On a scale, from most obviously harmful to most subtle, we have violent murder to quiet, implacable disapproval. In between we have, in random order, punching, kicking, slapping, shoving, handling roughly, verbally abusing, threatening, glaring at, mocking, humiliating, ignoring, demeaning, belittling, emotionally and physically withdrawing and many other techniques. Sarcasm and silence can both be deployed effectively to express displeasure, as can an uncompromising refusal to engage with the other person’s feelings, including the ever popular dead fish expression in response to the other person’s attempts to befunny.Silence might be the king of all of them, with its wonderful feature of complete deniability (as compared to, say, bashing somebody in the face in public no matter how much they may have seemed to deserve it).
My father, in most ways a wonderful human being, had been repeatedly physically abused and emotionally brutalized as a young child, by his own mother. He was a master at showing anger, employing numerous techniques from the in-your-face to the demonically subtle. As he was dying, literally on the last night of his life, he lamented, for the first time (after a lifetime of denying that childhood has anything to do with your adult life) that his life was effectively “over” by the time he was two years old. The next seventy-eight years was a determined exercise never again to experience the trauma of being humiliated, powerless, viciously treated. In his case a tiny, violent, ill-tempered religious fanatic mother had convinced herself, somehow, that whipping her first born in the face from the time he could stand was what God wanted. We all know that the Old Testament God is a vengeful diety, He told us so Himself, but fuck…
Anything that awakens a childhood trauma hurts well beyond the event that activated it. It is unsettling to find yourself, as an adult of many years’ experience, suddenly as vulnerable as a baby about to be mistreated again by an insane caretaker. It makes us feel coldly abandoned, particularly if done to us by somebody we love and trust. There is no end to the cycle of hurt and anger this provokes in us, unless we constantly strive to do the goddamned difficult work not to become enraged, intransigent, capable of doing things to others that we ourselves would suffer terribly if done to us.
On the other hand, of course, much easier to simply join an angry mob, under incoherent banners, to scream, pump your fist in unison, and let the fucking chips fucking fall where they may.
What never gets old is a high-minded party taking the high road in a fight with a psychopathic enemy. While the high-minded party cites respect for precedents, norms and common decency, the low-minded party, unhampered by any thought of fairness in a fight to the death, smiles as it straps on a switchblade-toed iron boot for below the belt kicking.
The meaning of Make of America Great Again, year 2000 model, while the final ruling in Bush v. Gore was pending:
The wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas said today that she was working at a conservative research group gathering resumes for appointments in a possible Bush administration but that she saw no conflict between her job and her husband’s deliberations on a case that could decide the presidency.
The comments from the justice’s wife, Virginia Lamp Thomas, a former Republican Congressional aide, came as a federal judge in Nashville said Justice Thomas faced a serious conflict of interest as a result of his wife’s work for the Heritage Foundation.
The foundation has close ties to the Republican Party and would probably have a say in the hiring of key government officials if Gov. George W. Bush assumed the presidency. In e-mail distributed on Capitol Hill earlier this month, Mrs. Thomas solicited resumes ”for transition purposes” from the government oversight committees of Congress.
A decision by Justice Thomas to recuse himself could alter the outcome of the case now before the court, which is weighing whether to allow a manual recount of votes in Florida. On Saturday, by a vote of 5 to 4, the court blocked the recount for now. JusticeThomas, who was appointed to the court by President George Bush, Governor Bush’s father, was in the majority.If Justice Thomas were to recuse himself, it could result in a 4-to-4 tie in the case now before it, which would allow the ruling by the Florida Supreme Court to stand.
”There is no conflict here,” Mrs. Thomas said in an interview. She insisted that she rarely discussed matters before the Supreme Court with her husband and that Justice Thomas therefore should not consider recusing himself from the landmark case.
A spokesman for Vice President Al Gore said he had no comment on accusations of a conflict of interest. ”The Vice President has the highest regard for the independent judiciary, so we’re not going to comment on the various questions that have been raised,” said Mark Fabiani, a Gore campaign spokesman.
Ah! The fucking high road, boys and girls!Over and over.
It was surprisingly hard to find another source for this story I dimly recalled of the brilliant, unprincipled Scalia’s decision that he and Clarence Thomas would not recuse themselves from deciding the 2000 presidential election on 5-4 partisan grounds. It must have taken me ten minutes, and several searches to corroborate my recollection. The information below is pretty specific, and would not be hard to further verify, if anyone truly cared to. It supports with detail what I remembered of that stunning one-off Supreme Court overreach, the one that ushered in our age of neo-fascism/anything for a win, a savage, steel-toed kick to the groin, though arguably against the rules, is no disgrace, nor disqualifying, if the ref is on your side.
Besides Thomas, Scalia also took part in the decision while a close relative had a substantial interest in the outcome. Scalia’s son Eugene is a partner in the Washington office of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, where one of the senior partners is Theodore B. Olson, who argued Bush’s case before the Supreme Court.
Scalia refused to recuse himself from Bush v. Gore, although the lead lawyer for the plaintiff was, in effect, his son’s boss. He took the same position in the various legal proceedings that accompanied the impeachment of Bill Clinton, beginning with the Supreme Court’s decision to permit Paula Jones to proceed with her lawsuit against Clinton for sexual harassment, in which Olson provided legal assistance.
The personal conflicts-of-interest involving Thomas and Scalia were one-day wonders in the media, then quickly dropped after the two justices supplied Bush’s margin of victory in the 5-4 decision to halt the Florida recount. This kid-glove treatment is in marked contrast to the use of minor or even imaginary ethical infractions to witch-hunt cabinet-level officials during Clinton’s eight years in the White House.
Independent counsel investigations were carried out into the affairs of Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, Labor Secretary Alexis Herman, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros, and, of course, Bill and Hillary Clinton, on much flimsier evidence than is already apparent in relation to the Supreme Court justices.
A friend, making the point that the left and the right both live in echo-chambers today, asked me if I believed things I heard from the media sources I generally trust. I told him I did. He smiled and rested his case — everybody on both sides faithfully believes the bullshit of their own political side. I smiled and let it slide, as we were having a nice dinner, and there was no need to further comment on this unending, rapidly escalating, dark money funded march to one-party rule, the open oligarchy that has been plowing ahead for decades here, during our long “culture war”. It occurs to me that next time we have dinner I have to clarify one thing.
When I read something that surprises me, or hear something that sounds too outrageous, or convenient, to be true, I consult the world’s knowledge base that is in my pocket. It is so fucking easy to find corroboration or refutation in a few seconds of research by looking at a few disparate sources. If Democracy Now!, The Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal all agree that certain things actually happened a certain way, it’s a pretty safe bet they happened that way.
Certain claims are easy to dismiss out of hand, like the brief rumor during Donald Trump’s alarming rise to power that Trump and his friend Sheldon Adelson gang banged a thirteen year old girl — and videotaped themselves doing it. You wouldn’t put it past men of their high moral standing, maybe, but at the same time, I knew the story was clearly bullshit. That one I didn’t need to check. But there are claims that shock, like that all but twelve House Trumpists recently voted against lowering the price of insulin, and those claims are easy to find multiple sources to confirm or refute, or spin according to echo chamber. Verification takes literally seconds. Here you go:
So, yes, I generally trust Ari Melber, Mehdi Hasan, Amy Goodman or Glenn Kirschner, when they make statements about reality, or present complex issues. I generally dismiss the vapors that come out of things like furrow browed TV dinner heir Tucker Swanson Dansby Dickhead Carlson’s puckered blow hole. Make a false equivalence between these sources of information/disinformation if you like, but also, do an honest ten seconds work before accepting statements from any of those sources and we’ll compare notes afterwards. Then I’ll join you on your armed trip to that DC pizza place to liberate those child sex slaves Hillary and Barbara Streisand keep chained up there for Tom Hanks to molest and bleed, for his Satanic pleasure.
It is laid out clearly and succinctly in this short, illuminating lecture by master expository storyeller Sheldon Whitehouse. This is the latest installment of his series The Scheme, on the capture of the federal judiciary by the deep pocketed radical right, part 13, so far, and maybe the best, though every installment of this is great, memorable, important and well worth listening to.
Hillary Clinton, a bright, very competent but fairly uninspiring neo-liberal advocate of incrementalism and espouser of the meritocracy of her fellow Ivy League high achievers, society’s best, brightest and most ambitious (since childhood), was pilloried for referring to the ‘vast rightwing conspiracy” that regularly, and damagingly, attacked her for decades. She was not wrong about the conspiracy which has been actively and effectively changing American politics into a no-holds-barred blood match for decades now and is in sight of its goal of a permanent one-party government directly controlled by the wealthy white partisans ofthe 1%.
Not all conspiracies are hatched out of unfounded social media claims, spun out wildlyto millions online by bot farms in Russia and elsewhere. Pizzagate, once conclusively disproved (even if Hillarywas running a child sex farm in the basement, there was no basement in that pizza place…), metastasized into Q-Anon (not just Hillary, ALL liberals are Christ-hating cannibal pedophiles!), in the spirit of fact deniers‘ now reflexive doubling down and doubling down until the lie is so gigantic nobody can say millions don’t already believe it (see, e.g., Ted Cruz, certification of Biden’s win must be postponed because of massive allegations of widespread fraud believed by millions).
Not all conspiracy theories are created equal. If you can show a straight line in concerted action, to benefit a particular group, such as the straight line wealthy ‘movement conservatives’ have been drawing since shortly after Brown v. Board of Education rocked their world by declaring segregation unconstitutional (partisan judicial activism, that unanimous decision!) then you have a conspiracy. The conspirators don’t have to be in the same room, though they often are, as long as they are single mindedly united in advancing their movement’s common cause,especially if they work in a network of like-minded organizations that they fund with secret donations. Case in point: attorney and president of Liberty Consulting, Ginni Thomas and her long jihad for a conservative, white, Christian fundamentalist USA.
Bush v. Gore, the partisan 5-4 decision that decided the outcome of the 2000 presidential election was one Ginni’s husband, Clarence, should have sat out, for ethical reasons. The Supreme Court stopped the recount in Florida on the theory that, after the Supreme Court delayed the recount until it was too late to meet the constitutional deadline for counting all the uncounted votes, that it was too late and Bush, who led by very few votes (with thousands uncountedand tens of thousands more purged from voter rolls) had to be declared the winner [1].
As for the consistent inconsistency of this transactional group’s jurisprudence and modus operandi, note that this logic — we delayed you and now you’re barred by time limits we made you miss — is identical to the “logic” Republicans used as the rationale for acquitting Trump of any wrongdoing in connection with his January 6 riot to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s victory. McConnell refused toformallyaccept the articles of impeachment until after he had created a procedural Catch 22 — you can’t impeach somebody after they’ve already left office, however compelling the merits of the case might be, sorry, cucks.
Bush v. Gore prevented “irreparable harm” to candidate George W. Bush, in a one-off political ruling it instructed posterity not to cite as a precedent (though it contained the poison pill of the independent state legislature doctrine). The partisan 5-4 decision was placidly accepted by Gore who cited his constitutional obligation to obey the Supreme Court’s decision, stepped aside and let Bush be inaugurated after O’Connor, Scalia, Rehnquist and Kennedy, joined by Clarence Thomas, ruled that Bush would be president, by bare Electoral College majority, Bush having one more than thenecessary 270.
Ginni Thomas worked for the Koch-funded Heritage Foundation at the time, an outfit that was busily staffing the prospective Bush/Cheney administration. Related organizations were on the ground stopping the Florida recount (including young partisans Boof Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, who along with John Roberts, were also dispatched to Florida — check out this unimpeachable source), including self-proclaimed rat-fucker Roger Stone’s Dade County “Brooks Brothers Riot” where a well-dressed mob he assembled managed to stop the lawful recount underway in a large Florida county Bush almost certainly lost by thousands of votes (in an election he “won” by a few hundred, and falling fast, when the Supreme Court ordered the recount to stop). Thomas supplied the deciding vote, giving Bush one vote more than he needed for a one vote Electoral College victory. Democracy. Nothing to see here. Scalia also had the appearance of conflict (I think at least one son was working for the Bush campaign), but Scalia was a brilliant, slippery bastard whose overarching principle was advancing his confidently espoused religious right-wing worldview.
Then, of course, there’s this kind of in-your-face shit, always popular among Dixiecrats and the Ku Klux Klan, very fashionable right now in right wing states’ rights activism, this from Florida prior to the 2000 election:
Here is a December 12, 2000 New York Times article about the appearance of impropriety in Thomas not recusing himself from Bush v. Gore. This “kerfuffle” with his influential extremist wife is certainly nothing new.
A similar conflict of interest presented itself in June 2018, when Clarence Thomas cast the deciding vote on Trump’s “Muslim ban,” which barred foreign nationals from predominantly Muslim countries from traveling to the U.S. In 2017 and 2018, The New Yorker reported, Ginni Thomas’ consulting firm raked in $200,000 from a conservative nonprofit that submitted an amicus brief to the Supreme Court when it was reviewing the ban in Trump v. Hawaii, which in a 5-4 ruling led to the policy being upheld.
Most notably, in January, Clarence Thomas stood firm as the lone dissenter in Trump v. Thompson, voting against allowing the January 6 selection committee to access president records from the Trump White House in their investigation of the Capitol riot. That decision came just a month after the panel was attacked in an open letter by Ginni Thomas, who in December called on House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., to expel Reps. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., and Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., from the House Republican Caucus over their roles in the probe.
Here’s a nice slice of the letter to Kevin McCarthy (who quickly acted on it), signed by a Who’s Who of far-right activists, including Liberty Consultants President Ginni Thomas:
The actions of Reps. Cheney and Kinzinger on behalf of House Democrats have given supposedly bipartisan justification to an overtly partisan political persecution that brings disrespect to our country’s rule of law, legal harassment to private citizens who have done nothing wrong, and which demeans the standing of the House.
One month later, her husband, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, took part in a case crucial to the same committee’s work: former president Donald Trump’s request to block the committee from getting White House records that were ordered released by President Biden and two lower courts.
Thomas was the only justice to say he would grant Trump’s request. . .
. . . The first major case that drew national attention to that potential conflict came in 2000, when the fate of the presidential campaign between Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore came before the Supreme Court. At the time, Ginni Thomas was working with the Heritage Foundation to recommend people for jobs within a possible Bush administration. Some Democrats called for Clarence Thomas to recuse himself from hearing the case that would decide the presidency, but Ginni Thomas told the New York Times at the time that “There is no conflict” and that she rarely discussed cases with her husband.
Well, at least we get the occasional self-reflective mea culpa from the outlying Republican:
Sandra Day O’Connor, who was one of the five votes that gave Bush and Cheney the 2000 election (when you’re a swing vote, in a pinch, you have to swing with your team), later opined that the Supreme Court intervening to declare George W. Bush the winner (by a Florida decided Electoral College majority of 271-266) of a close election he’d almost certainly lost was “probably a mistake”:
Now she tells us. More than 12 years after the fact, retired Justice Sandra Day O’Connor said it was probably a mistake for the Supreme Court to hear Bush v. Gore and anoint George W. Bush as president of the United States.
“It [should more accurately read “we” — ed.] took the case and decided it at a time when it was still a big election issue,” Justice O’Connor told the Chicago Tribune editorial board on Friday. “Maybe the court should have said, ‘We’re not going to take it, goodbye.’
She continued: “Obviously the court did reach a decision and thought it had to reach a decision. It turned out the election authorities in Florida hadn’t done a real good job there and kind of messed it up. And probably the Supreme Court added to the problem at the end of the day.”
The result, she allowed, “stirred up the public” and “gave the court a less than perfect reputation.”
Granted, we don’t know for sure whether Justice O’Connor wanted to take Bush v. Gore. Only four justices have to agree to hear a case. But we do know that she sided with the majority on the actual decision, which stopped the recounting in Florida and gave a one-vote majority in the Electoral College to the man who lost the national popular vote. The ruling was a huge stain on the court’s reputation because it appeared to be — may well have been — blatantly partisan.
[1]
While the four-member liberal minority argued that the federal courts had traditionally deferred to state courts in the interpretation of state constitutions and state election laws, the five-member majority discarded their usual posture of support for “states’ rights” when it came into conflict with the interests of the Republican Party and its ultra-right backers.
Three days later, the same 5-4 majority handed down its final ruling, declaring, in a perfect Catch-22, that the delay in the recount—caused by its own order—had made it impossible to complete a recount in time to meet the December 12 deadline for certifying electors. Accordingly, the decision of the Republican-controlled state government, awarding the electors to Bush, was upheld.
Because the three ultra-right members could not obtain agreement from two other conservatives Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy, to base the decision on Scalia’s Article II claim that the American people have no constitutional right to vote for president, the court majority found an entirely new legal argument to support its predetermined outcome: putting Bush in the White House.
Ginni Thomas was Trump’s initial informal Czarina of loyalty telling him who to fire for disloyalty and who to hire because they would be loyal to him personally and to his mission to make America “great” again. Her services were so valuable to Trump that he eventually employed someone on site, full-time job, his one time body man, baggage handler and confidant, John McEntee. Was Johnny qualified for the job? At least as qualified as Ginni Thomas (or her dear colleague Sidney Powell, or Jared, for that matter). Checkthis shit out:
Sadly, neither Ginni or Johnny were outliers in Trump’s inner circle. They are two of the many loyal, ambitious assistantsthat any self-respecting (or even self-loathing) autocrat can always find, drawn to power like flies to shit.
At this point, there’s very little distance between the fringes of the modern Republican Party and the elites who lead it. Superficial differences of affect and emphasis mask shared views and ways of seeing. In fact, members of the Republican elite are very often the fringe figures in question.
Take Virginia (known as Ginni) Thomas. She is an influential and well-connected conservative political activist who has been a fixture of Washington since the late 1980s. A fervent supporter of former President Donald Trump, she reportedly urged his chief of staff, Mark Meadows, to do everything in his power to subvert the results of the 2020 presidential election and keep Trump in power. And judging from her text messages to Meadows — which include the hope that the “Biden crime family & ballot fraud co-conspirators” are awaiting trial before military tribunals at Guantánamo Bay — she is also something of a QAnon believer, one of millions of Americans who embrace the conspiracy theory that Trump is fighting a messianic war against the “deep state.”
And the beauty part is that nobody can force a Supreme Court Justice to say anything but “make me!” and “I know you are, but what am I?” as far as any enforceable ethics rules. Expect Thomas to follow Mitch McConnell’s public advice and fuck the appearance of so-called impropriety. We will likely see another lone dissent by Thomas in the case his former clerk John Eastman will bring to the Supreme Court to try to block release of his incriminating emails toTrump’s war room co-conspirators.
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