Bill Maher uses the term “whiny little bitch” to refer to our massively sensitive (when it comes to his own feelings) president’s constant complaining about the world’s unfairness toward him.   It is the prerogative of rich white men to complain; that there are other people richer than them, that taxes are unfair, that the roads they drive on should not be partially paid for by their wealth.    We just take this for granted, it is the way it is.  Simple.   Money talks and you shut the fuck up.

Of course it’s easy to pick on rich white men who whine about unfairness.   Low hanging fruits, you sassy bitches!   They can’t help it.   Why be so judgmental just because they tend to be greedy, entitled, overbearing in-your-face assholes?   They are winners.  Isn’t it kind of automatic for losers to resent winners?   Automatic or not, that’s exactly what I’m doing, a loser being a reflexive hater, but I can explain.

I just saw a piece detailing the reasons why powerful TV executive Les Moonves was finally fired by his corporate overlords.     He apparently forced a few women to perform oral sex on him, exposed himself to others, threw at least one against a wall, damaged careers and professional reputations of women who hurt his feelings by refusing his unwanted sexual advances.   Moonves is a man with a beautiful wife much younger than he is.   You’d think… never mind.   He’ll be OK, one suspects, with his severance package worth over $100,000,000, luckily for him (skillfully, really) his lawyers made sure there was no “morals clause” in his employment contract.   Isn’t his ignominious ouster from a position of power punishment enough for his widely alleged shitheadedness?

It’s not really about sex, the abuse of power that hyper-sexualized alpha apes like Moonves exhibit.   Rape, it is said, is about power, rage and domination, not about sex at all.  Forced sex is used to express rage, to demean the victim, to increase the raping asshole’s damaged sense of self-esteem.   Rapists and other sexual predators are not romantics, they’re the opposite.   It’s easy to dump on the evil bastards, of course, and I won’t stoop to it.   Fuck them is all I can really say about it at the moment.

Outside of the realm of sexual abuse, we have many institutionalized abuses that are far too lucrative to ever halt, or even seriously question.   Racism comes to mind.  It’s big business.   Always has been here.   You capture and import a gigantic workforce with all the rights of cows, sheep, pigs.   The good looking ones you can screw whenever the urge moves you.   You can work them to death, in the manner of slave laborers cheaply rented out by the SS to far-sighted, bottom line focused German corporations during World War Two.   

A decade after the Civil War you can put a law meant to protect the rights of freed slaves into a deep, unappealable judicially induced coma for ninety years (I’m thinking here of the Fourteenth Amendment, reduced for a century to protecting three or four limited federal rights [1]).   Why not?  The Ku Klux Klan has rights too, after all.   Nobody can appeal a Supreme Court decision, no matter how morally repulsive it might be.  Law of the land, boys and girls, decided by nine unsmiling Americans appointed for life, like supremely impartial family guy Brett Kavanaugh, overruling, with a one vote majority of their peers, explicit legislation by pointing to some imagined higher principle that nobody can question.

I’m thinking of the financial disaster of 2008, and the inevitable next one.   The 2008 massive upward redistribution of wealth was in the making for years.  George W. Bush made speeches encouraging people to find the American Dream by owning their own homes.  Profiting off people getting mortgages they couldn’t pay wound up being a gigantic windfall for financial industry profiteers.   Unsophisticated consumers who wouldn’t have qualified for the gigantic loans soon began defaulting on their mortgages, the rate they had been paying suddenly “ballooned” as they sometimes do in that industry.   This tsunami of debt was an additional windfall, unscrupulous highly paid geniuses figured out there was a way to make a killing by repackaging the debt, creating investment opportunities buying and selling slices of it (tranches, don’t you know?), having those opportunities falsely rated triple A, the safest investments around.    Everybody was in on it.   It was massive fun for a while, certain super wealthy people made shitloads of money.   Then it all collapsed.

The government, reviled by super-rich financial titans as tyrannically trying to stifle the Free Market whenever an attempt is made to regulate anything, was forced to come up with enormous stacks of tax-payer money to rescue financial institutions that were “too big to fail”.  Unlike you and me, who have the freedom to fail every day, the absolute freedom to move from a home to a cardboard box somewhere any time our luck turns bad, these gigantic money making enterprises could not be allowed to fail.  The world economy would have gone into the toilet.

We get all this.   We have State Capitalism here, the government enables this kind of profiteering because it’s good for the economy.   The economy being a synonym for the gigantic roulette wheel that is the Stock Market.   Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen.  Pick right and you will do well.  Pick badly and you have nobody to blame but yourself.   Who could begrudge the rescued financial giants the record $135,000,000,000 compensation they paid themselves in 2009?   It’s not as though any of them were caught in a random stop and frisk with a joint in their pocket.   These super important men are too big to jail, or fine, or even prosecute.   Be reasonable, boys and girls.   We all know the set up.

We cannot imagine it any other way.  This is by design.   This is what freedom looks like in the land of the free and the home of the brave.   If you are a liberal, wise-ass senator given to asking tough, probing questions at confirmation hearings, and your hand falls in the wrong place on a female body during one of a thousand campaign photo ops, your own high-minded, corporately funded party will force you to resign as a sexual predator.  If you are a powerful, avowedly apolitical executive who just happens to like having your dick sucked by any woman you find attractive, well, allowances can be made.  You see, this is the Free Market, really.  It’s free until it’s time for loser suckers like us to pay for it.

One of the cardinal rules of wealth is never risk your own money.   Our president, who doesn’t grasp much, who is, in the words of a sassy comedian, a “whiny little bitch,” knows this.  Witness the billions he personally saved during his multiple business failures, his serial bankruptcies.   Even he knows that fundamental rule of wealth: let the fucking suckers suck on not getting paid, avoid taking a dime out of your own pocket at all costs.   

Of course, I should not really be writing this today.  It is the first day of the Jewish year today, year 5779 since God created the world (I know).   Many of my co-religionists are in synagogue (that’s a Greek word for ‘shul’) today praying to the all-merciful Creator who gave us all free will, the Free Market and every other freedom.    Whether God is a desperate creation of humans born into an often terrifying world that ends in each of our inevitable deaths is not my place to speculate about today.   Only actions matter.   It is what we do, not what we espouse, that matters. 

I can believe with all my heart, with all my might and all my soul, that we have a duty to our fellow creatures never to mistreat them.    If I  mistreat them in spite of this fervent belief, well, call me what I am.  That is all we can ask of our fellow creatures, to live by our highest ideals.  Unless, of course, they are rich white men, the most unfairly persecuted group on God’s polluted earth.  We are morally obliged to give those freedom-loving involuntary fellatio connoisseurs a pass every time.  Fair is fair and hard to picture it any other way.

[1]  The Supreme Court decided that the Fourteenth Amendment was not intended by its framers (only a few years earlier) to make the protections of the Bill of Rights applicable to the States (it was, and currently is).   The Court restricted the 14th Amendment to the enforcement of the rights to use navigable interstate waterways and ports, to freely migrate from state to state and to be protected on the high seas.  Civil Rights were, according to the Court, completely at the discretion of the States and not intended to be protected by the federal government under the 14th Amendment.  Civil Rights violations by the states could not be challenged via the 14th Amendment, or in any other way, for almost a century.  A century of terrorism at law for unlucky former slaves and several generations of their descendants.

Here’s a bit of the sickening, neutral and impartial sounding cavil of the famous 1873 Slaughterhouse cases that decided the scope of the Fourteenth Amendment a few years after it became part of the post-Civil War constitution:

Was it the purpose of the fourteenth amendment, by the simple declaration that no State should make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States, to transfer the security and protection of all the civil rights which we have mentioned, from the States to the Federal government? And where it is declared that Congress Shall have the power to enforce that article, was it intended to bring within the power of Congress the entire domain of civil rights heretofore belonging exclusively to the States?

All this and more must follow if the proposition of the plaintiffs in error be sound…. [T]he effect is to fetter and degrade the State governments by subjecting them to the control of Congress in the exercise of powers heretofore universally conceded to them of the most ordinary and fundamental character….

We are convinced that no such results were intended by the Congress which proposed these amendments, nor by the legislatures of the States which ratified them.

The states that seceded from the United States and took up arms to defend the rights of their wealthiest to own slaves were forced, after their military defeat, to ratify the wartime amendments as the price of getting federal money to rebuild their destroyed infrastructure.   As the Court reasonably points out, why would the legislatures of such States agree to federal protection of the rights of their former chattel, chattels they’d spent rivers of blood and gold to keep in slavery?   

In the more objective light of hindsight, and ongoing racist practices from coast to coast, we say to the former slave states and their ilk: you lost the fucking bloody war you started, you goddamned racist motherfuckers!   Losers walk.  Traitors too, with malice toward none.  Now take down your proud flags of treason, too, even though the 14th Amendment protects your First Amendment right to fly them.

The only person who has to fear a “perjury trap” is someone who can’t control his lying.   A person with things to hide, given to lying to get himself out of trouble, to distract, to divert attention from their actual deeds, is the likeliest victim of a ‘perjury trap’.   A person whose deep sense of shame and inferiority will cause him to reflexively lie when any probe gets close to that shame and fear walks right into a perjury trap.   “Perjury trap” think about that phrase.   It’s an admission that the person going to testify under oath is a compulsive liar, no?

It’s not surprising that the best Rudy Giuliani can do for his friend the president is cough up the talking point of a “perjury trap”.    He appears to be as demented as his buddy when he speaks on right wing talk TV in defense of the often insane- seeming statements his friend makes.  Giuliani likes to appear to be a ‘stand up guy’, and so he talks tough, and loyal.    I will not let the president put himself in a no-win situation where his lies will have legal consequences, no way!   Perjury Trap! Fuck that.   We’re going to hit Mueller’s investigation with both barrels.

It is a tribute to the times we live in that this curious phrase appears to be good enough for purposes of telling Mueller to fuck himself on right wing TV.   “My client is a well-known and prodigious liar, as well as a master of puffery and the world’s smartest genius.   I’m not going to subject him to perjury charges in an obvious perjury trap.  Why would I place him in a situation where he could go to jail for lying?    He does what he does, I do what I do.  The truth is a completely separate question and your truth may not be my truth, or the president’s.   You see what I’m saying?”

When Trump was asked the other day about the short jail sentence for an aide named George Papadopolpous, who perjured himself, he prevaricates a bit, mentioned Flynn, out of the blue (another former close associate who is talking to Mueller) and ended with a curt, smart-sounding “perjury trap.”   It’s good to be on the same page as your lawyer.

By the way, PBS did its best, prior to the 2016 elections, to alert people to the perjury trap the nation was about to fall into, thanks to ingenious work by one campaign identifying and winning a few dozen crucial districts to get the Electoral College while the other campaign did a victory dance on the fifty yard line the night before the election.  Check this 4:16  piece out, though it may also make you holler a bit.

Brett Kavanaugh is an extreme right wing rich man’s dream Supreme Court justice. He rules for corporations, almost every time.  He does not necessarily think a woman’s right to an abortion should be constitutionally protected across the country (although what business that is of extreme right wing rich men is a mystery to me).   He consistently rules against consumers, employees, the disabled, voting rights, the environment, the air we breathe, the water we drink.  He rules for gun manufacturers and the Scalia-created expansive view of the Second Amendment.   He has no problem with the right to own an arsenal of assault weapons being constitutionally protected.  He has no comment about his involvement in the Bush Administration’s torture program, though he admitted he probably worked with John Yoo, author of the torture memo, in the days after 9/11 when it was “all hands on deck”.  He could not promise to recuse himself from any case involving the investigation into Trump, even after probably, and improperly, speaking with Trump’s lawyers about the Mueller investigation.

Kavanaugh has a perfect score on every issue dear to bottom-line conservatives.  Some of his writings and opinions are so far to the right, and presumably so repugnant to most average Americans, that they have been classified and are being kept from public view, in the interest of getting him confirmed as quickly as possible without an undue uproar about his actual beliefs.   You can be sure of these beliefs, since he was recommended highly by the ultra-conservative Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation, endorsed by every other organization of their type. He brazens it out, as his predecessors have learned to do.  One important qualification for our nation’s top court would appear to be brazenness.   This quality enables him to blandly pretend that the issue of a president claiming the power to pardon himself and to refuse to comply with judicial subpoenas is purely hypothetical.

Kavanaugh has long been a partisan conservative.  He was one of Kenneth Starr’s most aggressive assistants during the historically partisan investigation that led to the impeachment of an American president for lying under oath about a series of blow jobs he received from a White House intern.   Since then American presidents have prudently stopped speaking under oath.   Kavanaugh, whose deference to the wishes of conservative presidents is well-documented, worked in the George W. Bush White House when Bush refused to testify under oath, quite possibly advising him on that matter.  George W. Bush would not speak under oath to the 9/11 Commission, a commission whose work he fought for a long time.   Bush and Cheney eventually negotiated a deal, they’d jointly attend a secret session where they’d speak to the Commission on terms of complete secrecy.    No notes or recordings were allowed, no oaths were administered, no promises to be truthful were made, the Commission agreed to say nothing about the meeting.  Nothing to see here! Including, fourteen years later, whatever Brett Kavanaugh might have had to say about it, he was a lawyer at the White House [1] in the years before Bush appointed him to the federal bench.

This seemingly guilty behavior, lawyering up on terms that offer absolute protection from any possible liability, has been normalized, but it was, until recently, a ballsy move for a politician to invoke complete secrecy, and preservation of the right to prevaricate or outright lie, without legal consequences, in a matter of extreme public interest.   It makes them look guilty, for one thing.   Blanket classification of politically embarrassing matters appears to be profoundly anti-democratic, since the public, theoretically, has a right to be fully informed on such matters.  

Brett Kavanaugh appears fine with this enhanced secrecy as he brazens out his confirmation questioning by Democrats who don’t have the votes to stop his confirmation.   He went to the top of the nominee list when the justice he clerked for, Anthony Kennedy, was persuaded to retire so that Trump could immediately get another Supreme Court pick.  It is hard to imagine that his replacement, by a clerk he trained, was not part of Trump’s discussion with Kennedy about preserving his legacy on the Court.  

Kavanaugh has written, since his days aggressively pursuing the investigation into the perjurer Bill Clinton, that the president should be immune from prosecution, even investigation, during the performance of the duties of our nation’s highest office.   Very handy, for a president under investigation, whose personal lawyer and former campaign manager are already heading to prison, to have another friendly ally on the bench of the Supreme Court as he seeks to continue working “outside the box” to Make America Great Again.

Unfortunately for the rest of us Americans, and for our jurisprudence going forward for at least a generation, there is little any of us can do to influence the outcome of this confirmation sham, or even to get thousands of pages of compromising writings by Kavanaugh released prior to his confirmation and appointment .   Kavanaugh’s rushed confirmation and appointment to a seat on the nation’s final arbiter of what is legal and what is illegal, will give the sitting president a long-term partisan majority to rule on every matter pertaining to his administration.   The rush is no accident, the Republicans are in a hurry.  If Kavanaugh is confirmed next week (it would likely be a new record for a speedy appointment [2])  he will be seated in time to make rulings during the crucial midterm elections.   If there is an emergency ruling on some voter-related issue during the elections, Kavanaugh and Gorsuch will decide it.   If there is a subpoena served on our historically prolific liar in chief, to testify in the “perjury trap” he’d be surely caught in, according to his supporters, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh will decide whether he must obey it.

Until the Republicans changed the rules after Gorsuch’s nomination fight to ensure that a 51-49 majority was inviolable, a filibuster would have been possible to delay this fait accompli.   Prior to 2017 the opposition party could engage in a filibuster that took 60 votes to overcome.   Now a 51-49 majority is inviolable, absolute.    Nothing to see here!   This is American partisan democracy at work.  Suck on it, losers.

Oh, yes, Committee Confidential.   I think this too may be a new innovation by the famously shameless partisans on the Republican side of the aisle.  Under pressure more Kavanaugh writings were released to the Senate Judicial Committee members, after vociferous public demands for more of the classified documents by Democratic members of the committee.   They were released on the condition that the American public, the voters, never learn of their contents.  There was an email about Racial Profiling that Kavanaugh wrote, apparently reflecting his reflexive right wing thinking on the matter.  Cory Booker asserted that he’d be making the email public, and take the consequences.  A Senator named John Cornyn, an apparent dickhead from Texas, seemingly sitting in for the chairman, reminded the angry Democrats on the committee that such opinions were Committee Confidential and would be disclosed to the public at the rule-violating committee member’s peril.  Cornyn read the rule severely, threatening Senator Cory Booker with expulsion from the Senate.  It appears to have been a wholly blustering threat.  [3]

What business is it of the American voting public if the lifetime appointee believes, for example, that Racial Profiling is a perfectly acceptable way for law enforcement to protect us from the ravages of our long, ongoing race war?    Or if he believes that a woman who gets pregnant, or a girl who is raped, must give birth, no matter what, if the laws of her state forbid abortion?    What kind of country we are living in will be decided by Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, even if Trump, who won the democratically dubious Electoral College by a historically small number of votes (about 80,000), is impeached, tried, convicted, sent to prison, he will leave his illegitimate mark on our nation for at least the rest of my lifetime, if not everyone on the planet’s.   He will leave his indelible stain as he goes down fighting, to the death. 

[1]   After the 2000 U.S. presidential election (in which Kavanaugh worked for the George W. Bush campaign in the Florida recount), Kavanaugh joined the administration and was a central figure in its efforts to identify and confirm judicial nominees.^[3]

[2]  The Republicans have a very short window to get Kavanaugh his seat on the Supreme Court in time to join them before the midterms.  The new term starts the first Monday of this coming October, October 1.

Before 1981 the approval process of Justices was usually rapid. From the Truman through Nixonadministrations, Justices were typically approved within one month. From the Reagan administration to the present, however, the process has taken much longer. According to the Congressional Research Service, the average number of days from nomination to final Senate vote since 1975 is 67 days (2.2 months), while the median is 71 days (or 2.3 months).^[13][14] Some believe this is because Congress sees Justices as playing a more political role than in the past.^[15] The perceived politicization of the process has drawn criticism. For example, columnist George F. Will termed the defeat of Robert Bork’s nomination “unjust” and, more generally, that the nomination process does “not delve deeply into the nominee’s jurisprudential thinking.”^[16] Supreme Court nominations have caused media speculation about whether the judge leans to the left, middle, or right.^[17] One indication of the politicized selection process is how much time each nominee spends being questioned under the glare of media coverage; before 1925, nominees were never questioned;^[18] after 1955, every nominee has been required to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee and answer questions; and the hours spent being grilled have lengthened from single digits (before 1980) to double digits today.^[19]

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[3] Cory Booker’s bold challenge to be censured or expelled from the Senate for violating the Committee Confidential rule made good television.  Unfortunately for fans of Senator Booker, he’d allegedly already received clearance, the night before, to disclose the contents of the email before his television moment of great principled bravery .    This is according to the Kavanaugh ally in charge of the release of any or all the controversial documents.  Booker’s office had no comment (Booker give his side here). Snakes everywhere, Mr. President!

I am very impressed, if not always in a good way, by the Trump administration’s ongoing policy of posting details of White House press conferences on the internet.   I don’t know if previous administrations in the internet age did this, I suspect now that they probably did, but every time I search for some striking moment I see reported in the news (or more often in the comedy of Colbert, Noah, Meyers, Bee) , there it is on the official Whitehouse.gov website.  

The principle of making government actions accessible to the public is a cornerstone of democracy.   Let the people know what the government is doing in our name.   Let the people decide how they feel about what we are doing, after seeing all the details for themselves.   Let the people then speak, and not just 40%, or 1%, and let the government reflect the will of the people and protect our interests, majorities and minorities alike.  This is the theory our democratic, republican government is founded on.

I heard the reports of the president’s recent public chastisement of a Trump critic, former CIA Director John Brennan.  Not only angry tweets, but cutting off Brennan’s security clearance.    Raising the ante in the argument in a way no previous president has ever dared to do.   It looks like the kind of petty thing an aggrieved tinhorn dictator would do, immediately before arranging the former top government official’s death. The official statement, which you can read here in its entirety, reads in pertinent part:

Mr. Brennan has recently leveraged his status as a former high-ranking official with access to highly sensitive information to make a series of unfounded and outrageous allegations — wild outbursts on the Internet and television — about this administration.  Mr. Brennan’s lying and recent conduct, characterized by increasingly frenzied commentary, is wholly inconsistent with access to the nation’s most closely held secrets, and facilities [facilitates] the very aim of our adversaries, which is to sow division and chaos.

Trevor Noah  said “unfounded allegations, wild internet outbursts and lying?  it sounds like Sarah Sanders is just reading from  President Trump’s daily schedule.”    Others have noted that Michael Flynn, former top presidential advisor, the fiery cheerleader who led the “Lock Her UP!” chants at the 2016 Republican Convention, a man who was forced to resign as National Security Advisor and later pled guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russian officials, still has his security clearance. [1]   The president’s outburst seems to be a fairly clear case of what psychiatry calls “projection.”   I know you are, but what am I?

I love the way the transcript is so honest and transparent that it shows the original language mistake:   and facilities [facilitates] the very aim of our adversaries, which is to sow division and chaos.    

Stephen Miller, or some other young genius, must have been in a hurry, under pressure, to finish crafting the president’s polished written statement.  It was an act of restraint on the part of whoever wrote it, I think, not to point out that sowing division and chaos is clearly the president’s job.

That Trump himself, so challenged to marshal his “best words, very best words”, didn’t write the presidential statement is obvious.   It reminds me of a great scene from low culture.   In “Back to School” Rodney Dangerfield plays a rich buffoon who goes to college when his son is admitted.   In an attempt to impress his freshman English professor, played by Sally Kellerman, he hires Kurt Vonnegut to write his paper on Cat’s Cradle.   When Kellerman returns the paper to him, with a C, she tells him “whoever wrote this paper, and it clearly wasn’t you, doesn’t know the first thing about Kurt Vonnegut’s work”.    The Dangerfield character promptly strikes back, angrily calling to tell Vonnegut he’s canceling his check and telling him, over the phone: “Hey, Vonnegut, read my lips– FUCK YOU!”

But all this is an aside, another of a million distractions.  The main thing, somehow, is not to look away.   The truth matters, it actually does. Remembering the inconsistencies week to week, day do day, is important. Participating in participatory democracy is essential.  Speaking calmly, and clearly, and pointing out actual facts, is the best way to convince people currently voting against their interests to wise up, straighten up, fly right.

Everything this president does is an attempt to enhance his own image, a fake “brand” of a brilliant, highly successful business genius with a Midas touch.   He is none of these things.  Just look at his colossal, hubris-driven failures in Atlantic City, where, prior to one of his more spectacular bankruptcies, the Artist of the Deal owned the top two casinos in that town and put them both out of business going deep into hock to build a third, the Mother of All Casinos, his idiotic Taj Mahal.  His genius was in not paying a penny out of his own pocket, stiffing thousands of chumps, retaining his reputation as a business genius.

His only business success in a life that started with millions from dad, and massive political connections that garnered him hundreds of millions in tax breaks,  was as a highly opinionated fake billionaire genius/mentor on “reality TV”.    He has not shown himself to be smart or successful in any business he’s ever been involved in, except as the abrasive, self-aggrandizing star of his long-running hit TV show where he played the man he pretends to be.    And that TV endeavor, I point out sourly, was produced by people who knew what they were doing.

“FAKE NEWS!” may resonate with those who can’t believe the mainstream news is not reporting how much the damned, ungrateful blacks hate the Klan, for no goddamned reason, or how much money greedy Welfare parasites are stealing from the government every year, or how many illegal immigrants sneak into the country to bust their asses at shit jobs where unscrupulous employers ruthlessly exploit them and the ungrateful aliens still won’t learn English.    

The idea of fake news is fake.   Do not go for the fake.  Stay tuned.  Don’t let these two year-old temper tantrum tactics make you so disgusted you stop paying attention.   We all need to pay close attention, and start getting busy heading into these 2018 midterms, which many are calling the most important elections in American history.   

I have nothing more to say about this, except to salute the tinhorn Trump administration for making these important presidential decrees available to the public, for pundits and comedians to discuss and for the rest of us to read over and think about while having our morning coffee.   Viva Democracy!   With the help of a merciful All-Mighty, and the hard work of millions of us, this threat to the planet too shall pass.

[1] On December 1, 2017, Flynn appeared in federal court to formalize a deal with Special Counsel  Robert Mueller to plead guilty to a single felony count of “willfully and knowingly” making “false, fictitious and fraudulent statements” to the FBI.^[18] He confirmed his intention to cooperate with the Special Counsel’s investigation.

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