Category: American Psyche

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Trying Times — MAGAts are having the week from hell

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

June 20th 2023

www.zeppscommentaries.online

Well, it’s not a very good day for MAGAts. First, Trump had an absolutely catastrophic interview with, of all people, Brett Baier at Fox News. The following morning, the date and location for his trial was announced: “This case is hereby set for a Criminal Jury Trial during the two-week period commencing August 14, 2023, or as soon thereafter as the case may be called. A Calendar Call will be held at 1:45 p.m. on August 8, 2023. All hearings will be held at Alto Lee Adams, Sr. United States Courthouse, 101 South U.S. Highway 1, Courtroom 4008, Fort Pierce, Florida 34950, with modifications to be made as necessary as this matter proceeds.”

Aileen (the Loose) Cannon will be presiding, and much as she may want to get Trump off the hook, it doesn’t seem likely that she could get away with anything other than a negotiated plea bargain (and even if Trump had enough sense to accept a deal, Jack Smith is unlikely to let him get away with a slap on the wrist.) Her other escape avenue would be to have Trump submit to a competency hearing. In the wake of the Baier interview, a case really could be made for that.

I can just picture MAGAts in their flags and star-spangled panties and such declaring, “He may be a drooling idiot, but by God, he’s OUR drooling idiot.” Voters with three digit IQs who don’t have six or more psychiatric markers might have second thoughts about him.

Then, just to rub a little salt in the wound, they announced a plea bargain in the case against Hunter Biden. According to the Guardian, “Biden, 53, was charged with illegally owning a firearm in 2018 after lying about his drug use when he purchased a gun. Biden was also charged with failing to file and pay taxes in 2017 and 2018, which are misdemeanor offenses. Documents from the Justice Department confirm that Biden will enter a pre-trial diversion agreement for the firearm offense.” Biden probably won’t serve any jail time, although the firearms agreement is likely to result in probation and he may lose the right to vote for a while. But the laptop and the missing 19 tapes and the “special whistleblower” nobody can find all just went away, leaving only the ineffectual nuts to howl their conspiracy theories into the void.

Since I started writing this about a half hour ago, Trump said: “Wow! The corrupt Biden DOJ just cleared up hundreds of years of criminal liability by giving Hunter Biden a mere ‘traffic ticket.’ Our system is BROKEN!” Well, if the system didn’t have serious flaws, Trump would have been in prison many years ago, so there’s that.

James Comer called Biden’s charges a “slap on the wrist when growing evidence uncovered by the House Oversight Committee reveals the Bidens engaged in a pattern of corruption, influence peddling, and possibly bribery”. OK, bubbles. Prove it. Oh, you’ve spent thousands of hours and millions of dollars already, and have nothing to show for it? Aw, poor Jimmy. Bit a wooden leg and now his teeth hurt.

Mary Millar, howling nut from Illinois, wrote, “Hunter Biden is receiving a sweetheart deal from the DOJ that shields ‘THE BIG GUY’ Joe Biden from the Biden foreign bribery operation. The cash & diamonds he didn’t pay taxes on came from CHINA, RUSSIA & UKRAINE. No FARA foreign agent charges? TWO SYSTEMS OF JUSTICE!” All the scattershot all caps accusations really make for a convincing case. Yup. Shore do.

I note none of them want to mention that the DA who signed off on the plea deal, David Weiss, was a Trump appointee. Ironically, he wasn’t asked to step down when Joe Biden’s administration started because he was already handling the Hunter Biden case, and it was felt that asking him to resign under the circumstances would be seen as partisan.

So let the nuts scream. The Hunter Biden “case” is dead.

I suspect the saner Republican are all secretly feeling a sense of relief over all this. The Trump trial might loosen his grip on the party and they were facing the prospect of a candidate who 60% of all voters absolutely hated. Granted, the rest of their field is dominated by kooks and vicious Nazis, and they are probably just going to have to suffer a pasting come November, 2024, but they pretty much brought that upon themselves. Trump was already a liability before the Baier interview—now he’s flat-out radioactive.

Trump’s confused and crazy lies were bad enough—even worse than the CNN ‘town hall’ that nearly destroyed that channel. But I can’t imagine how he thought he could go on Faux and announce the 2020 election had been stolen. Baier had 787 million reasons to flatly contradict him, and he did.

And for the first time, Trump actually looked scared. I think he is finally realizing the wheels of justice are not going to let him walk away unscathed.

The trial is going to be complicated. I know a lot of people wanted the trial televised, but I don’t see how that’s possible. I want them to televise whatever they can of it, but there are legitimate complications.

The 37 counts all involve Trump’s mishandling and possible abuse of national security files—some listed as top secret, and even the ones listed as “confidential” have information that could put national interests and assets at risk. But it would be impossible to give Trump a fair trial (which he has an absolute right to) without letting the jury know the exact nature of those documents.

That means the jurors and court officials will all have to have at least temporary national security clearance to handle top secret information. They will probably have to sign an agreement that if they discuss ANY of that with anyone, they will end up in a cell next to Donald’s and probably be there after he dies.

They’ll also have to set up a sensitive compartmented information facility (SCIF) in order to keep the contents of the evidence and testimony pertaining to such evidence secret. They have no choice: the jury MUST know the exact nature of the secrets.

But all the rest can and must be public. MAGAts will never read the transcripts because they have to stay safe in their psychotic little bubble, but fortunately, the large majority of Americans aren’t MAGAts, and they want and deserve to know exactly what is going on, and how a verdict was reached.

And don’t forget: there’s still the felony indictments for the New York tax scheme trial, and pending findings for January 6th and the efforts to overturn the Georgia election.

Trump really is going to be “too busy” for once, and his monkeys are going to wear themselves out screaming about it.

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“But Everyone Loves The Leader!” — Well, maybe not so much, it seems…

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

May 28th 2023

www.zeppscommentaries.online

Talk to a Trump supporter for more than a few moments, and the absurdities begin to pile up like newspaper wrappings and plastic bags in a blind alley. Trump is a victim of Antifa and George Soros. The communist leftist radicals plotted for years to bring him down. America was never richer nor more powerful than it was during his presidency. Trump built the wall and solved the border crisis, only to have the Democrats destroy it. Trump cured COVID. Trump exemplifies probity, patriotism and piety. It goes on and on.

It reminds me of some of the claims I’ve heard about North Korean strongmen: they can shoot a perfect 18 in a round of golf, impregnated one thousand virgins in a single night, and lift a starving and benighted nation to glory.

I’m sure most of you have seen examples of what I call Trump Tractor Art; hagiographic images that portray Trump as a hero, a leader, even as Jesus. Some of them made it onto those ridiculous NFT ‘trading cards’ that Trump was peddling last year.

I understand they’re selling “Trump dollars” now at an inflated price that have exactly zero value. A few years ago I gifted a friend with a Trump coin, which basically resembled a fifty cent piece only the presidential seal replaced the national one, and Trump replaced Kennedy. It was a brass alloy designed to be golden, and the quality was actually surprisingly good. I paid $4.99 for it. I’m a jokester, not an idiot. I’m kinda sorry I didn’t get one for myself: it was unique amongst the trolling-for-morons marketplace of MAGAland in that it wasn’t utter garbage and was reasonably priced.

In much of the tractor art emitted by Trump sycophants, he bears an unnerving resemblance to The Homelander, arch-villain in Garth Ennis’ HBO production of The Boys. Given Trump’s personality problems, the notion of a Trump with superpowers is horrifying. Vain, brittle, narcissistic, delusional and devoid on any personal ethics or morality. I’ve wondered in the past if Garth Ennis drew some of his inspiration for The Homelander from Trump. A similar emotionally damaged human with superpowers was Alan Moore’s “Kid Miracleman” and while his physical appearance was drawn from David Bowie, his empty malevolence seemed familiar more to that of Trump’s.

Which brings me to a claim a Trump supporter made recently that stopped me in my tracks in utter disbelief. The claim was that Trump was far more popular before he decided to run for president and he sacrificed that to the howling mob of haters who opposed Trump because he was strong and noble and pure. Or something.

The thing is, a lot of people saw Trump for what he was long before he decided to run for president. His notoriety was such that he became a frequent target in such well known daily comic strips of the 1980s and 1990s as “Bloom County” and “Doonesbury.” Berkeley Breathed, the creator of Bloom County, quit mocking Trump for the simple reason that he wanted people to smile and feel better, not worse. (Reports that Trump hit him with a cease-and-desist order, while certainly plausible enough with the thin-skinned Trump, turned out to be myth.) Garry Trudeau had no such qualms, and made Trump a mainstay in his strip from the early eighties right up to this morning’s strip. He even had Trump running for president in 2000. The idea was that a man so vile and vulgar would get a rabid following but end up flaming out in scandal. This was back in the days when it was believed that rank-and-file Republicans at least possessed some of the integrity and values that they loved to inflict upon others. Then, as now, Trump was vile, he was vulgar, and he was ridden with scandal. He was a cheat, a liar, a bigot and vicious as hell in the 1980s, and everyone knew it.

Even he knew it. Shock-jock Howard Stern asked him about running for President back about that time, and he said that with his history with women and the law, he could never get elected.

Just his history in the court system revealed a man who cheated his customers and clients, didn’t pay his bills, and ran endless scams. He even had to settle on cheating a children’s cancer charity, and is forbidden from being involved in such charities in New York state. His relationship with the courts is one of using an army of lawyers to obfuscate and delay, and eventually to get away with a vast panoply of misdeeds, not through justice, but through attrition.

One of his most infamous moments came with the 1989 case of the Central Park 5. A young woman, Trisha Meili. was viciously assaulted and raped and left for dead while jogging in Central Park. The assault was so vicious that to this day she has no memory of it, having lost 80% of her blood, sustained significant brain injuries, and was left tied up to die. Suspicion immediately fell on a group of black children who had been nearby, youths aged 14 and 15 who had been hassling but not really threatening people in the park. Police coerced confessions from the bewildered kids, and Trump blew $85,000 on a full page ad that read, in part “I want to hate these muggers and murderers. They should be forced to suffer… Yes, Mayor Koch, I want to hate these murderers and I always will…. How can our great society tolerate the continued brutalization of its citizens by crazed misfits? Criminals must be told that their Civil Liberties End When an Attack On Our Safety Begins!”

He wanted the death penalty brought back specifically to punish those kids. (Then, as now, he was wholly ignorant of the Constitution and its prohibition against Bills of Attainder and ex post facto enforcement of laws.) That would have been bad enough, but the totally mismatched DNA (which the NY pigs called “inconclusive”) was found to match that of a man who confessed to the crime, Matias Reyes.

That was in 2001, twelve years later. The kids, now adults, were released and several won large suits against NYC due to the massive miscarriage of justice they suffered. (Reyes never was tried for the rape and near-murder of Meili, due to the statue of limitations. Oddly, Trump didn’t weigh in on that injustice, perhaps because Reyes isn’t black.)

Now, most demagogues would be content to slither under their rocks and pretend their calls for the execution of five kids was due to bad information at the time. Not Trump. He snorted, “You have people on both sides of that. They admitted their guilt.” Under duress, and of course, police station confessions are a favorite tool of dictators world wide. Stalin was very fond of those.

Trump likes to deflect, claiming without evidence that the kids “mugged” dozens of other people in the park at the time. He’s let it be known that he would have liked to see those five boys executed ANYWAY, regardless of whether they committed the crime or not.

So no, Trump was NOT ‘more popular’ then. He may not have been as unpopular, but that’s not quite the same thing. He was widely derided, scorned, even hated, and he gave ample cause.

We didn’t like Trump than, and we don’t like him now, and no amount of myth-building amongst his dwindling band of followers is going to change that.

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Hawks and Owls — GOP continues lemming plunge

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

May 18th, 2023

www.zeppscommentaries.online

I wonder which will happen first? Will the Republicans’ extremism that sometimes slops over into outright treason and fascism cost them enough votes to neuter them, or will they destroy the country first in a mindless attempt at extortion?

Of course, things aren’t going well for them. They lost two mayoral elections Tuesday, both in deep red areas, one under the purview of Ron DeSantis, and the other in the district to Lauren Boebert. Both had been considered locks for the GOP.

Speaking of Bo-bo, she’s getting divorced, and that’s already turning into a white trash rodeo, Palin-style. Maggie Armpits is also getting divorced. Family values and all that.

The GOP is clinging to George Santos because they need his vote so desperately, and the Dems gleefully maneuvered them into voting against expelling the con artist. The Republicans think they can strike back by voting to expel Adam Schiff, because two actions are always the same no matter what. Just like having Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court is exactly the same as having Thurgood Marshall.

Speaking of the “all things being equal” mentality, Armpits is whining that “white nationalism” is the same as the N word, because ‘slaveholder’ means exactly the same thing as ‘enslaved.’

Trump is claiming the Durham report proves that he tried to stop Biden from committing war crimes or something. Trump’s buddy Putin has his mercenaries firing on his own troops and he just fired the scientists who developed their hypersonic missiles because, like the jet planes under Hitler, it failed to change the course of the war. Stay in your bunker, Putie. Someone will be by shortly to scrape you up.

Then there’s the Jordan ‘hearings.’ How many courts could a kangaroo court if a kangaroo could quartz courts? The clowns in the little car are the only part that makes any sense. It seems the dawg ate Gym’s homework.

In Arizona, election and reality denier Kari Lake called her star witness, Jacqueline Onigkeit, She was supposed to establish improper verification of voter ballots. She did the exact opposite. The Arizona Republic bemusedly reported, “As a witness for the defense, Onigkeit was dynamite. The problem is, she was supposed to be the star witness for Lake.”

But of course, there is the budget blackmail that is still ongoing. Republicans are hoping Democrats will cave before they have to murder the country, and Biden doesn’t look to be in a caving mood. The crazier boobs of the Republican Party are hoping that they can stay with their tried-and-true approach to governance: Fuck things up, and leave it for the Democrats to fix. This would be more of the same, piled higher and deeper.

Racking up bills is always more enjoyable than is paying them, and for many years, Republicans have gotten away with the lie that the Dems rack up the bills. Don’t believe me? Here’s something my friend Isaac in the Weasels posted this morning: It shows that over nine out of every ten dollars in the debt is from Republican policies and misadventures. It’s only gotten worse since it began with Reagan. It also shows the Democrats tried to staunch the flow of Republican largess to the rich. Read it and weep:

Here’s a look at the budget deficit each president since Lyndon Baines Johnson inherited from his predecessor, and what the budget deficit was when he left office.

Lyndon Baines Johnson (D)
Assumed office November 1963: $5 billion deficit
Left office January 1969: $3 billion surplus
Reduced the deficit by $8 billion

Richard Nixon (R)
Assumed office January 1969: $3 billion surplus
Left office August 1974: $6 billion deficit
Increased the deficit by $9 billion

Gerald Ford (R)
Assumed office August 1974: $6 billion deficit
Left office January 1977: $54 billion deficit
Increased the deficit by $48 billion

Jimmy Carter (D)
Assumed office January 1977: $54 billion deficit
Left office January 1981: $79 billion deficit
Increased the deficit by $25 billion

Ronald Reagan (R)
Assumed office January 1981: $79 billion deficit
Left office January 1989: $153 billion deficit
Increased the deficit by $74 billion

George H.W Bush (R)
Assumed office January 1989: $153 billion deficit
Left office January 1993: $255 billion deficit
Increased the deficit by $102 billion

Bill Clinton (D)
Assumed office January 1993: $255 billion deficit
Left office January 2001: $128 billion surplus
Reduced the deficit by $383 billion

George W. Bush (R)
Assumed office January 2001: $128 billion surplus
Left office January 2009: $1.4 trillion deficit
Increased the deficit by $1.5 trillion

Barack Obama (D)
Assumed office January 2009: $1.4 trillion deficit
Left office January 2017: $665 billion deficit
Reduced the deficit by $735 billion

Donald Trump (R)
Assumed office January 2017: $665 billion deficit
Left office January 2020: $3.7 trillion deficit
Increased the deficit by $3 trillion

Joe Biden (D)
Assumed office January 2021: $3.7 trillion deficit
Fiscal year 2022: $2.775 trillion deficit
Fiscal year 2023: $1.376 trillion deficit
Reduced the deficit by $2.3 trillion (so far)

So in the past 60 years, only one Democratic president, Jimmy Carter, had a larger budget deficit in his last year in office than he inherited from his predecessor. All six Republican presidents had larger deficits in their last budgets than they were handed at the start of their term.

In other words, Republicans love to spend taxpayer money. And yet so many gullible voters have swallowed the GOP line that it’s the Democrats who are spendthrifts, the basis for McCarthy’s current threat to refuse to pay the nation’s bills — something Republicans never did as Trump was adding $8 trillion to the national debt in just four years.

Yes, the party of Trump, DeSantis, Greene, Santos, Luna, Boebert, Lake and Jordan is going to save us all for irresponsibility and financial ruin. Oh, did I say “for.” Cough. I’m aFreud I made a typo…

Let me put it as plainly and as bluntly as I possibly can: if you think the Republicans want to help you, and help the country, and the Democrats don’t, well, you’re a fucking fool.

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We’re Not From the Government — And We’re Not Here to Help

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

May 6th 2023

www.zeppscommentaries.online

In the wake of the latest mass shooting in Texas, Greg Abbott, putative governor of that benighted state, blamed the shooting on the government.

My comment on Facebook was “Someone notify this stupid bastard that in Texas, HE is ‘the government.’”

I drew a good response from one fellow who wrote, “That’s one of the strangest things these aholes are allowed to get away with when addressing their base; ‘It’s somebody else’s problem. Sure you elected me to fix the problems, but that still doesn’t make them my problems.’”

Well, that’s not by accident. I wrote back, “Ever since the Kochs hit on the realization that the only way they could seize power was to divorce government from the people. Thus elected Republicans would pretend that they were the freedom fighters and ‘government’ the enemy they struggled against, And as they made government less representative, less helpful, less honest, they would say, ‘See? Our self-fulfilling prophecy has come true!’ Only fools elect people to government who want to destroy government.”

Did the Founders consider this when they wrote the Constitution?

Of course they did. They recognized that in order to have a viable representative Democracy, there were two major social forces that had to be curbed and held in check: The aristocracy, and the churches. James Madison, considered the chief architect of the Constitution wrote some twenty years later, “The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe in blood for centuries.” While he was working on the Constitution, Thomas Jefferson, then in Paris (and an early supporter of what eventually became the French Revolution) petitioned Madison strongly for a bill of rights, one of which would include what amounted to a 100% real property estate tax in order to prevent the rise of an aristocracy like the ones he saw enslaving England and France. (Unfortunately, that one didn’t make the list.)

Churches are still churches, and no matter how well-intentioned, breed malevolent zealots. The aristocracy goes by a wide variety of names: Royalty, plutocrats, corporations, fascists, ‘captains of industry,’ and more recently, “disrupters” and “libertarians.”

Both are fueled by authoritarian impulses, and want, among other things, unswerving loyalties from the masses, a captive audience, and a complete lack of accountability.

Madison and Jefferson, along with most of the Founders, saw the twin threats to freedom for what they were, and resolved to keep them contained.

The results were mixed; many states sneaked through laws against blasphemy and enforced cruel dictates against behavior that didn’t hurt anyone. The aristocracy caused one civil war in support of slavery, the ultima thule of capitalism. They’ve crashed the economy dozens of times, including one that very nearly destroyed the country. They, too, have pushed for cruel and repressive laws, and demanded authority they neither deserved or could handle responsibly or fairly. But overall, the dream of Jefferson and Madison kept those forces of tyranny somewhat in check.

In the wake of the Great Depression and World War II, with the reputation of fascism and capitalism in ruins with the American public, the wealthy elites formed an alliance with the one authoritarian power nexus that working people didn’t instinctively recognize as an adversary: Religion. The preachers, stymied by popular skepticism toward cross-wavers in power, were quite willing to accept an allegiance with the plutocrats. The plutocrats needed help in convincing people that the government was inept, overbearing, and an enemy of the people. They knew the only effective way to do that was have their preachers teach that government is evil. They had jovial clowns like Ronald Reagan to quip, “The most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help,” and to persuade people that turning over the tax revenue to the super-rich would somehow help the poor.

What they needed was some sort of high-octane moral issue. The ones that galvanized the public, such as civil rights, the environment, and education, weren’t what they had in mind. They wanted angry pitchfork wavers who wouldn’t threaten profits or strengthen the labor pool.

They hit on abortion, an issue of importance only to the type of loons who felt dancing should be a criminal offense, those, and the Catholic Church, which still hadn’t gotten over Galileo.

After that, all they needed was an extreme propaganda network that could block truth and promote lies. Enter Rush Limbaugh and Rupert Murdoch, the world’s greatest merchants of hate.

The message was a drumbeat: government bad and evil, profits and gawd good.

So when Abbott blames a mess he contributed to making on “the government,” nobody should be surprised. Republicans have spent generations working to make government weak and ineffectual, and then bitterly blaming it for not being strong and effective. Although when pressed to make government strong and effective, say through gun control laws, effective laws against monopolies and dishonest business practices, or protect the rights of minorities, they claim this would make government overbearing and tyrannical. It’s a three-card monte of a philosophy.

They want government limited to only defending their interests, and only a fool thinks the interests of billionaires or televangelists coincide in any way with the interests of the average person.

All autocracies, whether theocratic, or fascist, or (usually) both rapidly become corrupt, cruel, and detrimental to the security and safety of the society they have sought to enslave.

Need proof? Looks at the studied viciousness and cruelty of the anti-abortion freaks now that they’ve been unleashed. Look at the corrupt members of the Supreme Court that unleashed them. Look at the blossoming corruption in the financial sector, and the next coming crash.

Authoritarians are authoritarians, and waving crosses and flags doesn’t make them “more American.” They are the antithesis of what America is meant to be about. They are not your friends, they are not your protectors, and they will make your life hell if they take over, just as has happened throughout history.

America is not immune to this nonsense; they’ve just had the incredible good fortune to be guided by people who saw religion and landed wealth for the threats that they are.

Until now.

 

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Tucker vs The Weasels –Then, as now, he neither knew or cared if he was telling the truth

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

April 25th, 2023

www.zeppscommentaries.online

I have been thoroughly enjoying reading about the firing of Tucker Carlson, and the widespread consternation on the far right over the slap down of their little tin god. I doubt he’s gone from the public eye; he’s fucked up several previous jobs with MSNBC and CNN and bounced back. If Fox had a yellow-dog clause forbidding him from working broadcast for a rival for a set amount of time, he’ll either enter politics or try to set himself up as a religious leader. Unfortunately, we haven’t seen the last of that dirt bag.

But for me, it isn’t just the weary disgust I have for the vicious paid liars at Fox and the loony-toon shouty-boys on the web or lurking in the corners on Newsmax or OANN. My hatred and disgust for Carlson is personal.

As regular readers know, I’m a member of a group known as the Lying Socialist Weasels. This group was established by a group of Usenet liberals some 30 years ago. There was a Usenet user, a Reagan supporter named Brett Kottman. He was in the habit of screaming that any critic of Reagan, no matter how mild, was a “lying socialist weasel!”

So we formed a club. The Weasels included some of the leading voices in online liberalism at the time: Howie Klein, Bartcop, Milt Shook, Milt Brewster, Glen Yeadon, Isaac Peterson, Jim Kennemur and, well, me. I wasn’t a founder: I was the first of the second-generation Weasels, invited in by Jim. Several of us are Weasels to this very day. Usenet has dwindled to a wasteland of Nazis and child molesters, and the Weasels all drifted away. But not from one another. We’ve added many wonderful people since then, and at least four of the originals are still alive, active and involved with the group both online and in email.

One of our most prominent members was a fellow named Steve Kangas. Steve had a website, Liberalism Resurgent, which stood out as one of the most literate, informed, and conscientiously factual websites around. Some of the Weasels were bigger names and more influential, but we all looked to Steve when we needed to fact check ourselves or simply learn more on nearly any given topic.

On February 8, 1999 Steve died under the most mysterious of circumstances. His body was supposedly found in a restroom on the 39th floor of a Pittsburgh skyscraper owned by Richard Mellon Scaife, billionaire and funding father of what we were already referring to as the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy. It was only feet away from Scaife’s office. His body was allegedly found at two AM that morning, long after the tower had closed for the night.

It was announced that Steve had shot himself at 2am in that restroom, 2,000 miles from his Nevada home and in the headquarters of a man who had every reason to hate and fear the careful factuality of Liberalism Resurgent. In direct contravention of Pennsylvania law, there was no autopsy. There was a rumor that Steve had somehow managed to kill himself by shooting himself twice in the back of the head. The following day, a man later associated with Scaife turned up at Kangas’ parents home and removed the hard drives from Steve’s computer.

Enter Tucker Carlson, then a silver-spoon nobody writing for VRWC flagship magazine The Weekly Standard, jumped in. He began a campaign of defamation against Kangas, claiming, among other things, that Kangas was heavily armed (Kangas was a champion of gun control) and that he carried on his person that night a copy of Mein Kampf (unlikely under pretty much any circumstance.) Both claims are still on Steve’s Wikipedia page, with no corroboration, of course.

A couple of former Usenet Nazis celebrate Steve’s death every February. These are people who love Trump and can’t bring themselves to spell “Jew” with a capital ‘J.’ They weren’t celebrating Steve carrying Mein Kampf. Even for them, that was a bridge too far. Didn’t stop old Tucker, though.

He also argued that Steve was intrinsically suicidal, self-loathing and with absolutely horrible self-image. Uncharacteristically, he actually offered a factoid to support this claim. He reported that on Usenet, Steve often referred to himself as a “weasel.”

Yes, Steve was a Weasel. A Lying Socialist Weasel. He was quite proud of that, and respected us as much as he respected himself.

Had Tucker spent five minutes reading the posts of people Steve communicated with, he would have learned that amongst Usenet liberals, “Weasel” was the exact opposite of disparaging. But he wasn’t there to report: as he does to this very day, he was there to hate-monger, divide, and smear. He was a disgusting parody of a reporter then, just as he is to this day.

He’s one of the big reasons why America is the septic mess it is today. There’s a number of reasons why even Kangarupe Murdoch finally decided he was too vicious, too out-of-control. Some say it was his role in promoting, knowingly, the lies leading the the disastrous defamation suits against Fox. Some say it was sexual harassment and creating a toxic workplace. Reports of a possible defamation suit from Ray Epps that the January 6th participant was supposedly an undercover agent for the FBI, a theory that Carlson has been promoting. One of the more arresting theories is that Murdoch broke off his short-lived engagement when he realized the woman was extremely religious, and Tucker just happened to pick right then to start trying to lead his audience in prayer. Who knows? Maybe Kangarupe realized that Zealots are extremely dangerous allies. Well, it’s a nice idea, right?

Tucker is gone, for now, but his stench lingers over the body politic.

But for us Lying Socialist Weasels, its a good time to lift one to Steve, and say, “This one’s for you, Mister Kangas.”

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The Settlement — How Fax Fux Fox

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

April 19th 2023

www.zeppscommentaries.online

My kneejerk reaction to the news yesterday that Fox and Dominion had settled their defamation suit for $787.5 million was disgust. “Take the money and run,” I muttered to myself.

But then I told my knee to shut up and started thinking. First; the settlement is monumental, just huge. Has there ever been a settlement in a suit this big in history? There are class-action settlements that were far bigger, ranging from Enron ($7.2 billion) up to the 1998 Big Tobacco settlement of $206 billion.) But those were class-action suits, with plaintiffs in the hundreds (Enron) to the millions (Big Tobacco. This was one small company with 200 employees and annual revenues around $17 million a year. The biggest personal injury settlement I could find was for $60 million (a gas station manager injured by a train derailment). But even there, there was a permanent, crippling injury that would require lifetime care. A small company taking on a media giant usually, if it were very, very lucky, results in the media giant saying, “Here’s five million, kid. Now go away.”

So make no mistake: three quarters of a billion dollars is a titanic settlement, and shows just how hopeless Fox’s defense was just on the face of it.

Fox made one of the most witless efforts of putting a good face on it that I’ve ever heard of. Their official statement following the settlement read, “We are pleased to have reached a settlement of our dispute with Dominion Voting Systems. We acknowledge the court’s rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false. This settlement reflects Fox’s continued commitment to the highest journalistic standards.”

Journalists reading it on air burst in to open laughter. “Highest journalistic standards?” Fox News? Oh, that ship has sailed, hit an iceberg, hit it ten more times, and then sunk without a trace!

The fact that Fox didn’t have to agree to tell their viewers they had deliberately and knowingly lied to them about the election all along bothered a lot of people, who surmise (correctly) that Fox will simply not even tell their viewers about the settlement or the circumstances that caused it to be so huge. And while there is no cult so corrupt, so ridiculous, and so compromised that it can’t keep and maintain its cadre of True Believers, Fox will experience attrition, for a variety of reasons.

The thing is, all that stuff from the discovery process is out there. The admission that the election theft claims were fabricated; the admission that they lied about the election in order to maintain ratings, the admission of open contempt for Donald Trump and his followers. They are claims made against Fox; they are admissions right out of Fox’s official representatives in the discovery process. There’s no unringing that bell.

It was a hideous (read ‘wonderful’) mistake on the part of Fox. As Robert Harrington over at The Palmer Report noted, “Fox made a huge mistake by not settling early. Had they come forward with the $787.5 million in the early days of the suit, they could have avoided all of the revelations of lies they told. Internal squabbling and nuggets like Tucker Carlson’s ‘passionate hatred’ for Donald Trump came to light as a direct result of the summary judgement. Had Fox News settled early none of those revelations would be general knowledge. According to Dominion lawyer Stephen Shackleford, there were no further shocking revelations to be told, no bombshells yet undetonated. In short, Fox screwed themselves with their own myopia.”

Some other right wing media outfits, hoping to supplant or even replace Fox, are telling their followers that Fox lied, but they won’t lie. (Obviously this doesn’t include OANN or Newsmax, who are facing their own lawsuits for lying about the election.)

You know that loudmouth in the bar, or the obnoxious uncle at the family gatherings who is always rabbiting on about how Trump is the “real” president? They are going to be talking to people who have indisputable evidence that Fox and the rest lied. Trump supporters have already all but vanished from social media outside of fringe areas like Truth Social and Twitter. There’s going to be a strong element of attrition as these people are finally facing reality.

The True Believers will become ever more insular and more cut off from mainstream society. But they will have muted themselves, reduced to agreeing with one another that everything is one vast conspiracy.

There’s a reason flat-Earth theories never gained any credence. There is just too much evidence. The “stolen election” cult will find themselves in a similar position. I suspect that, as with flat-Earthers, eventually a majority of “followers” will be con artists looking for easy marks amongst their indisputably stupid new-found brethren, and trolls who profess such a belief just to be annoying and aggravating.

Meanwhile, an avalanche of reality awaits. Dominion has suits pending against former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, former Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, and MyPillow founder Mike Lindell—and now have the resources to press a full legal suit, even if the individuals named won’t be able to pay more than pocket change. Dominion might ‘settle’ for the admission of malicious falsehoods that they didn’t get from Fox.

And Fox itself faces an even bigger defamation next year from Smartmatic, which has their own huge discovery process going on now, and access to all of the discovery performed by Dominion. $2.7 billion. Fox won’t get away with a mere $750m on that one. They will have to settle, not just for a huge number, but for public admissions of wrong-doing. They may even have to shop Trump, who first launched the conspiracy theory that they “flipped” votes in Georgia and Wisconsin (Smartmatic had no machines in either state, or any contested state for that matter).

By then, Trump may be on trial for the Georgia vote tampering and quite possibly for his role in taking classified materials and then lying about it. His approval ratings, already in the twenties, may plummet to single digits by then, removing the one cudgel Fox and the rest might have to try and threaten and bluster their way out of it.

The settlement isn’t a death blow for Trump and Fox, but it has weakened them and left them open for the actions that will be a death blow.

And the rest of the “advocacy journalism” crowd just got an important lesson in accountability. Lie maliciously, get sued, get sued big time.

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The McCurtain Cunts — Petty authority out of control, called to account

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

April 18th, 2023

www.zeppscommentaries.online

 

The word “cunt” is one of the most radioactive in the United States. Even George Carlin shied away from it.

But in the UK and portions of Canada, where I was raised, it has another meaning. Oh, it is still a ugly term for vagina, but the far more pervasive usage is to describe a weak, nasty, contemptible and generally pathetic and/or despicable person. For example: Boris Johnson is a cunt. So is King Charles. Outside of World War 2, Winston Churchill was an immense cunt. Every member of the Trump family covering four generations are cunts. Yes, under this definition, women can be cunts, too. Margaret Thatcher was a cunt. So was that 30 day wonder last year at 10 Downing—wossname the Tory cunt. (Yeah, I’m going to make you look that one up.) Here in the States, Armpit Maggie and Bobo are cunts. With Elon Musk it has to be in all caps and with a blue verified tick.

While I don’t avoid the word, I kinda save it for special occasions, special people. Besides, all the words you couldn’t say on TV ten years ago are all over the place in this era of Trump. If you say ‘shite’ a nun might look at you and try to correct your pronunciation. Cunt is about the only word left with any shock value. (Cussing is a human universal custom; new words will come along. Don’t worry.)

This all brings us to one of the more obscure corners of Oklahoma, McCurtain County. If you haven’t heard of it, don’t worry. There are probably people in the Oklahoma state government who hadn’t heard of it before last week. It’s about 30,000 people, 70% of which are white and 9% are black. Agriculture and forestry are the main industries, along with a tourist trade exploiting the legacy of the Choctaw nation now that it has been safely destroyed. It went for Trump by 67 points in 2016. If the county doesn’t already have a motto, I suggest a line from Gene McDaniels’ ‘Compared To What’: “Poor Dumb Rednecks, Rollin’ Along.”

What McCurtain County DOES have, though, is something lamentably missing in much of the rest of the country: an independent, engaged local journalism. Most of that element of democracy has been bought up by plutocrats and corporations, which is a leading reason why the country as a whole is so fucked up.

McCurtain Gazette-News is an actual on-paper newspaper. It doesn’t have a website. The owner and publisher is one local guy, Bruce Willingham, and the leading reporter is his son, Chris Willingham.

Over the past several years, the two have run some 30 articles detailing corruption in the county sheriff’s department. Like most cops who get held to account (still far too seldom an occurrence) this lot were unamused. They didn’t like the Willinghams and their snitchy little paper, not one bit.

It came to Chris Willingham’s notice that the Sheriff, along with the County Board of Supes, were having informal “off the record” meetings in which official business was being discussed. That contravenes Oklahoma state law on open meetings concerning official proceedings. So he set out to show this was going on. He left a voice activated recorder in the room he believed the meetings were taking place.

He did catch the usual suspects (Sheriff Kevin Clardy, District 2 Commissioner Mark Jennings, Investigator Alicia Manning, and Jail Administrator Larry Hendrix, hereafter referred to as “a pack of cunts”) having a meeting. But they weren’t discussing official business. At least, I hope to christfuck it wasn’t considered official business. Judging from the scalded-cat reactions of various officials in OK all the way up to the governor, it was something they knew was wrong, and we’ll save whether they believed it was wrong for another time. “Oklahoma Crude” refers to more than just oil.

The pack of cunts were discussing the Willinghams and their newspaper. The elder Willingham had just filed a defamation suit against the four, and they were not happy about it.

Alicia Manning, who investigates crimes, is heard suggesting that she needed to take some packages to a shipping center near the newspaper’s office. Without context it seems an innocent enough remark. In context, though, where they are discussing killing the Willinghams and disposing of their bodies, it’s pretty clearly a terrorist threat. Cunt Commish Mark Jennings just happened to know of “two big deep holes” that might be of use. Sheriff Kevin (Big Cunt) Clardy just happened to mention he had an excavator should a need for holes in a different locale arise. Jennings, apparently realizing what was needed in order to fill these holes, hypothetical or otherwise, said, “I’ve known two or three hit men, they’re very quiet guys…” Probably less messy than what dear sweet Alicia had in mind for her local shipping center.

Moving on from the fascist fantasies of assassinating the local journalists, they turned to another, more racist theme. I should mention at this point that nearly all fascists and by definition, all racists are cunts. You have to be a cunt to feel the way these people do, and to feel the way they do, you have to be a cunt. It’s a closed circle of cuntishness.

Jennings, the cunt with the holes, lamented the fact that they couldn’t just take “[the Willinghams] down to Mud Creek and hang them up with damned rope. But you can’t do that anymore. They’ve got more rights than we’ve got.” It’s safe to assume the “they” in the latter sentence isn’t referring to the Willinghams. In a motif often heard amongst the trashier elements of the far right, it’s often believed that African Americans have more rights then poor, meek, timid little white people. Why, they have a right not to be lynched! Can you imagine? White people don’t have a right not to be lynched! Why, any Ken or Barbie poking their pink noses outside are liable to find a sheriff and some commissioners waiting outside with ropes, ticking packages, and maybe an excavator or two. I tell you, it’s just so unjust! Cunts everywhere are crying over that injustice.

Even worse on the cunt scale of “put-upon-ness” was the fact that the recording was done without their consent, and thus was a far greater crime than plotting murder and terrorist bombings. Cause, you know, snitches get stitches. Can’t trust those reporters to allow cunts to go about their business unmolested.

Now, as horrible as this story is, there is a bright side. All four have been suspended and will probably lose their jobs. All are likely to face criminal charges, state level for certain, and in the case of the implied threats to bomb or lynch, federal charges as well. The cunts can whine about how unfair it all is, but the fact is they blew themselves up, and good riddence.

Most of the people in McCurtain County, I’m happy to say, seem shocked and appalled.

Many county governments are corrupt, some viciously so. Petty authority attracts cunts. Local journalism used to keep them in check, but most of the US doesn’t have anyone like the Willinghams, and so the cunts get away with it.

First thing to control the cunts: fight for strong, independent and engaged local journalism. We won’t survive without it.

 

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Happy Slappy gets Sloppy — Thomas is the face of the GOP’s moral bankruptcy

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

April 16th 2023

www.zeppscommentaries.online

There was plenty of ‘silly season’ news this week. For instance, we had videos of enraged rednecks standing in their backyards and shooting cases of beer with AR-15s after Budweiser had an online video featuring transgender advocate Dylan Mulvaney. No, they weren’t promoting drag queens or litter boxes in school bathrooms. It was to promote the NCAA basketball tournament. But the National Association of Zealots and Ideologues have devoted many, many “minutes of hate” against transgenders, so their brownshirt followers promptly lost what little in the way of minds they had and started shooting beers, and not in a good way.

Normally the GOP views such antics with a self-satisfied smirk. But then one of them noticed that the maker of Bud Lite, Anheuser-Busch, was a major GOP contributor, and the morons were violating the prime directive of the GOP, which is “You don’t piss on the money.” Suddenly they realized how idiotic the whole thing was. It was so idiotic that descendant of stable geniuses, Donald Trump the Lesser, suddenly noticed it was idiotic. This resulted in another civil battle between the two branches of the GOP: those who felt hate should be pure, and those that feel love of money should be pure.

Maggie Armpits weighed in on climate change. Rather than trying to describe it, let me just quote her: “If you believe that today’s ‘climate change’ is caused by too much carbon, you have been fooled,” she wrote. “We live on a spinning planet that rotates around a much bigger sun along with other planets and heavenly bodies rotating around the sun that all create gravitational pull on one another while our galaxy rotates and travels through the universe. Considering all of that, yes our climate will change, and it’s totally normal!”

OK then. That sorts that. Maggie should ask for letters of apology from Michael Mann, Al Gore, and Daniel Swain for all that fear mongering. It was all just gravitational pull.

When last seen, Maggie was complaining about ‘marijuana zombies’ in New York City. Apparently it’s quite a problem. Perhaps one of them bit her. That would explain a few things.

On a more serious note, the widening corruption of Associate Supreme Court Justice Clarence “Slappy” Thomas continued to spread like a sinkhole in a septic tank. Today’s revelation (and they are coming on a daily basis now) is that he reported up to $750,000 in income from an outfit called “Ginger, Ltd., Partnership” that was owned by himself and his toxic wife, Ginni. The operative word there is “was.” Ginger, Ltd., Partnership was dissolved in 2006, so Thomas was reporting income from a company that doesn’t exist.

Well, it sorta doesn’t exist. It was replaced by another company, Ginger Holdings, LLC. But Slappy and Ginni don’t run it. It’s run by one Joanne Elliot, who is Ginni’s sister. But even though they have no formal association with this company, they’re still receiving considerable amounts of money from it for who-knows-what.

And what does Ginger Holdings, LLC do? Well, that’s one of life’s little mysteries then, isn’t it? Whatever it is, it pays well. I need to get me one of those Ginger Holdings LLC for myself. Then I can feed the cats the fancy cat food instead of the usual slop. As far as I can tell, you don’t have to do jack shit, just watch the money roll in. My kind of job!

In any other developed nation, a judge with the kind of malfeasance Slappy is displaying would have been in prison by now. In less developed countries, the mob might have got him.

But Slappy is vital for keeping the fascist contingent in control of the court. He’s one of six conservative justices, but one of them, Roberts, has shown that he puts law before ideology sometimes, and that makes him totally unfit for purpose. So if Slappy is impeached, that leaves the Court at the mercy of Joe Biden and a Democratic Senate, which means they might nominate an actual jurist with an interest in the law, rather than what the Federalist Society and the National Association of Zealots and Ideologues want. And worse, that uppity public might not vote Republican in ‘24, meaning it could be six years before they get to continue eviscerating the Courts.

So the GOP aren’t going to impeach Thomas, and he sure isn’t going to retire. He thinks it’s his god-given duty to screw over the public in the name of owning the libs.

Well, you can’t really expect a healthy emotional outlook on life and society from a man who willingly turned himself into a lawn jockey, can you?

We may get a better look at the one group that could force Slappy off the bench, the rest of the Court, this coming week. They will be ruling on whether to maintain the stay on mifepristone that that religious nut Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk of the Northern District of Texas imposed on the country. I expect Roberts to side with the three liberal justices, since the ruling is so blatantly and egregiously unconstitutional. I think there’s a decent chance Brett Kavanaugh might also jump the leads. He’s basically the swing vote on this. Gorsuch could go either way. Amy Coney Barrett is another religious nut and feels a divine need to impose her psychosis on the rest of us. Alito, of course, is the author of Cobb and depends on 16th century witchfinders for his legal lodestar.

Normally it would be a slam-dunk for the religious loons. But I think that Kavanaugh and Gorsuch might bolt simply to cut Slappy loose. He’ll probably head up the ban-the-pill contingent, and the size of that contingent will speak volumes about Slappy’s clout within the Court.

As Rachel Maddow says, “watch this space.”

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Cornered Rats — At their most vicious and dangerous

Cornered Rats

At their most vicious and dangerous

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

April 9th 2023

www.zeppscommentaries.online

Despite, but largely because of a mounting tide of anger and disgust, the GOP have been doubling down on their most corrupt and unpopular items.

This past week Tennessee took the headlines by expelling two members, both of whom were black, for the ‘crime’ of protesting gun violence. A third member, who was white and thus incapable of committing a crime, was not expelled. This is the same ‘legislative body’ that previously tolerated the presence of pedophiles, rapists, and one member who was caught urinating on the seats of other members. That must be the ‘proper decorum’ that black representatives can’t uphold. In the past month, a member suggested that capital punishment include lynching. Lynching not as a capital crime, but as a state-sanctioned form of punishment.

Slappy Thomas was busted for covering up twenty years of lavish gifts and trips from a billionaire, aptly named Crow, who happens to be a Hitler admirer. Slappy’s defence was they was just good friends, and they had been doing this for years. Turned out Slappy’s cozened junkets were first noticed some twenty years ago, and he dealt with the potential scandal then by simply ceasing to file the legally-required reports. The liberal media had more important things to report on, like Obama wearing a tan suit and putting Dijon mustard on his hot dogs.

“Just good friends.” Because Hitler admirers always like to pal around with Negroes who are married to white women, right? Slappy is exactly what Hitler had in mind when he talked about the Master Race, you know.

The Trump indictment showed his waning influence and the growing realization on the far right that maybe they don’t speak for most Americans. Armpit Maggie turned up at the New York City demonstration, expecting to be the new leader for a sea of people outraged at the crucifixion of Trump. What she got was the usual small collection of nuts and weirdos, a motley collection dwarfed by large numbers of chanting, whistle-blowing counter-demonstrators. She retreated, in obvious confusion, within minutes.

The anti-freedom zealots had another wish granted by Trump when a religiously insane judge, one Matthew Kacsmaryk, ruled that mifepristone, a pill used in over half of all abortions in the US for decades, be taken off the shelved because when the FDA approved it over twenty years earlier, they didn’t factor in a right wing lunacy that women would be destroyed by the resulting grief and guilt of aborting that poor little baby. The blob squad simultaneously believe that most women will abort the day before the baby is due just on a whim, and never look back.

It’s the sort of demented thinking that demonstrates why religious zealots should never be allowed within a thousand miles of anything approaching actual authority over the lives of others.

The hate campaign against the LGBTQ community and, for gawd knows what reason, drag queens continues unabated. There are calls not only to cut them off from medical coverage and school activities, but to outlaw them altogether. Let’s see, I bet if we asked Thomas’ buddy Crow about that, he would be quick to mention the Enabling Acts, or the Nuremberg polices. But that was different: they were after Jews and Commies then, not fags and Mexicans. Totally different. Why, when the camps are made, they’ll use new and improved Zyclon C. Nothing at all like the Nazis. What’s more, they have God’s approval for all this. They’ll prove it by stamping “Got Mit Uns” on all their rifles and army belt buckles. Just fags and Mexicans. Not real people. Oh, and liberals Muslims Unionists the disabled Socialists pot smokers and Joos. But no real people.

The Republicans who have realized that their policies are unpopular (or, if you prefer, almost universally hated and despised) are dealing with it by removing those pesky voters from the equation. The GOP have been fighting for years to gut the Voting Rights Act (and finally succeeded) and gerrymander (see Wisconsin and Pennsylvania for details. And Florida. And Michigan. And Missouri…and on and on.) They are dealing with state referendums to protect abortion and other rights by making it difficult to impossible to get such referendums on the ballot.

In Wisconsin, a heavily contested election for the Supreme Count resulted in a big win for the candidate not underwritten by the National Association of Zealots and Ideologues. Janet Protasiewicz beat Dan Kelly by a whopping ten points. However, in an obscure state legislative race, the Republican won by 1.7% of the vote, giving the heavily gerrymandered body a supermajority. Republicans promptly vowed to impeach and remove Protasiewicz from office, presumably on the day she takes office, because you can’t have women running around aborting left and right and then killing themselves because of the shame. Tain’t Christian or something.

Right now, similar moves by authoritarians in France and Israel have resulted in weeks-long mass demonstrations and threats to topple the regimes. I can only hope the same thing would happen in Wisconsin if the state lege tried this particular stunt.

If it did, it might help prevent a similar convulsion nationwide. Americans won’t give up their freedoms and rights to zealots and ideologues without a fight.

The reason we’re seeing such blatant and horrific extremism is the Republicans know this is their last chance. If they can’t steal the country now, they may have to wait another 100 years for such an opportunity to come along.

They are desperate. They are cornered. They are at their most dangerous.

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A Good Day — Rule of Law sustained

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

April 4th 2023

www.zeppscommentaries.online

The Trump indictments got all the press, but the really big news today was the vote for a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. There, an American moderate liberal defeated an individual heavily funded by a clandestine coalition of right wing groups that I’ve come to think of as the National Association of Zealots and Ideologues. Janet Protasiewicz is projected to handily defeat Dan Kelly, a right winger with ties to election deniers, anti-vaxxers, and who is on record advocating an end to all abortions.

Nearly all of Protasiewicz’s funding came from residents and the state Democratic party. Kelly’s money, some $30 million, came from groups and individuals outside of Wisconsin, with only $200,000 coming from in-state.

The election gave control of the Supreme Court back to non-fascists. You don’t need to tell me it’s utterly insane that supreme court judges are elected in contests in which powerful political interests control the funding (and far too often, the outcome) of elections. It is utterly insane. Not that the Senate is that big an improvement.

But for now, at least, Wisconsin residents are no longer at the mercy of dishonest fundamentalist hacks pretending to be judges. That puts them ahead of the country as a whole.

The list of indictments made for strangely easy reading. The same charge was repeated 34 times: Donald J. TRUMP, Defendant. THE GRAND JURY OF THE COUNTY OF NEW YORK, by this indictment, accuses the defendant of the crime of FALSIFYING BUSINESS RECORDS IN THE FIRST DEGREE, in violation of Penal Law §175.10, committed as follows: The defendant, in the County of New York and elsewhere, on or about February 14, 2017, with intent to defraud and intent to commit another crime and aid and conceal the commission thereof, made and caused a false entry in the business records of an enterprise, to wit, an invoice from Michael Cohen dated February 14, 2017, marked as a record of the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust, and kept and maintained by the Trump Organization.

In each of the subsequent 33 charges, only the dates and check recipients/numbers changed. Each was a felony under New York State law. It wasn’t the actions Trump committed that were illegal. It isn’t illegal to bang a porn star if she is a consenting adult. It’s not illegal to try to hide that you did. It isn’t even illegal to buy her silence. Where Trump fucked up was in the accounting; he gave false information on where the money came from, who it went to, what it paid for, and how it was disbursed. As Dick Nixon could tell you, it wasn’t the crime (and in this case it wasn’t even a crime); it’s the coverup. And Al Capone could tell you that if they can’t prove you killed dozens of people and committed many other violent crimes, they can always get you on the bookkeeping.

In the case of Trump, it’s the facts behind the indictments that could leave him hanging out to dry.

Frankly, despite the bluster from Trump and his minions, I expect that he’ll eventually work some kind of plea bargain on this. It’s a white collar series of crimes, and incredible as it may sound, he’s a first time offender. It’s entirely possible he could get a suspended sentence and several years probation. It wouldn’t be too extraordinary in this situation. America may be one of the most savage nations on Earth when it comes to punishing people who steal bicycles or shoplift, but they’ve always had a warm fuzzy spot in their flinty little hearts for people who use pens to steal millions. The old saying has it, “Steal a loaf of bread, go to jail. Steal a million dollars, go to the Senate.”

He already has taken major political damage. His supporters swarmed New York City by the dozens, outnumbered by anti-Trump demonstrators, police, and reporters. Marjorie-Taylor Greene tried to seize the Trump banner, no doubt visualizing herself in Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People (what a mental image. Ohmigawd, woman, cover up! Bad enough that we have to see your PITS!). She lasted all of ten minutes before a hooting and whistling crowd, before retreating to her SUV and scurrying off in disgrace.

Trump and his wastrel sons made threats against the Judge and his daughter, and continued attacks against DA Bragg and his family. Trump, at least, could end up in jail on contempt charges if he keeps that shit up.

More important, the vote tampering cases in Georgia and the federal case surrounding January 6th present a far greater threat to Trump. He may settle this first case so he can help fight in the two bigger ones coming.

But settling will damage him beyond repair politically. Outside of his own small circle and the dead-enders on Truth Social, there had been mostly a silence, simultaneously awkward and thoughtful, from the far right.

They are finally realizing that neither reality nor history are on their side. The Great Crumble of the GOP may have begun.

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