it's been done

never having been a special fan of the presidency, and holding politicians as a class in even less esteem, the stench emanating from swamptown and its past and present residents is putrescent but not surprising...naked of any moral restraint there aren't all that many things these people are incapable of...and yet they still assume a false mantle of "public service" and expect the rest of us to believe it...that borders on criminal stupidity...which, it seems, there is no shortage of in the political caste here in the late empire...i have been perusing a copy of the federal indictment handed down against donny and, momentarily, i thought i had warped back fifty years ( yes i am old enough to rmember this stuff )...

if this doesn't scream "richard milhous nixon" ( and, incidentally validate the name of this blog ) at the top of it's lungs i'll eat my hat with no salt...i am surprised they didn't offer to submit "transcripts" of the documents or, in a reboot of the offer to let the stone deaf senator stennis listen to the nixon tapes, allow the most myopic senator available to shuffle through the hoard...providing they left their glasses at home...stonewalling is ineffective as a strategy...let donny be his brazen meglomaniac entitled thirteen year old self in his disdain for anything like being held accountable for his acts and see if that flies any better...of course he has his cadre of suporters ( although i haven't heard anything from that twerp linsey grahm as yet ) old margie greene has called the department of justice and the fbi "corrupt" and veers dangerouly close to calling a class of people vermin when she says "we must win in 2024. we must beat these sick people"...puts me in mind of aktion T4...

and this servile sycophant in what has to be the donny brigade uniform...right down to the long red "slimming" tie ( "it was a tainted, meanly obsequious age"...leave it to tacitus to nail it...he was talking about an empire as well ) says "president donald trump will be back in the white house and joe biden will be hunter's cellmate"...well...life is mostly about contingency and probablility...it may be possible...how probable? who knows what will crawl out from under a rock in the coming primaries...look what happened in 2016...we'll be empricists and wait and see...like the weather, predicting political outcomes is a tentative business at best...this low-rent saga continues and no one really knows where it will end up at...attitudes are hardening and doctinaire ideologues are ascendant...reason has run like the wind, screaming in the night.

cooked

"falsifying business records in the first degree...with intent to defraud and commit another crime and conceal the commission thereof" is what the "introduction" to the indictment has to say...most of this case revolves around a payoff to a porn actress to suppress news of their canoodling becoing public and the deliberate mislabeling of invoices, vouchers, and ten check stubs for checks made out to lawyer cohen to reimburse him for the payoff which were labeld as "retainers"...wonderful...they cooked the books...well, "don't boo" donny comes from a corporate culture and there are a couple of things to consider...first of all those structures are universally authoritarian and coersive.."my way or the highway" is a standard viewpoint as you move up any corporate hierachy...so we have an entitled twerp who thinks he should have his own way no matter what...secondly, i would be hard pressed to think that there isn't a corporate entity that doesn't keep multiple sets of books...one for the government, one for the shareholders, and then the actual accounting...corporate structures are sociopathic...they lie, cheat, steal, and cut the competition's throat at every available opportunity...cooking the books is all part of that...like the spook world, they want things as confusing as possible so why would they be transparent about "business records"? i perused the indictment's tangled legalese for some time ( helpfully provided by the new york times as a pdf ) and as i wandered through, translating as best i could, i ran across this interesting passage..."from august 2015 to december 2017 the defendant orchestrated a scheme, with others, to influence the 2016 presidential election by identifying and purchaseing negative information about him to suppress its publication and benefit the defendant's electoral prospects. in order to execute the unlawful scheme, the participants violated election laws and made and caused false entries in business records of various entities in new york. the participants also took steps that mischaracterized, for tax purposes, the true nature of the payments made in furthurance of the scheme."...so parts of this "scheme" took place while donny was president which, and mind i am no lawyer, would seem to open the door to the whole "executive privilege" and "presidential immunity" business, at least in part...if they can't find some judge to overturn a possible conviction ( and we need to ponder how likely either of those events may be ) this could conceivably land in the lap of the supreme court...that sounds like a process of years..and another point, the "tax purposes" signals the possibility of some wider investigation by other legal entities ( aka the justice department )...all of which are serious spurs for donny to get back into office and begin meddeling with the constitution via some reichstag fire incident so he can stay there...toss in the fact that any conviction would not bar donny from seeking the presidency or serving as such ( the senate acquitted him twice and a senate conviction for "high crimes and misdemeanors" would be the only legal bar to a second term ) and all this will probably succeed in doing is offering donny attention he seems to need and harden attitudes as far as advocacy for one candidate or the other in 2024...in short hightening divisions and political dissonance...commodities we already have in abundance...the behavioral sump that is presidential politics is begiining to reek noticeably early and i am uncertain whether this is going to help put a lid on the sump.

the fat's in the fire (sort of )

the entitled are narcissitic...it goes with the territory...some seem a shade more reserved about displaying it...for the true attention whore however ink is ink...the viewpoint isn't the issue, it's the attention and this one is a hog in that respect...one suspects a deep seated nixonite inferiority complex at root...you will have to convince me of otherwise in this case...so since the critique is irrelevant to the attention where does that leave us? let's have a look back a ways...

big news back in 2019...and, one suposes, we spent a fair chunk of taxpayer money for a trial in the senate...and where did that end up? acquittal...

2021 and we repeat the same scenario with, probably, a few different actors...the results were the same and donny continued in his tenure...

and yesterday? a new york state sting for a payoff to some porn actress donny bought off to avoid undue publicity about who knows what...appearance...personal hygene...preferences...certainly not out of any sense of shame...and there are,no doubt, numerous among his "base" that wish they could have had the opportunity...ink is ink and all this could do would be to enhance his reputation among a sector of the faithful ( with,no doubt, some secretly envious among the evangelical set )...where will al this end? riots in the streets...civil war...a house investigation...or just another acquittal...it stems from a payoff in october of 2016...so donny wasn't in the white house yet so ( and i am no lawyer [praise be] so this is all laic supposition...however i have researched some and will try to be critical in thinking ) one supposes that executive privilege and presidential immunity are not a part of the case...alvin bragg is district attorney for new york county...so this is a state case not a federal one...the only federal judges who might actually review it would be the supreme court ( more on that later )...an indictment is not a conviction and i would be remiss if i did not point out that, being one of the elite, there is probably a judge higher up the judicial food chain that would have no qualms about overturning it...and here's where it gets interesting...even if he is convicted there is nothing that legally bars him from running for president or serving a second term...a supreme court review would be pointless...if these were reasonable times i'd say they would scoff at even heraing it...however, to borrow a phrase, this is a tainted, meanly obsequious age and the court is as packed with loons as the senate...in the end this is a meaningless tempest in a teapot...that the republican party would welcome an indicted and/or convicted candidate is a no brainer...we live in foul times...the fat's in the fire...however not, probably, how most people think.

in the belly of the beast?

so will this bewigged wingnut ever see the "inside"...i have my doubts...he may be off the rails in manifold ways but he is of the elite and they have a tendency to protect their own...he masquerades as some sort of populist "outsider" but the truth is he is "one of them" ( which actually makes him part of the problem...the conspiracy theorists are apparently blind to this ..."men's minds, once unbalanced, are ready to belive anything"tacitus-"the annals of imperial rome"...he isn't going to do anything but aggrandize himself and roil the stench in "the swamp"...drain it? he will wallow in it )...let's think back a ways ( we could focus, for instance, on the drubbing the republicans took last november because of this bozo...and that would not be a bad thing to dwell on...however i am thinking of a depraved saga from a deeper palm beach elite past ) to the halcyion days of the first term of the reagan presidency when roxanne tried to trash pete pulitzer's reputation in a lurid divorce case that had sordid details about a trumpet and the fact the the pulitzers had, in 1981, spent $441,000 on the "miscellanious and unknown"...the "unknown" being alleged to be the finest blue-flake cocaine in florida...what happened? the hegemons ran that girl out of town and old pete's reputation was seriously re-habed...who remebers that? the hegemons closed ranks around their own and made "no comment"...add in a supreme court packed with characters either superannuated or nearly as unhinged as the disruptive ( and, one could add, obstructionist ) slime in congress and you have the makings of something of a whitewash...toss in the standard "trump plan b" of caling for violence and you have the next chapter in the decline of the late empire in your grasp...another dip in the behavioral sump of what tacitus would call "a tainted,meanly obsequious age"

basta ja!

like rats fleeing a sinking ship

up until the mid terms i was giving a second term a fifty-fifty chance...when rupert turns on you the deal may be artlessly fucked...see page 26.

at long last have you no sense of decency

mr. welch called tail-gunner joe's bluff in 1954 and the half-bright bully mccarthy was never the same...he oozed back to the wisconsin sump that bred him and became another case of karma's visceral hatred for hubris...

politics breeds depraved characters on both sides of the aisle and they have wallowed in the swamptown nights since 1800...narcissistic to the bone they all believe they are the best suited for the executive office...that most of them are utterly mistaken in this is obvious to many...they seem oblivious...i am at odds with the new york times more often than not...in this particular stament by the editorial board i find myself in agreement...we do not need another term from this entitled bigot with the overall maturity of a thirteen year old...admittedly once this sort of sociopathy enters the dialectic it takes time to synthesize...and things are never quite the same...there will be pretenders to the mantle of "don't boo" donny...wannabes...imitators...desantises...it is part of the process...still...like the times...i have had enough of this one...should the opportunity arise in the 2024 primary i will declare as republican...simply to provide myself the opportunity to vote aginst this clown twice should the need arise