Add This Georgetown-Columbia Law Product, Brian Morgenstern To The List Of Those Who Should Carry Trump On Their Backs For The Rest Of Their Lives

 

This interview with  this youngish lawyer-liar for Trump shows how the product of the Ivy-Ivy equivalent and it's elite-Catholic university is one of the most powerful components in Trumpian-Republican fascism.   They clearly taught them how to lie and change the subject and deflect and, no doubt, they're always coming up with new ways to do that for the rich and powerful.  

Brian Morgenstern is only one of many, many such well-heeled, well-trained scumbags who should never, ever be able to live down this kind of thing.  Unless there is a life-long price to be paid for this kind of thing it's a reward for being the most effective liar, the most shameless servant of liars, the William Barr kind of thug pushing the country into strong-man rule, it doesn't matter how bad and incompetent and reckless and even insane that they are.   Is it any wonder that lawyers are so little respected when they let these kinds of people practice law and keep their credentials.   The cowards in the New York Bar had to wait till he was on his death-bed to finally disbar one Roy Cohn after a lifetime of evil.   As probably his worst client, Trump has proved, there are scores and hundreds of them still with law licenses and doing worse than that scumbag ever did on behalf of oligarchic fascism and the gangsters who are politically and legally empowered by their efforts.

Lest Anyone Wonder Why I Despise The Dersh As I Do

My probably over-stocked vocabulary of sex isn't big enough for it to include a male-prostitute equivalent of "call girl" but if I knew one I'd use it to correct something I read when Alan Dershowitz filed his $300 million lawsuit against CNN. Someone in the stuff around that called him a "public intellectual" when he's no intellectual and he's certainly not "public" if by that you mean someone whose public babblage falls in the realm of honesty or is in the public's interest.  What he is is a whore of Trumpism.

I happened across a piece he got posted the other day at some outfit called "The Jewish Press.com" in which he makes a pose of intellectual activity which, unsurprisingly, comes out exactly where you'd expect it to, giving Trump a win.

One conclusion that is beyond any dispute is that no doctor has the right to deliberately and willfully mislead the public, even if his patient tells him to. I am not accusing any doctor of doing that in this case. But the rules of the profession are clear: a doctor can refuse to disclose based on patient confidentiality; or a doctor can disclose with the consent of the patient; but a doctor cannot lie to the public even if the patient demands that he do so.

This is a complex area of medical ethics, law and public policy. It requires nuanced solutions that serve both the short-term public interest and the long-term need to maintain medical confidentiality. These issues should be discussed in a non-partisan, non–ideological and non-political manner.

To which I say, just fuck off Dershowitz. YOU are the one who chose to lie like a lawyer about Trump misleading the public WHILE OCCUPYING THE OFFICE OF PRESIDENT, to then claim that "these issues should be discussed in a non-partisan, non-ideological and non-political manner," is lawyerly lying bullshit of the typical kind. THE PRESIDENCY IS A POLITICAL, A PARTISAN AND AN IDEOLOGICALLY HELD OFFICE THE ENTIRE REASON THAT PRESIDENTIAL HEALTH IS AN ISSUE AT ALL IS BECAUSE OF THAT. It is public BECAUSE IT IS POLITICAL. The public has every right to know what the health AND THE FUCKING TAX RETURNS of a man who wants to rule them are. It is a public interest exactly because of that, because political office holders hold the power to impact our lives through the enahnced power that politics gives them. To insist that those very things be removed from the discussion is the kind of thing that makes people rightfully think the legal profession are a bunch of lying scumbags for profit. 

 

And I'll point out that as during your lairaing on his behalf in his impeachment hearing, you are trying to get him a POLITICAL, A PARTISAN AND AN IDEOLOGICAL WIN.  Oh, no doubt while issuing a lawyerly disclaimer claiming you did not share his political, partisan or ideological orientation, a pose so transparently dishonest that even the Martha's Vineyard crowd has seen through it, but not the media. You carry his sewage, you stink as it does.

 

There is a lot more that I could say about the thing but as it ends in that heap of mendacity after lawyerly dodge and weave bull shit, that's enough to show what a scumbag he is.

Dershowitz, I hate CNN, the original degraders of the news into 24-7 cabloidism, your natural environment, but I hope that they either get huge costs when your phony lawsuit fails or they drag it out like Lillian Hellman did when Mary McCarthy told the truth about that lying skank and that CNN breaks you. The law was used by Lillian Hellman and the scumbag "civil liberties" lawyer she hired to destroy her when she honestly exposed Hellman as a liar, I'd like to see if it can be used for the opposite,doubtful as I am considering people like you have profited so much from it.

An Atheist God - Unfortunately, This Is An Ever Relevant Post From My Archives

 

 Note: October 8, 2020, I am reposting this because I have another beloved family member who it is clear to me is falling into alcoholism.  The key in this, in answer to what they said to me, mouthing the words provided to them by atheists, is 

 
Atheists are perfectly fine with people making the ethyl alcohol molecule their higher power, the all consuming god that they sacrifice their lives and the lives of others, their spouses, their children, the victims of their accidents and violence to, but they get in a swivet if someone non-violently recommends that God would be a better choice. 

If I had no other reason to have problems with atheism, that one thing alone would be more than enough to provide me with them.  Alcoholism has been a recurring problem for my family skipping my parents generation because they didn't drink.  It's not skipping the next generation. 

A while back I had occasion to help move some furniture out the apartment of a close relative, a long-term alcoholic as he lost the ability to pay rent.  He's in terrible shape with late-state liver disease, his skin a horrible green yellow, his abdomen swollen with his diseased liver, his legs covered with the worst angiomas I've ever seen.   And there is the terrible smell of fetor hepaticus, which no amount of laundering and showering can rid him of, him or anything in his apartment that the smell could permeate.  Most of his stuff had to be binned due to the smell.   I look at him and think my one brother who died of alcoholism rather more quickly than he has was fortunate it didn't go on as long. 

What brings that to mind is thinking about the reaction big-mouth blog atheists have had to posts like the one below, either echoing (ignorantly and incompletely) Marx's slogan that religion is an "opiate" or in some less articulate barroom atheist form.   What I thought of was the argument I got in with one who goes by "Moe" which I've mentioned here before, how during the event of Ken Burns' "Prohibition" being on PBS, I said that the biggest problem with prohibition was that it didn't work, that if they had been able to get rid of drinking alcohol the results would have been almost exclusively positive and beneficial.   The reaction was the horrific accusation that I wanted to deprive "working men" the chance to relax with a drink at the end of the day.    Now, I don't specifically recall "Moe" calling religion an "opiate" or a "crutch" though I don't doubt those sentiments are shared by him, not to mention the Larrys and Curleys who are the milieu he hangs out in.   

Think of that lapse in logic among those who won't hesitate to tell you they are the champions of reason and scientific evidence.  Religion, which actually has been found to have positive correlations with health and well-being (those guys are all suckers for the social-sciences, so I don't hesitate to bring this up, much of which is far more accurate research) is an "opiate" while alcohol, which is associated with alcoholism, car crashes and other accidents, violence, crimes, and general stupid behavior is a boon to humanity.   I didn't think of it till I read the reactions in today's hate-mail, that it's the same as the stupid slogans used against AA.  Atheists are perfectly fine with people making the ethyl alcohol molecule their higher power, the all consuming god that they sacrifice their lives and the lives of others, their spouses, their children, the victims of their accidents and violence to, but they get in a swivet if someone non-violently recommends that God would be a better choice.  

It's been a long, long time since an atheist said something I haven't heard an atheist say decades ago, they follow a typical rote series of insipid and stupid ideological holdings along with mouthing such empty pieties as those they hold for alcohol, pornography, prostitution, crap pop culture, Hollywood crap movies, . . .  Their gods, a whole pantheon of pathetic substitutes, almost all of them leading to those base miseries, foolishly and weakly self-induced, often with the encouragement of jr. high level peer pressure.  

 

It Will Soon Be Time For The Never-Trumpers To Really Earn The Trust Of The Rest Of Us

I saw somewhere the reminder that the 2016 "never Trumper" Scott Walker was now an  ex-"never Trumper" which I have to say doesn't surprise me.  There are so many of those in the Republican Party - Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, sometimes that revolving door of temporary expediency Mitt Romney, etc. - that I'd forgotten about the putrid Paul LePage of Wisconsin. 

There are some Republicans, or ex-Republicans, "principled conservatives" who have been resolute and not hypocritical about that, their Lincoln Project and similar efforts have been much welcomed, I am grateful to them for those and I do admit that they gain some credibility for that.  

But what happens if Democrats win big and take the elected offices, the Presidency, the Senate and House, many State Legislatures and Governorships, etc.  When Democrats start doing what Democrats elected them to do - and that's not to get the talking heads of CNN happy - what will the resolute never-Trumpers do when the Democrats don't go along with what was a main-stream conservative agenda?  I mean those who have supported Biden-Harris in order to stop the mad-man their (former) party put into power and who their fellow Republicans wouldn't investigate or remove even as he was not only a demonstrated criminal but also a traitor in the pocket of the enemies of American democracy, OF AMERICAN ELECTIONS!   

I think that unless these conservatives own up to the fact that it is their party, the power-structure they were a part of which brought us here, the Republican promoting media, the networks, the cabloids, the gutter press from the National Enquirer, FOX, Sinclair, numerous local hate-talk radio venues up to and including the New York Times, NPR and PBS that those are the things that brought us to Trump their never-Trumpism will deserve the quotes as much as Scott Walker's did.   I don't remember too many of them expressing the same kind of outrage when Walker in Wisconsin, the Republicans in Michigan and Maine were doing Trumpian things on the state level that Trump did nationally.

More telling is that I don't remember too many of them really being vocally opposed to the Citizens United or other Supreme Court decisions WHICH MANY ON THE LEFT POINTED OUT OPENED UP THE COUNTRY AND OUR ELECTIONS TO FOREIGN INTERFERENCE IN A DANGEROUS WAY.   

Unless they really own up to the fact that their own, main-stream conservatism was the vehicle that got us to Trump they really aren't opposed to it happening again.   As I've been pointing out, if Trump had been every bit as evil as he is but was competent and crafty, things might look better but they would be far, far worse than they are now.   If they are not willing to admit that their ideas are what led us to a Trump, any of us is rightfully suspicious of their intentions and their real objections to what their party has done to this country. 

The never-Trump (former) Republicans will soon come to the real test of their sincerity.   I would say that it reminds me of the real test of the American left that I have pointed to ever since I started this public writing, whether they would really want to make progress by winning elections, something the American left seems to be unwilling to do for going on more than a century.   I have been unsparing in my criticism of the American left of which I am arguably a member, though I'm far to the left of that since I know that what happens in reality is more radical than anything that happens in theory or in the typical play-lefty play-time imaginings which will never happen.  The American right has had power so their lapses are ever so much more dangerous than those of the play-left.  Now is the time for them to find if they can do what the play-left seems incapable of doing, looking at the results of what they have done and learning from the dangers they have created.

Get Rid Of The Damned Debates - The Morning After

 I've seen a few people both-siding it complaining that sometimes Kamala Harris didn't answer Susan Page's questions, that she "didn't strictly follow the rules, either."   

I'm glad she didn't, if there's one thing that Democrats need to know about these phony debates it's that Republicans won't follow the rules and the "moderators" won't hold them to them and the friggin' "Commission on Presidential Debates" won't set things up so that there's any price for a Republican who breaks the rules, interrupting, going over time (Pence did that constantly) LYING THROUGH THEIR FRIGGIN' TEETH, etc.  Look at what they didn't stop Trump from doing either in 2016 or this last time.

No, any Democrat who tries to "follow the rules" is just showing that they can be taken as a chump, that Kamala Harris did what she needed to do makes me a lot happier with her than I'd have been if she'd followed the stupid rules set up by that bunch of idiots on that friggin' Commission and the "moderators" who are always drawn, not from people who might know something, academics, for example, but from media figures. 

No, these "debates" are worse than a joke because the results aren't funny. 

Pence And The Rot Within Republicans

About the most obvious thing about the so-called debate last night is what Pete Buttigige said he'd learned from when Pence was governor of Indiana and he was Mayor of South Bend, "He's pretty comfortable telling a total lie."   He's got the methodology of a talk-show host thing down pat, which  for some reason some people seem to like, it's clear he's a practiced liar of the kind you regularly see on TV, no doubt where he got the look, too.  He's a good example of the dangers inherent in the inability to tell the difference between content and packaging that I have to say TV hallelujah peddlers, especially those of the "prosperity gospel" typically have.  He's crap with a package designed to sell.

That his brand of his much advertised "christianity" has so easily melded with the pathological mammonist-pagan-satan-spawn which Donald Trump is what should define not only him but the genera of  white "evangelical" which has done the same thing.  Everything about the Gospel of Jesus, the Law of Moses goes (except for a few of the things about sex, though that doesn't count if you're a Republican, oddly enough).  No doubt Pence is as comfortable with Lindsay Graham's barely secret life as a frequenter of gay-prostitutes as he so clearly is with Donald Trump's flagrant adultery.  "Lady G" as Graham is known to style himself in his sex life is as comfortable with Alito and Clarence Thomas's openly laying groundwork to overturn marriage equality and, no doubt other aspects of equality.  But, then, Thomas is laying groundwork for the possibility of his own inter-racial marriage becoming what it would have been before, illegal in many states, no doubt that Thomas would use the same language as those who defended anti-miscegenation laws in his ruling, confident that it would never come back to bite him and his wife.  

These are people of no integrity, of no morality, of no character.   Mike Pence with his boring, white-bread white-face(bronzed), white-haired whited sepulcher is as good a symbol for it as anyone.  The fly that landed on him and stayed there during the debate may have been as fit a  symbol of the rot that lies within.

We Need An Authoritative List Of The Criminals And Skanks And Scumbags Of The Trump Regime With Documented Crimes and Lies And Smears To Serve As A Constant Reminder

SO many skanks who should never be allowed to live it down, so hard to remember them all.   I'd forgotten about Jason Miller until I listened to Seth Meyers' monologue from the night before last.   That skank has been in and out of Republican-fascist campaigns to being hired by the like of CNN and back into campaigns DESPITE BEING NAMED IN SCANDALS THAT WOULD DESTROY A DEMOCRAT'S REPUTATION FOR LIFE.   Here, from Politico when he went back into the Trump media operation I mentioned here earlier today.

President Donald Trump’s reelection team is tapping Jason Miller to serve as a senior adviser, bringing a controversial figure back into the fold as the campaign barrels towards a treacherous final stretch.

Miller, who served as a top adviser on Trump’s 2016 bid, will focus on overall strategy and help to coordinate between the campaign and White House. Two people familiar with the hire said Miller would provide additional support to campaign manager Brad Parscale. While Miller served as chief spokesman four years ago, he will not be running communications, a role filled by Tim Murtaugh.

After the 2016 election, Miller was named White House communications director. But weeks before Trump’s inauguration he backed out after reports emerged that he had an extramarital affair and impregnated another campaign official, A.J. Delgado. In the ensuing months they were engaged in a legal battle that came to focus on attorneys fees and child support. Miller later stepped down from his position as a commentator on CNN and has an ongoing lawsuit against an online media outlet over what he has called a defamatory report about his personal life.

Yet Miller has remained close with Trump, who has kept up with loyalists he credits with helping to guide his 2016 campaign. Bill Stepien, a top adviser on Trump’s first presidential bid, was recently elevated to deputy campaign manager. Kellyanne Conway, who was Trump’s campaign manager, has been White House counselor his entire first term. Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie, two other top officials, recently met with Trump to express concern about his reelection prospects. Justin Clark, another longtime adviser, is helping to spearhead the GOP legal fight over voting rules.

 

You want to make a bet that CNN or its equivalent wouldn't hire the scumbag back on, or, really, any of these scumbags? 

 

They have to find out that there are real, lifetime consequences of doing to the country and the world what they've done to us and the media isn't likely to be the source of those consequences. They'll probably pay them big bucks to continute to lie against a Biden or Harris administration in the same way they did about Barack Obama's, probably the least crooked presidency after Carter, if not from before.  

Just How Willfully Stupid Is The Commission on Presidential Debates?

Here's how stupid they are and knowingly choose to be. 

 

THEY LET THE TRUMP SIDE SUPPOSEDLY DO ITS OWN TESTING OF THE PRESIDENT ON THE FRIGGIN' "HONORS SYSTEM".

That, alone, shows you why this whole bullshit "debate" thing should be shut down. The alleged leadership of that commission is full of celebrity names who clearly are too invested in such a myth, that the Republicans who have shown they have no morality, no, not even the watered-down, self-focused aspect of that which goes by the false label of "honor" which no one should ever have put their confidence in to start with.

Well, ’tis no matter; honour pricks me on. Yea, but how if honour prick me off when I come on? How then? Can honour set-to a leg? No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound? No. Honour hath no skill in surgery, then? No. What is honour? A word. What is in that word “honour”? What is that “honour”? Air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it? He that died o’ Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. ’Tis insensible then? Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? No. Why? Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I’ll none of it. Honour is a mere scutcheon. And so ends my catechism. 

 

Only Falstaff the scumbag who wisely saw through the fraud never was exposed to the modern mass media, they'll lie about honor for the rich and connected no matter how demonstrably dishonorable they are. Such notions of "honor," as noted, a phony secular replacement for morality such as abounded among the Elizabethan system, are bound to lead us to such degenerate times as we live in. Any Democrats on that Commission should have already taken their names off of it when they let Chris Wallace be one of the long list of Republican hacks who have "moderated" these shit-shows.

Oh. . . . Now I Get It. Trump WantsTo Be Evita - I'll Never Forgive The Republicans For Making Me Think Of This

Some of you might know I'm not a fan of musicals, especially those of Andrew Lloyd Webber, who I loathe.   I do like some of the actor-singers who appear in them,  I love Patti Lupone, especially when she's been in some of those musicals I do kinda like.  But I'll spare you the music. 

So it was fun as well as satisfying for her to give her insights into Trump's steroid-fueled balcony scene the other day as not being inspired by Il Duce, Mussolini (who I wouldn't be surprised if Trump never heard of) but by her performance as Evita Peron in the ALW spectacle, "Evita".

I, thankfully, had not known that Trump, or, rather, whoever ghost-writ a book "by him" had revealed that he and Ivanka had gone on daddy-daughter dates to see her in that thing many times.  Everything about that relationship yeechs me out. So we can see the danger that such spectacles have on weak minds with perverted tendencies - what else was the relationship between Juan and Evita but one especially awful psycho-drama of sexual degeneracy and insanity.  Maybe it would have been better if they'd let Trump dress up as Evita instead of having Rudy Guiliani be the one in drag.  It's not as if Rudy doesn't know how to abuse women, too.

What the Republican Party and the media inflicted on us in Trump should never be forgotten.   And before him Bush II and Reagan.  

 

Update:  Reading through this, again, I have to wonder how it relates to that piece I did a few weeks back wondering about the Trump-regime's use of Pavarotti's bellowing of Nessun Dorma, another torchy show tune.  Only one in Italian so the idiots had no idea how it fit into the show.  I wonder if, instead of Trump being the one burdened with faking a touch of class, it wasn't the work of Ivanka,  culcha being more in the realm of "womens' work" among the monied.

I Am So Grateful To Brian Tyler Cohen - He Watches These Skanks So I Can Just Watch What He Excerpts

 

 

Steve Cortes, Alyssa Farrah, Mercedes Schlapp, the minor cabloid featured talking heads of Republican lying should be blamed and punished for their role in the catastrophe that the Republicans have brought us to.  Trump is an As Seen on TV product, sold to us through the lies as heard on TV coming from carefully chosen designated liars.  

And all of them, from the Spicers and Huckabee-Sanders and  McEnany level down to the Schlapps should never, ever be mentioned in public again without having their names, faces and lying voices tied to Trump who I would bet will be considered thelow point of American life - if we don't continue to get really unlucky through the Supreme Court enabled regime of mass media lying that these skanks inhabit.   Without punishing this, so far worst, batch of them with a lifetime of infamy, their like in the future will be encouraged that there is no real price to pay for what they do.

-------------------------

As a hobby student of the depravity that is turned out mostly by elite private prep-schools and universities, I check to find out who credentialed these scumbags and have found that mostly they do come from the private education sector, Farrah went to some place called Patrick Henry College which I'd never heard of before but which seems to be some "christian" degree mill started by one Micheal Farris, a Republican scumbag lawyer who got his credentials from, among others, the Jesuit outfit Gonzaga University.  

The theory of Catholic education, that these highly reputed Catholic prep-schools and universities, especially those connected to the Jesuits, that they instill a sound moral education along with the worldly credentials they impart is clearly disproven from the moral atrocities they release into the world with credentials that get them jobs from which they can do evil.  Brett Kavanaugh shows that that allegedly "christian" educational world ties in seamlessly with the elite secular system.   Though you can find those who never attended a private school or a parochial one who are as evil, it is notable how unevenly and amply represented in the Republican-fascist dishonor roll the products of such "christian" and such "elite" education are.   

Trump, his children, his son-in-law were all credentialed by a high-tone school, no doubt on the sound basis of how much money they might bring to the place.   If Biden or Harris is president next year, one thing we must demand is that at least the Secretary of Education has to have been someone with a lifetime experience with public schools, as a student, as a teacher, as the parent of students in it.  And I'd carefully consider putting some products of public universities in high positions instead of the prep-Ivy equivalent who are so often not as advertised.

I think We, The People, need to have a revolt against the rule of the private-school elite.  We are as saddled and ridden by them as the Brits are, now.

 

 

To offer symbols that are adequate to the horror and massiveness of the experience which evokes numbness and requires denial

 The task of prophetic imagination is to cut through the numbness, to penetrate the self-deception, so that the God of endings is confessed as Lord.  Notice that I suggest for the prophet in a really numbed situation a quite elemental and modest task.  That task has three parts:

(a) To offer symbols that are adequate to the horror and massiveness of the experience which evokes numbness and requires denial.  The prophet is to provide a way in which the cover-up and the stonewalling can be ended.  This does not mean that symbols are to be invented, for that would be too thin.  Rather it means that the prophet is to reactivate out of our historical past symbols that always have been vehicles for redemptive honesty, for example,  "cross over to Shiloh to see what I did,"  or, finally, take another look at Pharaoh.  The Exodus symbol, above all, is turned to show for all would-be Pharaohs that Exodus is a catastrophic ending of what had seemed forever.

The symbol of Shiloh refers to the traditional home of the Arc of the Covenant, the "home" of God, which was destroyed when the Philistines captured the Arc and destroyed the center of worship for the Children of Israel, the illusion comes from Jeremiah in which a host of sins of the Children of Israel are warned will bring the most dire of consequences even to those who had aspired to the greatest holiness.

 3Thus saith the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel:

Amend your ways and your doings, and I will cause you to dwell in this place. 4Trust ye not in lying words, saying: ‘The temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD, are these.’ 5Nay, but if ye thoroughly amend your ways and your doings; if ye thoroughly execute justice between a man and his neighbour; 6if ye oppress not the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow, and shed not innocent blood in this place, neither walk after other gods to your hurt; 7then will I cause you to dwell in this place, in the land that I gave to your fathers, for ever and ever. 8Behold, ye trust in lying words, that cannot profit. 9Will ye steal, murder, and commit adultery, and swear falsely, and offer unto Baal, and walk after other gods whom ye have not known, 10and come and stand before Me in this house, whereupon My name is called, and say: ‘We are delivered’, that ye may do all these abominations? 11Is this house, whereupon My name is called, become a den of robbers in your eyes? Behold, I, even I, have seen it, saith the LORD. 12For go ye now unto My place which was in Shiloh, where I caused My name to dwell at the first, and see what I did to it for the wickedness of My people Israel. 13And now, because ye have done all these works, saith the LORD, and I spoke unto you, speaking betimes and often, but ye heard not, and I called you, but ye answered not; 14therefore will I do unto the house, whereupon My name is called, wherein ye trust, and unto the place which I gave to you and to your fathers, as I have done to Shiloh. 15And I will cast you out of My sight, as I have cast out all your brethren, even the whole seed of Ephraim.  (Jeremiah 7:3-15  JPS 1917)

"Nay, but if ye thoroughly amend your ways and your doings; if ye thoroughly execute justice between a man and his neighbour; if ye oppress not the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow, and shed not innocent blood in this place," that is a list of things you have to do in order to prevent catastrophe for a society and a nation, the consequence of having blessing removed is a result of doing those, and in the United States we certainly do do them, up to and including the worshiping of false gods,  Donald Trump having replaced the God of Moses and Jesus and Paul for a significant number of those calling themselves and called "Christian leaders" and that's not the Jewish Trump worshipers who are not an insignificant manifestation, though far fewer as a percent than those "christians" who have turned the bronzer covered moon-calf into their idol.  

When you see the catastrophe we have today it is certainly accompanied by what was listed by the prophet.  You'd think the first people to notice that and take it seriously would be the professional clergy who are supposed to be specialists in the Scripture.  And some do but not the ones who get on TV and the radio much.

Get Rid Of The Damned Debates

The Commission on Presidential Debates should be shut down for their cowardly, stupid failure to hold the Trump side, the Trump family, the Trump fandom to the most basic of health and safety measures in the first Trump event.  But they should also be shut down for insisting on holding the second debate with an audience, in person when one of those persons should be in quarantine and in DC in case Trump collapses or dies as a result of being pumped full of steroids while being stuffed with a reportedly unprecidented mixture of drugs which have never been tested for their interactions.  

 

Then there is the even greater danger to us.  It is more than slightly possible that Kamala Harris and, or, Joe Biden could be taken out by Covid spread to them at one of these stupid shows.  If those who say that these "debates" really don't have an effect in changing minds are right, they are a grotesque and useless exercise based on a phony imagining of the Lincoln-Douglas style of debates when they have absolutely nothing to do with that.  

The "debate" show is something that should have been ended or it should have been turned into a real debate in which the candidates actually debated on a question.  I'm not an enormous fan of debates, which are actually more of an entertainment than a means of informing people.  Their history is more useful for pushing an agenda than doing something more responsible and good than that.  I have pointed out, repeatedly, that it is far easier to structure a lie for easy sales to a majority of people than the truth because a lie doesn't have to remain within the confines of reality.  I think the showmanship of a debate helps that at the best of times and the more intelligent, the more skilled debater is not guaranteed to be the more honest, the more moral, the one who is presenting more of the truth instead of a carefully crafted and malignant lie.   That is one of the stupidest conceits of modern America, that intelligence is necessarily related to morality when it is so often not.  I have no doubt that the slick, really well educated prep-Ivy equivalent members of the Trump regime are intelligent, it's as obvious that they are amoral sociopaths and psychotic cultists.  Imagine if the TV experienced Trump were one of them instead of a show-biz phony with little intelligence and mere TV honed slickness.  Even one like Trump may well succeed in ending democracy, a smart Trump would do it without any trouble, at all.

This modern dog and pony show is an invention of the Kennedy campaign in 1960, they are a TV determined thing.  The absurd romance about JFK will probably die with my generation, it's time for younger, more critical and less celebrity addled people to admit it wasn't a good thing for American democracy. 

Trump's Drugged Up Strong Man Act - Unless The Collapse Has Happened Since I Started Writing This

I suppose the Republican-fascist practice of putting empty-headed dummies in the presidency, Reagan, Bush II, Trump, supported by the Murdoch-Sinclair wall-screen would come to this level of criminal insanity.  This is having your cornered rat pumped full of drugs and run, not through a maze because your rat never ran anywhere and couldn't get through a maze but through the simplified routine permitted for Republicans with media support.

They're, no doubt, putting pardons in front of him for him to touch a pen to, or maybe it's one of those automatic signing things, no doubt they've got some Dr. Feel Good pumping him full of steroids - I've never known someone on steroids who didn't later report the strong mental effects of them as being strong and generally dangerous.  But this is only the most extreme of show-biz supported dummy as president we've had, a phenomenon of the 24-7, talk-radio-cabloid "news" industry.  Though since 1964 the broadcast networks were greasing the skids into this sewer, the 1968 campaign which elected Nixon was a milestone in it as his presidency was a great stride in presidential criminality.  The 1972 campaign, even as his criminality was obvious was even more so on the part of the electronic media.

TV, radio, movies, all devolve into creating images and slogans and tunes for selling stuff, whether good quality at a good price or deceptively presented garbage, even dangerous garbage, it doesn't matter.   That's as true of the "creative content" as the advertising.  It was the great innovation of electronic mass media that they were able to use the deceptive, enticing practices of the advertising industry to more generalize the bilking of the public to all areas of life.  That was something that was realized by the people running all of them almost from the start.  People may have wondered how Orson Wells had such a deep understanding of the world and mind of a king of the tabloids, it was because they were in essentially the same  business, show biz, the creating of illusions, the creating of fiction, the manipulation of peoples' emotions, first, knowing the inclination of how people thought was more likely to be led by what they wanted to believe instead of what their harder reasoning and previous experience of consequences told them was real.  Getting people to ignore their own experience in favor of what is on a screen in front of them is one of the things most praised about the movies, TV, show biz and one of its most dangerous aspects.

They didn't have to sucker most people most of the time, they just had to sucker those whose votes could be counted with the percentage of the population whose inclinations were firmly fixed through their prejudice, their greed, their resentment, envy and hatred - they always had the convinced and motivated racists on board they just needed enough of the non-racists or mildly frightened to go along with them.

Oh, and don't forget the "civil libertarians" who are generally white and affluent and know which side their bread is buttered on and what is not going to really be much of any danger to them.  They are more like the margin of otherwise not depraved people who can be suckered, in many cases the "civil libertarians" have merely played the such on TV or in other media, they never really cared about much of anything. Dershowitz is merely the iconic example of such "civil libertarians".   Nat Hentoff, may he long linger in purgatory, was too.

"Such a religion serves the king well, for he imagines he is still king," For Others Their Non-Religion Lets Them Imagine They Are The Kings Of Reality

In a hospital room we want it to be cheery, and in a broken marriage we want to imagine it will be all right.  We bring the lewd promise of immortality everywhere,  which is not a promise but only a denial of what history brings and what we are indeed experiencing.  In the Christian tradition, having been co-opted by the king, we are tempted to legitimate the denial by offering cross-less good news and a future well-being without a present anguish.  Such a religion serves the king well, for he imagines he is still king.  He imagines that he can manage and that his little sand castle will endure (if you pardon the phrase) "forever."

Of course, the first thing that comes to mind is the Trump act, not only Trump's life-endangering delusion but that of his family-court, that of his party, that of the Supreme Court majority who cannot be counted no not to try to extend at least the rule of their, Republican party as they have been trying to do, certainly since Rehnquist became Chief "Justice".

But as I was thinking about that delusion another thing that came to mind was not the various pie-in-the-sky distortions of the Christian religion but the incredibly silly delusion of the materialist-atheist-scientistic people, such as Ray Kurtzweil and other "transhumanists" who have been increasingly dotty since the time of the early romantics, I have to wonder the extent to which "Frankenstein" isn't Mary Godwin Shelley's satire on some of her father's more lunatic fantasies of immortality or maybe her husband's.   In our time the monster is imagined to be a digital codification of human minds in a form that will forever endure - though I once asked one of them what they expected would happen during the final material epoch of proton decay.   And such idiocy is politely acceptable within even the highest courts of modern, atheist, scientistic materialism, such as MIT.

People wonder how the Trump cult can be as denying of reality as it is when they miss that there are other, though hardly as powerful, cults of a similar denial of reality taken to not only be entirely respectable, but intellectually admirable.   As noted in my morning post, to which this can be considered a footnote, that kind of stuff even happens among those whose business is supposed to be founded on the very scriptures in which this kind of stuff is warned against.  The God of Moses, of Jesus, of Paul, of James, etc. is not a material god, such as the ones graven images are made of.  The ultimate reality is not material, of that I am quite sure though the material is real.  As I mentioned here recently, I don't know exactly how Brueggemann's "materiality" relates to my belief.  I will try to find out and hope to report on that after I read his recent book on it.  I'm kind of busy with this one which keeps me on my toes as it relates to the news on any given day. All of Brueggemann that I've read could take up a lifetime of study and reflection, I don't know how he does it but I'm panting to keep up with him from four decades ago.

When You Stop Refusing To Say What Isn't Supposed To Be Said, When You Refuse To Not Notice What You Are Not Supposed To See

When I decided to go through Walter Brueggemann's rightly famous study of the Prophets last August I had no idea just how intense an experience it would be.  Every single time I pick it up and read it, it's as if the events of the previous few days could have been performed as an example of what Brueggemann forty-two years ago noted he found in the Scriptures from more than two thousand years ago.   The next several passages are especially resonant with the spectacle of Trump's Covid infection (if that's what we really are seeing, a question made necessary from the continuing lies of even his doctor) and the Republican manipulation of his TV addled fans.   This is a manifestation of a modern mass insanity display well described here:

Robert Lifton has studied attitudes concerning death in our culture beginning with Hiroshima and Nagasaki and responses to these events.

I will break in right there and note that to study those two acts of mass bombing without taking the diminution of them by the flagrant racism and "othering" of those who died in them is to not understand the American reaction to them.  I have not read Lifton on this, yet, but I think it needs to be said.  That "othering" to a minimal extent is understandable, though not morally excusable, as a reaction to retaliation against "the enemy" something which is certainly not absent from the Scriptures even as it is presented in a matrix that has to lead to the consideration of its dubious justification - the very religious tradition that retains those texts also calls attention to their moral ambiguity.

The Republican-right in the United States has made such racism and "othering" one of its most potent political tools as, in fact, their predecessors among the slave-holding, land-stealing "founders" did, even as early as some of the more disgusting parts of the Declaration of Independence and the records of the First Continental Congress.

Beyond these he has considered the more general response to living in a world where death is so visible, so daily, so pervasive, and so massive, and yet so unnoticed.  Lifton has concluded that we have no adequate way to relate to death's reality and potential, so it is dealt with by a numbness that denies.   Moreover, says Lifton, behind that frightened practice is the symbol gap in which we do not have symbols that are deep or strong enough to match the terror of reality.  What takes place when symbols are inadequate and things may not be brought to public expression is that the experience will not be experienced.  Obviously the notion of a symbol gap about the reality of death is pertinent to our theme.  The royal consciouness that lacks the symbols for full experience is the same royal consciousness that nullified the symbols in the fist place.  Those symbols that will release experience and let it be redemptive bring to expression precisely those dimensions of reality which the king fears and cannot subjugate.  It is the penchant of kings to nullify all symbols that reveal what is beyond royal administration.   And so the power of the king to destroy symbols are reducing them makes necessary the subsequent denial of the experience symbolized.

It must be observed that religious practitioners are often easy and unwitting conspirators with such denial.  We become the good-humor men and women, for who among us does not want to rush in and smooth things out, to reassure, to cover the grief?

Everyone helps his neighbor,
and says to his brother, "Take courage!"
The craftsmen encourages the goldsmith,
and he who smooths and the hammer him who strikes the anvil,
saying of the soldering,  "It is good"'
and they fasten it with nails so it cannot be moved. (Isa 41:6-7)

I can't help but reflect on the president of Notre Dame college, Fr. John Jenkins is among those who were infected with Covid at the roll out of Amy Coney Barrett who will certainly become just such a royal apparatchick (or at least will be when it's a Republican who is president) no doubt Jenkins congratulated himself on getting a faculty member of his university on the Court, just as the "liberal" lawyers and colleagues of Samuel Alito did even as they lied under oath that he would be an especially bad upholder of such royalism on the Court.  Every one of them, as did everyone else who was listening, knew they were lying about him, his record proved that.

But everything about this passage could be a commentary on last week's news and, in fact, could not possibly be more topical since last winter when the first rumors leaked out about the earliest infections with what would be called Covid-19.  The denial of that is as thick as it was as I was first beginning to read and hear foreign news sources spreading the earliest alarms about it.  And the link between that and death on the other end of it, its origin, as so many other pandemic diseases, in the meat industry is an ongoing denial of even the strongest of realities thrust on us, for so many of us the death not needing a symbol because we can see the person getting sick and dying.

Writing that, I am thinking of the YouTube cooking channel on which, having had comments about the link between Covid-19 and the meat industry, the celebrity cook whined that he learned to cook meat and in early middle-age he didn't feel like he could change his habits.  And those are only a few of the many habits that deny reality, as a habit, as an unconsidered part of "culture".  I had a young person throw the old "cultural supremacy" stuff at me when I noted that this virus had originated in the cruel, notorious wet-markets - which, by the way, are not a peculiarly Chinese phenomenon - even as I noted others had started in the conventional meat industry in the U.S. or elsewhere.   I suppose what I was being told that the reality that these pandemic diseases are intimately tied to the keeping of animals, their slaughter and eating them was to be a suppressed reality of the kind that Brueggemann notes is a royal practice.  Perhaps to get the fullest meaning of that you have to consider that human beings treated by such "royal consciousness" are treated as is considered and ethical, even moral way we treat animals.

If Trump didn't look on the Secret Service members whose lives he put at risk as if their lives were his to dispose of as meat-eaters consider animals' lives to be, it's only because he probably didn't think of it at all, merely following his habits of an entitled, enabled lifetime of self-indulgence.

The experience of reading this book at this time is incredibly intense, especially this section of it.  

The Scriptures in which this study by Walter Brueggemann starts are too radical to be allowed in polite quarters, certainly not without watering them down.  Maybe in some theology departments or schools, certainly not allowed among the secular faculties and even not among many who teach religion. 

Steve Cortes Designated Liar

 

Why would any TV show have the flagrant liar Steve Cortes on unless they want to hear him lying, it's all he does?   And he's only one of a host of Republican-fascist liars who only lies, repeatedly, constantly, obviously, flagrantly - one side lies its head off the other side doesn't.

The Danger That Media Inspired Cults Are To The Rest of Us

 

 

 

You don't have to get it yourself to know that there are obviously large numbers of people who are such complete suckers for what they see on TV that they would buy Trump as as "sent by God" to rule us even as of yesterday, even as he was proving he was more likely sent by Satan to destroy as many of us as he could, who didn't care at all for the lives of the Secret Service men and the driver who had to be locked in his presidential van so he could bask as they screamed their adoration at him like the total and complete ninnies they were.  One of the videos I saw had some man declare that he'd die for Trump as he watched people who on Trumps orders might well do what he only pretends he would do.   I do have to wonder what would have happened if all of the Secret Service suddenly all said they were not going to go along with Trump on these obscenely selfish, obscenely irresponsible, stunts.

For us, we can see what TV wrought when it created the Trump persona, through the vulgar glamour spreads of his properties in the New York Times style and features reporting to the entertainment stuff to the TV "news" that allowed him to go from the phony "reality" star to a politician, what we have is as much of a creation of TV as Pence was of right-wing, hate-talk radio and megachurch style hallelujah peddling.  And don't think I didn't notice the "religious" figures there, too.  We have seen it over and over again, the potential of TV to come up with these kind of cult figures, the world of celebrity and show biz are built on such stuff and we pretend that that doesn't impinge on our politics, creating large enough cults of personality that they can sway elections, to the peril of egalitarian democracy and even the concept of good government.   For the love of humanity, Trump has managed to perhaps fatally attack the very concepts of decency, truth and even reality as the media allowed the Bush II - Cheney regime to do.  Stephen Colbert, in his Comedy Channel show summed that up in the accurate parody of "truthiness" years before Trump rose from the pandemonium of "reality TV".

The danger that mass communication is for all of those things, morality, decency, the truth, reality and the political expression of those in egalitarian democracy is never addressed though it is one of the greatest dangers we face.  It will certainly not come up first even in the MSNBC liberal ghetto hours because it is contrary to the interests of the media industry, not only the "entertainment side" then the "news division" and the entire culture of "journalism" is unlikely to want to talk about the role they have all played in getting us to this dangerous point.  They don't discuss the role that the license to lie that the courts have given them for the past fifty-six years have had in the degeneration of American politics because they enjoy that privilege, "liberals" as much as conservatives and down into the sewer of the Trump supporting media.  

But that is a danger that, the wiping out of modern technology not happening, is one that democracy either contends with to prevent these effects, or democracy is a dead and extinct species of governance.   We won't have any choice but face the danger that was personified in the Trump cult yesterday,  even those among the Republican politicians he infected but who recover in time will be supporting the Trump cult as surely as those who get shot or whose loved ones do support the gun industry.   Their political careers depend on the very depravity and its continuance. 

When I must deny about myself then I can afford to deny about my neighbor as well and I don't need to know what my neighbor has or doesn't have.

 There is no place in the public domain where failure can be faced.  Witness the squirming anguish of Richard Nixon, who is more like us than different from us.  Ultimately, we are incapable of facing our own death.  All these denials about endings are necessary in the royal community because it is too costly to face and embrace them.  It would suggest that we are not in charge, that things will not forever stay the manageable way they are, and that things will not finally all work out.  It is the business of kings to attach the word "forever" to everything we treasure.  The great dilemma is that religious functionaries are expected to use the same "forever,"  to attach it to things and make it sound theologically legitimated.  But "forever" is always the word of Pharaoh, and as such it is the very word against which Yahweh and Moses did their liberating thing.

In a Saint Louis radio station there is a cleaning lady who one day walked through a studio during a program offering advice on marital problems.  In an offhand way she simply provided advice on her way to do her work.  Her advice turned out to be more sound and clever than what was officially offered, and as a result she was made a part of the regular programming.  Miss Blue has become a feature, and the words with which she begins and ends are,  "All is well."  Sometimes, depending on the mood of the announcer, she is invited to say it repeatedly, perhaps only to cause a chuckle, probably a bit of mockery, even self-mockery, but also to practice the religion of deception.  From the ghetto community out of which she speaks, it could be that "all is well" is a trusting affirmation that enables persons to cope.  But when the same phrase is co-opted for the media it becomes an endorsement of the status quo that serves further to deny and numb.  It is like a king who says "forever" to keep all the serious questions in check.

The chant of Miss Blue, now co-opted, is not unlike the mocked statement of Jeremiah concerning the numbed self-deception of the temple:  "This is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord" (Jer. 7:4).  Nor is it unlike Toots Shor, that most famous saloon-keeper who died of cancer.  In his last days, when his death was imminent, he said, "I don't want to know what I have."' That is a fair summary of the attitude of the royal consciousness - not wanting to know.  If we don't know perhaps it won't happen,  and we can pretend a while longer.  When I must deny about myself then I can afford to deny about my neighbor as well and I don't need to know what my neighbor has or doesn't have.  I can imagine both my neighbor and myself out of historical existence,  and "forever" becomes not an affirmation but a denial.

As I read this again it is breathtaking how topical it is on Sunday October 4, 2020, how topical it would have seemed any day of my adulthood in the United States or, probably anywhere.  

I wonder if there was an intention of denying the importance of the texts that Walter  Brueggemann bases his study on for exactly the same reasons he discusses here, it is dangerous to the royal consciousness in our late, decaying republican form of it.  The extent to which this has been the difference demonstrated in the Hebrew Scriptures, New as well as Old Testament, the difference between the typical royal consciousness and the radical alternative of Moses, the other Old Testament Prophets, Jesus and Paul and James, etc.  The conventional religion of most of Christianity as invested in the Solomonic distortion of that tradition as some of the former and contemporary sects of Judaism - the temple cult being slammed by the Prophets was so obvious that it is one of the few aspects of this that made an impression on me in childhood and which has stuck with me ever since.  

Trump's behavior this year has, of course, been the masthead example of the denial of everything from mortality and death to the fact that though he might not live to see the exposure of the crimes of his corporations, his children and in-laws may well not escape it.   When that's the kind of "forever" that someone chooses to deceive themselves with, it's no wonder that the concept comes in for such critical dismissal.  

Note:  The great mystic Julian of Norwich had a famous vision in which she was told by Jesus,   ‘It was necessary that there should be sin; but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.' These words were said most tenderly, showing no manner of blame to me nor to any who shall be saved.”  That vision of what I'd interpret to be universal salvation is far removed from Miss Blue's radio-show slogan.  It's tempting to go into a long contrast between the two phrases and how they originated and how they were used, but I just thought I'd mention it in passing.

Trump is closing in on 30,000 documented lies told as "president" and his fans are whining about people doubting that he's really got Covid-19.   

That would be like someone complaining that someone doesn't trust him with money or with the care of young girls. 

When someone has done more than anyone to destroy the concept of truth and reality they have no right to be believed on the honors system.  Especially when they're the one who assassinated honor. 

Fratelli Tutti Is Worth Reading Right Now

I have only gotten up to about paragraph 50 of Pope Francis' new encyclical, on fraternity and social friendship.   So far it strikes me as among the most consistently apt studies of what is dangerous as well as some of what is good in today's world,  the world of the internet and, also of terrible poverty, destruction, especially through conscious, planned exploitation of people, of communities, of societies, of the natural world, of everything including the destruction of valuing or even believing that such a thing as truth, of reality matters. 

 

Here's a link to the English version of it. 

Fratelli Tutti  

Just one example that resonated for me:

 14. These are the new forms of cultural colonization. Let us not forget that “peoples that abandon their tradition and, either from a craze to mimic others or to foment violence, or from unpardonable negligence or apathy, allow others to rob their very soul, end up losing not only their spiritual identity but also their moral consistency and, in the end, their intellectual, economic and political independence”.  One effective way to weaken historical consciousness, critical thinking, the struggle for justice and the processes of integration is to empty great words of their meaning or to manipulate them. Nowadays, what do certain words like democracy, freedom, justice or unity really mean? They have been bent and shaped to serve as tools for domination, as meaningless tags that can be used to justify any action.

 

Remember this as you listen to the hearings in which Amy Coney Barrett will, I have every confidence, along with the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee "empty great words of their meaning,' or "manipulate them," including those in that paragraph and similar ones.

Trump And The Senate Republicans Are Putting A Hate Group Figure On The Court

Here is a video about the regrettably former Senator Al Franken questioning Amy Coney Barrett about her repeatedly accepting money to speak to a hate group masquerading as a "freedom" group.

I don't believe her claim that she was unaware of the nature of the group she accepted money fromm,  I never believe these lawyers who claim that they were, somehow, an innocent victim of a group that spouts many of the same beliefs they do, many of the same positions, supports many of the same political figures from their political party.  I think she was lying through her teeth, I think she knew exactly who she was taking money from and why they wanted her to talk, putting words in their lawyers' mouths to use in court and on TV to push a hate agenda.  The very reason that Republican-fascists want her on the court is her use of these issues to gain power for their fascist agenda.   She will join other Republican-haters on the federal judiciary to push a hate agenda using the words of the 18th century slavery protecting Constitution to undo any and all progress made against that.  Given her extreme views of women being subjugated to men, something more out of the imagination of Margaret Atwood than I'd have thought would become a real danger, I wouldn't now hold that to be entirely in the realm of fiction.   I will point out that this is a person who Notre Dame law school has had on its faculty for a long time, elite Catholic education is a moral atrocity.