Category Archives: politics smells like meat

The Limited Reach of Government Reports

Our 45th president is erratic, impulsive, wanton, vain, untruthful.  Still, 40% of the country, polls tell us, think he’s the greatest thing since the flush toilet.  Nothing the former eight year-old millionaire can do will deter his base from believing that he speaks for the little people and is actively making America great again (whatever the hell that glittering slogan might mean).

Presumably more than 50% of the nation is anxiously awaiting the report by former FBI director Robert Mueller that will be written at the end of a now almost two year investigation into Trump’s alleged ties with Russian election meddlers and his octopus-like business relations with many shady characters.  Mueller has indicted several of Trump’s close associates as well as a raft of Russians, got guilty pleas, a conviction or two, several are cooperating with Mueller, a few of these close Trump associates were actually sentenced to prison time for serious crimes.  

The majority of Americans who are waiting for Mueller’s report are hoping that Mueller will drop the hammer on the president and force Congress to end his reign.   This is probably a hope that will be disappointed.  There is an even chance that Americans will never get to even read the report or learn more than a summary of its contents.   There are undoubtedly many reasons for millions of us to want this president out of office;  keep in mind that it is probably a mistake to put too much faith in the silver hammer of the Mueller report, no matter how often liberal pundits and people like Nancy Pelosi tell us “wait for it… wait for it… here it comes…. wait for it!!!”

Millions of us are distressed by the way Trump constantly attacks others,  peddles a stream of wildly shifting untruths, openly admires dictators, defends vicious policies like family separation, applauds racists as fine people, appoints right wing extremists to lifetime judicial posts, wealthy incompetents like Betsey DeVos to cabinet positions,  ignores real national and world crises while creating false emergencies, takes heroic steps to increase income and wealth inequality, recently took almost a million US government workers and their families hostage (in addition to millions more who depend on government services and are being fucked big time while the most powerful man in the world throws his tantrum) and too many other bad things to jam into one long sentence.

These words of warning should come as no surprise: faith in government reports is often a recipe for cruel disappointment.   A few years ago a long belated, vast report on America’s torture policy under Cheney-Bush was compiled and read by members of Congress.   The 6,700 page report detailed a widespread American government-sanctioned practice of medieval horrors committed by Americans and American proxies, sometimes against “rendered” (kidnapped) persons innocent of any connection to any crime [1].    Cheney’s lawyers crafted a secret memo that laid out the legal defense for the torture program.    The report notes that the CIA lied about the extent of the program [2].  The brutalities described in the report should have landed the architects of the program in front of Congressional committees, if not prosecuted for war crimes.   Nothing of the sort ever happened.  In fact, one of the most enthusiastic participants in the program, a CIA agent known by her colleagues as “Bloody Gina”, an agent known to have destroyed video evidence of the “enhanced interrogations” she oversaw, was appointed by this president, and confirmed by his party’s Senate, as CIA director.   She’s hard at work right now.

Where is this gigantic torture report now, you ask?   There is one copy we know of that has not been destroyed, it is preserved in Barack Obama’s presidential library, but it is under seal for the next twelve years.  It is unclear how many of its heavily redacted pages will be made public in 2028.

One of the most famous government reports ever was the investigation into John F. Kennedy’s assassination.   The commission that investigated it was headed by Supreme Court justice Earl Warren.  As Chief Justice, Earl Warren, an Eisenhower appointee, was a force for social justice during his term (October 5, 1953 – June 23, 1969).   He was hated by the extreme right, the John Birch Society (including Fred Koch, father of the two far right billionaire zombies who have done so much to make America great again for liberty) screamed for his impeachment.   He was widely seen as a man of integrity, but his Warren Commission Report concludes that one former marine, acting completely on his own, with a faulty rifle, fired three shots into the moving target of  JFK’s head, bullets that magically made all kinds of twists and turns, including into the body of Texas Governor John Connally.   Woody Allen referred to the Warren Commission Report as a work of fiction, playing it for laughs.  It is unlikely we will ever get closer to the truth of who else was working with the ‘lone gunman’ who was killed a couple of days later while in police custody by another lone gunman, though a later Congressional investigation nobody today recalls found evidence of conspiracy. [3]

Donald J. Trump, with his gut instinct for survival, is doing everything  he can to put people in place to make sure any damage from Mueller’s findings is blunted, kept in the shadows, kept from public view.   Who knows what will be included in the report, or how hard Mueller will bring the magical hammer down on this amoral president?  My only point here is that there is an even chance that we will never know.  

My larger point is that it is upon every one of us whose consciences are most enflamed to organize to become part of the change we’d like to see in the world.   “Hope and Change” ain’t going to do it, any more than “MAGA”, even though Obama may or may not have preserved the last copy of the torture report.

 

[1] The case of Maher Arar, a Canadian architect grabbed in an American airport and rendered to Syria where he was tortured for over a year, on completely mistaken intel, is one every school child should learn (but one I fear none will learn).  Talk about the unlearned lessons of fucking history.

[2]  The Guardian article linked above includes this nice paragraph:

 Through an investigation that lasted more than six years, the Senate intelligence committee found that the CIA’s torture was far more brutal than the agency had told the Bush administration or Congress, and that the agency had lied about the program’s contours and effectiveness. It found unequivocally that torture produced no valuable counter-terrorism intelligence. President-elect Donald Trump has repeatedly expressed a desire to make the CIA engage in torture once again.   (link)

[3]  Wikipedia:  

A later investigation, the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) agreed with the Warren Commission that the injuries that Kennedy and Connally sustained were caused by Oswald’s three rifle shots, but they also concluded that Kennedy was “probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy”[4] as analysis of a dictabelt audio recording pointed to the existence of an additional gunshot and therefore “… a high probability that two gunmen fired at [the] President.”[5][6] The Committee was not able to identify any individuals or groups involved with the possible conspiracy. In addition, the HSCA found that the original federal investigations were “seriously flawed” with respect to information-sharing and the possibility of conspiracy.[7] As recommended by the HSCA, the acoustic evidence indicating conspiracy was subsequently re-examined and rejected.[8]

The accursed false equivalency of American Media

False equivalency is American corporate media’s idea of fairness.   If you have a speaker, a climate scientist, describing the looming climate catastrophe that is already killing and displacing people, you also must have a political person, a public relations type, explaining why all the alarmist scientists are completely full of shit.   This passes as presenting “both sides” of the issue here in the land of the free and the home of the brave.  

That there is often little or no truth on one side, and overwhelming empirical evidence on the other, means nothing to the corporate bottom line types who present everything we see on every network.  The main thing is that corporate media presents both sides of the “argument” and treats each side with respect.   We see it now with Trump’s petulance over his fucking wall on the southern border, (a wall that would take years to build under the rosiest scenario because countless eminent domain cases would have to be settled before the hundreds of miles of land would even be available to build on).  Good people on both sides, on many sides, if American mass media is to be believed, have convincing arguments and compromise is the only solution.

The president was never a CEO, he never had to work with a board of directors, never once had to compromise about anything.   He inherited a privately held family business from his ruthless, law-flouting father.   He leaned autocracy from demanding, indomitable Fred Christ Trump himself.   As the head of Fred Christ’s empire he was accountable to nobody but the father, who gifted him a modest $400,000,000, much of it tax free, and bailed him out many times when his bad business decisions blew up.  If any detail of the NY Times report on Trump’s father’s criminality in creating fraudulent tax dodges to pass on a vast, largely tax-free fortune to his self-made son had been in any way actionable in court, the blockbuster headline lawsuit would have been filed months ago. [1]  

The president is used to zero-sum stand-offs featuring winners (him) and losers (anybody who opposes him).   Drawing these lines in the sand has always worked for him, except in cases where he had to declare bankruptcy, or was forced to pay $25,000,000 to settle a suit about a fraudulent university he set up.    Even those losses the Artist of the Deal chalks up as wins, because it never personally cost him a dime, and because, in the case of his fraudulent university, his business entity paid pennies on the dollar (25 of them) and never admitted shit, plus he was elected president, by an historic Electoral College margin not seen in several years, so, suck it.

So this is not a man who knows how to make a deal, nor does he care about making deals.   He has never needed to make a deal, except to negotiate the price for using his family name as a brand for marketing.   He is good at that, has had his father’s family name on so many things, including colossal buildings.

He shut down the government because Congress would not agree to make him look good.   He might as well have shut it down because Congress stubbornly and nastily refused to lock Crooked Hillary up.   Lock her up or I’ll shut down the government, the poor and working people you say you care about will be the ones to suffer, not me, not anybody I know.   I can shut the government down for a year, I don’t care.  LOCK HER UP!   I won’t say it again, losers.

Yet look at virtually any mass media discussion of this “issue”, the president’s unilateral, unnecessary Congress-ignoring government shut down over the building of the wall his audience has been chanting about for years, and you will find people, reasonable moderates like John Kasich, taking pains to assign blame to both sides for this impasse.   The Democrats, you see, are also refusing to compromise, it’s not only this “unusual” president who is being intractable.  The Democrats could agree that Hillary will forfeit her passport and wear an ankle monitor while Congress debates locking her up for the rest of her life.  But– NOTHING.  So you see, both sides are at fault here for the gridlock the president blurted, on live TV, that he was proud to own, should it come to that.  He said he’d assume the mantle and would not blame the Democrats.

A Republican bill to keep the government open for thirty days while negotiations continued was sent to the president with unanimous approval in the Senate.  The president was poised to sign it.  Then the right wing media sphere went ballistic. More than one powerful right wing woman pundit stared into the camera and addressed her audience of one, accused the president of having no balls, no penis, not a drop of testosterone if he “caved” on his base this way.   Not one to be manipulated, he immediately vetoed the bill.   Then blamed the Democrats for the shut down.

In the lead up to the 2018 midterm elections we heard a lot of scary noise about an army of thousands of illegal aliens marching to overrun our southern border, a massive caravan of mostly women and children determined to destroy our constantly threatened nation.   They were not armed, if you consider tuberculosis, leprosy, AIDS, malaria, pimples, dysentery, necrotizing enteritis, polio, cancer and all the other highly infectious and deadly diseases they were deliberately bringing, along with rape, drugs, decapitation, stabbing, shooting, castration, strangulation, etc, not to be arms.   The hysteria over this caravan was hyped around the clock prior to the 2018 election.  We were in danger of immediately being overrun by drug dealers, gangsters and terrorists, some even Middle Eastern!!!

Since then, silence, we hear nothing about the “caravan”.   The reason?   The vast majority of these poor devils pose no threat to anyone, are taking great risks to flee hellish conditions in Honduras, Guatemala and other dangerous places, seeking safety, the asylum many of them are entitled to under US and international law.

As for the “humanitarian crisis” the president spoke of during his address from the oval office the other night, he is the creator and perpetrator of it.   

I don’t have much faith in the Democrats, a largely corporate party like the Republicans (although not yet captured by far right extremist “ideologues” and sponsors), but if you believe this crisis is a bipartisan one, you should shut off your TV and cancel your cable subscription and internet service.   Go to the nearest Trump rally, there is always one nearby, and shout “LOCK HER UP!   LOCK HER UP!!!!” until the president adds that to his list of demands for reopening the government so that hapless government workers can pay their bills and poor people don’t end up starving and evicted from their homes en masse.   It will simply not stand, reopening the government, and you should not rest, until fucking Hillary is locked up!!!

 

[1] I note that the Times detail-rich story on the source of Trump’s wealth came out the same day the Mohammed Bin Salman ordered slaughter of Jamal Kashoggi was being carried out in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, a mere five days after Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony about Brett Kavanaugh.   So much news, so hard to present both sides of all of it!

 

 

Death Squads

Trying to take a break from the coverage of our petulant president’s vain and self-created “crisis”, his vanity project of a gigantic wall, and his unprecedented use of extremist “Tea Party” tactics, a president vetoing a bipartisan bill in order to force a government shutdown hostage crisis, I wake up today thinking about death squads, damn it.  

History is written in blood, much of it, and that blood is rarely the blood of kings, lords, popes, princes of industry and finance.  The tree of liberty, according to an eloquent slave owner who rebelled against British tyranny, is supposed to be occasionally watered with the blood of tyrants and patriots, though it’s often hard to sort the tyrants from the patriots without a scorecard.   The tally of blood spilled is probably a few dozen tyrants against millions and millions of voluntary and involuntary patriots, not to mention millions of innocent civilians caught in the crossfire.  Tyrant blood is very, very expensive, it turns out; the rest of our blood, incalculably cheap.

It’s easy to see how this works, it is done the same way over and over throughout human history.   You create a story in which people who think like you, or who belong to your identity group,  are good, and people who don’t think like you, or don’t look like you, are evil.   Then it’s all black and white.  You can send troops in to clear things up, kill the evil people while lovingly protecting, even sacrificing their own lives, for their brothers and sisters in arms.  Somebody called this selective empathy, and it’s a good way to think of it, infinite mercy for my beloved siblings, only death and destruction for evil motherfuckers like you.

In the war zones in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, it was often impossible to know who was “good” and who was “evil” just by looking, and often the only glimpse you got, seconds before somebody’s death, was fleeting.   The population was mixed, like every population is, many of them simply trying to avoid death during a war, enemy and friend were often impossible to tell apart.   That at least two of the three major recent American wars were based on lies, or faulty but often chanted theories (the Domino Theory, WMD) makes it even worse, but not that much worse.

War often brings a nation together, no matter how much we learn about it afterwards, no matter how cynical the calculation was, no matter how deadly and destructive war always is.   Dubya Bush had very low popularity numbers until, after the attacks on 9/11, he became a war time president.   His popularity soared.   A war time president is usually popular, particularly in a nation where military service is not mandatory and anybody who doesn’t want to die or be maimed in war can safely stay out of it.    Would I put it past this grandiose, increasingly beleaguered autocrat to start a war to goose his popularity above 40% ?   I’d put nothing past him, how could I?   I’d be surprised if he didn’t launch something huge.

Why Death Squad?  It’s how unpopular governments always maintain power, through brutality and terror.   You, priest, you gave a powerful speech talking about how strongly Jesus would denounce our regime’s torture and disappearance policies?   How about we crucify you to the door of your church, padre, for everyone to see how effective those policies actually are?   You want to save poor children?   How about we leave a pile of them, drenched in blood, at the feet of your crucified body?   

I have friends who sometimes poke me about seeing Nazis everywhere.   I come by this wariness somewhat honestly.   The town where my grandparents, my mother’s parents, came from had a mixed population with about 4,000 Jews, few survived the cold winter of 1942 and the final deadly night in August 1943, when the Nazis decided their fate.  

The town was in the Ukraine.  The Poles controlled it for many years, and Ukrainians, who remained nationalistic, worked with the Poles.   World War One was rough in that town, and then, after the Russian Revolution, the Red Army marched into the area and put up the flags of the USSR.   The Ukrainians hated the Russians who, in turn, once Stalin came in, starved literally millions of Ukrainians to death, right before World War Two was underway in earnest. 

My grandparents got the hell out while the getting was still possible.   My grandmother came to America in 1921, my grandfather in 1923.  It was a good thing, because in 1924 strict immigration quotas were put into effect, reducing the numbers from that area to a tiny trickle.   

Then my mother was born, in the Bronx, and my father, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.   As they grew up the world was marching inexorably through the Great Depression toward the second act of the Great War.   Stalin starved millions of Ukrainians to death while taking all their grain.   Hitler launched his invasion of the USSR.   German troops marched eastward, and behind his troops, einsatzgruppen, death squads.   These death squads were mobile units of the Security Police and SS Security Service that followed the German armies to Poland in 1939 and to the Soviet Union in June, 1941.   They rounded up and shot partisans, intellectuals and any Jews they encountered.   They experimented with gassing, using carbon monoxide from their trucks and vans, but it was inefficient and there were just too many people to kill that way.

Have your captives dig a huge ditch, have the people stand next to it, their clothes neatly piled somewhere else, and take aim at their heads, which pop like pumpkins or melons if you hit them just right.   It was a hard job and even dedicated SS men had a hard time doing it for very long.   It was the kind of work that could drive a person mad, no matter how strongly that person believed they were doing the right thing.

In my grandparents’ town in the Ukraine the einsatzgruppen were not, apparently, involved when the time came to cleanse the town of its remaining Jews .  By August 1943 you had trains running constantly eastward toward huge industrial killing facilities.   Jews would be concentrated in various ghettos and camps which would eventually be liquidated by sending them to death camps in long trains of cattle cars.  From the Nazi perspective this was a much better arrangement all around, what with the millions of Jews who needed to be eliminated.  Then there were small pockets of Jews, in fairly out of the way places, like the survivors of my grandparents’ town.

So the Jews of this Ukrainian town were forced to build a fence between their new ghetto and the rest of the town, while the Nazis took a few hostages, including a brother or nephew of my grandmother’s, to ensure the job was done quickly.   The Jews were persecuted, starved, frozen, beaten, many died during the harsh winter of 1942-43.   Everybody left in my grandmother’s family, and my grandfather’s (and each was one of seven siblings) was eventually marched to a ravine on the northwestern edge of the town, one night in August 1943.   There local Ukrainians, under the guidance of SS officers, took care of the surviving Jews, in the way that killers “take care” of their victims.  They acted as an ad hoc death squad, while the SS supervised.

None of this was ever discussed in our home.   My grandmother drank to excess as she got older, my grandfather was fearful and sometimes a little withdrawn, but they were otherwise fine.   I learned nothing from them, or from my parents, outside of the indigestible fact that everyone left behind in Europe had been killed.   It would be decades before I’d get the details, from an indispensable web site, which collected (and translated) the eye witness accounts of survivors, including an account of the schools in that town by a first cousin of my grandfather’s, a guy named Henry, who lived in Baltimore and who I met more than once when I was a kid.  His wife was named Goldie.

There was also, amazingly, this account, by either my grandfather’s youngest brother, or, more likely, a nephew.   Identified only as Y.   Through an amazing, twisted series of misadventures, he was spared the fate of everyone in his family, outside of my grandparents and Henry, who must have emigrated around the time my grandparents did.   A horrific story, the wartime experiences of Y. Mazur, but he lived to tell it, went back to his hometown and, after a long court fight, got paid for the family home and made his way to the new state of  Israel.  I had no idea.

I have searched in vain, as have other family historians, for the exact location of my maternal grandmother’s town, in the marsh south of Pinsk.  Wiped from the map without a trace, along with everybody there, like thousands of small hamlets where poor Jews made their homes in that part of the world.

So it never leaves me, the very real idea that when a death squad comes, you’re fucked. There is literally nothing you can do, outside of trying to escape.  By the time the death squad is on its way, good fucking luck to you, collateral damage.   If a maniac wants to kill you, they usually will.   Particularly if it’s nothing personal, you understand.

 

Compare and Contrast

This polarization in American life, so similar to the vicious divide that led to the Civil War, has been escalating for the last thirty years as the fucking Koch Brothers and their accursed ilk get closer to their eventual reward — and toward their mad political goal of limitless liberty for everyone, even if it means the destruction of the planet itself.   You have as much liberty as you can afford to buy, what could be more American than that?   The petulant, immature man they have as president now doesn’t have to be asked to do their bidding.   He has the same interest in unfettered liberty they do. He too was born with $400,000,000 worth of liberty.

Was there a time when there was still a bit of decency left in American bare knuckles politics?   You can argue that during the start of Reagan’s term there was still some, a little bipartisan recognition that some compromise is sometimes a good thing.   Look what happened to Reagan’s Supreme Court pick Douglas Ginsburg and let’s contrast it to the recent confirmation, by the slimmest margin since 1881, of partisan team player and conservative Republican party insider Brett “Justice” Kavanaugh.   The following summary is from Wikipedia:

On October 29, 1987, President Reagan nominated Ginsburg to the Supreme Court of the United States to fill the vacancy created by the retirement of Lewis Powell,[1][2] which had been announced on June 26.[14] Ginsburg, age 41, was chosen after the United States Senate, controlled by Democrats, had voted down the nomination of Judge Robert Bork after a bruising confirmation battle which ended with a 42–58 vote on October 23.[15]

Ginsburg’s nomination collapsed for entirely different reasons from Bork’s rejection, as he almost immediately came under some fire when NPR‘s Nina Totenberg[16] revealed that Ginsburg had used marijuana “on a few occasions” during his student days in the 1960s and while an assistant professor at Harvard in the 1970s. It was Ginsburg’s continued use of marijuana after graduation and as a professor that made his actions more serious in the minds of many senators and members of the public.[17] Ginsburg was also accused of a financial conflict of interest during his work in the Reagan Administration, but a Department of Justice investigation under the Ethics in Government Act found that allegation baseless in a February 1988 report.[18] [1]

Due to the allegations, Ginsburg withdrew his name from consideration on November 7,[4][5] and remained on the Court of Appeals, serving as chief judge for most of the 2000s. Anthony Kennedy was then nominated on November 11 and confirmed in early February 1988 as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court.[19][20]

In contrast, here is the essence of Brett Kavanaugh’s indignant, winning response to allegations of drunken sexual impropriety.  He characterized the testimony of Christine Blasey Ford, who had accused him of drunkenly locking her in a room, lying on top of her, groping her and trying to remove her clothes during a high school party as nothing more than part of:

“a calculated and orchestrated political hit, fueled with apparent pent-up anger about President Trump and the 2016 election, fear that has been unfairly stoked about my judicial record, revenge on behalf of the Clintons and millions of dollars in money from outside left-wing opposition groups.”

Ginsburg, confronted with the unseemly fact that he liked marijuana, an illegal drug particularly reviled by conservatives (many of whom stated at the time that they’d still support his nomination), withdrew his name from consideration for the Supreme Court and remained on the federal bench until he retired many years later.   Kavanaugh, confronted with allegations of bad conduct and bad character, had a dedicated team working hard to make those allegations go away.

We have the burnt kettle calling the pot black here.   Kavanaugh, in fact, engaged in a calculated and orchestrated public relations campaign to save his good name and his lifelong dream of unappealable judicial power.   The night before his hearing he appeared on Fox News with his family, portraying himself as a God-fearing life-long choir boy.   He wrote an op ed in the Wall Street journal defending himself against the left wing smear campaign.   When, after Blasey Ford testified credibly and his confirmation seemed to be in doubt, he came back snarling, snorting and swinging, fueled by apparent pent-up anger over the fucking liberal conspiracy against good men like him.   His judicial record, and his record at Dubya Bush’s White House, both redacted by about 90%, were carefully hidden from the Senate Committee and the public.   His hatred of the Clintons and all they stand for, stemming from his diligent work as a partisan assistant to Independent Counsel Ken Starr, had been bolstered by millions of dollars in money from outside right-wing opposition groups and fellow extreme right travelers.  He freely admitted that he has always liked beer, even as he raged and resisted any real investigation into the allegations against him.

Rage in a man is now considered a good thing in a political confrontation, if you rage on behalf of Justice and Liberty and have the votes behind you to get your way.   Clearly Kavanaugh did that, and won his appointment, albeit by the slimmest margin in 137 years.  Much has been lost since the appearance of impropriety standard was clear to everyone and innocent men sought to clear their names rather than rage incoherently against their accusers.  

I know it may be far down the list of things to be investigated in this most corrupt of administrations, but I’d love to see that lying fuck subpoenaed to testify before the House Judiciary Committee, confronted with his plainly untruthful testimony in confirmation hearings going back to when Dubya first put loyal Brett on the federal bench.

[1]   Note that Ginsburg was found innocent of the financial conflict of interest months after he withdrew his name from consideration for the Supreme Court.