Summary: Tomorrow is Armistice Day; 100 years ago tomorrow the Great War came to an end with a cease-fire between the Allied and Associated Powers and Germany. A century later, much of the world as we know it has been ineluctably shaped by the events of those four years which represented the death agonies of the 19th century and the birth pangs of the 20th. We, lapped in the accumulated treasures of the long post-World War II peace, live in a world largely shaped by the events of 1914-1918 and by those of 1939-1945. Even now, we owe an incalculable debt to those who fought and died, whose bones are part of the soil over which they fought. From the rising of the sun to its going down, we will remember them.
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Cathedral City - November 10, 2018. One hundred years ago tomorrow the Great War ended, with an armistice signed aboard a railroad car assigned to Marshal Ferdinand Foch, on a siding at Rethondes in the Forest of Compiègne in the Oise Département, in France. Representatives of the Allied and Associated Powers and representatives of what became the Weimar Republic of Germany signed the armistice document during the predawn hours between 5:12 and 5:20 a.m.
As is now well known, the armistice between The Allied and Associated Powers and Germany would go into effect with a cease-fire at 11:00 a.m. that day, the Famous Eleventh Hour of the Eleventh Day of the Eleventh Month.
The armistice of Compiègne represented the last in a series of armistices which had taken the other Central Powers, one by one, out of the Great War, starting with Bulgaria on September 29, 1918, the Ottoman Empire on October 30, 1918, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire on November 3, 1918.
Germany, the last of the Central Powers to sign an armistice, had suffered the most immediate and far-reaching of the political consequences that befell the Central Powers as a result of the Great War. Germany, at that time a Confederation of various quasi-sovereign states, suffered a more or less complete breakdown of its political structure. The 27 constituent units of the Reich included four kingdoms, including Prussia – by far the dominant constituent of the Empire, six grand duchies, five duchies, seven principalities, the three “Free Hanseatic Cities” of Hamburg, Bremen, and Lübeck, and the occupied, formerly French territory of Alsace-Lorraine (Elsaß-Lothringen).
As a result of the collapse of the Empire in early November, 1918, only the three Free Hanseatic Cities of Hamburg, Bremen, and Lübeck emerged at the end of the War with anything even resembling their original quasi-republican forms of government. In the rest of the Reich, Kaisers, Kings, Grand Dukes, Dukes, and Princes had fled or abdicated, leaving the pinchbeck panoply of the German monarchies in dust and shambles around them.
The collapse of Imperial Germany led by stages first to the Weimar Republic, then to the Third Reich, and now, after a second world war, to a new, reunified Germany that has actually incarnated the promise of freedom and democracy represented by the Weimar Republic. Indeed, for more than 60 years, the Bundesrepublik, with its stubbornly Atlanticist statesmen and stateswomen, has been one of the strongest bulwarks of the Atlantic Alliance. The Bundesrepublik has also been one of the strongest and most dependable proponents of a united Europe.
Yet, the history of Europe is not the history of Germany alone. When the Great War ended, it had exacted a fearsome price from the Allies as much as it had from the Central Powers. As Winston Churchill described the end of the Great War in the United Kingdom, “[v]ictory ha[d] been bought at a price so dear as to be indistinguishable from defeat.” In both the U.K. and in France, virtually an entire generation had marched off to war in 1914 singing songs of battle and imagining that they would be home by Christmas. Yet that optimistic generation that had marched off to war in August, 1914 never came home.
That optimistic generation, reared in the self-confidence of the 19th century, became the first casualties of the industrial scale war that has come to be so much the hallmark of our calamitous 20th and 21st centuries. Writing in The World Crisis, Winston Churchill had described “the old world in its sunset[, so] fair to see.” “Nations and Empires, crowned with princes and potentates, rose majestically on every side, lapped in the accumulated treasures of the long peace.” Within four years, from the awful assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on that price-cursed day of Vidovdan, June 28, 1914, right through to the Eleventh Hour of the Eleventh Day of the Eleventh Month, 1918, countless Europeans had lost their lives, many of them in squalid trenches far from the accumulated treasures of the long peace. If the events of Sarajevo were the death knell for the 19th century, the events of the Great War may with equal felicity be described as the birth pangs of the 20th.
But as much as the events of the Great War may be described as the birth pangs of the 20th century, they may also be described as the necessary predicates of the 21st.
For truthfully, we live in a world order that is very much shaped by the events of the Second World War, which in their turn were ineluctably shaped by the events of the Great War. If Germany today is a necessary bulwark of the Atlantic Alliance, it is because of the vision of German statesmen like Konrad Adenauer and Willy Brandt, whose respective commitments to building a united Europe and to laying long-lead foundations for the reunification of the German nation have very much made Europe what is today.
Additionally, we cannot speak of the United States as the world’s “indispensable” nation without acknowledging how the Great War played so large a part in accelerating America’s industrial development and advancing the United States in status from a regional power to an undisputed Great Power. If, in 1914, the United States was considered the preeminent power in the Americas, by 1918 she had become one of the four to five preeminent powers in the world. It is not unreasonable to suggest that the foundations for the post World War II pax Americana were laid at Château Thierry, at Belleau Wood, and in the Meuse-Argonne.
In short, as we commemorate the Centennial of the armistice at Compiègne tomorrow, we, in our 21st century world, lapped in the accumulated treasures of a long post-World War II peace, must not forget the debt we owe to our dead, many of whose bones have become part of the soil on which they fought. They were the attendants at the birth of the 20th century in which we still, numbers on the calendar notwithstanding, live. Those of us of a certain age, who may be old enough to remember the 50th anniversary of the Armistice, should know and appreciate the meaning of the Eleventh hour of the Eleventh day of the Eleventh month.
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning,
We will remember them.
-Laurence Binyon, For the Fallen, St. 4, 1914
Saturday, November 10, 2018
Thursday, November 8, 2018
LITTLE SNAPPERS: NOVEMBER 8, 2018
Summary: With the 2018 midterms now all over, “bar the shouting,” Democrats seem to have done passably well. Aotsunami (the Blue Tidal Wave) may have appeared to be more Aonami (the Blue Wave) than the Fukushima-like phenomenon we had hoped, but nevertheless, it delivered us control of the House of Representatives, numerous state governorships, and results in some local races that merit further discussion.
Of course, the ineluctable temper tantrum from The Donald has created more of a stir and more controversy the White House can ill afford. The Donald’s petulant stripping of CNN reporter Jim Acosta’s White House press pass, and White House flak Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s invocation of an obviously doctored video provided to her by Infowars’s Alex Jones, has given birth to another one of the endless parade of scandals dogging The Donald.
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The dust from the midterm elections is slowly settling, though we probably won’t know the full extent of Aonami (the Blue Wave) for some time. Nonetheless, in addition to wresting back control of the House of Representatives from the Republican Party, Democrats also appeared to have made some significant inroads at the state and local levels.
Indeed, Democrats may probably be forgiven today for experiencing some measure of Schadenfreude as close elections continue to tilt in their favor.
Here in Cathedral City, congratulations are due to incoming councilmembers John Rivera and Raymond Gregory, as well as to returning councilmember Mark Carnevale. Congratulations also to outgoing Council member Shelley Kaplan as he moves from the Cathedral City city Council to representing Zone 4 of the Desert Healthcare District, an obscure, but important post.
We don’t have the official canvass of voters from the Riverside County registrar yet, so we can’t know just how Democratic Cathedral City broke in the last election; all we have are results without knowing what part of the city voted for which candidate for assembly, State Senator, Congressman, or U.S. Senator. While according to the registrar’s numbers, Riverside County appears to have broken for Republican gubernatorial candidate John Cox, statewide numbers show Cox being trounced by Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom. How Cathedral City voted in that election we can’t yet know.
Nonetheless, there were some distinct losers in Tuesday night’s election. Cathedral City’s fourth Council District, by choosing experienced former planning Commissioner John Rivera over Trumpist conservative Ernesto Gutierrez, appears to have fairly decisively rejected the siren song of Trumpism. Unfortunately for departing mayor Stan Henry, his embrace of Gutierrez will taint his otherwise positive legacy. Stan would have done better to have kept his mouth shut altogether rather than endorse so manifestly unsuitable a candidate as Gutierrez.
The other loser in Tuesday night’s election, at least as far as District 4 is concerned is our local Gannett publication. By endorsing Gutierrez as their choice in District 4, the Desert Sun has once again demonstrated how woefully out of touch it is becoming with the increasingly Democratic electorate of the Coachella Valley. The Desert Sun seems to have forgotten or to have been utterly indifferent to changing voter demographics. Of course, The Desert Sun’s Republican cheerleading tendencies have always been readily apparent.
This after all was the same newspaper that last endorsed a Democrat for president some time during the administration of Franklin Roosevelt. When the Desert Sun in 2016 bucked its historic trend of endorsing Republicans for president, Democrats throughout the Valley were shocked; this was, after all, the same newspaper which had once fired an editorial page editor and escorted him off the premises under heavy security when he had had the effrontery to suggest that the Desert Sun might want to endorse a Democrat in a local congressional race.
We had expected our local Gannett publication to bend over backwards to find some sophistry of reason to justify endorsing Donald Trump. Fortunately, that did not happen, and two years later, the editorial staff of The Desert Sun are, in hindsight, probably thanking their lucky stars that they did not give the nod to The Donald.
Nevertheless, the endorsement of Ernesto Gutierrez was another blunder by the Desert Sun’s editorial staff. Unfortunately, as the monopoly print media source in this market, the Desert Sun can pretty much get away with ham-handed editorial decisions. Only time will tell what their next gaffe will be.
* * * * *
Of course, the landfall of Aonami, for all the effects it may or may not have here in the Coachella Valley, certainly has provoked more peevish, splenic outbursts of temper from the toddler occupying the Oval.
In my last post, I suggested that junior hominids, unlike kittens, puppies, or ducklings, are most distinctly not cute. Indeed, the toddler years can be years of travail for both parent and child; but never before have we had a toddler occupying the Oval Office, with all the various and sundry misbehaviors in which not-yet-socialized children indulge. To watch The Donald is to watch just such an un-socialized toddler, immured in a 72-year-old body, flaunt his inability to conform his behavior to the norms of civilized society.
We were subjected to just such a dog and pony show yesterday with The Donald’s breathtakingly bizarre 87 minute press conference in the East Room of the White House, the low point of which was Donald Trump’s testy exchange with CNN’s Jim Acosta, who apparently has long been a particular bête noire of the toddler-in-chief, followed by the yanking of Acosta's White House press credential.
After Trump attempted to cut off Acosta in mid-question, he sent a White House intern to try to forcibly relieve Acosta of his microphone. The intern should have known better; the least touching of another in anger is a battery at common law, and the intern has now made herself vulnerable to a lawsuit from Jim Acosta and from CNN. Trump, having instructed the intern to do so, has also made himself vulnerable to a lawsuit; even a president is not immune to being called to account in damages for ordering an assault and battery against another person.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders, whose record for lies and mistruths is very much coterminous with that of The Donald himself, attempted to justify the battery of Jim Acosta and the stripping of Acosta's credential by referencing a video that had been altered by Alex Jones’s Infowars, a gambit which was quickly found out and called out.
What neither The Donald nor his flack understand is that outside the dwindling minority of the population that constitutes The Donald’s base, the “enemy of the people” rhetoric he uses to describe the American media, like the rest of his rhetoric intended to cast doubt on the legitimacy of our other institutions, including our public institutions of self-government, has worn infinitesimally thin.
We may reasonably expect that when the Democratic House of Representatives takes control on January 3, barring some kind of Fujimori-style self-coup by The Donald, that Elijah Cummings’s House Government Reform And Oversight Committee may very well want to conduct hearings and investigations into, among others, the physical attack on Jim Acosta at the November 7 White House press conference. It might be time for Sarah Huckabee Sanders to think about lawyering up.
After all, as the Republicans have liked to gloat over the last two years, elections do indeed have consequences.
Of course, the ineluctable temper tantrum from The Donald has created more of a stir and more controversy the White House can ill afford. The Donald’s petulant stripping of CNN reporter Jim Acosta’s White House press pass, and White House flak Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s invocation of an obviously doctored video provided to her by Infowars’s Alex Jones, has given birth to another one of the endless parade of scandals dogging The Donald.
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The dust from the midterm elections is slowly settling, though we probably won’t know the full extent of Aonami (the Blue Wave) for some time. Nonetheless, in addition to wresting back control of the House of Representatives from the Republican Party, Democrats also appeared to have made some significant inroads at the state and local levels.
Indeed, Democrats may probably be forgiven today for experiencing some measure of Schadenfreude as close elections continue to tilt in their favor.
Here in Cathedral City, congratulations are due to incoming councilmembers John Rivera and Raymond Gregory, as well as to returning councilmember Mark Carnevale. Congratulations also to outgoing Council member Shelley Kaplan as he moves from the Cathedral City city Council to representing Zone 4 of the Desert Healthcare District, an obscure, but important post.
We don’t have the official canvass of voters from the Riverside County registrar yet, so we can’t know just how Democratic Cathedral City broke in the last election; all we have are results without knowing what part of the city voted for which candidate for assembly, State Senator, Congressman, or U.S. Senator. While according to the registrar’s numbers, Riverside County appears to have broken for Republican gubernatorial candidate John Cox, statewide numbers show Cox being trounced by Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom. How Cathedral City voted in that election we can’t yet know.
Nonetheless, there were some distinct losers in Tuesday night’s election. Cathedral City’s fourth Council District, by choosing experienced former planning Commissioner John Rivera over Trumpist conservative Ernesto Gutierrez, appears to have fairly decisively rejected the siren song of Trumpism. Unfortunately for departing mayor Stan Henry, his embrace of Gutierrez will taint his otherwise positive legacy. Stan would have done better to have kept his mouth shut altogether rather than endorse so manifestly unsuitable a candidate as Gutierrez.
The other loser in Tuesday night’s election, at least as far as District 4 is concerned is our local Gannett publication. By endorsing Gutierrez as their choice in District 4, the Desert Sun has once again demonstrated how woefully out of touch it is becoming with the increasingly Democratic electorate of the Coachella Valley. The Desert Sun seems to have forgotten or to have been utterly indifferent to changing voter demographics. Of course, The Desert Sun’s Republican cheerleading tendencies have always been readily apparent.
This after all was the same newspaper that last endorsed a Democrat for president some time during the administration of Franklin Roosevelt. When the Desert Sun in 2016 bucked its historic trend of endorsing Republicans for president, Democrats throughout the Valley were shocked; this was, after all, the same newspaper which had once fired an editorial page editor and escorted him off the premises under heavy security when he had had the effrontery to suggest that the Desert Sun might want to endorse a Democrat in a local congressional race.
We had expected our local Gannett publication to bend over backwards to find some sophistry of reason to justify endorsing Donald Trump. Fortunately, that did not happen, and two years later, the editorial staff of The Desert Sun are, in hindsight, probably thanking their lucky stars that they did not give the nod to The Donald.
Nevertheless, the endorsement of Ernesto Gutierrez was another blunder by the Desert Sun’s editorial staff. Unfortunately, as the monopoly print media source in this market, the Desert Sun can pretty much get away with ham-handed editorial decisions. Only time will tell what their next gaffe will be.
* * * * *
Of course, the landfall of Aonami, for all the effects it may or may not have here in the Coachella Valley, certainly has provoked more peevish, splenic outbursts of temper from the toddler occupying the Oval.
In my last post, I suggested that junior hominids, unlike kittens, puppies, or ducklings, are most distinctly not cute. Indeed, the toddler years can be years of travail for both parent and child; but never before have we had a toddler occupying the Oval Office, with all the various and sundry misbehaviors in which not-yet-socialized children indulge. To watch The Donald is to watch just such an un-socialized toddler, immured in a 72-year-old body, flaunt his inability to conform his behavior to the norms of civilized society.
We were subjected to just such a dog and pony show yesterday with The Donald’s breathtakingly bizarre 87 minute press conference in the East Room of the White House, the low point of which was Donald Trump’s testy exchange with CNN’s Jim Acosta, who apparently has long been a particular bête noire of the toddler-in-chief, followed by the yanking of Acosta's White House press credential.
After Trump attempted to cut off Acosta in mid-question, he sent a White House intern to try to forcibly relieve Acosta of his microphone. The intern should have known better; the least touching of another in anger is a battery at common law, and the intern has now made herself vulnerable to a lawsuit from Jim Acosta and from CNN. Trump, having instructed the intern to do so, has also made himself vulnerable to a lawsuit; even a president is not immune to being called to account in damages for ordering an assault and battery against another person.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders, whose record for lies and mistruths is very much coterminous with that of The Donald himself, attempted to justify the battery of Jim Acosta and the stripping of Acosta's credential by referencing a video that had been altered by Alex Jones’s Infowars, a gambit which was quickly found out and called out.
What neither The Donald nor his flack understand is that outside the dwindling minority of the population that constitutes The Donald’s base, the “enemy of the people” rhetoric he uses to describe the American media, like the rest of his rhetoric intended to cast doubt on the legitimacy of our other institutions, including our public institutions of self-government, has worn infinitesimally thin.
We may reasonably expect that when the Democratic House of Representatives takes control on January 3, barring some kind of Fujimori-style self-coup by The Donald, that Elijah Cummings’s House Government Reform And Oversight Committee may very well want to conduct hearings and investigations into, among others, the physical attack on Jim Acosta at the November 7 White House press conference. It might be time for Sarah Huckabee Sanders to think about lawyering up.
After all, as the Republicans have liked to gloat over the last two years, elections do indeed have consequences.
Wednesday, November 7, 2018
KEEP THE CAMEL IN THE TENT, PISSING OUT
Summary: It did not take long for the reality show huckster masquerading as the president of the United States to manifest his anger over the results of last night’s midterm elections. The Democratic recapture of the House of Representatives demanded, in Trump’s mind, a sacrifice to be laid upon the altar of his psychopathology. Thus, the long expected ouster of Atty. Gen. Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III. Sessions can respond either by slinking back to Alabama to lick his wounds, by writing a tell-all opus akin to Omarosa Manigault Newman’s Unhinged, or by disclosing everything he knows about Trump to special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. Trump, who apparently hasn’t got the common sense God gave an axolotl, seems to have forgotten the old-fashioned Washington wisdom distilled by Lyndon Johnson in the unforgettable phrase “it’s better to have a camel inside the tent pissing out then to have it outside the tent pissing in.”
The “Kremlin watchers” who study The Donald and The Donald’s reality show of an administration predicted, with almost uncanny accuracy, what the reality show huckster masquerading as President of the United States would do if Aonami (the Blue Wave) materialized in yesterday’s midterm elections.
Most of us, at some point in our lives, have had to deal with the junior hominids commonly referred to as children. Unlike puppies or kittens or ducklings, junior hominids are not cute or cuddly. In fact, the toddler stage is particularly obnoxious, both for adult and child. Sadly, the Republic has been oppressed for the last two years by the existence of a toddler in the Oval Office. The toddler in the Oval generally communicates his displeasure with untoward events through temper tantrums and relationship-sundering terminations. After all, this is the same Donald Trump who tried to trademark the phrase “you’re fired!”
So, in the wake of Aonami, when Donald Trump let his temper go, the first casualty, the first sacrifice upon the altar of The Donald’s insensate ego was his much-maligned Attorney General, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III. Sessions may be the first casualty of Aonami in the executive branch, but he certainly won’t be the last. Indeed, he goes the way of numerous senior Administration officials who have somehow displeased the Maximum Leader.
However, with Sessions having departed from the administration, we may wonder what the quondam Attorney General’s response to this unceremonious dumping may be. At one end of the spectrum, Sessions can return to Alabama to lick his wounds, soliciting a position on the faculty of the law school at the University of Alabama and finding himself involved in bitter bickering with faculty members who will have no reason to hold him in much, if any, regard, and every possible motivation to seek discipline of Sessions’ professional licensure up to, and potentially including, disbarment.
Or, not desiring to incur the enmity of an outraged professoriate, Sessions may seek, and possibly find, a position with either a white shoe Washington City law firm or as a highly compensated K Street lobbyist. Such employment would free Mr. Sessions to write the inevitable tell-all book, somewhat like Bob Woodward’s recent opus Fear or perhaps Omarosa Manigault-Newman’s slim volume entitled Unhinged. If Sessions were to pen such a work, it would no doubt quickly find itself on the bestseller lists of the New York Times and Amazon.com.
The third option, and the one most damaging to Donald Trump and his administration is that Sessions may decide to make a clean breast of things with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. It is known throughout the government that prior to the Trump Administration taking office, Sessions did have meetings with representatives of the Russian State which he then denied having during his Senate confirmation hearings.
That’s perjury.
In addition to being an offense for which an attorney can be disbarred in his jurisdiction or jurisdictions of licensure, perjury before the Senate about contacts with representatives of the Kremlin also puts Sessions fairly in the crosshairs of the Mueller investigation.
It would not be surprising therefore to find that Mr. Sessions, presumably desiring to avoid either incarceration or professional discipline in his jurisdiction of licensure, would want to make the best possible deal with the Special Counsel. If, as is been suggested, the entire thrust of Japanese diplomacy after November, 1942, was to bring about an end to the Pacific War on the best possible terms Japan could obtain, so too, in the instant case, Sessions may find himself in negotiations with Special Counsel Mueller to obtain the best terms he can. After all, it would be a hell of a come down for a former senator and a former Attorney General of the United States to find himself rusticating in a federal correctional facility somewhere.
We cannot know what political goodies or things of value Jeff Sessions may be able to offer to Mueller’s team. But it is not unreasonable to expect that any proffer from Sessions to Mueller will probably be very substantial. The more substantial the proffer, the greater degree of risk it represents to the Trump administration. For Sessions, the safest course may be to limber up his vocal cords and be prepared to sing like a canary, lest the almost inevitable discovery of substantial Administration wrongdoing leave him with no cards to play.
He should do so quickly, and secure some measure of protection from congressional subpoenas, before incoming House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff or Incoming House Government Reform and Oversight Committee Chair Elijah Cummings can have a chance to make mincemeat of him on national television.
Trump may find, according to the line from the Star Trek original series episode Amok Time, that "having is not nearly so pleasing a thing after all is wanting;" or put in another, more Lyndon Johnson-esque way, it would have been better not to have fired Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, because is better to have a camel in the tent pissing out then do have one outside the tent pissing in.
The “Kremlin watchers” who study The Donald and The Donald’s reality show of an administration predicted, with almost uncanny accuracy, what the reality show huckster masquerading as President of the United States would do if Aonami (the Blue Wave) materialized in yesterday’s midterm elections.
Most of us, at some point in our lives, have had to deal with the junior hominids commonly referred to as children. Unlike puppies or kittens or ducklings, junior hominids are not cute or cuddly. In fact, the toddler stage is particularly obnoxious, both for adult and child. Sadly, the Republic has been oppressed for the last two years by the existence of a toddler in the Oval Office. The toddler in the Oval generally communicates his displeasure with untoward events through temper tantrums and relationship-sundering terminations. After all, this is the same Donald Trump who tried to trademark the phrase “you’re fired!”
So, in the wake of Aonami, when Donald Trump let his temper go, the first casualty, the first sacrifice upon the altar of The Donald’s insensate ego was his much-maligned Attorney General, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III. Sessions may be the first casualty of Aonami in the executive branch, but he certainly won’t be the last. Indeed, he goes the way of numerous senior Administration officials who have somehow displeased the Maximum Leader.
However, with Sessions having departed from the administration, we may wonder what the quondam Attorney General’s response to this unceremonious dumping may be. At one end of the spectrum, Sessions can return to Alabama to lick his wounds, soliciting a position on the faculty of the law school at the University of Alabama and finding himself involved in bitter bickering with faculty members who will have no reason to hold him in much, if any, regard, and every possible motivation to seek discipline of Sessions’ professional licensure up to, and potentially including, disbarment.
Or, not desiring to incur the enmity of an outraged professoriate, Sessions may seek, and possibly find, a position with either a white shoe Washington City law firm or as a highly compensated K Street lobbyist. Such employment would free Mr. Sessions to write the inevitable tell-all book, somewhat like Bob Woodward’s recent opus Fear or perhaps Omarosa Manigault-Newman’s slim volume entitled Unhinged. If Sessions were to pen such a work, it would no doubt quickly find itself on the bestseller lists of the New York Times and Amazon.com.
The third option, and the one most damaging to Donald Trump and his administration is that Sessions may decide to make a clean breast of things with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. It is known throughout the government that prior to the Trump Administration taking office, Sessions did have meetings with representatives of the Russian State which he then denied having during his Senate confirmation hearings.
That’s perjury.
In addition to being an offense for which an attorney can be disbarred in his jurisdiction or jurisdictions of licensure, perjury before the Senate about contacts with representatives of the Kremlin also puts Sessions fairly in the crosshairs of the Mueller investigation.
It would not be surprising therefore to find that Mr. Sessions, presumably desiring to avoid either incarceration or professional discipline in his jurisdiction of licensure, would want to make the best possible deal with the Special Counsel. If, as is been suggested, the entire thrust of Japanese diplomacy after November, 1942, was to bring about an end to the Pacific War on the best possible terms Japan could obtain, so too, in the instant case, Sessions may find himself in negotiations with Special Counsel Mueller to obtain the best terms he can. After all, it would be a hell of a come down for a former senator and a former Attorney General of the United States to find himself rusticating in a federal correctional facility somewhere.
We cannot know what political goodies or things of value Jeff Sessions may be able to offer to Mueller’s team. But it is not unreasonable to expect that any proffer from Sessions to Mueller will probably be very substantial. The more substantial the proffer, the greater degree of risk it represents to the Trump administration. For Sessions, the safest course may be to limber up his vocal cords and be prepared to sing like a canary, lest the almost inevitable discovery of substantial Administration wrongdoing leave him with no cards to play.
He should do so quickly, and secure some measure of protection from congressional subpoenas, before incoming House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff or Incoming House Government Reform and Oversight Committee Chair Elijah Cummings can have a chance to make mincemeat of him on national television.
Trump may find, according to the line from the Star Trek original series episode Amok Time, that "having is not nearly so pleasing a thing after all is wanting;" or put in another, more Lyndon Johnson-esque way, it would have been better not to have fired Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, because is better to have a camel in the tent pissing out then do have one outside the tent pissing in.
Thursday, October 25, 2018
REVENGE, RETALIATION, AND RETRIBUTION: THOUGHTS ON THE MURDER OF JAMAL KHASHOGGI
Summary: The assassination of Jamal Khashoggi may be expected, over the medium to long term, to have significant effects on the US relationship with Saudi Arabia and, more significantly, on the House of Saud itself. The Saudi response to Khashoggi’s murder has morphed from posture of what Winston Churchill might have called “injured guilt,” to one of acknowledgment of the fact of the crime while denying culpability, attempting, against the overwhelming weight of evidence, to suggest that Khashoggi’s murder was the result of “rogue” operators. The now apparent complicity of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, in a culture that places a premium on revenge, retaliation, and retribution, may be the spark that sends his aging and unbelievably corrupt Dynasty up in flames.
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When Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, nephew of notorious multi-zillionaire Adnan Khashoggi and cousin of sometime Princess Di boyfriend Dodi Fayed, was murdered inside the Turkish Consulate in İstanbul at the beginning of this month, the initial official Saudi response was one of indignant protestations and denial. To use Winston Churchill’s mordant description of Sir Stafford Cripps, the Saudi response to the initial and overwhelming evidence that Jamal Khashoggi had, in fact, been murdered in the consulate was an outburst of “injured guilt.”
In the better part of a month that has followed, the Saudi response has shifted from denials delivered in that tone of “injured guilt” to acknowledgment that Khashoggi had indeed been dispatched within the consulate, while denying any official culpability on the part of the Kingdom in Khashoggi’s murder.
In the meantime, all manner of lurid stories and conspiracy theories have been circulating. In the vacuum caused by the official unwillingness of the kingdom to come clean with what really happened when Jamal Khashoggi entered the consulate but never emerged, conspiracy theories and lurid stories have abounded.
Perhaps the most lurid of them all is the story circulating in Turkey and in parts of the American leftist media that Khashoggi was dismembered while still alive, a story lent credence by reports of screams from within the consul general’s study, together with the presence of a bone saw in the possession of one of the apparent kill team.
The “dismembered alive” narrative is certainly convenient to Ankara. It plays well into Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s neo-Ottoman diplomatic Kriegßpiel against Iraq and Saudi Arabia. It certainly plays well among the left-progressive media in this country, which have long had a conspicuous disdain for the monumentally corrupt House of Saud.
Nevertheless, as convenient as such a narrative is for Ankara, inasmuch as it shocks the consciences of civilized people everywhere, the Turkish narrative is open to serious question because it postulates a violation of one of the fundamental rules of intelligence tradecraft; use minimal force necessary to accomplish the intelligence objective at hand, which was to liquidate Jamal Khashoggi as efficiently, quietly, and expeditiously as possible.
A well-executed intelligence “wet work” would have involved a swift administration of a deadly nerve agent such as Novichok (or its United States equivalent). Given that the Saudis learned the lion’s share of their intelligence tradecraft from us, it is by no means unreasonable to expect that a fight may have been stayed inside the consulate in order to give the Saudi intelligence operatives of the kill team enough time and opportunity to administer the fatal poison.
If in fact a kill team of 15 men was lying in wait for Khashoggi inside the consul-general’s study, the scream referenced in Turkish and Western media reports can be fairly easily accounted for as Khashoggi’s exclamation of surprise or cry for help as he was put in the headlock that has also been referenced in Turkish and Western media reports. Alternatively, the scream could be accounted for by the jabbing of a needle and syringe into some part of his body, probably his neck.
If a nerve agent had been administered in such a fashion, the scream would have been Jamal Khashoggi’s last audible utterance. Novichok, or the US equivalent thereto, can be fatal within seconds or minutes. If the operatives of the kill team had Khashoggi in a headlock, and shot him full of Novichok, there is no doubt that Jamal Khashoggi would have been dead by the time his body was lowered to the floor. It certainly is more in keeping with best practices of intelligence tradecraft to kill your victim quickly rather than dismember him alive. Saudi intelligence operatives should have learned at least that from their US instructors.
After all, when all is said and done, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) is no fool. MBS certainly recognizes that Jamal Khashoggi was a scion of one of the wealthiest families in the Arab nation. After all, you don’t enjoy a certain measure of entrée to Saudi royal circles unless you are the nephew of the late, fabulously wealthy Adnan Khashoggi and the cousin of Dodi Fayed.
MBS must have been aware that to murder a Khashoggi would have been to provoke one of the famously endless cycles of revenge, retribution, and retaliation that have figured so prominently in the history of the Arab nation. Surely, MBS cannot be utterly unmindful of the revenge-based 1975 assassination of King Faisal ibn Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia, the 1951 assassination of King Abdullah I of Jordan, the brutal 1958 murder of King Faisal II of Iraq, or the 1981 jihadist assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat.
MBS should be fearful that somehow, somewhere, some Islamic cleric will issue a Fatwa sanctioning and calling for MBS’s assassination or that the Saudi ulema (the senior Islamic clerics of the Kingdom) will issue some kind of similar declaration.
Indeed, MBS may have crossed a so-called red line in the Kingdom’s politics. For most of its history, Saudi Arabia has been an absolute monarchy tempered by the realization of the royal house that its absolute rule depends for its legitimacy — and its survival — upon cultivating consensus among the kingdom’s leading families, and among the historic regions of the Arabian Peninsula under Saudi control, al-Hasa, the Hejaz, ‘Asir, and Najd.
But under the “stewardship” of MBS, the Saudi model of rule has shifted from one of consensus-based absolute rule to one of royal totalitarianism.
Unfortunately, MBS and his acolytes seem altogether blind to the historical reality that absolute monarchy, whether hereditary or de facto, has become, to all intents and purposes, a thing of the past, an historical curiosity increasingly regarded by a majority of the world not as a quaint holdover from times past, but as a positive social evil to be eradicated whenever the opportunity presents itself.
Of course, none of this relieves the kingdom of any of its culpability in the matter. Moreover, because MBS is no fool, he would no doubt have sought to shore up his flanks before moving against the Khashoggi family. He would have sought, in short, to avail himself of the cravenness, venality, corruptibility, and gullibility of Donald Trump and Donald Trump’s equally craven, venal, corrupt, repulsive, and gullible son-in-law Jared Kushner.
By drawing Trump and Kushner into what was an evident plot to assassinate the inconvenient journalist, MBS could feel comfortable of having the power of the United States behind him in the event of any attempt at revenge by Khashoggi’s friends or family. Thus, it is not unreasonable to conclude that it is highly doubtful that MBS would have sanctioned and intelligence wet work against Jamal Khashoggi if he did not have an advance green light from the White House.
Indeed, it is also reasonable to infer that MBS did, indeed have a green light for the killing from the highest reaches of the Trump administration. Knowing Donald Trump’s poisonous hatred for the Washington Post, we may infer the Trump would have seen in the Saudi operation against Jamal Khashoggi and opportunity to fire a warning shot across the bow of the Post as an institution and its journalists as individuals.
Trump, whom the evidence now suggests was read in to the Saudi operational plan before green-lighting it, probably saw the assassination/murder of Jamal Khashoggi as an excellent vehicle for intimidating what he plainly sees as a significant domestic political enemy. When all is said and done, the evidence appears to be mounting that Donald Trump was indeed either read in before the operation took place, or, even more damning, that it may have been Donald Trump himself who gave the go order for the planning and execution of actual operation itself.
Unfortunately for him, since The Donald has not got the self-awareness that God gave an axolotl, or any insight into the history of the English-speaking peoples, he plainly has absolutely no knowledge or recollection of the story of St. Thomas à Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, whose assassination, on December 29, 1170 on orders from King Henry II, sparked outrage throughout Christendom.
Now while Khashoggi himself of course was Muslim, and not a high-ranking cleric (in a religion that has neither priests nor bishops), he was a fearless journalist and somewhat after being the conscience of the Arab nation. For Trump to allow the United States to be seen as complicit in the murder of a witness for freedom of expression, a virtue much put upon and derided throughout much of the Arab world, is to put the United States in the position of gathering to itself yet further reservoirs of ill will, not just from the Arab nation, but from much of the Islamic ummah as a whole.
By parroting the Kingdom’s line, Donald Trump, his ridiculous, neotenous lap dog Jared Kushner, and the administration as a whole may well have filled the vials of wrath among the ummah and in the Arab nation to overflowing.
By their supine acquiescence in a gross crime against humanity and against human freedom, Trump and Kushner may well have also exposed this country to a new wave of terror when, not if, the unbelievably corrupt House of Saud finally collapses under the weight of its own internal contradictions and inconsistencies.
MBS would have done well, before sanctioning the murder of Jamal Khashoggi to have reacquainted himself with the words of the 81st sura of the Holy Qur’an:
When the sun is overthrown,
And when the stars fall,
And when the hills are moved,
And when the camels big with young are abandoned,
And when the wild beasts are herded together,
And when the seas rise,
And when souls are reunited,
And when the girl-child that was buried alive is asked
for what sin she was slain,
And when the pages are laid open,
And when the sky is ripped away,
And when hellfire is lighted,
And when the Garden is brought nigh,
[Then] every soul will know what it hath done!
Qur’an 81, Sura at-Takwir (The Overthrowing): 1-14
----------------------------------------------------------------
When Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, nephew of notorious multi-zillionaire Adnan Khashoggi and cousin of sometime Princess Di boyfriend Dodi Fayed, was murdered inside the Turkish Consulate in İstanbul at the beginning of this month, the initial official Saudi response was one of indignant protestations and denial. To use Winston Churchill’s mordant description of Sir Stafford Cripps, the Saudi response to the initial and overwhelming evidence that Jamal Khashoggi had, in fact, been murdered in the consulate was an outburst of “injured guilt.”
In the better part of a month that has followed, the Saudi response has shifted from denials delivered in that tone of “injured guilt” to acknowledgment that Khashoggi had indeed been dispatched within the consulate, while denying any official culpability on the part of the Kingdom in Khashoggi’s murder.
In the meantime, all manner of lurid stories and conspiracy theories have been circulating. In the vacuum caused by the official unwillingness of the kingdom to come clean with what really happened when Jamal Khashoggi entered the consulate but never emerged, conspiracy theories and lurid stories have abounded.
Perhaps the most lurid of them all is the story circulating in Turkey and in parts of the American leftist media that Khashoggi was dismembered while still alive, a story lent credence by reports of screams from within the consul general’s study, together with the presence of a bone saw in the possession of one of the apparent kill team.
The “dismembered alive” narrative is certainly convenient to Ankara. It plays well into Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s neo-Ottoman diplomatic Kriegßpiel against Iraq and Saudi Arabia. It certainly plays well among the left-progressive media in this country, which have long had a conspicuous disdain for the monumentally corrupt House of Saud.
Nevertheless, as convenient as such a narrative is for Ankara, inasmuch as it shocks the consciences of civilized people everywhere, the Turkish narrative is open to serious question because it postulates a violation of one of the fundamental rules of intelligence tradecraft; use minimal force necessary to accomplish the intelligence objective at hand, which was to liquidate Jamal Khashoggi as efficiently, quietly, and expeditiously as possible.
A well-executed intelligence “wet work” would have involved a swift administration of a deadly nerve agent such as Novichok (or its United States equivalent). Given that the Saudis learned the lion’s share of their intelligence tradecraft from us, it is by no means unreasonable to expect that a fight may have been stayed inside the consulate in order to give the Saudi intelligence operatives of the kill team enough time and opportunity to administer the fatal poison.
If in fact a kill team of 15 men was lying in wait for Khashoggi inside the consul-general’s study, the scream referenced in Turkish and Western media reports can be fairly easily accounted for as Khashoggi’s exclamation of surprise or cry for help as he was put in the headlock that has also been referenced in Turkish and Western media reports. Alternatively, the scream could be accounted for by the jabbing of a needle and syringe into some part of his body, probably his neck.
If a nerve agent had been administered in such a fashion, the scream would have been Jamal Khashoggi’s last audible utterance. Novichok, or the US equivalent thereto, can be fatal within seconds or minutes. If the operatives of the kill team had Khashoggi in a headlock, and shot him full of Novichok, there is no doubt that Jamal Khashoggi would have been dead by the time his body was lowered to the floor. It certainly is more in keeping with best practices of intelligence tradecraft to kill your victim quickly rather than dismember him alive. Saudi intelligence operatives should have learned at least that from their US instructors.
After all, when all is said and done, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) is no fool. MBS certainly recognizes that Jamal Khashoggi was a scion of one of the wealthiest families in the Arab nation. After all, you don’t enjoy a certain measure of entrée to Saudi royal circles unless you are the nephew of the late, fabulously wealthy Adnan Khashoggi and the cousin of Dodi Fayed.
MBS must have been aware that to murder a Khashoggi would have been to provoke one of the famously endless cycles of revenge, retribution, and retaliation that have figured so prominently in the history of the Arab nation. Surely, MBS cannot be utterly unmindful of the revenge-based 1975 assassination of King Faisal ibn Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia, the 1951 assassination of King Abdullah I of Jordan, the brutal 1958 murder of King Faisal II of Iraq, or the 1981 jihadist assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat.
MBS should be fearful that somehow, somewhere, some Islamic cleric will issue a Fatwa sanctioning and calling for MBS’s assassination or that the Saudi ulema (the senior Islamic clerics of the Kingdom) will issue some kind of similar declaration.
Indeed, MBS may have crossed a so-called red line in the Kingdom’s politics. For most of its history, Saudi Arabia has been an absolute monarchy tempered by the realization of the royal house that its absolute rule depends for its legitimacy — and its survival — upon cultivating consensus among the kingdom’s leading families, and among the historic regions of the Arabian Peninsula under Saudi control, al-Hasa, the Hejaz, ‘Asir, and Najd.
But under the “stewardship” of MBS, the Saudi model of rule has shifted from one of consensus-based absolute rule to one of royal totalitarianism.
Unfortunately, MBS and his acolytes seem altogether blind to the historical reality that absolute monarchy, whether hereditary or de facto, has become, to all intents and purposes, a thing of the past, an historical curiosity increasingly regarded by a majority of the world not as a quaint holdover from times past, but as a positive social evil to be eradicated whenever the opportunity presents itself.
Of course, none of this relieves the kingdom of any of its culpability in the matter. Moreover, because MBS is no fool, he would no doubt have sought to shore up his flanks before moving against the Khashoggi family. He would have sought, in short, to avail himself of the cravenness, venality, corruptibility, and gullibility of Donald Trump and Donald Trump’s equally craven, venal, corrupt, repulsive, and gullible son-in-law Jared Kushner.
By drawing Trump and Kushner into what was an evident plot to assassinate the inconvenient journalist, MBS could feel comfortable of having the power of the United States behind him in the event of any attempt at revenge by Khashoggi’s friends or family. Thus, it is not unreasonable to conclude that it is highly doubtful that MBS would have sanctioned and intelligence wet work against Jamal Khashoggi if he did not have an advance green light from the White House.
Indeed, it is also reasonable to infer that MBS did, indeed have a green light for the killing from the highest reaches of the Trump administration. Knowing Donald Trump’s poisonous hatred for the Washington Post, we may infer the Trump would have seen in the Saudi operation against Jamal Khashoggi and opportunity to fire a warning shot across the bow of the Post as an institution and its journalists as individuals.
Trump, whom the evidence now suggests was read in to the Saudi operational plan before green-lighting it, probably saw the assassination/murder of Jamal Khashoggi as an excellent vehicle for intimidating what he plainly sees as a significant domestic political enemy. When all is said and done, the evidence appears to be mounting that Donald Trump was indeed either read in before the operation took place, or, even more damning, that it may have been Donald Trump himself who gave the go order for the planning and execution of actual operation itself.
Unfortunately for him, since The Donald has not got the self-awareness that God gave an axolotl, or any insight into the history of the English-speaking peoples, he plainly has absolutely no knowledge or recollection of the story of St. Thomas à Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, whose assassination, on December 29, 1170 on orders from King Henry II, sparked outrage throughout Christendom.
Now while Khashoggi himself of course was Muslim, and not a high-ranking cleric (in a religion that has neither priests nor bishops), he was a fearless journalist and somewhat after being the conscience of the Arab nation. For Trump to allow the United States to be seen as complicit in the murder of a witness for freedom of expression, a virtue much put upon and derided throughout much of the Arab world, is to put the United States in the position of gathering to itself yet further reservoirs of ill will, not just from the Arab nation, but from much of the Islamic ummah as a whole.
By parroting the Kingdom’s line, Donald Trump, his ridiculous, neotenous lap dog Jared Kushner, and the administration as a whole may well have filled the vials of wrath among the ummah and in the Arab nation to overflowing.
By their supine acquiescence in a gross crime against humanity and against human freedom, Trump and Kushner may well have also exposed this country to a new wave of terror when, not if, the unbelievably corrupt House of Saud finally collapses under the weight of its own internal contradictions and inconsistencies.
MBS would have done well, before sanctioning the murder of Jamal Khashoggi to have reacquainted himself with the words of the 81st sura of the Holy Qur’an:
When the sun is overthrown,
And when the stars fall,
And when the hills are moved,
And when the camels big with young are abandoned,
And when the wild beasts are herded together,
And when the seas rise,
And when souls are reunited,
And when the girl-child that was buried alive is asked
for what sin she was slain,
And when the pages are laid open,
And when the sky is ripped away,
And when hellfire is lighted,
And when the Garden is brought nigh,
[Then] every soul will know what it hath done!
Qur’an 81, Sura at-Takwir (The Overthrowing): 1-14
Friday, October 5, 2018
LITTLE SNAPPERS: BRETT KAVANAUGH, THE RUSSIANS, AND THE DEMOCRATS
Summary: unsurprisingly, the Senate voted to approve a cloture motion to terminate debate on the confirmation of badly compromised Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. It’s also worth noting that Kavanaugh may well be compromised through association with the Russian State as well; Russian state media have been vigorously pressing his cause, and it’s not unreasonable to suspect that a lot of the funding for the dark money issue ads supporting Kavanaugh may have come from Russian sources. Of course, this puts the Democrats in Hobson’s choice position, yet one which may also prove advantageous to them in the November midterms.
----------------------------------------------------
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.
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