One Todd Rokita, Attorney General of the State of Indiana, has undertaken an “investigation” into Dr. Caitlin Bernard’s treating a 10-year-old rape victim. He has been challenged by Dr. Bernard’s lawyer and an angry public, but The Attorney General insists that “The baseless defamation claim and other accusations are really just attempts to distract, intimidate and obstruct my office’s monumental progress to save lives.” Put more correctly, it’s his “monumental progress” towards kissing the ass of anti-abortion fanatics, towards making a fool of himself, and towards bringing the law into contempt. I could think more of the contemptible people who are trying to “take back” America if they would find better flunkies than Attorney General Rokita.
27 VII 2022: The “Bannon” Look
Now I’m worrying that Steve Bannon will not be allowed to maintain his skid-row style when he is in jail. He has embodied the “I don’t give a shit” look, providing a model and encouragement for men who are similarly disposed. The extent to which he is imitated can be seen in very many of the Capitol rioters of Jan 6th. More than that, Steve’s slovenly chic style is part of his persona, indeed, part of his message, and I think that forcing Steve to wash his face and shave would be a violation of his freedom of speech.
22 VII 2022: Archetypes of the Attack on the Capitol
While watching the hearings of the Jan 6 Committee, I kept wondering what was Trump’s fantasy of The March on the Capitol that he was setting in motion.
Was he dreaming of something like the March on Rome in October 1922 of Mussolini and his fascist paramilitary Blackshirts? Their threat of violence caused the terrified King to dismiss the legal government and make Mussolini the Prime Minister!
Or was he encouraged by Hitler’s attempted coup d’état, the Beerhall Putsch of 1923. Hitler had gathered around him his supporters, the disgraced retired general Erich Ludendorff, along with Ernst Roehm and his paramilitary Brownshirts. It was Ludendorf who rallied the Putsch at a moment of hesitation by shouting “We will march!!” The ensuing march, led by Hitler and Ludendorf, met unexpected government resistance and the coup failed. However the leaders of the Putsch were given trifling sentences. They soon resumed where they’d left off, met little resistance, and enslaved Germany.
Or, I wonder if Trump was caught up in Sergei Eisenstein’s glorification of the Bolshevik Storming of the Winter Palace, the seat of Russia’s provisional government, in his film October: Ten Days that Shook the World. Eisenstein shows revolutionary mobs fighting and killing guards and forcing their way into the Winter Palace. Once inside, the horde rampages through the palatial halls and long corridors. They kill anyone who resists, plunder the wine cellar, seize the members of the government, and vandalize the living quarters of the Tsar and his family. (see youtube.com/watch?v=tQ9GCi4Gjso). The attack on the Winter Palace in Eisenstein’s movie and the behavior of the mob depicted there are sadly similar to Jan 6’s Storming of the US Capitol.
Mussolini led his March on Rome — well, not really, but he was photographed with the marching Blackshirts — and as Il Duce became the dictator of Italy. Hitler suffered a setback on the march of his Beerhall Putsch, but the resistance he met and negligible consequences he faced only delayed and did not prevent his eventual dictatorship. Bolshevik leaders let the mob achieve their goal of bringing down the Provisional Government by inciting them to attack the Winter Palace.
They wouldn’t let Trump lead The March on the Capitol. So he sat back while the mob was doing his work. What consequences will he face? If tried at all, will Trump be acquitted like General Ludendorf, or if convicted, will he, like Hitler, be given five years reduced to eight months in cushy confinement, to go on to self-identify as a martyr, and continue to poison the United States even after his death?
17 VII 2022: Don’t let the states decide
I encounter apropos of Roe v. Wade and any number of other issues the right-wing slogan: “Let the states decide.” Various arguments are made in favor of so-called “states’ rights,” most of them self-serving and spurious. I will make only a few points about this:
1) if it had been left to the states to decide, some Southern states would have continued slavery until the beginning of the twentieth century;
2) if it had been left to the states to decide, schools in the South would still be segregated;
3) if it were not for the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, thinly disguised child labor would be commonplace;
4) if it were not for federal environmental regulations the ruin of our country would have gone much farther than it has ;
5) most state legislatures are notorious for the wrong-headedness and outright foolishness of members who seem to have been elected because they are incompetent;
6) how many state legislatures are free of corruption?????
16 VI 2022: Misc. complaints: Republican trash in House of Representatives, political abuse of women, contagious mendacity.
Headline from today’s CNN site: House Republicans plot investigative revenge on January 6 panel as Trump itches for payback.
The fact that trash like the so-called Freedom Caucus can be elected to high office causes me to doubt the viability of democracy, at least in the United States. The past ten years have shown us that universal suffrage cannot work here. Democracy depends on voters, and on a particular kind of voter, sc., one who is thoughtful, dispassionate, and informed. Half of America’s voting population plainly fail to measure up to this standard.
The efforts of the minority Anti-female (a.k.a. Right to Life) Movement to impose their preferences on the majority has not abated. Republican state legislators vie with one another to think up new forms of abuse of women. These legislators, usually from one of our slave states, remind me of students stoked up on “school spirit.” No one can have too much school spirit, and anyone thought to be wanting in school spirit is a pariah. So there is no limit to pep-rally posturing, declarations of esteem for “the team” and hatred for its opponents, no limit to the foolish, wasteful paraphernalia that fans are expected to purchase. So too, no one can be too anti-abortion, too anti-women. Excesses in this area are rewarded in Republican states.
Now we learn that even the Secret Service has been destroying evidence relevant to the Insurrection. Trump’s dishonesty is like an aggressive infection that has spread itself to anyone associated with Trump, from aides to the entire Republican Party. To them applies the phrase from Scripture: “Every man is a liar!”
15 VII 2022: Joe Manchin, a flirt!
Manchin is either a fool or very devious or both. Democrats should write him off altogether and put an end to his approach-avoidance game.
14 VII 2022: Good help is hard to find!
On 18 Dec. 2020 President Trump, leaving no stone unturned, met at the White House with Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and the once-pardoned Michael Flynn.
On 21 Dec. he met with a group of Republican congressmen at a meeting arranged by Rep. Mo Brooks. The representatives who attended were: Rep. Brian Babin, Rep. Andy Biggs, Rep. Matt Gaetz, Rep. Louie Gohmert, Rep. Paul Gosar, Rep. Andy Harris, Rep. Jody Hice, Rep. Jim Jordan, Rep. Scott Perry, Then-Rep-elect. Marjorie Taylor Greene. Bold type indicates the names of those who received or have been seeking a pardon from Trump.
Who would assemble a group like this? and for what purpose? These two meetings highlight Trump’s desperation, lack of discrimination, and his true character as he surrounded himself with sleazes and crazies like these. All these false counselors were relentlessly telling Trump what he wanted to hear and driving away his temperate advisers. Their manic energy combined with Trump’s self-aggrandizing bitterness to produce the Insurrection of January Sixth.
No one with ambitions to accomplish anything at all, would select a crew like this, no one with a modicum of sanity and prudence. The delusionists at the Dec. 20 meeting heated up Trump’s delusions, and the chorus of yes-men of Dec. 21 kept the pot boiling. Good help is hard to find, and America can be grateful that Trump got the help he deserved.
7 VII 2022: Conservatives and slaves
The Conservative Party in the United Kingdom is finally removing Boris Johnson. It has taken them all too long to ditch Johnson, but they have finally united in absolute rejection of this destructive anomaly in British politics. The contrast with the Republican Party in the United States is altogether striking. Trump’s behavior has been much more destructive and far more criminal than Boris Johnson’s, but a majority of Republicans remain enslaved to Donald Trump, their worst enemy.
3 July 2022: Dictators for life?
Haiti’s one time blood-soaked dictator, Papa Doc Duvalier was “elected” President for Life, as had been a number of his predecessors, as have quite a number of dictators world-wide. This title is, of course, a euphemism for Dictator for Life. In the U.S. no elected official in the executive and legislative branches can hold office for life. However, the federal judiciary is dominated by appointees who hold office until retirement or death. This anomalous lifetime tenure in office is intended to free the judges from having to seek re-election and so from subservience to any particular voting base, and supports an indifference to politics that we would expect of an honest judge.
But federal judges are appointed by the President, must be confirmed by the Senate, and are thus the same as all other high-level political appointees except that their terms of service do not end with a change of government. So if a justice of the Supreme Court is nominated because of her/his political orientation, upon the recommendation of an radical political organization (e.g., the Federalist Society), and is hastily confirmed only by the votes of a temporary majority in the Senate, the odds are, it seems to me, that the justice so appointed may continue as a creature of the political faction that brought about his/her appointment and confirmation throughout her/his lifetime term. And if connivance and misfortune create enough justices of this sort to constitute a majority on the Court, we have all that is needed for a judicial dictatorship for life.
30 VI 2022: A census of “Trump world”
I am seeing, as the Jan 6 Hearings progress, more and more references to “Trump World” or “Trumpworld.” This expression is puzzling. What and where is Trump World? One could think that it exists only in Donald Trump’s mind, an imaginary world of shining hyperbole that orbits around King Donald. But as commonly used, the term means Trump and all the more public members of his entourage, Donny Jr. and Eric, Ivanka and Jared, Mark Meadows, Roger Stone, Sean and Laura, Stormy Daniels, Jim Jordan, Steve Bannon, and Trump’s legal team: Rudy Giuliani, Sydney Powell, John Eastman. However, there are many more inhabitants of Trump World than these, and I would like to see them dragged out of the shadows so that we will know their names as well.
Trump’s campaign to retain power has been long-lasting and multi-faceted. Now among Trump’s well known deficiencies are his attention deficit disorder, his disinclination to read anything, his impetuosity, and his furious impatience. These are not the character traits of one who is to design and execute a grand scheme over an extended period of time. I am ready to agree that the Big Lie was actually born of Trump’s lifelong conviction that he is absolutely the best and therefore unbeatable unless someone cheated him. But unless the Big Lie is surrounded and supported by a lot of little lies and little liars it must look like the paranoid delusion it is. Quickly deploying so many vocal supporters and convincing them of the truth of the Big Lie, or, rather, convincing them to pretend that the Big Lie is true, requires a capacity for detailed planning and an organizational ability well beyond Trump’s poor powers. No, Trump had many co-conspirators, many more than we know, in disseminating the Big Lie and organizing and funding the attempted coup. I want to know specifically who were these seditionists, and I want to see them brought to justice along with the more public and less effective members of Trump’s entourage.