Summary: Donald Trump crashed and burned last night. If his dreadful performance in his first one-on-one debate with Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton was intended to sway undecided voters, it did nothing but demonstrate not only his woeful lack of preparation, but also it gave those undecided voters a glimpse into the character flaws that make him totally unfit to be dogcatcher, let alone President of the United States.
Indeed, Trump’s poor performance not only demonstrated the truth of the so-called 7 Ps of military readiness: Proper Preparation and Practice Prevent Piss Poor Performance, but it also demonstrated what has been a fundamental truth about this election cycle that many had been reluctant to recognize: that there exists a profound moral imperative to vote for Hillary Clinton. Indeed, so powerful is this moral imperative that it can be described as a Kantian categorical imperative. Morals and patriotism have flowed into one common channel that demand are unequivocal support of Hillary Rodham Clinton for the presidency of the United States.
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Donald Trump went out to debate Hillary Clinton at Hofstra University last night. He might have done his campaign better service had he fabricated some excuse to stay away.
Instead, The Donald crashed and burned. Or, to use what might be under these circumstances a more felicitous metaphor, Donald Trump’s debate performance last night was akin to George Pickett’s ill-fated charge against the Union lines on Cemetery Ridge at the battle of Gettysburg on July 3, 1863.
Pickett’s Charge, to give it its due capital letters, has been described as “the high water mark of the Confederacy.” And like all high water marks, the tide can do nothing but ebb after that. Though the Confederacy had nearly 2 years to live after Pickett’s Charge, those two years or nothing more than the ill-fated storm-born child’s death agonies.
Of course, when George Pickett’s troops stepped out across the three quarters of a mile that separated their lines from those of the Union forces whom Robert Lee could never bring himself to call “the enemy,” preferring instead the epithet “those people,” they stepped out in confidence, with their battle banners held time and their bands blaring “Dixie.”
Because the boys in butternut and gray just knew that they would carry all before them. Things went a little differently. They stepped out across those three quarters of a mile and they were slaughtered. When it was all over, and the rebel remnants had retreated back to the safety of Southern lines, there was very little left. In fact, Pickett’s division had been so badly chewed up that when Robert Lee asked after it, George Pickett told him, in tones of bitterness and anguish, “General Lee, I have no division.” George Pickett’s anguished words that day could have served as one of the many epitaphs for the storm-born Southern Confederacy.
Last night, Donald Trump stepped out to what he knew would be a great victory over Hillary Clinton. He expected to win, and to win bigly. He expected to charge across the stage and reduce the quondam Secretary of State to a blubbering mound of Jell-O. All the expectations were that he would do exactly that. The bar had been set so low that all Donald Trump had to do was appear and, for one brief glimmering moment, look presidential on stage. Because the bar was set correspondingly high for Hillary Clinton, it was felt that if Donald Trump did not make an utter fool of himself during the debate, it would be easy for his camp to spin his debate performance as a victory.
Yet, like Pickett’s division charging against the Union lines at Cemetery Ridge, Trump’s woeful lack of preparation proved his undoing. Despite the lowness of the bar and the general grade-on-a-curve mentality of the news media, The Donald was not even able to surmount the low bar. Though he started strong, by the 25th minute he was plainly out of energy, he was taking Hillary’s bait, and he was falling into the trap of imagining that the same kind of performance that enabled him to lay away his 16 Republican competitors in the primary will avail him against Hillary Clinton.
But Hillary Clinton is a far more skillful debater. She knew how to make The Donald look like the fool he is, and more importantly, she knew how to bait him and force him to make a fool of himself, to humiliate himself, on national television in front of millions of viewers. Add to that his inability to control his various physical tics (which lends credence to the speculation that Trump’s quack doctor has the man hooked on either cocaine or some type of amphetamine-based stimulant) made The Donald come across like an insincere simulacrum of Richard Nixon debating John F. Kennedy.
Either way, notwithstanding the efforts of conservatives to spin Trump’s performance as some kind of victory, most reasonable Americans have weighed his debate showing in the balance and found it absolutely wanting. Trump himself must have known by the end of the evening that he had turned in a subpar performance, that like Pickett’s division hurling itself against the Union lines on Cemetery Ridge, his effort had come up short. Trump, scorning preparation, failed to realize what amyone who has been in or near the American military understands: Proper Preparation and Practice Prevent Piss Poor Performance.
And indeed, Trump’s disappointment in his performance manifested itself in the usual Trumpian fashion. Since The Donald seems constitutionally unable to accept any kind of personal responsibility for his performance, let alone reflect on it, his immediate spin as he left the debate venue was to complain about the microphone (!), as if the microphone itself had been a Democratic operative deliberately embedded in the operation with specific instructions to make The Donald look bad.
Moreover, this morning, The Donald doubled down on his churlish remarks, repeating, for roughly the nth time, a whole series of boorish and sexist remarks about former Miss Universe Alicia Machado, whom Trump had referred to as “Miss Piggy,” and “Miss Housekeeper,” among other things, while body shaming what is to all accounts a beautiful and self-possessed woman with far more self-awareness than The Donald can ever hope to possess. In short, the Donald demonstrated and lived down to every negative stereotype that Southerners have about New York in general and the borough of Brooklyn in particular. He was rude, crude, and utterly misogynistic.
And if the kindest thing we can say about Donald Trump is that neither Robert Lee nor George Pickett would ever have spoken of, let alone addressed, a woman with such scorn and disrespect, then we are necessarily setting the bar very, very low. Hillary Clinton didn’t need to be particularly brilliant, all she needed to be was prepared. That she in fact was brilliant, that she, like Vladimir Putin, knows how to play The Donald like a Stradivarius, made her victory all the sweeter and more inevitable. Her epic throwing of shade in his direction, when he attempted to downplay the importance of preparation and she came back saying that she was “prepared to be President,” will go down in the history of presidential debates. It was a moment when the bully realized he was being beaten by a girl(!).
But if anything The Donald can do, Hillary can do better (by orders of magnitude) we must candidly acknowledge that there is a moral dimension to the selection unlike that of any election in this country since perhaps 1860.
Now Democrats are often chary of seeing in the fever swamps of politics any kind of moral dimension whatsoever. As Tony Blair so infamously put it, “we don’t do God.” Yet, even if we don’t do God, we can and very much must do morality.
Because voting for Hillary Clinton isn’t just a political choice. In this election, in which the future not only of democracy in America, but of democracy and of America itself is on the line, an election fraught with existential peril, voting for Hillary Clinton is what Immanuel Kant would have called categorical imperative.
As new facts have emerged about Donald Trump, coming forth in a steady drip-drip-drip of unsavoriness, we must take a look, even at the acknowledged risk of imperiling our souls, into what Friedrich Nietzsche called the abyss, and hope to God the abyss doesn’t stare back.
Because the abyss that is Donald Trump offers for us a whole series of what we might, in charity, call non-recommending issues.
Secretary Clinton touched on some of them last night.
Trump’s refusal to disclose his tax returns was compounded last night by his Freudian admission that he does not in fact pay taxes because he’s “smart.” Aside from being a very good way to lose the middle class, which does pay the taxes that Donald Trump and his fellow One Percenters are at pains to avoid and evade, it also makes another point: that Donald Trump doesn’t believe enough in America to support it with his taxes. And, as the Washington Post’s David Fahrenthold has uncovered, Trump may have engaged in the kind of systematic tax evasion and abuse that brought down Vice President Spiro Agnew in 1973. The slow, steady, drip-drip-drip of information about Trump’s taxes is revealing a profound unsavoriness in his character.
Trumps misogyny and sexism were also on full display last night as he attempted to play the alpha male against a woman who is his better in every conceivable respect. His abuse of Alicia Machado, on which we have already touched, on which he doubled down again this morning, along with his abuse of Rosie O’Donnell and the Sec. Clinton herself, displays a depth of moral depravity that no American should tolerate. Not in the board room, not in the bedroom, and certainly not in the White House.
The final bit of evidence of Trump’s moral unfitness comes of course in his expressions of disloyalty to the United States. The Donald’s whiny complaints about the cost of our astonishingly successful Atlantic alliance, and his pro-Russian policy positions, to say nothing of his bromance with the thuggish Vladimir Putin, who does what Trump would like to do, but can’t get away with in this country, namely assassinating journalists and critics of his regime, ought to lead any remotely patriotic American to turn away from The Donald in horror.
Because the Donald is in fact a special kind of horrible. Aside from being unprepared and imagining that he can wing it when all the other kids in the class went ahead and did their homework, The Donald’s positions, to the extent they extend any deeper than mindless, redeless platitudes, display an extent of disloyalty to this country not seen since Aaron Burr opposed Thomas Jefferson for the presidency. Indeed, the subsequent trajectory of Aaron Burr’s career, which included a planned filibustering expedition against Mexico, plans to create an empire in Louisiana, and finally, a treason trial, is worth contemplating because we can see similar delusions of grandeur in Donald Trump.
By contrast, Hillary Rodham Clinton is a known quantity. She’s not particularly charismatic, but she is methodical, she’s careful, she is a coalition-builder in that uniquely feminine way that has not been tried and found wanting, but instead has been found difficult and left untried, (pace, G.K. Chesterton), and she knows what it is to have been betrayed and to have taken the ultimate revenge of forgiving her betrayer. A woman who can do that is a kind of tough that Donald Trump can never hope to emulate.
So, for a thousand policy reasons, Hillary Clinton deserves the nod. But beyond that, Hillary Clinton is the only candidate for whom there is an unanswerable moral case to be made. We know the future of the American experiment in self-government is in grave jeopardy. Donald Trump claims that only he can save this country. But since Donald Trump is so wrapped up in lies, Nazi tactics, and skating much too close to Russia (against which Rudyard Kipling so famously warned against making any truce: “make ye no truce with Adam-zad, the Bear that walks like a man!”), we cannot run the risk of submitting to his ministrations.
There is absolutely no moral case to be made for electing Donald Trump so much as dogcatcher. The best place for Donald Trump is in Guantánamo, with the other enemies of the People.
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PAUL S MARCHAND is an attorney who lives and practices in Cathedral City, California, where he spent two terms on the city Council. He has been a supporter of Hillary Clinton since she announced for president, he despises Donald Trump, and he expects, should Trump be victorious, to share the fate of Anna Politovskaya and of Alexander Litvinenko, who were assassinated on direct orders from Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin because they dared speak ill of the thuggish regime in Russia.
Tuesday, September 27, 2016
Sunday, September 11, 2016
TOO CONVENIENT TO BE COINCIDENTAL: WAS HILLARY CLINTON'S INDISPOSITION AN ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT?
Summary: Hillary Rodham Clinton’s walking pneumonia, and the apparent brief spell of illness it occasioned at the 9/11 commemoration ceremonies in New York today has called forth the usual boorish behavior from Donald Trump and his allies. But perhaps Mr. Trump and his allies should be careful what they wish for. Secretary Clinton’s indisposition bears all the hallmarks of a Russian state-sponsored assassination attempt. She is as much a target of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin as Anna Politovskaya and Alexander Litvinenko were, and both Ms. Politovskaya and Mr. Litvinenko are now dead. The American counterintelligence apparat and the FBI need to investigate this matter closely. Was Secretary Clinton’s indisposition an act of the Russian state carried out to benefit Donald Trump?
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By: Ivan A. Lopakhin
Special to Cathedral City Observed
While attending the 9/11 commemorations in New York City today, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Rodham Clinton apparently suffered a mild case of heat exhaustion secondary to the walking pneumonia she was diagnosed as having last Friday. Was it a naturally occurring phenomenon, or was this something rather darker, perhaps an attempted assassination carried out by Russian operatives acting on behalf of Donald Trump?
Of course, we now find ourselves waiting for the inevitable, ineluctably boorish tweet from Donald Trump, along the lines of something like “crooked Hillary is dying on her feet” or something rather similar. Trump and his Trumpanzees have been assiduously promoting a conspiracy theory that Hillary Rodham Clinton is “too sick” to President, eagerly comparing her health to that of Donald Trump, about whose health we actually have nothing more than the quackish testimony of his gastroenterologist, himself a presumptive quack, contained in a letter dashed off in the space of five minutes while the good doctor was waiting for a limousine to take him to make a house call (!) on The Donald.
And of course, the revelations of late about The Donald’s health itself have been none too savory. Apparently, Trump takes an amphthetamine related stimulant that has verifiable, known, negative effects upon the nervous system and the higher cognitive brain functions. It may certainly go a long way toward explaining Trump’s apparent psychopathic behavior and his own weird fascination with and for Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. It may also go a long way toward explaining Trump’s bizarre embrace of some of the worst sectors of American society and equally toward explaining his uncritical embrace of conspiracy theorists of the Drudge/Alex Jones/Breitbart ilk.
We also cannot discount the very real possibility that Donald Trump’s campaign is receiving material support from Russian state actors, including the Russian intelligence services and the FSB. Indeed, Trump’s documented plea for assistance to Russian hackers to hack Secretary Clinton’s emails, and the extent to which WikiLeaks’ Clinton-hating criminal of a leader, Julian Assange, has been providing material aid and support to the Trump campaign, largely in the form of acting as a laundromat for emails hacked by Russian intelligence, supports an inference that Trump’s campaign is and always has been orchestrated, if not entirely, then certainly in substantial part, from the Moscow Kremlin. Certainly, Otechestvo (the Russian Fatherland) is watching.
And that leads us to another disturbing question that the FBI should look into rather closely: was Hillary’s sudden illness not a coincidence, but a planned event? In November, 2006, Russian defector Alexander Litvinenko was fatally poisoned in London by a Russian operative identified by HM Government as Andrey Lugovoy, a member of Russia's Federal Protective Service. After a number of years of investigations and inquiries by HM coroners and by Scotland Yard, HM government announced in January of this year that Litvinenko’s murder had been in operation of the FSB carried out at the personal direction of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin himself.
Given the willingness of Russian state actors to assassinate people on Vladimir Vladimirovich’s enemies list, including a number of Russian journalists, Anna Politovskaya among them, or try to run them out of Russia altogether, we may legitimately ask whether Secretary Clinton’s sudden illness was indeed a natural occurrence. Or was it something more sinister? We know how much Vladimir Vladimirovich wants to see Donald Trump in the White House. After all, a Trump presidency would represent the biggest Russian victory over the United States since the October Revolution of 1917. Trump having made it clear that he would betray NATO and America’s national security interests to the Kremlin, it is not surprising that the Kremlin would like to enable him to do just that.
In which case, if I were Secretary Clinton’s security staff, I should be conducting a careful investigation of the individuals with whom the secretary comes in contact. For the possibility that one or more Russian state actors may have deployed a biological or radiological weapon of some sort against Secretary Clinton cannot be discounted. It would be, given the openness of American society, relatively easy to introduce some such agent agent into the secretary’s food or drink.
The use of poison has always been an engine of Russian tradecraft, dating back to the days of Tsar Ivan the Terrible, who attributed to it the death of his tsarita, but who was also notorious for the use of poison as a weapon against his own political adversaries. Certainly, in more recent history, poison has played a role in certain convenient demises in Russia and the Soviet Union. It is rumored, for example, that the Emperors Peter III and Ivan VI were quietly poisoned to make way for more congenial female successors, including the empresses Catherine The Great and Elizabeth. It is also rumored that the Emperor Paul and his son, the Emperor Alexander I were also helped on their way by a judicious draft of something fatal.
In more recent history, rumors of poisoning have surrounded the deaths of Mikhail Frunze, Iosif Stalin, and even of Ilyich himself. In short, the use of poison has an extensive role in the history of both the Russian Empire and of the Soviet Union. Given the relative importance of poison as an engine of Russian/Soviet tradecraft and as a strategic weapon, it is not at all unreasonable to believe that Russian state actors may have been behind the illness that has befallen Hillary Rodham Clinton. Russia does not want Hillary Clinton to be president. They have indeed gone so far as to state that Hillary Rodham Clinton’s election to the presidency of the United States might constitute a casus belli, a justification for war. And if the Kremlin cannot get its way by terrifying American voters into voting for their preferred candidate, they may try to get what they desire by assassinating their way to that goal.
The FBI and the entire American counterintelligence apparat need to be working from the assumption that Hillary Clinton’s illness today must be assumed to be the result of a deliberate assassination attempt by Russian state actors until the contrary can be proven beyond reasonable doubt. We may be reaching a situation analogous to that which obtained in the state of Maryland during the year 1861, when secessionists and seditionists sought to take the state out of the union, but were forestalled by President Lincoln’s decision to suspend habeas corpus within the Old Line State. A wave of arrests followed hard upon Lincoln’s decision, and two years later, former governor and then-Senator Thomas Hicks defended the policy, saying: “I believe that arrests and arrests alone saved the State of Maryland not only from greater degradation than she suffered, but from everlasting destruction." He also said, "I approved them then, and I approve them now....”
We may be at a point in our history where “arrests and arrests alone” will save the United States. We are not living through a situation that is in any way analogous to the McCarthyite hysteria of the 1950s. During the 1950s, there was a wave of hysteria, of fear of “Reds under our beds.” Of course, as in all moral panics, the red panic of the 1950s was not without some initial factual justification. The treason of the so-called Cambridge Five, Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt, and the “Fifth Man” whose identity was speculated upon but never established, together with the treachery of Klaus Fuchs, who passed the West’s atomic bomb secrets to the Soviet Union, provided at least a partial factual predicate for the red scare of the 50s.
But today’s Kremlin scare is more frightening by orders of magnitude. The Soviets could never hope to achieve a hostile takeover of the United States government; Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin stands a very good chance of being able to mount just such a hostile takeover. The question therefor is do we wanted to become a compliant Russian satellite, or do we want to remain a free, if politically divided, country.
As long as Hillary Clinton remains alive, she stands in the way of Vladimir Vladinirovich’s desire to reduce America to the status of a Russian satellite. And if she is indeed in the way, then Hillary Clinton represents as much of a target as Anna Politovskaya or Alexander Litvinenko. There is a palpable threat to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s well-being, and the American counterintelligence community should be investigating the activities not only of the Trump campaign, but of the hidden Russian agents assisting it. And if the evidentiary trail leads back to Donald Trump, or to the senior leadership of his campaign, then truly arrests, and arrests alone, will save this country.
-xxx-
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Ivan A. Lopakhin was born 59 years ago in Leningrad, to an American mother and a Russian father. After his father’s death, Ivan accompanied his mother on her return to the United States. A confused Young Pioneer of 14 quickly acclimated himself to life as an immigrant in the United States, mastering the related arts of skateboarding and surfing. Ivan currently works as a “fixer,” helping businesses in the United States and Russia overcome the obstacles occasioned by the snits and quarrels of their respective governments. Though he remains Russian Orthodox, Ivan regularly takes the Sacrament according to the rite of the Episcopal Church.
-------------------------------------------
By: Ivan A. Lopakhin
Special to Cathedral City Observed
While attending the 9/11 commemorations in New York City today, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Rodham Clinton apparently suffered a mild case of heat exhaustion secondary to the walking pneumonia she was diagnosed as having last Friday. Was it a naturally occurring phenomenon, or was this something rather darker, perhaps an attempted assassination carried out by Russian operatives acting on behalf of Donald Trump?
Of course, we now find ourselves waiting for the inevitable, ineluctably boorish tweet from Donald Trump, along the lines of something like “crooked Hillary is dying on her feet” or something rather similar. Trump and his Trumpanzees have been assiduously promoting a conspiracy theory that Hillary Rodham Clinton is “too sick” to President, eagerly comparing her health to that of Donald Trump, about whose health we actually have nothing more than the quackish testimony of his gastroenterologist, himself a presumptive quack, contained in a letter dashed off in the space of five minutes while the good doctor was waiting for a limousine to take him to make a house call (!) on The Donald.
And of course, the revelations of late about The Donald’s health itself have been none too savory. Apparently, Trump takes an amphthetamine related stimulant that has verifiable, known, negative effects upon the nervous system and the higher cognitive brain functions. It may certainly go a long way toward explaining Trump’s apparent psychopathic behavior and his own weird fascination with and for Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. It may also go a long way toward explaining Trump’s bizarre embrace of some of the worst sectors of American society and equally toward explaining his uncritical embrace of conspiracy theorists of the Drudge/Alex Jones/Breitbart ilk.
We also cannot discount the very real possibility that Donald Trump’s campaign is receiving material support from Russian state actors, including the Russian intelligence services and the FSB. Indeed, Trump’s documented plea for assistance to Russian hackers to hack Secretary Clinton’s emails, and the extent to which WikiLeaks’ Clinton-hating criminal of a leader, Julian Assange, has been providing material aid and support to the Trump campaign, largely in the form of acting as a laundromat for emails hacked by Russian intelligence, supports an inference that Trump’s campaign is and always has been orchestrated, if not entirely, then certainly in substantial part, from the Moscow Kremlin. Certainly, Otechestvo (the Russian Fatherland) is watching.
And that leads us to another disturbing question that the FBI should look into rather closely: was Hillary’s sudden illness not a coincidence, but a planned event? In November, 2006, Russian defector Alexander Litvinenko was fatally poisoned in London by a Russian operative identified by HM Government as Andrey Lugovoy, a member of Russia's Federal Protective Service. After a number of years of investigations and inquiries by HM coroners and by Scotland Yard, HM government announced in January of this year that Litvinenko’s murder had been in operation of the FSB carried out at the personal direction of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin himself.
Given the willingness of Russian state actors to assassinate people on Vladimir Vladimirovich’s enemies list, including a number of Russian journalists, Anna Politovskaya among them, or try to run them out of Russia altogether, we may legitimately ask whether Secretary Clinton’s sudden illness was indeed a natural occurrence. Or was it something more sinister? We know how much Vladimir Vladimirovich wants to see Donald Trump in the White House. After all, a Trump presidency would represent the biggest Russian victory over the United States since the October Revolution of 1917. Trump having made it clear that he would betray NATO and America’s national security interests to the Kremlin, it is not surprising that the Kremlin would like to enable him to do just that.
In which case, if I were Secretary Clinton’s security staff, I should be conducting a careful investigation of the individuals with whom the secretary comes in contact. For the possibility that one or more Russian state actors may have deployed a biological or radiological weapon of some sort against Secretary Clinton cannot be discounted. It would be, given the openness of American society, relatively easy to introduce some such agent agent into the secretary’s food or drink.
The use of poison has always been an engine of Russian tradecraft, dating back to the days of Tsar Ivan the Terrible, who attributed to it the death of his tsarita, but who was also notorious for the use of poison as a weapon against his own political adversaries. Certainly, in more recent history, poison has played a role in certain convenient demises in Russia and the Soviet Union. It is rumored, for example, that the Emperors Peter III and Ivan VI were quietly poisoned to make way for more congenial female successors, including the empresses Catherine The Great and Elizabeth. It is also rumored that the Emperor Paul and his son, the Emperor Alexander I were also helped on their way by a judicious draft of something fatal.
In more recent history, rumors of poisoning have surrounded the deaths of Mikhail Frunze, Iosif Stalin, and even of Ilyich himself. In short, the use of poison has an extensive role in the history of both the Russian Empire and of the Soviet Union. Given the relative importance of poison as an engine of Russian/Soviet tradecraft and as a strategic weapon, it is not at all unreasonable to believe that Russian state actors may have been behind the illness that has befallen Hillary Rodham Clinton. Russia does not want Hillary Clinton to be president. They have indeed gone so far as to state that Hillary Rodham Clinton’s election to the presidency of the United States might constitute a casus belli, a justification for war. And if the Kremlin cannot get its way by terrifying American voters into voting for their preferred candidate, they may try to get what they desire by assassinating their way to that goal.
The FBI and the entire American counterintelligence apparat need to be working from the assumption that Hillary Clinton’s illness today must be assumed to be the result of a deliberate assassination attempt by Russian state actors until the contrary can be proven beyond reasonable doubt. We may be reaching a situation analogous to that which obtained in the state of Maryland during the year 1861, when secessionists and seditionists sought to take the state out of the union, but were forestalled by President Lincoln’s decision to suspend habeas corpus within the Old Line State. A wave of arrests followed hard upon Lincoln’s decision, and two years later, former governor and then-Senator Thomas Hicks defended the policy, saying: “I believe that arrests and arrests alone saved the State of Maryland not only from greater degradation than she suffered, but from everlasting destruction." He also said, "I approved them then, and I approve them now....”
We may be at a point in our history where “arrests and arrests alone” will save the United States. We are not living through a situation that is in any way analogous to the McCarthyite hysteria of the 1950s. During the 1950s, there was a wave of hysteria, of fear of “Reds under our beds.” Of course, as in all moral panics, the red panic of the 1950s was not without some initial factual justification. The treason of the so-called Cambridge Five, Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt, and the “Fifth Man” whose identity was speculated upon but never established, together with the treachery of Klaus Fuchs, who passed the West’s atomic bomb secrets to the Soviet Union, provided at least a partial factual predicate for the red scare of the 50s.
But today’s Kremlin scare is more frightening by orders of magnitude. The Soviets could never hope to achieve a hostile takeover of the United States government; Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin stands a very good chance of being able to mount just such a hostile takeover. The question therefor is do we wanted to become a compliant Russian satellite, or do we want to remain a free, if politically divided, country.
As long as Hillary Clinton remains alive, she stands in the way of Vladimir Vladinirovich’s desire to reduce America to the status of a Russian satellite. And if she is indeed in the way, then Hillary Clinton represents as much of a target as Anna Politovskaya or Alexander Litvinenko. There is a palpable threat to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s well-being, and the American counterintelligence community should be investigating the activities not only of the Trump campaign, but of the hidden Russian agents assisting it. And if the evidentiary trail leads back to Donald Trump, or to the senior leadership of his campaign, then truly arrests, and arrests alone, will save this country.
-xxx-
--------------------------
Ivan A. Lopakhin was born 59 years ago in Leningrad, to an American mother and a Russian father. After his father’s death, Ivan accompanied his mother on her return to the United States. A confused Young Pioneer of 14 quickly acclimated himself to life as an immigrant in the United States, mastering the related arts of skateboarding and surfing. Ivan currently works as a “fixer,” helping businesses in the United States and Russia overcome the obstacles occasioned by the snits and quarrels of their respective governments. Though he remains Russian Orthodox, Ivan regularly takes the Sacrament according to the rite of the Episcopal Church.
Friday, September 9, 2016
LITTLE SNAPPERS: GUN CONTROL IN PALM SPRINGS AND A CHARTER FOR CATHEDRAL CITY
Summary: Palm Springs adopted a gun control ordinance Wednesday night that speaks less to solving a real problem than it does to having the city go on record that it Deplores What Happened at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando. The new Palm Springs gun-control ordinance, which is now awaiting second reading, is a classic example of legislation by anecdote, designed not so much to solve a real problem as much as it is to Make a Statement. Yet all the ordinance does is to balkanize the law in the state with 542 County and city jurisdictions. We need one uniform statewide set of gun safety legislation California, one uniform statewide set of gun safety legislation that does not unduly burden the exercise of constitutionally protected Second Amendment freedoms. The legislature should set to work at once on a package that will occupy the entire field of gun safety legislation, preempting local cities and counties. Unchecked, unsafe gun use is a social evil. It will not be addressed by bien pensant city councils looking to pick fights with the NRA.
To the east, in Cathedral City, the usual kitty litter box full of brain-dead Trump Tea Partisans and dead and Kathleen DeRosa loyalists is gearing up to oppose Cathedral City’s proposed charter, which is on the ballot for voter approval this November. Residents should not be swayed by either the Tea Partisans or the dead-end DeRosa loyalists. A city charter is long overdue, and while this one has some flaws which will need fixing, it’s a good start.
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It’s virtually a truism in the legal profession that “hard cases make bad law.” That’s especially the case where a legislative body decides to make law by anecdote, proposing legislation in response to some dreadful event on the other side of the country or of the world.
That’s especially the case with any sort of gun safety/gun control legislation. The city of Palm Springs finds itself succumbing to the temptation to go down the rabbit hole of legislating by anecdote, bringing forward a slate of proposed ordinances restricting the manner in which guns are kept, largely in response to the horrific mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida.
The legislation, somewhat like that which was challenged in District of Columbia v. Heller and McDonald v. City of Chicago, is intended to impose a significant restrictions upon the ownership and possession of any form of firearm in the City of Palm Springs. The proposed ordinance would require 1) that a lost or stolen gun be reported to the authorities within 48 hours, with the potential $1000/day fine for failure to report; 2) that anyone storing guns or ammunition in their car will be required to obtain and have an effect a concealed carry permit, and 3) that guns stored in a residence would have to have a trigger lock or be kept in what amounts to a gun safe.
Naturally, the NRA has promised to initiate litigation fairly quickly against the city of Palm Springs if this ordinance passes, which it is expected to do unanimously at tonight’s counsel meeting. And of course, it’s easy to love the NRA. Their leadership shows all the signs of diagnosable psychopathy, and their reflexive opposition to any sort of gun safety measure at all represents not only the worst possible optics, but also an extended middle finger to an American public that is rightfully shocked by the extent of mass gun violence in this country.
Certainly, right thinking Americans were appalled by the mass shootings at Sandy Hook and repelled by the mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando. Indeed, what happened at Pulse comes across to the metaphorical queer nation as a singular and disturbing event, without parallel since the June, 1973 arson fire at the UpStairs Lounge in New Orleans’ French Quarter that claimed the lives of 32 patrons and severely injured 15 others. The mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub brought back all those memories, and shocked a generation of queerfolk that had begun to exhale, as it were, following the Supreme Court’s historic decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, which had extended the right to marry to queerfolk nationwide.
Not surprisingly, a call went out that “something must be done,” “there oughtta be a law,” something “must change.” Predictably, states such as California, New York, and New Jersey all rushed to propose largely symbolic, “feel good” legislation by anecdote intended to convey official Legislative Disapproval of What Had Happened, and to make sure that the legislatures of the states in question were firmly on record Against It Happening Again. Unfortunately, no one bothered to perform due diligence to make sure this was not a solution in search of a largely nonexistent problem. In all three states, legislators eagerly went down the rabbit hole, and in Palm Springs, the city Council has eagerly followed them there.
After such a lengthy prolegomenon, I have little choice but to agree, with great unwillingness and with weeping and gnashing of teeth, that in this case, the NRA is telling us some truths we need to attend on. The NRA itself is the worst possible messenger for a call to restraint; its unrestrained conspiracy theories and its unabashed embrace of Donald Trump make it absolutely the worst possible messenger for such a message of legislative restraint. Nonetheless, we should sit back, take a metaphorical deep breath, and ask ourselves just exactly what Palm Springs proposes to accomplish with its ordinance, knowing as we do that it is but one of 10 CVAG cities, and that it may find itself very much alone on this issue.
The first problem with the Palm Springs ordinance is that it flies in the face of both McDonald and Heller, which established that the Second Amendment is one of those preferred rights that is enforceable against the states through the 14th Amendment. Thus, a state or municipality which adopts ordinances that are intended to make the ownership of firearms difficult if not impossible does so at the acknowledged risk of falling afoul of the Supreme Court’s teaching in McDonald and Heller. When a preferred freedom in the Bill of Rights is implicated, a legislature must demonstrate not only that there is a compelling government interest that the legislation in question seeks to vindicate, but that there is in fact no less compelling means to vindicate it, that there are no less drastic means to vindicate the restriction at issue, and that the legislation is narrowly tailored to accomplish the compelling governmental interest.
In this case, the ordinance appears to be nothing more than another case of what may be described on charitably as nanny state legislation by anecdote. Palm Springs been remarkably free of the kind of gun violence that the proposed ordinance is ostensibly intended to address. In short, the proposed ordinance is less about solving an actual municipal problem than it is about making a statement that the city of Palm Springs, that Progressive Citadel in Riverside County, Officially Deplores What Happened at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando and Desires to Go on Record That It Disapproves of Such Violence and Intends to Stamp It out by Any Means Necessary. In short, it’s less about solving an actual problem that it is about making a normative statement.
Worse, there are 484 incorporated cities in California, together with 58 counties. That produces a figure of 542 separate jurisdictions all of which might be tempted to pass their own “gun control” legislation, turning the state into a patchwork of gun legislation, and leading California residents to surmise as to what the statutory schema will be respect to firearms if they drive 10 blocks down the street and into a neighboring jurisdiction. This kind of patchwork approach does violence to the certainties the law is intended to promote.
Rather than having 542 separate bodies of legislation concerning firearms, the state needs to take a firm hand on the situation. Let the legislature do its duty and develop a comprehensive, uniform body of preemptive state legislation that will occupy the field in this area to the entire exclusion of counties and cities, including Palm Springs. No California County or city should be in the business of passing any form of gun control or gun safety legislation. That is emphatically the province of the Legislature, and the Legislature needs to get off its duff, perform some due diligence, and at the very least, send a clear message to cities and counties that firearms legislation is not for cities or counties.
The city of Palm Springs should have done the right thing and either stayed this ordinance pending further action by the Legislature, or it should have rejected the ordinance altogether, which would also have had the effect of throwing it back into Sacramento’s bailiwick. At all events, Palm Springs should not have allowed itself to become another Morton Grove, Illinois or another Chicago, or another Washington City, where attempts to ban the possession of handguns fell afoul of the Second Amendment. What Palm Springs has adopted is arguably beyond its powers even as a charter city, what the legal profession might describe as ultra vires. After all, there is a right way and a wrong way to do things.
Unfortunately, Palm Springs has opted to go about things the wrong way. There is no doubt that the Council majority was as much motivated by a desire to “fling down the gauntlet” to the NRA as by any legitimate desire to address a problem whose existence had been vouchsafed by an empirical data set. Sad to have to say it, in this case, the NRA, as loathsome and objectionable as they are, may very well possess the constitutional high ground. And that is a concept that, as George Orwell put it in “Politics and the English Language,” frightens me worse than bombs. Nonetheless, if it takes the NRA suing the city of Palm Springs on the authority of Heller and McDonald, then so be it.
What we may hope, therefore, is that the legislature takes up a package of common sense, non-burdensome, Second Amendment-compliant preemption legislation in the next session. We don’t need, and can’t afford, 542 conflicting sets of compliance mandates. I should not be in danger, should I relocate 10 blocks from Cathedral city into Palm Springs, of becoming a gun criminal because my method of storing my weaponry doesn’t meet with the approval of the bien pensant city fathers of Palm Springs.
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While Palm Springs is busy going down a rabbit hole of unnecessary and foolish legislation by anecdote, Cathedral City is in the process of something rather more consequential. After more than 30 years as a so-called General Law City, Cathedral City has before at this November an opportunity to adopt an autonomous city charter.
A city charter in Cathedral City will give the municipality a far greater degree of autonomy than it currently enjoys under general California municipal corporation law. It will enable us to make important commitments to workers, enshrine our living wage and nondiscrimination policies in a way that protects them from legislative forays, and it will provide for rotating mayoralty. Indeed, a rotating mayoralty is one of the significant selling points of the charter. By rotating the mayoralty annually among councilmembers, no single mayor has the opportunity that Kathleen Joan DeRosa had to do the damage she did to Cathedral City during the 10 long winters that she was the elected mayor.
Indeed, having had to serve alongside Kathleen DeRosa for six of the 10 years that she was mayor, I can testify in detail to the significant damage and stagnation that occurred on her Leonid Brezhnev-like watch. Had DeRosa been limited to single nonconsecutive annual terms, her ability to do damage and her ability to stand in the way of needful projects might have been inhibited.
We might have a union destination resort in downtown Cathedral City, rather than acre upon acre of barren, empty, caliche lots where a thriving downtown used to be.
We might have a vibrant, world-class, showpiece renewable energy economy, but for the fact that DeRosa was a paid employee of Southern California Edison with a built-in conflict of interest.
We might even have an In-n-out Burger on East Palm Canyon Drive, to which locals could repair to enjoy animal style hamburgers without having to drive all over the Coachella Valley to satisfy their jones for one of California’s legendary burgers.
But DeRosa stood in the way of all of this.
We don’t have a resort because DeRosa put the interests of Palm Desert ahead of those of Cathedral City and did her best to squash it.
Edison’s interests, not those of Cathedral City, prevented our renewable energy economy from getting off the ground,
And we’re still jonesing for animal style burgers because DeRosa, quite simply, was a snob who didn’t want and In-N-Out Burger in downtown Cathedral city.
In short, Kathleen Joan DeRosa epitomized and personified all the arguments against a separately elected mayor and in favor of a rotating mayoralty in which the incumbent doesn’t have enough time to do significant damage.
Unfortunately, there are still dead-end DeRosa loyalists who pine for the do-nothing days of municipal stagnation on her watch. Many of them are Tea Partisan supporters of the Kremlin’s own candidate, the unspeakable Donald Trump. It is been this kitty litter box of brain-dead ultraconservatives who believe that government doesn’t work, and then they get elected and prove it, that has been leading the charge against the charter. Spearheaded by one Randy Winbigler, whose right-wing utterances in the letter to the editor page of our local Gannett publication (which is on track, predictably, to engage in the most unbelievable mental gymnastics imaginable to justify an endorsement of Donald Trump this November) make it reasonable to believe that the opposition to the charter is partisan, it is pernicious, and it is downright dangerous to the body politic in Cathedral City.
Add to that the opposition of city Council wannabe Sergio Espercueta, and it’s not hard to see where the opposition to the charter comes from. Espericueta himself, probably one of the least qualified, least knowledgeable, and least prepared Council candidates in the city’s recent history, has made opposition to the charter a centerpiece of his campaign. In doing so, he is certainly lost my vote, and, I expect, the vote of many other charter supporters throughout Cathedral City.
Cathedral City has been bedeviled throughout its history by a legion of naysayers, Winbigler and Espericueta among them, who have opposed everything that might have moved the city forward, enhanced its economy, or improved its quality of life.
These people can all be defined by the convenient acronym COVE: Citizens Opposed to Virtually Everything.
In 1999, they opposed measure J, the reauthorization of the city’s municipal services district, a move which forced the city to discontinue watering its parks for a time.
They opposed every revenue measure intended to make up the $3m shortfall caused by the demise of the municipal services district.
They opposed needful revenue measures to provide adequate funding for police and fire services.
They opposed efforts to kickstart our renewable energy economy.
They opposed (unsuccessfully) assessment districts in the Cathedral City Cove and in the Dream Homes to enable those neighborhoods to receive sewers and sewer hookups.
In short, the Citizens Opposed to Virtually Everything have much to answer for, and they had a friend in City Hall when Kathleen Joan DeRosa was mayor.
Fortunately, DeRosa is gone, but the COVE people still linger on, waiting to come out of the woodwork to bedevil us again.
They’ll tell you that government doesn’t work, then they’ll elect one of their own and prove it. We cannot afford to have such people at the head of our affairs. It will take the current Mayor and Council at least ten years to undo the damage and the stagnation that occurred on DeRosa’s watch. The charter, which DeRosa always opposed, is a good first step toward ridding Cathedral City of the blight her 10 winters in office engendered.
I am voting “YES” on measure HH, and I urge my fellow Cathedral City residents to do likewise.
Paul S. Marchand, Esq., is an attorney who lives and practices in Cathedral City, which has been his home for more than two decades. Between 2002 and 2010, he was a member of the city Council. Between 2001 and 2014, he served non-continuous terms on the Riverside County and California state Democratic central committees. The views set forth herein are his own, and should not be construed as legal advice. He's voting for Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine because he's sane. Comments will be strictly moderated. Trump supporters and DeRosa loyalists, don't expect to see your comments here.
To the east, in Cathedral City, the usual kitty litter box full of brain-dead Trump Tea Partisans and dead and Kathleen DeRosa loyalists is gearing up to oppose Cathedral City’s proposed charter, which is on the ballot for voter approval this November. Residents should not be swayed by either the Tea Partisans or the dead-end DeRosa loyalists. A city charter is long overdue, and while this one has some flaws which will need fixing, it’s a good start.
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It’s virtually a truism in the legal profession that “hard cases make bad law.” That’s especially the case where a legislative body decides to make law by anecdote, proposing legislation in response to some dreadful event on the other side of the country or of the world.
That’s especially the case with any sort of gun safety/gun control legislation. The city of Palm Springs finds itself succumbing to the temptation to go down the rabbit hole of legislating by anecdote, bringing forward a slate of proposed ordinances restricting the manner in which guns are kept, largely in response to the horrific mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida.
The legislation, somewhat like that which was challenged in District of Columbia v. Heller and McDonald v. City of Chicago, is intended to impose a significant restrictions upon the ownership and possession of any form of firearm in the City of Palm Springs. The proposed ordinance would require 1) that a lost or stolen gun be reported to the authorities within 48 hours, with the potential $1000/day fine for failure to report; 2) that anyone storing guns or ammunition in their car will be required to obtain and have an effect a concealed carry permit, and 3) that guns stored in a residence would have to have a trigger lock or be kept in what amounts to a gun safe.
Naturally, the NRA has promised to initiate litigation fairly quickly against the city of Palm Springs if this ordinance passes, which it is expected to do unanimously at tonight’s counsel meeting. And of course, it’s easy to love the NRA. Their leadership shows all the signs of diagnosable psychopathy, and their reflexive opposition to any sort of gun safety measure at all represents not only the worst possible optics, but also an extended middle finger to an American public that is rightfully shocked by the extent of mass gun violence in this country.
Certainly, right thinking Americans were appalled by the mass shootings at Sandy Hook and repelled by the mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando. Indeed, what happened at Pulse comes across to the metaphorical queer nation as a singular and disturbing event, without parallel since the June, 1973 arson fire at the UpStairs Lounge in New Orleans’ French Quarter that claimed the lives of 32 patrons and severely injured 15 others. The mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub brought back all those memories, and shocked a generation of queerfolk that had begun to exhale, as it were, following the Supreme Court’s historic decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, which had extended the right to marry to queerfolk nationwide.
Not surprisingly, a call went out that “something must be done,” “there oughtta be a law,” something “must change.” Predictably, states such as California, New York, and New Jersey all rushed to propose largely symbolic, “feel good” legislation by anecdote intended to convey official Legislative Disapproval of What Had Happened, and to make sure that the legislatures of the states in question were firmly on record Against It Happening Again. Unfortunately, no one bothered to perform due diligence to make sure this was not a solution in search of a largely nonexistent problem. In all three states, legislators eagerly went down the rabbit hole, and in Palm Springs, the city Council has eagerly followed them there.
After such a lengthy prolegomenon, I have little choice but to agree, with great unwillingness and with weeping and gnashing of teeth, that in this case, the NRA is telling us some truths we need to attend on. The NRA itself is the worst possible messenger for a call to restraint; its unrestrained conspiracy theories and its unabashed embrace of Donald Trump make it absolutely the worst possible messenger for such a message of legislative restraint. Nonetheless, we should sit back, take a metaphorical deep breath, and ask ourselves just exactly what Palm Springs proposes to accomplish with its ordinance, knowing as we do that it is but one of 10 CVAG cities, and that it may find itself very much alone on this issue.
The first problem with the Palm Springs ordinance is that it flies in the face of both McDonald and Heller, which established that the Second Amendment is one of those preferred rights that is enforceable against the states through the 14th Amendment. Thus, a state or municipality which adopts ordinances that are intended to make the ownership of firearms difficult if not impossible does so at the acknowledged risk of falling afoul of the Supreme Court’s teaching in McDonald and Heller. When a preferred freedom in the Bill of Rights is implicated, a legislature must demonstrate not only that there is a compelling government interest that the legislation in question seeks to vindicate, but that there is in fact no less compelling means to vindicate it, that there are no less drastic means to vindicate the restriction at issue, and that the legislation is narrowly tailored to accomplish the compelling governmental interest.
In this case, the ordinance appears to be nothing more than another case of what may be described on charitably as nanny state legislation by anecdote. Palm Springs been remarkably free of the kind of gun violence that the proposed ordinance is ostensibly intended to address. In short, the proposed ordinance is less about solving an actual municipal problem than it is about making a statement that the city of Palm Springs, that Progressive Citadel in Riverside County, Officially Deplores What Happened at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando and Desires to Go on Record That It Disapproves of Such Violence and Intends to Stamp It out by Any Means Necessary. In short, it’s less about solving an actual problem that it is about making a normative statement.
Worse, there are 484 incorporated cities in California, together with 58 counties. That produces a figure of 542 separate jurisdictions all of which might be tempted to pass their own “gun control” legislation, turning the state into a patchwork of gun legislation, and leading California residents to surmise as to what the statutory schema will be respect to firearms if they drive 10 blocks down the street and into a neighboring jurisdiction. This kind of patchwork approach does violence to the certainties the law is intended to promote.
Rather than having 542 separate bodies of legislation concerning firearms, the state needs to take a firm hand on the situation. Let the legislature do its duty and develop a comprehensive, uniform body of preemptive state legislation that will occupy the field in this area to the entire exclusion of counties and cities, including Palm Springs. No California County or city should be in the business of passing any form of gun control or gun safety legislation. That is emphatically the province of the Legislature, and the Legislature needs to get off its duff, perform some due diligence, and at the very least, send a clear message to cities and counties that firearms legislation is not for cities or counties.
The city of Palm Springs should have done the right thing and either stayed this ordinance pending further action by the Legislature, or it should have rejected the ordinance altogether, which would also have had the effect of throwing it back into Sacramento’s bailiwick. At all events, Palm Springs should not have allowed itself to become another Morton Grove, Illinois or another Chicago, or another Washington City, where attempts to ban the possession of handguns fell afoul of the Second Amendment. What Palm Springs has adopted is arguably beyond its powers even as a charter city, what the legal profession might describe as ultra vires. After all, there is a right way and a wrong way to do things.
Unfortunately, Palm Springs has opted to go about things the wrong way. There is no doubt that the Council majority was as much motivated by a desire to “fling down the gauntlet” to the NRA as by any legitimate desire to address a problem whose existence had been vouchsafed by an empirical data set. Sad to have to say it, in this case, the NRA, as loathsome and objectionable as they are, may very well possess the constitutional high ground. And that is a concept that, as George Orwell put it in “Politics and the English Language,” frightens me worse than bombs. Nonetheless, if it takes the NRA suing the city of Palm Springs on the authority of Heller and McDonald, then so be it.
What we may hope, therefore, is that the legislature takes up a package of common sense, non-burdensome, Second Amendment-compliant preemption legislation in the next session. We don’t need, and can’t afford, 542 conflicting sets of compliance mandates. I should not be in danger, should I relocate 10 blocks from Cathedral city into Palm Springs, of becoming a gun criminal because my method of storing my weaponry doesn’t meet with the approval of the bien pensant city fathers of Palm Springs.
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While Palm Springs is busy going down a rabbit hole of unnecessary and foolish legislation by anecdote, Cathedral City is in the process of something rather more consequential. After more than 30 years as a so-called General Law City, Cathedral City has before at this November an opportunity to adopt an autonomous city charter.
A city charter in Cathedral City will give the municipality a far greater degree of autonomy than it currently enjoys under general California municipal corporation law. It will enable us to make important commitments to workers, enshrine our living wage and nondiscrimination policies in a way that protects them from legislative forays, and it will provide for rotating mayoralty. Indeed, a rotating mayoralty is one of the significant selling points of the charter. By rotating the mayoralty annually among councilmembers, no single mayor has the opportunity that Kathleen Joan DeRosa had to do the damage she did to Cathedral City during the 10 long winters that she was the elected mayor.
Indeed, having had to serve alongside Kathleen DeRosa for six of the 10 years that she was mayor, I can testify in detail to the significant damage and stagnation that occurred on her Leonid Brezhnev-like watch. Had DeRosa been limited to single nonconsecutive annual terms, her ability to do damage and her ability to stand in the way of needful projects might have been inhibited.
We might have a union destination resort in downtown Cathedral City, rather than acre upon acre of barren, empty, caliche lots where a thriving downtown used to be.
We might have a vibrant, world-class, showpiece renewable energy economy, but for the fact that DeRosa was a paid employee of Southern California Edison with a built-in conflict of interest.
We might even have an In-n-out Burger on East Palm Canyon Drive, to which locals could repair to enjoy animal style hamburgers without having to drive all over the Coachella Valley to satisfy their jones for one of California’s legendary burgers.
But DeRosa stood in the way of all of this.
We don’t have a resort because DeRosa put the interests of Palm Desert ahead of those of Cathedral City and did her best to squash it.
Edison’s interests, not those of Cathedral City, prevented our renewable energy economy from getting off the ground,
And we’re still jonesing for animal style burgers because DeRosa, quite simply, was a snob who didn’t want and In-N-Out Burger in downtown Cathedral city.
In short, Kathleen Joan DeRosa epitomized and personified all the arguments against a separately elected mayor and in favor of a rotating mayoralty in which the incumbent doesn’t have enough time to do significant damage.
Unfortunately, there are still dead-end DeRosa loyalists who pine for the do-nothing days of municipal stagnation on her watch. Many of them are Tea Partisan supporters of the Kremlin’s own candidate, the unspeakable Donald Trump. It is been this kitty litter box of brain-dead ultraconservatives who believe that government doesn’t work, and then they get elected and prove it, that has been leading the charge against the charter. Spearheaded by one Randy Winbigler, whose right-wing utterances in the letter to the editor page of our local Gannett publication (which is on track, predictably, to engage in the most unbelievable mental gymnastics imaginable to justify an endorsement of Donald Trump this November) make it reasonable to believe that the opposition to the charter is partisan, it is pernicious, and it is downright dangerous to the body politic in Cathedral City.
Add to that the opposition of city Council wannabe Sergio Espercueta, and it’s not hard to see where the opposition to the charter comes from. Espericueta himself, probably one of the least qualified, least knowledgeable, and least prepared Council candidates in the city’s recent history, has made opposition to the charter a centerpiece of his campaign. In doing so, he is certainly lost my vote, and, I expect, the vote of many other charter supporters throughout Cathedral City.
Cathedral City has been bedeviled throughout its history by a legion of naysayers, Winbigler and Espericueta among them, who have opposed everything that might have moved the city forward, enhanced its economy, or improved its quality of life.
These people can all be defined by the convenient acronym COVE: Citizens Opposed to Virtually Everything.
In 1999, they opposed measure J, the reauthorization of the city’s municipal services district, a move which forced the city to discontinue watering its parks for a time.
They opposed every revenue measure intended to make up the $3m shortfall caused by the demise of the municipal services district.
They opposed needful revenue measures to provide adequate funding for police and fire services.
They opposed efforts to kickstart our renewable energy economy.
They opposed (unsuccessfully) assessment districts in the Cathedral City Cove and in the Dream Homes to enable those neighborhoods to receive sewers and sewer hookups.
In short, the Citizens Opposed to Virtually Everything have much to answer for, and they had a friend in City Hall when Kathleen Joan DeRosa was mayor.
Fortunately, DeRosa is gone, but the COVE people still linger on, waiting to come out of the woodwork to bedevil us again.
They’ll tell you that government doesn’t work, then they’ll elect one of their own and prove it. We cannot afford to have such people at the head of our affairs. It will take the current Mayor and Council at least ten years to undo the damage and the stagnation that occurred on DeRosa’s watch. The charter, which DeRosa always opposed, is a good first step toward ridding Cathedral City of the blight her 10 winters in office engendered.
I am voting “YES” on measure HH, and I urge my fellow Cathedral City residents to do likewise.
Paul S. Marchand, Esq., is an attorney who lives and practices in Cathedral City, which has been his home for more than two decades. Between 2002 and 2010, he was a member of the city Council. Between 2001 and 2014, he served non-continuous terms on the Riverside County and California state Democratic central committees. The views set forth herein are his own, and should not be construed as legal advice. He's voting for Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine because he's sane. Comments will be strictly moderated. Trump supporters and DeRosa loyalists, don't expect to see your comments here.
Wednesday, August 10, 2016
CAN WE PLEASE BE RID OF DONALD AND JILL
Summary: Despite all of the hyperventilating from Donald Trump and Jill Stein and from their supporters, the evidence is beginning to mount that it is not Hillary Clinton who has been engaged in criminal activity in this election cycle. We all like to think that all politicians are crooks, but in 2016, it appears more likely than not that both Donald Trump and Jill Stein has skated uncomfortably close to the edge of criminality. Voters may come to realize that Hillary Clinton is in fact the only serious, noncriminal, choice for President of the United States. The Donald can’t seem to unclench his foot from his mouth, and his coziness with enemies national raises severe questions about his basic loyalty to the United States. Jill Stein suffers from much the same ailment; she should not have gone to Moscow and she certainly, while there, should not have engaged in a lengthy criticism of her own country which had the effect of giving aid and comfort to our enemies.
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What is happening in our politics the summer is extraordinary and unprecedented. Two of the four candidates running for president have skated so close to the edge of criminality as to disqualify themselves from serious consideration. Jill Stein has managed to make a pro-Russian fool of herself by criticizing the United States on the soil of an enemy of the state, and thus rule herself completely out of the running. Donald Trump has managed, with one ill considered twenty second soundbite, to add incitement to murder to treason to his list of factors that disqualify him from any office of trust or profit under the United States or any of them. Both Trump and Stein have managed to make their causes criminal or quasi criminal enterprises, in which no American should be complicit.
For years, one of the fondest tropes of American political discourse has been to criminalize the opposition: to paint one’s political opponents in the darkest possible terms and to suggest that they are criminals, and that their supporters are complicit in their criminality.
Certainly, both the right and the far left have sought diligently to frame Hillary Rodham Clinton as “the notoriousest traitor that was ever seen.” Partisans of Donald Trump and Jill Stein/Bernie Sanders had tried to tar the Democratic nominee with just about every crime conceivable, from treason right down to expired dog license. Yet curiously, despite their fondest hopes that this or that scandal might sprout legs, Hillary Clinton, like Ronald Reagan and, curiously enough, Donald Trump, has remained standing.
Despite numerous investigations of the so-called Benghazi scandal, as well as hyperventilating nonsense over the so-called email scandal, much of it ginned up by Donald Trump or by Jill Stein/Bernard Sanders supporters, all the so-called Clinton scandals have proven, in the jargon of the environmental movement, unsustainable.
And so the irony of this election season is not that the American public has been shown proof that Secretary Clinton is in fact “crooked Hillary,” but that her opponents Donald Trump and Jill Stein have in fact skated much closer to criminality then has the quondam Secretary of State. This may be the first election in American history since the Jefferson/Burr contest of 1800 in which credible criminal charges can be brought against failed presidential candidates, not only against Donald Trump but also against Jill Stein as well.
We’ve all seen how, in recent weeks and months, Donald Trump’s disturbingly cozy relationship with Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin has caused many Americans to entertain growing doubts about Mr. Trump’s loyalty to this country and his apparent willingness to sell this country’s interest to the highest, Russian, bidder. His expressed willingness to abandon the Baltic states to the tender mercies of Vladimir Vladimirovich’s military, and his equally expressed willingness to recognize Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea are just two indicators that Donald Trump is not to be trusted with America’s national security.
But a lot of Americans weren’t prepared to connect the dots. Right-wing Americans weren’t willing to see the possibility of any wrong in their chosen candidate, while the American left, perennially ready to self-sabotage at the drop of a hat engaged in its usual pious enterprise of hand-wringing denunciations of “McCarthyism.” rather than denounce Trump, too many on the American left chose instead to denounce those patriotic Americans who were themselves daring to tell the truth about Donald Trump. Worse still, many on the American left contrived to bootstrap their dislike of Hillary Clinton into a reflexive unwillingness to criticize Trump, on the rather absurd theory that to do so was to make oneself “complicit” in McCarthyism.
But in the last 48 hours, the defecation has hit the ventilation. In a speech to a rally of his supporters, Donald Trump utter these words: "Hillary wants to abolish -- essentially abolish the Second Amendment. By the way, if she gets to pick, if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don't know,” by which he plainly urged his more unhinged supporters to commit acts of violence against Secretary Clinton or against President Clinton should she be elected. It didn’t take long for the shit to hit the fan bigly, as Trump himself might put it.
Trump and Stein have managed this extraordinary achievement in self-criminalization all by themselves. Jill Stein went to Moscow, opened her mouth at a Kremlin dinner, and badmouthed her country — the country she wants to lead— in the presence of an enemy of the United States, and she didn’t seem to have the first degree of care or concern for how her remarks might be received here in the homeland. Donald Trump has been available himself assiduously of the resources made available to him by the Russian military and intelligence apparat at the behest of his good friend Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, and laundered through WikiLeaks, which a mounting preponderance of evidence demonstrates is, in effect, an unofficial organ of the Russian government.
When the evidence reaches critical mass and offers probable cause to believe that two of our four candidates for president are agents, either witting or unwitting, of Russia, that puts their supporters in a potentially untenable position. The position is untenable because if either Donald Trump or Jill Stein are traitors, their supporters are traitors, too. At common law, there are no distinctions of accessory liability when the crime involved is treason; every person connected with an actual treason or with a treasonable conspiracy is liable as a principal. This means, in theory, that any vocal supporter of Donald Trump or of Jill Stein could be indicted with Donald Trump or Jill Stein for treason.
Let that settle in for a moment.
If not only Trump and Stein, but also any of their vocal supporters, is a principal in treason, then the door is open for a terrifying recrudescence of the Palmer raids, HUAC, state legislative un-American activities committees, and a rebirth of McCarthyism in its fullest form, albeit with considerably greater justification.
If we are to save the Republic, however, from devouring itself in endless witchhunts, we must take some steps fairly quickly. Both Donald Trump and Jill Stein must discontinue their campaigns immediately, as the New York Daily News and other mainstream media publications have urged. Donald Trump should be indicted at once on a charge of seditious conspiracy. It should not be hard to do. Let a federal grand jury be impaneled in the Eastern District of Virginia (the historic go-to court for high-profile national security cases) and let a team of highly competent prosecutors present the case against him to the grand jury. If, as sometime New York Chief Judge Sol Wachtler once put it, “a good prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich,” that team of highly competent, high-powered federal prosecutors should have no difficulty securing a true bill against a cheeto-faced, ferret-wearing shitgibbon.
Of course, indicting Donald Trump or Jill Stein is an extreme step, more worthy of a banana republic than of a great power. It should not be undertaken unless the weight of evidence is so clear that no reasonable prosecutor would not present a similar case if it involved a private citizen and not a presidential nominee. The development of the evidence must be conducted with excruciating care, and every inference that can be drawn must be drawn favorably to the accused and against the government. But if the evidence supports the growing consensus among the legal community that Donald Trump has, in fact, committed one or more crimes, he should, so to speak, be put to an election: he can plead guilty to a single low-level felony such as making a false or misleading statement to a federal investigator, and agree to discontinue his campaign at once, and never seek any public office, anywhere, ever again. Or he can face the full wrath and the full resources of a United States government determined to seek and obtain a conviction by any lawful means available to it. Not even the Donald has the resources to stand up against a government that has everything it needs to convict him out of the words of his own mouth.
We should not have had to have come to this place.
We should not have had to contend with a candidate whose sense of entitlement has bereaved him of his common sense and his basic loyalty to the United States.
We should not have had to contend with a fringe party candidate whose conviction that the United States is the source of all the world’s ills should have bereaved her of her common sense and basic loyalty to the United States.
Finally, we should not have had to contend with the unsubtle efforts of the Russian government to destabilize our politics, intrude in our elections, and possibly to hack the vote.
We can deal with the traitors among us, with fire and sword if necessary. But we should not have to defend the integrity of our political process by telling the Kremlin that its interference in our politics may be the casus belli that leads to World War III.
Oh, for a third Obama term!
Can we please be rid of Donald and Jill?!
-------------------------------------------------
What is happening in our politics the summer is extraordinary and unprecedented. Two of the four candidates running for president have skated so close to the edge of criminality as to disqualify themselves from serious consideration. Jill Stein has managed to make a pro-Russian fool of herself by criticizing the United States on the soil of an enemy of the state, and thus rule herself completely out of the running. Donald Trump has managed, with one ill considered twenty second soundbite, to add incitement to murder to treason to his list of factors that disqualify him from any office of trust or profit under the United States or any of them. Both Trump and Stein have managed to make their causes criminal or quasi criminal enterprises, in which no American should be complicit.
For years, one of the fondest tropes of American political discourse has been to criminalize the opposition: to paint one’s political opponents in the darkest possible terms and to suggest that they are criminals, and that their supporters are complicit in their criminality.
Certainly, both the right and the far left have sought diligently to frame Hillary Rodham Clinton as “the notoriousest traitor that was ever seen.” Partisans of Donald Trump and Jill Stein/Bernie Sanders had tried to tar the Democratic nominee with just about every crime conceivable, from treason right down to expired dog license. Yet curiously, despite their fondest hopes that this or that scandal might sprout legs, Hillary Clinton, like Ronald Reagan and, curiously enough, Donald Trump, has remained standing.
Despite numerous investigations of the so-called Benghazi scandal, as well as hyperventilating nonsense over the so-called email scandal, much of it ginned up by Donald Trump or by Jill Stein/Bernard Sanders supporters, all the so-called Clinton scandals have proven, in the jargon of the environmental movement, unsustainable.
And so the irony of this election season is not that the American public has been shown proof that Secretary Clinton is in fact “crooked Hillary,” but that her opponents Donald Trump and Jill Stein have in fact skated much closer to criminality then has the quondam Secretary of State. This may be the first election in American history since the Jefferson/Burr contest of 1800 in which credible criminal charges can be brought against failed presidential candidates, not only against Donald Trump but also against Jill Stein as well.
We’ve all seen how, in recent weeks and months, Donald Trump’s disturbingly cozy relationship with Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin has caused many Americans to entertain growing doubts about Mr. Trump’s loyalty to this country and his apparent willingness to sell this country’s interest to the highest, Russian, bidder. His expressed willingness to abandon the Baltic states to the tender mercies of Vladimir Vladimirovich’s military, and his equally expressed willingness to recognize Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea are just two indicators that Donald Trump is not to be trusted with America’s national security.
But a lot of Americans weren’t prepared to connect the dots. Right-wing Americans weren’t willing to see the possibility of any wrong in their chosen candidate, while the American left, perennially ready to self-sabotage at the drop of a hat engaged in its usual pious enterprise of hand-wringing denunciations of “McCarthyism.” rather than denounce Trump, too many on the American left chose instead to denounce those patriotic Americans who were themselves daring to tell the truth about Donald Trump. Worse still, many on the American left contrived to bootstrap their dislike of Hillary Clinton into a reflexive unwillingness to criticize Trump, on the rather absurd theory that to do so was to make oneself “complicit” in McCarthyism.
But in the last 48 hours, the defecation has hit the ventilation. In a speech to a rally of his supporters, Donald Trump utter these words: "Hillary wants to abolish -- essentially abolish the Second Amendment. By the way, if she gets to pick, if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don't know,” by which he plainly urged his more unhinged supporters to commit acts of violence against Secretary Clinton or against President Clinton should she be elected. It didn’t take long for the shit to hit the fan bigly, as Trump himself might put it.
Trump and Stein have managed this extraordinary achievement in self-criminalization all by themselves. Jill Stein went to Moscow, opened her mouth at a Kremlin dinner, and badmouthed her country — the country she wants to lead— in the presence of an enemy of the United States, and she didn’t seem to have the first degree of care or concern for how her remarks might be received here in the homeland. Donald Trump has been available himself assiduously of the resources made available to him by the Russian military and intelligence apparat at the behest of his good friend Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, and laundered through WikiLeaks, which a mounting preponderance of evidence demonstrates is, in effect, an unofficial organ of the Russian government.
When the evidence reaches critical mass and offers probable cause to believe that two of our four candidates for president are agents, either witting or unwitting, of Russia, that puts their supporters in a potentially untenable position. The position is untenable because if either Donald Trump or Jill Stein are traitors, their supporters are traitors, too. At common law, there are no distinctions of accessory liability when the crime involved is treason; every person connected with an actual treason or with a treasonable conspiracy is liable as a principal. This means, in theory, that any vocal supporter of Donald Trump or of Jill Stein could be indicted with Donald Trump or Jill Stein for treason.
Let that settle in for a moment.
If not only Trump and Stein, but also any of their vocal supporters, is a principal in treason, then the door is open for a terrifying recrudescence of the Palmer raids, HUAC, state legislative un-American activities committees, and a rebirth of McCarthyism in its fullest form, albeit with considerably greater justification.
If we are to save the Republic, however, from devouring itself in endless witchhunts, we must take some steps fairly quickly. Both Donald Trump and Jill Stein must discontinue their campaigns immediately, as the New York Daily News and other mainstream media publications have urged. Donald Trump should be indicted at once on a charge of seditious conspiracy. It should not be hard to do. Let a federal grand jury be impaneled in the Eastern District of Virginia (the historic go-to court for high-profile national security cases) and let a team of highly competent prosecutors present the case against him to the grand jury. If, as sometime New York Chief Judge Sol Wachtler once put it, “a good prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich,” that team of highly competent, high-powered federal prosecutors should have no difficulty securing a true bill against a cheeto-faced, ferret-wearing shitgibbon.
Of course, indicting Donald Trump or Jill Stein is an extreme step, more worthy of a banana republic than of a great power. It should not be undertaken unless the weight of evidence is so clear that no reasonable prosecutor would not present a similar case if it involved a private citizen and not a presidential nominee. The development of the evidence must be conducted with excruciating care, and every inference that can be drawn must be drawn favorably to the accused and against the government. But if the evidence supports the growing consensus among the legal community that Donald Trump has, in fact, committed one or more crimes, he should, so to speak, be put to an election: he can plead guilty to a single low-level felony such as making a false or misleading statement to a federal investigator, and agree to discontinue his campaign at once, and never seek any public office, anywhere, ever again. Or he can face the full wrath and the full resources of a United States government determined to seek and obtain a conviction by any lawful means available to it. Not even the Donald has the resources to stand up against a government that has everything it needs to convict him out of the words of his own mouth.
We should not have had to have come to this place.
We should not have had to contend with a candidate whose sense of entitlement has bereaved him of his common sense and his basic loyalty to the United States.
We should not have had to contend with a fringe party candidate whose conviction that the United States is the source of all the world’s ills should have bereaved her of her common sense and basic loyalty to the United States.
Finally, we should not have had to contend with the unsubtle efforts of the Russian government to destabilize our politics, intrude in our elections, and possibly to hack the vote.
We can deal with the traitors among us, with fire and sword if necessary. But we should not have to defend the integrity of our political process by telling the Kremlin that its interference in our politics may be the casus belli that leads to World War III.
Oh, for a third Obama term!
Can we please be rid of Donald and Jill?!
Tuesday, August 2, 2016
GIVING THE FALLING WALL A PUSH
Summary: The very public, very theatrical, mental unraveling of Donald Trump has become a tragedy of Greek proportions, played out on the American political stage. His ostentatious public feud with the grieving parents of Capt. Humayun Khan, and now, his equally ostentatious feud with a crying baby at one of his rallies are only the latest ammunition for the #neverTrump movement in the Republican Party. The Hillary Clinton attack ads virtually write themselves. When a Republican presidential candidate loses such normally reliable Republican supporters as the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Houston Chronicle, and major poobahs and sachems within the Republican Party establishment, you know that something has gone, or is going, seriously wrong in the Trump campaign.
Simply put, Donald Trump appears to be in the end stages of a serious psychic break. He is plainly unfit to hold office, and the Republicans are becoming painfully aware of it. We Democrats should help them enhance their awareness of Donald Trump’s unfitness be president by heightening the contradictions within the Republican Party, inhibiting their activities, encouraging their closet Clintonite tendencies, and at all events, as Trump continues to collapse, giving the falling wall a push.
--------------------------------
There is an old adage to the effect that when one is in a hole, one should stop digging. Put more bluntly, the sentiment can be expressed as “do not kick the turd;” whatever you do, do not shit in your own punch bowl. One should particularly avoid kicking the turd or shitting in one’s own punch bowl as repeatedly as Donald Trump has contrived to do repeatedly in the days since the Democratic National Convention.
We all know what happened at the Democratic convention. Khizr and Ghazala Khan, the grieving parents of Army Capt. Humayun Khan, who was killed in Iraq by a car bomb in 2004, took to the stage of the Democratic National Convention where Mr. Khan delivered probably one of the most effective political takedowns of the 2016 election cycle. We do not need to recapitulate Khizr Khan’s epic takedown in detail. It has been covered over and over and over again in both the traditional and digital media. When he told Donald Trump “[y]ou have sacrificed nothing and no one,” he delivered words as powerful as Lincoln’s Gettysburg address and as subtle as those of Lincoln’s immortal letter to Mrs. Bixby of Boston, who had lost five sons on the field of battle during the Civil War.
You have sacrificed nothing and no one.
Khizr Khan, a heretofore unknown Pakistani-American lawyer from the Virginia suburbs of Washington city, spoke with a moral authority that, quite frankly, has not come out of the Indian subcontinent since another lawyer, Mahatma Gandhi, shook the British Empire to its foundations. Speaking as a Muslim, and as an immigrant who loves this country as only an immigrant truly can, Mr. Khan scored a direct hit right to the dark heart and palsied soul of the man who wants to be President.
Donald Trump, of course, the man of seventy going on six, did not handle the criticism very well. In the days since the Democratic National Convention ended, Trump and his vile supporters have waged an unceasing Twitter and media war against Mr. And Mrs. Khan. With each broadside The Donald lobs in the direction of the Khans, their moral position and authority improve while his diminishes. Speaking privately to me yesterday at my gym, a Republican acquaintance of mine uttered partisan heresy, but American morality: “Trump,” my acquaintance told me, “has either lost his mind or he is suffering from a diagnosable mental illness.”
My acquaintance looked around, in that guilty way people sometimes do when they are about to mouth heresy, and then added “I can’t do it. I can’t vote Trump and I won’t throw away my vote on a third-party candidate.” Then, looking at me with a somewhat hangdog expression, he asked me not to tell his boyfriend that he planned to cast his vote for Hillary Rodham Clinton. “Don’t worry,” I replied, concealing my amazement, “your secret is safe with me.”
My acquaintance, who managed for years to reconcile being a gay man with being a registered Republican, with all the Stockholm syndrome implications thereof, had finally reached the end of his tolerance for Donald Trump and for a Republican Party which had prostituted itself so completely on the altar of The Donald’s ego. I knew that my acquaintance, who had once dropped me as a boyfriend because of our irreconcilable politics, was in the same difficult place many Republicans, both straight and queer, find themselves the summer.
Republicans who find themselves unwillingly traveling the Trump train to St. Petersburg’s Finland Station, dreading their arrival at that destination, remind me to some extent of the Democrats of the late 1970s who turned to Ronald Reagan because they thought the Democratic Party had left them. I was one of those Democrats. I could not support Ronald Reagan but, at the time, I felt no enthusiasm for Jimmy Carter and what I saw as a crisis of conviction and courage on the part of the West. I also, candidly, felt that the Democratic Party had left many of us in California behind with its uncritical opposition to Proposition 13, the meat ax waving initiative Howard Jarvis proposed to limit property tax in California.
But Ronald Reagan never commanded my allegiance. Like many moderate Democrats, I could not and I would not support Ronald Reagan. I felt about him much the same way I feel about Donald Trump, that he had done such damage as governor of California that it would take more terms than Jerry Brown could ever possibly have served to mitigate what Ronald Reagan had done to this state. Even now, as Jerry Brown enters the last two years of his fourth term, California is still recovering from the eight bitter winters of Ronald Reagan’s governorship.
Nonetheless, having gone through my own “dark night of the soul” with respect to the Democratic Party, I emerged into the morning light with my Democratic convictions strengthened, my Democratic partisanship enhanced, and my sense of political tribalism reinforced.
For when Ronald Reagan took office he brought with him to Washington City a whole coterie and claque of criminals, losers, and nutcases who should never have been brought into the high reaches of the federal government. From his attorney general, Edwin Meese, to the head of the civil rights division of his Justice Department, who delivered herself of the astonishing view that the disabled’s physical ailments were a reflection of their spiritual worthiness, to Casper Weinberger, who got his metaphorical tit in the ringer over the Iran/Contra scandal, to his wife, Nancy Reagan, and her idiotic “just say no” campaign which accomplished zero in reducing America’s drug habit, Ronald Reagan had an unerring ability to pick losers, criminals, and nutcases to staff his administration.
I see the same kind of criminals, losers, nutcases, and indeed, out-and-out whackjobs forming a Trump administration in waiting. I can foresee that within 72 hours of Donald Trump taking the oath of office, his administration would be mired in scandal and articles of impeachment would be moving through the House. I can also see an exodus from the administration of highly competent senior civil service appointees and military officers and senior enlisted personnel whose jobs should never depend upon the identity of the man or woman in the Oval Office.
And I do not say this simply out of some vague sense of alarmism, but on the basis of evidence out of Donald Trump’s own mouth. Speaking at a rally recently both Donald Trump and surrogate Chris Christie recently declaimed that in a Trump administration every single Obama appointee could expect to be fired. Since the United States has had a merit-based civil-service since the presidency of Chester Alan Arthur, I think I am right in regarding this as a pernicious, evil threat to the integrity of the civil service at every level. It took us more than hundred years after independence to free ourselves from the evil of patronage-based civil-service. Yet, Donald Trump wants to bring it back.
And what sort of people might Donald Trump appoint? Well, perhaps, he will appoint the sort of people who believe that Donald Trump is some sort of God Emperor, as noted in several articles in both digital and mainstream media that have emerged in the last few days. If so, I can understand the panic in the End Times community that Antichrist may be upon us. I do not know if arrogating to oneself some sort of tinpot delusion of godhood constitutes impeachable offense, but to this queer Episcopalian it certainly constitutes a very dangerous and pernicious heresy of the type that — and I do not say this very often — is the sort that will send its utterer straight to hell upon death; do hot pass Go. Do not collect $200.
About the only conclusion that we can draw from Donald Trump’s last several terrible, horrible, no good, very bad days, is that we are in fact watching some kind of end-stage psychotic break occurring before our horrified, yet fascinated eyes. Certainly, our allies in Europe and in Asia are watching this with scornful wonder and horrified fascination. One would hope that Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin would be watching with the same kind of horrified fascination. Unfortunately, Putin is enough of a son-of-a-bitch that he is probably watching with eager anticipation waiting for the United States to implode so that Russia can move in to take advantage of a compromised security situation in Europe. In Putin’s mind, he visualizes a Russian motor-rifle divisions rolling down the Unter den Linden in Berlin, the Champs Elysées in Paris and the Mall in London. In Vilnius, Riga, and Talinn, in London and Paris, in Tokyo, Seoul, and in Beijing, in Manila, Jakarta, and Kuala Lumpur, and in Canberra and Wellington, government leaders are dreading the kind of power vacuum either an American collapse or an American withdrawal from the Baltic or from Asia would engender.
Yet, all the while, Donald Trump continues to unravel on national television. And as he unravels, we may take some small consolation from indicators that perhaps the media are no longer prepared to give him the uncritical break and pass that he has hitherto enjoyed. A few days ago, CNN broke away from a typical rambling, Castro/Brezhnev-like Trump speech to cover Dianne Feinstein talking about serious intelligence issues confronting the nation. As he pulled away, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer said in effect “we’ll come back to Trump’s speech if he says anything of substance,” before pulling away and going to Senator Feinstein’s remarks. This may be a fluke or it may be the beginning of the end of the love affair between the mainstream media and Donald Trump. It may be the end of the mainstream media’s being complicit in what appears to be either Donald Trump’s mental breakdown or a pattern of deliberate and organized treason against the United States.
For, like Antony Babington and the Catholic conspirators against Queen Elizabeth I, Donald Trump has in fact skated very close to, if not over the boundaries of, treason. He may believe that an electoral victory will have the effect of absolving him from having to answer for it, on the theory, expressed by 16th-century English author John Harington that “[t]reason doth never prosper, what's the reason? For if it prosper, none dare call it Treason.” Yet, in a country where faculties of mass communication and community organization exceed those of Elizabethan England by orders of magnitude, Americans can be kept aware of Donald Trump’s treason quite easily, though his national security apparatus would no doubt try to shut down all talk of treason. A president may be impeached for treason, and, as I predicted above, President Trump might well find that by the afternoon of January 20, 2017, articles of impeachment would be circulating in the House of Representatives.
And a #stoppresidentTrump movement among Republicans would be circulating for no other reason than that by January 20, 2017, Donald Trump’s mental breakdown will be so complete and so obvious that the Republicans themselves will feel they have no option but to take him out. They may assassinate him or they may impeach him, but the finger on the trigger or the hands that sign the impeachment resolution will be those of Republicans. They may pray that their dirty work will be done by Democrat, but in the same way that Gandhiji was assassinated by Nathuram Godse, a Hindu terrorist, and not by a Muslim, we Democrats should insist that the Republicans clean up the mess they will have made if they are fool enough to elect Donald Trump as president of the United States.
In the meantime, however, we who stand with Hillary should do everything possible to “heighten the contradictions” our Republican brothers and sisters are feeling. There may surely be enough of them willing to put patriotism over party, hold their nose, and mark their ballots for a woman who, while perhaps uncharismatic, is nonetheless far too sensible to start a nuclear war, and far too well put together to be suffering from the obvious mental disease and deficiency which so plainly afflicts Donald Trump, and unfits him entirely for any office of trust or profit under the United States or any of them. We must encourage their closet Clintonism. We must inhibit their activities to elect Donald Trump. We must heighten the contradictions within the Republican Party and, as a Chinese would say, not hesitate to give the falling wall a push.
Simply put, Donald Trump appears to be in the end stages of a serious psychic break. He is plainly unfit to hold office, and the Republicans are becoming painfully aware of it. We Democrats should help them enhance their awareness of Donald Trump’s unfitness be president by heightening the contradictions within the Republican Party, inhibiting their activities, encouraging their closet Clintonite tendencies, and at all events, as Trump continues to collapse, giving the falling wall a push.
--------------------------------
There is an old adage to the effect that when one is in a hole, one should stop digging. Put more bluntly, the sentiment can be expressed as “do not kick the turd;” whatever you do, do not shit in your own punch bowl. One should particularly avoid kicking the turd or shitting in one’s own punch bowl as repeatedly as Donald Trump has contrived to do repeatedly in the days since the Democratic National Convention.
We all know what happened at the Democratic convention. Khizr and Ghazala Khan, the grieving parents of Army Capt. Humayun Khan, who was killed in Iraq by a car bomb in 2004, took to the stage of the Democratic National Convention where Mr. Khan delivered probably one of the most effective political takedowns of the 2016 election cycle. We do not need to recapitulate Khizr Khan’s epic takedown in detail. It has been covered over and over and over again in both the traditional and digital media. When he told Donald Trump “[y]ou have sacrificed nothing and no one,” he delivered words as powerful as Lincoln’s Gettysburg address and as subtle as those of Lincoln’s immortal letter to Mrs. Bixby of Boston, who had lost five sons on the field of battle during the Civil War.
You have sacrificed nothing and no one.
Khizr Khan, a heretofore unknown Pakistani-American lawyer from the Virginia suburbs of Washington city, spoke with a moral authority that, quite frankly, has not come out of the Indian subcontinent since another lawyer, Mahatma Gandhi, shook the British Empire to its foundations. Speaking as a Muslim, and as an immigrant who loves this country as only an immigrant truly can, Mr. Khan scored a direct hit right to the dark heart and palsied soul of the man who wants to be President.
Donald Trump, of course, the man of seventy going on six, did not handle the criticism very well. In the days since the Democratic National Convention ended, Trump and his vile supporters have waged an unceasing Twitter and media war against Mr. And Mrs. Khan. With each broadside The Donald lobs in the direction of the Khans, their moral position and authority improve while his diminishes. Speaking privately to me yesterday at my gym, a Republican acquaintance of mine uttered partisan heresy, but American morality: “Trump,” my acquaintance told me, “has either lost his mind or he is suffering from a diagnosable mental illness.”
My acquaintance looked around, in that guilty way people sometimes do when they are about to mouth heresy, and then added “I can’t do it. I can’t vote Trump and I won’t throw away my vote on a third-party candidate.” Then, looking at me with a somewhat hangdog expression, he asked me not to tell his boyfriend that he planned to cast his vote for Hillary Rodham Clinton. “Don’t worry,” I replied, concealing my amazement, “your secret is safe with me.”
My acquaintance, who managed for years to reconcile being a gay man with being a registered Republican, with all the Stockholm syndrome implications thereof, had finally reached the end of his tolerance for Donald Trump and for a Republican Party which had prostituted itself so completely on the altar of The Donald’s ego. I knew that my acquaintance, who had once dropped me as a boyfriend because of our irreconcilable politics, was in the same difficult place many Republicans, both straight and queer, find themselves the summer.
Republicans who find themselves unwillingly traveling the Trump train to St. Petersburg’s Finland Station, dreading their arrival at that destination, remind me to some extent of the Democrats of the late 1970s who turned to Ronald Reagan because they thought the Democratic Party had left them. I was one of those Democrats. I could not support Ronald Reagan but, at the time, I felt no enthusiasm for Jimmy Carter and what I saw as a crisis of conviction and courage on the part of the West. I also, candidly, felt that the Democratic Party had left many of us in California behind with its uncritical opposition to Proposition 13, the meat ax waving initiative Howard Jarvis proposed to limit property tax in California.
But Ronald Reagan never commanded my allegiance. Like many moderate Democrats, I could not and I would not support Ronald Reagan. I felt about him much the same way I feel about Donald Trump, that he had done such damage as governor of California that it would take more terms than Jerry Brown could ever possibly have served to mitigate what Ronald Reagan had done to this state. Even now, as Jerry Brown enters the last two years of his fourth term, California is still recovering from the eight bitter winters of Ronald Reagan’s governorship.
Nonetheless, having gone through my own “dark night of the soul” with respect to the Democratic Party, I emerged into the morning light with my Democratic convictions strengthened, my Democratic partisanship enhanced, and my sense of political tribalism reinforced.
For when Ronald Reagan took office he brought with him to Washington City a whole coterie and claque of criminals, losers, and nutcases who should never have been brought into the high reaches of the federal government. From his attorney general, Edwin Meese, to the head of the civil rights division of his Justice Department, who delivered herself of the astonishing view that the disabled’s physical ailments were a reflection of their spiritual worthiness, to Casper Weinberger, who got his metaphorical tit in the ringer over the Iran/Contra scandal, to his wife, Nancy Reagan, and her idiotic “just say no” campaign which accomplished zero in reducing America’s drug habit, Ronald Reagan had an unerring ability to pick losers, criminals, and nutcases to staff his administration.
I see the same kind of criminals, losers, nutcases, and indeed, out-and-out whackjobs forming a Trump administration in waiting. I can foresee that within 72 hours of Donald Trump taking the oath of office, his administration would be mired in scandal and articles of impeachment would be moving through the House. I can also see an exodus from the administration of highly competent senior civil service appointees and military officers and senior enlisted personnel whose jobs should never depend upon the identity of the man or woman in the Oval Office.
And I do not say this simply out of some vague sense of alarmism, but on the basis of evidence out of Donald Trump’s own mouth. Speaking at a rally recently both Donald Trump and surrogate Chris Christie recently declaimed that in a Trump administration every single Obama appointee could expect to be fired. Since the United States has had a merit-based civil-service since the presidency of Chester Alan Arthur, I think I am right in regarding this as a pernicious, evil threat to the integrity of the civil service at every level. It took us more than hundred years after independence to free ourselves from the evil of patronage-based civil-service. Yet, Donald Trump wants to bring it back.
And what sort of people might Donald Trump appoint? Well, perhaps, he will appoint the sort of people who believe that Donald Trump is some sort of God Emperor, as noted in several articles in both digital and mainstream media that have emerged in the last few days. If so, I can understand the panic in the End Times community that Antichrist may be upon us. I do not know if arrogating to oneself some sort of tinpot delusion of godhood constitutes impeachable offense, but to this queer Episcopalian it certainly constitutes a very dangerous and pernicious heresy of the type that — and I do not say this very often — is the sort that will send its utterer straight to hell upon death; do hot pass Go. Do not collect $200.
About the only conclusion that we can draw from Donald Trump’s last several terrible, horrible, no good, very bad days, is that we are in fact watching some kind of end-stage psychotic break occurring before our horrified, yet fascinated eyes. Certainly, our allies in Europe and in Asia are watching this with scornful wonder and horrified fascination. One would hope that Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin would be watching with the same kind of horrified fascination. Unfortunately, Putin is enough of a son-of-a-bitch that he is probably watching with eager anticipation waiting for the United States to implode so that Russia can move in to take advantage of a compromised security situation in Europe. In Putin’s mind, he visualizes a Russian motor-rifle divisions rolling down the Unter den Linden in Berlin, the Champs Elysées in Paris and the Mall in London. In Vilnius, Riga, and Talinn, in London and Paris, in Tokyo, Seoul, and in Beijing, in Manila, Jakarta, and Kuala Lumpur, and in Canberra and Wellington, government leaders are dreading the kind of power vacuum either an American collapse or an American withdrawal from the Baltic or from Asia would engender.
Yet, all the while, Donald Trump continues to unravel on national television. And as he unravels, we may take some small consolation from indicators that perhaps the media are no longer prepared to give him the uncritical break and pass that he has hitherto enjoyed. A few days ago, CNN broke away from a typical rambling, Castro/Brezhnev-like Trump speech to cover Dianne Feinstein talking about serious intelligence issues confronting the nation. As he pulled away, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer said in effect “we’ll come back to Trump’s speech if he says anything of substance,” before pulling away and going to Senator Feinstein’s remarks. This may be a fluke or it may be the beginning of the end of the love affair between the mainstream media and Donald Trump. It may be the end of the mainstream media’s being complicit in what appears to be either Donald Trump’s mental breakdown or a pattern of deliberate and organized treason against the United States.
For, like Antony Babington and the Catholic conspirators against Queen Elizabeth I, Donald Trump has in fact skated very close to, if not over the boundaries of, treason. He may believe that an electoral victory will have the effect of absolving him from having to answer for it, on the theory, expressed by 16th-century English author John Harington that “[t]reason doth never prosper, what's the reason? For if it prosper, none dare call it Treason.” Yet, in a country where faculties of mass communication and community organization exceed those of Elizabethan England by orders of magnitude, Americans can be kept aware of Donald Trump’s treason quite easily, though his national security apparatus would no doubt try to shut down all talk of treason. A president may be impeached for treason, and, as I predicted above, President Trump might well find that by the afternoon of January 20, 2017, articles of impeachment would be circulating in the House of Representatives.
And a #stoppresidentTrump movement among Republicans would be circulating for no other reason than that by January 20, 2017, Donald Trump’s mental breakdown will be so complete and so obvious that the Republicans themselves will feel they have no option but to take him out. They may assassinate him or they may impeach him, but the finger on the trigger or the hands that sign the impeachment resolution will be those of Republicans. They may pray that their dirty work will be done by Democrat, but in the same way that Gandhiji was assassinated by Nathuram Godse, a Hindu terrorist, and not by a Muslim, we Democrats should insist that the Republicans clean up the mess they will have made if they are fool enough to elect Donald Trump as president of the United States.
In the meantime, however, we who stand with Hillary should do everything possible to “heighten the contradictions” our Republican brothers and sisters are feeling. There may surely be enough of them willing to put patriotism over party, hold their nose, and mark their ballots for a woman who, while perhaps uncharismatic, is nonetheless far too sensible to start a nuclear war, and far too well put together to be suffering from the obvious mental disease and deficiency which so plainly afflicts Donald Trump, and unfits him entirely for any office of trust or profit under the United States or any of them. We must encourage their closet Clintonism. We must inhibit their activities to elect Donald Trump. We must heighten the contradictions within the Republican Party and, as a Chinese would say, not hesitate to give the falling wall a push.
Wednesday, July 27, 2016
STABBED IN THE BACK
Summary: Bernie Sanders deserves better than his supporters. Yesterday, in a magnificent, unity-building gesture akin to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s similar gesture in 2008, Bernie moved Hillary’s nomination by acclamation. Unfortunately, many of his supporters haven’t been willing to follow Bernie’s lead. They been pitching a fit on all the various media about how the election was “stolen” from them, and a great many of them have evinced a determination to throw their votes and their support to the Kremlin’s candidate, Donald Trump. To justify such behavior, the intransigents have tried very hard to fabricate a Dolchßtolegende (a stab-in-the-back narrative) that the entire primary process had been “rigged.”
On the Hillary side, a similar Dolchstoßlegende to take shape, based largely on the manner in which the so-called email scandal that has already claimed the political life of Debbie Wasserman Schultz has unfolded. Increasing evidence points to the infamous Wikileaks as having obtained the data it dumped the day before the convention from sources within the Russian intelligence apparat. While Bernie’s Dolchstßlegende is largely a fantasy of his disgruntled, intransigent, over-the-top supporters, the Hillary Dolchstßlegende has the advantage of being largely true. Bernie diehards and Trump trolls (and there is a frightening degree of overlap between the two) insist either that there is no “proof” of Russian involvement or that the substantive content of the emails, ostensibly “proving” that Hillary is somehow of “corrupt,” outweighs the criminality of the circumstances under which WikiLeaks and its West-hating, Hillary-despising cofounder, cowardly Julian Assange, a known rapist and traitor currently hiding from Her Majesty’s justice in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, obtained the emails from the Russian intelligence apparat which had hacked into the DNC servers.
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Bernie Sanders displayed astonishing nobility of spirit yesterday by moving, on the convention floor in Philadelphia, that Hillary Rodham be selected by acclamation as the nominee of the Democratic Party. It was a magnificent gesture, that like Hillary Clinton’s similar gesture at the 2008 Democratic convention in Denver, was intended to heal the breach, lay groundwork for party unity, and moreover, to establish the foundations for the infrastructure of victory in November.
I was saddened, but not altogether surprised, that many of Sanders’s delegates in the convention hall, and many intransigent Berniebots across the country, angrily rejected Senator Sanders’s impassioned calls for unity and chose to demean themselves and to dishonor that nobility of spirit by engaging in what can only be described as a Trumpertantrum, protesting in the streets of Philadelphia, chanting the Trumpian trope of “lock her up,” and turning their backs on former President Bill Clinton when he addressed the convention.
Such behavior is unforgivable, unforgettable, and inexcusable. When the candidate to whom you have devoted yourself calls on you to behave like adults, to bear the seemingly unbearable, and to buck up and bear a hand for the sake of the country, to boo him, or to shout that he is a “sellout,” is dishonorable behavior of the worst sort. For not only did these intransigents dishonor the Senator, his nobility of spirit, and his loyalty to a party to which he came very late, but into which he poured himself heart and soul, it also dishonors the intransigents themselves.
To attempt to exonerate their guilty behavior, the intransigents have eagerly fabricated a Großer Dolchstoßlegende, a great stab-in-the-back narrative which attempts to excuse Bernie’s performance by casting doubt on the fundamental legitimacy of the process by which Hillary Rodham Clinton became the first female nominee for president of a major party in American history.
What a long way we’ve come since Abigail Adams insisted that her husband “remember the ladies” during the sessions of the Continental Congress which adopted and approved the Declaration of Independence; how far we’ve come since Sojourner Truth asked her immortal question “ain’t I a woman?”! What an amazing journey it has been since the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848! How profound the distance since the Constitution removed sex-based barriers to voting with the 19th amendment, 96 years ago this August 18. What a long way we’ve come to that moment in Philadelphia when the last crack in the glass ceiling opened wide and sent that barrier to equality crashing to the ground!
Yet, to the diehard Sanders intransigents, pitching an earsplitting snit and storming out of convention hall, or chanting “lock her up!” outside in the streets, living down to the stereotype of spoiled children of privilege, this enormous step for full, first class, female membership in the commonwealth and body politic was nothing more than the triumph of the vagina over the penis. It carried the ugliest possible overtones of misogyny, sexism, and worse, Trumpian treason.
And so, all of the ancient bullshit claims of a rigged election were dusted off and waved in the Democratic Party’s face. The claim that the primaries were rigged in favor of Hillary Clinton has been denied by Senator Sanders himself on numerous occasions, and it has been debunked by just about every reputable traditional and digital media publication out there. The only people still trafficking in the rigged election dolchstßlegende are conspiracy theorists of the radical left, the American equivalent of the Trotskyite Militant Tendency that almost destroyed Britain’s Labour Party in the late 70s and early 1980s, Donald Trump, or other minions of the right wing scream machine which have a vested interest in casting doubt upon the basic legitimacy of Hillary Clinton’s candidacy.
When people like Alex Jones, the Breitbart organization, or Trump trolls on social media ramp up the Hillary hatred, and that right-wing Hillary hatred finds echoes among the Sanders intransigents, we may justly wonder whether these Sanders intransigents are simply too obtuse to understand anything at all about American politics, or whether, like Susan Sarandon, they are so excessively privileged that a possible Trump victory will have no consequences for them, and therefore that Bernie Sanders is nothing but political cover for them to indulge their Hillary hatred, or whether they are in fact trolls of the other side trying to spread disinformation among us to break our unity and cause us to fall out among ourselves.
If the Bernie Dolchstßlegende suffers the disadvantage, and to just about every Dolchstßolegende of being false, and demonstrably false, the Hillary Dolchstßlegende has the advantage of being eine wahrhaftige Dolchstoß, (a real stab in the back narrative). When WikiLeaks dumped its 20,000 or so emails which had been purloined from the DNC server, it became clear fairly quickly that a number of things that occurred. First, the emails did not demonstrate systemic corruption nor did they invalidate the substantial majority that Hillary had garnered in the primary election. To say otherwise, as the Sanders intransigents began to do, that the 3.8 million more votes that Hillary had garnered in the primary should be disregarded, was an act of banana Republican political immaturity.
Again, that whole line of argument has been extensively rebutted and debunked in numerous traditional and digital media sources. We need not burden the record here with an extensive explanation of why the system was not, in fact, “rigged” in favor of Hillary Clinton. We can actually take Bernard Sanders’s admission itself that the system was not “rigged” as being dispositive of the issue. It is as good as what the Federal Rules of Evidence call an “admission of a party opponent,” that is, hearsay which is an exception to the rule against hearsay because it comes from the mouth of someone with authority to make the statement, and which statement is arguably against his own interest.
But, wait! say the Sanders intransigents the emails display personal animus on the part of certain DNC staffers. As friends of mine on both sides of the debate might put it “no shit, Sherlock!” After the vituperation and personal abuse showered upon the DNC and its outgoing chair, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, it’s not surprising that some of the emails in question, of which fewer than a dozen are any kind of “smoking gun,” should be somewhat embittered in their tone. And as for the infamous Debbie Wasserman Schultz email which said, and some of substance, that Bernie won’t be president, the intransigents would have us ignore the temporal context of that email, sent as it was after the April primary in New York State which narrowed Sanders’s path to the nomination almost impossibly narrow. Wasserman Schultz, the intransigents notwithstanding, wasn’t demonstrating some kind of malicious predisposition toward Hillary Clinton, she was simply stating an emerging fact, albeit one that was uncongenial to the intransigents of the Sanders campaign.
But no matter what Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s emails may have said about Bernie Sanders, who, because of the antics of his supporters, had become very hard to like at that stage of the campaign, what we are here to litigate is not the contents of the emails at all. Despite the Sandernistas’ reliance on the substance of the emails, the issue that needs to be litigated is the criminality of the circumstances by which WikiLeaks obtained possession of the emails. Because if the emails were obtained unlawfully, then their contents are what the legal profession would refer to as “fruit of the poisonous tree,” and subject to being excluded from evidence.
What is a good rule for courtroom evidence is, in this case, a good rule for the so-called email scandal. What we must explore instead are the criminal circumstances surrounding the chain of custody of the purloined emails, as well as the motivations of the prior custodians of the emails once they left the possession of the Democratic National Committee.
Because there is now probable cause to believe that the hacked emails were hacked by hackers associated with or in the employee of the Russian intelligence apparat, from which they were passed on to the ever-obliging WikiLeaks and its West-hating cofounder, cowardly, Hillary-despising Julian Assange, a known rapist and traitor now hiding from Her Majesty’s justice in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. (It is, candidly, somewhat of a mystery to me why Britain has not cut off diplomatic relations with Ecuador, declared her ambassador persona non grata at the court of St. James’s, and, just as importantly, cut off power, water, and sewage to the embassy. I daresay, such legitimate diplomatic pressure might be enough to force the Ecuadorians to relinquish Mr. Assange.)
The theft by Russian hackers of the emails from the DNC is itself a criminal offense, and indeed, tantamount to an act of war against the United States by the Russian Federation. When the Russian intelligence apparat handed those emails over to WikiLeaks, that not only compounded the crime, but it was also in effect a further act of war by which the Russian government attempted to intervene in a muscular and easily detectable way in the conduct of an American presidential election.
To make matters worse, this morning, The Donald delivered himself of a press conference in which he essentially invited the Russians to hack Hillary Clinton’s email servers again. If nothing else, this should justify a federal grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia (which traditionally handles national security prosecutions,) to initiate proceedings targeting Donald Trump for violating either the treason laws or the Espionage Act of 1917. Since turnabout is fair play, it is delicious to contemplate the possibility of one of the presidential candidates in fact being indicted. Instead of “lock her up,” there now appears to be ample critical mass to justify saying “lock him up.”
As the federal government expands the scope of the national security investigation now underway, we may expect that hopefully the net will begin to tighten around the person of Donald J. Trump. I posted earlier that “Trumpism is treason.” As more and more traditional and digital media begin to expose the nature of the Kremlin’s support for America’s true Manchurian candidate, I feel some schadenfreude, but I also feel a disturbing apprehension that far too many of Trump's willing dupes are prepared to turn a blind eye to systematic treason at the highest levels.
We need to conduct investigations that would make the McCarthy years look like little boys in short pants, because this time, unlike that time, the threat is real.
Citoyens! La patrie est en danger! -Georges Jacques Danton, French Rrevolutionary leader.
On the Hillary side, a similar Dolchstoßlegende to take shape, based largely on the manner in which the so-called email scandal that has already claimed the political life of Debbie Wasserman Schultz has unfolded. Increasing evidence points to the infamous Wikileaks as having obtained the data it dumped the day before the convention from sources within the Russian intelligence apparat. While Bernie’s Dolchstßlegende is largely a fantasy of his disgruntled, intransigent, over-the-top supporters, the Hillary Dolchstßlegende has the advantage of being largely true. Bernie diehards and Trump trolls (and there is a frightening degree of overlap between the two) insist either that there is no “proof” of Russian involvement or that the substantive content of the emails, ostensibly “proving” that Hillary is somehow of “corrupt,” outweighs the criminality of the circumstances under which WikiLeaks and its West-hating, Hillary-despising cofounder, cowardly Julian Assange, a known rapist and traitor currently hiding from Her Majesty’s justice in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, obtained the emails from the Russian intelligence apparat which had hacked into the DNC servers.
-------------------------------------------------------
Bernie Sanders displayed astonishing nobility of spirit yesterday by moving, on the convention floor in Philadelphia, that Hillary Rodham be selected by acclamation as the nominee of the Democratic Party. It was a magnificent gesture, that like Hillary Clinton’s similar gesture at the 2008 Democratic convention in Denver, was intended to heal the breach, lay groundwork for party unity, and moreover, to establish the foundations for the infrastructure of victory in November.
I was saddened, but not altogether surprised, that many of Sanders’s delegates in the convention hall, and many intransigent Berniebots across the country, angrily rejected Senator Sanders’s impassioned calls for unity and chose to demean themselves and to dishonor that nobility of spirit by engaging in what can only be described as a Trumpertantrum, protesting in the streets of Philadelphia, chanting the Trumpian trope of “lock her up,” and turning their backs on former President Bill Clinton when he addressed the convention.
Such behavior is unforgivable, unforgettable, and inexcusable. When the candidate to whom you have devoted yourself calls on you to behave like adults, to bear the seemingly unbearable, and to buck up and bear a hand for the sake of the country, to boo him, or to shout that he is a “sellout,” is dishonorable behavior of the worst sort. For not only did these intransigents dishonor the Senator, his nobility of spirit, and his loyalty to a party to which he came very late, but into which he poured himself heart and soul, it also dishonors the intransigents themselves.
To attempt to exonerate their guilty behavior, the intransigents have eagerly fabricated a Großer Dolchstoßlegende, a great stab-in-the-back narrative which attempts to excuse Bernie’s performance by casting doubt on the fundamental legitimacy of the process by which Hillary Rodham Clinton became the first female nominee for president of a major party in American history.
What a long way we’ve come since Abigail Adams insisted that her husband “remember the ladies” during the sessions of the Continental Congress which adopted and approved the Declaration of Independence; how far we’ve come since Sojourner Truth asked her immortal question “ain’t I a woman?”! What an amazing journey it has been since the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848! How profound the distance since the Constitution removed sex-based barriers to voting with the 19th amendment, 96 years ago this August 18. What a long way we’ve come to that moment in Philadelphia when the last crack in the glass ceiling opened wide and sent that barrier to equality crashing to the ground!
Yet, to the diehard Sanders intransigents, pitching an earsplitting snit and storming out of convention hall, or chanting “lock her up!” outside in the streets, living down to the stereotype of spoiled children of privilege, this enormous step for full, first class, female membership in the commonwealth and body politic was nothing more than the triumph of the vagina over the penis. It carried the ugliest possible overtones of misogyny, sexism, and worse, Trumpian treason.
And so, all of the ancient bullshit claims of a rigged election were dusted off and waved in the Democratic Party’s face. The claim that the primaries were rigged in favor of Hillary Clinton has been denied by Senator Sanders himself on numerous occasions, and it has been debunked by just about every reputable traditional and digital media publication out there. The only people still trafficking in the rigged election dolchstßlegende are conspiracy theorists of the radical left, the American equivalent of the Trotskyite Militant Tendency that almost destroyed Britain’s Labour Party in the late 70s and early 1980s, Donald Trump, or other minions of the right wing scream machine which have a vested interest in casting doubt upon the basic legitimacy of Hillary Clinton’s candidacy.
When people like Alex Jones, the Breitbart organization, or Trump trolls on social media ramp up the Hillary hatred, and that right-wing Hillary hatred finds echoes among the Sanders intransigents, we may justly wonder whether these Sanders intransigents are simply too obtuse to understand anything at all about American politics, or whether, like Susan Sarandon, they are so excessively privileged that a possible Trump victory will have no consequences for them, and therefore that Bernie Sanders is nothing but political cover for them to indulge their Hillary hatred, or whether they are in fact trolls of the other side trying to spread disinformation among us to break our unity and cause us to fall out among ourselves.
If the Bernie Dolchstßlegende suffers the disadvantage, and to just about every Dolchstßolegende of being false, and demonstrably false, the Hillary Dolchstßlegende has the advantage of being eine wahrhaftige Dolchstoß, (a real stab in the back narrative). When WikiLeaks dumped its 20,000 or so emails which had been purloined from the DNC server, it became clear fairly quickly that a number of things that occurred. First, the emails did not demonstrate systemic corruption nor did they invalidate the substantial majority that Hillary had garnered in the primary election. To say otherwise, as the Sanders intransigents began to do, that the 3.8 million more votes that Hillary had garnered in the primary should be disregarded, was an act of banana Republican political immaturity.
Again, that whole line of argument has been extensively rebutted and debunked in numerous traditional and digital media sources. We need not burden the record here with an extensive explanation of why the system was not, in fact, “rigged” in favor of Hillary Clinton. We can actually take Bernard Sanders’s admission itself that the system was not “rigged” as being dispositive of the issue. It is as good as what the Federal Rules of Evidence call an “admission of a party opponent,” that is, hearsay which is an exception to the rule against hearsay because it comes from the mouth of someone with authority to make the statement, and which statement is arguably against his own interest.
But, wait! say the Sanders intransigents the emails display personal animus on the part of certain DNC staffers. As friends of mine on both sides of the debate might put it “no shit, Sherlock!” After the vituperation and personal abuse showered upon the DNC and its outgoing chair, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, it’s not surprising that some of the emails in question, of which fewer than a dozen are any kind of “smoking gun,” should be somewhat embittered in their tone. And as for the infamous Debbie Wasserman Schultz email which said, and some of substance, that Bernie won’t be president, the intransigents would have us ignore the temporal context of that email, sent as it was after the April primary in New York State which narrowed Sanders’s path to the nomination almost impossibly narrow. Wasserman Schultz, the intransigents notwithstanding, wasn’t demonstrating some kind of malicious predisposition toward Hillary Clinton, she was simply stating an emerging fact, albeit one that was uncongenial to the intransigents of the Sanders campaign.
But no matter what Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s emails may have said about Bernie Sanders, who, because of the antics of his supporters, had become very hard to like at that stage of the campaign, what we are here to litigate is not the contents of the emails at all. Despite the Sandernistas’ reliance on the substance of the emails, the issue that needs to be litigated is the criminality of the circumstances by which WikiLeaks obtained possession of the emails. Because if the emails were obtained unlawfully, then their contents are what the legal profession would refer to as “fruit of the poisonous tree,” and subject to being excluded from evidence.
What is a good rule for courtroom evidence is, in this case, a good rule for the so-called email scandal. What we must explore instead are the criminal circumstances surrounding the chain of custody of the purloined emails, as well as the motivations of the prior custodians of the emails once they left the possession of the Democratic National Committee.
Because there is now probable cause to believe that the hacked emails were hacked by hackers associated with or in the employee of the Russian intelligence apparat, from which they were passed on to the ever-obliging WikiLeaks and its West-hating cofounder, cowardly, Hillary-despising Julian Assange, a known rapist and traitor now hiding from Her Majesty’s justice in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. (It is, candidly, somewhat of a mystery to me why Britain has not cut off diplomatic relations with Ecuador, declared her ambassador persona non grata at the court of St. James’s, and, just as importantly, cut off power, water, and sewage to the embassy. I daresay, such legitimate diplomatic pressure might be enough to force the Ecuadorians to relinquish Mr. Assange.)
The theft by Russian hackers of the emails from the DNC is itself a criminal offense, and indeed, tantamount to an act of war against the United States by the Russian Federation. When the Russian intelligence apparat handed those emails over to WikiLeaks, that not only compounded the crime, but it was also in effect a further act of war by which the Russian government attempted to intervene in a muscular and easily detectable way in the conduct of an American presidential election.
To make matters worse, this morning, The Donald delivered himself of a press conference in which he essentially invited the Russians to hack Hillary Clinton’s email servers again. If nothing else, this should justify a federal grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia (which traditionally handles national security prosecutions,) to initiate proceedings targeting Donald Trump for violating either the treason laws or the Espionage Act of 1917. Since turnabout is fair play, it is delicious to contemplate the possibility of one of the presidential candidates in fact being indicted. Instead of “lock her up,” there now appears to be ample critical mass to justify saying “lock him up.”
As the federal government expands the scope of the national security investigation now underway, we may expect that hopefully the net will begin to tighten around the person of Donald J. Trump. I posted earlier that “Trumpism is treason.” As more and more traditional and digital media begin to expose the nature of the Kremlin’s support for America’s true Manchurian candidate, I feel some schadenfreude, but I also feel a disturbing apprehension that far too many of Trump's willing dupes are prepared to turn a blind eye to systematic treason at the highest levels.
We need to conduct investigations that would make the McCarthy years look like little boys in short pants, because this time, unlike that time, the threat is real.
Citoyens! La patrie est en danger! -Georges Jacques Danton, French Rrevolutionary leader.
Sunday, July 24, 2016
TANTAMOUNT TO TREASON: WHAT WE NOW KNOW ABOUT THE KREMLIN'S CANDIDATE, DONALD TRUMP
Summary: Donald Trump’s campaign may be about to self-destruct. As more and more revelations begin to surface suggesting close linkages between Donald Trump and the Moscow Kremlin, those red flags, all puns intended, that I raised about three weeks ago are now being seen and waved by other, more “respectable” sources. The recent Wikileaks publication of roughly 20,000 emails from the Democratic National Committee has all the hallmarks of an operation initiated by, and planned by, Russia’s intelligence apparat. From CNN to Talking Points Memo to Forbes to defenseone.com, numerous media outlets in the West, together with the Hillary Clinton campaign itself, are connecting the dots and discovering a trail that leads right back to the Kremlin. One headline in defenseone.com this afternoon reads “How Putin Weaponized Wikileaks to Influence the Election of an American President.”
What is clear is that a Russian kriegßpiel is very much in progress against the West. In many ways, we are at war right now with Russia. Naïve Democrats, too conditioned by fear of what happened with Joseph McCarthy to regard any form of calling Russia out as unacceptable, need to understand that the evidence is far clearer now than it was 60 years ago. Again, a kriegspiel is very much underway against the West, Russia is using every malign instrumentality it can to secure the election of Donald Trump, a useful idiot it thinks it can control. We are at a point where failing to support Hillary Clinton for president is very close to being treasonable.
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In the last 48 hours the Donald Trump campaign has begun to show a new kind of vulnerability, one that we had never expected in an American political campaign. Media sources from CNN to Forbes to Talking Points Memo to defenseone.com have begun to connect the dots linking Trump Tower with the Moscow Kremlin. The Clinton campaign has also begun to connect those dots, and as the dots come together, we begin to see evidence of malign attempts on the part of the Russian government to influence the outcome of this election. Three weeks ago, had anyone suggested that Vladimir Putin and the Russian intelligence apparat were trying to influence the outcome of an American election, “right-thinking” Democrats, conditioned to reject anything that smacks of McCarthyism, would have said such a soothsayer his or her tongue for uttering such a heresy.
I was almost fed my own tongue for suggesting, last month, in my post of June 29, entitled “The Disastrous Ramifications of Brexit: Russia's Kriegßpiel Against the West” (http://cathedralcityobserved.blogspot.com/2016/06/the-disastrous-ramifications-of-brexit.html), that part of the reason for the success of Brexit was that Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and his minions within the Russian intelligence apparat had attempted successfully to influence the outcome of the Brexit referendum. My fellow Democrats, conditioned by the history of American McCarthyism in the 1950s, were quick to denounce my ideas as being “unhelpful.”
Unhelpful to whom? I responded. At the risk of sounding like Donald Trump congratulating himself for the Pulse nightclub shootings, I can’t resist a certain measure of schadenfreude, a certain temptation to say “I told you so.” Because ultimately, the evidence before us points not only to malign Russian intervention in our election, but also to the treasonable nature of Donald Trump and of the Trump campaign. In a previous post, entitled “Donald Trump’s Treasonable Protection Racket,” (http://cathedralcityobserved.blogspot.com/2016/07/donald-trumps-treasonable-protection.html) I suggested that Donald Trump’s unwillingness to defend the Baltic state members of NATO constituted evidence of treason.
Again, I was pooh-poohed by all the bien pensant Democrats who read my post. And again, I must confess to feeling a certain measure of schadenfreude.
However, the fact that we are betrayed at the highest levels isn’t limited to the treason being committed by members of the American right. Many of us in the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party have noted with increasing dismay the tendency of diehard supporters of Vermont Independent Senator Bernard Sanders to echo and repeat the often poisonous Hillary-hating tropes that find such a ready home in the campaign of the Kremlin’s own candidate, Donald Trump. We find, indeed, that some of the Sanders diehards, the so-called Sandernistas, speaking from a standpoint of excessive white privilege, have gone so far as to state very publicly that they would prefer four years of Donald Trump to one day of Hillary Clinton.
And, of course, the same over-the-top Sandernistas pitched an earsplitting snit when Hillary Clinton Virginia Senator Tim Kaine as her running mate. Yet, the whines that Tim Kane wasn’t “progressive enough” soon proved to be bullshit. It wasn’t so much that Sandernistas didn’t think Tim Kaine was progressive enough, though some of the stupider members of that tribe probably lapped up such nonsense with their silver spoons, while applying nonsensical purity tests that even God himself could not pass, but that more subtle, clever, and malignant Sandernistas realized that Tim Kaine was exactly the kind of progressive who could draw votes from the left wing of the Democratic Party, who could induce them to come home to Hillary.
And because Tim Kaine was indeed a progressive choice, Trump moles in Sanders world could not run the risk that Tim Kaine might actually be seen for the progressive choice he represents. Something had to be done. And so, against the possibility that Hillary might choose a genuinely progressive candidate, even if also a cautious one, the Sanders holdouts and the Trump apparat quietly let it be known that they believed that Tim Kaine would be Hillary’s choice. And once Moscow became aware that Tim Kaine was Hillary’s choice, it gave WikiLeaks the green light to dump the 20,000 emails which Russian hackers had obligingly provided to WikiLeaks to hold in case some development like Hillary’s selection of Tim Kaine should occur.
Because the WikiLeaks data dump was timed very carefully to drop a turd into the DNC’s punch bowl to counteract Hillary’s announcement of her vice presidential candidate. No doubt instructions also went out from the Trump organization and from such foolish Sanders supporters as former Ohio State Senator Nina Turner to pitch a fit over the veep selection itself.
And certainly, this Russian offensive against Hillary Clinton’s campaign has scored one victory already. Debbie Wasserman Schultz has resigned, effective at the end of the convention, as Democratic National Committee chair. This represents a gift to the Kremlin and Donald Trump. To the extent that Bernard Sanders and his people have been responsible for procuring DWS’s departure, it is not unreasonable to suggest that they have allowed themselves to become useful idiots and willing dupes for Vladimir Vladimirovich. In such case, we ought to appoint another Vermonter as chair of the DNC. We should bring back Howard Dean, who was a brilliantly effective Democratic National Committee chair. Bringing back Howard Dean, and acknowledge Hillary Clinton supporter, will send a powerful message to the Kremlin and to Bernard Sanders that the Democratic Party won’t take such bullshit lying down.
At all events, the Democratic Party needs to conduct a thoroughgoing purge of the Russian sympathizers in its midst, and it needs to insist that a similar purge be conducted throughout the nation. Not since the days of Charles Lindbergh have we seen such obvious treason being perpetrated in the context of an American political election. And while the Republicans love to chant “Hillary is a traitor, lock her up!” it is more than ever apparent that the true treasonable conspiracy aimed like a dagger at the heart of America is the one emanating from the Kremlin and from Trump Tower.
I leave to the labors of abler commentators than I the recitation of the detailed mechanism by which Trump and the Russian government have made common cause together. But we do know now that Donald Trump is the Manchurian candidate, and that the revelations of the extent to which the Russian intelligence apparat is deploying all the tradecraft that it can to try to secure his election as President of the United States has given the Democratic Party in general, and the Hillary Clinton campaign in particular a stick with which he may ultimately be bearbaited and beaten to death. Let’s not do the typical Democratic thing and be too afraid to unwrap the gift this represents. Instead, let’s open up this priceless gift, and not be afraid to be “opinionated, brash, fearless, partisan, hectoring, rude, cunning and unfair,” as the late John Mortimer, QC put it in his Rumpole stories. Above all, let us, as Rudyard Kipling put it “make ye no truce with Adam-zad, the bear that walks like a man!” If redbaiting is no longer an option because Russia is no longer communist, then let us never be afraid to engage in a little baiting of the Russian bear. After all, the Puritans didn’t oppose bearbaiting because of the pain it gave the bear, but because of the pleasure it gave the spectators.
Let us also not be afraid to forthrightly declare that we are at an unprecedented pass in American history, where, for the first time, opposition to a particular presidential candidate, in this case, Hillary Clinton, is in fact tantamount to treason.
Then, let us set about the pleasurable enterprise of bearbaiting Donald Trump and his campaign to death. Until. There. Is. Nothing. Left.
#NeverTrump.
What is clear is that a Russian kriegßpiel is very much in progress against the West. In many ways, we are at war right now with Russia. Naïve Democrats, too conditioned by fear of what happened with Joseph McCarthy to regard any form of calling Russia out as unacceptable, need to understand that the evidence is far clearer now than it was 60 years ago. Again, a kriegspiel is very much underway against the West, Russia is using every malign instrumentality it can to secure the election of Donald Trump, a useful idiot it thinks it can control. We are at a point where failing to support Hillary Clinton for president is very close to being treasonable.
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In the last 48 hours the Donald Trump campaign has begun to show a new kind of vulnerability, one that we had never expected in an American political campaign. Media sources from CNN to Forbes to Talking Points Memo to defenseone.com have begun to connect the dots linking Trump Tower with the Moscow Kremlin. The Clinton campaign has also begun to connect those dots, and as the dots come together, we begin to see evidence of malign attempts on the part of the Russian government to influence the outcome of this election. Three weeks ago, had anyone suggested that Vladimir Putin and the Russian intelligence apparat were trying to influence the outcome of an American election, “right-thinking” Democrats, conditioned to reject anything that smacks of McCarthyism, would have said such a soothsayer his or her tongue for uttering such a heresy.
I was almost fed my own tongue for suggesting, last month, in my post of June 29, entitled “The Disastrous Ramifications of Brexit: Russia's Kriegßpiel Against the West” (http://cathedralcityobserved.blogspot.com/2016/06/the-disastrous-ramifications-of-brexit.html), that part of the reason for the success of Brexit was that Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and his minions within the Russian intelligence apparat had attempted successfully to influence the outcome of the Brexit referendum. My fellow Democrats, conditioned by the history of American McCarthyism in the 1950s, were quick to denounce my ideas as being “unhelpful.”
Unhelpful to whom? I responded. At the risk of sounding like Donald Trump congratulating himself for the Pulse nightclub shootings, I can’t resist a certain measure of schadenfreude, a certain temptation to say “I told you so.” Because ultimately, the evidence before us points not only to malign Russian intervention in our election, but also to the treasonable nature of Donald Trump and of the Trump campaign. In a previous post, entitled “Donald Trump’s Treasonable Protection Racket,” (http://cathedralcityobserved.blogspot.com/2016/07/donald-trumps-treasonable-protection.html) I suggested that Donald Trump’s unwillingness to defend the Baltic state members of NATO constituted evidence of treason.
Again, I was pooh-poohed by all the bien pensant Democrats who read my post. And again, I must confess to feeling a certain measure of schadenfreude.
However, the fact that we are betrayed at the highest levels isn’t limited to the treason being committed by members of the American right. Many of us in the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party have noted with increasing dismay the tendency of diehard supporters of Vermont Independent Senator Bernard Sanders to echo and repeat the often poisonous Hillary-hating tropes that find such a ready home in the campaign of the Kremlin’s own candidate, Donald Trump. We find, indeed, that some of the Sanders diehards, the so-called Sandernistas, speaking from a standpoint of excessive white privilege, have gone so far as to state very publicly that they would prefer four years of Donald Trump to one day of Hillary Clinton.
And, of course, the same over-the-top Sandernistas pitched an earsplitting snit when Hillary Clinton Virginia Senator Tim Kaine as her running mate. Yet, the whines that Tim Kane wasn’t “progressive enough” soon proved to be bullshit. It wasn’t so much that Sandernistas didn’t think Tim Kaine was progressive enough, though some of the stupider members of that tribe probably lapped up such nonsense with their silver spoons, while applying nonsensical purity tests that even God himself could not pass, but that more subtle, clever, and malignant Sandernistas realized that Tim Kaine was exactly the kind of progressive who could draw votes from the left wing of the Democratic Party, who could induce them to come home to Hillary.
And because Tim Kaine was indeed a progressive choice, Trump moles in Sanders world could not run the risk that Tim Kaine might actually be seen for the progressive choice he represents. Something had to be done. And so, against the possibility that Hillary might choose a genuinely progressive candidate, even if also a cautious one, the Sanders holdouts and the Trump apparat quietly let it be known that they believed that Tim Kaine would be Hillary’s choice. And once Moscow became aware that Tim Kaine was Hillary’s choice, it gave WikiLeaks the green light to dump the 20,000 emails which Russian hackers had obligingly provided to WikiLeaks to hold in case some development like Hillary’s selection of Tim Kaine should occur.
Because the WikiLeaks data dump was timed very carefully to drop a turd into the DNC’s punch bowl to counteract Hillary’s announcement of her vice presidential candidate. No doubt instructions also went out from the Trump organization and from such foolish Sanders supporters as former Ohio State Senator Nina Turner to pitch a fit over the veep selection itself.
And certainly, this Russian offensive against Hillary Clinton’s campaign has scored one victory already. Debbie Wasserman Schultz has resigned, effective at the end of the convention, as Democratic National Committee chair. This represents a gift to the Kremlin and Donald Trump. To the extent that Bernard Sanders and his people have been responsible for procuring DWS’s departure, it is not unreasonable to suggest that they have allowed themselves to become useful idiots and willing dupes for Vladimir Vladimirovich. In such case, we ought to appoint another Vermonter as chair of the DNC. We should bring back Howard Dean, who was a brilliantly effective Democratic National Committee chair. Bringing back Howard Dean, and acknowledge Hillary Clinton supporter, will send a powerful message to the Kremlin and to Bernard Sanders that the Democratic Party won’t take such bullshit lying down.
At all events, the Democratic Party needs to conduct a thoroughgoing purge of the Russian sympathizers in its midst, and it needs to insist that a similar purge be conducted throughout the nation. Not since the days of Charles Lindbergh have we seen such obvious treason being perpetrated in the context of an American political election. And while the Republicans love to chant “Hillary is a traitor, lock her up!” it is more than ever apparent that the true treasonable conspiracy aimed like a dagger at the heart of America is the one emanating from the Kremlin and from Trump Tower.
I leave to the labors of abler commentators than I the recitation of the detailed mechanism by which Trump and the Russian government have made common cause together. But we do know now that Donald Trump is the Manchurian candidate, and that the revelations of the extent to which the Russian intelligence apparat is deploying all the tradecraft that it can to try to secure his election as President of the United States has given the Democratic Party in general, and the Hillary Clinton campaign in particular a stick with which he may ultimately be bearbaited and beaten to death. Let’s not do the typical Democratic thing and be too afraid to unwrap the gift this represents. Instead, let’s open up this priceless gift, and not be afraid to be “opinionated, brash, fearless, partisan, hectoring, rude, cunning and unfair,” as the late John Mortimer, QC put it in his Rumpole stories. Above all, let us, as Rudyard Kipling put it “make ye no truce with Adam-zad, the bear that walks like a man!” If redbaiting is no longer an option because Russia is no longer communist, then let us never be afraid to engage in a little baiting of the Russian bear. After all, the Puritans didn’t oppose bearbaiting because of the pain it gave the bear, but because of the pleasure it gave the spectators.
Let us also not be afraid to forthrightly declare that we are at an unprecedented pass in American history, where, for the first time, opposition to a particular presidential candidate, in this case, Hillary Clinton, is in fact tantamount to treason.
Then, let us set about the pleasurable enterprise of bearbaiting Donald Trump and his campaign to death. Until. There. Is. Nothing. Left.
#NeverTrump.
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