A broken clock is right twice a day. Tip of the skull cap to Heather Cox Richardson.
(Fucking Twitter apparently requires permission to reproduce a video from Twitter, which I don’t know how to get, so click the link and watch the 15 second clip of Trump nonchalantly saying the wall Mexico paid for would have been completed by now “had we won the election”)
And this refreshing bit of conceited honesty from the same source, just in:
American Exceptionalism is well-known and beyond dispute, though, of course, it cuts both ways. We are the land of the free and the home of the brave. We lead the world in spending on health care, by a country mile. We lead the world in death by constitutionally guaranteed firearms. Military spending, we’re exceptional by a landslide, numero uno mundial. It’s not even a contest if you put our budget up against the total of the next five miltary big spenders. Though not among the very worst nations for infant mortality, our numbers are impressively high considering our great wealth. We have a deadly, ongoing partisan war over basic health precautions during a deadly plague, for fuck’s sake, and a raging debate over gathering, frequently devastating climate catastrophe we are all witnessing. We have Texas Justice.
Here’s a professor, a constitutional scholar, describing our remarkable, indeed, Exceptional, constitutional democracy. He lays out the unamended anti-democratic traditions enshrined in our original, elite-protecting constitution, blueprint for the most anti-majority democracy in the modern world, by design of the sainted Framers. The Electoral College and non-proportional apportionment of Senators, check it out, fascinating food for thought.
The Anti-defamation League, a group of Jews who scream in the mass media and bring lawsuits whenever a mainstream outfit pushes an overtly anti-Semitic idea, threatened FOX “news” and forced them to take down this cartoon right out of Germany’s Der Sturmer 1936.
Before FOX was forced (by the Jews) to take it down 15,978 MAGA adherents liked it. 754 were moved to make comments, no doubt about the sinister truth of the cartoon, that fucking Jews control the child raping, child-blood drinking, godless, communist Democrat (sic) party. If that many FOX diehards had come out to vote for Joe Manchin III’s Republican opponent in the last senatorial race in West Virginia things would have gone differently. If the well-drawn cartoon (nice piece of artwork, credit where it’s due) hadn’t come down, the number of likes it would have by now would eclipse Centrist Joe’s 290,000 total votes in the West Virginia race he won by three points.
But a couple of larger points, before I get back to the meeting with my fellow rabbis to figure out how to get more gullible colored people into the country to vote for the party that supports intolerable affronts like affordable child care, skilled elder care, universal health care, slowing the destruction of our habitat, replacing police as first responders to mental health crises, and other communist pipe dreams like that, and to insert these coloreds to replace the “legacy Americans” (tip of the yarmulke to Swanson TV dinner heir Tucker Carlson) who embrace conspiracy theories about the one non-right wing billionaire we know about, George Soros. The story goes that Soros, at the age of six or so, worked closely with the Nazis and profited handsomely by selling Jewish homes. That’s some power, if you think about it. Diabolical, really. No wonder anti-Semites hate Soros!
This cartoon could work better as a real reflection of the USA in 2021 if you had a three headed puppeteer, say, Charles Koch, a descendant of Andrew Mellon and the reclusive, autistic math genius Robert Mercer (who put Trump over the top by hooking him up with Sloppy Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Alternative-Fact), working the puppets for tax cuts for the wealthy, right wing extremist federal judges and dismantling all government regulation (while enforcing laws prohibiting abortion). Or the monstrous Charles Koch could stand in for the rest of his network of philanthropic psychopaths, or Rupert Murdoch could, for that matter.
One more point, and I hesitate to make this obvious point, even as I make it with my traditional shrugging Jewish irony:
Doesn’t the fact that Jews forced super-powerful billionaire reactionary Rapert Merde-och to take down an arguably anti-Semitic cartoon showing a very ugly Jewish puppeteer controlling things kind of make the anti-Semites’ point for them? I mean, nu?
Here’s a good graphic demonstrating how powerful minority rule is in our dodgy experiment in representative democracy. A wealthy conservative senator from one of the poorest states in the US has flatly announced his veto of Build Back Better. Manchin, who has almost always voted with the political right (he voted for Sessions, Barr, Gorsuch, banning abortions after 20 weeks, Kavanaugh) won his seat by a slim 19,397 margin over his Republican challenger, in an election less than half of West Virginia voters turned out for. What we Americans call a mandate.
He abruptly announced on Rupert Murdoch’s FOX network that he is tanking the popular Build Back Better Bill he has pretended to negotiate over for months. He said he cannot “in good conscience” support a bill to tackle catastrophic climate change (fossil fuel industry donors and coal barons hate this), lift children out of poverty (back to austerity, little West Virginians), create jobs for caregivers, home care options for seniors and otherwise shore up our shaky social safety net. President Manchin claims he’s concerned about inflation, and the national debt, and that poor people will only waste direct government child care payments (on drugs) if it’s given to them, that providing seniors with dental and vision care as part of the Medicare we all purchase is a slippery slope to … communism?
Then, after snarling about being called a liar and an obstructionist, he gets in his Maserati and drives to the yacht he lives on. Oh, well, at least he doesn’t own any slaves.
If the GOP manages to take back the Senate in 2022, expect this millionaire man of the people (his people) to immediately defect to the party that will immediately end the “bipartisan” filibuster.
It’s an obvious point that fear makes us feel vulnerable and weak and anger makes us feel righteous and strong. When you are afraid you are at your most helpless, an extremely hard feeling to sit with. Anger, on the other hand, makes you feel mobilized against an intolerable threat. Frustrated by feeling helpless in the face of terror, or shame, it is common to lash out in anger. The nice thing about anger is that it makes you feel justified, and it is much easier to feel than fear. The object of anger is not as important as the certainty that you’re right to be mad, a safe target of anger is often selected, even if that person has little to do with why you’re angry, or afraid.
Neuroscientists have done research into how anger works on a biological level. There is a center of the brain, the insula, that is engaged whenever you have a strong emotion. The insula is what makes you unable to find fault in the person you are infatuated with. It glows when you have a creative idea or are doing something you love to do. It is a very important part of the brain. It lights up when you’re angry. So they attach electrodes, get people angry, and watch their ability to analyze reality become disabled. All the angry person can see, while the insula is engaged, is their anger. It is literally impossible, while angry, to see another person’s point of view, to take in an explanation, to see any gradations in human experience. You are certain of only one thing– that you are completely right to be mad as hell.
The most widespread form of human genius is our ability to rationalize anything we feel strongly about. A glance at politics shows us this in an instant. If you supported a candidate who lost, that loss had to have been because of massive fraud and you have every right to be mad as hell and do whatever it takes to restore justice. Anything can be weaponized, it turns out — science’s best precautions against a new, highly infectious, deadly disease can be turned into infuriating provocations, designed by evil people solely to tyrannize and having nothing to do with public safety. When anger rules fear seems to disappear and the world becomes black and white, simple, good vs. evil. The thing you are afraid of does not go anywhere, but your fear is masked by the energetic righteousness of anger.
Demagogues have always known this and used it to get and keep power. I think of the nobility of eastern Europe, born booted and spurred to mercilessly ride the peasants, the serfs, the poor and the powerless. Whenever the mood of the masses was turning ugly the lords and barons set the mobs on the Jews, who were said to be to blame for all evil in the world. A nice drunken pogrom makes the mob feel much better, stronger, more powerful. It allows them to blow off steam by beating, raping, burning, killing and looting. It does nothing to give them any measure of control over their own miserable lives, but for a while it is apparently intoxicating to join others to do violence to people you hate. Think of mobs in this country, doing the exact same thing to a succession of immigrant groups (and indigenous ones), most commonly and consistently to Blacks. Think of the myth of White Supremacy, the massive pogrom in Tulsa, Oklahoma a hundred years ago, the popular rage of local powerless whites incensed that a prosperous Black middle class had emerged in that oil boom town.
Think of someone you love, who is seized by fear. Fear of death is a big one at the moment, and it is entirely rational to fear death right now, during a deadly pandemic that is the perfect accompaniment to the worldwide rise of angry autocrats who lead violent mass movements. Was Berlin in 1932 a fearful place? Our moment in history is not that different, but let’s focus on the personal. Take any fear, the fear of not being loved. It hurts like hell to feel it, and it feels unfair, like a betrayal, when someone close to you withdraws empathy. What did we do to deserve having sympathy and consideration taken from us? Painful as hell. The predictable response to fear and loss is anger. There is a theory, that sounds reasonable to me, that depression is anger turned against the self. Anger and depression is a cocktail as potent as a deadly pandemic amid a worldwide march toward fascism. Don’t drink it, though, it will fucking kill you.
From today’s New York Times:
Even as House Republicans have condemned the investigation as a political witch hunt, the committee found support this week from Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the top Republican in the chamber. Mr. McConnell, who in May led a filibuster that blocked the creation of an independent commission to investigate the attack, said this week that he believed the House committee was uncovering valuable information.
“It was a horrendous event,” Mr. McConnell said of the Capitol siege in a TV interview. “I think what they are seeking to find out is something the public needs to know.”
Which, of course, is obviously why I led a filibuster to prevent the creation of an independent commission to investigate the horrendous event. And why I waited almost two months to concede that President Biden won the election. And why I need your money and support more than ever.
Self-proclaimed totally innocent rat fucker Roger Stone, one of Trump’s closest long-time advisors (unofficial! No legal connection to Trump!) and coiner of “Stop the Steal” (2000, 2016, 2020, 2024) appeared before the January 6 Select Committee for a few minutes yesterday to assert his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. He claimed that Democrats just want to trap people into fake perjury so they can persecute them. The multi-millionaire then began a crowd-funding campaign for his legal defense and to pay for around the clock security guards.
Dirty trickster Stone is an innovator in political dirty tricks who raked in a mountain of cash with his former partner Paul Manafort (no connection to Trump! He worked for free!). Stone has been integral to the disinformation, outright lying and threats of right-wing political violence culture we now live in.
Here is a capsule description of this cynical, destructive man’s career as a presidential campaign disinformation specialist from a recent episode of historians Heather Cox Richardson and Joanne Freeman’s Now and Then podcast called Disinformation and Democracy:
Heather Cox Richardson:
. . . And one of the things that’s interesting about the Nixon campaign . . . is that one of the people involved as a young man who carries an image of Nixon on his back to this day in a tattoo, and that is Roger Stone, who was a 20 year old operative in that campaign. And he did things in that, like making a donation from a fake organization called the Young Socialist Alliance, to somebody who was opposing Nixon in the primary, using things like that to go ahead and again, slime opponents. And that business of running politics by lying is going to make a huge difference in our lives in the year 2000. Thanks again to Roger Stone.
So Roger Stone, again, cuts his teeth in this idea of running politics by convincing people of things that are not true, by changing the trajectory of reality by creating narratives and creating images. And he is instrumental in, what’s known as the Brooks Brothers riot in 2000 after the election of that year. And the way that that played out was that the election of that year was on November 7th. And on that election, it became clear that the outcome of the 2000 election would depend on the electoral votes from Florida. There were a lot of problems with that Florida election; there was a butterfly ballot in which you didn’t actually read down one side of the page and then down the other, you were supposed to read page to page, which meant that a bunch of democratic voters get siphoned off to vote for a far-right candidate. There were a number of people kicked off the roles immediately before the election. But after the election, it becomes clear that Bush has a lead in the state, but as they continue to do recounts, the numbers of votes that put Bush in the lead start to drop, and they start up by a lot. Usually recounts don’t change the vote very much, but in fact, the recounts in Florida drop Bush’s lead in the state from 1,784 votes, to 327 votes,, then to 154 votes.
And finally, attention comes down to Miami-Dade County, which is a democratic stronghold. And there, it seems likely that Gore is going to pick up a lot of votes in a recount. So on November 21st, the Florida Supreme Court authorized a manual recount in four counties and set a deadline for November 26th on that. And then on November 22nd, the Miami-Dade County Canvasing Board decided to focus solely on the contested ballots in order to meet their deadline. And so, they’re trying to hunker down, and trying to avoid the media frenzy that’s descending on them. And so in order to go ahead and avoid that they move into a smaller room on the 19th floor of the County Building, so that they can be close to the ballot scanning machine. That day hundreds of people from around the country, including a bunch of Republican staffers descend into South Florida to protest the recount.
There’s a New York Congressman, for example, a man named John Sweeney who was working for the Bush campaign, who ordered protestors to shut it down, meaning to shut down the recount. And there’s more and more pressure on the Miami-Dade recount that eventually becomes known as the Brooks Brothers riot, because the protestors who were trying to shut it down, come dressed in buttoned shirts and sport jackets. And they appear at the room outside where the counting is taking place, and they start screaming, “Stop the count, stop the fraud, let us in.” And the protestors increasingly accuse the Miami-Dade counters of stealing ballots and of stealing the election. The guy in charge of that was the democratic county chairman, a guy named Joe Geller. And six days after the Brooks brothers riot, Geller told Salon, and this is a quote, “This was not a Miami moment. It was outsiders, Hitler Youth sent in by the Republicans to intimidate the election officials.”
And that’s actually exactly what it was. It was a Stone operation to go ahead and orchestrate that protest in Miami. He recruited a bunch of Cuban American protestors by warning on the radio, for example, that democratic candidate Al Gore was going to stage a coup, the same way that Fidel Castro had staged a coup in Cuba. He’d organized phone banks to encourage Miami Republicans to storm the counting site. And on the day of the rioting, he actually was in a Winnebago outside, organizing the protests. So there was this sense that by manipulating the media and getting people to think that there was something untoward going on in what was really quite a legitimate recounting, that he could go ahead and orchestrate and end to that recount. And that is exactly what happened.
Joanne Freeman:
And think about the layers of impact of that. So first of all, you have the people doing the recount who have the impression there’s this mass of people banging down the doors, wanting to end it all, and that there’s mass opposition. You’re getting an awareness outside of that place that somehow or other there’s a mass movement, mass opposition against what, of course, must be some kind of illicit attempt to steal the election. And that the fact that there’s that kind of protest shows that things not right down there in Florida. So on many, many levels, this out and out fabrication can spread to voters, can spread to the public, can have an impact in Florida, and in the counting of votes in Florida, it echoes, it resounds out in a lot of different ways. And it’s completely fabricated.
Heather Cox Richardson:
Well in a sense, we’re talking about information, and how in a democracy, you desperately need to have an informed public, but the manipulation of that information into disinformation that then can be transmitted increasingly quickly over first telegraph lines, then telephone lines, then radio, then television, and now the internet, means that we have a real problem with disinformation, and with its ability to whip people up to an emotional reaction to go ahead and change our history, change our political history. And in the case of 2000, stop a recount that looked as if it were going to put a Democrat who won the popular vote into the White House, rather than a Republican.
Joanne Freeman:
To act on impulse and act on emotion rather than to act on real information. So first of all, that in and of itself, not only is it disinformation, it’s anti-information. It’s trying to get people emotionally riled up. And that kind of emotion is always going to be more effective than plain old, boring truth when it comes to what’s being publicized and what’s catching the public eye. And as you just said, Heather, different forms of technology are helping that transformation, that spread of deliberately emotion rousing lies, to change the whole political picture and alter American political history.
You know, if you think about it, democracy in and of itself is a conversation of sorts between people who hold power, and the people who have given it to them. And the process of governing has to do with the communication back and forth of people with power, and the people who’ve given it to them, that’s where accountability comes in. But any form of technology that alters the nature of that conversation, alters democracy. It makes perfect sense, if democracy is a conversation between people with power and those who’ve given it, any technology that changes that conversation is going to transform democracy. And the question then really becomes: how does the nation adjust to that new technology? How is that new technology reigned in or accommodated what happens in that moment when people are trying to figure out in essence, a new language of politics. And depending on what happens there, really depends the direction of the nation’s politics.
source
Lawyers for two misguided patriots who attacked Capitol Police on January 6 and made their way into the building to impede the final counting of Electoral College Votes for the candidate who won the election argued their clients did not violate 18 US Code Sec. 1512 and moved to have the federal criminal charge under 1512 dismissed.
The lawyers argued that the joint session of congress was, for a variety of arguable legalistic rationales, not an “official proceeding” and that “corruptly obstructs, influences or impedes” gives unconstitutionally ambiguous notice to rioters who break into a closed Capitol building to merely stop the steal, because “corruptly” is a vague, overbroad and essentially meaningless word.
Federal judge Dabney L. Friedrich, of the DC District Court, was having none of this and wrote a precise and basically unappealable decision denying the motion. In 25 crisp pages she clarified why the law applied directly to the actions of two men who assaulted police with a variety of deadly weapons and forced their way into the Capitol to obstruct, influence or impede the official proceeding then underway.
As for explaining what “corruptly” means in the legal sense (and in the popular sense), she did so unambiguously:
In this sense, the plain meaning of “corruptly” encompasses both corrupt (improper) means and corrupt (morally debased) purposes. … The Court agrees that § 1512(c)’s proscription of knowing conduct undertaken with the specific intent to obstruct, impede, or influence the proceeding provides a clear standard to which the defendant can conform his behavior.
source [1]
It’s hard to think that this same federal law would not apply to an elected official who had been informed by the Attorney General of the United States that voter fraud claims had been exhaustively investigated and were “bullshit” and who nonetheless aggressively spread a knowing lie, organized a rally, and an unpermitted march (no reason to have phalanxes of DC cops on the route to the Capitol, which would have happened with a permit for a march, you understand), to corruptly obstruct, influence or impede the last official session of Congress relating to the peaceful transfer of power.
What do you think, Merrick?
[1]
Jennifer Rubin wrote an excellent piece called “A federal court has ruled that obstructing the electoral vote count is illegal. Trump should panic.” describing the case, the ruling and the potential worries for Mr. Trump and his most ardent loyalists.
Granted, Paul McCartney is a musical genius, but check out this simple demonstration of how you can compose and play complex and beautiful music without having the foggiest idea how to read or write it. Maybe the best explanation of how to organically learn an instrument that I’ve ever seen, nicely done, Sir Paul!
gratuitousblahg 