“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”– Martin Luther King, Jr.
Today that arc bent heavily in that direction.
Utter Prostration
May 24, 2024 at 5:32 pm (Political Commentary)
So now Nikki Haley says she will vote for Trump. As my wife said, Republican politicos will sell their souls very cheaply these days. It almost begs the question as to whether they were issued one to begin with. For a while, back when Haley took down the South Carolina state flag, one could decently respect her, as I did. But when she raised her hand in that first debate saying she would support Trump if he were the nominee, and when she could not admit that slavery was the cause of the Civil War, she made clear that she was all about personal ambition—not about honor, or integrity, or the good of the country. Now she has erased any doubt. Elected officialdom of the Republican Party has morphed into a jamboree of toadies, cringers, mountebanks, and bootlickers, all clamoring for a touch of the Dear Leader’s hand. The vanishing few who might have brought the party back to decency, or at least to a recognition that Putinism, Trumpism, and autocracy in general are not desirable aspirational goals, have fled the arena (Romney, Kinzinger, Sasse, Burr, Toomey) or been kicked out of it (Cheney, Beutler, Rice). Others—Burgum, Stefanik, Vance, Rubio, the insufferable Ramaswamy—seek even lower ground and further mortification, obscenely soiling themselves for the exalted role of carrying the Dear Leader’s chamber pot as his veep.
What a ghastly parade of trembling obeisance was on display for our edification by those who scurried to a Manhattan courtroom, all bewailing their leader’s Inquisitorial persecution, all prostrating themselves on all fours with arms extended and faces kissing the ground in groveling submission to the grand panjandrum who reigns in their morally pitiful lives. Lapdogs Burgum, Vance, Ramaswamy, Johnson, Rick Scott, Tuberville, Boebert, Gaetz, and almost two dozen other House Republicans all cowered before him, knowingly supporting a despotic authoritarian who instigated a violent, attempted coup against their country, and thus they knowingly undermine democracy itself. With their presence in Manhattan, as Lawrence O’Donnell observed, all were debasing themselves, if further debasement is possible, by aligning with a man known to have paid a porn star to keep a sexual encounter under wraps before an election and shortly after his third son was born. Normally the grovelers might consider their support of extra-marital sex with porn stars a questionable career strategy, not to mention their support of lying about it, but for His sake–and ultimately theirs–exceptions can be made.
Not one of them has a drop of the courage of Navalny in their unwillingness to publicly whisper even a word of reproach, even the barest intimation of doubt, against the man who has said that he would suspend the Constitution and who clearly intends to be an unconstrained dictator. And unlike Navalny, all they might lose is their jobs, not their freedom and their lives. Meanwhile Russia and China are celebrating, clinking their champagne glasses and toasting the cancer metastasizing through the world’s most consequential democracy. Join us, Putin and Xi are saying; and a significant plurality of the country—easily enough to win the Electoral College—is drooling at the prospect of doing so.
Former President Trump Competes on Jeopardy Against Greene and Gaetz
May 4, 2024 at 10:56 pm (Political Humor)
Real Fake News Special Report
Los Angeles
The long-running game show Jeopardy hosted Donald Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Matt Gaetz in a “celebrity-politico” game which aired last Tuesday. All three contestants had pledged their winnings to a charity of their choice: The MAGA Foundation for Victims of Unfair Elections (Trump), The Ladies’ Auxiliary of The American Society for the Propagation and Preservation of the Insane (Greene), and The National Association for Eyebrow Awareness and Promotion (Gaetz). Despite questions deemed by regular Jeopardy enthusiasts to be absurdly easy (“My four-year-old could have answered every one of them,” complained one former five-time champion), all three contestants were deeply in the hole at the end of Double Jeopardy. Normal rules would have excluded each of them from Final Jeopardy since they had no money to wager. However, since this situation had never arisen before, Jeopardy management conferred and allowed each of them to wager up to $1000 for Final Jeopardy.
The category was U. S. Presidents, and all three contestants wagered their full $1000. The final question seemed at first to perplex two of the three contestants: “He cut down a cherry tree, led American troops in the Revolutionary War, became the first president, retired to Mt. Vernon, and is on the one dollar bill.” Mr. Trump quickly wrote his answer, Arthur Lincoln. After a quizzical stare into space, Ms. Greene seemed to be humming the Jeopardy jingle, confident that the answer had to be a Georgian, and scribbled Jimmy Carter; while Mr. Gaetz, after raising his eyebrows even higher while peeking to try to see Greene’s answer, jotted down Benjamin Franklin just as the jingle ended. Management again conferred and decided to give all three $1000 each. After the game, a Real Fake News reporter asked Mr. Trump about his performance, and the former president complained to a small crowd that the whole game was rigged against him and he was planning to sue the company and talk with the Proud Boys about a protest, adding, “I’ll be standing in their way when these Jeopardy vermin try to come after you.”
John Rachal's Blog 
Righteous Day
May 31, 2024 at 9:58 pm (Ethics, Political Commentary)
On the point that a twice-impeached but unconvicted former American president and now the Republican nominee seeking re-election was yesterday convicted on all thirty-four counts of election fraud and is thus a convicted felon—on that point yes, one can legitimately say that for the American presidency to be so deeply shamed is sad. Out of forty-six presidents (Grover Cleveland was elected to two non-consecutive terms and his two terms are treated as separate presidencies though forty-five different men have served as president; Biden is thus “forty-six”), only one has the status of either convicted felon or convicted sexual abuser. Donald John Trump has both. It is also sad what continued support for this man says about what the Republican Party, which has chosen him for its 2024 nominee for president, has come to.
But that should not blind us to the clear fact that May 30, 2024 was a glorious day, a righteous day. The judicial system, stressed almost out of joint by a former president and his elected sycophants, worked. The curtain was lifted on all their claims of a rigged system and corruption as those claims were revealed for what they were: the debasement of a political party whose MAGA motto has devolved to “If we don’t win, it was rigged.” This theme has animated the party and particularly its now infamous leader since before the 2020 election when Trump stated it nakedly without even the adornment of fig leaves. And then he did lose, and then, outraged, he lost over sixty court cases clarifying that he lost by their findings of no election fraud.
As I noted at the time, it was wonderfully convenient that there were Republican howls and lamentations of fraud only in the states that Biden won, but not a whiff of fraud in states Trump won. As for those down-ballot Republicans who won in the Biden states? Were they elected through fraud also? No comment from MAGAdom—only the fearful silence of a mouse in a room full of cats. And now two-thirds of the GOP electorate—and virtually all of its officialdom—claim to believe that Trump was cheated out of re-election because Joe Biden is corrupt and the election was rigged. Now that is what is actually sad. What the GOP now bawls for—certainly its MAGA majority does—is a system in which they can never lose in a fair election or even a fair trial; if they lose, ipso facto, it was not fair. This overturning of the two most fundamental measures of democracy, fair elections and fair trials, by one of the two major parties does not augur well for the future, and despots the world over are smiling.
Even so, yesterday was also a righteous day because eighteen citizens, including six alternate jurors in the courtroom every day, were brave enough to accept the role of juror and to hear and see the evidence and render an evidence-based judgment. The judge conducted a trial that was professional and fair. Given Trump followers’ propensity for issuing death threats and committing actual violence (see violent protest, Charlottesville; Pelosi, Paul; insurrection, American), both the prosecutors and Judge Juan Merchan showed considerable courage in following the law. Perhaps they even heard the ancient admonition “Let justice be done though the heavens fall” hovering about their shoulders. The jurors were attentive and seemed to be able to set aside any biases, including the juror who acknowledged being a Truth Social follower (what an ironic name coming from the former president). I believe that I would say the trial was fair even had the verdict been different.
And yet, though the system worked so well in the weeks leading up to yesterday’s righteousness, there are heavy breakers amid the rocks between here and the safety of the shore. Trump-appointed Judge Aileen Cannon has indefinitely delayed Trump’s classified documents trial, ensuring that it will not conclude, or probably even begin, before the election. If Trump wins in November, as she is happily aware, that trial will simply disappear, despite its likely being the closest of the four trials to a slam dunk. Meanwhile the Supreme Court purposefully stalls on Trump’s immunity claim,* also hoping (at least six of them) for a Trump victory in November that will obviate their need to decide whether a sitting president has immunity from prosecution—even if he were to send a SEAL team to assassinate a political rival or give classified documents to a foreign enemy. According to Trump’s lawyers, prosecution even in those cases could only proceed once the president has been impeached and convicted, thus reducing him to a mere citizen no longer above the law. No president has ever been impeached and convicted.
These disturbing undercurrents, especially the anti-democratic dangers posed by the elected MAGA rabble, their angry and gullible constituents, and the two MAGA Supreme Court Justices Alito and Thomas, clearly threaten our judicial system and our democracy. They stand between us and that safe shore. But yesterday was a good day, an American day, a righteous day.
* July 16 update: Judge Aileen Cannon, Trump appointee, dismissed the case altogether, Sunday, July 14, the day after the attempted assassination of Trump, claiming–shockingly–that Special Prosecutor Jack Smith was illegally appointed, since he was not approved by the President and the senate–as if the Special Prosecutor for, say, Hunter Biden had been through such a process. Moreover, this case, in which Trump illegally carted off classified documents to his Florida home, was the closest to an open and shut case among the three federal cases against him. As for the Supreme Court, the six Republican-appointed justices ruled within the last week that presidents are immune from any prosecution argued to be an “official act,” while leaving wholly undefined what constitutes an “official act.” Justice Sotamayor had asked Trump’s defense attorney if sending a Seal Team to assassinate a political rival would be allowable, and he answered that it would be prosecutable only if the president were impeached and convicted–i.e., rendering him a private citizen no longer above the law. The court majority rejected that argument, but appeared to say that any conversation between a president and the attorney general (or anyone?) would not be prosecutable even if they were conspiring to commit a crime, since such a conversation would be an official act. Indeed, it would be very tricky to come up with a presidential action that could not be construed to be an “official act.”
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