Relatable Terrorism

 

Saw a Bluesky post yesterday morning alleging that the "exchange of fire" at the Washington Hilton Saturday night between the Secret Service and Metro Police and whoever and the Californian wouldbe assassin was all from one side, with the one Secret Service officer saved from serious injury by his bullet-proof vest having been hit by friendly fire when another of the cops was pulling his gun from its holster and it misfired.

Can't find the post any more, and it may have been deleted, possibly with good reason, because that bit about the misfiring doesn't sound right at all—but it's remarkably difficult to find reporting that contradicts the basic outline, that there was no actual exchange, in spite of most of the newspapers using the word, the gunman (Cole Allen, 31, of Torrance) never having gotten a shot off or even tried, as he was too busy running, presumably to get into the ballroom, but maybe at this point wanting to escape, so that the friendly fire story is mostly true; and a couple of the sources basically say so, delicately: Reuters

Closed-circuit TV footage released by Trump on Truth Social showed the suspect running rapidly through a security checkpoint, momentarily catching security personnel off-guard before they drew their weapons.

No shots were fired at the gunman who got through two checkpoints before being brought down.

"You know, he charged from 50 yards away, so he was very far away from the room. He was ​moving. He was really moving," Trump said after the gala ​dinner was canceled.

And VINNews ("VIN" short for "Vos Iz Neias" or "What's New" in Yiddish)

A volunteer at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner said a gunman appeared to prepare a weapon in a service area before gunfire broke out near the ballroom entrance, according to media reports.

The witness described the suspect moving from a little-monitored area toward the event space moments before shots were fired, triggering panic as guests and staff fled. The witness said numerous shots rang out, though that account has not been independently verified.

So he readied his shotgun in the service area and then tried to run right though the checkpoint and magnetometers, with no time to shoot, which makes some sense; the security forces shot (ineffectively, wounding one of their own but not badly), then caught up with him, tackled him, apparently stripping off his shirt (I suppose looking for additional weapons) and tying his hands behind his back, and left him on his belly while they moved on to emptying the ballroom of the dignitaries and other partygoers.

What Were You Expecting?

 

Image by Nicholas Konrad for The New Yorker, from David Rohde's coverage of the Mar-a-Lago documents case, August 2022.

The defense secretary makes more use of that inadequately secured communications platform than he originally said, like to keep his missus and his brother apprised of his military activities, thus endangering national security even more than when he did this with members of the Principals Committee, plus the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic (who wasn't supposed to be there but seems to be the only person involved who had a clue on how to behave in a situation where sensitive information is being discussed). Hegseth seems extremely reliant on the missus and the brother, dragging the one of them to meetings for which she hasn't got an appropriate, or indeed any, security clearance, and appointing the other to a Pentagon sinecure, and I can't help thinking their job is to carry the hip flasks, but who knows. 

The punditry explodes with excitement: surely the president will have to fire him now, but that's not what happens when the president is informed:

Mr. Hegseth called the president around 8 p.m., said the person, who asked for anonymity to discuss a private conversation. The president told Mr. Hegseth that disgruntled “leakers” were to blame for the report and made clear that he had Mr. Hegseth’s back. The president also said he had plenty of experience dealing with leakers.

As far as Trump is concerned, the problem isn't that Hegseth is a threat to national security, it's that disgruntled leakers let everybody know about it. That's what those leakers do, probably because of whatever it was that disgruntled them. Once disgruntled, twice shy.

Indeed it might be the still gruntled ones who are the greater problem, like the White House anonymi who persuaded NPR to report that Trump was actively seeking a new defense secretary. At least the disgruntled ones are likely to be telling us the truth—that more or less everything is out of control.

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).

It's Gangland

 

From Kash Patel, The Plot Against the King.

So nothing is illegal any more:

Inauguration funds are the bribe-iest funds. No reporting requirements on expenditures from inaugural funds. Trump can pocket them outright.

[image or embed]

— David Waldman (@kagrox.bsky.social) December 12, 2024 at 6:45 PM

Bezos following on Zuckerberg, who chose the same nice round number for his inauguration donation, but it doesn't occur to Washington Post to call that one a bribe either:

The donation, which was confirmed by Meta spokesman Andy Stone, is the latest effort by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to mend fences with the political right, which has persistently criticized him following the company’s 2021 decision to ban Trump from Meta’s social platforms. The donation arrives nearly two weeks after Zuckerberg dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago in November.

And today it's reported that Sam Altman of Open AI has also joined the million-dollar inauguration club, is that cool or what? And Apple's Tim Cook, Tim Apple as Trump has called him, has a dinner date coming up with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, so I suppose he'll be ponying up his million soon.

Hardly anyone is using the word "bribe", despite the fact that we basically know Trump pocketed donations from his first inauguration, in 2017, another million dollars, as it happens, in the form of grossly inflated charges paid by the Inauguration Committee to the Trump International Hotel on Pennsylvania for the inauguration events held there; I'd forgotten, but DC Attorney General Karl Racine brought a lawsuit against the committee and the Trump Organization over it and won a $750,000 settlement out of them. Or course there's also a fig leaf of denial: the defendants say they are settling only to avoid the cost and trouble of litigating, and do not admit any "wrongdoing, unlawful conduct, or liability".

At War With Virtually Everybody

 

Eli Feldstein, former spokesman in the Prime Minister's Office, now under indictment in an elaborate plot to use fabricated intelligence to exculpate Binyamin Netanyahu (who of course knows nothing about it) in the deaths of those six hostages. Photos via The Times of Israel.

I don't pretend to know any better than I did before the election what Joe Biden should have done about the Gaza war beyond what he did do, but I will say that the administration shouldn't send a ferocious letter like the one of October 16 if they're just going to back off from their threats the way they did on November 12 and pretend everything's fine, the way they've generally seemed to do for the whole 13 months. You can't have it both ways.

International Criminal Court has finally issued the arrest warrants the prosecutor requested last May for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, former Defense Minister Gallant, and Hamas commander Mohammed Deif (whom Israel claims to have killed in a missile attack back in July, but they've never offered any kind of evidence). White House and State Department quickly out condemning "moral equivalence", which I don't get. The ICC isn't claiming that Netanyahu and Deif are "morally equivalent", merely that they have something in common—both seem to be guilty of war crimes. And not the same crimes. Deif is held  responsible for the killing of some 1200 Israelis and others in the massacres of October 7, Netanyahu and Gallant for the killing of at least 44,000 Palestinians, a large majority of them noncombatant women and children, and the deliberate starving and displacement of two million more, for one thing, and Deif committed his crime first, so he "started it", so that Israel is entitled to argue that it has merely been exercising its "right to defend itself" (needless to say, Gazans are not allowed to argue that they were driven stir-crazy by their 16 years in a kind of prison camp from which their freedom of movement was under absolute Israeli and Egyptian control, stir-craziness isn't a legitimate defense).

BBC News Hour asked a Prime Minister's Office flunky "what evidence do you have" of some complaint the flunky was making, I didn't quite catch what, but I think it must have been Israel's irrelevant allegations against prosecutor Karim Khan:

A Government of Lulz, Not Men

 

Halloween costume by Skeleteen.

As we know, when president-elect Trump left the White House in January 2021, he took a lot of stuff that did not belong to him, but to the National Archives and Records Administration, as provided in the Presidential Records Act, according to which all records of a presidential administration are the property of NARA when the administration ends (with a few exceptions for personal stuff), and brought it to his business/home in Palm Beach, where he kept the boxes in various locations, including a storeroom, a bathroom, his own living quarters, and even on a ballroom stage. 

It's not clear how much stuff altogether Trump stole; NARA's first estimate, when they wrote to demand it back in May 2021, was "two dozen boxes". Trump, after eight months of denial and stalling, sent them 15 boxes in January 2022, but it soon became clear to NARA that there was more that he hadn't returned (including famous things like the love letters from Kim Jong Un and the hurricane map he altered with his Sharpie to prove he wasn't bullshitting when he told the nation the storm was heading for Alabama, though that was an obvious forgery and he plainly was bullshitting). Also, in the 15 boxes they got, 100 documents, 700 pages in all, were classified, which got the FBI more seriously involved in the case (it might be case of violating not only the Presidential Records Act, but also the Espionage Act, especially if Trump went around showing them to people, or moved them around to hide them from the FBI, both of which it turned out he definitely did), to the point where they searched the Florida property in August, and found some 11,000 stolen documents in maybe 22 more boxes altogether, including over 100 more classified documents, some with top secret and higher classification. Finally, that November, the attorney general named a special counsel, Jack Smith, to look into the matter of whether the ex-president had violated any laws, and after a seven-month grand jury investigation Smith decided he had, and issued a criminal indictment in June 2023. The indictment didn't mention the tens of thousands of non-classified documents that should have been given to the NARA—LOL, nobody in Washington cares if you steal stuff from a library, apparently—but he was charged, along with a couple of employees, with 37 federal crimes involving the classified documents, illegally retaining them and conspiring to obstruct justice in the government's effort to get its property back from the thief. All this really happened.

Meanwhile, Smith, in parallel with a special committee in the House of Representatives and the district attorney of Atlanta, Georgia, had also been investing Trump's conduct around the same time, after Joe Biden was elected president in November 2020, when Trump worked with a host of confederates to stop Biden's accession to office, with a combination of failed legal moves to cast the election in doubt, outright extortion, fraud, and conspiracy to change or fake the results, and ultimately violence in the riotous invasion of the US Capitol led (or pushed) by Trump-linked paramilitary groups, on January 6 2021. 

All this really happened too, as you know, and led to serious legal consequences for many of the people involved. In the Georgia case, which focused on Trump's efforts to get the state's election authorities to falsify the election results there in his favor (as also, in varying degrees, in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin), it led to racketeering and other charges against Trump and 18 other defendants, among whom Georgia bail bondsman Scott Hall, Justice Department lawyer Kenneth Chesebro, and Trump personal lawyers Sydney Powell and Jenna Ellis have already pleaded guilty. In Washington, the January 6 insurrection has led to charges against more than 1,400 people, among whom at least 629 have pleaded guilty and another 300 or so have been convicted at trial so far (and two defendants, Wikipedia adds, have been acquitted of all charges). A lot of crimes were committed, and Trump was deeply involved in all of them.

But Trump himself has escaped all consequences. Not that he's innocent, or makes any serious claim to be innocent; he often claims, without evidence, that the 900 convicted January 6 defendants are innocent (even though most of them have pleaded guilty) and that those in prison are "political prisoners", but he offers no fact defense at all on his own part. His legal defense is based entirely on strategies of delay, legalist quibbling, judge-shopping (to judges who owe him their jobs, including the three "conservative" Supreme Court justices he nominated, half of an invincible majority if they refuse to recuse themselves, which they always do), intimidation and threats against judges and prosecutors and their families that would mean immediate jail for contempt for any other defendant, and endless appeal, and he's managed to avoid trial up through the 2024 election.

That is, not entirely: he's lost his company's criminal case in New York for bank and tax fraud, and a parallel civil case in which he was ordered to pay $450 million, which is still under appeal, so we can call him an adjudicated fraud, and he's lost E. Jean Carroll's civil case against him for defamation, for another $88 million or so making him additionally an adjudicated rapist, and he's got 34 felony convictions for falsifying business records in hiding Michael Cohen's hush money payments to Stormy Daniels in the 2020 campaign and his reimbursements to Cohen after his inauguration, for which he's to be sentenced on November 26. LOL, nobody cares about that either, and he'll appeal in any event. He'll never pay for that crime, and none of them cost him votes.

Trump was an openly criminal president from the day he took office, as I've been explaining since April 2017 with reference to that illegal hotel lease and the unconstitutional collection of foreign emoluments; and the main reason he's gotten away with it is that nobody is prepared for that, and nobody knows how to deal with it, even after eight years. It's not normal for presidents to break the law or violate the Constitution, and we don't have a mechanism for dealing with it. 

James Comey's and Robert Mueller's efforts to pin down a case against his collaboration with Russian intelligence in the 2016 campaign didn't quite add up to a case, obvious though it was that he'd been doing it (and it does add up to a case since the Senate's investigation was published in 2020, but no prosecutor had the stomach to try it), and while Mueller worked up an excellent case against Trump for obstruction of justice, that couldn't be prosecuted either, and not just because Attorney General Barr chose to join in the obstruction—there's that memo from the Office of Legal Counsel stating that indicting a sitting president would impermissibly interfere with his ability to carry out his duties, and practically everybody insists this has the force of law, even though it obviously doesn't. As Walter Dellinger wrote at Lawfare in 2018, there are six competing memos and briefs on the question, and it's not obvious that they even have a consistent message:

Consider the 1973 OLC memo stating that a sitting president should not be indicted. Far from being authoritative, it was essentially repudiated within months by the Justice Department in the United States’ filing in the Supreme Court in United States v. Nixon...Richard Nixon was so named in the Watergate indictment, and that inclusion was sustained by Judge John Sirica and defended by the United States...

Why would you even want a criminal president to carry on with his duties?

Of course there is supposed to be a specific remedy for that. The idea of the Constitution is that it should be dealt with by impeachment, anyway, but this turns out to be a partisan matter; Trump couldn't be impeached for anything until after the 2018 election gave us a Democratic House to do it, and Speaker Pelosi didn't want it to happen (not that she imagined Trump wasn't a criminal, but she thought it was bad politics), and when they finally managed, first over the smoking-gun evidence of Trump's effort to extort campaign help from the president of Ukraine, then over the January insurrection, the Republican Senate was unable to convict. (They came pretty close in the second case, with a majority of 57 to 43, including seven Republican senators, but they needed 67. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell voted to acquit, although he had said that "there is no question that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of that day...a mob was assaulting the Capitol in his name. These criminals were carrying his banners, hanging his flags, and screaming their loyalty to him.") Then, in the final insult, Chief Justice John Roberts ruled in Trump v. United States that it is unconstitutional to indict a president or ex-president for acts committed while he is acting in his official capacity. We don't know quite how far that extends. 

All these things really happened, but they didn't stop Trump from getting reelected on Tuesday. The price of butter is still kind of high, and on the reality side credit card interest rates are genuinely usurious (if you think Donald Trump is going to do a better job of lowering your credit card interest rate than a Democratic government getting its banking advice from Senator Elizabeth Warren, you deserve to be paying 23%, but I don't. Sweet Jesus.)

One of the most important things about the Jack Smith cases was that trying them would explore how far that insane new immunity rule can really be carried, but we aren't going to find out: the cases are going away, apparently, as well (we don't know about Georgia yet), even though we all know he's guilty of the crimes (including the less ignorant among the Republicans, who think it's funny, the fuckers—LOL, nothing matters), because Trump will be a sitting president (couch potato–in-chief) again before the trial can be held, a criminal president once again, for four more years of supervising his racketeering operation and watching out for his personal interests and funneling government money into his businesses and promoting his family and minions and grifting money out of his supporters for his lawyers and all the impulsiveness and ignorance and venality that characterized his first term endangering our human rights, our economy, our national security, and our planet. 

As I was typing through that last bit President Joe Biden came on the radio, as Kamala Harris did yesterday, for one of the inevitable unity rituals, congratulating Trump and offering his help in the peaceful transfer of power (the rituals Trump refused to participate in, committed as he was to the lie of the stolen election), and urging us all to stay calm and hopeful, because we're American, and I get that, I really do. He's still working, at the last minute, for the restoration of the norms that Trump smashed to pieces. He's showing Trump how to behave, though there's no chance Trump will learn. It has to be done. All the foreign leaders and all the legislators and governors here will try to do the same. They'll be doing it to protect us, because they don't want Trump to do anything crazy out of pique or rage, and they'll be doing it because they really care about the norms.

I really get it, but I was brought up with the slogan that we should have a government of laws, not men. I understand that's never been perfectly true and probably never would be, but I feel in elevating this lawless man and his minions to the highest position a second time, helplessly (we can't do otherwise), after we've learned so much more fully what he is, we are irretrievably losing—throwing in the trash—the aspiration the slogan represents.. 

Permission to Be Your Worst Self

Over at the Xitter, Dinesh D'Souza is really on drugs now:

No, Dinesh, it's a 1787 document. See the "We the people" up at top?

Eleven years earlier, the authors had been members of a rebellion against a monarchy, and they could conceivably have been arrested for it, if the British army had been able to get close enough (I know for instance that Samuel Adams and John Hancock were expecting to be arrested in 1775 and fled Boston for Concord), but they weren't, and none of them was ever charged with, let alone convicted of, a felony. You can't become a convicted felon without having a trial first. That's how Trump did it, with a grand jury deciding to charge him and a regular jury deciding he was guilty.

That's just one of the differences between Donald Trump and James Madison. If you're looking for a Trump parallel in the story, you'd do better going with George III, another extremely wealthy but profoundly stupid grandchild of German immigrants who believed that God had put him above the law.

Think about it: 

Moral Equivalence

Larry Thomas and Bret Mendenhall in Uwe Boll's 2008 Postal, via The New York Times.

On the prospect of the International Criminal Court issuing arrest warrants on Yahya Sinwar (the head of Hamas in Gaza), Ismail Haniyeh (head of the Hamas Political Bureau), Mohammed Deif (commander-in-chief of the Qassam Brigades), and the Israeli prime minister and defense minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, there's been a lot of angry talk about the ICC prosecutor practicing "moral equivalence", including from President Biden—

The ICC prosecutor’s application for arrest warrants against Israeli leaders is outrageous. And let me be clear: whatever this prosecutor might imply, there is no equivalence — none — between Israel and Hamas.  We will always stand with Israel against threats to its security.  

A truly weird error in this connection from NBC News, which ran an interview with Netanyahu yesterday in which the prime minister complained that he was being given a "bum rap" (Trump's language choices are a bad influence, now Bibi too sounds like a 1950s gangster):

Echoing Biden's comments, Netanyahu said Khan's decision to seek arrest warrants for both Israel's and Hamas' leaders reflected a "false symmetry" that he said was comparable to the arrest warrants that were issued for both President George W. Bush and Osama Bin Laden following the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Remember when ICC put out a warrant on Bush? I was so startled I looked it up, but of course it didn't happen (the court did open a preliminary investigation of war crimes in Afghanistan after the country ratified the Rome statute in 2003, but after 11 years of that, from 2006 to 2017, it took until 2020 for them to decide to move on to a full investigation, upon which Trump put sanctions on them, which Biden has reversed). And Netanyahu didn't say it did. You can get a more accurate report of what he said on NBC from The Times of Israel:

It's Not Hyperbole, Man!

 

Holding babies in Rose Valley, PA. Photo by Andrew Harnik/AP via Citrus County Chronicle.  

As I was saying, the last SOTU of Biden's first term was an extraordinary departure from the SOTU norm, which I've been observing off and on since I was a teenager in the Johnson administration (likely for the first time in 1964, when LBJ announced an "unconditional war on poverty in America"), but I don't think I got all the way to what made it so extraordinary. 

Of course one of the reasons it's different is that there's an overriding purpose to this particular speech tied directly to the presidential campaign, as Josh Marshall explains in his Backchannel:

there was one overwhelming sina qua non objective and that was to demonstrate that Biden is vigorous, up to the fight and can deliver on the key requirements of running a national campaign.

Biden clearly did as well with that as you could have hoped for, showing himself to be sharp, energetic, and a master of the detail, displaying passion, humor, and a very good memory. he's absolutely on top of it, as staff has claimed. Nobody who watched it could say he was frail, out of it, or suffering dementia, and we can be confident as he puts himself out to the public in the coming weeks and months that he'll be able to sustain that and an increasing number of voters will get it. He's plainly capable of doing both jobs, of presidential candidate and president; if there's a problem, whether it's bias against the elderly or Fox News or New York Times propaganda, it won't be because of anything actually wrong with him.

So that had been a huge worry among all kinds of Democrats, and I thought it should be a big point in the reaction to the speech, which it has been, and that's great.

But it's not the only point that deserves to be talked about.

Literary Corner: Make a Federal Case of It

 

Matthew Broderick as Professor Harold Hill tries out The Think System.

NY vs. Trump and his spawn and their businesses seems to me to have pretty much everything I could have wanted: over 200 specific acts of fraud committed in the valuations of Trump properties for his annual financial statements between 2011 and 2021 (yes, including during the presidency), generally in order to get better credit terms, some of them just spectacularly off, the demand for $250 million in damages, plus wiping all their New York businesses—should the state win its case, Trumps will be forbidden to operate a business in the state for the next five years—and federal criminal referrals in New York's Southern District and the Internal Revenue Service.

That last especially cheers me, because the publicity over the past year or so has been so dominated by Trump's overvaluing his properties to get loans, and hardly anybody has been talking about how he undervalues them in order to cheat on his taxes. But it turns out AG Letitia James wasn't ignoring it at all; in fact she was making a federal case of it, which is what it's supposed to be. Whether IRS is going to prosecute them or not (he's been fighting them for something like the past 12 years to stop them from collecting a $70-million refund he didn't deserve) I don't know, but the case needs to be out there.

Meanwhile, in another federal case, I'm intrigued by the lyricism and haunting ambiguity of Trump's answer to a a TV question from Sean Hannity ("What was your process to declassify?"):

For the Record: This Week in IOKIYAR

 

Drawing by Neal Obermeyer, September 2009.

I guess it's because everybody knows at some level everybody knows Republican concern with "law and order" is aimed at criminals of color, not "people like us" who always have presumption of innocence and mitigating factors like their mom was mean to them.

— Yas We Can (@Yastreblyansky) March 6, 2022

Retired Emperor Has Complaints

 

"The antipope of Mar-a-Lago": illustration by Jason Seiler for Politico. Can't really tell from the setting whether he's meant to be one of the historical antipopes or the Holy Father of Sherwood Forest, Pope Tuck I, but whatevs.

Retired emperor seems to be upset about something, at great length, on his antisocial medium website:

I have just learned, through leaks in the mainstream media, that after being under investigation from the time I came down the escalator 5 ½ years ago, including the fake Russia Russia Russia Hoax, the 2 year, $48M, No Collusion Mueller Witch Hunt, Impeachment Hoax #1, Impeachment Hoax #2, and others, that the Democrat New York Attorney General has “informed” my organization that their “investigation” is no longer just a civil matter but also potentially a “criminal” investigation working with the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office.

AG James "informed" his organization but he learned about it through media leaks? Why didn't his organization tell him? Or are the scare quotes supposed to suggest that they didn't really inform his organization at all, and it's not really an "investigation", and "criminal" is an exaggeration of some kind? Or is the author just signaling subtly that we're dealing with an unreliable narrator here?

The Attorney General of New York literally campaigned on prosecuting Donald Trump even before she knew anything about me. She said that if elected, she would use her office to look into “every aspect” of my real estate dealings. She swore that she would “definitely sue” me. She boasted on video that she would be, and I quote, “a real pain in the ass.” She declared, “just wait until I’m in the Attorney General’s office,” and, ”I’ve got my eyes on Trump Tower.” She also promised that, if elected, she would “join with law enforcement and other Attorney Generals across this nation in removing this President from office,” and, “It’s important that everyone understand that the days of Donald Trump are coming to an end.”

Letitia James knew a good deal about Donald Trump by the time she was campaigning for attorney general in 2018, as indicated by the formal promises included in her campaign website, to

Curate's Egg

 

Right Reverend Host: "I'm afraid you've got a bad Egg, Mr Jones!"; The Curate: "Oh no, my Lord, I assure you! Parts of it are excellent!" "True Humility" by George du Maurier, originally published in Punch, 9 November 1895, via Wikipedia.

Jordan in comments yesterday insisting that, even though Bret Stephens must have been wrong about what happened in the 2016 primary campaign, something did after all happen, and it was important:

that the 2016 Republican primaries were a fundamentally transformative moment in American Conservatism, like the Counter-Reformation, with Trump as Martin Luther -- suddenly, the conflict between scripture and practice wasn't tenable any more, and the voters rebelled (for real, unlike the fake, astroturf "rebellion" of the Tea Party period, but borrowing the same frameworks), followed by the politicians, who were dragged hopelessly along until they awakened to the possibilities that the Trump movement had opened and became true-believers (like Goebbels and other Third Reich figures).

I'm not so crazy about the Reformation analogy, with its implication that Trump had an idea (let alone 95 of them). I've used the Hitler analogy, of course, with a different emphasis, thinking about the surprise the German conservatives got when the idiot to whom they'd offered the chancellorship turned out not to be controllable. 

For the Record: Out Like Flynn

Image by Trumped Up Flicks/Kos.

This kindhearted troll concerned for General Flynn's family was so daunted that he never responded at all, but I think there's some value in laying out something about his legal situation, apart from his 2015 work in support of RT television and violation of the retired officers' version of the emoluments provision, with a new and especially delusional lawyer, who may be advising him this year to break his annual customary guilty plea

IANAL but I don't think you can really do that after he's pleaded guilty and been convicted.

— YASTAROTH DUKE OF HELL (@Yastreblyansky) October 26, 2019

A Yarn Ball as Big as China

Junior, unnamed friend, Parnas, and Fruman at some Trump property in May 2018, Facebook screenshot via Financial Times.

So I was having the craziest dream, all bound up, naturally, with the impeachment inquiries, and the House Intelligence Committee attempt to get witnesses and Trump and Barr trying to make then all refuse, and there were these two respectively Ukrainian- and Belarus-born Florida business guys, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, who had worked in some capacity for the president's personal lawyer, Rudolph Giuliani, in the Ukraine matter, refusing to testify or provide documents, only they did it by mail, in the form of a letter from their lawyer, John Dowd, who used to be Trump's personal lawyer, only the letter was in Comic Sans

Scandalmongering

Alfred Hitchcock, The Lodger, 1927.

David F. Brooks wishes to inform the public that it's another bothsides case: "We've All Just Made Fools of Ourselves—Again".

Democrats, or at least former congressman Beto O'Rourke and former CIA director John O. Brennan, need to make a public apology to the president for calling him something like a traitor (and O'Rourke said he did the treason "ham-handedly", which is just mean) when they "lacked the evidence". Republicans need to apologize to Washington for calling it a swamp. Everyone concerned should adopt "an attitude of humility and honest self-examination."

I love it to death when David F. Brooks starts talking about honest self-examination. He, of course, is the exception, regarding himself as having no self to examine, an affable, ego-free void.

Also it's all because of Watergate:

Otherwise Blameless Life

Obligatory: Manafort, Stone, and Atwater, 1985. Photo by Harry Naltchayan/Washington Post.

I have to laugh at Judge Ellis remarking that Paul Manafort had led an "otherwise blameless life" except for the period between 2004 and 2018 when he committed all the crimes he's charged with in the Virginia and DC cases. Does he believe Manafort went to Ukraine and suddenly became a professional criminal at the age of 55?

I have my doubts, above all over his work for Philippines dictator Ferdinand Marcos, reported by Ken Vogel in Politico Magazine back in June 2016, not long before Manafort's promotion from convention manager to campaign manager (the article was published literally the day after the meeting in Trump Tower with the anti-sanctions campaigner Natalia Veselnitskaya where he was reported to have fallen asleep, seemed later to have been taking desultory notes on his phone, and possibly, as Emptywheel pointed out, recorded the whole thing, which would now be in the hands of the Special Counsel, with Manafort's other electronic devices):