Category: American Psyche

Posted on

Unreality Show I’ll Take Door Number i for $100, Alex

October 12th 2018

Who would have thought, three years ago, that we would have a black entertainer meeting with the President in the Oval Office and arguing for the repeal of the 13th amendment?
Trump has achieved the trifecta of crazy: Sarah Palin, Ted Nugent, and now Kanye West. A pity Charlie Manson is dead: he could have visited and argued for lowering the age of consent to six.

This spectacle would have been grotesque and awkward under the best of circumstances, but it occurred almost to the minute that a major hurricane was devastating the Florida panhandle coast, completely leveling one town and inflicting major damage from Florida to North Carolina. Even as the Trump administration was arguing that 4C increase was inevitable, so we all might as well get used to it.

At least this time touring Melania Trump didn’t show up wearing a coat that proclaimed her lack of concern; she was off in Africa, wearing a British RA-style pith helmet, recreating “Call Me Bwimbo”. Oh, wait, that’s Bwana. Second look. No, it’s Bwimbo. The woman has a gift for wearing “Fuck You” as a fashion accessory. After getting some light criticism over that, she flounced off, calling herself the most bullied person in America. Easy solution, babe: file for divorce.

Was it really just 23 months ago that people were saying in hopeful tones that Republicans in Congress could keep Trump in line and blunting his more egregious impulses?

Nah. They saw Trump apparently getting away with the most blatant lies and viciousness, and decided they knew a winning approach when they saw it. Now they’re all lying their heads off. As the election nears, it’s a race to the bottom.

You see campaign ads all over the place swearing up and down that Republicans want to protect Medicare, and that Democrats are goddless commie Muslims who want to allow billions of Mexicans to come in and take over the country. They boast about how Trump saved the economy by maintaining employment and growth trends previously seen over the past six years under Obama, and carefully don’t mention the trillions in new debt for the latest tax giveaways to the rich (including the additional $3 trillion last week that the same Republicans who voted for it last week aren’t mentioning now), or the fact that despite the fact that they are fracking and drilling the living shit out of America and working to turn national parks into oil reserves, the price of gasoline is a dollar fifty above what it was last year.

It got so bad that NY Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote a piece yesterday effectively calling the entire party liars. Such a column would never have seen the light of day a few years ago, but that was before the GOP went mad and abandoned all principle. At least the NY Times belatedly remembered they were a newspaper and what that meant.

Trump had an ‘op-ed’ in the disreputable USA Today that has to be read to be believed. The Washington Post stated that nearly every single sentence included a misstatement or flat-out lie.

In Georgia, the Republican Secretary of State, Brian Kemp, is running for Governor, but as SS he retains the power to purge voter rolls. Which he is doing with a vengeance, some 26,000 names over the past few weeks, over such criteria as whether a middle initial is included on the written name but not in the signature. While African-Americans make up 32% of Georgia’s population (and a somewhat lower proportion of the voting population for obvious reasons) they make up 70% of the voters being purged. Oh, and the SS office isn’t bothering to tell the voters they have been purged. Let it be a surprise on election day. Similar, if less egregious stories abound in other states saddled with Republican rule.

Of course, Trump hates a free press, but isn’t above using the more whorish and lower segments of that press to attack the rest. The National Enquirer has been prostituting itself for him for years now, and Fox News is nothing more than the propaganda arm for the GOP. It’s a shameful thing to see in America, which once was proud of its free and independent press. Now the government has fascist whores pretending to be reporters to spread lies and stifle dissent.

It’s no surprise that news that Saudi Arabia lured a journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, into the Saudi embassy in Istanbul and proceeded to torture, murder and dismember him. It’s widely believed that it was ordered by the vile despot Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who seized power last year with the somewhat clandestine help from the Trump administration (Chief Wastrel Jared Kushner was on hand to oversee the coup and possibly offer friendly advice and hidden funding).

Trump’s reaction to this was muted, partly because he doesn’t mind seeing journalists being killed for doing their job and partly because his business interests are heavily intertwined with bin Salman’s. Even as most of the corporate world pull away from the swinish and vicious Sauds, Trump is going ahead with another arms deal so Saudi Arabia can massacre a few thousand more Yemanis.

Iran is a vile theocracy, but it’s only the third worst in the region, behind Israel and Saudi Arabia. Guess which of the three the US condemns solely?

Kavanaugh, perjurer, liar and partisan ratfucker, has already established a new precedent, becoming the first sitting justice in Supreme Court history to be under active investigation for violation of judicial practices and ethics, based on his sworn Senate testimony. He managed this odiferous distinction on just the second day on the court. It will get worse.

Trump is submitting written answers to Meuller’s investigative team, about his only remaining constitutional recourse. His lawyers knew he can’t go a minute without lying, so spoken testimony under oath would be a legal death trap, and this at least gives the lawyers time to write and finesse the answers, in the hope they can make Trump at least technically not liable for perjury. We’ll know soon enough if these lawyers, not the most brilliant legal team over assembled, can come up with anything that won’t result in immediate indictments.

OK, admit it: after all that, Kanye West sounds pretty sane, doesn’t he?

At least harmless, right? Right?

Posted on

Trump Junior’s War Sour grapes following a sour victory

Donald Trump Junior, vacuous moron, big game killer, child prodigy swindler and defender of the privileged class, rage-tweeted in the wake of the Kavanaugh vote, “Trump supporters – The fight isn’t over. You better believe that Democrats are going to do everything in their power to impeach Kavanaugh from the Supreme Court if they take control of Congress in November…This is war. Time to fight. Vote on Nov 6 to protect the Supreme Court!”

Just imagine how aggrieved and full of empty threats Donny the Lesser would have been had he lost this battle.

He’s right, of course. We won’t forget. Kavanaugh is a perjurer and a liar. He lied repeatedly to the Senate, committing the same crime for which he believed Bill Clinton should be destroyed. He was selected by the criminal Trump precisely because he believes now that no president should be subject to the kinds of legal persecution he inflicted on Bill Clinton. Even a president who is demonstrably a swindler and a tax cheat. One who assaults, rather than diddling consenting adults. One who is staging a coup against his own country. Even one who might be a traitor.

Kavanaugh’s demeanor made it clear that he is nothing more than what Charles Pierce memorably described as “a partisan ratfucker.” He would have been more at home as Rush Limbaugh’s color commentator than as a Supreme Court nominee.

He’s credibly accused of rape and sexual assault. The example he set, and the fact that he and his scumbag president got away with it by smearing and mocking victims, significantly increases the chances that his own daughters will suffer similar fates at the hands of entitled frat boys in the future. If they complain, perhaps Kavanaugh can asked Trump to mock them, so he needn’t suffer political embarrassment.

We will impeach Kavanaugh, and we will drive him from the Court and back under his rock where he belongs.

Then we will come for the moral and ethical abdicates, the criminals and fascists, and the traitors of the GOP. We will drive them from office.

People like Trump and Kavanaugh don’t see themselves as traitors. They don’t see themselves as liars and cheats. They believe they deserve to take what is theirs. Any woman. Any money. Any country. All of us. We aren’t citizenry to them; we are chattel.

Susan Collins only needed a sham FBI investigation to don a g-string and pasties and do a little shimmy for Trump and Kavanaugh. She knows a woman’s place. As long as she’s rich, what value is dignity? Her only remaining role is to demonstrate that when you sell out your own, you can never reclaim the mantle of being their champion.

The Eleven swine on the Senate Judiciary Committee who made such a joke of the Senate and the Supreme Court in their lust for power will never win another election. We will drive them out.

You know what kind of life you can expect if these fascists prevail. Ask the thousands of customers, investors and contractors that Trump has swindled. Ask the women he has raped and mocked.

Watch the tears stream down Kavanaugh’s flabby cheeks as the toy he was promised is held at arm’s reach. How can we take away that which he deserves?

Once he has it, he will give us exactly what he thinks he deserves. His won’t be the sullen rage of the post-turtle Thomas who never was able to convince himself he was anything more than a GOP token, the result of a cynical belief that the great Thurgood Marshall could be adequately replaced by a House Negro.

No, Kavanaugh’s will be an open rage, an aristocrat frightened by an aroused citizenry. Rush and Tucker and Donald will assure him, over and over, that he is the victim, and his persecutors must pay. He is damaged goods, and will inflict damaged decisions.

Kavanaugh is on the Court, and all it cost was the legitimacy of the Court and the Senate. A small price to pay when you think the country shouldn’t have that sort of nonsense when there is money to be stolen and women to be raped.

Yes, Donald the Lesser, you will get the war you so desire. If you are very lucky, you and your wastrel family will merely end up in jail for many years, and the country will emerge intact. That is the deepest wish of all who oppose you and your brotherhood of gangsters.

But don’t count on that desire for a peaceful solution. You’re merely fighting for an imagined right to shoot large animals. The rest of us are fighting for the right to a decent life, something you hold in contempt.

You will not win this war you want.

Posted on

Fascism Rising – Trump and Kavanaugh aren’t bugs; they’re features

September 23rd, 2018

One of the many sub-plots in Cary Joji Fukunaga’s brilliant Maniac involves the character Jed Milgrim (played by Billy Magnussen) a “colorful douche” who is a scion of a vicious, powerful, wealthy family, and who stands accused of a heinous sexual assault involving urination. It’s nearly impossible not to think of the Trump family while watching this, not only because of the nature of the crime, or the resemblance Magnussen bears to one of the Trump scions, but because of the calm assurance of the family that in order to protect their power, prestige and wealth, it is perfectly reasonable to commit perjury, blackmail and bribe people (including family members), and stand well above the law in pursuit of their own interests. They are used to dismissing people who they have wronged and who want to fight back as greedy little scuttlers, and resent a legal system that doesn’t just let them destroy such rabble.

The haughty, self-assured mien Magnussen wears is one we have seen far too often, not just in this White House (including many of its nominees from the world of wealth and privilege) but in the faces of the broadcasters on the right-wing media, and the people who trot out endless columns of right wing think tanks to assure us that “identity politics” and “takers” are only showing resentment of their betters, and Americans should not believe people who profess to stand for the people when America’s ultra-wealthy stand ready to defend the people from the people.

Congruent with this, I’m presently reading a book by Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains – The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America. I’ll have a full review of the book upon completion of reading it,

America has always had a class of aggrieved plutocrats who believe their property rights trump the civil rights of all other Americans. This dates back to John C. Calhoun and his vigorous defense of America’s biggest economic phenomenon prior to the civil war: slavery. MacLean notes that slavery made North Carolina the richest and most powerful state in the union prior to 1860, and created more one percenters in Mississippi than in New York.

The power of this elite was held in check by the Civil War and various economic crashes, culminating in the Crash of ‘29 and the Depression, resulting in the New Deal.

MacLean explains how a libertarian economist of the 1950s, James McGill Buchanan, created a reality in which vast sums of money could be spent organizing the plutocrat class and using propaganda and control of the media to convince Americans that they were incapable of self-governance and should let the natural leaders of society (the “businessmen”) run things.

It was fascism, pure and simple, although that is a word they never, ever acknowledge and attack all who use it. Governance through corporation.

The biggest problem with fascism is the same that one sees with other unaccountable forms of governments, such as theocracies and monarchies: corruption sets in quickly, and the rot spreads until it finally kills its host.

But as long as there is power and money to be accumulated, corruption isn’t seen as a bug—it’s seen as a feature.

The fascists have taken over the GOP, with the nightmarish and Kafkaesque results that we see in the paper every day, of people grimly determined to fight unions, civil libertarian groups, workers in general, women, and any group that can organize, collectivize and perhaps challenge their power.

MacLean writes, “Is what we are dealing with merely a social movement of the right whose radical ideas must eventually face public scrutiny and rise or fall on their merits? Or is this the story of something quite different, something never before seen in American history? Could it be—and I use these words quite hesitantly and carefully—a fifth-column assault on American democratic governance?…Pushed by relatively small numbers of radical-right billionaires and millionaires who have become profoundly hostile to America’s modern system of government, an apparatus decades in the making, funded by those same billionaires and millionaires, has been working to undermine the normal governance of our democracy. Indeed, one such manifesto calls for a “hostile takeover” of Washington, D.C.”

As you watch this week as the Republicans cling like grim death to the Kavanaugh nomination, hoping to push this vile corporatist down our throats to consolidate their power they way they have with Thomas, and Gorsuch, and you wonder how they can possibly continue to support Trump, reflect on the fact that they are no longer just an American political party: they are a fifth column, enemies to the Constitution and determined to finish a slow coup they have been conducting against America for 40 years.

They know Trump is a bad president. Even without the corruption, the sheer scale of his incompetence and inability to lead would, in a normal party, be enough to impeach him. They see the weirdness and chaos as inconveniences; the fact that Trump is utterly corrupt is what makes him so valuable to them. They know he’s a thief, a crook, a swindler, and possibly a traitor. But so are they, even if they dress it up in self-serving rhetoric, and as for being traitors, they are much closer in spirit to the most corrupt plutocrat of all, Vladimir Putin, then they are to anything readers might recognize as American values. Treason is betrayal against those you owe fealty. By their lights, betraying America is not treason.

Perhaps the saddest element of this is the people they have roped in to support them. The racists. The Evangelicals. The Xenophobes. The growling, disaffected population that feel they deserve a place at the table and the fascists are more than happy to promise them that place.

They’ve always been useful idiots for demagogues. Nothing new there. What is new is what will follow.

Should the fascists win, they will discard these people like used condoms. Not only are their beliefs and impulses bad for business, but they can reorganize and pose a threat to their masters. And they cannot be trusted: they’ve already betrayed America. It would only be a matter of time before they revolt against Trump’s New Order.

And the worst of all is that they would become our allies in a common cause.

If you can vote in November, vote like your life depends on it. It does.

We can avoid having to fight a Fascist Fifth Column again.

Posted on

Calexit – Maybe Russia wants California Back

September 16th, 2018

Secession movements in California are nothing new. There have been some 220 different schemes to divvy up the state, 27 of which either made it to the state legislature floor, or were put up for referendum. Most of latest ones would have the effect of taking a big blue state and making one or two blue states, and three or four red states.

There have been at least four different secession movements since 1975, the most recent of which is the resurrected Calexit movement, run by a shady character named Louis Marinelli.

It’s a mistake to assume that everyone who wants to break the state up or secede from the Union is seeking partisan advantage, or working for a foreign power. One of the most famous secession movements of the 20th century, for the State of Jefferson, was sparked by a desire for decent highways through the region and a widespread perception that Sacramento had reneged on promises to provide such. Some secession schemes were idealistic in nature: Ecotopia and Cascadia were proposed with an eye to creating an environmental paradise. Most of these movements sought to improve things, one way or another. Even the ones that sought to gain were self-serving, rather than villainous.

Just this year a scheme to split California into three (Cal3, backed by venture capitalist Tim Draper), creating two red states and one blue died when the State Supreme Court ruled that the proposition constituted a “major revision” to the state constitution. Such changes can be placed in front of voters only by the state Legislature or a constitutional convention. The Court concluded, “because significant questions have been raised regarding the proposition’s validity, and because we conclude that the potential harm in permitting the measure to remain on the ballot outweighs the potential harm in delaying the proposition to a future election.” That would suggest that unless future initiatives specified that the existing state constitution be grandfathered into the mini-me states, such initiatives would be considered invalid.

Mind you, it was unlikely that two thirds of the state voters would turn the state water supply over to the thinly populated northern California, where the rain and snow like to congregate.

Which brings us to the Calexit movement. A year ago, it was moribund. The leader of the movement, the aforementioned Louis Marinelli, had suddenly fled the country, writing a manifesto that said, among other things, “I have found in Russia a new happiness, a life without the albatross of frustration and resentment towards ones’ homeland, and a future detached from the partisan divisions and animosity that has thus far engulfed my entire adult life. Consequently, if the people of Russia would be so kind as to welcome me here on a permanent basis, I intend to make Russia my new home.”

OK, good riddance. Turned out that unbeknownst to most voters and even most of his supporters, he had moved to Yekaterinburg the previous September, and was surreptitiously running Calexit from there.

He set up a bullshit embassy in Moscow, supposedly representing the “Republic of California.” Putin, of course, isn’t daft enough to grant recognition to this endeavor, but in a land where he viciously suppresses demonstrations he finds embarrassing, Putin seems oddly tolerant of Marinelli.

Russia did once have a colony in California from 1821 to 1841, what is now Fort Ross. (The “Ross” was for “Russia”). Nearby Sebastopol was not part of the Russian Empire, but got its name from the winners in a bar fight in a mysterious and largely unknown process. Northern California has the best history…

I had heard that Calexit was still a Thing, even without the Tsar of Yekateringburg, and assumed it basically gave the Teabagger crowd something to play with to distract them while the GOP imploded. While a lot of liberal and progressive Californian also fantasize about escaping from Trumpistan, they give Calexit a wide berth, knowing that it’s where venture capitalists, sagebush rebellion zanies, religious whacks and baby authoritarians go to die.

The Santa Barbara News Press is one of three papers that endorsed Trump in 2016 (and has its own remarkable story of takeover by a self-absorbed plutocrat) and so it’s not unusual to find Op-Eds saying that Lincoln was widely condemned during his presidency, just like Trump, so therefore Trump is just like Lincoln, or (today) that Trump must be honest because he refused to accept the presidential salary.

Even so, yesterday’s headline was a bit startling: “Secessionists hope ‘hatred’ of Golden State will aid cause.” The article, from Foxnews’ website, elaborates that the Calexit people want ‘deep hatred’ from at least twenty-five state legislatures, Not just hatred; deep hatred. I guess that means the sort of hatred people have for pink Capri pants, or Justin Beiber, or Barney the Dinosaur. Rip-your-teeth-out-and-throw-them-at-it type hatred.

The rationale is that if twenty five state leges vote to ask California to leave, that they will have the constitutionally required consent, and Calexit will tell the California voters that they now have legal permission from the country to leave.

It’s utter nonsense, of course. But Marinelli clearly hopes that the resounding rejection would make California all butt-hurt and they would leave in a huff, taking 12% of America’s economy and 15% of their tax base with them. The new Republic of California anthem could be, “Nobody loves me, everybody hates me, guess I’ll go eat worms.” It would be only fitting.

“Disentanglement” could cost California a cool trillion, and the rest of the country even more, and both would take massive hits in wealth and power.

Happy birthday, Vladimir. Stand by to pick up the pieces.

Maybe Louis Marinelli would be president-for-life. “Medals for Everyone!”

It’s not going anywhere. Yes, Trump is widely hated in California, but it’s a lot easier and far more productive to get Trump out of office than it is to break up the United States.

In the meantime, reflect on this: Calexit and Marinelli want to stoke hatred to their ends. That rarely involves benign intent, and the Russian influence is, as they say, clear and present.

To the Trumperdoos who hate California and want us gone: There is no such thing as a “California.” Never was. It’s just something ginned up by Hollywood and the Fake Liberal Media.

Just ask your President. Nothing here except illegal voters. Who you want to vote for Calexit.

Or something like that.

Posted on

Cooperation – The Manafortress has Fallen

September 14th, 2018

Paul Manafort has flipped. He’s going to give Bob Mueller everything he knows; about that Trump Tower meeting, about any and all other contacts between the Trump campaign and the Russians, and the exact degree each played in subverting the Clinton campaign and forced propagandization of the public discourse.

It’s a devastating blow for Trump, le coup de grâce, and it’s now becoming very unlikely that he will still be president six months from now.

It’s bad enough for a president when his campaign manager pleads guilty to two counts of conspiracy against the United States. (Trumperdoos, “Conspiracy” is the legal term for “collusion”).

Trump, when Manafort’s going to spill the beans, rat you out, sing like a canary, give it up to the G-men, telling them every thing you did as a part of that, you have a pretty sizable problem.

Mueller has a death grip on Manafort’s throat. In addition to the two guilty pleas and promise of cooperation, Manafort has agreed to give over nearly all of his personal wealth, some $145 million including four mansions, to asset forfeiture. It leaves just enough so his wife and kids won’t starve while he rots in jail. Manafort is clearly a man with no options and no bargaining chips, other than to give over Trump and many others close to Trump. This way, his family isn’t destitute, and he might actually live long enough to get out of prison, something not in the cards last week.

Shortly after Cohen decided to plead out and turn evidence, Trump got asked about ‘flippers.’ His answer was characteristically weird, in that he said he knew a lot of flippers and they were just part of his regular environment.

You have to wonder what other crime lords would have made of that statement. James Cagney’s characters would have prefaced any remarks made to suspected flippers with “Youse doity rats” and ended up with escapades involving cement overboots and the East River. Real mobsters would have arranged for brake failures, or skiing accidents (“Both legs”). For a man who supposedly demands absolute personal loyalty from all the people he’ll eventually betray, it was an oddly tepid response.

If America had to elect a mafia don president, at least they picked one that was profoundly incompetent and abjectly stupid. Trump can’t even call his little friend and arrange for Manafort to have an adventure involving ricin, polonium or novichok. It’s too late.

Manafort has already given everything he has to convince Mueller to let him off with just a decade or two and $145 million. All he had to do was sign the paperwork, and all that evidence were there for Mueller to do with as he pleased.

It’s too late for Trump to pardon his way out of it, too. A lot of the evidence will go to the State of New York Southern District, who will use it for state charges. Trump can only pardon federal offenses.

A lot of that evidence stands to implicate Trump himself. Even with Trumpenstooge Kavanaugh on the court (not a foregone conclusion at this point) the Court is unlikely to rule that a president indicted for criminal conspiracy against his own country (which is now quite likely) can pardon himself. Even Dead Tony would have trouble arguing that this came under the aegis of original intent.

I suspect that it wasn’t for their damp lust to get Kavanaugh on the court, thus assuring a corrupt corporate majority, the Republicans would have dumped Trump by now. Unfortunately for them, they need to maintain the few remaining tatters of presidential legitimacy Trump possesses for them to get Kavanaugh confirmed.

But it’s costing them massively, since the American people, Republicans in particular, are beginning to realize that this isn’t a witch hunt or a librul conspiracy; this is real, and Trump’s position becomes less defensible by the day.

A lot of Republican Senators, even those in safe states, are wondering what the real costs may be of forcibly rubber-stamping a man to the highest court in the land by a president facing indictment for criminal conspiracy against the United States. For Republicans, the question is no longer, “How badly will we lose the mid-terms?”

They have to ask if they can survive at all as a party, or even a movement. They’ve bet all their political, ethical and moral legitimacy on this one last toss of the dice.

Posted on

Nothing to Fear but…: A review of Fear

Fear: Trump in the White House

Bob Woodward

Simon & Schuster September 2018

Yes, I know the title of the book is Fear, and I should have regarded that as fair warning.

But FFS, I thought I would at least get through the Prologue without being reduced to mindless, numbing, existential terror!

In a well-reported vignette from the book, “On the desk was a one-page draft letter from the president addressed to the president of South Korea, terminating the United States–Korea Free Trade Agreement, known as KORUS.” Woodward goes on to relate the immense strategic, tactical, economic and diplomatic damage the United States would suffer as an almost immediate result of a sudden, unilateral withdrawal from KORUS.  

Gary Cohn, the former president of Goldman Sachs and the president’s top economic adviser, spotted the draft and stole it from the President’s desk, counting on Trump’s sparkler-like mind to forget about it. And in fact, he did.

Woodward writes, “It was no less than an administrative coup d’état, an undermining of the will of the president of the United States and his constitutional authority.”

That’s pretty scary right there.

Woodward goes on to relate a power struggle, with Trump and Kushner on one side, and Mattis, Cohn, and Porter on the other. Trump was determined to destroy KORUS, but only intermittently, and Kushner’s agenda was focused on real estate and Israel, so he didn’t seem to be behind the memos to destroy the pact.

So who was behind it? Woodward doesn’t know. Possibly even Trump doesn’t know.

That’s very scary. An unstable, mercurial president who is easily manipulated is bad enough, but when nobody even knows who is pulling his strings, that is truly terrifying.

Fear is a surprisingly easy read, broken up into 42 easily-digested chapters. A lot of them won’t taste very good, but that’s not Woodward’s fault—he just reports what he saw. And he saw a lot.

Just how crass, craven, amoral and reckless with the truth is Trump? This vignette, from the Chapter detailing Trump’s contentious relationship with NATO, sums it up nicely:

A staffer who sat in on several calls that Trump made to Gold Star families was struck with how much time and emotional energy Trump devoted to them. He had a copy of material from the deceased service member’s personnel file.

“I’m looking at his picture—such a beautiful boy,” Trump said in one call to family members. Where did he grow up? Where did he go to school? Why did he join the service?

“I’ve got the record here,” Trump said. “There are reports here that say how much he was loved. He was a great leader.”

Some in the Oval Office had copies of the service records. None of what Trump cited was there. He was just making it up. He knew what the families wanted to hear.

It’s been a week since the pre-release reviews of this book rocked the Trump White House. Since then, the op-ed by Anonymous came out, Trump called Woodward a liar and Woodward promptly produced a tape showing he talked to Trump, Trump made fist-bumps to celebrate 9/11, and his son Eric, poster child for post-partum abortion, made a stunningly anti-semitic remark about Woodward. Trump declared the catastrophe of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico an “unsung sucess” and promised to bring that same high level of preparation and competence to the Carolinas when Florence makes landfall late tomorrow.

I feel sorry for the Carolinas and wish them well.

It seems like in any given week, Trump manages to recapitulate the worst of Nixon, Reagan and Bush the Lesser.

As I finish Woodward’s latest and perhaps greatest, I’m reminded of another President: “…let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory.”

In those dark days, reality was what we feared, and Franklin Roosevelt was what stood up to it.

In these dark days, Trump is what we fear, and we have to stand up to him. Woodward is one of the strongest voices yet to do so.

We have nothing to fear but Trump himself.Nothin

Posted on

Our “Oh Shit” Moment – We’re at Meltdown Point for Trump

The Bob Woodword book,  Fear: Trump in the White House was probably the body blow. Certainly, it sparked the events of today.

The most lenient things in the book we already knew; that Trump was erratic, prone to rash and ill-considered moves, amoral, and the world’s nightmare boss. The worst were things we suspected, such as the military effectively removing him from chain of command (in normal times, mutiny punishable by death), aides scrambling to hide proclamations written by his vilest advisors (Stephen Miller and the absent-only-in-person Steve Bannon) that would be likely to spark a civil war or revolution.

Recent books, most notably Everything Trump Touches Dies by GOP operative Rick Wilson have broadly hinted at this.

But this is Bob Woodward, chronicler of Administrations going back to Nixon (who he helped pull down). When it comes to credibility, he is at the top. And the wild, galvanic reaction of Trump to the pre-release reviews of the book only add to the sense that horrific as it is, Woodward has nailed this administration. The book doesn’t even go on sale for a week, and I find myself wondering if Trump will even still be President at that point.

His bizarre recorded conversation with Woodward from last week, after the galley copy had gone to the publishers and it was far too late to influence the contents of the book in any way, showed that Trump, emotionally and intellectually, was at the end of his tether.

Affirming the point the book was making: Trump, bellicose, ignorant, vicious and thin-skinned, is utterly unfit to be President, his is a White House in paralysis, the government is in chaos, and America is facing political collapse.

The existence of the Woodward book led to today’s even more extraordinary events. Trump came out and screamed about the media being the enemy of the people and he was the best president America ever had. Senate Republicans all ducked and went silent, intent on getting their amoral and possibly criminal stooge onto the Supreme Court in a last-gasp effort to maintain perpetual power. All they ever wanted was power, so fuck Trump, fuck Woodward, and fuck the country.

They are broken and twisted creatures of a broken and twisted philosophy, and Trump is their hireling. You just can’t get good help when your cause is morally bankrupt.

But one of them, intent on saving his (or her) ass and perhaps being able to pretend he was thinking of America all along, wrote an anonymous editorial to the New York Times. Make no mistake: the author of this piece is self-serving scum, gleeful at the damage the GOP has done to the country. This is clear early on: “We want the administration to succeed and think that many of its policies have already made America safer and more prosperous.”

OK, the writer is happy to shaft Trump, but is going to promote Trump’s more egregious lies about the efficacy of GOP policies that have been inflicted on us.

The author continues, “The root of the problem is the president’s amorality. Anyone who works with him knows he is not moored to any discernible first principles that guide his decision making.” Translated: Trump’s greedy nihilism is more visible and exceeds what we think we can cover up.

The author is delighted that the administration has enabled stealing another trillion from the public treasury for the ultra-rich, destroyed efforts to combat the threat of climate change, stripped millions of health care access, and is working hard to destroy Medicare and Social Security.

“But these successes have come despite — not because of — the president’s leadership style, which is impetuous, adversarial, petty and ineffective.” What fascists need as they rape the country is a leader who can good dignified and resolute as he destroys us. At at time when the GOP when needs a Calvin Coolidge to look dignified and resolute as they steal the country blind, they have Rufus T. Firefly. Only without Firefly’s ability to think quickly.

So the author is no hero: the author is just a rat deserting a sinking ship and probably hoping for a book deal out of the wreckage.

Trump of course, had a public meltdown over this, epic even by his standards. He had some ceremony honoring cops, and was backed by a rather clownish-looking choir of sherrifs as he howled about the “failing New York Times” for their “gutless editorial.” He vowed that the media “the media will be out of business” by the time he leaves office (that departure might be next week at this rate).

The cops dutifully applauded. Authority uber alles.

This is an Alex Butterfield (“Oh, didn’t you know? President Nixon taped everything in the Oval Office!”) and John Dean moment. It is truly the beginning of the end for Trump.

Now all we have to do is survive the Fall of Trump, and then drive the fascists who made him possible out of office.

Posted on

Three Funerals…And Some Precedence for Presidents

August 31st 2018mcains final salute

They buried John McCain and Aretha Franklin today. Both had Presidents in attendance (Bill Clinton at Franklin’s and he and all the other retired Presidents at McCain’s) and both were free of Trumps. Both ceremonies were on the telly in the background and I didn’t pay deep attention. I don’t intend to eulogise either of them here, not out of disrespect, but simply because I have nothing to add that hasn’t been said thousands of times over the past week. I’ll simply note that 250 years from now, should we survive, every historian will know who McCain was, and every music lover will know who Franklin was.

I don’t mean to sound churlish—McCain had hundreds of very important people who said very important things about him, but I can’t help but think that the praises heaped on him, and the expositions of his importance to the country, were a bit more effusive and ebullient then they actually needed to be. It’s almost as if they were rubbing it in, somehow.

Well, the headline over a David Smith article at the Guardian let the cat out of the bag: Trump sits alone ‘sulking’ as Washington pays its respects to John McCain.

Ah, poor widdle Donnie needs his nappie changed! His behavior towards McCain has always been churlish—really churlish, and not just me trying to avoid sounding that way. Trump is a man whose soul resides where the sewer rats won’t go, but he hit new personal lows in his response to McCain’s death this week. That stunt of ordering the flags back to full mast the day after McCain died…

One of the Weasels noted that McCain’s family missed a bet. They should have invited Justin Trudeau.

Vice President Pence, who always looks like Leslie Nielsen with severe constipation, spoke at the McCain ceremony, and I believe he was the only one who uttered the words “President Trump.” The pained, sullen silence that greeted his invocation of the Glorious Leader must have seemed very strange to him: he’s used to watching cabinet members cheer, stomp and hoot every time Trump’s name is mentioned. Maybe he went home afterward, dropped to his knees, and said, “Jesus, you gots some ‘splaining to do…”

Aretha’s funeral was a happier, more boisterous affair. The eulogies were cheery, heartfelt, loving and often funny. But the most amazing tribute was one played by a small and rather unremarkable marching band some five time zones east. The Buckingham Palace Guard, in their traditional Changing of the Guard ceremony, played “R-E-S-P-E-C-T.” It was unthinkable, and couldn’t have been done without the Queen’s knowledge and consent.

At McCain’s funeral, people showed respect. At Franklin’s, they sang it.

Trump knew of Franklin’s death, of course, tweeting that she had worked for him on several occasions. Even by Trump standards, it was a weird response. Imagine Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry tweeting, “Stephen Hawking? Oh, I had him on my show once!”

I’m not sure Trump actually knew who Franklin was, though. Otherwise he might have tweeted something like “Imagine how great quality a singer if she had been white!” Yes, I know some of you are wincing, but admit it: you could see Trump coming up with something like that. Nobody else. Just Trump.

Glioblastoma, one of the most loathsome forms of cancer around, caused McCain’s death, and played a role in his funeral. His death came nine years to the day after Ted Kennedy died of the same disease, and one of the eulogies was delivered by Vice President Joe Biden, whose son Beau died of the disease at age 46.

The funerals are over now, and Trump can stop pretending he’s concentrating on his golf game and continue preparing for the burial of his presidency. It’s Friday, and the Office of the Special Counsel (note spelling, Donny!) often has new announcement and new indictments on a Friday. There’s an unofficial courtesy in Washington that legal attacks on a campaign should not occur after Labor Day, but of course, Trump himself isn’t running for office this year.

So now he can have the flag put back up to full staff, and hopefully, as he does so, he can study the flag and learn which colors go where in case he ever has to crayon another flag. (Hint, Donnie: none of the stripes are blue. Not on the American flag, anyway. Your flag probably does have a blue stripe.)

So Trump can stop worrying about those greedy, selfish people who keep upstaging him by dying. Hopefully there won’t be any others for a while.

In the meantime, Trump can draw solace in the knowledge that his own funeral is one of the most highly-anticipated events of the century.

The downside: it will be the lightest attended.

Posted on

Donald, Duck! In the wake of the Manafort and Cohen catastrophes, more looms

August 23rd, 2018

Did you spill your popcorn following the Travesty of the Donald this week? Leave it. Things are going to get fast and furious, and you aren’t going to have time to make more popcorn.
Pecker! That’s what this complex of scandals was missing! A corrupt pseudo-journalist named Pecker turning on Trump. Now this David Pecker is a newspaper man in much the same way that Trump is a president: he has the power, and the accoutrements pertaining thereto, but he’s still just a dangerous joke.
He’s the owner of the supermarket tabloid, the National Enquirer. Long the province of psychics, bat-boys, and endless scandalous (and almost always false) rumors, it branched out into politics in the 1990s, breathlessly detailing secret meetings between Bill Clinton and space aliens. It was unbelievably stupid, but it put Clinton in a bad light (space aliens, really) so it became a new bible for the types of morons who think the notion that Earth is a big old ball just hanging in space is just a conspiracy by scientists to make us all not love Jesus. The Ray-de-oh is broke, so they can’t listen to tINFOil WARS.
So when you have a candidate come along who bangs porn stars, and is possibly a Russian agent and might have had hookers put on a golden shower show for him, you would think the National Enquirer would expand to 500 pages weekly just to keep up with all the lurid scum flowing from this walking sewer of a candidate.
Um, no. They didn’t. In fact they went out of their way to protect him, buying up tell-all stories from women who got paid not to discuss having sex with Trump, and starting an unending stream of attacks on Hillary.
Rachel Maddow tonight showed a bakers’ dozen covers from the NE, putting Trump in a god-like light, and blasting Hillary Clinton over and over.
Interestingly, much of what they accused Clinton of was things we know Trump was doing. She was corrupt, swindled people, kowtowed to foreign agencies, was secretly a lesbian who banged porn stars, ran a fake charity, and lied a lot. It was part of the standard right wing propaganda: protect your candidate from his own ruinous behavior by accusing his opponent of the same things. It confuses the cows in the supermarket line.
Interestingly, the tab also accused Hillary of being far sicker and more senile than she looked, and having a severe drug problem. Was that part of the same pattern? Are these Trump problems being projected?
You know, things with this administration phase between ‘chilling’ and ‘ridiculous’ so fast and so often it’s frequently hard to tell which is which.  But this one involves long-time scandal rag ‘National Enquirer’ covering up for a corrupt politician on multiple sex scandals, so let’s call it ‘ridiculous.’
In any event, Vanity Fair and the Wall Street Journal (who seem to be getting very fed up with Trump these days) reported that Pecker and his Vice President and Chief Content Officer, Dylan Howard, were granted immunity in return for some nice long chats (30 hours worth?) with Robert Mueller’s people. There are lurid rumors of a safe in Pecker’s office that is crammed with hundreds of stories the NE has covered Trump on.
Trump is openly musing a pardon for Manafort trial even as the second one looms. This, by itself, is a federal felony by Trump, an open move to obstruct justice. Mueller probably grinned mirthlessly and added it to his very long list.
Cohen is going to have some nice long chats with the Special Counsel’s office himself. Apparently he’s not too fond of Captain Pissmop any more and wants to share more items. One line in the court proceedings where he entered his pleas might give a clue as to what he wants to discuss: “The $50,000 represented a claimed payment for ‘tech services,’ which in fact related to work COHEN had solicited from a technology company during and in connection with the campaign.”
OK, here’s the thing: The Trump campaign detailed all their spending in regards to computer servers, use and communications.
Except this. There’s a hint the ‘tech service’ in question was based in Russia.
If there was direct clandestine communication between the Trump campaign and Russia during the campaign, even the corrupt, venal, cowardly and unpatriotic Republicans in Congress will have to abandon their dreams of enslaving the American people and cut their losses—and Trump’s throat.
If you have any popcorn left, hang on to it tightly, no matter what your dog suggests.

Posted on

Omarosa Crazed crying lowlifes, Unite!

“When you give a crazed, crying lowlife a break, and give her a job at the White House, I guess it just didn’t work out. Good work by General [John] Kelly for quickly firing that dog!”

Well, OK then. Apparently it is the role of the President of the United States to give politically sensitive jobs paying nearly a quarter million a year to “crazed, crying lowlife(s).”

Usually mercy hires are for custodian, or mail clerk. Something with limited responsibility, even more limited visibility, and where if it doesn’t work out, the damage can be swiftly addressed. Press Liaison for the White House might be above the paygrade of your typical crazed, crying lowlife. It might be suitable for a dog, or even a cat: Bo, Millie and Socks are all very good press liaisons for their respective administrations, and they weren’t even asked to sign non-disclosure agreements. But it was generally assumed the White House would avoid crazed crying lowlifes since the Mary Lincoln incidents. Normally, crazed crying lowlifes are not well suited to be envoys and ambassadors for the President. Until now.

“When you give a crazed, crying lowlife a break, and give her a job at the White House, I guess it just didn’t work out. Good work by General [John] Kelly for quickly firing that dog!”Back when she was hired, days after the election, I knew little about her, but considered the choice to be a joke. A reality-TV show actor whose main claim to fame was she was the resident Samantha Bee word. A close match for the President elect, who fitted the same description, but at the time, I had no idea he was hiring her because she was a crazed crying lowlife. As a liberal, I like to see all segments of society represented in government, but this seemed a bit beyond the necessary courtesies of inclusionism.

In short, I regarded Omarosa, and her subsequent dismissal, as just one more minor sideshow Trump’s Big Top, appearing soon in a Stephen King novel near you. Her role in this chaotic administration could be equated to noticing a dog lifting his leg against a woman’s expensive boots during a nuclear attack. No catastrophe is complete without its moments of low farce, and Omarosa seemed perfect for the role of minor low farce.

Then I heard about the tapes. I didn’t expect them to amount to much. Trump has boasted he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it, and Republicans and Faux News are intent on proving him right. Even if the tapes had something damning, Republicans are far too lost and amoral to care. They smell power, and so fuck morality, fuck propriety, fuck the country, fuck everything.

My opinion of Omarosa went up minutely, though. She had enough common sense to tape her interactions with Trump.

Now it’s coming to light that taping Trump was de rigueur at the House of the Orange Pomposity, and damn the non-disclosure agreements. People simply felt a need to protect themselves.

This isn’t something about Trump we didn’t already know. During the campaign, it came out that his lawyers got in the habit of conferring with him in teams of two or more. The reason was simple: Trump was the ultimate nightmare client. He would not only lie to his lawyers, but if cornered, he would lie about them. In fact, he would lie for no particular reason at all.

We’ve seen this literally thousands of times during his presidency. Trump lies. He lies when it suits his interests. He lies just for the hell of it. He sometimes even lies when it does nothing but hurt his own interests. There’s an old political joke: “George Washington couldn’t lie, FDR couldn’t tell the truth, and [incumbent] can’t tell the difference.” I first heard it during the Nixon administration, and just about for every administration since.

Only now it isn’t a joke. I doubt Trump usually knows if he’s lying or not, and wouldn’t care either way.

His lawyers figured that out fairly quickly, and double-teamed him because he would, inevitably, betray them and throw them under the bus. He wouldn’t even need a reason.

Getting elected president didn’t make him better, any more than feeding a rabid dog will make him a good playmate for the kids. (Yeah, I just compared the President of the United States to a dog. What goes around comes around!).

So we have a White House where the leader is so chaotically temperamental and destructive that the people putatively working for him are recording him to cover their asses. Despite the non-disclosure agreements.

Speaking of which, campaigns often have their volunteers sign NDAs. I came across a copy of the one required by the Obama campaign in 2008 ( https://obama.3cdn.net/d33f3886bfb70a0cca_zrs9mvxyt.pdf ). Its scope is significantly more limited than the one Trump used ( http://slnews.us/sf081418a ), both in terms and range of items not to be discussed. One limit was that it forbade disclosures that might hurt the campaign, giving it a term of the day after the election. Trump’s is indefinite, and thus may not hold up in court. The Trump campaign supposedly is suing Omarosa “for millions of dollars”, so it will be interesting to see if a court considers it enforceable or not.

It’s being reported that Trump had administration hires sign and NDA, as well, and that’s far more problematic. Security clearances (which Trump tried to grandly ignore) are one thing: it’s reasonable to set limits on access to national security elements. But NDAs, something no other administration has ever required, is another. Is it reasonable, or even legal to require government employees to keep non-national-security items secret from the public? I suspect that’s going to get tested in court in fairly short order.

In the meantime, if you’re an employer, owner of a large firm, and you want to show how big-hearted you are and hire a crazed, crying lowlife, that’s probably a nice thing to do, but one word of advice: don’t put that hire in charge of your public relations. Get a dog instead.

error

Enjoy Zepps Commentaries? Please spread the word :)