PMC Commentary

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Trump's lawyers split - and I'm split, too

In nine days Donald Trump will go on trial in the U.S. Senate for "incitement of insurrection," but he ain't got no lawyers.

The five lawyers he did have (although an intent letter was never signed) have hit the road. Reports CNN: The two lead attorneys "are no longer on the team"; a third "has also left"; and a fourth and fifth "are no longer involved with the case, either."

Other outlets, such as the Washington Post, are reporting that it's "unclear" as to why the Gang of Five has taken flight. The NY Times says vaguely that Trump's insistence on arguing election fraud rather than the unconstitutionality of a post-presidency trial triggered the departures; that, plus Trump believes, in classic Trumpian fashion, that the case is so "simple" he could argue it himself — and thereby spare a defense bill, though he probably wouldn't pay it anyway.

CNN, however, states unequivocally that "Trump wanted the attorneys to argue there was mass election fraud and that the election was stolen from him rather than focus on the legality of convicting a president after he's left office." Somewhere, somehow, I should think, he'll find attorneys willing to do precisely that.

The ploy is an unambiguous sign of how seriously the former president is taking this trial. He just wants a circus in which dancing elephants with law licenses attach to each other's tail and perform, exclusively for Trump's political benefit, his election-fraud sideshow. Presiding judge Sen. Leahy shall then be compelled, I assume, to rule that Trump's strained "defense" is inadmissible.

This further raises the question: Is the trial even worth it? We'll have a presidential impeachment trial without a Chief Justice presiding; a concluding verdict that is, to put it mildly, foregone; a verdict that is also absurd in its acquittal; a "vindicating" verdict; a trial impinging on President Biden's urgent agenda to save lives and the economy; and a defendant, all along, who wishes to treat the trial as both a joke and a campaign rally.

I certainly understand the argument in support of a trial — its historic … necessity? But, borrowing from Nancy Pelosi's initial objection to any pre-Ukraine Trump impeachment — "He's just not worth it" — George Will suspects that Chief Justice John Roberts' decision to forego presiding over this impeachment trial suggests an identical judgment: He’s just not worth it.

And that's an argument of attitude and sentiment which is hard to overcome.

On the manipulation of truth: the conservative press and its red scare of censorship

"Speech and Sedition in 2021: The progressive press decides that dissenters should be suppressed."

You may have guessed who wrote the headline before reaching its last, duplicitous word. Its opening paragraph proceeds to inform us that most of us learn our horrible history of censorship as schoolchildren — would that we did — through the dark illustrations of McCarthyism, the Red Scare and the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. Dreadful times, indeed. "Yet a recent Washington Post opinion piece purports to explain 'what the 1798 Sedition Act got right,'" opines the Wall Street Journal's editorialists.

Then the dull knife: "We highlight this as one example among many of the emerging appetite for viewpoint suppression among journalists, intellectuals and Democrats in the wake of the Trump Presidency."

And that is a true Red Scare. The alleged, scalawagish suppressor featured by the Journal is one Katlyn Marie Carter, a history professor at Notre Dame. Her appetite for and advocacy of stifling free expression? She advocates no such thing; she has no such appetite.

The good professor does note that the 1790s American hope of "spread[ing] enlightenment" via "newly expanded print media" was soon molested by partisan garbage, much akin to the sewer of today's social media. Thus did actual suppressors advocate the criminalization of "false, scandalous and malicious writing or writings against the government of the United States … with intent to defame the said government … or to bring [it] into contempt or disrepute."

In a show of almost comic understatement, Prof. Carter observes that "their notion of what constituted falsehoods at the time proved to be problematic." For instance one chap — an indicted member of the U.S. House — had written that the sitting president, John Adams, possessed an "unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp." (I once wrote an undergraduate paper on President Wilson's wartime revival of the Sedition Act, in which I noted the imprisonment of one poor fellow for merely uttering a less than favorable view of our military intervention. And he wasn't alone. Again, a dreadful, "problematic" time indeed.)

Quite contrary to the WSJ's editorial spin, Carter, in fact, points out what the 1798 Sedition Act got wrong, which was pretty much everything. Her proposed remedies to "false, scandalous and malicious writings" in the political sphere are but the reasoned and reasonable suggestions of schools teaching "critical thinking skills"; a return to "good civic participation," i.e., "responsibly consuming and sharing information" — just plain republicanism; and "editorial standards," which are wanting, it seems, at 1211 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY.

Other "journalists, intellectuals and Democrats" named by the Journal as frightful hawkers of unAmerican censorship — in an "extraordinary and ominous turn in a democracy" — have, in reality, only called for boycotts of advertisers and public pressure on reckless, profit-mongering outlets that huckster known falsehoods. And that's as American as Chevrolet.

I would agree with the Journal's editorial writers if they had condemned genuine censorship. I have no truck with those on the "woke" left who are so intellectually comatose that they labor to shut the mouths and minds of anyone they deem insufficiently enlightened. I and others could press for the same against them, but this is the rightly First-Amendment United States, where we allow fools to be fools.

Yet it isn't fools the Journal manipulatively attacks; it is those who simply long for honest debate.

On a lighter note ...

Harlan Hill, commentator! political consultant! and former Trump campaign advisor, once averred that he was "one hundred percent" sure that his Toddler King would triumph in November's election. But that wasn't all the dapper Mr. Hill had to say.

He also pledged that if Trump went down in defeat, "I'll eat my shoe. We'll do it in a livestream."

Has Harlan lived up to his promise? Not at all, of course. And from it, he has slithered in an almost admirable manner of chickenshitness.

Trump, you see, or as Harlan postures to see it, in fact won the presidential election. In separate tweets since the "consultant's" heartfelt assurances of footwear consumption, he has also sworn that "Trump was robbed," and that "Democratic mob bosses have stolen an election and undermined the democratic process."

I really must remember The Harlan Gambit the next time I play blackjack in a casino, and perhaps lose. I'm just sure the pit boss will forgive any failed, monetary venture.

Biden, Putin, Kasparov - and the lingering question

In an op-ed for USA Today, Garry Kasparov writes:

"Putin and President Joe Biden had their first call Tuesday, and initial reports said the new president 'pressed' Putin on [Alexei] Navalny, among other things. But unless there are real consequences to deter him, Putin considers such tough talk to be nothing more than posturing for the U.S. domestic audience. Biden has a chance to prove him wrong."

I find it interesting that Kasparov goes no further in his demands of Biden than to call for freezing the accounts and seizing the assets of eight Russian oligarchs named by Navalny. "If the West is finally going to get serious about stopping Putin before his next invasion, his next cyberattack and his next assassination attempt," writes Kasparov, "that list should be on top of Biden’s desk."

Even the nonpartisan Atlantic Council, in 2017, urged the U.S. and its European partners to announce that if Putin "doesn’t stop the fighting in eastern Ukraine, military action will follow." (The Council was not urging direct, Western intervention: "Allied forces would be put on standby alert as the Ukrainian army, supported by its Western partners, retakes control over its land in eastern Ukraine.")

My guess is that rarely has the adage of "discretion is the better part of valor" been more true than it is for Kasparov. Although the U.S. resident compared Putin to Hitler in his book, Winter Is Coming, whether he also foresees a military confrontation I do not know; nor do I believe that, to his host nation, he would counsel such a move.

But if he ever does, I wouldn't blame him. Putin will never allow himself to be dethroned — that, he'll fix one way or another; he'll persist in seeking the dismantlement of the West's special relationships and democratic foundations by any means necessary; and for those reasons, as Winter Is Coming's subtitle states, Vladimir Putin … Must Be Stopped.

I can no longer recall the number of years I have read of Putin and Russia's coming imperial implosion and concomitant, imminent economic collapse. And yet the slavic little peckerhead just keeps on truckin'. I'll be damned if I know what President Biden should do or to what lengths he should do it, but yes, somehow, Putin must be stopped. He's an intolerable menace to all that is worthy and holy. And his menacing will only get worse.

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"The Capitol insurrection was as Christian nationalist as it gets”

​​​​​In Taking America Back for God, sociologists Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry examine Christian Nationalism, which played an integral role in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, America's Enlightenment founding, and democracy itself:

"[The creed] includes assumptions of nativism, white supremacy, patriarchy and heteronormativity, along with divine sanction for authoritarian control and militarism. It is as ethnic and political as it is religious. Understood in this light, Christian nationalism contends that America has been and should always be distinctively 'Christian' from top to bottom — in its self-identity, interpretations of its own history, sacred symbols, cherished values and public policies — and it aims to keep it this way."

This is no "culture war," says another analyst. "It is a political war over the future of democracy." And, observes another sociologist of the Capitol Hill insurgency: "There were Christian crosses and Jesus Saves banners, Trump flags and American flags, fascist insignia and a 'Camp Auschwitz' hoodie. Some saw apples and oranges. But it was really a fruit cocktail: White Christian Nationalism." Adds Perry, bluntly: “The Capitol insurrection was as Christian nationalist as it gets.”

I would add as well: The Christian Nationalist uprising was probably as insurrectionist as it can go. There may come similarly organized and even violent demonstrations, but today's Christian Nationalism is as doomed as the political, obscurantist, Christian fundamentalist movement of the 1920s. Such movements evince a dissociative disordering that, historically speaking, have been more centripetal than centrifugal in their sociopolitical duration; overreaching is their hallmark, and overreaching is a surefire path to ideological suicide.

Yet, for years I have read psychoneurotic hysterics — much of it from once-respectable writers — over the approaching triumph of Christian nationalism, or Christian supremacy or Dominionism, or whatever one wishes to call it. This visible panic does not help, it seems to me.

For, as the Times' Thomas Edsall concludes: "As members of the Christian right have become angrier and more adversarial, some to the point of violence, their decline from dominant to marginal status has bred a provocative resentment that is serving to spur the very secularization processes that so infuriates them…. This vicious circle does not bode well for the future."

Clearly, insurrectionists and scheming "Christian" bomb-throwers cannot be ignored. But it might be advisable for panic-buttoners to let the FBI worry about them, investigate them, prosecute them and lock up their seditious butts. From hourly cable news alarmism to Twitter frenzy, elevating these theocratic goons to decisive power planes only permits them to imagine a sociopolitical strength they do not possess — and that in itself serves to spur them on.

Kevin McCarthy: intensely focused on cutting out the wrong crap

CNN:

"House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy privately made a blunt appeal to his colleagues in the aftermath of the divisive fight to impeach former President Donald Trump: Stop attacking each other and instead focus on Democrats."

"Cut that crap out," said McCarthy.

The cardinal reason for the conference call was to collect boodle for the National Republican Congressional Committee, so that GOP officeholders could better harm the United States in 2022 — 3 & 4. They pledged to do just that, with "they" including Q-harpie and would-be Pelosi assassin Marjorie Taylor Greene, "which prompted the committee's chairman … to thank her."

Isn't that precious?

And today, Kevin McCarthy is meeting with Trump.

Let's just say it: This bitch - along with quite a few bastards - needs to go

​​​​​U.S. House member Marjorie Taylor Greene, from Georgia's scary 14th congressional district, has, in just the past two years, "liked" a comment suggesting that "a bullet to the head [of Nancy Pelosi] would be quicker" in removing her from the speaker's seat; has concurred with desires to "hang" other Democrats; has liked comments about executing "deep-state" FBI agents; has agreed that the 2018 Parkland, Fla. high school shooting was a "false flag" operation (incidentally, Greene is about to join the House committee on education); has drooled Islamophobic and anti-Semitic slurs; and has been a loyal soldier of Q.

Says a spokesman for her Republican conference leader, Kevin McCarthy: Greene's, shall we say, activities "are deeply disturbing and Leader McCarthy plans to have a conversation with the congresswoman about them."

A good, stern conversation.

Says House GOP Whip Steve Scalise: "I've consistently condemned the use of violent rhetoric in politics on both sides, and this is no exception. There is no place for comments like that in our political discourse."

Thus is the question raised: Then what is she doing in the United States House of Representatives?

Rep. Greene, along with the other 146 "lawmakers" who voted to rob 81 million Americans of their democratic rights — especially Cruz, Hawley, McCarthy, Scalise, [Greg] Pence, Jordan, Gaetz, Gohmert, Biggs and Brooks — should be treated to a tar-and-feather party and then summarily expelled from Congress.

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Who the hell are "they"? The MyPillow dude and YourShame

There's nothing like having a national platform on which to melt down, downer, and downest.

This is sheer lunacy from the MyPillow guy. If you of your family members ranted like this you’d be worried about them. pic.twitter.com/ppPzHug0An

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 27, 2021

In a frisson of Lindellian patriotism, Tucker Carlson piled on by denouncing the media — you know, them, those guys — for ignoring the MyPillow guy's rants about the miasmic evils of Dominion. "They’re not making conspiracy theories go away by doing that," bubbled the Fox host. "You don’t make people calm down and get reasonable and moderate by censoring them, you make them way crazier. Of course!"

If Tucker really prays for calm and reasonable moderation and Mike really wants to "help addicts across the country," both should begin by detoxing themselves from this really weird shit.

(By the way, should this weirdness not also be relegated to no more than local access broadcasting? Just after an hour of some church lady and a half-hour of do-it-yourself seal training?)

From obstructionism to hate: the GOP's long trek into darkness

Today, reports the Times in above-the-fold placement, we can expect the Commerce Department to report that America's GDP, in 2020's last quarter, rose all of about 1 percent — rendering the year as a whole a near record-breaking economic calamity.

Blame not the devastating effects of the coronavirus alone, or even principally. In the preceding quarter, the GDP soared by 7.5 percent, as congressional aid to consumers and businesses in March reenergized the economy. Yet by the last quarter that assistance was a spent force, and so the economy retracted once again.

In the decimating wake of supply-side resistance to re-legislating the demonstrably effective, Congress did manage to pass a $900 billion relief package in the fourth quarter. Though much less than needed, the economy once again began to lift and now, in 2021's first quarter, there is realistic hope that the GDP will reach its pre-pandemic level sometime this year, not next year, as previously predicted.

As the Times summarizes our economic recrudescence, "Aid passed by Congress in December has begun to flow in enhanced unemployment benefits, small-business loans and direct payments to households…. Democratic control of the Senate [makes] further rounds of assistance more likely." The aid included $600 stimulus checks, extended unemployment benefits, billions in rental assistance, another ban on evictions, more money for food insecurity, another round of the Paycheck Protection Program for businesses, and $68 billion for covid vaccine distribution.

But that aid will expire. The only path to reaching the economy's pre-pandemic level in 2021 — as is now "hoped" — is by enacting the Biden administration's nearly $2 trillion relief package.

And that, we should add, presents a national problem even larger than any imminently failed economic recovery. Not only is relief at stake: "For Republicans," notes the AP, "the final roll-call vote will indicate whether they plan to be constructive advocates of the minority party or just-say-no obstructionists." Meanwhile, "Democrats are operating as if they know they are borrowed time."

The evidence of Keynesian macroeconomics' efficacy is incontrovertible — as are the vast benefits of the administration's designs on climate control, immigration and, among many other intents, health care. And yet Republicans' aggressive insistence on dreary supply-sideism, science denial, xenophobia and chicken-bartering for a doctor's appointment goes on and on. This blind, arrogant, pseudoconservative attitude of obstructionism is actually less any sort of ideological resistance than just a plain hatred of Democrats.

And that, no amount of reasonable debate or persuasion will cure. It's who they are, it's the Dorian Gray they've become, it's by now a deep-set grotesquerie. There is another hope, however. The Republican ranks are splintering like a hovel bombed by a howitzer, and this, in time, will thin their numbers in Congress — perhaps to a non-pre-pandemic level of virtual insignificance.

Want some hydroxychloroquine? Call Okla.'s gov. or a. g.

God bless the Internet. And state and local journalism. Really.

From Oklahoma's undeniably illuminating Frontier, which I somehow stumbled on a few minutes ago:

"The Oklahoma Attorney General’s Office has been tasked with attempting to return a $2 million stockpile of [hydroxychloroquine], once touted by former President Donald Trump as a way to treat the coronavirus." The state's governor ordered the useless heap.

"[He] purchased the hydroxychloriquine stockpile in early April, days after Trump began to tout it as a treatment." Even though "health officials nationwide immediately began to caution people against using the drug," Oklahoma's governor "wasn’t alone in his support of hydroxychloroquine."

State representative Justin Humphrey — who had sought "to establish a Bigfoot hunting season in Oklahoma and made waves in 2017 when he referred to pregnant women as 'hosts'" — also "promoted [it] as a viable treatment after he had contracted COVID-19."

The governor "defended the purchase at the time," arguing that "the drug had multiple other uses" — such as a potion for those millions of Oklahomans who yearly come down with malaria, or perhaps for those many housewives who hanker to use it as an aromatic compound in their monthly home production of house paint.

"A spokesman for [the] Oklahoma Attorney General … told The Frontier this week that the AG’s office was working with the state health department 'to try to figure out a solution.'"

Uh, grow a brain?

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Astounding. The GOP always reserves another nail for its coffin.

Yet another lamentation for partisan decadence and the serial death of probity.

Yesterday, 90 percent of Senate Republicans declared as unconstitutional the — maybe — upcoming trial of a living, very former president of the United States for — sedition.

"Maybe," since what's the point of convening a jury already announcing its corrupt, unyielding intent to absolve and acquit?

There may be some civics-textbook value in at least trying to condemn, on paper, such an antipresidential blackguard. But for Christ's sake, I would argue, we might as well instead just declare the Republican Party's virual entirety to be a spent, dead force at any level of American integrity, respectability, or decency.

Be done with it and move on to overcoming — or trying to overcome — the general blackguards' opposition to legislative decency. Spend also some time trying to convince those lone, four-of-the-five unretiring, principled GOP senators to quit caucusing with a party that is philosophically, morally and ethically dead, dead, dead.