LET US MAKE THE SIGN OF THE CROSS

Sometimes, even relatively small cities seem to get hit upside the metaphorical head with terrible, heartbreaking news.

So it was in Palm Springs this afternoon. Two police officers have been killed in the line of duty and a third has been seriously injured.

Yet the life of the community continues. If memory serves, it was St. Seraphim of Sarov, a Russian Starets and mystic, who observed that if in the midst of life, we are in death; it is equally true that in the midst of death; we are in life.

Under such circumstances, we can, and we must, as Seraphim Sarovsky might have said, offer prayers and intercessions for the officers whose lives were so tragically and incontinently taken, as well as prayers and intercessions for the recovery of the officer who was injured.

Yet beyond that, we can but make the Sign of the Cross and continue to go about the business of life to which God has called us. For this earthly life does not stop when one member of community passes into eternal life. Though, as a Christian, I must believe in a theology of resurrection --that this life is but a dress rehearsal, so to speak, for the eternal life that follows –- I also, as a Christian, have to believe that dying is an integral part of living.

So, the resurrection faith I profess and confess requires of me a willingness to look death in the face and say, without quibble, cavil, or demur, “God willing, not today.” We can render the fallen officers no greater tribute than to continue the life of the community they laid down their lives to serve. I do not believe it serves the community or their memory to shut down or start flame wars over timing.

For in the end, the power of the resurrection narrative lies in the fact that death is real, that it will happen to all of us eventually, and that it leaves gaps in the lives of those who have yet to experience its ineluctably. Yet the resurrection narrative also reminds us that in the end, the grave has no victory and death has no sting because the Lord we confess has been the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, rising from the dead, conquering death by death.

Let us make the Sign of the Cross as we offer intercession for the departed. Rest eternal grant to them, O Lord, and may light perpetual shine upon them. Amen.

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PAUL S. MARCHAND lives and practices law in Cathedral City. He is a practicing member of the Episcopal Church, which is not a synod of Saints, but a school for sinners. The views expressed herein are his own, and should not be taken as legal advice

THE GANNETT THAT COULDN’T SHOOT STRAIGHT: THE DESERT SUN’S ANIMOSITY GETS THE BETTER OF IT

Summary: Yesterday, our local Gannett newspaper did something that didn’t surprise us at all. The editorial board saw fit to endorse Measure HH, the city charter for Cathedral City. But at the same time, the editorial board did not see fit to endorse councilmember Greg Pettis for reelection, opting instead to endorse the grossly unqualified Sergio Espericueta, a protgé/puppet of former Mayor Kathleen Joan DeRosa, who wants her job back so badly she can taste it.

Never a group to let inconsistencies bother them, the Desert Sun’s editorial board chose to let itself be driven by antipathy, basing their decision to withhold endorsement from Mr. Pettis on unproven, over-the-top, three-year-old allegations made by former Desert Sun reporter Tamara Sone, a young and credulous wannabe journalist who, at the time, allowed herself to be spoonfed a whole series of claims originating out of the sociopathic mind of our former mayor. The Desert Sun didn’t see fit to do any due diligence or fact checking then, instead accepting DeRosa’s allegations uncritically. Now, three years later, they compound their act of journalistic malpractice by repeating those allegations again in order to justify endorsing a manifestly unqualified candidate.
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Our local Gannett newspaper, which surprised us all by endorsing the candidacy of Hillary Rodham Clinton for president of the United States, when most of us in this Valley had expected them to go through every sort of forensic contortion imaginable to endorse Donald Trump (becoming the only newspaper in the country to do so, had they done so), demonstrated the other day that their endorsement of Sec. Clinton was to all intents and purposes a fluke.

The Gannett that couldn’t shoot straight did manage to do the right thing when it endorsed Measure HH, the proposed Cathedral City charter. But the Gannett that couldn’t shoot straight then managed to go wildly off the rails by declining to endorse Greg Pettis, the councilmember whose support for a Cathedral City charter has been steadfast and unflagging for years.

Instead, the editorial board saw fit to endorse Sergio Espericueta, a Council wannabe with no serious qualifications for public office save for being a protgé/puppet/stalking horse of former Mayor Kathleen Joan DeRosa, who wants her old job back so bad she can taste it.

Espericueta has become very much the public face of opposition to a charter in Cathedral City. Now the opposition to the charter is based on nothing more and nothing less than its provision for a rotating mayoralty. The Council and a large number of residents in Cathedral City, having before them the deplorable example of the ten winters of Kathleen Joan DeRosa’s misgovernment of Cathedral city as mayor, felt it best that the mayoralty rotate among the members of the Council.

By rotating the mayoralty, the Council was acting proactively to protect the city from another disastrous mayoralty like that of Kathleen Joan DeRosa. If, after all, a mayor has only a twelvemonth at the helm, she can’t do too much damage. But a directly elected mayor, who sets up a political machine that keeps getting her reelected over a ten-year period, can do a great deal of damage.

And Kathleen Joan DeRosa did, in fact, do a great deal of damage. The damage Kathleen Joan DeRosa inflicted on this community is too well known to require extensive recapitulation here. Suffice it to say that Kathleen Joan DeRosa’s disdain for this community is reflected in her opposition, and in the opposition of her fellow travelers and Donald Trump supporters, to Measure HH.

As much as I don’t intend to spend a great deal of time recapitulating the low points of Kathleen Joan DeRosa’s disastrous mayoralty, I don’t propose to spend a great deal of time recapitulating the merits of the charter, either. It’s not perfect, but, as Adm. Of the Fleet of the Soviet Union Sergey G. Gorshkov once out it, “good enough is best,” and the charter, with its faults, is good enough.  As the New York World recommended Theodore Roosevelt for election to the presidency in his own right in 1904 with words of the immortal brevity: “Theodore! With all thy faults,” so too am I on record as supporting Measure HH by saying “yes on Measure HH! With all thy faults.”

Yet, if I find myself agreeing with our Gannett newspaper’s endorsement of Measure HH, I find myself regrettably forced to the conclusion that an editorial board that can see its way clear to endorsing a needful charter measure for Cathedral City cannot logically endorse the Council candidate who has made opposition to the charter his signature issue. I must conclude that this Gannett newspaper, which cannot seem to shoot straight, is once again making editorial decisions on the basis of its personal and institutional antipathies.

Three years ago, this Gannett newspaper tried its level best to embarrass Greg Pettis so badly that he would hopefully have been forced from office. Within weeks of Mr. Pettis having been installed as president of the Southern California Association of Governments, a powerful recognition of his notable service to the city, the region, and the state, this Gannett newspaper ran a breathless “exposé,” carrying Tamara Sone’s byline and consisting of information which those of us with some familiarity with Cathedral City’s political ins and outs knew immediately had been provided to her by Kathleen Joan DeRosa to form the basis of a journalistic hatchet job.

Tamara Sone, a relatively gullible and credulous baby journalist with skeletons in her own closet, took the bait hook, line, and sinker. She rushed into print with a breathless story whose evident purpose was to create a scandal that would force Mr. Pettis from office, put a journalistic feather in Tamara Sone’s cap, and gratify Kathleen Joan DeRosa’s burning antipathy, nay, her hatred, for Greg Pettis.

In rushing to print, neither Sone nor the editorial board which should have supervised her work bothered to do the slightest bit of fact checking or due diligence. These were shortcomings which I addressed in two posts in my blog which, I like to think, helped torpedo Ms. Sone’s career here in the Desert. The first, on Sunday, April 28, 2013, was entitled “Journalistic Malpractice: The Desert Sun’s Hit Piece against Councilmember Greg Pettis.:. The second, which followed on Saturday, May 4, 2013, was entitled “The Desert Sun’s Rabid Pursuit of Greg Pettis."

Not long after that, Tamara Sone left of the employ of our local Gannett newspaper. One might have thought after that that the powers that be at our local Gannett newspaper would have been chastened enough thought twice about invoking and trotting out these tiresome allegations to relitigate at a remove of three years. Perhaps our local Gannett newspaper thinks there has been enough voter turnover in Cathedral City that voters would be ignorant of its acts of malpractice three years ago. Unfortunately for our local Gannett newspaper, the memories of some of us in Cathedral City are long and unforgiving, just like those of our Gannett newspaper’s editorial board.

Because what is clear from our Gannett newspaper’s sorry endorsement of an unqualified candidate is 1) they are still carrying Kathleen Joan DeRosa’s water in the service of her visceral antipathy, nay, hatred, for Greg Pettis, and consequently 2) they are not really interested in the future of Cathedral City. Given that our Gannett newspaper is headquartered in Palm Springs, it is hardly surprising that it would have a somewhat Palm Springs-centric disdain for what is seen as the poor Latino majority community to its east, whose very incorporation it opposed back in 1982.

The editorial board did acknowledge, in endorsing incumbent councilmember John Aguilar, that Cathedral City is a Latino-majority city. Unfortunately, as they have done so often in the past, the editorial board was more interested in its antipathy toward Greg Pettis than it was in doing right by Cathedral City. Endorsing Espericueta is, in effect, a slap in the face of Cathedral city’s Latino community. There are literally scores of more qualified individuals from the Latino community who the desert sun could have endorsed, had those individuals stepped forward to run. But none of them trimmed his sails so closely to Kathleen Joan DeRosa, the sometime darling of this Gannett publication.

This Gannett publication allowed itself to be blinded by antipathy and by misplaced loyalty to a scheming politician who was able to trade for a number of years on her close personal relationship with the Desert Sun’s editor. Apparently, the editorial board feels that she still has markers which they need to pay, or some other form of juice at 750 N. Gene Autry Trail. 

Either way, the Desert Sun’s endorsement of Sergio Espericueta doesn’t bear any kind of serious scrutiny at all. Voters would be well advised to cast their vote for the most qualified councilmember in the Valley, Greg Pettis, and not heed the ridiculous antipathies of the Desert Sun’s editorial board, whose conduct has been reprehensible.

WIKILEAKS’ JULIAN ASSANGE: CRYING “WOLF” IN A MASTERPIECE OF NARCISSISTIC SELF-PROMOTION

Fortunately for Donald Trump, Mike Pence is not the only weapon in his arsenal. Trump can always hold out hope that WikiLeaks will drop a so-called October surprise on Sec. Clinton. Yet, if Trump and his Trumpanzees were hoping for such an October surprise this week, they were disappointed. WikiLeaks poobah Julian Assange, still holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London in craven flight from sexual assault charges in Sweden, kept Trump supporters up all hours of the night for what amounted to a self-serving infomercial for Assange’s book. So much, at least this week, for a deus ex WikiLeaks that would rescue the Trump campaign from its own contradictions and apparently inevitable failure.

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Julian Assange promised a YUGE document dump this week that the Donald Trump campaign eagerly forecast would be the end of Hillary Clinton. Indeed, Trump spokesslime Roger Stone tweeted about the possibility with all the excitement of a schoolgirl about to intentionally lose her virginity, and enthusiastically contract herpes in the process.

Of course, Clinton’s opponents have been hoping against hope for some campaign-ending revelation from WikiLeaks for some time. Indeed, the extreme Japanese-holdout-stranded-on-Pacific-island-after-the-end-of-the-Pacific-War militants in the Bernard Sanders campaign, the twentysomething Bernie-or-busters who could not reconcile themselves to Sec. Clinton’s primary victory, had for months been hoping against hope, salivating at the prospect, that Julian Assange would “save” America from the prospect of That Woman.

Hopes of both the Sanders holdouts and the Trump campaign for a deus ex WikiLeaks keep being raised and then dashed on the all too obvious rock of Julian Assange’s multitudinous character defects.

We know, from the public record, that Julian Assange is a fugitive from justice, wanted in the kingdom of Sweden on charges of sexually assaulting at least one, and possibly additional, underage girls. Assange, one of those Nietzschean creatures who fancies himself some sort of superior man, and thus, above the law, did not see fit to meet with Swedish authorities, even accepting for a moment the possibility that his doing so might corroborate his denial of the charges. Instead, Assange fabricated a paranoid conspiracy narrative that the Evil Swedes had Made It All Up and were acting as a stalking horse for the U.S. Department of Justice.

Now Assange may be right to believe that DOJ would very much like to speak to him about his plundering forays into American intelligence, in which he was aided and abetted by Bradley-who-wants-to-be-Chelsea Manning. The DOJ will certainly like to speak to Mr. Assange about a number of those issues, not least of which, of course, is how and why Julian Assange, that self-appointed, self-righteous Tribune of the Downtrodden, that self defined Moral Paragon, could have so cowardly abandoned Bradley-who-wants-to-be-Chelsea Manning to his/her fate.

Of course, the indisputable facts are the Assange IS a coward. Instead of presenting himself in Stockholm to answer the Swedish charges, Assange broke bail and fled to the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. Relying upon the fact that Ecuadorian Pres. Rafael Correa is, like like Bolivia’s Evo Morales and Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro, a reflexive hater of the United States, Assange believed, and rightly it has turned out, that the Ecuadorians would give him, a notorious fugitive from British, Swedish, and American justice, sanctuary within their Embassy. From there, Assange has been free to throw bombs, unsettling the political life of the West while identifying himself and WikiLeaks as an eager, uncritical supporter of Russia’s long-standing Kriegßpiel against the West.

Certainly, Assange and WikiLeaks have acquired an unsavory reputation for acting as an uncritical, un-curatorial laundromat for phony emails emanating from Russia’s powerful and sophisticated disinformation operation. Indeed, so serious was the problem of WikiLeaks un-curated data dump that even Edward Snowden -of all people- felt it necessary to criticize WikiLeaks’ complete lack of sophistication or discrimination in determining what they would release. And indeed, WikiLeaks has been so promiscuous in its un-curated data dumps that it has, for example, intentionally, recklessly, or negligently, outed queerfolk in backward countries where homosexuality is punishable by death. 

All this in the name of some so-called virtue of “transparency,” which, when parsed, actually means revealing information that harms the West while advantaging Russia. Is it any surprise that a number of Western intelligence agencies, and a number of Western media outlets as well, characterize WikiLeaks as being essentially a propaganda arm of the Russian government, a part of Russia’s disinformation apparatus operating in and against the West? Is it any wonder that the patriotism and loyalty of Trump campaign supporters, Jill Stein zealous, and some of Bernie’s Japanese-holdout-on-Pacific-island “Bernie-or-bust” people should be questioned when they begin to hyperventilate and salivate with anticipation that WikiLeaks might release something harmful to Hillary Clinton.

Yet, to date, none of the much ballyhooed WikiLeaks data dumps have been what Assange claims they are. Every “this will finish Hillary Clinton” data dump has proved, in the words of one media commentator, to be “a whole lot of nothing,” or a “nothingburger” with a side of Russian dressing.

Thus, when Trump’s spokesslime Roger Stone began hyperventilating last week that Assange’s latest disclosures would be “the end of Hillary Clinton’s campaign,” Democrats understandably began preparing preemptive damage control against the possibility that some part of Assange’s data dump might require explaining and contextualizing. But, Roger Stone, Alex Jones, and the Breitbart people notwithstanding, Assange’s much vaunted data dump was another nothingburger: essentially a narcissistic infomercial plugging the tenth anniversary of WikiLeaks and pitching Assange’s new book.

Indeed, arguably the only beneficiaries of Assange’s ridiculous infomercial will be HM Crown Prosecution Service and the United States Department of Justice. Because it goes virtually without saying that self-made, self-righteous, self-important people like Julian Assange and Donald Trump will always destroy themselves with the most powerful instrument available, their own mouths and what emerges therefrom. Ninety percent of criminal defendants who take the stand for themselves convict themselves out of the words of their own mouth.

The Trump people, who had been up all night waiting for the revelations that would “end Hillary Clinton’s campaign” found themselves reduced to stuttering, sputtering, spluttering, apoplectic, vein-popping, friendship-sundering, lawsuit-inducing, bowel-evacuating, psycho-guano rage. The tweet storm that followed was breathtaking to behold. The great deus ex WikiLeaks moment for which the Trump supporters, the irreconcilable Bernie-or-busters, and the Jill Stein anti-vaxxer-anti-science aging hippies had been eagerly waiting, with bated breath, came and went with a sales pitch. Not with a bang, but with a tawdry tease.

Even Julian Assange, smarmy, want-to-take-a-skillet-to-his-smug-mug, narcissist that he is, must truly realize that one can only raise and dash expectations so many times before one’s credibility begins to run short. As the fable puts it, Julian Assange has cried “wolf!” once too often.

There is a virtue to institutional openness and transparency. But that openness and transparency must come from within the institution in question. Assange, and the Russian government for which he works, don’t accept that proposition. For them, transparency is a concept that is useful only to the extent that it can be weaponized in the service of the Russian State. That, of course, is NOT how transparency is supposed to work in a liberal, Western, democracy. And because Julian Assange is such a coward and so obvious a water-carrier for the Kremlin, we may, with justification, wonder what will happen to him in future.

President Rafael Correa of Ecuador and his ambassador in London should be confronted with a simple choice by HM Foreign and Commonwealth Office: give up Assange or be expelled from the United Kingdom for actions inconsistent with the ambassador’s diplomatic status. This is not the equivalent of Jozsef Cardinal Mindszenty taking refuge in the United States diplomatic mission in Budapest in 1956 and remaining there for the next fifteen years.

For Mindszenty, for all the rumors have swirled about him, had at least been, for a time, the courageous voice of Hungarian resistance to fascism and communism. By that token, Mindszenty represented the authentic voice of a persecuted church and people. What does Assange represent? He represents nothing but his own ego, pressed into the service of the Russian State and the anti-American hatred of the Rafael Correa/Evo Morales/Nicolas Maduro breed of anti-American caudillos for whom anti-Americanism is nothing but a convenient device to deflect attention from their own failures of leadership.

Julian Assange is a coward, and he will meet, in due course, a coward’s end, dying not from a drone strike, as the Hillary haters fondly imagine and like to accuse her of plotting, but alone, probably in a dismal council flat in a depressed neighborhood of South London with no one to mourn his passing, having spent his declining years cadging charity from a dwindling number of supporters and besieging the Australian High Commission in London for assistance.

And that is how it should be.

SUNLIGHT IS THE BEST DISINFECTANT: DISINFECTING THE FEVER SWAMPS OF OPPOSITION TO CATHEDRAL CITY’S CITY CHARTER MEASURE

Summary: With the election barely a month away, we can begin to draw some conclusions about both local and national politics. Here in Cathedral City, the opposition to a local city charter, on the ballot as Measure HH, has begun to emerge from the shadows, and what we see calls the legitimacy of the whole opposition project into grave doubt. The public face of the opposition is city Council wannabe Sergio Espericueta, an increasingly obvious puppet/protegé of former Mayor Kathleen Joan DeRosa, on whose watch, through 10 bitter winters, our city stagnated as DeRosa, our own little simulacrum of Donald Trump, used the mayoralty as an ego trip and as a vehicle to advance the interests of her employer. Measure HH is not perfect, but when we consider the nature of the opposition, the case in favor of a charter for Cathedral City becomes unanswerable.

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Organized opposition to a city charter for Cathedral City, which charter is on the November ballot as Measure HH, has begun to emerge from the shadows. Much of the public face of the opposition has been that of Council wannabe Sergio Espericueta, who was made opposition to the charter a centerpiece of his campaign.

Espericueta, a Dream Homes resident with little practical knowledge or experience of local government, has sought to frame himself as the outsider in the Council race. To do that, he has had to embrace a signature issue to separate him from the two incumbents seeking reelection. That issue, of course, is opposition to Measure HH. Yet, Espericueta has been at best an indifferent spokesman, either for himself or for opposition to a city charter. He has been a no-show at a number of candidate fora, but what is more significant is the increasingly obvious evidence that Espericueta is in fact acting as a stalking horse for former Mayor Kathleen Joan DeRosa, who, it is rumored, is trying to stage a political comeback in 2018. To do so, she is apparently attempting to assemble a coalition of diehard DeRosa loyalists and Donald Trump supporters to defeat the charter.

DeRosa, rumor has it, has been responsible for most of the content of Espericueta’s presence on social media. She apparently authors his Facebook page, a fact which can be ascertained through textual analysis of its pugnacious style. Given Espericueta’s limited command of the English language, it is ineluctable that he would have to outsource his social media to someone with a native-speaker proficiency therein.

Unfortunately, Espericueta, by outsourcing his social media to Kathleen DeRosa, has effectively sold his soul. Because when one makes a Faustian bargain of that nature, one relinquishes one’s integrity and one’s agency. It is thus no surprise that many in the community have come to regard Espericueta as little more than a stalking horse and a mouthpiece for DeRosa.

And what reasonable person in Cathedral City wants to see Kathleen Joan DeRosa, our own little simulacrum of Donald Trump, another grifter from her old neighborhood in Brooklyn, back in the center chair as mayor? Kathleen Joan DeRosa was mayor of Cathedral City for ten winters. Those winters were a time of stagnation in Cathedral city. DeRosa, whose disdain for the city and its Latino majority population was evident in her every public utterance and in her behavior, chose to administer the city in the interests of her employer, Southern California Edison. Moreover, because, as an Edison employee, she sat on the board of the Palm Desert Chamber of Commerce, her loyalties were always more to Palm Desert than they ever were to Cathedral City. As a result, we suffered stagnation much like that which the Soviet Union suffered during the years of Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev.

DeRosa, and her various Trump supporting cronies in this community, don’t want a city charter because the city charter does away with the direct election of a Mayor, and instead rotates the mayoralty annually among the Council the way it is done in other, better run, cities in this Valley. Indeed, recent history of Coachella Valley cities with directly elected mayors does not paint a pretty picture. Consider, for example, the ongoing scandal of former Mayor Steve Pougnet in Palm Springs. Then there is the ridiculous sniping in Desert Hot Springs among current Mayor Scott Matas, and former Mayors Adam Sanchez and DeRosa ally Yvonne Parks, which has been the subject of bemused commentary in our local Gannett newspaper and on social media. And the ten winters of Kathleen Joan DeRosa, also the subject of bemused commentary in our local Gannett newspaper and on social media.  The circumstantial case against direct election of mayors in this Valley is strong.

Nevertheless, DeRosa apparently imagines opposition to the charter to be a vehicle by which she can reenter local politics. She may find that a more difficult undertaking that she had thought. Polling indicates that current voting residents of Cathedral City are, all in all, satisfied with the current Mayor and Council. If they were not, incumbent Mayor Stan Henry would not be running unopposed for reelection.

Of course, it bears remembering that in early 2014, Henry, or his surrogates, put a poll in the field to gauge his electability. The results for DeRosa were not encouraging; as a matter of fact, the poll showed that in a straight up Henry/DeRosa confrontation, Henry would have trounced her. It was for that reason of course that DeRosa fabricated a “road to Damascus” experience in which, she claimed, God had told her that Stan should be her successor. By invoking the deity, DeRosa – or as some Latino residents of the city call her, Mentirosa, the liar- was able to fashion a face-saving climbdown from a position that had become untenable for her.

Indeed, if adopted, the charter will be Stan Henry’s legacy achievement. He can position himself as a Mayor who oversaw Cathedral City’s transition from a general law city subject to the whims and vagaries of the Legislature in Sacramento into a charter city with substantially greater autonomy and substantially greater freedom from Legislative inroads. But, if the charter fails, as DeRosa hopes it will, she hopes also to have an issue with which to belabor Stan Henry, and an issue on which she can attempt to stage a political comeback two years from now. Since it is emphatically not in Cathedral City’s interest to let Kathleen Joan DeRosa meddle in our politics anymore, and since it is also in Cathedral City’s interest to adopt a rotating mayoralty where no single Mayor has enough time in office to do the kind of damage that Kathleen Joan DeRosa was responsible for doing during her ten winters of incumbency, support for the charter is a no-brainer.

I will be supporting the charter, with all its faults and flaws. As the New York World expressed it in its memorably brief editorial endorsement of Theodore Roosevelt in 1904, “Theodore! With all my faults!”  So too, will I be supporting the charter: yes on Measure HH! With all its faults. After having served on the Council for six years alongside the worst mayor in Cathedral city’s history, I don’t think it makes good sense to give her an issue to campaign on in 2018.

A Pence Win? One Is Rather Inclined to Think Not

Summary: Mike Pence certainly did not help Donald Trump last night in the vice presidential debate. It’s hard to see how the mainstream media can buy into the notion that Mr. Pence “won” the debate when his entire performance was a bravura demonstration of undercutting the top of the ticket and setting himself up as a possible presidential contender in 2020.

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So much spin has emerged from last night’s vice presidential debate that the public is virtually seasick from it.
As usual, Democratic loyalists are insisting that Tim Kaine won the debate, while Republicans are insisting that the nod should go to Mike Pence.

In truth, both men are not inexpert debaters. The consensus that has emerged seems to be that Pence delivered a smoother performance, one that may win on points. However, as we dig deeper into what transpired last night, Pence’s victory begins to look more and more illusory.

For Tim Kaine, representing a campaign that is now up by anywhere between five and ten points nationally, and which has actually pulled ahead in the battleground state of Ohio, the assignment was quite simple and even Hippocratic: first do no harm. And indeed, Tim Kaine did no harm. Despite handwringing and Monday morning quarterbacking from timid Democrats who saw fit to place their interest in decorum above their loyalty to their party, Tim Kaine delivered a masterful Kriegßpiel against the embattled Mike Pence.

Moreover, the debate appeared to be two separate proceedings conducted in the same space at the same time. Much like the 2008 vice presidential debate between Joe Biden and the unspeakable Sarah Palin, Tim Kaine reached out purposefully to the broad coalition which makes up the Democratic Party. By contrast, Mike Pence spent the debate grokking with the evangelical subset of the Republican base. While Tim Kaine was evangelizing the broad Democratic coalition and acting as a “fisher of men” among the undecideds, Mike Pence was engaged in a love feast with a narrow subsection of the Trump electorate. Like Sarah Palin and Joe Biden, the two contenders seem largely to have talked past or at one another.

Watching the debate was akin to watching a kind of bizarre, balletic, pas de deux, or perhaps watching two judoka sparring in the dōjō, so evenly matched that neither could pull off a definitive victory against the other. Nonetheless, we may see a number of factors emerge in the next few days tending to undercut the “Pence won” narrative that the Beltway media have been trying assiduously to propagate since yesterday evening.

For, as a number of sites, including vox.com and Politico have suggested, much of Pence’s performance last night seemed less about defending the top of his ticket than it did about positioning Mike Pence for a possible presidential run in 2020 or 2024. Yet, more than that, Mike Pence’s astonishing failure to defend Donald Trump against any of the very serious charges Tim Kaine leveled against him may have begun to drive a wedge between the two Republican standardbearers.

Moreover, Pence’s denial of many of Trump’s outrageous and documented utterances not only shows a disturbing lack of moral compass implicit in Pence’s unwillingness to own his running mate’s remarks, but also an astonishing lack of strategic grasp. The Hillary Clinton campaign ads virtually write themselves; Pence saying “Donald Trump never said [insert outrageous thing here],” followed by a video clip of Donald Trump saying exactly that.

If Mike Pence thought he had won the debate last night, victory will surely be snatched from him by the Clinton attack ads we can expect to see in short order, highlighting each obvious Pence lie. To the extent that the Clinton attack ads emerge fairly swiftly, they can be expected to significantly undermine the credibility of the Trump-Pence ticket among undecided voters. This, notwithstanding the conventional wisdom that most vice presidential debates don’t much move the needle. And in truth, this one probably won’t move the needle terribly much. It will be the fact checkers and the attack ad writers for Hillary Clinton will have the effect of moving the needle.

Of course, the fact checkers and the attack ad writers will have a powerful, if un-self-aware, ally in Donald Trump himself. The Donald, who seems to have all the impulse control of a five-year-old child, can’t stop tweeting foolish and unhelpful things. Already, this morning, the word is out the Trump is having conniptions over the strong public perception that Mike Pence might have been the better presidential candidate for the Republicans than would The Donald himself. And since The Donald cannot stand not to be thought of as the best, the smartest, the most endowed, the most YUGE guy in the room, we may predict another self sabotaging Twitter meltdown before too long. 

In short, while the early post game wrapup might award the debate to Mike Pence on points, the Clinton campaign can afford to play a long game, allowing the situation to develop for a few days while the fact checkers do their work and the attack ad writers do theirs. Mike Pence may have won a transitory victory yesterday evening, but his tergiversation, his outright untruths, and his astonishing failure to mount a vigorous defense of the top of his ticket will, in the end, be one of those factors which will cost the Trump campaign the election.

A QUESTION OF LOYALTY AND A DEFENSE OF McCARTHYISM: WHY HILLARY CLINTON IS THE ONLY CHOICE FOR PATRIOTIC AMERICANS THIS NOVEMBER

Summary: As the ongoing controversy about the close relationship between Donald Trump and Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, and the fairly obvious Russian attempts to intervene in Election 2016 begin to gain critical mass, the choice for undecided voters be is no longer an abstract one involving only voter preference.

Instead, the choice has become one involving basic questions of loyalty to the United States. Though Trump supporters and leftists of the Katrina Vanden Heuvel stripe may attempt to put a stop to such discussions by invoking the tired cliché of McCarthyism, the indisputable fact remains that we are indeed being subverted by paid agents of the Russian State, acting on behalf of Donald Trump.

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The defecation has apparently hit the ventilation in Trump world. Aside from his erratic, unhinged, meandering, Fidel Castro-like speech in Pennsylvania in which he required almost an hour and a half to deliver nine scripted sentences, and aside from the bombshell story that hit late yesterday about his $916m claimed loss on his 1995 income tax returns, or his appalling debate performance last Monday evening, or his bizarre, possibly drug fueled, ongoing Twitter attack on former Miss Universe Alicia Machado, and insisting, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that he “won” Monday’s debate, The Donald has clearly had a wonderful week.

In laying aside the irony of trying to spin Donald Trump’s last seven days as anything but a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week, we may still wonder how a presidential wannabe can manage to continue to shoot himself in the foot so badly, so often, so theatrically, and still be within a hair’s breadth of being able to win the election.

Because in the last few days the one revelation which has hit about Donald Trump’s campaign from which recovery may not, in the end, be possible, is the revelation inherent in the increasingly detailed information about the manner in which Russian state actors have played an increasingly obvious role in attempting to secure victory for Donald Trump. We know, for example, that Russian state media have made no secret of their desire to see Donald Trump elected to the presidency of the United States. Moreover, a routine Google search for Putin’s army of Trump trolls brings up 369,000 results in a little bit more than half a second.

While traditional media had largely been reluctant to address the issue of the extent to which Vladimir Vladimirovich was trying to help his good friend Gospodin Donald Trump win the presidency, the issue has hit critical mass in the last few days. When Newsweek, for example, broke Kurt Eichenwald’s story concerning Gospodin Trump’s violation of the federal trade embargo against Cuba, the immediate response to the story took the form of a Russian-linked cyberattack on Newsweek.com, which attack itself became news. The cover story in the current issue of Time magazine is an extensive exposé of the extensive Russian efforts to infiltrate and undermine the integrity of the 2016 elections.

What this critical mass of reporting on Russia’s efforts to mount what is, to all intents and purposes, a hostile takeover bid for the United States government has catalyzed is a discussion of the extent to which our votes in this election have, and must have, a patriotic dimension to them. In short, we have reached the point in this 2016 election cycle where the only patriotic vote possible is unequivocally and absolutely a vote for Hillary Clinton. We had never thought, at least not since the contest between Aaron Burr and Thomas Jefferson in 1800, that it could, let alone should, be necessary to define a vote for one or another presidential candidate as unpatriotic or treasonable.

Yet, we have reached exactly that point in this 2016 election. Because it simply is not patriotic to support, let alone vote for, a man whose campaign is receiving substantial material assistance from the Kremlin.

Months ago, in writing about the unexpected triumph of Brexit, I suggested that pro-Brexit voices in United Kingdom were actually doing Moscow’s work; I had no hesitation then, and I have no hesitation now, about impugning the basic loyalty to the West of Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, or even of David Cameron. I suggested that champagne corks were popping in the Kremlin the night the Brexit vote result was announced, largely because the Brexit vote represented a victory in Russia’s long-standing kriegßpiel against the West. I went further in that post from this summer and suggested that Donald Trump’s advocacy of Brexit was of a piece not only with the advocacy of Farage and Johnson for Brexit, but also of a piece with a long-standing Russian policy goals toward the West.

Indeed, I went so far as a suggest that a hundred-division armored thrust at the heart of NATO could not have caused more chaos among the European Union than had Brexit, which Gospodin Trump had advocated for because we now know that Donald Trump is a faithful steward and advocate of Russian policy. We may expect the first foreign decoration to come President Donald Trump’s way will no doubt be the Order of Saint Andrew or some other similar senior Russian bauble.

That is, of course, if Donald Trump is elected president. It is up to us to prevent that from happening by any means necessary.

“By any means necessary” necessarily includes close and searching scrutiny of Trump’s, and Trump’s family’s, business connections with the Kremlin. It should also include an investigation into Donald Trump’s relationships with Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. Now, one advocating such searching investigations, and possible criminal prosecution against Trump and Assange, can expect to be, and will be, attacked by leftists who have never integrated into their thinking the reality that Russia is no longer a state of the left; what was once the Soviet Union has been replaced by a fascist kleptocracy run by the biggest fascist kleptocrat of all, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.

Yet the left will still squawk about “redbaiting,” while invoking the tired old trope of McCarthyism. McCarthyism, as a trope, has become an example of what Robert Jay Lifton in his seminal monograph Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, which dealt with brainwashing in Mao’s China, has described as a “thought-terminating cliché.” A “thought-terminating cliché” is nothing more than a convenient shorthand by which a rational discussion may be circumvented. Having grown up in the liberal-leftist circles during the late 1970s, and being still myself a man of the liberal left, I can remember the invocation of such thought terminating clichés as “McCarthyism” at first hand.

Among liberal Democrats in the 1970s, for example, invocations of such unfashionable-at-the-time concepts as patriotism were almost routinely met with a facile charge of “McCarthyism.” To rebut a foolish, pro-Soviet notion with a suggestion that such things were harmful to our national interest, or worse, to question the patriotism of the maker or offeror of such a notion, was to call down an immediate invocation of “McCarthyism.” And among the pious, knee-jerk liberals of the time, to invoke the evil memory of Joseph McCarthy was all that was necessary to shut down the discussion. It was a form of intellectual bullying roughly akin to neoconservative invocations of Munich to justify our military misadventure in Vietnam or our similar misadventure in Iraq.

And indeed, we see similar appeals to thought terminating cliches today. It is bad enough when the Nation’s Katrina Vanden Heuvel springs to the defense of Donald Trump and Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin by seeking to define any expression of concern about the bromance between the two men as an illegitimate expression of McCarthyism. But what reduces one to sputtering, spluttering, fiery, fulminant, angry, apoplectic rage is to hear Julian Assange try to delegitimize any discussion of his own criminal behavior by invoking a similar fraudulent, thought-terminating cliche.

Because when it comes right down to it, America is in greater danger now from Russian subversion than she was in the late 1940s and early 1950s when Iosif Vissarionovich was in command in the Moskovskiy Kremlin. Because for all we knew that Stalin was an authentically bad man, and we remembered how he had been responsible for the deaths of millions of Kulaks, we also knew that Soviet efforts at subversion here in the United States were remarkably unsuccessful. We didn’t have the Soviets attempting to take over one of our major political parties the way that Vladimir Vladimirovich has attempted to co-opt the Republican Party. We could back then name on the fingers of our hands the worst traitors in our midst.

Kim Philby. Guy Burgess. Daniel MacLean. Anthony Blunt. The “fifth man,” whose identity has been much speculated on in Britain but never ascertained. Klaus Fuchs. Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. Alger Hiss. This was the rogues gallery of traitors upon whom Joseph McCarthy erected an overweening, overreaching edifice of finger-pointing, suspicion, and hysteria. On this edifice rested such enormities as the House Un-American Activities Committee, the California Legislature’s Dies committee, and the purges in many American unions.

Yet, while we knew that there were a great many excessively idealistic Americans who had flirted with Soviet communism because they believed, in truth, that Lincoln Steffens had been right when he had said of Soviet communism “I have seen the future and it works,” we came to realize that their flirtation had been just that, a passing enthusiasm from which many of them came home, for they had never really given up on our American experiment in representative democracy, on our Constitution, and on the fundamental legitimacy of our representative institutions of self-government. What we had thought was a generation of subversives turned out to be a generation of passionate loyalists, passionately loving this country, and passionately convinced that this country had and has a great and exceptional heritage and promise to live up to.

But today, the threat of subversion, the threat of a hostile takeover by the Moskovskiy Kremlin is not just the fever dream of a closeted homosexual Senator from Wisconsin. It’s a reality that could take place as early as January, 2017. For in the 50s, though we were buffaloed into believing wrongly that there was a Red under Every Bed, 60 years later we now see evidence of real fellow travelers everywhere in the Trump campaign, and in the campaigns of Gary Johnson and Jill Stein as well. Why would Donald Trump have a man like Boris Epshteyn in a senior role in his campaign? Epshteyn, an immigrant from post-Soviet Russia, has the kind of resume which strongly suggests that he is in fact an asset of some part of the Russian intelligence apparat; either of FSB, the successor to KGB, or of GRU, Russian military intelligence.

Indeed, there is considerable speculation that Epshteyn is Donald Trump’s Russian control/handler/case officer. If so, it would be in character with the incredibly amateurish nature of the Trump campaign to allow so obvious a Russian intelligence asset to parade himself repeatedly on American television, for all the world to see. I cannot imagine an experienced American case officer, say, Valerie Plame, outing herself in similar fashion. (Indeed, the Bush administration’s deliberate acts to expose Valerie Plame as a CIA case officer resulted in a number of rather high profile criminal prosecutions in this country.) But, apparently, the Trump campaign remains so arrogant and so amateurish that they apparently do not imagine that anyone would have the synaptic capability to connect the dots and conclude that Boris Epshteyn is in fact a Russian intelligence asset.

If, in fact, Boris Epshteyn is a Russian intelligence asset functioning as Donald Trump’s control/case officer/handler, and if, as we know, there are numerous Trump trolls in the pay of the Russian government operating out of venues in Moscow or St. Petersburg, among them a nondescript office block at Ulitsa Savushkina 55 in that city’s Primorskiy district, and another location believed to be on the grounds of the Smolny Institute, a St. Petersburg memorial to the October Revolution owned and maintained by the Russian State, we must nevertheless conclude that Russia’s paid trolls are not exclusively located in Moscow, St. Petersburg, or other cities and towns of the Russian land. We must conclude that there are paid Trump trolls in this country who are either aware that their paychecks come from the Russian State, or who are culpably ignorant of the source of such paychecks.

To the extent that this is the case, we are the target not only of an organized disinformation campaign from without, but also of comprehensive betrayal from within. One can usually tell a Russian Trump troll by their uncertain command of recursion or of the conditional/subjunctive tense and mood in English language. Though English may be linguistically the most promiscuous of tongues, it is also one of the fullest of traps for the unwary. Since Russian handles verb tenses and moves rather differently from English, it’s relatively easy to catch a person for whom Russian is his or her first language. No Russian speaker could have written in English a paragraph as laden with recursions and subjunctive clauses as those which have appeared in this blog.
That is not, of course, to say that every Trump troll is posting from Ul. Savushkina 55 or from Smolny. It is the domestic Trump trolls and the American Trump supporters and surrogates of whom we should be particularly afraid. These are the traitors and nut cases who can be expected to be prominent in any hypothetical Trump administration. These are not people who should be allowed anywhere near the levers of power.

And because we cannot allow a nutcase like Trump or nut cases like those who ally themselves to his cause access to the corridors of power, we Hillary Clinton supporters must be willing to frame the next five weeks in the most apocalyptic terms we can. We must be willing to call out the Russian trolls when we encounter them -they will give themselves away by their uncertain command of the English language, or by their repeated cutting and pasting– but even more, we must be prepared to expose the Trump traitors in our midst. Because, this time, a healthy dose of McCarthyism may be all that stands between the United States and a Russian motor-rifle division patrolling Capitol Hill.

Citizens, the Republic is in danger!