In a week when we have an anonymous upper level member of the Trump regime writing an op-ed saying the country is being governed by an amoral, ignorant, cruelly indifferent and unstable toddler with attention deficiency one thing really struck me, hearing that the media's white knight of the Department of Justice, Rod Rosenstein sat behind Trump's pick for the Supreme Court, the known perjurer and tool of Republican-fascist ideology and action, Brett Kavanaugh in what was interpreted as his support for putting Trump's second pick on the Supreme Court. An appointment which, in Kavanaugh's own writings, holds the very real possibility that Trump could get by Supreme Court ruling what he couldn't do by firing Sessions and then Rosenstein, shutting down the investigation into the massive criminality that put Trump in office.
In July Rosenstein made an unprecedented and controversial decision to ask Federal Attorneys to assign staff to review Kavanaugh's long paper trail, the one that Chuck Grassley and the Trump regime is hiding from the Senate Judiciary Committee and the public because, among other things he's lied under oath to get appointed as a federal judge. Not to mention that he's a two-faced Republican party hack who has turned from a Ken Starr prosecutor of a sitting president to a lawyer hack who has said that when it's a Republican president, they should be immune from prosecution.
The reason given for Rosenstein's presence was their "long term friendship". Maybe I'm just not as good a buddy as Rod Rosenstein but if I had a friend whose record was that of Brett Kavanaugh's I wouldn't be his friend. I wonder if it wasn't an attempt by Rosenstein to facilitate the advancement of his friend. I haven't fact-checked it, but at least one source dates their friendship from their both being involved with the Ken Starr witchhunt after Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton which produced no evidence that either of them were criminals. Whatever role he's playing in the protection of another Republican, Bob Mueller's investigation in Donald Trump, Rosenstein is a long-time Republican apparatchick.
Apparently such a friendship withstood the depravity and injustice and cruelty that Brett Kavanaugh's record as a federal judge displayed all during his tenure as a judge. Apparently he didn't hurt the kind of people that a Rod Rosenstein thinks are important enough to end a friendship over. Something in the anti-egalitarian soul of such Republican conservatism (and not just among Republicans) is basically antithetical to egalitarian democracy and the moral obligation for respect of all peoples rights which is displayed so well in Brett Kavanaugh's public career*.
When you watch the MSNBC Republican hires, the ones who were never-Trump and anti-Trump I have to wonder why they expected that the trajectory of mainstream Republican policy didn't lead here. The imperial presidency - when it's a Republican - has been part of Republican orthodoxy since the time of Nixon. Racism and bigotry has, as well. The Southern Strategy was a real thing only it wasn't exclusively Southern, it was effective in many areas of the country. And over all there is the empowerment of billionaires and millionaires and the thwarting of egalitarian democracy and collective moral obligations which inevitably include the moral obligation to produce economic justice.
I hear the former members of the Bush II administration, conservative columnists, George Will, Jennifer Rubin, etc. who, working for MSNBC, now, are striking an anti-Trump position. I will not judge whether or not that position is a pose, I think they really are shocked at how the policies and ideological positions they thought were safely pushed under the old guard who had a vestige of a sense of honor or shame have produced a Trump. I think that they are genuinely horrified that so much of what they thought they wanted produced this. But I don't see any sign that any of them are feeling any need for self-questioning, for asking themselves how their party, the Republican Party is the one which has produced this amoral, treasonous, evil presidency. I certainly see no evidence that John Roberts, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito or Sandra Day O'Connor have had any second thoughts about their role in producing this disaster. I think a good part of the Trumpian amorality was the substance of large parts of their Supreme Court careers, that kind of legal-professional amorality is built into an elite education in the law.
This disaster is a direct product of and consequence of conventional, orthodox, American conservative, Republican policy and legal rulings, even more so, conservative, Republican journalism. Its continuation will be done through those. If Trump is removed against his will or through the political process, as long as those policies, legal rulings and journalistic assertions that produced him still stand, it's only a matter of time until it happens again. Nixon's wasn't the Republican presidency with the greatest number of criminals in it, that would be Reagan's, the man that such Republicanism sets up as some kind of heroic ideal. That wasn't that much of an improvement over Trump's even more floridly criminal regime. And that doesn't address the total craven, opportunistic pathology in the Republican Congress, the blatant corruption that this week is best personified in Chuck Grassley.
Those Republicans, all of them, owe us a real and public soul searching of the kind I have called on the American left to conduct. Even more so because those Republicans have held actual power and have produced a right-wing, Republican version of the imaginary worst-case scenario of a left-wing despot that they erected as a boogy-man to win power. The one which the Trumpzi mob imagines constitutes the "deep state". The only deep state of that kind is in people like Brett Kavanaugh and Rod Rosenstein and Chuck Grassley. The ones who have kept Trump in office and will support the totally awful Mike Pence.
Everyone seemes to be is asking "why now" over the NYT op-ed of yesterday. I wonder if their plan isn't to try to remove Trump before the election so as to blunt the Democratic wave and keep Republicans like Grassley and whatever billionaire bought goon who replaces Paul Ryan in control. I don't think anything counts as paranoid fantasy anymore. Nothing can count as too ridiculous to be possible, though it might merely be wrong.
* And while I'm at it, I'm going to point out that the Jesuit prep-school that Kavanaugh was bragging on being a product of, the one that also produced the putrid and amoral Neil Gorsuch obviously didn't do a single thing to instill a sense of basic morality in either of them. Those Jesuits who produced those two should be sent to a monastery to practice prayer and repentance for that. It's disgusting that a Brett Kavanaugh and a Neil Gorsuch could both make that boast.
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