Antifa – It’s not antifashionable

August 17^th 2019

Donald Trump, doubtlessly hoping to further spark unrest between fascists and antifascists, sent out an incendiary tweet July 27^th, 2019. “Consideration is being given to declaring ANTIFA, the gutless Radical Left Wack Jobs who go around hitting (only non-fighters) people over the heads with baseball bats, a major Organization of Terror (along with MS-13 & others). Would make it easier for police to do their job!”

In a (vain) hope of escalating the confrontation between such groups in Portland today, he tweeted last night, “Major consideration is being given to naming ANTIFA an “ORGANIZATION OF TERROR.” Portland is being watched very closely. Hopefully the Mayor will be able to properly do his job!”

To that end, GOP legislators have been given marching orders to blame all further incidents of mass murder on “leftists” in general and Antifa in particular, and never, ever admit that racial hatred and xenophobia might drive such attacks—indeed, one Republican today tried to blame El Paso on Antifa.

Well, that’s the nature of propaganda. There’s an image popular on far right sites that shows a flag, remarkably similar to the Nazi German military flag, with the letters “AF” where the swastica would be. It’s photoshopped: the original nazi-style flag was for the National Front in Britain, a far-right group. The ‘N’ was photoshopped to an ‘A’ and the right wing propagandists were off to the races, sobbing over the victims of the thugs wielding the “Antifa” flag. The ‘victims’ in the original photo? Oh, they were Antifa. British Nazis were attacking them. Details, details.

There’s only been one case where a leftist acting on his political philosophy shot some people, and that was that clown who shot up the Congressional baseball game. The bozo who shot Gabby Gifford was described by a classmate who didn’t actually know him as “a liberal” and the right seized on that with glee, but the reality is he was mentally too far gone to have any sort of coherent political philosophy, and furthermore, Gifford is a Democrat. The Dayton shooter did express leftist sympathies on his Facebook page, but he was not Antifa, nothing in his screeds advocated violence. If he was out to make a political statement, killing his sister and her boyfriend seems a strange way to start.

Compare with the hundreds of murders committed by the right for political and racial reasons: El Paso, most of the school shootings, the attacks on mosques and synagogues, black churches shot up and burned. Deaths from far-right killers acting on their Nazi beliefs are in the thousands. Deaths from Antifa: 0.

I’m happy to report that the mayor and Portland Police did do their job, although probably not in the way Trump hoped. They kept protesters and counter-protesters largely separate, with the result that there were 13 arrests and perhaps a half dozen injuries, of which only one required a visit to the hospital.

This is probably much closer to what Trump hoped to see in the immediate future for America:

In the final years of the Weimar Republic, Germany was mired in a grave political and economic crisis that left the society verging on civil war. Street violence by paramilitary organizations on the Left and the Right increased sharply. In the final ten days of the July 1932 parliamentary elections, Prussian authorities reported three hundred acts of politically motivated violence that left twenty-four people dead and almost three hundred injured. In the Nazi campaigns, propaganda and terror were closely linked. In Berlin, Nazi Party leader Joseph Goebbels intentionally provoked Communist and Social Democratic actions by marching SA [Brownshirt] storm troopers into working-class neighborhoods where those parties had strongholds. Then he invoked the heroism of the Nazi “martyrs” who were injured or killed in these battles to garner greater public attention. Nazi newspapers, photographs, films, and later paintings dramatized the exploits of these fighters. The “Horst Wessel Song,” bearing the name of the twenty-three-year-old storm trooper and protege of Goebbels who was killed in 1930, became the Nazi hymn. The well-publicized image of the SA-man with a bandaged head, a stirring reminder of his combat against the “Marxists” (along with other portrayals of muscular, oversized storm troopers), became standard in party propaganda. In the first eight months of 1932, the Nazis claimed that seventy “martyrs” had fallen in battle against the enemy. Such heroic depictions — set against the grim realities of chronic unemployment and underemployment for young people during the Weimar period — no doubt helped increase membership in the SA units, which expanded in Berlin from 450 men in 1926 to some 32,000 by January 1933.

It’s a nightmare scenario that no sane person ever wants to see in America. Not among the scattered groups of people collectively known as “Antifa” and not among a surprising number of people that are pro-Trump. It was interesting to note that Oath Keepers, a Christian Dominionist group often seen as an umbrella organization coordinating Proud Boys and other far right groups, withdrew support and involvement from the Portland demonstrations the day before, explicitly stating that they felt the other groups had not done enough to keep the white nationalists out of the proceedings. It’s a reminder that not everyone in that crowd is a violent Nazi, and that some groups, such as the Oath Keepers, have a moral basement.

While the American 21^st century version of Antifa is a loose coalition of groups ranging from librarians to the guys in black with truncheons you see reminding the Nazis that if they start breaking windows of shops belonging to minorities there will be a price to pay, Antifa as a global phenomenon dates back nearly a century, to the rise of Mussolini in Italy, and Hitler in Germany. In Germany it was known as the Antifaschistische Aktion and sad to relate, it wasn’t very effective. While it was originally organized by the second largest party in Germany at that time, the Communists, and supported by some of the moderate Social Democrats (although those two groups were largely antipathetic), the Nazis simply had more hobnailed boots on the ground and truncheons, and the power of propaganda.

Every time some brown shirt got drunk and fell in a ditch and drowned, or got run over by a bus, a howl went up from the Nazis, on the radio and in pamphlets and on posters and stickers everywhere, glorifying the victims of political oppression, and condemning the vicious, ravening hordes of greedy Jews who committed murder most foul against glorious Aryan youth who sought only to protect God and the Fatherland from such contamination.

When Hitler seized total power, he created a law, Reichstrafgesetzbuch which outlawed political dissidents, equated all dissenters to terrorists, and mandated life in prison, twenty years hard labor, or death. The good news for Antifa was that death usually came fairly quickly in Hitler’s prisons.

You have the Nazi propagandists of today, the Faux News opinionators and the radio blowhards, and an endless chorus of how the real threat is from the left, and they are attacking and annoying brave, patriotic Proud Boys whose only crime was defending America. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

And the Reichstrafgesetzbuch is quite similar to legislation being pushed by another Nazi born in a neighboring country, Ted Cruz. Imagine how Donald Trump will use legislation like THAT if it’s in place for the campaign next summer! The mere act of condemning white nationalists who murder Hispanics, Moslems or schoolchildren could get you decades in Trump’s prisons, and we’ve already seen what kinds of conditions he wants for little children; imagine what he has in mind for you! And Trump’s corrupt Attorney-General Barr is already compiling lists of “suspected leftist terrorists” for future use. No doubt I’m on that list, even though I’ve never espoused political violence in any form. No doubt you are too, because you’re reading this.

We’ve seen this before—in Europe before WW2, in Europe since the breakup of the USSR, and many times in many other countries. It never ends well.

If we don’t get Trump and his henchmen out of office before the next election through peaceful and legal means, it gives him a ticket to strive for the power and glory that Hitler enjoyed for over a decade before he self-destructed and took his entire nation with him.

Impeach Trump now before he and his brownshirts get us killed.

Addendum:

Where the Brownshirts Came From

by James H. Barnett Washington Examiner

Daniel Siemens’s Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler’s Brownshirts, a superbly detailed account of the Sturmabteilung (SA), the main paramilitary wing of the Nazi party from its inception in 1920 until the consolidation of Hitler’s power in 1934. Siemens, a professor of European history at Newcastle University, looks beyond the traditional trope of the SA, or “Brownshirts” as they were commonly known, as a group of rowdy young psychopaths looking to brawl. His book paints a far more frightening portrait of a million-member organization that flourished by promising young German men a world of hypermasculinity, camaraderie, and egalitarianism—with genocidal undertones.

[…] Readers well-versed in the history of interwar Europe will appreciate Siemens’s valuable new research on the SA’s role in the Nazis’ rise to power as well as the group’s participation in the German war effort and Holocaust. For the general reader, Stormtroopers sheds light on the terrifying phenomena of political violence trouncing liberalism and of relatively ordinary young men getting swept up in the furor of a genocidal project. Hopefully, it will be read widely.

June 13, 2019

Treason – Trump crosses the line—twice

Treason

Trump crosses the line—twice

June 13^th 2019

In an interview with George Stephanopoulos, Trump said, “I think you might want to listen, there isn’t anything wrong with listening. If somebody called from a country, Norway, [and said] ‘we have information on your opponent’ oh, I think I’d want to hear it.”

An incredulous Stephanopoulos then asked what Trump would do is the country in question was China or Russia. Would he take the information, or call the FBI? Trump blandly replied, “I think maybe you do both. It’s not an interference, they have information – I think I’d take it. If I thought there was something wrong, I’d go maybe to the FBI… but when somebody comes up with ‘oppo research’, right, they come up with oppo research, ‘oh let’s call the FBI.’”

The President of the United States just announced that he would be happy to let a hostile foreign power directly interfere with an American election. This despite the fact that he is very strongly suspected of having done exactly that during the 2016 campaign and is in an ever-deepening morass of investigation and scandal as a result.

He’s already been driven to claim executive privilege over documents already made public, ordered people to ignore subpoenas, and even tried to get the Supreme Court to rule that Congress could not investigate him.

It’s already far deeper and darker than Watergate ever was, and he’s learned nothing from it. He just announced to the world that he would do it again, and suborn his own country in order to get dirt on a possible opposition candidate.

We already know that Rudy Guiliani was planning to go to the Ukraine in order to get dirt, not on Joe Biden, but his son Hunter, to use as kompromat against Biden.

It’s obvious this sort of filthy and unpatriotic behavior is his game plan for the upcoming election.

Remarkably, some alleged Americans are already trying to excuse this. One guy on one of the cable yammerfests last night was arguing that proving intent was key to a successful prosecution of Trump, and that all his actions since 2015 didn’t include strong evidence that he maliciously intended to violate the law.

I hope the guy was talking about the conspiracy charges, where intent is key, since conspiracy by its nature usually involves criminal activity that hasn’t happened yet, or cover up actions that might be embarrassing. If he was talking about the crimes that Trump has openly and blatantly committed, then it shows how corrupt and morally dissolute some in the legal profession have become. It would show the chasm between justice for the rich (“Prove he intended to do any harm when he broke the law”) and justice for the poor (“Ignorance of the law is no excuse.”).

It came on the heels of something that was, if anything, even viler. His love affair with Kim Jong Un, the vicious despot running North Korea, is well known. I guess it’s part of some addle-pated effort to show that he has tamed Kim, and now that Kim is belled and leashed, they’re best of buddies. It’s not a very convincing performance, a middle-school performance by an alleged grown-up.

Back in 2017, Kim had his half-brother murdered in a Thai airport by two women who sprayed VX compound in his face. It was both grotesque and ludicrous. Two years later, it emerged that Kim Jong Nam, the half-brother, was on his way to meet with a CIA operative, and in fact was secretly reporting to the CIA.

For a President who welcomes interference by a hostile foreign power in US government, Trump was appalled that the US might interfere with North Korea’s government. When a reporter asked him about the reports that Kim Jong Nam was working for the CIA, Trump appeared to be caught flat-footed. “I don’t know, I have not heard about that.”

Then he said, “I saw the information about the CIA with respect to his brother or half brother, and I would tell him that would not happen under my auspices, that’s for sure. I wouldn’t let that happen under my auspices.”

Apparently shaken by this horrid example of American perfidy, Trump continued, “I just received a beautiful letter from Kim Jong Un. I can’t show you the letter, obviously, but it was very personal, very warm, very nice letter. North Korea, under his leadership, has great potential,”

It’s difficult to gauge if Trump really wants to prevent US espionage against North Korea. He lies about everything, so there’s no particular reason to suppose he’s telling the truth now. But we can’t really know. He’s too random.

But for North Korea, his words provided considerable aid and comfort.

Now, here’s the thing. Back in 1950, when North Korea attacked South Korea, the two halves of the country promptly declared war on each other. The US came in on S. Korea’s side, as the Soviet Union and later China came in on N. Korea’s side. The US involvement was fig-leafed as being a part of a United Nations action. Since the UN Charter forbade the organization from waging war, they called it a “Police Action” instead. The death toll from this “Police Action” both civilian and military, all sides, came to well over two million people. So let’s not be stupid: it was a war. Period.

It ended with a cease-fire armistice in 1953, but there never was a peace treaty. South and North Korea are still at war, and the US, by terms of their own treaty with S. Korea, are at war with N. Korea as well. North Korea is considered an enemy regime.

The Constitution defines treason thusly: “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.”

I’m pretty sure more than two people saw Trump prattle on about his good buddy Kim Jong Un and promise to never let the US conduct intelligence operations against him. Given his feckless disregard for American security and willingness to shaft his own people, I wouldn’t be in the least bit surprised if Trump revealed the identity of the CIA people Kim Jong Nam was reporting to. You know he’s capable of doing such a thing. After all, he sent his thugish lawyer to the Ukraine to dig up dirt on a family member of a opposition candidate, called his own appointee to head the FBI a liar, and grandly announced he would commit the same felonies again in the next election. It’s no outside the realm of possibility.

But Congress can stop this traitor. They can do it right now, by opening formal impeachment hearings and putting the evidence of Trump’s disloyalty and criminality out where Faux News can’t sweep it under their carpet.

But they must act quickly. There was already a serious incident in the Gulf yesterday, two tankers attacked and set ablaze. Iran will certainly be blamed, and it was most likely the US was actually behind the attacks. Oil prices are plunging, and Trump desperately needs a big war in order to distract and exploit the American tendancy to rally round the flag when war breaks out.

Trump is not interested in America, and won’t mind seeing millions of Americans risk their lives so he can avoid prison.

Trump is a traitor. He needs to be tried for treason now.

May 24, 2019

Decompensation – Trump is at his most dangerous

May 23rd, 2019

According to Dorland’s Medical Dictionary, decompensation, among other things, is “failure of defense mechanisms resulting in progressive personality disintegration.” Basically, if a person with mental illness is confronted by a reality that shatters the comforting lies with which he has cocooned himself, he shatters, both mentally and emotionally.

Donald Trump appears to be in a state of decompensation and seemingly can no longer sustain the pretense of being a functional person able to interact with others.

Yesterday was remarkable enough. In a pre-planned meltdown (and one apparently vigorously opposed by his aides) he declared that he would not be interacting with Congress on legislative negotiations at all until the investigations of himself were ended. That was astonishing.

He concluded this utter spectacle by declaring grandly, that he was “the most transparent president in history, who doesn’t do cover-ups.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called the performance “jaw-dropping” and it’s pretty hard to take issue with that.

By way of example, three presidents before him have faced serious impeachment proceedings: Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton. All three continued to do their jobs and even on the eve of impeachment votes, continued back-and-forths with Congress regarding major legislation. They had a job to do, and they all had the courage and character to do the job, no matter how bleak their political futures appeared.

He had already declared that investigating him was treasonous, and today he doubled down on that, declaring that James Comey, Lisa Page, Peter Strzok and Andrew McCabe were the traitors he had in mind. The reporter asking him that added, “Sir, the Constitution says treason is punishable by death. You’ve accused your adversaries of treason. Who are you talking about?” Trump didn’t seem to have any problem with the inference that he would want to have those four individuals put to death.

At a rally last night, he declared that William Barr, his lickspittle and contemptible Attorney General, was “looking into” investigating Trump’s political foes.

This is Nazi dictator stuff that is happening here.

Trump’s entire world is collapsing. He is a man who not only has lived a lie, but has been an utter lie since he was about three years old. He loudly proclaimed (and presumably believed) that he was a great businessman and one of the best negotiators on Earth. In the past fortnight, a stunning investigative piece by the New York Times revealed that not only was he a poor businessman, but in terms of money lost, the worst businessman in America over a ten-year span. Despite his efforts to utterly stonewall all investigations, Congress has his bank records from Wells Fargo and TD banks; Rex Tillerson gave hours of secret testimony about his pathetic meetings with Vladimir Putin, and he is losing court case after court case, unable to even use litigation as a delaying tactic.

Imagine the thing in your life that most defines you as a person, and is something your entire self-respect and self-image relies upon. Maybe you know it’s a lie, and maybe you don’t, but suddenly, you are totally and utterly exposed in such a way that the whole world knows about it. This is far worse than dreams about no pants in school, or getting caught downloading porn of 14 year olds. This is something that utterly smashes your entire public persona.

That’s what happened to Trump.

Now, I’m not trying to present him sympathetically. His is a tawdry, sordid, vicious life in which he has coldly and even joyfully hurt and cheated many people. He was utter sociopathic scum before he became president.

He also had Nazi proclivities. During the campaign, people warned that his bedside reading material consisted of one book: “My New Order” by Adolf Hitler. He admitted to this readily enough, but claimed that it was OK because the person who loaned him the book was Jewish. (He wasn’t, and it doesn’t exactly explain why Trump would fixate on a book that, along with many of Hitler’s speeches, provided a step-by-step description of how he attained and consolidated his power.) Even without Trump’s blatantly and viciously anti-Semitic, racist, bullying and dishonest tactics, the fact that he would put in considerable amount of his time studying this particular book is deeply disturbing.

So we have a President who is a sociopath and deeply admires a murderous long-dead dictator, and has a self-evident trait of finding and wanting to kill scapegoats. His actions in the wake of Puerto Rico’s hurricane should have put us all on notice: he doesn’t mind killing people.

Now all the rest of his defenses are crumbling. He is losing court case after court case, and even some Republicans are beginning to distance themselves from Trump. One, a Michigan representative, Justin Amash, called for impeachment hearings, meaning that Trump will want to try and execute him for treason. Pelosi is openly goading him into overreacting to the point where even Congress will have to consider removing him, not through impeachment, but on 25th Amendment grounds. She called on the GOP, his cabinet and his aides to stage an intervention, the way you might with a nephew who just got popped for drunk driving for the third time.

The worst of it is that Trump has toadies in Congress such as McConnell who will do nothing to stop Trump. He has frantically populated the Justice Department and the courts with stooges, and doubtlessly hopes his two appointments to the Supreme Court might shield him. It’s horrifying to realize that Gorsuch and Kavanaugh might do just that; they never were anyone’s idea of independent and impartial jurists, and Trump loves to use the Russian tactic of kompromat; who’s to say what he has on those two? It’s unlikely he would have named either without a file with nasty personal information.

Make no mistake: facing utter personal and professional ruin, Trump is at his most dangerous. He is capable of casually horrific acts; now he has, from his perspective, unlimited reason to employ such tactics.

Brace yourselves, people: the next chapter in this story is going to be very, very ugly, and quite dangerous.

May 12, 2019

Biden His Time – Trump’s gone fishing

May 12th, 2019

Yesterday, Rudy Giuliani called Trump’s Attorney General, William Barr, “independent, brilliant and honest.” Translated from Giulianese into Realspeak, that means that Barr is a servile flunky, dull-witted, and corrupt. Translating Giuliani is pretty easy, as it turns out. Just take whatever he says and invert it. Black is actually white, up is down, and Trump is wisdom and integrity personified.

But then after about five minutes of speaking, Giuliani’s 32 kilobits of RAM is depleted, his buffer is empty, and the inadvertent truths start tumbling out. His eyes go blank, he starts sweating profusely, and Fauxnews suddenly has to go to commercial.

He is the face of an administration that exists on typos, lies and cruelty. He’s a perfect match.

So why is he yakking about the Barrbarous One, anyway?

Well, Rudy managed to get his tail in a real crack this week. He planned to travel to the Ukraine as part of a mission to dig up dirt on the present leader of the Democratic thundering herd, Joe Biden.

Well, not Joe, actually. His son, Hunter. Hunter Biden.

Now, Hunter isn’t an angel. He got popped for cocaine in 2014 and got kicked out of the Naval Reserve as a result. He also joined the board of Ukraine’s largest natural gas companies, Burisma Holdings, owned by Mykola Zlochevsky. Burisma in general and Zlochevsky in particular have been under a dark cloud of official suspicion of corruption for years, culminating in the Serious Fraud Office of the British government seizing some $23 million in Zlochevsky’s assets.

However, doing a fraud investigation on a Ukraine company is a bit like fishing for a particular turd in a septic tank. It’s dark, and there’s nothing to make a particular turd stand out. The Crown, confronted with systematic intransigence from the Ukraine government, eventually abandoned the investigation, unlocking the assets and paying the legal bills. That removed the legal liability, but not the suspicion. To give you some idea of how bad things are in the Ukraine, Zlochevsky, president of a natural gas company, had been the Minister of Ecology under the now-exiled Viktor Yanukovych.

It’s nearly as bad in the Ukraine as it is in Trumpistan, the former United States.

It doesn’t help that Hunter has close associations with Morgan Stanley and other Wall Street outfits. That doesn’t reassure as regards his business ethics and scruples. He’s was also banging his late brother’s widow after the brother, Beau, died. He proclaimed his love publicly, but this still had a fairly high element of creepiness about it. They broke up earlier this month, just about the time Daddy announced he was running for President. Pure coincidence, I’m sure.

Since the Ukraine activities ceased, he founded a hedge fund in China called Bohai Harvest RST, and the three billion dollar fund has involvement in various unsavory activities, such as mass surveillance and harassment of Moslems in China.

So it’s not too unreasonable to have questions about the activities of Hunter Biden.

But there’s never been any evidence that Joe Biden was involved in any of this. Indeed, as this was going on, his other son, Beau, was dying of brain cancer, which ensured Joe’s attention was elsewhere.

But the Ukraine thing was four years ago. Investigations went nowhere, and that particular turd eventually decomposed.

But now this month, Giuliani planned to go to the Ukraine in hopes the present Ukraine government could dig up some dirt on Joe Biden. It’s illegal to solicit campaign interference from a foreign government, but Giuliani probably looked at Trump and figured that if the President does it, it must be legal, and blabbed his intentions to the press.

I think the poor fool was honestly amazed at the reaction he got. In any event, he hurriedly canceled the trip, blaming Democrats and, weirdly, the Ukrainians.

Well, lo and fucking behold, here comes that Lion of Liars, the Parson of Persiflage, the Trumpty of Dumpty, Captain Pissmop himself, who declares grandly that Hunter Biden’s activities in the Ukraine need to be investigated, and is ordering his Attorney General, the “independent, brilliant and honest” William Barr, to open an investigation.

Yes, four years after the fact, and long after other investigations had closed on the matter.

Trump obviously feels that nobody should be near the White House who may have solicited illegal campaign meddling from foreign governments and been involved in shady financial dealings in the countries run by such governments. Why, to Trump, such a horrible situation was totally unthinkable.

So that’s why Giuliani was suddenly calling the sluggish William Barr “independent, brilliant and honest.” He needs some cover, and having Trump’s pet oaf of an A-G throw shade at Biden by attacking his son struck him as wise and patriotic (remember to translate from Giuliani to realspeak, now).

The remarkable speed with which Trump came up with the notion of having Barr investigate Hunter Biden tells us this: Trump originally told Giuliani to go to the Ukraine and get dirt from their government on the son of the now-leading Democrat he might have to face in 2020. If Trump hadn’t already known about it, he would have done what he usually does when Rudy does something exceptionally stupid and unexpected, and just left him to twist in the wind. The fact that he overreacted so quickly tells us he’s looking to cover his own ass, at least to the extent that he’ll give Rudy enough cover that Rudy won’t panic and blow the whistle on Trump.

And we think the Ukraine is corrupt.

If I ever run into Robert Mueller, I’m going to have to ask him what bait he uses to go fishing in the Trumpistan septic tank for a particular turd.

Well, Mueller will be appearing before Congress later this month. I don’t guess he’ll have any thoughts on Hunter Biden, but he will tell us about life in Septic Washington.

May 7, 2019

There was music in the cafés at night – And revolution in the air

May 7th 2019

It’s a bit strange right now, comparing the headlines in the news with the general calm in the population at large. Trump and the Republicans are actively staging a coup against the United States, and seemingly inviting a revolt with their open sneers at the Constitution and rule of law.

But for now, people are just going about their business, outside of the cable stations and general media. Folks watched Game of Thrones the other night, and if they drew any correlations between Cersei and Trump, they didn’t speak of it. John Oliver did discuss what he calls “Stupid Watergate,” but the balance of his show was on the topic of lethal injections.

Some people are watching closely, of course. Even a majority of Americans are watching now. In the cesspools of Faux News, the viewers and readers are being assured that this is a plot against the wildly successful, patriotic and deeply Christian Donald Trump by Democrats seeking revenge for the Clinton impeachment or something. They have succeeded in making their audience so self-isolated that they can tell them anything, no matter how objectively ridiculous it is.

Just to show how insular and divorced from the mainstream this Republican cult really is, a fellow named James McDaniel set up a fake ‘right wing news’ website that featured stories of Hillary Clinton sacrificing children and Barack Obama running a secret coup from an underground bunker in Washington DC. He then promoted the site on actual right wing sites, mostly by forwarding his fake news stories.

In just two weeks, his site received a million unique visits, and hundreds of thousands of likes and shares. He said, “If I wrote about CNN being fake news and connected to ISIS, readers would agree wholeheartedly with my fabricated article. If I wrote about a black liberal or Obama supposedly saying something controversial, the response was unbridled racism and hatred. When I wrote about Hillary Clinton’s new emails that proved she was a child sacrificing maniac, people screamed for her head.”

Alarmed by the type of response he was getting, he posted a message saying everything on the site was fake, and added a disclaimer to every news story. Didn’t help. He wound up parking the page because right wingers kept right on believing the fake news stories.

So it’s not surprising that about 35% of the population has been brainwashed into supporting what amounts to open treason against the United States. But what’s going on with the rest of America?

In light of the Mueller report, in which the redacted version shows such a vast array of criminality and corruption on the part of Trump that over 700 federal prosecutors have signed a document stating that the evidence was so compelling that anyone who was not a sitting president would be facing multiple indictments right now, his popularity has actually improved somewhat, from a -16 on the aggregate polls in late January to a -10 now. Fully 78% of Republican voters believe the Mueller Report cleared Trump of any wrongdoing. Pfft! What do 700 federal prosecutors know, anyway?

Part of this response, ironically, is a tendency of people to ‘rally round the flag’; the thinking, if that’s the word for it, is that our president is under attack, and we must forget our partisan differences and defend the country. If you think that it requires a stunning level of ignorance to achieve that mindset, you are in a minority; relatively few Americans know who William Barr is, or even Mitch McConnell. These vaguely ‘support the President’ sorts take pride in “not paying attention to that political stuff” so all they know, in a dim sort of way, is that Congress and the President are having some sort of tiff, and it’s along party lines. They know who Trump is, but Jerry Nadler is just some Democratic politician they never heard of, so they side with Trump. And they are lacking the intellectual and educational tools needed to understand just how serious Trump’s defiance of the Constitution is, and how grave the consequences for them might be if he should succeed in his drive to become a dictator.

That still leaves over half the voting population of the US unaccounted for. And one of the strangest things about the coverage of all this is the utter lack of attention to what the voting public thinks about all this. Outside of the right wing sewers, media response is all but unanimous and vociferous: rule of law must be upheld, Trump must be held to account. But you can search the web in vain for reports of any outcry amongst the public. The aggregate polling sites ask if people think Mueller ‘cleared’ Trump or not, but not how the feel about what is going on. Activists sites such as MoveOn are rabid about the contempt Trump is showing for America, but not discussing actions outside of the power of the subpoena.

It’s perplexing. In just about any other country, a situation like this would result in massive rallies in every city, and talk of general strikes. Hotheads would be discussing revolution, and broadcasters would be urging calm.

Let me be clear: nobody sane wants a revolution, and I’m talking about rallies, not riots. (I don’t trust the right not to stage riots, either on their own behalf or provoking riots at rallies just for purposes of ratfucking the rest of us). But the country is in a very clear and immediate danger, and if Trump wins this, the only likely outcomes will read like the plotline from Game of Thrones. We can either move peacefully now and help save America from Trump and the Republicans, or face far less palatable options later on.

Why the ongoing silence?

May 3, 2019

Barrbarian Rhatsophy – Barr belongs in jail—next to Trump

May 2^nd 2019

William Barr, career criminal and putative top cop of the country, refused to show up before the House for testimony on the Mueller report today. Some wag on the Democratic side replaced the doughy and misshapen Trump stooge with a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. It was an improvement, insofar as the bucket of chicken at least promised to provide some content.

The Republicans, who have descended below the level of kindergarteners in trouble with the teacher, tried blaming the Democrats for Barr’s refusal to testify. One major moron in waiting, Doug Collins, a Republican of Georgia, opined that “The reason Bill Barr is not here today is because the Democrats decided they did not want him here today.”

See? It was all the Democrats fault! Why, they wanted to ask Barr questions about his contradictions and lies, and to explain why Mueller was so pissed at him. That’s all. I’m sure there were reasonable explanations.

Other Republicans blamed Hillary Clinton because they couldn’t think of anything else to say. After all, it’s not like they would ever force Clinton to testify for 11 hours in response to loaded, ideological and dishonest questions. Given the perfect fairness and civility Republicans showed, is it too much to ask that Barr be given a pass?

Perhaps the best rationale came from the perjurer-in-chief, who is of the opinion that the suspect in a criminal trial should be free to refuse to be questioned by authorities if he felt the questions might be biased against him or cause embarrassment.

OK, fair point. When the LAPD asked Charlie Manson if he stuck a fork in Sharon Tate’s belly, that showed great insensitivity and even some microaggression on the part of the police. Better a mass murderer should be allowed to run free rather than to have to deal with impolite and even overbearing police!

Only an overprivileged moron like Trump could, with his bare face hanging out, demand the right for a suspect in a criminal investigation to determine what questions he might have to answer.

And poor Donald has so many other distractions to deal with. Both his nominees to the Fed imploded over the past couple of days, one because he couldn’t handle his household finances, let alone a world economy, and the other because he was the most stupid fucking bastard this side this side of a pile of dog shit. Indeed, Trump nominees implode with such regularity and to such comic effect that it reminds you of that episode of “Russian Doll” where the protagonist dies a couple of dozen times in the space of five minutes. Or Sideshow Bob with the garden rakes.

Now that the clown rodeo has closed for the day and there’s no longer any doubt that Barr is a criminal Trump stooge, the question arises: what is congress going to do about it? Even Pelosi flat-out called Barr’s actions criminal. Dozens of Democrats want him punished: arrest or impeachment, or both.

Make it march, guys. Arrest the guy. If he quits and thus can’t be impeached, he’s still going to face criminal charges. And Trump is starting to realize that the power of the pardon is a dangerous tool, as witness the fact that even as he was schmoozing with the psychotic murderers of the NRA, and despite Vladimir Putin’s howls of outrage, he was letting Maria Butina rot in jail.

If Congress orders Barr’s arrest for contempt of Congress and perjury before Congress, Trump may not dare intervene.

In fact, Trump being Trump, he’ll probably start calling Barr weak, stupid, fat, and a host of other adjectives, and create an enemy where he had an ally. We’ve seen him do that dozens of times before, with Sessions, Cohen, Manafort, and Ryan. It’s a gift, I tell you.

Meanwhile, the Department of Justice is threatening to sue to prevent Mueller from testifying before Congress. Think about that: the DoJ appointed Mueller to do exactly what he did, with the intent of giving his report to Congress, and now they are suing themselves to prevent Mueller from giving his report to Congress. It’s the sort of clownery you expect from inept authoritarian regimes, whether Rufus T. Firefly or Donald J. Trump.

April 19, 2019

Mueller to Pissmop – Yes, you are fucked

April 19^th 2019

Back on May 17, 2017, Confederate Pixie and then-AG Jeff Sessions told Trump that Rod Rosenstein had just appointed Robert Mueller to be a special prosecutor looking into ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. Trump slumped, and said, “Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I’m fucked.”

It’s a side of Trump we don’t see very often: the one that is capable of doing an honest and forthright analysis of a situation. Usually all we get from him is demented and hateful gibberish, a trashy and despicable President playing to a trashy and despicable base.

Much has been made of Trump’s reaction. Not in the morally upside down world of the Republicans, where if Obama had said ‘fucked’ they would have impeached him for using cusswords in the White House. However, Republicans normally would think it’s OK for Trump to do so because he’s bravely fighting immoral people who might say “fuck” in the White House. But they’ve been strangely silent for other reasons.

Trump’s reaction is, prima facie, the reaction of a man who knows he is guilty. It’s the kid snapping his hands behind his back as the teacher walks in the room, the husband slapping off the computer screen as the wife walks in, the guy turning his face away as a police cruiser goes by. It’s not an admission of guilt, but it is the reaction of someone who is guilty.

The rest of the report, even Bawdlerized by Barr, makes it amply clear that Trump repeatedly and knowingly obstructed justice. There’s at least a dozen felony actions by Trump detailed in the report.

And yes, Mueller felt the Department of Justice could not indict a sitting president, and that only the House, through the power of impeachment, could do so. He strongly urged the House to do so, since he believes that no man is above the law—or in Trump’s case, in the sewers below the law.

We now know that in an action that is a felony in and of itself, Barr conferred with the Trump administration on what to censor in the report. Barr needs to be indicted and prosecuted for tampering with evidence and obstruction of justice, and die in jail.

But what we’re seeing now is what Trump felt he could get away with the public knowing. He has utter contempt for the resolve of the American people or their ability to stand up to an self-entitled millionaire autocrat. We do not yet know what remains hidden in the report.

Yes, there’s no doubt that some is hidden for legitimate cause; because it may interfere with other ongoing investigations. (Remember how war criminal and traitor Oliver North was able to skate because of Congress’ reckless release of evidence from a grand jury?) And there may be items that could harm national security if made public.

But this is the corrupt, self-centered and morally bankrupt Trump dictating to his loathsome toady of an Attorney-General what should not be allowed into the public eye. There remains stuff the public is entitled to know, and it’s probably the worst stuff of all. Congress must get the full, unredacted report. I’m happy to say the Congressional subpoena has been issued.

While other legal investigations into Trump’s tawdry life continue, the political battle is now joined.

Some Democrats are still saying it’s too early to consider impeachment. One of them is a presidential candidate, Cory Brooker. In a bizarre show of equivocation, he is saying that Congress should not impeach until the evidence is in, apparently unaware that impeachment is the gathering and evaluation of evidence of presidential misconduct.

He eliminated himself from any support from myself with that statement. What is the point in replacing Trump with a man who was unable to stand up against Trump when the time came to do so. What do we gain from replacing Trump with someone who is afraid of Trump?

We’re hearing the usual political arguments against impeachment hearings, of course. “Democrats are cowards and won’t start a fight they can’t win.”

Well, yes, some Democrats are cowards. And some, like Brooker, are just far too fond of political calculation. But if the Democrats aren’t willing to join this battle now that the time has come to begin fighting, then they will not win in 2020, or ever again.

There were politicians in England and France who, even after Hitler’s invasion of Poland, urged against a declaration of war against the dictator because Hitler had a massive military and England and France were too weak to beat him. In fact, that was the case, but the politicians who still urged appeasement are forgotten to history, because because while they were right in terms of the immediate situation, they were so horribly, horribly wrong on the bigger picture.

Dems who argue that impeachment must not happen because Republican will never support it need to realize that we’ve passed the Polish invasion point of the opposition to Trump, and that political headcounting no longer protects.

Republicans can also count heads, and some of them are cowards. They know, first hand, the political calculus of an impeachment, and how it can blow up in their faces. But they also know that this is a whole lot bigger than the man in the White House lying about getting a blow job. Trump is a felon hundreds of times over, and a serious and immediate threat to the continued existence of the United States. To not act is treason.

Even the redacted Mueller report makes it clear that we are at the point where we must impeach. We’re long past any reasonable excuse to let the Trump regime continue.

Yes, Pissmop: You are fucked.

April 14, 2019

Trumpanazi – American descent into Nazism continues

April 13^th 2019

The Premier League of Britain has a problem with some of its fans. Granted, footies have never been a particularly sedate lot, sometimes preferring to discuss the friendly rivalry between clubs with clubs, or chains, or shivs.

There have always been racist and bigoted assholes in their ranks, who delight in throwing bananas at black players, or shouting some of the particularly lurid racial abuse that is the hallmark of British hooligans.

But in recent times, the nature and frequency of these attacks has sharply increased. WestHam United is in the process of banning fans who videoed themselves singing racist ditties about the Jewish players on that night’s match rival, Tottenham. Two days earlier, Chelsea supporters sang anti Moslem chants about a player in Slavia Prague, and attacked one of their own fans who objected to the vile chants. And on the same night, Arsenal fans screamed anti-Islamic abuse at players on the other club, in a match in the Emirates. Those fans were lucky; most Islamic countries have notoriously little patience for slurs against Allah or his followers. Public whipping is the local equivalent of community service.

Of course, it isn’t just soccer. The number of such incidents has been on the rise throughout Europe and in North America. In Québec, a player, Jonathan Diaby, a 24-year-old defenseman for Marquis de Jonquière of the Ligue Nord-Américaine de Hockey, and his family who were watching him play were subjected to such intense racial abuse from the filth in the stands that he was pulled from the game and he and his family escorted from the stadium for their own safety.

And unfortunately, it’s not just sports where this is happening.

Nazism—and let’s stop pretending it’s anything other than Nazism—has been on the rise, and emboldened by political power in many parts of Europe and the United States, Nazis come out from under their rocks in force. This is how they behave when they think they can get away with it.

It’s a phenomenon that puts us all at risk. Yes, even if you are a member of the so-called ‘master race’, male, and Christian. It’s not a political philosophy, not that such are especially coherent or good at attending to the interests of their own followers. It’s a mental illness, and an ethical vacuum using hate as a substitute for faith and strength. It eventually destroys everything in its path.

Hitler famously executed 12 million people, including six million Jews, between 1936 and 1945. No matter what the Nazis say, that happened. And among the six million he killed who were not Jewish, many were white, ‘pureblood’ Germans, who happened to be communist, socialist, atheist, liberal, intellectual, or just not approving of Nazism’s murderous tactics. And of course, the actual fighting killed even more of the very people who supported Hitler, beginning with the Brownshirts. Nazis killed many people, and resulted in many more being dead.

So if you’re sitting there watching Faux News, smug in the certain knowledge that Trump and his ilk will only target groups you hate, read some history. He’ll get you killed, too, one way or another. If you don’t flunk some unseen test for ideological purity, you’ll die in the fighting, or in the starvation after Trump and his kind have destroyed the country and the economy. You are as much at risk as any Hispanic immigrant, or Moslem, or African American. Your death may just be later, rather than sooner.

Hitler was able to con the German people—his followers—into believing he was acting on their behalf. The war nearly destroyed them, but even without the war, he would have gotten around to putting them in work camps and then death camps after he used up all the groups he hated and needed to feed bodies to the endless maw of his nationalistic ego. The millions who died because of him are nothing compared to the hundreds of millions he envisioned killing.

Trump—and there really is little difference between Trump and Hitler at this point—doesn’t even pretend to be addressing the needs of his followers. His “tax reform” was a vicious cheat that targeted the lower middle class, the source of much of his following. He proposes to make massive cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and to dismantle what remains of Obamacare. Probably about three quarters of the people who voted for him will be hurt by those proposals. Many will be killed.

But Trump doesn’t care. They served their purpose. They voted for him once. Like Hitler, that one election is all he needs. Once he consolidated power, Hitler’s only use for ‘the common man’ was that of cannon fodder.

Trump is trying to stage a coup against the United States now. He purged the department of Homeland Security last week, leaving the reptilian spawn of Goebbels, Stephen Miller in effective control of an organization capable of jailing millions. The bitch who threw children in cages wasn’t vicious enough for Trump, you see. He is defying Congress on its request for his taxes—a demand Congress unequivocally has a right to issue. He is using his lapdog Barr to try to bury the Mueller report, and its doubtlessly damning contents.

He tried to threaten ‘sanctuary’ cities with sending them what he considers to be animals and subhumans—immigrants. To the credit of the American people, most of those cities said they would welcome Trump’s castoffs. And his goosestepping followers won’t even stop to consider the mad logic behind protecting America from immigrants by sending immigrants to major American cities. Bigotry and hatred don’t run on logic.

He’s attacking a member of Congress for her Islamic faith. He tweeted twice a falsehood that she was dismissive of the attacks on 9/11. Never mind that Trump rejoiced in the attacks, claiming that it left him with the tallest building in New York City. (It’s a truism that when Trump attacks someone, he almost always ends up describing his own behavior). Equating someone with 9/11 for no other reason than that they are Moslem is exactly the same as claiming that Jews like to drink the blood of Christian babies, or that African Americans live only to rape white girls.

They are blood libels, these threats and smears. It’s the sort of thing you expect to hear from Nazi filth.

And it’s what we now hear from the President of the United States.

April 7, 2019

Stumping for Beni – Trump disgraces himself, again

April 6^th, 2019

A lot of American Jews will doubtlessly be surprised to learn that Donald Trump considers Benjamin Netanyahu to be their “Prime Minister.” He was talking to the American Republican Jewish Coalition Leadership, but in fairness, Trump may not have been entirely aware that these were supposed to be American Jews and not Israeli Jews, as he went on to say, “If implemented, the Democrats’ radical agenda would destroy our economy, cripple our country, and very well could leave Israel out there all by yourselves. Can’t do that.”

Yeah. “Yourselves.” It isn’t the first time Trump has used the trope that Jews all have divided loyalties and it won’t be the last. Even as he, and the Republican party at large, condemn Ilhan Omar, the Islamic Congresswoman from Minnesota for hinting that Jews have divided loyalties for saying that AIPAC has undue influence on Congress.

He was promoting a GOP strategy called “Jexit.” It’s a clever-ish play on words, based on “Brexit” and the reasoning is that because Trump says Democrats hate Jews, there is a mass migration from the Democratic Party to the GOP. Must be true: in 2016 the Democrats got 72% of the Jewish vote, and in 2018 they got 78%. See? Oh, wait.

Then there’s that term: Jexit. Republicans may be the only carbon based lifeforms on Earth that think Brexit was a sound strategy and something desirable for their allies to emulate. Right now the UK is staggering, red-eyed, pasty, doughy and slurring her words, and town drunks are stopping her in the street and saying, “Are you OK? You really should see a doctor, you know?” And Brexit hasn’t even happened yet. The UK could go from being “the poor man of Europe” to “the Somalia of Europe.”

I think it’s a safe bet that a very large majority of American Jews do not consider Netanyahu to be their prime minister, and aren’t eager to pursue a strategy named for the biggest national own goal in history. Yes, even worse than America electing Trump.

Even Steve Wynn and Sheldon Adelson, perhaps the only two Jews in Las Vegas that Trump actually gives a wet shit about, have to be looking at today’s performance and wondering how far this can ride this spivened old nag of a President before he finally collapses from dementia or gets kicked out of office.

Trump apparently was advised that his father was not born in Germany, but in New York City, and people were wondering about his mental faculties as a result of his recent claims. So he put the rumors to rest by noting his father was born in Brooklyn. The only problem was that Fred wasn’t born in Brooklyn. He was born in the Bronx, just as Donald was.

“Are you OK? You really should see a doctor, you know?”

By now convinced that the speech was going swimmingly and he had his audience in the palm of his hand, he decided to do a little bit of hate mongering, and told the crowd, “A special thanks to Representative Omar of Minnesota.” The audience of Republicans obligingly booed. Trump continued,

“Oh, I forgot. She doesn’t like Israel, I forgot, I’m sorry. No, she doesn’t like Israel, does she? Please, I apologize.”

At least now we know under what circumstances Trump will say, “I apologize.” It’s when he is doing a heavy handed and lame effort at sarcasm, not a good look on a man who possesses no actual sense of humor.

His timing was a bit off, though. A New York clown, one Patrick W. Carlineo, was arrested today for calling Omar’s DC office and saying, “Do you work for the Muslim Brotherhood? Why are you working for her, she’s a fucking terrorist. I’ll put a bullet in her fucking skull.” Carlineo then proceeded to leave his contact info, because, you know, it’s OK to threaten to assassinate members of Congress if they happen to be non-Christian.

I’m guessing this brain donor is a) aTrump fan, and b) not Jewish. Any takers?

But it reminds people that the hateful crap Trump spews is putting lives at risk. Hell, the stupid bastard can’t even ingratiate himself with groups he wants as allies without indulging in harmful stereotypes. Hint, Donald: American Jews are not secret agents of Israel. They don’t drink the blood of Christian babies, either. You might want to write that on the back of your hand, along with the word “Bronx.”

I don’t think he advanced the cause of Jexit. If only Britain had called the Brexit referendum, ‘Gallipoli II.’ Same positive connotations, you know.

The executive director of the Jewish Democratic Council of America (JDCA), Halie Soifer said: “We strongly denounce President Trump’s continued assault on decency and truth, as was evident in his speech earlier today before the Republican Jewish Coalition in Las Vegas.”

I suspect he was speaking for what now has to be more than 78% of Jewish voters in America.

As for Trump, a lot of people wondered why he would schedule a speech to a Jewish audience on a Saturday morning. It was, after all, Shabbat, the Jewish Sabbath. It occurred right after sundown in Israel, when television stations could broadcast his speech live. Israel has a general election in three days.

It’s possible that there were some Jews in the audience who DO have divided loyalties. They would be a tiny minority of the American Jewish population, but they do exist. The GOP tends to attract people like that.

But it’s certain that one person in that room does have divided loyalties, and with many different counties. Including, despite his well-known distaste for Jews, Israel.

That would be Donald Trump, once again accusing others of things he does.

Maybe he thinks Netanyahu was born in Brooklyn. Or Germany. You know, one of those New York resorts.

March 25, 2019

Barr None – A-G’s efforts to subvert Mueller cause confusion

Barr None

A-G’s efforts to subvert Mueller cause confusion

March 25^th, 2019

OK, I’m going to beobvious the labor here and tell you that I think William Barr’s third-grade book report version of the Mueller Report is somewhat short of credible.

Barr, you’ll recall, was the architect of the Iran-Contra pardons issued in the final day of the George HW Bush administration that basically destroyed a six year investigation of some of the worst felonies committed since the previous time a Republican was president. Back then, William Safire referred to Barr witheringly as “the Coverup-General” and here we are, some 23 years later, and we still have a Coverup-General, and it’s the same despicable toady.

Safire was a speechwriter for Nixon and Agnew (‘nattering nabobs of negativism’) and he found Barr contemptible in his willingness to subvert the legal process in service to party.

Safire’s dead, but the evil spawn of the far-right takeover of the GOP live on.

Barr’s letter is nothing more than a last-ditch effort to confuse the Mueller Report with Trump administration talking points. We still don’t know what’s in the Mueller report. We know that Mueller did not indict Trump for treason or even conspiracy against the United States, but that was never part of his remit. He could recommend such a course to the Justice Department or the House of Representatives, and he still might. And even Barr couldn’t manage to pretend that serious evidence of obstruction of justice didn’t exist; the best he could manage was that the Report “does not exonerate him [Trump].”

So we watch to see if Congress can wrest the report from Barr’s greasy paws and bring most, if not all of it into the light of day. We’ve gotten the talking points from Trump’s dancing monkey; now let’s see the actual report.

Even if Barr and Trump do manage to bury the report, there are three grand juries and at least a half dozen state investigations underway to determine the extent of Trump criminality in everything from using inaugural donations as a laundry for foreign influence peddling to the wild shenanigans surrounding the Trump Tower in Moscow to the demand that Moscow ferret out Hillary’s emails. Even without whatever Mueller has, Trump faces decades in prison for the potential charges he will face.

But Congress will subpoena the report, and possibly Mueller himself. Barr can’t prevent that, and Trump might face a revolution if he tried.

And remember, we still don’t know what is in that report. All Barr did was show up with an empty plastic bag draped over a hanger and grandly announce our tuxedo was back from the cleaners.

The media, in general, got completely played. I even heard a lot of them transposing Barr’s book report with the Mueller tome, and saying Mueller exonerated Trump. Most TV journalism is a vast wasteland, but even for them, that was a limp performance.

The right wing online circus weighed in, of course. One meme read, “Why are so many liberals in tears over learning that their president is not a traitor?”

I still think he’s a traitor, or at least conspiring against the United States for personal gain. (In just about any other country, conspiracy against that country would be considered treason, but the US has a very specific definition of the term ‘treason’ that sorta takes Trump off the hook.) If anyone’s crying, it’s because they just realized that Trump and the Republicans may have so badly broken the United States that it may no longer have any legal address to rid itself of an enemy in high office. That would be a death knell for any country. That would leave any thinking person in tears.

Well, Barr gave the empty-headed goosesteppers of the far right something to cheer about, and managed to confuse the equally empty-headed fluffers who purportedly keep us informed, but I doubt it’s going to last for very long.

Just the things Trump has openly admitted to should have gotten him impeached two years ago. Maybe the United States is that badly broken, in which case expect bloody and horrible times ahead.

Or maybe it’s like 1940, where the United States was suffering massive attacks on life and property from Germany on the high seas (the equivalent of a 9/11 every two weeks) and needed 18 months or so to gather the resolve to crush their vicious tormentors.

It may be that Trump himself, vicious and heedless in what he seems to believe is a victory, will trigger that himself. He has already said he would “call for organizations to fire members of the media and former government officials who he believes made false accusations about him”.

Ever heard an American President say anything like that? Nope. Not even Nixon.

Still, he needs to maintain the pretense that Barr’s Cliff’s Notes version is a substitute for the actual report, and not the real thing. And he has to do something about all those other investigations going on.

At which point, people will have to decide if they want to simply surrender to this vicious five-and-dime despot and his brown-shirt devotees, or put up a fight.

Tag: Trump