Looking toward the spot where Manhattan island was “purchased” for twenty-four dollars, many years back.
Below we are looking westward.
Transparently False President
Somehow, through the time-tested principle of endless repetition and the inevitably numbing process of habituation, millions of Americans have come to accept that the current president, like many people, simply cannot help lying. At least he’s honest about being a compulsive liar, his loyal supporters say.
The president boasted, during the investigation he mocked as a ‘witch hunt’, that he’d talk to Mueller, under oath, any time. Then he refused to speak to Mueller, on the advice of lawyers who understood that the president is incapable of not walking into a “perjury trap.” The term perjury trap, of course, was created for this man, to give a semblance of normalcy to his inability not to lie.
Since Trump’s Attorney General (his third in little over two years) began inaccurately spinning the unequivocal findings of the Mueller Report (ample grounds to indict for obstruction, but for OLC memoranda arguing against indicting a sitting president) Trump has contradicted himself at every step. Not a problem in the post-fact, post-analysis, post-reason world that Mr. Trump seeks to establish, nobody can separate one lying boast from the ten others that directly contradict it. They come too furiously, in tireless profusion.
“The report totally exonerated me!” Trump said over and over after Barr told him there was no finding by Mueller of criminal conspiracy between his inept crew and the Russian government. Trump never read the report but he knew the bottom line: TOTAL EXONERATION!
Followed by “it was a totally unfair witch hunt conducted by my enemies, eighteen angry Democrats” that needs to be investigated, along with Obama’s spying, Hillary’s emails and all the other major crimes of his many guilty, totally despicable and disgustingly unfair enemies.
“I have no problem with Mueller testifying,” he said calmly when asked about the Special Prosecutor speaking under oath to Congress. It’s likely that Bill Barr hipped him to the fatal stupidity of allowing the man who is upset at Barr’s deliberate distortions of his findings to speak in a televised session. Mueller will not be allowed to testify, was the next thing Trump said about that. Neither will anybody else, in or out of the government. No do-overs!!! No collusion, no obstruction and no investigation of obstruction, no subpoenas, I will lawyer up to obstruct any attempt to do anything that could reveal my seamless, ongoing pattern of obstruction!!! Mueller found me totally innocent, of everything, and I hate him because he’s a lying, traitorous member of the Deep State who had it in for me for no reason!!! UNFAIR! SAD!
And on and on. One looks in vain for anything approaching logical consistency in the many impulsive utterances of our Electoral College president. The only consistency that can be observed is the pattern of constant, reflexive twitches of self-protection and self-aggrandizement by this stunningly insecure natural-born “winner”.
The other day the governor of Florida announced that he’d seen proof of Russian hacking of two Florida counties prior to the 2106 election. He would not name the counties, he had signed a Non-disclosure Agreement with the feds when they showed him the evidence of Russian interference in the election. I cannot name the counties, the Florida governor announced, but the hack had NO EFFECT ON THE VOTE OUTCOME. Seriously?
I have no idea if Russian hackers actually changed votes in the electronic tallies of certain counties to help Trump win the relatively few districts he won by a total of 78,000 votes in the four “swing states” that decided the Electoral College outcome. I know that brilliant quants on Trump’s campaign team (probably working for mathematical savant and Asperger’s-afflicted billionaire Robert Mercer) engineered a brilliant and successful surgically targeted campaign to get those crucial votes, 50 here, 101 there, in every electoral district they needed to win to take all of those Electoral College votes by the slimmest of margins (less than 1% in three of those four states). [1] And that, naturally, the president bragged, without so much as a wink to easily obtainable facts, about his historically impressive landslide victory in the Electoral College. He, in fact, finished a few places from the bottom of the chart of Electoral College wins, but– hey.
There is no reason to doubt that those two Florida counties in question both went for Trump in that perpetual battleground state. Otherwise, why the need for the NDA? When in doubt, hide the evidence, lie about your reasons for hiding everything, make everybody take a loyalty oath, sign an NDA, dummy the fuck up, and heaven help the stinking rat who contradicts any of this. Nothing to fucking see here, you fucking Commies!
As for me, I’m looking forward to the transparently false president’s colorful tweet storm once impeachment hearings begin.
[1] There’s a nice chart here (toward the bottom) showing that Trump actually finished 46th in the 58 presidential elections in terms of Electoral College margins (check out Nixon in 1968 vs. 1972!)
and state by state we have these amazing landslide margins of victory for DJT in the Electoral College
- Michigan, 0.23%
- Pennsylvania, 0.72%
- Wisconsin, 0.77%
- Florida— a whopping 1.2%!!!
A few thoughts on thinking
The most satisfying and memorable kind of conversation is like a great catch. The thought you throw to the other person is held for a moment and tossed back, with an interesting additional idea, and it comes directly into your hand, for a moment of consideration, before you toss it back. There is a rhythm to this kind of chat, and no rush to talk.
What you just said reminds me of something eerily similar that happened to me years ago. I mention it. You raise your eyebrows, nod, yes, it’s very similar, but there is one big difference. You elaborate. I hadn’t thought about that, but, sure, that’s a very big difference, all the difference in the world, really.
You can learn something important when a distinction is illuminated like that. This kind of conversation is a way of thinking back and forth, of collaboratively considering things and shedding light on some of the mysteries of this mysterious life.
Most talks between us are not so much this way, they are quick, many unrelated things come and go, threads pop up and disappear, shorthand is substituted for consideration, we move on, time is fleeting, we gossip, we vent, we don’t linger to converse in the more thoughtful mode every day.
We can all remember specific conversations that were on a deeper level, that moved us, changed us even. I recall one, during a bike ride with an old friend, when she told me something obvious and profound that I’d never thought of. She put it succinctly, in a phrase, and it changed the way I saw things. I had one, and only one, wonderfully deep, personal conversation with my otherwise fussy, distracted Aunt Barbara. In the living room of my parents house, after everyone else had gone to sleep, the moments with her I value the most.
The desire for this kind of conversation is a big reason people love to read. We have a dialogue, of a sort, with another mind, a mind who was driven to set things on paper, after combing them into the readable form we have in front of us. I am reading a book like that now, a novel. Full of what Zora Neale Hurston called “that oldest human longing”, the desire to reveal ourselves to another, to speak our deepest personal truths and be seen and heard as we really are. Speaking is great, writing is a more refined version of speech.
This dialogue with the author is a big reason we read. I knew nothing about Shoshana Zuboff except that she recently gave a few very interesting interviews about her mind-blowing book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. I didn’t pick up the book because I wanted a dialogue with her specifically, the subject she wrote about was compelling to me. It turns out she is not only a very perceptive and extremely well-read woman, she’s fucking brilliant, creative and extremely engaging.
She reminded me of Hannah Arendt in the way her book was loaded with thought-provoking insights seemingly peripheral to her central idea. Of course, no insight is peripheral to anything, in the hands of a creative thinker and skilled writer.
Take this seemingly random peripheral insight from her book. We in the West have long valued the idea of our own autonomy. The principle that we alone, as individual moral actors, have the final say in what we think and do. This idea, Shoshana Zuboff points out, is under great pressure now, in an age when systematically modifying our behavior, our choices, how we think and interact, is increasingly monetized by people who become billionaires by tracking our every impulse, particularly things like the desire to be accepted by others, and directing these impulses toward personally targeted commerce.
The ideal consumer is one who is not autonomous, driven by deeply held beliefs and a strong internal need to feel independent, but heteronomous.
Heteronomous? What the fuck?
Shoshana Zuboff provides this great term as the opposite of autonomous. Heteronomy is the external force, based on an overarching concept, that drives mass conformity. This indispensable word is apparently a coinage of Immanuel Kant’s [1].
Note: the digital technology that allows us to instantly search for and pull up information, opinion and historical (and ahistorical) details is a sharp double-edged sword, of course. We are all very smart, in our information age, and capable, if we wish, of effortlessly fact-checking and quoting very accurately, when we have instant access to the world’s collected information. We are not nearly as impressive when we have no cell reception and only memory and wit to rely on. In this age anyone can tap in a quick search and come up with:
Heteronomy refers to action that is influenced by a force outside the individual, in other words the state or condition of being ruled, governed, or under the sway of another, as in a military occupation.
Immanuel Kant, drawing on Jean-Jacques Rousseau,[1] considered such an action nonmoral.[2][3]
It is the counter/opposite of autonomy.
Philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis contrasted heteronomy with autonomy by noting that while all societies create their own institutions (laws, traditions and behaviors), autonomous societies are those in which their members are aware of this fact, and explicitly self-institute (αυτο-νομούνται). In contrast, the members of heteronomous societies (hetero = others) attribute their imaginaries to some extra-social authority (e.g., God, the state, ancestors, historical necessity, etc.).[4]
The actions of a heteronomous person are driven not by an internal imperative to act based on a personal, individualized belief system, but by an external force. The masters of the force that moves masses can make themselves all-powerful and wealthy beyond the dreams of the most wanton slaveholder who ever enjoyed the involuntary company of an endless parade of beautiful servant girls.
You get a notification and look into your cellphone screen to read a come on that a third party has sent to you. Your smartphone, of course, has a camera with a sharp lens and you have, by clicking “accept” when downloading the app, already given permission for the app and any associated third parties to have access to that camera. As you look at the come on, the camera captures your reactions. A few revealing micro-expressions are taken and filtered through algorithms that tell the third party exactly what you are receptive to receiving as a follow-up. Disgusted by the ad? We are too! We’ll send you the antidote!
In our surveillance age, privacy is sacrificed to “security” and convenience. The genius of the world’s smartest man, Jeff Bezos, was implementing a system to exploit his keen understanding that by monetizing the laziness and poor impulse control of the average American consumer he could become the richest individual in human history.
Shop, in the privacy of your home, in your underwear, for the specific things that will make you elegant, popular, the envy of your friends and enemies alike. Pay an annual fee and become a preferred customer, you can receive this great stuff almost instantly. They’re working on a way to have robots and drones get this stuff to you in virtual real time. What a world!
As we enjoy the convenience of this cyber world we give up certain crucial things. Human interaction has been changed by the always-on social media machine that converts the world into a data-driven high school popularity contest. The need for face-to-face play, improvisation just for fun, one of the great joys of human life, has been largely replaced by virtual human contact. Virtual human contact that allows third parties to monetize and profit from our need to connect.
Just as the female calf on the industrial diary farm never experiences the play that all young mammals have always enjoyed as they master a host of social skills, including the flirting that will lead to reproduction (these industrially raised young cows don’t need to learn anything, they’ll be artificially inseminated and give more milk than any naturally raised cow) [2] today’s teenagers are growing up in a less playful, far more precarious, world few of us could have imagined. Except perhaps on our worst day in junior high school.
A world where everyone has a camera on them at all times, for better or worse. Where, on a dare, or being flirtatious, at an age when people are searching for the acceptance of their peers, racy nude photos are taken, exchanged, live forever on servers in virtual clouds. At the worst possible time in the life of a fifteen year-old girl a formerly trusted best friend reveals a vicious side, posts that photo of you with the dick against your dumbly grinning face. Of all the things that goad adolescent suicide, a good public humiliation is high up there. Another person’s shame can now be uploaded, instantly, on to the internet everybody carries in their pocket. This is a new, devastating weapon everyone is aware of.
Shoshana Zuboff discusses the wariness that must be imparted to children in this world of eternal invasive, largely commercial, surveillance. Be paranoid, they are collecting every private insight that can be gleaned, in order to “serve you more efficiently”. They are modifying your behavior in real time, and the reach of their prying apps, in continually more refined ways. You are a sucker if you trust anyone. Do not make eye contact, hit “like” and LOL.
I saw an ad for what seems to be a wonderful project. A search engine that spends its profits planting trees, they’ve already planted millions of trees in formerly denuded, lifeless landscapes. We can read all the devilish details of what amoral motherfuckers Google’s executives are. They also built the greatest internet mousetrap in history, you have to give them credit. The proof of Google’s value, as they say, is in the pudding, they are richer than fuck, among the most successful companies in history. That’s really all you need to know. Hate success? You hate freedom! (talk about heteronomous logic)
The alternative search engine I saw the ad for, Ecosia, has a series of wonderful ads. They plant trees to restore destroyed rain forests, reclaim arid new deserts, provide habitat to preserve some of the thousand of species that are becoming extinct every day. You can download their free app. Sounds like a total win-win. Fuck google. Let me support a company that is doing something proactive to save our planet from the rapacious extractionists who are, to put it crudely, raping our biosphere to death.
Then I think: this is exactly what they want, isn’t it? Talk about building the ultimate mousetrap.
Download the free app, along with every other idealist in the radius of Ecosia’s advertising, and they are on your computer, on your phone, in your home, in your head. They now have your name, and your every preference, on a worldwide list of everybody who fancies herself an idealist, everyone who wants a better world. Who do they have to wipe out first, if they are to finally have everything just before the earth breathes its last? Me and you, baby, the people who are determined to fight the grim, determined, heteronomous armies of death.
Another bracing thing Shoshana Zuboff details is how this justified paranoia has decreased human to human trust among Americans. We also have less and less trust for institutions, norms, the fairness of justice. We are right to be paranoid, as we are screwed left and right, in the name of abstract principles that serve only the monetizers at the top of the societal food chain. Distrust has become a kind of default setting as we learn more and more about the details of how we are being systematically fucked and lied to about the nature of this nonconsensual arrangement.
One final thought about thinking. We tend to think in words (feelings come in many tastes, smells, sounds, colors, etc.) and so a word like anodyne, or heteronomy, is essential in forming certain thoughts. Without the word neatly expressing and encompassing the larger concept, we’d have nothing to chew on, at least not in a way we can express. Something to masticate.
[1] Kant, a world-changing philosopher, is reputed never to have traveled more that a short distance from where he was born. Forty miles is the distance I recall hearing from a chatty professor in a philosophy class at City College around 40 years ago. I did a search for what that distance actually was, using the newfangled internet. That he never travelled more than 16 km. (9.9 miles) from his birthplace is apparently a crock:
A common myth is that Kant never traveled more than 16 kilometres (9.9 mi) from Königsberg his whole life.[45] In fact, between 1750 and 1754 he worked as a tutor (Hauslehrer) in Judtschen[46] (now Veselovka, Russia, approximately 20 km) and in Groß-Arnsdorf[47] (now Jarnołtowo near Morąg (German: Mohrungen), Poland, approximately 145 km). source
Ninety miles, bitches. Don’t believe the hype.
[2] Thank you, Yuval Noah Harari, for the description of this animal right to play and socialize, unsentimentally sacrificed without a second thought by the industry that brings Americans their dairy and meat.
Mueller’s preemptive retort to Barr’s statements strongly implying that Mueller exonerated Trump of all wrong-doing
from the report:
Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, however, we are unable to reach that judgment [that Trump did not act with corrupt intent and did not commit felonies]. The evidence we obtained about the President’s actions and intent presents difficult issues that prevent us from conclusively determining that no criminal conduct occurred. Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him. [1]
And, if you are still on the fence about the importance of moving forward on impeachment hearings, take three minutes to watch this excellent short video on the five major benefits of beginning an impeachment of President Obstruction.
[1] Mueller also wrote, with no ambiguity whatsoever:
The conclusion that Congress may apply the obstruction laws to the President’s corrupt exercise of the powers of the office accords with our constitutional system of checks and balances and the principle that no person is above the law.
Punishment for Contempt re: subpoenas — it depends
I had a professor in law school who drilled his students to begin every answer to a legal question with “it depends.” He’d stop us if we forgot to begin our answer that way, smile encouragingly as one of us began with this phrase and wave his hand for the follow up, an explanation of the devilish details on which your actual answer depends. He was no radical, as far as I know (he taught Intellectual Property, the area he also practiced), but that qualification, “it depends”, turns out to be the key to all critical discussion of our laws.
If you are eighteen and your girlfriend is sixteen, in many states you can be easily convicted of statutory rape. Will every eighteen year-old sleeping with his sixteen year-old girl friend be prosecuted for this crime? Obviously not, but why not? It depends. On who the boy is, who the girl is, who their families are. A prep school kid from a rich family can be excused for letting his heart rule him that way. It seems so unfair to let this youthful love affair (even — yea, especially– if it is only one night long) destroy the boy’s entire life! A hard boy from the ghetto will generally get a less generous pass from the law for letting his heart decide what the law should be. Additionally, justice reasons, the kid from the ghetto should know exactly how ungenerous his pass will be. Impossible to compare the lives of those two boys, one a hard criminal type, the other the finest sort our society produces!
Is contempt of a subpoena to testify a crime? It depends.
The Attorney General is instructing the president on a (very weak) “protective presidential privilege” defense for his ongoing obstruction of justice. He has given Trump’s energetic attempts to cover up all potentially damaging information against him the tiniest, most obscene fig leaf of legal cover. On the plus side, from Barr’s experienced point of view, when Obama was challenged on a similarly weak assertion of presidential privilege, it took the courts four years to decide that his weak-ass defense could not stand.
A random note about time: four years is the difference between Mr. Hitler as Time Magazine Man of the Year, for restoring German power and prestige, and Mr. Hitler as a Hall of Fame mass murderer at the top of his game, gleefully slaughtering in the East.
Back to contempt of a subpoena to testify, or to release documents.
Chelsea Manning, who leaked, among other things, video footage of American soldiers committing war crimes, murdering civilians and civilians who went to rescue the surviving machine gunned civilians, with the full backing of their commander (“light ’em up!”), was locked up for seven years, after being sentenced to thirty-five years for giving the files to Wikileaks. She recently was locked up for more than two months for failing to comply with a grand jury subpoena (she got out yesterday or today, temporarily). They are trying to force her to give additional testimony that will aid in convicting Mr. Wikileaks, Julian Assange, and locking him up under the jail for the rest of his natural life.
Meanwhile, this smug, openly contemptuous, expertly evasive fuck has already shown his eagerness to wipe his ass with any and all legal process.
He openly advises the president, in writing, on how to best stonewall to drag out the legal processes against him for as long as the law allows, including using a pathetically weak constitutional defense to support Trump’s order to everyone in government (and those formerly in his government) to ignore all subpoenas and not give anyone anything under any circumstance. Trump has vowed to fight all efforts at transparency all the way up to the Supreme Court, a court he is betting will vote on strict partisan lines to protect the corrupt bastard who appointed the two most recent right wing die hards.
As for contempt of Congress itself, as a matter of law and practice … [1]
Trump clearly has a very guilty conscience. You would too, if you’d done what he has done for his entire life. I n fairness to him, though, he has never been held accountable for any of the many incredibly stupid, immoral, vicious, inexcusable and illegal things he has done since childhood. When your father is a billionaire with a weakness for bailing you out of your own colossally imbecilic fuck-ups, year after year, decade after decade, you don’t really have to worry. You never have to worry!
Ask Don Jr, ask Ivanka, ask Jared. They will tell you, in no uncertain terms, “it depends”.
[1] You can read that basics about Contempt of Congress HERE.
There’s a good discussion of what Congress can do to give teeth to a contempt citation HERE
A person cited for contempt of Congress can be arrested by the sergeant-at-arms of the House of Representatives and dragged into Congress. The last time this procedure was used was a long time ago. Gratifying as it would be to see Barr dragged into the House in handcuffs, it would just as likely be a bloodbath as a cornered, twitchy, enraged Barr could use his own armed agents to repel the sergeant-at-arms in a hail of bullets. I would put nothing past the smug, contemptuous Nazi bastard.
Here are a couple of powerful government appointees who were held in contempt in recent times (from the table at the bottom of the Wiki):
Eric Holder, Attorney General under Obama, was found in contempt of Congress (by a vote of 255-67, no less) in 2012.
Note also that Anne Gorsuch, mother of our own Neil Gorsuch, was, like her son, a faithful soldier whose service to her masters included allowing herself to be cited for contempt of Congress.
What Nazis Do
A good Nazi is loyal to his leader, above all else. The original Nazis back in Germany believed in strict obedience to the will of their infallible leader, uber alles. The Fuhrer’s every word had the force of absolute law — they phrased it, in their inimitable language: Fuhrerworte haben Gesetzeskrafte. Fuhrerworte was left to an army of Nazi lawyers to write indelibly into the German legal code of the time.
You can read all about Nazis and their hierarchy of obedience to orders in many excellent books. One I recommend, if you are only ready to read one short book about these very fine people, is Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem.
In that detailed and philosophical account of the prosecution of an unremarkable high school drop-out who rose to become a major cog in the industrialized Nazi killing apparatus, you will see numerous examples of ambitious men, unhindered by restrictive principles, hitching their destinies to an infallible, all-powerful Fuhrer, a man chosen by a certain type of savage pagan god as the instrument to dominate and slaughter every hated enemy of The People.
A central trait of Nazis is rubbing the faces of despised people in Nazi imposed shame. Nothing is more hilarious to a Nazi (or your equally fine klansman, for that matter) than watching a good bit of rough humiliating violence inflicted on a hated, subhuman enemy. They forcibly cut the beards off of religious men, kicked children, humiliated enemies at every opportunity, stripped people naked as they marched them to anonymous deaths.
We are cautioned against comparing bad people who misuse their power to Nazis, that this sort of easy hyperbole undermines credibility (even when talking about people who openly applaud the beliefs of actual Nazis). So I don’t compare Trump, a dictator wannabe, to his most famous all-powerful countryman, Mr. Hitler. It’s a cheap comparison of two great men, right? Forget the lying ex-wife who scurrilously claimed Trump kept one of the few books he ever read, the Collected Speeches of Adolf Hitler, on the gold-plated nightstand next to his gold-plated bed. [1]
The raging bitches I am comparing to ambitious young Nazis are the token Jews in Mr. Trump’s xenophobic, racist inner circle. Stephen Miller, a nominally Jewish troll who needs no introduction, is one of the few remaining original Trump loyalists still loyally advising the president to remain ruthless with his many enemies. Miller, you will recall, rode in on the coattails of disgraced former Trump ally Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, the first mainstream politician to endorse Trump in his then quixotic-seeming run for president. The other skanky bitch I have in mind is the son of a convicted Jewish felon, the hereditary billionaire grandson of humble survivors of the Nazi holocaust. You know him as Jared, the president’s loyal son-in-law.
I have only one thing to say, at the moment, about Jared Kushner, a man, like his father-in-law, born stinking rich and possessing zero qualifications for his present job as a world leader. Jared has apparently decided (probably in consultation with Miller and Trump himself) that the details of his “peace plan” for Palestinians shall be be announced immediately after conclusion of the holiest holy days of the Muslim year, Ramadan. This month-long religious duty requires devout Muslims to fast during daylight hours for the duration of this period of prayer and self-reflection.
When Ramadan ends, there is a celebratory feast عيد الفطر] ] to mark the end of this period of religiously mandated privation. It is during this feast that Mr. Kushner will announce his “peace plan” for the Palestinians. One can only imagine the generous humanity, fairness and decency of untutored C-student Jared’s historic proposal to the people he considers the rightfully hated enemies of his ancestral homeland. The timing of its release: pure, in-your-fucking face Nazi.
Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year, is the tenth of ten days of repentance. A Jew is supposed to fast on that day, reflecting on any other harm he may have done to his fellow creatures and doing whatever is possible to repair that harm. The Nazis took no greater delight than mischievously scheduling some really hateful shit for the moment when Jews were taking their first drink of water, eating the first food in twenty four hours, after a day of prayer and soul-searching. “Here, have this with your bread, my dear Jewish friends,” said the playful Nazi, offering a bit of Xyklon B to spice up the festivities.
I don’t call Miller, the advocate of ruthless child separation at the border, a Nazi. Though, in fairness, this kind of vicious state-sponsored terrorism is exactly what the Nazis routinely did. I don’t call announcing a peace plan to enshrine the intolerable status quo on the very night that ends the holiest days in the target population’s year a Nazi-like thing to do. Though, in fairness, it’s exactly the kind of thing the fucks who fully intended to kill all of Jared’s grandparents loved to do.
I’m just sayin’.
[1] once again, those America-hating commies at Business Insider with a lying hatchet job on, arguably, the greatest German in history. Here’s a nice little tranche from those rabid freedom-hater’s 2015 hit piece on Mr. Trump:
When Brenner asked Trump about how he came to possess Hitler’s speeches, “Trump hesitated” and then said, “Who told you that?”
“I don’t remember,” Brenner reportedly replied.
Trump then recalled, “Actually, it was my friend Marty Davis from Paramount who gave me a copy of ‘Mein Kampf,’ and he’s a Jew.”
Brenner added that Davis did acknowledge that he gave Trump a book about Hitler.
“But it was ‘My New Order,’ Hitler’s speeches, not ‘Mein Kampf,'” Davis reportedly said. “I thought he would find it interesting. I am his friend, but I’m not Jewish.”
After Trump and Brenner changed topics, Trump returned to the subject and reportedly said, “If, I had these speeches, and I am not saying that I do, I would never read them.”
What Contempt Looks Like
(image courtesy of Fox)
The new Attorney General of the United States (Trump’s third), facing a House citation for contempt of Congress, sends a letter to the president advising him of what he needs to do to keep redacted details of Mueller’s deliberately mischaracterized investigation secret to avoid the revelation of any details that could prove embarrassing, or worse, to the Unitary Executive and his reelection prospects. Barr did this yesterday when he wrote a letter to Trump that begins (almost perfect in its grammar):
I am writing to request that you make protective assertion of executive privilege with respect to Department of Justice documents recently subpoenaed by the Committee on the Judiciary of the House of Representatives. [1]
If the president’s personal lawyer and gleefully loyal sidekick Rudy Giuliani had sent him this letter, or another member of Trump’s Praetorian Guard like Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, Chuck Grassley, Lyin’ Ted Cruz or any one of dozens like them, had sent the letter, I’d simply have hit snooze. Loyal ass-lickers loyally licking ass, nothing to see here.
But this letter to the president, with advice from the U.S. Attorney General on how to best stonewall and run out the clock on any legal probe into his seamless pattern, as president (and since childhood), of obstruction of justice (much of it done in public, shamelessly and usually dishonestly, but no less indictably) is contempt itself. In addition to urging the president to take a desperate action to obstruct the administration of justice, it is also frivolous advice — the president already waived his executive privilege when he let Mueller gather all the redacted evidence. Desperate times call for desperate measures, yo.
Barr is acting as war time consigliere, a role he feels he was born to play — protecting the most powerful man in the world from facing the consequences of his illegal acts.
Do not be lulled. This is remarkable shit, the nation’s top lawyer personally advising the president on how to skate for what appears to be a reflexive lifelong pattern of criminal activity, or, at least, open contempt of all law and every norm decent people all observe. The pathetic porcine puppet did this service for his old boss George HW Bush when he helped orchestrate the pre-trail pardon of indicted Iran-Contra co-conspirator Caspar Weinberger. The trial would have, at the very least, left HW covered with shit when discovery began and Bush’s name was all over Weinberger’s notes of meetings HW consistently denied knowledge of. Barr acted to protect his boss and did, advising on the pardons of the rest of the conspirators, including convicted perjurer Elliot Abrams, in the final cover-up of a series of illegal and deadly actions known blandly as the Iran-Contra Affair.
When Barr consented to be questioned on television, under oath in front of a Senate committee, the master evader had the protection of the chairman, hissy fit throwing Lindsey Graham, a seasoned ass-licker who could be depended on to protect the apolitical A.G. from any rough questioning by political enemies. Graham had proven his ability to hiss with the best of them when he provided passionate indignation and full-throated snarling cover for intemperate Boof Kavanaugh who railed, snorted and cried defending his birth right to sit on the highest court in the land and not have to settle, unfairly defeated and life destroyed by a cabal of filthy rich lying traitors, for his lifetime seat on the second highest court in the land. Graham proved himself one shameless single white man in both of these high stakes, spotlit moments.
In the House, a forum where evasion would not be so easy, without a five minute questioning clock to easily run out with lawyerly cavil, with a referee clearly not on his side, Barr simply refused to testify. Contemptuous of Congress’s limited power, without action by the Department of Justice, at whose head Barr sits, to do shit to him, he simply told the members of the Democratically controlled Congressional committee to fuck themselves and their perfectly reasonable, legal requests for testimony and evidence. As for legal documents you have an unequivocal legal right to see, I have your unequivocal legal right right here, bitches (note that I am cupping my porcine privates), as I have so advised the president who I have vowed to loyally protect, come what may.
In the senate session, confronted with written evidence, prepared by Robert S. Mueller III within a day of Barr’s initial public distortions about the findings of his report, that Barr had, at best, fibbed when he claimed he didn’t know what Mueller felt about his lying mischaracterization (he’d had Mueller’s short letter for weeks by then, with every opportunity to read it and know precisely how Mueller felt) Barr did what any powerful, contemptuous, pig-faced motherfucker would have done. Holding the letter that proved he’d been lying under oath he shrugged and said it was a “snitty” letter, probably written by one of Mueller’s junior associates.
A peevish amateur, in other words, had written this peevish letter, out of pure snit and powerless loser indignation, to the most powerful law enforcement agent in the United States. Barr was hinting by this smug surmise, you understand, that Mueller probably didn’t even look when he signed the snitty little letter. You see? Nothing to see here. Mueller’s supposed letter was a mere piece of snit, not even written by him, so how am I supposed to know what he said about how he felt when he didn’t even fucking say it?!
I’m not impressed by this kind of shit. I knew many people in law school as talented as Barr is (or fucking Boof Kavanaugh, for that matter) in skating right up to the line of outright perjury, giving a contemptuous smile and inviting you to kiss their ample ass as they skate back to a neutral corner. It is a despicable part of the lawyer’s art, to vigorously lie without actually, technically, lying. Barr is an experienced, high-priced corporate (and corpulent) lawyer, apparently not bound any ethical restraints in the highest sense, and so he can evade answering any question (in a forum where the ref only calls fouls on the other team) merely by going around the side of the question and being contemptuous. He can (and did) do this at will in a forum where the partisan ref had his back.
I once volunteered on a kibbutz. The kibbutzniks challenged the teen- aged volunteers to a friendly game of basketball. We had two or three really good players. They quickly scored a few points and soon found they couldn’t get near the basket without being hacked, grabbed, stomped on, literally put into headlocks. There was never a foul called.
This was because the referee, the guy calling fouls and making sure the rules were enforced, turned out to be the coach of the kibbutz team. The fucking coach. One of our best players got mad, after being restrained by two burly kibbutzniks, and elbowed hard in the stomach by one, with nuggies from the other, as he went up for his shot. He was called for a technical foul when he loudly asked a teammate, in English “how do you tell the ref he’s a fucking lying piece of shit?”
The kibbutzniks had a guy waiting under their basket for a full-court heave and an easy, uncontested lay-up. I watched this a couple of times and then hung back near half court. As Alon, master of the chicken coops, got the pass I was a few feet from him, racing to close the distance. He went up for the lay-up and I leaped up and slapped that shit cleanly out of the air. It was one of the best plays I ever made on a basketball court. Perfectly timed, athletic, totally clean.
Naturally, I was called for a foul and the little fuck shot two, that little smirk still on his face. As the kibbutznik sunk both shots I muttered loudly, in Hebrew, that the ref was a complete piece of shit, and the son of a stinking whore, his father being a young boy who services pederasts. The ref graciously did not call another foul on me (I was not much of a scoring threat). The kibbutzniks were ahead by 20 points by then anyway.
This is what we’re dealing with here with Mr. Contempt, Bill Barr. A bulging barr of stinking shit. Needs to face impeachment, if that’s what it takes to wipe that fucking smug smile off his contemptuous pig face and restore some version of the rule of law, rather than the rule of contempt for all laws.
Notice also, though Mueller found numerous Russian acts to help Trump win the 2016 election, Trump’s administration has done nothing to investigate these acts to prevent them from happening again in 2020. That’s what winners do, according to people like Trump and Barr, they preserve all their privileges and do a wild victory dance while pissing on what fucking powerless losers think.
[1] The rest of Barr’s letter reads:
In cases like this where a committee has declined to grant sufficient time to conduct a full review, the President may make a protective assertion of privilege to protect the interests of the Executive Branch pending a final determination about whether to assert privilege. See Protective Assertion of Executive Privilege Regarding White House Counsel’s Office Documents, 20 Op. O.L.C. 1 (1996) (opinion of Attorney General Janet Reno). The Committee has demanded that I produce the “complete and unredacted version”of the report submitted to me on March 22, 2019, by Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller, III, regarding his investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. The Committee also seeks “[a]ll documents referenced in the Report”and “[a]ll documents obtained and investigative materials created by the Special Counsel’s Office.” The Committee therefore demands all of the Special Counsel’s investigative files, which consist of millions of pages of classified and unclassified documents bearing upon more than two dozen criminal cases and investigations, many of which are ongoing. These materials include law enforcement information, information about sensitive intelligence sources and methods, and grand-jury information that the Department is prohibited from disclosing by law.
Consistent with paragraph 5 of President Reagan’s 1982 memorandum about assertions of executive privilege, the Department requested that the Chairman of the Committee hold the subpoena in abeyance and delay any vote recommending that the House of Representatives approve a resolution finding me in contempt of Congress for failing to comply with the subpoena, pending a final presidential decision on whether to invoke executive privilege. See Memorandum for the Heads of Executive Departments and Agencies, Re: Procedures Governing Responses to Congressional Requests for Information at 2 (Nov. 4, 1982). The Department made this request because, although the subpoenaed materials assuredly include categories of information within the scope of executive privilege, the Committee’s abrupt resort to a contempt vote—notwithstanding ongoing negotiations about appropriate accommodations—has not allowed sufficient time for you to consider fully whether to make a conclusive assertion of executive privilege. The Chairman, however, has indicated that he intends to proceed with the markup session scheduled at 10 a.m. today on a resolution recommending a finding of contempt against me for failing to produce the requested materials.
In these circumstances, you may properly assert executive privilege with respect to the entirety of the Department of Justice materials that the Committee has demanded, pending final decision on the matter. As with President Clinton’s assertion in 1996, you would be making only a preliminary, protective assertion of executive privilege designed to ensure your ability to make a final assertion, if necessary, over some or all of the subpoenaed materials. See Protective Assertion of Executive Privilege, 20 Op. O.L.C. at 1. As the Attorney General and head of the Department of Justice, I hereby respectfully request that you do so.
Explanation for P___
I saw old friends this weekend. One of them, P______, told me that V____ had given her a link to my blahg and that she’d read some of my posts. This puts her in an elite sliver of humanity, since I scorn “social media” as a destructive shit-show and, in consequence of being an on-line hermit, get very few visitors here. I was pleased to hear she was reading it. I must have raised my eyebrows questioningly because she volunteered that she found some of it extreme.
I immediately tried, without waiting for her to elaborate (she didn’t seem about to in any case), to explain why these posts might seem extreme. I sit down, often burned by some specific, irksome detail (like the seeming fact that many Americans appear to believe Bill Barr’s version of the Mueller report– nothing to see here, total exoneration of “POTUS”– in spite of Mueller’s own take, that Barr is sewing confusion about Mueller’s findings and conclusions) and I have to process it somehow, to make the burning and the fucking irking stop.
It often helps, I explained, to think an issue through by setting it out in front of me, trying to see it as clearly as possible, writing it out as lucidly as I can. I saw, as I was saying this, that P’s expression wasn’t changing.
It turned out that the politics didn’t bother her (probably because she holds largely related views). It emerged that the extreme aspect was the personal writing, the laying out of hidden, monstrous details of people close to me, like my father. My father had been director of the camp P and I went to as teenagers. It turns out P thought my old man was a really great guy, smart, funny, hip. Yes, he was all of those things, but he was also, how to put this delicately … a fucking monster.
This is the kind of highly opinionated thing P was referring to when she said “extreme”. Crossing a boundary of privacy and good taste, I guess. I told her that it may have been a mistake to put the first draft of the book about my father on-line. as I was wrestling the material into form.
I neglected to tell her that making my words “public” exerts a good effect on the words, forcing me to commit to each sentence in a way I don’t have to if I’m not putting them on-line. It has become my practice, writing and editing my words for others to read, for a couple of hours, as close to daily as I can — and “publishing” them.
I told her that if I had it to do over again, I would have written the sprawling first draft differently, now that I’ve written more than a thousand pages. The first few hundred pages of the best version of the book about my father would conjure a man capable of great personal warmth, wit and charm. An idealistic man imbued with humor and sophistication, a man unlike most fathers we knew in that he clearly loved subversives like Lenny Bruce, Richard Prior, Malcolm X. He could tell you, in very few words, when you passed him in the grove by the office, why you should check out Lenny, why Malcolm was an inspirational character who needed to be vilified by the Man. He could talk about virtually anything with insight and wit. He could be playful. Yes, I told P, I completely get why you found my old man cool. He was, objectively, an original.
Only once you liked him, as a reader, would the crafty writer begin to show the fissures, the cracks you could look through to see the world of demons inside that made him act, in the privacy of his nuclear family, like the coldly insane bastard he often was to my sister and me. A much more interesting story, once you like and admire the guy, to find the very dark side, the bottomless pit of personal torments that drove him.
I am fascinated by the feat of holding two strongly opposed sides of a person or thing in mind at once. It is a feat we must often perform with the people we love, their faults balanced by qualities we do not want to live without. That balancing act was the genius of Jane Leavy’s masterful portrait of my childhood hero Mickey Mantle. On every page, sometimes in the same paragraph, you get strong evidence of the cool, generous, funny, playful, powerful, beloved Mick and an equally compelling case for the sullen, angry, self-loathing, despicable asshole Mick.
You can make the personal case both ways, at the same time, as Leavy does, without diminishing or idealizing the person. If you do it well– fascinating shit. We are all complex this way, capable of great kindness and sometimes unspeakably bad actions. Leavy’s biography did not make me like or admire Mantle any less, it gave me a lot more nuance, and a much more realistic picture of the person, than most biographies do.
I also meant to tell P of my lifelong project, not to react with the helplessly raging anger I was taught. It was the lingua franca of the little house I grew up in — lash out violently at those you know won’t punch you in the face. A foolish way to be, and something that must be thoroughly understood if you hope to escape it.
My very brief conversation with P gave me an idea. From time to time I write things here that are anodyne, in the best sense of the word. These pieces are (unconsciously) calculated to cause no harm. They are written not to grind any ax, expose troubling difficulties or to wrestle with my own nimble, endlessly engaging demons. Oddly, these pieces express no bitterness, ambiguity or criticism at all. I sometimes (not often, admittedly) write something just to tell a story of someone or something I love. Take these pieces, for example.
My brief chat with P convinced me that I should put up an Anodyne category on this blahg. A link I could send you where you would read only pieces that put the things written about in the best light. The affectionate vignettes about my grandfather, for example, do not hint at the savagely powerful demons that haunted the gentle old man in his deepest places. Demons with every claim to fucking haunt him, I might add. He grew up in the Ukraine among anti-Semites who, from time to time, drunkenly invaded the Jewish part of town and held an old fashioned pogrom.
Seriously, you ask, a fucking pogrom?
Yes, a cohort of the worst of the good Christian Ukrainians he lived among, the folks he sold his father’s grain and other groceries to, went nuts periodically, and animated by the passionate belief that my grandfather and his filthy ilk had deliberately murdered God’s only son (another long story) , ran amok among the Jews. They’d smash shop windows, plunder, loot, beat people up, kill a few Jews, if the feeling (and the vodka, one imagines) was on them strong enough, and, of course, rape any Jewish women and girls who were not hidden behind sturdy, heavily bolted doors.
My grandfather was physically strong, but an individual, no matter how strong, is no match for an enraged lynch mob. He grew up with legitimate terror. Being the object of a mob of hate-filled drunks is no joke. Twenty years after he left the town, following his more courageous fiance to America during the reign of Calvin Coolidge (she’d arrived while Harding was president), those same Christian neighbors marched every Jew to a ravine on the northwestern edge of town and executed all of them, under Nazi supervision. Fragments of their bones still stir on windy days, the bones of my grandfather’s and grandmother’s many brothers and sisters, and their children. I read this disquieting detail in an article in the New York Times magazine, by someone who visited the town not long ago.
In the Anodyne section there would be no reference to this kind of horrific shit. You could safely read, in a protected harbor I’d carve out for you, gentle reader, only things that make you wonder and imagine. Only the lapping of the waters on the shores would be heard, the rustle of the leaves and the songs of birds and primates. I will attempt to put this section together in the coming days, for my old friend P_____ and anyone else who might want to hang out in the cool shadows of a leafy glade as the greediest of the world casually burn everyone who is not them.
I Rest My Case
thank you to FOX news
Sickening, but important to focus and not look away. Stay vigilant and critical, friends.
If you read Mueller’s concise summary of Volume II, the section that details instance after instance of Trump’s colorable obstruction of justice (even as we watch Trump’s obstruction machine churning full-bore in real-time with ongoing cover-ups, flouting of legal process, distortions, reversals, spins, mood-swinging tweets on who will and won’t testify and presidential bluster about how he’ll obstruct any probe into obstruction all the way up to the Supreme Court) you already know what the more than 370 former federal prosecutors wrote in their letter published yesterday. [1]
They reach the same conclusion Mueller did, the same one pathetic, porcine Bill Barr deliberately mis-stated repeatedly, with calculated, clearly misleading nationally broadcast statements that have so confused so many Americans about the evidence the Mueller team found relating to the president’s long, ongoing pattern of obstruction.
Mueller himself protested Barr’s misleading pronouncements about the findings of his investigation and the confusion his misleading statements were sowing among Americans. He pointed this out, in a few hundred clear words, in a second letter to Barr (dated weeks before Barr released the lightly redacted summaries and the rest of the blacked out report).
The OBVIOUS CONCLUSION of Mueller’s investigation: but for the fact that the boastful, childish, litigious boor was the sitting president, he would have been immediately charged with numerous counts of obstruction of justice, backed by significant evidence of a pattern of illegal obstructive behavior. The report concludes that because of the large amount of evidence against the guilty-acting president, it could not exonerate him, even as Office of Legal Counsel policy speaks against indictment of a sitting president.
Of course, there’s always another side to any story. FOX, obviously, had another spin about who the actual democracy despising traitors are, where our withering ire should be directed. The fucking rat leaker who let anyone see Mueller’s private, confidential letter to the Attorney General.
Ken Starr, the righteous prosecutor who put salacious, pornographic details of sitting president Bill “Unlit Cigar” Clinton’s sex life on the internet for any twelve year-old to read (along with an unflattering physical description of the president’s erect penis), gave a good headline to the folks over at Fair and Balanced:
Ken Starr: Leak of Mueller’s ‘whiny’ letter to Barr was an ‘unforgivable sin’.
Among other asinine statements, Starr found the proper victim in all this:
“Here comes Bob Mueller with this letter which is then leaked. That is, to me, the unforgivable sin. He, Bob Mueller, badly injured this attorney general and the attorney general didn’t deserve that but, of course, that created its own huge firestorm including suggestions that the attorney general was totally mischaracterizing the report and so forth,” Starr said.
read all about it
The pathetic porcine puppet, Mr. Barr, testilying with expert evasiveness in front of a Republican-chaired Senate committee (as to the Democratic House committee, shove your fucking partisan subpoenas up your asses, losers), dismissed Mueller’s letter as “snitty” (a pretty fucking snitty thing to say about a polite, formal letter on a matter of pressing national interest, I thought) written, Barr breezily surmised, by “someone on Mueller’s staff”. (In spite of the inconvenient facts that it’s plainly signed “Sincerely yours, Robert S. Mueller, III” and that the prose style is clearly Mueller’s).
Spun another way, toward the plain statements of fact contained in the letter– Mueller’s concise letter is a gripping piece of evidence. It was submitted to Barr to become part of a record preserving the rest of the redacted, hidden evidence of Trump’s eternal campaign to redact and hide his most indefensibly sociopathic actions. The very actions that Barr deliberately mislead Americans about by spinning the conclusions and refusing to release the fully redacted summary Mueller himself had already provided to Barr.
It emerged, as a result of the Mueller team’s single leak, that Barr was in receipt of Mueller’s letter on March 28, even as he deliberately, and repeatedly, oversimplified and misstated the findings, substance and conclusions of the report in the weeks before he belatedly released what he could have released (the summary) immediately. Certainly would have created less deliberate confusion than his bullshit four page abstract which gave the glaringly false impression, repeated over and over in the Trump echo-chamber, that the president had been exonerated and cleared of all wrong-doing in a, nonetheless, partisan witch hunt.
I am an optimist by nature, I suppose. Dark as the times are now, when Nazis and klansman are defended by our narrow-minded, “transactional”, blowhard president as “very fine people”, it is no time for despair. It is worth remembering (as a NY Times editorial opined about the basic “sobriety” and “rationality” of the German people on the eve of Hitler’s election in 1933) the collective We have an impulse toward justice that cannot always be denied. As evidence and public testimony mounts, more and more people begin to realize that all these witnesses can’t be lying under oath merely to unfairly bring down a completely innocent man aggressively defended by an army of wildly spinning lawyers.
At the risk of seeming partisan, in these hideously partisan times, I have to quote the great George Lopez, as to our ethically challenged gangster wanna-be president– “fuck that puto“.
[1] The number of signatories went up to 459 former federal prosecutors and judges, as of yesterday, as dozens of other former prosecutors, from across the political spectrum, continue to sign on to the on-line letter. source
gratuitousblahg 