Politics posts

It always amuses me when Republicans talk up the “paid protesters” at left-wing or anti-Trump rallies. Have they been to one of these? I went to the #HandsOff rally at Seattle Center yesterday, one of hundreds, maybe thousands of such protests around the country, as people gave up part of their weekend to protest ... well, everything Trump is doing, but mostly the dismantling of our federal government by unelected boobs (as opposed to the Big Elected Boob), and—here's the point—I must've seen a thousand signs and no two were the same. That's us. That's the left. Nothing uniform about our sign-making. The issues were all over the spectrum. Could be about Trump dismantling the government, could be trans issues, could be immigration or tariffs or the stock market, or the unconstitutionality of almost everything he's doing, and the ignoring of the courts and the upending of the rule of law and American democracy, I mean, just so, so much that is so, so wrong with that sad, sad fuck, and it was all there on all these handmade signs held by all these people who gave up part of their weekend. We're cohesive on nothing save hating everything Trump is doing.

To be honest, I didn't think I'd go. I was about 40-60 against. But the weather was nice, I was going for a walk anyway, might as well head toward something meaningful as the world caves in. Maybe we can shore up part of it. 

“To put things into perspective: I had a Canadian passport, lawyers, resources, media attention, friends, family and even politicians advocating for me. Yet I was still detained for nearly two weeks. Imagine what this system is like for every other person in there.”

-- Jasmine Mooney, “I'm the Canadian who was detained by Ice for two weeks. It felt like I had been kidnapped,” in The Guardian. I've seen plenty of movies about autocracy taking over democracies, “Missing,” “I'm Still Here,” etc., and we're here now. That's us.

Well, at least some lawyers, even Trumpian ones, are in favor of rule of law. 

Trump's DOJ wants to dismiss the corruption case against Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat, in the Southern District of NY, apparently to ensure his cooperation on removing immigrants from the city and who knows what else. Border czar Tom Homan (w/Adams!) was on Fox News this morning, and said the following:

“If he [Adams, sitting next to him] doesn't come through, I'll be back in New York City, and we will be sitting on the couch. I'll be in his office saying, 'Where the hell is the agreement we came to? We're going to deliver for the safety of the people of this city.'”

The agreement we came to. Interesting. What quid for what quo, Gracie?

Better, DOJ is having trouble finding anyone in SDNY to actually dismiss the Adams case. A sepulchral figure named Emil Bove, straight out of central casting, but currently the acting U.S. Deputy Attorney General, has sent out orders to do just that; but the Trump appointee leading the SDNY office, Dannielle R. Sassoon, who clerked for Antonin Scalia and is a member of the Federalist Society—i.e., her con credentials are all there—resigned yesterday rather than go through with it. Because it's so contrary to everything. Bove responded to her resignation with a long, nasty letter, standing in for the boss, and then searched for someone else to do the deed. Right, it's Saturday Night Massacre all over again. One thing we know? Hagen Scotten, AUSA, won't be Robert Bork. 

He sent a letter to Bove, and ... OK, before we get to the really good stuff, we get the funny stuff. Scotten has to let Bove know that, though he received a letter saying he refused to dismiss the Adams case, he says he was never asked to dismiss the Adams case. He never got the opportunity. Chef's kiss. The Trumps are not just mean but incompetent, and probably incompetent first. 

My favorite part of Scotten's letter, which is short and sweet, is that he already brands the future Robert Bork:

But any assistant U.S. attorney would know that our laws and traditions do not allow using the prosecutorial power to influence other citizens, much less elected officials [i.e., Eric Adams], in this way. If no lawyer within earshot of the President is willing to give him that advice, then I expect you will find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion. But it was never going to be me. 

Encore, please. 

The update, as I was writing this post, is that apparently someone has been found to dismiss the case, a career federal prosecutor, who claims he's doing it so others won't have to quit. But he still has to make his argument before a judge. One hopes, if he's the guy we hope he is, that he burns a few people in the process. 

In a month without much hope, all this gives me a teaspoon of it.

From a Guardian article by Peter Rothpletz on what Democrats need to do to get their message out effectively instead of what they've been doing. 

The Democrats who have emerged as the most successful communicators in the last few years—Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett, Senator Chris Murphy, Senator John Fetterman, and the aforementioned [Alexandria] Ocasio-Cortez—are those who made a concerted effort to reject this conventional risk aversion. They curse, they go on Fox News, and they're extremely aggressive in calling out their conservative counterparts. They've renounced the long Democratic tradition of bringing not a knife to a gun fight but a butter knife to a bazooka fight. Their messaging reflects the urgency of this moment.

He's missing Pete Buttigieg, maybe because Pete doesn't quite fit his formula. He'd go on Fox News and politely dismantle the other side's insane arguments. Even so, Rothpletz's point stands. He adds:

In response to the Trump administration's move to freeze trillions of dollars in federal grants and loans, the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, should not have waited hours upon hours to finally issue a marble-mouthed, oddly sexual statement from behind a podium. No, the most talented Democratic communicators should have been immediately deployed to nursing homes and preschools in their respective districts. They should have taken to Instagram Live and decried—with F-bombs aplenty—the utter inhumanity of throwing the future of Medicaid and Head Start into doubt.

100%. Stop playing by the rules. These people are not your friends. Don't let America end because you were too polite to stop it.

For decades Democrats have misdiagnosed why Reagan was popular. They think it was the “Morning in America” bullshit, that old-time American secular religion, the smile and the wave and the Cheerios, and they've been trying to play into that for years. They've forgotten an important ingredient: resentment. Reagan was all about that, too. He built his base that way, as Trump has. So Dems just need to figure out what's on the Republican ledger that most Americans resent. I have a few ideas. 

Some posited Obama was running interference for the Bushes but the seating appears chronological. As for Michelle?  

Earlier this week, George W. Bush, the 43rd president of the United States, put out the following statement following the death of Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States.

"James Earl Carter, Jr., was a man of deeply held convictions. He was loyal to his family, his community, and his country. President Carter dignified the office. And his efforts to leave behind a better world didn't end with the presidency. His work with Habitat for Humanity and the Carter Center set an example of service that will inspire Americans for generations.

Nicely said. I also can't help but read it as throwing shade at (on?) the 45th/47th president of the United States. Carter was loyal to family, community and country? Trump is only loyal to his own sad self. Carter dignified the office? Yeah, as opposed to You Know Who. Carter's efforts to leave a better world didn't end with his presidency ... while Fuckstick there hasn't even begun. The opposite. He will leave the world much diminished. If Clarence the Angel showed DJT what the world would be like if he'd never be born, I can only imagine a much happier place.

In the fall of 1976, at Bryant Junior High School in South Minneapolis, Ms. Hebert's homeroom class held a debate about the upcoming U.S. presidential election, and two students were chosen to argue the cases for the two candidates. I was tapped to defend the challenger, James Earl “Jimmy” Carter, which seemed like an easy task. His Republican opponent, Pres. Gerald Ford, was a clutz who took office only because the previous Republican president and vice-president were both corrupt—and corrupt in different ways. Ford became VEEP when Spiro Agnew resigned for tax evasion; and he only took over when Nixon resigned because of the Watergate break-in and its year-long cover-ups. Then Ford promptly pardoned Nixon. Not a popular move. Plus Ford was lampooned weekly by Chevy Chase on this new show “Saturday Night,” and everyone liked that. So my task seemed an easy one. Problem? I wasn't as smart as Ms. Hebert (or I) thought. I was a kid who knew the big stories (Watergate), and the pop-cultural ones (Gerald Ford always falls down), and that was it. I did so poorly talking about actual political matters that Ms. Hebert tried to help me along toward better answers. It was embarrassing. I didn't do my job. I didn't defend Jimmy Carter well. 

You could say we've spent the last 50 years not defending Jimmy Carter well.

He was our the first rock 'n' roll president, digging the likes of Bob Dylan and the Allman Brothers and quoting their lyrics. He was the first serious presidential candidate with long hair—hair that went past his ears—and that wasn't slicked into place with Vitalis or some shit. He was a deep Southerner (and we hadn't had one of those in a while), and overtly religious (ditto). He also took advantage of the new primary system to come out of nowhere to win it. Didn't I see a “60 Minutes” piece about Carter going door-to-door in the snow of New Hampshire a year before the primaries? That was his idea: win the early ones, gain attention, and ride that all the way to victory. Which is what he did. What's standard operating procedure began with him.

What happened on his watch? Stagflation, a second oil crisis (this time with long gas lines), and the Iranian hostage crisis. Oh, and the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and we bowed out of the Olympics. Oh, and a rabbit attacked Carter while he was on vacation. A rabbit! This was the guy leading our nation—someone even rabbits knew was fair game. The nation felt dispirited—that was the big issue. We had a hole in the national soul you could drive a mack truck through. The liberal press didn't help—they really played up the “killer rabbit” story. Liberal Hollywood didn't help, either—they released movies like “Americathon” (1979), in which, in the near future, America has run out of oil, Americans are living in their now-useless cars, and the national government, long bankrupt, holds a telethon to raise money to in order pay back a Native American who wants to foreclose on the country. That was the mood.

Carter detailed our troubles in his infamous “malaise” speech, for which he got flak, since he got flak for everything, but I don't know if the speech should be infamous. If you watch “20th Century Women,” and you should, you get a great chunk of that speech, and boy if he didn't nail what was (and is) wrong with us:

There is a growing disrespect for government, the schools, the news media, and other institutions. ... Too many of us now tend to worship self indulgence and consumption. But we've discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We always believed that we were part of a great movement of humanity itself, involved in the search for freedom. We are at a turning point in our history. The path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest, down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom. It is a certain route to failure.

My father interviewed him once. This was in 1988, Carter had a new book coming out—post-presidency, he always had a new book coming out—called “An Outdoor Journal: Adventures and Reflections.” My father actually tried to get out of the assignment. “I'm not an outdoorsman,” he told the editor. “Well, talk about something else, then,” the editor replied. “I hear he likes poetry. Talk to him about poetry.” Which is what Dad did. They met at the Rose Gardens by Lake Harriet in South Minneapolis, and the two men talked poetry. Dad said Carter recited from memory Dylan Thomas' poem “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London” and talked about the ambiguity of its last line: “After the first death, there is no other.” As a young man, he said, that line hit him hard and made him pay attention. 

Dad also talked to him about another outdoor adventure—the killer rabbit story. Carter said it was what we'd now call fake news:

“That was a story that was created by the Washington press corps,” the former president said with the genial nature that hasn't deserted him, even in retirement. “What actually happened was that I was fishing one day in my little pond, by myself, and a little bunny rabbit was chased by dogs. As any outdoorsman knows, any animal can swim well, and the rabbit, in order to escape the dogs, jumped in the pond and swam across about 10 or 15 feet from my boat, came out the other side and kept running.

”About six months later, (press secretary) Jody Powell was talking to some reporters in a tavern and telling them about this rabbit. They doubted whether rabbits could swim, and out of that came a completely fabricated story that a killer rabbit had attacked me.

"It's one of those things that you don't know whether to let it ride and treat it as a joke, which we did, or to call a press conference and announce officially that a rabbit did not attack the president of the United States.

There is a third option. You can denounce the press as a bunch of partisan liars. That's what the other side would've done, but Carter was more genial than that. He thought we were part of a great movement of humanity itself.

Biden's Unpardonable Hypocrisy: The president vowed not to pardon his son Hunter—and then did so anyway.

That's a headline on the Atlantic site in an article by one-time New York magazine writer Jonathan Chait. It's been said that headlines scream, and sometimes they do, but this one simply tsks. It tut-tuts. It demands purity on the losing side of a very dirty game.

Chait owns up to the fact that one of the charges against Biden's son (lying on a form to obtain a weapon) is something that rarely gets charged, and Hunter Biden was charged for it probably because he's Joe's son. The other charge, tax evasion, well, that gets charged, but who cares? Biden promised he wouldn't pardon his son but who cares? That was six months ago when he was running for president, and he assumed he would win it again and the world would remain semi-stable—meaning wobbly. Nope. He dropped out, Kamala entered, Trump won. Trump is now in the midst of weaponizing the Justice Dept., the FBI, the IRS, everything he can get his small, piglike hands on, as he works on his stated policy of “retribution” and to be “a dictator from day one.” What father would leave his son hanging out there to face that crap? A bad father. Joe made the right move.

I say more. I say encore. This is war. Time to get dirty. 

The week after the election, I posted this on Threads:

Someone born in one year, 1946, has led this country for 20 of the last 32 years—and if Tubby lasts his term it'll be 24 of 36. All from one year. All from a few summer months. All from some postwar fucking in the fall of '45. And we've been fucked ever since. 

In the post, I mention '50s babies because my wife is one, but '30s babies (my father) haven't exactly been represented, either. If you expand it to incude every U.S. president born in the 20th century, you get this by decade:

• 1900s (1): LBJ (1908)
• 1910s (4):  Reagan (1911), Nixon (1913), Ford (1913), JFK (1917)
• 1920s (2): Carter (1924), H.W. Bush (1924)
• 1930s (0)
• 1940s (4): Biden (1942), Clinton (1946), W. Bush (1946), Trump (1946)
• 1950s (0)
• 1960s (1): Obama (1961)

JFK was famously the first 20th century president, “born in this century” as he stated in his inaugural address in January 1961, which is pretty crazy. We're 61 years into the 20th century before getting a 20th century baby? Even crazier: four of the next five presidents were older than him. We went young in '61 and then ... “Nah.” That's our story. Great leap forward, retreat. Progress, regress. Change we can believe in, make American great again.

The regress has gone from Nixon to Reagan to W. to Trump. The arc of American history is short but it bends toward stupidity.

I'm mostly sorry for Ukraine. We did this to ourselves but Ukraine is out there fighting for its life, fighting for democracy, and wasn't that something the U.S. once promoted? Something the U.S. once stood for? Making the world safe for democracy, the arsenal of democracy ... Well, we've got a brand-new brand now.

It's been a rough 12 months for me and I didn't really have the emotional bandwidth to follow along with this election, the awfulness and lies, the lies and insanity. I was so out of it that I felt not-bad about the election a month ago. But as the days dwindled down even I was picking up on the signals. The Washington Post and LA Times and USA Today not endorsing a candidate, for example. This was no new moral stance for them, some greater-than-great objectivity for even their Op-Ed pages. It's: They thought he would win. It was a cowardly move that won them nothing but contempt. Like all cowardly moves.

Even the night of I was more detached than normal. Our friend Ward had a few close friends over to either celebrate or commiserate. Some professed to be, in the phrase of the day, nauseously optimistic. Soon they were just nauseous. My immediate thought, which I said out loud, was the Democratic party needed to nominate more straight white men since the woman thing wasn't working. As Bill Burr said last night on SNL, “Alright, ladies, you're 0-2 against this guy: Oh and two!” That pissed people off but he wasn't wrong. One guy's beaten him, Biden, and that took a global pandemic. One guy from either party, by the way. Republicans had 10 other options back in 2015 and they all fell down. They could've taken him out after Jan. 6 but they all fell down.

But I don't know if the straight white men thing is the answer. I don't know if we're just too sexist and/or racist a country, or if there's just too many masters of misinformation out there, the Fox Newses of the world, or if the legit media keeps failing us by normalizing the roughest edges of the roughest major party candidate who ever feigned fellating a microphone, or if it's the new technology allowing the new propaganda to seep into our lives and brains and souls. I don't know if the Democratic party is just too polite. I suspect so. They're playing tennis at Wimbledon when it's rugby on a muddy field in the middle of winter. With cheaters.

I do know that if you voted for Trump because you're worried about the price of eggs, you're an idiot. If, however, you voted for him because you're racist and/or sexist, well, you backed the right person. You're getting what you wanted. Ditto if you're rich and want a tax cut, or if you love Putin or don't care about Ukraine. Or if you just don't like American democracy. I'm not a huge fan of it myself these days. When Biden won in 2020 I began to think of the Trump years as an aberration. Now the Biden years look like the aberration. We laughed at Trump when he put his stupid name on all of his buildings. Now he's doing it to the times. He went from hotelier to era.

I like something the actor Jeffrey Wright posted recently:

Fuck it. Hard week. Let's go. Right is right. History will applaud us.

Good attitude. I like something my friend Craig Wright posted the day after:

Everything that was true yesterday is true today. Some of it is more evident now, and more present; and some is less evident now, and less present. But it's a closed system, this world. The good always goes somewhere. Find it. 

Two Wrights don't erase a massive wrong. But it's a start. 

The legit media has been one of the great disappointments of the Trump era—even now, 10 years into it, they still haven't figured out a way to cover the guy correctly, and in some ways have actually gotten worse—but Peter Baker's piece in The New York Times last month deserves some praise. Entitled “For Trump, a Lifetime of Scandals Heads Toward a Moment of Judgment,” and subtitled “No major party presidential candidate, much less president, in American history has been accused of wrongdoing so many times,” the piece is exactly that: a tallying up of all the shit the fucker's done over the decades. If you have anyone sitting on the fence in this election, or a favorite relative you can't believe believes in the guy, send it to them. Or just send them paragraphs 5-7 about “the record of scandal stretching across his 78 years,” which includes “so many acts of wrongdoing” that “it requires a scorecard to remember them all”:

His businesses went bankrupt repeatedly and multiple others failed. He was taken to court for stiffing his vendors, stiffing his bankers and even stiffing his own family. He avoided the draft during the Vietnam War and avoided paying any income taxes for years. He was forced to shell out tens of millions of dollars to students who accused him of scamming them, found liable for wide-scale business fraud and had his real estate firm convicted in criminal court of tax crimes.

He has boasted of grabbing women by their private parts, been reported to have cheated on all three of his wives and been accused of sexual misconduct by more than two dozen women, including one whose account was validated by a jury that found him liable for sexual abuse after a civil trial.

He is the only president in American history impeached twice for high crimes and misdemeanors, the only president ever indicted on criminal charges and the only president to be convicted of a felony (34, in fact). He used the authority of his office to punish his adversaries and tried to hold onto power on the basis of a brazen lie.

Which is still only scratching the surface. And yet he's still there, still holding onto power, still transforming the “Grand Old Party” into a club for hucksters and scumbags, opportunists and cowards, with the Federalist Society trying to work levers in the background, and looking increasingly like scumbags and cowards themselves. Tonight, or tomorrow, or some time this week, we'll begin to see how much longer “the Trump era” might last. And how it might end. And what America might look like at the end of it.

Vote. 

“As the coronavirus tore through the world in 2020, and the United States and other countries confronted a shortage of tests designed to detect the illness, then-President Donald Trump secretly sent coveted tests to Russian President Vladimir Putin for his personal use.

”Putin, petrified of the virus, accepted the supplies but took pains to prevent political fallout — not for him, but for his American counterpart. He cautioned Trump not to reveal that he had dispatched the scarce medical equipment to Moscow, according to a new book by Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward. ...

“The unnamed Trump aide cited in the book indicated that the GOP standard-bearer may have spoken to Putin as many as seven times since Trump left the White House in 2021.”

-- “Trump secretly sent covid tests to Putin during 2020 shortage, new book says” by Isaac Stanley-Becker

“In our nation's 248-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump. He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him. He can never be trusted with power again. As citizens, we each have a duty to put country above partisanship to defend our Constitution. That is why I will be casting my vote for Vice President Kamala Harris.”

-- former vice-president Dick Cheney in his endorsement of Kamala Harris for president

When was the last time a former president or vice-president from one party endorsed the candidate for the other party? Ever? Curious who else will step up, now that Cheney has. (W. has said he won't make an endorsement.) What I like about the above? No punches pulled. Dems could learn from this. Niceties are for peacetime. 

“On any given day it is difficult to measure desperation. Polling offers a snapshot of what voters think, but not how the campaigns view the arc of the race. Official statements from campaign officials are rightly viewed with some skepticism.

'In the final weeks of an election, you should focus on what the campaigns do, rather than what they say. Pay particular attention to what they are spending money on. [And] there is nowhere Republicans are spending more than in the courts. In recent weeks they have filed a flurry of lawsuits targeting the voting process. They can call their voter suppression program whatever they please, but it is still a massive voter suppression effort.

”Consider this: when the Democratic National Convention began, there were 88 pro-voting lawsuits and 85 anti-voting lawsuits that had been filed during this election cycle. Three weeks later, anti-voting lawsuits now outpace pro-voting 99 to 90. Adding to the GOP's troubles is their dismal record of success. By the first night of the DNC, pro-voting forces had won 167 cases and lost 73. That record is now 184 wins and 76 losses.

“Republicans are in real electoral trouble and they have turned to the courts to bail them out. And with less than 60 days until the election, that strategy is failing.”

-- Voting rights attorney Marc Elias in his newsletter today. More here. I hope he's right.

“I believe that leaders must display dignity.
I believe that leaders must tell the truth.
I believe that leaders should be able to laugh at themselves.
I believe that leaders must care for, and love, the people they are leading.
I believe that leaders must possess knowledge and expertise but with the full awareness that none of us has all the answers—and in fact some of the best answers come from members of the team.”

-- NBA coach and former NBA star Steve Kerr last night at the Democratic National Convention. Each one has a negative example, and everyone knows who that is. Even he knows who that is.

MUSK: People were asking me in California, “Are you worried about a nuclear cloud coming from Japan?” I am like no, that's crazy. It is actually, it is not even dangerous in Fukushima. I flew there and ate locally grown vegetables on TV to prove it. ... Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed but now they are full cities again.

TRUMP: That's great, that's great.

MUSK: It is not as scary as people think, basically. ...

TRUMP: We will have to rebrand it. We will name it after you or something.

-- Part of the interview/conversation between Elon Musk and Donald Trump last night on Musk's platform, X, which was initially marred by technical issues, and subsequently marred by the two of them talking. The above is taken from The Independent, which adds, for those like Musk who need it, “America dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, destroying the city and killing 140,000 people. Three days later, it nuked Nagasaki and killed 70,000 more people.” Tom Nichols of The Atlantic wrote in response: “I am as big a fan of nuclear power as there is but this is a completely dumbass thing to say.”