Category: ionsurrection

Posted on

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier…–Trump Audio recording eliminates any defense he had

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

May 31st, 2023

www.zeppscommentaries.online

The denouement of Trump’s defense in the documents scandal came from a New Yorker story by Susan Glasser that, by itself, was utterly horrifying. The story details how Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley opposed Trump, both openly and behind the scenes, to stymie Trump’s impulse to launch a full-scale military invasion of Iran.

Milley presumably realized that this would be the greatest military blunder in American history. Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam and Korea would all pale next to it. Those were all small, comparatively weak nations and time after time the US sank into a quagmire they eventually lost. Iran is neither small nor weak, and an attack there would almost certainly draw in the Russians. It probably would be the start of World War III. Milley went so far, according to the story, to surreptitiously tell the military to ignore any “illegal orders” that might come from the President.

The story utterly infuriated Trump (OK, for once I can at least understand why he would be pissed). But his endless need to self-justify and his thin skin led him to what perhaps was the most damning error he has made, post-presidency.

Per CNN, “President Donald Trump acknowledges he held onto a classified Pentagon document about a potential attack on Iran, multiple sources told CNN, undercutting his argument that he declassified everything.”

The story goes that two writers for Mark Meadows “autobiography” met with Trump at his golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey. That autobiography contains an account where Trump “recalls a four-page report typed up by (Trump’s former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) Mark Milley himself. It contained the general’s own plan to attack Iran, deploying massive numbers of troops, something he urged President Trump to do more than once during his presidency.” It’s anyone’s guess if Milley was contradicting himself, or this is just one of the obligatory scenarios the military delight in creating (“What happens if Lower Slobbovia invades Delaware? Or vice-versa?”) but Trump seized on it as proof Milley was lying.

Trump rattled some papers at the interviewers, and said that these were classified documents that showed the truth of the Meadows claims, and he would like to show them to the interviewers, but the documents were classified, so he couldn’t.

How do we know this?

Oh, lord, there are tapes, part XI. The interviewees, with Trump’s knowledge and consent, were recording the meeting. Trump either forgot, or was so irate he simply lost his temper, or both.

And Jack Smith has that tape. Lawdy, lawdy.

I can envision dozens of felony counts awaiting Trump just on the documents case. But for the first time, I think the DoJ has a prima facie case to persecute Trump for espionage. Combined with the probable indictments for the January 6th case (insurrection) and the Georgia vote count (election tampering) Trump’s most likely future will include dying in prison. This one tape demonstrates that Trump was lying about declassifying the documents, or that he COULD declassify them, or that he didn’t know he had them, or that he ever misused them in any way. This tape is more damning than all the Nixon tapes combined, including the infamous missing “14 ½ minutes.”

It came at the same time that Trump revealed just how far his contempt for the Constitution went by vowing to rescind the 14th amendment through executive order. Even Slappy Thomas would have trouble justifying that one. Trump is irked that the constitution specifies that anyone born in the territories of the US are American citizens, including babies who don’t speak English. (That would be most of them, I would hazard.)

He also threw his weight behind preventing the impeachment of Ken Paxton in Texas who was, of course, promptly impeached. It shows how weak his grasp on the party has become, even as the marching morons continue to chant his praises.

Trump legally, is a dead man walking. He won’t be a candidate in 2024 because he will be in prison. He may still claim to be a candidate, but his campaign will be as quixotically ridiculous as the one run by Lyndon LaRouche back about 30 years ago. The Republicans who, under Trump, let the lunatic fringe take over their party are in such disarray that they will have severe trouble coming up with any candidate at all. They may no longer even be a single discrete party at that point.

The voting on the debt ceiling limit is taking place as I write this, and its passage is extremely likely. For a small number of concessions, Biden got the Republicans to throw away the only real weapon they still possessed, eliminating the debt ceiling until after the 2024 election. Yes, Biden is smarter than the GOP—combined. I was of the strong opinion that Biden shouldn’t negotiate with terrorists, but the implications of this agreement please even me. Biden lost a couple of minor skirmishes, but won the war. The same Republicans who had been howling that Biden was so senile and/or incompetent he couldn’t find his trousers just learned they lost their own pants in a poker match against him.

I’m starting to feel hope that America is going to survive Trump, and MAGA, and Qanon.

In any event, the next few weeks should be entertaining as all hell.

Posted on

Perp-traitors — Donald and his legions about to perpwalk

Perp-traitors

Donald and his legions about to perpwalk

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

March 19th 2023

www.zeppscommentaries.online

There’s all sorts of crazy rumors flying around this weekend as the possible indictment (and yes, possible actual arrest) of Donald J. Trump is likely to occur Monday or Tuesday. Armed neo-Nazis will surround Mar-a-Lago and open fire on US Marshalls. Other groups will storm the New York court issuing the indictment. And of course, there is talk of storming Congress because, you know, Congress welcomes peaceful tourists. Why, Josh Hawley was so happy to see them he ran out to greet them, you know.

Assuming they actually do arrest Trump for the crimes his lawyer, Michael Cohen, already carried out and served time for at Trump’s behest, I expect scattered protests and lots of angry rhetoric on cesspools like Truth Social and Twitter.

But that’s about the extent of it.

My reasoning is simple enough: Trump’s star has dimmed considerably in the two years since the storming of the Capitol. The events of January 6 shocked those moderate supporters among independents and Republicans. Since then, there have been the 1/6 Committee hearings, which reminded most people of how Congress does when it actually works right (and we have the McCarthy-Greene-Jordan circus going on now to remind them of what Congress is like when fools, nuts and crooks are running the show).

There’s been the endless parade of right wing outrage staged over such things as green M&Ms, furries in the schools, drag queens, and Hunter Biden’s laptop. While Fox and Trump purposefully cultivated fools, they drew in a significant number of people who, while credulous and easily convinced of the evil of Democrats, knew damnfoolishness for what it was. Litter boxes in school restrooms? Bugs Bunny in a dress is a bigger threat to children than the thousands of pedophile priests? Those are bigger threats than mass shootings or climate change?

Putting zealots on the courts has backfired massively. Most Americans—including most Republicans—are frightened and angry at the ongoing assault on the rights of women, African Americans, undocumented aliens and other minorities. The notion that there are zealots on the courts who want a Christian version of Afghanistan or Iran is horrifying, and anyone who knows history knows that is exactly what they envision, with the best of motives. Serving God is a hard thing, you know. The unfaithful must pay a price.

They will also notice that promises to arrest and convict {Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Hunter Biden, Adam Schiff, Nancy Pelosi, dozens of other Democrats} have never ever amounted to anything. Certainly nothing like the NYPD and Secret Service sitting down and planning how to turn Trump over to the police when they come to serve the arrest warrant. (The Trump people aren’t cooperating with the police, of course.)

The significance of the endless feigned outrage is finally wearing thin. Banks didn’t fail because libertarian tech bros who exploited them were woke; they failed because Trump and the Republicans stripped away rules that prevented such exploitation. Trains didn’t derail because Democrats didn’t care about rural white communities; they derailed because Trump stripped necessary safety regulations imposed during the Obama administration. Those weren’t peaceful tourists; those were terrorists and Nazis. The lies are getting ever more shrill and more transparent.

But the main reason Trump’s hoped-for revolt is going to fizzle is because the revelations from the Dominion lawsuit revealed once and for all that the whole “stolen election” lie upon which the storming of the Capitol and the outrage of Trump supporters rested was in fact a sham and a complete fabrication, and the propagandistic filth posing as “reporters” for Faux News knowingly and maliciously perpetrated the lie, aware that it was a lie, and aware of the damage it might do to the country.

There has always been a hard core of MAGAts who were absolutely unswerving in their support of Trump and the Big Lie. They truly believed the election was stolen. They were certain that it was orchestrated by Biden, George Soros, Hugo Chavez and drag queens. They made up perhaps 20% of the people who voted in 2020. That’s a sizable number, but similar numbers believe in faeries, that we’ve never been to the Moon, or that Ivermectin is the only treatment for COVID. Keep in mind that statistically, 20% of the population has an IQ below 90. That isn’t unrelated; many of these people are pure stupid and will die stupid.

But the Dominion findings have managed to penetrate even that rock of impermeable idiocy. In the weeks since the stories of what Tucker really thought of Trump and why Murdoch allowed this to happen and the rest, a full 21% of viewers who trusted Fox News no longer do. That’s a seismic shift in belief. (One of the weirder findings in that poll were the 23% of Fox viewers who didn’t trust the station to begin with.) There aren’t many substitutes for Faux: OANN and Newmax face oblivion, done in by their own excesses. That leaves just the howling nuts on talk radio and Youtube.

Even amongst the steadfast, there have to be doubts creeping in. When Tucker tells them they have to get out and save their country by facing the police and national guard, how many of them would now do so unreservedly? They know that over a thousand people have been convicted in the wake of 1/6, and thousands more convictions await. They know they won’t take the authorities by surprise this time, and Trump and his planted traitors won’t be available to blunt the response of authorities, or promise pardons to those who would betray their country.

Some will even think it through, and realize that fighting for the lies that Trump and Fox told them meant they actually were betraying their country. And they would then realize that Trump is an infinitely stupid hill to die upon.

I expect protests and angry rhetoric, and that’s fine. Those people have the right to protest and declaim.

But in the end, it will be an empty rattle, as devoid of authenticity and reason as the frantic lies spewed by Faux News.

Posted on

Drumpf’s Kampf — Trump no longer echoes Hitler; he channels him.

Drumpf’s Kampf

Trump no longer echoes Hitler; he channels him.

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

March 5th 2023

www.zeppscommentaries.online

I guess it was only a matter of time before Trump started sounding like the Big Bad in a poorly translated anime series. The demagoguery and megalomania reached Hitlerian proportions at his speech at the lightly-attended CPAC convention last night.

“2016 habe ich erklärt: Ich bin deine Stimme, ich bin dein Krieger. Ich bin eure Gerechtigkeit. Und für diejenigen, denen Unrecht getan und betrogen wurde: Ich bin eure Vergeltung.”

OK, Hitler would have screamed it better. He was, after all, a superb orator, even if he did look goofy to non-German eyes. And of course Trump only has a fourth-grade level vocabulary in English; his German is probably limited to whatever he picked up from watching Hogan’s Heroes.

Granted, my own German is little better. I used translate.com above. What Donald actually screamed to his howling band of insurrectionists was “In 2016, I declared: I am your voice. Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed: I am your retribution,”

No historian is going to hear that and not immediately think something like, “Oh, holy fuck. If this maniac gets back in office, he’s going to get millions of people killed.” It comes as no surprise that in the past week followers of his have proposed exterminating gays and lesbians, executing doctors who provide gender ID therapy to anyone under 18, and banning opposition political parties.

And Donald wants retribution. Revenge against those forces, within and without, that have betrayed America. Hitler blamed Jews, labor, intellectuals, Communists, socialists, and the media for Germany losing the great war. Trump blames gays, Mexicans, Muslims and the media for him losing the election in 2020. And don’t kid yourself: in his narcissistic mind, him losing an election is as every bit a great tragedy as his nation losing a world war. Perhaps more, because he believes if he fails America will fall because it’s nothing without him.

He went on, “For seven years you and I have been engaged in an epic struggle to rescue our country from the people who hate it and want to absolutely destroy it. We are going to finish what we started. We started something that was a miracle. We’re going to complete the mission, we’re going to see this battle through to ultimate victory. We’re going to make America great again.”

If you read Hitler’s speeches given after his failed Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 and his ascendancy to power in 1933, you’ll see the same sort of verbiage and rhetorical flourishes. The German word for ‘struggle’ is kampf, as in Mein Kampf. Both had missions to make their country great again, including retribution, extermination, elimination of opposition, and throwing off the (imaginary) yoke of victimhood.

It gets worse: “With you at my side, we will demolish the deep state. We will expel the war mongers… We will drive out the globalists. We will cast out the communists. We will throw off the political class that hates our country … We will beat the Democrats. We will rout the fake news media. We will expose and appropriately deal with the RINOs. We will evict Joe Biden from the White House. And we will liberate America from these villains and scoundrels once and for all…We had a Republican party that was ruled by freaks, neocons, globalists, open border zealots and fools but we are never going back to the party of Paul Ryan, Karl Rove and Jeb Bush.”

The use of “globalists” is interesting. As the Anti-Defamation League’s Jonathan Greenblatt put it, “Where the term originates from is a reference to Jewish people who are seen as having allegiances not to their countries of origin like the United States, but to some global conspiracy.”

Trump went on, “And you’re going to have world war three, by the way. We’re going to have world war three if something doesn’t happen fast. I am the only candidate who can make this promise: I will prevent world war three.” Just like Hitler promised to avoid further wars and undo the damage of The Great War. And about as likely.

He then made the absurd promise, “Before I arrive in the Oval Office, I will have the disastrous war between Russia and Ukraine ended… I know what to say.” OK, so why doesn’t he say it? Even ignoring the hundreds of thousands of people who have died and the vast destruction, there’s the fact that his good buddy Putin has his tail stuck in a crack over this war he started, and if he wasn’t in that position, he would be much more likely to help Donald win like he did in 2016.

He finished with, “We have no choice, this is the final battle. If we don’t do this, our country will be lost forever.”

If he somehow crawls back into power, America will be lost forever, and I, along with most of you reading this, will be dead. Count on it. You can nearly see him building the death camps in his mind as he creates his vision of a Trumpian utopia in which white America takes over the world and only the evangelicals are permitted to vote.

He gave America a warning every bit as clear as the ones Hitler gave prior to 1933. And Germans at that time were better educated and more politically savvy than Americans are today. And still they fell to that madman. Can America do better?

One thing that might save us: Hitler was only 44 when he seized power. Trump will be 78 in 2024. And he’s clearly not in good shape. Nature, rather than resolve, may be what saves America in the end.

Posted on

McCarthy to Carlson to Lindell — An Infield from Hell

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

February 26th, 2023

www.zeppscommentaries.online

“A coward dies a thousand times before his death, but the valiant taste of death but once. It seems to me most strange that men should fear, seeing that death, a necessary end, will come when it will come.” – Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

You have to wonder how many deaths Kevin McCarthy will suffer before Death,the real one, takes pity on the pathetic little sod and hauls his craven, twitching little ass away. It really would be a mercy at this point; I honestly cannot think of an individual in the entire scope of American history whose personal cowardice even approaches that of McCarthy.

He became Speaker, not because he was resolute and stood firm for what was right; the GOP wanted him because he was never either of those things in his entire political life. The extremists in the MAGA caucus knew he had the spine of a jellyfish and the ethical standards of a sewer rat. The rest of the GOP, not exactly great American heroes themselves, knew the bigots and traitors of the extreme right would block any other nominee.

There have been many instances in American history where groups of opposing views have agreed on a least objectionable candidate. Political conventions are famous for such. The results are usually either bad (Alf Landon),or mediocre (Hubert Humphrey), and sometimes the unobjectionable nebbish turns out to be a lion. (Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, and now, it seems, Joe Biden).

This is a far rarer situation, where a rump party minority holds out for the MOST objectionable candidate, and will accept no alternatives. I’ve tried to find instances in history where this has happened and come up short. Short of invading countries installing puppet rulers (American products included a number of regimes in Central and South America), the closest I can think of would be Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, both chosen explicitly by their party because they were easy to control and put a pleasant smile in front of an ugly reality.

With McCarthy, even the pretense of decency and resolve is completely missing. They didn’t want someone to look pretty for the cameras; they wanted someone who would do whatever the fuck he was told and not even hesitate.

When he was giving away the store to the lunatics of the far right in order to get the fifteen votes he so desperately needed in order to become elected speaker, he told them he would release all the video tapes from the Capital area that recorded the events of January 6th, 2021. That would be 41,000 hours of video recordings from over 5,000 cameras that explicitly showed all the emergency protocols used to protect members of the government on that day, both known and confidential.

If McCarthy had just released them to the press, that would have been a grave act of irresponsibility. Some of those recordings would show how to assassinate members of Congress by revealing the protective steps taken when dealing with a hostile invader. Anyone who hates America and the American government will love getting access to the information on those tapes.

But McCarthy didn’t do that: he released the tapes to Tucker Carlson.

Carlson isn’t even remotely a journalist. He is a propagandist, a paid liar, and a stooge for the far right. He’s a fascist and a demagogue, and recent revelations have shown incontrovertibly that he will cheerfully destroy the United States in the name of ratings and a small modicum of power. He’s quite possibly the sleaziest and most reprehensible character McCarthy could have picked. Carlson, of course, is the darling of the lunatics who made McCarthy’s speakership possible. And McCarthy, in an action so craven it would appall Doctor Smith of the old Lost in Space television show, gave Carlson exclusive rights to the footage.

Enter Mike Lindell. You know. The pillow guy. He has two things in common with Carlson. He’s getting sued for defamation by Dominion Voting, and he is Carlson’s equal as a journalist. Basic arithmetic, that: zero equals zero. The only real difference is that Lindell, who is something of a crackpot, apparently genuinely believes the election was stolen from Donald Trump in 2020. Carlson, of course, never believed a word of that.

So Lindell is now suing McCarthy, arguing that he has at least as much right to those video recordings as Carlson does. (Again, true. 0=0).

I suspect there are going to be many such suits filed. The Proud Boys will want those tapes. So will the Oath Keepers, Qanon, Al Qaida, Putin, and Xi. You never know when you might need information making it easy to wipe out most elected officials in Washington in one fell swoop.

McCarthy will eventually face civil and criminal charges for his actions. He belongs in prison for at least twenty years just for the security breaches. His actions, giving sensitive national security date to a hostile party (and Carlson has proven his hostility to the United States) border on treason.

McCarthy belongs in a prison cell, one next to Donald Trump’s.

Posted on

Trump’s Cross to Bear — or why cross people can’t bear him

Trump’s Cross to Bear

or why cross people can’t bear him

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

January 22nd, 2023

www.zeppscommentaries.online

It’s not clear why Donald Trump decided to start attacking the Christian evangelicals who had been the backbone of his support. Perhaps it was Trump’s well-known propensity for shooting himself in the foot. Or perhaps it was because he always regarded the evangelicals as idiots and had an unguarded moment. He does that a lot, recently furnishing prosecutors for a motive for stealing all those classified documents (he apparently was looking for evidence to support the ludicrous “crossfire hurricane” election theft conspiracy theory). When his lawyers got fined nearly a million bucks for frivolous abuse of the legal system, he promptly withdrew another, similar case against Hillary Clinton et al, a tacit admission that it, too, was frivolous and would be seen as a waste of the court’s time. He does that a lot, too.

But I suspect that it’s mostly because the evangelicals have been souring on him. The flock are finally noticing that he isn’t really the second coming of Christ (and yes, a few of them literally believed that) and in fact, he might not be all that godly at all (paging Captain Obvious!). The evangelical leadership, safely inured from such inconveniences as faith or belief, saw that not only was Trump’s power slipping, but he was dragging the entire evangelical movement down. Yes, the evangelical movement had always been viewed from outside with a mixture of pity and disgust but that didn’t bother the leadership as long as their political stock remained firm. Now that it isn’t, it suddenly bothers them a lot.

The blob squad, the vicious biblical demagogues who hilariously characterize themselves as ‘pro life,’ have lost a certain amount of interest in the presidential race. They only supported candidates who promised to put anti-choice zealots on the courts, and Trump obliged them, giving them what they wanted. Now, they have a brighter fascistic zealot to worship: Ron DeSantis, who is intent on getting rid of all that “individual liberties” and “personal freedoms” shit and make the right people safe in the arms of Jeezus. At a recent blob squad convention, DeSantis outpolled Trump for President by about 54% to 20%. After all, he’s most likely to destroy women’s rights and keep the ‘lower races’ in their place.

Without the zealots, Trump is going nowhere. He didn’t have a prayer in ‘16 or ‘20 without them (and in fact lost the popular vote in both elections anyway) and even if he stays out of jail, he won’t have their support in ‘24.

Sic transit gloria mon dieu.

The MAGA crowd are evaporating, as well. That decline began the evening of January 6th, 2021, when the implications of what that mob in Washington were trying to do started to sink in with those followers who weren’t completely nihilistic zombies. That unease has slowly snowballed since, with the January 6th Select Committee erasing any and all doubt that these were not just enthusiastic Trump tourists agitated by dark AntiFa forces. Or that Trump didn’t really mean to have Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi hanged for daring to oppose his attempted coup.

As the legal system closes in on Trump himself, the legal penalties his hirelings and supporters face have sharply increased of late. A lot of the defendants haven’t exactly covered themselves in glory, offering excuses that are ridiculous on the face of it (Just wanted to go to the bathroom and somehow wound up with his feet up on Pelosi’s desk) and some are just cowards. A lot of them blamed Trump for misleading them into their predicaments.

Then there’s the matter of the sorts of people who have infiltrated the Republican party and turned it into a grotesque unintentional parody of the Sturmabteilung, Hitler’s brownshirts. While a lot of that indisputably preceded Trump (Newt Gingrich did much to create the present face of the GOP) he has encouraged and empowered the likes of George Santos (or whatever the hell he calls himself) and Marjorie Taylor-Greene and Lauren Boebert.

Then there’s Trump’s basic personality. We got a sample of that just today. There was a horrible mass shooting in Los Angeles at Monterey Park, where ten were killed and ten more wounded when someone attacked a Chinese New Years’ party. He wrote on his fake Twitter, “10 dead in California shooting, horrible gun wielding ANTIFA protest against our great police in Atlanta – Nothing will happen to them despite night of rage and destruction.” Yes, he really compared largely peaceful (and unarmed) protesters to a gunsel who massacred innocent people. He went on to say things like that wouldn’t happen if he was president, even though many of the nation’s worst mass shooting DID happen during his four years in office. But he was too busy trying to get the Army to teargas peaceful protesters in front of a church he was using as a stage prop.

A lot of people, myself included, believe that at this point, to support a man like this means you are utter filth yourself. And that view, increasingly, is becoming widespread, and Trump supporters are finally realizing that not only are their views unpopular, but many people see them as vile and anti-American. Yes, even the evangelicals, who pride themselves on being cruel, disagreeable and anti-American in the name of Christ.

Unfortunately, this crowd is impervious to the concept of “a learning experience.” Some other opportunistic demagogue will come along for them to glom on to. Church of George Santos, anyone?

Posted on

The Trump Dump — January 6th Committee gives its referrals

The Trump Dump

January 6th Committee gives its referrals

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

December 19th, 2022

www.zeppscommentaries.online

The January 6th committee held its final meeting today, and voted to make a criminal referral to the Department of Justice on Trump for four potential felony counts. Those referrals included obstruction of an official proceeding of Congress, assisting an insurrection and conspiring to defraud the United States. The committee also said Trump may have committed seditious conspiracy. Should the Department of Justice elect to act on these referrals, the resultant indictments could amount to 35 years in jail. Given Trump’s age and health, even a ten year sentence would ensure he never walked free again.

The seditious conspiracy charge is both the rarest and the most serious. It’s one step short of a charge of treason.

The committee also referred ethics charges against four congressmen, all Republicans for their involvement in the events of January 6. Those four are Kevin McCarthy, Jim Jordan, Andy Biggs and Scott Perry. McCarthy is the leading candidate to be Speaker (second in line to the Presidency) and Jordan is expected to become chair of the Judiciary Committee. If nothing else shows how incredibly low the Republican Party has sunk, that would be it.

Jordan plans to launch endless investigations, of Biden, of Biden family members, of Special Counsel Jack Smith, Attorney-General Merrick Garland, the FBI, the CIA, and pretty much anyone who isn’t part of the nutball right. It’s going to be fun watching him issue subpoenas while under investigations for an ethics breach, the nature of which includes refusing to obey a congressional subpoena.

Andy Biggs spent the rest of his day on Twitter, or what’s left of it, raving about the “open border” and all the terrible people swarming over and replacing the white race. (That last bit was implied. Evidently the Canadian border, which is far less guarded, isn’t a problem.)

Special Counsel Jack Smith hasn’t been showing any signs he’s just screwing around, but the Committee’s finding today, combined with the thousand pages of evidence coming out Wednesday, should make formal DOJ indictments against Trump, some of his co-conspirators, and members of Congress almost inevitable.

The January Sixth Committee will go down as one of the legendary committees in Congressional history, along with the 9/11 Committee, the Watergate Committees, the Army-McCarthy hearings. It will be something the public will want to remember, particularly the fairness and decorum and the investigative depth shown, when the clown show convenes next January, and we are once again treated to the spectacle of amoral slime like Jim Jordan screaming down witnesses as they try to answer ridiculously contrived questions about scandals that didn’t actually exist. Kevin McCarthy has vowed to throw all Democrats who were on the 1/6 Committee out of all committee memberships in an open act of childish and improper retaliation.

The Republicans will look like scum, not just because they are scum, but because with the 1/6 Committee, the public saw Congress doing its job, protecting the Constitution and finding the truth.

An amazing 62% of the public say they want to read the Committee’s final report, which is said to be over 1,000 pages long. Just the introduction is 100 pages, and I’ll be surprised if 10% actually read that. (I hope to be in that 10%, but I’ll be the first to admit that a thousand pages might be too much for me).

I notice today that very few Republicans were out there defending Trump. Mitch McConnell annoyed some of the more servile members of the party by observing, “’The entire nation knows who is responsible for that day. Beyond that, I don’t have any immediate observations.” McConnell is belatedly realizing what his legacy in all this is going to be.

Even Trump himself seems to have gone silent. I doubt that will last. Trump can’t ignore any sort of attack for long. And I suppose his response will only implicate him further.

A hundred years from now, some overimaginative playwright will hit on the notion of Trump as a heroic, tragic, flawed figure, one who brought about his own demise from his sterling belief that he was acting only in the interests of what was best for all. A King Lear figure, perhaps, even Prometheus.

But we know better. Trump was never anything more than a third-rater, born to far too much wealth and power, protected his entire life from consequences, and never forced to consider treating others as humans rather than objects to be manipulated. His fall comes, not from good intentions, but only the lowliest and tawdriest, the Faginesque grasping of an amoral man seeking ultimate power.

The Committee didn’t save Americans from the vice of worshiping such men, but they may have broken them of the vice of worshiping this particular specimen.

Posted on

Last Election? — Or jumping off place?

Last Election?

Or jumping off place?

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

November 5th 2023

zeppscommentaries.online

Trump has been teasing his cult that he will announce if he’s running for President in 2024 or not on November 14th. That happens to be the day he has to comply with the January 6th Committee’s subpoena to appear, but I don’t think that is it. For one thing, the committee gave him an extra week.

No, the main thinking is that it’s his time after the mid-term elections. His entire strategy for the next two years rests on whether the GOP win the House and Senate or not.

If the Democrats keep the House, he might want to rile up his base whether he complies or not. Being morally bereft, they’ll be fine with it either way. He’ll be pushing the ‘stolen election’ narrative and hoping to foment a revolution.

What happens if the Republicans take Congress?

He might see that happen. Fivethirtyeight.com is one of the few outfits not interested in blowing smoke up the asses of one side or the other, but even then, a lot of the polls they use have become increasingly suspect, partly from political influence, and partly from an out-of-date methodology (many voters, particularly younger ones, don’t even HAVE landlines, and because of the huge numbers of spam and scam calls we all get, anyone with caller ID tends to not answer calls from unfamiliar numbers). And this year, pollsters are ignoring the elephant in the room, and not asking about abortion.

And because “common sense” says that incumbent presidents lose seats in the midterm election, and the supposition that inflation hurts the party in power, so pollsters are uncritically saying it looks like a Republican election, with gains in the House and Senate. Add the factors of gerrymandering, voter suppression, and voter intimidation that the GOP is engaging in, and a Republican win seems likely. Certainly Donald must think so. But then, he didn’t expect to lose power in 2021, either.

If the Republicans do take the House and Senate, he will certainly announce that he’s running for President.

He can quit worrying about his legal problems. First thing the House will do is shut down the Congressional investigation. And they will launch endless “investigations” of the Department of Justice that should completely hogtie Merrick Garland. State cases will face increasingly hostile courts as suborned judges blindly rule in favor of Trump, going to any ludicrous length they can to protect him. We’ve already seen quite a bit of that. Sammy, Slappy, and the Three Trump Stooges will be Trump’s refuge from then on.

The House will revert to the kangaroo court hearings that were the mainstay of the GOP House Rule going back to the Newt Gingrich years, only this group are even crazier and nastier.

MAGA followers, emboldened, will intimidate and harass all dissenting opinion. I wouldn’t rule out pogroms and a Kristallnacht or two. Targets will be blacks, Hispanics, anyone suspected of “sexual deviancy,” Moslems (including Sikhs, Amish, and anyone who “looks like an Arab”), and Jews “who don’t support Israel.”

Then Donald can run without any impediment from the law or popular sentiment.

Nor will he have to worry about losing the election. If the GOP control the methods of counting the votes and determining who will be permitted to vote, it won’t matter if the voters hate Donald or not. He will get elected, just the same way Stalin and Xi and other autocrats got elected. Republicans know they can’t win an honest election; they make sure they can’t lose a dishonest one.

The GOP have promised to do away with Social Security and Medicare, and will go after workers’ rights, civil rights, environmental protections, and anything that might annoy or inconvenience a major corporation.

Voters will be too busy fighting to survive to care about fighting the government, and will be hit with a wave of propaganda about how the new misery that makes up their lives is a result of the failed “great experiment” that imposed liberalism and godlessness on the citizenry. They just won’t mention that that experiment began in 1789.

Personally, I fully expect to end up in the camps if the Republicans win this time. I’m a blasphemer, you see, a liberal, an intellectual, and a socialist. Why, with a record like that I don’t even have to be guilty of any crime, but no worries: courts in the land of Trump will be happy to secure convictions for the greater good of the party.

Think I’m exaggerating? Boy, I sure would like to think so. But I’ve read history, you see. I know how this sort of thing goes, and I don’t for an instant believe Americans are immune. There’s a reason the French and the Germans are watching events here with a mixture of horror and disgust. They’ve been down that road. They know all about having a Strong Leader to Make the Country Great Again in the Name of God. The leader won’t be strong; he’ll be brittle and cruel. The country won’t be great again; you’ll just get propaganda telling you it will become great only when enemies both inside and out have been eliminated, and they are the reason there is no food or services. And as usual, God will be silent, but every vicious opportunistic jackass in the country will be willing to speak up on his behalf—and amazingly, it turns out God hates anyone who so much as doubts Trump.

Can’t happen here? Folks, it very nearly has. We’re only one step away. And we might take that step Tuesday.

Posted on

1932 vs 2022 — The ‘last chance’ election

1932 vs 2022

The ‘last chance’ election

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

October 20th, 2022

www.zeppscommentaries.online

Back in the 1930s a lot of industrialists, not just in Germany but among most of the western democracies, gave aid and support to the National Socialist German Workers’ Party of Germany. The Nazis. Part of it was fear of communism. They had seen a successful revolution in Russia, and the popularity of communist and less extreme socialist parties was on the rise as the world was in the grip of a seemingly unending depression. Capitalism had suffered an economic collapse, and capitalists are like housecats: they consider themselves wholly independent and self-reliant and are totally oblivious to their complete need for the system that supports them.

In America, it was Franklin D. Roosevelt and the First One Hundred Days that prevented complete and utter economic collapse. Few people know that the day FDR took office, one third of American states were accepting script in lieu of American currency. Despite that, as the nation slowly and painfully backed away from the precipice, capitalists tried an abortive coup against FDR just months into his first term.

They felt that the solutions offered by Hitler were more likely to save them, and possibly the nation, than those offered by FDR. Then, like now, they had a disgraced General to be the face of the revolution: Smedley Butler then, and Michael Flynn now. Many of the same families that fed money and resources into the coup attempt then—the Bush family, the Morgans, the Scaifes, the DuPonts—now support MAGA.

They knew the odds of overthrowing the US government were slim, but they had promoted the Nazi Party. The reasoning then was the same as the reasoning their 21st century correlates have now: they knew they were supporting an erratic megalomaniac and risked totally destabilizing the country and throwing an already divided and desperate population into a nightmare age, but they believed that they could control the monster, stop some of his excesses, and ensure that he didn’t destroy his entire country, taking them down with him. They were wrong then. There is little reason to hope they won’t be wrong now.

As was the case then, they played up economic desperation, trumped-up fears of “others”, and vast amounts of propaganda to bend popular sentiment.

The problem is that had Trump or Hitler been working in a political vacuum, hated and reviled by the vast majority of the population, then they would have been able to control them, although that’s little guarantee that the results would have been much better. Capitalists by nature are fascist, and fascists are cruel, incompetent, and corrupt. Always. Without exception.

After four years of the most inept, dishonest and vicious administration, perhaps in all of US history, Trump was still able to attract over 74 million votes. His party is riddled with Trump acolytes, some of whom are certifiable lunatics. Which is why you have states declaring foetuses to be people, or banning the mention of the existence of transsexuals, or declaring openly that they will challenge any election they don’t win, but not any they do win. At least two Congressional candidates—one of whom is an incumbent—have the unanimous opposition of their own families, who are begging the public to reject their own flesh and blood on the grounds that they are destructive and dangerous maniacs. Both are MAGA Republicans, of course. Ron DeSantis has taken up shipping people and stranding them, only a step removed from sending them to camps. House Minority Leader McCarthy has said he will cut aid to Ukraine, and Republicans are promising to force defaults on the debt unless Democrats agree to the same draconian economic policies that bombed the British economy and got Liz Truss tossed from office after just 45 days.

Remember, America doesn’t have a Parliamentary democracy. There are no votes of no-confidence, no easy mechanism to remove the stupid and the dangerous. We’re pretty much stuck with them. And America’s one brake on congressional and state misgovernance, the courts, have been badly suborned by the Republicans. Most judges are honest, but that’s not true of the Supreme Court, which is now run by fascists and religious nuts.

Comparisons between MAGA and the Nazis, between Germany in 1932 and America right now, are not hyperbole. In both cases, you have powerful moneyed interests working hard to appeal to the disaffected with vicious propaganda and promises to make the country great, spearheaded by a vicious charlatan who openly flaunts his personal viciousness and ethical, moral bankruptcy.

If Republicans take over the House, it’s all over. Abortion will be banned nationwide. Gays and transgenders are next on the chopping block, followed by Muslims, immigrants, Hispanics and other minorities. More books will burn. More workers rights will vanish, along with consumer protections. Major oil companies will decide what is best for us to know about the burning of fossil fuels. And your vote will be utterly pointless because the Republicans will control how those votes are counted.

In three weeks, we’ll know if the US has a future or not, and if we have a future or not. Remember Germany in 1932, and try to turn back now. There won’t be any other chances.

Posted on

Enemy of the State — What to do about Trump if the legal system fails?

Enemy of the State

What to do about Trump if the legal system fails?

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

August 23rd, 2022

Ever since the FBI served a subpoena on Trump at his residence at Mar-A-Lago, things have just looked worse and worse for the disgraced former president. The New York Times reported yesterday that the FBI secured more than 300 documents that were classified ‘secret’ or ‘top secret’, totaling some 600 pages. Trump had no business having them in the first place, and it has now come to light, according to the Times, that “the 15 boxes Mr. Trump turned over to the archives in January, nearly a year after he left office, included documents from the C.I.A., the National Security Agency and the F.B.I. spanning a variety of topics of national security interest.” The Times goes on to say that Trump went through the boxes himself in “late 2021” which means he had to know what the contents were. Even if he wasn’t bright enough to understand the nuances of what he was stealing, he could clearly see the security designations on each one.

Trump’s guilt is evident. His latest filing admits he knowingly took the documents. He lied about having the documents. When he finally turned some over in January, he lied again and said he didn’t have any more. He admits that he went through them personally. I can’t help but marvel at the aching silence of Republicans who screamed for years about Sandy Berger, who took secure documents home but with no malign intent and was tried and punished, or Hillary Clinton, who had some emails on an unsecured server. Neither was 1% as serious as what Trump did.

It doesn’t help that Trump is making veiled threats both on his ridiculous Twitter knock-off, and on Faux News. He said, “People are so angry at what is taking place. Whatever we can do to help— because the temperature has to be brought down in the country. If it isn’t, terrible things are going to happen.”

Trump’s support is eroding quickly, so it may be an increasingly empty threat. Even the must rabid cult followers have to realize that if Trump is, in fact, a traitor, supporting him could damage reputations. As if being a MAGAt doesn’t.

Nice country youse got here. It would be a shame if SOMETHING should happen to it.

Given Trump’s level of literacy and intellectual laziness, I think we can dismiss the explanation offered by some Trump apologists that he took the documents (illegally) in order to do research for his memoirs. The man would be held back in the third grade, for Pete’s sake! He is no writer; one of his most vocal critics is the fellow who actually wrote “The Art of the Deal.”

Trump loved the trappings of office, and it’s been suggested that he wanted mementos of his time in power. But Trump loves the gaudy, the crass. He wouldn’t steal dry double-spaced documents; he would steal the White House cutlery, White House statuary, pictures of himself with world leaders.

It’s also been suggested that he took the documents in hopes of selling them to foreign powers. Certainly there is a market there; China, possibly, and almost certainly Russia. Trump may well have GIVEN Putin national secrets as a quid pro quo for the Russian involvement in the 2016 election.

But I think Michael Powell, former Trump personal lawyer and torpedo, a man who has spent decades immersed in the absolute depravity, dishonesty and cruelty of Trumpworld, has the right idea. He thinks Trump is planning to extort America. It’s his ‘get out of jail free’ card.

That makes sense. Beyond all the “stolen election” bluster, Trump had to know he lost, and that the Republicans had lost the House, as well. He still had the Senate, but as the January 6th primary drew near, his advisors had to know there was a chance that Democrats might win both special elections in Georgia (which they did) and at that point, he would be open to Congressional investigations. After his failed coup attempt, he probably took some chances, stealing documents that could cripple America.

The FBI taking those boxes hasn’t ended that threat: we don’t know they got everything he stole, or how much he scanned and put in a safe spot on the internet for release In The Event Of.

He suspects (with good cause) that he might be able to threaten the legal system into dropping the matter. Should the voters give Republicans control of the House, any pretense of serving national interest will vanish overnight and the January 6th Committee disbanded and its members, along with the DOJ, at the mercy of some of the scummiest creatures in America in a parade of endless showcase ‘investigation.’ Republican have already openly made that threat.

Capitalism, which Trump epitomizes, and a degraded form of Christianity have corrupted the judicial system just enough that Trump could get convictions overturned there. Do you really think THIS Supreme Court would uphold convictions for Insurrection or even Treason?

The remaining question is how badly Trump has corrupted the intelligence services. We know the Secret Service is corrupt. There is strong evidence that the Homeland Security Inspector-General is corrupt. But is it corrupt enough?

Well, Trump might be betting his life on that. If the CIA is still true to its mission, and believes that Trump is willfully extorting or profiting from national secrets, then they might just respond in the time-honored fashion of spy agencies, and engage in some black ops against Trump. I doubt the Secret Service would want to face that particular threat. And the MAGA crowd, no matter how loyal to Trump, wouldn’t have a chance.

Obviously, the far better recourse is to have Trump stand trial, fair and open and scrupulously honest, and if convicted, go to jail. That beats the hell out of seeing a former President assassinated by the government, which no matter what the circumstances, is a horrible route for America to take. But Trump isn’t in the habit of offering reasonable options, so this has to be on someone’s mind at DHS headquarters.

Hopefully, Trump will consider that—and take his chances with an honest trial without threats against the country.

Will that happen? Well, this IS Trump.

Prepare for the worse.

Posted on

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier…Donald Trump — Disgraced Ex-President facing charges of espionage

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier…Donald Trump

Disgraced President facing charges of espionage

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

August 12th 2022

www.zeppscommentaries.online

Property to be seized

“All physical documents and records constituting evidence, contraband, fruits of crime, or other items illegally possessed in violation of 18 U.S.C. §§ 793, 2071, or 1519, including the following:
a. Any physical documents with classification markings, along with any containers/boxes (including any other contents) in which such documents are located, as well as any other containers/boxes that are collectively stored or found together with the aforementioned documents and containers/boxes;
b. Information, including communications in any form, regarding the retrieval, storage, or transmission of national defense information or classified material ;
c. Any government and/or Presidential Records created between January 20, 2017, and January 20, 2021; or
d. Any evidence of the knowing alteration, destruction, or concealment of any government and/or Presidential Records, or of any documents with classification markings.”

The search warrant that was served on Donald Trump includes cites of the United States Code that could result in prison sentences of 3, 10, and 20 years on each count by which Trump ends up convicted. And each seemingly has evidence supporting multiple counts.

First, a quick glance at the codes Trump apparently has violated. I included links to the actual text so people can see for themselves. 793 alone runs several pages. It’s the one Trump needs to worry the most about: it’s not an accusation of actual espionage, but rather a basis for which a criminal charge of espionage might be made. In essence it says, “this is what the guy had, and it’s clear he had no legitimate reason to have it and it could be given or sold to people to use against us.” By itself it’s a grave charge, and if convicted, Trump would be banned from ever holding any office or position of public trust ever again. Assuming, of course, he lived long enough to get out of jail. Maybe he can hope President Boebert will pardon him.

Let’s start with the statutes cited as the basis for the warrant. 18 U.S.C. §§ 793 begins, Whoever, for the purpose of obtaining information respecting the national defense with intent or reason to believe that the information is to be used to the injury of the United States, or to the advantage of any foreign nation…Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.

Then there’s 18 U.S.C. §§ 2071.

(a) Whoever willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, or destroys, or attempts to do so, or, with intent to do so takes and carries away any record, proceeding, map, book, paper, document, or other thing, filed or deposited with any clerk or officer of any court of the United States, or in any public office, or with any judicial or public officer of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.

(b) Whoever, having the custody of any such record, proceeding, map, book, document, paper, or other thing, willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, falsifies, or destroys the same, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both; and shall forfeit his office and be disqualified from holding any office under the United States. As used in this subsection, the term “office” does not include the office held by any person as a retired officer of the Armed Forces of the United States.

Finally, there’s 18 U.S.C. §§ 1519

Whoever knowingly alters, destroys, mutilates, conceals, covers up, falsifies, or makes a false entry in any record, document, or tangible object with the intent to impede, obstruct, or influence the investigation or proper administration of any matter within the jurisdiction of any department or agency of the United States or any case filed under title 11, or in relation to or contemplation of any such matter or case, shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.

It crossed my mind from time to time starting in mid 2020 when it was becoming clear that Trump wasn’t going to win the election that he might try to grab sensitive secrets through his office and use them to blackmail the United States or simply help his buddy Putin. While I had an accurate view of his viciousness and moral depravity, I once again overestimated his intelligence. He kept this stuff at his Mar-a-Lago compound in a safe that one agent described as “being the type of safe you find in hotel rooms that are pieces of junk good only for preventing the maid from stealing your laptop.” The man is fantastically arrogant and profoundly stupid. I’ve said before that Trump’s incompetence is his best feature, in that it will save us all from Trump, and here we are.

There are reasonably credible reports that at least some of the top secret material he had stashed was nuclear. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed for conspiring to give away nuclear secrets. There apparently is other material relating to top secret process procedures the US uses in dealing with adversarial nations.

If this is all true, then Trump will end up on trial for espionage.

And his followers are already up in arms. One bozo tried to attack an FBI office in Cincinnati with a nailgun. The judge who signed the search warrant has been getting death threats and antisemitic smears. Fox News linked him to Jeffrey Epstein, which would have been a legitimate story (if irrelevant) but then, being Fox, fabricated a picture of the Judge hanging out with Epstein. Fox News is utter trash, the lowest form of propaganda. There’s talk amongst the dupes of civil war.

So my suggestion to these people is mellow your shit out and see what happens. Donald fucked around. Now we all get to find out. In the meantime, remember that Donald Trump is a really stupid hill to die on. Don’t do it. Serve your country by exercising a little patience and common sense.

error

Enjoy Zepps Commentaries? Please spread the word :)