Don't be fooled: The crocodile tears of those like Bill Barr & the “ex-Republicans” longing for a return of their “Grand Old Party” are still the con of Iran-Contra, Bush v Gore & Citizens United…
I didn't think I could be surprised and shocked more than I already have been by Republican corruption, but Thom Hartmann amazed me again with his knowledge of the corruption.
One does not have to read Machiavelli to be a Machiavellian. Machiavelli simply encapsulated in literary form, what it takes to be an effective dictator.
The requirements and prerequisites come naturally narcissism, sociopathy, psychopathy and greed.
Yeah, we can always dream up someone worse, but Trump does Putins bidding, swoons like a schoolgirl over every dictator, presumably reads the Hitler speeches his ex wife said he kept next to the bed, has suggested internment camps and suspending the constitution, and stole and hid classified documents. Were pretty far into "how bad can it get?" territory.
Tis is a perfect example that us dems do not always have clean hands, although I support thoroughly democratic ideals. We have a very long way to go,repubs a lot longer than dems ,but non the less if the shoe fits we need to own up. Particularly how does our CIA define democracy. Supporting corporations needs abroad. I think that it's time for Thom to deep dive into CIA
Listening to a commenter on Thom's show today, Thom was not there, hope everything is okay.
The commenter made the statement that the department of Justice does not like Donald Trump? After all he has done he is still walking the streets spewing treason and hatred! Selling State secrets to dictatorships. The dunderheads believe the department of Justice is against Donald Trump after he committed an insurrection?
Trump borrowed about 7 trillion dollars to make it look like he was a good leader. That would have to come to an end when he becomes a dictatorship and that is when the maggots will regret voting for him. Especially when they keep the young healthy immigrant labor and get rid of all the useless eaters, which there are a lot of maggots in that crowd.
Include Dole. When he was in the Senate Congress passed a big tax act that had one line giving a break to any company that bought trucks for use in Kansas City during one particular month. The sole beneficiary of this was Dole's family business. Probably this sort of thing goes on all the time, but here was something really obvious.
Sure, there's plenty of room to criticize Dole. I never meant to portray him as an ideal, but on the political spectrum he was something of a moderate. I definitely don't think he was worse than George H. W. Bush.
I agree, at least he had a sense of humor knowing that his presidential campaign was doomed from the start. And the man did have courage to come back from terrible war wounds. But just look at this whole crew and for what do they want more money and power? This is no legacy for the nation.
We forget even blazingly corrupt actions and activities, as these all were. Perspective provided by your work brings them back into full illumination and focus. Rage is the only appropriate psychological response to the abhorrent abuse these privileged white elders committed against us, as citizens, and our democracy.
The only appropriate political and social response is to focus on destroying the current menagerie of toxic democracy-killing revanchists. Rinse and repeat, because they will always return for another go.
I agree with your sentiment Donald, but you can't kill an idea, and the idea is matriarchalism, in the the case of the U.S.A, it is layered over with "nationalism", white Christian supremacy.
The same toxic ideology exists all over the world, it just has different layering. Russian Orthodox, Islam, Judaism.
This is not to say that all of an ethnicity are toxic to humanity, but it doesn't take all, only an organized and loud minority.
Weinberger, ironically with Jewish DNA was once Secretary of HHS. Was considered a "liberal." But his white supremacy was exposed in Relf v. Weinberger:
In 1973, the Southern Poverty Law Center named Weinberger as a defendant in a case that sought restitution for the forced non-consensual sterilization and medical experimentation on three young Black American girls, Minnie Lee, Mary Alice, and Katie Relf in Montgomery, Alabama. An employee of Montgomery's federally-funded Community Action organization took the Relf sisters to a family planning clinic under the pretext of needing “shots.” Staff gave Katie Relf a then-experimental birth control shot as well as inserted a contraceptive IUD device without parental knowledge or consent. On a separate occasion, doctors surgically sterilized Minnie Lee and Mary Alice who were twelve and fourteen years old respectively. At the time of the suit, the Office of Economic Opportunity was preparing to hand over funding and control of its associated family planning clinics to Weinberger's Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.
The SPLC's complaint shows that the O.E.O. recently began providing funding for such sterilization procedures, while top OEO personnel intentionally did not distribute a medical memo containing guidelines on obtaining patient consent for such operations. Dr. Warren M. Hern authored the memo, and ultimately resigned in outrage that the guidelines were not distributed. Copies of the memo, which included age of consent laws whose criteria the Relf girls did not meet, sat undistributed in a DC warehouse. At the time of the suit, Weinberger's most recent approved Health, Education, and Welfare budget included specific funding allotments for sterilization procedures, and thus he was named a defendant in the case. A district court involved in Relf V. Weinberger hearings found that anywhere from 100,000 to 150,000 poor people were sterilized annually using federal dollars, and some among those sterilized were coerced into the procedures by doctors who threatened to cut off welfare benefits. The case shined fresh light on numerous[example needed] state sterilization and eugenics programs nationwide and led to compensation funds and settlements for some victims[citation needed].
After the experience of 1933 to 1945, I am gobsmacked that a Jew, or some one with Jewish DNA could embrace eugenics, especially when Hitler shook off criticism of his eugenics program, by pointing out that he was only following the American lead.
Caspar Weinberger wasn't hurt it seems, because he was a member of the Trilateral Commission and Reagans Secretary of Defense (despite the fact that Reagan ran on the promise that he would not appoint any CFR or TC ,members tohis
r or TC members to his cabinet, and voila the first thing he did was precisely that. In fact he appointed Weinberger as Secretary of Defense.
I read the wiki article on Casper. Quite interesting.
There was a TV series, BrainDead, starring Mary Elizabeth Winstead. The plot is aliens, in the form of some ant like creatures that lived in the Cherry Blossoms of Washington DC, crawled into the brains of prominent politiicians and took over their brains, retaining the memories and some aspects of the personality. Liberals became ultra right wing.
Every time I see Lindsey Graham I think of that movie. A part of me thinks that it was not so much science fiction but science fact.
I just watched a zoom seminar from NZ/AUS on the history of the ATLAS organization and all the 600 "think tanks" (think climate denial fossil fuel friendly disinformation) they've spawned worldwide. WOW! Who knew?! They make Our Mad King (wannabe) Donald and his GQP lackeys look like the small potatoes they are, but include the big players: Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institute, Hoover Institute, etc. These are the real corporate overlord sycophants who pave the information road to and through the unsuspecting MAGAmind, among others. Look for "The ATLAS Network" on YouTube.
Yes! So few ppl know about this, and just constantly experience whiplash from the strings that are attached to their necks. This is the biggest story that nobody is discussing bc they found the perfect frontman clown. How to get a story of this magnitude out to the masses?
No one it seems has been afflicted with integrity in that party for many years.
In fact the Republicans have confused coverup with integrity.
One’s as good as the other in their book.
If we Democrats really believed our eyes and ears and could absorb the reality of their constant attacks on the truth , the Constitution, the rule of law, we could’ve prevented the emergence of the catastrophe tha is Trump.
I believe the burial of truth year after year by Republicans got us primed to allow this monster to be in office . An office that was so dirtied up by the acts of Republicans presidents and their benefactors.
Bill Barr for all his attempts to pretend otherwise, is a scoundrel .
He has been the thread from rotten administration to rotten administration for decades.
I think the clarity that has descended on us( democrats) must be the fulcrum for ‘NO MORE’ . The GOP terrorism of the last several decades has resulted in the Maga movement to Authoritarianism.
Democrats need to come out of the woodwork to fight these lying terrorists and remove them forever.
A big job but not undoable. Of course it would help if the Supreme Court was not funded by the Heritage Foundation and assorted billionaires who want to keep the corruption going.
Knowing the quality of your post I can click the heart before reading it. Corruption runs much deeper than I ever thought. But I am not so much versed in your american system. Anyway congrats!! Vote BLUE
This devolution of the GOP was probably inevitable given the pro-kleptocrat rulings by SCOTUS over the years. They have taken a stage-3 political malignancy during the Reagan regime and super-metastasized it into a stage-4 cancer of our democracy that can only survive if we nullify their powers of corporate personhood to end their grifting ways.
And the only way we can do it is by electing competent officials who will fulfill their Constitutional purpose.
Maybe Thom could produce a documentary about this subject and call it "The Barring of Democracy."
It started with Nixon’s treason which prolonged the Viet Nam war and cost an additional 25k American troops’ lives, continued with Reagan’s treasonous conspiracy with the Iranians to prolong the hostage situation, as well as Shrub’s ignoring the warnings of his predecessor, which cost he lives of another 3k American lives on 9/11/2001 and his subsequent illegal invasion of Iraq, leading directly to the most corrupt GQP administration IN HISTORY! Why do we do it to ourselves?
I knew the Republican Party was bad but until I read today's post I had no idea of just how corrupt and immoral this party has been. Now, with the 🟠💩's announcement that "People have to understand that America First, the MAGA movement is the new Republican Party. That is conservatism today," at least our eyes are open to the truth. The corruption in the party, be it called GOP or MAGA, runs so deep and the lack of morals or ethics in its members and those too afraid to buck it is entrenched in its culture. We WILL overcome this cult and save our fragile democracy but it won't be easy. And, it won't be pretty.
The consequences of the Pardon of Nixon and the Dems being nice to the old Reagan and not prosecuting him as he was going out have manifested into today's troubles. The cost of not making people pay the consequences is an enormously high price to society. If any had known the cost, they would not have paid it. We need some historians to be elder advisors to these government agents. The lesson is those that do theses things know that the peoples memory is short and they can repeat lies until almost nobody knows what the real facts are and believe his side is being wronged by those that do not agree with them. The GOP will do things nasty and then repeat lies to support those past actions,
Time for the Dems to repeat facts and campaign with a focus on 3 or 4 economic issues for the Dem voter base giving them a reason to vote which they did not do in 2022 and we lost the House.
Trying to get a magat to read this article would be like getting a two-year-old to quit making messes. If they actually read this article they wouldn't believe a word of it, even though it is all true! All Americans over age 60 should remember!
It sounds like top law enforcement in America has been corrupted for at least 50 years. The republican party is nothing more than a crime organization who has taken over law enforcement and the supreme Court.
The GOP has been working for a dictatorship by sabotaging any progress in dealing with America and the worlds problems. Like global warming, homelessness, wealth inequality, unfunded wars, offshore banking, interest on the national debt, bank bailouts, union busting immigrant labor, corporate welfare and much more costing the middle class over 100 trillion dollars before this dictatorship move of theirs. Fleece the flock, then let the weak (disabled, old, criminals, journalists, intellectuals...) starve to death or send them off to some execution camp or war is their only possible solutions. While employing healthy young immigrant labor who will work for less money.
And now to finish rotting the fish we have Trump and all those MAGAs that want to be just like him. There are no intricate foreign plots played out in the dark corners of the earth. They have made the CIA irrelevant when it comes to dictators. They just invite Orban over to show them how it's done. Trump invites that murdering despot Putin to just have at it.
So I'd say the rot is complete, they stink, and it's time for them to go. Tragically, they were given a couple off-ramps and refused them. Their sick ideology has decayed further. The Republicans have become a cult following a bunch of psychopaths, and I wish it wasn't true.
Dr. Frankenstein-Barr knows exactly what he is looking at.
I wish I could say any of this was news to me. I was, in my high school years, a Republican—conservative on defense and some economic issues, liberal on civil rights and other “social” issues. Meaning I was a Rockefeller, Scranton, Dirksen, Kuchel Republican. By 1968, I was a college sophomore campaigning for Bobby Kennedy, shattered by the assassinations of King and RFK. My first year in law school I sat next to Elliot Abrams in,ironically enough, Criminal Law. I most remember he always wore the same, in need of dry cleaning suit with very thin ties, had beady, shifty eyes, and whispered to me on more than one occasion as he glanced around, “You know there are Communists here.”
I shrugged him off. But by 1972 was walking the streets of Lewiston, Maine knocking on doors for McGovern, I guess part of the much maligned “Children’s Crusade.” He would have been so much better than Nixon, though he might not have been able to recognize China.
Voting straight blue this year and doing all my battered, soon to depart 76-year old body can do to get as many people I know in swing states to do the same, I acknowledge some of what Dr. Kaufman says in his comments. But he goes too far. Yes, the Democrats are nearly as in thrall to various pots of big money as the Orange Fascist party. But are prepared to try to raise taxes on the obscenely rich, extend and support social safety nets and civil rights, and give full support to Ukraine and measured, anguished but necessary support to Israel as far the lesser of the evils in that part of the world (I am not Jewish but am deeply supportive of the Jewish people and Zionism except in its extreme forms).
Because there is no remote equivalence between the Democrats and the Orange Fascist party in any other way. A vote for “uncommitted” is a vote for the Orange Excremental and his puppet masters and cultists. A blue vote is a vote of hope, of a belief that our country and its ideals remain salvageable, a hope to which I have to cling, not so much for myself as for our beloved grandson, who deserves a shot at a decent, honorable, dignified life and a country worthy to have him.
Merrick Garland’s respect for the DOJ tradition of ignoring or burying the high crimes of the high & mighty is noted. He isn’t as brazen about it as Barr, but the effects are as bad. He needs to spend more time with his family.
I didn't think I could be surprised and shocked more than I already have been by Republican corruption, but Thom Hartmann amazed me again with his knowledge of the corruption.
Since Dole every GOP presidential nominee has been worse than the last, I just don't know if they'll ever be able to find someone worse than Trump.
Trump is blatant. Consider a stealth Manchurian candidate. who could actually read Machiavelli.
One does not have to read Machiavelli to be a Machiavellian. Machiavelli simply encapsulated in literary form, what it takes to be an effective dictator.
The requirements and prerequisites come naturally narcissism, sociopathy, psychopathy and greed.
Yeah, we can always dream up someone worse, but Trump does Putins bidding, swoons like a schoolgirl over every dictator, presumably reads the Hitler speeches his ex wife said he kept next to the bed, has suggested internment camps and suspending the constitution, and stole and hid classified documents. Were pretty far into "how bad can it get?" territory.
this is the outcome I guess when you get your "false-iticians" ( they don't deserve to be called Politicians), from the 99 cent store.
If Biden doesn't fire Garland, you mean?
Tis is a perfect example that us dems do not always have clean hands, although I support thoroughly democratic ideals. We have a very long way to go,repubs a lot longer than dems ,but non the less if the shoe fits we need to own up. Particularly how does our CIA define democracy. Supporting corporations needs abroad. I think that it's time for Thom to deep dive into CIA
Listening to a commenter on Thom's show today, Thom was not there, hope everything is okay.
The commenter made the statement that the department of Justice does not like Donald Trump? After all he has done he is still walking the streets spewing treason and hatred! Selling State secrets to dictatorships. The dunderheads believe the department of Justice is against Donald Trump after he committed an insurrection?
Trump borrowed about 7 trillion dollars to make it look like he was a good leader. That would have to come to an end when he becomes a dictatorship and that is when the maggots will regret voting for him. Especially when they keep the young healthy immigrant labor and get rid of all the useless eaters, which there are a lot of maggots in that crowd.
7 TRILLION??????
Include Dole. When he was in the Senate Congress passed a big tax act that had one line giving a break to any company that bought trucks for use in Kansas City during one particular month. The sole beneficiary of this was Dole's family business. Probably this sort of thing goes on all the time, but here was something really obvious.
Sure, there's plenty of room to criticize Dole. I never meant to portray him as an ideal, but on the political spectrum he was something of a moderate. I definitely don't think he was worse than George H. W. Bush.
I agree, at least he had a sense of humor knowing that his presidential campaign was doomed from the start. And the man did have courage to come back from terrible war wounds. But just look at this whole crew and for what do they want more money and power? This is no legacy for the nation.
We forget even blazingly corrupt actions and activities, as these all were. Perspective provided by your work brings them back into full illumination and focus. Rage is the only appropriate psychological response to the abhorrent abuse these privileged white elders committed against us, as citizens, and our democracy.
The only appropriate political and social response is to focus on destroying the current menagerie of toxic democracy-killing revanchists. Rinse and repeat, because they will always return for another go.
I agree with your sentiment Donald, but you can't kill an idea, and the idea is matriarchalism, in the the case of the U.S.A, it is layered over with "nationalism", white Christian supremacy.
The same toxic ideology exists all over the world, it just has different layering. Russian Orthodox, Islam, Judaism.
This is not to say that all of an ethnicity are toxic to humanity, but it doesn't take all, only an organized and loud minority.
Toxic ideology. How about eugenics?
Weinberger, ironically with Jewish DNA was once Secretary of HHS. Was considered a "liberal." But his white supremacy was exposed in Relf v. Weinberger:
In 1973, the Southern Poverty Law Center named Weinberger as a defendant in a case that sought restitution for the forced non-consensual sterilization and medical experimentation on three young Black American girls, Minnie Lee, Mary Alice, and Katie Relf in Montgomery, Alabama. An employee of Montgomery's federally-funded Community Action organization took the Relf sisters to a family planning clinic under the pretext of needing “shots.” Staff gave Katie Relf a then-experimental birth control shot as well as inserted a contraceptive IUD device without parental knowledge or consent. On a separate occasion, doctors surgically sterilized Minnie Lee and Mary Alice who were twelve and fourteen years old respectively. At the time of the suit, the Office of Economic Opportunity was preparing to hand over funding and control of its associated family planning clinics to Weinberger's Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.
The SPLC's complaint shows that the O.E.O. recently began providing funding for such sterilization procedures, while top OEO personnel intentionally did not distribute a medical memo containing guidelines on obtaining patient consent for such operations. Dr. Warren M. Hern authored the memo, and ultimately resigned in outrage that the guidelines were not distributed. Copies of the memo, which included age of consent laws whose criteria the Relf girls did not meet, sat undistributed in a DC warehouse. At the time of the suit, Weinberger's most recent approved Health, Education, and Welfare budget included specific funding allotments for sterilization procedures, and thus he was named a defendant in the case. A district court involved in Relf V. Weinberger hearings found that anywhere from 100,000 to 150,000 poor people were sterilized annually using federal dollars, and some among those sterilized were coerced into the procedures by doctors who threatened to cut off welfare benefits. The case shined fresh light on numerous[example needed] state sterilization and eugenics programs nationwide and led to compensation funds and settlements for some victims[citation needed].
From Wiki.
After the experience of 1933 to 1945, I am gobsmacked that a Jew, or some one with Jewish DNA could embrace eugenics, especially when Hitler shook off criticism of his eugenics program, by pointing out that he was only following the American lead.
Caspar Weinberger wasn't hurt it seems, because he was a member of the Trilateral Commission and Reagans Secretary of Defense (despite the fact that Reagan ran on the promise that he would not appoint any CFR or TC ,members tohis
r or TC members to his cabinet, and voila the first thing he did was precisely that. In fact he appointed Weinberger as Secretary of Defense.
I read the wiki article on Casper. Quite interesting.
There was a TV series, BrainDead, starring Mary Elizabeth Winstead. The plot is aliens, in the form of some ant like creatures that lived in the Cherry Blossoms of Washington DC, crawled into the brains of prominent politiicians and took over their brains, retaining the memories and some aspects of the personality. Liberals became ultra right wing.
Every time I see Lindsey Graham I think of that movie. A part of me thinks that it was not so much science fiction but science fact.
I just watched a zoom seminar from NZ/AUS on the history of the ATLAS organization and all the 600 "think tanks" (think climate denial fossil fuel friendly disinformation) they've spawned worldwide. WOW! Who knew?! They make Our Mad King (wannabe) Donald and his GQP lackeys look like the small potatoes they are, but include the big players: Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institute, Hoover Institute, etc. These are the real corporate overlord sycophants who pave the information road to and through the unsuspecting MAGAmind, among others. Look for "The ATLAS Network" on YouTube.
ATLAS organization,. apparently named after Ayn Rands first big seller book Atlas Shrugged
The enemy of humanity: Libertarianism, followed by the worlds religions or is it the other way around. really doesn't matter.
Yes! So few ppl know about this, and just constantly experience whiplash from the strings that are attached to their necks. This is the biggest story that nobody is discussing bc they found the perfect frontman clown. How to get a story of this magnitude out to the masses?
California to the rescue? https://www.gov.ca.gov/2023/09/16/people-of-the-state-of-california-v-big-oil/
Several more states considering it.
Excellent!
Release the Mueller report unredacted.
The history of Republican Crime is
constant and repetitive.
No one it seems has been afflicted with integrity in that party for many years.
In fact the Republicans have confused coverup with integrity.
One’s as good as the other in their book.
If we Democrats really believed our eyes and ears and could absorb the reality of their constant attacks on the truth , the Constitution, the rule of law, we could’ve prevented the emergence of the catastrophe tha is Trump.
I believe the burial of truth year after year by Republicans got us primed to allow this monster to be in office . An office that was so dirtied up by the acts of Republicans presidents and their benefactors.
Bill Barr for all his attempts to pretend otherwise, is a scoundrel .
He has been the thread from rotten administration to rotten administration for decades.
I think the clarity that has descended on us( democrats) must be the fulcrum for ‘NO MORE’ . The GOP terrorism of the last several decades has resulted in the Maga movement to Authoritarianism.
Democrats need to come out of the woodwork to fight these lying terrorists and remove them forever.
A big job but not undoable. Of course it would help if the Supreme Court was not funded by the Heritage Foundation and assorted billionaires who want to keep the corruption going.
Knowing the quality of your post I can click the heart before reading it. Corruption runs much deeper than I ever thought. But I am not so much versed in your american system. Anyway congrats!! Vote BLUE
This devolution of the GOP was probably inevitable given the pro-kleptocrat rulings by SCOTUS over the years. They have taken a stage-3 political malignancy during the Reagan regime and super-metastasized it into a stage-4 cancer of our democracy that can only survive if we nullify their powers of corporate personhood to end their grifting ways.
And the only way we can do it is by electing competent officials who will fulfill their Constitutional purpose.
Maybe Thom could produce a documentary about this subject and call it "The Barring of Democracy."
It started with Nixon’s treason which prolonged the Viet Nam war and cost an additional 25k American troops’ lives, continued with Reagan’s treasonous conspiracy with the Iranians to prolong the hostage situation, as well as Shrub’s ignoring the warnings of his predecessor, which cost he lives of another 3k American lives on 9/11/2001 and his subsequent illegal invasion of Iraq, leading directly to the most corrupt GQP administration IN HISTORY! Why do we do it to ourselves?
I knew the Republican Party was bad but until I read today's post I had no idea of just how corrupt and immoral this party has been. Now, with the 🟠💩's announcement that "People have to understand that America First, the MAGA movement is the new Republican Party. That is conservatism today," at least our eyes are open to the truth. The corruption in the party, be it called GOP or MAGA, runs so deep and the lack of morals or ethics in its members and those too afraid to buck it is entrenched in its culture. We WILL overcome this cult and save our fragile democracy but it won't be easy. And, it won't be pretty.
The consequences of the Pardon of Nixon and the Dems being nice to the old Reagan and not prosecuting him as he was going out have manifested into today's troubles. The cost of not making people pay the consequences is an enormously high price to society. If any had known the cost, they would not have paid it. We need some historians to be elder advisors to these government agents. The lesson is those that do theses things know that the peoples memory is short and they can repeat lies until almost nobody knows what the real facts are and believe his side is being wronged by those that do not agree with them. The GOP will do things nasty and then repeat lies to support those past actions,
Time for the Dems to repeat facts and campaign with a focus on 3 or 4 economic issues for the Dem voter base giving them a reason to vote which they did not do in 2022 and we lost the House.
Trying to get a magat to read this article would be like getting a two-year-old to quit making messes. If they actually read this article they wouldn't believe a word of it, even though it is all true! All Americans over age 60 should remember!
It sounds like top law enforcement in America has been corrupted for at least 50 years. The republican party is nothing more than a crime organization who has taken over law enforcement and the supreme Court.
The GOP has been working for a dictatorship by sabotaging any progress in dealing with America and the worlds problems. Like global warming, homelessness, wealth inequality, unfunded wars, offshore banking, interest on the national debt, bank bailouts, union busting immigrant labor, corporate welfare and much more costing the middle class over 100 trillion dollars before this dictatorship move of theirs. Fleece the flock, then let the weak (disabled, old, criminals, journalists, intellectuals...) starve to death or send them off to some execution camp or war is their only possible solutions. While employing healthy young immigrant labor who will work for less money.
Very good history of the rot at the top!
And now to finish rotting the fish we have Trump and all those MAGAs that want to be just like him. There are no intricate foreign plots played out in the dark corners of the earth. They have made the CIA irrelevant when it comes to dictators. They just invite Orban over to show them how it's done. Trump invites that murdering despot Putin to just have at it.
So I'd say the rot is complete, they stink, and it's time for them to go. Tragically, they were given a couple off-ramps and refused them. Their sick ideology has decayed further. The Republicans have become a cult following a bunch of psychopaths, and I wish it wasn't true.
Dr. Frankenstein-Barr knows exactly what he is looking at.
No Daniel, I am more afraid of a Trump presidency than I am of a Biden presidency
I wish I could say any of this was news to me. I was, in my high school years, a Republican—conservative on defense and some economic issues, liberal on civil rights and other “social” issues. Meaning I was a Rockefeller, Scranton, Dirksen, Kuchel Republican. By 1968, I was a college sophomore campaigning for Bobby Kennedy, shattered by the assassinations of King and RFK. My first year in law school I sat next to Elliot Abrams in,ironically enough, Criminal Law. I most remember he always wore the same, in need of dry cleaning suit with very thin ties, had beady, shifty eyes, and whispered to me on more than one occasion as he glanced around, “You know there are Communists here.”
I shrugged him off. But by 1972 was walking the streets of Lewiston, Maine knocking on doors for McGovern, I guess part of the much maligned “Children’s Crusade.” He would have been so much better than Nixon, though he might not have been able to recognize China.
Voting straight blue this year and doing all my battered, soon to depart 76-year old body can do to get as many people I know in swing states to do the same, I acknowledge some of what Dr. Kaufman says in his comments. But he goes too far. Yes, the Democrats are nearly as in thrall to various pots of big money as the Orange Fascist party. But are prepared to try to raise taxes on the obscenely rich, extend and support social safety nets and civil rights, and give full support to Ukraine and measured, anguished but necessary support to Israel as far the lesser of the evils in that part of the world (I am not Jewish but am deeply supportive of the Jewish people and Zionism except in its extreme forms).
Because there is no remote equivalence between the Democrats and the Orange Fascist party in any other way. A vote for “uncommitted” is a vote for the Orange Excremental and his puppet masters and cultists. A blue vote is a vote of hope, of a belief that our country and its ideals remain salvageable, a hope to which I have to cling, not so much for myself as for our beloved grandson, who deserves a shot at a decent, honorable, dignified life and a country worthy to have him.
Merrick Garland’s respect for the DOJ tradition of ignoring or burying the high crimes of the high & mighty is noted. He isn’t as brazen about it as Barr, but the effects are as bad. He needs to spend more time with his family.
He and Mike Johnson would make quite a pair.