Month: September 2022

The most maddening bit about The Church of Trump’s main article of faith, that their Lord and Savior didn’t lose an election fair and square and Joe Biden is not the legitimate president, is that by the time they will be in position to do anything about it, Joe Biden’s first term will be over. But that doesn’t change the fact that Trumpniks who deny the 2020 election are running in crucial states and if they take over state legislatures or Secretary of State positions, they may be in position to just throw out any election results they don’t like for the presidential race in 2024. And at the rate things are going, Trump IS going to be the Republican presidential nominee. I mean, guys like Ron DeSantis are certainly in competition to see who can be the most gratuitous dickweed, but Ron still seems to have enough grasp of reality to know how many fingers he has on his hands. That’s a liability with his voter base. No, Republicans want somebody who’s just as whiny, stupid and delusional as they are, and no one fills that role like Trump. Nothing will stop Trump. Why? How can he get impeached, TWICE, and not be convicted? Why can he commit crimes that anybody else would have gotten arrested for years ago and nothing happens to him? How can he survive into his mid-70s exercising as little as possible and eating food that would have given anybody else heart disease and Type II diabetes?

Why? Because God is real, and He hates us all. That’s why.

Still, it seems that even a Supreme Being can only do so much to cover for His Divine Instrument’s cosmic-level incompetence and stupidity.

Up to this point, Trump’s biggest liability was the Department of Justice investigation of his resort at Mar-a-Lago – or as Michael Cohen calls it, Mar-a-Lardo – where they found out the estate still held documents after Trump’s attorney said they’d turned over all the documents he had. But in his appeals through the judicial system, Trump managed to get his case to Southern District of Florida Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee who’d only been confirmed by the Senate after the 2020 election. She decided to grant the Trump legal team’s request to appoint a special master to review which documents the government had a right to, in the process completely blocking the DOJ use of the materials. This was a decision so obviously biased and lacking in grounding that Trump’s own Attorney General Bill Barr said it was “deeply flawed in a number of ways.” (Barr being the main expert opinion on twisting the law to make sure Donald Trump is immune to it.)

But the Department of Justice decided to humor the charade for a bit and acceded to one of the proposed choices for special master, Raymond Dearie, a Reagan-appointed judge who is currently serving in the District Court for the Eastern District of New York. And on Tuesday September 20, things didn’t start off well for Trump when the lawyers came to see Dearie in New York and based their case on the idea that they don’t HAVE to tell him, the special master, which documents Trump has a right to and which he does not, which documents are declassified and which are not. Now, if one takes the premise of a special master seriously, the officer would have cause to separate out documents which are attorney-client communications, personal messages, things of that nature. If you are to have a special master, he must be able to make the distinction. But Trump’s team refused to cooperate. There is of course a reason for this, one that the attorneys may have deduced only after taking the case. If they assert that documents have not been declassified, they have no case because the government has ownership. If they assert the documents have been declassified by Trump, then he retroactively did so after leaving office (i.e., he did not declassify anything) and he admits to holding sensitive documents which remain government property whether they are declassified or not. Ergo, the Trump lawyers must present the documents as being in this eternally nebulous state where their legal status must be undetermined but in effect favoring Trump’s case. As some of us called it, “Schrodinger’s Legal Defense.”

Dearie seemed to perceive this right off the bat, because again, the matter in question is, one, why does the former President have possession of documents that he has no legal right to hold? And two, why does the classification status matter if these are still government documents?

“The judge, a veteran of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, expressed puzzlement about what his role would be if the government says certain documents are classified and Trump’s side disagrees but doesn’t offer proof to challenge that.

”What am I looking for?….As far as I am concerned, that’s the end of it,” Dearie said. “What business is it of the court?”

James Trusty, one of Trump’s attorneys, called it “premature” for Dearie to consider that issue right now. “It’s going a little beyond what Judge Cannon contemplated in the first instance,” he said.

In one of several moments of palpable tension with the Trump team, Dearie replied: “I was taken aback by your comment that I’m going beyond what Judge Cannon instructed me to do. … I think I’m doing what I’m told.”

In other words, our boss has a pet judge, and she appointed you, so that makes you our pet judge, too.

That’s a great legal strategy, isn’t it? I wonder if they teach that in law school? Maybe David E. Kelley would come up with that, but he writes legal comedies. Even Denny Crane would think that was cuckoo.

And then this week, New York’s Attorney General Leticia James announced a lawsuit over Donald Trump and the Trump Organization misrepresenting their assets by billions of dollars, and seeking $250 million in damages. Assuming he’s good for it.

And, on the same day (Wednesday) the DOJ’s appeal to the 11^th Circuit was reviewed by 3 of the 11 judges, and that panel determined to remove the restriction against the government review of Trump’s documents. “The court also pointedly noted that Trump had presented no evidence that he had declassified the sensitive records, as he has repeatedly maintained, and rejected the possibility that Trump could have an “individual interest in or need for” the roughly 100 documents marked as classified.” (Y’know, other than ‘MineMineMineMineMINE!!!!’)

Contrary to Trump’s publicly stated opinion to Sean Hannity that he can declassify documents “by thinking about it”, The Son of Man cannot just wave his hand over documents like a priest consecrating the Host and decree, “I declassify thee, this stuff is mine now.” And even if he could, the government has stated, repeatedly, that classification status has no bearing on the government’s ownership and does not answer the question of why Trump has more right to the documents than they do.

Trump might have gotten his pet judge to stymie the DOJ’s investigation of him, but he forgot that the DOJ aren’t the only people investigating him, and there are multiple levels of the legal system that prosecution can appeal to just as well as he can. He’s not behind a shield, he’s behind a very leaky dike, and he doesn’t have enough fingers to plug it. Besides, those fingers are pretty stubby.

The other issue is that Trump simply CANNOT tell the truth. The truth is not in him. He fears the truth like Dracula fears the cross. Even when a truthful presentation would serve him better than lying, he has to lie. At the very least he has to spin some big-fish story that gets further and further out of control.

Like, if someone accuses him of rape, Trump could just look up where the crime was supposed to have occurred, trace his whereabouts, create an alibi for what he was doing, get someone to corroborate that, and that would be the defense. But more likely, Trump would say something like, “I NEVER touched that woman, and this is why. Because I have NEVER had sex. Everyone knows this. Never. Like, you know all those kids I got? How many kids do I have now, five? Four? I got four kids. So yeah, I got four kids. And they are all immaculate conceptions. Believe me. That I can tell you. Like, with Melania, one afternoon, Melania was in her bedroom, and suddenly, a ray of light came through the window, and The Angel of The Lord appeared to her in his glory, and he says to Melania, ‘hey, congratulations, yer knocked up.”

I had once made a comparison of the Trump movement to The Picture of Dorian Gray, except I said that the man was to his cult what Dorian Gray was to his portrait. Trump could move from scandal to scandal and remain unmarred, but the Republican Party became that much more visibly decayed and corrupt the more it assumed his spirit and the more it covered for his evil. Which may be why some Republicans in the 2022 midterms are starting to think it may not be such a good idea to campaign with Trump. I mean, why should they, if he’s going to give a “support” speech and make it all about him while humiliating them in the process?

But it occurs to me that the Dorian Gray analogy might apply in a different way. There is of course another strongman who has possibly had more malicious impact on the world than Donald Trump and been subject to even less legal challenge or restriction. That would be Vladimir Putin, the Russian Federation’s apparent president for life.

It may take quite some time and retrospective historical analysis to truly assess how much damage Putin has done to the world, but we’re learning more and more. It was recently revealed that Russian “troll factories” united to undermine the 2017 Women’s March campaign immediately after Trump was inaugurated president, by targeting the controversial Linda Sarsour. (I am NOT a fan of Sarsour’s politics, but she wasn’t the only person involved in the March, and that movement was not invalidated simply because she was involved.)

As in the Trump campaign, Putin’s Russia directly and indirectly aided “countercultural” political efforts in several other countries, including support for Serbia’s President Aleksandr Vucic, and Marie Le Pen in France. The most famous of these mini-Vlads is the Hungarian President Viktor Orban, even if he started being less overtly supportive of Russia in the wake of the Ukraine invasion. These declared heirs to conservatism (and media supporters like Tucker Carlson) say they are advocates of a “post-liberal” world order; post-liberal, like postmodernism, meaning a philosophy of cutesy sophistry and bad taste. I have gone over the connections between Putin and the Trump Organization to such extent that I don’t need to elaborate again.

We can speculate all day as to what Putin has “got” on Trump, but it’s not like he needs anything. The Occam’s Razor explanation for Trump’s slavish loyalty to Daddy Vlad is (I think) that Putin is to Trump what Trump is to the fan club that used to be a serious American political party. Those guys see their Leader acting like an inflamed asshole and making everything around him worse and suffering absolutely no repercussions, and think they should be able to do that too. To Republicans, Trump is the role model, and to Trump, Putin is the role model. He’s what Trump wants to be when he grows up and becomes a real dictator. Of course it seems to surprise Trump (and his fan club) when he actually does suffer consequences for his actions, and it seems to be a new experience for Putin, too.

Up to a point, Putin had had the world over a barrel (so to speak) because he was grinding down the resistance to his Ukraine invasion and is in position to cut off fuel and heating oil supplies to Europe when this year’s winter is expected to be especially bitter. He had reason to believe that if he just kept going as he was he could wear down European Union resistance to his military campaign and make the West go along with his land grab, even knowing it will just encourage him to consolidate and take more people’s territory later.

Of course he could not keep going as he was. In a military offensive that will itself be the subject of later history (and that I have some ideas about that I want to explore at a later time), Ukraine’s military attacked at several points along the fronts with Russia. Telegraphing an intent to retake the southern city of Kherson, they apparently got Russia to concentrate its best forces there while the main offensive went due north east of Kharkiv city, taking key cities and eventually rolling up most of Kharkiv Oblast up to the pre-war Russian border, recapturing almost 2500 square kilometers in less than two weeks.

This was such a clusterfuck for the Russian side that even Russian state media hosts on the Fox News-style debate shows had to admit they were losing. It was that much harder to deny, given how much intact equipment Ukraine captured after Russian soldiers cut and ran.

This all makes Putin seem a little less threatening. He has exactly three tools against Ukraine and the West: nukes (a bluff he can only call once), the military, and fuel exports, and now that his military has proven to be that much more hollow than we thought, the West has a lot less reason to fear long-term fuel boycotts, because there’s less reason to think Putin can win this thing.

So this Wednesday Daddy Vlad had his personal parliament pass new legislation not only authorizing a limited mobilization of Russia but increasing the penalties for avoiding service. Supposedly the reserve pool is 300,000, consisting of those who already have military experience, but that pool includes both sexes up to an age of 60. It remains to be seen how well Russia will meet its new recruitment goals, but the announcement did great business for Russian airlines. So great in fact, that Russian airlines are now prohibited from selling tickets to men between ages 18 and 65. Like apparently the country is in that much danger of running out!

Not like increasing the draft pool will even work in military or strategic terms, precisely because the problem with Russian military performance was that the government couldn’t properly train and equip the people it had (especially pilots, with the Russian Air Force nearly missing in action the whole war). It’s going to be that much harder for Putin to equip the new people now. BECAUSE Ukraine captured so much of his stuff.

Like I said, Vladimir Putin, President for Life. Let’s see how long that is.

Dorian Gray was apparently immortal as long as he kept his portrait, but when he destroyed it, he suddenly died. Once the false appearance of perfection was destroyed, reality reasserted itself. It may simply be coincidence, or just irony, but as Putin weakens himself with his irrational mistakes, the “post-liberal” proteges he has done so much to help are weakening too.

For instance, one of Putin’s other supplicants, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, is in danger of losing re-election. Bolsonaro is the guy for conservatives who think “I like Trump, but he’s not macho and stupid enough.” His leftist opponent is Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva, formerly the biggest politician in the country. He is a popular, populist leader with his own personality cult who got convicted several years ago on money laundering charges and later had his charges and conviction reversed on grounds of bias and improper prosecution. Basically, this guy actually IS what Republicans have accused Democrats of being for years. Even so, while Bolsonaro’s polling is picking up, Lula is still almost 10 points ahead. Why? Maybe because Bolsonaro was just as lackadaisical about coronavirus in Brazil as the Trump Organization was in the US. Or maybe because Bolsonaro is that much more corrupt than Lula.

And who would’ve thought, all it took was fighting back. Having a military that resists naked aggression. Having a legal system that asserts a universal standard of law. And having citizens who vote against parties that are destructive and unpopular.

If Ukrainians can go to war and get shot at to stop fascism, the least you can do is come out and vote.

So I broke into the Palace

With a sponge and a rusty spanner

She said ‘eh, I know you, and you cannot sing’

I said ‘that’s nothing, you should hear me play pian’er’

-The Smiths, “The Queen Is Dead”

So, Queen Elizabeth the Second has died. She was 96 years old. Her mother (also named Elizabeth) actually made it to 101 until dying in 2002. When you live that long, I see little reason to mourn, rather I would celebrate the fact that one could live so long, and for the most part in good health (although the Queen was seen formally recognizing Liz Truss as Prime Minister just two days before her death in Scotland, and she was smiling but really didn’t look great).

Yet there is still great mourning. This is after all a truly historic event. Elizabeth ruled 70 years, longer than any other monarch besides Louis XIV of France. (Even Ramses II was estimated to have reigned only 66 years.) The former Prince of Wales, now King Charles III, is taking the throne at 73, having been heir longer than most people get to live. Which is why, incidentally, I have no reason to believe Charles is going to follow a common rumor and hand over the title to his son, the far more popular and glamorous Prince William. I seriously have to ask, why would you give up a destiny that is literally the only reason for which you were born? And frankly, while Charles seems to be in good health himself, I don’t think William has nearly so long to wait.

There has been much said about how Elizabeth had her own personality, her hobbies with raising corgis and horses, her sense of humor (which she expressed in appearances with James Bond and Paddington Bear) and so on. But she was never part of the emotional celebrity culture like Princess Di or Andrew or other royals who kept the family in the scandal sheets. Elizabeth spent most of her life as a professional national symbol, never letting the uniform off, mostly because she had to. (And as Edward VIII showed, you really don’t HAVE to be monarch.) But also she was still part of that old-world, sense-of-duty culture. The other royals, including Charles and even Prince Phillip, were not quite so restrained, and that’s partly because the times changed but partly because they didn’t HAVE to be the monarch and set the national example.

Yet even somebody who (unlike some of those people) didn’t destroy her reputation with bad behavior is still inspiring rage and hate even before she’s buried. A Nigerian-born professor at Carnegie Mellon attracted a lot of attention when she said: “I heard the chief monarch of a thieving raping genocidal empire is finally dying. May her pain be excruciating.” Other people used this event to call upon Great Britain to return the Kohinoor Diamond which has been part of the Crown Jewels since Britain conquered India during the Victorian Era.

It all points up the fact that Britain, that much more than America or Russia, has its glory and history built upon “centuries of exploitation, oppression, racism, slavery”. And while Britain is for the most part a free country where the monarch reigns but does not rule, the government still acts in the Crown’s name. All the stuff that we are obliged to celebrate (and there is much to celebrate in Elizabeth’s reign) is tied up with everything that the rational humanist must oppose if Britain is to progress.

This is why, in his Substack column, Andrew Sullivan said: “You can make all sorts of solid arguments against a constitutional monarchy — but the point of monarchy is precisely that it is not the fruit of an argument. It is emphatically not an Enlightenment institution. It’s a primordial institution smuggled into a democratic system. It has nothing to do with merit and logic and everything to do with authority and mystery — two deeply human needs our modern world has trouble satisfying without danger.

“The Crown satisfies those needs, which keeps other more malign alternatives at bay. No one has expressed this better than C.S. Lewis:

Where men are forbidden to honor a king, they honor millionaires, athletes, or film stars instead; even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.”

But then Sullivan, like Lewis, is an old British Conservative, from a culture where conservatism still means something more than “life begins at the point of erection.” Or at least it did.

I don’t think it’s either-or. Our current events indicate that there might be a need for some national focus beyond politics, and that some Americans’ desire for a strongman, not to mention our own gossip-rag obsession with the Royals, indicates that we have our own primal desire to look up to kings, as Edmund Burke might put it. But I am at heart an American, which means I am a small-r republican. The (C)onservative idea that every nation needs some monarchical leader, even if not titled as such, is to me not a virtue of humanity that must be accepted, but a tribal vice that must be overcome. The idea that someone is just better and made to rule, Dei Gratia, is inherently opposed to the Declaration of Thomas Jefferson, that “We hold these truths to be self evident; that all men are created equal”.

And while I’m on Jefferson, that example means that you don’t need to be a monarchy to have a racist and imperialist global regime, nor does such history invalidate the real virtues of a national culture. Nor does monarchy prevent or even mollify the worst aspects of humanity. Would the Germans have been better off with a Kaiser than with Hitler? The German Empire may not have been the lowbrow gangsters that the Nazi Party were, but they were still capable of committing genocide. Austria-Hungary might have been better in some ways than the nations that succeeded it, but it broke up precisely because it was a multitude of communities that were united only by one beloved old monarch, and after Franz Joseph died (and Austria lost World War I) there was no other common focus. Even Hungary wanted to call itself a monarchy but it didn’t want Franz Joseph’s successor. As for Russia, the Bolsheviks were definitely worse than the Czars, but most of the reason the Bolsheviks got traction is because the Czars were THAT bad.

You can see from that latter example that certain people in the Russian Federation (specifically, Vladimir Putin) want to have all the “good stuff” about monarchy (like absolute power) and the “good stuff” about a democratic republic, namely the premise that the leader is a regular guy who rules with popular support and not just cause he immediately crushes any dissent against his own evil and incompetence. At the same time, Putin has attempted to embrace traditional Russian culture (like the Orthodox Church) as he also attempts to embrace the “good stuff” about Bolshevism (which was historically anti-Christian). But just as the Soviets attempted to cast off both the monarchy and the church, but merely replaced them with their own secular religion, Putin has not transcended old-world traditions so much as replaced them with an arbitrary structure that cannot appeal to those primal, mysterious, anti-logical urges but just stands naked in its craving for power and fear. And as such it has even less justification than monarchy.

Because if you don’t have that sense of mystery, what reason is there to say one person should be anointed just because? The traditions themselves were a means of rationalizing that any barbarian who wanted to seize the realm was going to do so anyway and getting the blessing of the Church was the realm’s means of validating the fait accompli. And now that we have no reason to assume there is a Mandate of Heaven or that God will strike down those who strike the King, it is a lot harder for us to suspend our disbelief and embrace the mystery.

Simply having a monarchy doesn’t change the fact that Britain’s new government under Liz Truss (a British politician name that ranks right up there with Ed Balls) is facing catastrophic levels of inflation. A study this year indicated that the rising cost of living meant that one in seven adults is in food insecurity (food insecurity being a polite way of saying you don’t get enough to eat because you’re not making enough money to survive). You can have the lion and unicorn and castles and stuff but it doesn’t change the fact that the United Kingdom is in the real world with everybody else and its government is facing real problems, and as with some other countries, many of those problems are self-inflicted.

I think that exactly because Britain is a pragmatic, (small c) conservative culture, most of the British, and even most people in the outer Commonwealth, will resist the urge to republicanism and accept Charles, because it’s a lot easier to roll with tradition than contemplate the potential dangers that Sullivan and Lewis raise. But then the British are also pragmatic in their liberalism, which is why Burke could defend both British tradition and the American Revolution but stood against the French Revolution. In a similar vein, another British Conservative was quoted as saying “democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” That may indeed be why Britain has kept its monarchy for so long, because unlike France and so many other nations, its nobles and its commoners were both able to adapt. But I think the reason the monarchy is so well thought of is precisely that Elizabeth set an example that so many other royals (like the aforementioned Edward) failed to uphold. And the fact that she reigned so long means that in the modern world she became a standard with no other comparisons, as opposed to our opinions of presidents and prime ministers. So while I’m not expecting radical changes to the Commonwealth because of Charles, the world has already changed a great deal in the 70 years of Elizabeth’s reign, and I am not expecting Charles to attain the same level of reverence. And this year, even the popular William and Kate got a lot of flak for their tour of the West Indies, where in one case protests forced the couple to cancel an appearance, and as John Oliver pointed out, “this was a clear attempt to try and keep the Commonwealth together, especially as just four months ago, Barbados formally removed the queen as their head of state and, during the same ceremony, recognized Rihanna as a national hero, proving Barbados is currently making all the right decisions.”

We should feel glad that someone could rise to the occasion of her moment and be exactly the kind of figure that tradition required her to be. We should also acknowledge that not every human, even every born royal, has the kind of character to precisely maintain tradition, that, as with Diana Spencer and to a lesser extent Meghan Markle, the attempt to fit in to that world can literally break you, that privilege even without power has an immense temptation to spoil and deform the human character, and privilege WITH power is a temptation that much worse, that precisely because traditions are made within specific cultures, not every culture is made for monarchy and even those that are are finding it increasingly implausible to maintain, and maybe we could not put so much trust in specific individuals who are meant to represent lasting traditions even as they themselves come and go, and instead try evolving our governments to practice more shared responsibility and accountability?

Just a thought.

The Queen is dead boys

And it’s so lonely on a limb