Tag: Brett Kavanaugh

It ISN’T About Politics, Part II: Even For Republicans It Isn’t Always About Politics; Sometimes It’s About Criminal Conspiracy…

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

Dear MSNBC, CNN & The Whole Rest of The MSM:

Yesterday I ranted at you for ascribing everything the Democrats do to “politics“. It’s not true. Some people, when they take an oath of office, actually take their oaths seriously. To assume everyone does what they do for political reasons is to assume every one of those sincere oath-keepers is full of shit.

No, it’s not true. Both sides do not regularly violate their oaths.

For 3+ years now, we have watched Donald Trump and every Republican in Congress violate their oaths of office. The deal is, you take the oath, you uphold the Constitution. You don’t do it selectively like you do with your religion. Your religion is entirely make-believe.

Our Constitution doesn’t work that way (though, to be fair, we did make it up; we invented the Constitution and we can change it as needed).

When Mitch McConnell announced that he wouldn’t give Merrick Garland so much as a hearing, that was 100% political. It had no basis in the Constitution. When Democrats objected to Brett Kavanaugh, there was ideology at play — absolutely. But Kavanaugh’s political affiliation isn’t what Democrats believe makes Kavanaugh unqualified. It’s his penchant for sexually assaulting women and lying about it.

That’s NOT a political disagreement, it’s a moral disagreement. It’s disagreeing with the idea that a man, reliably and consistently accused of serial sexual assault does not belong on the SCOTUS.

When Republicans stand with Trump in the face of blatant criminality — behaviors and actions so terrible that Republicans can’t even argue facts; they have to argue process — they’re not standing with him out of pure political tribalism. No, when Republicans stand with Donald Trump, there’s something OTHER than politics at play — there’s criminal complicity.

That’s the MSM’s giant, economy-sized blind spot. They’re determined to ascribe the GOP’s rabid defense of Trump as Republicans defending their standard-bearer. Well… kinda yes but mostly no — it’s worse. Donald Trump, though not a lifelong Republican (he may have registered as a Democrat but that was political expedience at play, not political ideology), epitomizes Republican “thinking”. It’s all pig at the trough all the time. It’s a cynical approach to the Constitution.

Violating it is a given. The trick is to insist, when caught violating it, that you were following the letter of the law (even as you were raping it).

Republican “thinking” (such as it is) rests on conservative values. Conservative values — as the name says — want to CONSERVE. But conserve WHAT, you may ask? Conserve the future? That’s a contradiction of terms.

Save the present? Okay, we can freeze right now in place. Why would we want to do that? Why are we freezing now and stopping the future from happening? Hmmmmm… is there something in the past that conservatives actually want to conserve?

Indeed there is — there’s something in the past conservatives want to conserve: THE PAST. Conservatives want to make the past our new present and our eternal future. It’s right there in their name. And the past American conservatives want to conserve is the past where THEY — white, Christian men — were the ones in full, unequivocal control. THAT is what conservatives — and therefore Republicans — want to CONSERVE.

So — normally, for Republicans, it IS always about politics and the Republicans’ need to control even how we talk about politics. “Both Sides Do It” journalism is pure Republicanism. They know they’re intentions are corrupt. If they can paint the opposition with the same brush — even if the opposition’s version of corruption is at a fraction of the scale — then “Both Sides Do It”.

Bernie Madoff’s a mega thief who stole billions. Jean Valjean stole bread because of hunger. To the conservative way of thinking, both men are thieves. Both Sides Do It.

Look at how the Republicans are trying to undermine the investigators of THEIR crimes — “It’s the investigators who are criminals! Both sides do it!” Republicans insist. Oh, the irony (both sides don’t do irony by the way).

Trump’s defense of Putin’s criminal behavior? We do it too — Both sides do it!

Quid pro quo? Both sides do it — get over it!

No — both sides DON’T do it and never did. Both sides do NOT commit TREASON to hold onto political power. Both sides do not stand with a man they KNOW FOR A FACT is a traitor.

Republicans do however. And, for once — it ain’t entirely political. In this instance — it’s because they’re CO-CONSPIRATORS. To a whole host of crimes including election fraud, obstruction of justice and treason.

I’ll say it one more time: It AIN’T about politics.

Republicans Are The “Mission Accomplished” Party; That’s Great Until You Realize What Their “Mission” Is…

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

Who can forget W aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, May 2, 2003 – proudly proclaiming just what the banner behind him said: “Mission Accomplished”.

That image haunted W’s presidency.  It haunts him to this day because nothing had actually been accomplished.  The only thing they’d succeeded at, mission-wise, up to that point was successfully hanging that banner without anyone getting hurt.

Like everything else Republicans say, “Mission Accomplished” was marketing, no more honest or genuine than Mitch McConnell insisting Merrick Garland couldn’t get a hearing because “the American people needed to make the SCOTUS choice, not the president who they’d overwhelmingly returned to office”. That WAS what Moscow Mitch said with as straight a face as he could muster.

And yet – when it comes to “Mission Accomplished”, Republicans have actually succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.  The America being torn apart right now is the America Republicans want.  We are living in their “Mission Accomplished” – or, to be accurate, “Mission NEARLY Accomplished”.  Republicans can see Permanent Minority Rule from their house now.  They ache to get there.

This is how close Republicans are now to accomplishing their mission –

  • PACK THE COURTS — Moscow Mitch denied Obama dozens of lifetime court appointments.  How strange that all those vacancies started filling the moment Trump became POTUS.
  • How strange that Merrick Garland couldn’t get a hearing while Brett Kavanaugh skated despite overwhelming evidence he was unworthy to hold the judgeship he already held.

  • PROHIBIT NON-WHITE IMMIGRATION – Children in cages, anyone?

  • DESTROY THE ENVIRONMENT – We left the Paris Accords.  Ryan Zinke.  The end of clean water, clean air, National Parks.  Life as we know it.
  • MAKE THE RICH RICHER & THE POOR POORER – Tax cuts for the rich, bullshit & lies for everyone else.
  • INSTITUTIONALIZE RACISM – “Decent people on both sides”.
  • MAKE GERRYMANDERING PERMANENT – Twice as many Democrats as Republicans have to vote in order for their majority to actually feel like a majority.  The whole point of gerrymandering is to CIRCUMVENT the Will Of The People.  Welcome to Republicanism.  Can’t win on the law, can’t win on procedure, so pound the table into sawdust instead.
  • ENFORCE PERMANENT MINORITY RULE – Remind the class – how many more votes did Hilary Clinton get over Trump?  3 million plus, was it?  Remember – that doesn’t include all the uncounted, provisional, suppressed, flipped & tossed in the trash ballots.  Think any of those were Republican votes?
  • DESTROY OUR RELATIONSHIPS WITH ALL ALLIES – The knife-wound in the Kurds’ back is still fresh enough we can watch it bleed.
  • MAKE AMERICA A RUSSIAN SATELLITE STATE – How about that: “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED”!

If Brett Kavanaugh Is Still Working As A SCOTUS Judge, That Means The Rule Of Law Is NOT Working

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

The Rule Of Law is kinda like a soap bubble made of iron. In and of itself, it’s incredibly solid — it’s made of iron, isn’t it? But it’s still got the delicacy of a bubble. There’s no “slightly popped”. There’s popped and not popped.

The Rule Of Law is a radical notion if you think about it — it survives only by our mutual agreement to follow it. The chaos consuming us now flows directly from the fact that while some of us still do follow The Rule Of Law, one of our two political parties has revealed that they don’t (and never really did). The Rule Of Law says if you break it, you pay.

It says everyone gets treated equally by The Rule Of Law. And everyone who breaks it — they, too, will be treated exactly the same regardless of how many zeroes there are on their weekly pay stub. Brett Kavanaugh was NOT treated equally at any point during his confirmation hearing. Brett, rather, was shown extraordinary privilege.

He was allowed to perjure himself in fact — and even get belligerent about it as if HE were the one who’d been sexually assaulted. It doesn’t get more (white) privileged than that.

The Rule Of Law says if you lie, cheat or steal to achieve something, you haven’t achieved it — rather, you’ve broken the law and should be punished for it. If you broke the law, say, to become president — it means you’re not actually the president. How could you be? You didn’t meet the basic requirement of “winning an election”. Cheating does NOT equal winning — EVER.

When we finally get to do a deep, deep dive into Mitch McConnell’s actions leading up to the election (especially Moscow Mitch’s refusal to let We The People in on the secret that Moscow was putting its thumb on our election scale for Trump), we’ll have to pick apart Mitch’s real reasons for denying Merrick Garland so much as a hearing. That unprecedented SCOTUS seat grab was DESIGNED to steal the judiciary as a means to force permanent minority rule down the country’s throat. Was it illegal? That will depend on what we nail Mitch on.

By all rights, Merrick Garland should be sitting where Neil Gorsuch sits. We The People voted for Barack Obama — and part of why we voted for him was so he could — while still in office — choose SCOTUS judges to the liking of HIS voters. Mitch’s bullshit about wanting the American voter to get to choose — one has to wonder if Mitch knew anything about the machinations Russia was gearing up to throw at us.

Then again — in Mitch’s “defense”, he did say that if Hillary had won, he’d have refused to fill any vacancies — even if every single justice suddenly dropped dead.

The Rule Of Law says thieves — after they’re caught, prosecuted and convicted — do NOT get to keep the loot. In the case of Brett Kavanaugh’s SCOTUS seat, you don’t get to gut the “advise and consent” part of the process — lying through your teeth every step of the way — and then KEEP the SCOTUS seat. It sets a terrible precedent otherwise.

When the whole point of the exercise is destruction of the judiciary in order to install permanent minority rule? It makes the thievery extra rotten.

As we learned from the NYTimes today, the White House killed the FBI’s investigation into Deborah Ramirez’s corroborated accusations of sexual assault against Kavanaugh. If the FBI had interviewed the 25+ witnesses and filed that report, Brett Kavanaugh would not be a SCOTUS judge today — that had to have been the GOP’s calculus.

If our highest court is tainted by corruption, it ceases to be viable. The only way to make sure it is and remains a bastion of fairness would be to expunge every bit of Trump or McConnell influence. In the end, it should be as simple as this: If Trump cheated to become POTUS — which he absolutely did — then he has no authority to “be” POTUS. Not being POTUS, he has no authority to nominate anyone for anything.

Not a single Trump nominee can stand because the man who nominated was not AUTHORIZED to do it. I know — chaos. I don’t give a shit.

The Rule Of Law is all or nothing.

Want To Know How & What A Rapist Thinks? Just Ask President Donald J Trump

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

I’m biased as hell here — I’ll own it. Being a sexual assault survivor, I have a particular loathing for rapists that I don’t think I’ll ever “get over”. I know rapist code. I know how they use implied power to coerce or force you into submission and then silence. I know how a victim thinks, too (unfortunately). Wish I didn’t. Victims think: “How can I say anything? Who would believe ME over THEM? The Truth doesn’t matter…”.

It’s not unusual for the assault victim to then flip it — and the whole terrible episode becomes their fault — like they concocted this, wanting this thing to happen to them. It’s utterly irrational. But it becomes the accepted explanation — so that, in a very real way, the sexual assault or the rape continues. The victim feels the rapist’s brutal touch every minute of every day (even if only subliminally).

Yeah — I loathe rapists. I loathe people who enable rapists — though I will cut them a teeny bit of slack. Not everyone knows they’re enabling a rapist. I don’t think the conservative Jewish congregation my family belonged to when I was growing up outside of Baltimore in the 1960’s knew that the “ritual director” working for them was a pederast. If anyone in the small hierarchy knew or suspected what my attacker was up to — I have giant issues. But, in the absence of any such knowledge, there’s your slack. They didn’t know.

I especially loathe people who stand by rapists — who stand with them and refuse to either acknowledge that a rapist is a rapist or — far worse — see no problem with rapists raping. They seem to have a law of the jungle dynamic in their mind — a bully’s Garden of Eden. Put enough of these rape-loving thugs together and voila! Rape Culture is born.

Donald Trump is The Poster Boy for Rape Culture. He’s the Poster Boy for Toxic Male Culture & Entitlement. Donald Trump earnestly believes he should be allowed to stick his wretched pecker anywhere he wants to with absolute impunity. There’s no such thing as “rape” in Trump’s mind — unless someone of color is doing it. Then all bets are off & all charges are filed.

In response to E. Jean Carroll’s credible, richly detailed (and contemporaneously reported — to friends) account of Donald Trump RAPING her in a Bergdorf-Goodman changing room 28 years ago, Trump never says “I find rape abhorrent! I am mortified that Ms. Carroll feels that way about our encounter and I want to do everything in my power to make it up to her”, no, he says “She’s not my type”.

In other words — If she WERE my type — hell, yeah, I raped her!

A RAPIST occupies the White House. So does a TRAITOR. So does a CAREER CRIMINAL.

How the hell did we let this happen to us? If you really want to know? We let Rape Culture live. We let Rape Culture dictate to us. What was the Brett Kavanaugh hearing BUT a painful example of Rape Culture having its way with us — again. We had a RAPIST crying crocodile tears because HE felt victimized for being called out AS A RAPIST.

It was impossible not to feel raped (or at least assaulted) that day.

It is impossible not to feel assaulted when a rapist replies to accusations of rape with “You’re not my type”.

If you don’t feel assaulted by that? The rapists are winning.