Remember when Trump swore to uphold the Constitution? I laughed then because I knew it was BS. This week we have two instances of Trump violating the Constitution, and naturally nothing has been done yet by the Senate (hah) or the House to stop it. Although boy, they sure have let him know it in a variety of cities where masses of people have protested. I haven’t seen such a crowd in Times Square since New Year’s Eve.
1). First Amendment? What First Amendment? . We all know that the only amendment Trump will fight for is the Second, but I should point out that the first one, the one stating that the government will keep its mitts off the right to free expression, is worth mentioning considering he’s been waging war on it since pretty much the beginning. His incessant casting of the press as the enemy of the people has many reporters concerned–and rightfully so–about their safety. It’s happening on both sides as a gang of idiots protested outside Tucker Carlson’s house, which proves once again that the left can be as blind to the First Amendment as the right…indeed, sometimes worse. Of course, the difference between the right and left is that when the left goes after Carlson, others on the left are critical and condemn them. If, on the other hand, the right went after Rachel Maddow, conspiracy theorists would declare it was actually organized by the left in order to make the right look bad.
The point is, Trump’s “enemy of the people” riff is frightening reporters, which can cause a chilling effect on the news. That’s what Trump wants, of course. Fear is his main ally, and he wants people afraid to report on him for fear of their lives.
But this week he took another step on the throat of the First Amendment by banning CNN reporter Jim Acosta from the White House press room. Why? Well, the claim is that he manhandled an intern who was trying to yank the microphone from him, “proof” of which was provided by Sarah Huckabee by circulating a doctored tape she got from a right wing conspiracy farm. This excuse was rejected by anyone who had a clear mind and a set of eyes who saw it for what it was: Acosta asking tough questions that Trump didn’t want to answer.
This was yet another chilling effect, a warning: don’t question Trump too harshly or you too will be left unable to enter the White House and do your job. If there is no purer definition of First Amendment violation than refusing to let reporters do their jobs, I really can’t think of it.
2). Advise and consent? What advise and consent? . So Trump forced Jeff Sessions to resign, an action that members of the GOP threatened would be unleashing a virtual shitstorm of trouble…a threat that they have of course walked back since. Trump then, as he should, placed Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, in charge.
Kidding, of course. Instead he replaced him with a guy who basically looks like the TV Daredevil’s Kingpin.
Now what many people are focusing on–indeed, the trigger for the various protests–is that the Kingpin has been going around on TV for months (and even wrote an editorial to the effect) that the Mueller investigation is a witch hunt that should be shut down. This alone should cause him to recuse himself from overseeing it, the way that Sessions did. But he won’t do that. He’s a Trump flunky who will do whatever Trump wants him to do, which means if Mueller wants to get his report out, it’s time to write the dámņëd thing and fast.
But the larger point is that Trump can’t appoint him. What’s supposed to happen is that Rosenstein is supposed to step in and serve while Trump waits for the Senate to reconvene so that they can run approvals on the numb nut that Trump put in charge. On a constitutional basis, the Kingpin has no power and any decisions he makes should carry no weight. So the question will become, Is the Senate going to do its job and rein in Trump? The answer is No, of course not. They haven’t in two years; why would they now?
The House, on the other hand, can and should.
3) A brand new war.. An intelligent president, when asked about the prospect of actual House oversight in the wake of the Blue Wave that washed over the legislative branch, would say “Bring it on. I’ve nothing to hide.” You know, the way Kavanaugh said when asked about…oh, wait, never mind.
But since Trump is quite possibly the least intelligent president in the history of the office, he threatened to take a “war” posture with the House and even claimed that he would have the justice department investigate Democrats who intended to do the House’s job for the first time in two years.
Naturally he doesn’t understand that he can’t do that. He can’t just order the Justice Department to investigate people for no reason whatsoever. The fact that he makes šhìŧ up and his supporters are okay with that may be fine for him in his daily existence, but the Justice Department is not going to go on fishing expeditions just because Trump is pìššëd øff that the House Oversight Committee is actually overseeing him. Trump’s world has just gotten a whole lot more complicated, and that terrifies him because the truth is that he is a blustering coward who has a TON of things to hide and is petrified it’s all going to come out. If nothing else, there’s stuff in his tax returns that is very likely criminal and he wants to keep that under wraps.
God, let him actually achieve a first: the first POTUS to be arrested.
PAD
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Anyone who’s a fan of NBC’s The Good Place will understand why I think that it was perfect timing that the finale of that show’s fist season aired the night before Trump’s inauguration. The first season is probably well and truly spoiled for most everyone, but still I’ll just say that I watched that Season Finale and said, “Yeah, that makes perfect sense.”
First Yates got the boot and then came Flynn!
Comey was out and McCabe in!
Then Spicer got the boot! So did Harvey!
Followed by Priebus and Scaramucci!
Who’s next?
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Bannon got the boot! Price told “Goodbye”!
While Gorka slinked off, who knows why?
Porter and Sorenson left all the worse!
While Higbie and Newman were booted first!
Who’s next?
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Booted out then were the Mc Three!
McMaster, McCabe and McEntee!
Tillerson felt of high repute,
Only to be twittered he got the boot!
Who’s next?
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Pruitt duly got the boot!
Though Shulkin was first en route!
Hicks and Haley began to fuss,
That they’d be thrown under the bus!
“Our reps are safe!” They claimed without fear!
“But just in case, we’re getting outta here!”
Who’s next?
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Sessions’s the latest to go!
And, who knows, someday Pompeo!
We’ll try not to laugh and hoot!
When Ivanka gets the boot!
Who’s next?
Who’s next?
Who’s next?
Who’s next?
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I do not own “Who’s Next” by Tom Lehrer.
Bravo, good sir — very well done!
*Applause* Lehrer is retired, but he’s still around. Maybe he could be persuaded to … ?
I doubt it – as he put it “Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel peace prize”
Excellent!
“So Trump forced Jeff Sessions to resign, an action that members of the GOP threatened would be unleashing a virtual shitstorm of trouble…a threat that they have of course walked back since.”
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On Thursday, Fox News’ Martha MacCallum reminded Lindsey Graham that he promised “holy hëll” for Trump if Jeff Sessions was fired.
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His response was priceless: “When was that?”
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They played video.
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He laughed.
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https://crooksandliars.com/2018/11/lindsey-graham-embarrased-fox-news-over
On an unrelated note, given that I seem to remember you trying to give Trump a nickname, it occurs to me that he was already given one by his parents, who probably never thought little Donnie would have to pay for sex…
Donald JOHN Trump.
Peter – there’s a typo in the title for this column. You have “December” instead of “November”. Probably should be fixed for the sake of searching it later in the archives.
It’s fixed. Thanks for notic8ng.
The sad things is, these days the Left also has its hands occupied having a chilling effect on Free Speech. I’m not going to pretend otherwise just because I’m myself a Leftist. Actually, I’m even more critical of it when my side does it.
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Sure, no one in the Left has the power of the orange maniac in the White House, and they’re very much reacting against the alt-right tidal wave, but it doesn’t make it less insane.
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If you say anything they don’t like, you’re tone-deaf. If you say it enough times you can be cancelled. If you’re a white person and writes a story about racism, like Mark Waid did, then you’re usurping black people’s protagonism. Of course, if you don’t write about racism, you’re whitewashing history. If you’re gay or lesbian and you talk about how much you want to bang that famous actor or actress, it’s great. But if you’re a straight male and you talk about how much you want to bang that famous actress, then you’re contributing to rape culture. Ask a woman or minority to be polite, and you’re guilty of tone policing, but if you’re not a minority or a woman, anything you say can be a micro-aggression. If you write a minority character in your story and make them a well-accepted middle class person, then you’re erasing their experiences. But if you make them poor and/or suffering hardship, you’re turning them into stereotypes or sensationalizing an important issue. Any criticism of Islam is Islamophobic. Saying that you like women that are full-figured is body shaming to thin women. Saying that you like women that are slim is body shaming to full-figured women
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Anything you say will be micro-analysed to death and never forgotten or forgiven. The level of insanity in the modern left is more or less the same as that in the modern right. The main difference is that the insane left urges people to be ostracized. The insane right urges people to be killed.
It’s hardly just “these days.” The left has been trying to shut down opposing views in the world since the 1980s. It was particularly vicious (and to some degree still is) at the college level where colleges would try to bring in people with unpopular (sometimes racist) opinions. Except these weren’t slack jawed yokels; these were educated men with a learned point of view. And college students would go nuts, trying to shut down the speakers by cramming into the venues and protesting at the top of their lungs. I wound up basing an entire issue of “Supergirl” on these real life cases. I remember giving Steel this whole speech about how these guys should not be allowed to speak, rather than hearing them out and then refuting them. Fans claimed that the words I put in Steel’s mouth were purely to make him look bad; that no educated black man would ever speak out in favor of restricting speech. The fans were of course unaware that I had taken every single word Steel said directly from opinion pieces written by educated black men who wanted to shut down racists from speaking on college campuses.
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The main difference between left and right is that the left wants to shut down unpopular speech with the claim that it will hurt the feelings of others. Righties want to shut down speech they don’t like because they say it upsets them. It’s all censorship; it’s just that the right is more honest about it.
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Even my opinions on that have changed over time. I used to be so absolute in free speech that I allowed fools to show up here and say whatever they wanted without impeding them. But I’ve come to the conclusion that this site is basically my house, and if in the real world I wouldn’t allow some áššhølë to stride into my living room and start badmouthing me, I don’t have to do it here. So some people who I feel purely want to give me grief and are not interested in actually contributing something, them I just shut down. But I still provide space to the wing nuts who want to spout off their idiocy. It’s kind of amusing.
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PAD
Yeah, someday I have to read your entire Supergirl run. I don’t think it was published here in Brazil in its entirety. But I know of that issue with Steel in the campus, because I’ve seen an article about it in CBR.com.
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I have a confession to make. I used to have a more restrictive view on Free Speech. I remember you used to call them “Free Speech butheads”, like in “I support Free Speech, but…” But I’ve changed my views and became much more supportive of Free Speech, in part because I’m finally seeing the monster that is created when good intentions want to restrict “offensive” speech.
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It’s true that the Left has always tried to shut down opposing views, mainly in campuses, but I feel like these days, with the rise of the Intersectional Feminist Left (derogatorily called “SJWs”), this censorship has gone into overdrive. Some forums and places are really Orwellian nightmares.
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I used to think Libertarians were full of šhìŧ when they spoke of the Thought Police, but by God, in this they were not wrong.
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The saddest thing is that we’re at risk of seeing only two surviving sets of opinions on anything that is inflamatory: Alt-Right-Fascist-Social-Darwinist and Intersectional-Left-Feminism-SJW. Because those are the two main owners of echo chambers. Diverging opinions are shouted down, shamed, and driven away.
Well, DC is print8ng it in trade form if that helps. I think three volumes are out so far.
You have a good description of the attitude of many who have been engaging in electronic communication for so many years, that the people who are deliberatively destructive don’t have to be allowed to insert themselves anywhere they like to make it worse for other people, they just need to be pushed back into their own hate-spaces and walled off in them, a Coventry of refused links and comments, where they can hate each other until like the Critics at the end of Heinlein’s The Number of the Beast, they’ll consume themselves.
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I know you’re tired of it, Peter, I know Wil Wheaton is, too, there are lots of others, and so am I in my little spaces in the ‘net.
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Life’s too short, which means that when they get away with that, they’re stealing parts of our limited lives, which we’ll never, ever get back.
“This was yet another chilling effect, a warning: don’t question Trump too harshly or you too will be left unable to enter the White House and do your job.”
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Any reporter who would let that get in the way of their asking the tough questions is not deserving of respect. They’ll have become a supporter of Trump and his cause.
I didn’t say any reporters will stop doing their jobs because of it, but the attempts to try and get them to knuckle under is clearly a First Amendment violation.
What makes Trump (and all the Trump clones around the world) very scary is that the threat he poses to Free Speech is subtler and more insidious than just shutting up reporters.
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Dictators from the past would try to stop reporters from painting them in a bad light, while Trump seems to antagonize the press in the hope that they will take the bait and paint him in a bad light, so that he can then present himself as a persecuted hero to his followers.
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Likewise, past dictators would lie and hide uncomfortable facts, like the Soviets often did. The Neo-Fascist Right goes them one better, in that they don’t care that people know that they are lying, and they don’t care that people know the facts. They expect their enemies to know the facts, and use their own indifference towards the facts as a sort of way to mock their enemies and demonstrate superiority. They also expect their followers to engage in the doublethink of knowing they are lying, but believing in the lie.
Yup.
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It’s amazing and, frankly, more than a little terrifying watching so many people who four to six years ago were conservative with only occasional minor lapses into unreality become in the last 2 1/2 years completely divorced from reality in dámņëd near everything they say and present as fact in their pursuit of being a Trump supporter.
Yeah, it’s frigging terrifying. I had this same experience the past year, in the run-up to Bolsonaro’s election.
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When half the people I knew become entranced by the far right and started to talk like proto-fascist radicals, while I kept the same center-left democratic views I always had, the disturbing sensation was that I was the one that had changed.
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Because, all of a sudden, my center-left and bland views that used to be very mainstream, became radical and inflamatory in the face of their opposition. My very logical and (to my mind) non-inflamatory rebuttals to their conspiracy theories and fake news made ME look like the troublemaker.
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When talking to folks unaffected by the madness, we’d wonder why the aliens had switched half of our co-workers and friends, while lefting us untouched. Or, in my moments of weakness, I started to wonder if I was the crazy one, since society all around me started to become crazy, while I stayed the same.
And as if things couldn’t get any worse, Stan Lee has passed away. A true giant has left us. He shall be remembered, and missed, for the rest of time.
Upon seeing the new soulless robot, the first doppleganger who came to my mind was Lex Luthor, although the Kingpin works as a simile, too.