Category: American Psyche

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Why Dictators Stop Being Great — They Fall; Hitler, Stalin…Trump

‪Bryan Zepp Jamieson

April 27th 2025

“It’s easy to be cynical about public opinion, but scholars of authoritarianism are pretty clear that there’s a serious difference in what an autocrat polling at 80% and what one polling at 40% can do. Not obeying in advance includes not surrendering to specious narratives of omnipotence.”

Tim Marchman‬, ‪@timmarchman.bsky.social‬

Perhaps the most reassuring item in the news this week was that Trump is cratering in all the polls. Overall, his approval rating is minus 10 (45-55) and he’s underwater on all policy elements, including immigration. Apparently throwing out American toddlers with cancer is, even for the most rabid haters in MAGA, a bit much.

Marchman is absolutely correct about the role public opinion can play in the rise and fall of despots. People don’t like to admit it, but Hitler was immensely popular in the 1930s, not just in Germany, but in the United States as well.

In Germany, once he had established power, Hitler’s mesmeric sway over the German people was almost unbounded. The huge cheering crowds were totally unfeigned, and the girls blowing kisses and flowers at the fuhrer doubtlessly fantasied about having his babies. Absurd as it may seem, the brown-eyed mousy-haired little man, so similar to a famed American comedian of the time, was seen as the exemplar racialist dream. After all, he saved the economy. He beat inflation. He made Germany great again. He rid the country of enemies, foreign and domestic, real and imagined. (Does any of this sound familiar?)

It wasn’t until the tide turned against Germany following D-Day and the Russian resurgence that his popularity began to crack. Like all despots, he banned polls and independent news, but he couldn’t stop people from gossiping and whispering about the empty shelves, the strange lack of neighbors, the lack of any news from overseas, and of course the huge number of families with war dead.

Hitler knew the limits to his support, no matter how propped up it was by propaganda and news control. There was a reason all of his death camps were built outside of Germany and in the occupied territories. His work camps, hardly any less atrocious, were portrayed as happy, productive, genial places with smiling parents watching healthy children playing in the sun.

Hitler had extraordinary influence and popularity in the UK and the US prior to the start of the war. Ken Burns did a three part six-hour documentary about it in 2022, The US and the Holocaust. One example he noted was that after Charlie Chaplin did The Great Dictator, pressure from Germany ensured that America made no more films disparaging Germany and its fuhrer until hostilities actually broke out.

American plutocrats in 1933, envious of Germany’s apparent rise from the depths of the Great Depression and admiring of Hitler’s approach to undesirables, actually staged an abortive attempt to overthrow FDR and replace him with General Smedley Butler. It was aptly known as the Wall Street Putsch.

Despite the fact that Butler had voted for FDR and hated capitalism, American plutocrats, who were no smarter or more loyal than our present bunch, felt he would reverse all the proposed New Deal stuff and return America to the capitalist greatness that had ruined it in the first place. (Trump likes to rhapsodize about the “good old days” of the Gilded Age, from post-Civil War until Teddy Roosevelt, a “golden era” that saw two major depressions, thousands of bank failures, and an appalling standard of living for 95% of Americans.)

Accounts vary on how close the plotters (which included the same prominent families that support Trump today) came to actually pulling this off. Close enough that the NY Times tried to pretend it never happened, anyway. If there had been polls in those days, Hitler probably would have polled better than FDR, at least amongst people wealthy enough to have telephones. (A presidential preference poll a few years later proved catastrophically wrong because it solicited opinions only from those who had phones.)

People don’t like to admit it, but Stalin was also immensely popular in the USSR. Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn has a passage in “The Gulag Archipelago” about how the inmates in the prison containing Solzhenitsyn erupted in an outpouring of utter grief at the loss of the leader and father of the working class. Most of those weeping had been unjustly imprisoned for anywhere from ten to twenty-five years by Stalin, for trivial or non-existent “Anti-Soviet Agitation” charges. One such mourner was a man who had been practicing his signature on a copy of Pravda and was impolitic enough to write one of his autographs across an image of Stalin. Ten years in the Gulag for that. Yes, he mourned the loss of his Great Leader.

But the USSR provides a perfect example of just how important the “consent of the governed” can be. It fell, in 1990, the most repressive and brutal regime in modern history, with nary a shot being fired. People were simply fed up, and en masse, the citizenry took away their support.

America has several advantages. First, the dictatorship of both Germany and the USSR arose at a time when both nations were in horrible condition, with widespread corruption, hunger, and humiliation. All the stuff Fox News likes to pretend America was suffering from under Joe Biden, only of course it wasn’t. Second, we have polls, and enough of a free press that we don’t have to take the word of Katherine Leavitt (Baghdad Barbie) as to how well-loved Trump is. And if Hitler and the Soviets were incompetent, capricious, and cruel, Trump is just as bad, only he lacks the wit to hide his mistakes. Finally, the same weakness that allowed Americans to stumble blindly into a Trump dictatorship is also their greatest strength: they have no history of living under dictatorial regimes, and even before it gets off the ground, a majority of Americans want to end it.

Trump wants to end Wikipedia. He is trying to end a free media. He is arresting judges. He doesn’t like stories about how he’s throwing American children with cancer into his El Salvador death camp.

But even if he manages to still those voices, people will talk. And notice the privations, the loss, the ‘disappeared’ and the vicious cruelty that dictatorial regimes always employ.

With a free press, the end will come quicker.

Stay informed.

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After the Demonstrations — Ways to further block fascism

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

April 22nd, 2025

New York Times columnist David Brooks has called for a “comprehensive national civic uprising” to protest the Trump administration. Brooks, who has been with the Times since the invention of dirt, is the ultimate establishment ‘button-down’ conservative. When HE calls for a “comprehensive national civic uprising,” you know we’re well out of normal times.

I was at the local demonstration Saturday, and while the crowd was enthusiastic, it was about two-thirds the size of the rally held two weeks earlier. Part of that was because it was cooler and windier, and because it was on Easter weekend.

But it got me thinking. The 50501 “Hands Off” rallies, while terrific at galvanizing public opinion, aren’t going to be enough. Interest will wane, especially since it would become obvious it wasn’t slowing Trump’s fascist coup against America in the slightest.

Brooks is right; a civic uprising is needed. I’m not thinking peasants with pitchforks and blood in the streets; with a half-billion guns loose in the country, that’s the last thing we need. What we do need are national strikes. Yes, plural. Rolling strikes, areas hit once per week.

When you hear the word ‘strike’ you may think of workers walking off the job in protest. But this is America: only 3% of workers have union protection, and most unions are barred by law from having ‘wildcat’ strikes. And most states have what is laughingly referred to as “right-to-work” laws which generally translates to “at will” employment. You only have a job until the boss gets a bug up his ass, and you’re out the door, usually without so much as a day’s warning.

The fact is most American workers don’t have much more in the way of job security and rights than your typical wage slave in Bangladesh. Most people live paycheck to paycheck, and are perhaps two months away from homelessness. It’s a shit work culture, but it’s the result of 45 years of Reaganomics.

So a strike has to be something much more than workplace actions.

They may have coercive power over you on the job, but they can’t make you buy stuff. There have already been embargoes ranging from one day to one week against major retailers such as Amazon and Nestle, and boycotts against Target and similar outfits that have been ongoing, and they’ve been effective enough to cause worry in the right quarters. The Trump admin already floated the idea of a 5 year prison sentence for anyone demonstrating in front of a Tesla dealership. Elon Musk has already figured out that the widespread hatred caused by his rampage through most government programs isn’t going away, and he has already lost hundreds of billions and risks losing it all. He announced he’s getting out of politics by the end of May. Hopefully he’ll get the fuck out of the country.

But picture this: the manager at the local fast-food joint has already told his employees that if they so much as call in sick on the day of a scheduled strike, he’ll fire them. Yes, in much of the county, a shit boss like him can get away with that crap. Because we still have full employment, jobs are scarce, and he holds the whip.

But come the day of the strike, all the employees he coerced into showing up are standing around idle, because walk-in business has dropped 70%. He’ll send some of them home, of course, and if he’s a big enough a bastard, he might try telling them not to join any protests that might be going on.

If this happens once a week, he’s going to see that his profit margins—which in the fast-food industry are pretty thin—are vanishing. He can’t take a 10% overall loss in business.

And if he starts firing people, he may find he no longer has any control over them, and they may well be standing across the street from his business on days of the strike, adding to the pressure for people to stay away and urging employees to engage in malicious compliance.

What we need to do is set up five zones across the country, one for each workday, Monday through Friday. One day per week, we get as many people as possible to buy nothing (currently such actions exempt small, locally-owned businesses, and that’s a wise distinction to make). Nothing purchased on line, and skip lunch at the chain eatery. Don’t buy groceries that day. (It’s ok to stock up the day before if needed—the bosses will notice the one day slump a lot more than a smaller one-day bump in sales.)

And on those Zone days, everyone who can, protest. It can be as small as a bumper sticker, or a small flag, or even a prearranged dress code (for instance, everyone wear something red on the Zone Action Day.) If you can march and chant and ring cow bells, do so. Just…don’t let up.

And keep the pressure on elected officials. Republicans are already running scared, and they need to realize that Trump and his MAGAts are the lesser of two factions. They are between a rock and a hard place, and you are the hard place.

And talk to people. Persuade them that this is no longer just “politics”; it’s the survival of a free and open America. These aren’t disagreements over policy; this is a fight to stop a fascist coup against the United States, and if we don’t stop them now, then we may face a very bloody war as the final option. And nobody with any sense of decency or intelligence wants to go there.

We fight hard now, or we fight for our very lives later. There’s no point in asking nicely. The fascists aren’t going to simply go away.

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Trumpenomics — The best way to save money is to waste it

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

April 12th, 2025

G. Elliot Morris, formerly one of the guiding geniuses behind the late, lamented 538 website, came up with this tidbit today: “According to the Hamilton Project data, the U.S. government has spent $2.17 trillion as of April 10, 2025, at 7:00 p.m. ET (the data, which comes from the Treasury, is updated in near-real-time). That is just shy of a 6% increase over spending on the same date in 2024 when the feds had spent “just” $2.05 trillion at this point in the year. This puts the US federal government on track to spend $8 trillion this year, barring other budget changes…”

As odd as that stat is in light of ElonTrump’s chainsaw ‘cost-cutting’ measures, it only tells a small part of the tale. In fact, trillions of dollars have been lost over the past two months to waste, fraud and abuse, and even though Trump had to scurry back on his “Liberation Day” tariffs in light of a potential total economic collapse, the wholesale destruction will continue.

The slashes to government programs, big and small, have been capricious, arbitrary, and often cruel. Thousands of on-going projects have been stopped in their tracks, even though the money for them had already been allocated and spent, meaning that money—hundreds of billions—has been thrown away. Just the ongoing research programs that just got torched alone were in the billions.

They’ve gutted thousands of departments by taking a very systematic and subtle approach: just fire anybody who a) is on probationary status and b) has a vowel or a consonant in their name. This meant every promising new hire who hadn’t been there two years yet, all temporary employees, and anyone who had just been promoted for doing a superior job but whose promotion came with probationary status. With no regard to capabilities or functions.

Courts have ordered thousands of employees unfired, and many of those returned to find their chairs, their desks, and their computers all gone, either trashed or dumped at fire sale prices.

Many of the most important (and popular) government programs, including the Department of Education, NOAA, NASA, Department of the Interior and Social Security are being gutted. That last one, which makes up about 10% of national economic income for the general public, is teetering and in danger of collapse. They want to privatize the Post Office, which means thousands of non-profitable rural post offices will close even as the price of sending a letter explodes ten-fold.

I’ve actually had right wingers whine that we wouldn’t be complaining if a Democrat did to the government what Trump is doing. Typical of MAGAts—they love to howl about what victims they are as they rape and bully everyone around them.

Fact is, Democrats DID cut government spending, and even balanced the budget. This was in Bill Clinton’s second term, with vice President Al Gore overseeing the government efficiency task force. It was called “Reinventing Government” It eliminated what Elaine Kamarck, administrator of the program, said was “more than 400,000 federal positions between 1993 and 2000 through a combination of voluntary departures, attrition and a relatively small number of layoffs.”

Hundreds of departments were merged or eliminated, and the savings were so great that the Clinton administration had the first (and last) balanced budget since 1968. The day George Bush Jr took office, newspapers and economists where rhapsodizing about “surpluses as far as the eye can see” and there was serious talk of retiring the national debt by 2010. Of course, Republican fiscal fecklessness and greed, serving the notion that the national treasury should be the plaything of the very rich, eliminated the surpluses and instead created record floods of red ink, which their propagandists assured the public was the result of “Democrat spending.” It was a lie, but it was repeated endlessly.

And Reinventing Government slid into the memory hole, partly because it didn’t support the fascist narrative, and partly because it worked exactly the way government was supposed to work: democratically, with decision-making and responsibility shared between Congress and the executive, and with time taken to determine what jobs and projects served a good purpose and which were just accumulated fat. It worked so well hardly anybody even noticed it.

So the next time some wankers moan in self pity that people just hate right wingers, it isn’t politics or factionalism; it’s disgust for greed, incompetence, capriciousness and viciousness. The Democrats used competence, honesty, and good faith. The difference is night and day. People don’t hate Trump and Musk for “saving money”; they hate them because they are hateful people who are destroying the country and selling it off for parts and at our expense.

Even though Trump had to back off on his massive tariffs folly, the damage is already nearly unrecoverable. Not just the incredible waste and incompetence of his “cost-cutting”; the extraneous damage inflicted.

The bond market is teetering. US bonds are the “safe haven” for investors during market crashes, something that New Deal economics took out of our lives which Reaganomics restored. Stocks tank, you invest in bonds and wait it out.

But bonds depend entirely on “The Full Faith and Credit” of the United States, and under this administration, nobody trusts that government. As far as good credit goes, the US might as well be Zimbabwe. And the bond market—nearly $30 trillion in size—relies entirely on trust in the US government.

You hear a lot about China owning a chunk of that, and it does: about $1.8 trillion. About 6%, more or less. A small but significant share. (Most of the bond market is money the US owes to itself).

Trump is going out of his way to antagonize and even insult the Chinese with his mindless bluster. If China tanks the bond market, they will take great economic damage. But the US would be ruined. It would take decades for the nation to recover, and it wouldn’t look anything like the US that we all enjoyed in the 20th century.

It’s clear Trump isn’t running the show: his plutocrats, including Musk, are. But they aren’t noticeably smarter or more competent, and often mistake greed for wisdom. Most of them have the compassion and knowledge of Charles Montgomery Burns, Homer Simpson’s boss. Two words: Howard Lutnick. And he’s not even the worst one: far from it. Trump’s Secretary of Education is talking about using that thinking computer thingie for educating the kids, what was it she called it? Oh, yes, “A-One.”

Hope she didn’t pick Hewlett-Packard for the computers. Everyone knows HP and A One are competitors.

Sheesh.

 

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Trump America — Another business destined to fail

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

April 5th 2025

When the Dow drops 3,600 points—9% of its value—in just two days, it’s pretty safe to say market conditions are ‘unsettled’ in much the same way that Grindavik is unsettled.

My guess is we’ll see a partial recovery Monday, and then the slide will resume. It’s illegal to manipulate markets for a quick and dirty profit, but that’s hardly going to slow down Donald Trump, America’s most powerful con man. He’ll keep right on making announcements that will manipulate the market to his advantage.

The game has already begun. Erik the Moron piped up today, saying that the tariffs were “negotiable” and the first countries to negotiate would get the best deals.

While that made perfect sense to a dimwitted conman, it will also completely blows up the premise behind Trump’s tariffs. The stated reason is that it will force manufacturing to either move to America or start up there. But that means the tariffs have to be inflexible and permanent. Nobody is going to go to the trouble and expense of moving their operations stateside only to find the tariffs have been dropped or reduced and they find themselves competing with competitors back in their previous locales who didn’t move.

The sheer hucksterism of “move now because these deals won’t last” is pretty jawdropping.

Of course, to make a factory that was paying its employees $1.50 a day to set up shop in America means that to make it work, the have to slash pay scales and find a way to greatly reduce all other costs to match what they were paying in Vietnam or Laos or wherever. In other words, to make it worth the overhead of the tariffs, they would have to cut everything to third world levels: no OSHA, no FDA, no EPA, no minimum wage, nothing.

Donald, of course is working hard to get rid of all that crap. It’s patriotic to send your eight year old to work in a poisonous, dangerous place where they might live to be 12 if they’re lucky. Florida is already working on legislation to replace migrant labor with child labor. No, I’m not kidding.

Warren Buffet, who knows a thing or two about the markets, suggested that Trump also inflicted the incoherent tariffs in order to drive interest rates up, something that would also greatly profit the markets. That statement left Donald screaming in rage, which tells you that Buffet pretty much nailed it.

Trump is openly defying courts, ignoring direct orders not to send innocent people to his gulags, knowing that the five fascists on the supreme court will rule in his favor. It won’t be Donald who ends the United States: it will be Thomas, Kavanaugh, Alito, Gorsuch and Coney Barrett, none of whom seem to realize that once they’ve ended the country, they will no longer have any importance to anyone. Some of them are rich and will do OK in the new plutocracy, but lawn jockeys like Thomas and religious whack jobs like Coney Barret will find themselves on the outside looking in.

Basically, the plutocrats are working to parcel out the United States and make it an impoverished third-world nation while making off with tens of trillions in profits. It’s the biggest heist in history. Then they move on to the next prosperous zone and conduct a parasitic orgy there. China would be a sensible target since it’s already authoritarian. If they aren’t stopped, your life, and the life of your children, will be one of misery and deprivation.

Think Trump and his manipulators are not out to ruin your life and kill your children? Consider this Raw Story news article today: “A federal judge in Rhode Island accused the Trump administration of “covertly” withholding funds for Federal Emergency Management Agency disaster relief programs from states that didn’t vote for him, Courthouse News reported on Friday. In March, U.S. District Judge John McConnell issued a preliminary injunction in favor of 23 states that sued the government over its plan to implement a broad pause to state aid,” noted the report.”

A court finding is a bit more than a accusation. The reason McConnell ruled the way he did was because he had solid, incontrovertible evidence that Trump was deliberately cheating people for the crime of living in a state that didn’t vote for him.

Pussy Riot, indisputably the bravest rock group in the world, showed up in Manhattan today to urge Americans stand up for themselves against Trump’s planned tyranny. The cowardice of the Republicans is well documented. Democrats, as always, are divided on the notion of whether ‘tis nobler to be spineless, gutless, boot-licking cowards or not. Fortunately, most are not.

It’s the same as with the American public, where I’ve had people tell me they won’t come to today’s demonstrations because they want to keep their heads down and survive. Understandable, but I have to wonder what makes them think life outside of Trump’s gulags will be any improvement. He plans to leave you in poverty and squalor. That’s what’s in store. At least in prison you’ll get moldy bread and contaminated water, just like you would outside. And inside, nobody expects you to pretend to love Trump. Hopefully.

As most of you know, four American serviceman drowned in Lithuania in a motor vehicle mishap. Their bodies were eventually all recovered, and as the caskets were taken to the airport yesterday for the flight back to America, thousands of Lithuanians lined the streets to pay their respects.

The servicemen landed today, but Donald Trump wasn’t there.

He had a golf tournament to watch. That was more important than losers and suckers.

The rallies against Trump begin in an hour and a half (I’m finishing this at 7:25 PDT). I’m hoping nationwise five million will show up, but I think three million will get the point across. There may have do be more than one day of rallies, and widespread strikes and boycotts. But if we want our freedoms back, that’s what it’s going to take.

In a world of Cory Bookers, don’t be a Mike Johnson.

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Lost Signal — Even by Trump’s standards, this was dismal

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

March 27th 2025

The breaking story about the Signal chat group conversation leading up to the bombing of Houthis in Yemen was already one of the most egregious and bizarre in the annals of American history.

Accidentally inviting the top editor of one of America’s most renowned journalistic magazines, (Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, in case you’ve been on the far side of the Moon this past week) to a group chat about a pending military attack is a bit like being in an NFL team huddle and glancing up to see the stadium announcer is also in the huddle, holding a microphone, listening carefully to the play plan and nodding thoughtfully.

Of course, to stretch that simile further, in this particular huddle there’s no assurance that any of the guys wearing your uniform are actually on the same team. You already know the coach is working for the other guys, after all.

The participants, caught out, have been throwing excuses and lies around madly in all directions like custard pies in a Mack Sennet movie. They’ve tried claiming that the transcript was a hoax, that they didn’t discuss classified information, and that Goldberg made it up because he doesn’t like Trump.

Tulsi Gabbard doesn’t seem to know what country she was in during the discussion. Well, you know how it is: you see one Asian country, you’ve seen all of them. At least one participant was in Moscow during the chat.

Speaking of Moscow, it seems that the reason the Pentagon had issued a blanket order the week before to never use Signal for any official reasons was because Russia had successfully hacked the encryption of the app. And while the Russians may not have been involved with this particular breach, it seems that the names, phone numbers, emails and passwords of all the participants in the session were available online.

About the only people who didn’t know were the American public. But by inviting Goldberg, they got that covered.

To call this a clusterfuck is a bit like saying the Fyre Festival didn’t go well. It’s damning with faint praise.

National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, the man who somehow invited Goldberg to the chat room, claims he never met Goldberg and had no idea who he was. Evidence, including photographs, says otherwise. It’s not quite clear how inviting a total stranger to a top-secret national security chat is somehow better than inviting the editor of the Atlantic. Apparently one guy there was awaiting confirmation to his government post!

But never mind all that. One person was conspicuous by his absence: Le grand citrouille, King Pumpkin, the Donald.

You seen scenes where a major military operation is underway, and they release photos of the president and his cabinet all sitting around, looking tense and serious as they rescue hostages or grease bin Laden or whatever.

Not in this case. The closest to presidential leadership is when one of the participants says vaguely that he thinks Donald approves of what they’re doing here. Evidence suggests that Trump had no idea what was going on. To paraphrase the famous Watergate investigative question: “What did he know, and does he know that he knew it?” It seems pretty clear that the President of the United States was absent simply because he had nothing to offer.

Trump himself seems to have no idea what the scandal is about, and is mostly reduced to his boilerplate deflection and denial, some of which may actually be valid. It’s pretty clear he has no idea what Signal is, but having discerned that something called Signal was involved, he has declared it defective and wants people to look into it. After all, it let that Goldberg, who was mean to him in the past, in. Something must be wrong with Signal.

He’s variously tried claiming the transcript was a hoax (that backfired: Goldberg released more to show it wasn’t) and that the Democrats were to blame somehow, and that no secrets were discussed. (Several of the participants have tried making that claim, stopping just short of saying the dog ate their homework.) He is, in a word, clueless.

He doesn’t even have the wit to address the specifics, but is just generally doing The Donald, the things he always does when he’s feeling defensive. He’s the old guy with the cane batting at imaginary insects.

He finally realized that there was something to all this confusing ‘signal’ stuff and described the event as a ‘glitch’ and boasted that it was the first glitch in the two months of his administration. A sardonically amused Rachel Maddow that evening spent a full half hour running down the glitches so far. She didn’t pad it or speak slowly. It’s an impressive pile of glitches, worthy of Inspector Clouseau.

But no worries: Trump will have Clouseau’s real-life equivalent, Inspector Hegseth, in to determine what, if anything, happened.

In addition to the blatant incompetence, malice and possible treason, public discourse needs to include whether Trump has any control over this gang of fascists, crooks and subversives or is just their little smiley face for the public. Are the lights on? Is anybody home?

The next day we learned that a) four US soldiers were missing in Lithuania and b) nobody had bothered to tell Trump about it.

If you need more evidence of how feckless, reckless, and anti-American this junta is, consider the following exchange between Congressman Jim Himes of Connecticut and alleged Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.

HIMES: Do you think it’s responsible for you, as head of the intelligence community, to retweet posts from individuals affiliated with Russian state media?

GABBARD: That retweet came from my personal account.

HIMES: Personal account? You’re the Director of National Intelligence, not an Instagram influencer. There’s no such thing as “personal” when you’re elevating Kremlin propaganda.

GABBARD: I have the right to share information—

HIMES: Information? You mean Russian disinformation. You sit in high-level intelligence briefings, then turn around and boost the same narratives Moscow is pushing. Should we just CC the Kremlin on your next meeting and cut out the middleman?

GABBARD: This is just an attempt to smear me—

HIMES: Smear you? You lied under oath in a Senate hearing yesterday, claiming you knew nothing about classified information, while sitting in Signal chats where war plans were discussed. You retweet Kremlin-backed sources, then act shocked when people question your loyalties.

GABBARD: I’m focused on national security—

HIMES: National security? While pushing Russian propaganda and pretending you’re clueless about intelligence leaks? If a Democrat had done half of this, you’d be screaming treason on national TV.

GABBARD: This is about free speech—

HIMES: Free speech? You’re the President’s top intelligence advisor, not some random guy on Twitter. Every word you amplify has consequences. And right now, you’re handing America’s enemies exactly what they want—straight from your “personal account.”

https://x.com/Acyn/status/1904907517261705605

Speaking of Twitter, I’m a bit surprised Musk wasn’t one of the participants. I suppose he’s too busy destroying the United States, though. That can keep a man busy, you know.

Or maybe he’ll join the chat when they discuss bombing Toronto. Hopefully the Russians will leak that before it happens.

 

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The Rise of Emperor Trump — After the Don, Darkness

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

March 16th, 2025

That Donald Trump is mad almost goes without saying. He has been a pathological malignant narcissist his entire life, going back to a loveless childhood with a cruel and vicious father, a wraith of a mother; no friends, not even pets.

Long before he entered politics, he was widely hated and despised for his cruelty, his dishonesty, his open contempt for women and his hatred of minorities. His wealth protected him from the consequences of his mental illness, but his history of civil suits tells a squalid tale of lust, greed, viciousness, and open thievery. He is and always has been a wastrel, a moral and ethical sewer of a man. Had he been born poor, I am certain he would have died in prison long before he reached thirty years of age.

His unrestrained presidency has been the absolute nightmare many of us feared, as he throws away an entire nation for his own aggrandizement. Manipulated by fascist billionaire scum, given a army of servile and ever-compliant underlings to wreak his will, Trump is rapidly tearing apart the fabric of society, replacing the United States with…

Well, history tells the tale. People may consider this time utterly insane, a time of nihilistic orgy and abandonment of human mores, but historians recognize this. Oh, yes, we’ve trodden this path before. I’ll give a few examples shortly.

I caught some of Trump’s characteristically windy speech at the Department of Justice the other day. It was the same as the SOTU and his stump speeches. People are stupid enough to let him mar memorial services and other solemn occasions with the same self-serving bullshit. The same litany of lies, defamations, whinging, racism, hatred of all who are different from him, and bellicosity. And I realized: that’s all he’s capable of doing any more.

We know that in his first term, “Doctor” Ronnie Jackson saw fit to administer the Montreal Cognitive Assessment Test to Trump. It’s a simple fifteen minute test used to set benchmarks for onset or continuing development of dementia and/or Alzheimer’s. It’s not something a doctor would ask of a sitting President of the United States without a damned solid reason. I don’t know if they administered any such test to Reagan in his second term, when his mental decline was becoming evident, but he and his staff were together enough not to blurt it out to the public. Trump actually boasted about it, repeatedly, and never realized that just the fact that someone thought he needed to take such a test raised a whole host of questions.

Age-related dementia is progressive and irreversible. It progresses at various rates, even in individuals, and along with increasing loss of cognitive abilities, it can cause catastrophic personality changes. While it can take people who have been pleasant all their lives and turn them into utter horrid monsters, I’ve never heard of a case where a life-long jerk got compassionate or thoughtful.

Trump is well into dementia, and propped up by his toadies and never held to account, so he’s only going to get worse.

I suspect that’s why Elon Musk has effectively co-opted Trump’s office. He’s a young, vicious, soulless libertarian with his own set of mental problems, exactly what the fascists want, and he’s there to “be” Trump long after Trump has forgotten he’s president.

I repeat. It’s only going to get worse.

There isn’t a country in Europe or Asia that hasn’t seen a peaceful and beneficial land fall to madness and destruction. Indeed, Trump is just an example of such madness that is presently expanding globally: Russia, Iraq, Iran, Hungary, the Philippines, Brazil, the list is getting longer. Eventually fascists/theocrats collapse due to corruption, cruelty and incompetence, but they can cost millions and even tens of millions of lives in the process. Best to avoid it in the first place, but humanity is flawed. As history shows:

An excellent summation of History’s Nine Worst Leaders by Conner Brighton can be found here.

https://www.worldatlas.com/history/history-s-9-worst-leaders.html

I have made light edits for clarity in both excerpts.

Commodus was the son of the previous emperor Marcus Aurelius and had been groomed for the position his whole life. However, despite his father’s best efforts, it would seem as though Commodus was destined for a life of selfishness and cruelty.

From a young age, he was justly hated by those around him for his inflated ego and lack of honor. The resentment held towards Commodus only grew when Marcus Aurelius suddenly died in 180 AD and his son came to power.

At no point throughout his twelve-year reign did Commodus show any concern for the well-being of the empire. He was much too concerned with holding lavish festivals, gladiatorial games, and extravagant parties for himself and the few friends he had in the Roman senate.

Commodus was exceptionally paranoid and routinely had members of his court executed for treason without the smallest shred of evidence. He also built up an obsession with becoming a gladiator himself. Something that was considered unbelievably low class for any decent Roman, let alone an emperor.

He would hold “fights” against other gladiators in a vain effort to prove his combat ability. These contests would of course be rigged in his favor. He never did kill any of his opponents but he was known to slice off the odd ear or nose depending on his mood. Commodus would often claim that he was undefeated in the arena and that there was not a man alive who could beat him…

…Commodus was so bad that his rule would spark an end to the Roman golden age and almost prematurely destroyed the Roman Empire.

If that doesn’t bear a ton of similarities to the tale of Donald Trump, I don’t know what does. I could picture him employing AI to stage gladiator fights between himself and his enemies, real or imagined, with predictably vainglorious results. Or continue what he’s already doing now, which is forwarding the absurdly over-the-top tractor art of him riding a dragon or blessing Jesus or looking compassionate and heroic.

There’s a temptation to compare Trump to the even more notorious Caligula, but Trump seems to have stopped raping virgins, and while he’s sent many jackasses to the Senate, he’s never sent a horse.

Robert Mugabe

Almost as soon as Mugabe took power, the standard of living began to decline drastically [in Zimbabwe]. Access to education and healthcare took an immediate dive. Even access to clean food and drinking water became a struggle.

In 1987 Mugabe declared himself the first-ever executive president. This made Zimbabwe essentially a one-party state in all but name. There were plenty of elections held between 1987 and 2017 but all of them were plagued with accusations of Mugabe using violence and political pressure to rig elections and intimidate would-be opponents from running against him.

Aside from the endless examples of political violence at the hand of Mugabe, perhaps his biggest failure had to do with his handling of the economy. By the early 2000s, Zimbabwe’s once thriving agricultural sector of the 1970s was on life support. A series of droughts and decades-long mismanagement by inexperienced and corrupt officials led to massive food shortages.

By 2008 the nation’s economy was in total freefall with inflation reaching an unheard of 100,000%. Mass unemployment destroyed what was left of the middle class and thousands of Zimbabweans fled for greener pastures in neighboring countries.

Summary

Bad leaders come in all shapes and sizes. Mass killings and genocide are certainly good markers for an evil leader but a poor leader does not always need to be at the same level as Pol Pot or Joseph Stalin to be considered bad.

History is full of heads of state that were either way in over their heads or could simply not be bothered with the unique problems that their nations were dealing with. Perhaps through the study of history, we can spot similar patterns with our leaders in hopes of avoiding the same kinds of tragedies and mishaps in the future.

Connor Brighton July 30 2023 in History

That was just two examples. Monarchies often end up with a succession of bad or foolish leaders. Theocracies always turn awful because they all depend on the most talented snake-oil salesman convincing others that he knows what their silent and invisible god wants. It happens to Republics, of course. Some, like Germany or France, recover, usually at a ruinous cost. Some like Russia, just end up with a succession of bad rulers, no matter what they try. By Russian standards, Putin is actually somewhat benign, and believe me, that’s not saying much. On the rare occasions they get a competent and wise leader, such as Gorbachev, they promptly and utterly collapse despite that leader’s best efforts.

Americans have never been at this point before, and the fact that they have no real history of truly cruel and oppressive leaders makes them more vulnerable to this one. Americans used to see that lack as a strength and proof of the superiority of the Constitutional system. They had to do a lot of white washing to arrive at that conclusion, and America is known in Europe as a country that regrows its virginity on a regular basis. In truth, Americans are no better or no worse than the population of any other land, and like all the other nations that have been faced with imminent disastrous dictatorship, they will find they need to resist and fight the problem before it completely subsumes the land. If they don’t, they face decades of ruin and deprivation.

Will enough Americans see the danger in time?

 

 

 

 

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Heil Trump! — Leni Riefenstahl should have filmed the speech

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

March 5th 2025

I only watched the first half hour of Trump’s speech last night. I understand he raved and ranted and lied for a full 100 minutes, which puts him in line with other windy despots, such as Castro or Hitler or Mao. I’ve always wondered why dictators feel a need to orate at such length. Do they enjoy holding a captive audience? Or is there a deeper insecurity at work here? Braggarts often are compensating for something.

The speech was interrupted several times by chants of “USA! USA!” from the Republican side. One hears it often at international sporting events, and it’s usually good natured if a bit tiresome. But there was an edge, a bellicosity to the chant here that made it sound more like “Sieg Heil!” All that was missing was the stiff-armed salute. It’s a pity the camera angle couldn’t pick out faces of those saluting the dictator: I wondered how many wore the same joyous truculence of the true believer, and how many sneaked nervous glances about, too aware of the penalties for inadequate enthusiasm. (I wonder if anyone in the room looked for the same thing and had the wisdom to realize that the true believers would be the greater threat to Trump than the shivering cowards. When Trump’s programs implode and the public fury rises, they will turn faster and harder against Trump.)

“Never be the first to stop applauding” – Alexandr Solzhenitsyn

Trump got into the issue of waste in Social Security. Apparently he hoped a long list of patently untrue claims would give him some credence, but as usual, he over embellished, breaking down “recipients” by age groups—110 to 115, 116-125, and so on up to 350. That last one amused me: apparently someone filed for social security benefits either in 1675 or at the age of 260, when Social Security actually came into existence. I watched Mike Johnson shaking his head sorrowfully over that, and recalled that the man is a Bible literalist, which means he really believes Methuselah really lived to be 969. Maybe he thought the SS recipient in question was actually one of Noah’s children, and was just lying about his age in order to pick up girls. Was he first paid in ducats or florins?

Of course, there are no checks going out to people older than about 113. The December 2024 Social Security stats show that a bit over 89,000 people got payments, in line with the census report from 2020 which showed 88,000 in that age group. The database is in COBOL, which uses numbers like 150 to indicate that the person in question is dead.

But Trump has two audiences he wants to reach: those who are in on the con as part of his drive to flat-out steal the Social Security trust fund, and utter fools. If you believe him but don’t know which group you’re in, you’re in trouble.

Trump babbled about the “woke agenda” of course. Among other items that he considers woke: “biodiversity,” “transgenic mice,” and “discriminants.” As I said, his main audience is morons.

At least one Democrat, Rep. Al Green (D, Texas) stood and shouted “You have no mandate to cut Medicaid!” and “He has no mandate!” Mike sent the palace guard to evict him. It’s a pity the rest of the Democrats didn’t join him.

Still, Trump woke up this morning to a new crisis, which probably took the sheen off what he doubtlessly considered a wildly successful oration: the Supreme Court ruled that he must honor the contracts made from funds allocated by Congress to outfits such as USAID.

The ruling, which in any sane time would have been a 9-0 no-brainer, was dissented by Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch. Alito wrote the dissent, saying he was “stunned” that judges might think it is the duty of judges to adjudicate contracts under the rule of law. That is, after all, only the reason judges exist in the first place, and obviously is just some woke liberal crap and must be struck down. I wonder if any of those four have considered what may happen if they managed to rule against their own raison d’être. Of course, their masters at the Heritage Foundation probably have golden parachutes ready for when they finish selling out the country and there is no longer any reason for silliness like “Constitutional Law.”

But it puts Trump right up against that red line: does he abandon his efforts to dismantle the government by fiat, or does he defy the Court? Either way leads to the end of his government, either as a legitimate government or a government at all.

For all of us, the red line is here. And if he crosses it and defies the courts, then either Trump must go, or America does.

Your choice what to do next.

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The Ambush — Senile Man bites visitor

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

March 1st 2025

That Trump is vicious, deceitful and a bully has never been in question. We’ve known that about him for over 40 years, because of his long and tawdry history of cheating contractors, mistreating employees and renters, endless scams (including bilking a children’s cancer charity), humiliating wives, and general lechery. The man is, and always has been, a pig.

He’s also incompetent. He lost more money in business in the 20th century than any other American businessman, and only his willingness to lie, cheat and steal kept him afloat. Casinos are almost a license to print money—he bankrupted all four that he owned.

He has no respect or use for family, friends or allies. He turns on them with monotonous regularity, and it’s no accident that his most vociferous critics are family members, former associates, employees, members of his administration, and supporters. I don’t include friends in that group since I doubt he has ever experienced friendship. Petless his entire life, it’s no surprise that he feels no need for human contact other than commercial sex.

He is and always has been a hateful, loathsome, despicable man, and the fact that he not only is tolerated but thrives in our society is a deep condemnation of American social values and principles.

I’ve known this about him for decades. That’s going back to his wild public fling with Marla Maples, when I saw the expression on the face of his wife—the one now buried in an unmarked grave on one of his golf courses.

So even though I was appalled at the cheap and thuggish ambush of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy yesterday, I was totally unsurprised. He had to put on a show for the only man he regards as his better, Vladimir Putin (he even snuck a “reporter” in from the Russian propaganda outlet TASS to record the ambush for Putin’s entertainment). He also had to appeal to his dwindling band of flying monkeys, the group of so-called Americans who cheer Trump and revere him as some sort of cheap Jesus figure. Including, of course, the cowardly, treasonous Republicans who are selling out their country in the vain hope of currying favor with a man who almost certainly will turn on them when they are no longer of any use. He has given Congress “battered wife syndrome.”

You can find videos all over the net of the seven minute meeting, and see it for yourself. It won’t be pleasant—not if you have any pride or self-respect, or care even faintly about your country.

For America, it was one of the lowest points in her history. For Trump, it was just another Friday.

But almost missing in the mountain of coverage is one of the most alarming elements in his display, the open and increasingly unstable dementia. Raving about his predecessor in office who armed Ukraine in the wake of the Russian invasion in 2018, he repeatedly referred to him as Obama. Not Biden. Obama. He also said ridiculous things, such as that Ukraine attacked Russia, or that the US gave Ukraine $350 billion, although that might just have been his characteristic Hitleresque lies, rather than senility.

He had one of his toadies on some right wing blog attack Zelenskyy for his non-business suit garb, saying it disrespected the Oval Office—the same Oval Office where Elon Musk in his goofy “Tech Support” Tee Shirt stood not three days earlier.

He did immense damage to the United States, and has placed the US squarely in the realm of pariah nations—those with regimes like Putin’s, or Xi’s, or Kim’s—places too unstable and too inimical to American interests to be trusted.

But the senility showed up again later, when he pardoned Pete Rose. Apparently he thinks pardoning Rose will allow him to enter baseball’s hall of fame. Rose did have a criminal record: he pled guilty in 1991 to failing to disclose taxable income. He had to pay the taxes owed, serve five months in a resort prison, and do community service. It was unrelated to his MLB woes. I’m not sure Trump even knew Rose had that criminal record (I had very nearly forgotten it myself) but he apparently was pardoning him from being banned from the HoF. Which, of course, he doesn’t have authority to do.

It may actually help Rose, though, because far too many of the baseball owners are cut from the same cloth of cowardice and servility that stain the American character in the face of wealth and power. So Rose may get inducted as a result, and even though I feel he should be inducted myself, under these circumstances I think it would add, rather than absolve, the air of disgrace around Rose. He’s lucky he’s dead.

Trump also made the fiat declaration that English is the official language of the US. Again, he doesn’t have the authority to do that, but I’m sure there are endless Nazi bigots in state legislatures avid to declare the speaking of any language other than English illegal. “Did I hear you say ‘tête-à-tête’? You’re for the camps, you furrin asshole!” I wonder if dialects are illegal too? Is Scotty from Star Trek breaking the law in our new world ordure?

This all comes in the middle of a massive dismantling of the United States, so in the end it may not matter, because by the time he’s done with us, the US will just be another third world shithole and it won’t matter what he says or does because we’ll all be dead, in the camps, or terrified into utter silence.

Unless, of course people start growing some angry self respect and love of country, and start growing it NOW.

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The United States versus America — The time is coming to choose sides

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

February 19th, 2025

I picked up a follower on Blue Sky the other day (I must be in double digits by now!) whose page reveled in his love of country and patriotism. He had pictures of himself in uniform, along with pictures of wheat fields and sunsets and dogs and all the other things that make America special in the eyes of hyper-patriots.

Nothing to take offense to, but I was mildly curious. I’m skeptical of hyperpatriotism for the same reasons I’m skeptical of overt religiosity or guys who scream about “impure women” or whatever. All are signs of fundamentalism, a mental disorder I’m at best uncomfortable around. My writings and posts don’t attract such people, other than the ones who want to scream about what a degenerate I am. One of the nice things about Blue Sky is that people like that tend to weed themselves out in pretty short order.

But I was curious. What did my new-found friend think about events over the past month? I scrolled through his past few weeks of posts. Not one word about any current event: nothing about the abandonment of Ukraine, or a psychopathic South African billionaire and his pock-faced juvenile delinquents rummaging through all the national secrets and finances. Nothing about the immense damage Trump has already inflicted on the country, both domestically and in foreign affairs.

I didn’t block or mute the guy, but I did elect to not follow him back. (Some people think the number of followers they have validates them, and that’s fine. I measure my reach by the number of people I elect to follow BACK. This eliminates all the people who want to sell me land, drugs, or bitcoin, the illuminati, or who want to sex me all night long for the cost of a penicillin shot.)

The polls show that Trump’s popularity is dropping at over 2% a week, which in the ideologically rigid present state of public opinion represents a vast and momentous shit. His polls on the economy have dropped 12% in two weeks, even though the economy really hasn’t reacted to his policies. But many idiots still measure the economy by the price of eggs, which is like picking the Superbowl winner by which mound of corn a chicken pecks at first. And the price of eggs is skyrocketing as bird flu decimates the laying hens.

The malicious ineptitude of the TrumpenMusk regime is starting to percolate through all the propaganda from newspits like Newsmax or the Washington Post. All the redcap morons are starting to realize they really mean the stuff they said in Project 2025, and do hope to wipe out medicare and social security and shift ALL the tax burden to the lower class while they totally raid the entire nation’s wealth. Right now they just see it in them cutting programs that matter to them; day care, product safety regulations, conservation, etc. In short, all the millions of things government actually does because it’s far cheaper and more efficient than the private sector could possibly manage.

For many years, the right wing has promoted the silly notion that you are a patriot if you love America but want to get rid of the United States. Instead of “United States” of course they say “government” and they lie constantly about how the government is wasteful (it is, but so are corporations; but a lot of their operations are ‘proprietary’ and so they aren’t transparent or responsive to public interest, and unfortunately it’s been nearly 250 years since Americans had to deal with power centers that were unresponsive to the public interest.) Government is oppressive, evil, eats kittens, yada, yada, yada.

What they don’t understand (and are prevented from understanding) is that the United States, the thing that makes America special, IS the Constitution, and the government which it founded. The separation of powers, the mandated responsiveness to the people, the protection of the oppressed, the Bill of Rights – that is what the United States is. That is what the rest of the world envied. Not fields and dogs and sunsets, because every fucking country in the world has those, and some are prettier. Without the United States, America is just another patch of land filled with squabbling and destitute peasants, no better than most and worse than some.

The Constitution—the heart and soul of the United States—exists with the express purpose of using government to defend the people from the depredations of banks, aristocrats, and churches. While it has had an imperfect record with these, it worked well enough to make America the greatest of nations for a long, long time.

Trump and Musk are the vile faces of an evil consortium of fundamentalist churches, rapacious corporations, and vicious plutocrats—all the evils men like Jefferson and Madison wanted to free the citizenry from. The reason Trump and Musk are dismantling government isn’t to save the taxpayers money—they have zero interest in that, and quite the opposite, in fact. They want to create a power vacuum and fill it themselves, and put every public need on a “make it pay” basis. Instead of a not-for-profit service such as social security or medicare, they want to run it on a 30% markup, and regard the actual services as outlays that need to be minimized for the sake of profit.

We’re rapidly approaching a point where all the dog and sunset-loving cardboard patriots have to decide if they love a rapidly diminishing America, or want to fight for the United States.

I know which line they may cross: when they declare that they are no longer obliged to observe court rulings. That’s where I begin to advocate the overthrow of Musk and Trump by any means possible. At that point, they are outlaw, and enemies of the United States.

If people want to keep the America they love, they may well have to take up arms on behalf of the United States.

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The Wednesday Night Massacre — The battle between Trump and America is joined

The Wednesday Night Massacre

The battle between Trump and America is joined

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

February 14th, 2025

Some of you may remember the Saturday Night Massacre. It was the turning point of the Watergate scandal in 1973, when it was revealed that Richard Nixon had taped his conversations in the Oval Office—which would likely include conversations pertaining to the break-in at Democratic Headquarters in the Watergate hotel and subsequent conversations about the cover-up of the crime and possible White House complicity.

The special prosecutor investigating the case, Archibald Cox, promptly issued a subpoena for the tapes. Nixon refused, and ordered Cox to drop the subpoena. Cox refused. Nixon then ordered the Attorney General, Elliot Richardson, to fire Cox. Richardson refused and resigned. Nixon then ordered the assistant attorney general, William Ruckelshaus, to fire Cox. He refused and resigned. Finally, Nixon found a willing toady in the contemptible Robert Bork who said, in effect, oh, hey, master, no problem! Cox is gone. Bork went on to become a hero to the morally bankrupt conservative movement, even getting nominated to the Supreme Court before people remembered who he was.

The fiasco pretty much sealed Nixon’s fate. Americans hadn’t yet been subjected to 50 years of right wing propaganda designed to erode their confidence in democracy, freedom, justice and themselves. They realized that Nixon’s behavior was not that of an unjustly accused president, and his support plummeted.

Now here we are not one month into the most criminally capricious and ethically destitute administration in US history, and an even bigger massacre has taken place.

Eric Adams is the mayor of New York City, and he is a piece of work. He was, at best, a shady cop for many years, and rose to captain. He retired, got elected to the state senate, then became Brooklyn borough president, and then ran for mayor, winning handily against an inept vigilante.

Adams’ ethics, if he ever had any, vanished, and by 2024 he had been indicted on federal charges of bribery, fraud, and soliciting illegal foreign campaign donations. He was the first mayor to face federal charges while still in office.

Then Trump got elected, and set about destroying rule of law. After Matt Gaetz flamed out, he picked his second-best alternative, Pam Bondi, to run the Justice Department. (Yes, she was sloppy seconds to Matt Gaetz, so don’t get your hopes up.) The DoJ immediately became what Trump claimed it was when it was prosecuting him: corrupt, incompetent, and politicized. (Trump ALWAYS accuses others of being what he is himself).

Trump needed scapegoats who couldn’t fight back to blame the country’s problems upon, and immigrants are his version of the Jews under Hitler. He was delighted that Eric Adams shared his views and wished to punish people in order to make it look patriotic. Eric Adams wouldn’t be much use in prison. So he told Bondi to make the charges go away, just like he did with hundreds awaiting trial for January 6th, and she passed word down to one of her flunkies, Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove, to make the case go away. Emil, no hero, passed word down to one Danielle Renee Sassoon, who was appointed the acting US Attorney for the Southern District of New York by Trump just the month before. Bove claimed that the charges against Adams, a Democrat, were politically motivated. (The charges were brought under Merrick Garland during the Biden Administration.) Bove no doubt presumed that Sassoon would be as corrupt, nuts and/or servile as all Trump’s other appointments.

Well, turns out she isn’t.

She wrote a seven page letter detailing why she could not follow Bove’s orders to drop the case against Adams, and resigned effective immediately. Starting to sound familiar?

It turned into an avalanche. According to an MSN report, “According to a person briefed on the matter, after Sassoon refused to dismiss the case, the Trump administration directed John Keller, the acting head of the Justice Department’s public corruption unit, to do so.

“Keller also resigned on Thursday, two people familiar with the matter said. Kevin Driscoll, a senior official in the department’s criminal division, has also resigned, one of the people said.

“Three other deputies in the Justice Department’s public corruption unit – Rob Heberle, Jenn Clarke, and Marco Palmieri – also resigned on Thursday over the orders to dismiss the Adams case, a person familiar with the matter said.”

Wow. This already makes the Saturday Night Massacre look like an office spat over nuking popcorn in the microwave and stinking up the place. Seven resignations on principle, and counting.

An army of skunks couldn’t stink up the place the way Trump has.

More resignations are expected as all the decent people get out, leaving the Justice Department (and our dependence on a fair and just legal system) in the hands of obedient strutting swine and toadies. Good luck, America. I’ll probably end up in Gitmo for writing this.

Mind you, the massacre 52 years ago took place when lack of evidence made the entire Watergate case a matter of “he said she said.” Many people sided with Nixon in good faith. That’s not the case here.

Bove’s order to Sassoon made it clear that there was a fiddle in the case. Again, according to MSN: “Sassoon said the memo Bove wrote directing the case be dropped makes clear Adams is being granted leniency in exchange for assisting the federal government with its immigration priorities, citing a meeting Jan. 31 that she, Bove, Adams’s attorney and members of her office attended.

‘Adams’s attorneys repeatedly urged what amounted to a quid pro quo, indicating that Adams would be in a position to assist with the Department’s enforcement priorities only if the indictment were dismissed,’ Sassoon said in the letter Wednesday.”

Rachel Maddow reported that the order was to dismiss the charges against Adams “without prejudice” which, Maddow explained, meant that they were to be suspended rather than dropped entirely, and would be left hanging over Adams’ head for as long as he was in office and carrying out Trump’s pogrom against immigrants for him. No hint of coercion there, right?

It’s been 52 years since the Saturday Night Massacre. Since then, Americans have been subjected to a half century of endless propaganda designed to erode American confidence in democracy, freedom, justice and self-respect. The Massacre effectively ended Nixon. Will this end Trump? With a corrupt Court and servile, cringing Republican congress? Will the public finally rise up against this criminal?

When the right decided to avenge Watergate and end the American experiment, they probably didn’t think it would culminate in Donald Trump, already known back then as a vicious and unreliable clown.

But their cause is a broken and twisted one, so it’s no surprise their hirelings are broken and twisted people.

All the decent people in the Justice Department are getting out. What remains are swine and lower than swine.

Good luck to all of us

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