Summary: The assassination of Jamal Khashoggi may be expected, over the medium to long term, to have significant effects on the US relationship with Saudi Arabia and, more significantly, on the House of Saud itself. The Saudi response to Khashoggi’s murder has morphed from posture of what Winston Churchill might have called “injured guilt,” to one of acknowledgment of the fact of the crime while denying culpability, attempting, against the overwhelming weight of evidence, to suggest that Khashoggi’s murder was the result of “rogue” operators. The now apparent complicity of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, in a culture that places a premium on revenge, retaliation, and retribution, may be the spark that sends his aging and unbelievably corrupt Dynasty up in flames.
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When Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, nephew of notorious multi-zillionaire Adnan Khashoggi and cousin of sometime Princess Di boyfriend Dodi Fayed, was murdered inside the Turkish Consulate in İstanbul at the beginning of this month, the initial official Saudi response was one of indignant protestations and denial. To use Winston Churchill’s mordant description of Sir Stafford Cripps, the Saudi response to the initial and overwhelming evidence that Jamal Khashoggi had, in fact, been murdered in the consulate was an outburst of “injured guilt.”
In the better part of a month that has followed, the Saudi response has shifted from denials delivered in that tone of “injured guilt” to acknowledgment that Khashoggi had indeed been dispatched within the consulate, while denying any official culpability on the part of the Kingdom in Khashoggi’s murder.
In the meantime, all manner of lurid stories and conspiracy theories have been circulating. In the vacuum caused by the official unwillingness of the kingdom to come clean with what really happened when Jamal Khashoggi entered the consulate but never emerged, conspiracy theories and lurid stories have abounded.
Perhaps the most lurid of them all is the story circulating in Turkey and in parts of the American leftist media that Khashoggi was dismembered while still alive, a story lent credence by reports of screams from within the consul general’s study, together with the presence of a bone saw in the possession of one of the apparent kill team.
The “dismembered alive” narrative is certainly convenient to Ankara. It plays well into Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s neo-Ottoman diplomatic Kriegßpiel against Iraq and Saudi Arabia. It certainly plays well among the left-progressive media in this country, which have long had a conspicuous disdain for the monumentally corrupt House of Saud.
Nevertheless, as convenient as such a narrative is for Ankara, inasmuch as it shocks the consciences of civilized people everywhere, the Turkish narrative is open to serious question because it postulates a violation of one of the fundamental rules of intelligence tradecraft; use minimal force necessary to accomplish the intelligence objective at hand, which was to liquidate Jamal Khashoggi as efficiently, quietly, and expeditiously as possible.
A well-executed intelligence “wet work” would have involved a swift administration of a deadly nerve agent such as Novichok (or its United States equivalent). Given that the Saudis learned the lion’s share of their intelligence tradecraft from us, it is by no means unreasonable to expect that a fight may have been stayed inside the consulate in order to give the Saudi intelligence operatives of the kill team enough time and opportunity to administer the fatal poison.
If in fact a kill team of 15 men was lying in wait for Khashoggi inside the consul-general’s study, the scream referenced in Turkish and Western media reports can be fairly easily accounted for as Khashoggi’s exclamation of surprise or cry for help as he was put in the headlock that has also been referenced in Turkish and Western media reports. Alternatively, the scream could be accounted for by the jabbing of a needle and syringe into some part of his body, probably his neck.
If a nerve agent had been administered in such a fashion, the scream would have been Jamal Khashoggi’s last audible utterance. Novichok, or the US equivalent thereto, can be fatal within seconds or minutes. If the operatives of the kill team had Khashoggi in a headlock, and shot him full of Novichok, there is no doubt that Jamal Khashoggi would have been dead by the time his body was lowered to the floor. It certainly is more in keeping with best practices of intelligence tradecraft to kill your victim quickly rather than dismember him alive. Saudi intelligence operatives should have learned at least that from their US instructors.
After all, when all is said and done, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) is no fool. MBS certainly recognizes that Jamal Khashoggi was a scion of one of the wealthiest families in the Arab nation. After all, you don’t enjoy a certain measure of entrée to Saudi royal circles unless you are the nephew of the late, fabulously wealthy Adnan Khashoggi and the cousin of Dodi Fayed.
MBS must have been aware that to murder a Khashoggi would have been to provoke one of the famously endless cycles of revenge, retribution, and retaliation that have figured so prominently in the history of the Arab nation. Surely, MBS cannot be utterly unmindful of the revenge-based 1975 assassination of King Faisal ibn Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia, the 1951 assassination of King Abdullah I of Jordan, the brutal 1958 murder of King Faisal II of Iraq, or the 1981 jihadist assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat.
MBS should be fearful that somehow, somewhere, some Islamic cleric will issue a Fatwa sanctioning and calling for MBS’s assassination or that the Saudi ulema (the senior Islamic clerics of the Kingdom) will issue some kind of similar declaration.
Indeed, MBS may have crossed a so-called red line in the Kingdom’s politics. For most of its history, Saudi Arabia has been an absolute monarchy tempered by the realization of the royal house that its absolute rule depends for its legitimacy — and its survival — upon cultivating consensus among the kingdom’s leading families, and among the historic regions of the Arabian Peninsula under Saudi control, al-Hasa, the Hejaz, ‘Asir, and Najd.
But under the “stewardship” of MBS, the Saudi model of rule has shifted from one of consensus-based absolute rule to one of royal totalitarianism.
Unfortunately, MBS and his acolytes seem altogether blind to the historical reality that absolute monarchy, whether hereditary or de facto, has become, to all intents and purposes, a thing of the past, an historical curiosity increasingly regarded by a majority of the world not as a quaint holdover from times past, but as a positive social evil to be eradicated whenever the opportunity presents itself.
Of course, none of this relieves the kingdom of any of its culpability in the matter. Moreover, because MBS is no fool, he would no doubt have sought to shore up his flanks before moving against the Khashoggi family. He would have sought, in short, to avail himself of the cravenness, venality, corruptibility, and gullibility of Donald Trump and Donald Trump’s equally craven, venal, corrupt, repulsive, and gullible son-in-law Jared Kushner.
By drawing Trump and Kushner into what was an evident plot to assassinate the inconvenient journalist, MBS could feel comfortable of having the power of the United States behind him in the event of any attempt at revenge by Khashoggi’s friends or family. Thus, it is not unreasonable to conclude that it is highly doubtful that MBS would have sanctioned and intelligence wet work against Jamal Khashoggi if he did not have an advance green light from the White House.
Indeed, it is also reasonable to infer that MBS did, indeed have a green light for the killing from the highest reaches of the Trump administration. Knowing Donald Trump’s poisonous hatred for the Washington Post, we may infer the Trump would have seen in the Saudi operation against Jamal Khashoggi and opportunity to fire a warning shot across the bow of the Post as an institution and its journalists as individuals.
Trump, whom the evidence now suggests was read in to the Saudi operational plan before green-lighting it, probably saw the assassination/murder of Jamal Khashoggi as an excellent vehicle for intimidating what he plainly sees as a significant domestic political enemy. When all is said and done, the evidence appears to be mounting that Donald Trump was indeed either read in before the operation took place, or, even more damning, that it may have been Donald Trump himself who gave the go order for the planning and execution of actual operation itself.
Unfortunately for him, since The Donald has not got the self-awareness that God gave an axolotl, or any insight into the history of the English-speaking peoples, he plainly has absolutely no knowledge or recollection of the story of St. Thomas à Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, whose assassination, on December 29, 1170 on orders from King Henry II, sparked outrage throughout Christendom.
Now while Khashoggi himself of course was Muslim, and not a high-ranking cleric (in a religion that has neither priests nor bishops), he was a fearless journalist and somewhat after being the conscience of the Arab nation. For Trump to allow the United States to be seen as complicit in the murder of a witness for freedom of expression, a virtue much put upon and derided throughout much of the Arab world, is to put the United States in the position of gathering to itself yet further reservoirs of ill will, not just from the Arab nation, but from much of the Islamic ummah as a whole.
By parroting the Kingdom’s line, Donald Trump, his ridiculous, neotenous lap dog Jared Kushner, and the administration as a whole may well have filled the vials of wrath among the ummah and in the Arab nation to overflowing.
By their supine acquiescence in a gross crime against humanity and against human freedom, Trump and Kushner may well have also exposed this country to a new wave of terror when, not if, the unbelievably corrupt House of Saud finally collapses under the weight of its own internal contradictions and inconsistencies.
MBS would have done well, before sanctioning the murder of Jamal Khashoggi to have reacquainted himself with the words of the 81st sura of the Holy Qur’an:
When the sun is overthrown,
And when the stars fall,
And when the hills are moved,
And when the camels big with young are abandoned,
And when the wild beasts are herded together,
And when the seas rise,
And when souls are reunited,
And when the girl-child that was buried alive is asked
for what sin she was slain,
And when the pages are laid open,
And when the sky is ripped away,
And when hellfire is lighted,
And when the Garden is brought nigh,
[Then] every soul will know what it hath done!
Qur’an 81, Sura at-Takwir (The Overthrowing): 1-14
Thursday, October 25, 2018
Friday, October 5, 2018
LITTLE SNAPPERS: BRETT KAVANAUGH, THE RUSSIANS, AND THE DEMOCRATS
Summary: unsurprisingly, the Senate voted to approve a cloture motion to terminate debate on the confirmation of badly compromised Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. It’s also worth noting that Kavanaugh may well be compromised through association with the Russian State as well; Russian state media have been vigorously pressing his cause, and it’s not unreasonable to suspect that a lot of the funding for the dark money issue ads supporting Kavanaugh may have come from Russian sources. Of course, this puts the Democrats in Hobson’s choice position, yet one which may also prove advantageous to them in the November midterms.
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The cloture motion to terminate debate on the nomination of tainted Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh carried 51 to 49, on what was virtually a straight party-line vote. Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski voted with the Democrats, and West Virginia’s Joe Manchin broke ranks and voted with the Republicans.
As I write, “moderate” Maine Republican Susan Collins has finished dithering before the Senate, explaining how she intends to fall in line with the rest of her party. (Of course, the gutless senator did indeed choose to fall in line. Principles routinely evade Republican officeholders.)
The Kavanaugh fiasco has demonstrated, as bluntly as any other since Clarence Thomas’s nomination process back in 1991, that when it comes to nominating men to powerful positions, the voices of women are considered unworthy of belief.
Simply put, uppity women will not be permitted to question the patriarchy.
Of course, in the air of Donald Trump, that self-described “man of the 50s,” we should expect the patriarchy to behave as it has been behaving. Indeed, the 20 months of Donald Trump can be described quite simply as “the revenge of the white patriarchy.”
And indeed, the white patriarchy has had its revenge, to just about the nth degree. Not only was the entire Kavanaugh process tainted by the worst of bad faith from start to finish (as several Democratic Senators and media pundits have put it, the fix has always been in) but Kavanaugh’s performance itself, particularly during the renewed hearings, was a partisan screed delivered in a tone of aggrieved entitlement, or in what Winston Churchill famously described as the tone of Sir Stafford Cripps: “injured guilt.”
Aggrieved entitlement, insulted privilege, or injured guilt, the tone of Kavanaugh’s over-the-top remarks to the Senate Judiciary Committee, and the blatant, obvious, effort of the Republicans on that selfsame Judiciary Committee and in the White House to rig the process, are themselves, absent more, non-recommending to Kavanaugh’s nomination.
Add to that the fact that millions of Americans, in fact a majority of Americans, find Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony to be credible, and that also a majority of Americans oppose Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Court, and you have a nomination which under any other administration than that of the malignant narcissist and traitor Donald Trump, would and should have been withdrawn.
----------------------------------------------------
Of course, knowing the Donald, we know that the Kavanaugh nomination will never be withdrawn, because we know that the Donald not only cannot stand to acknowledge that he made a mistake but we also know that the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh is very much in the interests of the Russian State; Brett Kavanaugh is the Kremlin’s nominee, and the Kremlin will not permit his nomination to be withdrawn.
The evidence that Brett Kavanaugh is Russia’s man in our judiciary derives from the extensive, heavily editorialized coverage in Russian state media supporting Kavanaugh’s nomination. Moreover, the Russian trolls and bots have been swarming American social media again.
The evidence that Brett Kavanaugh is Russia’s man in our judiciary derives from the extensive, heavily editorialized coverage in Russian state media supporting Kavanaugh’s nomination. Moreover, the Russian trolls and bots have been swarming American social media again. Furthermore, it is now becoming obvious that some of the pro-Kavanaugh ads cluttering up our various media have been paid for by dark money from Russian sources.
Indeed, there are allegations that Facebook has been working closely with the Russians to try to influence public opinion in favor of Brett Kavanaugh. Aside from providing further ammunition for the developing case against Facebook and Gospodin Zuckerberg, the heavy-handed Russian attempts to intervene in favor of Brett Kavanaugh ought to have convinced at least a couple of Republicans that Kavanaugh was a Muscovite mole.
Unfortunately, we have reached a point at which the basic patriotism and loyalty to this country of Republican officeholders at all levels is open to the gravest of question. How many of them, how very many of them, have come to resemble Benedict Arnold’s love child by Maj. John André, the British spymaster who was Arnold’s case officer, and whose capture and hanging represented one of the first great triumphs of American counterintelligence work.
If, in fact, Brett Kavanaugh and Donald Trump are Muscovite moles, then of course it is in the interests of the Russian State to infiltrate them into positions of enormous power. Unless Donald Trump is able to run some kind of self-coup and make himself “president for life,” we should be rid of him before too much longer. But Brett Kavanaugh occupies a position that is a de facto lifetime tenure. How much mischief can the Kremlin accomplish with one of their moles on the Supreme Court?
It may come down to Americans having to exercise the option that Game of Thrones’ Cercei Lannister exercised when she found herself confronted with an unpalatable situation: “I choose violence.” And of course if Americans were to choose violence, Moscow could not be more satisfied. Moscow’s relentless cyber war and active measures against this country have been designed to accomplish the slow destruction of American institutions from within. Perhaps when America chooses violence, it should choose violence against the Russians, and not against itself.
After all, if the Russians think it is permissible for them to impose upon us a president of their choosing, then why should we not, with equal propriety, impose upon the Russian land a Romanov tsaritsa or Tsar of our own choosing? Democracy clearly does not work as well for Russia as it does for us. Perhaps our mission in this centennial year of the Russian Civil War, is to make the world once again safe for Romanov rule in Russia.
-----------------------------------------------
Of course, as much as it may be fun to contemplate a restoration of imperial rule in Russia, as much as it may be fun to imagine Vladimir Putin choking out his life at the end of the noose in the Trubetskoy Bastion of St. Petersburg’s Peter and Paul fortress, we must now turn to an examination of the political calculus of the midterms.
For the Republicans, the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh may prove to be a more mixed blessing then they had contemplated. It is not unreasonable to hypothesize that the Republicans were hoping that somehow the Democrats would defeat the Kavanaugh nomination process.
A successful Democratic resistance to the Kavanaugh nomination process, in the malign minds of Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell, would have enabled the Republicans to whip their base into a frothing, fulminating, spittle-flying, friendship-sundering, violence-inciting, lather of indignation against the Democrats. Unfortunately for them, the Republicans, who have a malodorous reputation for being sore winners, may well find themselves deprived of that weapon, just when they needed it in this election cycle.
However, with an undeserved victory landing in their laps like a turd, the Republicans may find themselves bereft of the very thing needed to make up the deficit they are suffering vis-à-vis Democrats in these final weeks before the midterms. By contrast, the Democrats should stay pissed off. The Kavanaugh nomination process ought particularly to piss off women voters. In that sense, a confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh may keep the Democratic base angry enough and engaged enough to flip the House, and if we are lucky, the Senate, too.
However, it will be necessary for the Democratic base to stay angry and engaged. It is reasonable to believe that had the Democrats scored a victory by denying Kavanaugh confirmation, which at this point looks like it is not about to happen, that far too many Democrats would have become complacent, their anger would have been tempered, and they would not have felt it incumbent upon them to get out and vote. The Kavanaugh confirmation may very well have been the moment for Democrats where, having had the football pulled away by Republican Lucy “seventy times seven,” the Democratic Charlie Brown finally overcomes his terminal niceness, and cold cocks her.
Of course if Democrats do flip the House, they will possess subpoena power, and the concomitant ability to make the Trump administration miserable. If Democrats take the House, it is not unreasonable to believe that one of the very early orders of business in a democratic-controlled House would be articles of impeachment against Brett Kavanaugh.
Now, no Supreme Court justice has been impeached since Samuel Chase was impeached in 1803. While the impeachment of Chase was unsuccessful, largely because it concerned his handling of trial court matters no longer handled by justices of the Supreme Court, an impeachment of Kavanaugh, arising from legal and ethical misconduct, particularly his serial untruths before the Senate Judiciary Committee, might very well be within the realms of possibility.
Republicans will no doubt claim that any Democratic investigations, hearings, or impeachment proceedings, will be tainted by revenge, and will argue ad hominem that the motivations of the Democratic Party should be on trial. But motivations don’t matter when impeachments are on the table. What matters is whether the conduct charged itself justifies impeachment.
The impending confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court may well prove to be a victory from which the Republicans never recover.
Let us hope this is the case.
----------------------------------------------------
The cloture motion to terminate debate on the nomination of tainted Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh carried 51 to 49, on what was virtually a straight party-line vote. Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski voted with the Democrats, and West Virginia’s Joe Manchin broke ranks and voted with the Republicans.
As I write, “moderate” Maine Republican Susan Collins has finished dithering before the Senate, explaining how she intends to fall in line with the rest of her party. (Of course, the gutless senator did indeed choose to fall in line. Principles routinely evade Republican officeholders.)
The Kavanaugh fiasco has demonstrated, as bluntly as any other since Clarence Thomas’s nomination process back in 1991, that when it comes to nominating men to powerful positions, the voices of women are considered unworthy of belief.
Simply put, uppity women will not be permitted to question the patriarchy.
Of course, in the air of Donald Trump, that self-described “man of the 50s,” we should expect the patriarchy to behave as it has been behaving. Indeed, the 20 months of Donald Trump can be described quite simply as “the revenge of the white patriarchy.”
And indeed, the white patriarchy has had its revenge, to just about the nth degree. Not only was the entire Kavanaugh process tainted by the worst of bad faith from start to finish (as several Democratic Senators and media pundits have put it, the fix has always been in) but Kavanaugh’s performance itself, particularly during the renewed hearings, was a partisan screed delivered in a tone of aggrieved entitlement, or in what Winston Churchill famously described as the tone of Sir Stafford Cripps: “injured guilt.”
Aggrieved entitlement, insulted privilege, or injured guilt, the tone of Kavanaugh’s over-the-top remarks to the Senate Judiciary Committee, and the blatant, obvious, effort of the Republicans on that selfsame Judiciary Committee and in the White House to rig the process, are themselves, absent more, non-recommending to Kavanaugh’s nomination.
Add to that the fact that millions of Americans, in fact a majority of Americans, find Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony to be credible, and that also a majority of Americans oppose Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Court, and you have a nomination which under any other administration than that of the malignant narcissist and traitor Donald Trump, would and should have been withdrawn.
----------------------------------------------------
Of course, knowing the Donald, we know that the Kavanaugh nomination will never be withdrawn, because we know that the Donald not only cannot stand to acknowledge that he made a mistake but we also know that the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh is very much in the interests of the Russian State; Brett Kavanaugh is the Kremlin’s nominee, and the Kremlin will not permit his nomination to be withdrawn.
The evidence that Brett Kavanaugh is Russia’s man in our judiciary derives from the extensive, heavily editorialized coverage in Russian state media supporting Kavanaugh’s nomination. Moreover, the Russian trolls and bots have been swarming American social media again.
The evidence that Brett Kavanaugh is Russia’s man in our judiciary derives from the extensive, heavily editorialized coverage in Russian state media supporting Kavanaugh’s nomination. Moreover, the Russian trolls and bots have been swarming American social media again. Furthermore, it is now becoming obvious that some of the pro-Kavanaugh ads cluttering up our various media have been paid for by dark money from Russian sources.
Indeed, there are allegations that Facebook has been working closely with the Russians to try to influence public opinion in favor of Brett Kavanaugh. Aside from providing further ammunition for the developing case against Facebook and Gospodin Zuckerberg, the heavy-handed Russian attempts to intervene in favor of Brett Kavanaugh ought to have convinced at least a couple of Republicans that Kavanaugh was a Muscovite mole.
Unfortunately, we have reached a point at which the basic patriotism and loyalty to this country of Republican officeholders at all levels is open to the gravest of question. How many of them, how very many of them, have come to resemble Benedict Arnold’s love child by Maj. John André, the British spymaster who was Arnold’s case officer, and whose capture and hanging represented one of the first great triumphs of American counterintelligence work.
If, in fact, Brett Kavanaugh and Donald Trump are Muscovite moles, then of course it is in the interests of the Russian State to infiltrate them into positions of enormous power. Unless Donald Trump is able to run some kind of self-coup and make himself “president for life,” we should be rid of him before too much longer. But Brett Kavanaugh occupies a position that is a de facto lifetime tenure. How much mischief can the Kremlin accomplish with one of their moles on the Supreme Court?
It may come down to Americans having to exercise the option that Game of Thrones’ Cercei Lannister exercised when she found herself confronted with an unpalatable situation: “I choose violence.” And of course if Americans were to choose violence, Moscow could not be more satisfied. Moscow’s relentless cyber war and active measures against this country have been designed to accomplish the slow destruction of American institutions from within. Perhaps when America chooses violence, it should choose violence against the Russians, and not against itself.
After all, if the Russians think it is permissible for them to impose upon us a president of their choosing, then why should we not, with equal propriety, impose upon the Russian land a Romanov tsaritsa or Tsar of our own choosing? Democracy clearly does not work as well for Russia as it does for us. Perhaps our mission in this centennial year of the Russian Civil War, is to make the world once again safe for Romanov rule in Russia.
-----------------------------------------------
Of course, as much as it may be fun to contemplate a restoration of imperial rule in Russia, as much as it may be fun to imagine Vladimir Putin choking out his life at the end of the noose in the Trubetskoy Bastion of St. Petersburg’s Peter and Paul fortress, we must now turn to an examination of the political calculus of the midterms.
For the Republicans, the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh may prove to be a more mixed blessing then they had contemplated. It is not unreasonable to hypothesize that the Republicans were hoping that somehow the Democrats would defeat the Kavanaugh nomination process.
A successful Democratic resistance to the Kavanaugh nomination process, in the malign minds of Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell, would have enabled the Republicans to whip their base into a frothing, fulminating, spittle-flying, friendship-sundering, violence-inciting, lather of indignation against the Democrats. Unfortunately for them, the Republicans, who have a malodorous reputation for being sore winners, may well find themselves deprived of that weapon, just when they needed it in this election cycle.
However, with an undeserved victory landing in their laps like a turd, the Republicans may find themselves bereft of the very thing needed to make up the deficit they are suffering vis-à-vis Democrats in these final weeks before the midterms. By contrast, the Democrats should stay pissed off. The Kavanaugh nomination process ought particularly to piss off women voters. In that sense, a confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh may keep the Democratic base angry enough and engaged enough to flip the House, and if we are lucky, the Senate, too.
However, it will be necessary for the Democratic base to stay angry and engaged. It is reasonable to believe that had the Democrats scored a victory by denying Kavanaugh confirmation, which at this point looks like it is not about to happen, that far too many Democrats would have become complacent, their anger would have been tempered, and they would not have felt it incumbent upon them to get out and vote. The Kavanaugh confirmation may very well have been the moment for Democrats where, having had the football pulled away by Republican Lucy “seventy times seven,” the Democratic Charlie Brown finally overcomes his terminal niceness, and cold cocks her.
 | |
| Charlie BrownCoyote bit Lucy after the took the | football away for the 491st time |
Of course if Democrats do flip the House, they will possess subpoena power, and the concomitant ability to make the Trump administration miserable. If Democrats take the House, it is not unreasonable to believe that one of the very early orders of business in a democratic-controlled House would be articles of impeachment against Brett Kavanaugh.
Now, no Supreme Court justice has been impeached since Samuel Chase was impeached in 1803. While the impeachment of Chase was unsuccessful, largely because it concerned his handling of trial court matters no longer handled by justices of the Supreme Court, an impeachment of Kavanaugh, arising from legal and ethical misconduct, particularly his serial untruths before the Senate Judiciary Committee, might very well be within the realms of possibility.
Republicans will no doubt claim that any Democratic investigations, hearings, or impeachment proceedings, will be tainted by revenge, and will argue ad hominem that the motivations of the Democratic Party should be on trial. But motivations don’t matter when impeachments are on the table. What matters is whether the conduct charged itself justifies impeachment.
The impending confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court may well prove to be a victory from which the Republicans never recover.
Let us hope this is the case.
Thursday, September 13, 2018
LITTLE SNAPPERS
Summary: every now and again, like the late Chief Justice Warren Burger, I’ll fire off a couple of “little snappers,” brief observations in this blog about things that get me going, but which aren’t worth lengthy discussion.
This week, I deal with John McCain, Donald Trump, and Cathedral City council wannabe Ernesto Gutierrez, and some of the other usual suspects.
------------------------------------------
I’ll admit it, I didn’t expect Arizona Republican Senator John McCain’s death to hit me quite as hard as it did. I expect part of it is simply the ineluctably of advancing age. When you are Teetering On the Brink of an Age Range, especially if, like every other middle-aged gay man in this valley, you remember the AIDS epidemic, you start taking more than abstract notice of the obituary notices in the local Gannett publication, or the obits of famous people with whom you may have interacted.
Nonetheless, John McCain’s death struck me with considerably greater force than I might have expected, particularly given that John was a conservative Republican and I am a liberal Democrat. But Senator McCain and I had a number of things in common. Though the senator had a not undistinguished career in the United States Navy, whereas my naval service was cut short by the Reagan Administration’s cynical bargain with the religious right expressed in the so-called 123 words which purported to exclude queerfolk altogether from the military, we do, to some degree, share that common naval nexus.
I suppose my appreciation for the Arizona senator stems in the larger part, however, from the fact that he was, like I am, a believer in Regular Order. Senator McCain did not appear particularly enamored of parliamentary tricks, even those intended to secure partisan advantage for his own, Republican Party. He famously demanded to know on the Senate floor why that body was not proceeding according to regular order in addressing legislative issues. As a lawyer, whose life is wrapped up in “regular order,” I could appreciate Senator McCain’s insistence on Regular Order.
I can also appreciate the difference between John McCain’s “straight talk,” and the bullshit pablum Donald Trump uses to convince his redeless base that he is “telling it like it is.” John McCain, with his “straight talk,” told it like it was. By contrast, Donald Trump, Sarah Palin, and that superannuated Bolshevik Bernard Sanders offer their redeless followers little but pablum, populism, and prevarication. John McCain could tell you to “keep your eyes in the boat” without having that admonition come across as an unjustified reproof.
Finally, I must appreciate John’s insistence on putting patriotism and principle ahead of partisanship. His gentle, but devastating reproof of the woman who insisted to him that Barack Obama was “an Arab,” his almost preternaturally graceful concession speech on election night, 2008, and his last political testament to the country all spoke of the nobility of spirit that many of us fear is passing not merely out of the Republican Party, but out of our national life altogether.
America, and the world, are a little bit less for not having John S. McCain in them. To riff on Mao Zedong, who once said “in agriculture, learn from Dazhai; in industry, learn from Daqing,” in America, in politics, let us learn from the nobility of spirit of the late John S. McCain.
* * * * *
As much as I was moved to sadness by the deathwatch and passing of John S. McCain, I find myself moved to the extremest annoyance by the antics of Cathedral City council wannabe Ernesto Gutierrez and his redeless followers. By all indications, Gutierrez is a particularly perfervid follower of Donald Trump. If so, we in Cathedral City, or at least in Gutierrez’s constituency, should reject his candidacy with all of the energy at our command.
Yes, dammit, I am talking about nationalizing the Cathedral City elections this fall. Because whether we like it or not, every election at every level this fall will, to some degree, be nationalized.
Every election, at every level, will be a referendum on Donald J. Trump and his collection of grifters, drifters, reivers, and potential Criminal RICO defendants. If, as Republican strategist Rick Wilson has suggested, everything Trump touches dies (with the possible exception of the mainstream media and the legal profession), that should certainly apply to the political fortunes of the little Trumps among us, the people who want to offer to their potential constituencies the same kind of preposterous populist pablum which emerges from the logorrheic mouth of Donald Trump like an endless offering of feces thrown by an addlepated chimpanzee. If H.L. Mencken was right to suggest that “democracy is the worship of jackals by jackasses,” we are certainly seeing it in Cathedral City.
What is worse, is that we are apparently seeing an effort by former Cathedral city mayor Kathleen DeRosa to try to revive the shambles of a political machine. DeRosa knew in 2014 that in a straight up contest between her and now-Mayor Stan Henry, Stan would have mopped the floor up with her. Sources have informed me several times that one of the two of them put a poll in the field, a real poll, not a push poll, which showed DeRosa being defeated by double digits in any hypothetical DeRosa/Henry race. Rather than take such a trouncing, and lose face, DeRosa tried to convince the community, with limited success, that Stan Henry was her hand-picked, “anointed” successor. While it was a not unimpressive exercise in making a virtue of necessity, it was still recognized by most of the community as a desperate face-saving, self-serving lie.
But, now, the quondam mayor wants back in. She’s clever enough to know that she can’t do so directly. First she has to secure the election of like-minded Trump supporters to the Council. She must, in short, secure the election of people who think like her to whom she has markers, who owe her.
The rest of the community must not permit that to happen.
We have made too much progress in the last four years to allow it to be undone by a redeless follower of Donald Trump. We must nationalize this election; we must make it about Republicans and Democrats, and we must prevent the Stockholm syndrome Trump followers in our community from gaining a political foothold or beachhead.
Gutierrez claims to be “one of us.” To borrow a line from a member of my own family, “what is this ‘we’ shit, Pocahontas?” Perhaps Gutierrez is attempting to play a Latino identity politics card, assuming that because Cathedral city is roughly 55% Latino, all he needs to do is wave his name in front of them for Latino voters to flock to him. If so, he may well find himself speedily disabused of such foolhardy ideations. While he may attempt to position himself as an ordinary, family-values, good Christian guy, his social media postings reveal that he is a rabidly anti-choice supporter of Donald Trump.
To that extent, it is obvious that Mr. Gutierrez has failed to read the tea leaves of the constituency. Cathedral city breaks strongly Democratic. That is the case no matter where one lives, who one loves, or what one’s ethnicity may happen to be. In addition to being roughly 55% Latino, Cathedral City is anywhere between 35 and 45% LGBT. Statistically, since we know that such percentages necessarily imply overlap; we must conclude that Cathedral city is home to a not insubstantial number of Latino queerfolk.
Additionally, we should take into account the fact that Cathedral city is demographically one of the younger cities of the upper Valley. Not “God’s waiting room” like Rancho Mirage, Palm Desert, or Indian Wells, Cathedral city is also not nearly so much a place of refuge for Bay Counties transplants as is Palm Springs. In short, Cathedral city looks a lot more like California than do many other Coachella Valley cities.
Because Cathedral city looks more like the California aggregate, Ernesto Gutierrez should be careful about the conclusions he draws about this constituency. Cathedral City tended to be broadly reflective of California in its electoral choices in 2016. California as a whole rejected Donald Trump, and so did Cathedral City. A Council candidate with a history of fealty to Donald Trump and a presence on social media that would make cringe any constituent not falling off the hard right edge of the world should not be surprised if the voters choose someone else.
* * * * *
Finally, as promised, a parting note on the unspeakable Donald Trump. Like millions of other Americans, I’ve preordered two copies of Bob Woodward’s Fear: Trump in the White House. I’ve also added to my collection Omarosa Manigault-Newman’s book Unhinged: An Insider’s Account of the Trump White House and Michael Wolff’s’ Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House. So far, Omarosa’s book very much tracks what I saw in Fire and Fury, and I expect that the Woodward book will be not dissimilar.
All them should be read not merely as fairly devastating exposés of the banality (pace Hannah Arendt), venality, incompetency, incoherence, and dysfunction of easily the worst presidential administration in living memory, but also as excellent vade mecums for special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s possible prosecution of the Donald. The Omarosa and Wolff books do, in fact, read like the so-called speaking indictments special counsel Mueller has used in such brilliant effect in his prosecutions of George Papadopoulos and Paul Manafort.
I’ll be waiting with some degree of anticipation to get my mitts on Fear. It promises to be interesting reading.
-xxx-
____________________________________
Paul S. Marchand has been practicing law for almost 30 years. The more he practices, more he gets it right. He lives in Cathedral City and practices in Rancho Mirage. He is an unapologetic liberal Democrat, which has probably earned him a place on one of Donald J. Trump’s enemies lists, which he will wear as a badge of honor.
This post is a revised and extended version of an earlier post published on August 31, 2018.
This week, I deal with John McCain, Donald Trump, and Cathedral City council wannabe Ernesto Gutierrez, and some of the other usual suspects.
------------------------------------------
I’ll admit it, I didn’t expect Arizona Republican Senator John McCain’s death to hit me quite as hard as it did. I expect part of it is simply the ineluctably of advancing age. When you are Teetering On the Brink of an Age Range, especially if, like every other middle-aged gay man in this valley, you remember the AIDS epidemic, you start taking more than abstract notice of the obituary notices in the local Gannett publication, or the obits of famous people with whom you may have interacted.
Nonetheless, John McCain’s death struck me with considerably greater force than I might have expected, particularly given that John was a conservative Republican and I am a liberal Democrat. But Senator McCain and I had a number of things in common. Though the senator had a not undistinguished career in the United States Navy, whereas my naval service was cut short by the Reagan Administration’s cynical bargain with the religious right expressed in the so-called 123 words which purported to exclude queerfolk altogether from the military, we do, to some degree, share that common naval nexus.
I suppose my appreciation for the Arizona senator stems in the larger part, however, from the fact that he was, like I am, a believer in Regular Order. Senator McCain did not appear particularly enamored of parliamentary tricks, even those intended to secure partisan advantage for his own, Republican Party. He famously demanded to know on the Senate floor why that body was not proceeding according to regular order in addressing legislative issues. As a lawyer, whose life is wrapped up in “regular order,” I could appreciate Senator McCain’s insistence on Regular Order.
I can also appreciate the difference between John McCain’s “straight talk,” and the bullshit pablum Donald Trump uses to convince his redeless base that he is “telling it like it is.” John McCain, with his “straight talk,” told it like it was. By contrast, Donald Trump, Sarah Palin, and that superannuated Bolshevik Bernard Sanders offer their redeless followers little but pablum, populism, and prevarication. John McCain could tell you to “keep your eyes in the boat” without having that admonition come across as an unjustified reproof.
Finally, I must appreciate John’s insistence on putting patriotism and principle ahead of partisanship. His gentle, but devastating reproof of the woman who insisted to him that Barack Obama was “an Arab,” his almost preternaturally graceful concession speech on election night, 2008, and his last political testament to the country all spoke of the nobility of spirit that many of us fear is passing not merely out of the Republican Party, but out of our national life altogether.
America, and the world, are a little bit less for not having John S. McCain in them. To riff on Mao Zedong, who once said “in agriculture, learn from Dazhai; in industry, learn from Daqing,” in America, in politics, let us learn from the nobility of spirit of the late John S. McCain.
* * * * *
As much as I was moved to sadness by the deathwatch and passing of John S. McCain, I find myself moved to the extremest annoyance by the antics of Cathedral City council wannabe Ernesto Gutierrez and his redeless followers. By all indications, Gutierrez is a particularly perfervid follower of Donald Trump. If so, we in Cathedral City, or at least in Gutierrez’s constituency, should reject his candidacy with all of the energy at our command.
Yes, dammit, I am talking about nationalizing the Cathedral City elections this fall. Because whether we like it or not, every election at every level this fall will, to some degree, be nationalized.
Every election, at every level, will be a referendum on Donald J. Trump and his collection of grifters, drifters, reivers, and potential Criminal RICO defendants. If, as Republican strategist Rick Wilson has suggested, everything Trump touches dies (with the possible exception of the mainstream media and the legal profession), that should certainly apply to the political fortunes of the little Trumps among us, the people who want to offer to their potential constituencies the same kind of preposterous populist pablum which emerges from the logorrheic mouth of Donald Trump like an endless offering of feces thrown by an addlepated chimpanzee. If H.L. Mencken was right to suggest that “democracy is the worship of jackals by jackasses,” we are certainly seeing it in Cathedral City.
What is worse, is that we are apparently seeing an effort by former Cathedral city mayor Kathleen DeRosa to try to revive the shambles of a political machine. DeRosa knew in 2014 that in a straight up contest between her and now-Mayor Stan Henry, Stan would have mopped the floor up with her. Sources have informed me several times that one of the two of them put a poll in the field, a real poll, not a push poll, which showed DeRosa being defeated by double digits in any hypothetical DeRosa/Henry race. Rather than take such a trouncing, and lose face, DeRosa tried to convince the community, with limited success, that Stan Henry was her hand-picked, “anointed” successor. While it was a not unimpressive exercise in making a virtue of necessity, it was still recognized by most of the community as a desperate face-saving, self-serving lie.
But, now, the quondam mayor wants back in. She’s clever enough to know that she can’t do so directly. First she has to secure the election of like-minded Trump supporters to the Council. She must, in short, secure the election of people who think like her to whom she has markers, who owe her.
The rest of the community must not permit that to happen.
We have made too much progress in the last four years to allow it to be undone by a redeless follower of Donald Trump. We must nationalize this election; we must make it about Republicans and Democrats, and we must prevent the Stockholm syndrome Trump followers in our community from gaining a political foothold or beachhead.
Gutierrez claims to be “one of us.” To borrow a line from a member of my own family, “what is this ‘we’ shit, Pocahontas?” Perhaps Gutierrez is attempting to play a Latino identity politics card, assuming that because Cathedral city is roughly 55% Latino, all he needs to do is wave his name in front of them for Latino voters to flock to him. If so, he may well find himself speedily disabused of such foolhardy ideations. While he may attempt to position himself as an ordinary, family-values, good Christian guy, his social media postings reveal that he is a rabidly anti-choice supporter of Donald Trump.
To that extent, it is obvious that Mr. Gutierrez has failed to read the tea leaves of the constituency. Cathedral city breaks strongly Democratic. That is the case no matter where one lives, who one loves, or what one’s ethnicity may happen to be. In addition to being roughly 55% Latino, Cathedral City is anywhere between 35 and 45% LGBT. Statistically, since we know that such percentages necessarily imply overlap; we must conclude that Cathedral city is home to a not insubstantial number of Latino queerfolk.
Additionally, we should take into account the fact that Cathedral city is demographically one of the younger cities of the upper Valley. Not “God’s waiting room” like Rancho Mirage, Palm Desert, or Indian Wells, Cathedral city is also not nearly so much a place of refuge for Bay Counties transplants as is Palm Springs. In short, Cathedral city looks a lot more like California than do many other Coachella Valley cities.
Because Cathedral city looks more like the California aggregate, Ernesto Gutierrez should be careful about the conclusions he draws about this constituency. Cathedral City tended to be broadly reflective of California in its electoral choices in 2016. California as a whole rejected Donald Trump, and so did Cathedral City. A Council candidate with a history of fealty to Donald Trump and a presence on social media that would make cringe any constituent not falling off the hard right edge of the world should not be surprised if the voters choose someone else.
* * * * *
Finally, as promised, a parting note on the unspeakable Donald Trump. Like millions of other Americans, I’ve preordered two copies of Bob Woodward’s Fear: Trump in the White House. I’ve also added to my collection Omarosa Manigault-Newman’s book Unhinged: An Insider’s Account of the Trump White House and Michael Wolff’s’ Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House. So far, Omarosa’s book very much tracks what I saw in Fire and Fury, and I expect that the Woodward book will be not dissimilar.
All them should be read not merely as fairly devastating exposés of the banality (pace Hannah Arendt), venality, incompetency, incoherence, and dysfunction of easily the worst presidential administration in living memory, but also as excellent vade mecums for special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s possible prosecution of the Donald. The Omarosa and Wolff books do, in fact, read like the so-called speaking indictments special counsel Mueller has used in such brilliant effect in his prosecutions of George Papadopoulos and Paul Manafort.
I’ll be waiting with some degree of anticipation to get my mitts on Fear. It promises to be interesting reading.
-xxx-
____________________________________
Paul S. Marchand has been practicing law for almost 30 years. The more he practices, more he gets it right. He lives in Cathedral City and practices in Rancho Mirage. He is an unapologetic liberal Democrat, which has probably earned him a place on one of Donald J. Trump’s enemies lists, which he will wear as a badge of honor.
This post is a revised and extended version of an earlier post published on August 31, 2018.
Thursday, June 28, 2018
HERESY COMES TO EDEN: THE ANNAPOLIS MASS SHOOTING
Summary: today’s shooting at the Capital/Maryland Gazette offices in Annapolis, Maryland is the latest in a series of firearms -related outrages that ought to shock the conscience of an aggrieved nation. Of course it will not. As we try to take a deep breath, to give ourselves time to learn the facts, the temptation to engage in obsessional speculation and partisan recrimination will be well-nigh irresistible. My dear little Annapolis, Annapolis of so many fond memories, quirky, funky, and endearingly weird: welcome to the league of massacre cities.
----------------------
Another shooting.
This one at the Capital/Maryland Gazette offices in Annapolis. It’s a newspaper I can remember from my Baltimore childhood. Though my family had a subscription to the Baltimore Sun, every once in a while one of my parents would pick up a copy of the venerable Maryland Gazette from a local newsagent, largely because the Gazette’s coverage of the ofttimes bizarre politics of Maryland’s inbred, postage stamp capital excelled that of either the Baltimore Sun or the Washington Post.
Now, as has happened so often, a shooter has invaded the workplace and shot up the joint, killing five and “gravely injuring” several others.
As always, our first, involuntary reaction is to invoke the deity.
Oh, my God.
Our second reaction, equally ineluctable and equally inevitable, is to start engaging in a frantic round of obsessional speculation, accompanied by conspiracy theorizing, as shocked, aggrieved nation struggles to come to terms with the latest massacre. We know that a shooter is in custody. Yet we do not know yet what the shooter’s motivations may have been, whether the shooter was acting alone, or whether the shooter was part of some larger criminal or terrorist enterprise.
But, while imagination is as good for a fool as a physic, as my West Texas grandmother used to like to say, in the immediate aftermath of the events which transpired in Annapolis this afternoon we should perhaps take a deep breath, and wait to speculate, to point fingers, to clutch pearls, to engage in partisan recrimination, or to engage in Trumpian tweeting until the authorities have had a chance to gather additional information.
Right now, before we risk jumping to what may well be unsupportable and unsustainable conclusions, we should take a deep breath, and quietly, carefully, and with complete honesty of self and purpose, ask ourselves what do we think? What do we know? What can we prove?
I remember asking these questions after former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords was shot by Jared Lee Loughner, along with senior U.S. Chief District Judge John McCarthy Roll, who died of his injuries, and 16 others on January 8, 2011. What do we think? What do we know? What can we prove?
I suggested at the time, and do so again now, that it may well be far too early, and the data may be far too insufficient, for us to be able to formulate any hypotheses about the shooting. Nevertheless, we live in qualitatively different times now than then.
Seven-and-a-half years ago, the political climate in this country was divisive, but we did not have a president in office whom Russian American journalist Masha Gessen has suggested is a fascist, even if the government over which he presides is not. Seven-and-a-half years ago, America seemed to be more calm, more centered, more rational. Aside from various sufferers of Obama Derangement Syndrome, the country was not tribalized or Balkanized to nearly the extent that it is today.
In just a few hours since the shooting occurred, partisans and activists on both sides of the political divide have launched the inevitable complaints, barbs, and allegations against one another that seem to be virtually inevitable in Donald Trump’s America. Moreover, indications are already emerging that Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin’s troll army is preparing to enter the fray, to use active measures to propagate as much disinformation as possible, as they did within 45 minutes of the Parkland, Florida shooting, and as they have now been exposed as having done in connection with the Minneapolis death of Philando Castille, where Russian trolls organized phony protests and fake Facebook groups as part of their information warfare campaign against the United States.
Indeed, it is also possible that no matter what the root causes or etiology of today’s events in Annapolis may have been, the Trump administration will respond in one of two ways. Either the administration will try its level best to ignore the shootings or depict them as the single act of the so-called lone wolf shooter, motivated by some sort of mental illness, thus stigmatizing the mentally ill while exonerating everybody else, or the administration will, should the shooter prove to be a member of a minority, to urge an anti-immigrant propaganda or an anti-“terrorist” one.
Given the unbelievable, and nakedly cynical, tactics of this administration, with its bland indifference to how poor the optics of its constant appeals to rabid partisanship and its constant pandering to its base may be to the majority of Americans who are not on the so-called Trump train, we can reasonably expect that this president and this administration will do their damnedest to wring every possible ounce of partisan political advantage out of the outrage outside of Annapolis.
Sadly, a state capital where the most newsworthy events for years had been Spiro Agnew and Marvin Mandel’s tax troubles, and Gov. William Donald Schaefer’s unconventional relationship with Hilda Mae Snoops, has now joined the unhappy league of American massacre sites. Annapolis can now join a murderers’ row that includes New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Bernardino, Santa Fe, Texas, Orlando and Parkland, Florida, Tucson, Columbine, and on and on and on.
Oh, my dear little Annapolis, Annapolis of so many fond memories, quirky, funky, endearingly weird, not a state capital like the others. With what has happened today, heresy has come to Eden.
What do we think? What do we know? What can we prove? Whatever the answers these questions may be, we’re not going to like any of them one little bit.
-----------------------------------
PAUL S. MARCHAND is an attorney who lives in Cathedral City and practices in Rancho Mirage. He spent several years of his childhood living in Baltimore and has many fond memories of the endearingly weird little state capital where the Severn River meets the Chesapeake Bay.
----------------------
Another shooting.
This one at the Capital/Maryland Gazette offices in Annapolis. It’s a newspaper I can remember from my Baltimore childhood. Though my family had a subscription to the Baltimore Sun, every once in a while one of my parents would pick up a copy of the venerable Maryland Gazette from a local newsagent, largely because the Gazette’s coverage of the ofttimes bizarre politics of Maryland’s inbred, postage stamp capital excelled that of either the Baltimore Sun or the Washington Post.
Now, as has happened so often, a shooter has invaded the workplace and shot up the joint, killing five and “gravely injuring” several others.
As always, our first, involuntary reaction is to invoke the deity.
Oh, my God.
Our second reaction, equally ineluctable and equally inevitable, is to start engaging in a frantic round of obsessional speculation, accompanied by conspiracy theorizing, as shocked, aggrieved nation struggles to come to terms with the latest massacre. We know that a shooter is in custody. Yet we do not know yet what the shooter’s motivations may have been, whether the shooter was acting alone, or whether the shooter was part of some larger criminal or terrorist enterprise.
But, while imagination is as good for a fool as a physic, as my West Texas grandmother used to like to say, in the immediate aftermath of the events which transpired in Annapolis this afternoon we should perhaps take a deep breath, and wait to speculate, to point fingers, to clutch pearls, to engage in partisan recrimination, or to engage in Trumpian tweeting until the authorities have had a chance to gather additional information.
Right now, before we risk jumping to what may well be unsupportable and unsustainable conclusions, we should take a deep breath, and quietly, carefully, and with complete honesty of self and purpose, ask ourselves what do we think? What do we know? What can we prove?
I remember asking these questions after former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords was shot by Jared Lee Loughner, along with senior U.S. Chief District Judge John McCarthy Roll, who died of his injuries, and 16 others on January 8, 2011. What do we think? What do we know? What can we prove?
I suggested at the time, and do so again now, that it may well be far too early, and the data may be far too insufficient, for us to be able to formulate any hypotheses about the shooting. Nevertheless, we live in qualitatively different times now than then.
Seven-and-a-half years ago, the political climate in this country was divisive, but we did not have a president in office whom Russian American journalist Masha Gessen has suggested is a fascist, even if the government over which he presides is not. Seven-and-a-half years ago, America seemed to be more calm, more centered, more rational. Aside from various sufferers of Obama Derangement Syndrome, the country was not tribalized or Balkanized to nearly the extent that it is today.
In just a few hours since the shooting occurred, partisans and activists on both sides of the political divide have launched the inevitable complaints, barbs, and allegations against one another that seem to be virtually inevitable in Donald Trump’s America. Moreover, indications are already emerging that Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin’s troll army is preparing to enter the fray, to use active measures to propagate as much disinformation as possible, as they did within 45 minutes of the Parkland, Florida shooting, and as they have now been exposed as having done in connection with the Minneapolis death of Philando Castille, where Russian trolls organized phony protests and fake Facebook groups as part of their information warfare campaign against the United States.
Indeed, it is also possible that no matter what the root causes or etiology of today’s events in Annapolis may have been, the Trump administration will respond in one of two ways. Either the administration will try its level best to ignore the shootings or depict them as the single act of the so-called lone wolf shooter, motivated by some sort of mental illness, thus stigmatizing the mentally ill while exonerating everybody else, or the administration will, should the shooter prove to be a member of a minority, to urge an anti-immigrant propaganda or an anti-“terrorist” one.
Given the unbelievable, and nakedly cynical, tactics of this administration, with its bland indifference to how poor the optics of its constant appeals to rabid partisanship and its constant pandering to its base may be to the majority of Americans who are not on the so-called Trump train, we can reasonably expect that this president and this administration will do their damnedest to wring every possible ounce of partisan political advantage out of the outrage outside of Annapolis.
Sadly, a state capital where the most newsworthy events for years had been Spiro Agnew and Marvin Mandel’s tax troubles, and Gov. William Donald Schaefer’s unconventional relationship with Hilda Mae Snoops, has now joined the unhappy league of American massacre sites. Annapolis can now join a murderers’ row that includes New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Bernardino, Santa Fe, Texas, Orlando and Parkland, Florida, Tucson, Columbine, and on and on and on.
Oh, my dear little Annapolis, Annapolis of so many fond memories, quirky, funky, endearingly weird, not a state capital like the others. With what has happened today, heresy has come to Eden.
What do we think? What do we know? What can we prove? Whatever the answers these questions may be, we’re not going to like any of them one little bit.
-xxx-
-----------------------------------
PAUL S. MARCHAND is an attorney who lives in Cathedral City and practices in Rancho Mirage. He spent several years of his childhood living in Baltimore and has many fond memories of the endearingly weird little state capital where the Severn River meets the Chesapeake Bay.
Friday, May 18, 2018
OH, GOD, NOT AGAIN
By: Paul S. Marchand
Summary: another mass shooting has called forth almost predictable responses within American society. Republicans and Democrats will each have their own partisan take; the NRA, shameless and corrupt as ever, will be fundraising off the tragedy, while the Kremlin will be deploying its troll army to use this latest outrage to spread dissension and division within American society. Altogether absent will be the comforting words Barack Obama knew how to offer. Instead, we should we were with the usual hackneyed political clichés of “thoughts and prayers.” How long will it be before an outraged public finally calls bullshit on the shootings, on the thoughts, and on the prayers? What, then, is to be done?
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Columbine.
Virginia Tech.
Tucson.
Sandy Hook.
Mother Emmanuel.
Pulse.
Marjory Stoneman Douglas.
Santa Fe, Texas.
Every time another mass shooting happens in this country, we have an almost standard involuntary reaction. We hear the news and we invoke the deity.
“Oh, my God....”
Some of us may be moved to utter prayers and to make the Sign of the Cross. Politicians among us will offer the anodyne cliché that their “thoughts and prayers” are with the killed and injured, (though with the events at Orlando’s Pulse Nightclub, the “thoughts and prayers” from Republican politicians were notably thin on the ground, inasmuch as so many of the dead were queerfolk.)
This shooting, like so many others, seems to fit into a fairly standard pattern: a young man with uncompensated issues and insecurities goes into a public or semipublic venue, armed to the teeth, and opens fire. Aside from offering their anodyne thoughts and prayers, politicians will do little, especially knowing that the National Rifle Association will be ineluctably fundraising off this tragedy even as these words are written.
We also know, after the Ash Wednesday shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, that the Kremlin’s troll army will be swarming social media networks with a view to using this latest incident to stir up dissension and division within American society.
After the shooting in Tucson, in which Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot and wounded, I asked in this blog “what do we think, what do we know, what can we prove?” At the time, I suggested that before drawing any conclusions we should allow the dust to settle, allow a reasonable time for mourning, allow ourselves some space for careful, rational thinking, and that we should perhaps forbear from drawing immediate conclusions.
The same counsels apply today. It is still far too early to have a clear picture of what was going on in the mind of the shooter, who is at least in custody and can be interrogated. It would be reckless to try to draw conclusions when the facts are still not completely clear to us and we see as through a glass, darkly.
Nevertheless, there are some not unknown knowns, pace Donald Rumsfeld, which have manifested themselves to us since the events at Marjory Stoneman Douglas in February.
First, we know that the Russian troll army has already been deployed. After the Ash Wednesday shootings at MSD, Russian trolls swarmed American social media networks within half an hour to forty-five minutes of the incident, disseminating all manner of divisive disinformation. It was a textbook example of Russian active measures intended to drive wedges into American society.
Second, the NRA, as always, hopelessly corrupt, began aggressively fundraising within a couple of hours of the incident at MSD. NRA Executive Vice President Wayne La Pierre, with his unerring lack of tact, took to the microphones and to the “interwebs” with his by now standard trope of self victimization to besiege the faithful to help fill the NRA’s coffers for the inevitable “battle to save the Second Amendment” that, to the NRA’s way of thinking, has been just around the corner since the assassination of President Kennedy.
Third, the conspiracists at Breitbart, at Infowars, and at other conspiracists outlets, have already begun circulating ridiculous claims and notions that this latest incident was just another “false flag” attack, that the dead — and survivors — are nothing but paid “crisis actors,” presumably acting at the behest of some sort of quasi-mythical Deep State out to destroy the Trump administration.
We also see that the response to mass shooting incidents inevitably breaks down along partisan lines. Republicans tend to respond to such fusillades by taking absolutist Second Amendment positions in which they frequently delude themselves of such nonsensical notions as “a bad guy with the gun will be stopped by a good guy with the gun,” and “let’s arm all the school teachers.”
Democrats, by contrast, tend talismanically to invoke the notion that an assault weapons ban and universal background checks are a panacea for the problem. Democrats, who also control the legislatures in large population blue states such as New York and California often tend to respond to mass shooting incidents with their own fusillades of predictable legislation by anecdote.
For example, after Sandy Hook, the New York legislature rushed onto the statute books reactive legislation essentially doing away with most of the evidentiary privileges that had shielded doctor-patient communications. In California, 3000 miles away from the side of the incident, Democratic lawmakers in Sacramento rushed a whole package of legislation into law designed to enhance California’s reputation for having the nation’s toughest gun control laws.
Indeed, gun control continues to be a political football in California. Gubernatorial candidate Gavin Newsom has aggressively campaigned on an activist gun-control platform, and today’s events will no doubt form the subject matter for yet another Gavin Newsom campaign commercial or mailer.
Yet, stuck between Republicans, with their Second Amendment absolutist positions, and Democrats who think the moment is opportune to push for a totally gun free society, the millions of Americans who inhabit the political middle find themselves in a difficult place. It’s hard in America in 2018 to be a gun owner between the two camps. If you are not a Second Amendment absolutist, the Republicans will anathematize you as a “squish;” while for their part, the “repeal the Second Amendment” militant tendency among Democrats will condemn you as an illiberal, anti-communitarian DINO, to be read out of the Democratic Party with bell, book, and candle.
The absolutist positions of absolutists and doctrinaires within both parties leave conservatives who favor reasonable gun safety legislation and armed liberals in a conundrum. I, myself, fall into the latter category. As an armed liberal, as a person of the political left who was taught by his grandfather at the age of seven and eight how to shoot in the arid country of West Texas, I know the destructive potential of even a low caliber weapon. I know that you can kill as easily and as efficiently with a .22 round as you can with a .44 Magnum. I know that depending upon the production run, a Colt .45 caliber model 1911 semiautomatic tends to throw high and to the right, as does a 9mm Makarov semiautomatic.
That I know some of the behaviors of these two semiautomatic handguns does not make me a monster, a gun nut, or a ravening conservative. I do, however, treat each such weapon — on the rare occasions when I come into contact with one — with the care it deserves. That may be one reason why I don’t keep semiautomatic handguns in my home, in my car, or in my business. I keep the one handgun I do possess, a .44 caliber revolver, locked away in a gun safe to which no other human being on the planet has the combination.
In short, I treat guns with the care and respect my West Texas grandfather inculcated into me those long years ago when we were plinking bottles out near the New Mexico line. For when the hammer falls, and you hear the explosion that sends that bullet on its way to destroy a bottle on a fence post or a watermelon propped up on the ground, there is that ephemeral moment, that (pace, Betty Friedan) quintessentially male moment when you see the bullet destroying the bottle or blast in the watermelon, and a little frisson of satisfaction lights up the lizard part of the brain.
But we’re not lizards. Neither are we those other closest living relatives of dinosaurs, birds. And because we are neither birds nor lizards, it is incumbent upon us to interact with the weapons we create and use in the context of a larger moral compass.
It would be a mistake, with investigations still pending, to try to guess the nature and parameters of the moral compass within which Dimitrios Pagourtzis, 17, the alleged shooter, was acting. Nonetheless, at some point, we must try to suss out the moral geography in which the shooter was operating. The shooter himself may tell us, and it will be incumbent upon Facebook to cooperate fully with investigators, and the shooter’s social media profile for clues.
If, as Pat Conroy once wrote in his novel Lords of Discipline, “our Europes were different; our Americas were different,” so are our Texases. The Texas of my heritage is the West Texas of the sere, stripped-of-nonessentials, Trappist desert. It is the Texas of El Paso, of Democratic Congressman and Senate hopeful Beto O’Rourke. The shooter’s Texas, by contrast, was the humid, hurricane Harvey harried, conservative East Texas of the Gulf Coast, the Texas of Tom DeLay and Blake Farenthold, the Texas of so many Republican politicians whom the late Molly Ivins took such joy in skewering.
As investigators, journalists, and inky wretches like me seek to get our arms around what made the shooter go and do what he did, we will be tempted, after the fashion of Joan Didion and the other dissectors of the California psyche, to try to draw conclusions about the shooter from the environment in which he was raised and from which, presumably, he took his inspiration.
Yet still, as we try to ascertain the whys and wherefores of this latest incident, we should still let ourselves be guided by the better angels of our nature, allowing the survivors to recover, to grieve, to mourn and bury their dead, and to regain the composure so unceremoniously stripped from them today. Donald Trump notwithstanding, no good can come of off-the-cuff, inconsiderate, predawn tweets from the residence of the White House.
What do we think? What do we know? What can we prove?
The next few days will be a time for considerate contemplation of this incident, not for partisan bickering, Trumpian tweeting, conspiracy theorizing, or Russian active measures.
Summary: another mass shooting has called forth almost predictable responses within American society. Republicans and Democrats will each have their own partisan take; the NRA, shameless and corrupt as ever, will be fundraising off the tragedy, while the Kremlin will be deploying its troll army to use this latest outrage to spread dissension and division within American society. Altogether absent will be the comforting words Barack Obama knew how to offer. Instead, we should we were with the usual hackneyed political clichés of “thoughts and prayers.” How long will it be before an outraged public finally calls bullshit on the shootings, on the thoughts, and on the prayers? What, then, is to be done?
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Columbine.
Virginia Tech.
Tucson.
Sandy Hook.
Mother Emmanuel.
Pulse.
Marjory Stoneman Douglas.
Santa Fe, Texas.
Every time another mass shooting happens in this country, we have an almost standard involuntary reaction. We hear the news and we invoke the deity.
“Oh, my God....”
Some of us may be moved to utter prayers and to make the Sign of the Cross. Politicians among us will offer the anodyne cliché that their “thoughts and prayers” are with the killed and injured, (though with the events at Orlando’s Pulse Nightclub, the “thoughts and prayers” from Republican politicians were notably thin on the ground, inasmuch as so many of the dead were queerfolk.)
This shooting, like so many others, seems to fit into a fairly standard pattern: a young man with uncompensated issues and insecurities goes into a public or semipublic venue, armed to the teeth, and opens fire. Aside from offering their anodyne thoughts and prayers, politicians will do little, especially knowing that the National Rifle Association will be ineluctably fundraising off this tragedy even as these words are written.
We also know, after the Ash Wednesday shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, that the Kremlin’s troll army will be swarming social media networks with a view to using this latest incident to stir up dissension and division within American society.
After the shooting in Tucson, in which Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot and wounded, I asked in this blog “what do we think, what do we know, what can we prove?” At the time, I suggested that before drawing any conclusions we should allow the dust to settle, allow a reasonable time for mourning, allow ourselves some space for careful, rational thinking, and that we should perhaps forbear from drawing immediate conclusions.
The same counsels apply today. It is still far too early to have a clear picture of what was going on in the mind of the shooter, who is at least in custody and can be interrogated. It would be reckless to try to draw conclusions when the facts are still not completely clear to us and we see as through a glass, darkly.
Nevertheless, there are some not unknown knowns, pace Donald Rumsfeld, which have manifested themselves to us since the events at Marjory Stoneman Douglas in February.
First, we know that the Russian troll army has already been deployed. After the Ash Wednesday shootings at MSD, Russian trolls swarmed American social media networks within half an hour to forty-five minutes of the incident, disseminating all manner of divisive disinformation. It was a textbook example of Russian active measures intended to drive wedges into American society.
Second, the NRA, as always, hopelessly corrupt, began aggressively fundraising within a couple of hours of the incident at MSD. NRA Executive Vice President Wayne La Pierre, with his unerring lack of tact, took to the microphones and to the “interwebs” with his by now standard trope of self victimization to besiege the faithful to help fill the NRA’s coffers for the inevitable “battle to save the Second Amendment” that, to the NRA’s way of thinking, has been just around the corner since the assassination of President Kennedy.
Third, the conspiracists at Breitbart, at Infowars, and at other conspiracists outlets, have already begun circulating ridiculous claims and notions that this latest incident was just another “false flag” attack, that the dead — and survivors — are nothing but paid “crisis actors,” presumably acting at the behest of some sort of quasi-mythical Deep State out to destroy the Trump administration.
We also see that the response to mass shooting incidents inevitably breaks down along partisan lines. Republicans tend to respond to such fusillades by taking absolutist Second Amendment positions in which they frequently delude themselves of such nonsensical notions as “a bad guy with the gun will be stopped by a good guy with the gun,” and “let’s arm all the school teachers.”
Democrats, by contrast, tend talismanically to invoke the notion that an assault weapons ban and universal background checks are a panacea for the problem. Democrats, who also control the legislatures in large population blue states such as New York and California often tend to respond to mass shooting incidents with their own fusillades of predictable legislation by anecdote.
For example, after Sandy Hook, the New York legislature rushed onto the statute books reactive legislation essentially doing away with most of the evidentiary privileges that had shielded doctor-patient communications. In California, 3000 miles away from the side of the incident, Democratic lawmakers in Sacramento rushed a whole package of legislation into law designed to enhance California’s reputation for having the nation’s toughest gun control laws.
Indeed, gun control continues to be a political football in California. Gubernatorial candidate Gavin Newsom has aggressively campaigned on an activist gun-control platform, and today’s events will no doubt form the subject matter for yet another Gavin Newsom campaign commercial or mailer.
Yet, stuck between Republicans, with their Second Amendment absolutist positions, and Democrats who think the moment is opportune to push for a totally gun free society, the millions of Americans who inhabit the political middle find themselves in a difficult place. It’s hard in America in 2018 to be a gun owner between the two camps. If you are not a Second Amendment absolutist, the Republicans will anathematize you as a “squish;” while for their part, the “repeal the Second Amendment” militant tendency among Democrats will condemn you as an illiberal, anti-communitarian DINO, to be read out of the Democratic Party with bell, book, and candle.
The absolutist positions of absolutists and doctrinaires within both parties leave conservatives who favor reasonable gun safety legislation and armed liberals in a conundrum. I, myself, fall into the latter category. As an armed liberal, as a person of the political left who was taught by his grandfather at the age of seven and eight how to shoot in the arid country of West Texas, I know the destructive potential of even a low caliber weapon. I know that you can kill as easily and as efficiently with a .22 round as you can with a .44 Magnum. I know that depending upon the production run, a Colt .45 caliber model 1911 semiautomatic tends to throw high and to the right, as does a 9mm Makarov semiautomatic.
That I know some of the behaviors of these two semiautomatic handguns does not make me a monster, a gun nut, or a ravening conservative. I do, however, treat each such weapon — on the rare occasions when I come into contact with one — with the care it deserves. That may be one reason why I don’t keep semiautomatic handguns in my home, in my car, or in my business. I keep the one handgun I do possess, a .44 caliber revolver, locked away in a gun safe to which no other human being on the planet has the combination.
In short, I treat guns with the care and respect my West Texas grandfather inculcated into me those long years ago when we were plinking bottles out near the New Mexico line. For when the hammer falls, and you hear the explosion that sends that bullet on its way to destroy a bottle on a fence post or a watermelon propped up on the ground, there is that ephemeral moment, that (pace, Betty Friedan) quintessentially male moment when you see the bullet destroying the bottle or blast in the watermelon, and a little frisson of satisfaction lights up the lizard part of the brain.
But we’re not lizards. Neither are we those other closest living relatives of dinosaurs, birds. And because we are neither birds nor lizards, it is incumbent upon us to interact with the weapons we create and use in the context of a larger moral compass.
It would be a mistake, with investigations still pending, to try to guess the nature and parameters of the moral compass within which Dimitrios Pagourtzis, 17, the alleged shooter, was acting. Nonetheless, at some point, we must try to suss out the moral geography in which the shooter was operating. The shooter himself may tell us, and it will be incumbent upon Facebook to cooperate fully with investigators, and the shooter’s social media profile for clues.
If, as Pat Conroy once wrote in his novel Lords of Discipline, “our Europes were different; our Americas were different,” so are our Texases. The Texas of my heritage is the West Texas of the sere, stripped-of-nonessentials, Trappist desert. It is the Texas of El Paso, of Democratic Congressman and Senate hopeful Beto O’Rourke. The shooter’s Texas, by contrast, was the humid, hurricane Harvey harried, conservative East Texas of the Gulf Coast, the Texas of Tom DeLay and Blake Farenthold, the Texas of so many Republican politicians whom the late Molly Ivins took such joy in skewering.
As investigators, journalists, and inky wretches like me seek to get our arms around what made the shooter go and do what he did, we will be tempted, after the fashion of Joan Didion and the other dissectors of the California psyche, to try to draw conclusions about the shooter from the environment in which he was raised and from which, presumably, he took his inspiration.
Yet still, as we try to ascertain the whys and wherefores of this latest incident, we should still let ourselves be guided by the better angels of our nature, allowing the survivors to recover, to grieve, to mourn and bury their dead, and to regain the composure so unceremoniously stripped from them today. Donald Trump notwithstanding, no good can come of off-the-cuff, inconsiderate, predawn tweets from the residence of the White House.
What do we think? What do we know? What can we prove?
The next few days will be a time for considerate contemplation of this incident, not for partisan bickering, Trumpian tweeting, conspiracy theorizing, or Russian active measures.
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand has been an attorney for the last 29 years. He lives in Cathedral City, California, where he served two terms on the city Council. He currently practices in Rancho Mirage. The views contained herein are his own.
Tuesday, February 20, 2018
WAS THE FLORIDA SCHOOL SHOOTING A RUSSIAN "ACTIVE MEASURE" TO GIVE THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION A REPRIEVE FROM ITS SCANDALS?
After the Florida school shooting last Wednesday, I predicted that it would not be long before 1) the NRA began fundraising on the tragedy and 2) that the right, particularly conservative media and people like Trump Flack former Congressman Jack Kingston (R-Georgia) began attacking any survivor who had the temerity to speak out in criticism of the existing dispensations that allow an active shooter to enter a high school and wantonly take seventeen lives.
As the White House and the right wing eagerly circulate all manner of conspiracy theories to deflect attention from America’s lax gun safety laws, to say nothing of deflecting attention from the numerous scandals swirling about the Trump administration itself, we may legitimately ask whether there does not exist probable cause to believe that there may indeed have been conspiracies occurring with respect to this tragedy.
The conspiracy I suggest may well exist is one designed to protect Donald Trump and his embattled administration. Consider the following facts: first, anywhere that Donald Trump sets up a substantial business operation, be that in Bedminster, New Jersey, or around his Mar-a-Lago country club in Palm Beach, Florida, there almost inevitably arises a substantial community of Russian émigrés and oligarchs looking to shelter flight capital. Second: wherever two or three Russians are gathered together, there is almost certain to be a Russian intelligence apparat presence. It is said in Russia that you cannot speak of Russians in the plural without also implying the presence of Kremlin eyes and ears. Third: the presence of sketchy Russian oligarchs, including Oleg Deripaska and Dmitri Rybolovev, in close proximity to Trump, his campaign appearances, or his properties at highly suspicious times has been documented by both the Western media and by the U.S. Intelligence community.
Add to that the close propinquity in time between the release of the so-called Mueller indictment, with its bombshell charges against 13 Russian individuals and three Russian entities, and the shooting. The Mueller indictment not only created a distinct sense of agita in the embattled Trump White House, but it also sounded clear alarm bells in the Kremlin. Both the Trump White House and the Moskovskiy Kremlin were clearly looking for a “reprieve” from the relentless drumbeat of bad news coming the administration’s way. Indeed, the degree of Muscovite solicitude for the Trump administration only lends further probable cause to believe that a conspiracy is very much underway.
The nexus between Moscow and Parkland, Florida may be inferred from the existence of Moscow’s felt need to protect the Trump administration. It is worth noting that Moscow’s reaction to the indictments of Paul Manafort, George Papadopoulos, and quondam national security advisor Michael Flynn, like their reaction to this most recent True Bill, was composed in equal shares of contempt, defensiveness, dismissiveness, and old-fashioned “shit, we’ve been caught,” apoplexy.
But, one may ask, how does this feed in to the events in Parkland, Florida. Again, consider the presence of that not insubstantial Russian émigré community in Palm Beach, to which they gravitated to be near Donald Trump. The Russian intelligence apparat is fairly sophisticated. Knowing, as we do, that the accused shooter had manifested distinct right-wing tendencies, it is not unreasonable to infer that his existence may very well have become known to one of the Russian intelligence agencies operating in this country, FSB, SVR, or GRU. Any asset of any one of the three Russian intelligence agencies would have known how to acquire the shooter as a potential asset, working on his strengths and weaknesses to compromise him and to turn him into a compliant asset of the Russian State.
The shooter could have been acquired through the kind of tradecraft the intelligence community refers to as MICE, Money, Ideology, Compromise (or Coercion), and Ego. Assets can be turned and acquired through one or a combination of these factors. Certainly, the Florida investigators will want to do careful research into the shooter’s 1) finances, 2) his ideological leanings, 3) the extent to which he had been compromised and was thus subject to being coerced, and 4) the extent to which the shooter may have been driven by his ego. The Florida authorities would be fools not to treat this matter as a counterintelligence investigation.
Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and his team should also take cognizance of these events. It is not unreasonable to believe that if the shooter had been turned by one or more of the agencies of the Russian intelligence apparat, that he may well have been encouraged or goaded into shooting up Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and murdering 17 classmates and teachers to distract attention from the Mueller indictment in particular and from the mounting scandals engulfing the Trump White House in general.
Indeed, it is also worth noting that within a matter of hours of the school shooting, Russian botnets were active selling as much dissension and disinformation as possible, most of it intended to defend the Trump administration or to smear the survivors. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/19/technology/russian-bots-school-shooting.html This Russian botnet activity is too fortuitous to be coincidental. Indeed, the Russian botnet offensive strongly suggests that the shooter had indeed been compromised, turned, and acquired, set in motion by the Kremlin to divert the attention of the American public away from the systematic treason happening in the White House.
If any part of the hypothesis laid out hereinbefore is supported by any data at all, then the investigation of the Florida school shooting needs to become part of the remit of the Mueller investigation. We are under a systematic attack from Russia, and the school shooting bears all the hallmarks of Russian active measures.
---------------------------
The opinions expressed herein are solely those of the author, but if readers find them congenial, readers are welcome to make them their own.
As the White House and the right wing eagerly circulate all manner of conspiracy theories to deflect attention from America’s lax gun safety laws, to say nothing of deflecting attention from the numerous scandals swirling about the Trump administration itself, we may legitimately ask whether there does not exist probable cause to believe that there may indeed have been conspiracies occurring with respect to this tragedy.
The conspiracy I suggest may well exist is one designed to protect Donald Trump and his embattled administration. Consider the following facts: first, anywhere that Donald Trump sets up a substantial business operation, be that in Bedminster, New Jersey, or around his Mar-a-Lago country club in Palm Beach, Florida, there almost inevitably arises a substantial community of Russian émigrés and oligarchs looking to shelter flight capital. Second: wherever two or three Russians are gathered together, there is almost certain to be a Russian intelligence apparat presence. It is said in Russia that you cannot speak of Russians in the plural without also implying the presence of Kremlin eyes and ears. Third: the presence of sketchy Russian oligarchs, including Oleg Deripaska and Dmitri Rybolovev, in close proximity to Trump, his campaign appearances, or his properties at highly suspicious times has been documented by both the Western media and by the U.S. Intelligence community.
Add to that the close propinquity in time between the release of the so-called Mueller indictment, with its bombshell charges against 13 Russian individuals and three Russian entities, and the shooting. The Mueller indictment not only created a distinct sense of agita in the embattled Trump White House, but it also sounded clear alarm bells in the Kremlin. Both the Trump White House and the Moskovskiy Kremlin were clearly looking for a “reprieve” from the relentless drumbeat of bad news coming the administration’s way. Indeed, the degree of Muscovite solicitude for the Trump administration only lends further probable cause to believe that a conspiracy is very much underway.
The nexus between Moscow and Parkland, Florida may be inferred from the existence of Moscow’s felt need to protect the Trump administration. It is worth noting that Moscow’s reaction to the indictments of Paul Manafort, George Papadopoulos, and quondam national security advisor Michael Flynn, like their reaction to this most recent True Bill, was composed in equal shares of contempt, defensiveness, dismissiveness, and old-fashioned “shit, we’ve been caught,” apoplexy.
But, one may ask, how does this feed in to the events in Parkland, Florida. Again, consider the presence of that not insubstantial Russian émigré community in Palm Beach, to which they gravitated to be near Donald Trump. The Russian intelligence apparat is fairly sophisticated. Knowing, as we do, that the accused shooter had manifested distinct right-wing tendencies, it is not unreasonable to infer that his existence may very well have become known to one of the Russian intelligence agencies operating in this country, FSB, SVR, or GRU. Any asset of any one of the three Russian intelligence agencies would have known how to acquire the shooter as a potential asset, working on his strengths and weaknesses to compromise him and to turn him into a compliant asset of the Russian State.
The shooter could have been acquired through the kind of tradecraft the intelligence community refers to as MICE, Money, Ideology, Compromise (or Coercion), and Ego. Assets can be turned and acquired through one or a combination of these factors. Certainly, the Florida investigators will want to do careful research into the shooter’s 1) finances, 2) his ideological leanings, 3) the extent to which he had been compromised and was thus subject to being coerced, and 4) the extent to which the shooter may have been driven by his ego. The Florida authorities would be fools not to treat this matter as a counterintelligence investigation.
Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and his team should also take cognizance of these events. It is not unreasonable to believe that if the shooter had been turned by one or more of the agencies of the Russian intelligence apparat, that he may well have been encouraged or goaded into shooting up Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and murdering 17 classmates and teachers to distract attention from the Mueller indictment in particular and from the mounting scandals engulfing the Trump White House in general.
Indeed, it is also worth noting that within a matter of hours of the school shooting, Russian botnets were active selling as much dissension and disinformation as possible, most of it intended to defend the Trump administration or to smear the survivors. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/19/technology/russian-bots-school-shooting.html This Russian botnet activity is too fortuitous to be coincidental. Indeed, the Russian botnet offensive strongly suggests that the shooter had indeed been compromised, turned, and acquired, set in motion by the Kremlin to divert the attention of the American public away from the systematic treason happening in the White House.
If any part of the hypothesis laid out hereinbefore is supported by any data at all, then the investigation of the Florida school shooting needs to become part of the remit of the Mueller investigation. We are under a systematic attack from Russia, and the school shooting bears all the hallmarks of Russian active measures.
---------------------------
The opinions expressed herein are solely those of the author, but if readers find them congenial, readers are welcome to make them their own.
Friday, December 8, 2017
“MORAL HIGH GROUND:” NOTHING BUT A PLACE TO SURRENDER ON.
Summary: the Democrats have once again demonstrated that they have the courage of all the wrong convictions. Faced with what is increasingly obviously a Roger Stone/Kremlin ratfucking operation designed to eviscerate the Democratic leadership in the United States Congress, the Democrats have fallen into the usual “they go low we go high “posture of unconditional and abject surrender. The first target of the Stone/Kremlin operation was outgoing Minnesota Senator Al Franken. The second target of the Stone/Kremlin operation was the Father of the House, Michigan’s John Conyers. Democrats should realize that these are preemptive strikes intended to protect Republican Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore. But Democrats, sadly true to form, reacted in their typically puritanical fashion, rushing to judgment and establishing a lynch mob. It is certainly suspicious that Democratic ire should fall on a Jew and on a person of color. We have been played like a Stradivarius, our hypocrisy is plain for all to see, and behind the scenes, Roger Stone and Donald Trump are laughing their asses off. Democrats have a reputation for political cowardice, and they earned it again, in full measure, during the last 10 days.
The other day, embattled Minnesota Senator Al Franken announced that he would be resigning “in the coming weeks.” Last week, Michigan’s John Conyers, the longest-serving representative in Congress, the Father of the House, also resigned.
Both men were caught up in an emergent moral panic of ostensible sexual harassment that appears to be targeting the careers of a number of lawmakers. Let’s shame the devil, told the truth, and admit that the lawmakers in question come from both parties. Arizona Republican Trent Franks, who had planned to leave at the end of January, 2018, announced today that he has moved up his departure and is leaving now. Texas Republican Blake Farenthold is currently under ethics investigation by the House of Representatives, and is expected to call it quits fairly shortly.
Nevertheless, the moral panic in Washington is just a little bit too convenient, and its Democratic targets just a little bit too prominent, to be taken at face value. When Roger Stone tweeted, almost immediately after the Franken “scandal” broke, with information which suggested that Stone had some kind of pre-knowledge of Leeann Tweeden’s allegations, that should have been an indicator to Democrats that this particular moral panic might be something rather more nefarious, that this “moral panic” might in fact be part of a campaign of “active measures,” or dezinformatsiya trafficking in dubious kompromat designed to cause as much harm to prominent Democratic officeholders and to the Democratic Party as possible.
Unfortunately, instead of doing due diligence, which might well have discovered the existence of a coordinated campaign of active measures of dezinformatsiya and kompromat, a whole raft of Democratic officeholders trooped to various microphones and piously declared that they believed in their entirety all of the allegations against Franken and Conyers, no matter how stale, how far-fetched, or how remote in time.
Worse, this lynch mob of Democratic officeholders was not interested in hearing any defense from either Sen. Franken or Rep. Conyers, but was instead determined to see the two men’s metaphorical heads on pikes being led out of the Capitol. Instead of a careful review of the veracity of the allegations, the Democrats climbed onto a puritanical bandwagon of “zero tolerance” and made it clear to both Senator Franken and Congressman Conyers that they were not disposed to do due diligence before hustling the senator and the Congressman straight to the Tarpeian Rock and hurling them to the bottom.
The conduct of the Democratic officeholders who made speed to hurl Senator Franken and Congressman Conyers from the Tarpeian Rock spoke to everything that is wrong with the Democratic Party. It spoke to the puritanical, schoolmarmish tendency of the Democratic Party to buy into the notion that one who is accused of anything at all must be considered guilty until proven innocent. It also spoke to the unfortunate Democratic tendency to be unable to distinguish true moral high ground from a hill on which to undertake an abject surrender.
Democratic protestations that it is somehow important to make an example of Senator Franken and Congressman Conyers fail on two counts.
First, the desire to make an example of these two lawmakers so that we may “establish a clear moral contrast with the Republicans” is worse than feckless. It assumes that the Republican Party and the American electorate possess a moral compass. There is absolutely no evidence to support the proposition that either the Republican Party or the American electorate possess anything even resembling a moral compass. Given this lack of any evidentiary support for the proposition that either the GOP or the American electorate even has a moral compass, democratic invocation of some sort of “moral high ground” starts to look less like a principled stand and more like an unprincipled hunt for a hill upon which to engage in the traditional Democratic tendency toward abject and unconditional surrender.
Second, we should take a look at the targets of this campaign of active measures, dezinformatsiya, and kompromat. For while the Republicans are rallying around a serial outrager of girls and young women in the person of quondam Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, the Democrats have been pursuing two members of their own party who, by definition, are Other. Senator Franken is Jewish; Congressman Conyers is black. And yet the Democratic Party doesn’t seem to have had the good common sense of optics to realize that the lynch mob set in train against both men might very well appear, notwithstanding minority participation therein, like a boneheaded maneuver intended to cast to prominent Others out of the halls of Congress.
Queerfolk observing this phenomenon should consider themselves on notice; the moral panic can be, and will be, extended to include claims of queer sexual misconduct as well as claims of straight sexual misconduct. And when that happens, the Democratic Party, that masterpiece of American cowardice, cannot be expected to rally to the defense of any queer officeholder. What will happen when someone with a queer ax to grind targets California Congressman Mark Takano (D-Riverside) the only gay, Asian member of the House of Representatives? What will happen if Wisconsin Senator Tammy Baldwin, the only open lesbian in the upper Chamber, is targeted?
It is easy to predict what will happen. Democrats, who practically wet themselves trying to get on the bandwagon to condemn Al Franken, the Jew, and John Conyers, the African-American, will find it even easier to fan the flames of moral panic against the strange, exotic, queerfolk in their midst. And people like Roger Stone, Donald Trump, and the Russian intelligence apparat with which they have so obviously and notoriously coordinated, will be happy to provide kompromat and to undertake Active Measures and spread dezinformatsiya intended to drive queer Democrats from office. And, Goddammit, stupid Democrats will be more than happy to help them do it.
In my previous post, I sounded the alarm bell that this kind of moral panic, stirred up by Republicans to ratfuck the Democratic Party, would be something the Democrats would fall for, hook, line, and sinker. I was right.
We should have had the courage of our Democratic convictions. We should have done our due diligence before jumping on the moral panic bandwagon. We should not have allowed ourselves to become part of a lynch mob. We should have stood with Al Franken and John Conyers.
Our Democratic failure to stand with Al Franken and John Conyers is a failure of our moral compass and our respect for the rule of law. Our eagerness to rush them to the Tarpeian rock and hurl them over it is a nasty revelation of our own internalized anti-Semitism, our own internalized racism, and our own internal unwillingness to do the kind of due diligence we should have done.
When they pulled a knife, we should have pulled a gun. When they sent one of ours the hospital, we should have sent one of theirs to the morgue. Instead, we scrambled up on a spurious piece of “moral high ground” and once there, we ran up the white flag.
The Democratic reputation for political cowardice has never been better deserved that it has been in the last 10 days.
The other day, embattled Minnesota Senator Al Franken announced that he would be resigning “in the coming weeks.” Last week, Michigan’s John Conyers, the longest-serving representative in Congress, the Father of the House, also resigned.
Both men were caught up in an emergent moral panic of ostensible sexual harassment that appears to be targeting the careers of a number of lawmakers. Let’s shame the devil, told the truth, and admit that the lawmakers in question come from both parties. Arizona Republican Trent Franks, who had planned to leave at the end of January, 2018, announced today that he has moved up his departure and is leaving now. Texas Republican Blake Farenthold is currently under ethics investigation by the House of Representatives, and is expected to call it quits fairly shortly.
Nevertheless, the moral panic in Washington is just a little bit too convenient, and its Democratic targets just a little bit too prominent, to be taken at face value. When Roger Stone tweeted, almost immediately after the Franken “scandal” broke, with information which suggested that Stone had some kind of pre-knowledge of Leeann Tweeden’s allegations, that should have been an indicator to Democrats that this particular moral panic might be something rather more nefarious, that this “moral panic” might in fact be part of a campaign of “active measures,” or dezinformatsiya trafficking in dubious kompromat designed to cause as much harm to prominent Democratic officeholders and to the Democratic Party as possible.
Unfortunately, instead of doing due diligence, which might well have discovered the existence of a coordinated campaign of active measures of dezinformatsiya and kompromat, a whole raft of Democratic officeholders trooped to various microphones and piously declared that they believed in their entirety all of the allegations against Franken and Conyers, no matter how stale, how far-fetched, or how remote in time.
Worse, this lynch mob of Democratic officeholders was not interested in hearing any defense from either Sen. Franken or Rep. Conyers, but was instead determined to see the two men’s metaphorical heads on pikes being led out of the Capitol. Instead of a careful review of the veracity of the allegations, the Democrats climbed onto a puritanical bandwagon of “zero tolerance” and made it clear to both Senator Franken and Congressman Conyers that they were not disposed to do due diligence before hustling the senator and the Congressman straight to the Tarpeian Rock and hurling them to the bottom.
The conduct of the Democratic officeholders who made speed to hurl Senator Franken and Congressman Conyers from the Tarpeian Rock spoke to everything that is wrong with the Democratic Party. It spoke to the puritanical, schoolmarmish tendency of the Democratic Party to buy into the notion that one who is accused of anything at all must be considered guilty until proven innocent. It also spoke to the unfortunate Democratic tendency to be unable to distinguish true moral high ground from a hill on which to undertake an abject surrender.
Democratic protestations that it is somehow important to make an example of Senator Franken and Congressman Conyers fail on two counts.
First, the desire to make an example of these two lawmakers so that we may “establish a clear moral contrast with the Republicans” is worse than feckless. It assumes that the Republican Party and the American electorate possess a moral compass. There is absolutely no evidence to support the proposition that either the Republican Party or the American electorate possess anything even resembling a moral compass. Given this lack of any evidentiary support for the proposition that either the GOP or the American electorate even has a moral compass, democratic invocation of some sort of “moral high ground” starts to look less like a principled stand and more like an unprincipled hunt for a hill upon which to engage in the traditional Democratic tendency toward abject and unconditional surrender.
Second, we should take a look at the targets of this campaign of active measures, dezinformatsiya, and kompromat. For while the Republicans are rallying around a serial outrager of girls and young women in the person of quondam Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, the Democrats have been pursuing two members of their own party who, by definition, are Other. Senator Franken is Jewish; Congressman Conyers is black. And yet the Democratic Party doesn’t seem to have had the good common sense of optics to realize that the lynch mob set in train against both men might very well appear, notwithstanding minority participation therein, like a boneheaded maneuver intended to cast to prominent Others out of the halls of Congress.
Queerfolk observing this phenomenon should consider themselves on notice; the moral panic can be, and will be, extended to include claims of queer sexual misconduct as well as claims of straight sexual misconduct. And when that happens, the Democratic Party, that masterpiece of American cowardice, cannot be expected to rally to the defense of any queer officeholder. What will happen when someone with a queer ax to grind targets California Congressman Mark Takano (D-Riverside) the only gay, Asian member of the House of Representatives? What will happen if Wisconsin Senator Tammy Baldwin, the only open lesbian in the upper Chamber, is targeted?
It is easy to predict what will happen. Democrats, who practically wet themselves trying to get on the bandwagon to condemn Al Franken, the Jew, and John Conyers, the African-American, will find it even easier to fan the flames of moral panic against the strange, exotic, queerfolk in their midst. And people like Roger Stone, Donald Trump, and the Russian intelligence apparat with which they have so obviously and notoriously coordinated, will be happy to provide kompromat and to undertake Active Measures and spread dezinformatsiya intended to drive queer Democrats from office. And, Goddammit, stupid Democrats will be more than happy to help them do it.
In my previous post, I sounded the alarm bell that this kind of moral panic, stirred up by Republicans to ratfuck the Democratic Party, would be something the Democrats would fall for, hook, line, and sinker. I was right.
We should have had the courage of our Democratic convictions. We should have done our due diligence before jumping on the moral panic bandwagon. We should not have allowed ourselves to become part of a lynch mob. We should have stood with Al Franken and John Conyers.
Our Democratic failure to stand with Al Franken and John Conyers is a failure of our moral compass and our respect for the rule of law. Our eagerness to rush them to the Tarpeian rock and hurl them over it is a nasty revelation of our own internalized anti-Semitism, our own internalized racism, and our own internal unwillingness to do the kind of due diligence we should have done.
When they pulled a knife, we should have pulled a gun. When they sent one of ours the hospital, we should have sent one of theirs to the morgue. Instead, we scrambled up on a spurious piece of “moral high ground” and once there, we ran up the white flag.
The Democratic reputation for political cowardice has never been better deserved that it has been in the last 10 days.
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