Summary: Mike Pence certainly did not help Donald Trump last night in the vice presidential debate. It’s hard to see how the mainstream media can buy into the notion that Mr. Pence “won” the debate when his entire performance was a bravura demonstration of undercutting the top of the ticket and setting himself up as a possible presidential contender in 2020.
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So much spin has emerged from last night’s vice presidential debate that the public is virtually seasick from it.
As usual, Democratic loyalists are insisting that Tim Kaine won the debate, while Republicans are insisting that the nod should go to Mike Pence.
In truth, both men are not inexpert debaters. The consensus that has emerged seems to be that Pence delivered a smoother performance, one that may win on points. However, as we dig deeper into what transpired last night, Pence’s victory begins to look more and more illusory.
For Tim Kaine, representing a campaign that is now up by anywhere between five and ten points nationally, and which has actually pulled ahead in the battleground state of Ohio, the assignment was quite simple and even Hippocratic: first do no harm. And indeed, Tim Kaine did no harm. Despite handwringing and Monday morning quarterbacking from timid Democrats who saw fit to place their interest in decorum above their loyalty to their party, Tim Kaine delivered a masterful Kriegßpiel against the embattled Mike Pence.
Moreover, the debate appeared to be two separate proceedings conducted in the same space at the same time. Much like the 2008 vice presidential debate between Joe Biden and the unspeakable Sarah Palin, Tim Kaine reached out purposefully to the broad coalition which makes up the Democratic Party. By contrast, Mike Pence spent the debate grokking with the evangelical subset of the Republican base. While Tim Kaine was evangelizing the broad Democratic coalition and acting as a “fisher of men” among the undecideds, Mike Pence was engaged in a love feast with a narrow subsection of the Trump electorate. Like Sarah Palin and Joe Biden, the two contenders seem largely to have talked past or at one another.
Watching the debate was akin to watching a kind of bizarre, balletic, pas de deux, or perhaps watching two judoka sparring in the dōjō, so evenly matched that neither could pull off a definitive victory against the other. Nonetheless, we may see a number of factors emerge in the next few days tending to undercut the “Pence won” narrative that the Beltway media have been trying assiduously to propagate since yesterday evening.
For, as a number of sites, including vox.com and Politico have suggested, much of Pence’s performance last night seemed less about defending the top of his ticket than it did about positioning Mike Pence for a possible presidential run in 2020 or 2024. Yet, more than that, Mike Pence’s astonishing failure to defend Donald Trump against any of the very serious charges Tim Kaine leveled against him may have begun to drive a wedge between the two Republican standardbearers.
Moreover, Pence’s denial of many of Trump’s outrageous and documented utterances not only shows a disturbing lack of moral compass implicit in Pence’s unwillingness to own his running mate’s remarks, but also an astonishing lack of strategic grasp. The Hillary Clinton campaign ads virtually write themselves; Pence saying “Donald Trump never said [insert outrageous thing here],” followed by a video clip of Donald Trump saying exactly that.
If Mike Pence thought he had won the debate last night, victory will surely be snatched from him by the Clinton attack ads we can expect to see in short order, highlighting each obvious Pence lie. To the extent that the Clinton attack ads emerge fairly swiftly, they can be expected to significantly undermine the credibility of the Trump-Pence ticket among undecided voters. This, notwithstanding the conventional wisdom that most vice presidential debates don’t much move the needle. And in truth, this one probably won’t move the needle terribly much. It will be the fact checkers and the attack ad writers for Hillary Clinton will have the effect of moving the needle.
Of course, the fact checkers and the attack ad writers will have a powerful, if un-self-aware, ally in Donald Trump himself. The Donald, who seems to have all the impulse control of a five-year-old child, can’t stop tweeting foolish and unhelpful things. Already, this morning, the word is out the Trump is having conniptions over the strong public perception that Mike Pence might have been the better presidential candidate for the Republicans than would The Donald himself. And since The Donald cannot stand not to be thought of as the best, the smartest, the most endowed, the most YUGE guy in the room, we may predict another self sabotaging Twitter meltdown before too long.
In short, while the early post game wrapup might award the debate to Mike Pence on points, the Clinton campaign can afford to play a long game, allowing the situation to develop for a few days while the fact checkers do their work and the attack ad writers do theirs. Mike Pence may have won a transitory victory yesterday evening, but his tergiversation, his outright untruths, and his astonishing failure to mount a vigorous defense of the top of his ticket will, in the end, be one of those factors which will cost the Trump campaign the election.
Wednesday, October 5, 2016
Monday, October 3, 2016
A QUESTION OF LOYALTY AND A DEFENSE OF McCARTHYISM: WHY HILLARY CLINTON IS THE ONLY CHOICE FOR PATRIOTIC AMERICANS THIS NOVEMBER
Summary: As the ongoing controversy about the close relationship between Donald Trump and Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, and the fairly obvious Russian attempts to intervene in Election 2016 begin to gain critical mass, the choice for undecided voters be is no longer an abstract one involving only voter preference.
Instead, the choice has become one involving basic questions of loyalty to the United States. Though Trump supporters and leftists of the Katrina Vanden Heuvel stripe may attempt to put a stop to such discussions by invoking the tired cliché of McCarthyism, the indisputable fact remains that we are indeed being subverted by paid agents of the Russian State, acting on behalf of Donald Trump.
----------------------------------------------------
The defecation has apparently hit the ventilation in Trump world. Aside from his erratic, unhinged, meandering, Fidel Castro-like speech in Pennsylvania in which he required almost an hour and a half to deliver nine scripted sentences, and aside from the bombshell story that hit late yesterday about his $916m claimed loss on his 1995 income tax returns, or his appalling debate performance last Monday evening, or his bizarre, possibly drug fueled, ongoing Twitter attack on former Miss Universe Alicia Machado, and insisting, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that he “won” Monday’s debate, The Donald has clearly had a wonderful week.
In laying aside the irony of trying to spin Donald Trump’s last seven days as anything but a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week, we may still wonder how a presidential wannabe can manage to continue to shoot himself in the foot so badly, so often, so theatrically, and still be within a hair’s breadth of being able to win the election.
Because in the last few days the one revelation which has hit about Donald Trump’s campaign from which recovery may not, in the end, be possible, is the revelation inherent in the increasingly detailed information about the manner in which Russian state actors have played an increasingly obvious role in attempting to secure victory for Donald Trump. We know, for example, that Russian state media have made no secret of their desire to see Donald Trump elected to the presidency of the United States. Moreover, a routine Google search for Putin’s army of Trump trolls brings up 369,000 results in a little bit more than half a second.
While traditional media had largely been reluctant to address the issue of the extent to which Vladimir Vladimirovich was trying to help his good friend Gospodin Donald Trump win the presidency, the issue has hit critical mass in the last few days. When Newsweek, for example, broke Kurt Eichenwald’s story concerning Gospodin Trump’s violation of the federal trade embargo against Cuba, the immediate response to the story took the form of a Russian-linked cyberattack on Newsweek.com, which attack itself became news. The cover story in the current issue of Time magazine is an extensive exposé of the extensive Russian efforts to infiltrate and undermine the integrity of the 2016 elections.
What this critical mass of reporting on Russia’s efforts to mount what is, to all intents and purposes, a hostile takeover bid for the United States government has catalyzed is a discussion of the extent to which our votes in this election have, and must have, a patriotic dimension to them. In short, we have reached the point in this 2016 election cycle where the only patriotic vote possible is unequivocally and absolutely a vote for Hillary Clinton. We had never thought, at least not since the contest between Aaron Burr and Thomas Jefferson in 1800, that it could, let alone should, be necessary to define a vote for one or another presidential candidate as unpatriotic or treasonable.
Yet, we have reached exactly that point in this 2016 election. Because it simply is not patriotic to support, let alone vote for, a man whose campaign is receiving substantial material assistance from the Kremlin.
Months ago, in writing about the unexpected triumph of Brexit, I suggested that pro-Brexit voices in United Kingdom were actually doing Moscow’s work; I had no hesitation then, and I have no hesitation now, about impugning the basic loyalty to the West of Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, or even of David Cameron. I suggested that champagne corks were popping in the Kremlin the night the Brexit vote result was announced, largely because the Brexit vote represented a victory in Russia’s long-standing kriegßpiel against the West. I went further in that post from this summer and suggested that Donald Trump’s advocacy of Brexit was of a piece not only with the advocacy of Farage and Johnson for Brexit, but also of a piece with a long-standing Russian policy goals toward the West.
Indeed, I went so far as a suggest that a hundred-division armored thrust at the heart of NATO could not have caused more chaos among the European Union than had Brexit, which Gospodin Trump had advocated for because we now know that Donald Trump is a faithful steward and advocate of Russian policy. We may expect the first foreign decoration to come President Donald Trump’s way will no doubt be the Order of Saint Andrew or some other similar senior Russian bauble.
That is, of course, if Donald Trump is elected president. It is up to us to prevent that from happening by any means necessary.
“By any means necessary” necessarily includes close and searching scrutiny of Trump’s, and Trump’s family’s, business connections with the Kremlin. It should also include an investigation into Donald Trump’s relationships with Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. Now, one advocating such searching investigations, and possible criminal prosecution against Trump and Assange, can expect to be, and will be, attacked by leftists who have never integrated into their thinking the reality that Russia is no longer a state of the left; what was once the Soviet Union has been replaced by a fascist kleptocracy run by the biggest fascist kleptocrat of all, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.
Yet the left will still squawk about “redbaiting,” while invoking the tired old trope of McCarthyism. McCarthyism, as a trope, has become an example of what Robert Jay Lifton in his seminal monograph Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, which dealt with brainwashing in Mao’s China, has described as a “thought-terminating cliché.” A “thought-terminating cliché” is nothing more than a convenient shorthand by which a rational discussion may be circumvented. Having grown up in the liberal-leftist circles during the late 1970s, and being still myself a man of the liberal left, I can remember the invocation of such thought terminating clichés as “McCarthyism” at first hand.
Among liberal Democrats in the 1970s, for example, invocations of such unfashionable-at-the-time concepts as patriotism were almost routinely met with a facile charge of “McCarthyism.” To rebut a foolish, pro-Soviet notion with a suggestion that such things were harmful to our national interest, or worse, to question the patriotism of the maker or offeror of such a notion, was to call down an immediate invocation of “McCarthyism.” And among the pious, knee-jerk liberals of the time, to invoke the evil memory of Joseph McCarthy was all that was necessary to shut down the discussion. It was a form of intellectual bullying roughly akin to neoconservative invocations of Munich to justify our military misadventure in Vietnam or our similar misadventure in Iraq.
And indeed, we see similar appeals to thought terminating cliches today. It is bad enough when the Nation’s Katrina Vanden Heuvel springs to the defense of Donald Trump and Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin by seeking to define any expression of concern about the bromance between the two men as an illegitimate expression of McCarthyism. But what reduces one to sputtering, spluttering, fiery, fulminant, angry, apoplectic rage is to hear Julian Assange try to delegitimize any discussion of his own criminal behavior by invoking a similar fraudulent, thought-terminating cliche.
Because when it comes right down to it, America is in greater danger now from Russian subversion than she was in the late 1940s and early 1950s when Iosif Vissarionovich was in command in the Moskovskiy Kremlin. Because for all we knew that Stalin was an authentically bad man, and we remembered how he had been responsible for the deaths of millions of Kulaks, we also knew that Soviet efforts at subversion here in the United States were remarkably unsuccessful. We didn’t have the Soviets attempting to take over one of our major political parties the way that Vladimir Vladimirovich has attempted to co-opt the Republican Party. We could back then name on the fingers of our hands the worst traitors in our midst.
Kim Philby. Guy Burgess. Daniel MacLean. Anthony Blunt. The “fifth man,” whose identity has been much speculated on in Britain but never ascertained. Klaus Fuchs. Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. Alger Hiss. This was the rogues gallery of traitors upon whom Joseph McCarthy erected an overweening, overreaching edifice of finger-pointing, suspicion, and hysteria. On this edifice rested such enormities as the House Un-American Activities Committee, the California Legislature’s Dies committee, and the purges in many American unions.
Yet, while we knew that there were a great many excessively idealistic Americans who had flirted with Soviet communism because they believed, in truth, that Lincoln Steffens had been right when he had said of Soviet communism “I have seen the future and it works,” we came to realize that their flirtation had been just that, a passing enthusiasm from which many of them came home, for they had never really given up on our American experiment in representative democracy, on our Constitution, and on the fundamental legitimacy of our representative institutions of self-government. What we had thought was a generation of subversives turned out to be a generation of passionate loyalists, passionately loving this country, and passionately convinced that this country had and has a great and exceptional heritage and promise to live up to.
But today, the threat of subversion, the threat of a hostile takeover by the Moskovskiy Kremlin is not just the fever dream of a closeted homosexual Senator from Wisconsin. It’s a reality that could take place as early as January, 2017. For in the 50s, though we were buffaloed into believing wrongly that there was a Red under Every Bed, 60 years later we now see evidence of real fellow travelers everywhere in the Trump campaign, and in the campaigns of Gary Johnson and Jill Stein as well. Why would Donald Trump have a man like Boris Epshteyn in a senior role in his campaign? Epshteyn, an immigrant from post-Soviet Russia, has the kind of resume which strongly suggests that he is in fact an asset of some part of the Russian intelligence apparat; either of FSB, the successor to KGB, or of GRU, Russian military intelligence.
Indeed, there is considerable speculation that Epshteyn is Donald Trump’s Russian control/handler/case officer. If so, it would be in character with the incredibly amateurish nature of the Trump campaign to allow so obvious a Russian intelligence asset to parade himself repeatedly on American television, for all the world to see. I cannot imagine an experienced American case officer, say, Valerie Plame, outing herself in similar fashion. (Indeed, the Bush administration’s deliberate acts to expose Valerie Plame as a CIA case officer resulted in a number of rather high profile criminal prosecutions in this country.) But, apparently, the Trump campaign remains so arrogant and so amateurish that they apparently do not imagine that anyone would have the synaptic capability to connect the dots and conclude that Boris Epshteyn is in fact a Russian intelligence asset.
If, in fact, Boris Epshteyn is a Russian intelligence asset functioning as Donald Trump’s control/case officer/handler, and if, as we know, there are numerous Trump trolls in the pay of the Russian government operating out of venues in Moscow or St. Petersburg, among them a nondescript office block at Ulitsa Savushkina 55 in that city’s Primorskiy district, and another location believed to be on the grounds of the Smolny Institute, a St. Petersburg memorial to the October Revolution owned and maintained by the Russian State, we must nevertheless conclude that Russia’s paid trolls are not exclusively located in Moscow, St. Petersburg, or other cities and towns of the Russian land. We must conclude that there are paid Trump trolls in this country who are either aware that their paychecks come from the Russian State, or who are culpably ignorant of the source of such paychecks.
To the extent that this is the case, we are the target not only of an organized disinformation campaign from without, but also of comprehensive betrayal from within. One can usually tell a Russian Trump troll by their uncertain command of recursion or of the conditional/subjunctive tense and mood in English language. Though English may be linguistically the most promiscuous of tongues, it is also one of the fullest of traps for the unwary. Since Russian handles verb tenses and moves rather differently from English, it’s relatively easy to catch a person for whom Russian is his or her first language. No Russian speaker could have written in English a paragraph as laden with recursions and subjunctive clauses as those which have appeared in this blog.
That is not, of course, to say that every Trump troll is posting from Ul. Savushkina 55 or from Smolny. It is the domestic Trump trolls and the American Trump supporters and surrogates of whom we should be particularly afraid. These are the traitors and nut cases who can be expected to be prominent in any hypothetical Trump administration. These are not people who should be allowed anywhere near the levers of power.
And because we cannot allow a nutcase like Trump or nut cases like those who ally themselves to his cause access to the corridors of power, we Hillary Clinton supporters must be willing to frame the next five weeks in the most apocalyptic terms we can. We must be willing to call out the Russian trolls when we encounter them -they will give themselves away by their uncertain command of the English language, or by their repeated cutting and pasting– but even more, we must be prepared to expose the Trump traitors in our midst. Because, this time, a healthy dose of McCarthyism may be all that stands between the United States and a Russian motor-rifle division patrolling Capitol Hill.
Citizens, the Republic is in danger!
Instead, the choice has become one involving basic questions of loyalty to the United States. Though Trump supporters and leftists of the Katrina Vanden Heuvel stripe may attempt to put a stop to such discussions by invoking the tired cliché of McCarthyism, the indisputable fact remains that we are indeed being subverted by paid agents of the Russian State, acting on behalf of Donald Trump.
----------------------------------------------------
The defecation has apparently hit the ventilation in Trump world. Aside from his erratic, unhinged, meandering, Fidel Castro-like speech in Pennsylvania in which he required almost an hour and a half to deliver nine scripted sentences, and aside from the bombshell story that hit late yesterday about his $916m claimed loss on his 1995 income tax returns, or his appalling debate performance last Monday evening, or his bizarre, possibly drug fueled, ongoing Twitter attack on former Miss Universe Alicia Machado, and insisting, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that he “won” Monday’s debate, The Donald has clearly had a wonderful week.
In laying aside the irony of trying to spin Donald Trump’s last seven days as anything but a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week, we may still wonder how a presidential wannabe can manage to continue to shoot himself in the foot so badly, so often, so theatrically, and still be within a hair’s breadth of being able to win the election.
Because in the last few days the one revelation which has hit about Donald Trump’s campaign from which recovery may not, in the end, be possible, is the revelation inherent in the increasingly detailed information about the manner in which Russian state actors have played an increasingly obvious role in attempting to secure victory for Donald Trump. We know, for example, that Russian state media have made no secret of their desire to see Donald Trump elected to the presidency of the United States. Moreover, a routine Google search for Putin’s army of Trump trolls brings up 369,000 results in a little bit more than half a second.
While traditional media had largely been reluctant to address the issue of the extent to which Vladimir Vladimirovich was trying to help his good friend Gospodin Donald Trump win the presidency, the issue has hit critical mass in the last few days. When Newsweek, for example, broke Kurt Eichenwald’s story concerning Gospodin Trump’s violation of the federal trade embargo against Cuba, the immediate response to the story took the form of a Russian-linked cyberattack on Newsweek.com, which attack itself became news. The cover story in the current issue of Time magazine is an extensive exposé of the extensive Russian efforts to infiltrate and undermine the integrity of the 2016 elections.
What this critical mass of reporting on Russia’s efforts to mount what is, to all intents and purposes, a hostile takeover bid for the United States government has catalyzed is a discussion of the extent to which our votes in this election have, and must have, a patriotic dimension to them. In short, we have reached the point in this 2016 election cycle where the only patriotic vote possible is unequivocally and absolutely a vote for Hillary Clinton. We had never thought, at least not since the contest between Aaron Burr and Thomas Jefferson in 1800, that it could, let alone should, be necessary to define a vote for one or another presidential candidate as unpatriotic or treasonable.
Yet, we have reached exactly that point in this 2016 election. Because it simply is not patriotic to support, let alone vote for, a man whose campaign is receiving substantial material assistance from the Kremlin.
Months ago, in writing about the unexpected triumph of Brexit, I suggested that pro-Brexit voices in United Kingdom were actually doing Moscow’s work; I had no hesitation then, and I have no hesitation now, about impugning the basic loyalty to the West of Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, or even of David Cameron. I suggested that champagne corks were popping in the Kremlin the night the Brexit vote result was announced, largely because the Brexit vote represented a victory in Russia’s long-standing kriegßpiel against the West. I went further in that post from this summer and suggested that Donald Trump’s advocacy of Brexit was of a piece not only with the advocacy of Farage and Johnson for Brexit, but also of a piece with a long-standing Russian policy goals toward the West.
Indeed, I went so far as a suggest that a hundred-division armored thrust at the heart of NATO could not have caused more chaos among the European Union than had Brexit, which Gospodin Trump had advocated for because we now know that Donald Trump is a faithful steward and advocate of Russian policy. We may expect the first foreign decoration to come President Donald Trump’s way will no doubt be the Order of Saint Andrew or some other similar senior Russian bauble.
That is, of course, if Donald Trump is elected president. It is up to us to prevent that from happening by any means necessary.
“By any means necessary” necessarily includes close and searching scrutiny of Trump’s, and Trump’s family’s, business connections with the Kremlin. It should also include an investigation into Donald Trump’s relationships with Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. Now, one advocating such searching investigations, and possible criminal prosecution against Trump and Assange, can expect to be, and will be, attacked by leftists who have never integrated into their thinking the reality that Russia is no longer a state of the left; what was once the Soviet Union has been replaced by a fascist kleptocracy run by the biggest fascist kleptocrat of all, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.
Yet the left will still squawk about “redbaiting,” while invoking the tired old trope of McCarthyism. McCarthyism, as a trope, has become an example of what Robert Jay Lifton in his seminal monograph Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, which dealt with brainwashing in Mao’s China, has described as a “thought-terminating cliché.” A “thought-terminating cliché” is nothing more than a convenient shorthand by which a rational discussion may be circumvented. Having grown up in the liberal-leftist circles during the late 1970s, and being still myself a man of the liberal left, I can remember the invocation of such thought terminating clichés as “McCarthyism” at first hand.
Among liberal Democrats in the 1970s, for example, invocations of such unfashionable-at-the-time concepts as patriotism were almost routinely met with a facile charge of “McCarthyism.” To rebut a foolish, pro-Soviet notion with a suggestion that such things were harmful to our national interest, or worse, to question the patriotism of the maker or offeror of such a notion, was to call down an immediate invocation of “McCarthyism.” And among the pious, knee-jerk liberals of the time, to invoke the evil memory of Joseph McCarthy was all that was necessary to shut down the discussion. It was a form of intellectual bullying roughly akin to neoconservative invocations of Munich to justify our military misadventure in Vietnam or our similar misadventure in Iraq.
And indeed, we see similar appeals to thought terminating cliches today. It is bad enough when the Nation’s Katrina Vanden Heuvel springs to the defense of Donald Trump and Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin by seeking to define any expression of concern about the bromance between the two men as an illegitimate expression of McCarthyism. But what reduces one to sputtering, spluttering, fiery, fulminant, angry, apoplectic rage is to hear Julian Assange try to delegitimize any discussion of his own criminal behavior by invoking a similar fraudulent, thought-terminating cliche.
Because when it comes right down to it, America is in greater danger now from Russian subversion than she was in the late 1940s and early 1950s when Iosif Vissarionovich was in command in the Moskovskiy Kremlin. Because for all we knew that Stalin was an authentically bad man, and we remembered how he had been responsible for the deaths of millions of Kulaks, we also knew that Soviet efforts at subversion here in the United States were remarkably unsuccessful. We didn’t have the Soviets attempting to take over one of our major political parties the way that Vladimir Vladimirovich has attempted to co-opt the Republican Party. We could back then name on the fingers of our hands the worst traitors in our midst.
Kim Philby. Guy Burgess. Daniel MacLean. Anthony Blunt. The “fifth man,” whose identity has been much speculated on in Britain but never ascertained. Klaus Fuchs. Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. Alger Hiss. This was the rogues gallery of traitors upon whom Joseph McCarthy erected an overweening, overreaching edifice of finger-pointing, suspicion, and hysteria. On this edifice rested such enormities as the House Un-American Activities Committee, the California Legislature’s Dies committee, and the purges in many American unions.
Yet, while we knew that there were a great many excessively idealistic Americans who had flirted with Soviet communism because they believed, in truth, that Lincoln Steffens had been right when he had said of Soviet communism “I have seen the future and it works,” we came to realize that their flirtation had been just that, a passing enthusiasm from which many of them came home, for they had never really given up on our American experiment in representative democracy, on our Constitution, and on the fundamental legitimacy of our representative institutions of self-government. What we had thought was a generation of subversives turned out to be a generation of passionate loyalists, passionately loving this country, and passionately convinced that this country had and has a great and exceptional heritage and promise to live up to.
But today, the threat of subversion, the threat of a hostile takeover by the Moskovskiy Kremlin is not just the fever dream of a closeted homosexual Senator from Wisconsin. It’s a reality that could take place as early as January, 2017. For in the 50s, though we were buffaloed into believing wrongly that there was a Red under Every Bed, 60 years later we now see evidence of real fellow travelers everywhere in the Trump campaign, and in the campaigns of Gary Johnson and Jill Stein as well. Why would Donald Trump have a man like Boris Epshteyn in a senior role in his campaign? Epshteyn, an immigrant from post-Soviet Russia, has the kind of resume which strongly suggests that he is in fact an asset of some part of the Russian intelligence apparat; either of FSB, the successor to KGB, or of GRU, Russian military intelligence.
Indeed, there is considerable speculation that Epshteyn is Donald Trump’s Russian control/handler/case officer. If so, it would be in character with the incredibly amateurish nature of the Trump campaign to allow so obvious a Russian intelligence asset to parade himself repeatedly on American television, for all the world to see. I cannot imagine an experienced American case officer, say, Valerie Plame, outing herself in similar fashion. (Indeed, the Bush administration’s deliberate acts to expose Valerie Plame as a CIA case officer resulted in a number of rather high profile criminal prosecutions in this country.) But, apparently, the Trump campaign remains so arrogant and so amateurish that they apparently do not imagine that anyone would have the synaptic capability to connect the dots and conclude that Boris Epshteyn is in fact a Russian intelligence asset.
If, in fact, Boris Epshteyn is a Russian intelligence asset functioning as Donald Trump’s control/case officer/handler, and if, as we know, there are numerous Trump trolls in the pay of the Russian government operating out of venues in Moscow or St. Petersburg, among them a nondescript office block at Ulitsa Savushkina 55 in that city’s Primorskiy district, and another location believed to be on the grounds of the Smolny Institute, a St. Petersburg memorial to the October Revolution owned and maintained by the Russian State, we must nevertheless conclude that Russia’s paid trolls are not exclusively located in Moscow, St. Petersburg, or other cities and towns of the Russian land. We must conclude that there are paid Trump trolls in this country who are either aware that their paychecks come from the Russian State, or who are culpably ignorant of the source of such paychecks.
To the extent that this is the case, we are the target not only of an organized disinformation campaign from without, but also of comprehensive betrayal from within. One can usually tell a Russian Trump troll by their uncertain command of recursion or of the conditional/subjunctive tense and mood in English language. Though English may be linguistically the most promiscuous of tongues, it is also one of the fullest of traps for the unwary. Since Russian handles verb tenses and moves rather differently from English, it’s relatively easy to catch a person for whom Russian is his or her first language. No Russian speaker could have written in English a paragraph as laden with recursions and subjunctive clauses as those which have appeared in this blog.
That is not, of course, to say that every Trump troll is posting from Ul. Savushkina 55 or from Smolny. It is the domestic Trump trolls and the American Trump supporters and surrogates of whom we should be particularly afraid. These are the traitors and nut cases who can be expected to be prominent in any hypothetical Trump administration. These are not people who should be allowed anywhere near the levers of power.
And because we cannot allow a nutcase like Trump or nut cases like those who ally themselves to his cause access to the corridors of power, we Hillary Clinton supporters must be willing to frame the next five weeks in the most apocalyptic terms we can. We must be willing to call out the Russian trolls when we encounter them -they will give themselves away by their uncertain command of the English language, or by their repeated cutting and pasting– but even more, we must be prepared to expose the Trump traitors in our midst. Because, this time, a healthy dose of McCarthyism may be all that stands between the United States and a Russian motor-rifle division patrolling Capitol Hill.
Citizens, the Republic is in danger!
Tuesday, September 27, 2016
TRUMPS PICKETT’S CHARGE
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.
--------------------------------------------
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.
-xxx-
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.
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.
--------------------------------------------
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.
-xxx-
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.
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?
-------------------------------------------
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.
-------------------------------------------
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.
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.
-------------------------------------------------
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.
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