Summary: Once again, Christmas finds me in the office honoring what has become a shibboleth for me. By going into the office, I can escape some of the seasonal ridiculousness of the kind of nastiness into which Christmas has degenerated.
Yet, in the silence of the office, insulated from The Donald’s objectionable and nasty cultural appropriation of this holy incarnation season, And his recasting of it is some kind of political Festivus, I’m reminded not only that God’s passionate love for us is passionately expressed in the Incarnation, Passion, death, and Resurrection of our Savior, but also that God and God’s holy church remind us that we ought to have a preferential option for the poor, the oppressed, and those who have no place to lay their heads. God will come again in glory to judge the quick and the dead, and will take note of how we have treated the least among us.
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In the nearly 30 years since I was admitted to the practice of law, I have maintained a more or less constant shibboleth of coming into the office on Christmas Day. In the silence of the office, with no phone calls, no interruptions, no unwanted human interaction, I actually find a place to get some work done, but perhaps more importantly, to find a quiet place for meditation in this Incarnation season.
I came across a new word recently, coined by a high school student who shows what his teacher called “signs of greatness.” The word in question, used to describe our current situation, was “fucktangular.” Certainly, with the traitor-in-chief Donald Trump at the head of our affairs, the situation this Christmas can only be described fucktangular.
What, after all, can we say when Gospodin Trump, in a fit of pique, holds the United States government to ransom for his ridiculous border wall? What can we say one Gospodin Trump treats Christmas like Seinfeld’s Festivus, subjecting us all to a recitation of his usual diet of lies, falsehoods, and childish grievances? What can we say as we learn that on this Christmas day, another child, this one a boy of eight, died in the custody of the United States government?
Moreover, what can one say when one sees a homeless person, with all his worldly possessions crammed into a shopping cart, making his way with a kind of sad, weary dignity, from one side of the street to the other? It came home to me forcibly in that moment that, as a Christian, a Catholic, an Anglican, an Episcopalian, I profess and confess a deep and abiding faith in a God Who took human form that we sinful humans might be reconciled to God. God made for that holy purpose an icon of Godself to draw all humankind to God. So, too was I reminded of God’s ineffable presence looking out into the Whitewater Wash and seeing another homeless person sharing his or her meager foodstuff with a murder of crows, in a kind of Franciscan feast of the impoverished.
It reminded me then and there that there is something fucktangular in the way modern American society tends to organize itself. It reminded me that there is something indeed fucktangular about the heresies implicit in the so-called prosperity gospel beloved of so many evangelical Protestant Nonconformists. It reminded me that there is something fucktangular in the way we have appropriated the Christmas narrative and twisted it into something I don’t think God ever intended the Incarnation of the Savior ever to represent.
In a time when Gospodin Trump has emboldened all of us to live down to the worst aspects of our Originally Sinful human nature, we should, instead of accepting his invitation, which is, after all, an invitation to live according to the perverse “gospel” of Antichrist, try to get in touch with the eternal truths contained in our Christian Incarnation narrative.
For when we examine the Lucan infancy narrative, the one we hear about at every Christmastide, the one that has become such a treasured possession of the Western mind and the Christian Republic, it’s easy to gloss over a very simple, foundational, reality. Simply put, our Savior, his mother Mary, and Joseph were situationally homeless. Worse, the Lucan infancy narrative also reminds us that they became refugees fleeing Herod’s slaughter of the Holy Innocents.
In short, the Holy Family represented precisely the kind of people against whom Gospodin Trump and his supporters are holding the government hostage to build their absurd border wall, to go Qin Shihuangdi one better. Yet, as I pointed out in my last post, Wanli Changcheng (The Great Wall of China) did not keep out the barbarians whom China desired to exclude. Instead, the Manchu turned Wanli Changcheng at Shangaiguan, conquered China, and, in the end, became more Chinese than the Chinese themselves.
And if Wanli Changcheng proved unavailing, so, too, will Gospodin Trump’s border wall. Indeed, we have the assurances of the Savior Himself that Gospodin Trump, and all his minions of Antichrist will not prevail. For when the Savior comes, he brings with him what Gandhiji called the power of powerlessness, the ability of nonviolence to overcome all terrors. For we who are Christian, we who are Catholic, we who are Anglican, we who are Episcopalian, preach the faith of God Incarnate, of God among humanity, of God crucified, of God conquering death by death.
The baby in the manger or the mature man with his disciples supping for the last time in the upper room may not have been much to look upon, but the power of God is ineluctable; the power of God can turn every wall, it can reduce every fortification, and it can do so in the manner in which French playwright Edmund Rostand described a beautiful young girl gaining access to a grim fortress by convincing the sentries to grant her entry: “she smiled at them.”
On this Day when we commemorate the Incarnation of the Savior of the World in that manger in Bethlehem more than 2000 years ago, we acknowledge His conquest of our sinful hearts by acknowledging the smile of that beautiful Child.
The Savior of the World is at hand!
Oh! Come let us adore Him!
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand is an attorney. He lives in Cathedral City, where he served two terms on the city Council, and he practices law in Rancho Mirage. He is a religiously Conformist member of the Episcopal Church, that denomination of Christians who like to eat little sandwiches with the crusts cut off and drink tea with her pinkies extended. The views contained in this post are his own, unless you like them, in which case, they can be yours, too.
Tuesday, December 25, 2018
Thursday, December 20, 2018
LITTLE SNAPPERS: THE ARROGANCE AND HUBRIS OF DONALD TRUMP AND MARK ZUCKERBERG
Summary: The arrogance, hubris, and treasonable incompetence of Messrs. Donald Trump and Mark Zuckerberg has revealed itself yet again. The Donald, in another, perhaps inevitable, display of churlishness, solipsism, and indeed treasonable incompetence, has managed, almost simultaneously, to betray our national security interests in Syria and to set up a shutdown of the government for which the Russian ... er, that is, the Republican Party, will ineluctably be held responsible, and with respect to which they will be ineluctably tarred with the same brush of treason as The Donald himself.
If The Donald’s own lack of self-awareness, and his own treasonable disposition, have left the Republican Party caught with its metaphorical cock and balls hanging out for everyone to see, Mark Zuckerberg’s own solipsism, arrogance, hubris, and pathetic want of self-awareness have left his company, Facebook, on the brink of intrusive and necessary legislation by hostile legislative bodies including, but not limited to, Congress, the California Legislature, the Imperial Parliament, the European Parliament, Dáil Éireann, and the Danish Folketing. The handwriting may be on the wall for scandal-plagued Facebook.
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The traitor-in-chief of the United States, Donald Trump, demonstrated yet again his treasonable incompetence within the last 48 hours. First, by announcing a withdrawal of all American military forces from Syria, on his mere ipse dixit, without the first shred of interagency review or participation in the decision, Trump has given material aid, and probably considerable comfort, to enemies national of the United States, including Russia and Iran.
Moreover, Trump’s demarche has also given aid, and a distinct amount of comfort, to Daesh, the entity known in the West as ISIS, or to the Obama administration as ISIL. Trump may have felt it appropriate to adopt the strategy of some time Vermont Sen. George Aiken, who, appreciating that we were backing into a quagmire in Vietnam, said that we should, in effect, “declare victory and pull out.”
Unfortunately, as with the Vietcong, Daesh is not the kind of opponent with respect to whom we can unilaterally declare victory and slink out of the battlespace. Daesh has demonstrated, time and time again, that it is not disposed to conduct itself according to the laws of war or the usages of civilized societies in either the Judeo Christian Roman world or in the Islamic community. To achieve victory against Daesh will require the kind of scorched earth, on-the-ground elimination of the enemy which Donald Trump is unprepared to contemplate, and which he actually quails from thinking about.
By withdrawing American forces from Syria, Trump the traitor-in-chief only emboldens Daesh, and gives openings to Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and to Turkey’s neo-Ottoman dictator Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Moscow will be looking to establish a de facto protectorate over Syria, with access to Syria’s warm-water port of Latakia; Ankara will be looking for an opportunity to crush the Kurds.
Either way, The Donald’s unilateral demarche is not only contrary to American interests, but also serves the interests of enemies national.
In addition to serving enemies national by screwing up the American position in Syria, The Donald has also betrayed this country by holding the United States government hostage to his hubristic demand for funding for his so-called Great Wall. The last head of a sovereign state to have a Great Wall associated with him was a Chinese Emperor Qin Shihuangdi, 2200 years ago. The Qin Emperor, though enumerated as the first Emperor of China, is uniformly reviled on both the Chinese mainland and in Taiwan for his excesses, his character flaws, and his bloodthirstiness.
Any student of Chinese history can tell you that the Qin Emperor’s project was not a success. Wanli Changcheng, as the Great Wall is known in China never stopped a barbarian invasion of China proper. In 1644, the Manchu turned Wanli Changcheng at Shanhaiguan, northeast of Beijing, and went on to conquer all China, ruling it as the Qing Dynasty until 1912.
By holding the United States government hostage, The Donald has managed to recapitulate many of the political mistakes and the character flaws which led to the collapse of the Ming and Qing Dynasties. Certainly, by threatening to cripple large parts of the government, the Donald has given another Christmas present to Vladimir Vladimirovich: a government shutdown promotes instability and reduces the credibility of the United States with its alliance partners in both NATO and the Pacific.
Such a lack of basic competence in the skills of governing is not merely inexcusable, it constitutes what the Russian Imperial Criminal Code defined as treasonable incompetence: incompetence on a scale so massive, and so dangerous that one must infer malice on the part of the incompetent. In all, malice may be inferred where an action is taken with obvious and reckless disregard for its probable consequences.
For example, a person firing an AR 15 into a moving Amtrak train would not be able to defend him- or herself by denying any specific malicious intent to kill a passenger, but the law would infer malice from the high probability that death might result. In the same fashion, drunk driving offenses can be, and often are, charged as a second-degree murder, because of the high risk that death will occur as a result of the illegal conduct.
In the case of Donald Trump, adverse consequences to the United States stemming from his conduct, are so foreseeable that his incompetence may indeed be considered treasonable; it is not a defense for a bad actor to claim that he did not intend the results of his misconduct, when those consequences are reasonably foresseable to anybody with even a middle-school skill set or level of self-awareness.
The Donald has laid the groundwork for what should be an extensive set of articles of impeachment by the House of Representatives come January. His conduct is inexcusable, it is treasonable, and it should be punished accordingly.
* * * * *
If anyone else can be accused of culpable incompetence, that person is Mark Zuckerberg, the man-child in charge at Facebook.
This week, Facebook was the subject of another exposé about its failure to respect its users’ privacy. This one, broken by the New York Times, comes hard on the heels of a series of other, not altogether unexpected, Facebook scandals.
In every one of them, Gospodin Zuckerberg has managed to stumble his way into making a bad situation worse. Not only has Facebook lost nearly 30% of its market value, but it is now facing investigations into its business activities by a whole series of hostile legislative bodies including, but not limited to, Congress, the California Legislature, the Imperial Parliament, the European Parliament, Dáil Éireann, and the Danish Folketing.
Starting even before Cambridge Analytica, Facebook had confronted a series of privacy scandals. Gospodin Zuckerberg responded to each scandal with an anodyne non-apology “apology.” In every case, Zuckerberg’s pro forma apology was a cosmetic fiction, leading to no real reforms whatsoever. In fact, so inauthentic were Gospodin Zuckerberg’s apologies that we may not only doubt the sincerity of his current so-called apology tour, but we may also infer that his other apologies, those to Congress and to the Imperial Parliament, may well have been nothing more than carefully packaged, artfully orchestrated lies.
The writing may be very much on the wall for the monstrosity of Menlo Park. Not only does Facebook have to confront the possibility of a growing #deletefacebook movement, but it must also contemplate the possibility that one or more of the legislative bodies looking into its business model may see fit either, in the case of Congress, to reassert in their fullest forms the antitrust remedies contemplated in the Sherman Antitrust Act, or to legislate Facebook out of existence altogether, a step being contemplated by the Imperial Parliament, Dáil Éireann, and the Danish Folketing.
Facebook may have no other option than to offer Gospodin Zuckerberg a gold watch for his service, buy him out, and put some figure of worldwide, unimpeachable integrity at the helm. If Zuckerberg continues his arrogance, his hubris, and his solipsism, Facebook may not be here come the elections of 2020.
I’m not sure I would count that a great privation.
Tuesday, December 18, 2018
BRINGING TREASON IN FROM THE COLD: WHY THE DONALD SHOULD BE CRAPPING IN HIS PANTS
SUMMARY: District Judge Emmet Sullivan brought the concept of treason in from the cold this morning at the abortive sentencing hearing for Michael Flynn. By mentioning treason for the first time in a criminal proceeding involving The Donald, Judge Sullivan has very much upped the ante. Treason and bribery are the two specifically enumerated crimes that constitute grounds for impeachment under the constitution. Sullivan may very well have unstoppered the bottle and let the genie out.
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In a Washington, D.C. courtroom this morning, United States District Judge Emmet Sullivan tore a metaphorical strip off former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. In a series of pointed questions directed at the quondam general, Sullivan included one inquiring whether the investigators from the Special Counsel’s office had considered charging Flynn with other crimes, including treason.
Given that Flynn has already pled guilty to lying to the FBI in connection with his undeclared work as an agent of foreign governments, it might have seemed that ventilating the possibility of a treason prosecution might have been a bit of a reach.
Yet, as the evidence has continued to mount that the United States has been the subject of what amounts to an undeclared war by an enemy national, the question of whether the numerous contacts between Trump administration figures and agents of the Russian State constitutes treason has been one that has been very much bubbling along at the margins of our national conversation.
No one has been willing thus far, with the possible exception of former Naval Intelligence officer Malcolm Nance and a number of other commentators on MSNBC, even to mention the T-word.
Until today.
Because in his Washington courtroom today, Judge Sullivan brought the concept of treason in from the cold and set it right down at the table. Essentially, Judge Sullivan has done two things none had thought possible; he has mainstreamed the concept of treason prosecutions for one, some, or even all of the Trump entourage, and in so doing has decidedly upped the ante.
Basically, Judge Sullivan has blown the lid off of the generalized reluctance to link treason and Trump. If, as recently as last week, the concept of some kind of formal linkage between the Trump campaign and the concept of treason had been dismissible as the ravings of a marginal conspiracist, this morning’s courtroom colloquy, by bringing treason in from the cold, demands that we now engage in a serious, non-hysterical discussion about the possibility that one, some, or all of the senior leaders of the Trump administration may have been engaged with agents of the Russian State in a comprehensive effort to betray the United States.
Of course, many “lay lawyers,” imagining themselves as far more competent in the law than they really are, will protest that there is no declared war between the United States and Russia, and insist that a treason prosecution will only lie when there has been a formal declaration of war.
Aside from constituting the crime of unauthorized practice of law, the “lay lawyers’” analysis fails on two very simple points.
First, neither Article III, Section 3 of the Constitution, which defines the federal offense of treason, nor 18 U.S. Code § 2381, which defines the statutory offense of treason, contain any textually demonstrable requirement that the United States be in an actual, declared state of war. In fact, the United States last declared war on December 8, 1941, when Congress, in consequence of “the unprovoked and dastardly attack” against Pearl Harbor the previous day, declared a state of war to have existed from December 7 between the United States and the Japanese Empire.
Yet, if we were to accept the “lay lawyers’” formulation that a treason prosecution requires a declared war, then the treason statutes would fall into ineluctable desuetude, becoming unenforceable through nonuse.
Yet, when one considers the statutory history of treason statutes, both in this country and in England, one finds that from the time Parliament first legislated on the subject of treason, in the Statute of Treasons 25. Edw.3. c.5 s.2. (1351), that while levying war against the sovereign within the sovereign’s own jurisdiction was certainly treason, certain other acts could be considered treason as well.
What the statutory history makes quite clear, especially when one considers the various English Treason Acts following the original 1351 Act, is that the gravamen of the offense is that it constitutes an effort to contravene the authority of the State at the most basic level, by individuals who owe a duty of allegiance thereto.
Moreover, it cannot be gainsaid that Russia’s “active measures” in the course of propaganda, disinformation, fomentation of division, and stirring up of unrest constitute what is known as “information warfare,” prosecuted by the Russian State against the United States and its allies may not be a declared war, but it is war, all the same.
Consequently, if we accept the proposition that Russia’s “active measures” against the United States are a form of warfare, then any American assisting the Russian State in prosecuting such “active measures” against this country is unquestionably guilty of treason within the meaning of Article III, section 3 of the Constitution, and within the meaning of 18 U.S. Code § 2381.
Even the most basic understanding of the realities of how Russia’s “active measures” of information warfare do in fact constitute war against the United States should quickly dispose of any half-baked notion on the part of “lay lawyers” that assisting Russia against this country is not treason.
When Judge Sullivan dared to say the T-word in his courtroom, he not only brought treason, the redheaded stepchild whose name no one had dared to speak its name until now (pace Lord Alfred Douglas), into the mainstream of our national discussion, But, he also unstoppered the bottle, allowed the genie to escape, and also raised the very real possibility that treason prosecutions may very well become a part of the counterintelligence toolbox.
Donald Trump should be afraid, afraid to the point of existential dread, about where the prosecution in U.S. v. Flynn is heading.
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In a Washington, D.C. courtroom this morning, United States District Judge Emmet Sullivan tore a metaphorical strip off former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. In a series of pointed questions directed at the quondam general, Sullivan included one inquiring whether the investigators from the Special Counsel’s office had considered charging Flynn with other crimes, including treason.
Given that Flynn has already pled guilty to lying to the FBI in connection with his undeclared work as an agent of foreign governments, it might have seemed that ventilating the possibility of a treason prosecution might have been a bit of a reach.
Yet, as the evidence has continued to mount that the United States has been the subject of what amounts to an undeclared war by an enemy national, the question of whether the numerous contacts between Trump administration figures and agents of the Russian State constitutes treason has been one that has been very much bubbling along at the margins of our national conversation.
No one has been willing thus far, with the possible exception of former Naval Intelligence officer Malcolm Nance and a number of other commentators on MSNBC, even to mention the T-word.
Until today.
Because in his Washington courtroom today, Judge Sullivan brought the concept of treason in from the cold and set it right down at the table. Essentially, Judge Sullivan has done two things none had thought possible; he has mainstreamed the concept of treason prosecutions for one, some, or even all of the Trump entourage, and in so doing has decidedly upped the ante.
Basically, Judge Sullivan has blown the lid off of the generalized reluctance to link treason and Trump. If, as recently as last week, the concept of some kind of formal linkage between the Trump campaign and the concept of treason had been dismissible as the ravings of a marginal conspiracist, this morning’s courtroom colloquy, by bringing treason in from the cold, demands that we now engage in a serious, non-hysterical discussion about the possibility that one, some, or all of the senior leaders of the Trump administration may have been engaged with agents of the Russian State in a comprehensive effort to betray the United States.
Of course, many “lay lawyers,” imagining themselves as far more competent in the law than they really are, will protest that there is no declared war between the United States and Russia, and insist that a treason prosecution will only lie when there has been a formal declaration of war.
Aside from constituting the crime of unauthorized practice of law, the “lay lawyers’” analysis fails on two very simple points.
First, neither Article III, Section 3 of the Constitution, which defines the federal offense of treason, nor 18 U.S. Code § 2381, which defines the statutory offense of treason, contain any textually demonstrable requirement that the United States be in an actual, declared state of war. In fact, the United States last declared war on December 8, 1941, when Congress, in consequence of “the unprovoked and dastardly attack” against Pearl Harbor the previous day, declared a state of war to have existed from December 7 between the United States and the Japanese Empire.
Yet, if we were to accept the “lay lawyers’” formulation that a treason prosecution requires a declared war, then the treason statutes would fall into ineluctable desuetude, becoming unenforceable through nonuse.
Yet, when one considers the statutory history of treason statutes, both in this country and in England, one finds that from the time Parliament first legislated on the subject of treason, in the Statute of Treasons 25. Edw.3. c.5 s.2. (1351), that while levying war against the sovereign within the sovereign’s own jurisdiction was certainly treason, certain other acts could be considered treason as well.
What the statutory history makes quite clear, especially when one considers the various English Treason Acts following the original 1351 Act, is that the gravamen of the offense is that it constitutes an effort to contravene the authority of the State at the most basic level, by individuals who owe a duty of allegiance thereto.
Moreover, it cannot be gainsaid that Russia’s “active measures” in the course of propaganda, disinformation, fomentation of division, and stirring up of unrest constitute what is known as “information warfare,” prosecuted by the Russian State against the United States and its allies may not be a declared war, but it is war, all the same.
Consequently, if we accept the proposition that Russia’s “active measures” against the United States are a form of warfare, then any American assisting the Russian State in prosecuting such “active measures” against this country is unquestionably guilty of treason within the meaning of Article III, section 3 of the Constitution, and within the meaning of 18 U.S. Code § 2381.
Even the most basic understanding of the realities of how Russia’s “active measures” of information warfare do in fact constitute war against the United States should quickly dispose of any half-baked notion on the part of “lay lawyers” that assisting Russia against this country is not treason.
When Judge Sullivan dared to say the T-word in his courtroom, he not only brought treason, the redheaded stepchild whose name no one had dared to speak its name until now (pace Lord Alfred Douglas), into the mainstream of our national discussion, But, he also unstoppered the bottle, allowed the genie to escape, and also raised the very real possibility that treason prosecutions may very well become a part of the counterintelligence toolbox.
Donald Trump should be afraid, afraid to the point of existential dread, about where the prosecution in U.S. v. Flynn is heading.
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand is an attorney. He lives in Cathedral City, where he served two terms as a member of the city council. He currently practices law in Rancho Mirage. The views expressed herein are his own.
Monday, December 10, 2018
A WORLD DYING, A WORLD BORN
Summary: the municipal world in Cathedral City is dying. The municipal world in Cathedral City is being born. After more than 30 years of directly elected mayors, Cathedral city passes to a rotating mayoralty. The first rotating mayor of Cathedral City will be my old friend and sometime Council colleague Greg Pettis. Much will be expected of this highly talented, richly experienced new mayor. We should all wish him well.
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Cathedral City-December 10, 2018. Tonight, as our eyes behold the vesper light, our municipal world is dying, and it is also going through its birth pangs. Three councilmembers will take their oaths of office here in Cathedral City. One, Mark Carnevale, will be sworn in for his second term on the city Council. The other two, Ray Gregory and Ernesto Gutierrez, will be taking the oath for the first time
At the same time, my old friend and former colleague Greg Pettis, will become mayor of Cathedral city. Of course, having known Greg for 20 years and having served with him as a councilmember for eight years, and having been his political ally through much of that time, I congratulate him and wish in the best of success in his mayoralty.
Of course, much has changed in Cathedral City in just the last couple of years. Two years ago, Cathedral City adopted Measure HH; after 30-plus years as a general law city, Cathedral City opted to become a Charter city, free from many of the impositions and mandates historically imposed by Sacramento on general law cities.
One of the major changes wrought by Measure HH was to adopt the system of a rotating mayoralty in which the mayor is chosen by the members of the city Council from among their number. Measure HH thus did away with the quasi- mayor-Council system, in which the mayor, though a member of the city Council, was directly elected for a two-year term. The system of rotating mayoralty, which obtains in many other Coachella Valley cities, is common among cities with a Council-manager form of government, which Cathedral city had and has.
The particular upside of a rotating mayoralty is that the mayor under such a dispensation serves a single twelve month term and then hands the mayoralty off to another member of the Council. More bluntly, by limiting the mayoralty of a single individual to twelve months, that individual has a relatively limited opportunity to do significant damage to the city he or she represents.
Had we had a rotating mayoralty system between 2004 and 2014, we would not have had to put up with the 10 dreadful winters of the mayoralty of Kathleen Joan DeRosa Olsen, whose conflicts of interest, whose disdain for the city she represented, whose vindictiveness, and whose all-around nasty behavior were a perfect prefiguring of those of Donald J. Trump.
When Ms. DeRosa’s successor, outgoing Mayor Stan Henry, took up the gavel, Cathedral city had lived through what can only be described as a period of ten winters of Brezhnev-like stagnation. DeRosa was more interested in the ego trip of the mayoralty than she was in actually getting anything done for the community. Stan Henry, the former police chief in Cathedral City, managed to get Cathedral City somewhat back on track. And kudos is due to him for his accomplishments during his two terms in office.
But now the gavel passes to our first annual, rotating mayor, my old friend and former colleague Greg Pettis. There is much work to be done in Cathedral City. I certainly believe that Greg is the right man to move that work forward. After better than two decades on the Council, with experience that includes service on the Riverside County transportation commission, and the presidency of the Southern California Association of Governments, among others, Greg brings more experience to the mayoralty than any of his predecessors since incorporation.
Of course, with such a body of experience, much will be expected from the incoming mayor, perhaps so much that some of his constituents will be disappointed if, on his watch, we do not attain utopia in a day. Certainly, followers of former mayor Kathleen Joan DeRosa Olsen will be looking eagerly for any gaps or missteps the Pettis administration may stumble into. It is common knowledge that DeRosa despises Greg Pettis, and it is also common knowledge that she would very much like to stage a political comeback.
Yet Cathedral City is not what it was during the ten Brezhnev winters during which DeRosa was mayor. To the extent that Stan Henry has been a turnaround CEO for Cathedral City, all of us should perhaps thank him for his service and wish him well in his amply deserved retirement.
At the same time, we should all be aware that Greg Pettis takes the gavel with more expectation and more hope for his success than has greeted any mayor of Cathedral City since incorporation.
I wish my old friend and former colleague all the best as he jumps into the maelstrom of being the public voice and face of Cathedral City.
Knock ‘em dead, old friend.
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Cathedral City-December 10, 2018. Tonight, as our eyes behold the vesper light, our municipal world is dying, and it is also going through its birth pangs. Three councilmembers will take their oaths of office here in Cathedral City. One, Mark Carnevale, will be sworn in for his second term on the city Council. The other two, Ray Gregory and Ernesto Gutierrez, will be taking the oath for the first time
At the same time, my old friend and former colleague Greg Pettis, will become mayor of Cathedral city. Of course, having known Greg for 20 years and having served with him as a councilmember for eight years, and having been his political ally through much of that time, I congratulate him and wish in the best of success in his mayoralty.
Of course, much has changed in Cathedral City in just the last couple of years. Two years ago, Cathedral City adopted Measure HH; after 30-plus years as a general law city, Cathedral City opted to become a Charter city, free from many of the impositions and mandates historically imposed by Sacramento on general law cities.
One of the major changes wrought by Measure HH was to adopt the system of a rotating mayoralty in which the mayor is chosen by the members of the city Council from among their number. Measure HH thus did away with the quasi- mayor-Council system, in which the mayor, though a member of the city Council, was directly elected for a two-year term. The system of rotating mayoralty, which obtains in many other Coachella Valley cities, is common among cities with a Council-manager form of government, which Cathedral city had and has.
The particular upside of a rotating mayoralty is that the mayor under such a dispensation serves a single twelve month term and then hands the mayoralty off to another member of the Council. More bluntly, by limiting the mayoralty of a single individual to twelve months, that individual has a relatively limited opportunity to do significant damage to the city he or she represents.
Had we had a rotating mayoralty system between 2004 and 2014, we would not have had to put up with the 10 dreadful winters of the mayoralty of Kathleen Joan DeRosa Olsen, whose conflicts of interest, whose disdain for the city she represented, whose vindictiveness, and whose all-around nasty behavior were a perfect prefiguring of those of Donald J. Trump.
When Ms. DeRosa’s successor, outgoing Mayor Stan Henry, took up the gavel, Cathedral city had lived through what can only be described as a period of ten winters of Brezhnev-like stagnation. DeRosa was more interested in the ego trip of the mayoralty than she was in actually getting anything done for the community. Stan Henry, the former police chief in Cathedral City, managed to get Cathedral City somewhat back on track. And kudos is due to him for his accomplishments during his two terms in office.
But now the gavel passes to our first annual, rotating mayor, my old friend and former colleague Greg Pettis. There is much work to be done in Cathedral City. I certainly believe that Greg is the right man to move that work forward. After better than two decades on the Council, with experience that includes service on the Riverside County transportation commission, and the presidency of the Southern California Association of Governments, among others, Greg brings more experience to the mayoralty than any of his predecessors since incorporation.
Of course, with such a body of experience, much will be expected from the incoming mayor, perhaps so much that some of his constituents will be disappointed if, on his watch, we do not attain utopia in a day. Certainly, followers of former mayor Kathleen Joan DeRosa Olsen will be looking eagerly for any gaps or missteps the Pettis administration may stumble into. It is common knowledge that DeRosa despises Greg Pettis, and it is also common knowledge that she would very much like to stage a political comeback.
Yet Cathedral City is not what it was during the ten Brezhnev winters during which DeRosa was mayor. To the extent that Stan Henry has been a turnaround CEO for Cathedral City, all of us should perhaps thank him for his service and wish him well in his amply deserved retirement.
At the same time, we should all be aware that Greg Pettis takes the gavel with more expectation and more hope for his success than has greeted any mayor of Cathedral City since incorporation.
I wish my old friend and former colleague all the best as he jumps into the maelstrom of being the public voice and face of Cathedral City.
Knock ‘em dead, old friend.
Thursday, November 22, 2018
CRITICAL THOUGHTS AT THANKSGIVING
Summary: The celebration we call “Thanksgiving” is problematic a number of grounds. Leaving aside the issue of whether any European-derived celebration of “Thanksgiving” reflects a kind of cultural amnesia with respect to the settlement of this continent by her First Peoples, Thanksgiving, as we celebrate it, is hardly a retelling of a triumphalist Yankee version of the national creation story, inflicting upon us cultural amnesia as to our Latino history, our Cavalier history, and our Anglican history. Perhaps we ought to give thanks not for the things the Yankee, triumphalist, sectionalist Thanksgiving myth postulates, but for our basic human ability to build communities and to find strength therein. In building communities may very well lie our saving grace and our salvation.
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To be a queer Anglican of at least attenuated First Peoples descent at Thanksgiving is to find oneself roused to silent dissent over the holiday.
Thanksgiving, as we have come to understand and to celebrate it, finds its origin in Abraham Lincoln’s proclamation of November, 1863. It has been a federal holiday since then. Given the origin of Thanksgiving in the maelstrom of the Civil War, it is perhaps unsurprising that it should have taken on a profoundly Northeastern coloration. Thanksgiving is now, and always has been, about retelling the next story with a distinctly Massachusetts-centric, white, Anglo, religiously Nonconformist accent.
Going to school in California ---among classmates of every conceivable sort and condition, African-American, Asian-American, Native American, Latino, families that had been in California for generations and classmates who were either children of immigrants or immigrants themselves— I always found it vaguely amusing to see an Ethiopian-American schoolgirl, descended as she was from an ancient, Christian, African civilization, togged up to look like a “comely Indian maiden” of the Wampanoag tribe. I, descended as I am from Native Americans appearing on one or more Dawes Commission reports, and therefore myself a “Congressional Injun,” was inevitably cast as a towheaded Englishman in whatever Thanksgiving pageants the educational bureaucrats of my elementary school had seen fit to inflict upon us. (It’s worth remembering that the rate of intermarriage among the Eastern Cherokee has always hovered around 100%; scratch a Cherokee and you will find Scots Highlander.)
But togging up Ethiopian, Latino, Native American, and Latino schoolchildren as English religious Nonconformists or Wampanoag Indians inflicted upon us a kind of historical amnesia that bereft us of knowledge not only of Native American Thanksgiving-type harvest feasts, but also of earlier, pre-Plymouth Rock European observances.
As we pranced about in our inauthentic pilgrim garb, we were blissfully ignorant, for example, of the thanksgiving feast held on September 8, 1565, the Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, to mark the foundation of the City of San Augustín, Florida, or of the feast of thanksgiving celebrated by Juan de Oñate and his compadres at what is now San Elizario, a suburb of El Paso, Texas.
As much as we were ignorant of these early Spanish thanksgivings, we were equally ignorant of the very-similar-to-Plymouth Rock Thanksgiving feast that had occurred at Berkeley Hundred Virginia in 1619. For us, togged up in our inauthentic, Nonconformist Massachusetts 1621 attire, our Thanksgiving history and our national history was presented to us as having begun at Plymouth Rock with the arrival of the pilgrims aboard Mayflower.
The other shortcoming of the triumphant Yankee sectional myth with which we were inculcated was that for those of us who came from religiously Conformist families, i.e., we were members of the Episcopal Church, was that it tended, and tends, to cast the Episcopal/Anglican Church as the villain of the piece. When we were taught the triumphalist Yankee sectional myth, the pilgrims were always presented as noble, stalwart, Calvinist souls fleeing religious persecution that, according to the myth, was somewhat akin to the sufferings inflicted on Christians under the Emperor Diocletian or on "heretics" by the Roman and Spanish inquisitions.
In short, the triumphalist Yankee sectional myth with which we were inculcated was intended, whether knowingly or not, to poison our minds against the Anglican faith and to bias us with a pre-disposition in favor of Calvinist Nonconformity.
Now the truth be told, it has been said that the two foundational ideologies of our American society are capitalism and Calvinism. Given the tentacular reach of both ideologies into just about every aspect of American life, it is hardly surprising that the “official” Thanksgiving narrative should postulate what is, to all intents and purposes, an anti-Anglican, anti-Indian, anti-Spanish, anti-Catholic, narrative.
More than 150 years after the initial Thanksgiving proclamation, Thanksgiving has come to mean little more than an occasion for gluttonous feasting, political arguments with the Trump followers at the dinner table, and vacuous football pageantry afterwards. The thankful introspection to which President Lincoln’s proclamation called us has become as beyond our knowledge as have the other harvest feasts and thanksgivings which formed the context in which the Plymouth pilgrims celebrated their own Thanksgiving.
Instead of seeing Thanksgiving through the Massachusetts-centric, Yankee triumphalist sectional lens through which we have heretofore been accustomed to see it, perhaps we should read President Lincoln’s proclamation as a call to a broader, more inclusive time of thankful introspection. Perhaps we should give thanks for the coming together of native and newcomer, for the expression, throughout what has become the United States, of the basic human imperative to build communities, and for the equally basic human imperative to find gregarious companionship.
For what are we human beings except creatures whom God was gathered together into families and communities?
Nearly a generation ago, when the science fiction television series Babylon 5 was running, I watched the episode entitled “Lines of Communication.” In it, the character of Ambassador Delenn tells the commander of the Babylon 5 station that “[she] began studying [human] history. I came to the conclusion that of all the races we had encountered humans were the most dangerous. Because humans form communities, and from that diversity comes a strength no single race can withstand. That is your strength and it is that which makes you dangerous.”
Perhaps that’s the true message of Thanksgiving; we build communities; perhaps that will be our saving grace.
When we can understand that Thanksgiving is not about the triumphalist sectional narrative of a particular part of our society, but about coming together in thanksgiving and love as communities within our body politic, then we may envisage an hypothesis of salvation.
---------------------------------------
To be a queer Anglican of at least attenuated First Peoples descent at Thanksgiving is to find oneself roused to silent dissent over the holiday.
Thanksgiving, as we have come to understand and to celebrate it, finds its origin in Abraham Lincoln’s proclamation of November, 1863. It has been a federal holiday since then. Given the origin of Thanksgiving in the maelstrom of the Civil War, it is perhaps unsurprising that it should have taken on a profoundly Northeastern coloration. Thanksgiving is now, and always has been, about retelling the next story with a distinctly Massachusetts-centric, white, Anglo, religiously Nonconformist accent.
Going to school in California ---among classmates of every conceivable sort and condition, African-American, Asian-American, Native American, Latino, families that had been in California for generations and classmates who were either children of immigrants or immigrants themselves— I always found it vaguely amusing to see an Ethiopian-American schoolgirl, descended as she was from an ancient, Christian, African civilization, togged up to look like a “comely Indian maiden” of the Wampanoag tribe. I, descended as I am from Native Americans appearing on one or more Dawes Commission reports, and therefore myself a “Congressional Injun,” was inevitably cast as a towheaded Englishman in whatever Thanksgiving pageants the educational bureaucrats of my elementary school had seen fit to inflict upon us. (It’s worth remembering that the rate of intermarriage among the Eastern Cherokee has always hovered around 100%; scratch a Cherokee and you will find Scots Highlander.)
But togging up Ethiopian, Latino, Native American, and Latino schoolchildren as English religious Nonconformists or Wampanoag Indians inflicted upon us a kind of historical amnesia that bereft us of knowledge not only of Native American Thanksgiving-type harvest feasts, but also of earlier, pre-Plymouth Rock European observances.
As we pranced about in our inauthentic pilgrim garb, we were blissfully ignorant, for example, of the thanksgiving feast held on September 8, 1565, the Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, to mark the foundation of the City of San Augustín, Florida, or of the feast of thanksgiving celebrated by Juan de Oñate and his compadres at what is now San Elizario, a suburb of El Paso, Texas.
As much as we were ignorant of these early Spanish thanksgivings, we were equally ignorant of the very-similar-to-Plymouth Rock Thanksgiving feast that had occurred at Berkeley Hundred Virginia in 1619. For us, togged up in our inauthentic, Nonconformist Massachusetts 1621 attire, our Thanksgiving history and our national history was presented to us as having begun at Plymouth Rock with the arrival of the pilgrims aboard Mayflower.
The other shortcoming of the triumphant Yankee sectional myth with which we were inculcated was that for those of us who came from religiously Conformist families, i.e., we were members of the Episcopal Church, was that it tended, and tends, to cast the Episcopal/Anglican Church as the villain of the piece. When we were taught the triumphalist Yankee sectional myth, the pilgrims were always presented as noble, stalwart, Calvinist souls fleeing religious persecution that, according to the myth, was somewhat akin to the sufferings inflicted on Christians under the Emperor Diocletian or on "heretics" by the Roman and Spanish inquisitions.
In short, the triumphalist Yankee sectional myth with which we were inculcated was intended, whether knowingly or not, to poison our minds against the Anglican faith and to bias us with a pre-disposition in favor of Calvinist Nonconformity.
Now the truth be told, it has been said that the two foundational ideologies of our American society are capitalism and Calvinism. Given the tentacular reach of both ideologies into just about every aspect of American life, it is hardly surprising that the “official” Thanksgiving narrative should postulate what is, to all intents and purposes, an anti-Anglican, anti-Indian, anti-Spanish, anti-Catholic, narrative.
More than 150 years after the initial Thanksgiving proclamation, Thanksgiving has come to mean little more than an occasion for gluttonous feasting, political arguments with the Trump followers at the dinner table, and vacuous football pageantry afterwards. The thankful introspection to which President Lincoln’s proclamation called us has become as beyond our knowledge as have the other harvest feasts and thanksgivings which formed the context in which the Plymouth pilgrims celebrated their own Thanksgiving.
Instead of seeing Thanksgiving through the Massachusetts-centric, Yankee triumphalist sectional lens through which we have heretofore been accustomed to see it, perhaps we should read President Lincoln’s proclamation as a call to a broader, more inclusive time of thankful introspection. Perhaps we should give thanks for the coming together of native and newcomer, for the expression, throughout what has become the United States, of the basic human imperative to build communities, and for the equally basic human imperative to find gregarious companionship.
For what are we human beings except creatures whom God was gathered together into families and communities?
Nearly a generation ago, when the science fiction television series Babylon 5 was running, I watched the episode entitled “Lines of Communication.” In it, the character of Ambassador Delenn tells the commander of the Babylon 5 station that “[she] began studying [human] history. I came to the conclusion that of all the races we had encountered humans were the most dangerous. Because humans form communities, and from that diversity comes a strength no single race can withstand. That is your strength and it is that which makes you dangerous.”
Perhaps that’s the true message of Thanksgiving; we build communities; perhaps that will be our saving grace.
When we can understand that Thanksgiving is not about the triumphalist sectional narrative of a particular part of our society, but about coming together in thanksgiving and love as communities within our body politic, then we may envisage an hypothesis of salvation.
“Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope.-Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History.
Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith.
Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love.”
Friday, November 16, 2018
LITTLE SNAPPERS November 16, 2018
Summary: Cathedral City’s adoption of an ordinance banning single-use plastic straws, while doubtless well intended, is nothing more than grandstanding. A statewide prohibition will go into effect at the new year, leaving Cathedral city’s ordinance little more than a piece of “feel-good” legislation. Councilmember Mark Carnevale and outgoing Mayor Stan Henry were right to vote against it.
A federal district judge in Washington City ordered the White House to reinstate CNN’s Jim Acosta’s “hard pass” after a hearing this morning at which the Justice Department lawyers made absolutely nonsensical arguments. Today’s order is a victory for the free press, but the war against the regime is by no means won.
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Cathedral City, November 16 –- at its Wednesday night Council meeting, the Cathedral City city Council adopted an ordinance banning the use of so-called single-use plastic straws in Cathedral City.
The ordinance, while well intended as a gesture of conscientious environmental stewardship, nonetheless comes across as unfortunate political grandstanding. The state has adopted similar legislation which goes into effect on January 1, 2019. Why Cathedral City should have felt it necessary to burden its municipal codebook with a duplicative and probably pre-empted ordinance is unfortunately no mystery.
Cities throughout California, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Berkeley, West Hollywood, and Palm Springs, have a history of what may be called statement legislation. The legislation itself is usually intended to cover matters that are already covered, or will be covered, by a statewide Act of the Legislature. But, by jumping the gun, cities with histories of “statement legislation” can feel good about having made a statement or taken a stand about a particular issue before the Legislature did so.
Now, fortunately, the damage that local jurisdictions can do with “statement legislation” is pretty much limited to the geographic boundaries of the jurisdiction. Unfortunately, from a Democratic partisan perspective, the ammunition that such “statement legislation” gives to Republicans and cultural conservatives of every stripe cannot be measured.
While of course, there is no good reason to take issue with limiting the use of plastic straws. (Who can forget the heartbreaking YouTube video of rescuers trying to extract a plastic straw from a sea turtle’s nose, having to make an election between leaving the straw in and potentially killing the creature, or extracting it and causing the creature excruciating pain in the process?) There is ample reason indeed to limit the use of plastic straws, even ignoring the plight of the random sea turtle.
However, trying to steal a march on the Legislature through “statement legislation” does not strike one as a compelling justification for grandstanding. Sacramento has been known to take a fairly dim view of local legislation that it sees is trampling upon the prerogatives of the Legislature, whose powers, where not limited by the Constitution, laws, or treaties of the United States, are, after all, coextensive with the powers of the Imperial Parliament of the United Kingdom. That includes the authority to pass pre-emptive statewide legislation on any subject within the Legislature’s competence. And the Legislature has been known to be more than a little territorial on occasion.
Thus, while the Cathedral City ordinance in question was doubtless well intended, it was the kind of political grandstanding that in the end should be rejected as politically ill-advised because it not only pisses off the Legislature, but also because it provides ammunition to haters.
Cathedral City’s plastic straw ordinance will probably prove to have been an unforced error on the part of the city Council. Were I still on the Council, I would have voted “no.”
* * * * *
The Trump administration took another black eye this morning when federal District Judge Timothy J. Kelly, ironically a Trump appointee, ordered the White House to reinstate CNN reporter Jim Acosta’s “hard pass,” thus reinstating Acosta’s ability to cover the White House for “the little network that could.”
Just about every American by now has learned the history of the Trump/Acosta confrontation last week that resulted in a petulant president ordering Acosta’s hard pass revoked. Just about every American also knows that the Trump administration attempted to justify its conduct with the usual outrageous lies, buttressed by a doctored video supplied by Alex Jones’s InfoWars website. Those lies, together with a doctored video, were quickly fact checked by numerous media outlets. Those same media outlets, including Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, rallied to CNN and Acosta’s defense.
And CNN and its colleagues in the media have prevailed. Gospodin Trump’s effort to impose a media regime on the White House that would reduce coverage of the President to that which is fawning and sycophantic, has — at least for the time being — failed, and American democracy lives to survive, and fight, another day.
But what was so problematic about the Trump/Acosta imbroglio was that the Justice Department, in oral arguments before the District Court, argued that the White House had essentially unfettered discretion to keep any journalist off the White House grounds for any reason whatsoever. Reporting on CNN.com, CNN’s Brian Stelter framed the larger issue in these ominous words:
While responding to a hypothetical from Kelly, [Justice Department lawyer James]Burnham said that it would be perfectly legal for the White House to revoke a journalist's press pass if it didn't agree with their reporting. "As a matter of law... yes," he said.Fortunately for the Republic, Judge Kelly did not see the matter the way Mr. Burnham would have liked him to see it.
A President does not have the right to contravene either the First Amendment, which guarantees free speech, or the Fifth Amendment, which guarantees due process as against the federal government, on his mere ipse dixit, simply because he dislikes or disagrees with the reporter or the media outlet in question.
Of course, Donald Trump, who has a rather imperial concept of presidential power, including the power of his mere ipse dixit, won’t like the results of this morning’s hearing one little bit. Like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, who, according to bombshell New York Times reporting earlier this week, also has a rather thin skin, Donald Trump can be expected to let fly with one or more rage tweets. We should expect something along the lines of “Disgraceful decision by Democratic so-called judge! Outrageous! Will appeal! Terrible for the country! Sad!”
Already, a number of media outlets are describing a sense of siege within the White House. A Politico.com headline describes Trump world as “preparing for the worst.” CNN’s victory in court this morning can only have reinforced the ominous feelings within Trump world. Will that world come crashing down? Will Trump world go the way of Atlantis or Pompeii? All the auguries indicate that the Trump organized crime family is becoming uncomfortably aware that it is dancing on a volcano.
Thursday, November 15, 2018
WOMEN HOLD UP HALF THE SKY; DON'T FORGET IT!
Summary: The Democrats appear to have done rather better in the midterm elections then a lot of the pundits and handicappers had thought possible. It was, after all, Aotsunami, a blue Tidal Wave, rather than just Aonami, a little blue ripple. Though the dust has yet to settle, the Democratic margin of control in the incoming House of Representatives appears to be widening. Kyrsten Sinema’s victory in heretofore deep red Arizona gives Democrats throughout the country hope for recapturing the upper chamber in 2020.
But Democrats, true to their reputation for foolishness and fecklessness, are talking seriously about ousting Nancy Pelosi, the architect and field marshal of their victory. It’s too early to say whether the mutiny against the incoming leader of the majority is a fruit of sheer misogyny, or whether it is part of the ongoing Sanders effort to destroy the Democratic Party from within. Either way, the rebellion should be squashed without mercy.Women hold up half the sky, and the Party needs to remember that immutable truth.
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When I posted in this blog on November 8, I suggested that “Aotsunami (the Blue Tidal Wave) may have appeared to be more Aonami (the Blue Wave) than the Fukushima-like phenomenon we had hoped.” I may have been premature. As votes are counted, particularly in California, which seems to take a perverse pride in the slowness of its election returns, it appears that Aonami really may have been Aotsunami after all.
While we did not recapture the Senate, the defeat of Nevada’s Dean Heller and the victory of Kyrsten Sinema in heretofore ruby red Arizona suggests that Democrats may be well-positioned to recapture the upper chamber in 2020, when the electoral math and map for Republicans will be even more unpromising than the senatorial electoral math and map of 2018 were for Democrats.
Withal, the last week has been a very good week for The Democracy and a very bad week for Gospodin Trump and the un-American Republicans. Democrats should be celebrating the extent of their victory and laying plans for 2020.
Unfortunately, the Democrats are displaying once again their traditional fecklessness and foolishness. In the House, there seems to be a revolt brewing against Nancy Pelosi, the once and hopefully future Speaker of the house.
Unfortunately, feckless and foolish Democrats seem intent on penalizing success and rewarding failure. The anti-Pelosi revolt, spearheaded by Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton, and encouraged by Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocacsio Cortez, seems to come straight out of either a deep cesspit of misogyny, which tried to find expression in the insurgency of Kevin de León against Dianne Feinstein, or it comes out of a conscious effort by the so-called Bernie Sanders "wing" of the Democratic Party to destroy the party from within.
Either hypothesis bodes ill for the Party’s hopes of being victorious in the long game against the Muscovite Republicans in 2020.
If the Party is taken hostage by a kind of reflexive ageist misogyny that postulates the unsuitability of either Dianne Feinstein or Nancy Pelosi for public office because they are too old or insufficiently masculine, then the Party will be setting itself up for long-term defeat.
The Party ought to have realized that the coalition originally set in motion by Franklin D. Roosevelt in his four victorious presidential campaigns was a Coalition of Others. It was a coalition of women, Native Americans, Labor, and most of all, people of color. The Roosevelt coalition was a harbinger, in politics, of what the nation has come to resemble as a whole.
For we are rapidly becoming a minority-majority nation. No single American can say that he or she represents the majority of all voters any longer. To recognize this truth is not to traffic in identity politics, but merely to acknowledge that America has always been a glorious, messy tossed salad of a society. Where voters are comfortable accepting the reality of our “tossed salad” body politic, such voters tend to vote Democratic.
It is equally a matter of political truth that Republicans do well in parts of the country where appeals to threatened senses of whiteness resonate with paler voters. Democrats should realize not only that we are still the coalition Franklin D. Roosevelt called in to being, but that within that coalition itself resides enormous wellsprings of strength and political potential.
Democrats need to realize that in our Party, “women,” as Mao Zedong put it nearly three quarters of a century ago, “hold up half the sky.” And to the extent that women hold up half the sky, they also hold up a considerable portion of our Party and our politics.
Thus, to hear Kevin De León or his followers argue that Sen. Feinstein is “too old” or too “out of touch,” to be California’s senior senator, is to say in effect that “this is a man’s job,” for which the old lady simply isn’t qualified. Add to that the often ill concealed undertones of anti-Semitism that not infrequently emerge from certain quarters of the California Democratic Party, and it is easy to see that there is very little substantive merit in either Mr. De León’s critique, or in that of the critique of the executive board of the California Democratic Party, which saw fit to overrule the delegates at the state Democratic convention, who had opted not to endorse De León, and substitute their own judgment in the place of that of the representatives of the broad mass of the California Democratic Party.
Of course, if misogyny, misplaced identity politics, ageism, or even anti-Semitism were the primary reasons for Kevin de León’s challenge to a sitting senior senator with substantial seniority, it might be easy to understand such behavior.
It’s a lot less easy to understand, and a lot less easy to forgive, the motivations behind the revolt against Nancy Pelosi, the Organizer and the field marshal of our recent victories. Again, the fecklessness of the Democratic Party seems to be asserting itself powerfully. Of course, political parties sometimes get a metaphorical bug up their butt that causes them to turn on incumbents with substantial seniority, without realizing what advantages that seniority brings home to the district or the state, but most party activists with a pragmatic sense of how politics works understand that shivving a senior member of your Party’s own caucus benefits no one but the other side.
One can see in the revolt against Nancy Pelosi two equally objectionable Militant Tendencies at work. The first is raw sectionalism. Many of the rebels against Nancy Pelosi come from the Northeast, formally the most dominant section of the American body politic. One can see in the sullen and mutinous disposition of a Seth Moulton, a Conor Lamb, or an Alexandria Ocasio-Curtez, some sense of loss expressing itself over the diminished role of the Northeast in our national politics.
Time was, in living memory of many with current seats in Congress, that states such as New York and Pennsylvania had the largest House delegations of any. Though California has had the largest population of any state in the union since 1962, and New York has fallen to fourth among the states in terms of population, there is still a certain sectional bias in favor of the Northeast and against California.
Add to the that the fact that Nancy Pelosi represents the 12th Congressional District of California, which is comprehended entirely within the City and County of San Francisco, and it’s not hard to understand why there should have been a Republican propaganda against Nancy Pelosi for so very many years.
But for Democrats to subscribe to that propaganda, and to the larger Republican propaganda against state of California as a whole, is simply inadmissible.
The other Militant Tendency operating within the Party is the Bernie Sanders virus. It is simply inadmissible is for members of the Democratic caucus to be pledging their loyalty not to the Party but to the person of Bernard Sanders, the Independent Vermont Senator who flirts with the Democratic Party when it suits his political agenda to do so, but who stabs the Party in the back on a regular basis.
The various Sanders front groups that seem more interested in helping The Donald then and helping The Democracy include groups like the so-called Justice Democrats, the Our Revolution group, and the Democratic Socialists. Not one of these names bears any semantic resemblance to reality. Instead, they all seem to be dedicated to attacking the Democratic Party, the oldest political party existing anywhere in the world, the party founded by Thomas Jefferson, the party of Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama.
I have written elsewhere in this blog of the perfidy of Bernard Sanders and his redeless followers, of how they were, and are, nothing more than a fifth column for Donald Trump. Given the perfidious nature of Bernard Sanders and his followers, it is hard to understand why any person identifying as a Democrat would give him -or them- the time of day or the courtesy of a hearing.
The Sanders game plan seems to be to attack the unity of the Democratic Party from within so that it can be vulnerable to attack from without. We do not yet possess sufficient evidence to link Sen. Sanders to Gospodin Putin, but it certainly does seem, at a gut level, to warrant further investigation.
But while we are doing so, we cannot afford the Democratic Party to be subverted from within by revolt led by people such as Messrs. Moulton and Lamb and by Ms. Ocasio Cortez. If, as appears likely, Nancy Pelosi becomes the new speaker of the Democratic House come January, the rebels should find themselves stripped of any significant or responsible committee assignments, and consigned to the darkest, dankest office accommodations available on Capitol Hill. And they should expect to be primaried in 2020 if they don’t straighten up and fly right.
Democrats need to stop being nice to the traitors and subversives in their midst. We need as always, to be guided by the counsels of Sean Connery’s character in the 1987 remake of The Untouchables:
They pull a knife,
we pull a gun;
they send one of ours of the hospital,
we send one of theirs to the morgue!
After all, women hold up half the sky.
But Democrats, true to their reputation for foolishness and fecklessness, are talking seriously about ousting Nancy Pelosi, the architect and field marshal of their victory. It’s too early to say whether the mutiny against the incoming leader of the majority is a fruit of sheer misogyny, or whether it is part of the ongoing Sanders effort to destroy the Democratic Party from within. Either way, the rebellion should be squashed without mercy.Women hold up half the sky, and the Party needs to remember that immutable truth.
------------------------------------------------------
When I posted in this blog on November 8, I suggested that “Aotsunami (the Blue Tidal Wave) may have appeared to be more Aonami (the Blue Wave) than the Fukushima-like phenomenon we had hoped.” I may have been premature. As votes are counted, particularly in California, which seems to take a perverse pride in the slowness of its election returns, it appears that Aonami really may have been Aotsunami after all.
While we did not recapture the Senate, the defeat of Nevada’s Dean Heller and the victory of Kyrsten Sinema in heretofore ruby red Arizona suggests that Democrats may be well-positioned to recapture the upper chamber in 2020, when the electoral math and map for Republicans will be even more unpromising than the senatorial electoral math and map of 2018 were for Democrats.
Withal, the last week has been a very good week for The Democracy and a very bad week for Gospodin Trump and the un-American Republicans. Democrats should be celebrating the extent of their victory and laying plans for 2020.
Unfortunately, the Democrats are displaying once again their traditional fecklessness and foolishness. In the House, there seems to be a revolt brewing against Nancy Pelosi, the once and hopefully future Speaker of the house.
Unfortunately, feckless and foolish Democrats seem intent on penalizing success and rewarding failure. The anti-Pelosi revolt, spearheaded by Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton, and encouraged by Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocacsio Cortez, seems to come straight out of either a deep cesspit of misogyny, which tried to find expression in the insurgency of Kevin de León against Dianne Feinstein, or it comes out of a conscious effort by the so-called Bernie Sanders "wing" of the Democratic Party to destroy the party from within.
Either hypothesis bodes ill for the Party’s hopes of being victorious in the long game against the Muscovite Republicans in 2020.
If the Party is taken hostage by a kind of reflexive ageist misogyny that postulates the unsuitability of either Dianne Feinstein or Nancy Pelosi for public office because they are too old or insufficiently masculine, then the Party will be setting itself up for long-term defeat.
The Party ought to have realized that the coalition originally set in motion by Franklin D. Roosevelt in his four victorious presidential campaigns was a Coalition of Others. It was a coalition of women, Native Americans, Labor, and most of all, people of color. The Roosevelt coalition was a harbinger, in politics, of what the nation has come to resemble as a whole.
For we are rapidly becoming a minority-majority nation. No single American can say that he or she represents the majority of all voters any longer. To recognize this truth is not to traffic in identity politics, but merely to acknowledge that America has always been a glorious, messy tossed salad of a society. Where voters are comfortable accepting the reality of our “tossed salad” body politic, such voters tend to vote Democratic.
It is equally a matter of political truth that Republicans do well in parts of the country where appeals to threatened senses of whiteness resonate with paler voters. Democrats should realize not only that we are still the coalition Franklin D. Roosevelt called in to being, but that within that coalition itself resides enormous wellsprings of strength and political potential.
Democrats need to realize that in our Party, “women,” as Mao Zedong put it nearly three quarters of a century ago, “hold up half the sky.” And to the extent that women hold up half the sky, they also hold up a considerable portion of our Party and our politics.
Thus, to hear Kevin De León or his followers argue that Sen. Feinstein is “too old” or too “out of touch,” to be California’s senior senator, is to say in effect that “this is a man’s job,” for which the old lady simply isn’t qualified. Add to that the often ill concealed undertones of anti-Semitism that not infrequently emerge from certain quarters of the California Democratic Party, and it is easy to see that there is very little substantive merit in either Mr. De León’s critique, or in that of the critique of the executive board of the California Democratic Party, which saw fit to overrule the delegates at the state Democratic convention, who had opted not to endorse De León, and substitute their own judgment in the place of that of the representatives of the broad mass of the California Democratic Party.
Of course, if misogyny, misplaced identity politics, ageism, or even anti-Semitism were the primary reasons for Kevin de León’s challenge to a sitting senior senator with substantial seniority, it might be easy to understand such behavior.
It’s a lot less easy to understand, and a lot less easy to forgive, the motivations behind the revolt against Nancy Pelosi, the Organizer and the field marshal of our recent victories. Again, the fecklessness of the Democratic Party seems to be asserting itself powerfully. Of course, political parties sometimes get a metaphorical bug up their butt that causes them to turn on incumbents with substantial seniority, without realizing what advantages that seniority brings home to the district or the state, but most party activists with a pragmatic sense of how politics works understand that shivving a senior member of your Party’s own caucus benefits no one but the other side.
One can see in the revolt against Nancy Pelosi two equally objectionable Militant Tendencies at work. The first is raw sectionalism. Many of the rebels against Nancy Pelosi come from the Northeast, formally the most dominant section of the American body politic. One can see in the sullen and mutinous disposition of a Seth Moulton, a Conor Lamb, or an Alexandria Ocasio-Curtez, some sense of loss expressing itself over the diminished role of the Northeast in our national politics.
Time was, in living memory of many with current seats in Congress, that states such as New York and Pennsylvania had the largest House delegations of any. Though California has had the largest population of any state in the union since 1962, and New York has fallen to fourth among the states in terms of population, there is still a certain sectional bias in favor of the Northeast and against California.
Add to the that the fact that Nancy Pelosi represents the 12th Congressional District of California, which is comprehended entirely within the City and County of San Francisco, and it’s not hard to understand why there should have been a Republican propaganda against Nancy Pelosi for so very many years.
But for Democrats to subscribe to that propaganda, and to the larger Republican propaganda against state of California as a whole, is simply inadmissible.
The other Militant Tendency operating within the Party is the Bernie Sanders virus. It is simply inadmissible is for members of the Democratic caucus to be pledging their loyalty not to the Party but to the person of Bernard Sanders, the Independent Vermont Senator who flirts with the Democratic Party when it suits his political agenda to do so, but who stabs the Party in the back on a regular basis.
The various Sanders front groups that seem more interested in helping The Donald then and helping The Democracy include groups like the so-called Justice Democrats, the Our Revolution group, and the Democratic Socialists. Not one of these names bears any semantic resemblance to reality. Instead, they all seem to be dedicated to attacking the Democratic Party, the oldest political party existing anywhere in the world, the party founded by Thomas Jefferson, the party of Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama.
I have written elsewhere in this blog of the perfidy of Bernard Sanders and his redeless followers, of how they were, and are, nothing more than a fifth column for Donald Trump. Given the perfidious nature of Bernard Sanders and his followers, it is hard to understand why any person identifying as a Democrat would give him -or them- the time of day or the courtesy of a hearing.
The Sanders game plan seems to be to attack the unity of the Democratic Party from within so that it can be vulnerable to attack from without. We do not yet possess sufficient evidence to link Sen. Sanders to Gospodin Putin, but it certainly does seem, at a gut level, to warrant further investigation.
But while we are doing so, we cannot afford the Democratic Party to be subverted from within by revolt led by people such as Messrs. Moulton and Lamb and by Ms. Ocasio Cortez. If, as appears likely, Nancy Pelosi becomes the new speaker of the Democratic House come January, the rebels should find themselves stripped of any significant or responsible committee assignments, and consigned to the darkest, dankest office accommodations available on Capitol Hill. And they should expect to be primaried in 2020 if they don’t straighten up and fly right.
Democrats need to stop being nice to the traitors and subversives in their midst. We need as always, to be guided by the counsels of Sean Connery’s character in the 1987 remake of The Untouchables:
They pull a knife,
we pull a gun;
they send one of ours of the hospital,
we send one of theirs to the morgue!
After all, women hold up half the sky.
Saturday, November 10, 2018
WE WILL REMEMBER THEM: THE CENTENNIAL OF THE ARMISTICE OF COMPIÈGNE
Summary: Tomorrow is Armistice Day; 100 years ago tomorrow the Great War came to an end with a cease-fire between the Allied and Associated Powers and Germany. A century later, much of the world as we know it has been ineluctably shaped by the events of those four years which represented the death agonies of the 19th century and the birth pangs of the 20th. We, lapped in the accumulated treasures of the long post-World War II peace, live in a world largely shaped by the events of 1914-1918 and by those of 1939-1945. Even now, we owe an incalculable debt to those who fought and died, whose bones are part of the soil over which they fought. From the rising of the sun to its going down, we will remember them.
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Cathedral City - November 10, 2018. One hundred years ago tomorrow the Great War ended, with an armistice signed aboard a railroad car assigned to Marshal Ferdinand Foch, on a siding at Rethondes in the Forest of Compiègne in the Oise Département, in France. Representatives of the Allied and Associated Powers and representatives of what became the Weimar Republic of Germany signed the armistice document during the predawn hours between 5:12 and 5:20 a.m.
As is now well known, the armistice between The Allied and Associated Powers and Germany would go into effect with a cease-fire at 11:00 a.m. that day, the Famous Eleventh Hour of the Eleventh Day of the Eleventh Month.
The armistice of Compiègne represented the last in a series of armistices which had taken the other Central Powers, one by one, out of the Great War, starting with Bulgaria on September 29, 1918, the Ottoman Empire on October 30, 1918, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire on November 3, 1918.
Germany, the last of the Central Powers to sign an armistice, had suffered the most immediate and far-reaching of the political consequences that befell the Central Powers as a result of the Great War. Germany, at that time a Confederation of various quasi-sovereign states, suffered a more or less complete breakdown of its political structure. The 27 constituent units of the Reich included four kingdoms, including Prussia – by far the dominant constituent of the Empire, six grand duchies, five duchies, seven principalities, the three “Free Hanseatic Cities” of Hamburg, Bremen, and Lübeck, and the occupied, formerly French territory of Alsace-Lorraine (Elsaß-Lothringen).
As a result of the collapse of the Empire in early November, 1918, only the three Free Hanseatic Cities of Hamburg, Bremen, and Lübeck emerged at the end of the War with anything even resembling their original quasi-republican forms of government. In the rest of the Reich, Kaisers, Kings, Grand Dukes, Dukes, and Princes had fled or abdicated, leaving the pinchbeck panoply of the German monarchies in dust and shambles around them.
The collapse of Imperial Germany led by stages first to the Weimar Republic, then to the Third Reich, and now, after a second world war, to a new, reunified Germany that has actually incarnated the promise of freedom and democracy represented by the Weimar Republic. Indeed, for more than 60 years, the Bundesrepublik, with its stubbornly Atlanticist statesmen and stateswomen, has been one of the strongest bulwarks of the Atlantic Alliance. The Bundesrepublik has also been one of the strongest and most dependable proponents of a united Europe.
Yet, the history of Europe is not the history of Germany alone. When the Great War ended, it had exacted a fearsome price from the Allies as much as it had from the Central Powers. As Winston Churchill described the end of the Great War in the United Kingdom, “[v]ictory ha[d] been bought at a price so dear as to be indistinguishable from defeat.” In both the U.K. and in France, virtually an entire generation had marched off to war in 1914 singing songs of battle and imagining that they would be home by Christmas. Yet that optimistic generation that had marched off to war in August, 1914 never came home.
That optimistic generation, reared in the self-confidence of the 19th century, became the first casualties of the industrial scale war that has come to be so much the hallmark of our calamitous 20th and 21st centuries. Writing in The World Crisis, Winston Churchill had described “the old world in its sunset[, so] fair to see.” “Nations and Empires, crowned with princes and potentates, rose majestically on every side, lapped in the accumulated treasures of the long peace.” Within four years, from the awful assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on that price-cursed day of Vidovdan, June 28, 1914, right through to the Eleventh Hour of the Eleventh Day of the Eleventh Month, 1918, countless Europeans had lost their lives, many of them in squalid trenches far from the accumulated treasures of the long peace. If the events of Sarajevo were the death knell for the 19th century, the events of the Great War may with equal felicity be described as the birth pangs of the 20th.
But as much as the events of the Great War may be described as the birth pangs of the 20th century, they may also be described as the necessary predicates of the 21st.
For truthfully, we live in a world order that is very much shaped by the events of the Second World War, which in their turn were ineluctably shaped by the events of the Great War. If Germany today is a necessary bulwark of the Atlantic Alliance, it is because of the vision of German statesmen like Konrad Adenauer and Willy Brandt, whose respective commitments to building a united Europe and to laying long-lead foundations for the reunification of the German nation have very much made Europe what is today.
Additionally, we cannot speak of the United States as the world’s “indispensable” nation without acknowledging how the Great War played so large a part in accelerating America’s industrial development and advancing the United States in status from a regional power to an undisputed Great Power. If, in 1914, the United States was considered the preeminent power in the Americas, by 1918 she had become one of the four to five preeminent powers in the world. It is not unreasonable to suggest that the foundations for the post World War II pax Americana were laid at Château Thierry, at Belleau Wood, and in the Meuse-Argonne.
In short, as we commemorate the Centennial of the armistice at Compiègne tomorrow, we, in our 21st century world, lapped in the accumulated treasures of a long post-World War II peace, must not forget the debt we owe to our dead, many of whose bones have become part of the soil on which they fought. They were the attendants at the birth of the 20th century in which we still, numbers on the calendar notwithstanding, live. Those of us of a certain age, who may be old enough to remember the 50th anniversary of the Armistice, should know and appreciate the meaning of the Eleventh hour of the Eleventh day of the Eleventh month.
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning,
We will remember them.
-Laurence Binyon, For the Fallen, St. 4, 1914
----------------------------------------------------------
Cathedral City - November 10, 2018. One hundred years ago tomorrow the Great War ended, with an armistice signed aboard a railroad car assigned to Marshal Ferdinand Foch, on a siding at Rethondes in the Forest of Compiègne in the Oise Département, in France. Representatives of the Allied and Associated Powers and representatives of what became the Weimar Republic of Germany signed the armistice document during the predawn hours between 5:12 and 5:20 a.m.
As is now well known, the armistice between The Allied and Associated Powers and Germany would go into effect with a cease-fire at 11:00 a.m. that day, the Famous Eleventh Hour of the Eleventh Day of the Eleventh Month.
The armistice of Compiègne represented the last in a series of armistices which had taken the other Central Powers, one by one, out of the Great War, starting with Bulgaria on September 29, 1918, the Ottoman Empire on October 30, 1918, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire on November 3, 1918.
Germany, the last of the Central Powers to sign an armistice, had suffered the most immediate and far-reaching of the political consequences that befell the Central Powers as a result of the Great War. Germany, at that time a Confederation of various quasi-sovereign states, suffered a more or less complete breakdown of its political structure. The 27 constituent units of the Reich included four kingdoms, including Prussia – by far the dominant constituent of the Empire, six grand duchies, five duchies, seven principalities, the three “Free Hanseatic Cities” of Hamburg, Bremen, and Lübeck, and the occupied, formerly French territory of Alsace-Lorraine (Elsaß-Lothringen).
As a result of the collapse of the Empire in early November, 1918, only the three Free Hanseatic Cities of Hamburg, Bremen, and Lübeck emerged at the end of the War with anything even resembling their original quasi-republican forms of government. In the rest of the Reich, Kaisers, Kings, Grand Dukes, Dukes, and Princes had fled or abdicated, leaving the pinchbeck panoply of the German monarchies in dust and shambles around them.
The collapse of Imperial Germany led by stages first to the Weimar Republic, then to the Third Reich, and now, after a second world war, to a new, reunified Germany that has actually incarnated the promise of freedom and democracy represented by the Weimar Republic. Indeed, for more than 60 years, the Bundesrepublik, with its stubbornly Atlanticist statesmen and stateswomen, has been one of the strongest bulwarks of the Atlantic Alliance. The Bundesrepublik has also been one of the strongest and most dependable proponents of a united Europe.
Yet, the history of Europe is not the history of Germany alone. When the Great War ended, it had exacted a fearsome price from the Allies as much as it had from the Central Powers. As Winston Churchill described the end of the Great War in the United Kingdom, “[v]ictory ha[d] been bought at a price so dear as to be indistinguishable from defeat.” In both the U.K. and in France, virtually an entire generation had marched off to war in 1914 singing songs of battle and imagining that they would be home by Christmas. Yet that optimistic generation that had marched off to war in August, 1914 never came home.
That optimistic generation, reared in the self-confidence of the 19th century, became the first casualties of the industrial scale war that has come to be so much the hallmark of our calamitous 20th and 21st centuries. Writing in The World Crisis, Winston Churchill had described “the old world in its sunset[, so] fair to see.” “Nations and Empires, crowned with princes and potentates, rose majestically on every side, lapped in the accumulated treasures of the long peace.” Within four years, from the awful assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on that price-cursed day of Vidovdan, June 28, 1914, right through to the Eleventh Hour of the Eleventh Day of the Eleventh Month, 1918, countless Europeans had lost their lives, many of them in squalid trenches far from the accumulated treasures of the long peace. If the events of Sarajevo were the death knell for the 19th century, the events of the Great War may with equal felicity be described as the birth pangs of the 20th.
But as much as the events of the Great War may be described as the birth pangs of the 20th century, they may also be described as the necessary predicates of the 21st.
For truthfully, we live in a world order that is very much shaped by the events of the Second World War, which in their turn were ineluctably shaped by the events of the Great War. If Germany today is a necessary bulwark of the Atlantic Alliance, it is because of the vision of German statesmen like Konrad Adenauer and Willy Brandt, whose respective commitments to building a united Europe and to laying long-lead foundations for the reunification of the German nation have very much made Europe what is today.
Additionally, we cannot speak of the United States as the world’s “indispensable” nation without acknowledging how the Great War played so large a part in accelerating America’s industrial development and advancing the United States in status from a regional power to an undisputed Great Power. If, in 1914, the United States was considered the preeminent power in the Americas, by 1918 she had become one of the four to five preeminent powers in the world. It is not unreasonable to suggest that the foundations for the post World War II pax Americana were laid at Château Thierry, at Belleau Wood, and in the Meuse-Argonne.
In short, as we commemorate the Centennial of the armistice at Compiègne tomorrow, we, in our 21st century world, lapped in the accumulated treasures of a long post-World War II peace, must not forget the debt we owe to our dead, many of whose bones have become part of the soil on which they fought. They were the attendants at the birth of the 20th century in which we still, numbers on the calendar notwithstanding, live. Those of us of a certain age, who may be old enough to remember the 50th anniversary of the Armistice, should know and appreciate the meaning of the Eleventh hour of the Eleventh day of the Eleventh month.
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning,
We will remember them.
-Laurence Binyon, For the Fallen, St. 4, 1914
Thursday, November 8, 2018
LITTLE SNAPPERS: NOVEMBER 8, 2018
Summary: With the 2018 midterms now all over, “bar the shouting,” Democrats seem to have done passably well. Aotsunami (the Blue Tidal Wave) may have appeared to be more Aonami (the Blue Wave) than the Fukushima-like phenomenon we had hoped, but nevertheless, it delivered us control of the House of Representatives, numerous state governorships, and results in some local races that merit further discussion.
Of course, the ineluctable temper tantrum from The Donald has created more of a stir and more controversy the White House can ill afford. The Donald’s petulant stripping of CNN reporter Jim Acosta’s White House press pass, and White House flak Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s invocation of an obviously doctored video provided to her by Infowars’s Alex Jones, has given birth to another one of the endless parade of scandals dogging The Donald.
--------------------------------------------
The dust from the midterm elections is slowly settling, though we probably won’t know the full extent of Aonami (the Blue Wave) for some time. Nonetheless, in addition to wresting back control of the House of Representatives from the Republican Party, Democrats also appeared to have made some significant inroads at the state and local levels.
Indeed, Democrats may probably be forgiven today for experiencing some measure of Schadenfreude as close elections continue to tilt in their favor.
Here in Cathedral City, congratulations are due to incoming councilmembers John Rivera and Raymond Gregory, as well as to returning councilmember Mark Carnevale. Congratulations also to outgoing Council member Shelley Kaplan as he moves from the Cathedral City city Council to representing Zone 4 of the Desert Healthcare District, an obscure, but important post.
We don’t have the official canvass of voters from the Riverside County registrar yet, so we can’t know just how Democratic Cathedral City broke in the last election; all we have are results without knowing what part of the city voted for which candidate for assembly, State Senator, Congressman, or U.S. Senator. While according to the registrar’s numbers, Riverside County appears to have broken for Republican gubernatorial candidate John Cox, statewide numbers show Cox being trounced by Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom. How Cathedral City voted in that election we can’t yet know.
Nonetheless, there were some distinct losers in Tuesday night’s election. Cathedral City’s fourth Council District, by choosing experienced former planning Commissioner John Rivera over Trumpist conservative Ernesto Gutierrez, appears to have fairly decisively rejected the siren song of Trumpism. Unfortunately for departing mayor Stan Henry, his embrace of Gutierrez will taint his otherwise positive legacy. Stan would have done better to have kept his mouth shut altogether rather than endorse so manifestly unsuitable a candidate as Gutierrez.
The other loser in Tuesday night’s election, at least as far as District 4 is concerned is our local Gannett publication. By endorsing Gutierrez as their choice in District 4, the Desert Sun has once again demonstrated how woefully out of touch it is becoming with the increasingly Democratic electorate of the Coachella Valley. The Desert Sun seems to have forgotten or to have been utterly indifferent to changing voter demographics. Of course, The Desert Sun’s Republican cheerleading tendencies have always been readily apparent.
This after all was the same newspaper that last endorsed a Democrat for president some time during the administration of Franklin Roosevelt. When the Desert Sun in 2016 bucked its historic trend of endorsing Republicans for president, Democrats throughout the Valley were shocked; this was, after all, the same newspaper which had once fired an editorial page editor and escorted him off the premises under heavy security when he had had the effrontery to suggest that the Desert Sun might want to endorse a Democrat in a local congressional race.
We had expected our local Gannett publication to bend over backwards to find some sophistry of reason to justify endorsing Donald Trump. Fortunately, that did not happen, and two years later, the editorial staff of The Desert Sun are, in hindsight, probably thanking their lucky stars that they did not give the nod to The Donald.
Nevertheless, the endorsement of Ernesto Gutierrez was another blunder by the Desert Sun’s editorial staff. Unfortunately, as the monopoly print media source in this market, the Desert Sun can pretty much get away with ham-handed editorial decisions. Only time will tell what their next gaffe will be.
* * * * *
Of course, the landfall of Aonami, for all the effects it may or may not have here in the Coachella Valley, certainly has provoked more peevish, splenic outbursts of temper from the toddler occupying the Oval.
In my last post, I suggested that junior hominids, unlike kittens, puppies, or ducklings, are most distinctly not cute. Indeed, the toddler years can be years of travail for both parent and child; but never before have we had a toddler occupying the Oval Office, with all the various and sundry misbehaviors in which not-yet-socialized children indulge. To watch The Donald is to watch just such an un-socialized toddler, immured in a 72-year-old body, flaunt his inability to conform his behavior to the norms of civilized society.
We were subjected to just such a dog and pony show yesterday with The Donald’s breathtakingly bizarre 87 minute press conference in the East Room of the White House, the low point of which was Donald Trump’s testy exchange with CNN’s Jim Acosta, who apparently has long been a particular bête noire of the toddler-in-chief, followed by the yanking of Acosta's White House press credential.
After Trump attempted to cut off Acosta in mid-question, he sent a White House intern to try to forcibly relieve Acosta of his microphone. The intern should have known better; the least touching of another in anger is a battery at common law, and the intern has now made herself vulnerable to a lawsuit from Jim Acosta and from CNN. Trump, having instructed the intern to do so, has also made himself vulnerable to a lawsuit; even a president is not immune to being called to account in damages for ordering an assault and battery against another person.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders, whose record for lies and mistruths is very much coterminous with that of The Donald himself, attempted to justify the battery of Jim Acosta and the stripping of Acosta's credential by referencing a video that had been altered by Alex Jones’s Infowars, a gambit which was quickly found out and called out.
What neither The Donald nor his flack understand is that outside the dwindling minority of the population that constitutes The Donald’s base, the “enemy of the people” rhetoric he uses to describe the American media, like the rest of his rhetoric intended to cast doubt on the legitimacy of our other institutions, including our public institutions of self-government, has worn infinitesimally thin.
We may reasonably expect that when the Democratic House of Representatives takes control on January 3, barring some kind of Fujimori-style self-coup by The Donald, that Elijah Cummings’s House Government Reform And Oversight Committee may very well want to conduct hearings and investigations into, among others, the physical attack on Jim Acosta at the November 7 White House press conference. It might be time for Sarah Huckabee Sanders to think about lawyering up.
After all, as the Republicans have liked to gloat over the last two years, elections do indeed have consequences.
Of course, the ineluctable temper tantrum from The Donald has created more of a stir and more controversy the White House can ill afford. The Donald’s petulant stripping of CNN reporter Jim Acosta’s White House press pass, and White House flak Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s invocation of an obviously doctored video provided to her by Infowars’s Alex Jones, has given birth to another one of the endless parade of scandals dogging The Donald.
--------------------------------------------
The dust from the midterm elections is slowly settling, though we probably won’t know the full extent of Aonami (the Blue Wave) for some time. Nonetheless, in addition to wresting back control of the House of Representatives from the Republican Party, Democrats also appeared to have made some significant inroads at the state and local levels.
Indeed, Democrats may probably be forgiven today for experiencing some measure of Schadenfreude as close elections continue to tilt in their favor.
Here in Cathedral City, congratulations are due to incoming councilmembers John Rivera and Raymond Gregory, as well as to returning councilmember Mark Carnevale. Congratulations also to outgoing Council member Shelley Kaplan as he moves from the Cathedral City city Council to representing Zone 4 of the Desert Healthcare District, an obscure, but important post.
We don’t have the official canvass of voters from the Riverside County registrar yet, so we can’t know just how Democratic Cathedral City broke in the last election; all we have are results without knowing what part of the city voted for which candidate for assembly, State Senator, Congressman, or U.S. Senator. While according to the registrar’s numbers, Riverside County appears to have broken for Republican gubernatorial candidate John Cox, statewide numbers show Cox being trounced by Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom. How Cathedral City voted in that election we can’t yet know.
Nonetheless, there were some distinct losers in Tuesday night’s election. Cathedral City’s fourth Council District, by choosing experienced former planning Commissioner John Rivera over Trumpist conservative Ernesto Gutierrez, appears to have fairly decisively rejected the siren song of Trumpism. Unfortunately for departing mayor Stan Henry, his embrace of Gutierrez will taint his otherwise positive legacy. Stan would have done better to have kept his mouth shut altogether rather than endorse so manifestly unsuitable a candidate as Gutierrez.
The other loser in Tuesday night’s election, at least as far as District 4 is concerned is our local Gannett publication. By endorsing Gutierrez as their choice in District 4, the Desert Sun has once again demonstrated how woefully out of touch it is becoming with the increasingly Democratic electorate of the Coachella Valley. The Desert Sun seems to have forgotten or to have been utterly indifferent to changing voter demographics. Of course, The Desert Sun’s Republican cheerleading tendencies have always been readily apparent.
This after all was the same newspaper that last endorsed a Democrat for president some time during the administration of Franklin Roosevelt. When the Desert Sun in 2016 bucked its historic trend of endorsing Republicans for president, Democrats throughout the Valley were shocked; this was, after all, the same newspaper which had once fired an editorial page editor and escorted him off the premises under heavy security when he had had the effrontery to suggest that the Desert Sun might want to endorse a Democrat in a local congressional race.
We had expected our local Gannett publication to bend over backwards to find some sophistry of reason to justify endorsing Donald Trump. Fortunately, that did not happen, and two years later, the editorial staff of The Desert Sun are, in hindsight, probably thanking their lucky stars that they did not give the nod to The Donald.
Nevertheless, the endorsement of Ernesto Gutierrez was another blunder by the Desert Sun’s editorial staff. Unfortunately, as the monopoly print media source in this market, the Desert Sun can pretty much get away with ham-handed editorial decisions. Only time will tell what their next gaffe will be.
* * * * *
Of course, the landfall of Aonami, for all the effects it may or may not have here in the Coachella Valley, certainly has provoked more peevish, splenic outbursts of temper from the toddler occupying the Oval.
In my last post, I suggested that junior hominids, unlike kittens, puppies, or ducklings, are most distinctly not cute. Indeed, the toddler years can be years of travail for both parent and child; but never before have we had a toddler occupying the Oval Office, with all the various and sundry misbehaviors in which not-yet-socialized children indulge. To watch The Donald is to watch just such an un-socialized toddler, immured in a 72-year-old body, flaunt his inability to conform his behavior to the norms of civilized society.
We were subjected to just such a dog and pony show yesterday with The Donald’s breathtakingly bizarre 87 minute press conference in the East Room of the White House, the low point of which was Donald Trump’s testy exchange with CNN’s Jim Acosta, who apparently has long been a particular bête noire of the toddler-in-chief, followed by the yanking of Acosta's White House press credential.
After Trump attempted to cut off Acosta in mid-question, he sent a White House intern to try to forcibly relieve Acosta of his microphone. The intern should have known better; the least touching of another in anger is a battery at common law, and the intern has now made herself vulnerable to a lawsuit from Jim Acosta and from CNN. Trump, having instructed the intern to do so, has also made himself vulnerable to a lawsuit; even a president is not immune to being called to account in damages for ordering an assault and battery against another person.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders, whose record for lies and mistruths is very much coterminous with that of The Donald himself, attempted to justify the battery of Jim Acosta and the stripping of Acosta's credential by referencing a video that had been altered by Alex Jones’s Infowars, a gambit which was quickly found out and called out.
What neither The Donald nor his flack understand is that outside the dwindling minority of the population that constitutes The Donald’s base, the “enemy of the people” rhetoric he uses to describe the American media, like the rest of his rhetoric intended to cast doubt on the legitimacy of our other institutions, including our public institutions of self-government, has worn infinitesimally thin.
We may reasonably expect that when the Democratic House of Representatives takes control on January 3, barring some kind of Fujimori-style self-coup by The Donald, that Elijah Cummings’s House Government Reform And Oversight Committee may very well want to conduct hearings and investigations into, among others, the physical attack on Jim Acosta at the November 7 White House press conference. It might be time for Sarah Huckabee Sanders to think about lawyering up.
After all, as the Republicans have liked to gloat over the last two years, elections do indeed have consequences.
Wednesday, November 7, 2018
KEEP THE CAMEL IN THE TENT, PISSING OUT
Summary: It did not take long for the reality show huckster masquerading as the president of the United States to manifest his anger over the results of last night’s midterm elections. The Democratic recapture of the House of Representatives demanded, in Trump’s mind, a sacrifice to be laid upon the altar of his psychopathology. Thus, the long expected ouster of Atty. Gen. Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III. Sessions can respond either by slinking back to Alabama to lick his wounds, by writing a tell-all opus akin to Omarosa Manigault Newman’s Unhinged, or by disclosing everything he knows about Trump to special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. Trump, who apparently hasn’t got the common sense God gave an axolotl, seems to have forgotten the old-fashioned Washington wisdom distilled by Lyndon Johnson in the unforgettable phrase “it’s better to have a camel inside the tent pissing out then to have it outside the tent pissing in.”
The “Kremlin watchers” who study The Donald and The Donald’s reality show of an administration predicted, with almost uncanny accuracy, what the reality show huckster masquerading as President of the United States would do if Aonami (the Blue Wave) materialized in yesterday’s midterm elections.
Most of us, at some point in our lives, have had to deal with the junior hominids commonly referred to as children. Unlike puppies or kittens or ducklings, junior hominids are not cute or cuddly. In fact, the toddler stage is particularly obnoxious, both for adult and child. Sadly, the Republic has been oppressed for the last two years by the existence of a toddler in the Oval Office. The toddler in the Oval generally communicates his displeasure with untoward events through temper tantrums and relationship-sundering terminations. After all, this is the same Donald Trump who tried to trademark the phrase “you’re fired!”
So, in the wake of Aonami, when Donald Trump let his temper go, the first casualty, the first sacrifice upon the altar of The Donald’s insensate ego was his much-maligned Attorney General, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III. Sessions may be the first casualty of Aonami in the executive branch, but he certainly won’t be the last. Indeed, he goes the way of numerous senior Administration officials who have somehow displeased the Maximum Leader.
However, with Sessions having departed from the administration, we may wonder what the quondam Attorney General’s response to this unceremonious dumping may be. At one end of the spectrum, Sessions can return to Alabama to lick his wounds, soliciting a position on the faculty of the law school at the University of Alabama and finding himself involved in bitter bickering with faculty members who will have no reason to hold him in much, if any, regard, and every possible motivation to seek discipline of Sessions’ professional licensure up to, and potentially including, disbarment.
Or, not desiring to incur the enmity of an outraged professoriate, Sessions may seek, and possibly find, a position with either a white shoe Washington City law firm or as a highly compensated K Street lobbyist. Such employment would free Mr. Sessions to write the inevitable tell-all book, somewhat like Bob Woodward’s recent opus Fear or perhaps Omarosa Manigault-Newman’s slim volume entitled Unhinged. If Sessions were to pen such a work, it would no doubt quickly find itself on the bestseller lists of the New York Times and Amazon.com.
The third option, and the one most damaging to Donald Trump and his administration is that Sessions may decide to make a clean breast of things with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. It is known throughout the government that prior to the Trump Administration taking office, Sessions did have meetings with representatives of the Russian State which he then denied having during his Senate confirmation hearings.
That’s perjury.
In addition to being an offense for which an attorney can be disbarred in his jurisdiction or jurisdictions of licensure, perjury before the Senate about contacts with representatives of the Kremlin also puts Sessions fairly in the crosshairs of the Mueller investigation.
It would not be surprising therefore to find that Mr. Sessions, presumably desiring to avoid either incarceration or professional discipline in his jurisdiction of licensure, would want to make the best possible deal with the Special Counsel. If, as is been suggested, the entire thrust of Japanese diplomacy after November, 1942, was to bring about an end to the Pacific War on the best possible terms Japan could obtain, so too, in the instant case, Sessions may find himself in negotiations with Special Counsel Mueller to obtain the best terms he can. After all, it would be a hell of a come down for a former senator and a former Attorney General of the United States to find himself rusticating in a federal correctional facility somewhere.
We cannot know what political goodies or things of value Jeff Sessions may be able to offer to Mueller’s team. But it is not unreasonable to expect that any proffer from Sessions to Mueller will probably be very substantial. The more substantial the proffer, the greater degree of risk it represents to the Trump administration. For Sessions, the safest course may be to limber up his vocal cords and be prepared to sing like a canary, lest the almost inevitable discovery of substantial Administration wrongdoing leave him with no cards to play.
He should do so quickly, and secure some measure of protection from congressional subpoenas, before incoming House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff or Incoming House Government Reform and Oversight Committee Chair Elijah Cummings can have a chance to make mincemeat of him on national television.
Trump may find, according to the line from the Star Trek original series episode Amok Time, that "having is not nearly so pleasing a thing after all is wanting;" or put in another, more Lyndon Johnson-esque way, it would have been better not to have fired Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, because is better to have a camel in the tent pissing out then do have one outside the tent pissing in.
The “Kremlin watchers” who study The Donald and The Donald’s reality show of an administration predicted, with almost uncanny accuracy, what the reality show huckster masquerading as President of the United States would do if Aonami (the Blue Wave) materialized in yesterday’s midterm elections.
Most of us, at some point in our lives, have had to deal with the junior hominids commonly referred to as children. Unlike puppies or kittens or ducklings, junior hominids are not cute or cuddly. In fact, the toddler stage is particularly obnoxious, both for adult and child. Sadly, the Republic has been oppressed for the last two years by the existence of a toddler in the Oval Office. The toddler in the Oval generally communicates his displeasure with untoward events through temper tantrums and relationship-sundering terminations. After all, this is the same Donald Trump who tried to trademark the phrase “you’re fired!”
So, in the wake of Aonami, when Donald Trump let his temper go, the first casualty, the first sacrifice upon the altar of The Donald’s insensate ego was his much-maligned Attorney General, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III. Sessions may be the first casualty of Aonami in the executive branch, but he certainly won’t be the last. Indeed, he goes the way of numerous senior Administration officials who have somehow displeased the Maximum Leader.
However, with Sessions having departed from the administration, we may wonder what the quondam Attorney General’s response to this unceremonious dumping may be. At one end of the spectrum, Sessions can return to Alabama to lick his wounds, soliciting a position on the faculty of the law school at the University of Alabama and finding himself involved in bitter bickering with faculty members who will have no reason to hold him in much, if any, regard, and every possible motivation to seek discipline of Sessions’ professional licensure up to, and potentially including, disbarment.
Or, not desiring to incur the enmity of an outraged professoriate, Sessions may seek, and possibly find, a position with either a white shoe Washington City law firm or as a highly compensated K Street lobbyist. Such employment would free Mr. Sessions to write the inevitable tell-all book, somewhat like Bob Woodward’s recent opus Fear or perhaps Omarosa Manigault-Newman’s slim volume entitled Unhinged. If Sessions were to pen such a work, it would no doubt quickly find itself on the bestseller lists of the New York Times and Amazon.com.
The third option, and the one most damaging to Donald Trump and his administration is that Sessions may decide to make a clean breast of things with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. It is known throughout the government that prior to the Trump Administration taking office, Sessions did have meetings with representatives of the Russian State which he then denied having during his Senate confirmation hearings.
That’s perjury.
In addition to being an offense for which an attorney can be disbarred in his jurisdiction or jurisdictions of licensure, perjury before the Senate about contacts with representatives of the Kremlin also puts Sessions fairly in the crosshairs of the Mueller investigation.
It would not be surprising therefore to find that Mr. Sessions, presumably desiring to avoid either incarceration or professional discipline in his jurisdiction of licensure, would want to make the best possible deal with the Special Counsel. If, as is been suggested, the entire thrust of Japanese diplomacy after November, 1942, was to bring about an end to the Pacific War on the best possible terms Japan could obtain, so too, in the instant case, Sessions may find himself in negotiations with Special Counsel Mueller to obtain the best terms he can. After all, it would be a hell of a come down for a former senator and a former Attorney General of the United States to find himself rusticating in a federal correctional facility somewhere.
We cannot know what political goodies or things of value Jeff Sessions may be able to offer to Mueller’s team. But it is not unreasonable to expect that any proffer from Sessions to Mueller will probably be very substantial. The more substantial the proffer, the greater degree of risk it represents to the Trump administration. For Sessions, the safest course may be to limber up his vocal cords and be prepared to sing like a canary, lest the almost inevitable discovery of substantial Administration wrongdoing leave him with no cards to play.
He should do so quickly, and secure some measure of protection from congressional subpoenas, before incoming House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff or Incoming House Government Reform and Oversight Committee Chair Elijah Cummings can have a chance to make mincemeat of him on national television.
Trump may find, according to the line from the Star Trek original series episode Amok Time, that "having is not nearly so pleasing a thing after all is wanting;" or put in another, more Lyndon Johnson-esque way, it would have been better not to have fired Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, because is better to have a camel in the tent pissing out then do have one outside the tent pissing in.
Thursday, October 25, 2018
REVENGE, RETALIATION, AND RETRIBUTION: THOUGHTS ON THE MURDER OF JAMAL KHASHOGGI
Summary: The assassination of Jamal Khashoggi may be expected, over the medium to long term, to have significant effects on the US relationship with Saudi Arabia and, more significantly, on the House of Saud itself. The Saudi response to Khashoggi’s murder has morphed from posture of what Winston Churchill might have called “injured guilt,” to one of acknowledgment of the fact of the crime while denying culpability, attempting, against the overwhelming weight of evidence, to suggest that Khashoggi’s murder was the result of “rogue” operators. The now apparent complicity of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, in a culture that places a premium on revenge, retaliation, and retribution, may be the spark that sends his aging and unbelievably corrupt Dynasty up in flames.
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When Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, nephew of notorious multi-zillionaire Adnan Khashoggi and cousin of sometime Princess Di boyfriend Dodi Fayed, was murdered inside the Turkish Consulate in İstanbul at the beginning of this month, the initial official Saudi response was one of indignant protestations and denial. To use Winston Churchill’s mordant description of Sir Stafford Cripps, the Saudi response to the initial and overwhelming evidence that Jamal Khashoggi had, in fact, been murdered in the consulate was an outburst of “injured guilt.”
In the better part of a month that has followed, the Saudi response has shifted from denials delivered in that tone of “injured guilt” to acknowledgment that Khashoggi had indeed been dispatched within the consulate, while denying any official culpability on the part of the Kingdom in Khashoggi’s murder.
In the meantime, all manner of lurid stories and conspiracy theories have been circulating. In the vacuum caused by the official unwillingness of the kingdom to come clean with what really happened when Jamal Khashoggi entered the consulate but never emerged, conspiracy theories and lurid stories have abounded.
Perhaps the most lurid of them all is the story circulating in Turkey and in parts of the American leftist media that Khashoggi was dismembered while still alive, a story lent credence by reports of screams from within the consul general’s study, together with the presence of a bone saw in the possession of one of the apparent kill team.
The “dismembered alive” narrative is certainly convenient to Ankara. It plays well into Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s neo-Ottoman diplomatic Kriegßpiel against Iraq and Saudi Arabia. It certainly plays well among the left-progressive media in this country, which have long had a conspicuous disdain for the monumentally corrupt House of Saud.
Nevertheless, as convenient as such a narrative is for Ankara, inasmuch as it shocks the consciences of civilized people everywhere, the Turkish narrative is open to serious question because it postulates a violation of one of the fundamental rules of intelligence tradecraft; use minimal force necessary to accomplish the intelligence objective at hand, which was to liquidate Jamal Khashoggi as efficiently, quietly, and expeditiously as possible.
A well-executed intelligence “wet work” would have involved a swift administration of a deadly nerve agent such as Novichok (or its United States equivalent). Given that the Saudis learned the lion’s share of their intelligence tradecraft from us, it is by no means unreasonable to expect that a fight may have been stayed inside the consulate in order to give the Saudi intelligence operatives of the kill team enough time and opportunity to administer the fatal poison.
If in fact a kill team of 15 men was lying in wait for Khashoggi inside the consul-general’s study, the scream referenced in Turkish and Western media reports can be fairly easily accounted for as Khashoggi’s exclamation of surprise or cry for help as he was put in the headlock that has also been referenced in Turkish and Western media reports. Alternatively, the scream could be accounted for by the jabbing of a needle and syringe into some part of his body, probably his neck.
If a nerve agent had been administered in such a fashion, the scream would have been Jamal Khashoggi’s last audible utterance. Novichok, or the US equivalent thereto, can be fatal within seconds or minutes. If the operatives of the kill team had Khashoggi in a headlock, and shot him full of Novichok, there is no doubt that Jamal Khashoggi would have been dead by the time his body was lowered to the floor. It certainly is more in keeping with best practices of intelligence tradecraft to kill your victim quickly rather than dismember him alive. Saudi intelligence operatives should have learned at least that from their US instructors.
After all, when all is said and done, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) is no fool. MBS certainly recognizes that Jamal Khashoggi was a scion of one of the wealthiest families in the Arab nation. After all, you don’t enjoy a certain measure of entrée to Saudi royal circles unless you are the nephew of the late, fabulously wealthy Adnan Khashoggi and the cousin of Dodi Fayed.
MBS must have been aware that to murder a Khashoggi would have been to provoke one of the famously endless cycles of revenge, retribution, and retaliation that have figured so prominently in the history of the Arab nation. Surely, MBS cannot be utterly unmindful of the revenge-based 1975 assassination of King Faisal ibn Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia, the 1951 assassination of King Abdullah I of Jordan, the brutal 1958 murder of King Faisal II of Iraq, or the 1981 jihadist assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat.
MBS should be fearful that somehow, somewhere, some Islamic cleric will issue a Fatwa sanctioning and calling for MBS’s assassination or that the Saudi ulema (the senior Islamic clerics of the Kingdom) will issue some kind of similar declaration.
Indeed, MBS may have crossed a so-called red line in the Kingdom’s politics. For most of its history, Saudi Arabia has been an absolute monarchy tempered by the realization of the royal house that its absolute rule depends for its legitimacy — and its survival — upon cultivating consensus among the kingdom’s leading families, and among the historic regions of the Arabian Peninsula under Saudi control, al-Hasa, the Hejaz, ‘Asir, and Najd.
But under the “stewardship” of MBS, the Saudi model of rule has shifted from one of consensus-based absolute rule to one of royal totalitarianism.
Unfortunately, MBS and his acolytes seem altogether blind to the historical reality that absolute monarchy, whether hereditary or de facto, has become, to all intents and purposes, a thing of the past, an historical curiosity increasingly regarded by a majority of the world not as a quaint holdover from times past, but as a positive social evil to be eradicated whenever the opportunity presents itself.
Of course, none of this relieves the kingdom of any of its culpability in the matter. Moreover, because MBS is no fool, he would no doubt have sought to shore up his flanks before moving against the Khashoggi family. He would have sought, in short, to avail himself of the cravenness, venality, corruptibility, and gullibility of Donald Trump and Donald Trump’s equally craven, venal, corrupt, repulsive, and gullible son-in-law Jared Kushner.
By drawing Trump and Kushner into what was an evident plot to assassinate the inconvenient journalist, MBS could feel comfortable of having the power of the United States behind him in the event of any attempt at revenge by Khashoggi’s friends or family. Thus, it is not unreasonable to conclude that it is highly doubtful that MBS would have sanctioned and intelligence wet work against Jamal Khashoggi if he did not have an advance green light from the White House.
Indeed, it is also reasonable to infer that MBS did, indeed have a green light for the killing from the highest reaches of the Trump administration. Knowing Donald Trump’s poisonous hatred for the Washington Post, we may infer the Trump would have seen in the Saudi operation against Jamal Khashoggi and opportunity to fire a warning shot across the bow of the Post as an institution and its journalists as individuals.
Trump, whom the evidence now suggests was read in to the Saudi operational plan before green-lighting it, probably saw the assassination/murder of Jamal Khashoggi as an excellent vehicle for intimidating what he plainly sees as a significant domestic political enemy. When all is said and done, the evidence appears to be mounting that Donald Trump was indeed either read in before the operation took place, or, even more damning, that it may have been Donald Trump himself who gave the go order for the planning and execution of actual operation itself.
Unfortunately for him, since The Donald has not got the self-awareness that God gave an axolotl, or any insight into the history of the English-speaking peoples, he plainly has absolutely no knowledge or recollection of the story of St. Thomas à Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, whose assassination, on December 29, 1170 on orders from King Henry II, sparked outrage throughout Christendom.
Now while Khashoggi himself of course was Muslim, and not a high-ranking cleric (in a religion that has neither priests nor bishops), he was a fearless journalist and somewhat after being the conscience of the Arab nation. For Trump to allow the United States to be seen as complicit in the murder of a witness for freedom of expression, a virtue much put upon and derided throughout much of the Arab world, is to put the United States in the position of gathering to itself yet further reservoirs of ill will, not just from the Arab nation, but from much of the Islamic ummah as a whole.
By parroting the Kingdom’s line, Donald Trump, his ridiculous, neotenous lap dog Jared Kushner, and the administration as a whole may well have filled the vials of wrath among the ummah and in the Arab nation to overflowing.
By their supine acquiescence in a gross crime against humanity and against human freedom, Trump and Kushner may well have also exposed this country to a new wave of terror when, not if, the unbelievably corrupt House of Saud finally collapses under the weight of its own internal contradictions and inconsistencies.
MBS would have done well, before sanctioning the murder of Jamal Khashoggi to have reacquainted himself with the words of the 81st sura of the Holy Qur’an:
When the sun is overthrown,
And when the stars fall,
And when the hills are moved,
And when the camels big with young are abandoned,
And when the wild beasts are herded together,
And when the seas rise,
And when souls are reunited,
And when the girl-child that was buried alive is asked
for what sin she was slain,
And when the pages are laid open,
And when the sky is ripped away,
And when hellfire is lighted,
And when the Garden is brought nigh,
[Then] every soul will know what it hath done!
Qur’an 81, Sura at-Takwir (The Overthrowing): 1-14
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When Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, nephew of notorious multi-zillionaire Adnan Khashoggi and cousin of sometime Princess Di boyfriend Dodi Fayed, was murdered inside the Turkish Consulate in İstanbul at the beginning of this month, the initial official Saudi response was one of indignant protestations and denial. To use Winston Churchill’s mordant description of Sir Stafford Cripps, the Saudi response to the initial and overwhelming evidence that Jamal Khashoggi had, in fact, been murdered in the consulate was an outburst of “injured guilt.”
In the better part of a month that has followed, the Saudi response has shifted from denials delivered in that tone of “injured guilt” to acknowledgment that Khashoggi had indeed been dispatched within the consulate, while denying any official culpability on the part of the Kingdom in Khashoggi’s murder.
In the meantime, all manner of lurid stories and conspiracy theories have been circulating. In the vacuum caused by the official unwillingness of the kingdom to come clean with what really happened when Jamal Khashoggi entered the consulate but never emerged, conspiracy theories and lurid stories have abounded.
Perhaps the most lurid of them all is the story circulating in Turkey and in parts of the American leftist media that Khashoggi was dismembered while still alive, a story lent credence by reports of screams from within the consul general’s study, together with the presence of a bone saw in the possession of one of the apparent kill team.
The “dismembered alive” narrative is certainly convenient to Ankara. It plays well into Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s neo-Ottoman diplomatic Kriegßpiel against Iraq and Saudi Arabia. It certainly plays well among the left-progressive media in this country, which have long had a conspicuous disdain for the monumentally corrupt House of Saud.
Nevertheless, as convenient as such a narrative is for Ankara, inasmuch as it shocks the consciences of civilized people everywhere, the Turkish narrative is open to serious question because it postulates a violation of one of the fundamental rules of intelligence tradecraft; use minimal force necessary to accomplish the intelligence objective at hand, which was to liquidate Jamal Khashoggi as efficiently, quietly, and expeditiously as possible.
A well-executed intelligence “wet work” would have involved a swift administration of a deadly nerve agent such as Novichok (or its United States equivalent). Given that the Saudis learned the lion’s share of their intelligence tradecraft from us, it is by no means unreasonable to expect that a fight may have been stayed inside the consulate in order to give the Saudi intelligence operatives of the kill team enough time and opportunity to administer the fatal poison.
If in fact a kill team of 15 men was lying in wait for Khashoggi inside the consul-general’s study, the scream referenced in Turkish and Western media reports can be fairly easily accounted for as Khashoggi’s exclamation of surprise or cry for help as he was put in the headlock that has also been referenced in Turkish and Western media reports. Alternatively, the scream could be accounted for by the jabbing of a needle and syringe into some part of his body, probably his neck.
If a nerve agent had been administered in such a fashion, the scream would have been Jamal Khashoggi’s last audible utterance. Novichok, or the US equivalent thereto, can be fatal within seconds or minutes. If the operatives of the kill team had Khashoggi in a headlock, and shot him full of Novichok, there is no doubt that Jamal Khashoggi would have been dead by the time his body was lowered to the floor. It certainly is more in keeping with best practices of intelligence tradecraft to kill your victim quickly rather than dismember him alive. Saudi intelligence operatives should have learned at least that from their US instructors.
After all, when all is said and done, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) is no fool. MBS certainly recognizes that Jamal Khashoggi was a scion of one of the wealthiest families in the Arab nation. After all, you don’t enjoy a certain measure of entrée to Saudi royal circles unless you are the nephew of the late, fabulously wealthy Adnan Khashoggi and the cousin of Dodi Fayed.
MBS must have been aware that to murder a Khashoggi would have been to provoke one of the famously endless cycles of revenge, retribution, and retaliation that have figured so prominently in the history of the Arab nation. Surely, MBS cannot be utterly unmindful of the revenge-based 1975 assassination of King Faisal ibn Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia, the 1951 assassination of King Abdullah I of Jordan, the brutal 1958 murder of King Faisal II of Iraq, or the 1981 jihadist assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat.
MBS should be fearful that somehow, somewhere, some Islamic cleric will issue a Fatwa sanctioning and calling for MBS’s assassination or that the Saudi ulema (the senior Islamic clerics of the Kingdom) will issue some kind of similar declaration.
Indeed, MBS may have crossed a so-called red line in the Kingdom’s politics. For most of its history, Saudi Arabia has been an absolute monarchy tempered by the realization of the royal house that its absolute rule depends for its legitimacy — and its survival — upon cultivating consensus among the kingdom’s leading families, and among the historic regions of the Arabian Peninsula under Saudi control, al-Hasa, the Hejaz, ‘Asir, and Najd.
But under the “stewardship” of MBS, the Saudi model of rule has shifted from one of consensus-based absolute rule to one of royal totalitarianism.
Unfortunately, MBS and his acolytes seem altogether blind to the historical reality that absolute monarchy, whether hereditary or de facto, has become, to all intents and purposes, a thing of the past, an historical curiosity increasingly regarded by a majority of the world not as a quaint holdover from times past, but as a positive social evil to be eradicated whenever the opportunity presents itself.
Of course, none of this relieves the kingdom of any of its culpability in the matter. Moreover, because MBS is no fool, he would no doubt have sought to shore up his flanks before moving against the Khashoggi family. He would have sought, in short, to avail himself of the cravenness, venality, corruptibility, and gullibility of Donald Trump and Donald Trump’s equally craven, venal, corrupt, repulsive, and gullible son-in-law Jared Kushner.
By drawing Trump and Kushner into what was an evident plot to assassinate the inconvenient journalist, MBS could feel comfortable of having the power of the United States behind him in the event of any attempt at revenge by Khashoggi’s friends or family. Thus, it is not unreasonable to conclude that it is highly doubtful that MBS would have sanctioned and intelligence wet work against Jamal Khashoggi if he did not have an advance green light from the White House.
Indeed, it is also reasonable to infer that MBS did, indeed have a green light for the killing from the highest reaches of the Trump administration. Knowing Donald Trump’s poisonous hatred for the Washington Post, we may infer the Trump would have seen in the Saudi operation against Jamal Khashoggi and opportunity to fire a warning shot across the bow of the Post as an institution and its journalists as individuals.
Trump, whom the evidence now suggests was read in to the Saudi operational plan before green-lighting it, probably saw the assassination/murder of Jamal Khashoggi as an excellent vehicle for intimidating what he plainly sees as a significant domestic political enemy. When all is said and done, the evidence appears to be mounting that Donald Trump was indeed either read in before the operation took place, or, even more damning, that it may have been Donald Trump himself who gave the go order for the planning and execution of actual operation itself.
Unfortunately for him, since The Donald has not got the self-awareness that God gave an axolotl, or any insight into the history of the English-speaking peoples, he plainly has absolutely no knowledge or recollection of the story of St. Thomas à Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, whose assassination, on December 29, 1170 on orders from King Henry II, sparked outrage throughout Christendom.
Now while Khashoggi himself of course was Muslim, and not a high-ranking cleric (in a religion that has neither priests nor bishops), he was a fearless journalist and somewhat after being the conscience of the Arab nation. For Trump to allow the United States to be seen as complicit in the murder of a witness for freedom of expression, a virtue much put upon and derided throughout much of the Arab world, is to put the United States in the position of gathering to itself yet further reservoirs of ill will, not just from the Arab nation, but from much of the Islamic ummah as a whole.
By parroting the Kingdom’s line, Donald Trump, his ridiculous, neotenous lap dog Jared Kushner, and the administration as a whole may well have filled the vials of wrath among the ummah and in the Arab nation to overflowing.
By their supine acquiescence in a gross crime against humanity and against human freedom, Trump and Kushner may well have also exposed this country to a new wave of terror when, not if, the unbelievably corrupt House of Saud finally collapses under the weight of its own internal contradictions and inconsistencies.
MBS would have done well, before sanctioning the murder of Jamal Khashoggi to have reacquainted himself with the words of the 81st sura of the Holy Qur’an:
When the sun is overthrown,
And when the stars fall,
And when the hills are moved,
And when the camels big with young are abandoned,
And when the wild beasts are herded together,
And when the seas rise,
And when souls are reunited,
And when the girl-child that was buried alive is asked
for what sin she was slain,
And when the pages are laid open,
And when the sky is ripped away,
And when hellfire is lighted,
And when the Garden is brought nigh,
[Then] every soul will know what it hath done!
Qur’an 81, Sura at-Takwir (The Overthrowing): 1-14
Friday, October 5, 2018
LITTLE SNAPPERS: BRETT KAVANAUGH, THE RUSSIANS, AND THE DEMOCRATS
Summary: unsurprisingly, the Senate voted to approve a cloture motion to terminate debate on the confirmation of badly compromised Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. It’s also worth noting that Kavanaugh may well be compromised through association with the Russian State as well; Russian state media have been vigorously pressing his cause, and it’s not unreasonable to suspect that a lot of the funding for the dark money issue ads supporting Kavanaugh may have come from Russian sources. Of course, this puts the Democrats in Hobson’s choice position, yet one which may also prove advantageous to them in the November midterms.
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The cloture motion to terminate debate on the nomination of tainted Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh carried 51 to 49, on what was virtually a straight party-line vote. Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski voted with the Democrats, and West Virginia’s Joe Manchin broke ranks and voted with the Republicans.
As I write, “moderate” Maine Republican Susan Collins has finished dithering before the Senate, explaining how she intends to fall in line with the rest of her party. (Of course, the gutless senator did indeed choose to fall in line. Principles routinely evade Republican officeholders.)
The Kavanaugh fiasco has demonstrated, as bluntly as any other since Clarence Thomas’s nomination process back in 1991, that when it comes to nominating men to powerful positions, the voices of women are considered unworthy of belief.
Simply put, uppity women will not be permitted to question the patriarchy.
Of course, in the air of Donald Trump, that self-described “man of the 50s,” we should expect the patriarchy to behave as it has been behaving. Indeed, the 20 months of Donald Trump can be described quite simply as “the revenge of the white patriarchy.”
And indeed, the white patriarchy has had its revenge, to just about the nth degree. Not only was the entire Kavanaugh process tainted by the worst of bad faith from start to finish (as several Democratic Senators and media pundits have put it, the fix has always been in) but Kavanaugh’s performance itself, particularly during the renewed hearings, was a partisan screed delivered in a tone of aggrieved entitlement, or in what Winston Churchill famously described as the tone of Sir Stafford Cripps: “injured guilt.”
Aggrieved entitlement, insulted privilege, or injured guilt, the tone of Kavanaugh’s over-the-top remarks to the Senate Judiciary Committee, and the blatant, obvious, effort of the Republicans on that selfsame Judiciary Committee and in the White House to rig the process, are themselves, absent more, non-recommending to Kavanaugh’s nomination.
Add to that the fact that millions of Americans, in fact a majority of Americans, find Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony to be credible, and that also a majority of Americans oppose Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Court, and you have a nomination which under any other administration than that of the malignant narcissist and traitor Donald Trump, would and should have been withdrawn.
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Of course, knowing the Donald, we know that the Kavanaugh nomination will never be withdrawn, because we know that the Donald not only cannot stand to acknowledge that he made a mistake but we also know that the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh is very much in the interests of the Russian State; Brett Kavanaugh is the Kremlin’s nominee, and the Kremlin will not permit his nomination to be withdrawn.
The evidence that Brett Kavanaugh is Russia’s man in our judiciary derives from the extensive, heavily editorialized coverage in Russian state media supporting Kavanaugh’s nomination. Moreover, the Russian trolls and bots have been swarming American social media again.
The evidence that Brett Kavanaugh is Russia’s man in our judiciary derives from the extensive, heavily editorialized coverage in Russian state media supporting Kavanaugh’s nomination. Moreover, the Russian trolls and bots have been swarming American social media again. Furthermore, it is now becoming obvious that some of the pro-Kavanaugh ads cluttering up our various media have been paid for by dark money from Russian sources.
Indeed, there are allegations that Facebook has been working closely with the Russians to try to influence public opinion in favor of Brett Kavanaugh. Aside from providing further ammunition for the developing case against Facebook and Gospodin Zuckerberg, the heavy-handed Russian attempts to intervene in favor of Brett Kavanaugh ought to have convinced at least a couple of Republicans that Kavanaugh was a Muscovite mole.
Unfortunately, we have reached a point at which the basic patriotism and loyalty to this country of Republican officeholders at all levels is open to the gravest of question. How many of them, how very many of them, have come to resemble Benedict Arnold’s love child by Maj. John André, the British spymaster who was Arnold’s case officer, and whose capture and hanging represented one of the first great triumphs of American counterintelligence work.
If, in fact, Brett Kavanaugh and Donald Trump are Muscovite moles, then of course it is in the interests of the Russian State to infiltrate them into positions of enormous power. Unless Donald Trump is able to run some kind of self-coup and make himself “president for life,” we should be rid of him before too much longer. But Brett Kavanaugh occupies a position that is a de facto lifetime tenure. How much mischief can the Kremlin accomplish with one of their moles on the Supreme Court?
It may come down to Americans having to exercise the option that Game of Thrones’ Cercei Lannister exercised when she found herself confronted with an unpalatable situation: “I choose violence.” And of course if Americans were to choose violence, Moscow could not be more satisfied. Moscow’s relentless cyber war and active measures against this country have been designed to accomplish the slow destruction of American institutions from within. Perhaps when America chooses violence, it should choose violence against the Russians, and not against itself.
After all, if the Russians think it is permissible for them to impose upon us a president of their choosing, then why should we not, with equal propriety, impose upon the Russian land a Romanov tsaritsa or Tsar of our own choosing? Democracy clearly does not work as well for Russia as it does for us. Perhaps our mission in this centennial year of the Russian Civil War, is to make the world once again safe for Romanov rule in Russia.
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Of course, as much as it may be fun to contemplate a restoration of imperial rule in Russia, as much as it may be fun to imagine Vladimir Putin choking out his life at the end of the noose in the Trubetskoy Bastion of St. Petersburg’s Peter and Paul fortress, we must now turn to an examination of the political calculus of the midterms.
For the Republicans, the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh may prove to be a more mixed blessing then they had contemplated. It is not unreasonable to hypothesize that the Republicans were hoping that somehow the Democrats would defeat the Kavanaugh nomination process.
A successful Democratic resistance to the Kavanaugh nomination process, in the malign minds of Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell, would have enabled the Republicans to whip their base into a frothing, fulminating, spittle-flying, friendship-sundering, violence-inciting, lather of indignation against the Democrats. Unfortunately for them, the Republicans, who have a malodorous reputation for being sore winners, may well find themselves deprived of that weapon, just when they needed it in this election cycle.
However, with an undeserved victory landing in their laps like a turd, the Republicans may find themselves bereft of the very thing needed to make up the deficit they are suffering vis-à-vis Democrats in these final weeks before the midterms. By contrast, the Democrats should stay pissed off. The Kavanaugh nomination process ought particularly to piss off women voters. In that sense, a confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh may keep the Democratic base angry enough and engaged enough to flip the House, and if we are lucky, the Senate, too.
However, it will be necessary for the Democratic base to stay angry and engaged. It is reasonable to believe that had the Democrats scored a victory by denying Kavanaugh confirmation, which at this point looks like it is not about to happen, that far too many Democrats would have become complacent, their anger would have been tempered, and they would not have felt it incumbent upon them to get out and vote. The Kavanaugh confirmation may very well have been the moment for Democrats where, having had the football pulled away by Republican Lucy “seventy times seven,” the Democratic Charlie Brown finally overcomes his terminal niceness, and cold cocks her.
Of course if Democrats do flip the House, they will possess subpoena power, and the concomitant ability to make the Trump administration miserable. If Democrats take the House, it is not unreasonable to believe that one of the very early orders of business in a democratic-controlled House would be articles of impeachment against Brett Kavanaugh.
Now, no Supreme Court justice has been impeached since Samuel Chase was impeached in 1803. While the impeachment of Chase was unsuccessful, largely because it concerned his handling of trial court matters no longer handled by justices of the Supreme Court, an impeachment of Kavanaugh, arising from legal and ethical misconduct, particularly his serial untruths before the Senate Judiciary Committee, might very well be within the realms of possibility.
Republicans will no doubt claim that any Democratic investigations, hearings, or impeachment proceedings, will be tainted by revenge, and will argue ad hominem that the motivations of the Democratic Party should be on trial. But motivations don’t matter when impeachments are on the table. What matters is whether the conduct charged itself justifies impeachment.
The impending confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court may well prove to be a victory from which the Republicans never recover.
Let us hope this is the case.
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The cloture motion to terminate debate on the nomination of tainted Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh carried 51 to 49, on what was virtually a straight party-line vote. Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski voted with the Democrats, and West Virginia’s Joe Manchin broke ranks and voted with the Republicans.
As I write, “moderate” Maine Republican Susan Collins has finished dithering before the Senate, explaining how she intends to fall in line with the rest of her party. (Of course, the gutless senator did indeed choose to fall in line. Principles routinely evade Republican officeholders.)
The Kavanaugh fiasco has demonstrated, as bluntly as any other since Clarence Thomas’s nomination process back in 1991, that when it comes to nominating men to powerful positions, the voices of women are considered unworthy of belief.
Simply put, uppity women will not be permitted to question the patriarchy.
Of course, in the air of Donald Trump, that self-described “man of the 50s,” we should expect the patriarchy to behave as it has been behaving. Indeed, the 20 months of Donald Trump can be described quite simply as “the revenge of the white patriarchy.”
And indeed, the white patriarchy has had its revenge, to just about the nth degree. Not only was the entire Kavanaugh process tainted by the worst of bad faith from start to finish (as several Democratic Senators and media pundits have put it, the fix has always been in) but Kavanaugh’s performance itself, particularly during the renewed hearings, was a partisan screed delivered in a tone of aggrieved entitlement, or in what Winston Churchill famously described as the tone of Sir Stafford Cripps: “injured guilt.”
Aggrieved entitlement, insulted privilege, or injured guilt, the tone of Kavanaugh’s over-the-top remarks to the Senate Judiciary Committee, and the blatant, obvious, effort of the Republicans on that selfsame Judiciary Committee and in the White House to rig the process, are themselves, absent more, non-recommending to Kavanaugh’s nomination.
Add to that the fact that millions of Americans, in fact a majority of Americans, find Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony to be credible, and that also a majority of Americans oppose Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Court, and you have a nomination which under any other administration than that of the malignant narcissist and traitor Donald Trump, would and should have been withdrawn.
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Of course, knowing the Donald, we know that the Kavanaugh nomination will never be withdrawn, because we know that the Donald not only cannot stand to acknowledge that he made a mistake but we also know that the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh is very much in the interests of the Russian State; Brett Kavanaugh is the Kremlin’s nominee, and the Kremlin will not permit his nomination to be withdrawn.
The evidence that Brett Kavanaugh is Russia’s man in our judiciary derives from the extensive, heavily editorialized coverage in Russian state media supporting Kavanaugh’s nomination. Moreover, the Russian trolls and bots have been swarming American social media again.
The evidence that Brett Kavanaugh is Russia’s man in our judiciary derives from the extensive, heavily editorialized coverage in Russian state media supporting Kavanaugh’s nomination. Moreover, the Russian trolls and bots have been swarming American social media again. Furthermore, it is now becoming obvious that some of the pro-Kavanaugh ads cluttering up our various media have been paid for by dark money from Russian sources.
Indeed, there are allegations that Facebook has been working closely with the Russians to try to influence public opinion in favor of Brett Kavanaugh. Aside from providing further ammunition for the developing case against Facebook and Gospodin Zuckerberg, the heavy-handed Russian attempts to intervene in favor of Brett Kavanaugh ought to have convinced at least a couple of Republicans that Kavanaugh was a Muscovite mole.
Unfortunately, we have reached a point at which the basic patriotism and loyalty to this country of Republican officeholders at all levels is open to the gravest of question. How many of them, how very many of them, have come to resemble Benedict Arnold’s love child by Maj. John André, the British spymaster who was Arnold’s case officer, and whose capture and hanging represented one of the first great triumphs of American counterintelligence work.
If, in fact, Brett Kavanaugh and Donald Trump are Muscovite moles, then of course it is in the interests of the Russian State to infiltrate them into positions of enormous power. Unless Donald Trump is able to run some kind of self-coup and make himself “president for life,” we should be rid of him before too much longer. But Brett Kavanaugh occupies a position that is a de facto lifetime tenure. How much mischief can the Kremlin accomplish with one of their moles on the Supreme Court?
It may come down to Americans having to exercise the option that Game of Thrones’ Cercei Lannister exercised when she found herself confronted with an unpalatable situation: “I choose violence.” And of course if Americans were to choose violence, Moscow could not be more satisfied. Moscow’s relentless cyber war and active measures against this country have been designed to accomplish the slow destruction of American institutions from within. Perhaps when America chooses violence, it should choose violence against the Russians, and not against itself.
After all, if the Russians think it is permissible for them to impose upon us a president of their choosing, then why should we not, with equal propriety, impose upon the Russian land a Romanov tsaritsa or Tsar of our own choosing? Democracy clearly does not work as well for Russia as it does for us. Perhaps our mission in this centennial year of the Russian Civil War, is to make the world once again safe for Romanov rule in Russia.
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Of course, as much as it may be fun to contemplate a restoration of imperial rule in Russia, as much as it may be fun to imagine Vladimir Putin choking out his life at the end of the noose in the Trubetskoy Bastion of St. Petersburg’s Peter and Paul fortress, we must now turn to an examination of the political calculus of the midterms.
For the Republicans, the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh may prove to be a more mixed blessing then they had contemplated. It is not unreasonable to hypothesize that the Republicans were hoping that somehow the Democrats would defeat the Kavanaugh nomination process.
A successful Democratic resistance to the Kavanaugh nomination process, in the malign minds of Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell, would have enabled the Republicans to whip their base into a frothing, fulminating, spittle-flying, friendship-sundering, violence-inciting, lather of indignation against the Democrats. Unfortunately for them, the Republicans, who have a malodorous reputation for being sore winners, may well find themselves deprived of that weapon, just when they needed it in this election cycle.
However, with an undeserved victory landing in their laps like a turd, the Republicans may find themselves bereft of the very thing needed to make up the deficit they are suffering vis-à-vis Democrats in these final weeks before the midterms. By contrast, the Democrats should stay pissed off. The Kavanaugh nomination process ought particularly to piss off women voters. In that sense, a confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh may keep the Democratic base angry enough and engaged enough to flip the House, and if we are lucky, the Senate, too.
However, it will be necessary for the Democratic base to stay angry and engaged. It is reasonable to believe that had the Democrats scored a victory by denying Kavanaugh confirmation, which at this point looks like it is not about to happen, that far too many Democrats would have become complacent, their anger would have been tempered, and they would not have felt it incumbent upon them to get out and vote. The Kavanaugh confirmation may very well have been the moment for Democrats where, having had the football pulled away by Republican Lucy “seventy times seven,” the Democratic Charlie Brown finally overcomes his terminal niceness, and cold cocks her.
 | |
| Charlie BrownCoyote bit Lucy after the took the | football away for the 491st time |
Of course if Democrats do flip the House, they will possess subpoena power, and the concomitant ability to make the Trump administration miserable. If Democrats take the House, it is not unreasonable to believe that one of the very early orders of business in a democratic-controlled House would be articles of impeachment against Brett Kavanaugh.
Now, no Supreme Court justice has been impeached since Samuel Chase was impeached in 1803. While the impeachment of Chase was unsuccessful, largely because it concerned his handling of trial court matters no longer handled by justices of the Supreme Court, an impeachment of Kavanaugh, arising from legal and ethical misconduct, particularly his serial untruths before the Senate Judiciary Committee, might very well be within the realms of possibility.
Republicans will no doubt claim that any Democratic investigations, hearings, or impeachment proceedings, will be tainted by revenge, and will argue ad hominem that the motivations of the Democratic Party should be on trial. But motivations don’t matter when impeachments are on the table. What matters is whether the conduct charged itself justifies impeachment.
The impending confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court may well prove to be a victory from which the Republicans never recover.
Let us hope this is the case.
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