The Roberts Court Is Taking The Marbury Powers Places All Of Its Champions From Marshall To Taney . . . They Could Not Have Predicted Such A Degenerate Court As Would Issue Trump v USA

I WILL NOT be posting more installments of this series going through the extremely careful and honest AND ABSOLUTELY TIMELY IN JULY 2026 article by Louis Boudin,  Government by Judiciary over the weekend.    I know that readership of such things goes down on weekends and holidays and this is about as important and serious a topic as we have before us.   

As was noted a hundred fifteen years ago by Louis Boudin, even the total success by even mere early 20th century "progressives" could not be guaranteed by their winning control of the Congress and the presidency because any laws they passed by the indisputably prescribed means laid out in the Constitution would reliably be annulled (annulling a duly enacted piece of legislation is an explicitly legislative action) by the Supreme Court under the usurped powers adopted by no Congress, the combined legislatures of the several states, by a massive referendum victory by Voters but by the assertion of fewer than ten appointed members of the Supreme Court in 1803.* 

The things which Boudin and those on his side of this question struggled against in the first decades of the 20th Century,  a reaction to decades of reactionary Supreme Courts,  anti-worker, anti-Women, anti-Black, anti-minority, PRO-MILLIONAIRE, PRO-CORPORATION, PRO-WHITE SUPREMACY "justices" acting under the Marbury Power, are exactly what we face today, only far worse. 

In 1911 faced a situation unlike that in which the likes of Marshall and Story who, having created that power out of thin air were careful not to cite it in the series of appalling rulings they made but after Taney et al who did use it in the most evil and disaster-provoking ruling the Court had made up till that time,  the Dred Scott decision and subsequent Courts went hog-wild on using that power which proved so evil and disastrous in its first important use.  They generally haven't had motives any higher than Taney's were.    

After the passage of the emergency Civil War Amendments, many previsions of which were passed to fulfill the broken promises of the Declaration of Independence,  what the Reverend King rightly called an unpaid "promissory note,"  and much of which was explicitly meant to nullify by Constitutional means the worst of the Dred Scott decision,  the Supreme Court twisted, lied about, nullified and turned especially the 14th Amendment on its head to achieve the political, economic and social goals of the robber barons, the gilded-age oligarchs, the pre and post-Plessey slavers and white supremacists - many of which could accurately describe members of the Court or those who were their patrons.   The contemporary questioning of the court at that time was a reaction to the terrible use of the Marbury power by the Court. 

If it hadn't been used primarily in the interests of the robber barons, the oligarchy,  white supremacists, it would never have been so vigorously protected against its critics.  As Boudin noted in the response I posted on Tuesday, the more evidence against it you put up, the more likely your article or book won't be published or taken seriously. 

The lying lore supporting the Marbury power and the other atrocities that the Supreme Court had practiced, with which it repeatedly handed victory to those who had been defeated in elections, overturning those winners of elections who passed even the mildest of provisions to ensure justice.  Especially economic justice - equality and making true that lie that is inscribed over the front of the Supreme Court's fascist marble palace - "Equal Justice Under Law - would not be the actual law of the United States,  

After the very brief and entirely atypical years of the Warren Court and, to a lesser extent, the Berger Courts, we have been for most of the past half-century in a period of Supreme Court right-wing activism which steadily gained steam after the appointments of Nixon,  Reagan, Bush I, Bush II and Trump where the Court under Roberts has outdone every previous Court in doing what the gilded-age Courts set the previous record for.  

Emboldened by the Rehnquist Court's stealing an election for their majorities party in 2000 - an action so blatant and repulsive that two of the Republicans sitting on the court dissented from it along with Democratic appointees - the Roberts Court is taking the Marbury powers places that I doubt all of its champions from Marshall and Taney up to and including the associate Justice who Boudin spent most of his article refuting decisively, could not have intended.  They could not have predicted such a degenerate Court as would issue Trump v USA which coronated Trump a monarch immune from prosecution and rendered the now so-called "Department of 'justice'" his secret and personal lawyers.   And that's only one of the many actions of the Roberts Court which could be listed.  Apart from those giving control of Womens' bodies over to state legislators - resulting in deaths and bodily harm to Women - the nullification of the Voters Rights Act, provisions of the Civil Rights Acts and other actions by which they have revived the American apartheid system which the earlier "justices" would have supported. 

The agitation to once and for all nullify Marbury by Congressional action, executive action (certainly made far riskier by the Supreme Court's own remarkably corrupt and epically stupid decisions) and a combination of the two which Boudin noted was an entirely honest way to do what was almost certainly neither required by the truth being told about the Constitution and certainly would be rendered impossible by the prescribed means of amendment of the Constitution the refusal of a president and Congress to allow that Court usurpation of power, the engine of the greatest corruption and evil that that Court has done to keep going along with it. 

What Boudin and his colleagues had to say in reaction to a century the legislating Court then is made a century MORE needed today because the Court's corruption has gone on a century longer than was long enough, already.   

For today I'll give Boudin's statement of Judge Lurton's claims in an article which he wrote in reaction to.  I will break in with comments.   I should mention that I've tried to type out exactly what Boudin wrote - I don't catch every typo or elision though I don't think I've let any pass through, so far - but I have made paragraph breaks in places the printed article doesn't for ease of reading and for emphasis in places I think that emphasis is made newly exigent due to the dangers the Court has produced. 

But this is by no means admitted by the other side. Indeed, it is emphatically denied, at least as far as the conclusions are concerned.

Some time after Mr. Roosevelt delivered his famous speech at Denver, Mr. Justice Lurton, of the United States Supreme Court, delivered an address on the subject to the joint bar associations of Virginia and Maryland. That address was subsequently published as the leading article in the January issue of the North American Review, under the title: "A Government of Law or a Government of Men? " In that article the distinguished jurist states what may be termed the" conservative"position on the subject,  which is diametrically opposed to that just stated. 

Judge Lurton categorically denies that the courts now exercise any legislative powers,that is to say, powers involving the exercise of  discretion or the following out of political policies.

I have noted here a number of times a remark that the great, late Old Testament scholar and master Preacher Walter Brueggemann made that, oddly enough, the self-proclaimed  "textualist-originalist" the late Associate "justice" Antonin Scalia never found anything in his asserted non-discretionary reading of the text of the Constitution which didn't support exactly what Scalia wanted it to say.  The claim that the Supreme Court, unanswerable to any higher court, hasn't, from the time that Marshall was uniformly reading it to support his own economic self-interest as the most slave-holding of all the "justices" (same with Taney) and up to today when the wealthy members of today's Court have given Trump the power to fire and pack all boards of all so-called independent agencies EXCEPT THE ONE WHOSE PACKING MIGHT IMPACT THE SAFETY OF THEIR OWN INVESTMENTS AND, SO WEALTH are certainly exercising an especially corrupt form of discretion in their asserted reading of the Constitution and the laws and statutes, etc. 

Seeing the actions of the Supreme Court, many, though not all of the lower courts, the refusal of bar associations to cancel the licenses of some of the most corrupt gangster lawyers in an effectivly timely fasion, . . . the cowardly ass-covering of lawyers in their testimony in front of Congress, as opposed to military officers and diplomats (the first Trump impeachment inquiries), the false promises of effective protection all during Trump I which would be delivered by the likes of Robert Mueller, other legal actions taken by even honest lawyers and right down to my shock at hearing a lawyer I still consider to be an honest and honorable one assert that there is such a thing as a "right to lie,"  I think the entire legal profession, from the lowest of the low (such as Micheal Cohen) right up to the top,  Sotomayor, Brown-Jackson, is corrupted by the ubiquitous permission of lawyers to lie on behalf of their clients or their own interest.   After the shattering corruption of the legal profession that I've witnessed,   I don't think anyone who has made an honest assessment of it has any reason, whatsoever to put more trust in the judiciary than in the reputedly corrupt Congress.   I will say there are SOME state legislatures I have somewhat more trust in but in a very large number of states,  and not all of them those in the traitorous Confederate states, I don't trust any more than I trust the Roberts Court. 
 

He asserts heroically that,in declaring legislation unconstitutional,  our courts merely  apply the law as they find it plainly written in the Constitution,precisely as any court applies the law in any ordinary judgment. He then proceeds to defend this power generally, and he closes with an appeal to his
readers to:

"rejoice that in standing by the institutions made us the most law-abiding people on the earth, that we are walking in the footsteps of our fathers when we maintain in letter and spirit that division of the great functions of government which the men of Massachusetts and the men of Virginia and the men of Maryland declared with Montesquieu to be the best security for a government of laws and the only safeguard against a return to a government of men."

Today it is only necessary to cite the gun-murder rates of the United States to say that Lurton's claims were a bald-faced lie of the type that is a lawyers' mother tongue.   And that was even before the Supreme Court legalized the reign of corruption which Trump II has been,  the Roberts Court issuing that ruling AFTER THE MASSIVE CRIME AND CORRUPTION OF TRUMP I, BUSH II, BUSH I (Roberts was thick as thieves with the action of George H.W. Bush to pardon his ass out of criminal investigation) and the previous holders of records of members of an administration convicted of felonies,  Reagan and Richard Nixon. 

Even in 1911,  Lurton was lying like the corporate lawyer he was. 

I will give you the rest of Boudin's introduction to his hands-down winning case only asking you to either believe me, for now, that he does demolish Lurton or to read the rest of his article, yourself or, better, to read the two volumes of Government by Judiciary which he anticipated in this article: "Indeed, the evidence against some of them is so overwhelming that its complete presentation would require several volumes."

Judge Lurton's appeal to American traditions puts his opponents in the awkward position of unpatriotic men,trying  to undo the work of the great men who established this government,  and of reactionaries, attempting to abolish one of the most effective safeguards of our free institutions against the tyranny " government of men." 

It is, therefore, but fair that we should inquire into the facts of the case, historical and contemporary, and compare them with the assertions on which Judge Lurton bases his conclusions, in an endeavor to arrive at an independent judgement as to whether or not his conclusions are warranted by the facts of the case. 

The salient points of Judge Lurton's argument, asserted by him as matters of fact, are as follows:

(1) That the framers of the Constitution, owing to their philosophical training in the school of Montesquieu and the governmental usage of the states prior to the adoption of the  United States Constitution, considered it necessary to invest the judiciary with the power to annul legislation whenever the judges should find it to be unconstitutional. 

(2)  That by the constitution framed by them, they intended to invest, and did in fact invest the judiciary with such power.

(3)  That the judiciary of this country has exercised that power ever since, in the manner in which the framers of the Constitution intended it to be exercised, without any change; and that the exercise of this power for "more than a century" has made us "the most law-abiding people of the earth."

(4) That the rules of "constitutional construction" applied by our sourts in the exercise of this power are so plain and simple that their application does not, in fact, involve any element of discretion; and that the courts, therefore, never have exercised, nor do they now exercise, any legislative powers in annulling legislative acts on the ground of alleged unconstitutionality.

On this last point, which is perhaps the most important,  Judge Lurton says:

" There is nothing in the past history of either the National or State judiciary which gives sanction to any such abuse of power or supports an expectation that the function of interpreting will be tortured into an exercise of legislative power.  The rules of construction are plain and simple of application.  They are in substance identical, whether the instrument of interpretation to be a statute or a contract." 

A careful examination of "the facts of the case," it seems to me, will show conclusively that each and every one of these propositions is erroneous.  Indeed, the evidence against some of them is so overwhelming that its complete presentation would require several volumes.  It is my purpose in the following pages to take up Judge Lurton's position point by point, and to present as much of what I consider to be the evidence against it as may be compressed into the narrow limits of a magazine essay.  An examination of these points, in the order stated by me, will also serve to present to the reader a historical picture of the growth of the power under consideration, showing its gradual development and the vast, indeed revolutionary, changes which have taken place in its application.  And this examination will, it seems to me, establish conclusively at least two points: first, that the power under consideration did not emerge in its present form from the rains of the framers, as Minerva sprang, fully panoplied, from the head of Jupiter;  and , second, that the epithet "revolutionary," applied by Judge Lurton to the demands of the progressives, could be more fitly applied to the latest actions of our courts. 

Question And Answer

Q:  Why do you hate Merrick Garland so much?

A:  I don't hate him,  I absolutely disdain him for his lawyerly cowardice and double standard,  holding "little people" to a standard of justice that he was too cowardly to try with the rich, the powerful, the Republican-fascist.    Like other elite lawyers who were held up as heroes such as Robert Mueller, like the large majority of the judiciary, EVEN THOSE IN WHOSE COURTROOMS TRUMP WAS FOUND LIABLE AND GUILTY OF FELONIES,  they are cowards or worse,  ministers of injustice who rarely hold the rich, the white, the male, the powerful to the same standards of justice that the poor, the Brown and Black, Women, those whithout power,  Merrick Garland has no credibility if the subject is real justice.   He was the most non-feasant of Democratic Attorneys General when the time of his term was the one that required courage and holding the most dangerous man in the United States, probably in its history,  Donald Trump to the letter of the law.  As I said he wasn't the only one who did that, lawyers from the bottom of the profession up through the elites,  lawyers in the Congress, lawyers in the Department of "Justice,"  lawyers who became judges and "justices" all did what Roy Cohn taught Trump his colleagues and the judges would do,  let him get away with everything, now even murder. 

The Inherent Corruption Of Our Presidential System Permits Trump To Steal Billions From Us

IT ISN'T POSSIBLE to assess how valuable that Senator Ruben Gallego may be to the citizens of the United States but his exposure of what should be a criminal scheme among Trump, Bondi-Blanche and the guy who you want to wipe the smug look off his corrupt lying face,  Bessent, to hand over ten-billion dollars to Trump was invaluable.  That exposure leaves a slim and faint hope that exposure may have delayed the money grab just long enough. 

Trump's ten billion dollar theft (on top of tens of millions already stolen) will be facilitated by HIS Department of "justice" and HIS Department of Treasury unless the worst president in American history dies before he completes the theft,  THAT BECAME APPARENT IN BESSENT'S FILIBUSTERING NON-RESPONSE TO SENATOR GALLEGO.   I hope a future Democratic House or Senate gets that piece of crap before them again to force him to answer questions and to hold him in contempt - the kind that doesn't depend on the corruption of a Republican-fascist "justice" department or the cowardice of a future Democratic Department of "justice" to send his billionaire ass to prison.   

And I hope if he goes to prison it's not on of those country-club ones which, by the way, should be abolished.   White collar criminals are some of the worst there are and they should do time as hard as the most destitute person convicted.

Before going on "HIS" above is to point out the fact that if the Attorney General is appointed by the sitting president and who can fire them at will,  the lie that the Department of Justice is in any way reliably not the sitting president's law firm depends entirely and absolutely on that president acting as Biden did in not exercising that control.  Republicans since Eisenhower have shown that they, consistently, will use the it as, if not the president's personal law firm, then the Republican parties and the oligarchs and, now, the white supremacists who are essential to their party's success.   The pious notion to the contrary is a piously told and transparent lie. 

But back to topic.  Now that the Trump crime spree has set up this scheme for Trump to grab ten billion dollars you can't ever depend on some future change in the mere law to stop it.  After the Nixon crime spree, including by the Department of "justice" under the Attorney General who eventually went to prison for his part in it, some very good anti-corruption laws, through restricting political money were adopted and destroyed by the Supreme Court, in a case brought by the overtly fascistic James Buckley.   There will never be such a thing as an honest Republican administration, again, that party has become so entrenched in oligarchic corruption that every future one will be open to the same practices.   That is unless the basic form of government of the United States is changed in the Constitution - those changes including taking the power to nullify federal laws from the almost certainly guaranteed to be corrupt or cowardly or just plain stupid Supreme Court.  

Under our system the Department of "justice" is only as clean as those in it choose to be, being staffed by the president and acting at his whim,  we have seen through successive Republican administrations since Nixon that they will generally be corrupt, in a line of Do"j" officials, starting with John Mitchell,  William French Smith, Ed Meese,  William Barr,* John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzales, Michael Mukasey,   Jeff Sessions,  Matthew Whitaker, William Barr (again) and on to Bondi with slightly lower levels like Blanche in all of those Republican administrations,  that pattern is firmly established with a few, arguably less corrupt examples in between.    I would be tempted to site Gerald Ford's Attorney General, Edward Levi as an exception to that rule if it were not for the fact that he had Rudy Giuliani, Robert Bork and Antonin Scalia working under him.  No truly honest person would have such consistent bad judgement as that. 

LOOK AT THAT LIST OF DULY, CONSTITUTIONALLY APPOINTED AND SENATE APPROVED (WITH THE EXCEPTION OF WHITAKER) CRIMINALS AND SLEAZEBAGS.  Look at it and the more than a half-century of American history they represent with the knowledge what has been permitted under the Constitution is, in fact, what the Constitution is in reality instead of law-scholar, civics-text book lies.  

Any system in which the criminal investigations and prosecution department is under the control of a self-interested, guaranteed to be partisan branch of the government is open to direct corruption of the kind that has flourished under every Republican president since Eisenhower and that corruption could be matched with the lack of courage and judgement of a number of those under Democratic administrations,  Reno, Garland, . . . 

I was curious to know if there was ever another instance like Trump's ten billion dollar grab by a sitting head of state in a modern democracy and found no instance of looking all weekend.   The closest I found was when the ex- Prime Minister of Canada,  the one often cited as the worst PM in Canadian history Brian Mulroney sued when the RCMP accused him of corruption in the infamous Airbus scandal which, from everything I can see Mulroney was guilty of corruption in.  The Jean Chrétien government settling with the criminal was, no doubt, an act of short term political expediency when taking a chance on defending the case would probably have served the country and history better in the long term.   I wish I'd written down in my notes who it was who, after he had left office, said they'd never believe a word that Mulroney said because he was an habitual liar,  but going into that will only get me into the permissive handling of lies under our system of government.   By American standards, by the way,  Mulroney would have never come close to being the worst president, he'd have lingered somewhere in the middle. 

The framers of the Constitution,  a pretty corrupt lot, themselves, probably didn't believe there would come a time when the regime of corruption represented in that list of Attorneys General above would become the norm for the government they were forming,  they certainly couldn't imagine a Supreme Court - armed with a self-created power that they never put in the Constitution - would turn the American president into a criminally impune monarch of the kind they'd explicitly thrown off in the Revolution.   But such is the inherently wrong assumptions they had about government, to start with in their novel scheme of "balanced powers" and the country continuing in the direction of good governance under a republic they believed, wrongly, that they'd sent the ship of state in that the very things they created have been corrupted UNDER THE VERY RULES THEY ESTABLISHED.  

There is always a potential of corruption under any scheme of governance but one that puts the investigation and prosecution of crimes AND THE SETTLEMENT OF CIVIL CLAIMS BY THE SITTING OR PAST EXECUTIVE in the hands of POLITICAL APPOINTEES BY THE VERY MAN WHO COMMITS THOSE CRIMES OR BRINGS THOSE CLAIMS, is a guarantee of corruption and theft.   I can't believe they couldn't imagine such corrupt partisans as Bondi,  Blanche and Bessent being a possibility - along with such criminals having the power to hollow out experienced, career investigators and prosecutors as has come to maturity and instant rot in Trump II - but that is the consequence of the presidential system they set up.   I have not taken the time to see if such consequences were predicted by the Anti-federalists but it is such an obvious problem with how the Department of "justice" and other agencies under the presidential system that someone could not have noticed it as a possibility.

Depending on the. . . um. . . "honor" of lawyers and politicians to avoid the kind of corruption that Trump has installed and will certainly profit from, unless he dies before Bessent gives him the ten billion, can't ever be depended on again.  Like the corrupt Rehnquist and Roberts Court, once a road has been cut through the make-believe lore of the Constitution and through those most stupidly depended on entities such as "norms" that road will ever remain open UNTIL THE CONSTITUTION IS EFFECTIVELY CHANGED TO PREVENT A FUTURE COURT TO OPEN THEM UP AGAIN.   To prevent that the Marbury power-grab of 1803 has to be forever nullified in the clearest and most effective ways.   I think to do that there will have to be a fixed an limited term or membership of the Court with a lifetime ban on ex-"justices" profiting from rulings they've made from the bench.  One with real prison terms attached, to be served in real prisons. 

Our system is totally corrupt,  this scheme of Trump to give himself (and he's said it in those terms, himself) ten billion dollars through his corrupt appointees is the total and final collapse of the "honors" system that has, so far, kept that level of corruption at bay.   From here on if we don't override the cowardice and corruption of the lawyers, and those in the House and, especially, the Senate will be a major hurdle to ending that corruption, and the witless foolishness of the "balance of powers"  the American Republic will be destroyed by the things already proven to be possible "under the Constitution."  The first step is we have to stop worshiping it and the slave-holders and corrupt financiers who wrote it and the corrupt "justices" that amended it at their whim, starting with the Marbury power grab.

I live to, among other things, be able to report the happy news that Trump has died and gone to hell,  that, among so many others, his thugs like Todd Blanche are disbarred and behind bars and that that monumental FAGA asshole Bessent has the smug smile wiped from his stupid billionaire face as he is perp walked.   I doubt it will happen, the American "justice" system seldom does to hold the biggest, white collar criminals accountable.  Probably only the first one will happen, divine justice being what "justice" under our system is not.  But I live in hope. 

* It should never be forgotten that even as his partisan, Republican corruption was in full flower, the man held up as being the white knight of American lawyers was best friends with the putrid, corrupt, fascistic William Barr.  The lavishly over-sold Robert Mueller, oversold in terms of integrity and honesty and devotion to the non-partisan application of the law played a huge role in my final disillusionent about the law and the legal profession.   

I Go Off On The Liberal Lawyers Of The Media - A Raw Comment Reposted At Meidas Touch

This is on the goddamned legal profession,  your fellow lawyers including the senior ranks of those sitting as judges and, especially that most corrupt bunch of them,  "justices" and their weaponization of delay and process which the rich and powerful benefit from even as the poorest find the "justice" system the most efficient passenger railroad service to prison and execution in the history of the country.    Look at how all of you guys have been guaranteeing us that the "justice" system was going to take care of things for the past ten years,  how we were to put our faith in the likes of Robert Mueller,  then the "restored" DoJ under Merrick Garland, then, finally, when he got around to appointing Jack Smith that justice would be done only to have Trump's liar-lawyers working in cahoots with judges and even some somewhat honest judges got him off again.   And you said similar things about the state prosecutions in Georgia and New York.   EVEN WHEN HE WAS CONVICTED IN NEW YORK, HE GOT OFF.     You guys should start being honest that all of this starts in the practices and habits and lore and myths of your profession.   Most of all it starts with turning lying into an allowed practice, then a professional obligation and, in the end what got lawyers paid the big bucks and, as can be seen in the case of the top positions in your profession ON TO THE SUPREME COURT.  

Why Isn't Anyone Mentioning Louis Freeh In Regard To The Enabling Of Epstein And Maxwell?

LISTENING TO THE LATEST information from Maria Farmer, one of the sisters who first informed the FBI about the Epstein pedophile rape ring only to have the FBI ignore their report for years,  I have to wonder why no one is asking what role the then FBI director, Louis Freeh had in facilitating the continued abduction, rape and trafficking of children after HIS FBI did exactly that.  

Along with Janet Reno as Attorney General, Bill Clinton's appointment of the DC establishment-media darling Louis Freeh as the director of the FBI have to stand as his worst appointments.   But what can a Democratic president who appoints a frickin' Republican to head the FBI expect?   By that time the Republican Party was well on its way to becoming the anti-democratic as well as anti-Democratic, fascist party it has become.  I can't believe that it was solely due to the deliberate idiocy of the legal profession that pretends that "the law" is above politics because Clinton certainly should have known better by then.  Though I've come to never underestimate the power of training in the law to allow you to pretend to not know what you know very well. *  

Maybe I'll rehash the vileness of Freeh another time but let me get to the other obvious figure who should be questioned and investigated as to what he knew about the enabling by his bureau of the massive child-rape-trafficking-blackmail ring with clear international features to it,  Freeh's successor, the absurdly lauded and idolized Robert Mueller.    His FBI sat on the same information from the Farmer sisters that Freeh's did.   

I will stand second to no one in my criticism of the epic malfeasance trough nonfeasance of Merrick Garland who should go down in history as the man who cared more for his own reputation than for American democracy or even the rule of law but he doesn't stand alone among those who could have saved countless children from being abducted, raped and trafficked by Epstein and Maxwell and the others who ran that child-rape-blackmail scheme.   I have enough disdain for all of those who facilitated that crime spree to continue and one of its major figures,  Trump to gain and regain power.   I find that the powers of disdain expand to the size of those who deserve it.   There are certainly others,  such as the politicians and scientists and figures of finance, etc. who knew about it all along.  I think there is every reason to believe that Bill Clinton was someone who was aware of it even as he did nothing to stop it.  He may have never gone to the island but he was no babe in the woods.   I will remind you Republicans who troll me that I have said from the start if Bill Clinton raped children they should lock him up and throw away the key.  I say the same for everyone who did that,  I don't believe that pedophiles can ever be safely assumed to reform.   Though I'm sure there are some who give it up,  I doubt most do. 

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

* Which brings me to that other major figure of both those accused of pedophile abuse and getting Epstein off so he could continue raping and trafficking and blackmailing for years,  Dershowitz.   Someone didn't care for me talking about what a damned liar he is and how that kind of lying is not only typical of those who take up the profession of lawyering, learning not only how to lie your lying face off to the media and only slightly reigned in in court so as to gull jurors from master liars such as Dershowitz at law schools such as Harvard where he taught the art of lying and Yale, where he learned it.  

I don't think I had listened to this exchange between that expert in the lies of Dershowitz  Norman Finkelstein and Katie Halper before the other day - I listen to way too many such things - but he had about the best explanation of how that works in regard to the epic lying of Dershowitz and how academia, which considers the minor sin of alleged plagiarism as a mortal sin that damns the accused for eternity even as it gives a pass to the most flagrant of lying by their faculty members, even those who get their lying puss on TV so much that they come to represent some place like Harvard Law. 

  Finkelstein's analysis that Dershowitz can both know he's lying while believing that his lies are true may be over psychologizing it,  I think he's just a shameless liar who knows he'll get away with it because a. Harvard isn't going to punish him for it,  they won't even investigate it, b. the media he lies in isn't going to make him pay in any way for it, c. he tells lies he knows he'll be rewarded for telling, d. he's got absolutely no moral core.   I can't imagine he has not lied in court to a jury and he's gotten away with it,  as I have said,  the legal profession, including judges and, probably most of all "justices" have elevated lying by lawyers into what passes as an ethical obligation.    I will point out that all of the men other than Epstein named above were trained as lawyers, all of them products of elite, private universities and law schools - they didn't graduate from some lesser regarded school, perhaps they'd have something like a chance of being less dishonest if they had.  

Those stupid shows that have led Americans to have an absurdly high respect for what is a pretty grimy profession,  everything from Perry Mason to the newer ones and movies like To Kill A Mockingbird have sold us a ridiculous image of lawyers.   I tell that truth because there is no hope of there ever being a reform of it unless those of us outside of that racket see through it and demand change.   Lawyers will never ever reform themselves, not even those who may disdain lying themselves because they know that they'd suffer professionally if they admitted what a bunch of fucking liars their colleagues are. 

And while we're at it,  I want to know which governments were in on it.  And what other child raping and trafficking and blackmailing rackets are there.  Between just those known here and in the UK, I have every confidence that those are the tip of a shitberg.   The elites seem to like to rape children.  Which is just one of the reasons why we should level elites out of existence.

I Will Admit That Until The Last Couple Of Days

it didn't occur to me to research the ways in which modern democracies, as distinguished from the very late medieval one* we managed to once have eked out of the U.S. Constitutional system, have sought to distance the investigation and prosecution of crimes from the kind of political manipulation that is built into the U.S. system.   

I will acknowledge that to one extent of another,  the U.S. system has been utterly reliant on the sense of morality (huh!) and honor (ha!) felt by the politicians and lawyers (and judges[ha!ha!]) who manned the government and the so-called Department of Justice and the judiciary at any given time or at least on their fear of effective consequences for delivering injustice but as we have seen increasingly since Nixon had what was once the most overtly criminal Attorney General,  John Mitchell who was never anything as obvious a law breaker as what Republicans have appointed since then and what you can be sure the "honorable" Roberts Court (give me a frickin' break!) would allow to be done now as it is unillegalizing all manner of crimes for the Trump crime spree of all times.  

I did look up to see at least a description of how Britain separates its  Crown Prosecution Service from the direct manipulation of the Prime Minister this morning and wondered if I should look at other democracies to see how they have done it as a clue as to what might work better than our obviously catastrophically failed system.   That failure long predates Trump,  it having been obviously in serious trouble under Bush I and II, something which certainly dates back to when Reagan had the crooked Ed Meese as his AG.   Meese was never prosecuted - the reluctance of prosecutors to prosecute the white, the male, the straight the rich and the power-linked is an intrinsic problem of all prosecution offices, I suspect - but he was certainly enough of a sleazebag that even back in Reagan's once record-breaking law-breaker administration, he had to resign.  I will say any Department of "Justice" that could harbor and nurture the likes of Bill Barr operates under rules that are seriously defective and, remember, he was once the duly Senate approved Attorney General of the United States.    And don't get me started on the to-be-held-as-honorable Robert Mueller,  Barr's good buddy all during his entirely sleazy, certainly often dubiously legal career.   "Honor" in such circles is entirely of the ersatz kind. 

I haven't looked far enough into the antifederalists to see if any of them addressed the glaring problem of having a president appoint the head of prosecution who, like all of the president's cabinet has a vested interest in not noticing law breaking by the president and their fellow cabinet members,  I would suspect that the blatant criminality of our system will never go back to something that kinda worked under the honors system,  Republican-fascists of the kind who man the DoJ and the Supreme Court have the same relationship with "honor" as Trump,  it's all a matter of appearance or at least a con job and transaction on those bases.   

Anyone with any ideas on how other countries have at least made an improvement over our totally failed system is welcomed to let me know at least where to look for that.   I'd have to see how it works in reality instead of on the stated intentionality of the thing,  ours is so obviously an open invitation to corruption that I'm kind of shocked that a lawyer like John Adams had such a role in creating it.   Maybe he figured everyone would be as honorable as he liked to think he was and Washington was alleged to be.**  Or maybe, him being a lawyer, after all, his sense of honor was entirely consonant with the filth that that profession regularly perfumes and whitewashes.  

* I think any Constiutional system that included overt slavery should be considered late medieval and ours had and still has those slave-power enabling features baked into it. 

** No figure who held people in slavery or sanctioned slavery has any right to be considered honorable, not even in history.   Washington held People in slavery his entire lifetime, he tried to gull Ona Judge back into slavery after she escaped while they were in Philadelphia.  She was not safe from that until he and Martha who was her enslaver were dead.     I believe I'm correct that if she had gone back to her,  she would have ended her days under the particularly cruel and brutal enslaver Robert E. Lee,  as the inheritance of Martha's great granddaughter.   In the end, the Washington's were no better than he was and he was notably more cruel, making it his practice of breaking up every enslaved family under his ownership.   I don't hold with telling history on the terms that slave holders and other criminals would have it told in.   It is an indictment of our culture and system that Lee died as an officially honorable man, peddled as such in a library full of lying books and a filmography of even more lying movies and TV shows.  

If The Department Of Justice Had That Trump Birthday Card To Epstein Why Wasn't It Made Public

during the four years that Merrick Garland was the Attorney General Of The United States?   The four years when the Garland "Justice Department" didn't bring charges against any of the child rapists or associated pimps involved in the Jeffrey Epstein crime spree that lasted for decades in plain sight of the rich and powerful BECAUSE MANY OF THE THE RICH AND POWERFUL WERE ALL IN ON JEFFREY EPSTEIN CRIME SPREE OF CHILD TRAFFICKING AND RAPING AND,  ALMOST CERTAINLY, BLACKMAILING THE RICH AND POWERFUL MEN WHO RAPED THEM ON THE VIDEOS HE CLEARLY COLLECTED.   They flew on his jet, the "Lolita express,"* they joked about his sexual escapades,  certainly we know that that was all known to law enforcement after the first legal action, finally, at long last taken against him what with the sweetheart deal that the corrupt Florida-Harvard product Alexander Acosta made with him which his pimpess Ghislane Maxwell may well get the Roberts Court to spring her from the insufficient 20 year sentence she got when she was tried for her crimes.   In the reports breaking today,  it is often pointed out that the current AG the Florida figure Pam Bondi certainly knows much if not all of the evidence,  the same was certainly true of the previous Trump AG William Barr under whom and almost contemporaneously with a visit to him with Epstein in prison and Epstein's supposed suicide in prison.   We know that Barr had a long connection to Epstein because his father gave Epstein his first big job "teaching" math and physics at the elite prep school Barr's father was the head of,  a job given to a young man who didn't have a bachelors degree for a position that generally requires those who get them have a graduate degree,  not atypically a PhD in the relevant subject.  

My question or why, since the Department of "Justice" had this evidence for the four years Garland was the Attorney General didn't he make it public and end Trump's crime spree AND HIS CONTINUAL CAMPAIGN TO MAKE THE COMEBACK HE CERTAINLY HAS SUCCEEDED IN and saving the United States, the many victims in the United States, those across the world who are already dying due to the actions of those in the Trump II regime will, certainly,  have an answer that includes "rules." "Rules" of how to handle evidence, "rules" of lawyerly scrupulosity,  all kinds of rules cooked up by lawyers and groups of lawyers and maybe a few by the senior members of that sleazy profession, the judges and maybe even "justices" that may have led to Garland or other lawyers suffering professional rebuke or damage - the kind of damage that politicians of any legitimate repute are expected to take to do the right thing in their profession.    If there's one thing we know about Garland and many of the lawyers in those positions they care about nothing more than their professions and their careers and their professional and, so, social positions.   

Garland had chance after chance to take down Trump and he dithered and delayed until he finally appointed someone else to do it far too late for that to work.    I won't go into the help he had in making sure Trump got away with the greatest crimes of the thousands he'd committed up till that time -IN ORDER THAT HE NOT HAVE THE CHANCE TO COMMIT THE CRIMES HE IS COMMITTING RIGHT NOW AS PRESIDENT - that help given him by the "rules" he and his gangster lawyers have manipulated Trump's entire life to get him off of answering for his crimes and the many instances of him robbing contractors and others,  of colluding with organized criminals here and from the Putin regime, laundering money for them, etc.   Many of the greatest enablers of Donald Trump, in his life of crime and cheating, in his first chance as president, after leading an insurrection to destroy American democracy and his successfully getting another chance to do it again have been judges and, especially, the "justices" of the goddamned Roberts Court - lawyers all, all "officers of the courts" all of them allegedly in the business of "justice."   

American democracy, the victims of the Trump II crime wave have been more ill served by the lawyers, the legal profession, the great fraternity of the law than they have any foreign adversary.   We have all been a victim of the "rules" that are used by an excuse by those professional ass-coverers and cowards with LL.D or JD after their names.    They have, with almost no exceptions, been careerist cowards when they aren't actual colluders in the the crimes of Trump,  just as the infamous and powerful Roy Cohn was,  the man who taught Trump all about evading responsibility for crimes and civil wrongs through using the rules and the courts (judges scheduling light work days for themselves, for example) - the only thing that Trump has ever actually mastered.   His crimes and wrongs have been known to his lawyers and the judges who have dealt with the evidence of those for more than half a century.   They have never held him to real account for them.  

I have no doubt that virtually any lawyer who is currently a member of the Republican Party,  the fully fascist party which isn't the merely corrupt party of their fathers and grandfathers, will never do anything to save American democracy, something I had long ago figured out.  If I'd had any notion that there was even one of those who were the brave and stalwart figures of public virtue the activities of Robert Mueller and the accommodation he gave to his good friend William Barr when Barr misrepresented and suppressed his report on his investigation into the crimes of Trump would have killed that off.   

Before the term of Merrick Garland I may have expected that non-Republicans might have put themselves slightly at risk to save the country,  I don't think that anymore.   I don't expect it of any lawyer,  these days the scruples and adherence to "the rules" by Democrats with law degrees in the Congress and as president give me nightmares that if, by some miracle, Democrats are in a position to save American democracy that their legal training and adherence to Garland style scruples will lead them to, like Obama, like, I am sorry to say,  Joe Biden, waste the opportunity that the American voters gave them.    I will say that I think it was Biden's principled adherence to not getting involved with the so-called Department of Justice, to not interfere with them that leads me to think there is a good chance that he had far, far less knowledge of the evidence in the Epstein case than the man he sentimentally appointed to be Attorney General did.  If there is something I fault Biden for it was him giving the man Obama nominated to the Supreme Court and who the Republican-fascists wouldn't even talk to as they prevented the Black President from practicing the full extent of his granted powers the consolation prize of being Attorney General.   Garland was Biden's worst appointment and it couldn't have been more disastrously consequential for the country.  But he isn't alone in that,  it's a long, long lifetime ago that a Democrat appointed a really good Attorney General, and I'm not talking about Bobby Kennedy or Janet Reno. 

I may have confused a few people here the other day when I alluded to my contempt for the legal profession.   I hope I've explained that in a bit more detail,  this rant could have gone on a lot longer.  America's lawyers have done some of the greatest damage to this country,  especially those on Supreme Courts, in the Congress and as president.   It's a sleazy, rotten profession that exists primarily to make money from the deepest pockets, those like Trump and Epstein, and I think that corruption accounts for some of the greatest damage to the American People in our history.   It's certainly the case, today. 

Since we can see how far the Roberts Court has gone in enabling and servicing the power grab and crime spree of Trump II, on behalf of the stupidest, most incompetent and corrupt vulgarian who has ever held the office of president (we do live in history making times) imagine what they'll do for J.D. Vance once he has assumed office to give Trump the pardon he has, certainly, already negotiated with him for, just as Nixon certainly negotiated with Gerald Ford for.   Maybe Vance will expect to be given the Kennedy,  the 'Profiles in Courage" prize that Teddy and Caroline Kennedy gave Ford for doing one of the most damaging things ever to be done to the rule of law in the United States, pardoning Nixon half a century ago.   Both of the Kennedys were lawyers, Harvard products,  though Caroline got her LL.D. from another of the Ivys,  Columbia. 

P.S.  I should note that the piece of shit who is about to get a position on one of the Courts of Appeal,  Emil Bove, is a product of that Ivy Equivalent run by Jesuits,  Georgetown.  Another great example of the morality imparted by Catholic elite education. 

*  It should have been called the Humbert Express because that's who it mostly carried,  old men who raped young girls.   It should never be forgotten in this that the girls were not "Lolitas" the middle age male fantasy of a young teenage girl who has an uncontrollable desire to have sex with men old enough to be her grandfather.  The girls were gulled into a place of total powerlessness and raped by Epstein and Maxwell (it is reported that she participated in the actual sexual abuse with Epstein)  groomed to be trafficked by them to the disgusting old goats who raped them.   I have always held that that book by Nabokov was disgusting fiction, promoting child rape and the alibi of the men who rape them,  that they were seductresses who were in control of the situation.    It was exactly the same fiction, inverted, that Gore Vidal gave as an excuse for the pedophile priests who began to be exposed at the end of the his long and largely fictitious life.  He said that the boys who were raped were "young hustlers" and he, out of all of his irreligious character, claimed the rapist priests were their victims.   

If there were rapist victims in this,  they were those who Epstein and Maxwell almost certainly videotaped committing felonies and then blackmailed,  some of those named by those who have seen the evidence powerful figures in politics and finance - it is speculated that Epstein and Maxwell may well have made money peddling what they had to foreign and maybe U.S. intelligence services who certainly would use it to make those powerful men do what they wanted.   So Epstein and Maxwell may have had a hand in the corruption of governments in that manner.   Such elite victims are in positions to transfer the costs of what they did to other People,  WE ARE THE ONES WHO PAY FOR THEIR CRIMES.  Such are the ways of the civil and criminal law.   

I've heard the names of three prominent Democrats floated as possibly being named or even recorded in the Epstein evidence,  if that's true I say publish it and let them face the consequences.   If they did rape children supplied to them by Epstein,  lock them up and throw away the key.   Who knows who else is doing what Epstein and Maxwell did.   It's important to let those who did the raping as well know they're in danger of imprisonment for their crimes.   Maybe they can get a plea deal by telling the full extent of what they paid and to who in the blackmail that resulted.   Though that would certainly have involved them in committing other crimes to get their asses out of the sling Epstein got them to put their asses in. 

Trump And His Goons Create Terror Then The Media Helps Him Turn The Reaction Against It To His Dictatorial Advantage

TRUMP CREATED THE CONDITIONS that led to the, at first, relatively small reaction to one of his ICEstapo terror raids in Los Angeles.  For most People who aren't subjected to the conditions of those most vulnerable to that terror,  they have no idea how rapidly the routine reporting of immigrants has turned into part of that terror campaign. 

Just six months ago, an appointment to check in with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement would have seemed routine — go in, make sure the federal authorities have your information, receive a date to return and do it again in a year or so. 

Not anymore.

On this spring day, a 40-year-old woman approached the ICE check-in with trepidation. The woman, who asked that her name not be used for fear of government retaliation, thought it was likely she would be detained and deported.

She wasn't. 

But the ICE appointment itself now sends terror through immigrant families, many who have fled violent gangs and other conditions in Latin America. Many families  came to the United States to live simple lives, remain here legally, closely follow orders from the government, and yet live with the fear that any interaction with ICE could mean the family is separated.

The Trump administration is moving aggressively to remove immigrants across the country. Although it's not everyone's experience, for some, routine check-ins with ICE are turning into ambushes where they are taken into custody and swiftly removed from the United States, according to NCR interviews, immigration groups, members of Congress and media reports. 

Trumps thugs, under the criminals such as Homan and Noem, have been terrorizing everyone from the youngest children - some of them here for life saving medical treatment - to adults of all ages, arresting people in exactly the way some of them fled,  being kidnapped off the street by masked, armed men and dragged into unmarked vehicles and removed to one of Trump's buddies for-profit prisons in Lousiana or elsewhere, maybe thousands of miles from home without any legal representation,  sent to torture prisons in foreign countries - not unlike what the Bush II regime did though on a much larger scale and targeting far more People.   I remind Americans of that because this and the Supreme Court butchery of what we still cynically call the "Constitution" has been in the works through a number of Republican administrations and Supreme Court terms.  

The resistance to that terror by ICE and "Homeland Security" (you just knew that name was chosen by Bush II to normalize fascist terminology) in Los Angeles produced less disruption and violent reaction than a city gets when its home team wins a major game,  as Olbermann pointed out the other day, but Trump's brains,  Miller, most likely, saw it as an opportunity for him to get back at the Los Angels Latino Community for that date refusal in his teen years (Afrikaners needn't worry,  you're white so the racist little pinhead won't target you) and to try to whip it up into another opportunity for the Roberts Court to give Trump even more dictatorial powers - as I said his Reichstag Fire - KNOWING FULL, WELL THAT THE CORPORATE MEDIA IS ALL-IN ON THAT.   

We are a lot farther down the road to fascism than anyone still wants to believe,  we've been a lot farther down that road than anyone wanted to believe for the past quarter of a century and more - led there by the media,  Hollywood created Trump the powerful dictatorial CEO who turned thumbs up or down on the likes of Meat Loaf and then sold him to the racists who were pissed off at Dems for electing a Black Man as president, then nominating a Woman and then, after Joe Biden, a Black Woman, as president.   It was entertainment media that did the most to get us here,  though the infotanement division, the "news" division did its part, as if that's in any way not just part of the same thing. 

I don't know if we'll ever get back to the idea of a democracy but I do know one thing,  if we don't change the most basic parts of our Constitutional order which have brought us here, we will just see it all happen again.   I remember back in the late 1960s and early 70s, many a liberal and even many lefties and certainly moderates, thought that what should have been understood as our long term and powerful form of indigenous fascism, white supremacy, was down for the count and wouldn't get up again.  That was always a stupid notion, largely by white, affluent People who were never targets of American apartheid in any serious way.   Though white workers faced its ally in the other major power holders here,  the super rich,  they reliably focused on those even beneath them in the economic and political ranking.   That major fact of our history is little seen even though white supremacy has, in fact, always ruled a large number of American states and,  I would argue, has, in fact, had the power in just about all of them for most of our history.   I can't name one in which People of Color have not, for long periods, been held in legal second class or lower status and, even when legal discrimination has not been in place, then it was through social ostracism and institutional racism as practiced so notably by employers and lending institutions.   And the free press, the media, has been among the worst in enabling and maintaining that.   The fear and loathing of Latinos was a nightly feature of CNN as spewed by Lou Dobbs, year after year, as, in fact, fear and loathing of Palestinians has been,  "Arabs" to remind you of how the Bush II regime played the same media prepared racism so as to enhance its own power.   

Going back to a status quo which got you into a disaster is a particular lunacy of our Constitutional system.   Relying on the words and sayings of "the founders,"  "the framers" who, as must always be pointed out were aristocratic slave-holders and finaciers AND THOSE WHO HELD POOR WHITES IN WAGE-SLAVERY,  while ignoring the experience of living under the oppression and inequality made possible by Courts imposing those words on us in perpetuity is only a guarantee of getting you more of what you have gotten under it.   The words we live under have to change if you want to get shut of the oppression and inequality that the Supreme Court can always be certain to return us to NO MATTER HOW OFTEN THAT RAREST OF THINGS HAPPENS, THE CONGRESS WITH OR WITHOUT THE EXECUTIVE, TRIES TO MAKE OUR ELECTIONS HONEST OR TO MAKE THE UNITED STATES AN EGALITARIAN, AND SO, GENUINELY LEGITIMATE GOVERNMENT.    The Court has consistently abolished or twisted not only the regular and duly adopted law to turn things back to their favored unequal status quo for the privilege of those already privileged BUT ALSO TO ABOLISH THOSE PARTS OF THE CONSTITUTION THAT DON'T SERVICE THAT PRIVILEGE.     The Roberts Court, the faith stupidly put in such granite false front as Robert Mueller,  the willful idiocy of all those MSNBC style lawyers assuring us that the courts and Court would restrain Trump, and the history of serving that same corruption while posing as a force for progress by the lawyers of the ACLU have convinced me that the professional practices and motives of that profession are almost a guarantee that the end result will be in service of even the overtly violent and fascist status quo,  certainly those who have the most money because, as a number of lawyers I know told me,  they're taught and learn to always go for the deepest pockets.   

I don't trust any of them anymore, certainly not those who are always reassuring us that just getting back to the intentions of the founders and framers are going to get us somewhere doing that in the past has not gotten us yet.   Certainly not those who maintain we are to suffer this forever because of what they wrote centuries ago.   I suspect many a white person, such as myself, is going to be learning that before this is over.    I suspect most People of Color already understand something like that now.   You wonder why any Woman, whose body was put under the ownership of state legislatures in even the most white-supremacist-fascist states doesn't realize it most directly.  Maybe they're so used to terror that it feels normal to them.  Media indoctrination is certainly part of that, too. 

Hate Mail - Some Thoughts On The Pose Of Pretending To Not See The Most Obvious Distinctions When It Suits You - Hate Mail

AMONG THE THINGS I've grown entirely tired of there is none that is more tired than the pseudo-legalistic pose of "even-handed" treatment of entirely different and opposite things

Republican-fascists destroying egalitarian democracy - The Democratic Party,

anti-democratic ideologies, fascism, white supremacy (the same in the American context), Republican-fascism, Nazism, Marxism - egalitarian democracy

Violent insurrection against the legitimate electoral order - making the elected President, President according to law,

Lies - the truth,

Rampant evil - any level of morality,

The list could go on and on. 

The idiocy of refusing to make those kinds of distinctions is based in the "enlightenment" idea that nature is going to take care of everything in the end so People can safely pretend that they don't know the difference and that such distinctions are impossible to make on the level of mathematical certainty so we shouldn't bother - I maintain that that is the reason the idiots, Madison and others in the First Congress who scribbled the poesy of the First and other Bill of Rights Amendments were so inspecific as to leave corrupt judges and "justices" the ability to put blatant lies and hate speech on the same legal footing as the obvious truth and moral speech, the legal corruption that has gotten us where we are now.  Something they started doing in little and big ways almost from the start of judge-craft under the Constitution.

No where is that more obviously the case than in the courts* but "journalism" the "free press" is matching them and, in many cases, surpassing them in their "even-handed" treatment of obvious malignancy and anywhere from probable to certain benevolence.  I made the mistake of listening to NPR a bit during my recess and it was among the things about it that reminded me why I stopped giving to them two decades ago.  But that irresponsible non-feasant malfeasance is typical of the American media.  

The media in the United States is not a dependable friend of democracy,  it has been the most effective tool of the anti-democratic forces on the right and the calculated enablers of the anti-democratic "left" who are always ready to be the tool of the fascists.  But it's not only those who are corrupt and clueless, it's pretty much the foremost stand of the media that it's institutional prerogatives are never to sacrificed in the mere service of the truth, the public good, equality and, in the end, democracy.   In that they share the general habits of the legal industry, the lawyers, the prosecutors, the judges and the "justices" who go by or can credibly be labeled as "institutionalists,"   

I grew to despise that term during the Trump years as we were, over and over again, reassured by the media and their talking heads that this one or that one of Trump's goons were "institutionalists" who would never go past a certain point and so endanger the repute or alleged soundness of the institution to which they were attached.  I remember Comey being called that even as that hypocritical Republican boy-scout violated DoJ policy and threw the election to Trump in the last weeks of the campaign, I remember Rod Rosenstein being called that even as he appointed another famous fixture of the Department of "justice" the man of granite with feet of putty, Robert Mueller to conduct his investigation that never amounted to much even as even people I still have some respect for assured us he would not let it become the toy of his good buddy William Barr as he took over and Rosenstein did his stuffed dummy with the glass eyes acts as Barr lied about and suppressed Mueller's long waited for report.  And Mueller didn't do much more than that when he reluctantly appeared before the Congress to not much report on his report.

I further learned to despise it during the term of Merrick Garland when it has continued to be used.  I'm just about at the point of deciding that the case on that has been thrown and the jury will never come back on it.

In an honest, egalitarian democracy, there would be no "institutionalists" because they would hold as absolute bedrock that those institutions have no higher purpose than to serve egalitarian democracy, that the laws have no higher purpose than that and the service to the common good.  Without that the DoJ is no better under Garland than it was under the worst AGs, Sessions, Barr, Wittacker, John Mitchell, . . . you have to go way back before you can find any Democratic AGs who are as malignant as they are, though the media, especially the DC based Washington Press Whores will never acknowledge that fact.   

* A first draft of this went far into the "free speech" "justicing" that led to pitched legal battles over such matters as requirements for strippers to wear pasties and g-strings and that such bull shit was judged to be important "First Amendment" molehills such as idiot 1960s-> style "liberals" would stand and die on.   For those who object to me doubting the wisdom of the Warren Court and its stupidest rulings, of which there were quite a few.   Maybe I'll do more reading up on the speech of strip-joints and write what I started but it was so stupid I was wondering if the pain meds they had me on were doing the typing.  I have to wonder if those old white men sometimes wondered if they were in incipient dementia as they wrote and read that crap though the civil-libertarians who spouted it were just shameless paid-sills for it, no pasties or g-strings to hide their shamelessness.

Merrick Garland is little different from Robert Mueller, both are establishment hacks who value their own ease of career more than they do government of by and for The People. The establishment hacks are not going to protect us. Congress should start arresting and jailing those in contempt of their subpoenas themselves because waiting for Garland is more futile than waiting for Godot.

the internal liberation of human beings to live the responsible life before God is the only genuine way to overcome stupidity

Yet at this very point it becomes quite clear that only an act of liberation, not instruction, can overcome stupidity. Here we must come to terms with the fact that in most cases a genuine internal liberation becomes possible only when external liberation has preceded it. Until then we must abandon all attempts to convince the stupid person. This state of affairs explains why in such circumstances our attempts to know what ‘the people’ really think are in vain and why, under these circumstances, this question is so irrelevant for the person who is thinking and acting responsibly. The word of the Bible that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom declares that the internal liberation of human beings to live the responsible life before God is the only genuine way to overcome stupidity.
 

But these thoughts about stupidity also offer consolation in that they utterly forbid us to consider the majority of people to be stupid in every circumstance. It really will depend on whether those in power expect more from people’s stupidity than from their inner independence and wisdom.

"To live the responsible life," the idea of being responsible, in today's secularized, entertainment addled America seems almost a quaint notion.  Everything around us is an inducement to not be responsible.  When I read that one of the first things I thought of was the principled, scrupulous refusal of that empty granite suit, Robert Mueller, to break protocol and speak voluntarily and fully to those who were investigating the total corruption of our elections by those backing and around Donald Trump, certainly a pose of living "the responsible life" but one based on professional and conventional expediency and, so, devoid of really acting responsibly.  He was joined in that by a host of other well-spoken of figures, many of them lawyers obligated to uphold secular, civil law and even those who had taken an oath to "protect and defend the Constitution."  Such is the secular notion of the responsible life. 

The heroic witness and action and martyrdom of Dietrich Bonhoeffer give him credibility today, even with many who would reject the central aspect of all of that and his motivation his religion, his Christianity.   I have seen bits and snips of this passage used by secularists which never really gets to the substance of what he was saying nor for the hope he held out for it.  Being a political blogger who agrees with him, I will begin with the end of the passage. 

But these thoughts about stupidity also offer consolation in that they utterly forbid us to consider the majority of people to be stupid in every circumstance.

That is real reason to hope but not one that Americans should find reassurance and repose in.   The fact is that the American political context, as we have seen time and time again, the Constitutional system is set up to empower a minority over even the will of a large majority, such as on issues of gun control, environmental protection, the right of women to full ownership and control of their bodies, etc.  

The minority have consistently thwarted that will of the majority on the basis of appeals to a margin of those who can be duped and suckered and corrupted.  In the Governor's race in Virginia decided last night, it was shown how bald-faced lies in order to take advantage of vestigial racism in a large percentage of otherwise not stupid voters and, if not racism a ginned up sense of rightness or wrongness on issues they don't really know anything about "Critical Race Theory" can have that effect.  

On top of that there is the inherent anti-democratic structure and makeup of the Senate which was always set up so a minority of people centered in small population states could thwart the will and even the wisdom of even large majorities of The People as a whole.  It is far easier to win over small populations in artificially created populations, in states, so as to have that effect than to thwart the will of the electorate as a whole.  Add in such corruptions as the Senate filibuster and the court packing of the Republican-fascists in the past fifty years and that great hope can be definitively thwarted.  

We are not headed into a period in which the anti-democratic American "democracy" is being dictated to by a minority of bad will above the better will of the majority, we are directly in that now, especially with the capture of the Supreme Court and federal courts by Republican-fascists and the billionaires and millionaires who have paid for that court capture. 

The excuse originally given for the anti-democratic features of the Constitution, that it would prevent the majority from oppressing minorities was a lie from the start.  The reason for it was to protect the minority of those who kept an oppressed minority in slavery and their allies among the financier class who saddled poor whites and would soon reduce so many of them to wage slavery.  And now we see, over and over again, how it prevents the majority of The People of good will from making that good will, equality, economic justice, environmental protection the law of the land.   We have seen, from the inception of the country, how the Senate and, on a growing number of disastrous occasions, the Electoral College have thwarted the majority on behalf of those of bad will and selfish-self-interest.

I'm sorry to take away the consolation of that but the fact is the idolized American Constitution is set up to disempower the majority on behalf of a malignant, self-interested minority and whatever dupes they can gull to go along with what will be in the billionaires and millionaires interests and not those for The People as a whole.  Racism is the primary but far from only tool of deception and corruption that works for them over and over again. 

I have mentioned before how I went from someone who was entirely reluctant to discuss matters of religion in politics to becoming convinced that not only was that reticence unnecessary, it was one of the foremost reasons that the American left has been worse than a near total flop, it has been a left that has stupidly given up the ground to its opponents, turning in the very years that the sacrifice of the religious left, more than any others, got us the laws overturning American apartheid and started dismantling other forms of oppression and discrimination.  I read the same text from Dietrich Bonhoeffer to its end and I agree with what he said is the only hope, though not believing that that hope is only present in Christianity or Judaism or Islam but whenever people of good will accept the same teachings present in it that are the preconditions of the modern conception of democracy,  what is far more reliably contained in the economic and social justice, the personal obligations that are contained in the Hebrew word Mishpat, what Bonhoeffer was referring to in its most basic and, in an American context, potent form.  

I would caution one thing about that, as I recently pointed out the great Jewish theologian and scholar Abraham Joshua Heschel said that even the Torah was a human expression of inspired revelation and that it was a commentary, a midrash on the original content of that inspiration.  As such even that authoritative text of that inspiration is susceptible to human misunderstanding, distortion and misrepresentation.  I am no more a Torah "literalist" or "originalist" than I would be of the text of the Constitution and the idolized Bill of Rights.  I certainly don't think that the Holiness code for the priestly class should be held over us, today, not any more than the elaborate instructions for the outfitting of the priests and Temple, in all of its unreadable detail, should govern worship today. 

Anyone who tells you that their articulation of Scripture is not fallible is a liar and, as the "literalists," "originalists," laying down the meaning of the American Constitution, they are up to no good.   Those slogans sound right but they are an ad campaign for evil just as the "parental rights" spoken on TV by a Republican-fascist activist "mom" threw the election to the Republican-fascist in Virginia last night. 

The Scripture is not an iron bound code of civil law,  used as such it has the opposite of intended effects.  But, its basic substance which is shared by some other religions, ignored will produce the impotence of the American left in its periods of post Civil Rights Movement secularism.  There was never a good reason for that.   I say that as an LGBTQ man who fully understands the complexities and perils of saying what I just did.  None of this is easy but I agree with Bonhoeffer,  

The word of the Bible that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom declares that the internal liberation of human beings to live the responsible life before God is the only genuine way to overcome stupidity.

Failure To Hold Trump's Mobsters To Justice Should Lead To Merrick Garland's Firing

On the appeals court, Garland has been a moderate liberal, with a definite pro-prosecution bent in criminal cases. Indeed, his views in the area of criminal law are considerably more conservative than those of the man he would replace, Justice Antonin Scalia.

Nina Totenberg and Carrie Johnson

THE RECENT REPORTING that Attorney General Merrick Garland is fretting that sending to jail the violent, white-supremacist, opponents of American democracy who attacked the Capitol, injuring more than a hundred police officers killing at least one as they were struggling heroically to protect the Congress and others, trying to stop the antiquated Rube Goldberg machinery of putting the winner of the presidential election into office, etc.  the ATTORNEY GENERAL OF THE UNITED STATES! sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution and to administer law is afraid that WHITE THUGS AND GANGSTERS will be more radicalized than they demonstrated they already are BY ATTACKING THE CENTER OF GOVERNMENT TO PREVENT IT FROM COMPLETEING ONE OF ITS CENTRAL ACTS IN ELECTED DEMOCRACY  if he does his job proves he was always the wrong person for the job he holds and the job as a member of the Supreme Court he was nominated to but failed to get on due to the Republican-fascists holding the the goddamned Senate.  

In light of that quote at the top of this post, I would love to know more as to how his past cases as a prosecutor and judge, especially the Oklahoma Bombing case fit in with his reported reluctance to go after the people who attacked the Capitol.  Did he lose his nerve somewhere along the way?  Did his subordinates have to deal with his reluctance to prosecute before?

If he fails to act against Steve Bannon as soon as the House sends a criminal referral to the Department of Justice President Biden should ask him for his resignation because he has already proven he is not up to the job of holding white racists and fascists to the same and currently unequal justice that People of Color and others are held to routinely and because he has proven he is not up to the job of defending the Constitution or administering the rule of law. 

I had my doubts about the wisdom of Barack Obama in his acquiescent observance to the courtly habits of the legal establishment he, no doubt, learned at Harvard Law and elsewhere.   The same place Garland learned about what nice lawyers do and, perhaps, who to go easy on as you don't on others.  That was only one of many disappointments I had with Obama.  There was little to nothing in his career in public office that led me to believe he had a devotion to true economic and social equality and equal justice under law. He was a prep-Ivy kind of guy, to the core.

It is about a year since I learned the hard lessons of listening to the hearings of the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees into the Trump crimes of trying to shake down the Ukranian government to get them to lie about Joe Biden so as to influence the election.   How it was the diplomats - who I can assure you I was not inclined to hold in high regard - and the military officers who were the ones to stand up and risk their careers and lives and how it was the legal class, the lawyers who consistently covered their asses and the truth of what really happened, feigning a pose of "fairness" "evenhandedness" "carefulness" to give the benefit of any ridiculously extended doubt in in all of the ways that self-protecting courtiers might be imagined to do.   I can add, as longtime readers of what I wrote would know, that watching the behavior of that granitic empty suit's, Robert Mueller's, behavior in regard to his buddy,  William Barr, had prepared me for that last disillusionment with the culture of the legal system.

It is one of the biggest problems I have with the administration of law in the United States that it is a grotesquely unequal from the fact that the rich can hire lawyers aplenty and use the clunky mechanisms of the courts and process to get away with anything they can, more than not.  The poor, the destitute, the merely not rich cannot do that.  Added on top of the fact that in the United States People of Color,  members of unfavored groups,  those who are not violent, insurrectionist facists on behalf of a would-be dictator, can expect a Merrick Garland to be a precisian enforcer of law and even an administer of injustice that should remove anyone unwilling to go after the January 6 mob from any position in the so-called Department of Justice. 

Democratic Presidents have an unfortunate history in their selections of Attorneys General, Obama, Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, . . . have all had rather bad ones who frequently demonstrated their devotion to the settled and unequal order or who were just not up to the job.  There must be better candidates than get nominated and confirmed,  I'd look outside of the graduates of Harvard and the other factories of the enablers of privilege, though that's no guarantee either.

"What could become one of America's enduring lies to itself about Afghanistan is being given birth on live TV these days"

UNLIKE THE CALLOW young, middle-aged things in the media and some in the Congress who either weren't born yet or were toddlers at the time the South Vietnamese government collapsed and the Communists took over Vietnam, I do remember that, I was a young adult at the time, politically involved and a news junkie, as is my family tradition.  

I'm old enough to remember in detail and I am old enough to have heard the right-wing and center figures who tried to rig history to make their own blame in what had happened disappear or turn into something it certainly was not, wise and noble.  Blaming those who had been right all along for what happened when they predicted what would happen with remarkable accuracy.     

The banally evil and futile folly and, at that time, longest American war, the terrible consequences for those who worked for or with the U.S. military and embassy and for American companies and others, were soon to be turned by Hollywood into myths of American servicemen returning from Vietnam being spit on by anti-war types, the typical Hollywood lie that informs the minds of the entertainment addled plurality if not majority of Americans - certainly the death of any sane and egalitarian democracy based in reality and learning from the worst mistakes.

Lawrence O'Donnell's commentary on this last night is the best I've heard yet, it deserves to be given a link and a listen.

I am also old enough to remember the early and best years of NPR under Frank  Mankiewicz before the establishment Corporation for Public Broadcasting and its partners in destroying public radio, right wing foundation money, installed a big donor  pleasing regime of mealy-mouthed Republican-propaganda and warm, fuzzy nostalgia as its typical product. [Is my memory correct that Morning Edition sponsorship was where I first heard of "My Pillow?"]   I seldom to never listen anymore.  I am very doubtful that you can have high-overhead journalism without risking the corruption of advertising, though the CBC radio division has been able to do it to some extent in Canada.  But, then, they have a modern constitution not an 18th century anachronism and a population that has been used to honest elections.

And I remember the absurdly legendary "golden age of television" when the legendary Edward R. Murrow still had a major TV show before William Paley chose his relationship with the best and brightest over reporting hard fact.  I will tell you that most nights right now on MSNBC is far better than anything he was allowed to do and then only once in a while.   If you had told me at the beginning of the American war in Afghanistan I would say that about MSNBC, I'd have said you had a hole in your marble bag.   Back then that channel had on the 1990s style Republican minstrelsy of Alan Keyes, the old American-fascism of Pat Buchanan and the developing American-fascism for the now middle-aged Tucker Carlson on as they were cancelling Ol' Phil Donahue.  

I will never forgive Donahue for his years as a talk show host promoting an easily sold caricature of liberalism that was such an easy foil and push-over for the fascists.  It tells you something about how bereft of actual liberalism it was in the media that he was the one you had to support as Rick Kaplan was firing him for being insufficiently supportive of the Bush II wars as he figured luring Tucker Carlson from PBS was a feather in his cap.   Rick Kaplan was a fixture of the Shorenstein Center at the very Republican friendly Kennedy School of Government at the establishment whore house of Harvard, which is necessary to point out.

I would advise everyone to support the current make-up of MSNBC because without a financial motive to keep what they've got now, it's no more secure than Murrow or Donohue were.  Now that print is in such decline - as was bound to happen because the cost of printing news on paper is prohibitive and the financial base of doing it online will not support the same level of journalism that print was capable of at times - if it goes, so does our lifeline to this kind of accurate and honest memory as well as current news.   Hollywood won't support it, neither with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.  

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

What Lawrence O'Donnell pointed out about the ignorant arrogance of the "best and brightest" believing, fully, that because Robert McNamara had been one of the team brought in to manage the Ford Motor Company after WWII and had risen to the top during a period of enormous profits that he could use his same management skills to make and sell cars to manage the American war in Vietnam as Secretary of State is worth thinking about, hard.  

It is testimony to one of the stupidest and more ingrained articles of faith in "enlightenment" thinking and the academic, college-credentialed set, that the universe is a monistic entity in which everything is guided by a few if not only one Law discernible by human science and that all of human thought and life should fall in line with that.   I think they really did believe that the management schemes and organizational ones used to make and sell cars was fungible and that such a person could be expected to succeed in carrying out the war policy of the United States.  It is the same faith that the Trumpists, perhaps especially those "white evangelicals" and "white Catholics" who believed that the totally phony business genius conman would fulfill that wet-dream of Hollywood and other Republicans that what the country really needed  was a businessman to be president.  As if George W. Bush had not already proved that such a creature, a legacy, daddy propped up businessman was no substitute for someone with the skills for the job.  

It is the biggest lesson of Joe Biden's few months in office that it is someone with his experience and knowledge from decades in public service who should be trusted to know what they are doing.  And the media and the Republicans are doing their damnedest to thwart that because they mostly don't want the American government to be a successful, egalitarian democracy, they want a gangster government only different in type and extent of violence than what Trump negotiated into power in Afghanistan on the watch of his successor.

I have mentioned, repeatedly that during the hearings into Trump's time as Putin's water boy in regard to Ukraine that I was impressed that it was the diplomats who had been on the ground and in harms way and the military officers who had some realistic view of reality who bravely risked their careers and, Trump's fanatical fans being what they are, their lives to expose his crimes.  

In that period, I could not help but notice it was the lawyers, the people who had worked at the Department of Justice, the FBI (with the exception of Andrew McCabe), the granite man with feet of clay, Robert Mueller,  who I found disgustingly ass-covering and, in many cases cowardly.  I think that it is not unrelated to the same training in a legal culture built with the same kind of "enlightenment" concepts and thoroughly in line with them.  In time everything is viewed as an aspect of that kind of substitution on the basis of everything being, essentially, the same thing, integrity for self-preservation, truth for cover-up, democracy for expediency.   But that thought will take a lot longer to continue.  I think it's also the difference between having talking heads on spouting lies and the reporting of the truth as if it mattered as "journalism,". 

I'll have more to say on that sometime.