Toward the end of my slow recovery from a frustrating and fatal conflict with my two closest friends, with nonnegotiable sides drawn by a unanimous group of our oldest friends, now mutually dead to me, I heard a political scientist say this:
People get so invested in their belief system that they don’t care what’s true.
The simple truth of this hit me hard, explains so much about our tribal species. The dear old friend of fifty years who accused me of sadistically torturing her poor husband, my closest friend, “to bend him to my will”, is known to everyone as someone with a very strong will. People tend to do what she wants, it’s always easier than locking horns with her. If anyone was bending anyone to their will, it was far less likely to be me than her.
Then there are the facts, a year of cause and effect, my continued attempts at healing a conflict, her silent, steely ignoring of each try, punctuated by fits of rage, her determination to silence me, to be right no matter what.
The alternative to my death and banishment from our group was unthinkable to her, the humiliation of being exposed as an angry, deeply damaged person incapable of vulnerability, or acknowledging fault when conflict arises.
Of course, when you are part of a cherished group and filled with attachment and belief, as in unquestioning love for a charming, charismatic friend who endearingly needs your admiration, you do not care what the “truth” is. Her hurt is all that matters.
Faith is the strongest force in human affairs, it is rarely subject to the back and forth of discussion, persuasion and compromise. Things that should be easy to resolve, in light of clear cause and effect, and empathy for the weakness each of us has, become impossible to ever fix.
If there is unquestioning emotional faith on one side, and a strong need never to be wrong, no matter what, faith erases any “truth” that might call its rightness into question.
There in a nutshell is the tragedy of human history.
The beautiful soothing voice and profound common sense of this Benedictine monk will restore your soul for an interlude of sanity, wonder. You will feel gratefulness for this breath and the next ones you take in. Take six minutes to yourself to let his message flow over you. His life affirming message, spoken against gentle music, is accompanied by gorgeous photography of our miraculous world. I have listened to it so many times over the years I can almost recite it with him.
However pessimistic the amplified ugliness of the lowest human impulses, hatred, intolerance, greed, rage, envy, stupidity and smirking cruelty might make you feel about the world, this is also true, and right, and very important to keep in your heart. It is good to remember the many blessings of our lives, every day.
Mighty white of them to acquiesce by accepting the results of an American election, I say.
Note the legalistic cunning of the masterful paragraph below. Reminds me of the elegant arguments the Defenders of the Faith constructed during the Spanish Inquisition, to explain, irrefutably, why Jesus Christ, His Father and the Holy Spirit are all deliriously happy to hear the screams of heretics and infidels tortured and burned alive.
I do not myself believe that there was fraud in the counting of ballots or voting machine malfunctions. I do believe, however, that the unprecedented use of mail in voting over a period of many weeks, with the loss of the secret ballot, and drop boxes, produced a fundamentally illegitimate Biden victory in 2020 in Pennsylvania and elsewhere. I simply do not believe that in an honestly held traditionally run presidential election that Joe Biden would get 181,866 more votes for President in 2020 in Pennsylvania than Barack Obama got in 2008.
This belief-based argument citing the unproven massive fraud of mail-in voting (a wingnut conspiracy theory denied even by corrupt partisan Bill Barr, who tirelessly promoted it prior to the 2020 election) was penned by the esteemed co-founder of the far right judicial fraternity and judicial appointment pipeline The Federalist Society. Thanks to a 2016 deal with candidate Trump, brokered by housewife Ginni Thomas, KellyAnne Conway, Sloppy Steve Bannon and other members of the secretive, by invitation only nonprofit Council for National Policy, that as president Trump would only appoint Supreme Court and other federal judges from the “Fed Soc” list, the Federalist Society controls a neat, doctrinaire 6-3 lock on the current Supreme Court.
The radical right’s goal of absolute, permanent power is so close they can taste it. They are throwing caution to the wind with one radical 6-3 decision after another, angry, self-righteous, arbitrary, vindictive, punitive, as their type is. They are currently in a mad dash to ultimate, permanent holy victory over a nation of irredeemable sinners and nonbelievers, as Jesus Christ Himself has ordained for the USA. Sadly for them, no dignified figurehead is available, they have to march behind an unhinged Hitler wanna-be, but so be it. An American Hitler is a small price to pay to fulfill the will of the One True God.
Notice the elegant construction of Professor Calabresi’s “argument”. In the opening he nonchalantly acknowledges there’s no proof for any of the fraud claims repeatedly made in courts by Trump and the RNC, claims made without producing evidence of any kind. He doesn’t mention that these false claims, that led to the riot at the Capitol, are still insisted on, are a litmus test for remaining in the Republican party. Then he does a nice sleight of hand, continuing to frame his argument, supporting the completely toothless fraud claim — now directed at another unproven form of claimed fraud — not weighed down by the legal burden of proof, or using anything as base as ordinary evidence, but with unsupported insinuations and beliefs about mail fraud and the hated drop boxes — both of which he claims also violate the constitution’s requirement of a secret ballot.
The argument, thus teed up, is no longer one of rigid legal proof tied to a reasonableness standard, but, is transmogrified into a more mystical matter of absolute belief. He does this operatic move in the manner of Alito and the rest of the disciples of Scalia (Antonin Scalia was the original beloved faculty advisor of this brotherhood of originalists co-founded by the supremely ambitious Calabresi, an apparent Alito wannabe). Persuasion is then based on an absolute moral claim, an appeal to deeply held personal belief, faith, if you will, which, in the proper case, trumps fallible, soulless, human-made law every time. This is always true if you have a one vote majority that always votes as a block.
A non-negotiable higher moral purpose is the infernal thing these politically radical Christian devils always righteously claim when stealing from the poor, forcing the powerless to remain so, gutting regulations that protect Americans, decreeing that girls raped will bear their rapist’s child, as God wills it. In a pinch, this judicial fraternity points to their admirably unyielding fealty to a particular ancient holy book they are all inspired and united by. Then, righteous and freed from the tawdry burdens of producing evidence and making an actual legal argument, in any sense, the distinguished law professor, like the rest of his accursed tribe, boldly makes his case.
This Kavanaugh-like bitch is auditioning as hard as fellow Yale Law alum and frat brother for life Boof Kavanaugh himself did for that coveted and hard-earned spot (and Boof sweated blood producing writings and radical rulings like a devil as he was left off one Fed Soc list of 25 Supreme Court candidates after another, until finally jumping the whole line to become an aggrieved martyr whose very life Soros, Streisand and the Clintons were intent on destroying). The 66 year-old Calabresi, with age and time against him, is putting his prayers on the realization of his network’s Project 2025, and seating himself on the bench where Alito or Thomas previously set their sweaty butts, keeping the seat warm and aromatic for their boy, Mr. Calabresi. Calabresi apparently personally adored Antonin Scalia, the patron saint of the brazenly corrupt assholes who were his protégés, the transactionally uxorious Alito and the morally limber Black Klansman, among many others.
When I say this Calabresi fuck is going full Nazi, I don’t mean that as a gratuitous insult, it’s descriptive of the type of rabid partisan that this well-educated, well-indoctrinated, impeccably credentialed true believing asshole is. Think I’m exaggerating? Here you go:
Biden said as a candidate in 2020 that he was a moderate liberal, but he proceeded to govern like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren except for the refusal of two brave Democrats, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, to go along with that nonsense. Manchin and Sinema will both be booted out of the Senate come January 3, 2025, as a result. Biden said as a candidate that he would depoliticize the criminal justice process. Instead, his Department of Justice has used an unconstitutionally appointed Special Prosecutor to indict former President Donald Trump—the first time in history that a former President has been indicted. Hillary Clinton was given a pass on the misuse of classified documents, but not so Donald Trump. Biden’s Democrats even got Trump unconstitutionally convicted for altering business records to conceal the Trump Organization’s involvement in First Amendment protected speech in a New York State trial that was truly a charade.
We are now about to choose again between Donald Trump and Joe Biden in a presidential election year—2024—which is totally free of the fears of infection in public places caused by Covid. Here are three things we should insist on: 1) a return to truly secret ballots cast in polling booths with the curtain shut behind the voter; 2) no use of drop boxes, and 3) that everyone votes on the same day, with the same headlines in mind, and not over the period of a month.
The loss of the secret ballot, the use of drop boxes, and of same day voting is a huge change in our democracy, which ought to be abandoned now that Covid is gone. You cannot fill out a ballot at home in most cases without your family members knowing how you voted and that means the sudden loss of the secret ballot. Partisan canvassers may also observe how people vote, intimidating them and undermining their independence.
The secret ballot is of central importance in elections, especially when candidates generate the passionate feelings of hatred that are generated by Donald Trump and Joe Biden. This is a hatred that pits family members and even long-time friends against one another sometimes ruining long-cherished relationships. If ever, there was to be a presidential election for which the secret ballot was essential, it is this year’s rematch between President Trump and Joe Biden.
What’s the point of having unappealable power if you don’t use it on behalf of your generous benefactors to do things that can’t be otherwise done legally in a democracy?
If you have something to say, and believe it is important, you can often express it most clearly in writing. Writing helps you organize, clarify and provide context for understanding and expressing things that can be complicated to sort through while speaking. Write every day, as a daily practice, and after a number of years, you will hone your ability to set out your beliefs, ideas and feelings clearly in writing. It feels like a wonderful blessing of my life, that I have acquired this ability. I would recommend a period of daily writing to anybody who likes to read, think and learn.
To people who are insecure, or angry, or highly competitive, or who don’t share your views, or feel unable to write themselves, receiving something that is written clearly and expressively can be threatening, even infuriating. It can sometimes instill a desire to take revenge on the fucking arrogant smartass who smugly sets out his thoughts and feelings so clearly, with an overbearing confidence that must be very galling to someone who does not practice this antiquated form of communication.
When this happens, you will often get silence, which can come for many reasons, some quite innocent. Sometimes you will get a polite categorical statement to the effect of “I will never discuss any of these things with you. Please do not send them to me ever again.”
The identical message can be clearly sent in a more passive, deniable way, simply by never responding to anything you receive from the “writer”. It is this seamless eternal silence by way of reply that was my father’s pet technique for expressing contempt. It is one unfailing calling card of the narcissist, a potent weapon everyone who can never be wrong, and will kill you to prove it, keeps sharp and at the ready for the moment it’s needed.
The world is ruled by passion, whatever we are most passionate about engages and moves us the most. People have widely different strategies for dealing with conflict, fear, vulnerability, isolation, anger, grief, taking care of loved ones, health concerns and otherchallenges. Better to describe these coping strategies through observation, than to judge them critically. We are all doing the best we can under often difficult circumstances.
For me there is no replacement for writing down the things that move or perplex me, particularly if they may not be spoken of, or if you are otherwise held powerless. I feel this way regardless of how often things I’ve written have alienated me from certain people over the years.
That I tend to think of those who became angry because of something I wrote as largely irredeemable assholes is a character flaw of mine, I suppose. If you won’t talk about a subject, and get pissy and hostile, or simply silent or categorical, over something I wrote, that’s pretty much all she wrote, as it is written.
The GOP has gone full Nazi (check out the latest seig heiling somersaults from Federalist Society co-founder Steven Calabresi — post coming soon). All of America’s wealthiest reactionaries (many of our current 813 American billionaires — up from the pre-pandemic 640) have gone all in with the clearly insane, iron-willed criminal candidate that many of them were, until recently, still hoping to replace with someone more stable, capable and reliable.
The big talking point on the right, since Trump’s recent conviction in NYS criminal court, is LAWFARE, the selective weaponization of the “justice” system against innocent members of their party, including vicious leftist attacks on the ethics of perfectly fair Supreme Court justices guilty of simply loving their wives and having generous billionaire personal friends.
Here’s a little partial scorecard:
The criminal trial of seemingly criminal Senator Bob Menendez (D-NJ), indicted September 22, 2023, is underway as you read these words (assuming it’s some time around June 10, 2024)
The criminal trial of a crack addict named Hunter Biden (you’ve seen photos of his genitals, displayed in the House of Representatives, now watch the trial itself) who lied on an application for a gun permit, a charge brought after a six year investigation by a Trump appointee made Special Counsel by the current AG, that was being disposed of in a plea deal (rejected by a Trump appointed judge on July 27, 2023) is currently about ready to go to a jury.
On June 9, 2023, Trump was indicted for violations of the Espionage Act, and criminal charges related to false statements by defendant Trump and his lawyers and multiple efforts to obstruct an FBI investigation, one year ago yesterday. The case has been postponed indefinitely based on a grab bag of defendant’s fringe legal theories the sitting judge, appointed by Trump after “losing” the 2020 election, has not yet had a chance to rule on (rendering her so far impervious to appeal, yo).
Trump was indicted for Election Interference, disrupting an official proceeding and other crimes in the federal court in D.C. on August 1, 2023. That case has been delayed indefinitely by the 6-3 Federalist Society Supreme Court, since December 2023 when they refused to expedite DOJ’s request to immediately hear Trump’s frivolous appeal, and rule on the absurd non-issue under consideration by the Federalist Six (the thorny, novel legal question: can a former president ever be indicted for anything done while president, including murder of his political opponents?) is unlikely to be ruled on in time for the full evidence against Trump to be heard by the public before the 2024 election.
Trump and eighteen co-conspirators were charged by Fulton County DA Fani Willis for a criminal conspiracy to overturn the results of the 2020 election in Georgia. They were indicted on August 15, 2023, a few pleading to lesser charges to avoid possible felony convictions. The case is now on hold because the appeals court in Georgia is planning to hold more hearings regarding the consentual relationship between the Fulton County DA and a prosecutor she hired for the criminal prosecution. Although the appeal appears to be as frivolous as the Trump defendants’ original stinking, racist dumpster of a motion to dismiss the prosecutor, bear in mind that the totally colorblind justice system of the state of Georgia continues to take any kind of colorable sexual improprieties between Black government officials as VERY serious matters of public concern.
In the one case the cognitively diminished 78 year-old former president (as of Flag Day, June 14) was indicted for and stood trial for (or rather, slept trial for), the unanimous jury convicted him on all counts. The jury found that Trump’s falsification of business records to cover up pay offs to silence two women whose stories would have hurt him in the upcoming 2016 election, payoffs made right after the “grab ’em by the pussy” recording was released by the Clinton campaign shortly before the election, had been established beyond a reasonable doubt.
That is the standard of proof in a criminal trial, a fairly high bar. Beyond a reasonable doubt. Just as the standard for recusal by a Supreme Court justice is set out with perfect clarity in federal statute for every right wing “textualist” with eyes to read it:
Of course, to the members of the orthodox, highly partisan “conservative-libertarian” federal judicial fraternity/ federal judgeship pipeline, the Federalist Society, citing this law out of context this way, and focusing unfairly on the word “shall”, making recusal mandatory if the judge’s impartiality might reasonably be questioned, is just another example of an armchair liberal cuck loser cripple, deranged on steroids and worse, pathetically trying to weaponize “justice”, waging more feckless Leftist partisan lawfare, ranting impotently while a good Christian conservative has loud, righteous sex with the cuck’s wife in the other room.
Fascists must destroy the citizens’ ability to obtain information, analyze it and make critical decisions. They do this through violence, after flooding them with propaganda that mobilizes their grievances to instill an overpowering sense of fear and rage in the population. Once enough disaffected people become terrified and enraged, they will all goosestep just fine, thanks, and the most violence prone among them will happily commit any idealistic violence the leader might require to seize and keep power.
So much of what these American Nazis are currently doing is literally translated from the original German. Stay tuned for the co-founder of the Federalist Society’s recent full embrace of the vaunted Federalist Society credo: Führerwortes haben Gesetzeskraft! He didn’t want death camps, if there was any choice in the matter, but since there is no choice? Death camps it shall be, sir!
It turns out there is currently a quorum of postal board governors, five of the seven appointed by President Biden, who can remove Trump megadonor Louis DeJoy as Postmaster. Been working on a letter, asking them, essentially, what the fuck? Here are the first few paragraphs:
Dear Governor (name):
I am writing to urge you to act to immediately to do whatever is necessary to replace Trump mega-donor Postmaster Louis DeJoy, who has effectively ended faith in the US Postal Service by severely disabling its formerly reliable service in multiple ways. It is essential that he is replaced while there is still time to protect the right to vote by mail in 2024 from Mr. DeJoy’s highly effective efforts to slow mail delivery to nullify those lawfully cast ballots.
The current Postmaster has introduced complete unreliability to a postal service that, until his stewardship, was remarkably consistent in its timely delivery of billions of items daily. I am 68 and have used the mail regularly since childhood. Until Mr. DeJoy took over the Post Office, delivery time was virtually always 3-5 days, over many decades.The US Postal Service, our democracy’s longtime dependable delivery service, relied upon by millions for checks, medications, letters, information, money orders, gifts, etc. has been under attack by the far right for years [1].
I understand that, due to Republicans blocking President Obama’s five nominees for the Board of governors that President Trump appointed seven governors and that they selected Trump nominee mega donor Louis DeJoy as Postmaster. President Biden’s appointment of five governors restored a quorum that could remove Mr. DeJoy. I don’t understand why a proven partisan like Mr. DeJoy, a man who has objectively done such damage to the Post Office, is still in position to continue crippling the business that he is CEO of.
I would greatly appreciate an explanation of why, two continued vacancies on the Board of Postal Governors aside, the present quorum of governors is allowing the clearly partisan Postmaster to exercise seemingly unchecked power as he hobbles mail delivery ahead of an election, expected to be close, that will feature millions of mail-in ballots.
As Postmaster, Mr. DeJoy has disabled dependable mail delivery and undermined Americans’ faith in the safety and efficiency of the USPS, under the color of “cost cutting” to reduce the Postal Service’s gigantic, legislatively imposed deficit [see footnote]. Reasonable hope of anything arriving by mail within any kind of predictable time frame is gone nationwide. Mr. DeJoy’s determined, successful efforts to hamper mail delivery appear to be part of the far right’s familiar, long-running attack on “the administrative state” – attack an institution, gain control over it and cripple it (see, e.g., the 118th Congress).
These are a couple of paragraphs I removed from the draft (I originally thought I was writing this letter to my senators and congressman):
It is a tribute to the power of propaganda, Rupert Murdoch, incendiary lies spread on unregulated social media, a brazenly partisan, aggressively activist Supreme Court, its 6-3 majority all members of an extreme right judicial fraternity, the deliberate destruction of norms, ethics, long held notions of civility and citizenship and the unlimited, tax-deductible dark money of America’s most reactionary oligarchs, the ravenous greed of corporate mass media, that the upcoming election, based on the relative accomplishments of each of the candidates while in office (one running, counterfactually, on denying he lost the previous election to the incumbent), can even be remotely close.
Personally, I think Biden wins by fifteen or even twenty million votes, but as history shows, the power of dead slaveholders gets the last word, with the Electoral College. Even a 2,000 vote margin, surgically spread across enough districts in a few key states can bring us, with mathematical precision, Project 2025. Heaven help any American with reservations about a dictatorship of the corporate/White Christian Nationalist right, massive deportation camps for millions and all the rest. Heaven help Rosie O’Donnell and the thousands on that enemies list with her.
Here is the footnote:
[1] I could not resist including this pertinent bit of context (even as I know some of it wasfinally addressed in The Postal Service Reform Act of 2022):
Committees of Correspondence were essential for organizing in the period leading up to the American Revolution, illustrating the danger this citizen ability to freely communicate poses to those who would be tyrants. The radical right’s project of undermining “the administrative state” made the USPS a logical target.
As you no doubt recall, at the end of the Bush/Cheney lame duck 109th Congress, by voice vote in the House and unanimous consent in the Senate, legislators passed the Postal Accountability Enhancement Act of 2006. The law imposed a mandate on the USPS that applies to no other business in the world, requiring it to pre-fund its pension and health insurance for retirees to the year 2056, ensuring the pension rights of postal workers not yet born while imposing ten years of pension prepayment costs, at $5,500,000,000 annually, on the Post Office, a self-sustaining government agency that gets no taxpayer funding. Suddenly there was a huge USPS deficit and an urgent need to cut costs regarding mail delivery, if not privatize the Postal Service outright.
Also on Saturday, top sports talk host Colin Cowherd pushed back on the idea that the trial was rigged, telling his listeners: “If everybody in your circle is a felon, maybe it’s not rigged. Maybe the world isn’t against you.” “Donald Trump is now a felon,” Cowherd said. “His campaign chairman was a felon. So is his deputy campaign manager, his personal lawyer, his chief strategist, his National Security Adviser, his Trade Advisor, his Foreign Policy Adviser, his campaign fixer, and his company CFO. They’re all felons. Judged by the company you keep. It’s a cabal of convicts.”
Cowherd went on: “[Trump’s] trying to sell me an America that doesn’t exist.” “Stop trying to sell me on ‘everything’s rigged, the country’s falling into the sea, the economy’s terrible,’” he continued. “The America that I live in is imperfect. But compared to the rest of the world, I think we’re doing okay.”
Look, it’s not as if Trump has ever been untruthful about being a serial fraud, our nation’s most prodigious public liar, a grabber of women’s genitalia, a two time defamer, a “civilly liable” rapist, a scammer, America’s most litigious man, an unabashed exploiter of the stupid and ambitious. He honestly paid $25,000,000 to settle a suit brought by the NY AG against his fraudulent “university” (weeks before being elected president via Electoral College), he allowed NYS to shut down his fraudulent charity and paid a $2,000,000 fine. He’s a human, he makes MISTAKES, he’s not perfect. To the religious Christians who support him he is, like King David, a flawed vessel, doing God’s will nonetheless.
I shouldn’t be so judgmental about the values of those who claim to love Christ yet believe a rapist’s unborn child has more rights than the rapist’s thirteen year-old victim. Love and empathy for everybody, isn’t that what Christ taught? Have a blessed day, as it is written.
How is a judge who has already shown bias towards a criminal defendant, the former president who appointed her to her lifetime position, by unlawfully taking his case and abusing her discretion in bending over backwards to accommodate her benefactor, not easily disqualified from sitting in judgment in a criminal case against him when she has already demonstrated reversible bias in the case he brought to prevent the criminal case she is, again, the sitting judge on?
Former President Donald Trump, in possession of dozens of boxes of government documents he unlawfully retained after leaving the presidency, brought a case in federal court to block the government’s ability to touch him for the ongoing criminal act he was engaged in. He filed the case in a federal courthouse where the only sitting judge was the one he appointed after losing the election. He had picked Federalist Society endorsed Aileen Cannon because of her extreme loyalty to the cause, presumably MAGA.
His incoherent case was captioned Trump v United States. It sought a ruling that a former president is entitled to do anything he feels like doing regarding government documents, secret or not, as he leaves office and forever after. It was his Roy Cohn style attempt to go on the offensive to preempt the Espionage Act and obstruction of justice charges Jack Smith brought after massive evidence of Trump’s crimes was recovered at one of the crime scenes, the open and shut, now maddeningly stalled United States v. Trump in federal court in Florida.
The crack Trump legal team’s largely incoherent pleadings in Trump v. US, his attempt to block Smith’s case, failed to establish what Aileen Cannon‘s jurisdiction was to hear this case. Without a basis for jurisdiction, a federal judge cannot hear a case. Cannon returned the papers to Trump’s attorneys directing them to fix this fatal flaw in its paperwork, suggesting several dubious theories of jurisdiction to them.
Trump’s attorneys returned the papers without providing grounds for jurisdiction, so, instead of dismissing it, as any law-abiding judge would be obliged to do, Aileen Cannon provided a grounds for jurisdiction for team Trump herself. She would take the dubious case as an exercise of the court’s equitable jurisdiction, basically to avoid what would otherwise be a grave injustice. Then she continued with the proceedings, ruling for Trump at every turn. The only problem was that the case still had no basis in law, except for the judge’s extremely shaky claim of a certain kind of special jurisdiction.
In the end, after an appeal by the DOJ, she was forced to dismiss the case.Here is the reversal and order to dismiss Trump v US concisely described by legal experts.
The 11th Circuit found that Cannon “improperly exercised equitable jurisdiction” in hearing the case and that the entire proceeding should be dismissed. Notably, the court also found that regardless of the status of a document in question (personal or presidential), the government maintains the authority to seize it under a warrant supported by probable cause.
The panel wrote, “The law is clear. We cannot write a rule that allows any subject of a search warrant to block government investigations after the execution of the warrant. Nor can we write a rule that allows only former presidents to do so.”
I am left with only one question now, as Aileen Cannon continues to dither and delay, postponing hearings, inviting far right third parties to make oral arguments for Trump, refusing to gag a violence threatening, lying defendant, threatening the DOJ with sanctions, postponing trial indefinitely and holding off ruling on a long line of incoherent and frivolous motions by team Trump. It is a question I’m sure I share with tens of millions of aggravated Americans:
What the fucking fuck? I mean, seriously, Jack, Merrick, nothing can be done about this glaring appearance of demonstrated judicial bias/incompetence/disdain for law in our republic of law?
gratuitousblahg 