DONALD TRUMP'S TREASONABLE PROTECTION RACKET

Summary: In this morning’s edition of the New York Times, Donald Trump laid out his treasonable plans either to extort vast sums of money from our NATO partners in exchange for American protection or sell them to the Kremlin if they won’t pony up. This article merely reinforces what I have been saying for a very long time: Donald Trump and his supporters are traitors to this country. They are giving aid and support to enemies national and that falls within the constitutional definition of treason. Grand juries should be empaneled throughout the country to investigate, indict, and refer for prosecution the numerous enemies of this country that Donald Trump and his supporters have become.
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Newsflash: Donald Trump is talking treason, like the traitor he is.

An article in this morning’s New York Times,  lays bare the sickening treason at the heart of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. The article, and the related transcript accessible (through the NYT website) demonstrate that Trump, that Cheeto-faced, ferret-wearing shitgibbon, views NATO as nothing more than a protection racket. (Find the link here: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/21/us/politics/donald-trump-issues.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=a-lede-package-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news )

Apparently, in Trump world, if you don’t pay the United States the protection money that Trump demands, he will be willing to hand you over to the tender mercies of Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin.

With respect to the Baltic states, this is the worst sort of calculated blackmail. In 1940, the Soviet Union forcibly absorbed Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. For half a century after that, cold warriors in the United States used to commemorate so-called “captive Nations week,” taking themselves to the Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian Embassy in it in Washington city to engage in symbolic protests designed to convey America’s “disapproval” all the Soviet takeover of the Baltic states.

When the Baltic states regained their independence with the breakup of the Soviet Union, the whole raison d’être for Captive Nations Week went away as the Baltic States celebrated anew the freedom they had known from the fall of the Romanov dynasty in 1917 to the Soviet invasion of 1940. Membership in NATO was intended, in large measure, to ensure that the governments in Tallinn, Riga, and Vilnius could go about their business, and the peoples of the Baltic States could go about their business,  no longer hagridden by the fear of a Russian coup de main against them.

Since the accession of Vladimir Putin to the presidency of Russia, the Kremlin has been making ominous noises about being prepared to undertake just such a coup de main.

 Enter the Cheeto-faced, ferret-wearing shitgibbon Donald Trump. Let’s recall for a moment how Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin have formed a noisome and disturbing mutual admiration society. Add to that The Donald’s prior statements of praise for Putin, his prior advocacy of withdrawing the American tripwire force from South Korea, which would, of course, constitute an open invitation to Kim Jong-Un and the North Koreans to march right South from the DMZ.

And if they do, what of Japan? As Prussian advisor Major Klemens Meckel put it nearly 130 years ago, Korea is a dagger pointed to the heart of Japan. What was true during the Meiji period is true during the Heisei rain of the Meiji Emperor’s reigning great-grandson. Yet, the shitgibbon is apparently willing to abandon our vital strategic interests in Korea, presumably unless he can extort from them ---and from the Japanese--- a great deal of money to pay for the defense of East Asia against Kim Jong-un and presumably Xi Jinping as well.

The Donald’s disturbing willingness to play fast and loose with the national security interests of the United States, particularly when it comes to our declared adversaries, falls squarely within the constitutional definition of treason (art III, § 2). A strong that constitutional case can be made that Trump, by telegraphing the potential weakness of NATO to our Russian adversaries, and by telegraphing the potential weakness of our alliance with South Korea to Kim Jong-un and Xi Jinping, has given aid and comfort to enemies national.

To the extent that he is done so, there is probable cause for any grand jury anywhere in the country, but most likely in the Eastern District of Virginia, notorious for its expertise in national security cases and for its so-called Rocket Docket, to conclude that treason has been committed, that Donald Trump and his campaign committed it, and that a true bill therefor should therefore issue.

Let there be no doubt in anyone’s mind that this American citizen dares to exercise his constitutionally guaranteed petition right to suggest that Donald Trump has committed treason, and to denounce him therefor as “the notoriousest traitor,” not excepting Benedict Arnold, that ever lived in America. Donald Trump's New York Times interview demonstrates that we are dealing with a new version of Aaron Burr.

But as much as we may be dealing with a 21st-century iteration of Aaron Burr, we must also deal with his supporters. At common law, there are no degrees of accessory liability in treason. Every person involved in treason or in a treasonable conspiracy is liable to prosecution and conviction AS A PRINCIPAL. Thus, it would be reasonable for the Department of Justice to empanel federal grand juries in every federal judicial district, all over the country, with a view to returning true bills of indictment for treason against all significant, vocal, Donald Trump supporters.

It may sound like a witch hunt, but it’s actually nothing more and nothing less than a necessary prophylaxis to protect this country from being taken over in a hostile takeover bid by the Russian government. It has been for generations of settled policy goal of the Soviet Union and of Putin’s Russia to acquire what amounts to a controlling interest in the United States government. 

With, God forbid, a President Trump in the White House, America would be owned, lock, stock, and barrel, by the Kremlin. Europe would be a perpetual hostage, always in pawn to the Russian bear, to Adam-zad, with whom Rudyard Kipling once warned us, we should make us no truce.

TERRIFIED BEYOND THE CAPACITY FOR RATIONAL THOUGHT

Summary: Right now, reading the Republican platform and contemplating Donald Trump’s selection Of Indiana Governor Mike Pence as his running mate, I’m not happy. The Republican platform, the Republican convention, and the performance of Melania Trump have all got me wondering whether I should expedite the process of applying for an Irish passport.
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Watching the obscenity that is the Republican national convention in Cleveland has got me more than a little worried. I watched last night a bunch of seriously pissed off people, overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly straight, overwhelmingly conservative, have a collective temper tantrum on national television about all the things they were convinced were wrong with America, not least of which the fact that in the last eight years that black man in the White House has been able to turn around the Bush recession, take long steps toward liquidating our military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, to create millions of new jobs, and, in an incidental way, to oversee advances in civil rights for queerfolk I would not have thought possible just five years ago.

The Republicans inveighed at great and angry length against all these changes, letting us know in no uncertain terms that they were against all of them, and that in the view of the Republican Party, it was time to declare war upon uppity women, uppity black folk, uppity Mexicans (who are all presumed to be illegal, freeloading moochers) uppity seniors concerned about Social Security and Medicare, and uppity queers concerned about marriage and basic human rights. For all of us Uppities, the Republican message could not be simpler or more unambiguous: shut the fuck up, get the fuck to the back of the bus, and fuck off.

The pissed off Republicans were, in short, campaigning against everything that has been accomplished in America since the 1960s. And in watching the Republicans having their chimpanzee-like, feces-throwing, shit-fit, hate-filled, NSDAP Reichsparteiwoche von Nürnberg obscenity of a convention, my response was, to borrow the line from Ghostbusters, to be terrified beyond the capacity for rational thought.

I’m terrified for a number of not altogether contemptible reasons.

First of all, I’m terrified because Donald Trump is Donald Trump. Though I don’t much care for Cornel West, brother West and I agree that Donald Trump represents the modern incarnation of fascism. I see in the ascent of Donald Trump frightening echoes to the ascent of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. I also see in the astonishing quiescence of the American public deeply disturbing echoes to Germany’s Weimarzeit, that brief, glimmering period of Weimar democracy that came in with the fall of the Hohenzollern monarchy and ended on that dreadful January 30, 1933, when Reichspräsident Paul v. Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler Reichskanzler.

In the run-up to the orchestrated coronation of Donald Trump, in an extravaganza that could have been designed and staged by none other than Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, the Republican Party has produced a platform that breathes more hostility toward queerfolk than any other platform in the 162 years that the GOP has been in existence.

Not since Pat Buchanan postulated in 1992 at the Republican convention in Houston the existence of a cultural and religious war for the soul of America have I been so concerned about what one of the major parties in my country thinks of queerfolk.

Because I happen to be queer.

I don’t apologize for it; I don’t make excuses for it; and I hadn’t thought that I would need to make it so much a part of my political identity as it has become.

But Republican antipathy toward queerfolk is beginning to call forth  the same kind of agita among the queer nation that Germany’s more perspicacious Jews began to feel in the fall of 1932, during the short, ill-fated, chancellorships of Heinrich Brüning and Kurt v. Schleicher. These perspicacious Jews took one look at the flatulent Nazi who was their new leader and made tracks over the water to the U.K. or the New World. For Albert Einstein’s presence in Princeton, we can thank Adolf Hitler. For Sigmund Freud’s final sojourn in London, we can also thank Adolf Hitler. Where, if Donald Trump bamboozles the American public into giving him a lease on a 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., Northwest, will America’s queerfolk be able to go? Where will our Thomas Manns, our Lion Feuchtwangers, our Albert Einsteins, our Arnold Schönbergs, our queer émigrés, find a congenial foreign lodgment away from the horrors of a Trump administration?

For if the indications coming out of the RNC are at all reflective of what we can expect from the GOP this year, the omens are not good. As an article in the Los Angeles Times put it a few days ago: “The Log Cabin Republicans, a wing of the party that pushes for gay rights, called the party’s stance the ‘most anti-LGBT platform in the Party’s 162-year history,’ and said that opposition to same-sex marriage, support for conversion therapy, and stances on other issues are out of step with the public at large.”

Unfortunately, while the Republican convention and platform have demonstrated a disturbing fondness and predilection for trying to reestablish in their fullest form the baleful social dispensations of the 19th century, a great many of the Republican base are virtually salivating at the opportunity to march queerfolk back into the closet, to send American womanhood back into the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant, to bundle black folk to the back of the national bus, to send Asians packing either to the Hawaiian Islands where they can be quarantined, or back to Asia where they can be ignored.

Moreover, the Republican party, which is been the subject of a brilliantly, frighteningly successful hostile takeover bid by Donald Trump, seems to have lost whatever moral compass it once had. Last night, Melania Trump delivered an introduction speech for her husband at the Republican convention in Cleveland. Mrs. Trump apparently did not realize that in 2016 there are legions of social media entrepreneurs and fact checkers who discovered, almost before she had stopped speaking, that material portions of her speech had been lifted almost word for word from Michelle Obama’s introduction speech for Barack Obama in 2008.

What Melania could and should have done was to offer an immediate, heartfelt, introspective apology. She should have owned what she did wrong, offered an explanation, not an excuse, and used it as a teachable moment on the importance of honesty and coming clean. Had she done so, it would have had the same kind of devastating effect as a 100 division armored thrust at the heart of NATO. Instead, the Trump campaign and the Republican party did what they always do when confronted with their harlotries. Melania herself has gone silent and of the Trump/Republican organization has tried to push back, blaming Hillary Clinton, blaming Barack and Michelle Obama, and putting just about every conceivable bizarre, tinfoil hat-wearing conspiracy theory conceivable out there. It would seriously not surprise me to find the Republican/Trump organization floating a psycho-guano, batshit theory that Obama campaign operatives had time traveled from 2008 forward to 2016, stolen Melania’s notes, and then traveled backward in time and given the notes to Michelle Obama so she could deliver them as part of her speech in 2008.

Because, apparently, the Republican Party and the Trump campaign are too deranged to understand either the importance of presenting original work, not taking credit for others’ work as one’s own, or of the importance of telling the truth when you get caught in obvious plagiarism. This failure of moral compass causes me to wonder even more what we can expect, God forbid, from a Trump presidency. An administration willing to push back in the face of obvious plagiarism is an administration with absolutely no moral compass at all. It is an administration that would be willing to shred the Constitution and to engage in the same kind of false flag activities that we saw Turkish President Recep Teyyip Erdoğan engage in with the phony coup intended to give Erdoğan an excuse to conduct a thoroughgoing purge of the Turkish military.

The response of the Republican/Trump organization and of individual Trump supporters to the Melania plagiarism incident is nothing more and nothing less than a moral litmus test, to which there can be only one correct answer. Anything less than a full throated denunciation of Melania Trump, the Trump campaign, the Republican Party, and all their fellow travelers constitutes complicity. It also constitutes an open admission that Melania herself, The Donald, and all of their enablers are functioning in a moral vacuum. At the risk of sounding somewhat pharisaical, these are not people who are fit to associate with morally grounded human beings.

And because there is a risk that such profoundly amoral people might come to power in America on January 20 of next year, many of us are beginning to make plans to bolt for the exits. Fortunately for me, coming as I do from the Irish diaspora, I can take advantage of what amounts to Ireland’s Law of Return: if you happen to be descended from at least one grandparent who was born in Ireland, as I am, you can apply for Irish citizenship and an Irish passport. Though Ireland is not in the Schengen zone, it is still a member of the European Union, and that makes it a not uncongenial place of exile. Moreover, marriage equality is a blackletter part of the Irish Constitution now, so I know that if I were to return to the ancestral island, and if I were to meet a congenial Irish fellow, we could tie the knot and enjoy the full civil rights that the Irish and EU constitutions guarantee to Irish and EU citizens.

The thought of having to go across the water, to make in reverse the journey my Irish grandmother made aboard RMS Oceanic in 1913, fills me with trepidation. Like her and her family, if I make the crossing, I necessarily make a leap into the unknown. If I make the crossing, I’m not sure whether it’s an act of courage, pulling up stakes to seek opportunity in a new country, or the cowardly act of a man who is terrified beyond the capacity for rational thought at what Donald Trump represents. I understand now, even as through a glass darkly (1 Cor. 13:12), the existential truth of what so many of my European Jewish friends and neighbors had used to talk about, 40-plus years ago in the Hollywood Hills. I understand, even if through that glass darkly, the fear that gripped the Jewish community in those closing years of the Weimarzeit, during the brief chancellorships of Brüning and Schleicher, before Hindenburg tapped Hitler to form a new government and pounded the last nails into the coffin of the Weimar Republic.

Because it can happen here. 

When Herr Drumpf bloviates on about Muslims, or about Latinos, or about black folk, or when he gives his imprimatur to the most sweeping the anti-queer platform in the history of the Republican Party, I know that we are dealing with the coming of fascism to America in its truest form. 

Yes, it can happen here.

If American fascism does happen, I would like to see Donald Trump meet the same bad end as Benito Mussolini himself. I would like to see a new Walter Audisio administer to Donald Trump the same kind of condign punishment the original partisan Walter Audisio administered to Benito Mussolini when he executed the Duce on April 28, 1945. For Mussolini had betrayed and sold out in the Italian people who he had once seduced and off of whom he had grown rich. After being executed, the bodies of Mussolini and his mistress, Clara Petacci were taken down from the foothills of the Alps where they had been shot to Milan and hung up from the rafters in a gas station for their bodies to be abused by the Italian people whom they had ripped off, betrayed, and given over to war and desolation. But before Mussolini could be executed, he had put Italy through 22 years of fascist Calvary and cost Italy half a million lives, all in the service of his ego and his narcissism. Death was a proper punishment for Il Duce.  Caesar had his Brutus; Charles I had his Cromwell; Louis XVI had his Robespierre; Nicholas II had his Yacob Sverdlov; Mussolini, as aforesaid, had his Walter Audisio, and Donald Trump... may profit by their example.

I don’t want to live through a flesh and blood version of Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle. Not now, not ever.

I don’t want to be part of a fascist America.

#Nevertrump

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AFTER THE DALLAS POLICE SHOOTING, TIME TO REFLECT… AGAIN

Summary: Five officers are dead and seven are injured in Dallas in what has been called the worst mass killing of police officers since 9/11. At this stage, we are still too early in the process to have a definitive idea what happened. Naturally, narcissists like Donald Trump, former Republican Congressman Joe Walsh, the Republican national committee, and the Westboro Baptist Church have weighed in, and the usual political food fight is just ginning up. But at this stage, it really is too early to draw definitive conclusions. Instead, it’s time for a considerate silence as we try to figure out what do we think? What do we know? What can we prove? Nonetheless, I feel disgust at having to have yet another go at this column. Jesus Christ, not again.

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When the news hit concerning the mass shooting in Dallas, which left five officers dead and seven injured, my immediate frame of reference for comparison was the Sandy Hook school shooting, the events in Tucson which led to the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and the death of  United States Chief District Judge John McCarthy Roll, and last month's horrific mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida.  But, even before that, my very first reaction was the almost invariable one of invoking the Deity.

Oh, my God. Jesus Christ, not again

My second reaction, equally ineluctable, was to ask who has done this and why.

The immediate temptation under such circumstances is to begin pointing fingers and assigning blame.  Certainly, the last 12 hours have seen a veritable feeding frenzy, as commentators, pundits, and others on both sides of the political divide lob verbal broadsides at one another, as former Congressman Joe Walsh probes the outer limits of the First Amendment with race baiting tweets, as Donald Trump tries as usual to make political capital, and as Hillary Clinton and President Obama do the adult thing, the right thing, trying to calm a shocked nation, and as the rest of us try to make sense of the worst killing of police officers since 9/11.

At some point, however, we must allow ourselves to be moved, if not by the better angels of our nature, at least by a sense of personal and professional responsibility to step back, putting our emotions aside and seeking truth from facts.

In short, we need to ask some basic questions: what do we know? what do we think?  What can we prove?

At the moment, what we know is that five officers are dead and seven officers have been wounded.  We know that a suspected shooter is dead, not shot by the police or by himself, as is usual in such situations, but blown up by a robot-deployed bomb.  We know that the suspected shooter is Micah Xavier Johnson, 25, a veteran of the Army reserve from Mesquite, Texas. We know little beyond that at this stage, such as, were there additional shooters, where their connections to any known terrorist organizations, or was the shooter just another crazy man, acting on some sort of sense of grievance, but alone?

What we think is a more problematic issue.  From this morning’s events, politicians, activists, commentators, pundits, and plain old bomb throwers have drawn whatever conclusions suit their own agenda and confirmation bias. Certainly, Donald Trump, who has been dogged recently by accusations of anti-Semitism, has seen this incident as a godsend to restore the hopes of his failing, flailing, floundering, foundering, campaign. Meanwhile, the Westboro Baptist Church, which can always be depended upon to say something outrageous in such circumstances, can be expected let fly with its usual hateful tweets, and former Republican congressman Joe Walsh has already made a fool of himself with a race baiting tweet on the subject that serve no purpose other than to probe the outer limits of the First Amendment. About the only conclusion that seems to enjoy any support at all across both sides of the aisle is that perhaps we need as a country to take a timeout, to think long and hard about the extent to which the tone of our political dialogue has served to enable extremists who prefer bullets to ballots, and about the ease of acquiring guns and ammo in our society. We also need to think long and hard about the extent to which we are enabling fanatics of every description.

Winston Churchill once famously defined a fanatic as someone who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.  By Winston’s definition, there may be a disturbingly large number of fanatics abroad in the land.  Fanaticism is in many ways an infantile disorder; many of us have passed through phases in life in which we have been tempted to treat every difference of opinion as irreconcilable, and every issue as a matter of unalterable principle, but for most of us, the operative word is “phase.”

What separates the fanatic from the well-adjusted person is that the fanatic remains stuck in that infantile phase.  The fanatic cannot, or will not, acknowledge the possibility that reasonable minds may differ, even on contentious issues.  Moreover, the fanatic, by forever misapplying first principles to trifles, will inevitably convince himself (and most of the great fanatics of history have been men) that not only does he possess truth with a capital T, but that those who disagree with him are in error to such an extent that they cannot be suffered to live.

Fanaticism of that kind, with its stark rejection of any view not absolutely accordant with its own, and with its sense of exclusive custodianship of the Truth (with that capital T), and its concomitant insistence that those with other views are not merely to be silenced, but eliminated, invariably arises in contexts in which disputes and controversies tend to become inflamed.

No one would argue that the downturn in our American economy has left many Americans of all political stripes fearful, fretful, and frustrated.  Difficult times have a way of fraying the fabric of civility which is -- or ought to be -- one of the critical components of a successfully functioning democracy.  When people are angry and afraid, extremism becomes not merely easy, but tempting.  And indeed, we need to take a look at this incident in the context in which it has emerged. Though it is become easy for some on the conservative side to demonize the Black Lives Matter movement, it has awakened the mind of  non-black America to a disturbing trend in which much of the law enforcement community apparently has declared open season on black males. Since March, 1991, when a group of LA cops administered a beatdown to Rodney King, the trend has been noticeable in American society.

Indeed, it is nearly 2 years since Michael Brown was “executed” by a street cop in Ferguson, Missouri. Since then, we have become accustomed to a doleful litany: Eric Garner in Staten Island, Walter Scott in North Charleston, South Carolina, Tamir Rice in Cleveland, and in just the last two days, Philando Castile outside of Minneapolis and Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. And yet, we continue to point accusing fingers at Black Lives Matter as if they, somehow, were the problem, as if there were a "war on cops" that is about as legitimate as the "war on Christmas" that forms a predictable trope of Fox "News" and Glenn Beck at every holiday season.

It’s easy, if you enjoy a certain measure of white privilege, to dismiss the concerns raised by Black Lives Matter. If, for example, like me, you can pass for straight, your interactions with the police, as a white male, are generally going to be respectful and professional. If your Otherness is too obviously manifest, that dynamic is altogether different. If my demeanor were to suggest to a cop who does not know me that I am in fact a queer fellow, as I am, the tension in our interpersonal dynamic would be much greater. Because, in fact, like my African-American brothers and sisters, I am an Other.  And law enforcement doesn’t deal well with Others. Law enforcement in America tends to see itself as the curator, custodian, conservator of what it considers “ought” to be the “correct” values of society. Those values tend to reflect a default paradigm of whiteness and straightness. Thus, like my African-American brothers and sisters, I tread lightly around law enforcement, because I can’t know if the cop I encounter is an ally, whether he is actually queer like me, or whether he represents that traditional law enforcement paradigm which tends to view queerfolk as cultural subversives. Though my understanding of the African-American experience with law enforcement is at best incomplete, seen through a glass darkly, as St. Paul wrote in his first epistle to the Corinthians (1 Cor. 13:12), it does give me enough knowledge for empathy.

But while I can empathize with what Black Lives Matter is trying to say to us, I can also empathize with the pain and suffering of the survivors of last night shooting. What happened last night appears, at first approximation, to a been a cowardly and dishonorable act, meriting the strongest possible condemnation. Nonetheless, it’s too early to do more than that.

Thus, when shocking events occur, such as those which transpired in Dallas yesterday, the first and greatest challenge is to take a metaphorical deep breath, to wait before rushing in with theories, allegations, or accusations.  As Donald Rumsfeld might have put it, we have very few known knowns at this point.  There are far more known unknowns, such as the true motivations of the shooter, or whether he had assistance, or whether there were in fact others involved. It’s a pity Mr. Rumsfeld’s fellow Donald, that cheeto-faced ferret-wearing shitgibbon Donald Trump apparently had neither the decency, nor the impulse control, nor the self-awareness to clap a muzzle on his foolish mouth before sounding off in an unhelpful way that has only made the situation worse.

In the days to come, the situation will develop further; more information will presumably become available about the shooter, his motives, whether there are accomplices, and whether this morning’s events were an isolated occurrence or part of something larger and more ominous.  At the moment, however, none of these facts have been developed; the evidence is too thin to justify drawing any significant conclusions, as much as we may be tempted to do so.

 In short, we know very little, we think -- perhaps -- too much, and at the moment we don’t know what, if anything, we can prove.

Nonetheless, whether this morning’s shooting was a political act, or merely the random crime of an unbalanced individual, to the extent it may have arisen from the embittered tone of our political dialogue, or to the extent that it is a false flag, Reichstag fire incident designed to benefit the Trump campaign, it should still be a warning to us that when we lose the ability to disagree agreeably, we put our democracy at risk. It should also be a warning to us, however, that there is truth in the scriptural admonitions that as we sow, so shall we reap (Gal. 6:7) , that they who sow the wind shall reap the whirlwind (Hosea 8:7), and that those who draw the sword shall die by it (Matt. 26:52). We do not know, and should not venture opinions on, whether the shooting was truly an insurrectionary act – in which case, there are larger issues in play which require our urgent attention — or whether the shooting was what it may well have been in truth, the random crime of a crazy person

So today, let our thoughts and prayers be with who were injured for their recovery, as well for the repose of the souls of the five officers whose lives were so tragically cut short.  Tomorrow, and on the days that follow, it will be time again to ask what do we know?  What do we think?  What can we prove?

For now, we should observe a principled and considerate time of silence, leaving off with partisan rhetoric and poisoned comments.  A decent respect for the dead and the injured should demand no less of us.

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Paul S. Marchand is an attorney in Cathedral City, California, where he practices law.  He served two terms on the Cathedral City city Council from 2002-2010.  The views expressed herein are exclusively his own.  This post is adapted from the one he wrote when Congresswoman Giffords was shot and U.S. Chief District Judge John McCarthy Roll was assassinated. Like President Obama, Mr. Marchand is sick and tired of having to rework the same comments every few months.

NOTE: comments on this post will be much more strictly moderated than might otherwise be the case.  Comments containing any personal attack will not be published, nor will comments that, in the view of the author, are intended to shed more heat than light.

Mr. COMEY LAYS AN EGG

Summary: FBI director James Comey laid an egg yesterday. His attempt to lay to rest the question of whether Hillary Clinton will be indicted was marred by his editorializing, and it pleased no one. To Democrats, he went too far, while to Republicans and their enablers in the national media, he didn’t go far enough. To Donald Trump and Bernard Sanders, neither one of whom would been satisfied with anything less than Hillary’s bleeding head on a spike, the director’s performance was not what they had desired. The Republican response demonstrated that the “scandal” over Secretary Clinton’s emails was nothing more then a partisan witch hunt. The response of the hipster left and the Sanders campaign was just as bad. Bernie has not played his losing hand well, having ruled himself completely out of the running with his behavior. The rest of the country, the country that works for a living, the country that is not part of the undergraduate Sanders left or the hateful Trump right, will greet this announcement with a momentary flurry of interest, followed as always, by a collective “meh.”


If FBI director James Comey thought he had laid to rest the issue of Hillary Clinton’s emails, his performance at yesterday’s press conference impressed no one. To Democrats, his performance went much too far and included extraneous political matters that should have been left out. Republicans, on the other side of the case, are having conniptions over his decision to recommend no charges be brought.

At all events, Comey managed to politicize further a process that has already been much too politicized already. The coverage has varied, depending on the partisan agenda of the institution doing the reporting. Fox “news” led the charge with its usual hyperventilating appeals to conspiracy theories and debunked, discredited notions. CNN, whose antipathy toward Hillary Clinton is an open secret, and whose drift into the camp of Donald Trump has been the subject of scornful wonder, led off its website today with half a dozen spin stories all faithfully repeating the Republican Party line.

Over at fivethirtyeight.com, Nate Silver and his numbers crunchers what may be the most likely verdict on the whole sorry imbroglio, that this will last one or two news cycles and be greeted by the American public with a collective “meh.”

This, notwithstanding the apoplectic reaction from the Republican national committee, various Republican lawmakers, and, most particularly, Donald Trump and diehard real or ostensible supporters of Bernard Sanders. The reaction from the right, with which I include the supporters of Bernard Sanders, was to be expected, and, with the usual exception of Donald Trump’s outraged tweets, bore all the hallmarks of preprepared, staged, indignation intended for the consumption of the base. And, of course, the right had a great deal of time to prepare. For some time now, the Bureau had been telegraphing the result of the investigation, whose expected result came as absolutely no surprise, as a whimper, not as the bang director Comey and the Republicans were hoping it would be.

But I don’t think director Comey and the Republicans were anticipating was how, in just the 24 hours since director Comey’s much vaunted, but ill advised press conference yesterday, growing questions about the legitimacy of his press conference, about the Bureau’s conduct of this investigation, and about the whole so-called email scandal have begun to emerge and flutter about like hummingbirds congregating for nectar.

Let’s take a look at how director Comey managed to cast such doubt on the legitimacy of his enterprise.

First, by adding considerable “editorial” commentary to his announcement, he lent credence to the view that the Bureau was conducting what amounted to a partisan witch hunt. He would like to have been able to refer the matter to a grand jury, but apparently, his judgment as a member of the Bar and an officer of the court overrode his partisan inclinations in this case. Nonetheless, his extraneous, uncalled-for, remarks clearly were intended by him to serve as Republican talking points for the general election campaign. This is not the first time that an FBI Director’s disdain or antipathy toward a high-ranking official has called the legitimacy of the Bureau itself into question. 

FBI Director Louis Freeh’s clearly demonstrated antipathy toward President Bill Clinton helped cast significant doubt on the legitimacy of the effort to drive him from office. The FBI director seems to have forgotten the lessons of the past, and by allowing himself to take political potshots at Secretary Clinton, to squander the FBI’s political capital as an impartial enforcer of the laws, possessed of unimpeachable integrity. Instead, we seem to have retreated 50 years to the time when J. Edgar Hoover was in charge of an agency that was to all intents and purposes a state within a state, or what we might now call a bulwark of the so-called Deep State.

Worse even than Director Comey’s missteps has been the unseemly Republican display of outrage, all of it nakedly partisan, and none of it even remotely connected to legitimate concerns over national security. When House Speaker Paul Ryan and his colleagues in Congress and at the Republican national committee had their collective conniptions, calling for investigations of the investigation, it was as clear as if they had shouted from the housetops their partisan anger at the FBI investigation’s outcome.

We should recall the remarks of Republican House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Bakersfield’s gift to American politics, who admitted the partisan motivation for the investigations of Secretary Clinton, saying “[e]verybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping. Why? Because she’s untrustable. But no one would have known any of that had happened, had we not fought.” The Washington Post swiftly and mercilessly dissected Mr. McCarthy’s remarks noting that “[t]he Republican-led House hasn’t been particularly good at governing, but perhaps governing has never been the point. Why govern when there’s a future election to influence?”

For director Comey, a Republican stalwart who contributed to both John McCain and Mitt Romney, there was political capital to be made from going in front of the press and delivering an announcement that went considerably beyond his agency’s brief. It was the FBI’s job to determine whether criminal prosecution was warranted and whether there should be referral to federal prosecutors. Everything else beyond that, as we have noted above, was surplusage, and Comey should have known it.

But if Comey's ill considered and gratuitous remarks, together with the predictable, but utterly unconvincing partisan outrage from the Republicans were not enough to demonstrate that what has taken place is indeed a partisan witch hunt, which would probably never have been set in train against a male former Secretary of State, and which has even less substance to it than the alleged misdoings of former CIA Director John Deutch, his foolishness, and the misconduct of Republicans on the Hill is nothing compared to the misbehavior of Donald Trump and of the Bernard Sanders campaign.

Trump’s reaction, of course, was utterly predictable. When the man-baby, or as the Scots describe him, the cheeto-faced, ferret-wearing shitgibbon, who has absolutely no impulse control, took to Twitter, his tweets were the usual-for-shitgibbon stuff: whines about how the system is “rigged,” attacks on any target who enters his field of vision, and the by now nauseating self-pity in which he so constantly indulges. The performance was typical, vintage Trump, and while it may have thrown red meat to his base, it did little to assuage the growing discomforts of many Republicans, and did absolutely nothing at all to attract the uncommitted and alienated voters he needs to have any hope of victory this November.

Also calling into question the legitimacy of the FBI’s findings was the “meltdown” of diehard, white privileged, Bernard Sanders supporters, who like man-baby, shitgibbon Trump, took to Twitter to express their disappointed outrage that their magical thinking had not produced the results they wanted. For the diehard Sanders people, the angry Bernie Bros and Bernie Bro-ettes who make up the diminishing “never surrender,” “100 million die together” remnant of the so-called Bernie or bust movement, the FBI’s decision not to recommend criminal charges against Secretary Clinton knocked the last prop out from under their magical thinking belief that Bernie’s path to the nomination, now closed to him, would somehow magically reopen if only Hillary were indicted. When, of course, the FBI investigation did not produce the desired indictment, such as Sanders supporters as That Idiot Rosario Dawson, Mark Ruffalo, and, of course, the unbelievably un-self-aware Susan Sarandon, took to Twitter like little Trumps venting their infantile disappointment, and suggesting that they had, once again, been “victimized.” Along with them, much of the hipster left found itself in mourning that one of their fondest pet theories had been put down.

Of course now that would’ve happened had Bernard Sanders not grossly maladroitly overplayed a losing hand. Against his two pairs of deuces and treys, ten high, Secretary Clinton could play a high inside straight, reflecting the careful, methodical style in which she waged a campaign. Unfortunately, neither the Senator nor his supporters seem to have played much poker. The Senator had an opportunity to leverage his position into a possible vice presidential nomination or high-ranking cabinet post  – had he been smart enough to have suspended his campaign and endorsed Hillary Clinton the day after the June 7 California primary. At the same time the Vermont Senator ought to have instructed his supporters to get with the program and flip their support to Hillary Clinton.

Instead, Bernie insisted on tergiversating, equivocating, triangulating, and making demands which he had no right to make. Had he been full throated in his support of Hillary Clinton, and had he taken the necessary steps to achieve party unity on the best terms he could get, even if they weren’t the terms he wanted, he would right now the enjoying a reservoir of goodwill from all parts the Democratic Party. Unfortunately, Bernie chose to take the Leninist Road of his youth. Considering all differences of opinion to be irreconcilable, Bernie encouraged the militant tendency among his supporters toward foolish, Trotskyite thinking. Instead of telling his hipster left supporters to get with the program, Bernie encouraged a dangerous tendency toward what has come to be known as “puritopian” thinking, in which the perfect is not only the enemy of the good, is the enemy of the best and most practical policy obtainable.

As Bernard Sanders’s hopes go glimmering, the anger from his puritopian supporters, or at least the decreasing percentage of them which is not come home to Hillary, has grown. Because the Senator will not admonish his supporters, and will do nothing to bring them into the fold, they have decided that they would prefer to bern the country down, to “heighten the contradictions” in American society in the hopes of provoking some sort of revolution in the near future. As both Soviet and Maoist theoreticians might observe, this is a “right deviationist error.” To the extent that Bernie Sanders is indulging in magical thinking with his refusal to endorse Hillary Clinton and get on board with her, he is engaged in “right deviationist” thinking.

But one thinks that Senator Sanders is aware of his right deviationism, and that he embraces it. One is forced to the regrettable conclusion that Bernard Sanders really does want Donald Trump to be victorious this November. That, like his hipster left followers, Bernard Sanders wants to heighten the contradictions American society to the point where they will explode into some sort of outbreak of “revolutionary” violence. The only way that Sanders can accomplish this Leninist objective is to ensure a Trump victory by acting as an active fifth columnist within the Democratic Party. Sadly for the Ilyich from Burlington, not only is Hillary Clinton not facing the indictment he desires, but the Democratic Party is also rallying to her in unexpectedly large numbers and with an unexpectedly cohesive degree of unity.

Hillary Clinton emerged from yesterday with a distinctly equivocal victory, but it is still a victory, if only for having brought vexation to the Republican Party and their media outlets, to Donald Trump, and to Bernard Sanders and his diminishing cohort of hipster holdouts.

THE DISASTROUS RAMIFICATIONS OF BREXIT: RUSSIA'S KRIEGSSPIEL AGAINST THE WEST

Summary: I hope I’m wrong in predicting potentially apocalyptic consequences flowing from Britain’s ill considered decision to leave the European Union. I’m not holding out hope, however. In the very short time since the Brexit referendum, the pound has shed something in excess of 10% of its value, Scotland and Northern Ireland are talking about leaving the United Kingdom in order to be able to become part of the European Union again, Scotland by declaring independence and Northern Ireland by joining the Republic, David Cameron is a lame-duck who will surely vanish into well-deserved permanent political exile in consequence of his galactically stupid decision to press forward with the Brexit referendum in the first place, for above all, champagne corks were no doubt popping in the Moscow Kremlin Thursday evening.

Because the real winner in the Brexit referendum was not the 17 million useful idiots who voted to take Britain out of the EU, it was Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and the Russian government, which has pursued a long game policy since 1949 of breaking the unity of the West by any means necessary. They have been materially assisted by such self-seeking and marginal men as Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, and Donald Trump. We are comprehensively betrayed from within. We must now do what we so often criticize the French for doing. We must seek scapegoats and punish them by driving Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson into the political wilderness and by depriving Donald Trump of the White House. Anything else would play straight into Vladimir Vladimirovich’s small, but grasping hands. If we don’t want to see Russian motor-rifle divisions rolling down the Champs Elysées, the West needs to strap on its balls and kick Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, and Donald Trump if not into the Tower of London, then certainly out of our political life. We can’t afford a hostile Russian takeover bid of the two most influential governments in the Atlantic alliance.



I hope this post proves to be wrong. Categorically, comprehensively, galactically, one hundred percent wrong. I hope I can recant of it in sackcloth and ashes if I am proven wrong.

But I don’t think I will be proven wrong.

Brexit is a disaster.

It is one of the worst, most galactically stupid political miscalculations ever made by any British politician. It is now well known that the infamous referendum on leaving the European Union was a political risk taken by discredited outgoing British Prime Minister David Cameron back in 2013, when he tried to throw a bone to the fascist tendency within his own party by promising a referendum on EU membership. Cameron, like an awful lot of Tories and an awful lot of Labour, believed that Brexit couldn’t possibly pass, and that a would be a passing thing, rather like the Scots independence referendum last year. (Of that, more, later.)

Cameron was wrong. As a result of his mistake, Cameron is the first casualty of Brexit. It is not certain whether David Cameron took the decision to step down from the Treasury Bench of his own accord, or whether he was pushed out by Tory Party elders, or whether he may have gotten a subtle, but unavoidable, nudge from Buck House. At all events, it’s clear the David Cameron no longer possesses the confidence of the House, and that he probably no longer possesses the confidence of the Queen, either. When you’ve lost both Westminster Palace and Buckingham Palace, it’s time to get the hell out of Number 10.  No knighthood and no peerage can be expected to reward him for his service.

With David Cameron, “discredited Dave,” on his way out, we should take a moment to parse out the immediate and long-term ramifications of Britain’s pending exit from the European Union. Those ramifications are potentially apocalyptic.

Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn hasn’t fared much better, either. Not only did Mr. Corbyn fail to command a majority in a vote of confidence of the Parliamentary Labour Party, but he has also had to contend with the resignation or sacking of two thirds of his shadow cabinet. Though Corbyn has not stepped down, claiming that he has a broader mandate from Labour voters then from Labour MPs, there are clear signs that the coup effort within Labour may not only not be over, but that it may well succeed within the next week to 10 days. Jeremy Corbyn’s hopes of moving into Number 10 Downing St. seem to be fading rather rapidly.

As much as the British political landscape seems to be littered with the broken and bleeding remains of political careers, the British economic landscape appears equally unpromising. In recent days,, sterling has taken its biggest hits as the mid-1980s, shedding 10% of its value in a single night. The pound has got altogether dickie in 24 hours. Thursday morning, the pound was standing at $1.48. By evening’s end, the pound was standing at $1.32, and there is speculation that if the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street can’t calm jittery investors in the City and elsewhere, the bottom could drop out of the oldest active currency in the world. Indeed, some forecasters are predicting that the pound could be at parity with the dollar by the Fourth of July.

 Indeed, the status of sterling as one of the world's reserve currencies is in grave doubt. Investors are already fleeing the island of Britain for the relative safety of the island of Manhattan. Already, the Fed reports that interest in US treasuries has shown a marked uptick.

But more than just taking a hit to the pound, Britain has also sacrificed a great deal of national and institutional credibility by this ill-considered vote. As from last Friday, the financial capital of Europe has ceased to be London and is now Berlin, and to a lesser extent, New York. London has overnight yielded pride of place, and it will take Londoners a long time to reconcile themselves to their new status as inhabitants of the backwater capital of a second-tier state that used to be one of the major shot-callers in Europe.

As much as London’s status took a hit last night, so too did the institutional status and indeed the institutional trustworthiness of Her Majesty’s Government. The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom used to count for something. At the Prime Minister’s word, countries around the world used to tremble. The merest rumbling from the British lion was enough to bring third world despots to heel. Just ask the Argentines, who may again be thinking very seriously about trying conclusions again with Britain for possession of the Malvinas. The Prime Minister of Britain has now become the head of the government of a second-tier state. Who now speaks for Europe?

From last Friday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel speaks for Europe. The first female Chancellor in the history of the German Empire, of the Weimar Republic, or of the Bundesrepublik now enjoys more political influence on the Continent than any German leader since the Iron Chancellor Otto v. Bismarck-Schönhausen 140 years ago. The world now attends carefully on Angela Merkel’s words, while it airily dismisses the words of discredited David Cameron and holds the words of other British politicians, such as Brexit cheerleaders Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson in contempt.

From last Friday, the credibility of her Majesty’s government is nil, the pound is dickie, and the British electorate is viewed worldwide as much of irresponsible yobs.

That’s the reality Britain woke up to last Friday morning when the discovered that roughly 17,000,000 thoroughly irresponsible voters had opted to cut Britain’s nose off to spite its face.

And if the short-term ramifications of Brexit are upsetting, the long-term ramifications of Brexit are almost too horrifying, to apocalyptic, to contemplate.

Because, in truth, Brexit may lead, sooner rather than later, to the breakup of the United Kingdom itself. The first great experiment in multinational European integration, the union of the kingdoms of England and Scotland as one joint entity, forming a precedent from which James Madison and the other framers of the Constitution drew inspiration for the United States, may find its days numbered.

Already, there is talk from the devolved Scottish government in Edinburgh of taking up again the issue of Scottish independence. It’s open to question what form of government the Scots might choose. Will they opt for a personal union with England in the form of her Majesty Queen Elizabeth I of Scots? Will HM travel north to receive the Scottish crown and anointing on the Stone of Destiny in Scone? Will the Royal Scottish ducal titles, Rothesay and Albany, remain as appanages of the House of Windsor? What about the Earldom of Carrick? Or the barony of Renfrew? Or will Scotland opt to become a republic, with all of the political fractiousness that republics in Europe tend to manifest?

 The Scots opted in the last independence referendum to remain part of the United Kingdom because the United Kingdom was part of the EU. With the United Kingdom set to leave the EU, again because of the foolishness of an electorate easily swayed by the blandishments of Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson, the case for Scots independence within the EU becomes almost unanswerable. And if Scotland becomes independent within the European Union, what kind of border controls will have to be erected between Scotland and England. Part of the rationale for the original Act of Union back in 1707 was to bring a halt to the interminable raiding back and forth across the Border. Will Brexit result in a heavily fortified border between the two halves of the island of Britain?

And what of Northern Ireland? Already, Sinn Féin has called for a unification referendum in the Emerald Isle. Will Hibernia once again be whole and entire? Will the fondest hopes of the Irish diaspora, that a free Ireland might govern the whole island finally be in prospect? Will 26+6 finally equal One? Will Northern Ireland, which voted overwhelmingly to remain part of the EU find her EU home by reunifying with the Republic.

Irish reunification may be closer now than it has been since partition in 1922. Certainly, Ireland’s thumping majority adoption of marriage equality by referendum last year should put paid to the common Protestant assertion that “home rule means Rome rule.” An Ireland that can so decisively reject the preferences of the Roman Catholic Church and the Vatican is certainly not a place where Rome rule should hold any terrors. Though it is paradoxical to think that the acceptance of queerfolk, so otherwise objectionable to Protestants in Ulster, might be the factor that greases the skids of reunification, stranger things have happened in Hibernia. Because, paradoxically, a body politic willing to tell the Roman Catholic Church to sod off when it comes to integrating fairies (all puns fully intended) into Irish society, is a body politic that’s not willing to let institutional religion, particularly not institutional Roman religion, get in the way of individual civil liberties.

If Scotland and Ulster are soon to depart from the United Kingdom, what is left? Wales? One is reminded of the devastatingly dismissive piece of dialogue from Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons: “why, Richard, it profits a man nothing to give up his soul for the whole world. But for Wales?”

The day may not be far in the future when the rump of the United Kingdom consists of England, Wales and Monmouthshire, and a few small islands around the fringe. I wouldn’t put it all past the Channel Islands to jump ship and make common cause with the French Republic. So much for “the Queen, our Duke.” Some United Kingdom, some British Commonwealth and Empire. Thank God Winston Churchill isn’t alive to see what may well be coming.

Writing in Friday’s New York Times, columnist Max Fisher suggested that the United Kingdom was what the European union had wanted to be but never quite became, a successful multinational state with a common government, a common currency, common national policy, and, symbolically but still importantly, a common head of state. And the United Kingdom, the first great multinational project in the world, has survived for more than 300 years. It has outlasted changes of dynasty, wars of national liberation, the acquisition and loss of Empire, class conflict, economic dislocations, two world wars, the ‘15 and the ‘45, and Margaret Thatcher, and yet the United Kingdom, under the amazing Elizabeth II, the longest reigning monarch in the history of any of the British nations, has managed to soldier on right up until last Thursday. It would be a shame, Fisher suggested, were the great multinational experiment that is United Kingdom to break up on the rock of what was essentially a fit of superannuated, over-65, English nationalist pique.

 For the one overwhelming demographic reality that came out of the Brexit vote is a sharp generational divide. Brexit carried because the over-65 cohort came out in far greater numbers than did young voters. Indeed, the Brexit result can be interpreted to say some fairly positively uncomplimentary things about older British voters. Because the negative repercussions of Brexit will fall overwhelmingly and most heavily upon the younger citizens of the United Kingdom. A much circulated Facebook meme details the numerous ways in which younger Britons will suffer as a result of the shortsighted selfishness of their elders. That’s a wound that won’t heal easily. As younger voters begin to enter Parliament in increasing numbers as the years pass, they can be expected to carry into the House a sense of historic grievance which it is not unreasonable to foresee will inform their decisions. I expect that the voters who were over 65 at the time of Brexit may find a rising generation of new MPs entirely unsympathetic to the sense of entitlement so common to the elderly the world over. The older generation in Britain has wounded itself, the United Kingdom, and the world in ways that cannot even begin to be evaluated.

But we may and must ask a larger question. Who benefits from this self-inflicted wound orchestrated by Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson, in which Donald Trump, whom at least one angry Scot has referred to as a “cheeto-faced, ferret-wearing, shitgibbon,” has made himself so disastrously complicit?

We know that champagne corks were popping in the Kremlin last Thursday night. Soviet/Russian policy toward the West has always been to promote dissension, disunity, and mistrust in the European West. It is an open secret that the Soviets, including successive foreign ministers such as Andrei Gromyko and Eduard Shevardnadze tried hard to keep the EU from becoming a reality. Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, the quintessential Soviet apparatchik now running post-Soviet Russia, is pursuing long-standing Soviet policy.

 It is in the Kremlin’s interest to have a weak and divided Europe on its western frontier not only because of the almost pathological fear of invasion from the West which is so much a part of the Russian psyche, but also because a weak and divided Europe leaves invasion routes from the east wide-open.

This is something that right-wing leaders on the Continent seem to have forgotten. When right-wing French politician Marine Le Pen and right-wing Dutch politician Geert Wilders made their predictable appeals for copycat referenda in France and the Netherlands last week, they seem not to have been aware of the presence in the room of Adam-zad, The Bear That Walks like a Man, with whom Rudyard Kipling warned us a century ago we should have no truce.

The willingness of Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders and other crypto fascist politicians in Europe to make common cause with Russia, even at the cost of weakening the West, is somewhat akin to the Republican objections to Woodrow Wilson that called forth from him one of the most withering expressions of scorn in American political history: ““A little group of willful men, representing no opinion but their own, have rendered the great government of the United States helpless and contemptible.”

One could so characterize the “leave” voters in the British electorate, but one really can’t blame 17 million yobs for succumbing to the frivolous and wicked blandishments of a small group of crypto fascists who, like the French right in the 1930s that preferred Adolf Hitler to Léon Blum, seem to prefer Vladimir Putin to EU Secretary-General Jeppe Tranholm-Mikkelsen.

It’s hard not to read into the whole sorry mess a certain sense of sexual insecurity, even of penetration anxiety. Deep in the Freudian unconscious of many Brexiteers, informing their resentment of Brussels and its Eurocrats appears to be a sense that British membership in the EU has stripped the nation of its testosterone, making Britain soft, weak, and effeminate, too tolerant of Muslims, black people, and queerfolk. (After all, London is one of the gayest cities in what is still the EU) This certainly plays into the fascistic nature of UKIP and its leader Nigel Farage (the Sir Oswald Mosley for the 21st century). Fascism involves appeals to the so-called manly virtues, fetishizing masculinity, war, and violence. One could indeed cue up a scene from Cruising, or Interior. Leather bar, and not be too distant from what is going on in the Freudian id of the more militant supporters of Brexit.

And if Brexit is about creeping fears in much of the British electorate that Britain has become weak and unmanly, then the appeal of manly man Vladimir Putin and of the regime of manly discipline he has enforced on Russia becomes possible to understand, if not to approve of.

In the 1930s, Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists appealed to many of the same kind of insecurities Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson or so eager to stoke. The 1930s were a difficult time for Britain. Though the Empire had attained its greatest extent in 1932, the nation had not yet recovered from World War I and much of the British political class found itself quailing before the aggressively nationalist regimes of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. To the British Union of Fascists, Mussolini and Hitler had drafted the blueprint for a fascist future, to which they were prepared to urge British adherence.

In 2016, Vladimir Putin’s Russia represents the same kind of alternative and the same kind of implied critique that Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy represented of the liberal West in the 1920s in the 1930s. In our own time, the right-wing populists of Europe project onto Putin’s Russia what they consider should be the correct values of European society. Seen through the rose-colored glasses of nostalgia, these 1930s era values appear curiously out of place to American Democratic and British Labour party observers. Culturally conservative circles in both Great Britain and the United States profess to admire Vladimir Putin because, to them, his regime represents not only so-called moral clarity, but also a value system more in keeping with their own Weltanschauung, or world-outlook, a value system whose frame of reference is a radically out of touch with the realities of the modern European West. It is no surprise that both the American right and its European counterpart have gushed over Vladimir Vladimirovich, to the extent that right-wing American pundits and politicians have wished that Vladimir Vladimirovich, with all his homophobic, religiously-infused nationalism, were in charge in this country. Donald Trump, with his effusive -and treasonable- praise for Vladimir Vladimirovich, falls squarely within the standard deviation of the Western right.

Because the Western right evidently craves a return to the regimes of discipline so common and prevalent in Europe during the 1930s, from Mussolini’s corporate state in fascist Italy to Germany’s Third Reich, to the little Hitlers in the Baltic states, the so-called Royal dictatorships of the Balkans, Greece under Ioannis Metaxas, and Spain under Francisco Franco, to say nothing of France, belabored throughout the 1930s by a rightist defeatism that ultimately found its fullest expression in Marshal Pétain’s Vichy French regime in 1940: Better Adolf Hitler then Léon Blum. And as in the 1930s, a lack of confidence in the power of the West and in the strength of its values has engendered in the right kind of defeatism that sooner or later verges into treason.

For indeed, “treason” is the most appropriate word for describing the conduct of that pro-Nazi French Right which was willing to sacrifice the Third Republic, selling out France because of their preferential option for Adolf Hitler over Léon Blum. And “treason” may be similarly correct term for the politicians in the West who view the fascist experience through rose-colored lenses, and who, like the Obamanators in this country, who have so frequently expressed their admiration for Vladimir Putin and their wish that he could be in charge in this country. By playing to the selfish desires of a largely superannuated, over-65 electorate, Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson played directly into the hands of the Kremlin.

Moreover, so has Donald Trump. The offenses of that cheeto-faced, ferret-wearing shitgibbon in this regard are many and varied. The first, of course, is his breathtakingly foolish suggestion that the United States should reduce or eliminate its commitment to the North Atlantic Treaty organization. Even someone as foolish as Donald Trump is presumed to have enough understanding of the dynamics of the free world proposes to lead to realize that the steady, stated, “long game” objective of Soviet/Russian foreign-policy since the Atlantic alliance was formed in 1949 has been to destabilize NATO by driving wedges into the infrastructure of the alliance. Their biggest victory came when France took itself out of the military command structure of NATO in 1968. Because Charles de Gaulle was president of the Fifth Republic at the time, and because de Gaulle’s loyalty to the West was unimpeachable and above suspicion, any question of France’s military exit from NATO being part of some sort of Soviet kriegßpiel against the West was necessarily rejected immediately as unacceptable and inadmissible. Infuriating though the general’s foreign policy was, there was never any question of France’s unimpeachable loyalty to the West, notwithstanding the continuing strength of the French Communist Party.

But Charles de Gaulle had a long and illustrious history of service not only to France, but to the West in general. It had been de Gaulle, who as a lowly General of Division, by refusing to accept the German conquest of France in 1940, and by considering to himself the unconquerable forces of free, fighting France, redeemed the honor of the Republic, gave France the will to live and persevere, and brought a reborn nation safely into postwar Europe.

For all of his missteps and occasional gas, Charles de Gaulle was far more legitimately a hero, and orders of magnitude greater a man then such marginal self-aggrandizing, self-dealing, self-important serial prevaricators as Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, and certainly that cheeto-faced, ferret-wearing shitgibbon Donald Trump. The General was to his core a man of honor, a man of duty, a man of country. Farage, Johnson, and Trump, on the other hand, are flimflam artists, frauds, political charlatans of the extremest order. Like the French Right of the 1930s which was willing to sell out the West to the Nazis, Farage, Johnson, and Trump make absolutely no bones in 2016 about being willing to sell out the West to Russia.

All of their policy prescriptions are in line with the Kremlin’s stated position on the issues in question. By actively seeking to destroy the West, including the United Kingdom, these three marginal men have done more damage to the West than all the Soviet spies who infiltrated Western intelligence apparatuses during the Cold War. Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson are more dangerous to the West then Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, and Anthony Blunt put together. For Philby, Burgess, and Blunt could only deliver the damage to the West as Soviet moles embedded deep within the British intelligence apparatus. Farage and Johnson, on the other hand, can do incalculable damage to the West because they are such effective demagogues. By campaigning in favor of Brexit, Farage and Johnson have turned 17 million British voters into unconscious dupes of the Kremlin.

In this country, of the possible advent of a Trump presidency is even more disturbing. Again, it is worth noting that despite the unhinged claims of the John Birch society that Dwight David Eisenhower was a communist agent, this country has never had an actual “Manchurian candidate” for president until now. Trump is a threat not so much because he would be a conscious and willing dupe of the Kremlin but because he is so foolish and so lacking in impulse control that Vladimir Vladimirovich and the Russian intelligence apparat could lead him by the nose, turning him into an eager and uncritical agent of Russian policy simply by appealing to his vanity or by baiting him and playing to his predictable ill temper and lack of impulse control.

If Nigel Farage enters the British government, or if, God help us, the Queen is forced to ask Boris Johnson to form a government, her Majesty’s government will become, by inevitable and sickening degrees, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Kremlin. The Tory Party, which cut its 20th century teeth on opposition to Russian/Soviet policy, would inevitably become the party of Putin. The same can be said of Donald Trump and any Trump administration in this country. We cannot allow the two most important governments in the Atlantic alliance to be a subject of a hostile Russian takeover bid or to have at their top man who are ideologically allied with, or in thrall to, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. We cannot allow Russia to secure by subterfuge what the Soviet Union could not win in more than four decades of Cold War.

 Right now, we have been betrayed at the highest levels. As the revolutionary tribunal of the First French Republic might have said, ironically quoting both Georges-Jacques Danton and Maximilien Robespierre: “Nous sommes trahis! Citoyens, la patrie est en danger!  Aux armes! Aux barricades!” We are betrayed! Citizens, the Fatherland is in danger! To arms! To the barricades! Though the French tendency to find scapegoats in time of political crisis has been much commented upon and deprecated by English-language commentators, we must sometimes acknowledge that even the French can from time to time occasionally get it right, that sometimes they are right to seek scapegoats, and that this is probably one of those times.

Though we should be loath to tumble to facile conspiracy theories, the particular concatenation of events in Europe and the United States in recent years supports a probable cause belief that the Russian long game is underway. Russia’s invasion of the Crimea, Russian probes around the Swedish defense perimeter and along the frontiers of the Kingdom of Norway, Russia’s singularly infelicitous and ham-handed attempts to meddle in the 2014 independence referendum in Scotland, Vladimir Vladimirovich’s undisguised support for the Brexit referendum, the efforts of Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson to set in motion not merely the breakup of the European Union but also the potential breakup of the United Kingdom itself, together with shitgibbon Donald Trump’s asinine suggestions concerning NATO are all too much of a piece to be coincidental. A kriegßpiel, or something very much equivalent thereto, is underway against the West.

As Britain plunges into uncertainty and recrimination of the Brexit outcome, and as even Brexiteers find themselves experiencing a heavy dose of buyers remorse, to the extent that public opinion in Britain is now clamoring for what amounts to a do-over, Farage, Johnson, Trump, and Putin all find themselves sharing a vested interest in preserving the new status quo.

On the other hand, it is in the interests of those of us who believe in the concept of the West to rally together and to drive the traitors from our midst. Now, “traitor” is a strong word, and I don’t use it in its strict legal signification here, but I think it’s safe to say that like the French traitors of 1940 preferred Adolf Hitler to Léon Blum, Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, and Donald Trump are all tantamount to traitors. If we cannot round them up and march them through Traitors’ Gate in the Tower of London or send them packing to Guantánamo, we can, at the very least, make sure that we drive Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson so far out into the political wilderness that they, like the discredited idiot, David Cameron, (what his name never be spoken again!) will never come back to afflict the lives of reasonable people again. Similarly, good people in this country will need to make common cause to ensure that Donald Trump never comes anywhere close to the White House. We can’t afford to dance to Moscow’s tune, and we won’t have to, if we’re smart enough not to be taken in by the sort of blandishments that inflicted Brexit upon the world.

Nous sommes trahis! Citoyens, l’ouest est en danger!

We are betrayed! Citizens, the West is in danger!