Summary: The very public, very theatrical, mental unraveling of Donald Trump has become a tragedy of Greek proportions, played out on the American political stage. His ostentatious public feud with the grieving parents of Capt. Humayun Khan, and now, his equally ostentatious feud with a crying baby at one of his rallies are only the latest ammunition for the #neverTrump movement in the Republican Party. The Hillary Clinton attack ads virtually write themselves. When a Republican presidential candidate loses such normally reliable Republican supporters as the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Houston Chronicle, and major poobahs and sachems within the Republican Party establishment, you know that something has gone, or is going, seriously wrong in the Trump campaign.
Simply put, Donald Trump appears to be in the end stages of a serious psychic break. He is plainly unfit to hold office, and the Republicans are becoming painfully aware of it. We Democrats should help them enhance their awareness of Donald Trump’s unfitness be president by heightening the contradictions within the Republican Party, inhibiting their activities, encouraging their closet Clintonite tendencies, and at all events, as Trump continues to collapse, giving the falling wall a push.
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There is an old adage to the effect that when one is in a hole, one should stop digging. Put more bluntly, the sentiment can be expressed as “do not kick the turd;” whatever you do, do not shit in your own punch bowl. One should particularly avoid kicking the turd or shitting in one’s own punch bowl as repeatedly as Donald Trump has contrived to do repeatedly in the days since the Democratic National Convention.
We all know what happened at the Democratic convention. Khizr and Ghazala Khan, the grieving parents of Army Capt. Humayun Khan, who was killed in Iraq by a car bomb in 2004, took to the stage of the Democratic National Convention where Mr. Khan delivered probably one of the most effective political takedowns of the 2016 election cycle. We do not need to recapitulate Khizr Khan’s epic takedown in detail. It has been covered over and over and over again in both the traditional and digital media. When he told Donald Trump “[y]ou have sacrificed nothing and no one,” he delivered words as powerful as Lincoln’s Gettysburg address and as subtle as those of Lincoln’s immortal letter to Mrs. Bixby of Boston, who had lost five sons on the field of battle during the Civil War.
You have sacrificed nothing and no one.
Khizr Khan, a heretofore unknown Pakistani-American lawyer from the Virginia suburbs of Washington city, spoke with a moral authority that, quite frankly, has not come out of the Indian subcontinent since another lawyer, Mahatma Gandhi, shook the British Empire to its foundations. Speaking as a Muslim, and as an immigrant who loves this country as only an immigrant truly can, Mr. Khan scored a direct hit right to the dark heart and palsied soul of the man who wants to be President.
Donald Trump, of course, the man of seventy going on six, did not handle the criticism very well. In the days since the Democratic National Convention ended, Trump and his vile supporters have waged an unceasing Twitter and media war against Mr. And Mrs. Khan. With each broadside The Donald lobs in the direction of the Khans, their moral position and authority improve while his diminishes. Speaking privately to me yesterday at my gym, a Republican acquaintance of mine uttered partisan heresy, but American morality: “Trump,” my acquaintance told me, “has either lost his mind or he is suffering from a diagnosable mental illness.”
My acquaintance looked around, in that guilty way people sometimes do when they are about to mouth heresy, and then added “I can’t do it. I can’t vote Trump and I won’t throw away my vote on a third-party candidate.” Then, looking at me with a somewhat hangdog expression, he asked me not to tell his boyfriend that he planned to cast his vote for Hillary Rodham Clinton. “Don’t worry,” I replied, concealing my amazement, “your secret is safe with me.”
My acquaintance, who managed for years to reconcile being a gay man with being a registered Republican, with all the Stockholm syndrome implications thereof, had finally reached the end of his tolerance for Donald Trump and for a Republican Party which had prostituted itself so completely on the altar of The Donald’s ego. I knew that my acquaintance, who had once dropped me as a boyfriend because of our irreconcilable politics, was in the same difficult place many Republicans, both straight and queer, find themselves the summer.
Republicans who find themselves unwillingly traveling the Trump train to St. Petersburg’s Finland Station, dreading their arrival at that destination, remind me to some extent of the Democrats of the late 1970s who turned to Ronald Reagan because they thought the Democratic Party had left them. I was one of those Democrats. I could not support Ronald Reagan but, at the time, I felt no enthusiasm for Jimmy Carter and what I saw as a crisis of conviction and courage on the part of the West. I also, candidly, felt that the Democratic Party had left many of us in California behind with its uncritical opposition to Proposition 13, the meat ax waving initiative Howard Jarvis proposed to limit property tax in California.
But Ronald Reagan never commanded my allegiance. Like many moderate Democrats, I could not and I would not support Ronald Reagan. I felt about him much the same way I feel about Donald Trump, that he had done such damage as governor of California that it would take more terms than Jerry Brown could ever possibly have served to mitigate what Ronald Reagan had done to this state. Even now, as Jerry Brown enters the last two years of his fourth term, California is still recovering from the eight bitter winters of Ronald Reagan’s governorship.
Nonetheless, having gone through my own “dark night of the soul” with respect to the Democratic Party, I emerged into the morning light with my Democratic convictions strengthened, my Democratic partisanship enhanced, and my sense of political tribalism reinforced.
For when Ronald Reagan took office he brought with him to Washington City a whole coterie and claque of criminals, losers, and nutcases who should never have been brought into the high reaches of the federal government. From his attorney general, Edwin Meese, to the head of the civil rights division of his Justice Department, who delivered herself of the astonishing view that the disabled’s physical ailments were a reflection of their spiritual worthiness, to Casper Weinberger, who got his metaphorical tit in the ringer over the Iran/Contra scandal, to his wife, Nancy Reagan, and her idiotic “just say no” campaign which accomplished zero in reducing America’s drug habit, Ronald Reagan had an unerring ability to pick losers, criminals, and nutcases to staff his administration.
I see the same kind of criminals, losers, nutcases, and indeed, out-and-out whackjobs forming a Trump administration in waiting. I can foresee that within 72 hours of Donald Trump taking the oath of office, his administration would be mired in scandal and articles of impeachment would be moving through the House. I can also see an exodus from the administration of highly competent senior civil service appointees and military officers and senior enlisted personnel whose jobs should never depend upon the identity of the man or woman in the Oval Office.
And I do not say this simply out of some vague sense of alarmism, but on the basis of evidence out of Donald Trump’s own mouth. Speaking at a rally recently both Donald Trump and surrogate Chris Christie recently declaimed that in a Trump administration every single Obama appointee could expect to be fired. Since the United States has had a merit-based civil-service since the presidency of Chester Alan Arthur, I think I am right in regarding this as a pernicious, evil threat to the integrity of the civil service at every level. It took us more than hundred years after independence to free ourselves from the evil of patronage-based civil-service. Yet, Donald Trump wants to bring it back.
And what sort of people might Donald Trump appoint? Well, perhaps, he will appoint the sort of people who believe that Donald Trump is some sort of God Emperor, as noted in several articles in both digital and mainstream media that have emerged in the last few days. If so, I can understand the panic in the End Times community that Antichrist may be upon us. I do not know if arrogating to oneself some sort of tinpot delusion of godhood constitutes impeachable offense, but to this queer Episcopalian it certainly constitutes a very dangerous and pernicious heresy of the type that — and I do not say this very often — is the sort that will send its utterer straight to hell upon death; do hot pass Go. Do not collect $200.
About the only conclusion that we can draw from Donald Trump’s last several terrible, horrible, no good, very bad days, is that we are in fact watching some kind of end-stage psychotic break occurring before our horrified, yet fascinated eyes. Certainly, our allies in Europe and in Asia are watching this with scornful wonder and horrified fascination. One would hope that Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin would be watching with the same kind of horrified fascination. Unfortunately, Putin is enough of a son-of-a-bitch that he is probably watching with eager anticipation waiting for the United States to implode so that Russia can move in to take advantage of a compromised security situation in Europe. In Putin’s mind, he visualizes a Russian motor-rifle divisions rolling down the Unter den Linden in Berlin, the Champs Elysées in Paris and the Mall in London. In Vilnius, Riga, and Talinn, in London and Paris, in Tokyo, Seoul, and in Beijing, in Manila, Jakarta, and Kuala Lumpur, and in Canberra and Wellington, government leaders are dreading the kind of power vacuum either an American collapse or an American withdrawal from the Baltic or from Asia would engender.
Yet, all the while, Donald Trump continues to unravel on national television. And as he unravels, we may take some small consolation from indicators that perhaps the media are no longer prepared to give him the uncritical break and pass that he has hitherto enjoyed. A few days ago, CNN broke away from a typical rambling, Castro/Brezhnev-like Trump speech to cover Dianne Feinstein talking about serious intelligence issues confronting the nation. As he pulled away, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer said in effect “we’ll come back to Trump’s speech if he says anything of substance,” before pulling away and going to Senator Feinstein’s remarks. This may be a fluke or it may be the beginning of the end of the love affair between the mainstream media and Donald Trump. It may be the end of the mainstream media’s being complicit in what appears to be either Donald Trump’s mental breakdown or a pattern of deliberate and organized treason against the United States.
For, like Antony Babington and the Catholic conspirators against Queen Elizabeth I, Donald Trump has in fact skated very close to, if not over the boundaries of, treason. He may believe that an electoral victory will have the effect of absolving him from having to answer for it, on the theory, expressed by 16th-century English author John Harington that “[t]reason doth never prosper, what's the reason? For if it prosper, none dare call it Treason.” Yet, in a country where faculties of mass communication and community organization exceed those of Elizabethan England by orders of magnitude, Americans can be kept aware of Donald Trump’s treason quite easily, though his national security apparatus would no doubt try to shut down all talk of treason. A president may be impeached for treason, and, as I predicted above, President Trump might well find that by the afternoon of January 20, 2017, articles of impeachment would be circulating in the House of Representatives.
And a #stoppresidentTrump movement among Republicans would be circulating for no other reason than that by January 20, 2017, Donald Trump’s mental breakdown will be so complete and so obvious that the Republicans themselves will feel they have no option but to take him out. They may assassinate him or they may impeach him, but the finger on the trigger or the hands that sign the impeachment resolution will be those of Republicans. They may pray that their dirty work will be done by Democrat, but in the same way that Gandhiji was assassinated by Nathuram Godse, a Hindu terrorist, and not by a Muslim, we Democrats should insist that the Republicans clean up the mess they will have made if they are fool enough to elect Donald Trump as president of the United States.
In the meantime, however, we who stand with Hillary should do everything possible to “heighten the contradictions” our Republican brothers and sisters are feeling. There may surely be enough of them willing to put patriotism over party, hold their nose, and mark their ballots for a woman who, while perhaps uncharismatic, is nonetheless far too sensible to start a nuclear war, and far too well put together to be suffering from the obvious mental disease and deficiency which so plainly afflicts Donald Trump, and unfits him entirely for any office of trust or profit under the United States or any of them. We must encourage their closet Clintonism. We must inhibit their activities to elect Donald Trump. We must heighten the contradictions within the Republican Party and, as a Chinese would say, not hesitate to give the falling wall a push.
Tuesday, August 2, 2016
Wednesday, July 27, 2016
STABBED IN THE BACK
Summary: Bernie Sanders deserves better than his supporters. Yesterday, in a magnificent, unity-building gesture akin to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s similar gesture in 2008, Bernie moved Hillary’s nomination by acclamation. Unfortunately, many of his supporters haven’t been willing to follow Bernie’s lead. They been pitching a fit on all the various media about how the election was “stolen” from them, and a great many of them have evinced a determination to throw their votes and their support to the Kremlin’s candidate, Donald Trump. To justify such behavior, the intransigents have tried very hard to fabricate a Dolchßtolegende (a stab-in-the-back narrative) that the entire primary process had been “rigged.”
On the Hillary side, a similar Dolchstoßlegende to take shape, based largely on the manner in which the so-called email scandal that has already claimed the political life of Debbie Wasserman Schultz has unfolded. Increasing evidence points to the infamous Wikileaks as having obtained the data it dumped the day before the convention from sources within the Russian intelligence apparat. While Bernie’s Dolchstßlegende is largely a fantasy of his disgruntled, intransigent, over-the-top supporters, the Hillary Dolchstßlegende has the advantage of being largely true. Bernie diehards and Trump trolls (and there is a frightening degree of overlap between the two) insist either that there is no “proof” of Russian involvement or that the substantive content of the emails, ostensibly “proving” that Hillary is somehow of “corrupt,” outweighs the criminality of the circumstances under which WikiLeaks and its West-hating, Hillary-despising cofounder, cowardly Julian Assange, a known rapist and traitor currently hiding from Her Majesty’s justice in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, obtained the emails from the Russian intelligence apparat which had hacked into the DNC servers.
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Bernie Sanders displayed astonishing nobility of spirit yesterday by moving, on the convention floor in Philadelphia, that Hillary Rodham be selected by acclamation as the nominee of the Democratic Party. It was a magnificent gesture, that like Hillary Clinton’s similar gesture at the 2008 Democratic convention in Denver, was intended to heal the breach, lay groundwork for party unity, and moreover, to establish the foundations for the infrastructure of victory in November.
I was saddened, but not altogether surprised, that many of Sanders’s delegates in the convention hall, and many intransigent Berniebots across the country, angrily rejected Senator Sanders’s impassioned calls for unity and chose to demean themselves and to dishonor that nobility of spirit by engaging in what can only be described as a Trumpertantrum, protesting in the streets of Philadelphia, chanting the Trumpian trope of “lock her up,” and turning their backs on former President Bill Clinton when he addressed the convention.
Such behavior is unforgivable, unforgettable, and inexcusable. When the candidate to whom you have devoted yourself calls on you to behave like adults, to bear the seemingly unbearable, and to buck up and bear a hand for the sake of the country, to boo him, or to shout that he is a “sellout,” is dishonorable behavior of the worst sort. For not only did these intransigents dishonor the Senator, his nobility of spirit, and his loyalty to a party to which he came very late, but into which he poured himself heart and soul, it also dishonors the intransigents themselves.
To attempt to exonerate their guilty behavior, the intransigents have eagerly fabricated a Großer Dolchstoßlegende, a great stab-in-the-back narrative which attempts to excuse Bernie’s performance by casting doubt on the fundamental legitimacy of the process by which Hillary Rodham Clinton became the first female nominee for president of a major party in American history.
What a long way we’ve come since Abigail Adams insisted that her husband “remember the ladies” during the sessions of the Continental Congress which adopted and approved the Declaration of Independence; how far we’ve come since Sojourner Truth asked her immortal question “ain’t I a woman?”! What an amazing journey it has been since the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848! How profound the distance since the Constitution removed sex-based barriers to voting with the 19th amendment, 96 years ago this August 18. What a long way we’ve come to that moment in Philadelphia when the last crack in the glass ceiling opened wide and sent that barrier to equality crashing to the ground!
Yet, to the diehard Sanders intransigents, pitching an earsplitting snit and storming out of convention hall, or chanting “lock her up!” outside in the streets, living down to the stereotype of spoiled children of privilege, this enormous step for full, first class, female membership in the commonwealth and body politic was nothing more than the triumph of the vagina over the penis. It carried the ugliest possible overtones of misogyny, sexism, and worse, Trumpian treason.
And so, all of the ancient bullshit claims of a rigged election were dusted off and waved in the Democratic Party’s face. The claim that the primaries were rigged in favor of Hillary Clinton has been denied by Senator Sanders himself on numerous occasions, and it has been debunked by just about every reputable traditional and digital media publication out there. The only people still trafficking in the rigged election dolchstßlegende are conspiracy theorists of the radical left, the American equivalent of the Trotskyite Militant Tendency that almost destroyed Britain’s Labour Party in the late 70s and early 1980s, Donald Trump, or other minions of the right wing scream machine which have a vested interest in casting doubt upon the basic legitimacy of Hillary Clinton’s candidacy.
When people like Alex Jones, the Breitbart organization, or Trump trolls on social media ramp up the Hillary hatred, and that right-wing Hillary hatred finds echoes among the Sanders intransigents, we may justly wonder whether these Sanders intransigents are simply too obtuse to understand anything at all about American politics, or whether, like Susan Sarandon, they are so excessively privileged that a possible Trump victory will have no consequences for them, and therefore that Bernie Sanders is nothing but political cover for them to indulge their Hillary hatred, or whether they are in fact trolls of the other side trying to spread disinformation among us to break our unity and cause us to fall out among ourselves.
If the Bernie Dolchstßlegende suffers the disadvantage, and to just about every Dolchstßolegende of being false, and demonstrably false, the Hillary Dolchstßlegende has the advantage of being eine wahrhaftige Dolchstoß, (a real stab in the back narrative). When WikiLeaks dumped its 20,000 or so emails which had been purloined from the DNC server, it became clear fairly quickly that a number of things that occurred. First, the emails did not demonstrate systemic corruption nor did they invalidate the substantial majority that Hillary had garnered in the primary election. To say otherwise, as the Sanders intransigents began to do, that the 3.8 million more votes that Hillary had garnered in the primary should be disregarded, was an act of banana Republican political immaturity.
Again, that whole line of argument has been extensively rebutted and debunked in numerous traditional and digital media sources. We need not burden the record here with an extensive explanation of why the system was not, in fact, “rigged” in favor of Hillary Clinton. We can actually take Bernard Sanders’s admission itself that the system was not “rigged” as being dispositive of the issue. It is as good as what the Federal Rules of Evidence call an “admission of a party opponent,” that is, hearsay which is an exception to the rule against hearsay because it comes from the mouth of someone with authority to make the statement, and which statement is arguably against his own interest.
But, wait! say the Sanders intransigents the emails display personal animus on the part of certain DNC staffers. As friends of mine on both sides of the debate might put it “no shit, Sherlock!” After the vituperation and personal abuse showered upon the DNC and its outgoing chair, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, it’s not surprising that some of the emails in question, of which fewer than a dozen are any kind of “smoking gun,” should be somewhat embittered in their tone. And as for the infamous Debbie Wasserman Schultz email which said, and some of substance, that Bernie won’t be president, the intransigents would have us ignore the temporal context of that email, sent as it was after the April primary in New York State which narrowed Sanders’s path to the nomination almost impossibly narrow. Wasserman Schultz, the intransigents notwithstanding, wasn’t demonstrating some kind of malicious predisposition toward Hillary Clinton, she was simply stating an emerging fact, albeit one that was uncongenial to the intransigents of the Sanders campaign.
But no matter what Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s emails may have said about Bernie Sanders, who, because of the antics of his supporters, had become very hard to like at that stage of the campaign, what we are here to litigate is not the contents of the emails at all. Despite the Sandernistas’ reliance on the substance of the emails, the issue that needs to be litigated is the criminality of the circumstances by which WikiLeaks obtained possession of the emails. Because if the emails were obtained unlawfully, then their contents are what the legal profession would refer to as “fruit of the poisonous tree,” and subject to being excluded from evidence.
What is a good rule for courtroom evidence is, in this case, a good rule for the so-called email scandal. What we must explore instead are the criminal circumstances surrounding the chain of custody of the purloined emails, as well as the motivations of the prior custodians of the emails once they left the possession of the Democratic National Committee.
Because there is now probable cause to believe that the hacked emails were hacked by hackers associated with or in the employee of the Russian intelligence apparat, from which they were passed on to the ever-obliging WikiLeaks and its West-hating cofounder, cowardly, Hillary-despising Julian Assange, a known rapist and traitor now hiding from Her Majesty’s justice in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. (It is, candidly, somewhat of a mystery to me why Britain has not cut off diplomatic relations with Ecuador, declared her ambassador persona non grata at the court of St. James’s, and, just as importantly, cut off power, water, and sewage to the embassy. I daresay, such legitimate diplomatic pressure might be enough to force the Ecuadorians to relinquish Mr. Assange.)
The theft by Russian hackers of the emails from the DNC is itself a criminal offense, and indeed, tantamount to an act of war against the United States by the Russian Federation. When the Russian intelligence apparat handed those emails over to WikiLeaks, that not only compounded the crime, but it was also in effect a further act of war by which the Russian government attempted to intervene in a muscular and easily detectable way in the conduct of an American presidential election.
To make matters worse, this morning, The Donald delivered himself of a press conference in which he essentially invited the Russians to hack Hillary Clinton’s email servers again. If nothing else, this should justify a federal grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia (which traditionally handles national security prosecutions,) to initiate proceedings targeting Donald Trump for violating either the treason laws or the Espionage Act of 1917. Since turnabout is fair play, it is delicious to contemplate the possibility of one of the presidential candidates in fact being indicted. Instead of “lock her up,” there now appears to be ample critical mass to justify saying “lock him up.”
As the federal government expands the scope of the national security investigation now underway, we may expect that hopefully the net will begin to tighten around the person of Donald J. Trump. I posted earlier that “Trumpism is treason.” As more and more traditional and digital media begin to expose the nature of the Kremlin’s support for America’s true Manchurian candidate, I feel some schadenfreude, but I also feel a disturbing apprehension that far too many of Trump's willing dupes are prepared to turn a blind eye to systematic treason at the highest levels.
We need to conduct investigations that would make the McCarthy years look like little boys in short pants, because this time, unlike that time, the threat is real.
Citoyens! La patrie est en danger! -Georges Jacques Danton, French Rrevolutionary leader.
On the Hillary side, a similar Dolchstoßlegende to take shape, based largely on the manner in which the so-called email scandal that has already claimed the political life of Debbie Wasserman Schultz has unfolded. Increasing evidence points to the infamous Wikileaks as having obtained the data it dumped the day before the convention from sources within the Russian intelligence apparat. While Bernie’s Dolchstßlegende is largely a fantasy of his disgruntled, intransigent, over-the-top supporters, the Hillary Dolchstßlegende has the advantage of being largely true. Bernie diehards and Trump trolls (and there is a frightening degree of overlap between the two) insist either that there is no “proof” of Russian involvement or that the substantive content of the emails, ostensibly “proving” that Hillary is somehow of “corrupt,” outweighs the criminality of the circumstances under which WikiLeaks and its West-hating, Hillary-despising cofounder, cowardly Julian Assange, a known rapist and traitor currently hiding from Her Majesty’s justice in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, obtained the emails from the Russian intelligence apparat which had hacked into the DNC servers.
-------------------------------------------------------
Bernie Sanders displayed astonishing nobility of spirit yesterday by moving, on the convention floor in Philadelphia, that Hillary Rodham be selected by acclamation as the nominee of the Democratic Party. It was a magnificent gesture, that like Hillary Clinton’s similar gesture at the 2008 Democratic convention in Denver, was intended to heal the breach, lay groundwork for party unity, and moreover, to establish the foundations for the infrastructure of victory in November.
I was saddened, but not altogether surprised, that many of Sanders’s delegates in the convention hall, and many intransigent Berniebots across the country, angrily rejected Senator Sanders’s impassioned calls for unity and chose to demean themselves and to dishonor that nobility of spirit by engaging in what can only be described as a Trumpertantrum, protesting in the streets of Philadelphia, chanting the Trumpian trope of “lock her up,” and turning their backs on former President Bill Clinton when he addressed the convention.
Such behavior is unforgivable, unforgettable, and inexcusable. When the candidate to whom you have devoted yourself calls on you to behave like adults, to bear the seemingly unbearable, and to buck up and bear a hand for the sake of the country, to boo him, or to shout that he is a “sellout,” is dishonorable behavior of the worst sort. For not only did these intransigents dishonor the Senator, his nobility of spirit, and his loyalty to a party to which he came very late, but into which he poured himself heart and soul, it also dishonors the intransigents themselves.
To attempt to exonerate their guilty behavior, the intransigents have eagerly fabricated a Großer Dolchstoßlegende, a great stab-in-the-back narrative which attempts to excuse Bernie’s performance by casting doubt on the fundamental legitimacy of the process by which Hillary Rodham Clinton became the first female nominee for president of a major party in American history.
What a long way we’ve come since Abigail Adams insisted that her husband “remember the ladies” during the sessions of the Continental Congress which adopted and approved the Declaration of Independence; how far we’ve come since Sojourner Truth asked her immortal question “ain’t I a woman?”! What an amazing journey it has been since the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848! How profound the distance since the Constitution removed sex-based barriers to voting with the 19th amendment, 96 years ago this August 18. What a long way we’ve come to that moment in Philadelphia when the last crack in the glass ceiling opened wide and sent that barrier to equality crashing to the ground!
Yet, to the diehard Sanders intransigents, pitching an earsplitting snit and storming out of convention hall, or chanting “lock her up!” outside in the streets, living down to the stereotype of spoiled children of privilege, this enormous step for full, first class, female membership in the commonwealth and body politic was nothing more than the triumph of the vagina over the penis. It carried the ugliest possible overtones of misogyny, sexism, and worse, Trumpian treason.
And so, all of the ancient bullshit claims of a rigged election were dusted off and waved in the Democratic Party’s face. The claim that the primaries were rigged in favor of Hillary Clinton has been denied by Senator Sanders himself on numerous occasions, and it has been debunked by just about every reputable traditional and digital media publication out there. The only people still trafficking in the rigged election dolchstßlegende are conspiracy theorists of the radical left, the American equivalent of the Trotskyite Militant Tendency that almost destroyed Britain’s Labour Party in the late 70s and early 1980s, Donald Trump, or other minions of the right wing scream machine which have a vested interest in casting doubt upon the basic legitimacy of Hillary Clinton’s candidacy.
When people like Alex Jones, the Breitbart organization, or Trump trolls on social media ramp up the Hillary hatred, and that right-wing Hillary hatred finds echoes among the Sanders intransigents, we may justly wonder whether these Sanders intransigents are simply too obtuse to understand anything at all about American politics, or whether, like Susan Sarandon, they are so excessively privileged that a possible Trump victory will have no consequences for them, and therefore that Bernie Sanders is nothing but political cover for them to indulge their Hillary hatred, or whether they are in fact trolls of the other side trying to spread disinformation among us to break our unity and cause us to fall out among ourselves.
If the Bernie Dolchstßlegende suffers the disadvantage, and to just about every Dolchstßolegende of being false, and demonstrably false, the Hillary Dolchstßlegende has the advantage of being eine wahrhaftige Dolchstoß, (a real stab in the back narrative). When WikiLeaks dumped its 20,000 or so emails which had been purloined from the DNC server, it became clear fairly quickly that a number of things that occurred. First, the emails did not demonstrate systemic corruption nor did they invalidate the substantial majority that Hillary had garnered in the primary election. To say otherwise, as the Sanders intransigents began to do, that the 3.8 million more votes that Hillary had garnered in the primary should be disregarded, was an act of banana Republican political immaturity.
Again, that whole line of argument has been extensively rebutted and debunked in numerous traditional and digital media sources. We need not burden the record here with an extensive explanation of why the system was not, in fact, “rigged” in favor of Hillary Clinton. We can actually take Bernard Sanders’s admission itself that the system was not “rigged” as being dispositive of the issue. It is as good as what the Federal Rules of Evidence call an “admission of a party opponent,” that is, hearsay which is an exception to the rule against hearsay because it comes from the mouth of someone with authority to make the statement, and which statement is arguably against his own interest.
But, wait! say the Sanders intransigents the emails display personal animus on the part of certain DNC staffers. As friends of mine on both sides of the debate might put it “no shit, Sherlock!” After the vituperation and personal abuse showered upon the DNC and its outgoing chair, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, it’s not surprising that some of the emails in question, of which fewer than a dozen are any kind of “smoking gun,” should be somewhat embittered in their tone. And as for the infamous Debbie Wasserman Schultz email which said, and some of substance, that Bernie won’t be president, the intransigents would have us ignore the temporal context of that email, sent as it was after the April primary in New York State which narrowed Sanders’s path to the nomination almost impossibly narrow. Wasserman Schultz, the intransigents notwithstanding, wasn’t demonstrating some kind of malicious predisposition toward Hillary Clinton, she was simply stating an emerging fact, albeit one that was uncongenial to the intransigents of the Sanders campaign.
But no matter what Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s emails may have said about Bernie Sanders, who, because of the antics of his supporters, had become very hard to like at that stage of the campaign, what we are here to litigate is not the contents of the emails at all. Despite the Sandernistas’ reliance on the substance of the emails, the issue that needs to be litigated is the criminality of the circumstances by which WikiLeaks obtained possession of the emails. Because if the emails were obtained unlawfully, then their contents are what the legal profession would refer to as “fruit of the poisonous tree,” and subject to being excluded from evidence.
What is a good rule for courtroom evidence is, in this case, a good rule for the so-called email scandal. What we must explore instead are the criminal circumstances surrounding the chain of custody of the purloined emails, as well as the motivations of the prior custodians of the emails once they left the possession of the Democratic National Committee.
Because there is now probable cause to believe that the hacked emails were hacked by hackers associated with or in the employee of the Russian intelligence apparat, from which they were passed on to the ever-obliging WikiLeaks and its West-hating cofounder, cowardly, Hillary-despising Julian Assange, a known rapist and traitor now hiding from Her Majesty’s justice in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. (It is, candidly, somewhat of a mystery to me why Britain has not cut off diplomatic relations with Ecuador, declared her ambassador persona non grata at the court of St. James’s, and, just as importantly, cut off power, water, and sewage to the embassy. I daresay, such legitimate diplomatic pressure might be enough to force the Ecuadorians to relinquish Mr. Assange.)
The theft by Russian hackers of the emails from the DNC is itself a criminal offense, and indeed, tantamount to an act of war against the United States by the Russian Federation. When the Russian intelligence apparat handed those emails over to WikiLeaks, that not only compounded the crime, but it was also in effect a further act of war by which the Russian government attempted to intervene in a muscular and easily detectable way in the conduct of an American presidential election.
To make matters worse, this morning, The Donald delivered himself of a press conference in which he essentially invited the Russians to hack Hillary Clinton’s email servers again. If nothing else, this should justify a federal grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia (which traditionally handles national security prosecutions,) to initiate proceedings targeting Donald Trump for violating either the treason laws or the Espionage Act of 1917. Since turnabout is fair play, it is delicious to contemplate the possibility of one of the presidential candidates in fact being indicted. Instead of “lock her up,” there now appears to be ample critical mass to justify saying “lock him up.”
As the federal government expands the scope of the national security investigation now underway, we may expect that hopefully the net will begin to tighten around the person of Donald J. Trump. I posted earlier that “Trumpism is treason.” As more and more traditional and digital media begin to expose the nature of the Kremlin’s support for America’s true Manchurian candidate, I feel some schadenfreude, but I also feel a disturbing apprehension that far too many of Trump's willing dupes are prepared to turn a blind eye to systematic treason at the highest levels.
We need to conduct investigations that would make the McCarthy years look like little boys in short pants, because this time, unlike that time, the threat is real.
Citoyens! La patrie est en danger! -Georges Jacques Danton, French Rrevolutionary leader.
Sunday, July 24, 2016
TANTAMOUNT TO TREASON: WHAT WE NOW KNOW ABOUT THE KREMLIN'S CANDIDATE, DONALD TRUMP
Summary: Donald Trump’s campaign may be about to self-destruct. As more and more revelations begin to surface suggesting close linkages between Donald Trump and the Moscow Kremlin, those red flags, all puns intended, that I raised about three weeks ago are now being seen and waved by other, more “respectable” sources. The recent Wikileaks publication of roughly 20,000 emails from the Democratic National Committee has all the hallmarks of an operation initiated by, and planned by, Russia’s intelligence apparat. From CNN to Talking Points Memo to Forbes to defenseone.com, numerous media outlets in the West, together with the Hillary Clinton campaign itself, are connecting the dots and discovering a trail that leads right back to the Kremlin. One headline in defenseone.com this afternoon reads “How Putin Weaponized Wikileaks to Influence the Election of an American President.”
What is clear is that a Russian kriegßpiel is very much in progress against the West. In many ways, we are at war right now with Russia. Naïve Democrats, too conditioned by fear of what happened with Joseph McCarthy to regard any form of calling Russia out as unacceptable, need to understand that the evidence is far clearer now than it was 60 years ago. Again, a kriegspiel is very much underway against the West, Russia is using every malign instrumentality it can to secure the election of Donald Trump, a useful idiot it thinks it can control. We are at a point where failing to support Hillary Clinton for president is very close to being treasonable.
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In the last 48 hours the Donald Trump campaign has begun to show a new kind of vulnerability, one that we had never expected in an American political campaign. Media sources from CNN to Forbes to Talking Points Memo to defenseone.com have begun to connect the dots linking Trump Tower with the Moscow Kremlin. The Clinton campaign has also begun to connect those dots, and as the dots come together, we begin to see evidence of malign attempts on the part of the Russian government to influence the outcome of this election. Three weeks ago, had anyone suggested that Vladimir Putin and the Russian intelligence apparat were trying to influence the outcome of an American election, “right-thinking” Democrats, conditioned to reject anything that smacks of McCarthyism, would have said such a soothsayer his or her tongue for uttering such a heresy.
I was almost fed my own tongue for suggesting, last month, in my post of June 29, entitled “The Disastrous Ramifications of Brexit: Russia's Kriegßpiel Against the West” (http://cathedralcityobserved.blogspot.com/2016/06/the-disastrous-ramifications-of-brexit.html), that part of the reason for the success of Brexit was that Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and his minions within the Russian intelligence apparat had attempted successfully to influence the outcome of the Brexit referendum. My fellow Democrats, conditioned by the history of American McCarthyism in the 1950s, were quick to denounce my ideas as being “unhelpful.”
Unhelpful to whom? I responded. At the risk of sounding like Donald Trump congratulating himself for the Pulse nightclub shootings, I can’t resist a certain measure of schadenfreude, a certain temptation to say “I told you so.” Because ultimately, the evidence before us points not only to malign Russian intervention in our election, but also to the treasonable nature of Donald Trump and of the Trump campaign. In a previous post, entitled “Donald Trump’s Treasonable Protection Racket,” (http://cathedralcityobserved.blogspot.com/2016/07/donald-trumps-treasonable-protection.html) I suggested that Donald Trump’s unwillingness to defend the Baltic state members of NATO constituted evidence of treason.
Again, I was pooh-poohed by all the bien pensant Democrats who read my post. And again, I must confess to feeling a certain measure of schadenfreude.
However, the fact that we are betrayed at the highest levels isn’t limited to the treason being committed by members of the American right. Many of us in the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party have noted with increasing dismay the tendency of diehard supporters of Vermont Independent Senator Bernard Sanders to echo and repeat the often poisonous Hillary-hating tropes that find such a ready home in the campaign of the Kremlin’s own candidate, Donald Trump. We find, indeed, that some of the Sanders diehards, the so-called Sandernistas, speaking from a standpoint of excessive white privilege, have gone so far as to state very publicly that they would prefer four years of Donald Trump to one day of Hillary Clinton.
And, of course, the same over-the-top Sandernistas pitched an earsplitting snit when Hillary Clinton Virginia Senator Tim Kaine as her running mate. Yet, the whines that Tim Kane wasn’t “progressive enough” soon proved to be bullshit. It wasn’t so much that Sandernistas didn’t think Tim Kaine was progressive enough, though some of the stupider members of that tribe probably lapped up such nonsense with their silver spoons, while applying nonsensical purity tests that even God himself could not pass, but that more subtle, clever, and malignant Sandernistas realized that Tim Kaine was exactly the kind of progressive who could draw votes from the left wing of the Democratic Party, who could induce them to come home to Hillary.
And because Tim Kaine was indeed a progressive choice, Trump moles in Sanders world could not run the risk that Tim Kaine might actually be seen for the progressive choice he represents. Something had to be done. And so, against the possibility that Hillary might choose a genuinely progressive candidate, even if also a cautious one, the Sanders holdouts and the Trump apparat quietly let it be known that they believed that Tim Kaine would be Hillary’s choice. And once Moscow became aware that Tim Kaine was Hillary’s choice, it gave WikiLeaks the green light to dump the 20,000 emails which Russian hackers had obligingly provided to WikiLeaks to hold in case some development like Hillary’s selection of Tim Kaine should occur.
Because the WikiLeaks data dump was timed very carefully to drop a turd into the DNC’s punch bowl to counteract Hillary’s announcement of her vice presidential candidate. No doubt instructions also went out from the Trump organization and from such foolish Sanders supporters as former Ohio State Senator Nina Turner to pitch a fit over the veep selection itself.
And certainly, this Russian offensive against Hillary Clinton’s campaign has scored one victory already. Debbie Wasserman Schultz has resigned, effective at the end of the convention, as Democratic National Committee chair. This represents a gift to the Kremlin and Donald Trump. To the extent that Bernard Sanders and his people have been responsible for procuring DWS’s departure, it is not unreasonable to suggest that they have allowed themselves to become useful idiots and willing dupes for Vladimir Vladimirovich. In such case, we ought to appoint another Vermonter as chair of the DNC. We should bring back Howard Dean, who was a brilliantly effective Democratic National Committee chair. Bringing back Howard Dean, and acknowledge Hillary Clinton supporter, will send a powerful message to the Kremlin and to Bernard Sanders that the Democratic Party won’t take such bullshit lying down.
At all events, the Democratic Party needs to conduct a thoroughgoing purge of the Russian sympathizers in its midst, and it needs to insist that a similar purge be conducted throughout the nation. Not since the days of Charles Lindbergh have we seen such obvious treason being perpetrated in the context of an American political election. And while the Republicans love to chant “Hillary is a traitor, lock her up!” it is more than ever apparent that the true treasonable conspiracy aimed like a dagger at the heart of America is the one emanating from the Kremlin and from Trump Tower.
I leave to the labors of abler commentators than I the recitation of the detailed mechanism by which Trump and the Russian government have made common cause together. But we do know now that Donald Trump is the Manchurian candidate, and that the revelations of the extent to which the Russian intelligence apparat is deploying all the tradecraft that it can to try to secure his election as President of the United States has given the Democratic Party in general, and the Hillary Clinton campaign in particular a stick with which he may ultimately be bearbaited and beaten to death. Let’s not do the typical Democratic thing and be too afraid to unwrap the gift this represents. Instead, let’s open up this priceless gift, and not be afraid to be “opinionated, brash, fearless, partisan, hectoring, rude, cunning and unfair,” as the late John Mortimer, QC put it in his Rumpole stories. Above all, let us, as Rudyard Kipling put it “make ye no truce with Adam-zad, the bear that walks like a man!” If redbaiting is no longer an option because Russia is no longer communist, then let us never be afraid to engage in a little baiting of the Russian bear. After all, the Puritans didn’t oppose bearbaiting because of the pain it gave the bear, but because of the pleasure it gave the spectators.
Let us also not be afraid to forthrightly declare that we are at an unprecedented pass in American history, where, for the first time, opposition to a particular presidential candidate, in this case, Hillary Clinton, is in fact tantamount to treason.
Then, let us set about the pleasurable enterprise of bearbaiting Donald Trump and his campaign to death. Until. There. Is. Nothing. Left.
#NeverTrump.
What is clear is that a Russian kriegßpiel is very much in progress against the West. In many ways, we are at war right now with Russia. Naïve Democrats, too conditioned by fear of what happened with Joseph McCarthy to regard any form of calling Russia out as unacceptable, need to understand that the evidence is far clearer now than it was 60 years ago. Again, a kriegspiel is very much underway against the West, Russia is using every malign instrumentality it can to secure the election of Donald Trump, a useful idiot it thinks it can control. We are at a point where failing to support Hillary Clinton for president is very close to being treasonable.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
In the last 48 hours the Donald Trump campaign has begun to show a new kind of vulnerability, one that we had never expected in an American political campaign. Media sources from CNN to Forbes to Talking Points Memo to defenseone.com have begun to connect the dots linking Trump Tower with the Moscow Kremlin. The Clinton campaign has also begun to connect those dots, and as the dots come together, we begin to see evidence of malign attempts on the part of the Russian government to influence the outcome of this election. Three weeks ago, had anyone suggested that Vladimir Putin and the Russian intelligence apparat were trying to influence the outcome of an American election, “right-thinking” Democrats, conditioned to reject anything that smacks of McCarthyism, would have said such a soothsayer his or her tongue for uttering such a heresy.
I was almost fed my own tongue for suggesting, last month, in my post of June 29, entitled “The Disastrous Ramifications of Brexit: Russia's Kriegßpiel Against the West” (http://cathedralcityobserved.blogspot.com/2016/06/the-disastrous-ramifications-of-brexit.html), that part of the reason for the success of Brexit was that Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and his minions within the Russian intelligence apparat had attempted successfully to influence the outcome of the Brexit referendum. My fellow Democrats, conditioned by the history of American McCarthyism in the 1950s, were quick to denounce my ideas as being “unhelpful.”
Unhelpful to whom? I responded. At the risk of sounding like Donald Trump congratulating himself for the Pulse nightclub shootings, I can’t resist a certain measure of schadenfreude, a certain temptation to say “I told you so.” Because ultimately, the evidence before us points not only to malign Russian intervention in our election, but also to the treasonable nature of Donald Trump and of the Trump campaign. In a previous post, entitled “Donald Trump’s Treasonable Protection Racket,” (http://cathedralcityobserved.blogspot.com/2016/07/donald-trumps-treasonable-protection.html) I suggested that Donald Trump’s unwillingness to defend the Baltic state members of NATO constituted evidence of treason.
Again, I was pooh-poohed by all the bien pensant Democrats who read my post. And again, I must confess to feeling a certain measure of schadenfreude.
However, the fact that we are betrayed at the highest levels isn’t limited to the treason being committed by members of the American right. Many of us in the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party have noted with increasing dismay the tendency of diehard supporters of Vermont Independent Senator Bernard Sanders to echo and repeat the often poisonous Hillary-hating tropes that find such a ready home in the campaign of the Kremlin’s own candidate, Donald Trump. We find, indeed, that some of the Sanders diehards, the so-called Sandernistas, speaking from a standpoint of excessive white privilege, have gone so far as to state very publicly that they would prefer four years of Donald Trump to one day of Hillary Clinton.
And, of course, the same over-the-top Sandernistas pitched an earsplitting snit when Hillary Clinton Virginia Senator Tim Kaine as her running mate. Yet, the whines that Tim Kane wasn’t “progressive enough” soon proved to be bullshit. It wasn’t so much that Sandernistas didn’t think Tim Kaine was progressive enough, though some of the stupider members of that tribe probably lapped up such nonsense with their silver spoons, while applying nonsensical purity tests that even God himself could not pass, but that more subtle, clever, and malignant Sandernistas realized that Tim Kaine was exactly the kind of progressive who could draw votes from the left wing of the Democratic Party, who could induce them to come home to Hillary.
And because Tim Kaine was indeed a progressive choice, Trump moles in Sanders world could not run the risk that Tim Kaine might actually be seen for the progressive choice he represents. Something had to be done. And so, against the possibility that Hillary might choose a genuinely progressive candidate, even if also a cautious one, the Sanders holdouts and the Trump apparat quietly let it be known that they believed that Tim Kaine would be Hillary’s choice. And once Moscow became aware that Tim Kaine was Hillary’s choice, it gave WikiLeaks the green light to dump the 20,000 emails which Russian hackers had obligingly provided to WikiLeaks to hold in case some development like Hillary’s selection of Tim Kaine should occur.
Because the WikiLeaks data dump was timed very carefully to drop a turd into the DNC’s punch bowl to counteract Hillary’s announcement of her vice presidential candidate. No doubt instructions also went out from the Trump organization and from such foolish Sanders supporters as former Ohio State Senator Nina Turner to pitch a fit over the veep selection itself.
And certainly, this Russian offensive against Hillary Clinton’s campaign has scored one victory already. Debbie Wasserman Schultz has resigned, effective at the end of the convention, as Democratic National Committee chair. This represents a gift to the Kremlin and Donald Trump. To the extent that Bernard Sanders and his people have been responsible for procuring DWS’s departure, it is not unreasonable to suggest that they have allowed themselves to become useful idiots and willing dupes for Vladimir Vladimirovich. In such case, we ought to appoint another Vermonter as chair of the DNC. We should bring back Howard Dean, who was a brilliantly effective Democratic National Committee chair. Bringing back Howard Dean, and acknowledge Hillary Clinton supporter, will send a powerful message to the Kremlin and to Bernard Sanders that the Democratic Party won’t take such bullshit lying down.
At all events, the Democratic Party needs to conduct a thoroughgoing purge of the Russian sympathizers in its midst, and it needs to insist that a similar purge be conducted throughout the nation. Not since the days of Charles Lindbergh have we seen such obvious treason being perpetrated in the context of an American political election. And while the Republicans love to chant “Hillary is a traitor, lock her up!” it is more than ever apparent that the true treasonable conspiracy aimed like a dagger at the heart of America is the one emanating from the Kremlin and from Trump Tower.
I leave to the labors of abler commentators than I the recitation of the detailed mechanism by which Trump and the Russian government have made common cause together. But we do know now that Donald Trump is the Manchurian candidate, and that the revelations of the extent to which the Russian intelligence apparat is deploying all the tradecraft that it can to try to secure his election as President of the United States has given the Democratic Party in general, and the Hillary Clinton campaign in particular a stick with which he may ultimately be bearbaited and beaten to death. Let’s not do the typical Democratic thing and be too afraid to unwrap the gift this represents. Instead, let’s open up this priceless gift, and not be afraid to be “opinionated, brash, fearless, partisan, hectoring, rude, cunning and unfair,” as the late John Mortimer, QC put it in his Rumpole stories. Above all, let us, as Rudyard Kipling put it “make ye no truce with Adam-zad, the bear that walks like a man!” If redbaiting is no longer an option because Russia is no longer communist, then let us never be afraid to engage in a little baiting of the Russian bear. After all, the Puritans didn’t oppose bearbaiting because of the pain it gave the bear, but because of the pleasure it gave the spectators.
Let us also not be afraid to forthrightly declare that we are at an unprecedented pass in American history, where, for the first time, opposition to a particular presidential candidate, in this case, Hillary Clinton, is in fact tantamount to treason.
Then, let us set about the pleasurable enterprise of bearbaiting Donald Trump and his campaign to death. Until. There. Is. Nothing. Left.
#NeverTrump.
Thursday, July 21, 2016
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®ion=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.
--------------------------------------------
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®ion=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.
Tuesday, July 19, 2016
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
-xxx-
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
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
-xxx-
Friday, July 8, 2016
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.
_____________________________________________
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.
-xxx-
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.
Wednesday, July 6, 2016
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.
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.
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