Month: April 2023

REVIEW: Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

The reason that so many role-playing game groups quote Monty Python and the Holy Grail – too much so, a couple of my friends say – is because Holy Grail is to fantasy role-playing what This Is Spinal Tap is to rock musicians: At some point, you will see a scene where you think: “My group has done this.”

The joke is the contrast between the medieval fantasy romance of The Lord of the Rings, Excalibur or even Camelot versus the reality of what modern people actually do when they’re roleplaying in such a world. Well, the great thing about the new Dungeons & Dragons movie is that it acknowledges this right off the bat.

Unlike the earlier atrocity released under the D&D name, this production (Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, henceforth to be called Honor Among Thieves, or D&D HAT) actually has some coordination with both game fans and the Wizards of the Coast company that has run D&D for years. For instance, the fictional world is the Forgotten Realms, the dimension that D&D has been using for its default setting since before Wizards took over. When Chris Pine’s character is described as an ex-Harper, Realms fans know that the Harpers are a group unique to that setting, basically an organization of do-gooders whose charter members actually were bards and other musicians.

Elgin (Pine) is a bard who left the Harpers after their enemies, the Red Wizards of Thay, tried to assassinate him and ended up killing his wife with a magical poison. So he gets his best buddy, the barbarian Holga (Michelle Rodriguez), elder thief Forge (Hugh Grant) and bumbling comic relief sorcerer Snails Simon (Justice Smith) to go on a quest for a magical plot device that will bring his wife back. This goes awry, Simon and Forge escape, Elgin and Holga are captured, and once they escape prison, they try to get back with Forge – now the regent lord of the city of Neverwinter – only to be double-crossed again by Forge, whose court wizard turns out to be another Red Wizard of Thay.

This leads to another quest to get the plot device, now combined with a need to get back at Forge, and of course this quest turns into a side quest to get another item they need to finish the first quest, and it becomes kind of a heist scenario, as most D&D games kind of are. The difference being that both the heroes and villain are less lethal and more altruistic than most D&D teams in my experience.

The acting is at least passable, the special effects are decent and there’s a lot of action and tricks. Again, the morality is more on the level of a Hollywood movie than true Swords & Sorcery, let alone High Fantasy, and the largely unserious tone might turn off more serious D&D players and wargamers. But it also is serious about the background material, with many monsters and spells that players will recognize. It might be a Hollywood action movie, but it’s a GOOD Hollywood action movie.

Indeed, my sister Natalie took me to this movie because she wanted to see it, and she really liked it despite not knowing anything about D&D besides what I’ve told her secondhand. Our other sister had told her she was interested in seeing it, and I would say that’s the best endorsement: If you can come into this movie not knowing anything about D&D or the Forgotten Realms, and it’s still an entertaining movie on its own terms, then that’s a success.

REVIEW: Strange New Worlds (Season One)

I took the plunge and got Paramount Plus (since I could just add it to my existing Amazon Prime account) and eventually binged Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season One to see if it held to the standard it had in the publicly released pilot.

Some impressions:

The girl playing Spock’s fiancee (Gia Sandhu) is better at doing Leonard Nimoy’s raised-eyebrow lift than Ethan Peck (the guy currently playing Spock).

If there’s anything I don’t like about SNW, it’s how they changed the Gorn into basically a race of space-faring Xenomorphs who cannot be reasoned with, which is especially odd because the one Original Series episode that used the Gorn (‘Arena’) started with the premise that they were a savage race but then Kirk found out they had their own reasons to feel threatened by the Federation, and the encounter managed to work out peacefully.
The security chief La’an (Christine Chong) is clearly the least sympathetic character, though I also think that’s on purpose. This is that much more obvious in the episodes where Chong is allowed to play against type.

Strange New Worlds was advertised as being more episodic (like the original Star Trek or TNG) in comparison to Discovery or Picard which have been focused on season-arcing plots. This is not exactly true. There’s no over-arcing “Big Bad/Bad Wolf” motif in Season 1, but there are several character arcs that recur over the course of the season, such as the courtship of Spock and T’Pring (which the audience knows will end badly), and the parallel flirtation between Spock and Nurse Chapel (Jess Bush), teasing what might be an interesting Season 2 with the villain played by Jesse James Keitel being married to Spock’s half-brother, the villain of Star Trek V. I mean, they could screw up that premise but I doubt they could screw it up as much as that movie did.

They finally gave a background to Number One (Rebecca Romijn), a character from the ’60s pilot who was so much of a cipher that the script didn’t give her a name other than “Number One.” Even in this production, her given name “Una” is just a synonym for “one.” Prior to SNW, fan fiction had assumed that Number One’s artificial identity meant she comes from some Human offshoot culture, and that turns out to be the case: Una is an Illyrian, from a Human nation that deals with the Federation but cannot join it because they use genetic engineering as applied technology when the Federation maintains a ban on it,due to the Eugenics Wars and the legacy of superman dictators like Khan Noonien Singh. What complicates things is that La’an considers Number One to be her role model as a Starfleet officer, but her surname is Noonien-Singh, which accounts for much of her character angst. (‘What’s your name, soldier?’ ‘Bill. Bill Hitler. No relation.’) La’an and Dr. M’Benga agree to keep Una’s secret but when it comes out, Una is arrested by Starfleet in a season-ending cliffhanger.

The engineer discovers that M’Benga (Babs Olusanmokun) has been using power from the transporter, and the doctor eventually tells Una that he has a young child with a fatal blood disease, and he smuggled her aboard in the transporter, keeping her in beam-lock as a makeshift suspended animation while he works on a cure. He takes her out periodically to share time and to read her favorite fairy tale book. This mini-arc gets resolved in the most deliberately silly episode of the season.

Pike (Anson Mount) remains haunted by his vision of the future, knowing that he saves young cadets from a radiation accident but is then condemned to live the rest of his life in a power chair that only allows him to click “YES” or “NO” (because in 1967, the effects department at NBC couldn’t imagine the interface system that Stephen Hawking had access to by the mid-1980s). However he is not aware of how he ends up after that (which was the story of original Trek’s ‘The Menagerie’) so he assumes that that vision is the end of his life. He also seems remarkably willing to discuss this issue with other people, given that the events surrounding Discovery Season 2 are supposed to be a Federation secret on par with the existence of Talos IV.

Pike’s latest attempt to thwart this fate leads to “A Quality of Mercy”, which is probably the best overall episode in terms of the level of its stakes and how it reinforces both Pike’s sacrifice and the bond he makes with Spock. Unfortunately, Paul Wesley (guest starring as Captain Kirk) through no fault of his own, less resembles William Shatner than Jim Carrey playing William Shatner on In Living Color.

That particular episode also implied that Kirk was ultimately the better captain where it counted and that it was better for the universe that Pike didn’t save himself from his future. In Strange New Worlds, they’ve made Pike a happy medium between the American military mindset of Captain Kirk and the compassionate humanism of Captain Picard, but in this alternate-timeline run of original Trek’s “Balance of Terror” episode, Pike ultimately decided to let the Romulans live, when the failure of their mission in the main timeline was what stopped a general war.

I really like the cast, especially Mount. If I squint hard enough, I can almost imagine him as Jeffrey Hunter. However, Ethan Peck just doesn’t come off as Spock to me. He doesn’t remind me of Leonard Nimoy or even Zachary Quinto. As I’ve said, it matters less when you have new actors for characters the audience has only seen once or twice (Pike, Number One, M’Benga) and more when you have characters who’ve been around most of the series (Kirk, Spock, Uhura, Chapel). Again, I LIKE these people, and I like what they’re doing with the characters, but they don’t really bring to mind the Original Series.

Strange New Worlds actually IS what Discovery was promoted as – an attempt to take pre-Kirk Star Trek in a new direction with modern sensibilities and production values – and while in the back of my mind it’s just not enough like original Trek to me, it’s good enough on its own terms to where it’s worth watching. Not just that, it’s better Trek in one season than half of Discovery and two-thirds of Star Trek: Picard. And now we’ve got the preview for Season 2, which looks to be much the same, only more so. Plus, the Klingons are back, and their makeup DOESN’T suck.

REVIEW: Star Trek: Picard (Season 3)

The main triumph of Star Trek: Picard‘s final season, after an “okay” first season and a completely unsatisfactory Season 2, is that it leaves fans wanting more.

All the more strange that it was largely the product of showrunner Terry Matalas, who was also strongly involved in Picard Season 2. But as Matalas put it in interviews, he thought that just as there was more that could be done showing Picard’s development in relative real time years after Star Trek: Nemesis, he also thought that that movie wasn’t a proper send-off to the Next Generation crew, and likened their reunion in this season to the final adventure of the original cast in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. Which figures, because in comparison to the deliberately low-key Season 1 and the wandering Season 2, Season 3 Picard (like Star Trek VI) was a tightly focused narrative that retained action and suspense even as the threat in the story was only gradually revealed.

I have always considered Amanda Plummer to be awkward and irritating. In this case it actually worked. But she was good enough in portraying the pain and vengefulness of her character that Vadic’s death at that point in the storyline actually seemed anti-climax. That, and bringing back the fan favorite characters Ro Larren and Shelby just to kill them off as soon as they appeared were the only false notes of the season.

And then the whole thing turned out to be an intricate Borg plot, which explained a great deal about both Jack Crusher and Picard, but it also required a little bit more explanation that a casual viewer might have needed. First, the Borg villain was the original Borg Queen voiced by Alice Krige in the First Contact movie, as opposed to the Picard Season 2 Queen played by the late Annie Wersching, whom the crew picked up from a dystopian alternate history and who ended up merging with Agnes Jurati before the end of that story. Second, the reason the Borg Queen was so screwed up here is actually because of the series finale of Star Trek: Voyager, when Kathryn Janeway infected her with a terrible pathogen, which in the Picard finale is revealed to have killed most of the Collective as the Queen was forced to “cannibalize” them for her own survival. So really, this should have been a great tie-in to Voyager as well as The Next Generation, but according to fanzine articles, they couldn’t bring in Kate Mulgrew, or use Tim Russ for more than a couple of scenes, cause apparently Terry Matalas and the other producers just didn’t have the budget.

And then in only one year, Jack got through cadet training in time to join the USS Titan‘s crew, after they rechristened the ship the Enterprise (G). Which on one hand is cool, but on the other hand is the ultimate erasure of Captain Shaw (Todd Stashwick).

But in the wake of this optimistic finale, and the success of this season, there’s a lot of buzz (encouraged by Matalas) to continue using the younger characters (with Raffi and Captain Seven) in a continuation series, projected title Star Trek: Legacy. I’d even heard they were going to try some way to bring back the martyred Shaw, who started off as the season’s by-the-book Starfleet bad guy but became a fan favorite once people realized he was right much of the time.

The fact that they could present an unsympathetic character and then round him out (as they did with Vadic) is a good example of how this season used all of its elements correctly, as opposed to wasting people like Picard Season 2 did. Using Raffi (Michelle Hurd) and her story arc to bring in Worf (Michael Dorn) as opposed to bringing him straight into the main cast, worked really well and showed how both characters could work in the shadows, as well as displaying their sense of humor. The repeated return of Brent Spiner as Dr. Soong’s last “golem” actually had a clever resolution to the Data/Lore conflict. LeVar Burton as Geordi LaForge got to display more deep emotion in his scenes than he ever did in the whole Next Generation series. And this season, by extension the entire series, was a vindication for Jeri Ryan and Seven of Nine, who was clearly brought into Voyager for blatant sex appeal but (let’s face it) gave that show some much-needed edge.

The last couple episodes were a bit pat and “fan service” but they actually worked, and like The Next Generation’s series finale, created a satisfying ending for the main characters while still setting up possibilities for the future. And again, the producers really seems to be trying to make that happen, although the network budget constraints that killed some of their ideas might prevent “Legacy” from taking off. Still, it was announced earlier this year that Star Trek: Discovery is ending after next season, and the fact that Picard Season 3 was both popular with fans and a high-quality storyline should give more momentum to future Trek projects, as opposed to how the sails were deflated with the last appearance of the Next Generation cast in Star Trek: Nemesis. Not to mention, the other seasons of Star Trek: Picard.

The Way Things Are Going, They’re Gonna Crucify Me

In Western Christianity, this is “Holy Week” – commemorating the short period between Christ arriving in Jerusalem, being arrested by the Romans and condemned to die before rising on Easter. It also happens to be the same week that Donald Trump, once and future Viceroy for Russian North America, was first arraigned on criminal offenses by the State of New York.

Lest I seem mocking in comparing Trump to Jesus, it is a comparison seriously made by his fan club, which was formerly called the Republican Party. As Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (BR.-Georgia) told a reporter in New York Tuesday, Trump is in the same situation as Nelson Mandela and Jesus, being prosecuted by the state.

No, Trump really is like Jesus. I mean, look at the comparisons: They can both turn water into wine and sugar into cocaine, they both hang out with sex workers, and they both have close friends and family who are Jewish even though most of their worshipers don’t like to admit it.

Just as Jesus was arrested by the Romans on a Tuesday, this Tuesday Trump actually had to enter a courtroom and while there were some photos, there wasn’t much of a transcript as to why the proceeding took almost 90 minutes. It was most notable for the photo shot of Trump sitting at a bench with his lawyers, with that same worn-out, defeated look he has when he leaves a closed-door meeting with Vladimir Putin. Outside meanwhile, you had professional Trumpniks like Greene trying to raise support for their Messiah while getting drowned out by native New Yorkers. It was like the Bane speech to Batman in The Dark Knight Rises, only substitute “the darkness” with “obnoxiousness.” One thing we did find out from the arraignment is that while the Judge, Juan Merchan did not give Trump a specific gag order, he did direct him to refrain from inflammatory statements as the case proceeded to trial. But as soon as he could, Trump got in his motorcade to the airport, almost as if he hated the city that made him as much as it now hates him, then flew back to his fortress in Mar-a-Lago to give a prime-time speech that hardly any major network covered, bad-mouthing the judge and his family -once he was no longer in New York jurisdiction.

Or as the poets said in Ancient Rome, “Alligator Mouth, Hummingbird Ass.”

What did we actually find out during the event?

According to the statement of facts released Tuesday, the Trump Organization’s machinations centered on various attempts to shut down the never-ending scandals that had the potential to sabotage Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Much of it was with the assistance of National Enquirer/American Media Incorporated head David Pecker. These were called “catch and kill” deals, where Trump’s people would get Pecker to offer a certain amount of money for rights to their sleazy story, but instead of publishing the piece, the National Enquirer would sit on it and keep it from getting out. One thing we didn’t know until Tuesday was that a former doorman at Trump Tower had a rumor that Trump had fathered a child with a woman who wasn’t Stormy Daniels or Karen McDougal. AMI paid this guy $30,000 for his story. “When AMI determined that the story was not true, the AMI CEO [Pecker] wanted to release the Doorman from the agreement. However Lawyer A [Michael Cohen] instructed the AMI CEO not to release the doorman until after the presidential election, and the AMI CEO complied with that instruction because of his agreement with the Defendant [Trump] and Lawyer A.” Shortly after the Access Hollywood (‘grab ’em by the pussy’) tape, AMI’s editor-in-chief contacted Pecker about another woman, Stormy Daniels (listed in the statement as ‘Woman 2’, as opposed to Karen McDougal, who is Woman 1 – keeping up so far?) who alleged that she had a sexual encounter with Defendant Trump while he was married. AMI arranged a deal to keep Daniels quiet, giving her $130,000. Twelve days before the 2016 election, Cohen drew $130,000 from a home loan, put it into a shell account, and used that to pay Daniels off. After the election, Trump repaid Cohen in installments, but had his Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg double the amount to $260,000 so that Cohen could classify the payment as income on tax returns (for ‘legal services’) rather than a reimbursement, allowing Cohen to make a profit once he’d paid income tax on the payment, assuming a total tax liability of 50 percent. So, not technically money-laundering, but pretty close. Close enough for the law, anyway. Not only did Michael Cohen go to prison over this, it was known during his trial that Trump was in fact aware of the payments Cohen made and agreed to pay him back. It was also revealed in the statement that Trump tried to delay the payment to Daniels as long as possible, preferably after the election, “because by that point it would not matter if the story became public.”

So so much for the idea that Trump was just trying to protect Melania from being hurt by the knowledge he’d had an affair. I mean, Melania was dating Trump when he was separated but not divorced from Marla Maples, so I don’t think it would surprise her that he was cheating. I mean, not like Melania is less likely to leave Trump than Lindsey Graham is. On that score, given that the transactions occurred just after the Access Hollywood tape, the Trump team, and most observers, really thought Trump was on the ropes, and one more scandal might have been enough. I don’t know. People hated Hillary Clinton THAT damn much, and the Trumpniks were that damn fanatic. I mean, early in the campaign, Trump said, in jest, “I could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and not lose any votes.” And the Republican Party has proven him right, rhetorically, ever since, every chance they get. All he needs to do now is actually kill somebody on Fifth Avenue, and we’ll know for sure. You might scoff, but I can see Lindsey Graham on Fox News now: “Look Sean, that three-year old was PACKING!!”

The statement of facts says that the participants mischaracterized the nature of the payments “for tax purposes.” The specific details of this constitute 34 felony counts against Defendant Trump. Now, under New York law, falsifying financial records is just a misdemeanor, but there is provision to change the charge to a felony if the State believes the act was to facilitate another crime or frustrate investigation of another crime. Also, misdemeanors have a statute of limitations. However, the statement of facts does not specify what second offense would justify elevating the charges to felonies.

But even though there are weaknesses in the case that a competent lawyer could exploit, that would assume Trump had a competent lawyer. That doesn’t seem to be the case. Trump runs through lawyers like Spinal Tap runs through drummers, and for similar reasons. While there were a couple people on Trump’s legal team Tuesday who looked like members of Homo sapiens sapiens, his main lawyer is currently a guy named Joe Tacopina, who was probably most famous for his grappling match against MSNBC’s Ari Melber as he tried to pull a document from Melber’s hand during an interview.

Even funnier, this guy donated to a Democrat (then-Congresswoman Kathleen Rice) who called for Trump to be prosecuted over his pressure call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger to “find” enough votes to swing the state. Republicans have issued fatwas for less. Not only that, in 2018, when all this stuff with Cohen came out, Tacopina was a legal analyst on CNN where he said that he believed Trump had had an affair with Daniels because “it means it’s true if he hasn’t threatened to sue” and on another show said “this could be looked as an in-kind contribution at the time of the election.”

But apparently this guy wasn’t hired for his smarts or consistency, but because he’d been one of the guys who defended a January 6 rioter in court (unsuccessfully). Like Cohen or Anthony Scaramucci, he’s not really there to provide legal acumen but to be Trump’s mouthpiece to the mainstream media and present that New York Tough Guy attitude Trump loves to fake so much, but with the imprimatur of a law degree.

It’s going to be that much harder for Trump to defend himself, given that when he was interviewed by Sean Hannity and Sean said “I can’t imagine you ever saying, ‘bring me back some of the boxes that we brought back from the White House, I’d like to take a look at them” Trump said, “I would have the right to do that, there’s nothing wrong with it.”

Any lawyer who agrees to become Donald Trump’s defense attorney would have to be that much more stupid and gullible than he is, which would certainly explain Joe Tacopina.

Much of what Tacopina and Trump’s other legal minds have put together as a defense, prior to arraignment, was more ad hominem attacks against the various other parties, especially Michael Cohen. And certainly if Cohen wasn’t lying when he was first being investigated, he can be easily accused of not telling the truth now. Which is why I’m sure the prosecution is also relying on other sources, including Allen Weisselberg, who it seems has just switched attorneys.

But as Cohen himself said to Republicans in Congress when he was ordered to testify there, his job was to do what they’re doing now, support and defend Donald Trump. And if things keep going at this rate, they are all going to end up where he is now.

But all that being the case, it just comes back to the point that Michael Cohen is himself Exhibit A in the case. He was the instrument of the transactions, not the person who ordered them made. So if nothing Trump did rises to the level of a criminal offense, why was Cohen investigated on virtually identical charges, and why did HE go to prison for them and NOT Trump?

Which just leads to the other whine of the Church of Trump, that this is all “political” and none of these charges would be pursued if this wasn’t Trump. First, when the Republican Party’s entire agenda for the House of Representatives is “let’s get Hunter Biden’s laptop”, saying that the other side is trying to politicize the justice system is a bit rich. But frankly, none of this stuff would be happening if this wasn’t Trump, and if this wasn’t a particular moment in time. Because if it’s political to go after Trump now, it was no less “political” not to go after him when the transactions occurred. Because then he was a popular celebrity, the nominee of one of the major parties for president, eventually to be the president, and as far as his base was concerned, a sweet little boy who could never do anything wrong. To say that they’re going after Trump now because they can is to tacitly admit that they couldn’t go after Trump then, because the nature of the offenses has not changed, but the system was always acting on the basis of politics and optics and not the objective merits of the charges. So if the charges are the same as they were years ago, what has changed in regard to Trump since he became President?

Shall we review again?

Fired the FBI director who was in charge of investigating Trump’s activities prior to the election, telling Lester Holt that he did so specifically over the “Russia thing”, immediately thereafter gave intelligence to the Russian Foreign Minister while he was in Washington, had a press conference with Putin where he basically spread his cheeks and let Putin ream him in front of international cameras,

Played “both sides” to support white supremacists at the Charlottesville protest, including Richard Spencer and David Duke,

Gave his son-in-law a position of power in his Administration, basically as Minister Without Portfolio, since he was never approved by Congress, said son-in-law used that position to make money off the Saudis, and used that influence to pressure Qatar into refinancing his real estate deal, including a Saudi blockade of Qatar, said son-in-law was appointed to lead a coronavirus task force in 2020, and in that capacity shut down vaccine research, allegedly on the grounds that “the political folks believed that because [the virus] was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors and that would be an effective political strategy.”

And when refusing to deal with coronavirus somehow led to more Democrats voting and more Republicans splitting the ticket, he ran through various schemes such as appointing “substitute electors” in red states that went for Biden, personally called Raffensberger to swing Georgia by himself, and when all that didn’t work, tried to pressure his own Vice President, Mike Pence, into decertifying the vote, getting his people like Steve Bannon to organize mobs around the January event, and when Pence refused to go along, that mob broke through the doors of the Capitol, hunted legislators, smeared feces on the walls, and ran Confederate battle flags through the halls of the Capitol, which Robert E. Lee was never able to do.

Let’s just say any ONE of these should have inspired an appropriate response from authorities.

Oh, I didn’t even get into the weeds of Trump holding all those government documents at Mar-a-Lago just cause he says he can.

The outrage is not that Our Lord And Savior is being obsessively persecuted by the “deep state” (which prior to Trump was just ‘the state’) but that it’s taken them SO GODDAMN LONG.

And if this is the weakest case against Trump, look at all the other cases building up, like the Mar-a-Lago documents case and the Georgia case where it’s going to be extremely hard to prove that Brad Raffensberger didn’t catch Trump attempting election tampering on tape. Everybody’s waiting for the next shoe to drop, and Trump’s got more “shoes” than Imelda Marcos.

Happy Easter. Remember, Good Christians (TM), Trump can’t really be Jesus until he’s crucified.

They Just INDICATED Me!!!

March 30, 2023.

A day which will live in Schadenfreude.

On that day, a New York grand jury, after hearing weeks of evidence, voted to indict former president Donald Trump, on charges to be specified at the hearing. And Trump’s response on Truf Censhal was with the usual flair:

“These Thugs and Radical Left Monsters have just INDICATED the 45th President of the United States of America, and the leading Republican candidate, by far, for the 2024 nomination for President. THIS IS AN ATTACK ON OUR COUNTRY THE LIKES OF WHICH HAS NEVER BEEN SEEN BEFORE. IT IS LIKEWISE A CONTINUING ATTACK ON OUR ONCE FREE AND FAIR ELECTIONS. THE USA IS NOW A THIRD WORLD NATION, A NATION IN SERIOUS DECLINE. SO SAD!”

(Posted in ALL CAPS, because as we know, the three loudest things in the universe are the original Big Bang explosion, Disaster Area, and Donald Trump social media posts.)


Well, at least he spelled “INDICATED” correctly.

Again, the public has not been made aware of the specific charges, but based on the investigations that were known up to this point, charges seem to stem from money paid out to porn actress Stormy Daniels so that she would not confess to an affair with Trump in 2006. This payment was arranged in October 2016, just before the presidential election that Trump ended up winning. While some would describe this as a financial arrangement between consenting adults, we know this qualifies as a crime because Trump’s lawyer and “fixer”, Michael Cohen, who actually made the payments, was convicted for doing so. At the time, Cohen insisted that he did not make the payments in collusion with Trump, but later turned against his boss and admitted that the money was transferred to his accounts. On May 2, 2018, Trump’s new lawyer, Rudy Guiliani, admitted that Trump had reimbursed Cohen. So… if it was a crime for Cohen, why is it NOT a crime for the “Individual One” who was listed as a “co-conspirator” in his case?

Trump’s logorrhea in this case is yet another example that every one of his accusations is either a projection or a confession. He is in no position to talk about free and fair elections when he whined about losing the popular vote in the 2016 election that he won with the Electoral College, and when we actually had a free and fair election in 2020 and he lost the popular vote AND the EC, he attacked that free and fair election by sending a lynch mob after the Congress that met to certify it. And if we are subjecting a former head of government to prosecution for criminal acts – as France has done at least once, and as Israel is doing with Benjamin Netanyahu – we are becoming less like a Third World nation, not more.

Which all leads to the question of how things will proceed. Supposedly Trump has agreed to fly to New York on Monday in order to appear in court Tuesday, when the charges will be unsealed. He will most likely have to be fingerprinted and recorded like any other suspect, although most sources agree he will not have to do a “perp walk” in handcuffs. After all, Trump is already under Secret Service escort at all times. What’s he going to do, flee to Russia as soon as it looks like he’s going to be arrested?

We are being told by the media that in order to preserve “the rule of law” that all proper legal procedures must be in place to protect the rights of a defendant, which is true, but elides the point that throughout his life, Donald Trump has had far more than the presumption of innocence, but has always acted on a presumption of immunity – as the formerly most criminal president in history, Richard Nixon, put it, “if the president does it, that means it’s NOT illegal.”

Of course Trump was not actually president at the time these transactions occurred, but that just gets to the larger point, that he has always acted as though he could do anything he wants because someone is always going to protect him. Because up until now, he has always had reason to believe that.

The liberal media keeps referring to Trump and this case by saying “no one is above the law.” But the fact that Trump has gotten away with as much as he has, as long as he has, proves that’s not the case, and it never really has been. But that’s okay. After all, we also keep saying “all men are created equal”, when in the legal system all men have never been equal to each other, let alone to women.

When we say “no man is above the law” or “all men are created equal”, these are not realities. These are aspirations. These are goals. And as long as we see that they are national aspirations and not the reality, we can make progress. This country has become more equitable insofar as we are capable of recognizing the contradiction between our ideal and our reality. Unlike some ideals, it is quite possible to make the legal system more fair, if not abstractly perfect. We can at least make it better than it was. People like Trump coast on the unfair reality of the world as it is, and that is what they seek to preserve. Far from a fair system, they want a sugar daddy government for themselves and a Road Warrior barbarism for the rest of us. When they whine that being equal under the law makes this country MORE of a Third World regime, they are not asking for a free country with fair elections. They want to indulge their desire to look up to a king.

Bad enough that that is the case, but Trump and the fan club that used to be a political party are willing to resort to intimidation. When Trump first heard he was going to be indicted, he first told his gang to protest at the court (when he should have known from local experience that NYPD aren’t nearly as restrained as Capitol Police) and then made a post on Truf Censhal showing a picture of him with a baseball bat next to a picture of New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg, raising his hand. When the actual indictment came, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis spoke up for the resident of his state, saying “The Soros-backed Manhattan District Attorney has consistently bent the law to downgrade felonies and to excuse criminal misconduct. Yet, now he is stretching the law to target a political opponent”. So the guy who is setting himself up to be the alternative to Trump in 2024 is going along with all the George Soros dog-whistling and antagonism to big cities, just like Daddy Trump does. Raising the question, is DeSantis really running for President, or Trump’s Vice President?

All of which sort of blows away the tut-tutting on MSDNC and other networks prior to the actual indictment about whether charges over an affair are worth a criminal case against Trump, when there’s so many more serious charges we should be pursuing. But as Cohen himself told the press, Al Capone was only convicted on tax evasion. And let’s review what we’re really dealing with: A populist who bragged about his support from the “poorly educated”, who said he would pay the legal costs for any fans who beat up protestors at his rallies, who openly begged Russia to release hacked intel on the Hillary Clinton campaign (which they DID), who as President fired people specifically because they investigated him, who hired an Attorney General (Bill Barr) largely to undermine investigations against him, who refused to admit the extent of coronavirus in 2020 because it would undermine his deals with Communist China, who told state governments to not allow special measures to vote by mail during the pandemic, because it helped his chances of re-election if people were less likely to vote, who still lost that second election anyway and refused to admit it, and who encouraged social media campaigns to organize violence against the certification, threatening the lives of Republican congressmen, not to mention his own Vice President.

This has gone far beyond having a difference of opinion. When you try to stop an election result from proceeding, you lose all right to talk about “FREE AND FAIR ELECTIONS” or rights when you certainly wouldn’t have given any rights to the people on the other side. Trump isn’t just some mean old conservative that woke liberals hate, he’s an active threat to national security. He has exhausted any benefit of the doubt, and any right to sympathy. And that goes double for anybody who looks at where he’s taken this country and thinks, “we need some MORE of that.” Bluntly, who gives a fuck which charge they get Trump on, as long as they GET him?

And if this doesn’t pan out – remember, it is a jury trial – there are all those other cases that the Feds and other states (namely Georgia) have waiting in the wings. If it was just one case of criminality, you could take your chances with the legal system. But Donald Trump is in a unique situation because of all our public personalities, only Trump lies, swindles and commits crimes like other people breathe. As in, he does so on reflex, and if he ever stops, he might die.

On the bright side, history also shows that while Al Capone got an 11-year prison sentence, he was released after only 7 1/2 years, after doctors diagnosed a case of syphilis that was slowly destroying his brain and his ability to function normally. But then we have no cause to believe that Donald Trump is suffering from an illness that is destroying his brain, much less an illness contracted from sexual incontinence.