Category Archives: politics smells like meat

One quick question, sir

Trigger warning:   this post contains the unexpurgated word “nigger”.

The president took a few moments the other day to viciously attack another critic who, even though the ever-honest president is “the most transparent president in history” and has “nothing to hide”, is still doggedly pursuing potentially compromising documents the president has lawyered up to refuse to provide. 

The chairman of the Congressional Oversight Committee, Elijah Cummings, is the latest “person of color” to be crudely attacked by the president who pretended not to know who David Duke was when asked about the support of the former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan during the run-up to his impressive 78,000 vote Electoral College mandate.   

The president, confronted with the multiple racist messages he had tweeted out against Cummings,  doubled down (it’s a reflex with the craven transactionalist), after attacking the chairman and the vermin “infested” city the chairman represents, calling African-American Elijah Cummings a “racist” [1].

Michael Cohen testified to Congress about the president’s long time racism, the disdain he has always shown toward poor blacks (he doesn’t have much more use for poor whites, of course, losers) who live in various American shit-holes.   Though he has posed with a few high profile black celebrity “friends” over the years (the demented Kanye West in the Oval Office comes to mind), Trump repeatedly reveals his deep racism through his statements and his actions.

So just one question, Mr. President, sir.  You pride yourself on plain talk, you speak like the average opinionated ignoramus and those who love you get a tremendous kick out of it.   You can double down one more time.  Why not just say what’s really on your mind?   “These goddamned niggers are out of control.”   

Don’t you feel better?

I know America would, to hear you simply say it.

 

[1] To translate the “dogwhistle” into the president’s own idiom:

That fucking nigger is the fucking racist, not me!  I don’t have a racist bone in my body, it’s the niggers who are the goddamned racists!

Come on now

20190726_210933.jpg

Is this really where we’re at as a culture?   We can all applaud Fidelis Care for its worthy aspiration — that no child in our wealthy nation die a preventable death for lack of health insurance coverage [1] — but, seriously, is this something we as a people really need to have a nuanced discussion about? [2]

We are living in a culture where extreme cruelty to children who look like the kid pictured in this poster is a mere instrument of policy, yawned at, because, you know… what the fuck.  Poor kids die by the millions every day, everywhere, what’s a few more?   Seriously– who among us has not inadvertently murdered some little kid somewhere?   Let he who is without sin cast the first stone at our well-born masters who decide who shall live well and who shall die miserably and unnecessarily, as it is said in the private clubs where these fabulous luxury-loving job creating philanthropists congregate when the unfortunate subject of the stinking poor comes up: why don’t they just go fuck themselves? 

 

[1] And note that it is lack of access to insurance coverage (which allows a lucrative private intermediary to negotiate health care prices with “providers”), not lack of access to affordable health care service itself, that deprives millions of kids of the same chance for a healthy life that that every brat in the poor child’s well-born cohort enjoys as a matter of course.

[2]  While the “well-born” Donald Trump bellows about stupid black bitches who hate our country and wolf-whistles to his enraged base, his party continues to attack hated Obamacare, the rightwing think tank health insurance plan once known, in Massachusetts where it was first implemented, as Romneycare.   The lying demagogue has no plan whatsoever to replace it because, heh, if you’re dumb enough to believe anything I say you deserve what you get, losers.    Here’s an article about the Republican party’s latest attempt to have the Affordable Care Act declared “unconstitutional” by the Federalist Society’s best minds on the federal bench.

Here’s a terrible section of that piece by Paul Waldman:

Let’s go over the relevant history, just so we’re clear:

  • Prior to the Affordable Care Act, insurers could deny anyone coverage or charge them exorbitant premiums if they had a preexisting condition. The ACA outlaws that practice, creating the protections for the first time. Every Republican in both the Senate and the House votes no.

  • Republicans spend the Obama years filing lawsuits to get the entire law struck down and holding congressional votes to repeal it, which if successful would eliminate protections for pre-existing conditions.

  • Republicans take control of the entire federal government in 2017 and realize they had promised repeal but hadn’t bothered to come up with a replacement. They hastily assemble a bill, including ending protections for pre-existing conditions. The overall effort fails when John McCain opposes it at the last minute.

  • Attorneys general and governors from 20 Republican-led states file a lawsuit to strike down the ACA. One attorney general who spearheaded it, Josh Hawley of Missouri, runs ads in his successful Senate bid touting his commitment to pre-existing conditions protections, the very ones was attempting to destroy.

  • Even conservative legal scholars who opposed the ACA argue that the lawsuit is ridiculous.

  • The lawsuit is filed in Texas so that it will be heard by Judge Reed O’Connor, an unusually partisan Republican. He rules that the whole ACA must be wiped out, thereby eliminating those protections.

  • The Trump administration signs on in support of the lawsuit, asking the appeals court to strike down the ACA and its protections for pre-existing conditions.

    source

Oy, Nancy, Nancy

Defending herself against the charge that she is running out the clock on a House vote on articles of impeachment against a president she claims is currently engaged in criminal activities, as Congress goes on its August break, Speaker Pelosi said:

“We will proceed when we have what we need to proceed, not one day sooner.  And everybody has the liberty and the luxury to espouse their own position and to criticize me for trying to go down the path in the most determined, positive way.

Again, their advocacy for impeachment only gives me leverage, I have no complaint with what they’re doing, but I know ( … Mueller… presi …) what ( …uh, I keep calling him Special Counsel Mueller), Mr. Mueller said the other day CONFIRMED, confirmed in the public mind that the president has obstructed justice.  You know what he said. if he could have exonerated him he would have, but he didn’t. 

But he wasn’t able to investigate the president’s finances, personal business or otherwise,  and that is what we’re doing in the courts.  So I’m willing to take whatever heat there is there to say when we, the decision will be made in a timely fashion, this isn’t endless, and when we have the best, strongest possible case, and that’s not endless either, it may be endless in terms of the violations of the law that the president is engaged in, but that’s what I say to you.”

source

I’ve got only three words for you, Madam Speaker: what the fuck?

Iron-willed Ditz and Birther “Judge”

Nancy Pelosi is Neville Chamberlain, as history will soon show, unfortunately.   An iron-willed version of Chamberlain, no doubt, one who knows how to wield power and get her party in line with whatever she decides.   Her party, according to Madam Speaker, is waiting for something more dramatic, more convincing, more of a total popularly approved slam dunk, than this seamless pattern of a mere ten obstructive acts detailed in the report Mueller handed to presidential bodyguard Bagpiper Bill now four months ago.   Each act was part of a long (and ongoing) pattern of obstruction of justice, each was done to impede or end a lawful investigation, with the intent to impede or end that investigation:  

1  President Trump asked the FBI director to shut down the investigation into National Security Advisor Michael Flynn

2  President Trump said he fired FBI director Comey because of the Russia Investigation

3 President Trump ordered White House counsel Don McGahn to fire Robert Mueller   

4  President Trump attempted to curtail the Special Counsel’s investigation 

5  President Trump prevented the public disclosure of evidence 

6  President Trump wanted Attorney General Sessions to “unrecuse” from the Russia investigation   

7  President Trump directed White House counsel Don McGahn to create false documents that covered up the truth from investigators

8  President Trump tried to discourage Campaign chairman Paul Manafort and National Security Advisor Michael Flynn from cooperating with the Special Counsel’s investigation 

9  President Trump encouraged Michael Cohen to lie about Trump Tower Moscow

10  President Trump tried to get his longtime lawyer Michael Cohen not to cooperate with the investigation.   

But according to Speaker Pelosi, this is not a very dramatic and convincing pattern of corrupt and arguably illegal actions by our in-your-face contemptuous president.   

He’s right, by the way, in this case, to feel contempt for the Democratic party.   I feel it too.   I watched Adam Schiff’s body language as he stood next to the confidently dithering leader of his party, his face said it too.  He was having a hard time keeping a neutral expression on his face, a scowl off of it.    “We are using the courts to try to get a ruling,” Nancy Pelosi explained.  Jerald Nadler added that once the court rules, as it should, that this blanket protective executive privilege, this ridiculously over-broad claim of immunity, is groundless that they’ll be able to subpoena everybody and they’ll have to appear, and produce documents.   He did his best, next to the Speaker, but Nadler didn’t seem particularly convinced either.   They looked like the beaming Pelosi’s dazed captives up there.   Elijah Cummings gave Pelosi some fiery support, speaking with some force and gripping the podium with both hands (since he was no longer holding on to his walker).

The most powerful player in that party right now is an iron-willed ditz with an unshakeable theory — that impeachment that doesn’t result in Trump’s removal from office will strengthen the corrupt, lying strongman president in 2020.   The best thing to do, according to the iron-willed ditz, is wait — until he actually shoots somebody in the face on Fifth Avenue and skull fucks their corpse, on live TV.

You can understand her worry when you see the caliber of the president’s defenders.   They were on powerful display yesterday at the Mueller hearings.   I was lucky enough to catch Texas Congressman Louie Gohmert’s riveting performance.     Gohmert [1] went ballistic, after first holding up a pamphlet he introduced into evidence.   The pamphlet was called Robert Mueller Unmasked.  Gohmert was too modest to mention that he was the author of the 48 page illustrated document proudly displayed on-line at hannity.com.   It makes the case that Mueller is the worst, simply the fucking worst.   It ends:

If you want answers, and you CAN handle the truth, join me in demanding those answers from “Special Counsel” Robert Mueller, along with his resignation. If he were to resign, it could well be the only truly moral, ethical and decent action Mueller has undertaken in this entire investigation.

There’s a ton of great shit in there, and it’s impeccably reasoned and beautifully written, of course, and also illustrated.   I’ll give you just a snapshot, just the opening salvo, since it’s worth scrolling quickly through this well-done strong opinion piece in its entirety (if only to see the several illustrations):

ROBERT MUELLER: UNMASKED

by Congressman Louie Gohmert

Robert Mueller has a long and sordid history of illicitly targeting innocent people that is a stain upon the legacy of American jurisprudence. He lacks the judgment and credibility to lead the prosecution of anyone.

I do not make these statements lightly.

Each time I prepared to question Mueller during Congressional hearings, the more concerned I became about his work ethic. Then as I went back to begin compiling all that information in order to recount personal interactions with Mueller, the more clearly the big picture began to come into focus. At one point I had to make the decision to stop adding to this or it would turn into a far too lengthy project.

My goal was to share some first-hand information as other Republican Members of Congress had requested, adding, “You seem to know so much about him.” This article is prepared from my viewpoint to help better inform the reader about the Special Prosecutor leading the effort to railroad President Donald J. Trump through whatever manufactured charge he can allege. Judging by Mueller’s history, it doesn’t matter who he has to threaten, harass, prosecute or bankrupt to get someone to be willing to allege something—anything—about our current President, it certainly appears Mueller will do what it takes to bring down his target, ethically, or unethically, based on my findings.

 Since we now seem to  be living in the sound byte/twitter-ruled land of the freakish and the home of the braying, let me not assume an American attention span sufficient to read all of the material quoted above.   Here’s the takeaway from a former “judge” [2], Texas’s own Louie Gohmert:

This article is prepared from my viewpoint to help better inform the reader about the Special Prosecutor leading the effort to railroad President Donald J. Trump through whatever manufactured charge he can allege.

Spoken like a true Texas judge, circa 1858.   “We’ll give the filthy, thieving varmint a fair trial and hang him, and let’s make it quick, boys, Ah need lunch, Ah’m starvin’.”

Democrats yesterday tried to get Mueller to say that only the OLC memo prevented him from referring Trump’s obstruction case for prosecution.   Mueller would not go quite that far, though he said that the OLC memo prevented him from making a traditional prosecutorial decision about the sitting president’s actions (as his report said, though Barr claimed in his famously misleading summary, and afterwards, that the OLC memo had nothing to do with anything).   

Mueller confirmed for his Democratic questioners that Trump refused to testify, for about a year, and would have tied up a subpoena in court for a long time, preventing the completion of the investigation into coordinated, wide-spread Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.  Mueller’s task was to publish his findings about Russian interference in the presidential contest, which he documented, characterized as “sweeping and systematic”,  and warned of repeatedly (and which Mitch McConnell refuses to allow the Senate to address in any way — the help was good in 2016, it’ll be great in 2020).  Mueller added that Trump’s inadequate written answers were often contradicted by credible evidence.  Mueller-speak for “Trump was not entirely truthful in his inadequate. arguably evasive, answers”.   (Sworn answers to a federal investigator that are not truthful are… p-p-p-perjury…)

Republicans, in contrast, didn’t care about the old news report that Barr had already disposed of.  They focused on indignantly showing what a pathetic, corrupt dupe of Commies and transsexual Mexican zombie abortionists the “Special Prosecutor” (as Gohmert refers to him in his final challenge on the damning hannity.com pamphlet) is, and how viciously and ineptly the vile partisan Mueller went after a completely innocent man, a man who should never have been investigated in the first place (we’re looking into that!) and was revealed, even by these Trump-hating traitors, to be completely and totally exonerated, exculpated, found not guilty of every and all charges.

We get the government we deserve.  We have earned this shit show, we really have.

What happened to the millions who ran into the streets wearing pussy hats, flocked to airports to immediately protest the Muslim ban, who assembled in a huge throng to support climate science?    Got tired out and shouted down by an innocent mad man and his most ardent supporters (including America’s top law enforcement official) who, believe it, would not hesitate to beat you to death if they thought you posed a real threat to the spotless reputation of the greatest leader this country has ever had. 

Speaker Pelosi urges us all to wait and see.  Maybe the paperless 2020 election won’t be hacked by anyone (although an 11 year-old recently demonstrated how small a challenge it currently is to do so), maybe those 78,000 surgically targeted Electoral College votes won’t appear again, as if by magic, in the proper number in every single district needed to win each state’s electors and amass the Electoral College majority to legally elect this innocent and good man to another four years of glory.

Nancy Pelosi, by refusing to allow an impeachment investigation to go forward, is Neville Chamberlain.   The end of democracy is taking place on her fretful, calculating, vote counting, party disciplined watch.   An iron-willed ditz, confidently wringing her hands with that great smile as the clock runs out on protecting our constitutional system.

 

[1]  Early in Obama’s second term, Gohmert (apparently an ardent Birther) sponsored a bill to make sure we never again have a Kenyan secret-Muslim president.    As Wikipedia reports:

On July 29, 2009, Gohmert signed on as a co-sponsor of the defeated H.R. 1503. This bill would have amended “the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 to require the principal campaign committee of a candidate for election to the office of president to include with the committee’s statement of organization a copy of the candidate’s birth certificate, together with such other documentation as may be necessary to establish that the candidate meets the qualifications for eligibility to the office of president under the Constitution”.[13]

Some of his other well-researched positions:

Gohmert does not believe in manmade climate change, and has asserted that data supporting the theory is fraudulent.[30] He opposes cap-and-trade legislation, such as the one that was passed in the U.S. House when it had a Democratic majority, and supports expanding drilling, and exploration and drilling in Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR).[30]

Gohmert is pro-life and opposes abortion. He has stated that he believes that life begins at conception. Gohmert sponsored the Sanctity of Human Life Act. Gohmert voted for the Child Interstate Abortion Notification Act, a bill that prohibits the transportation of a minor across state lines for the purposes of an abortion without the consent of the minor’s parents. He has 100% pro-life voting record rating from the National Right to Life Committee(NRLC).[39][40]

In December, 2018, Gohmert made national news headlines as a guest on Fox News. Gohmert digressed from the topic of Google to assert an unrelated and defamatory allegation about Holocaust survivor and philanthropist George Soros. The allegation, which is popular on right wing propaganda websites but has been thoroughly debunked by credible news sources, denigrates Soro’s childhood experiences during the Holocaust. Later, Stuart Varney of Fox News apologized for Gohmert’s “false allegations” against Soros.[74]

 

[2]   Gohmert actually did serve as a Texas judge.  The quotes around “Judge” refer to this:

join me in demanding those answers from “Special Counsel” Robert Mueller, along with his resignation.

HOAX of the lying, conflicted, Comey-loving witch hunter

The Honorable Robert S. Mueller III testified to two congressional committees today under subpoena.   He agreed to be bound by Bagpiper Bill Barr’s recent letter limiting the scope of his testimony.  Bagpiper had a fairly low level assistant write a snitty little legal letter laying out the limitations, asserted under the expansive new protective presidential privilege not to be subjected to anything that could possibly lead to his impeachment. 

Mueller (a former DOJ employee, we note — currently a private citizen) was informed by the DOJ that he may not impugn the president or speculate as to his intent or motives (both of which Barr has spoken extensively and conclusively about in defending his boss.)  The former Special Counsel was warned against directly contradicting any of the false and misleading things that Bagpiper has publicly said and written.  He was instructed not to comment on any member of Individual One’s family, or go into any detail not explicitly included in the report, or step near any redacted material, etc.  Mueller, good Eagle Scout that he is, stated that he’d abide by these restrictions.

If you watched the hearings wearing a MAGA hat, you had to laugh at this regurgitation of old, harmless news that Trump-haters put so much faith in.  The president, who said he wouldn’t be watching the lying, conflicted, Comey-loving, hoax-mongering witch hunter (whose report nonetheless TOTALLY exonerated him) was tweeting about the HOAX during the testimony he claimed not to be watching.   If you support Trump (or even if you despise him) you understand that all Trump has to do is brazen this one out, and he has decades of experience being as brazen as they come.  He has his all-powerful Roy Cohn, finally, an unprincipled, ideologically pure right-wing zealot who has proved his loyalty and his willingness to go beyond principle to defend his Unitary Executive master.

If you believe, as I do, as anyone who has read any portions of Mueller’s report does, that there’s massive evidence of impeachable conduct laid out in the Mueller report, you saw many answers by Mueller that hammered this home.   The president refused, over the course of many months of negotiation, to appear before Mueller and his “perjury trap”.   Mueller explained why he didn’t subpoena Trump (though, per Barr’s recent letter, he wouldn’t answer questions about why Koosay Jr., or smug, silent Jared, for that matter, wasn’t forced to testify).   Mueller said that a subpoena for the president would have been tied up in litigation (by the Roy Cohn-trained obstructor-in-chief) and unnecessarily hold up the crucial investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.   

Mueller elaborated about Trump’s written answers, which not only were “inadequate” but often were contradicted by other evidence.  He would not speculate, or give his opinion of Trump’s credibility, though he did note that he wasn’t satisfied with Trump’s answers, formulations that were inadequate and, as he said, often contradicted by other credible evidence.

Mr. Trump is, I’m trying to find the right New York Times tone to use here, a fucking liar.  He’s known as a compulsive liar, meaning, he seemingly cannot help himself.  He simply says whatever he feels he has to say at any given moment, to get maximum leverage in any given transaction.   What is Mueller’s opinion about Trump’s credibility?   Well, he gave inadequate answers that were often contradicted by other credible evidence.   So what are you saying?  That this known liar was lying in his sworn answers?   

That he stayed out the “perjury trap” of testifying falsely under oath on the strength of his long reputation as a lawyered up, action-taking knave.  He had a team of lawyers craft the answers he falsely claimed to have written himself, answers that stated he didn’t recall, had no specific recollection, was too busy winning to notice the detail asked about, didn’t remember, was coming up blank, really didn’t know because it slipped his mind, if he ever knew about it, which, for the life of him, he couldn’t say for sure if he did or not.   Answers that were often contradicted by credible evidence.  Nuff said?

I didn’t see Mueller’s entire testimony, but I was waiting for somebody to direct Mueller’s attention to his final written question to Trump about obstruction.   It was a long, complex question about the nefarious actions of disgraced former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn.  It was Trump’s firing of Comey, because not only did he refuse to declare personal loyalty to Trump but he wouldn’t let the Flynn thing go, that led to the appointment of the Special Counsel.   The multi-part question about Flynn was a particularly important question.   Trump’s answer was, literally, [no answer provided].     

Yo, Democrats, do I have to do all your work for you?   

If the testimony today had been part of an impeachment inquiry it would have meant far more than an exploratory feeler as to the public’s willingness to maybe not hold it against Democrats in 2020 if they upheld their constitutional obligation to investigate the corrupt and illegal acts of a famously corrupt and law-ignoring president, acts set out in great detail in a long, detailed report.   A president who calls false emergencies to thwart the will of Congress, a president who routinely ignores court orders, who calls democratic norms, and credible critiques “bullshit” and who is intent only on “winning”– whether it’s the fight over whether stinking, unsanitary child prisons should be called “concentration camps”, whether calling black athletes “sons of bitches”, black female critics “low IQ”, Mexicans “rapists” makes him divisive, hateful racist, misogynist, xenophobe, whether raking in millions from his various businesses, and giving personal access to preferred paying customers and patron-lobbyists, is a breach of his duty to at least appear non-corrupt.   Not to mention his numerous clock-running court challenges to every legal demand for documents and testimony or the sure to be overturned assertion of a blanket executive privilege against anything that could possibly put this innocent child of God in a less than blessedly Christian light.

If the Democratic House does not start impeachment proceedings, based on political handwringing, Speaker Nancy Pelosi will go down in history as America’s Neville Chamberlain.   I heard a recording of the former British Prime Minister, given after his famous Munich Conference with Herr Hitler.   He stated, in flowing, measured, confident tones, that at the outset he found Hitler to be unreasonable, but as they spoke Herr Hitler had convinced him of the justness of his request, that all he really wanted was for Sudeten Germans to be reunited with their countrymen.    Chamberlain arrived back in London to cheers, he had averted war and preserved “peace in our time” by turning British and French ally Czechoslovakia over to the Nazis.  In hindsight, he came to view it as a political mistake.   He lost his job and is remembered in history as a pathetic “appeaser” of one of history’s greatest tyrants.

Hindsight is 20/20, they say, and giving in to one of the world’s most notorious mass-murdering lying psychopaths looks bad on the old resume.   I’m not comparing Trump to Hitler [1] (all Trump has done, to date, is set up a network of stinking child prisons for little “illegals”, no death camps, NO DEATH CAMPS!) but if everything he’s done in his first two and a half years is left up to an election in 2020 that can be won by another beautifully engineered surgical 78,000 vote electoral college “mandate” (even if he loses the popular vote by 15,000,000 this time, instead of a mere 2,900,000) — we’re done.  America’s long, troubled experiment in democracy is over.   Stick a fork in us.   Get your tattoo and move on to indicated train to the assigned privatized processing center for re-education.

Impeachment is the only constitutional remedy for this kind of openly corrupt public official.    As no less an authority on our democracy than Robert S. Mueller III wrote, in his report:

The conclusion that Congress may apply the obstruction laws to the President’s corrupt exercise of the powers of the office accords with our constitutional system of checks and balances and the principle that no person is above the law.

 

 

[1] outside of his personality, his inability not to lie, his disregard for law, his scorn for custom, his autocratic nature, his limited intelligence (which he boasts about as genius), his open hatred of disloyalty, the vitriol he directs towards enemies, his demands for unconditional personal loyalty, a superhuman faith in his own infallibility, his inexperience and temperamental unsuitability for leadership, his violent and overwrought language, his readily combustible temper, his hatred of any opposition, his appeals to the irrational rage of a desperate base, his tendency to pout and throw tantrums, his sadism, his readiness to employ cruelty, his scorn for “democracy”, his demand to be obeyed, he insistence that his word is law, that his ample ass be constantly smooched and several other minor things like that.

Plus, look, to be fair, nobody ever accused Hitler of being corrupt or a money-hungry lover of incomparable luxury.

Bagpiper Bill– INNOVATOR Extraordinaire

Bill Barr has always been an innovator, a legal visionary, skating on new edges of the law to defend his powerful clients when they appear to be on the ropes.    When George H. W. Bush, after losing his reelection bid, was deeply worried about being outed as an Iran-Contra participant in Cap Weinberger’s notes, Barr went to work.   Bush would be out of office when Weinberger’s felony trial began, powerless to prevent the detailed meeting notes Weinberger kept from coming into evidence.   Bush’s legacy would be tarnished (or worse), since he’d been insisting for years he knew nothing about the ongoing plan to thwart the will of Congress, illegally funding right wing death squads in Central America with illegal sales of military equipment to the mullahs of Iran.    Enter Bush’s new A.G. Bagpiper Bill Barr- et, voila (a flourish of the bagpipes, please) a genius solution: a PRE-Trial (why not?) PARDON.  NOTHING TO SEE HERE.  FOREVER.  THE END.

When Mueller’s report came out, after immediately sharing the unredacted pages with Trump’s actual White House attorneys, Barr strongly defended Donald Trump in a series of live televised infomercials for Trump’s innocence.   His explanation for a series of actions by Trump that have a strong appearance that the president was trying to thwart, or obstruct, investigations into his suspicious conduct was elegantly simple, and unique:  Trump knew he was innocent and so was understandably angry and frustrated, which is why he did what he did to stop the investigations into his innocence.   He acted out of anger and frustration, as any one of us would, not with the corrupt intent to obstruct justice.  You dig?

This novel “he was angry and frustrated” defense was based on placing reasonable (or even unreasonable, doesn’t matter for our purposes) doubt on a key component needed to convict someone of the crime of obstruction of justice: corrupt intent.  In Barr’s innovative and generous view (towards his patrons, all others– mange le merde, comme un dit), there was nothing corrupt about a man who is justifiably angry and frustrated, doing whatever he can to make people criticizing him just shut the hell up.  He added the absurd touch that Mueller “admitted” that the president had been “angry and frustrated” once the investigation targeted his actions.   You see?   Mueller agreed!   

The absurdity of this defense is embarrassing, but it was also effective for those who want to see our lying, sociopath president put another staunch Federalist on the Supreme Court.  How do you like 6-3, LIBTARDS!   How about another tax break for those making more than $50,000,000 a year?   And renewed protection of those pure, blameless fetuses, who must be born, and baptized, or else are condemned, prenatally, to eternity in hell’s flames?

This is all old news, of course, Barr made this intelligence insulting “angry and frustrated” defense of his master months ago.  What reminded me of the “angry and frustrated” defense was that another loyal Republican zombie (I believe it was House minority leader Kevin McCarthy)  used it the other day to justify Trump’s race-baiting tweet about brown-skinned Congresswomen going back to the crime-infested places you come from.    He’s not a racist, said the Republican, not at all, he was just angry and frustrated!   You know, wink, wink, how these black women can be such haughty bitches!   “Angry and frustrated” the new get out of jail card!

“Your honor, my client did not commit assault with intent to inflict serious bodily harm when he broke the victim’s face.   His intent was only that he was angry and frustrated, as anyone would have been, subjected to the victim’s harsh ‘wit’.   She had been openly and ruthlessly mocking him, your Honor, and my client doesn’t take that, even from a seventy-five year old woman in a wheelchair!   He was acting out of anger and frustration, that’s all.  When he said ‘I’ll kill you, you black bitch” he was only expressing understandable anger and frustration at this vicious loudmouth with the now justifiably broken face.”

The other great Barr innovation in defense of Trump is the “public” exemption for things that would otherwise appear to be crimes.  Barr reminds us over and over that all of these suspicious looking acts, OK, many of them, were done publicly.   The old legal principle applies:  if you publicly rape somebody, it’s not rape.   Same for murder, if you do it with a gun on Fifth Avenue during rush hour, openly and without trying to hide it, well, that’s not really murder is it?   It’s something else.  Nobody knows what, but, if it was done out of anger and frustration, you understand… well, who could blame the poor fellow?

I would much prefer hearing the plump, handsome A.G. play the bagpipes (he’s won competitions, I understand) than listen to anymore of his “legal” pronouncements piously spoken, breath scented with the pungent aroma of his master’s anus.

Fighting Helplessness

I was so distressed before the 2018 midterm elections that I determined to go into a neighborhood where a Democratic candidate was in a real fight for Congress and speak to voters, try to influence even a few undecided voters in a tight race.   I found the race in nearby Staten Island.   The Democratic candidate was Max Rose.  Rose was running against — it was too perfect, you’ve got to check this out (and I have to do a little quick research for the details of this next paragraph):

The Republican he was running against was Dan Donovan, Jr., former law and order DA of Staten Island and an ardent Trump supporter.    Donovan won a special election to take over Republican Congressman Michael Grimm’s seat when Grimm left Congress after his indictment for a string of felonies (he eventually served an 8 month prison sentence after pleading guilty to a single felony count and acknowledging– without pleading, oddly– that he had committed several others) [1].    Grimm emerged from prison and challenged Donovan in the 2017 Republican primary to get his seat back.   Donovan ran hard to the right of Grimm, out-Trumping the Trump-loving Grimm, and won a hard fought primary battle against his Republican predecessor.   Now he was facing an unknown Democrat, thirty-one year old Afghan War veteran Max Rose, in the general election.

I remembered Dan Donovan from the Eric Garner murder on July 17, 2014, Donovan was the DA at the time.   OK, calling it “murder” may be a bit incendiary — the medical examiner ruled Garner’s death a “homicide” —  let’s go with that.   Donovan wrote the unreturnable indictment for Daniel Pantaleo — the officer accused of (and videotaped) applying a chokehold to the much larger Garner, who repeatedly pleaded “I can’t breathe” until he stopped breathing — and submitted it to a Staten Island grand jury that would never indict a policeman on the charges Donovan asked them to vote on.   No criminal indictment against the officer who killed Garner was returned.    Pantaleo has been on desk duty for the five years since the homicide, drawing his regular $100,000 plus salary as a New York City policeman.   

In recent NYPD departmental hearings there was a vigorous legal debate by regulation-parsing lawyers over the legality of the precise hold Pantaleo applied to bring down the much larger man, a black man with a history of arrests, even a few convictions.   The hold, without dispute applied by Pantaleo, that resulted in the homicide of Eric Garner.    Garner was a large black man known to illegally sell “loose” cigarettes from packs that did not have valid tax stamps on them, allegedly refusing to be arrested and dragged to a cell on a hot day, for a second time.   A known criminal who was also known by locals as a laid back gentle giant and a peacemaker.

If you want to get really worked up about the sickening injustice surrounding the killing of an unarmed man who was not at the time engaged in any illegal activity, or posing any other threat to anyone, read Matt Taibbi’s gripping long-form report I Can’t Breathe: A Killing on Bay Street.  The details will make your blood boil, unless you believe that a large black man with a criminal history deserves to be taken down, every time, with or without cause, even if the result is, tragically, a “homicide” by police.  Among a host of brutal specifics, the detail of the man who videotaped the homicide on his phone, Ramsey Orta, being the only person to face justice in relation to the homicide investigation, is mind-fucking.  Orta was facing up to sixty years in prison, at one time, for post July 17, 2014 drug charges and possession of a .25 caliber handgun.  [2] 

A state case was never brought against officer Pantaleo, but there was talk about the Department of Justice bringing federal charges against the aggressive officer whose actions had resulted in homicide, basically the choking death of a much larger man arguably “resisting arrest”.  That talk ended yesterday.   

Enter Bagpiper Bill Barr (on a break from gently bagpiping his master’s increasingly sweaty balls, one assumes) who ordered the U.S. Attorney from the Eastern District of New York, the office contemplating bringing federal charges against the death-causing policemen whose actions resulted in the homicide of Eric Garner, to stand down.   The U.S. attorney said:

“Let me say as clear and unequivocally as I can that Mr. Garner’s death was a tragedy,” Richard Donoghue, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said at a news conference. “But these unassailable facts are separate and distinct from whether federal crime has been committed. And the evidence here does not support charging police Officer Daniel Pantaleo with a federal criminal civil rights violation.”

source

 

All roads lead back to Mr. Trump, the undisputed non-racist, scrupulously honest leader of his lockstep Republican party.   Trump is, of course, not the cause for any of this — not directly.   He is the toxic chicken coming home to roost, the logical outcome of decades of unprincipled and very effective conniving by some very determined, very wealthy “job creators”.  He is a symptom, like projectile vomiting or explosive diarrhea, not the disease itself.   A herpes zoster on the genital politic, we might say.

A feeling of helplessness is a motherfucker, I’m here to say.   Time to get serious about impeaching this deserving, largely unqualified 78,000 vote (0.0006% mandate, yo)  Electoral College president.   He may be a symptom, but he is an especially ugly one and he will be hard for the unyielding extremists who support him, and have put all their faith in riding his stinking coattails, to replace on the 2020 ticket.   It is also past time to start making some fundamental, and long-overdue, changes in our recently faltering experiment in democracy.  Either that or we should all go back where we came from…

 

[1]  Wikipedia gives us the skinny on Grimm:

On April 28, 2014, Grimm was charged by federal authorities with 20 counts of fraud, federal tax evasion, and perjury.[2] On December 23, 2014, he pleaded guilty to a single count of felony tax fraud, and “acknowledged committing perjury, hiring illegal immigrants, and committing wire fraud”.[3]After initially vowing to retain his seat, Grimm announced on December 30, 2014, that he would resign from Congress effective January 5, 2015.[4] On May 5, 2015, Daniel M. Donovan, Jr. won the special election to replace Grimm. On July 17, 2015, Grimm was sentenced to eight months in prison for tax evasion.[5] He began his prison term on September 22, 2015 after a brief delay for medical treatments.[6]

On October 1, 2017, Grimm launched a campaign to attempt to win back his old House seat in New York’s 11th District.  On June 26, 2018, he lost in the Republican primary.[7][8]

source

[2]  written some time in 2015 (no attribution in original post)

In the last year, Orta’s life has been upended. He has been arrested three times since August 2014. The first, for criminal possession of a handgun he allegedly tried to give a 17-year-old, came a day after Garner’s death was ruled a homicide by the city’s medical examiner. In February [2015], he was arrested again on multiple charges of selling and possessing drugs. The third came on June 30 [2015] when he was accused of selling MDMA to an undercover cop. A lab test later showed that the alleged MDMA was fake and the charges were reduced.  All told, Orta is facing more than 60 years in prison if convicted on all charges.

(He eventually pled guilty and took a four year sentence)

source

Nothing Illegal About Being A Racist

Our ever marketing distractor-in-chief Donald J. Trump pooted out some racist tweets about four women in Congress (all “women of color”) the other day.  He wrote that if they hate his America so much they should go back to the corrupt shit holes they came from if they don’t like it here.   Three of the four would go back to Michigan and the Bronx, but no matter. 

Mitch McConnell and his pragmatic ilk were quick to defend Trump’s racist tweets against those who call the Orange Menace a racist — McConnell pointing out that, in his view, at least one of the president’s targets is an anti-Semite and that there’s a lot of overheated language on both sides.   Lindsey Graham adorably piled on “we all know that AOC and this crowd are a bunch of Communists, they hate Israel, they hate our own country, they’re anti-Semitic, they’re anti-America, they’re Socialists, they’re anti-Semitic, they stand for all the things most Americans disagree with.”  I like the way the proud single white southern man twice makes the claim that they hate Jews.  Tip of the yarmulke to you, Lindsey!    Let’s do that one again, a little bit louder, now:

Lindsey Graham adorably piled on “we all know that AOC and this crowd are a bunch of Communists, they hate Israel, they hate our own country, they’re anti-Semitic, they’re anti-America, they’re Socialists, they’re anti-Semitic, they stand for all the things most Americans disagree with.” 

White supremacists love this shit (Trump’s racism, not Graham’s Jew shit, of course), and Trump was no doubt widely applauded by a solid core of his base for taking no shit from these uppity colored bitches.   As take-a-bullet-for-the-Unitary-Executive Bagpiper Bill Barr would be among the first to point out — there is no law against an American being a racist, outside of certain limited laws that proscribe discrimination based on race and national origin.

Like the Fair Housing Act, for example.  Trump’s father took millions in free government money, subsidies and tax abatements, for building affordable housing for middle class workers.  Fred Christ Trump had a reputation for racism — though there’s no proof that his arrest at a Klan rally in 1927 was because he supported their racist, xenophobic views — it was well-known that he wouldn’t rent his apartments to blacks or Hispanics, or to any people not his preferred shade of white.   

There was also no law against this racist practice during the years he had his agents mark the application folders of  colored applicants with a “C” to identify which prospective tenants would be rejected.   A free country, Fred Christ was free to do what he liked with his property, in spite of the millions in tax abatements and subsidies he got from the government to build his middle class housing units, presumably for everybody.

Then there was a new federal law, the Fair Housing Act, enacted to end racist discrimination in housing rentals and sales, that suddenly made Fred Christ Trump’s long practices illegal.  So UNFAIR!   Enter Roy Cohn, rabid public homophobe and promiscuous closeted homosexual (who died of AIDS he claimed to his last breath was cancer), and his $100,000,000 counter-suit for defamation against the Department of Justice.   

Cohn settled the case without obtaining a penny for the Trumps (which would have been impossible — after all, truth– that the Trumps had been discriminating in the rental of housing on the basis of race and national origin– is an absolute defense to defamation in American courts) but  also, significantly without admitting the Trumps did anything wrong, ever.

At the same time the Trumps made no admission that they had been violating the Fair Housing Act,  page after page of the settlement is the Trumps’ agreement to scrupulously abide by the letter and spirit of the law, and to instruct their agents in nondiscrimination, make them take classes, take out newspaper ads for vacancies (stating explicitly that Trump properties followed the Fair Housing Act) and so forth.   The curious can see the entire “no admission of guilt” settlement HERE. [1]

The son of Fred Christ Trump is clearly not qualified to be the president, not by work or life experience, not by temperament, not by intelligence or basic competence in anything but self-promotion.   He has long been a boastful scofflaw, the biggest beneficiary of his father’s nefarious tax avoidance schemes and outright frauds.   

The president continues to obstruct justice, as he had when he fired Comey for not “letting the Flynn thing go” (and had Sessions and Rosenstein write memos outlining why Comey had to be fired, before boasting on TV that he didn’t care about the memos, he was going to fire Comey anyway for this “Trump-Russher thing”) as he had when he ordered White House counsel McGahn to fire Mueller, and then ordered him to write a memorandum saying the president had never ordered him to fire the Special Counsel.  As he did when he held on to the rejected resignation letter from Sessions as leverage against the surprisingly principled (in terms of recusal, anyway) little racist, and lied to his chief of staff about whether he still had the letter.    As he continues to do with his new Roy Cohn, Bagpiper Bill “how dare you call me bagpiper!!” Barr and the assertion of a blanket protective privilege over everyone and everything that might publicly compromise him or call his asserted “exoneration” into question.  

Trump is a racist, no law against that, but, seriously, in 2019, what the fuck?   They argue in Congress whether its an impermissible slander to condemn a president who acts like a racist, a president who strongly denies he’s a racist.

Trump never had a job he had to apply for, since he took over his brutal father’s lucrative housing empire (sold at a great discount after Fred Christ died, against the old man’s wishes that his life’s legacy never be sold).  Trump lost money in every business he ever had, was bailed out by his father time and again, declared bankruptcy more than once.   He lost billions in the course of his failed career as the Artist of the Deal, but then played the world’s biggest winner on a staged “reality” TV show that went on to fascinate millions of viewers.   He’s a compulsive liar, a loser and– it must be said again, a fucking racist troll.

He made racist attacks on many people over the years, particularly women, (his long Birther-in-Chief gig and taking out full page ads calling for the execution of five boys falsely convicted and later exonerated were two of his most famous, though women were not specifically involved) and as president called black NFL players sons of bitches (and their mothers, of course, bitches) but THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NO PROOF THAT HE EVER CALLED ANYONE A NIGGER!  (no matter how much they deserved it!)  Now he has done the next best thing, telling four progressive “non-white”  female congress members . via Twitter, to “go back where they came from!”   His crowds now chant “Send Her Back!” at the mention of the Somali-born Ilhan Omar.    His party unites to say Trump is not a racist, nor were his comments about those America-hating colored bitches racist, though his admirers know better. 

Comedian George Lopez said it best, and most succinctly, “fuck that puto“.

 

[1] an example, from the settlement

For two years after the entry of this Order, defendant shall notify the Open Housing Center of the New York Urban League, 150 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York, 10003, of every fifth available apartment in each apartment building owned and/or managed by the defendant which has a black tenancy of less than ten percent at least three days prior to placing that apartment on the open market. During this three-day period, the Open Housing Center shall have the opportunity to refer qualified applicants to the defendant for the purpose of renting the apartment. All applicants referred by the Open Housing Center shall provide the defendant or its representative with an appropriate identification which will serve to advise the defendants that such applicant has been referred by the Open Housing Center pursuant to this subsection. After three days if no qualified applicant referred by the Center has filed an application seeking to rent the apartment, the apartment may be placed on the open market to be rented in defendant’s normal business custom without regard to race, color, religion, sex or national origin.

Business as usual — running out the clock on the American experiment in representative democracy

I’d planned to get back to writing about my father, having had a renewed offer to get the story of my father’s life into printed book form recently.   Business as usual, and what Sekhnet has taken to calling my lack of executive function, has prevented me from starting to reframe the long manuscript into a svelte 250 page telling of the story of my poor father’s life.   I started a post on the reframing several days ago, but it got lost in my morbid fascination with our lying attorney general and the slow-motion horror show that is proceeding in our enraged, ill-informed nation.

My father would be worked up these days too, no doubt, if he were not already an insensate skeleton.  Three and a half months ago Mueller handed his completed report and a fully redacted executive summary to the new A.G., Bagpiper Bill Barr.   Barr, it should be noted, is an accomplished bagpiper.  I believe he may have won bagpiping competitions.   My father, oddly enough, always loved the bagpipes, but I don’t think he would have loved Bagpiper Bill in the least.   Bill is running the clock, like the pro he is.  

My father used to be a bit disgusted to see a college team running out the clock toward the end of a close game, spreading out and passing the ball in a methodical way that made it virtually impossible for the other team to have a chance to score.   Unsportsmanlike, if very pragmatic, to keep passing the ball that way, ahead by a couple of points and freezing the action until the other team desperately fouled, hoping for a rebound and a chance to score, as the clock wound down to 0.

Almost four months ago Robert S. Mueller III handed in his report to the A.G.   Barr spent months spinning the findings with a bravura flair for untruthfulness, is spinning them still.   Mueller was subpoenaed and was scheduled to testify before two House committees on July 17.  Then, as it happened, not enough members of Congress had read his long report, they needed more time to get questions ready for Mueller.  This delay was apparently at the behest of Democrats, looking at their one shot to convince their party’s iron-willed political strategist Speaker Pelosi that what is described in the obstruction section of Mueller’s is much worse than what Nixon was accused of in the third Article of Impeachment against him.

Instead of discussions of the report’s actual contents, partisan spins have been offered on both sides, parsing short cryptical public comments by Mueller, two months ago, and continual, ever flowing less ambiguously exculpatory ones by Barr.  

So Mueller is now scheduled to testify, for three televised hours, on July 24, four months to the day from when Barr presented his misleading conclusions a couple of days after Mueller delivered his finished report, and fully redacted executive summary, to his boss.   Nice way to run four months off the ticking game clock, boys. Mueller will now speak to Congress on July 24, in three hours of must-see TV, and then, two days later, Congress will go on its well-earned six week vacation.

Democracy is on a ventilator — as our unchecked, unmoored president, who came into power on a robust, surgical 78,000 vote victory in several key states to win the Electoral College, has found his Roy Cohn at last — and these public servants are leaving Washington for some nice R & R before resuming their grueling campaign financing schedules in the fall.   My father would dismiss this last bit as within their rights, as business as usual and nothing to get excited about.   People can’t be expected to sacrifice their paid vacations, he would say.

Still, William Barr, the openly corrupt president’s handpicked gunsel, I know would be giving the old man fits.  The latest is that he succeeded in preventing the two former DOJ attorneys who worked with Mueller from voluntarily testifying to Congress.  The NY Times (which the old man read cover to cover every day)  reports:

And, for now at least, Democrats have agreed to proceed without immediate access to Mr. Mueller’s top deputies that had previously been incorporated into his appearance on Capitol Hill. Both House panels had expected to have a chance to question the deputies, Aaron Zebley and James L. Quarles III, in private after Mr. Mueller’s public testimony.

The Justice Department had objected to such questioning and directed the men not to appear. But the reason for the change was not immediately clear.

source

Almost two months ago, Barr told an interviewer on a CBS broadcast:

From my perspective the idea of resisting a democratically elected president and basically throwing everything at him and you know, really changing the norms on the grounds that we have to stop this president, that is where the shredding of our norms and our institutions is occurring.

source

It’s hard to disagree with Bagpiper Bill.   It’s not as if this president was an illegitimate trickster, born in Kenya and living here under a false birth certificate, the real one disqualifying him from running for president, a secret Muslim with a name so suspiciously like Osama that when Bin Laden was killed virtually every newscaster flubbed the name of the executed terrorist, accidentally saying the president’s name instead.  It’s not as if this president never produced his long form birth certificate and college transcripts (well, let’s forget the college transcripts, SAT scores, everything else–not relevant, NOTHING TO SEE!).  

It’s not as if the opposition party, suddenly controlling both chambers of our bicameral Congress, vowed to block everything the twice popularly elected president proposed and denied him his constitutional right to nominate a candidate to replace a deceased Supreme Court justice.   It’s not as if this president’s successor (if any) will take pains to dismantle every deal this guy makes, void every law he has passed, remove his name from history, except as the biggest loser to ever serve in the office.   That’s how you shatter norms.

Sorry, dad, I know you tried to raise me better, but it’s simply too tempting, up to my nostrils in this swirling, stinking Koch-manufactured sewage, to simply say: fuck you, Barr  (and the fucking McConnell you rode in on).

 

 

Son of Criminal Obstructionists

I commented yesterday that Bill Barr is smarter than his boss.   Reading a bit of the transcript of his clumsy (but effective) spin of the Mueller report reminded me that smarter than our extremely stable genius president is not a very high bar.  Let’s have a quick look:

WILLIAM BARR: Well, I think Bob said that he was not going to engage in the analysis. He was, he was not going to make a determination one way or the other. And he also said that he could not say that the president clearly did not violate the law, which of course is not the standard we use at the department. We have to determine whether there is clear violation of the law and so we applied the standards we would normally apply. We analyzed the law and the facts and a group of us spent a lot of time doing that and determined that both as a matter of law, many of the instances would not amount to obstruction.

JAN CRAWFORD: As a matter of law?

WILLIAM BARR: As a matter of law. In other words, we didn’t agree with the legal analysis- a lot of the legal analysis in the report. It did not reflect the views of the department. It was the views of a particular lawyer or lawyers and so we applied what we thought was the right law but then we didn’t rely on that. We also looked at all the facts, tried to determine whether the government could establish all the elements and as to each of those episodes we felt that the evidence was deficient.

Mueller explained that unspecified DOJ regulations [1] required him to abide by the OLC memos stating that a sitting president cannot be indicted.   He explained that fairness dictated, since placing the president under a cloud of suspicion would impair his ability to do his job, that regardless of the weight of the evidence against him, the Special Counsel had to remain as neutral as possible on the question of his guilt.   He limited himself to collecting, sorting and preserving all the evidence it was possible to gather, “while memories were fresh” and while documents could still be obtained.   Here’s Barr’s vague and untruthful version (of admittedly hazy terrain):

Well, I think Bob said that he was not going to engage in the analysis. He was, he was not going to make a determination one way or the other. And he also said that he could not say that the president clearly did not violate the law, which of course is not the standard we use at the department.

Could Mueller have charged Trump with obstruction, had he not been bound by the OLC memo about not indicting a sitting president, based on the pattern of ten or more separate suspicious incidents he sets out in his report, including the president ordering his White House counsel to make a false record indicating that the president had never told him to obstruct justice by firing the Special Counsel?   Here’s Barr on that important question:

We analyzed the law and the facts and a group of us spent a lot of time doing that and determined that both as a matter of law, many of the instances would not amount to obstruction.

Aside from the fact that this is neither a sentence nor the expression of a complete thought, let’s parse it.  Many of the instances would not, as a matter of law, amount to obstruction of justice?   That means, by simple logic, that the others would amount to obstruction.  Also, obstruction is shown by a course of conduct– if many instances were not, in Barr’s view, obstruction, and several others were — then what is this irrefutable legal genius talking about?

As a matter of law. In other words, we didn’t agree with the legal analysis- a lot of the legal analysis in the report. It did not reflect the views of the department. It was the views of a particular lawyer or lawyers and so we applied what we thought was the right law but then we didn’t rely on that. We also looked at all the facts, tried to determine whether the government could establish all the elements and as to each of those episodes we felt that the evidence was deficient.

As a matter of law, sounds so categorical, so final.  As a matter of law– CASE CLOSED.   The views of the department?   That something like asking a subordinate to create a false written record to cover up arguable obstruction ais perfectly permissible if the person asking is the Unitary Executive?   Blow it out your bagpipes, Bill.   Way to dismiss the inconvenient “views of a particular lawyer” vs. the views of another particular, more powerful lawyer who gets the last word.  “We applied what we thought was the right law,” (as a matter of law) “but then we didn’t rely on that.”    Of course you didn’t rely on it — it would have harmed your boss!

I know, I know.   I keep acting like the facts matter, like simple logic should trump convoluted sophistry or outright partisan crap, like there is such as thing, in our post-truth society, as a “matter of law.”   Law is almost always decided based on the relative power of the parties.   Here in the land of the free and the home of the brave we have what is called “The American Rule”– unlike in most other civilized nations, each party pays his own legal fees in American courts (except in very limited circumstances).   This means if you have millions to spend against a less wealthy adversary who you can bankrupt in court — you win.   That is why our president is such a happy, satisfied, eternal WINNER who can claim to never to have settled a case (that claim is another demonstrable lie, but what the hey?).    USA! USA!!!!

I pretend otherwise, but in a world where time is literally running out on an inhabitable planet, as cynical old fossil fuel billionaires hire PR geniuses (and release “think tank” reports from their own spin doctors) to convince the pliable and the stupid that what they are seeing all around them has nothing to do with the looming climate catastrophe every responsible scientist on earth has been warning us of, emotion (plus power) beats the humble “truth” every time.

“If I’m so darned stupid — how come I’m the skeptic and you’re the fucking alarmist?   Tell me that, genius ass!”

Consider this piece my caveat about Barr’s supposed brilliance.  To that end I include, for the more ambitious reader (though not ambitious enough to click the link and read the CBS transcript) some more examples of his probity and his smarts.   [2]

Everyone who remains in Trump’s orbit reveals an essential stupidity (or at least moral vacuousness) after a while. They debase themselves by their transactional association with a giant, petulant, conniving, covetous 70 something year-old child.  

But remember, as Trump’s own loyal attorney general says, many of the suspicious things Mueller reported Trump doing to obstruct justice, many of them, as a matter of law (and Barr’s irrefutable, independent, Federalist Society opinion) were not crimes.  So there!

 

[1]   Mueller, speaking on his last day as Special Counsel

“The Special Counsel’s Office is part of the Department of Justice, and by regulation, it was bound by that department policy. Charging the president with a crime was therefore not an option we could consider,” Mueller said.

“Beyond department policy,” he continued, “we were guided by principles of fairness. It would be unfair to potentially accuse somebody of a crime when there can be no court resolution of the actual charge.”

source

[2] Some selections of Barr equivicating eloquently, and as a mater of law, directly through his ass:

WILLIAM BARR: Well, we live in a hyper-partisan age where people no longer really pay attention to the substance of what’s said but as to who says it and what side they’re on and what it’s political ramifications are. The Department of Justice is all about the law, and the facts and the substance and I’m going to make the decisions based on the law and the facts and I realize that’s in tension with the political climate we live in because people are more interested in getting their way politically. so I think it just goes with the territory of being the attorney general in a hyper-partisan period of time.

and

JAN CRAWFORD: So instead [of releasing a report not redacted to your specifications], you turned in this four page summary?

WILLIAM BARR: Right, because I didn’t think the body politic would allow us to go on radio silence for four weeks. I mean, people were camped outside my house and the department and every – there was all kinds of wild speculation going on. Former senior intelligence officials who were purporting to have it- or intimating that they had inside information were suggesting that the president and his family were going to be indicted and so forth —

JAN CRAWFORD: And saying that publicly?

WILLIAM BARR: Saying that publicly. There was all kind of wild and–

JAN CRAWFORD: And you knew that to be false?

WILLIAM BARR: Yes, and it was wild and irresponsible speculation going on which the very–

JAN CRAWFORD: Wild and irresponsible. The former intelligence officials’ speculation–

WILLIAM BARR: Right, and talking heads and things like that, and these things affect the United States’ ability to function in the world. We have an economy. It could affect the economy. It can affect – it can affect our foreign relations during very delicate period of time with, you know, serious adversaries in the world. So I felt- that in order to buy time, in order to get the report out, I had to state the bottom line just like you’re announcing a verdict in a case. My purpose there was not to summarize every jot and tittle of the report and every, you know, angle that – that Mueller looked into. But, just state the bottom line which I did in the four page memo.

JAN CRAWFORD: You didn’t say in that four-page memo that the report would not exonerate the president on obstruction. That line–

WILLIAM BARR: I said that, yes. In the- in the- in my four-page memo, I said that Mueller did not reach a decision. He gave both sides and that- and then I quoted that sentence which is, while we didn’t find a crime, we didn’t exonerate the president. That was in the four-page letter.

JAN CRAWFORD: The- did not- we would so clearly state the preface to that.

WILLIAM BARR: Yeah.

[Jan Crawford is right and Barr is lying.   Barr did not include the line she alluded to — if we had confidence the president did not commit a crime we would have said so. Barr’s letter quoted  the line “while this report does not conclude that the president committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him” , then followed it immediately, not with Mueller’s constitution-based conclusion that Congress is the proper venue for deciding whether or not the president used his powers improperly — but with his own preferred, pre-drawn conclusion that Mueller had decided to describe the facts without reaching a legal conclusion, which left the ultimate charging decisions up to the A.G.– as a matter of law, you dig….]

JAN CRAWFORD: That, that was not in there, and there was some criticism that in the summary, and the attorney- I mean, the special counsel himself wrote the letter saying, People are misunderstanding. There’s been some confusion, that the summary had caused some confusion–

Indeed it has, Barr’s four page PR release was a tissue of lawyerly cavil and did not reflect the content of Mueller’s findings

WILLIAM BARR: Right, right.

JAN CRAWFORD: That perhaps, and he didn’t say this, but the- the response was that you were too soft on the president, that actually the special counsel was a little sharper on obstruction.

[Barr wrote:  “Our determination [on no obstruction] was made without regard to, and is not based on, the constitutional considerations that surround the indictment and criminal prosecution of a sitting president” — as if, because many of the obstructive acts described were not… ah, if you’re interested, read the handsome true believer’s entire equivocating letter here]

WILLIAM BARR: Well again, I wasn’t trying to provide all the flavor and nooks and crannies of the report. I was just trying to state the bottom line, and the bottom line was that Bob Mueller identified some episodes. He did not reach a conclusion. He provided both sides of the issue, and he- his conclusion was he wasn’t exonerating the president, but he wasn’t finding a crime either. And, for the purposes of the point, I think that that was what was required for the body politic because actually most of the letter then goes on to explain how Rod Rosenstein and I reached a decision and the criteria we applied in finding no obstruction.

JAN CRAWFORD: He wrote the letter taking issue, saying there caused- you had caused confusion. Did that catch you off guard?

WILLIAM BARR: Yeah, sure. I was surprised he just didn’t pick up the phone and call me given our 30 year relationship, but–

That’s what lawyers call making a record, and it’s especially important to make a record when documenting actual understandings when you know the other party to be a corrupt person with no hesitation to lie “for the greater good” as a “matter of law”.   Like you, Bagpiper.  And it doesn’t explain why you didn’t release the fully redacted Mueller summary already in your possession, instead waiting weeks to make it public.   Now continue spinning your web of spun excrement:

JAN CRAWFORD: Why didn’t he?

WILLIAM BARR: I don’t, I don’t know, but, as I said it in the hearing, I thought it was- the letter was a little snitty and staff-driven–

JAN CRAWFORD: Staff-driven?

WILLIAM BARR: Yeah. I personally felt, but we had a good conversation–

JAN CRAWFORD: Because otherwise you would have picked up the phone?

WILLIAM BARR: Right, well, which I did, and we had a good conversation. And I think, I think the matter is now been fully vetted, and I think he was concerned that there should be more context and texture to his work given, and that in the absence of that, the vacuum had been filled with media reports that were then causing confusion, and he wanted it clarified by putting more of an explanation of his reasoning out. And I said that I didn’t want to put out dribs and drabs, I wanted the whole report out

[which is why I didn’t release Mueller’s detailed summary, of course].

And then I wrote a letter again to Congress saying, look, I didn’t- this is not intended to be a full summary. Bob’s thinking is reflected in the report. Everyone’s going to have access to it. They should look at that to determine, you know, what Bob’s reasoning was. So that’s where we let it sit till the report was released.

Sure, whatever you say, Bill, as a matter of law.

One last Barr gem, talking about which is worse, a foreign government interfering in our elections or “allowing  government power, law enforcement or intelligence power, to play a role in politics, to intrude into politics, and affect elections.”:

WILLIAM BARR: Well they’re both, they’re both troubling.

JAN CRAWFORD: Equally?

WILLIAM BARR: In my mind, they are, sure. I mean, republics have fallen because of Praetorian Guard mentality where government officials get very arrogant, they identify the national interest with their own political preferences and they feel that anyone who has a different opinion, you know, is somehow an enemy of the state. And you know, there is that tendency that they know better and that, you know, they’re there to protect as guardians of the people. That can easily translate into essentially supervening the will of the majority and getting your own way as a government official.

Got only two more words here:  Mitch McConnell. Oh, yeah, and Bill Barr.