern of the president committing the federal crime of obstruction of justice.   Pelosi made a strategic decision to play a weaker, but  arguably more straightforward, easily understandable, number card instead of the most powerful face card in her hand to play.  Oh well.

In December 2019, at the end of the Inspector General’s  investigation into the sordid origins of the what, unaccountably became the vicious partisan Mueller Witch Hunt conspiracy against Mr. Trump, the Bagpiper sucked his own bagpipe, as follows:

Screenshot_20191213-150447_NYTimes

The “intrusive investigation”  started on the “thinnest of suspicions,” suspicions in Barr’s view “insufficient” to start the Mueller probe (and, of course, in fairness, the investigation only only led to the conviction of a mere six (6) of Trump’s many close 2016 campaign associates for crimes related to a cover-up of Russian interference in the 2016 campaign and other improprieties.  Just yesterday the innocent, unfairly persecuted Roger Stone was unfairly sentenced for several arguable non-crimes, including jail time for the non-crime of “Obstruction of Congress.”  Horrible and very unfair, according to our nation’s Chief Law Enforcement Officer, Donald Trump. 

The country’s other, secondary Chief Law Enforcement Officer, Bagpiper Bill Barr, continues to stand by his arguably untruthful positions.   The conclusion by Mueller, our intelligence agencies and even in McConnell’s own Senate Report, that Russian efforts to sway the outcome of the 2016 election in favor of Donald John Trump were “sweeping and systematic” — SO?  That the efforts are ongoing and absolutely planned for the 2020 election, in progress now, urgent, danger, Will Robinson.   No action whatsoever needed to protect the integrity of the American electoral system, according to no less an authority than Moscow Mitch … puzzling, isn’t it?

The February 16, 2020 letter from 1,100 ex-DOJ officials calling for Barr’s resignation (that number is now over 2,000)  the one I was actually looking for is here.      The outcry came about when Trump whined on twitter that his friend Roger Stone was facing a long prison sentence for his numerous so-called crimes to protect the president, totally SAD! horrible and very unfair!  After the tweets DOJ withdrew its sentencing memo, a memo that asked for the seven to nine years prescribed by law for those serious crimes of lying and corruption to advance a corrupt scheme.  Not to mention witness intimidation (pretend I didn’t mention it) and defying a judge’s gag order.  (The charges in that case were based on Stone’s repeated lying and obstruction in connection with Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election.  Talk about grounds for twitter recusal, Mr. President…)

The lawyers formerly employed by the Department of Justice make another excellent case in their recent letter calling for Barr’s resignation.  It is a case that  the DOJ should really look into.  Whoops.  (ROTFLMAO!)

When Trump was in his moment of political and personal agony, on May 17, 2017, when he cried out to his inner circle that he was “fucked”, in his anguish, he cried out rhetorically for his Roy Cohn.  The evil and self-hating Roy Cohn, among his other destructive life achievements, was, for years,  the unbeatable attorney to all five major organized crime families in the United States.  The Trump family business was a long-time client of Roy Cohn’s.

Cohn was the man who taught Trump how to use the law as a sword and a shield.  Countersue audaciously, when you lose, appeal, drag it out, make them go bankrupt, break their balls with motions, kill them with process, make ’em spend millions if they want to try to beat them, make them pay while at the same time destroying them in the press.  Cohn’s taught Trump that unscrupulousness was no vice, if your aim was to keep a guilty person out of prison.  He showed Trump how to use the mass media to influence public sentiment, introduced him to friendly contacts at the tabloids, showed him how to publicly bully foes real and imagined and how to lie confidently (Trump probably didn’t need tutelage in that, he’s a Hall of Famer in that category).   In the end, when Cohn was disbarred, indicted, dying alone of AIDS he swore was cancer because everyone knew he hated fucking fags (don’t ask…) Trump, a man known for loyalty and his many deep friendships, turned his back on his longtime mentor. 

But in that moment of agony, on May 17, 2017 when Trump cried out for his Roy Cohn, the unprincipled Bill Barr’s ears pricked up.   Opportunity was knocking, history was knocking, Barr’s destiny was knocking.   Barr presented himself, a fatter, slicker version of Roy Cohn.  You an picture his courtly bow “at your service, my liege.”

Barr, the president’s current Roy Cohn, is a long believer in the infallible authority of the powerful and well-connected.  He is ever mindful of his own righteous version of truth and justice.  His public credibility (among the credulous) is bolstered by his sober demeanor: judicious in his pauses, utterly certain in his pronouncements, his cynical but authoritative-sounding use of legal chicanery. 

He argued to the American public, during a live appearance after he told America what Mueller’s report had actually concluded (while concealing Mueller’s actual summary for weeks), without betraying the slightest hesitation or irony, that Trump’s innocence was apparent, from the report itself.  Barr said that the crucial element of corrupt intent, necessary for proving the crime of  “obstruction of justice” could not be established.   Barr said, without breaking expression, that the president was simply understandably angry and frustrated at the persecution by Mueller and so did what any of us — knowing we were 100% innocent victims of a vicious conspiracy — would have done– used every one of his legal, self-defending powers to intentionally protect the rights of an innocent man.

Barr looked at the camera calmly, feeling no need to add at that moment what a weaker person would have blurted out:  so suck it!

Barr is Trump’s Roy Cohn, not much more to say about that.  Truth, particularly if potentially incriminating, will not be allowed to stand in the way of carrying out God’s will on earth, and God, clearly, demands a Unitary Executive to rule over these corrupt and evil generations.  Without vast powers to enforce the will of God, the soul of America will be lost to the invading haordes and wicket “social justice warriors”.

20191211_155337 (1).gif

[1] It’s fair to say Mueller punted in his noncommittal report, turning the ball over to the Congress for impeachment, after he performed an insanely legalistic ballet that enabled him to remain civil, polite and scrupulously unbiased, even when his investigation was documenting clearly very bad behavior by the president and his inner circle. 

[2] Not to get too far afield here, but Paul Manafort made tens of millions in Ukraine using his brilliant campaigning techniques to help get a Russian-backed thug named Yanukovich elected president of Ukraine.  (Unfair to call him a ‘thug”, I suppose, it was decades before his election, the convictions and two prison terms for assault)   Manafort’s efforts succeeded and Yanukovich was elected president of Ukraine, only to be ousted a few years later by a popular uprising.   After Yanukovich fled to Russia he was tried in absentia in Ukraine and found guilty of treason.   Manafort’s next client was Donald Trump, for whom he worked for free and on whose behalf he gave polling data to Russian agents.  Just sayin’… Nothing to see here!!!