Brave stance by the Grey Lady!

Arguably, this NY Times editorial board piece savaging Trump’s unfitness for office, in the words of those who know him best (Bill Barr, Betsy DeVos, Sean Spicer, Mike Pompeo, Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham and company), does not square with A.G. Sulzberger, the 44 year-old CEO of the family business’s idiotic formulation that “politics” and “objective reporting” do not mix, but it’s something, I suppose.

The Dangers of Donald Trump from those who know him

Here’s what Sulzberger, whose father passed the CEO crown to him a few years back, had to say about the insurmountable difficulty of a free press reporting honestly on “politics”:

In a recent guest essay for the rival Washington Post, Times CEO A.G. Sulzberger exemplified this stubborn tendency. After acknowledging the danger Trump poses to the nation and the media itself, Sulzberger straw-manned his critics with the following caricature. “As someone who strongly believes in the foundational importance of journalistic independence, I have no interest in wading into politics,” he wrote. “I disagree with those who have suggested that the risk Trump poses to the free press is so high that news organizations such as mine should cast aside neutrality and directly oppose his reelection.”

[I wasn’t able to find where I originally clipped this from, most likely suspects Heather Cox Richardson or Allison Gil)

AG Sulzberger strongly disagrees with those who “suggest” an enraged, incurious maniac like Trump is intent on suppressing all dissent, including the independent press, even if Trump himself is the one “suggesting it” (when he’s back in power he’ll pull the license of those commies at NBC after he won the rigged debate and they kept calling him a liar).

All I can really say to this strawman punching, issue obfuscating, 200 front page articles calling Biden’s cognitive abilities into question publishing, “foundational importance of journalistic independence” spouting CEO gasbag, and his September 5 op ed in the Washington Post is, go take a flying fuck at a rolling, apolitical, donut, bro.

Broken Souls

The world is full of broken souls. Some souls are broken early, by cruel or neglectful caretakers. If you are a baby who does not get comforted, or fed, regularly, your tiny soul will get a few deep cracks, always there as you grow. Others are broken later by life itself, injury, sickness, disability, bad luck, death of a particular loved one, abuse, meeting the wrong person at the wrong time and things going badly, and then the depressing pattern repeating.

We are all broken in some way, at least everyone I’ve ever met. The popular goal of achieving a state of permanent happiness appears to be an illusion. Can we remain happy when we read the latest accounts of babies killed, women and girls raped at gunpoint, explosions killing random innocent people in the name of one god or another, popular politicians angrily promising retribution and a return to the good old days of vast concentration camps for all enemies? Chasing after the abstraction of happiness, like the single-minded pursuit of “success” or wealth, is a kind of myopic idiocy, it seems to me. As my ex’s guru put it so poetically: chasing happiness is like a deer who runs after a mirage of water and dies of thirst. Well said, Babaji.

We love others in spite of their brokenness. We help each other heal a bit, by the application of a steady, empathetic love we all need. Every human being has a need for this healing connection to others, being given the benefit of the doubt and treated with kindness. Too many of us live without it, or even the hope for it. This precious love can be perverted, it turns out, when desperate souls place it on a scale against loyalty, righteous grievance and an appeal to harsh judgment and anger. It is a complicated business, being a decent, loving human being.

I think of my cousin Eli, my father’s first cousin. He was a very loving man, though he was rough, volatile, prone to fits of rage, capable of violence, estranged from his children, filled with hatred at times. I say he was very loving because he always showed that side, with warmth and humor, to me and to my mother before me. Both my mother and I fought with him regularly, vehemently sometimes, and in the end we always smiled, kissed and hugged and looked forward to our next battle. It was the complete recovery from our conflict, every time, no matter how fierce the fight had just been, that continually proved our love for each other.

You can look at a guy like Eli, conclude he’s dangerously nuts, give him a wide berth and have only the most polite and superficial interactions with him. Or you can see part of yourself reflected in him, a need to be heard, to have a strong opinion, to duke it out whenever you feel unfairly challenged, and above all, a need for reconciliation and reassurances of love. There was nothing false about my mother’s love for Eli or his love for her. They would each do anything for each other. But accept something from the other that struck them as bullshit? Why would they do that?

So in spite of our brokenness, we can form strong bonds, find love, set boundaries, overlook terrible faults in another because we also feel the steadiness of their love. Love is a stronger thing than happiness, which changes according to circumstances. We may get angry at someone we love, but the love remains. If it can be destroyed by a single conflict, eradicated by unyielding anger, it was not very sturdy, healthy love to begin with. It was the best our broken self was capable of finding at the time we first felt love toward that person.

As we grow, ideally we learn more about ourselves and the reasonable limits of our tolerance for the brokenness of those around us. Those who can’t acknowledge their own pain are the most dangerous motherfuckers on the planet. No amount of love can save someone who is hellbent on never being wrong, always being some childish notion of “perfect”. Can you imagine a love that can truly help a poor devil like that?

Truth vs. self-preservation

There are times when an insistence on telling the truth will cost you your head. Honesty is not always welcome, and we all know when it is best to smudge the truth a bit. A friend serves you a culinary creation that is not tasty, you compliment the consistency of the crust, smile as you point out how beautifully the greasy contents reflect a rainbow of light. You try your best to keep that look off your face as you pretend to enjoy the nasty dish, while looking for the dog to furtively offload it to.

In contrast to little lies to spare the feelings of people we care about, there are times when swallowing the truth you need to tell is like sucking down poison. If you can’t be honest with a friend, when it really counts, that person is not actually your friend. Sometimes a hideous choice will be presented to you by someone with a firm resistance to an unpleasant truth. I had a poisonous condition placed on me if I wanted to preserve my lost friendship with a group of lifelong friends, after a conflict with two friends raged in spite of all my attempts to make peace. I was told I had to admit that I was a sick, vindictive, torturing, unforgiving, venomous piece of shit who was totally to blame for all the bad feelings in this little group of old friends. Maybe then I could be forgiven for being unforgiving.

Accept responsibility for an insane conflict I hadn’t even caused?  No can do.  I found myself mostly able to refrain from sinking to their level of unreasoned anger — not to mention their uncritical embrace of a grossly counter-factual account of a simple conflict — but being called toxic (in a text) for simply being honest about a series of easy to understand events that actually took place, literally made me spit.  I was spitting out the toxin of being mercilessly treated by people I had long loved and trusted.

Gabor Maté points out that the two strongest human needs are for attachment and authenticity. Attachment comes first, as helpless babies we need to be cared for by our caretakers and, because our life literally depends on it, early on we learn to smile, cuddle, do endearing things so that our parents will become attached to us and protect us. Authenticity is the need, once we become conscious individuals, to express ourselves, have our feelings taken seriously, our needs and wants respected. These two primal human needs are often at odds and sometimes, although we shouldn’t be, in a better world than this, we will be forced to choose one or the other.

A parent starts off enchanted by their baby’s seeming adoration and complete need for them.   Conflicts arise in any parenting situation and the terrain can begin to change.  It is crucial to some parents to keep their child subservient to the parents’ needs.   Then the lifelong cycle begins — the child must always navigate the narrow, treacherous terrain between honesty and flattery, authenticity and fear of abandonment.   There are many weapons deployed in this ongoing, uneven struggle for supremacy, among parents wired this way by their own fucked up childhoods.

A parent who was traumatically shamed and humiliated as a child will always fear their child’s authenticity. Imagine a more horrifying situation for a parent than the possibility of being shamed and humiliated by their own child. If there is a conflict, this kind of parent must set the entire blame on the kid, there is no real choice for them. To admit weakness, or being wrong, or being fallible, are all direct invitations to a nightmare of shame and humiliation. It’s the goddamn baby who’s the asshole, not me!

It seems comical to state it that way, but otherwise intelligent, educated, sophisticated parents may believe that formulation to the end. I was a good parent, how it is my fault my child was born angry, contrary, needy, stubborn, vindictive? My own very smart parents, to the end of their eighty year lives, both insisted I was born hostile, senselessly fighting them about everything from the day I was born.

“One day old?” I’d ask them.

“As soon as you opened your eyes you glared at us with hostility, you challenged us. I was aware of your judgment and anger toward me from the day you came back from the hospital,” my father always insisted, and my mother would nod along, often citing an idiot pediatrician who confirmed I was having a precocious temper tantrum for absolutely no reason.

“Oh, wow. I guess I don’t remember that. No wonder you always treated me as a dangerous enemy.”

“Now you’re trying to be cute.”

“I never attempt the truly impossible.”

And around it went.

With tyrants there is always a foundational lie that must be accepted as beyond question, an article of faith that must always be pledged to. If there is no evidence to support the lie, and a mountain of evidence that it is a lie, it is that much more important that everyone publicly insist the lie is true and the so-called truth, devastating to the leader’s cause and credibility, is pure, evil, godless, pedophile commie bullshit. This clinging to the truth of demonstrable lies is a consistent tic with those who can never be wrong. If the truth is harmful, create a truth that is invincible.

Be true to yourself, painful as that may sometimes be. It will rarely come down to having your head literally cut off. I am living proof of that (so far).

To fanatically faithful supporters, this is drivel

Heather Cox Richardson reports:

On Sunday, a bipartisan group of 741 national security leaders—some of the biggest names in the field—endorsed Harris. “To the American People,” they wrote. “We are former public servants who swore an oath to the Constitution. Many of us risked our lives for it. We are retired generals, admirals, senior noncommissioned officers, ambassadors, and senior civilian national security leaders. We are Republicans, Democrats, and Independents. We are loyal to the ideals of our nation—like freedom, democracy, and the rule of law—not to any one individual or party.

“We do not agree on everything, but we all adhere to two fundamental principles. First, we believe America’s national security requires a serious and capable Commander-in-Chief. Second, we believe American democracy is invaluable. Each generation has a responsibility to defend it. That is why we, the undersigned, proudly endorse Kamala Harris to be the next President of the United States.

“This election is a choice between serious leadership and vengeful impulsiveness. It is a choice between democracy and authoritarianism. Vice President Harris defends America’s democratic ideals, while former President Donald Trump endangers them.

“We do not make such an assessment lightly. We are trained to make sober, rational decisions. That is how we know Vice President Harris would make an excellent Commander-in-Chief, while Mr. Trump has proven he is not up to the job.”

source

Traumatically low self-esteem

As psychiatrist James Gilligan, who spent years working with violent prison inmates, observed: all violence is an attempt to replace shame with self-esteem. It is an illuminating and important insight.

How does a child turn into a violent sadist? By being traumatized at the hands of those they relied on, beyond the ability to trust anyone, beyond hope of self-esteem. They internalize this hopeless, isolated, humiliation and must inflict violence on others to get a twinge of what feels to them like self-esteem. The suffering and helplessness of their crushed victims confirms for them that they are powerful after all, to be respected, and feared.

In one sense this seems obvious, after years watching the nonstop sickening performance of a thin-skinned, whining “strongman” who controls one of our two major political parties, banished all critics and bent it to his perverted will. He perceives violence carried out in his name as love, as he observed on January 6 when the “patriotic” mob of political martyrs were forced, by a massive bipartisan cabal of his cheating enemies, to attack Capitol police. He’d never seen so much love, he tweeted, as when his people were passionately injuring dozens of cops in his name.

It is true of any narcissist who is far enough on the scale to behave psychopathically. They literally cannot help what they do, though that’s no excuse for their predictably treacherous behavior. They are compelled by a desperation someone not traumatized to the extent they are can ever fully comprehend.

These creatures need to feel the power of hurting others, otherwise they feel utterly worthless. The humiliating feeling of being undeserving of love motivates monstrous behavior. The attempt to gain self-respect, respect and love by dominance, fear and manipulation is, as Gilligan points out, a misguided attempt to replace shame with self-esteem.

I point this out because knowing this basic mechanism of all abusers is important, if you are faced with one of these supremely destructive assholes. Once you see abusiveness in your personal life, say nothing (appeals to empathy or fairness are futile with these assholes) but put maximum emotional distance between yourself and one of these hopeless, reflexively harmful humanoids.

A Short history of this spasm of American Fascism

Although she makes no reference to the oligarchic designers, and prime beneficiaries, of the Republican strategy, increasingly shameless since the 1980s “Reagan revolution” of divide, enrage, terrify and exploit, Heather Cox Richardson writes as succinct a summary of how the Charles Kochs and their filthy ilk, aided by the Leonard Leos and their filthy ilk, orchestrated the fanatical chaos of our current political moment:

In the 1980s, radical Republican leaders set out to dismantle the government that regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, promoted infrastructure, and protected civil rights. But that system was popular, and to overcome the majority who favored it, they began to tip the political playing field in their direction. They began to suppress voting by Democrats by insisting that Democrats were engaging in “voter fraud.” At the same time, they worked to delegitimize their opponents by calling them “socialists” or “communists” and claiming that they were trying to destroy the United States. By the 1990s, extremists in the party were taking power by purging traditional Republicans from it.

And yet, voters still elected Democrats, and after they put President Barack Obama into the White House in 2008, the Republican State Leadership Committee in 2010 launched Operation REDMAP, or Redistricting Majority Project. The plan was to take over state legislatures so Republicans would control the new district maps drawn after the 2010 census, especially in swing states like Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. It worked, and Republican legislatures in those states and elsewhere carved up state maps into dramatically gerrymandered districts.

In those districts, the Republican candidates were virtually guaranteed election, so they focused not on attracting voters with popular policies but on amplifying increasingly extreme talking points to excite the party’s base. That drove the party farther and farther to the right. By 2012, political scientists Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein warned that the Republican Party had “become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

“It [the GOP] is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

source

and my plan

Don’t forget John Roberts

From Heather Cox Richardson yesterday, on the long judicial coup run by the cunning, privileged owners of the activist extremist party that is now calling itself MAGA (see, also John Birch Society):

In 1986, when it was clear that most Americans did not support the policies put in place by the Reagan Republicans, the Reagan appointees at the Justice Department broke tradition to ensure that candidates for judgeships shared their partisanship. Their goal, said the president’s attorney general, Ed Meese, was to “institutionalize the Reagan revolution so it can’t be set aside no matter what happens in future presidential elections.” 

That principle held going forward. Federal judgeships depend on Senate confirmation, and when McConnell became Senate minority leader in 2007, he worked to make sure Democrats could not put their own appointees onto the bench. He held up so many of President Barack Obama’s nominees for federal judgeships that in 2013 Senate majority leader Harry Reid (D-NV) prohibited filibusters on certain judicial nominees.

McConnell also made it clear that he would do everything he could to make sure that Democrats could not pass laws, weaponizing the filibuster so that nothing could become law without 60 votes in the Senate. . .

She then details McConnell’s right-wing judiciary appointment mission, and how he removed the filibuster for Supreme Court justices, when the time was right, to get a couple of 50% supported nominees on to the court, after denying Obama his constitutional right to nominate a replacement for Antonin Scalia eight months before the 2016 election.

. . . Throughout his tenure as Senate majority leader, McConnell made judicial confirmations a top priority, churning through nominations even when the coronavirus pandemic shut everything else down. Right-wing plaintiffs are now seeking out those judges, like Matthew Kacsmaryk of Texas, to decide in their favor. Kacsmaryk challenged the FDA’s approval of the drug mifepristone, which can be used in abortions, thus threatening to ban it nationwide.

Meanwhile, at the Supreme Court, Trump appointees are joining with right-wing justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito to overturn precedents established long ago, including the right to abortion. 

source

Don’t forget America’s most partisan balls and strikes umpire John “Corporations get to say ‘go fuck yourself'” Roberts. How does this smiling corporate shill, who schemes behind the scenes, votes in every key case with the right-wing fraternal order of the Federalist Society block, and has authored some of its most infamous decisions, get a pass from even someone as brilliant as Heather? How is he, the man who, although he didn’t vote with the other four to kill Roe v. Wade, gleefully signed on to nullify the power of federal regulators, keep an insurrectionist on the ballot in Colorado and immunize criminal acts committed by a criminal president, among other MAGA endorsed rulings, still seen as somehow “moderate” or an “institutionalist”?

Look no further than his infamous decision in Shelby County v. Holder when he ruled that enforcement of the Voting Rights Act, which he acknowledged righted a historical injustice, was no longer necessary. His argument is bland and pristine: Congress relied on forty year old data when they reauthorized it, so me and four Federalist Society diehards are undoing their uninformed, undemocratic activism. True, except that he was lying about the forty year old data, as it turns out. As I wrote when I read the decision:

Only when you read Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s dissent (another magnificent piece of clear, precise legal and moral logic) do you realize the audacity of the Roberts majority’s legal sleight of hand. You learn that the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act was passed, after 21 hearings and 15,000 pages of evidence of ongoing discrimination in the states under preclearance, by a vote of 390-33 in the House and, after further debate, 98 to 0 in the Senate. Reading the John Roberts decision you’d have no reason to suspect that President George W. Bush signed the reauthorization into law a week later, as Ginsburg writes:

recognizing the need for “further work . . . in the fight against injustice,” and calling the reauthorization “an example of our continued commitment to a united America where every person is valued and treated with dignity and respect.” 

Nah, says John Roberts, we’re going back to that golden time when the wealthy land owners, the ancestors of our greatest billionaire donors and close friends, made all the decisions for the USA.  Dignity and respect, after all, are just words, and ridiculous ones when applied to those who deserve neither. Strike three, bitches.

I began writing this yesterday, and today the Gray Lady herself chimes in on Roberts. Here’s how he teed up the question posed by the Roberts court in Trump v. US:

The justices instructed lawyers from both sides to address a broad question: “whether and if so to what extent does a former president enjoy presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for conduct alleged to involve official acts during his tenure.”. . .

. . . On April 25, the justices and the lawyers in the case gathered for oral arguments in the courtroom, across the street from where the Jan. 6 rioting had taken place three years earlier. The clamor from the Capitol attack had been audible from inside the court building, former employees recalled in interviews, and afterward, security sharply increased and fences shielded the building.

During the arguments, however, several conservative justices said that they wanted to focus not on what had happened that day, but on broader legal questions.

“I’m not discussing the particular facts of this case,” Justice Alito told the courtroom.

“I’m not focused on the here and now of this case,” Justice Kavanaugh said. “I’m very concerned about the future.”

“We’re writing a rule for the ages,” Justice Gorsuch said.

For the Thousand Year Reich, no doubt.

Here’s a bit about Roberts’s fundamental dishonesty:

One footnote left scholars wondering whether former presidents could ever be prosecuted for taking bribes. An N.Y.U. professor was startled to discover that the opinion, which leaned heavily on Nixon v. Fitzgerald, a 1982 case on presidential immunity, truncated a quote from that decision, changing its meaning.

Verdict: Federalist Society stalwart and Nazi fuck.

MAGA influencer of the week

She traveled with Donald “People don’t leave my rallies” (think roach motel) Trump to his most excellent September 10th debate in Philadephia, a debate he won, he said, like 98 to 2, and then on his September 11th rounds. Her overt racism, proud “white nationalist” self-identification and penchant for lying and promoting wild, unfounded conspiracy theories provoked Trump sychophant Lindsey Graham to urge Donald to distance himself from her. She fired back, questioning coy bachelor Graham’s sexual preference. Klan Mom Marjorie Taylor Greene criticized her racism as too extreme and appalling even for Greene (wow!), and Trump’s companion’s response was to remind the world of Greene’s extramarital affair and compare her to a “hooker” (arguably not unfair, but still).

Meet 31 year-old Laura Loomer.

The NY Times described her this way:

A far-right activist known for her endless stream of sexist, homophobic, transphobic, anti-Muslim and occasionally antisemitic social media posts and public stunts, Ms. Loomer has made a name for herself over the past decade by unabashedly claiming 9/11 was “an inside job,” calling Islam “a cancer,” accusing Ron DeSantis’s wife of exaggerating breast cancer and claiming that President Biden was behind the attempt to assassinate Mr. Trump in July. source

Wikipedia:

Loomer continued to advocate for the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump in 2024, telling The Washington Post, “I’m happy to dedicate all my time to helping Trump, because if Trump doesn’t get back in, I don’t have anything.”[54] Loomer was brought as a guest by Trump to Philadelphia where he engaged in the September 10 presidential debate with opponent Kamala Harris.[55] The following day, Loomer attended events alongside Trump commemorating the September 11 attacks. Loomer had previously endorsed claims that 9/11 “was an inside job.”[56] According to anonymous sources on the Trump campaign, Loomer reportedly influenced Trump to publicly endorse various false conspiracy theories, including the claim that Kamala Harris hid her black heritage and the claim that Haitian immigrants were eating other people’s household pets in Ohio. Loomer also posted a tweet referencing stereotypes of Indians, saying that if Harris, who is half-Indian, were elected President “the White House will smell like curry & White House speeches will be facilitated via a call center.” Marjorie Taylor Greene, a far-right member of the United States House of Representatives, condemned this remark as “appalling and extremely racist.”[57]

As part of a promotional deal for the pet food brand Pawsitive on her Rumble channel, Loomer filmed herself eating dog food.[58]

. . . Early life and education

Loomer and her two brothers were raised in Arizona.[21] She attended Mount Holyoke College, leaving after one semester; she said she felt targeted for being conservative.[22] She transferred to Barry University in Miami Shores, Florida, and graduated in 2015 with a bachelor’s degree in broadcast journalism.[22][23] Loomer is Jewish.[24][25]

Oy! No, not Jewish, please, for the love of Jesus…