The Fall of the American Republic: A Look Back from the Future

Editors' Note: They say that daily journalism is the first draft of history.  As America faces the most critical election since 1860, we thought we'd get a real historical perspective, since the first drafts we are reading every day are frankly pretty sh***y.  Therefore, we had to peer into the future and read what real historians wrote with the benefit of hindsight.  Today we offer an excerpt from the standard reference work, The Decline and Fall of the American Democracy 1968-2024 by the esteemed Professor of Western History at Harvard University of Korea, Prof.  Dong Geura-Mi, published by The Consortium of American University Presses in Exile in 2065.

Chapter 24

Those who were young in the autumn of 2024 will tell you that it was a golden time.  The weather, except for two serious hurricanes caused by climate change and its denial by the Republican Party, was warm and sunny from coast to coast.  Thanks to the Biden-Harris Administration, the American economy was humming, with real income growth, low inflation, and low unemployment.  In many cities, gasoline (the primary source of automotive energy then) fell below $3.00 a gallon.

On those fall weekends, hundreds of thousands flocked to America's gigantic pro-college football stadiums to thrill to the spectacle of young men crippling themselves for the entertainment of millions.  In baseball, the World Series featured the marquee match-up of the New York Yankees and the Los Angeles Dodgers. 

If you lived in one of the 43 U.S. states whose votes did not count for the Presidential election because they were not closely divided under the peculiar rules of the American Electoral College, you might have been able to ignore the election.  Almost one-third of Americans did, failing once again to vote, as turnout reached about 68%.

Feb. 2025: Immigrants are rounded up and detained

The actual electoral count failed to lead to a clear victor.  The Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, won the popular vote by over 3,000,000 over Republican Donald Trump.  But it availed her not.  In a shock, she lost the key battleground states of Pennsylvania and North Carolina by a mere 20,000 votes each.

The first complete count in Georgia gave Harris a 12,000 vote lead.  However, the Republican Governor and Legislature of Georgia moved quickly to purge voter rolls of those they claimed might not have been U.S. citizens.  In some counties, Republican election boards and operatives selectively challenged mail-in ballots on the grounds of alleged mismatches between the signatures on the ballot and on the registration cards.  As a result, Republicans invalidated some 40,000 ballots and called into question the reliability of the vote count.

Claiming that it was impossible to declare a winner based on the popular vote, the Georgia Legislature certified its own slate of Trump electors to the Congress.

The furor was tremendous.  For all of November and December, lawyers maneuvered to challenge electors in Georgia and other states.  However, the Democrats had failed to capture the House by one vote and lost their Senate majority.

June 2025: SG Giuliani urges
the Court to ban abortion medication

As was the case in 2000, a Republican-dominated Supreme Court decided that Trump had won a majority of the electors and even if he had not, he would nonetheless win a House vote, which under the Constitution was decided by a majority of the states.  Therefore, in a 6-3 vote, Chief Justice Roberts declared that in the interests of “finality,” Trump had won a second term.

Trump's allies on the Republican right had prepared well.  Even as Trump gave an angry speech to a sullen crowd on Inauguration Day, his aides promulgated a series of executive orders and commands.

By the end of day on January 20, Trump had called out the Army and National Guard units to begin rounding up the 400,000 undocumented immigrants with unexecuted removal orders.  He stripped civil service protections from millions of federal workers.  He reinstituted his immigration bans.  

Most shocking to the benumbed populace, he announced a ban on the sale and distribution of abortion medication under the Comstock Act, and used the National Guard to raid health care facilities and impound stocks of the drugs.

The reaction was immediate.  Close to a million descended on Washington to protest the attacks on abortion rights.  But Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Stephen Miller had mobilized thousands of heavily armed troops and paramilitary forces and told them to use whatever force was needed to keep the streets clear.  The show of force intimidated the marchers, who remained peaceful.

It was a harbinger of much worse to come.  Acting Attorney General Jeff Clark ordered all U.S. Attorneys and staff-level lawyers to prioritize prosecutions of abortion pill providers and those giving sanctuary to noncitizens without immigration status.  When hundreds of Justice Department lawyers refused, they were summarily fired and replaced by new hires working directly for Acting Deputy Attorney General Alina Habba.

Soon the number of noncitizens subject to deportation grew by the millions, as Trump revoked all TPS and DACA designations, taking away legal status from those who had lived in the United States for years, and in many cases decades.

The Supreme Court's reversal of the right to gay marriage in 2025 and upholding of state bans on medical gender transitioning ushered in a new era of oppression of LGBTQ individuals, many of whom left the United States for Canada or Europe.

Trump's imposition of 100% tariffs on imports from China and 20% tariffs on all other imports caused economic chaos. As the cost of those tariffs was passed on to consumers, inflation spiked to 8%.  The retaliatory tariffs imposed by China and the EU led to disastrous falls in farm income and higher unemployment in export-driven industries.

Trump moved with similar dispatch in foreign policy.  With Michael Flynn returning as his National Security Adviser, he immediately terminated US aid to Ukraine and withdrew the United States from NATO.  Although the European NATO members tried to make up the shortfall, Ukraine was forced to accept a humiliating peace which led to its full absorption by Russia in 2030.  

Nov. 2026: unarmed and defenseless, Ukraine sues for peace

Impulsively, Trump agreed to fly to Moscow to celebrate with Putin the Ukraine cease fire deal.  No details emerged from their meeting, but shortly thereafter Putin transferred his exhausted but victorious troops to new positions bordering the Baltic States.  The results of the Baltic War of 2033-37 are outside the scope of this volume, but it is not too much to say that the map of Europe was remade for generations.

In the Middle East, Trump approved the Israeli plan to annex Gaza and the West Bank, but backed down when Saudi Arabia threatened to boycott US businesses and awarded Trump a lucrative contract to build a luxury golf resort on the Red Sea.

But the American home front was seething.  The families and friends of immigrants began to resist the National Guard roundups of newly-undocumented noncitizens. In some places, they armed themselves with assault weapons and faced down the Guardsmen.  Some of the troops backed down, but others, principally from the Texas and Florida National Guard, shot and killed armed and unarmed resisters alike.

As out of state federal forces invaded so-called blue states such as California and Massachusetts, their governments tried to resist and frustrate the roundups of immigrants and abortion providers.  Generally they were unsuccessful, especially after the Supreme Court upheld Trump's use of the Immigration, Alien Enemies, and Comstock Acts.

Trump's massive and near-fatal 2026 stroke was regarded by his opponents as a chance for a fresh start.  They were wrong.  New President JD Vance, installed under the 25th Amendment, and his Chief of Staff Elon Musk continued the clampdown and even extended it.  Vance won re-election in 2028 and held the Senate after easing the pain of inflation with $10,000 checks bearing his picture, and the pattern was set.

Over time, the new Republican regime consolidated its power.  Justices Alito and Thomas were replaced by Aileen Cannon and James Ho, keeping a reactionary Republican majority in firm control of the Supreme Court.  In the 2030's the Court remade the administrative state by holding that independent agencies like the SEC and the NLRB violated the concept of a “unitary executive.” 

The toll these antidemocratic changes took on once powerful American institutions was immense.  Independent media outlets like The Washington Post and the liberal-leaning MSNBC network were closed down by their frightened proprietors, while others, like CNN and The New York Times, limited their criticism of government policies under the rubric of “occupying a neutral ground.”

March 2027: Florida college students seemingly
not bothered by loss of academic freedom

American universities were hard-hit by new regulations tying government aid, including federal student aid and loans, to compliance with vague guidelines intended to assure representation of conservative views.  Between those laws and others limiting medical and biological research in accordance with hard-right Catholic metaphysics, many simply found themselves unable to function. 

The richer schools opened satellite campuses in cities like Berlin, London, Tokyo, or Seoul, where academics out of favor with the American regime could teach and write without fear of persecution.  Some in deep red states actually picked up and moved to less oppressive states, like Houston's Rice University, which built a new campus in Los Alamos, New Mexico and sold its impressive Texas facilities to the newly-formed Musk University.

The economic stagnation and restrictions on liberty made living in the United States stultifying.  Before she left America to reside permanently in France in 2040, diarist Malia Obama recalled how even her parents were no longer optimistic about the future of their country....

Just a reminder that the last day to vote is Tuesday, November 5. It could be your last one ever.

Advice from Masters of the Universe: Let's make Harvard the next Steward Health Care!

By Yard Correspondent Larry Lowell

With the future of American democracy hanging by a thread (a few thousand voters in maybe seven states), let's turn to something really important: Harvard!

What's been going on in 02138 since the torrent of violence turned Harvard Yard into a re-enactment of the Kishinev Pogrom, at least according to the accounts of very credible Likudniks shrieking over having to confront Palestinians and others who don't share their views about the invasion of Gaza?

One bright spot is you won't have to hold that yard sale to support the University.  Its endowment grew to $53,200,000,000, a reasonably tidy sum, representing a 9.6% increase over June 30, 2023, thanks to the geniuses at the Harvard Management Company.  Of course, if Harvard simply moved the stash into an institutional S&P 500 Index Fund, it could have earned 23% (4416 to 5460), but then they would be investing just like any old dentist and not like a Master of the Universe.

Speaking of those private equity and other finagling Masters of the Universe, how are they doing?  Former genius Eddie Lampert who turned not one but two legendary names in American retail (Sears and Kmart) into rubble had to close the last Kmart in America this week:

The last full-size Kmart in the mainland U.S. in Bridgehampton, New York will close its doors on Sunday. Kmart was once America's second-largest retailer, but a bankruptcy filing in 2002 along with the rise of online shopping doomed the chain. pic.twitter.com/YjMs0gVGl5

— CBS Saturday Morning (@cbssaturday) October 19, 2024

Don't wory about old Eddie though – he stripped every dime out of those franchises before they cratered! 

Of course, the private equity geniuses who pulled the same stunt on eight Massachusetts hospitals got off scott free as well.  The good citizens of Dorchester, Norwood, and Ayer were left without their beloved and needed hospitals, but there were some winners too, like those deserving lawyers:

Lawyers for Steward Health Care were awarded more than $36 million — or more than $420,000 per day in fees — for their work on the first three months of the company’s bankruptcy case.

New York-based law firm Weil, Gotshal & Manges filed a request Tuesday for reimbursement of $36,255,939.14 for fees and expenses, which included rates for attorneys billing as much as $2,350 per hour. Other rates included $750 per hour for a law clerk, and up to $595 per hour for paralegals.

The rates “are no greater than the rates Weil charges for professional and paraprofessional services rendered in comparable bankruptcy and non-bankruptcy related matters,” the firm said in its filing. “Such fees are reasonable based on the customary compensation charged by comparably skilled practitioners in comparable bankruptcy and non-bankruptcy matters in a competitive national legal market.”

Well, that makes it OK! In fact it's a small price to pay for screwing over all those injured by Steward's malfeasance, if you ask – the lawyers!  (PS: the bankruptcy judge rubber-stamped the payday.)

Now the private equity geniuses who made Sears and Steward what they are today have turned their attention to another venerable institution desperately in need of their advice, Harvard:

Last year, a number of prominent donors lashed out at Harvard University for its handling of reactions on campus to the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attacks on Israel. Some announced they would freeze donations until the university cracked down on student protesters, did more to combat antisemitism, and reduced its focus on diversity.

Plutocrats: Let's do to Harvard what we did to Sears and Steward!

Harvard has made some changes since then, but the donors are not done: Two of the most outspoken, billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman and former Facebook executive Sam Lessin, are ratcheting up their campaign to reshape the university, each arguing Harvard is home to too much activism, that the university is lacking viewpoint diversity, and its bureaucracy has become bloated.

Yes, that's certainly the problem with Harvard: too much diversity and too few rich white men giving orders to the peons.  

But lest you think that these billionaire finaglers were just hurling a few windy accusations, they actually prepared the most powerful persuasive and rigorous presentation known to Man: a deck of slides.

Now the issues facing Harvard are indeed difficult and complex.  Let's take one: protecting members of the Harvard community from anti-Semitism.  We can all agree that that's a good thing and that Harvard's longstanding anti-Semitic Jewish quota (abolished after World War II) was very bad.

But when you start to think about it (a nasty habit Harvard instills in a few students but apparently almost none of its senior faculty), it gets hard.  It leads to questions like: what is anti-Semitism?  who gets to define it?  Does it mean anything a Jewish person disagrees with?  Does it mean opposing the idea of Israel as a Jewish state?  

Not to mention: from whom is Harvard obligated to protect its students?  Anti-Semitic members of the Harvard community or any idiot on Mass. Ave.?  If both, does the goal of protecting the Harvard community from anti-Semitism justify locking down Harvard Yard and keeping out those who simply want to get from the Square to the Broadway Market?

Here's a few more: What about protecting Palestinian and Arab students from anti-Arab prejudice?  And what is that?  If advocating for Palestine from the River to the Sea is anti-Semitic, what about the Likud policy of Israel from the River to the Sea?  How is that OK?  

And finally: how does Harvard create an open structure for resolving these complex and thorny questions?

That's a lot to cover in a slide deck

But slides are a bad way to resolve complex issues

• Lack of space to articulate ideas
• Inability to develop complex argument
• Tendency toward vague or inaccurate language 
• Conducive to simplistic conclusions

But what do we know?  We're not billionaires. Let's take a look at Ackman's subtle and sophisticated deck of slides.

We get to slide four before the wheels start coming off:

No it isn't.  

Harvard College doesn't have a business.  It has a goal, stated in the slide.  Businesses are organized to make money.  Other types of collective activities, like colleges, governments, armies, many hospitals, and other unimportant odds and ends, are similarly intended to serve other ends besides coining pelf for billionaire finaglers.

It's not just a poor choice of words as slide five makes clear to even the meanest private-equity intelligence:

So Ackman is arguing that because Harvard College enrollment is essentially flat, it's failing as a business?  Does this make sense to you?  Is your marriage failing because you have the same number of spouses you had 10 years ago?  Should Harvard attempt to double its enrollment every 10 years?  What's the point?  We recall an old PBS show arguing (satirically) that we need to pay attention to public broadcasting because at the then-current rate of PBS stations doubling every ten years by 2050 there would be 32 million public broadcasting outlets.

If you doubled the number of students every ten years (a good growth rate for revenues of a for-profit business), there would be 24,000 undergrads today.  Where would they live?  Who would teach the little darlings?  Not the senior faculty of course, based on past and current experience?

Would Harvard be better or stronger with an explosion of new undergraduates?  Why?

There's more nonsense to follow.  Slide 8 as others have pointed out tracks the rise in Harvard's list priced tuition without bothering to mention that the actual price paid is far lower, and that one-quarter of the entering class pays a tuition bill of $0.00, thanks to that huge endowment.

From there the deck descends into the usual bushwa about how Harvard faculty lacks diversity (true) because on the sole criterion of diversity Ackman values, more identify as liberal than conservative.  What this has to do with the teaching ability of a Professor of Music, or Computer Science, or Biology is obvious only the Ackman and his fellow reactionaries.

Indeed, one would think that the key criterion for a professor of natural scienes is their belief in scientific fact and method.  Neither of which is supported by the Tangerine-Faced Rapist that Ackman supports.

Plus we get the usual whine:

Really?  Which ones?  We can't think of any.  Frankly, we think Harvard would be a far better place if its faculty shut its yap and turned its attention to its job: teaching stuff to people.  The likelihood of that happening is zero.

By the way, what do these faculty members want to say that they feel they can't?  And what do they see as the consequence for saying dumb s***?  If it's getting dragged for saying dumb s***, let us make a modest suggestion: stop saying dumb s***, like when then-Harvard President Larry Summers mansplained that the reason the ladies don't have more STEM teaching positions is because their girl brains can't handle equations. 

We're barely a third of the way through this dreck [Surely, deck – Ed.] and we haven't gotten to some of the dumbest stuff, so we'll have to stop here and pick this up another day.

Or, as Mrs. Bill Ackman likes to say, “I'll think about it tomorrow, because tomorrow is another day!”

Hot Off The Trail: The Senate is slipping away from the Democrats and you'll never guess why!

By Political Editor David Bloviator with reports from Texas Correspondent Jacy Farrow, Florida Correspondent Jenny Herk, and Montana Correspondent Chet Huntley

While Democrats are focused on the Presidential race, perhaps because the Republican candidate is a dangerous degenerate Russian-owned disloyal demented criminal, there's almost equally alarming news coming out of the various Senate races.

Democrats face the prospect of losing control of the Senate.  Should this happen, even if Harris wins, we can expect total and adamant Republican opposition to everything she tries to accomplish, including legislation, judicial appointments, and even normal government operations like passing a budget, raising the debt ceiling, and confirming Executive officers.

Montana: where men are men and sheep are...

We know this will happen because it has been the Republican playbook since 1992, when Bill Clinton had the effrontery to win a Presidential election, after Republicans had held the job for 20 of the previous 24 years.  This led Republicans to view any Democratic President as a dangerous usurper who had to be thwarted at all costs.

This behavior, however bad for democracy, had three beneficial effects for Republicans: (1) it prevented any forward progress in America, (2) it cemented reactionary Republican control over a bent Supreme Court, and (3) because it stopped government from solving problems, it allowed Republicans to argue that Democrats (and government itself) couldn't get anything done.

Today there are 51 nominally Democratic votes in the Senate, although this includes two useless clowns: Krysten Sinema in Arizona and Maserati Joe Manchin in West Virginia.  The good news is that their constituents lost interest in their pained-centrist performances and send them packing.

The bad news: Manchin's Senate seat is likely to be filled by a corrupt hypocritical self-proclaimed Republican “billionaire” Jim Justice, who promises to do nothing that would help hard-pressed West Virginia white voters, and has been rewarded with their staunch support.

That takes Democrats down to 50.  They are defending Democratic seats in swing or red states, including Montana, Ohio, Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Nevada.

Montana, a heavily white Republican gun-toting Marlboro-smoking state, makes Democrats especially nervous:

The former senators also consider the political emphasis on divisive social issues — exacerbated by the explosion of social media and the success of Republicans at exploiting the culture wars — as a major driver of the turn toward the G.O.P.

Divisive social issues? What's covered by that euphemism?

OK girls, line up for genitalia check

Let's look at the ads the Republicans are running in Montana. One accuses Sen. Tester of supposedly discriminating against white farmers because he voted for remedial aid to Black farmers harmed by a century of racist allocation of government aid to farmers.   Despite this terrible discrimination, the white farmers of Montana pocketed a mere a $450,000,000 in government subsidies last year.  (Um, why do they get a f***in' dime of taxpayer money?)

Another huge issue confronting the beleaguered sheep-f**kers of Montana: the dreaded specter of, well, let The New York Times explain it:

In Ohio since the start of September, every ad about Senator Sherrod Brown from the leading Senate Republican super PAC has touched on transgender topics, such as accusing him of “allowing transgender biological males in girls’ sports.” Mr. Brown is one of the nation’s most vulnerable Democratic incumbents.

In Montana, five ads have deployed similar lines about transgender women in sports and bathrooms as Republicans press the case that Senator Jon Tester, another endangered Democrat up for re-election, is too liberal for the heavily Republican state. 

Yep, in a country that lost 1,100,000 lives thanks to the Tangerine-Faced Felon's pandemic lies, that has been devastated by hurricanes fueled by global warming, and where women bleed out in hospital parking lots because doctors are terrified by abortion bans, the greatest actual threat is – a trans woman who wants to play field hockey.

The story is the same in Texas, where Cancun Ted Cruz, facing a real challenge this year after doing exactly zilch for Texas over the past 12 years, unless you consider trying to overturn the 2020 election a win for Longhorns:

Nobel laureates poisoning our blood

For weeks now, Texans watching television, including during prime time football games, have seen ads from the re-election campaign of Senator Ted Cruz declaring: “Boys in girls sports, that’s not right.”

The Cruz campaign, like others supporting Republican candidates across the nation, has been pouring resources into attack ads that focus on transgender participation in youth sports.  

It's remarkable that the panic over trans kids playing sports doesn't come from the athletes themselves, who don't seem to have a problem.  It comes from hideous white men trying to milk ignorance and bigotry.  

But Republican attack ads aren't just focusing on vital issues like unearned white resentment and trans girls who want to play soccer. 

There's also the invasion of the dog eaters.

Republicans have dropped $25,000,000 into ads in Ohio falsely accusing incumbent Democrat Sherrod Brown of voting to permit undocumented immigrants to obtain government benefits.  There's no truth to it, according to well-known radical left mouthpiece Channel 13 Action News in Toledo.

In sum, with democracy hanging by a thread, Republicans are seeking control of the Senate by pandering to white voters' worst instincts: racism, bigotry and xenophobia.

The polling evidence suggests the appeals are effective: Tester is under water and many of the other embattled Democrats like Brown are barely holding their own.

Further, the media's endless fascination with the horse race obscures what the fans in the grandstand are cheering for: white supremacy, trans phobia, and hatred of immigrants vital to our nation's economic growth. Whitewashing hatred and bigotry as “culture wars” or “social issues” isn't helping either.

Perhaps our reporters and pundits should spend less time wondering who's ahead in Mineral County, Nevada and more time considering the question: what kind of a country would hand over control of the Senate on the basis of angry lies appealing to the electorate's bigotry?

The answer is: yours.

Jack Smith's brief explains why this is not a normal election

By Legal Correspondent Saori Shiroseki with
Meta-Content Generator A.J. Liebling

According to today's New York Times, the Presidential election is a thrilling down-to-the-wire horse race between Whirlaway and Man O' War:

 

According to Special Counsel Jack Smith's pre-trial brief filed in the District Court in Washington, it's something else.  It's a decision on whether to re-install a violent insurrectionist as President and allow him to complete his work of destroying constitutional democracy in the United States.

As Emily Litella would say, “Oh. That's different, then.”

To review the bidding, Smith filed his brief to explain to Judge Chutkan why, despite the best efforts of the bent Republican Supreme Court to exonerate the Tangerine-Faced Felon in the absence of a legal mandate to do so, the conduct charged in the indictment does not constitute immune official acts of a President, whatever that may mean.

Looks official to me: John Roberts '76

First Smith outlines the aspects of the Tangerine-Faced Felon's criminal conduct that cannot be considered to be the official acts of the President (We'll get to other aspects later).  After his frivolous lawsuits challenging election results in seven different states were all laughed out of court, Smith Br. at 14, the TFF and his co-conspirator mouthpieces, including the pathetic Rudy Giuliani and the laughable John Eastman, concocted two new schemes.

The first was to bully state officials into changing the results and not appointing electors who represented the victor (Joe Biden, in case you've forgotten).  Smith Br. at 16ff.  As part of this scheme lunatics like Sydney Powell repeatedly libeled voting machine companies by claiming their machines were defective or hacked.  These are the lies that eventually cost Rupert Murdoch $787 million.  

When that failed, the TFF crime gang tried to appoint fake electors in seven different states, send the resulting fake certifications to the Congress, Smith Br. at 49ff, where shameless integrity-free allies like the pride of Harvard Law School, Cancun Ted Cruz, would object to the certifications and claim falsely there was a controversy requiring further delay.

The crime depended on browbeating an apparently spineless Mike Pence into refusing to accept the state's electoral certifications, which was something he had no power to do.   The TFF must have been shocked when, after years of cringeworthy toadying to every corrupt evil scheme the TFF hatched, Pence said no.

In desperation, as outlined in Smith's filing, the TFF launched an attack on the Capitol to force Congress to abandon the election certification, Smith Br. at 74ff.  When the TFF was told that an armed mob had forced Pence and his Secret Service detail to retreat into a secure space and their lives were in danger, the TFF responded “So what?” Smith Br. at 142.

But even the 185 page account of the TFF's elected-related accounts had to leave out some of the worst of it.  For example, you won't find evidence that the TFF had attempted to corruptly influence the Justice Department to intervene to prevent counting and certification of the vote, by up to and including removing every senior Justice Department officer except the one co-conspirator ready to do his bidding.  Jan 6. Committee Report at 413.

Although this effort to pervert the course of justice was among the most serious criminal acts by the TFF, Smith could no longer pursue it, because according to the six bent Republican Supreme Court Justices (including three appointed by the very same TFF)  a President who obstructs justice by ordering federal law enforcement to intervene without legal warrant in an election has committed no crime.

Or, as Justice Sotomayor put it in dissent:

When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in ex- change for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.

Which also explains why the efforts of the TFF and his corrupt enablers at the Defense Department is likewise missing.  Although this led to a remarkable order issue on January 4 preventing the deployment of the DC National Guard to protect the Congress, none of can be charged in an indictment because according to the bent Republican Justices, the President commits no crime when he orders the military to stage or support a coup. 

By the way, here's the infamous Defense Department memo.

 

So Jack Smith has heroically presented the criminal case against the TFF as best he could. Keep in mind however that even if Judge Chutkan finds that the conduct alleged is not in fact immune, her ruling will be reviewed by the Republican Party's judicial arm, the Supreme Court.  Since it is no longer possible to predict the outcome of Supreme Court cases based on their legal merits, what will happen is anyone's guess, or to be more precise, whatever Leonard Leo and Harlan Crow decide they want.

The point is that Jack Smith can't save us and can't save the Republic.  If the TFF wins the election, Smith is out, and possibly facing prosecution himself.  If the TFF loses, but Democrats fail to hold the Senate and take the House, the effective control over the nation will be exercised not by the duly elected political branches but by an unelected Republican oligarchy doing business as the Supreme Court.

It's just another reminder of the stakes we face in this election, or at least in the seven states that will decide it.

But of course to our media, it's just another exciting horse-race.  Better enjoy your mint julep while you can.

The latest collateral damage in the Middle East: Judaism.

 

 

By Hebraic Affairs Editor A.I. Cahan
with Middle East Correspondent Gertrude Bell in Beirut

The prospect of losing American democracy in an election in which its subverter has absolutely no chance of winning the popular vote was so depressing that we decided to look elsewhere for something cheerier to write about.

Good morning Beirut!

As the Jewish people prepare to usher in the New Year, it might be well to look back over the past year in the Middle East.

It's hard to think of a worse year for the Jews in the Middle East since about 70 CE.

Without trading charges about who did what 3,000 years ago (a staple of both sides' claims to a divine right to torment and kill the other), let's start on October 7, when the State of Israel suffered the worst military defeat and civilian massacre in its history at the hands of Hamas terrorists and cutthroats.  Hundreds of Israelis were hunted down, tortured, and slaughtered; hundred more were violently abducted and stuffed in Gaza tunnels to languish.  Over 70 are still there, although it's no longer clear how many are still alive.

You would that any Israeli Prime Minister who allowed this security collapse to occur would be shown the door at once.  Especially when that same Prime Minister green-lit payments of billions of dollars to those same terrorists as part of his scheme to permanently divide and weaken Palestinian governance.

Not so much, goyishce kopf.

For the past year, the multiply-indicted Bibi Netanyahu has kept an iron grip on power, having offered his people a year of staggering war and violence, whose grisly toll has apparently entertained many furious Israelis but done nothing to return the hostages or bring true safety or security to his nation.

First, he unleashed a horrific military campaign against Hamas in Gaza, knowing full well that the unrelenting indiscriminate violence and bombing against a guerilla army operating in a heavily populated civilian area would lead to vast civilian death and suffering.

And so it did.  Recent casualty figures from Gaza based on what the two sides report suggest that Israel has killed 17,000 Hamas combatants and 23,000 civilians in Gaza.  Israel has also made essentially all 2 million civilians in Gaza homeless refugees, living precariously in tents and on beaches, forced to flee from place to place by Israeli bombings anywhere it thinks it can find a Hamas fighter – in other words, anyplace in Gaza.

What Israel has not done is either free the remaining 74 Israeli hostages or wiped out Hamas as a fighting force. According to Israel's own estimates, there remain 13,000 Hamas fighters skulking around the tunnels under Gaza, ready and able to strike.

Now the bad news.

Eager to bask in the reflected, um, glory of the butchers of Hamas, long-time adversary Hezbollah, a terrorist movement that occupies and runs much of Lebanon, decided it would weigh in by unleashing its own wave of terror against Israel, supposedly in support of Hamas.

As a result of the Hezbollah assault, large portions of the North of Israel adjacent to Lebanon have been rendered uninhabitable, including significant places like Qiryat Sh'mona.  Its civilian population has been forced to flee south, a situation that Israelis properly regard as intolerable.

In response, as Israel has run out of targets in Gaza, it has unleashed its forces against Hezbollah, including blowing them up with sabotaged pagers and most recently dropping buildings on their leader, Nasrallah.

This escalation has resulted in the deaths of hundreds if not thousands of Lebanese civilians.  It has also brought the Middle East to the brink of catastrophe:

 

What Netanyahu hasn't succeeded in doing though is (1) neutralize the threat of Hezbollah or (2) make the North of Israel safe for Israelis.

Hezbollah has said that it is willing to suspend its campaign and allow life to return to normal in the North if and when Israel enters into a permanent cease-fire in Gaza.

That's the last thing Netanyahu wants.  He has brought the cease-fire negotiations to a standstill and insured that the hostages will be left to rot and die because he knows that a cease-fire would be the end of his regime:

Israelis now increasingly think that Netanyahu has reneged on withdrawal for two reasons: his self-serving (but effective) argument that political recriminations over the Oct. 7 debacle must be put aside during the fighting; and because the far-right parties that are key to his government have threatened to bring it down should he stop the war (they want, instead, to resettle Gaza with Jews).

There are only two beneficiaries of continued war in Gaza: Hamas and Netanyahu. Since those are parties that must agree to any cease-fire, it's not looking good.  And with no cease fire, the war in the North will continue and the population of Qiryat Sh'mona will be left to languish in exile.

Those far-right parties propping up Netanyahu's 64-vote coalition also want the war to go on without end to further their goal of the ethnic cleansing of Gaza (where they hope that if Israel continues to make life unbearable for the 2,000,000 remaining living Gazans, they will magically pack up and go somewhere else, although no one on Earth is prepared to take them in and they show no interest in leaving) and the West Bank, where they intend to subjugate the native Palestinian population in support of their objective of total Israeli control “from the river to the sea.”

According to the liberal Zionist group J Street:

With all eyes on the war in Gaza, the Netanyahu government is taking actions in the West Bank that abet settler violence, advance annexation, weaken the Palestinian Authority, destabilize the territory, and fuel rising Palestinian extremism and support for armed struggle. Top Israeli military brass warn of the eruption of ‘a third Intifada,’ while Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar warned Netanyahu that “terrorism” committed by extremist settlers “will lead to bloodshed and will unrecognizably change the face of the State of Israel.” 

The Biden Administration imposed sanctions on two settlers, but shows no appetite for going much further the month before the election.  The settler atrocities continue pretty much unchecked by the Israeli authorities:

Which leaves Netanyahu exactly where he wants to be: immune from political and legal accountability and hoping his buddy the Tangerine-Faced Felon will back him up should he sneak back into the White House.

That's great for Bibi and his hard-right extremist annexationists, but very bad for tens of thousands of dead civilians, most in Gaza, and hundreds of thousands of others, most Palestinians, whose lives have been ruined and endangered by this endless pointless effusion of blood.  

It's also not great for the remaining hostages and their families, who have little reason to expect anything but the worst, and for the civilian population of the North of Israel unable to return home.

There's one more victim here that should be not be overlooked amidst all the suffering: American Judaism, at least the non-frummie non-Likud variety.

Most American Jews do not cosplay as 17th Century Rumanian merchants; instead, they are part of movements like Reform, Conservative, or just unaffiliated but in the neighborhood.  One of the animating principles of those movements was Zionism, understood as building a progressive democratic Jewish state living in peace amongst its Arab neighbors. 

For generations American Jews have not only supported Israel; they have organized their communities around it.  The arrival of an Israeli Prime Minister on these shores was once the occasion for huge dinners to raise money for Israel Bonds and express solidarity with the struggle of the Jewish State.

Those were the days

Can you imagine mainstream American Jews renting the main ballroom of the New York Hilton to fete Bibi Netanyahu on one of his visits to the United States to variously lie to the word at the UN or interfere in U.S. politics by sucking up to Republican extremists?  

It doesn't happen.

That's because Zionism was not understood by our parents as bombing civilians to retain political power, terrorize West Bank residents to expand illegal Jewish settlements, or driving the indigenous Palestinian populations of Gaza and the West Bank into exile.

Or at least not until the Likud achieved unchallenged power in Israel.  Bibi's policies of unbridled expansionism and perpetual war are to put it modestly unpopular with American Jews, especially younger ones:

A recent study by the Jewish Identity Project of Reboot documented that on average, young Jews (35 and under) are considerably less attached to Israel, express less caring for Israel, less engaged with Israel, less supportive of Israel and score lower on overall scale of Israel attachment than Jews older than 35. Young Jewish Millennials and Gen Z increasingly see Israel as an occupying power oppressing Palestinians — a shock to their parents and grandparents, who tend to see it as an essential haven fighting for survival.

The frummie answer is to study more Torah, although you'd have to study it pretty hard before you found the part about bombing the civilian population of Gaza into oblivion. Actually, you could find it, but if you really regard Torah as a license to kill Palestinians, what kind of Torah do you have?  Not the one whose paths are peace and pleasantness. Why should anyone care about the Torah of Mass Destruction more than say the Epic of Gilgamesh?

The answer that younger (and some older) Jews have arrived at it is they shouldn't.  

The alienation of American Jews from their faith is yet another casualty of the Netanyahu/Likud campaign of perpetual war, brutality, and oppression.  It may not be as terrible as the death of thousands of innocents in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon, but on this Rosh Hashonah we mourn it nonetheless.

The crisis of American democracy: Both sides are too mean

By Florida Correspondent Jenny Herk
with Meta-Content Generator A.J. Liebling

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. – This week we saw the inevitable outcome of the Republican policy of allowing hundreds of millions of high powered assault rifles to remain in the hands of anyone who wants one, including angry white male losers seeking to go out as a celebrity.

After what might have been another attempted assassination of the Tangerine-Faced Felon, he and his henchmen now doing business as the Republican Party immediately opened up their two page playbook and put in place both steps:

1.  Schnor for money; and

2.  Lie about and smear Democrats by claiming this deranged white man's desperate act was motivated by entirely legitimate criticism of the Tangerine-Faced Rapist. 

Sofa-bangin' running mate Jimmy Don Vontz lost no time in spreading the malignant talking point:

Mr. Vance said that Mr. Trump’s political opponents had crossed a line with their language, which he suggested had played a role in what the authorities are investigating as an assassination attempt directed at Mr. Trump while he was golfing in Florida on Sunday.

1932 Germany: why couldn't both sides tone it down?

“Look, we can disagree with one another, we can debate one another, but we cannot tell the American people that one candidate is a fascist and, if he’s elected, it is going to be the end of American democracy,” Mr. Vance said at a Georgia Faith & Freedom Coalition dinner. 

Even if it's true?

To its credit, The New York Times gagged on this one, pointing out 

Mr. Trump has called Ms. Harris a “fascist” on at least five occasions, including at a rally on Thursday in Arizona and during a news conference on Friday near Los Angeles.

“She’s a Marxist, communist, fascist, socialist,” Mr. Trump said in Tucson, Ariz.

At the dinner on Monday, Mr. Vance said that “no one has tried to kill Kamala Harris in the last couple of months.” The vice president has been the target of violent threats while in office.

Sometimes an invariable both-side lens actually focuses the discussion.

But more often putting on the both-sides specs distorts the picture out of all recognition.  Just yesterday, on WAMU's 1A, a writer for one of DC's most reliable fountains of lukewarm conventional wisdom, Axios, said (this is a verbatim transcript):

Yeah. I think we're basically walking into a tinderbox these next 6 weeks. And I think what you saw from the reaction of both Democrats and Republicans after the second, second attempt with an AK 47, is that there is no sense that the temperature is going to be taken down. Democrats basically responded either saying, that we need to, like, beef up Secret Service, but a lot of Democrats basically said, you know, it's Trump's fault, for increasing the dangerous rhetoric in the first place. And then Republicans countered that it was Democrats' fault for, you know, amping up the heated rhetoric in the first place. So that all that's to say and, you know, we can have a much longer conversation about who is, more responsible than what. But the the but the upshot is that we are headed in the last 6 weeks of presidential election, and neither side looks willing to actually, you know, bring down the temperature. And there is a lot of kindling here for political violence to really erupt and, you know, disrupt this election and the country.

Those dangerous Democrats – they're going to continue to say inflammatory stuff like the Republican candidate for President is a danger to democracy and the rule of law just because it happens to be, well, true.

The reliably useless Washington Post applied the same both-sides concealer to the current crisis:

Isn't it more dangerous to democracy to fail to point out that the Republican candidate if elected has already promised to end it?  Isn't that something an informed electorate has the right to know?  How can Democrats allow themselves to be bullied into not telling the truth about the Tangerine-Faced Fascist?

Republicans are so good at this kind of incendiary intimidation because they've had so much experience using it to their political advantage.  Was it already 20 years ago when the Democratic nominee, a Vietnam War hero named John Kerry, was vilely smeared as a traitor who did not merit the medals he had won for his combat service while his Republican opponent defending the skies over Waco, Texas and refused Vietnam service.  Yep:

Even leading Republicans said yesterday that things went a little too far when they had to publicly repudiate the actions of a delegate who was handing out adhesive bandages marked with Purple Hearts to mock Mr. Kerry's war wounds.

The bandages, distributed by Morton Blackwell of Arlington, Va., included a message that read, "It was just a self-inflicted scratch, but you see I got a Purple Heart for it." Mr. Blackwell said he was only trying to have fun, but the Military Order of The Purple Heart, an organization that says it represents wounded veterans, was not amused. ...

The Bush campaign and the party said they had nothing to do with the bandages and did not approve.

But even as they sought to distance themselves from the bandages, leading Republicans reprised a central accusation from the Swift boat group, which has said Mr. Kerry's testimony before the Senate in 1971 hurt American troops.

See the Republican two-step? Launch a vile false attack (immigrants eat kitties) and then back away to an equally false but more respectable position (Kerry's brave testimony about the futility of Nixon's war was somehow a betrayal of the troops).

You ll be unsurprised to know that the Democrats were intimidated out of attacking Bush's feckless failure to protect the nation from 9/11 because doing so in wartime would be “unpatriotic.”

Perhaps the rankest pre-Tangerine Faced Felon Republican smear was articulated by Republican hellhound Newt Gingrich, who pioneered the trick of tossing out incendiary lies while complaining that he was the victim of unfair attacks.   He led the scorched-Earth opposition to Bill Clinton, who had the nerve to win a Presidential election.

Here's his gem:

In 1994, Gingrich linked Democrats to Susan Smith, a woman who had murdered her two children in 1991.

"I think that the mother killing the two children in South Carolina vividly reminds every American how sick the society is getting and how much we need to change things," he said. "The only way you get change is to vote Republican."

Democrats support a mother killing her children? That's gotta be worse than eating kitties for dinner in Ohio!

When Vice President Gore suggested this comment was de trop, the New York Times gave it a few paragraphs on page A21 and then forget about the whole thing, because, well, when you're The New York Times you don't have to give a reason. 

(The Gingrich smear campaign worked.  The next day, the Republicans won the midterms and permanently crippled Bill Clinton's Presidency.)

Speaking of the Times and its terrible coverage of Republican lies and smears since at least 1994, its brightest expositor of conventional wisdom and whatever, Maggie Haberman, has responded to the drum beat of criticism of their terrible work with an exciting scoop of her own.

According to her reporting, it's not that media critics are motivated by dread over the threat to American democracy posed by the Tangerine-Faced Fascist and the unwillingness of the media to report the objective truth that democracy and the rule of law are on the ballot this year. 

That's not it.

The reason that critics are giving hacks like Maggie a hard time is because they are part of a vast industry which is apparently raking it in by daring to judge the quality of media coverage of the crisis of American democracy.

 

How did she know?

Here at the Spy, we have been cashing huge checks from this industry.  In fact we were thinking of using our winnings to pick up a little vacation property.

John Mack, the former CEO of Morgan Stanley, has listed his beachfront Caribbean mansion for $29.5 million https://t.co/zHUMAXfiTj

— Businessweek (@BW) September 20, 2024

By the way, it was nice of Maggie to admit in an interview that the old demented Republican nominee speaks “incoherently.”  It would be even nicer if that obvious truth made it into her published coverage. It seems like an objective fact that voters might be interested in.

Another fact: repeating the kitties-on-the-grill smear without aggressively pointing out both its falsehood and the underlying bigotry works great – for Republicans.

According to the latest CBS News poll, 69% of TFF voters believe that immigrants are frying up both Tweety and Sylvester:

CBS News.

We'll submit that such insane results are strong evidence that Maggie and her brothers and sisters aren't doing their jobs.   

Fact-Checking The New York Times: This Needs...Everything

 

Editors' Note:  Many years ago, the Times fired their Public Editor, claiming that the job was no longer necessary because the Internets would keep them honest.  (The former Public Editor, Margaret Sullivan, is now covering media for The Guardian and killing it.)  To help Ms. Sullivan, we have appointed our own Public Editor who among his other duties fact-checks the Times to provide the objective context that  you the reader deserve for your $2000 a year Times subscription.  

By A.J. Liebling
Public Editor

What They Said:

September 6, 2024

Less than nine weeks before Election Day, former President Donald J. Trump summoned journalists to the lobby of Trump Tower in Manhattan and then spent 45 minutes recounting in detail multiple sexual harassment allegations against him, lashing out at the women who made them and casting himself as the victim. 

This omits needed context.

In fact Trump once again publicly defamed E. Jean Carroll, whom he sexually assaulted in the dressing room of a Manhattan department store, leaving himself open for a third massive civil verdict. 

He also brought up another sexual assault allegation and dismissed it on the grounds that the victim wasn't attractive enough to rape.

–What They Said:

September 6, 2024

Just a day earlier, on Wednesday, Senator JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, responded to a similar question about child care with a nearly equally confusing answer at an event in Mesa, Ariz.

“Maybe Grandma and Grandpa wants to help out a little bit more,” Mr. Trump’s running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, right, said on Wednesday in response to a question about child care.

Mr. Vance, like Mr. Trump, acknowledged that the issue of affordable child care was “such an important question.” But his initial answer was that parents should get help from grandparents or aunts and uncles.

“Maybe Grandma and Grandpa wants to help out a little bit more,” Mr. Vance said. 

This is misleading.

As the detail implies, there was nothing “confusing” about Vance's position on government assistance with child care.  Like the last 60 years of Republican candidates, he opposes using government funds to help parents out with the immense costs of child care.

–What They Said:

September 5, 2024

Former President Donald J. Trump called for the creation of a government efficiency commission in an economic speech in New York on Thursday, adopting a policy idea that was pitched to him by the billionaire businessman Elon Musk.

Mr. Trump said that Mr. Musk would also lead the commission, which would conduct a sweeping audit of the federal government and recommend “drastic reforms” for cutting waste. He said the commission would save “trillions of dollars.”

In a wide-ranging and sometimes meandering speech that lasted more than an hour, Mr. Trump recast his first-term record as an economic miracle and renewed his pitch for lowering taxes and raising tariffs on imports, often disregarding some of the potential implications of his new proposals. 

This is misleading.

This is what Trump said:  

Well, I would do that, and we’re sitting down, and I was, somebody, we had Sen. Marco Rubio, and my daughter Ivanka was so impactful on that issue. It’s a very important issue. But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, that, because, look, child care is child care. You have to have it — in this country you have to have it.

But when you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to — but they’ll get used to it very quickly — and it’s not going to stop them from doing business with us, but they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country. Those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we’re talking about, including child care, that it’s going to take.

I look forward to having no deficits within a fairly short period of time, coupled with the reductions that I told you about on waste and fraud and all of the other things that are going on in our country, because I have to stay with child care. I want to stay with child care, but those numbers are small relative to the kind of economic numbers that I’m talking about, including growth, but growth also headed up by what the plan is that I just told you about.

We’re going to be taking in trillions of dollars, and as much as child care is talked about as being expensive, it’s, relatively speaking, not very expensive compared to the kind of numbers we’ll be taking in. We’re going to make this into an incredible [country that can] afford to take care of its people, and then we’ll worry about the rest of the world. Let’s help other people, but we’re going to take care of our country first. This is about America first. It’s about Make America Great Again, we have to do it because right now we’re a failing nation, so we’ll take care of it. Thank you. Very good question. Thank you.

As others including Parker Molloy have pointed out, these words are incoherent and even if parsed in the light most favorable to Trump insane because his ruinous tariffs will first never be imposed and if they are will not generate nearly enough money to pay for childcare.  Further, Trump did not in fact outline any particular policy for helping with childcare costs other than the false claim there will be plenty of money. 

Finally, the idea of appointing a ketamine-addled Fascist who most recently lost $30 billion on Twitter is ridiculous and, as the piece points out, brimming with conflict of interest, because Elno has trousered billions from government contracts.

–What They Said:

September 3, 2024

Journalism: it's failed before

Asked for examples of the technique, the Trump campaign provided what it called a “masterclass weave” — a four-minute, 20-second video of the candidate speaking at a rally in Asheville, N.C., in August in which he bounces from energy bills to Hunter Biden’s laptop to Venezuelan tar to mental institutions in Caracas to migrant crime to “the green new scam” to Vice President Kamala Harris.

In its disjointed way, it did all sort of seem to wend back to why he thinks he should be president again.

“Unlike Kamala Harris, who can’t put together a coherent sentence without a teleprompter, President Trump speaks for hours, telling multiple impressive stories at the same time,” said Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for Mr. Trump. “Kamala Harris could never.”

This is really missing the point

Trump's inability to talk coherently is not just a quirk of his personality; it shows that he lacks the cognitive capacity to serve as President.  Given the Times's 152 stories questioning Biden's mental state, it beggars comprehension for the Times to tie itself up into pretzels to avoid grappling with the efflorescence of Trump's dementia.  [Joe, take a deep breath – Ed.]

–What They Said:

September 7, 2024

Mr. Trump has repeatedly called for prosecutions against people who he believes have wronged him.

If he's not making any sense, you have to say so!

After he was indicted by the federal government for the first time in 2023, Mr. Trump vowed to have a “real special prosecutor” who would go after President Biden and his family if he won the presidency in 2024.

On Friday, speaking to reporters in the lobby of Trump Tower, in Manhattan, Mr. Trump said the criticisms of judges by Democrats “should be illegal” and that the Justice Department should look into “the legality of these people” attacking jurists like Aileen Cannon, the federal judge he appointed who recently dismissed an indictment against him. 

This fails to make the obviously true and unarguable point that Trump is promising to obstruct justice and attack democracy again. 

By simply reporting his threats without making it clear that if carried out they would subvert democracy and the rule of law, the Times is effectively admitting these threats into the universe of acceptable political discourse, thus normalizing these terrifying statements. [Joe, lighten up here.  We're supposed to be taking a calm detached perspective. – Ed.]

–What They Said:

August 17, 2024

If only someone had called out hate speech in time

Former President Donald J. Trump in a campaign speech on Saturday bounced among complaints about the economy and immigration, wide-ranging digressions and a number of personal attacks on Vice President Kamala Harris, including jabs at her appearance and her laugh.

At a rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., Mr. Trump swung from talking points on inflation and criticisms of Democratic policy as “fascist” and “Marxist” to calling illegal immigrants “savage monsters” and saying that rising sea levels would create more beachfront property.

This is a perverse effort to normalize bats**t crazy lies and rants and appeals to raw bigotry. 

How can you repeat these revolting lies without first debunking them and then noting that at least with respect to immigration and the attacks on VP Harris, are nothing more than appeals to bigots from a deranged hatemonger?  What possible justification could there be for not pointing out these facts so that readers will understand the true nature of the Republican candidate and his appeal?  By simply repeating their crude smears, the Times gives them a plausibility that only increases with each repetition of these lies and slurs.  No one who has even a particle of regard for the tenets of journalism could possibly – [Joe, I think you better lie down for a while. – Ed.]