Saturday, February 22, 2025

Git Along, Little Doges


Wish there'd been more Rubio (or just more cowbell) in the video of that meeting a week ago, which Trump decided contrary to custom not  to hold in private before the photo op and public statements but did all three at once, presumably to prevent King Abdullah from screaming at him; but Rubio's face in this photo reminds me of that lady in the Hermès scarfs who used to watch Trump explaining virology to the nation from the standpoint of his transcendent ignorance—deeply panicked but trying not to show it. I didn't realize until that moment that Trump actually has no idea what the Gaza ceasefire deal (which he has endorsed) entails: the sequence of phase 1, releasing some hostages and prisoners to set the stage for phase 2, negotiating a final disposition of the territory and releasing all the remaining hostages, followed by phase 3, implementing the deal and permanent ceasefire (the Biden deal I've been telling you about for a year), as revealed by Trump's comment,

“As far as I’m concerned, if all of the hostages aren’t returned by Saturday at 12 o’clock, I think it’s an appropriate time. I would say, cancel it and all bets are off and let hell break out. I’d say they ought to be returned by 12 o’clock on Saturday,” Trump said.

No, it's not an appropriate time. Phase 2 hasn't even started yet. It would be nice for the hostages and their families, who I support, and no doubt also nice for Netanyahu, who I don't support, but it has no relation to the agreement painfully worked out over the past year. It's demanding that all the parties trash that agreement and start all over again, which clearly meant it couldn't be wrapped up on Saturday. It's just a completely new idea nobody else has ever heard of, because Trump just made it up on the spot and doesn't know enough about the situation to realize that it can't possibly happen, and there's a reason it can't possibly happen.

It's nothing but a big smelly turd deposited in the Oval Office that is of no relevance to anything, except to Trump's equally irrelevant fantasy of taking control of the Gaza Strip as his own, or Jared Kushner's, development project, with all the irritating Gazans cleared out of the way in Egypt or Jordan (I don't know who he thinks are going to be the housekeepers and waitstaff and caddies, perhaps they'll be imported from the Philippines), in spite of endless attempts by Jordanians and Egyptians and Saudis to explain to His Imperial Stupidity that it can't be done. A turd the existence of which nobody present dares to acknowledge, because Big Donald might get upset (Abdullah did have something to say about it once he got out of there, though he did lower himself to suggesting that the meeting might be described as "constructive"—he's far from the worst king in his neighborhood, not that I support kings, but diplomacy requires some dishonesty).

Things may have marched in a different direction since I started drafting these remarks with the development of a Trump policy on Ukraine, but I think Trump's stupidity remains the main factor. I'm sure I'll get back to that later.

Sunday, February 16, 2025

Bonapartheid

 

From Michael Meschke's production of Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi, Stockholm 1964.


I guess that should be counted as a kind of confession, with a plea for jury nullification: yes, when you come down to it, he kind of has tried to overthrow the US government, a couple or three times, and that's probably illegal in the normal way of things, but then the price of eggs is really high, so what choice did he have? You can't make a revolution omelette without breaking some constitutional eggshells, even if that's going to push the egg price even higher.

That is, Trump is really and truly making the claim that he has led a revolution against unbearable oppression, and at a time like this, the ordinary laws that we've been living with don't apply any more. Laws specifying procedures you have to follow if you want to fire a few hundred civil servants, or saying you have to spend the money Congress has allocated for a certain purpose on that purpose, or demanding that you treat immigrants as if they were human beings. You're busy saving your capital-C Country, for Christ's sake! Like the Founders, who were breaking the law too! 

Though Jefferson wrote his complex and sophisticated argument denying that they were doing that at all, putting all the blame on poor George III and claiming not that the revolutionary gang were the saviors of a Country which didn't in any case exist yet—just that they were breaking up with the abusive old country, and that they were acting in the service of self-evident truths, a higher kind of law that George was alleged to have relentlessly violated, including the unwritten British constitution, particularly in his refusal to grant them the traditional liberties of the British citizen with respect to representation in Parliament.

The quote itself is usually attributed to Napoléon Bonaparte, as a presumptive defense for his role in the coup d'état of 18 Brumaire (November 9) 1799, which overthrew the government of France under the five-man revolutionary Directoire, and established him as First Consul, though it wouldn't have made much sense for Bonaparte to say it either; he undoubtedly thought of himself as the savior of the nation, but preferred to have other people say that for him (unlike the irrepressible Donald Trump), and was anxious that the thing look backed by stringent legality): "The extraordinary decree of the Council of Ancients, in conformity with articles 102 and 103 of the Constitution, has put me in charge of the city [of Paris] and the army," he told the soldiers gathered at the Tuileries, after the Council finished its vote before high-tailing it out of town to Saint-Cloud; "I have accepted, in order to support the measures it will be taking, all on behalf of the people." 

The French emperor was certainly a murderous and narcissistic psychopath, but he wasn’t an idiotic meme like our American emperor. He had some sense of dignity, and some sense of what ordinary people are like and what they need to hear.

Imagine Vought or Miller writing Trump a speech offering a legal justification from the Constitution or statutes for firing 12 or 17 inspectors general (we still don't know exactly how many) or decreeing the end of birthright citizenship, or sending the military in contravention of the Posse Comitatus Act to pacify the southern border area. Of course they wouldn’t be able to do it, any more than they are able to write up the administration’s executive orders and memoranda with the minimal professionalism required to keep judges from grinding their teeth in rage or laughing in the administration’s faces.

In fact Napoleon didn't say it, as I've been able to determine with my advanced Googling skills. The first appearance of the sentence "Celui qui sauve sa patrie ne viole aucune loi" is in 1838, 17 years after Napoléon's death on St. Helena, in a little collection of 525 unsourced sentences attributed to the emperor under the title Maximes et Pensées de Napoléon, signed by a hatmaker called Jean-Louis Gaudy, but actually written by no less a figure than Honoré de Balzac, it turns out, who ghostwrote it on commission from Gaudy, making the quotes up mostly up out of his head (Gaudy was apparently hoping to earn a decoration from King Louis-Philippe, the "citizen king" crowned after the 1830 revolution, who encouraged the Napoléon cult to bolster his liberal bona fides—Balzac himself was a Legitimist supporter of a Bourbon restoration but also a great admirer of Napoléon and his contrast with the destestable bourgeois dominance of the age of Louis-Philippe, which shows how confused French political thinking was in the early 19th century). Balzac could never afford to turn down some easy money. He probably tossed it off in three days with 60 cups of coffee and then hurried back to whichever installment of La Comédie Humaine he was working on.

That makes the thing a neat little epitome of what this Trump administration is about. We can argue what he means by using the sa ying, we can debate where he got it from (the prevailing opinion on X and Threads seems to be that it's Stephen Miller, who loyally retweeted its appearances three times yesterday afternoon), but what stands out in the end is that it's fundamentally bogus, like everything else they do. 

We are being ruled by memes, meme stocks, meme coins, meme policies, meme slogans, meme philosophies of government, a meme emperor who thinks he's Napoléon when he's actually more like Père Ubu, and his Batman villain billionaire sidekick. And we do have to worry about what it portends for the administration as a whole in the awful future, because it's actually going to kill people, throw families into turmoil, halt important research, destroy international relationships, spread poverty, crash markets, encourage criminal corruption, weaken the military, harm the education system, and generally humiliate our country in the eyes of the world, but we can't let them continue to make us stupider. Refusing to become stupider is our only hope.

Friday, February 7, 2025

The Emperor's New Immigration Policy

Image from The New York Times of the US Navy Base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The "Migrant Tent Camp" at lower left is an area that was used to house boat people on their way to Florida, in the days when America used to welcome refugees from godless socialism, and still did during the Biden administration, from around 37 at the beginning of the term to 4 last February; it's theoretically capable of holding 13,000, but for the current exercise they've just assembled a camp of 150 tents. However, the actual 10 Venezuelan migrants sent to Guantánamo this week from America, in one of the first big moves of the Trump administration's mass deportation program, are being held seven miles to the east in the prison complex, not with but not too far from the 15 9/11 terrorism suspects still languishing there since 2002 or 2003. 

This from The Guardian is hilarious on first look:

US immigration is gaming Google to create a mirage of mass deportations

It seems in the first week of the Trump presidency when you Googled ICE operations or raids you got the impression of a great big wave of arrests across the country of unauthorized foreigners in the form of ICE press releases, but when you looked at the stories there was something wrong:

That four-day operation in Colorado? It happened in November 2010. The 123 people targeted in New Orleans? That was February of last year. Wisconsin? September 2018. There are thousands of examples of this throughout all 50 states – Ice press releases that have reached the first page of Google search results, making it seem like enforcement actions just happened, when in actuality they occurred months or years ago. Some, such as the arrest of “44 absconders” in Nebraska, go back as far as 2008. 

They were old stories, some 13,000 of them, all timestamped "updated 1/24/2025", which shot them to the top of the Google and Bing rankings. Some Merry Pranksters (at the White House?) had spoofed us all into thinking Trump was keeping his violent Day One promises.

Thursday, January 30, 2025

Not Ready for Prime Time

 

Image by Markerarts via Butt Flood Designs.

One thing to remember about Stephen Bannon's celebrated tactical principle of "flooding the zone with shit" is that, in the end, you're landed with a shit flood, which isn't what you really wanted, though that may be OK if what you really wanted was a really big fat tax cut for yourself and your billionaire clientele. Somebody else can try to take care of the backed-up sewage, if they feel like it; you're up on the higher ground of the nice neighborhood, where you hardly even smell it.

I've been thinking of 2017, when the new administration started off with a big bang of regulatory crazy, with executive orders attempting to sabotage the individual mandate of the Affordable Care Act on January 20, mandating a 90-day freeze on hiring federal employees, meant to kick off a long-term reduction in the number of civil servants, on January 23, directing DHS to build a Wall of separation between Mexico and the US (they thought it might be paid for with a 20% tariff on Mexican imports) and fast-tracking environmental reviews of infrastructure projects on January 24,  cutting federal funding for so-called "sanctuary cities" that did not cooperate with ICE and banning the EPA from contact with journalists on January 26, suspending the Refugee Admissions Program and barring entry to the United States for citizens of Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen (not, of course, Saudi Arabia, UAE, or Qatar) on January 27, and ordering all federal agencies to eliminate two regulations for every new one they proposed on January 30 (when he also installed Thomas Homan as acting director of ICE, without bothering to try getting the Senate to confirm the nomination).

None of these initiatives had any particular consequences, of course. They were ill-conceived, badly drafted, in some cases of questionable legality, or just dumb. The idea of the hiring freeze went back to Carter and Reagan, and it was well known that it had never done any good:

Sunday, January 26, 2025

Birthright Citizenship

Wong Kim Ark, from a 1904 US immigration document, via Wikimedia Commons

Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, section 1:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Trump's executive order from last week "Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship" suggests that there are categories of persons born in the United States who are not "subject to the jurisdiction" of the federal government and hence not citizens, specifically:

Among the categories of individuals born in the United States and not subject to the jurisdiction thereof, the privilege of United States citizenship does not automatically extend to persons born in the United States:  (1) when that person’s mother was unlawfully present in the United States and the father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth, or (2) when that person’s mother’s presence in the United States at the time of said person’s birth was lawful but temporary (such as, but not limited to, visiting the United States under the auspices of the Visa Waiver Program or visiting on a student, work, or tourist visa) and the father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth. 

This is such bullshit I'm still gobsmacked a week later. In the first place it doesn't even attempt to make a case against the baby, only against its parents. Section 1 doesn't say "all persons born...in the United States whose parents are subject to the jurisdiction thereof". And then do the authors have a clue what the word "jurisdiction" means?

Friday, January 24, 2025

Dictatorship Takes Shape

Dominance and Submission. Photo by Reuters/Jonathan Drake via Hawaii Tribune-Herald.

There's way too much going on. Two bogus emergencies formally declared, the one at the border and the "energy emergency" about Trump's weird belief that the US doesn't mine enough natural gas, and then I think what you might call a "woke emergency" signaled by his actions in the Justice Department: seen, for instance in the canceling of ongoing civil rights cases and police department consent decrees.

An ominous restructuring of the department's procedures was reported in today's Guardian in a piece on the DOJ's investigations of the Biden administration, of its "weaponization" of the federal government (read: its investigations of Trump's criminal participation in the January 6 insurrection and in the theft of government documents) and of its "censorship of speech" in the 2020 campaign--the Twitter Files stories attempting to suggest that when Twitter's trust and safety department blocked users from sharing the New York Post's October 14 Hunter Biden laptop story for a full 24 hours before allowing it was what James Comer called 

a coordinated campaign by social media companies, mainstream news and the intelligence communities to suppress and de-legitimize the existence of Hunter Biden's laptop and its contents...

in which the company was obeying the dictates of the FBI (it wasn't).

The new wrinkle in these two orders is in the reporting requirements: instead of directing investigators to direct the final reports to the department's office of personal responsibility or its inspector general, which would be the normal procedure, they will go to a political appointee at the White House—the deputy chief of staff for policy, who happens to be Mr. Stephen Miller, resuming the job he took with the first Trump administration in December 2016. 

Tuesday, January 21, 2025

Pardon Me, Boys

Is that the Mar-a-Lago Cuckoo?

From Sun Valley Serenade (1941), with the Glenn Miller Orchestra and the always unbearably smug-faced Tex Beneke, in a stupid baseball cap, on vocals, redeemed later in the cut by the appearance of Dorothy Dandridge and the tapping Nicholas Brothers.

My dad's dad jokes tended to follow an exclusively linguistic pattern, as I guess they mostly do. If you gave him an opportunity to ask you, "What's an armored personnel carrier?" you'd answer "Tanks" and he'd say "You're welcome." And if you bumped into him and said, "Pardon me," he'd say, "Son, only the governor can do that." That's an index, by the way, of how rare the presidential pardon used to be.

So Joe Biden issued an official presidential pardon to his son Hunter for any crimes he may have committed between 2014 and 2024, including the ones he was in fact convicted for (false statement on a federal form seeking permission to buy a gun he turned out not to actually want, and a very late income tax payment). Crimes that wouldn't normally be charged (nobody would know they'd been committed if the defendant hadn't told on himself by acknowledging he was a drug user in the first case and paying the damn tax bill in the second place, as he did before the charge was filed).