History Lesson for September 11th

featuring an excerpt from Static: Government Liars, Media Cheerleaders, and the People Who Fight Back.

September 11 is probably a good time to transcribe this evocative passage from the opening chapter of the 2006 book by Amy Goodman and David Goodman that I have long been meaning to transcribe and post here.

Journalism is often called the first draft of history. These investigative reports from the first term of the Bush/Cheney administration detail the real-time actions of people struggling against a new regime in which torture was legally (if secretly, at first) redefined as “enhanced interrogation” and dark practices that were previously hidden were now flaunted as part of the US’s tough new zero-tolerance policy towards “Terror”. How did this official U.S. embrace of torture change history? Our current president, when he was a candidate, boasted that the tortures of Bush and Cheney were nothing compared to what he was prepared to do. In that sense, at least, Mr. Trump has kept his word.

Americans are famously prone to amnesia when it comes to history. The name Maher Arar will not ring any bells for most Americans. He was a Canadian citizen, born in Syria, who was detained at JFK airport on September 26, 2002, separated from his family (they were en route to Canada after a vacation) interrogated for days, drugged, diapered, shackled and “rendered” to Syria, where he was kept in a hole in the ground and tortured daily for a year before Canadian efforts finally got him released.

As Amy and David Goodman record: “Three hundred and seventy-four days after he landed at JFK, Maher Arar was released from the Syrian prison. Charges were never filed against him.”

Canada eventually issued a public apology to this innocent Canadian architect, a man with a name similar to someone the US suspected of being a terrorist, and paid him millions in damages. The U.S., in the name of “national security,” (and on several other grounds as well) dismissed the lawsuit Arar brought in U.S. federal court. Nothing to see here, dipshit, we’re fighting evil!

Years later President Obama would admit “we, uh, tortured some folks,” explaining that good people had done it with the best of intentions during very fearful times, but that it was still, you know, kind of wrong. So our first multi-racial president, whose election wiped the slate clean of racism once and for all, made a clean breast of our descent into barbarity, under cover of law. He said it was wrong. I will let the Goodmans take it from the beginning of their 2006 book, a work of journalism that is now a straight up history book (and one I highly recommend):

The United States is an outlaw nation.

The laws that used to govern the behavior of American leaders evolved from basic codes of conduct for civilized nations. In 1215 the Magna Carta asserted that no one, not even the king, was above the rule of law, and it established the concept of habeus corpus — a prisoner’s right to challenge his or her detention in a public court of law. Kidnapping, murder and rape, all nations agree, are crimes. The four Geneva Conventions, the first of which was adopted in 1864, established that even in wars, civilians and combatants have rights. The conventions prohibit murder, torture, hostage-taking and extrajudicial sentencing and executions.

These have long been the publicly proclaimed ideals of Western nations. In private, they have been routinely violated. From the Native American conquest, to slavery, to Vietnam, where torture and extrajudicial killing were staples of the CIA’s Phoenix program, to Latin America, where US-backed death squads rained terror on civilians throughout the 1970s and ’80s, to the US Army School of the Americas, which counts among its graduates a who’s who of Latin American dictators and humans rights abusers, the United States has been secretly involved in the torture business for years.

Yet even by these sordid standards, the United States is now probing new lows.

For this, we must credit President George W. Bush. A failed oil-man, he lost the 2000 election but was selected as president of the United States by the Supreme Court. Having lost the popular vote nationally that year — including, as recounts proved, losing in Florida– Bush proceeded to declare after the attacks of 9/11 that he had a God-given mandate not just to rule America, but to wage war across the globe. He reportedly told Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas, “God told me to strike at al Qaeda and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam.” Bush decreed that neither international law nor U.S. law applied to him or his administration.

Bush was not able to achieve all this on his own. A compliant Congress, lubricated by contributions from self-dealing lobbyists and multinational corporations, together with a deferential American media have been essential parts of his arsenal.

In the Outlaw Nation that has risen up where the United States once stood, holding humans in offshore cages and denying them fair trials is fine. Kidnapping has become an essential tool of foreign policy. The vice president personally lobbies the Senate to legalize torture, while the secretary of defense decides which medieval torments are acceptable (drowning and freezing are in, disemboweling is out). The secretary of state trots around the globe to forcefully and unequivocally reassure squeamish allies — on whose soil the kidnappings and torture occur — that what they know is happening (and secretly assisted) is not really happening. The U.S. media speaks politely about possible “abuse” and refers delicately to things like “stress positions”.

Torturing enemies in secret is not new for the United States. But the open — even proud– embrace of it is unprecedented. Let us take a look into the dark alleys, behind the iron bars, and into the dungeons to shed some light on the secret actions of the Outlaw Nation.

Static: Government Liars, Media Cheerleaders, and the People Who Fight Back. pp. 17-19 (c) 2006 Amy Goodman and David Goodman

A Defense of the President

On a US government website you can read this timeline of Republican talking points of how the Deep State put “Operation Crossfire” into motion, that baseless attempt to illegally set up Mr. Trump, his campaign, his donors, every patriotic citizen actively trying its best to make America great again, before it’s too late (2045 — the year US whites are expected to be a minority).

I don’t know what to make of those talking points being posted on a government website, except that the government itself has been weaponized by Mr. Trump in ways previously impossible to imagine. This is nothing new, certainly but conspiracy theories and random incendiary talking points have never been as commonly endorsed by government officials (Barr- massive voter fraud, for which there is no evidence, is “obvious”) as under “the most transparent president in history” as the president’s latest press secretary called him the other day. I’ve been meaning to transcribe the intro to Amy and David Goodman’s great Static, a pre-Obama work of journalism that is now a history book. I’ll do that soon (here you go, well-worth a read).

It’s always possible to defend anything, literally. Here is the defense of a well-spoken pro-Trump caller to yesterday’s Brian Lehrer show on WNYC (NY Public Radio) during a segment about the release of some exchanges from Bob Woodward’s recorded interviews with Mr. Trump showing that although Trump knew the pandemic was serious, deadly and airborne, he kept downplaying the severity of the virus:

David in Paramus (at 16:10 at “Trump Called COVID ‘Deadly’ Despite Publicly Downplaying It”)

…I’m a little bit taken aback by your guest today, he seems to think that you have Trump painted into a corner, that he said things to famous Watergate author Bob Woodward that maybe he thought wouldn’t go out into the public air, which we all know, obviously he knew it would all be played at some point, but why play it today and what’ll be played tomorrow and what’ll be played over the next two months prior to the election? He did the thing that he thought was best, that’s why we elected him president, and that was to set a tone to keep the country at ease [1].

He wasn’t a fact finder, he’s not a scientist, he’s going on the best information that he had at the time, that you had, that I had, that we all had, which is what is the coronavirus and where is it going? And for him to err on the side of not causing panic is a much better option than telling the whole country “oh, this is really, really bad!” [2].

And I’d like to bring up the point with regard to 9/11, I remember nineteen years ago tomorrow, George Bush sitting in that classroom with that look on his face when his aide whispered in his ear that the towers had been attacked. George Bush didn’t turn around and jump up and tell America “run for the covers!” It was a moment when he made the best decision with the facts he had at hand and he did keep the public from going into a panic [3].

And the comment with regard to panic on the street, Wall Street, I feel it’s also not appropriate.

Lehrer: …if he knew that it was more deadly than the flu and he turned around and told everybody it’s not so bad, you can go about your normal lives, why isn’t that like a doctor (who fails to give sound medical advice after detecting a potentially deadly heart condition in a patient)?

David: That’s an excellent point, I won’t say I’m not 100% fantastically appreciative of what he did on that day, I’m saying that I take it with a grain of salt, I don’t wake up in the morning and say “well, President Trump said this today so I’m going to conduct my life the way he said to.” I feel strongly about not inciting panic, I think that’s a tremendous responsibility, and to the young lady that lost her father, who I send my my condolences to, that spoke at the Democratic National Convention, for Trump to say it’s OK to go out to karaoke tonight and don’t wear a mask, it just falls flat for me, on its face [4].

I’ve seen Facebook responses from people that I went to high school with that feel strongly that this is the most momentous thing that they found that Trump did that was so egregious and his responsibility for the 190,000 deaths that have occurred. I don’t blame the Trump administration, I wouldn’t blame Biden, or Roosevelt or anybody else for an insidious pandemic that struck the world like we’ve never seen in our lifetime, any more than I would blame you or anybody else.

Very fair-minded, David.

some caviling, tell-tale notes:

[1] It is a key part of the job of the president to keep us calm during a national crisis. “We have nothing to fear but fear itself,” was famously uttered by FDR during a very frightening time in world history. Mr. Trump often fans fear, of things real and imagined (a cabal powerful cannibal pedophiles; evil, black uniformed men flying in to cause riots) because it leads to other strong emotions, like anger and violence, that he and his political base feed on. There is some irony in this defense of the president as the man who keeps the country calm.

[2] This is the precise reason that the weather service NEVER broadcasts terrifying predictions about incoming killer storms. It only causes panic, and keeping people calm before a raging climate event is a small price to pay for a few theoretical extra deaths.

[3] OK, I’ll leave off with this beating of a straw man, y’all get the point. If you select a single talking point, in this case “keep everyone calm,” you can beat it like a drum, over and over, no matter what other points are raised. This is called “making an argument” in Trump’s America.

[4] One last note: the “resistance” the “tyranny” of mandatory face masks and social distancing is a regular feature of every Trump news conference and campaign rally. The president refuses to wear a mask and has weaponized the wearing of protective gear, one of the few proven ways we have to minimize risk of infection. So that last bit, about “don’t just blindly do what the Leader says” and making his dead follower responsible for blindly following his calming advice about no need to fear the “pandemic”, well, for Trump’s base, that claim falls a bit flat, for me, on its face.

Irreconcilable Storylines — not a problem

The thing about contradictory storylines that can never be made to meet, in any detail, is that Americans today will believe one or the other depending on the color of the hat on their head. There is no convincing anybody who is undyingly loyal and determined in their true beliefs, no set of facts that will change anybody’s mind about these irreconcilable narratives. It’s sad as hell, but there we are.

Every “fact” you can produce to make a persuasive argument is now instantly met with a “counter-fact” from the equally compelling world of “alternative truth.”

It makes people feel good to be right, and, say what you want about him, it’s never been easier to be right than in Donald J. Trump’s America.

There’s been a lot of buzz about Bob Woodward’s new book, Rage, based on hours of recorded interviews with the president and his indispensable minister with many portfolios Jared Kushner. Apparently many inside the White House urged them not to speak to the dogged journalist whose reporting brought Nixon down, but they felt they had nothing to hide and had confidence that they could easily out-maneuver the liberal hack.

On recordings most of us have heard snippets of by now, Mr. Trump candidly tells Woodward, on February 7, more than a month before he ordered the limited national pandemic emergency in mid-March, that he knows how much deadlier than the flu Covid-19 is, five times deadlier, and highly contagious through the air. “But I don’t want to create a panic” says Mr. Trump to Mr. Woodward. This conversation about how deadly this infectious airborne disease was happened in early February, then the president continued to tell the American public that the China Virus, no more serious than the common seasonal flu, was a Democrat HOAX, a made up story to bring him down, and crash the greatest economy America has ever known, to damage him in the upcoming election.

The shocking revelations in Woodward’s book (and shame on him for not reporting these months ago when they happened, another John Bolton… preserving maximum books sales trumps trumping Trump…) will cause no ripples among the die-hard 39% who love Mr. Trump no matter what. The president speaks their language, he’s crude, he’s spicy, sometimes nasty, he honestly tells it like it is, like he believes it is, he’s not afraid to be “politically incorrect,” he’s not a pussy, he may lie, as do we all, but always in the name of a higher Truth.

Let’s take a quick look at a few facts and counter-facts.

Fact: the president’s weeks-long delay in declaring a national emergency when Covid-19 hit, and his failure to use his powers to produce and distribute desperately needed protective gear, cost thousands of American lives.

Counter-fact, this is part of a lying hoax, fake news, a false narrative spread by traitors wildly determined to hurt Trump (and who also, by the way, did nothing to stop the spread of the virus). The US did a great job fighting the pandemic, better than almost any other country in the world. They have statistics to back this up, too, you can ask the Governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, he went to Yale and Harvard and has all the granular numbers for you science worshipping pinheads.

If you’re following the president’s current story, we can all relax about this pandemic, because we’ll have a patented American Covid-19 vaccine in record time, an amazing achievement only possible because the president is the greatest man in history. Problem solved, by Election Day, even though it’s already not a problem, since the administration took such strong, decisive early action to defeat the China Virus — the same China which is illegally helping Joe Biden, by the way, along with Iran.

Or, as government epidemiologists repeatedly tell us, as well as several of our largest drug companies, in an unusual show of noncompetitive unity, it’s almost impossible that sufficient tests will be done to ensure the safety of any effective vaccine to have it ready for use before Election Day, as the president keeps promising. Also, Russian electoral interference on behalf of Trump in 2016 and 2020 is well documented by numerous investigations, including a Republican-chaired Senate investigation; China’s and Iran’s efforts to hurt Trump in 2020 are not nearly as well-established.

Counterfact: the president’s first national security advisor, Mike Flynn, fired by the president for lying to the Vice President, and then lying repeatedly to the FBI, who pleaded guilty for telling these lies, was actually innocent. Yes, he was framed by vicious partisan members of the Deep State who set him up, lured the innocent patriot into a “perjury trap” and then savagely “unmasked” him. Then, when the Department of Justice, under patriot Bill Barr, finally sought, in the interest of justice, to belatedly make the unfair case disappear, a judge, also from the Deep State, refused to follow the law. A coup d’etat by an overreaching judge who illegally insisted on usurping the power of the Executive Branch. The appellate judge who ordered the usurping judge to obey the law and immediately dismiss the case ruled that there was no reason for a hearing, since this is not the unusual case that merits special scrutiny before dismissing it.

Or, it is actually a highly unusual case, a defendant, fired by his boss for lying, who twice pleaded guilty to a felony count of “willfully and knowingly” making false statements to the FBI, having his case suddenly dismissed by the DOJ without reason or a hearing — (and yes, Barr made a call on the “materiality” of Flynn’s lies, so there is a rationale, if not a nonpolitical reason.) The appellate judge who ordered the trial judge to immediately dismiss the case without a hearing was rebuked by the full panel of the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, who vacated her order and found her ruling legally incorrect by a vote of 8-2.

Similarly, when the president calls a woman who accused him of rape in a Bergdorf-Goodman changing room a liar and claims he never even met her (in spite of at least one photo showing them together), and she in turn brings a defamation suit against the president, the Department of Justice steps in ten months later to make that case go away.

If Barr hadn’t stepped up to take the case the other day, under a fanciful interpretation of a Federal Tort law (that will be litigated and appealed for months, if not years, like Barr’s novel, flimsy but effective ‘blanket protective immunity’ claim for everyone who ever worked for President Trump), the president was in danger, weeks before a hotly contested election, of having to submit DNA to prove it wasn’t traces of him on the woman’s clothes — along with possibly being deposed in that case in a certain “perjury trap”.

You remember Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress? That was case closed for Lyin’ Bill Clinton. Even Slick Willie couldn’t lie after his DNA matched dried spunk on that blue dress, yo. This would be worse, because the woman (like all the others who accuse the president of similar things) is a liar and, besides that, a dog someone of Mr. Trump’s famously good taste in the ladies wouldn’t molest with Mike Pence’s dick.

Fact: more than twenty women accused then-presidential candidate Trump, who bragged about being able to “grab women by the pussy” because he was a star, of various sexual trespasses. Trump threatened to sue all of them, dogs and skanks one and all — and attention seeking liars — he promised he’d drag them all into court right after the 2016 election (along with providing a great, much more affordable and comprehensive health plan once he abolished Obamacare). None of these gold-digging partisan liars were sued (and no health plan was ever offered).

Counterfact: this lying, homely woman is just looking for a big pay day, and is probably already on the payroll of George Soros and the rest of the cannibal pedophiles Q has been warning us all about.

But here’s the thing that bugs me in this perilous moment, the consolidated media, run by advertising dollars and owned by very wealthy, connected corporate men, continues to pretend that cutting the baby in half is the way King Solomon would do it– if he was beholden to advertisers and wanted to maintain his access to the president’s administration. They have absolutely no sense of irony about this baby cutting they reflexively do, or any recognition that Solomon did not actually cut the baby, he only used the threat to be fair and chop the baby in half to learn who was the real mother. Or, more to the point, they don’t care about cutting your baby in half if there’s profit in it.

Here’s the Grey Lady on Barr’s sudden decision to intervene to make sure Trump doesn’t have to give DNA or be deposed in a defamation suit he brought on himself by publicly insulting a private citizen and calling her a liar from the bully pulpit. The headline repeats Barr’s claim that this is it unprecedented for the DOJ to step in and defend an American president in a civil suit — anything whatsoever that the president says in the course of his presidency is protected absolutely by this doctrine — ask Alan Dershowitz, nothing the president honestly thinks is right can be wrong:

Sure, perfectly normal. Presidents are regularly defended by the Department of Justice in defamation suits. It happens all the time. It could have been phrased “Barr defends unprecedented DOJ intervention as Normal” but that would only piss the administration off– and for what? What reminded Barr to take the case after so many months had passed?

Normal, you know. Not the sort of unusual, never seen before kind of case that merits any kind of close scrutiny. Happens virtually every day. Obama, yeah, he used it, sure he did, why wouldn’t he?

Perfectly normal, in Trump’s America. And you chumps can take that to the ballot box. Right after you get your vaccine, which will be safe, effective and free to everyone the day it is released.

Anarchist Jurisdictions

Manifest Destiny. The Lost Cause. Rugged Individualism. Social Darwinism. The War to End War. Isolationism. Separate But Equal. American Exceptionalism. The Shining City on the hill. Climate Change Skepticism. The Death Tax. White Supremacy. States’ Rights. Eugenics. Race-neutral color-blindness. Morning in America. Law and Order. Birtherism. Libertarianism. Felon disenfranchisement. Russiagate. Pro-life. Illegal Aliens. Second Amendment solutions. MAGA, man.

Anarchist Jurisdictions [1].

Catchy slogans are great and American as apple pie and The Peculiar Institution. I have nothing against slogans, as slogans. It’s just that so many of them are so clearly stupid and destructive, created by wordsmiths, hired by “ideologues,” to serve what a less measured blogger might call “evil.” Lately we have a new one, created for a lawyered up, all-powerful Unitary Executive who is having walls built around the White House (that the Anarchists and leftist fascists he denounces are paying for) to symbolize his oneness with the people who elected him: Anarchist Jurisdictions.

These are places where teaching students the history of American slavery and our long, sluggish struggle against violent racism and other social evils is done openly. These Anarchist Jurisdictions do not obey the unwritten laws we believe to be sacred and inviolable– the truths we hold to be self-evident and unalienable [2], like our freedom itself. The president has threatened to come down hard on any state or city that is teaching young people about America’s history of racist violence. Anarchist jurisdictions, you understand. Defund the police? Defund your fucking n-word curriculum! Anarchist Jurisdictions!

Or, as Bill Barr, Mike Pompeo and Mike Pence would call them Anti-Christ Jurisdictions. These are places where God’s plan for Christendom and mankind and His generous gift of His only Son’s Uniquely Precious Life, slaughtered by (well, you know who) to cleanse the world’s Original Sin (and also our extra-crispy sin) is denigrated. De-NIG-grated. These Anti-Christ Jurisdictions refuse to recognize the divinity and sovereignty of Jesus Christ. Of Jesus Christ! While claiming we are unChristian in our hearts. US!!!

We will bring the fist of justice down hard on these rabid dogs, fight these infidels with every righteous weapon in Jesus Christ’s great arsenal. We will extirpate this sinfulness, starting in every Godless Anarchist, Anti-Christ Jurisdiction we designate!

[1]

We will leave aside, for purposes of this discussion, a small problem with this slogan, an inherent contradiction, if you like.

Jurisdiction is defined as: the practical authority granted to a legal body to administer justice, as defined by the kind of case, and the location of the issue. In federations like the United States, areas of jurisdiction apply to local, state, and federal levels. Wikipedia

[2]

Unalienable describes things, especially rights, that cannot be taken away, denied, or transferred to another person. Unalienable means the same thing as inalienable, which is now the standard term.

source

further attempts to shed light on this hideous story

I just wrote to Bill Moyers (and I have a few other news outlets on my list for today, including FAIR, the Intercept and VOX):

I am a long-time admirer of Bill Moyers (a national treasure) and was delighted recently to discover his podcast, which continues his excellent and sorely needed journalism.  I am hoping somebody at BillMoyers.com will delve into this unreported story with direct effect on the 2020 election:

Trump appears to have ignored a federal judge’s 8/13/20 order to produce evidence of vote-by-mail fraud or state that he has no evidence.

Citing often-debunked mail-in voting fraud claims, the Trump campaign and the RNC brought a federal lawsuit against the Pennsylvania AG and all 67 counties for making voting easier and safer during the pandemic (Trump v. Boockvar).  Judge Ranjan (a Trump appointee) ordered Plaintiffs to produce evidence of their claims OR STATE THAT THEY HAVE NO EVIDENCE, by August 14. 

Several news outlets reported on the judge’s order, and his subsequent stay of the case (abstaining while state courts rule on many of the claims) but only one article (on The Intercept) has featured the lack of evidence presented by Trump and the RNC in their 524 page submission. 

 Stoking fears about mail-in voting fraud was recently reported as a Putin talking point for the US election.   It does not seem that Trump and the RNC submitted any evidence for their claims of massive mail-in voting fraud.  Not big news?

A headline might be:  Trump, in contempt of order by Trump-appointed judge, refuses to admit he has no evidence of voter fraud.    

I am happy to do my part fleshing out this important news story, which I have been following since Judge Ranjan’s 8/13 order.  McClatchy, the NY Times, Democracy Now!, the Intercept, Pittsburgh Public Radio station WESA (the federal court is in Pittsburgh) and other news organizations I contacted do not seem to have followed up on my pitch a few weeks back.   The media silence is puzzling and dismaying.   You can find links to my research HERE (along with the online docket for the case, which is HERE).   Please contact me if I can be of assistance with this story.   Here is what I posted yesterday:

Election Fraud: evidence or no evidence?

Why isn’t this “high profile” case front page news? It turns on the demonstrable falsity of Trump’s repeatedly debunked claims of massive voter fraud. These false claims are being actively spread by Putin, as well, according to US intelligence reports.

Trump v. Boockvar is the federal lawsuit brought by Donald J. Trump for President, Inc. and the Republican National Committee to prevent the Democratic Attorney General of Pennsylvania and the Election Boards of all 67 Pennsylvania counties from making voting easier and safer during a pandemic. The aim of the lawsuit is clearly to suppress the vote in a state whose twenty Electoral College votes Trump won by less than one percent (0.7%) in 2016. The judge has allowed the case to proceed without evidence of voter fraud being presented by the president’s lawyers (who were ordered to produce evidence by August 14th)

A sitting president and his party’s national committee are using campaign donations to fund an expensive federal lawsuit, forcing the massive expenditure of tax payer funds by a state/defendant trying to make ends meet during a pandemic.

Doesn’t seem quite right, does it?

Here’s the recent NY Times report about how Trump uses campaign funds to finance his many presidential legal battles.

Here’s the skinny on the flood of lawsuits Trump is having paid for by donors.

Incidentally, Trump’s claim in the case — that mail-in voting:

… denies any procedural visibility to candidates, political parties, and the public in general, thereby jeopardizing the free and fair public elections guaranteed by the United States and Pennsylvania Constitutions. The most recent election conducted in this Commonwealth and the public reaction to it demonstrate the harm caused by Defendants’ unconstitutional infringements of Plaintiffs’ rights. The continued enforcement of arbitrary and disparate policies and procedures regarding poll watcher access and ballot return and counting poses a severe threat to the credibility and integrity of, and public confidence in, Pennsylvania’s elections.

full amended complaint here

is not only unsupported by evidence (in apparent contempt of a judge’s order) but these claims are identical to Kremlin talking points about the upcoming US election [1]. How a federal lawsuit is allowed to go forward, unsupported by evidence of any kind, in spite of the unambiguous order of the federal judge that Plaintiff’s submit evidence or STATE THAT THEY HAVE NO EVIDENCE, is a modern American judicial mystery.  The failure of the news media to report on it is a modern American media mystery.  

Judge to Trump and Putin: put up or shut up!

The judge in the case, J. Nicholas Ranjan, a Trump appointee, ruled almost a month ago that Plaintiffs must submit evidence of the massive fraud they are claiming will take place if Pennsylvania’s voting modifications for the pandemic are allowed to go forward or STATE THAT THEY HAVE NO EVIDENCE.  

Judge Ranjan didn’t necessarily want to make this order against his benefactors, Trump and the RNC, he granted defendants’ motions asking for that order. Trump and the RNC plainly didn’t have good enough arguments for the judge to allow him to deny the motion and let them continue the case without a shred of evidence.

A federal lawsuit where the incumbent president and his massively wealthy party are using campaign funds to fuel a suit against a state to prevent the expansion of voting in a presidential election, during a pandemic — based on MASSIVE FRAUD they have produced no evidence of — eh, nothing to see here.

NOTHING TO SEE HERE?

[1]

A bulletin from the Department of Homeland Security alleges that Russian state actors are seeking to “amplify criticisms of vote-by-mail” in the U.S. election, with specific critiques echoing those made by President Trump and his allies.

additionally:

A bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report released in August found “irrefutable evidence of Russian meddling” in the 2016 election, concluding that Russia and China are both working to “disrupt our democracy, exacerbate societal divisions, and sow doubts about the legitimacy and integrity of our institutions, our electoral process and our republic.” National Counterintelligence and Security Center Director William Evanina said in a statement that Russia is actively working to “denigrate” former Vice President Joe Biden and “boost” Trump’s candidacy

source

Hyperbole and the H-word

Over the course of Donald Trump’s increasingly divorced from reality presidency (speaking of Covid-19 in the past tense as US leads the world in infections and deaths, railing against baseless witch hunts against the stable genius, denying Russian meddling in 2020 in spite of several reports, including the bipartisan Republican-led Senate report, and so on) it is tempting, to people like me, to compare the president to current dictators and fascist leaders of the past.

Some regard these comparisons as hyperbole. “Please, Hitler killed MILLIONS! Mussolini made his enemies drink oil until they shit themselves! Please! You dilute the monstrousness of world-class, history-shaping fascists by comparing this relatively mild-mannered autocrat to them!”

So while a president who believes his power is virtually absolute, supported by an Attorney General who shares his beliefs in a Unitary Executive whose powers may not be legitimately checked or balanced by judges or Congress, may resemble an authoritarian strongman in various ways, one should be very careful comparing a US president, whatever his flaws of excesses, to, say, Hitler.

All that said, neo-Nazis all love Mr. Trump, a man who speaks their language, backing them on every issue dear to them. Recently German far-right extremists, in Berlin, mounted a pro-Trump rally. I’m not saying these Hitler-revering Germans should have the last word on Mr. Trump’s politics and potential, I’m just sayin’.

Scandal Fatigue

It’s impossible to follow every dirty scheme the party of Trump is involved in. The sheer number of sickening abuses of power is mind-numbing. So you check out, for the sake of your mental health, and focus on not going insane. That is part of Trump’s plan, to emotionally wear out everybody who is not a full-time diehard hater or well-rewarded loyalist. I offer a quick take on one easy to follow scandal:

Story breaks that Louis DeJoy, Trump donor and head of campaign finance for the RNC and Donald J. Trump for President, Inc. until his recent appointment as Postmaster General of the UPSS, allegedly pressured his employees to donate to the Republican party and later reimbursed them. This is illegal. Trump is asked by a reporter whether DeJoy should face prosecution. Trump answers, with some cuteness, that if DeJoy did what he’s accused of that maybe he should be investigated.

The president then points out, falsely, that DeJoy was appointed by a bipartisan commission. For the record: the “bipartisan commission” claim is an outright lie, since Trump appointed them all, 4 Republicans and 2 Democrats, ensuring 4-2 votes and Trump “wins” on everything relating to the Postal Service. Google that “bipartisan” claim and you will learn:

Trump also praised DeJoy on Monday and emphasized that the postmaster general was appointed by a “bipartisan commission,” rather than by the president. While DeJoy was appointed by the USPS board of governors—which is made up of four Republicans and two Democrats, all of whom were appointed by Trump—his selection as postmaster general has recently become a source of controversy. DeJoy was initially suggested by USPS board chair Robert Duncan, who holds leadership roles in multiple GOP super PACs, rather than the independent executive search firm hired to find a new postmaster general, Duncan has testified to Congress, and former board member David Williams testified that he resigned from the board partially due to DeJoy’s appointment, believing he was not qualified for the position. 

source

Recalling that Mitch McConnell had blocked numerous Obama appointments, you follow that thread of the story and learn, to nobody’s surprise:

When the President took office three and a half years ago, he inherited an empty Board of Governors. For years, Congress had refused to confirm any of Barack Obama’s nominees to the Board, due to infighting on both sides of the aisle [note Time’s stunning even-handedness in not pinning the refusal to hold confirmation hearings on McConnell — ed] . Trump was therefore handed the opportunity to fill the Board of Governors with a majority of members—many of whom are business executives with ties to the Republican party—who shared his cost-cutting vision.

“I had never heard of anything like it in the U.S. government,” says James Sauber, chief of staff for the National Association of Letter Carriers, of the empty Board of Governors. “It was pretty extraordinary.”

source

Here’s how a fundamentally lawless, unethical man like McConnell makes something like this work (and it’s also been done with federal judgeships and at the Federal Election Commission– which hasn’t had a quorum for years — and other government oversight agencies)

There are nine slots allotted for the USPS Board of Governors. They function in a capacity akin a corporate board of a company, collectively appointing a Postmaster General and Deputy Postmaster General. The board is designed to be bipartisan by nature. While a sitting President appoints members when vacancies arise, no more than five members can be from the same party, and all nominees are subject to Congressional confirmation. Members are also elected to serve for seven year terms, ensuring that their tenure lasts through at least one Presidential administration.

By 2014, there were fewer than six members on the Board of Governors, which meant the body lacked a quorum and was unable to perform key functions. But while Obama nominated seven people to fill those vacancies, according to a 2018 report from the Congressional Research Service, none received a vote in the Senate [note again the restraint of Time in not stating what is also true, and perhaps more to the point: many Obama nominees were never allowed a hearing or vote by McConnell — ed. (1)].

source

No president can appoint more than five of the nine from his own party. Not a problem. Instead of nine, Trump appoints SIX, four from his party, two from the enemy party. Easy. Now he can win every vote 4-2. Nothing to it, if you have no scruples about anything but winning, your party’s as shameless as you are and your top law enforcement officer is a modern day Roy Cohn.

[1] According to the article, Bernie Sanders apparently blocked two nominees who favored privatizing the Postal Service.

Election Fraud: evidence or no evidence?

Why isn’t this “high profile” case front page news? It turns on the demonstrable falsity of Trump’s repeatedly debunked claims of massive voter fraud. These false claims are being actively spread by Putin, as well, according to US intelligence reports.

Trump v. Boockvar is the federal lawsuit brought by Donald J. Trump for President, Inc. and the Republican National Committee to prevent the Democratic Attorney General of Pennsylvania and the Election Boards of all 67 Pennsylvania counties from making voting easier and safer during a pandemic. The aim of the lawsuit is clearly to suppress the vote in a state whose twenty Electoral College votes Trump won by less than one percent (0.7%) in 2016. The judge has allowed the case to proceed without evidence of voter fraud being presented by the president’s lawyers (who were ordered to produce evidence by August 14th)

A sitting president and his party’s national committee are using campaign donations to fund an expensive federal lawsuit, forcing the massive expenditure of tax payer funds by a state/defendant trying to make ends meet during a pandemic.

Doesn’t seem quite right, does it?

Here’s the recent NY Times report about how Trump uses campaign funds to finance his many presidential legal battles.

Here’s the skinny on the flood of lawsuits Trump is having paid for by donors.

Incidentally, Trump’s claim in the case — that mail-in voting:

… denies any procedural visibility to candidates, political parties, and the public in general, thereby jeopardizing the free and fair public elections guaranteed by the United States and Pennsylvania Constitutions. The most recent election conducted in this Commonwealth and the public reaction to it demonstrate the harm caused by Defendants’ unconstitutional infringements of Plaintiffs’ rights. The continued enforcement of arbitrary and disparate policies and procedures regarding poll watcher access and ballot return and counting poses a severe threat to the credibility and integrity of, and public confidence in, Pennsylvania’s elections.

full amended complaint here

is not only unsupported by evidence (in apparent contempt of a judge’s order) but these claims are identical to Kremlin talking points about the upcoming US election [1]. How a federal lawsuit is allowed to go forward, unsupported by evidence of any kind, in spite of the unambiguous order of the federal judge that Plaintiff’s submit evidence or STATE THAT THEY HAVE NO EVIDENCE, is a modern American judicial mystery. The failure of the news media to report on it is a modern American media mystery.

Judge to Trump and Putin: put up or shut up!

The judge in the case, J. Nicholas Ranjan, a Trump appointee, ruled almost a month ago that Plaintiffs must submit evidence of the massive fraud they are claiming will take place if Pennsylvania’s voting modifications for the pandemic are allowed to go forward or STATE THAT THEY HAVE NO EVIDENCE.

Judge Ranjan didn’t necessarily want to make this order against his benefactors, Trump and the RNC, he granted defendants’ motions asking for that order. Trump and the RNC plainly didn’t have good enough arguments for the judge to allow him to deny the motion and let them continue the case without a shred of evidence.

A federal lawsuit where the incumbent president and his massively wealthy party are using campaign funds to fuel a suit against a state to prevent the expansion of voting in a presidential election, during a pandemic — based on MASSIVE FRAUD they have produced no evidence of — eh, nothing to see here.

NOTHING TO SEE HERE?

[1]

A bulletin from the Department of Homeland Security alleges that Russian state actors are seeking to “amplify criticisms of vote-by-mail” in the U.S. election, with specific critiques echoing those made by President Trump and his allies.

additionally:

A bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report released in August found “irrefutable evidence of Russian meddling” in the 2016 election, concluding that Russia and China are both working to “disrupt our democracy, exacerbate societal divisions, and sow doubts about the legitimacy and integrity of our institutions, our electoral process and our republic.” National Counterintelligence and Security Center Director William Evanina said in a statement that Russia is actively working to “denigrate” former Vice President Joe Biden and “boost” Trump’s candidacy

source

Thinking About Thinking

I’ve noticed a mysterious little flurry of viewers to a post I wrote two years ago about Hannah Arendt and her view of thinking and creativity. It is lack of imagination, Arendt asserted, and the dumb obedience this crabbed view of the world produces, that leads men, seeking to escape loneliness (among other things) to join movements in which they may be required to function as monsters, carry out unthinkably inhuman orders. They simply accept the rationale they are given, join a movement and execute the wishes of a Leader who may or may not be wise, capable or decent. A leader who may, in fact, be Adolf Hitler.

Adolf Eichmann, portrayed to this day as one of history’s most infamous monsters, was, as observed by Arendt during his sensational, important trial in Jerusalem, an unremarkable man of modest intellectual gifts who insisted it had been his duty to obey the laws of the new order in Germany. He spoke in cliches, often repeated stock Nazi phrases and was incapable of imagining that a regime that made mass murder ordinary, normal and lawful could have anything wrong with it. The several psychiatrists who examined him prior to his criminal trial in Jerusalem concluded he was not a “man obsessed with a dangerous and insatiable urge to kill” or a “perverted, sadistic personality” (as the prosecutor later wrote of Eichmann — and as the ad for the current Netflix offering about him suggests).

Half a dozen psychiatrists had certified him as “normal” — “More normal than I am after having examined him,” one of them was said to have exclaimed, while another had found that his whole psychological outlook, his attitude toward his wife and children, mother and father, brothers, sisters, and friends, was “not only normal but most desirable”– and finally the minister who had paid regular visits to him in prison after the Supreme Court had finished hearing his appeal reassured everybody by declaring Eichmann to be “a man with very positive ideas.”

(Eichmann in Jerusalem, pp. 25-26)

It was Eichmann’s utter lack of imagination, his willingness to believe what his superiors told him, his ambition to succeed and advance in his career, that made Eichmann the hardworking cog in the Nazi killing machine that he became. He was not troubled by conscience because what he was doing he had been legally ordered to do, he had only been doing his job. He literally could not imagine refusing to do his legal duty. A refusal to do it would have resulted in his own demotion, imprisonment, probably death — all unimaginably harsh and self-destructive outcomes. End of inquiry. Arendt was internationally vilified for “humanizing” this monster in her 1963 masterpiece. I’m with Hannah, she gives us a crucial understanding in her deep portrait of an otherwise ordinary enabler of evil.

In law school students are drilled in thinking through and articulating both sides of an argument, imagining as many avenues of legal attack to the client’s position as possible in order to defend against them. Rigorous thinking means sometimes considering ideas you might find repellant, overcoming the reflex to simply cast them out with a grunt of disgust. A mark of the agile mind, someone said (F. Scott Fitzgerald?) is being able to keep two contradictory thoughts in mind at the same time. We live in the instant information age, so here you go:

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” [1]

We are not trained to be nimble, creative thinkers — we are trained to be earners and consumers, as well as reflexive moralists who do not dwell on crazy-making nuance. From birth, here in the United States, we are exposed to hour upon hour of commercial advertisements, teaching us what to buy. By the time we are in kindergarten we can recite countless commercial tag lines and sing (at least when I was a kid and every product had a catchy little tune attached) dozens of jingles. I often lament that I can easily sing the entire “Veep” (a lemon lime soft drink, circa 1961) jingle perfectly but can’t recite a single line of Shakespeare or the Bible accurately.

In a sense it’s not anyone’s fault that we are a largely superficial, stubbornly opinionated culture, we’ve become this way by design, for the massive profit of the beneficiaries of this commercialized state of affairs. Imagining a fundamentally different way of life is almost impossible, given the pervasiveness of the one being sold to us 24/7 and now, literally so: carried on smart devices in our pockets, with little notification sounds to remind us to look at them. We tend to latch on to whatever suits our views, gravitating to items that support our confirmation bias.

Every moral and political issue is reduced to an oversimplified false duality — yes or no. If you critique an extractive, highly polluting consumer society that may well be destroying the earth for short-term profit it is easy to see what you are: a Communist, a soul-dead enemy of freedom and liberty. There is no other frame to think about such things here, though a desperately needed one is evolving with things like The Green New Deal.

Thinking about crowds carrying torches, united in some cause, often a violent one, we can set them in virtually any epoch in history. The rationale of the march is always similar — we are in pain, we are afraid, we’re angry, we are the victims, we are going to kill the people who are victimizing us! It’s true that once we have murdered the evil bastards our miserable life remains pretty much the same, the anger, pain and fair have not vanished — but that just means we haven’t killed enough of them. It is the triumph of action without thought, without imagination, without Reason, that leads to every mass catastrophe (not caused by “Acts of God”) that humans have ever fallen into.

It’s tempting, of course, to make comparisons between a guy like Eichmann and some of the political actors of our time. What “belief system” must one accept to justify the caging of children forcefully ripped from their mothers’ arms? It’s tempting to compare the thousands in perfect solidarity at a Nuremberg rally to the crowds today at certain political rallies, the fascist goon squads of 1930s Germany to a gang of men who take up arms to protest the tyranny of mandated mask wearing to slow the spread of a deadly pandemic. These types can imagine only one version of the world, as they believe it is, with powerful, evil cannibal child molesters trying to gain the upper hand, doing whatever they can to destroy our cherished way of life.

These crowds live, as we all do today, in echo chambers that magnify whatever bias they had last night, the one they wake up with today. A few guys are getting incredibly rich running these massive echo chambers while the rest of us face ever greater peril from endlessly magnified real problems that require deep thought, serious discussion and ingenious solutions, problems that are reduced to idiotic black or white, red or blue, yay or nay.

Thinkers are easily killed by violent men of action, men with guns, ropes, bombs. Violent, unthinking emotion, time after time, prevails over reflection, understanding, mercy, wisdom. That doesn’t make the attempt to understand, to be merciful, foolish. Understanding, and imagining a better future, is the only chance we have against the hoards who increasingly believe that politically powerful cannibal child rapists are coming to get all of the little white, Christian children in America and that only one man, an admittedly flawed vessel– but one secretly filled with Christ’s love — can save them. Decency prevails, when indecency becomes impossible not to see. The unimaginable stink of the thing can finally wake dozing souls to say: enough, goddamn it.

But we have to think. We actually have to think.

[1] F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1936, yo. A year one would have done well to keep this test in mind.