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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Trump Bumps — His Road to Ruin is not a Smooth Ride

August 12th, 2018

Despite the obvious peril and potential for great harm to the nation and the world, it’s enjoyable watching Trump continue to personally disintegrate as all his crimes and disgraceful behavior catch up to him. But make no mistake: it’s a very dangerous time.

The nation has been here before. Nixon, of course, but before that, as well. In 1932 FDR and the Democrats won the election by vast margins, but the nation was on the verge of collapse, and it would be a full four months before FDR and the Democrats assumed control. In the meantime, Herbert Hoover and the Republicans, ideologically incapable of addressing the Great Depression, were in control, and persuing the same destructive policies that had served them and the nation so poorly over the past 3+ years. Hoover was not a villain, not insane, and not heedless of the destruction that was driving the country into a morass. In desperation, at one point he offered FDR a “copresidency” to work through to the day, still months off, when FDR would be inaugurated. FDR sensed a trap, or at least a no-win situation, and declined. The country writhed in agony.

By the time FDR did take office, a third of the banks were shuttered, a dozen states were using script because US currency was no longer trusted, and unemployment was over 30% and starvation was widespread.

The political situation caused by the long gap between the election and inauguration was so dire that a Constitutional Amendment (20th) was passed, making the inauguration the twentieth of January, and the convening of the new Congress even earlier, January 3rd. Never again, it was resolved, would the country go through a slow-motion hanging as it did during the winter of 1932-33.

When Nixon fell, the denouement, after two years of investigations, was relatively rapid. Despite the sense of crisis, the country sensed that Congress would do its job if required, and the Court would rule in the national interest. When the Supreme Court did rule, 8-0, that he must release the tapes, Congressional leaders went to Nixon and told him he no longer had any hope of avoiding impeachment and conviction, and a few days after that, he was gone.

The moral rot in the GOP began in 1964 when the right wing first seized control of the party, making it the party of the loony John Birchers. Four years later, and Nixon embraced the bigots and aggrieved whites of the South, the infamous “southern strategy” which put the party on a pernicious path of ongoing public deception. So both fiscally and socially, the party had to put false faces on their true aims, hiding designs on the public treasury behind false concerns about ‘big government’ and ‘fiscal responsibility’ (and they went on to triple the size of the federal government and are responsible for nine out of every ten dollars in the national debt), and hiding their racist and authoritarian aims behind fake patriotism, fake religion, and loud claims that anyone who opposed them was socialist, if not disloyal.

It was a toxic stew even before it embraced the loony fundamentalist movement under Reagan, and the belief that the law existed to harass and persecute non-Republicans under Newt Gingrich.

It explains why Trump came to be the presidential candidate for the GOP, and why the party is utterly supine in the face of his obviously disastrous presidency. He is their Frankenstein’s monster, and like the doctor, they have lost control of their creation.

During the Hoover crisis, Hoover was a decent man trapped in an impossible situation, locked in by the always-destined-to-fail policies of Wall Street. He went on to serve the country honorably after the war and redeemed himself. Nixon may have had little interest in the welfare of the citizenry, and his patriotism is certainly open to question, but Republicans, at least, realized his position was untenable, and they needed to do the right thing, if only to save their own asses.

The safeguards that saved us in 1933 and in 1974 aren’t there. Republicans, trapped between voracious plutocrats who sense a change to make America their own private property, and the toxic little authoritarians of the trash right who want to make America a racist theocracy, can’t move without risking an eruption and rebellion by their base. The Supreme Court is compromised, and stands to be a plaything for fascists if the Republicans ram through the Kavanaugh nomination. And of course, Trump is completely amoral, and may not be intellectually or emotionally capable of knowing when he has lost, and decide to pull everything down around with him, a Samson-smash, a bid for failed glory.

Still, it’s not hopeless. The “Unite the Right” movement has failed so utterly that even Trump worked up the courage today to condemn Nazis. The huge demonstration in Washington attracted only a few dozen—and thousands of anti-fascist counter demonstrators.

Trump needs extremes and extremists to promote himself. His entire political career is modeled, after all, on “New World Order” by A. Hitler. Obviously America isn’t ready for Nazism.

He needs plutocrats, and they need him only if they profit, and dismay at his economic policies is growing rapidly as trade wars and increasing tensions work to isolate and ruin America financially.

Still, for America, that is not a good solution. After all, if plutocrats and the trash right turn on Trump and destroy him, it leaves the country beholden to the same groups that created him in the first place.

Best answer: the people must vote in November, and drive the Republicans far from the reins of power, and reinstate democratic freedoms and sanity.

 

Ja-Qs! Well, Ex-Qs me! It’s a Sign Qanon!

By Bryan Zepp Jamieson

August 5th 2018

I had a client once who loved conspiracy theories. Not in the abstract; he didn’t collect them as amusing oddities; he earnestly believed each one, and strove to work each into his own, very peculiar theology. Cover up at Area 51? Check! CIA putting chemicals in the air to make us docile? You betcha! The Queen of England and the Bush family were secretly extraterrestrial lizard people? Let’s have them drop drawers and check for tails! He came up with a few of his own: the Pharaohs of Egypt were all secretly Jewish. (He self-published a book about this, but for the life of me I couldn’t figure out why they would be secretly Jewish, or what advantage this gave them, or anyone.) He adored David Icke, and fairly routinely lost money to cults and online scams vowing to reveal hidden truths.

This was back around the turn of the century, and the majority of conspiracy theories, and their adherents, were harmless cranks. My client, when he wasn’t sputtering utter drivel gleaned from some mimeograph with an eye of Mordur letterhead, was pleasant, intelligent, kindly and caring—as nice a person as you could possibly hope to meet.

But even before the rise of the toxic and vicious Alex Jones, and the systematic cruelty of his followers, conspiracy theories had a dark side. Many were racist, or at least bigoted, and some could be utterly vile. Tony Alamo took the same stance toward Catholics that Hitler had toward Jews, and with similar rationales. Conspiracy theories were a favorite element of demagogues, religious cults, and sociopaths. A local new age movement has definable links to Nazi groups, often with members of either being aware of the links between the two.

My client ran afoul of this dark element. He came in one morning with a self-written article he wished me to put up on his website. I glanced at it, and spotted the words “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” Apprehensive, I gave it a quick scan. He was arguing that “Protocols” had been denigrated, not by the falsity of the claims, but by a vast hidden conspiracy of International bankers.

“You should drop this,” I said. “Nothing good will come of it.”

“I’m not afraid of Israel,” he declared stoutly.

I wasn’t worried about Israel either. But we had a fairly large number of mutual friends and acquaintances, and some of them were Jewish. I named some of them, and pointed out they would be hurt, and feel betrayed by the claim that this viciously anti-Semitic tract was factually based.

He considered, nodding slightly—either an affectation of showing deep thought, or a resting tremor—and drew a firm line with his mouth. Truth, no matter how unpalatable, must be upheld. This was hidden knowledge, and therefore must be True.

I could advise, but I couldn’t censor. I put the page up.

He caught hell for it, of course—not just from Jewish readers, but a lot of other directed sorts who knew hate speech when they saw it.

My client was hurt, depressed, and resolute. Hidden truths, he believed, were the most important truths of all. I’m happy to report that most of his friends understood that his page stemmed, not from some dark animus toward Jews, but from this odd psychological and intellectual tic of his. A few stopped talking to him, but it was generally understood that this latest page was a point on a continuum, and not a sudden dark descent into Nazism.

“Hidden” is key to understanding the psychology of the conspiracy theorist. It is the element that, in their eyes, proves the validity of the theory. If something is true, yet hidden, then clearly there must be a conspiracy involved! Conspiracy theorists don’t care much for mysteries, but they love secrets.

Every once in a while, a conspiracy theory turns out to be true: The CIA really did conduct mind-control experiments; the military really did do dry test runs of toxic gases in the NY subways, they really did spread contagion in Havana. The FBI really did track Martin Luther King and put spies in the anti-Vietnam peace movement. However: The instant a conspiracy theory is proven true, interest in it collapses. The attitude is “Yeah, it happened. Just proves government is evil. [Yawn]. But we still don’t know who murdered Princess Di!”

But since the turn of the century, something nasty has happened: conspiracy theories have become weaponized. They are more ludicrous, and at the same time more vicious. The followers are less amiable cranks and more meth-addled wannabee brownshirts. No longer content to dismiss nonbelievers as ‘sheeple’, they condemn, threaten, and sometimes even assault those who doubt their hidden truths. It is a confluence of several things; the rise of the web, the dark web in particular. A darkening of the public mood since 9/11, a greater willingness to embrace authoritarianism and savagery. And a flood of misinformation, either the paid-for variety of corporations and churches, or the general nuttiness of the truth seekers.

There are vile little sociopaths who adhere to the Sandy Hook conspiracy theories, that the shootings never happened and the bereaved parents are just “trauma actors”–people paid to be professional victims by the media for interviews and ratings. They personify the aggressive viciousness of today’s nuts.

This dark web of conspiracy theorists has coalesced around some anonymous crackpot(s) claiming to be from the higher reaches of the “deep state,” striving to now destroy this deep state they served because Hillary or Infowars or some nutball thing. This entity goes by the name of “Q Clearance Patriot” and first showed up in the festering emotional swamps of 4chan. Q supposedly was highly placed government operative. This source has produced a panoply of conspiracy theories, both familiar (The Rothschilds, CIA stooges as foreign leaders) and strange—vast pedophile rings run by ranking Democrats and intelligence agencies, or that Mueller is secretly working with Trump to discredit Trump’s enemies. The people bathing in this raw sewerage call themselves “QAnon”.

Despite that last one, Trump is very warm to this pack of loons, and people wearing QAnon T-shirts are becoming more noticeable at his rallies. Yes, he’s encouraging them. Even worse, THEY are encouraging him. He’s actually subscribing to their craziness, or at least strongly pretending to.

Well, maybe not the Mueller one. I’m guessing he doesn’t view Bob Mueller as his hidden enabler.

It’s no surprise that Trump attracts such as supporters. We’ve long passed the point where any Trump supporter should be considered a fool, a crackpot, a crook, an enemy of the United States, or any combination of the above.

That Trump is openly encouraging them is troubling, and a sign of how desperate BLOTUS (Biggest Liar Of The United States) has become.

I suspect my client, if he was still alive today, would be appalled.

We have to make sure Trump’s desperation and recklessness in treating with these lunatics doesn’t become our crisis.

Trumpcare Savage, Unreasoning, Malevolent

July 20th 2018

One of the elements of Obamacare is something called “risk-adjustment payments” which transferred funds from health insurance companies with a lower percentage of chronically or severely ill patients to companies with a higher percentage of such patients. The program, which involved on average, about $10 billion a year, was designed to keep insurance premiums and profits level among companies. It worked well.

In a compromise with Republicans, the program was designed to be revenue-neutral, to transfer money amongst the insurance companies with no net cost to the taxpayers.

Some smaller insurance companies sued, arguing that that the payment arrangements favored larger insurance companies and made it more difficult for insurance company startups. A Massachusetts federal judge ruled that no such adverse condition existed and bade the program continue.

But a federal judge in New Mexico ruled that the program must be suspended on the curious grounds that the government had not adequately articulated its reasons why the program should be revenue-neutral. Therefore, the program should be suspended so an investigation could be conducted as to why this wasn’t costing the taxpayers anything. (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/07/us/politics/trump-risk-adjustment-payments-obamacare.html)

Given the two conflicting rulings, it’s not hard to guess which the Trump administration decided to side with. Trump had already signaled during the Health Care debate of 2017 his intent to sabotage Obamacare in any way he could.

In July of 2017, Trump tweeted, “If a new HealthCare Bill is not approved quickly, BAILOUTS for Insurance Companies and BAILOUTS for Members of Congress will end very soon!”

He’s been working to fulfill this promise to unnecessarily hurt the American people to spite Obama ever since. And it’s having a dire effect already.

Two weeks ago, I got this in my email from an online friend, a highly-respected journalist who requested I withhold his identity due to harassment from trolls. He had suffered a stroke at the beginning of last year and been working hard to rebuild his life since.

He wrote:

As you no doubt know, about a year and a half ago, I suffered a massive stroke. I am told that most people who have a stroke of the type and severity of the one I had don’t survive it.

But I survived it with most of my mental faculties intact, although at times I have a bit of difficulty focusing and my short term memory is spotty. I have lasting nerve impairment that makes coordination and locomotion difficult. I live with constant fatigue, as well as lack of equilibrium. I am on medical prescriptions that leave me weak and dizzy, on top of the already existing difficulties. I had seizures last fall that required an additional med that puts me in even worse shape.

My doctors (my primary care doctor and the battery of specialists on my case) recommend I don’t even try to work outside the home, which is fine because black men of my age are not high on the priority list for companies to employ. This wasn’t hard to accept. Many days it is necessary for me to remain lying down all day because of the weakness and dizziness. I no longer have regular sleep patterns and often must sleep for large parts of daylight hours.

My expenses are covered by Medicaid, including my health care and prescriptions. By chance, I had enrolled in Obamacare shortly before the stroke, and fortunately, it covered all my hospital expenses, which would have left me in perpetual debt. Without Obamacare and Medicaid I am here to tell about it. My housing is also covered by a state program which utilizes Medicaid funding to help keep me going.

Yesterday I received a letter informing me that to retain my health care it will be necessary for me to start paying them $685 a month.

Today I received a notification informing me that it will now be necessary for me to begin paying $685 monthly to continue living in the home where the state moved me.

I don’t get SNAP any more. My only income is the $750 monthly from Social Security disability.

As far as I can tell, this is all due to Trump and his GOP cronies messing with both Obamacare and Medicaid.

My friend is one of hundreds of thousands of people affected by this cruel and capricious action by the Trump administration, and it will get far worse as the criminals and vicious ideologues of the Republican Party, led by the treasonous Trump, slash away at Obamacare in their drive to keep the American public desperate, frightened, and totally reliant on the supposed largess of the corporations. You have a party that is essentially middle management as envisioned by John Galt, and a malevolent narcissist leading us off a cliff.

One response my friend got to his post was this: “Be warned, ****, I have low empathy.  Your situation as described is very unfortunate; I hope you find a resolution.  It’s fair to point out that you’re not the only person who has faced a similar situation, since Obamacare resulted in many people losing their insurance, forcing them to get new policies with very high premiums and high deductibles.  I can’t hold you personally responsible for their problems, as you can’t (and I’m sure don’t) hold me personally responsible for yours. Even if the government didn’t meddle in the health care system, some people would come up short.”

This is a good example of the utter savagery of Trump and his supporters. “Low empathy” indeed.

My friend isn’t alone, and of course, the number of people affected by Trump’s tearing at the very fabric of society will grow and grow and grow, to the millions, and then tens of millions, and on up.

< The original promise was to “repeal and replace Obamacare with something better.” No Republican anywhere has proposed a replacement. They simply want to go back to the old Ayn Rand system, the wor>st in the developed world.

It’s easy to miss in the clownishness of Trump’s two-hour tryst in the Helsinki Don’t Tell Motel, or the efforts to drive the world economy into a ditch through trade and currency wars, but it is Trump’s vicious, unreasoning and vindictive attacks on health care that are having the most immediate, and horrific, effects.

Reread his words above very carefully. You’re next.

Send Out the Clowns — Trump in Europe, Congress in Sane

July 12th 2018

“I can’t help but wonder when I see you looking there with a little smirk how many times did you look all innocent in your wife’s eyes and lie about Ms. Page.”

And with that, Louie Gohmert, well known as being the most vicious clown in Congress, managed a new personal low, talking that august body, the House of Representatives, with him.

Wait, did I say ‘august’? Silly me. It’s only July. Although a case can be made for Congress being August; after all, that’s the dog days, and Congress has no shortage of curs.

Gohmert was attacking Peter Strzok, the FBI employee who wrote emails to his girlfriend disparaging then-candidate Donald Trump. Gohmert was exercising whatever it is that passes in him for moral outrage to defend the honor of serial adulterer Donald Trump.

It was a low point, but not by much. The Republicans were doing everything in their power to discredit Strzok, the FBI, the Justice Department, and anything and anyone that might bring Donald Trump and much of their own criminal party to justice.

The ones that weren’t vicious were almost preposterously stupid. Paul Gosar, an Arizona dentist who got tired of working for a living and ran for Congress, said to Strzok, “I’m a dentist, OK? So I read body language very, very well. And I watched you comment in your interactions with Mr. Gowdy. You got very angry in regards to the Gold Star father. That shows me that it’s innately a part of you and a bias.”

Well, OK, then. Let’s see if we can recreate the situation in that air conditioned dentist’s office that made Gosar such an expert.

Observe, Watson. The patient has his hands drawn into claws. His back is arched, his face is red, tears are streaming from the sides of his eyes, and he is emitting a loud, shrill, unpleasant noise. Do you note?”

“Amazing, Gosar. I have observed, and noted none of these things. How do you do it?”

“Acute powers of observation, Watson. Nothing more. But what do you deduce from this?

“The patient is, perhaps, a Democrat.”

“That is possible. Likely, even. But it suggests something a more immediate nature, Watson.”

“What would that be, Gosar?”

“That I forgot to administer the novocaine.”

Yes, he’s a member of Congress. Three terms now. The tide brings him in every two years, and the voters keep throwing him back. Bad teeth must be a small price to pay.

Republicans actually tried to threaten Strzok with contempt of Congress for refusing to divulge FBI investigation details that he is forbidden by law to answer. It happened like this: After declaring a motion to adjourn out of order, Chairman Goodlatte, who will never be associated with a tasty coffee drink, erupted in fury that Strzok refused to answer questions pertaining to confidential or secret FBI matters and threatened him with Contempt, despite an existing agreement that the committee honor such restrictions on what they could demand of him. Gleeful Democrats demanded the committee recall Steve Bannon, who also refused to answer some questions, but his basis was that to do so might embarrass President Trump.

They even tried accusing Strzok of claiming Trump supporters stink because he went to a Walmart in the sticks and “could smell the levels of Trump support.” Apparently metaphor is beyond the intellectual capabilities of the moral giants and magic dentists of the GOP.

The Republicans were betting the farm that they would find something, anything, to suggest that a) Strzok was tring to influence the 2016 presidential election and b) that the Russians were not. It’s safe to say they failed miserably, managing in front of a huge television audience, to thoroughly cover themselves in shit. Contempt of Congress isn’t a crime; it’s a sign of mental health.

Congress wasn’t the only branch of government making a complete ass of itself, of course. Trump barreled through Europe, doing all he could go blow up NATO. (Ironically, at the same moment that Strzok was explaining to the Committee that his remark that Trump must be stopped was based on Trump’s campaign pledge to make defense of NATO allies conditional on how much vig they put up.) He deep-sixed his own ally other than Putin by telling Prime Minister Teresa May publicly that she handled brexit all wrong.

(Remember the howls of outrage when Obama told the Brits that Brexit would move the UK down a notch as a trading partner to America? “Monstrous outrage” was one of the terms they used. According to Faux News, “Trump slams British PM over Brexit plan, warns US trade deal ‘probably’ dead in the water.” with the sub header, “Despite anger in London, Trump finds support in England’s pro-Brexit working“-class towns.” Oh, well, that’s OK then. He has support in Sheffield, so who cares what London thinks? )

Obama said Brexit was a mistake, and was clearly trying to interfere in someone else’s election, and that’s not a bit like Trump’s best budyy, that nice Mister Putin, who wouldn’t dream of doing such a thing.

Speaking of which, Putin and Trump meet in Finland next. No staffers, no aids, no interpreters. No witnesses.

It’s a truly terrifying prospect.

But perhaps Congressman/Dentist Gosar will read their body language as they leave the meeting, and tell us just how badly Trump has sold us all out.

NOTE: Article corrected to reflect that Putin and Trump are meeting in Finland, not Iceland as I originally stated.

Kavanaugh — The latest face in America’s decline into fascism

July 10th 2018

There’s a story going around that the reason Trump picked Brett Kavanaugh as his second nominee to the Supreme Court is that retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy offered to retire now and not after the midterms if Trump picked Kavanaugh to replace him. The thinly-sourced story, broken by NBC, seems unlikely on the face of it. Kennedy may like or not like Kavanaugh, but it’s unlikely he sees him as a continuation of the Kennedy legacy—whatever that is.

Slightly more plausible is the theory that Trump just wanted to annoy liberals. The day after his announcement, he pardoned the Hammonds, a couple of common land thieves who deliberately set fire to publicly-owned federal lands in hopes of making the land worthless for anything other than grazing. He saw their cause as anti-environmental, one of the more suicidal elements of Republican spite.

But the infantile philosophy of “Kiss a Nazi, it really annoys Democrats” could have pertained to any of the names on his showy short list, all of whom were religious whacks who disguised utter contempt for the Constitution in the nonsense jargon of ‘original intent.’ If the Constitution, hotly debated and compromised from the first word to the last, was crystal clear in its intent, what would we need with a Supreme Court?

All of them had appalling Dominionist policies, coupled with a deep, fascistic desire to make Americans the property of corporations.

Another theory going around is that Kavanaugh was willing to swear loyalty to Trump personally as a condition of being nominated. That one is much more credible, because Trump has made similar demands of his other appointees and department heads, including most notoriously James Comey. Kavanaugh would just be Tony Soprano’s Big Pussy (“Please. Not in the face.”). Is Kavanaugh dishonest and dishonorable enough to agree to such an oath in return for the coveted seat? I hope the Senate asks him about that.

No, the main reason Trump selected Kavanaugh over the sad pack of godstruck corporate hacks was because Kavanaugh, and Kavanaugh alone, was on record—repeatedly—of asserting that a sitting president should not be subject to indictment or criminal persecution while in office. It seems a curious stance for a man who played a leading role in the writing of the Starr Report, a damp piece of juvenile pornography (“Daddy, what does ‘analingus’ mean?) that was used to impeach and lynch a sitting president. The Starr Special Counsel’s office leaked like a syphiletic penis, and some believe Kavanaugh to be the starr leaker, particularly the juicy Monica Lewinsky scandal that the Republicans hoped would finish off Bill Clinton.

In the Minnesota Law Review in 2008 Kavanaugh penned an article entitled “Separation of Powers,” in which he wrote:

The result the Supreme Court reached in Clinton v. Jones—that presidents are not constitutionally entitled to deferral of civil suits—may well have been entirely correct; that is beyond the scope of this inquiry. But the Court in Jones stated that Congress is free to provide a temporary deferral of civil suits while the President is in office.

Congress may be wise to do so, just as it has done for certain members of the military. Deferral would allow the President to focus on the vital duties he was elected to perform. Congress should consider doing the same, moreover, with respect to criminal investigations and prosecutions of the President.

In particular, Congress might consider a law exempting a President—while in office—from criminal prosecution and investigation, including from questioning by criminal prosecutors or defense counsel. Criminal investigations targeted at or revolving around a President are inevitably politicized by both

their supporters and critics. As I have written before, “no Attorney General or special counsel will have the necessary credibility to avoid the inevitable charges that he is politically motivated—whether in favor of the President or against him, depending on the individual leading the investigation and its results.”

The indictment and trial of a sitting President, moreover, would cripple the federal government, rendering it unable to function with credibility in either the international or domestic arenas.

Even standing alone, the argument is radical. It isn’t enough that a president be shielded from criminal indictment, he argues; the President should be shielded from criminal investigation. Not only would a president be exempt from criminal law; he would be exempt from any inquiry of whether any evidence of criminal activity existed. Under such an arrangement, there could be no investigation into the 1972 Watergate break-in until 1977, when an unchallenged Nixon finally left office.

The appeal to Trump is obvious. It’s his ‘get out of jail free’ card, held by someone he probably regards as his own personal justice. It’s probably the main—indeed the only—reason he picked Kavanaugh.

But there is a drawback to Trump’s fantasy that he’s probably too dim to be aware of, and it’s almost certain Kavanaugh does know what it is, and chose not to mention it to Trump.

Clinton vs. Jones is stare decisis –- standing law –- and while it can be modified by an act of Congress, it cannot be done ex post facto, or after the fact. It could only apply to future inquiries against future presidents. Such a law would not apply to the existing Mueller investigation, or any of its findings.

Given his writings, Kavanaugh would have to rule in a way Trump would not like, not one little bit. That, or he could recuse himself, and we all know Trump doesn’t handle recusals at all well. Although that course of action would reflect better on Kavanaugh.

Congress might pass such a law between now and January (unlikely, since it would require 60 votes in the Senate) and the SC would probably find itself being petitioned for an emergency ruling at that point, or risk a possible revolution. Public tensions would be sky-high.

At that point, the Court would have to decide between law and order, or Trump and chaos.

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