The Supreme Court ruled today that Mr. Trump’s long hidden financial records, including his tax returns, must be turned over to the Manhattan District Attorney to be presented to the Grand Jury looking into allegations that Trump committed financial crimes. It has taken only four or five months, since lower federal courts rejected Trump’s lawyers’ idiotic, increasingly weak arguments that now private citizen Trump still has an absolute right to hide anything that might prove incriminating. Only a few short months for the Supreme Court to state the obvious, in accordance with its own opinion on the same matter issued in July. Here’s the NY Times today:
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday rejected a last-ditch attempt by former President Donald J. Trump to shield his financial records, issuing a brief, unsigned order requiring Mr. Trump’s accountants to turn over his tax and other records to prosecutors in New York.
The court’s order was a decisive defeat for Mr. Trump, who had gone to extraordinary lengths to keep his tax returns and related documents secret. There were no dissents noted.
Compare the deliberate speed of this decision (and the going on two years non-decision on whether it is lawful for a president to instruct former subordinates — Don McGahn, John Bolton [1], et al — to defy lawful Congressional subpoenas) with the overnight overturning of the stay of execution of a psychotic federal death row inmate in the days before Trump reluctantly left office after a rigged, stolen election deprived him of his rightful second term as POTUS.
The reasons for this are clear.
In one case, we have the public’s right to know if the president is a long-time felon and the extent of his seeming corruption. A decision like that takes time, and requires extending multiple bites at the legal apple, and every available appeal, to protect Trump’s presumption of innocence. In the case of an immediate decision on state killing, we have the president’s undisputed right to expedite the execution of any condemned federal death row inmate, especially when he is about to leave office.
A several day stay of execution would have been fatal to the president’s unquestioned right to kill anyone he has the legal power to kill. Lisa Montgomery and the others he chose to kill had to die! [2] Imagine the harm to all of us if Biden had extended the stay of execution, or, God forbid, commuted the tortured, heavily medicated murderer’s death sentence to life in prison without parole!
Lisa Montgomery, dead of lethal injection hours after Supreme Court instantly vacated the stay of execution, a week before Trump left office
[1]
You remember the patriotic Bolton, the hero who joined McGahn’s federal law suit to determine whether he had to obey a congressional subpoena, and, months after Trump’s first impeachment, published his tell-all book about the many reasons Trump should have been removed from office
John R. Bolton, the former national security adviser, says in his new book that the House in its impeachment inquiry should have investigated President Trump not just for pressuring Ukraine but for a variety of instances when he sought to use trade negotiations and criminal investigations to further his political interests.
Mr. Bolton describes several episodes where the president expressed a willingness to halt criminal investigations “to, in effect, give personal favors to dictators he liked,” citing cases involving major firms in China and Turkey. “The pattern looked like obstruction of justice as a way of life, which we couldn’t accept,” Mr. Bolton writes, saying that he reported his concerns to Attorney General William P. Barr.
Mr. Bolton also adds a striking new accusation by describing how Mr. Trump overtly linked tariff talks with China to his own political fortunes by asking President Xi Jinping to buy American agricultural products to help him win farm states in this year’s election. Mr. Trump, he writes, was “pleading with Xi to ensure he’d win.” Mr. Bolton said that Mr. Trump “stressed the importance of farmers, and increased Chinese purchases of soybeans and wheat in the electoral outcome.”
Montgomery was the 11th prisoner to be killed by lethal injection since Donald Trump resumed federal executions last July after a 17-year hiatus. The president is an ardent supporter of capital punishment.
Can’t even read the aggravating New York Times these days without pandemic-profiteer Jeff Bezos continually sticking his expensive free speech in your face (he has the most insistently intrusive ads I’ve seen anywhere, this one popped up over and over as I scrolled through the online NY Times).
First, more than doubling the federal minimum wage, a radical idea only a few years ago, seems only fair. It’s not like the $600/week for a full-time worker is going to make anyone middle class, but the $15/hr. wage will lift millions out of working poverty. Imagine the difference between making $290 a week and $600 a week. If there is concern about bankrupting small businesses, there can be a tax adjustment for small employers, or some other offset, but none of that has anything to do with the Bezos ad about why he’s supporting this pay increase for our lowest paid citizens.
I guess it’s the same reason Bezos hired some heavy hitters from the stable of Charles Koch to fight back against the ungrateful Amazon sweat-shop workers in Alabama, and elsewhere, who are trying to organize to attack Bezos’s absolute right to have a union-free workforce.
Probably the same reason for the massive public relations effort to villainize the fired New York City Amazon warehouse worker who, during the early days of the pandemic, when the virus was ravaging New York City for the first time, organized a strike seeking safety measures in the warehouse he worked in.
Amazon employees who go public with their complaints are likely to lose their jobs. The corporation prohibits its workers from commenting publicly on any aspect of its business, without prior approval from executives.
A traitorous executive at Facebook released a recording of Jeff’s fellow-billionaire Mark Zuckerberg telling Facebook executives that if the government comes after your company seeking to regulate its operations, its profits, “existential threats”, “you go to the mat” to fight those efforts. You fight like hell, with all the weapons you’ve got, or you’re not going to be one of the ten wealthiest men in the world.
When you are very, very rich, and defending your wealth with top lawyers, public relations teams and advertising is deductible as a business expense, you fight like hell with every means at your disposal not to be taken advantage of by hoards of smelly losers.
You can understand why the freedom loving owners of Texas energy providers would be against coercive regulations that could prevent them from charging $2,000 a day for electricity during a massive, deadly power outage. Supply and Demand, Free Market, motherfuckers.
So, sure, it’s good that the world’s richest man supports a minimum $30,000 a year income for full-time American workers. Nobody should be forced to work for less than that in our wealthy nation. And, yeah, Jeff has long been devoted to seeing the federal minimum wage raised to the same generous $600 a week/$31,200 annually (based on 52 weeks of work) he already voluntarily pays to the vast majority of the full-time workers in his massive workforce. God bless him for it.
I just heard a great discussion with Masha Gessen about the autocrat’s (or cult leader’s) imperative to replace thought and inquiry with unthinking, unquestioning belief, based on an overarching worldview (or “ideology”). No totalitarian leader can come to power without convincing multitudes that debate based on so-called facts, truth, outmoded common agreement about empirical reality — what their eyes and ears may tell them — means nothing compared to the belief system their leader instills in them. This destruction of belief in “fact” and its replacement with narrative-driving “alternative fact” is a precondition for any takeover by an authoritarian regime (or cult leader, though Gessen didn’t speak of cults, cults and autocracy have the same operating system).
The only sure route to the autocrat’s desired end is by instilling an “ideology,” a belief system that eliminates the need for doubt, instantly invalidates all criticism and cuts off the need for thought, replacing these things with loyal obedience to the inevitable historical imperatives dictated by ideology. The expression of ideology is often reducible to an easily remembered phrase.
Why do thousands gather on January 6th to enthusiastically support the outlandish and many times disproven proposition that there was massive voter fraud among Democrats and an illegitimate communist-puppet president is about to be sworn in? Why do 140 Representatives in the House and a dozen Senators stand to voice this baseless objection to certifying an election that was deemed fair by members of both parties and certified in all 50 states? Because tens of millions are angrily repeating these “ideologically-driven” allegations, tens of millions who voted to keep #Stop the Steal proponents in Congress, and therefore, those allegations of a rigged, stolen election might be true, must now be investigated! Before it’s too late!!!!
Here’s Hannah:
GESSEN: The way Arendt saw Hitler’s ideology – and she wrote about ideology a lot, but not in a way that you probably would intuitively imagine she wrote about ideology. She didn’t write about ideology as coherent thinking or as a system – as a worldview. She wrote about ideology as definitely a bad thing, as a kind of unthinking system.
SHULZ: (As Hannah Arendt) The last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility.
GESSEN: And she broke down the word ideology into its component parts, one idea taken to its logical extreme to derive from this ideological thinking the laws of history, right? So if history is inexorably moving in that direction, then we can help history along. And so they see themselves as agents of history. So then they go start – go about exterminating the other masses because the laws of history dictate that that be done. In the case of Germany, the idea that the Aryan race would come to rule the world…
Arendt broke down the word ideology into its component parts, one idea taken to its logical extreme to derive from this ideological thinking the laws of history.
With a client’s ideology on trial, and a sufficient number of jurors working with the defense and committed to acquittal, all a lawyer must do is show one incident where the other side is “lying” to prove his case that every enemy of his client is a fucking liar. As Mr. Trump’s lawyer, the sabbath observing David Schoen did with this arguable lie by Adam Schiff [1], who deliberately pronounced the commonly misspelled word “cavalry” in Kylie Jane Kremer’s tweet as “cavalry” [2].
“You see how these filthy, lying socialist Jews do it?” asked last-minute Trump attorney David Schoen, silently, referring to the alleged trickery of his sick and dangerous co-religionist.
Of course, as any Christian knows, and any clever (or even just choleric) Jewish lawyer knows, Calvary was where Jesus Christ was crucified. So, obviously, when talking about the modern day crucifixion of Donald Trump… this Trump supporter clearly meant that the place where Jesus was crucified was on its way. Exclamation point!
You could argue, of course, that in the context of Trump’s December 19 call for a march (no mere protest rally) on January 6, retweeting his “be there, will be wild” promise, the tweet by the person Schiff deliberately and cunningly misquoted could refer to the troops Trump was calling for to march on the Capitol and Stop the Steal (which they, in fact, did).
Of course, “context” is just more lying bullshit, calculated to obstruct and distract, if there is sufficient fervor for your “ideology.” The Trump supporter’s tweet was clearly referring to Our Lord’s crucifixion, which was coming, lying libtards!!!
Meanwhile, in other news, youth around the world are suffering massively from pandemic-induced social isolation. The New York Times reports ‘What’s the point?’ Young People’s Despair Deepens as Covid-19 Crisis Drags On.We philosophical old bastards have years of experience to compare this disorienting, historically unusual situation to, a world before we were all locked down in fear of infection and death. The young have not had as much time to become this philosophical, yet.
[1]
[2]
But this [misspelling] is also a mistake that Trump himself has made. On Jan. 1, promoting the Jan. 6 rally, Trump retweeted a user who also used “calvary” — prompting Merriam-Webster to troll the president by publishing an article on the differences. “Although they begin and end with the same groups of letters, cavalry and calvary are not related in either origin or meaning,” the dictionary company wrote.
I woke from a dream a few weeks back with a sense of wonder about how everything worked out much better than expected throughout. I still clearly remember the dream, the kind impulse leading to oddness and incoherence, the escalating danger, the surprise happy ending. There was every reason to anticipate the worst, things looked worse at every turn — instead, it turned out well for everybody, man and beast alike.
It used to be, prior to our current bellicose, threatening, highly infectious epoch, that sometimes grim-looking situations turned out fine. The unlikely thing happened sometimes and everyone walked away relieved instead of skittering sidewise like agitated crabs on the ocean floor. In our present moment, most of our hope for this kind of mutually beneficial outcome is forgotten.
The encounter where everybody comes away better than they were before was commonly called a win-win scenario, something that is almost impossible to remember, the black and white, toxic way things are now. Surprise happy endings are really not that rare, they certainly weren’t in the past, but this dream hit me with some force, reminded me how unlikely any kind of humane resolution to anything seems in our troubled, troubling, increasingly violent times.
I generally don’t remember dreams in any detail after I’ve had them, this one stayed around for a few days afterwards, is with me now weeks later. I intended to write it out and eventually made a note in my drawing book days that I didn’t need to even look at before writing this[1]. The only detail I forgot was the owner’s threat to call the local police on me — the law and common sense being completely on his side.
I was in the large enclosed porch, or maybe an unfurnished room with floor to ceiling windows. It was in a stranger’s house, a place I wasn’t supposed to be, I was trespassing. When I passed I’d seen there was a dog in there, alone, seemingly trapped, and in some distress, the door to the room was unlocked, or at least easy enough to pop open. The dog seemed traumatized, did not approach me, but watched me, cowering. There was no food or water anywhere to be seen. I was trying to figure out a way to help the poor devil.
As I puzzled over what to do about this dog, in a place where I didn’t know anybody (it seemed to be a small seasonal community, perhaps Cape Cod, during the off-season), a guy walks in the door on the other side of the room. He’s got a dog on a leash, he’s glowering and at the same time seems slightly sheepish. He was a short, stocky black man who reminded me of Cleveland on Family Guy, only he was angry and defensive.
As I began telling him about the dog he admitted that the dog used to be his, that he’d abandoned the dog. He looked guilty when he told me that, but also determined not to take any shit from me about about it. He didn’t know why he did it and he didn’t want to talk about it, was trying to be a tough guy but was obviously hurt, somehow. I told him I wasn’t from around here and asked him if he knew anybody who might be interested in rescuing or fostering the dog, maybe a local vet.
Suddenly the owner of the house, an imposing looking white man in a plaid flannel shirt, entered through the other door.
The scene was set for something bad to happen. The white guy was not happy to find two strangers in his place, trespassers, sitting, engaged in a tense conversation, as if one of them owned the place. He stood at the other end of the open room, demanded to know what the hell we were doing in his house. He may have had a shotgun, if not pointed at us, at hand, it might have been a baseball bat. He was about to call the police, told us he’d let us explain to the cops (his good friends) what the hell we’re doing in his house. I was at a loss for words, start gesticulating toward the dog, began to say something.
The man looks at the dog, as if seeing it for the first time, and it is clearly love at first sight. The dog immediately goes over to the guy who starts petting the dog and ruffling its fur. The man is happy, the dog is happily wagging its tail and gladly accepting the affection. The sheepish, angry black guy leaves quietly through the opposite door with his dog as this is going on. I’m sitting there, relieved to no longer be a suspect or in any jeopardy, watching the man and the dog happily enjoying each other. Everything is suddenly clear, the right thing is happening, no need to explain anything to the man and his new best friend. If anything, the guy will express gratitude toward me when I get up to leave.
I remember a great feeling of peace, of being in a universe where everything is in its place, for the right reason. The feeling was with me when I woke up.It is with me, a little bit, as I write these words.
I woke up (this was maybe three weeks ago) thinking “damn!” and feeling amazed about this dream long after I woke up. It has stayed quite vividly in my memory ever since, very rare for even my best dreams.
I wonder how long it has been since I pictured anything besides troubling, dangerous things inevitably turning to shit, the worst playing out in an escalating death spiral, inevitable as the next bit of widely broadcast lying propaganda enflaming angry, stressed out people on both sides.
The possibility of love and connection and things working out wonderfully for everybody — it hasn’t really gone anywhere, odd to say. It’s just that we’re living in disorienting times, beaten down by a long relentless war to keep unfairness firmly in place and we can hardly remember a time when it wasn’t this relentlessly bitter and threatening, no longer even dreaming of the possibility of things not being exactly as angry as they are right now, or worse.
You’re in trouble, you explain (no words needed), you are understood, no longer in trouble. Instead you get to watch the first flush of new love playing in front of your eyes, everybody getting what they need. Not a bad win-win, I’d say.
I was never a big believer in the existence of “evil,” in spite of abundant proof that evil is out there thriving and scheming. It’s hard to put another word to an administration that ignores a deadly national emergency, and, while repeatedly lying about its severity, allows tens of thousands of us to die preventable deaths during a pandemic, based on how our state voted in the last election. The divisive narcissist who just got voted out of office (arguably), when you boil down all of his other traits, is an evil guy. A malignant narcissist, if you prefer a more clinical term.
It is finally, as extremists have long phrased it, an open battle to the death between good and evil — like the war between the right to participate in the Peculiar Institution and those intent on abolishing human slavery once and for all time.
I don’t know any other word to fully describe this knowing lie by Tucker Carlson, outside of evil — you may have heard this clip on the most recent On The Media (or seen it posted here yesterday).
Hearing this outrageous lie, smugly delivered, to enhance the wallop of its provocation, was like being sucker punched in the face by a smirking, preening rich boy punk, then kicked by said punk, while police stand around watching and laughing. Made me want to throw Tucker on the ground and keep my knee on his neck, just until he lost consciousness:
BROOKE GLADSTONE
Later that evening, Fox primetime hosts Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity drew on increasingly deranged conspiracy theories to denature the evidence [in the impeachment trial –ed].
[CLIP]
TUCKER CARLSON
They’re just flat out lying. There’s no question about that. The question is, why would they lie about this? For an answer, think back to last spring. Beginning on Memorial Day, BLM and their sponsors and corporate America completely changed this country. They changed this country more in five months that it had changed in the previous 50 years. How’d they do that? They used the sad death of a man called George Floyd to upend our society. Months later, we learned that the story they told us about George Ford’s death was an utter lie. There was no physical evidence that George Floyd was murdered by a cop. The autopsy show that George Floyd almost certainly died of a drug overdose. Fentanyl.
[END CLIP]
BROOKE GLADSTONE
Right. A full autopsy report by Minneapolis police found that Floyd had fentanyl and other drugs in his blood. He also had Covid-19. None of that killed him. His death was ruled a homicide. Maybe Tucker will move on to flim-flam less foul, but why would he?
When divisive, ugly, infuriating, easily disprovable lies are broadcast to millions as indisputable proof, and millions then believe them and support, say, the violent nullification of an election based on echoing and re-echoing baseless allegations, the beast broadcasting this false and inflammatory information must be starved.
Sometimes advertisers and donors will abandon a particular celebrity “personality,” when they cross a line, like publicly referring to someone as a “dirty nigger” instead of saying “dirty n-word”, for example, although, for the most part, corporations are, at best, amoral and driven by their responsibility to maximize shareholder profits. There is another source of revenue for outlets like FOX, Newsmax and One America (and you know which one) News Network — massive fees from cable contracts.
When you buy a monthly cable package from Spectrum, or one of the other regional monopolies that provide basic cable service “bundles,” you are also paying fees for other channels you will never watch. A Rachel Maddow fan will automatically pay for FOX, Newsmax, OANN [1] and other extreme rightwing outlets when they buy a package to watch MSNBC. The same goes for sports. Sekhnet, for example, hates sports, but the package she buys contains a roster of sports channels she will never intentionally watch. Sign up for cable to watch Glenn Kirschner, pay for Sean Hannity, Tucker and the rest of the lovable extremists at Rupert Murdoch’s right-wing love and propagandafest. Here is one group organizing to fight to end this massive automatic payout to FOX and friends.
Their petition reads:
Fox News and OAN broadcast factually inaccurate and offensive material into millions of homes daily. Just as people should not be subjected to and thusly offended by materials that are outside the common standards of decency, they should not be subjected to factually inaccurate, inflammatory and racist ideology masquerading as news. People who desire such entertainment should have to opt in and pay extra to receive these materials, just as they do for premium services such as HBO, Showtime, etc.
We therefore request the cable carriers and providers to exclude this offensive programming from the basic cable bundle.
We are prepared to boycott to achieve this objective!
#BlackLivesMatter
#EnoughWithTheBS
Sadly, this movement so far seems to have very few participants [2].
There are also lawsuits available to rein in this kind of maddening propaganda, when it crosses a line into defamation. When My Pillow Guy went on the far right Newsmax, after Newsmax was threatened with a lawsuit by Dominion voting machines, and began repeating Trump lies about dead Venezuelan presidents and other scary spooks flipping millions of Trump votes to Biden to steal the rigged election, Newsmax read a statement written by their lawyers, informing viewers that what Pillow Guy was saying was false, that the results of the election were legal and final. The interviewer tried to shut My Pillow Lindell down immediately. When Pillow Guy energetically persisted, as his ilk always does, talking over the attempts of the interviewer to stop him, the host literally got out of his chair and walked off the set.Here you go, Mike Lindell’s Newsmax mini shit show on youTube, taking a principled stand against Cancel Culture.
I note, with characteristic snideness, that the latest victims of Cancel (or Censure) Culture include every Republican who voted for impeachment or conviction of the, like, totally innocent MAGA-man. USA! USA!!!! One America NOW!
[1]
Almost as scandalous as Barack Obama brazenly wearing a flesh colored suit to a news conference, Biden is already at it with the dirty tricks, according to One America News Network:
[Biden] added he would ask FEMA to speed up the paperwork so he could sign it as soon as possible, but Biden hedged on whether he would visit Texas to assess the situation first hand.
“It depends. The answer is yes. The question is, I had planned on being in Texas the middle of next week, but what I don’t want to be is a burden,” Biden stated. “When the president lands in any city in America, it creates, it has a long tail, and they’re working like the devil to take care of their folks. If, in fact, it’s concluded that I can do it without creating a burden for the folks on the ground while they’re dealing with this crisis, I plan on going.”
His unclear response drew criticism, with some pointing to trips President Trump took to states hit hard by natural disasters.
Fucking hell, devils and darkness!Was Biden unclear, did he stutter? Some pointing to Trump’s often exemplary responses to national tragedy? Did we pay to subsidize that shit? Or OANN’s next headline:
MORE NEWS: Don Jr.: I Won’t Jump On Bandwagon To Cancel Sen. Cruz
[2]
This petition, on Moveon.org, has 370 of the 400 signatures needed to submit. It gives more detail about the monetary split and the involvement of cable giant Spectrum:
Customers should have the choice to remove Fox News from their Spectrum Cable package. If customers overwhelming say, we don’t want to financially support Fox News, then Spectrum should allow us to make the choice.
Why is this important?
From the misinformation about the coronavirus to the anger and hate it promotes across the board, Fox News is something I find hurts society. But we don’t have to support them. Every TV channel charges cable providers a fee for carrying a channel set during negotiations. This is called a subscriber fee. The provider pays this fee for each customer they have and not viewer. Providers (like Spectrum) bundle channels into packages and pass costs to subscribers. News & info channels’ subscriber fees are normally small. EXAMPLE: MSNBC gets ~$0.33, CNN gets between $0.70-0.90 per month (and includes CNN and CNN Headline News). In contrast, Fox News charges near or over $2 a month. This is way higher in comparison with industry averages. Fox News’ fees are extremely inflated. Fox would not be able to sustain itself in its current state (because it doesn’t have the ad dollar support it once had) without forcing cable providers into overpaying. We need a Fox News fee correction (by losing even more customers) and the ability to hold them accountable. Hurt them where the money is if you want true change.
Our defeated ex-president, seizing on the death of a man of great certainty of opinion and even greater influence, around whose neck he’d hung a presidential medal at his last State of the Union, reemerged into the public spotlight, on FOX, to repeat the familiar refrain that he’d won, in a landslide, the election he lost decisively. In support of his ongoing #Stop the Steal campaign he said that this great, recently departed American anti-Leftist had strongly agreed with him, the presidency was stolen from him, from all real Americans. The professionals and experts all know the truth, he said — that the presidency had been stolen from him and from America by a vast cabal of evil, sick, dangerous enemies of the people — the vast Leftwing, Antifa, BLM, Feminist, Homosexual, Liberal Jew media conspiracy.
The charge that he won the election he lost may be untrue, (reasonable people can argue about it, claims Lyin’ Ted Cruz, reasonably) but you have no right to call it a lie when tens of millions honestly believe it’s true that there was massive voter fraud that stole the election from the rightful winner. How dare you call the sacred dead former talk-show host with talent on loan from God a liar?!!Standing up for possible truth is the whole reason more than a hundred and fifty GOP members of Congress united to contest the “certification” of an election that nobody ever proved wasn’t massively fraudulent, the deliberate and systematic theft of an election, by lying traitors, that the “defeated” candidate actually won in a landslide.
Back for a moment to the personal, to the moment when somebody decides you will be in a fight to the death no matter what you think about it, no matter what actions you may take to try to prevent it. Certainty is a powerful force. I’m thinking about an old friend who called to angrily confront me about being unjustly angry after my health insurance was abruptly cancelled, (illegally as it turned out). He then escalated his indignation and challenges week after week, finally, after pressing me to just fucking move on from whatever my grievance was, snapped, cut me off mid-sentence with a snarl and hung up. Then texted me that he was done being reamed by me.
It seems petty, I know, to keep coming back to this same indigestible example of another old friend suddenly become a devoted, eternal enemy. I’m trying to wring something instructive out of the vexation of it. It seems like the lesson has to be more than that we can all convince ourselves of the righteousness of our own actions, once we construct the right frame. It may be no more than that, though that answer is as unsatisfying as the conclusion that homo sapiens are just a petty, quarrelsome, largely irrational species whose history is always written in the blood of the justifiably murdered.
Surely there is something like objective reality. If you have no dog in the fight you are generally able to look at what actually happened, trace cause and effect, and often assess who is basically correct and who seems to have things ass backwards. The answer is rarely that both sides in a heated argument (like the consensus of Climate Scientists versus for-profit Climate Change Skeptics) are equally valid. There is generally more truth, more fact, more data, more thought behind one position than the other. The genius of the long right-wing project to convert the GOP into a radical right-wing party, similar in its essential features to the one-time fringe conspiracy-based John Birch Society cult, described this way, by political scientists Norm Ornstein and Thomas Mann in 2012:
is that today massive, repeated allegations of something, funded by tens of millions of dollars in ad buys to convince people of the allegations, suffice to back and fully justify any political move, including a righteous riot to disrupt the peaceful transition of power in the Capitol. You no longer need a shred of proof, evidence or any discernible facts on your side — the accusation itself is sufficient to fuel the righteous fight to the death.
Proponents of the need to contest the results of an election they claim (without evidence) was massively fraudulent, even after results have been certified fair by bipartisan officials, votes recounted, challenged dozens of times in court, left in place by the courts (for lack of evidence of fraud) need only site the ALLEGATION of fraud, believed by millions, to support their right to contest the election. Regardless, of course, of whether there is or isn’t, or has ever been, actual evidence of significant voter fraud found, even by the Koch-funded Heritage Foundation or Trump’s Presidential Electoral Fraud Commission headed by Hang Mike Pence and defeated voter-suppression expert Kris Kobach.
The project of convincing tens of millions of fraud that didn’t actually happen is vast power at work, and successful propaganda instilling belief in something that is based only on the needs of maintaining that power. It is our job going forward to make a humane case for the 99% as emotionally undeniable as these Koch-funded geniuses have made on behalf of the 1%. It saddens me to see the Democrats resorting to Lincoln Project-style attack ads, which they are now (the Lincoln Project proudly claims credit for Trump turning on his loyal retainer Pence) and I keep thinking there has to be a better way to make the case for fairness, although maybe not at the moment.
Back to the personal. This long-time friend, no matter how clearly I set out my issues, my specific concerns about our long “argument,” insisted that we can’t ever really know what is in anybody else’s head or heart, even someone we’ve known well for half a century.
It seems an untenable and depressing position to me, one that inevitably leads to estrangement, but this man is very smart, an accomplished lawyer, and he rests his case for this unshakeable belief on the fact that in the end, after my many attempts to be analytical and nonviolent in stating my concerns (concerns he repeatedly asked me to clarify, no matter how clearly I’d already made them) I admitted, in a very hurtful way, that I was frustrated, angry and disappointed in his limitations as a friend.
After all, from his point of view, every one of his attempts to make peace was met by my stubborn refusal to simply forgive, even after he made it clear that he truly didn’t understand what he’d ever done to me that was hurtful. Instead, he pointed out, I kept struggling, stubbornly and incoherently, to make him understand what was so “hurtful” about his conduct.
When I hear that Tucker Carlson, for example, said, of the police killing of George Floyd (bracketed by Brook Gladstone’s commentary from her excellent On The Media:
BROOKE GLADSTONE Later that evening, Fox primetime hosts Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity drew on increasingly deranged conspiracy theories to denature the evidence [in the impeachment trial –ed].
[CLIP]
TUCKER CARLSON They’re just flat out lying. There’s no question about that. The question is, why would they lie about this? For an answer, think back to last spring. Beginning on Memorial Day, BLM and their sponsors and corporate America completely changed this country. They changed this country more in five months that it had changed in the previous 50 years. How’d they do that? They used the sad death of a man called George Floyd to upend our society. Months later, we learned that the story they told us about George Ford’s death was an utter lie. There was no physical evidence that George Floyd was murdered by a cop. The autopsy show that George Floyd almost certainly died of a drug overdose. Fentanyl. [END CLIP]
BROOKE GLADSTONE Right. A full autopsy report by Minneapolis police found that Floyd had fentanyl and other drugs in his blood. He also had Covid-19. None of that killed him. His death was ruled a homicide. Maybe Tucker will move on to flim-flam less foul, but why would he?
I don’t often listen to FOX, or Cucker Tarlson (or whatever the well-born, entitled prick’s name is) but hearing him smugly intone a transparent and incendiary lie, calling the story of Floyd’s (who he called “Ford” at one point) homicide a lie, made me ready to fight him, as it was intended to. I immediately felt a violent urge to put my knee on Tucker’s neck and kneel on him for as long as it took him to stop kicking and begging, letting him up a second before his death. The whole FOX/Murdoch right-wing exercise is “triggering the libtards” and thar’s gold in them hills (Rush Limbaugh died with a net worth of over $600,000,000). The Minneapolis coroner who ruled that a grown man, armed with a gun, supported by three armed colleagues, kneeling on the handcuffed George Floyd’s neck for almost nine minutes, the last three after Floyd lost consciousness after begging for mercy and calling out for his mother, had caused Floyd’s death? A fucking liar and traitor, a tool of the fucking lying libs.
Hearing Carlson’s inflammatory hate speech I immediately, and involuntarily, flashed on my former friend’s claim that in spite of the thousands of words I’d written him trying to keep the peace (the first few thousand he thanked me for humbly, for I’d taken pains not cast undue blame on his actions) nothing I had written, in the end, gave him the slightest clue why I was so hurtful to him now.
The truth can slippery once strong emotions creep in, and people we trust can twist it convincingly sometimes, but, call me old-fashioned, I still believe there is a world of cause and effect that can be observed, that some narratives are closer to the truth of what happened than others. I can’t be sure what the root cause of my friend’s insistence that we fight to the death was. Not sure I made all the right moves to try to avoid it, obviously I didn’t, based on the irreconcilable enmity at the end.
But if someone asks you why you are angry, and you tell them you are protesting the long history of too many unarmed black people unaccountably murdered by the police in this country every year, and they respond by calling you a terrorist, dispersing protests with the full force of non-deadly state violence (tear gas, horseback charges, rubber bullets, anti-riot squad phalanxes swinging batons, mass arrests) you might be forgiven for feeling unheard.
“What is the real core issue here?” asked my friend, time after time, telling me he clearly didn’t understand what he did that seemed to have upset me so much. I told him that, in a nutshell, having my expressed concerns met by silence is probably the single most hurtful thing to me, that the attempted negation of my feelings by silence is like kryptonite to me. He stood on his right to remain silent, and on the reciprocal truth that I had no right to expect any different, since nobody can ever truly know what is in somebody else’s heart and mind or why they feel as they feel or do what they do.
“I read everything you wrote, searching in vain for a single clue as to what I’d done that made you so irrationally angry and hurtful to me,” he concluded, resting his case.
I can’t do anything about the gigantic phenomenon of unchallenged far-fetched falsehoods being presented as just good as undeniable truth when it comes to a partisan GOP argument. Greg Abbott, the Trumpist governor of Texas, is angrily blaming the Green New Deal for his state’s deadly weather-related emergency — and fuck your fucking facts, cucktards. The political is personal, of course, and there’s little we can do, outside of hard, slow, resolute work on the long-game of bending the long arch of history towards justice. In our personal lives, our choices are more straightforward.
I can’t do anything about a friend who insists that he will do everything in his power to save our friendship, while standing on his right not to revisit any concern that might make him uncomfortable, or even acknowledge I’ve clearly expressed a single goddamned thing worthy of consideration. In the end I can do one thing in the case of a friend like that — let him make his final arguments, accept his right to remain unchanged, and his verdict, and try not to brood about it whenever I hear a similar case indignantly made by a Tucker Carlson.
Though, I also have to acknowledge the deeply disturbing personal resonance of things like hearing the Rochester cop, while hand-cuffing and pepper spraying the emotionally disturbed nine year-old girl (and the fact that the cop was not immediately fired and prosecuted tells you the race of the child) demanding that she stop acting like a child. “I AM a child!” she replied, stating the obvious, to a brutal asshole who didn’t have the slightest concern for what was true and what was instantly verifiable bullshit. I heard the same from my own father, when I was that age and younger. That I should start acting like a man instead of a fucking child. He apologized about that right before he died, for whatever good that might have done anyone.
Truth and reconciliation, y’all, there is a tremendous value to it. It’s the only path to true healing.
At last, two of the country’s top Republican leaders finally speak the plain truth, after four solid years of partisan lying, sharp practices and covering for each other’s hypocrisy — and shortly after a partisan acquittal, on a shaky technicality, in Trump’s record second impeachment (in little over a year).Sadly, truth does not seem to have resulted in reconciliation.
MITCH McCONNELL:
“January 6th was a disgrace.
“American citizens attacked their own government. They used terrorism to try to stop a specific piece of democratic business they did not like.
“Fellow Americans beat and bloodied our own police. They stormed the Senate floor. They tried to hunt down the Speaker of the House. They built a gallows and chanted about murdering the Vice President.
“They did this because they had been fed wild falsehoods by the most powerful man on Earth — because he was angry he’d lost an election.
“Former President Trump’s actions preceding the riot were a disgraceful dereliction of duty.
“The House accused the former President of, quote, ‘incitement.’ That is a specific term from the criminal law.
“Let me put that to the side for one moment and reiterate something I said weeks ago: There is no question that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of that day.
“The people who stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of their President.
“And their having that belief was a foreseeable consequence of the growing crescendo of false statements, conspiracy theories, and reckless hyperbole which the defeated President kept shouting into the largest megaphone on planet Earth.
“The issue is not only the President’s intemperate language on January 6th.
“It is not just his endorsement of remarks in which an associate urged ‘trial by combat.’
“It was also the entire manufactured atmosphere of looming catastrophe; the increasingly wild myths about a reverse landslide election that was being stolen in some secret coup by our now-President.
“I defended the President’s right to bring any complaints to our legal system. The legal system spoke. The Electoral College spoke. As I stood up and said clearly at the time, the election was settled.
“But that reality just opened a new chapter of even wilder and more unfounded claims.
“The leader of the free world cannot spend weeks thundering that shadowy forces are stealing our country and then feign surprise when people believe him and do reckless things. [1]
(Of course, the constitution requires, unfortunately, that such an elected official not be held responsible by the Senate, Mitch concludes.)
DONALD J. TRUMP:
“Mitch is a dour, sullen, and unsmiling political hack, and if Republican Senators are going to stay with him, they will not win again,” Trump said in the statement. “He will never do what needs to be done, or what is right for our Country. Where necessary and appropriate, I will back primary rivals who espouse Making America Great Again and our policy of America First. We want brilliant, strong, thoughtful, and compassionate leadership.”
Then the CLINTON NEWS NETWORK continues:
Trump’s call for compassionate leadership came in a petty statement full of ad hominem attacks, including a jab at McConnell’s family, and after years of some of the most vitriolic political leadership in American history. Despite the potshot at McConnell’s family and the insulting characterization of his personality, Trump wanted to lob harsher personal attacks at McConnell, according to a source familiar with Trump’s desires. Trump adviser Jason Miller said an “earlier (version of the) statement was likely tougher. There was never a consideration to make a personal attack, though.”[2]
Which is why, of course, Mr. Trump refrained from making it a personal attack on another former close ally.
“Anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” — Voltaire
(quoted by Representative Jamie Raskin during the impeachment trial)
[1] Here’s the rest of the immoral, chinless fuck’s self-serving remarks:
“Sadly, many politicians sometimes make overheated comments or use metaphors that unhinged listeners might take literally.”This was different.”This was an intensifying crescendo of conspiracy theories, orchestrated by an outgoing president who seemed determined to either overturn the voters’ decision or else torch our institutions on the way out.”The unconscionable behavior did not end when the violence began.”Whatever our ex-President claims he thought might happen that day… whatever reaction he says he meant to produce… by that afternoon, he was watching the same live television as the rest of the world.“A mob was assaulting the Capitol in his name. These criminals were carrying his banners, hanging his flags, and screaming their loyalty to him.”It was obvious that only President Trump could end this.”Former aides publicly begged him to do so. Loyal allies frantically called the Administration.”But the President did not act swiftly. He did not do his job. He didn’t take steps so federal law could be faithfully executed, and order restored.”Instead, according to public reports, he watched television happily as the chaos unfolded. He kept pressing his scheme to overturn the election!”Even after it was clear to any reasonable observer that Vice President Pence was in danger… even as the mob carrying Trump banners was beating cops and breaching perimeters… the President sent a further tweet attacking his Vice President.“Predictably and foreseeably under the circumstances, members of the mob seemed to interpret this as further inspiration to lawlessness and violence.”Later, even when the President did halfheartedly begin calling for peace, he did not call right away for the riot to end. He did not tell the mob to depart until even later.”And even then, with police officers bleeding and broken glass covering Capitol floors, he kept repeating election lies and praising the criminals.”In recent weeks, our ex-President’s associates have tried to use the 74 million Americans who voted to re-elect him as a kind of human shield against criticism.
“Anyone who decries his awful behavior is accused of insulting millions of voters.”That is an absurd deflection.”74 million Americans did not invade the Capitol. Several hundred rioters did.”And 74 million Americans did not engineer the campaign of disinformation and rage that provoked it.”One person did.”I have made my view of this episode very plain.”But our system of government gave the Senate a specific task. The Constitution gives us a particular role.“This body is not invited to act as the nation’s overarching moral tribunal.”We are not free to work backward from whether the accused party might personally deserve some kind of punishment.“Justice Joseph Story was our nation’s first great constitutional scholar. As he explained nearly 200 years ago, the process of impeachment and conviction is a narrow tool for a narrow purpose.”Story explained this limited tool exists to “secure the state against gross official misdemeanors.” That is, to protect the country from government officers.”If President Trump were still in office, I would have carefully considered whether the House managers proved their specific charge.”By the strict criminal standard, the President’s speech probably was not incitement.”However, in the context of impeachment, the Senate might have decided this was acceptable shorthand for the reckless actions that preceded the riot.”But in this case, that question is moot. Because former President Trump is constitutionally not eligible for conviction.”There is no doubt this is a very close question. Donald Trump was the President when the House voted, though not when the House chose to deliver the papers.”Brilliant scholars argue both sides of the jurisdictional question. The text is legitimately ambiguous. I respect my colleagues who have reached either conclusion.”But after intense reflection, I believe the best constitutional reading shows that Article II, Section 4 exhausts the set of persons who can legitimately be impeached, tried, or convicted. The President, Vice President, and civil officers.”We have no power to convict and disqualify a former officeholder who is now a private citizen.”Here is Article II, Section 4:”The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.””Now, everyone basically agrees that the second half of that sentence exhausts the legitimate grounds for conviction.”The debates around the Constitution’s framing make that clear. Congress cannot convict for reasons besides those.”It therefore follows that the list of persons in that same sentence is also exhaustive. There is no reason why one list would be exhaustive but the other would not.”Article II, Section 4 must limit both why impeachment and conviction can occur… and to whom.”If this provision does not limit the impeachment and conviction powers, then it has no limits at all.”The House’s ‘sole power of Impeachment’ and the Senate’s ‘sole Power to try all Impeachments’ would create an unlimited circular logic, empowering Congress to ban any private citizen from federal office.”This is an incredible claim. But it is the argument the House Managers seemed to make. One Manager said the House and Senate have ‘absolute, unqualified… jurisdictional power.'”That was very honest. Because there is no limiting principle in the constitutional text that would empower the Senate to convict former officers that would not also let them convict and disqualify any private citizen.”An absurd end result to which no one subscribes.”Article II, Section 4 must have force. It tells us the President, Vice President, and civil officers may be impeached and convicted. Donald Trump is no longer the president.”Likewise, the provision states that officers subject to impeachment and conviction ‘shall be removed from Office’ if convicted.”Shall.”As Justice Story explained, ‘the Senate, [upon] conviction, [is] bound, in all cases, to enter a judgment of removal from office.’ Removal is mandatory upon conviction.”Clearly, he explained, that mandatory sentence cannot be applied to somebody who has left office.”The entire process revolves around removal. If removal becomes impossible, conviction becomes insensible.”In one light, it certainly does seem counterintuitive that an officeholder can elude Senate conviction by resignation or expiration of term.”But this just underscores that impeachment was never meant to be the final forum for American justice.”Impeachment, conviction, and removal are a specific intra-governmental safety valve. It is not the criminal justice system, where individual accountability is the paramount goal.”Indeed, Justice Story specifically reminded that while former officials were not eligible for impeachment or conviction, they were “still liable to be tried and punished in the ordinary tribunals of justice.””We have a criminal justice system in this country. We have civil litigation. And former Presidents are not immune from being held accountable by either one.”I believe the Senate was right not to grab power the Constitution does not give us.”And the Senate was right not to entertain some light-speed sham process to try to outrun the loss of jurisdiction.”It took both sides more than a week just to produce their pre-trial briefs. Speaker Pelosi’s own scheduling decisions conceded what President Biden publicly confirmed: A Senate verdict before Inauguration Day was never possible.”This has been a dispiriting time. But the Senate has done our duty. The framers’ firewall held up again.”On January 6th, we returned to our posts and certified the election, uncowed.”And since then, we resisted the clamor to defy our own constitutional guardrails in hot pursuit of a particular outcome.”We refused to continue a cycle of recklessness by straining our own constitutional boundaries in response.”The Senate’s decision does not condone anything that happened on or before that terrible day.
“It simply shows that Senators did what the former President failed to do:we put our constitutional duty first.”
When stuck with an untenable position in an argument, when the facts, the law and common sense are all against your cause, reframing is probably your best option. Here are three recent examples from the news.
Senator Ron Johnson, the Always-Trumper from Wisconsin, confronted by the fact that his leader unleashed a heavily armed mob, many in body armor, to riot in the Capitol building (immediately after a rally he promoted, promised would be wild and spent at least $3,500,000 in donations organizing) injuring 140 police officers, and killing several other people (including one of their own they trampled to death), focused on the word “armed.”
“Armed” Johnson claimed, reframing the word, means carrying a firearm. Since only one person was killed by a firearm, and a police firearm at that, it followed that the mob was not armed. Take something you can’t deny– the violent mob seriously hurt a lot of people, using a variety of arms (weapons, if you prefer), and reframe the question into a very limited definition of the word “armed.”
Bear spray (a super powerful form of mace to be used against wild 800 pound apex predator assailants), metal poles, baseball bats, stun guns, sticks, brass knuckles, whips, barricades, fire extinguishers and the other implements used in the riot to inflict injuries — not “arms,” not weapons. Guns only are arms, and only a small number were confiscated by police after the riot, and nobody was shot to death by the rioters (and only a few more automatic rifles, high capacity clips, homemade napalm and a few bombs were found– outside, in trucks owned by rioters– which don’t count) so, by simple logic, there’s your proof — the crowd was not armed.And even if there were a few guns, nobody was shot, except one rioter climbing through a window (by police) so, therefore, the CROWD was not ARMED [1].
It is an asinine bit of reframing, sure. Though how foolish the reframing is to a given individual in post-Trump America will depend on what their definition of “is” is and the color of their hat.
Texas is in the grips of winter storms and freezing temperatures rarely seen in that part of the country. The demand on electricity to heat homes caused a massive power outage across the state. Millions of Texans are without power, some have already died and many are in real danger of freezing. The power outage appears to be the result of unregulated energy in the state, arranged that way by the great state of Texas to evade those nasty federal regulators. Areas of western Texas that are part of an interstate power grid that is federally regulated, lost power briefly and then had it restored. A hard set of facts for the anti-regulation/government bad crowd to counter.
The Trumpist governor of Texas announced that since wind powered generators failed in the extreme cold, it was proof of how deadly the New Green Deal would be, with its reliance on renewable sources of energy.
Nicely done. Unless you know that wind powered generators account for only 10% of electric power in Texas.
Perhaps the most sickening recent bit of reframing — earlier this month police were called to help a girl who was in emotional crisis. When they arrived the nine year-old was very upset. The Washington Post reported:
The mother of the 9-year-old Rochester, N.Y., girl who was handcuffed and pepper-sprayed by police said Wednesday that she repeatedly told an officer that her daughter was having a mental health breakdown and she pleaded with them to call a specialist instead of trying to detain her.
The police did what they are trained to do — gave chase, ordered her on to the ground, subdued her, hand-cuffed her, pepper sprayed her (to calm her down), hustled her into a police car. She kept resisting. Here is the exchange between the child and one of the police officers, reframing to beat the band. The child has a better argument here, but that “stop acting like a child!” was a nifty bit of on-the-fly reframing by the police officer:
[1]
Others were armed during the riot: A police officer said he noticed a bulge on the hip of Christopher Alberts – who was dressed in body armor and carrying a gas mask – as he filed out of the Capitol grounds, according to court records. When they stopped him, they found a loaded handgun. Alberts’ lawyer did not respond to questions about the case.
At a particularly depressing and anxious time for the human race like the one we find ourselves in now, depression and anxiety are understandable. It is hard to stay optimistic in the face of prolonged social isolation, a still raging incurable disease that can kill you, lies and denial of reality in the service political brutality, cascading climate catastrophe and all the rest. The hanging out with friends, family and likeminded strangers that used to remind us of the other side of life is now dangerous, must be approached with caution, if at all.
Social media, texts and emails are no substitute for personal contact with people you like. People think you are insane (and they are probably justified) if you send them a hand-written letter in the mail. Sekhnet, a self-proclaimed happy hermit, is relatively fine with cheerful random encounters with strangers, by phone or socially distanced and masked. At times I find myself wistful about the ongoing lack of connection with others.
I’ve been aware of not falling into the trap of despair. The world is the world, always full of danger and challenges, and though fear may grab us hard sometimes, and doubt, and all the other dark things of this world, it is best to keep in mind all the rest, the sweetness of life that keeps us grateful for every lifegiving breath we take.
The world is also change, all life is constantly moving, evolving, changing. This shit too will pass, surely, and once the pandemic is over we’ll hang out together to talk about it and laugh in relief to have survived it.
There is hard work to be done fixing a lot of things that are badly broken, I’d like to help. I hope to figure out how to lend a hand, throw my back into it. I feel like I’ve been doing OK emotionally, the usual complaints (the arthritis in my left knee is getting to be a real pain) aside.
Last night I cheerfully dialed an old friend, to check in, to resume my long habit of checking in with distant friends. I’d decided not to talk for long, just hear how he was doing, hopefully have a laugh (he’s a funny bastard) as I exercised my ailing legs outside in what was suddenly a mild evening. I got his voice mailbox, which was full.
I suddenly remembered the weight he carries, responsible for the livelihoods of literally hundreds of people in his badly stressed organization, dozens of whom must call his cellphone daily. It was too late to ring his home phone, his wife goes to bed early and it was already almost 10:00. Figured I’d call the home line tonight, after the dinner hour, see how they’re doing.
Watched an episode of David Attenborough’s brilliantly presented (and beautifully shot) Planet Earth on Netflix, had a moment of despair about what human greed has made of the oceans and deep seas (which contain 95% of the earth’s life, I think I heard), but mostly, we marveled at the weird and wonderful beauty of nature and the gentle, wise presentation of it . Here’s a nice montage from the wonderful limited series.
Sekhnet and I went upstairs, played few rounds of Wordscapes on my phone and I tucked Sekhnet for the night (so she could spend the next hour learning Chinesein Duolingo).
Then sometime after I did a little watercoloring (a variation on the figure below):
washed the dishes, got myself a cold drink and sat down to prop my leg up and watch a dark crime show, I became aware that the Black Dog had crept into the room with me.
I’d truly forgotten all about el perro negro.
“Remember me, motherfucker?” asked the black dog.
I did, indeed. Everything was suddenly hopeless. Why bother calling my friend? I’d destroyed my life, utterly, the whole thing a series of stupid mistakes I’d keep making until the end. Nobody gives a rat’s ass about your precious, polished, meaningless, unmonetized hobbies. The world is only a depressing antechamber to certain, terrible death. Nothing is ever going to work out well, you’ll see. Everyone who ever said they loved you was lying, and they proved it, in spades; everyone you love, dead. Evil triumphs in this world and if you think it doesn’t — fuck you, I’ll slit your ugly face. Look around, asshole.
“Forgot how persuasive I am?” asked el perro negro, stinking faithfully at my feet.
Not for a second.
I took two Tylenol PMs (discovered by Sekhnet’s insomniac cousin recently) and waited for the stabbing in my left knee to subside. Within an hour I was drowsy, went up to bed. Today, no sign of the black dog, though I can still smell his wet, cloyingly pungent fur. I’d forgotten all about the motherfucker, actually.
gratuitousblahg 