16 V 2023: Harrumphs, and damned little more

In Blazing Saddles we witness a meeting of Governor William J. Le Petomane and his cabinet. At one point the Governor, in view of the possibility that they may lose their “phony-baloney jobs,” leads a chorus of harrumphs around the table to show how seriously he and his cabinet members are taking the crisis.

Fast forward to our Republican Congress and its many meaningless investigations. They too are harrumphing, just acting out being vigilant and deeply concerned as part of the camouflage show they are always presenting to distract the nation from the virtual crimes committed by big money. The Republicans in Congress are not there to make things happen, they are there to prevent anything happening that might diminish the earnings of the hyper-wealthy persons and corporations that put them and sustain them in the cushiest job one could imagine.

11 V 2023: Truth in advertising enforceable on Trump?

CNN made fools of themselves and did the country a grave disservice by allowing Trump to spiel his lies on prime time television. Did CNN think he would say and do anything different from his usual m.o? They knowingly gave free advertising to a habitual liar. 

The following is found on the Federal Trade Commission’s Truth in Advertising website: “When the Federal Trade Commission finds a case of fraud perpetrated on consumers, the agency files actions in federal district court for immediate and permanent orders to stop scams; prevent fraudsters from perpetrating scams in the future; freeze their assets; and get compensation for victims. When consumers see or hear an advertisement, whether it’s on the Internet, radio or television, or anywhere else, federal law says that ad must be truthful, not misleading, and, when appropriate, backed by scientific evidence.”

The DOJ has failed to hold Trump accountable for his lies. I guess they don’t think lying in politics is real lying. But the F.T.C. promises to come down hard on lying in advertising. Maybe they are the ones who should prosecute the Archliar.

9 V 2023: Greatest bitch hunt of all time

The jury in the E. Jean Carroll case has found against Mr. Trump : please pay $5M.

Trumpy is, as one might expect, more pissed off than anyone has ever been before, and has declared the finding of the Court to be a “continuation of the greatest witch hunt of all time.” I don’t know if Trumpy is right about “greatest … of all time,” but he shouldn’t call it a witch hunt, because it is more like a bitch hunt.

6 V 2023: Honesty demanded from all

I am so accustomed to cascades of evasion, distortion, misinformation, and out-and-out lies from Republicans that I’d come to assume that deceit was a reactionary métier. But features of the glacial removal from office of St. Louis CA Kim Gardner have shown that the left has its offenders, if on a far smaller scale.

I don’t know that it’s right to describe Ms Gardner as “soft on crime,” but her behavior has been what one might expect from a black politician playing to a majority urban black community that is, let’s face it, a semi-criminal culture. It’s within that community that shootings take place routinely day and night. It’s there that a very large number of people have family members, relatives, and friends who have done time, are doing time, or are likely to do time, and this situation, though surely not welcomed, is obviously tolerated. If you want to pick up a lot of votes in this community, you had better not come down hard on crime, but should displace responsibility to other elements of society and portray the criminals, the criminalized community, and oneself as victims. This is just the way things are now, and we must hope for better.

However, Ms Gardner is not only soft on crime, but soft on herself. Throughout her tenure the prosecutor’s office has been dysfunctional. Her complete screw-up has drawn a lot of criticism, criticism that she attacks as being racist in origin and at bottom all about her. Now, it’s possible that people dislike you because of what you are (race, religion, social class, etc.), and it’s easy to claim that this is the case when, in fact, they dislike you because of who you are. Paranoia loves to bask in the imagined approval of all, but it may also enjoy being the focus of universal antagonism.

Pop-psychologizing is unfair. But even so I have to wonder if the sources of Ms Gardner’s abrasiveness, apparently utter lack of organizational ability, and martyr complex lie not in the circumstances in which she finds herself, but in her psychological makeup. 

The situation is not helped by the hype that has attended Ms Gardner’s time as prosecutor, culminating in Mr. Adolphus Pruitt, head of the local NAACP, hailing Gardner’s downfall as “a modern-day lynching.” Oh, come on, Adolphus! It has not been helped by the prolonged silence of other black politicians who until quite recently have avoided any criticism of Ms Gardner. Is it an unwritten rule among black politicians never to criticize other blacks however deserved the criticism and however much the public needs to hear it?

It will take a long time for the office of the prosecutor to recover from Ms Gardner’s virtual sabotage, and it will take a long time for black St. Louis to recover lost credibility.

4 V 2023: Rockets’ red glare over Kremlin and “My God how the money rolls in!”

I read of a Kremlin reaction to the very peculiar drone “attack”: “Russia reserves the right to take countermeasures, wherever and whenever it deems appropriate.” When has Russia ever cared about whether it has the right to do anything. They are never concerned with what is equitable, but with what they think they can get away with.

Russia is charging Ukraine and the U.S. with connivance in this melodramatic “attack.” They might as well charge the Illuminati, Jews, and Freemasons as well – the Kremlin’s dramaturgy is so naive that nothing they claim will convince anyone.

I see reports of additional ways in which right-wing money has been rolling in to Justice Thomas. Does he accept the cash because he feels entitled to it as a member of disadvantaged minority or because he thinks receiving supplementary funds is a prerogative of the Supreme Court?

3 V 2023: Demagogues must boost dosage

The recent behavior of GOP legislators and demagogues shows the similarity between drug pushing and demagoguery. You cannot simply stir up the masses and walk away, if you want the loyalty of the masses you must feed their craving. 

The audience of demagogues are addicts. An addict cannot remain content with simple access to whatever is the focus of her/his addiction, for the craving is such that to remain sated it must keep enlarging its intake of what it craves. Consider the level of violence in American media. Violence creates a craving that demands a steady increase by being given larger and larger doses of what it wants. Those who have been termed “vendetta-crats” gain political power by stoking popular outrage, real or artificial, and outdoing each other in their frenzied dedication to revenge and the extent of the revenge demanded. 

So too demagogues, at the national and local levels. Once they have aroused the public against, e.g., abortion, transsexuals, crypto-communists, Jews, blacks, homosexuals, books they don’t like, foreigners, native Americans, et al, they have to be more absolutely anti-abortion, readier to persecute demonized trans-sexuals, and must steadily enlarge the menace they claim is posed by targeted minorities or the exercise of freedoms.

This is what we observe in demagogues left and right who, though their behavior is almost identical, can agree only in their common avoidance of truth.

22 IV 2023: What’s the opposite of “woke”?

I am asking this because Ms. Kay Ivey, governor of what her predecessor, George Wallace, always used to call “the great state of Alabama, used this term in explaining her firing of Ms Barbara Cooper from the Alabama Department of Early Childhood Education. She fired Ms Cooper because of a teaching manual that she had adopted as a resource for pre-K teachers.

This book reportedly maintains that there are “larger systemic forces that perpetuate systems of White privilege” and that “the United States is built on systemic and structural racism.” Governor Ivey doesn’t want school children to hear anything like this: “Woke concepts that have zero to do with a proper education and that are divisive to the core have no place in Alabama classrooms at any age level, let alone with our youngest learners. We want our children to be focused on the fundamentals, such as reading and math.” Kay Ivey is governor of a state with an ongoing history of vicious racial oppression, a state whose expenditure for education comes in as No. 40 in comparison to the other states. And so the Governor worry over the two centuries of racial violence that are fundamental in the state of Alabama and can rely on a defective education system to see to it that they will not become fundamental. The opposite of “woke” must be “deluded to the point of being asleep.”

22 IV 2023: Immunity of the rich and notorious from prosecution

News came today of a number of “irregularities” in the financial disclosures of Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, the abortion pill nazi. These irregularities, if not mendacious, are at least misleading, but what else can we expect from a MAGA appointment. MAGA sectaries feel that they, like their Führer Trump or Justice Silent Clarence, are above the law, or, perhaps more correctly, outside the law.

We’ve had so many shocking disclosures about the ruthlessness and the extent of the Jan 6 insurrection, and yet none of the really big bugs has been prosecuted. One of them, the quondam wrestler Rep. Gym Jordan, is chair of the House Judiciary Committee where is doing his best to cover up his crimes.

Trump and the Trumpettes show that Americans’ “equality before the law” is just so much window dressing. The rich, those whose crimes are too embarrassing politically, super-sleazes of all kinds can evade prosecution indefinitely by exploiting a legal system that, in fact, favors criminals more than their victims. If I were as guilty as these Jan 6th conspirators I would be in prison now.

14 IV 2023: Put Donald and Jack in same cell

Both Donald Trump and Jack Teixeira are going to be prosecuted for stealing classified documents. They did not steal the secret documents to share them with some enemy of the United States. They are not spies. What they are is dangerous fools. They stole classified documents to win bragging rights by showing them to their friends. This is not malicious but dangerously stupid behavior that has endangered the United States. Stupid behavior on the part of people with access to classified documents is intolerable. Therefore, both of these dangerous clowns must be prosecuted.

12 IV 2023: “… get up with a flea”

We have learned now that the right wing’s mole on the Supreme Court, Justice Clarence Thomas, has been on the take for many years. No, he did not take monetary bribes, but favors, lavish vacations, paid for by right-wing bag man Harlan Crow. 

I cannot imagine a Supreme Court justice being so stupid as to do this, unless he feels that the public is a fool or that his accepting such pay-offs in kind is none of the public’s business. Complaints have been renewed about the lack of a formal ethics code for the Supreme Court, and one is surely needed. But even without a code, he ought to know that a Justice should not take bribes, should not take anything that could be construed as a bribe.

I guess we are supposed to assume that Justice Thomas’ work on the Court is uninfluenced by the generosity of Mr. Crow, just as we are expected to believe that he does not talk politics with his wife. But either we are to credit Thomas with a superhuman ability to compartmentalize, or we ought to be very suspicious of judge who hobnobs with and receives extravagant gifts from a known agent of the right wing and with others of the super-rich. There’s an old saying that probably could be applied to Justice Thomas: “If you lie down with a dog, you get up with a flea.”