Disillusionment

 

The worst of the worst, really?

I was gone for a couple of weeks, and when I got back the whole place had gone nuts. The president seemed bent on conquering Greenland, apparently because he thinks the island is as big as it looks in the traditional Mercator projection and he just had to have it, and had in fact persuaded the Venezuelan Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado to give him her prize, or at least the gold medal that represents it (the prize itself also includes a variable monetary award of around 10 million Swedish kronor or one million US dollars, which the recipient normally uses to benefit the cause for which it was awarded, and which Machado didn't surrender to Trump, as far as I can learn, though I'm sure he'd have cheerfully accepted the money if it was offered, and the reputational enhancement that comes of having been judged worthy of the prize by the Norwegian committee, a glory that can no more be transferred than that of Trump's unearned Super Bowl rings and Purple Hearts, as the Committee made clear). 

Then there was the paramilitary occupation of Minnesota by 2000 irregular troops, 3000 after January, which seemed a good deal more serious than all that tomfoolery, more Miller than Trump if you know what I mean, with ICE and CBP terrorizing the Twin Cities with their arbitrary seizures of people, especially Somali and Latino, in "Operation Metro Surge" since Trump condemned Somalia as "garbage", not so different from what we'd already seen in California, Illinois, Oregon, North Carolina, and Washington, D.C., in particular the ethnic profiling leading to arrests and detention of US citizens and permanent residents and otherwise protected people and kidnaping of children, parking them in the hideous prison camps rising around the country, not to mention all the simple people occupying what may be considered an "illegal" position on US territory (I'll get to that later) doing nothing but working, often in what we call "essential" occupations, educating themselves, and caring for their kids—the exceptional discipline of the general population rising to help protect their neighbors evade the invaders—and the out-of-control response of the latter, who seem to have decided they're at war and so far murdered two.

Things are now apparently getting a little bit better. Seven hundred of the Guards have been removed from the site. Citizens and other officially protected individuals are still getting wrongfully arrested for immigration violations, but are now able to file a habeas claim to get out, though not very quickly: it's going to take you a long time to get your day in court as the entire federal justice system in Minnesota collapses:

the Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s Office has been crippled by mass resignations, including some of its most senior career attorneys. That has left the remaining DOJ attorneys in Minnesota inundated with more cases than they can keep up with. But I’m not sure that does justice to what’s been happening. It’s quite a bit worse than that.

The quality of lawyering has eroded to such a point that government lawyers have been unable to keep up with the court orders demanding that detainees be released. As a result, detainees have lingered in confinement even after courts have ordered their release....

You've probably heard of Julie Le, a DHS lawyer seconded to the U.S. Attorney's Office who was called in to explain why ICE was failing to comply with court orders and more or less broke down in front of the judge:

“I wish you would just hold me in contempt of court so I can get 24 hours of sleep,” Le said. “The system sucks, this job sucks, I am trying with every breath I have to get you what I need.”

***

Bye, Elise

 

21st congressional district, New York, via Wikipedia,

Some gossip, mostly from a caller from New York's 21st congressional district, on the radio WNYC Brian Lehrer, unable to link at the moment), about Rep. Elise Stefanik: that she's never liked the district, the state's largest geographically and most sparsely populated and of course poorest, if only because it's too cold, not too mention plagued by awful unemployment and alcohol and drug abuse. She's not even from there but from Albany; she's a carpetbagger, claiming residence on the basis of what upstaters call a "camp", or summer place, owned by her parents. She hasn't done a town hall for six years, and in what the local press categorized as a "rare visit" for a ceremonial function in August, to Plattsburgh, the booing stopped her from addressing a crowd consisting mostly of anti-Trumpers:

"Well, Elise has not shown up in our district for months and months," said protester Mavis Agnew. "She won't hold a town hall, she won't take questions. She's never in her office. People show up at her office constantly, door's closed. Her representatives, her employees won't talk to her... So this was her first appearance, the first opportunity we had to let her know we're unhappy."

She got a more positive response in February, but that was what was advertised as her farewell tour, when she was expecting to leave the House for a stint as US ambassador. Then, when Trump ordered her to stay in Congress instead to protect his razor-thin majority, a visit to Saranac Lake celebrating a federal grant for the firehouse (in an appropriation signed by President Biden) was received with "mixed emotions".

The other thing is, the district isn't inevitably Republican; it was held by Democrat Bill Owens, defeating a GOP torn by culture war issues, from 2009 through 2015, and voted for Obama twice, along with Schumer and Gillibrand (whose 20th congressional district overlapped a good deal with where the 21st is today).

Her dropping out of the governor's race is pretty easy to understand: she was certain to win the Republican primary, but very likely to lose the general election, and certain to lose, at least as long as Trump refused to endorse her, which he did for his own Trumpy reasons; perhaps he was mad at her for even considering giving up the congressional seat, like she valued herself more than him. You can see how that would be hard for him to take. Whatever happens to her next, she's certainly an instance of the Trump Curse. I"m sure she'd love a job in Washington, but I really feel she's headed for being relatively alive on the proverbial Farm Upstate. 

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.

January 6 Was Not a Dream

 

Peter Thiel Dreams of Empire, Hanna Barakat + AIxDESIGN & Archival Images of AI / via Dave Karpf, Tech Policy Press, January 2025.

I guess everybody's heard about the weird little present eight Republican senator—Tommy Tuberville (Alabama), Lindsey Graham (South Carolina), Marsha Blackburn (Tennessee), Ron Johnson (Wisconsin), Cynthia Lummis (Wyoming), Bill Hagerty (Tennessee), Josh Hawley (Missouri) and Dan Sullivan (Alaska)—gave or attempted to give themselves in the continuing resolution that ended the government shutdown last week, inviting them to sue the government for half a million dollars apiece for, I guess, insulting them by suggesting their behavior was suspicious, when the FBI seized their phone records for January 4 to 7 2021, in what was briefly known as the Arctic Frost investigation in 2023.

Or as Josh Hawley said, “Yesterday we learned that the FBI tapped my phone … tapped Lindsey Graham’s phone, tapped Marsha Blackburn’s phone, tapped five other phones of United States senators,” except of course that wasn't true in any way—it was just the metadata for the four days, no wiretaps. And

Biden’s Stasi who claimed to be saving ‘our sacred democracy’ in fact worked overtime to destroy it — all for power. They spied on Catholic churches, prosecuted pro-lifers, deployed the FBI against parents at school board meetings — and tried to tap the phones of their political enemies. Including mine," Hawley wrote on X.

"This is an abuse of power beyond Watergate, beyond J. Edgar Hoover, one that directly strikes at the Constitution, the separation of powers, and the First Amendment."

Obviously none of that was true either. "Biden's Stasi" is the agency that named special prosecutors to investigate Hunter Biden's business dealings and the classified documents retained in Biden's home from his time as vice president, as also Mike Pence's, though it also did issue a memo, rescinded shortly afterwards, expressing concern about hypertraditionalist Latin Mass enthusiasts, after investigating a

suspect [who] expressed neo-Nazi rhetoric and described himself as a "Catholic clerical fascist." The FBI said he wrote in a letter to a family member that he needed to "build guns, explosives, and other forms of weaponry" in order to "make total war against the Satanic occultist government and the Zionist devil worshiping bankers who control it."

Call me paranoid, but I'm with the FBI on that; I don't get a good feeling off people who call themselves "Catholic clerical fascists" either.

Joe Did What? Annals of Rhetoric

Charleston Mercury, February 16, 1861. Mr. Bret Stephens was not available to complain about how unkind and divisive Lincoln had been, so they had to do it themselves. Reminds me of Biden how they complain that Lincoln doesn't feed the press often enough and that he's an 'indecent old man".

The other day, I was comparing Biden's September 1 speech to President Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1941 State of the Union, and the Four Freedoms peroration. Today, Mr. Bret Stephens, stealing a David Brooks lede ("With Malice Toward Quite a Few"), decides to up the ante:

Abraham Lincoln’s first Inaugural Address was a 3,600-word olive branch to a South on the eve of the Civil War. His second promised malice toward none after the war left 620,000 dead. Americans have long revered both speeches because they offered a measure of redemption, and a means of reconciliation, to those who deserved it least.

Joe Biden’s speech in Philadelphia last week bears no resemblance to either address, except that, in his own inaugural, he staked his presidency on ending “this uncivil war that pits red against blue.” So much for that. Like the predecessor he denounces, Biden has decided the best way to seek partisan advantage is to treat tens of millions of Americans as the enemy within.

(First sentence in the second paragraph is screaming for an editor: an expression in Biden's inaugural address is not a feature of last week's speech—at some point in composing the sentence he decided it was about all of Biden's speeches, but was too lazy to reread the first seven words.)

Noteworthy, as Erik Loomis says, that Stephens is now agreeing that the Republican Party is the Confederacy. I mean, why else would he be urging Biden to treat the former the way Lincoln treated the latter?