Sessions of Sweet Silent Thought. II

Drawing by Glenn McCoy, via Valley News.

I'm still stuck on this question of why Trump should be so offended at Sessions's insisting on recusing himself. As if it were a bad habit, you know, that people should be able to easily control; "What kind of man is this?":

"Jeff Sessions recused himself which he shouldn't have done or he should have told me," the president said. "Even my enemies say that Jeff Sessions should have told you that he was going to recuse himself and then you wouldn't have put him in.

"(Sessions) took the job and then he said 'I'm going to recuse myself.' And I said 'what kind of man is this?' By the way, he was on the campaign. The only reason I gave him the job was I felt loyalty. He was an original supporter. He was on the campaign. He knows there was no collusion."

Why should Trump in the wake of the election have expected Sessions not to recuse himself in the Russia investigation? Or rather why should Trump have assumed he knew what Sessions would say if somebody asked him to recuse himself from it, so he could subsequently be so disappointed with Session's failure to do it? Given how unclear Trump seems to be, at the same time, as to what "recusal" actually means?

Sessions of Sweet Silent Thought. I

Another secret Muslim fundamentalist using the evil tawhid gesture? Via Buffalo News (once your correpondent's hometown paper).

Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III was certainly, as the ACLU said yesterday, the worst attorney general in modern American history

(only modern? well, there was Roger Taney, author of the Dred Scott decision, who managed to pack an amazing amount of evil into his brief stint as Andrew Jackson's attorney general in 1833, when he ruled that it was legal for South Carolina to ban free blacks from entering the state and held that the descendants of slaves could not be citizens, before Jackson moved him over to Treasury in a recess appointment and he proceeded to destroy the Second Bank of the United States without congressional authorization by withdrawing all its money; on account of which, when Jackson eventually submitted his name to the Whig Senate, he became the first nominee ever to be rejected for a cabinet position—come to think of it, he seems to have had a work ethic and personality type and effect on others quite a lot like Sessions)

and so it's somehow fitting that Trump should have fired him for the only thing he ever did right, just like the worst secretary of state ever, who got the sack for correctly referring to the emperor as a "fucking moron"; Sessions's crime was to take legal advice and turn over the supervision of Special Counsel Robert Mueller to his deputy, Rod Rosenstein, since he himself had become implicated in the matters under investigation, after his lies to Congress on the subject of his contacts with Ambassador Kislyak. Nothing in his career became him so much as the way it kicked him out.

Normless and Gormless

Teddy Gormless.

It's an odd moment, the week a criminal defendant making his guilty plea claims, under oath, that he was directed to commit a couple of his crimes (exceeding the federal campaign contribution limit by something like 1000% in unreported donations that he carefully, though not very effectively, tried to conceal) by the beneficiary of the contributions, presidential candidate Donald J. Trump, who thus enters the court record as an alleged co-conspirator (and let's just stipulate that we know it's true because we've all heard the fucking tape in which, rather than saying, "Christ, man, you're getting Pecker to pay McDougal $150,000 to kill the story? Is that legal?" he only says, "Pay with cash") for the first but clearly not the last time—

An odd moment, I was going to say, for Charles R. Kesler of the Claremont Institute to issue an op-ed piece in The New York Times on how

Most of President Trump’s alleged transgressions offend against the etiquette of modern liberal governance, not the Constitution.

and that's a good thing:

We don't have to prosecute them/but then we're not prosecuting them

Francisco de Goya, St. Peter Repentant, 1823-25. Via Wikipedia.

The truest Trump is perhaps the one who's spare and blank and at the same time musically repetitive, like the Eliot of "Ash Wednesday" ("Because I know that time is always time/ And place is always and only place/And what is actual is actual only for one time/ And only for one place...")—in this case literally true, because, speaking to the National Federation of Independent Businesses on their 75th anniversary, uncharacteristically using fairly elaborate notes but no prepared text, he found himself hovering around, if not quite landing on, a helipad of contrition:

Confessional

by Donald J. Trump

I

We have one chance
to get it right.
We might as well
get it right or let's
just keep it going but
let’s do it right.

II

We have a chance. We want to solve
this problem. We want to solve
family separation. I don’t want
children taken away from parents
and when you prosecute the parents
for coming in illegally, which should happen,
you have to take the children away.

III

Now, we don’t have to prosecute them
but then we’re not prosecuting them
for coming in illegally. That’s not good.

It's the acknowledgment that this crisis of concentration camps for children is of his own making: he did it, personally, voluntarily, in some kind of knowledge of what the consequences were going to be. "We don't have to" but it "should happen" (dodging the responsibility with the impersonal verb).

And then what do you know? After contrition comes atonement, and lo and behold!

No True Conservative Would Ever Tear a Family Apart

In Tijuana, from the April "caravan", via CNN.

Now that Anthony Scaramucci and Franklin Graham are on board, Brooks ("The Rise of the Amnesty Thugs") is venturing out to say he doesn't think much of the Sessions-Miller-Trump family separation party either, and it's not so bad in parts, especially since he points out that it's not just the CPB at the border that's violently separating immigrant families, but also ICE in the heartland, with links:

Sontag and Russakoff capture the fabric of immigration enforcement today: a van-load of men coming back from an Alcoholics Anonymous gathering detained by a state trooper after a routine traffic stop; a magisterial district judge in Camp Hill, Pa., pre-empting a Tajik wedding by calling ICE on the groom and best man, who were led away in handcuffs; work sites raided, with the Latinos separated from everybody else and lined up face to the wall; police officers who ticket Hispanics at a rate of twice or even five times their share of the population.

But of course there's always a razor blade in that apple, as our friends Driftglass and Boswood likes to say, which is that what he wants to say about it isn't so much that it's bad, or that it has to be stopped, or that Republican Senators need to do something about it, which would be terribly commonplace, as to produce his own smoking hot take, which is to clarify that it's not conservative! Though it is anti-liberal, where "liberal" means, as is becoming usual in the movement, "conservative looking for liberal approval", or trying to lull liberals into argumentative cease-fire, or into uniting against the common enemy of Imaginary Collectivism—Black Lives Matter secretly planning to turn into the Great Leap Forward and enslave us all!

That is, what's wrong with the Trump policy is its relentless statism:

For the Record: The Horrible Law

Image via Youth Radio.

This thread elaborating and clarifying a point that may have gotten a bit buried in the second post on Trump immigration policy, dealing with the question of asylum seekers at the Mexican border and the plan to break up families. I made an effort to really lay it out and tell the story with no smartass tricks, because I was in a rage at how the muddiness of Trump's mind keeps him from knowing what he's doing, and the Twitter audience has liked it a lot.

Put pressure on the Democrats to end the horrible law that separates children from there parents once they cross the Border into the U.S. Catch and Release, Lottery and Chain must also go with it and we MUST continue building the WALL! DEMOCRATS ARE PROTECTING MS-13 THUGS.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 26, 2018

What this is about--it isn't hallucinations, it's about something Sessions or Miller has told him to justify the grotesque and cruel policy that he doesn't understand. https://t.co/JzegGVwvtW

— Post-Impressionist Liberal (@Yastreblyansky) May 31, 2018

Important: Missing Children Announcement

William Blake, "The Little Boy Lost"

They aren't missing. That's the announcement. This is one of those awful things floating around the Internet spreading rage and distress in its wake that just isn't true. It is not the case that the government has lost 1,475 children.

Now that we’re all on twitter because of this game, I am making a public service announcement: PLEASE STOP SHARING THAT STORY ABOUT 1500 KIDS MISSING. The outrage I’ve seen is a result of a total misinterpretation and could SERIOUSLY threaten the children you want to save.

— josie duffy rice (@jduffyrice) May 28, 2018

The story is, rather, that on 26 April 2018 Steven Wagner, acting assistant secretary of the HHS Administration for Children and Families (and you can see by the "acting" that it's another job Trump hasn't managed to fill, so this is a professional you can trust) was testifying to the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, on Office of Refugee Responsibility care and placement of "unaccompanied alien children" (UAC), that is children who surrendered to immigration authorities at the border when they were unaccompanied by their parents or adult family members (so the government did not separate them from their families; these children, in contrast to the ones violently mistreated by the new Jeff Sessions policy, were already separated when they got here).

Notes from the Undrained Swamp

Domenico Remp (1620-99) Wunderkammer or Cabinet of Curiosities, via Wikimedia Commons.

Happened to look at the Axios front page, at a report on this evening's meeting between Schumer and McConnell, which sounds like progress since they were reported to be not speaking to each other at all this afternoon, but didn't get anywhere, and checking out the White House gossip there for just the last few hours, which is really something else, as it adds up:

1. Trump is pissed off with Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, accused of "going rogue" when he was hanging out with Florida governor Rick Scott a couple of weeks ago and decided to make Florida exempt from Interior's program to force oil and gas drilling on all coastal states whether they like it or not, although Florida's Gulf Coast has the best reserves off any coast in the Lower 48, and although the way he did it is apparently illegal:

The department’s offshore leasing policies are guided by a strict process set by statute that can only take certain areas out of consideration gradually through a multi-year process that specifically weighs various factors, like environmental risks and oil and gas resource potential. By tweeting Florida would be removed just days after announcing the offshore leasing plan, and without considering any of those factors, Zinke didn’t follow the statute.

But he's not totally pissed off, because he really likes Zinke, who was a Navy Seal. I imagine it's somebody other than Trump who is truly pissed off with Zinke, and told Axios about his feelings as part of an effort to do something about this criminality. Good luck!

Sessions of sweet silent thought

Image via.

Some small encouragement in the story on the Sessions Justice Department push to get rid of affirmative action in college admissions once for all, in Charlie Savage's report:

The announcement suggests that the project will be run out of the division’s front office, where the Trump administration’s political appointees work, rather than its Educational Opportunities Section, which is run by career civil servants and normally handles work involving schools and universities.

In the first place, the obvious suggestion, that Sessions can't trust the career personnel to do what he wants; not necessarily because they're left, but just because they're professional; Sessions hasn't managed to bleed all the honesty out of DOJ, the way Tillerson seems to have blown the expertise out of State.

Annals of Derp: Voter ID

Drawing by David Horsey/Los Angeles Times.

This great thread by Matthew Chapman welcoming the Supreme Court refusal to hear North Carolina's appeal on the quashing of its stupid and vicious voter ID law got me wound up into the battle:

@TexasSpecial1 @fawfulfan @RotNScoundrel This is an annoying and narcissistic mathematical mistake. It is not your vote that is offset. If 2000 ppl in your precinct voted same way

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) May 15, 2017

@TexasSpecial1 @fawfulfan @RotNScoundrel ...then it is 1/2000 of your vote, 1/2000 of your wife's, 1/2000 of your friend Joe's, etc. It has almost nothing to do with you.

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) May 15, 2017

This one makes me completely insane. I've been through it before. "They're canceling out my vote!" What kind of egomaniac thinks that way? (A mathematically challenged one.)

It's the coverup that tells you there's a crime

Down in Mobile, December 17; photo by Stephen Crowley/New York Times.

So we already knew Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III lied to Senator Franken in his confirmation hearing for the attorney general gig in early January.

No, not about his contacts as a Trump surrogate with the Russian ambassador, reported in the Washington Post last night, about his record as a defender of civil rights:

Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) grew testy when questioning Sessions about several civil rights lawsuits Sessions had listed on his Senate questionnaire as examples of “significant” cases that Sessions personally litigated during his career.

The Trump transition team later said that the cases were worthy of being mentioned, even though Sessions had not been actively involved in them.

Annals of Deception: Jeff Sessions

Photo via Politico.

From the Wikipedia biography (in its current state) of United States Attorney General–Designate Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, on his experience as US Attorney in Alabama in 1981-93:

Sessions' office investigated the 1981 killing of Michael Donald, a young African-American man who was murdered in Mobile, Alabama by a pair of Ku Klux Klanmembers.^[13][14] Session's office did not prosecute the case, but both men were arrested and convicted.^[15]

As a U.S. Attorney he filed several cases to desegregate schools in Alabama. And he also prosecuted Klansman Henry Francis Hays, son of Alabama Klan leader Bennie Hays, for abducting and killing Michael Donald, a black teenager selected at random. Sessions insisted on the death penalty for Hays.^[16]

That second paragraph startled me for a few reasons, especially because it wasn't there last time I looked at this (which wasn't long ago at all), and because it directly contradicts the first paragraph, for which I'd checked the documentation—duh, of course Sessions did not prosecute the Michael Donald lynching case (nobody ever calls it a lynching, but the killers hung their victim's body from a tree), since he was US Attorney and the case was tried in state court by Mobile District Attorney Chris Galanos; and because in this way there is a demonstrable lie in a Wikipedia article, which really pisses me off.

The paragraph was added on November 25 between 17:46 and 17:59 by somebody under the username Azarbarzin, and the link is to a November 18 article by Mark Hemingway in the Weekly Standard, which seems to be based on lies Sessions told Hemingway:

America is not some fragile thing

Archbishop Demetrios of America—that's his real title!—with Representative John Lewis. If you think this is not a great country you're crazy. Via Esperinos.

Well, that speech certainly does it for me. (If you haven't watched it, a happy place to do it is chez SmartyPants.) I'm not going to start agreeing with President Obama about everything that he thinks needs to be done or the way to do it, because, as he might say himself, that's not America. Right? But I'm really glad to belong to the same party as he does, and proud (and as startled now as seven years ago) that he leads it, and more hopeful than I have been most of the time that in the medium-to-long run his presidency will have made a truly important and fine difference to our peculiar, excessive, but lovable country.

It may seem a little comical to watch the president who insisted so notoriously from the start on his "belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards" taking such a strong look at the America of half a century ago and the Selma heroes we're celebrating this weekend: