The Supreme Court: they're not judges, so why waste a courthouse on them?

By Bill Zeckendorf
Real Estate Correspondent

Last week we recounted how the United States Supreme Court had decided it no longer had to act like a court, and instead had reinvented itself as a kind of House of Lords on, like Bobby Kennedy, Jr., steroids.  Like the British version, many of them are known to drink excessively.  Unlike those lords though, ours have the power to chuck out any law or regulation enacted by the democratically elected branches that they find not amusing.

Their unceasing assault on democracy and law itself have led to a number of possible fixes, such as unpacking the Court with new justices, enforcing term limits, and even limiting their legal to decide cases.  All of these ideas are reasonable, but all have failed because basically Democrats are too timid to pursue them.

We propose a much more modest solution.  Currently the Supreme Court does its dirty business from an imposing marble palace on Capitol Hill built in the depths of the Depression.  It was intended to embody in stone the majesty of justice under law.

Now that they have chucked out that justice under law ragtime, why do they need a courthouse?  A little known fact is that their Courthouse belongs not to them, but to us.  They are tenants.  Like poor powerless tenants, they can be chucked out into the street at any time at the whim of their landlord; in this case, us.

For the first 150 years of the Republic, though, these clowns got by without their own courthouse.  They heard argument in the Capitol.  Otherwise, the boys worked at home, where in many cases their Black slaves were able to provide spirituous refreshment and other services while they composed classics like Dred Scott.  

We propose repurposing their unneeded courthouse and transforming it into something useful, if not inspiring. Our idea would be to turn the palace into a conveniently-located day care center for the thousands of underpaid drones buzzing around the Capitol complex. There would likely be enough space left over to house the Marshall-Ginsburg Center for the Study of Civil Rights, returning at long last something resembling justice to a building that hasn't seen any for years now.

However, mostly out of sympathy for long-suffering spouses like Mesdames Roberts and Kavanaugh, we would not leave the Court without a home.

Fortunately, the Government's real estate arm, the General Services Administration, maintains a vast portfolio of real estate much of which could be repurposed to serve the needs of a Supreme Court of Revision.  What do they need except some offices and a big room to hear arguments?  Basically any office space will do.

Like the super-helpful problem solvers we are, we've found a number of attractive options, any of which would be more than suitable for the Supreme Court, and many of which would allow them to focus on their work without the distractions of a bustling downtown crawling with plutocrats and collectors of Hitler memorabilia.

Let's check out some of GSA's choice office inventory.

Bolling AFB, Southeast DC

See how close it is to the Capitol!

If you think that there is some symbolic reason to provide a DC address for the Court, there's a lot of Federal property on the far side of the Anacostia River that is located in the District.  For example, there's an Air Force base down there that has everything an Air Force base requires, except for planes and runways.

Surely there's space at Bolling AFB that could be repurposed to house the Supreme Court.  And the site boasts riverfront views and plenty of free parking.  Arguably it's less convenient to the ritzy clubs and restaurants of K Street, but we're sure the Justices would be welcomed in the Officers' Club.

Talk about location: it's right on the water, so the younger Justices can enjoy kayaking and paddleboarding on the Potomac, while the older ones can bask in the sun and dream about leaving their public hairs on the soda cans of particularly comely clerks and staff.  It's a short hop to National Airport, where the Justices' private empty-seat air force of Gulfstream jets stands ready to whisk them away to the vacation of their dreams with their dear friends, all of whom are remarkably enough rich reactionary white men eager to push their plutocratic Christian dominionist agenda.

Haynesworth Courthouse, Greenville SC

We were so moved by Clarence Thomas's story of how he rose from poverty and obscurity in rural South Carolina to the Supreme Court solely by virtue of his brilliance, hard work, and rigorous self-control without benefiting in any way from that nasty unconstitutional affirmative action stuff Clarence chucked out last month that we thought it would be a nice gesture to let him return home to South Carolina in triumph.

Perfect for Brett!

It would also let him spend more time with his mother in the house that Hitler tchachke collector Harlan Crow bought for her.

According to the GSA, there's plenty of empty space in this courthouse, and it already has a courtroom.  And Greenville (unofficial motto: “The town that's not too busy to hate”) has many attractions that should appeal at least to the six Republican hacks who run the Court.  Actually the official motto is “America's Friendliest City,” which should appeal to outgoing party guys like Brett “He just wanted to say hello” Kavanaugh.

By the way, who was that Clement Haynsworth fella whose name graces the future home of the Supreme Court?

Funny story:

Nearly a century after a former Confederate took the bench, Republican candidate Richard Nixon ran for president using a “Southern strategy,” as well as an emphasis on law-and-order politics, to woo white southern Democrats who were upset with Lyndon B. Johnson’s support for civil rights legislation. After winning the presidency in 1968, Nixon nominated two men for the Supreme Court who each had a history of supporting segregation.... The first one, Clement Haynsworth Jr., had supported a decision by Prince Edward County, Virginia—the county in which one of the five class-action suits incorporated into Brown v. Board of Education was filed—to close schools rather than integrate them.

Sounds like a man after John Roberts's stone cold no-racism-here heart.  And a perfect home for this bent Supreme Court.

Kodiak Island, Alaska

The liberal minority on the Court might complain that this former Naval facility on Kodiak Island, Alaska is a little distant from their favorite soy-latte haunts in Washington, but really, who cares what they think?  Not their six corrupt Republican colleagues.

The great advantage to this facility, located on ruggedly handsome Kodiak Island, Alaska, is its proximity to the vacation haunts favored by Sullen Sam Alito and his like-minded brethren.  You'll recall it was Alito who selflessly occupied an otherwise-empty seat on some plutocrat's private jet for a week long fishing getaway in Alaska, accompanied by gourmet meals and wine that certainly did not cost $1,500 a bottle, according to distinguished oenophile Sam Alito.

If the Court were moved to this simple yet adequate outpost, Sam wouldn't have to be embarrassed by private jet travel. Instead, he could be conveyed to the fishing lodge on Harlan Crow's hundred-foot yacht accompanied by his good friend Leonard “Moneybags” Leo and his constellation of goons who installed the last three bent white justices on the court. 

Further Kodiak Island would approximate John Roberts's ideal of an America that never has to grapple with the issues of race, because there are only about 140 Black people on the island. 

As this brief survey of available federal property has demonstrated, there is a range of desirable sites for the new home of the Supreme Court from which they could pursue their destruction of the rule of law in peace and quiet.  

Although these sites may be less luxurious than their current abode, keep in mind that having a roof over their heads puts them ahead of hundreds of thousands of desperate Americans who lack that simple comfort due to the continued efforts of the soulmates and owners of the six Republican Justices.

Of course, if they would prefer to remain in their marble courthouse on Capitol Hill, all they would have to do is behave like judges and limit themselves to deciding actual controversies by applying the law rather than their personal political preferences, which is what judges are supposed to do. 

The Most Dangerous Branch

By Legal Correspondent Saori Shiroseki

The latest delayed revelation from a former Tiny Toadstool flunky this week reminded us again of how deeply we fell into tyranny in the previous administration.

This week, craven Trump enabler John Kelly finally admitted under oath that the criminal he served had tried to use the IRS to attack FBI officials who were conducting a lawful inquiry into his misconduct.  The news generated crickets among the Washington press corps, otherwise engaged in wondering who had dropped a bag of Bolivian marching powder in the West Wing lobby.  (It was most likely hard-tweaking Fox “News” rabble-rouser Pete Doocy, who needed to give his stupid empty baiting of Biden Administration briefers that certain “lift.”  If not him, then some other hack who needed an extra something for their 6:32 a.m. hit.)

She's got a North Lawn hit in 10 and needs that bump bad!

Siccing the IRS on one's political enemies or law enforcement officials doing their jobs is of course tyranny.  Just like extorting political dirt by withholding authorized weapons from a vital ally (that was impeachment #1).  Just like mobilizing friendly states and then an armed mob to overturn a fair and free election (that was impeachment #2).  Just like stealing classified documents and lying about it (that was indictment #2).

We've been so focused on the very real specter of authoritarian tyranny (about two to three points away in recent non-nobbled polls) that we've overlooked an equally grim prospect: what if the threat comes not from a corrupt Russian-owned stooge ruling from the patio of his crapcan club, but from the black-robed subverters of democracy doing business as the United States Supreme Court?

The question was starkly posed at the end of its current disastrous term, by decisions that were not only wrong on the facts and the law, but were issued by a bent court without authority to do so.

We're not talking about horrendously wrong decisions like taking away a woman's right to control her own body.  Those have to be resolved in the political process (more on that below).

We're talking about decisions that the Court was explicitly without the authority to make.   The distinction tends to get lost these days, but the Supreme Court and the lower courts do not in fact have the authority to decide whatever the f*** they want, the way Congress can.

They have an extremely limited grant of power contained in Article III, sections 1 and 2 of the Constitution, which says

The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish....The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution, the Laws of the United States, ...In all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party, the supreme Court shall have original Jurisdiction. In all the other Cases before mentioned, the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.

There's a lot to unpack here, but for today's purpose note that the judicial power is limited to “cases” and “controversies.”

Those limitations are important.  We know this because Brett Kavanaugh this term whipped this out:

Brett Kavanaugh has long had trouble with standing

Article III of the Constitution confines the federal judicial power to “Cases” and “Controversies.” Under Article III, a case or controversy can exist only if a plaintiff has standing to sue—a bedrock constitutional requirement that this Court has applied to all manner of important disputes

.... As this Court’s precedents amply demonstrate, Article III standing is “not merely a troublesome hurdle to be overcome if possible so as to reach the ‘merits’ of a lawsuit which a party desires to have adjudicated; it is a part of the basic charter promulgated by the Framers of the Constitution at Philadelphia in 1787.”... The principle of Article III standing is “built on a single basic idea—the idea of separation of powers.” ..... Standing doctrine helps safeguard the Judiciary’s proper—and properly limited—role in our constitutional system. By ensuring that a plaintiff has standing to sue, federal courts “prevent the judicial process from being used to usurp the powers of the political branches.”

U.S. v. Texas, 599 U. S. ____ (2023).

And if Brett “Look What Popped Up” Kavanaugh says it, it must be true.  Like when he said he never tried to rape a 16-year-old girl in a drunken frenzy.   In Texas, the Supreme Court properly said that a bent Republican state had no standing to keep the Executive Branch from exercising its plenary authority over immigration as it saw fit.

The next week, though, they forget all about their bedrock principle and usurped the powers of the political branches in at least two cases (and possibly three, if you count the Harvard case).  In fairness, they were busy packing their bags for their summer boondoggles in Alaska and Bali.

In Nebraska v. Biden, 599 U. S. ____ (2023), the Supreme Court said that despite explicit language to the contrary the Biden Administration could not waive student loan debt.  It found that a loan servicer chartered by the State of Missouri somehow conferred standing on the state itself, although the servicer neither suffered nor complained of any injury.

The three non-bent non-Republican Justices wrote in dissent: 

In every respect, the Court today exceeds its proper, limited role in our Nation’s governance....The plaintiffs in this case are six States that have no personal stake in the Secretary’s loan forgiveness plan. They are classic ideological plaintiffs: They think the plan a very bad idea, but they are no worse off because the Secretary differs. In giving those States a forum—in adjudicating their complaint— the Court forgets its proper role. The Court acts as though it is an arbiter of political and policy disputes, rather than of cases and controversies.

The majority didn't like forgiving student loan indebtedness so they killed it.  But that wasn't a judicial act.  It was an attempted arrogation of political power that they didn't have.

And they didn't stop there.  They went on to create a religion-based right to discriminate against a protected class seeking public accommodation in 303 Creative LLC v. Ennis, 599 U. S. ____ (2023), even though the plaintiff had not been asked to create a website for people she found abhorrent (a same-sex couple).  In fact she had suffered no injury at all, nor was there any present opportunity for her to do so.  The plaintiff had never sold a wedding website to anyone, gay or otherwise.  303 Creative, 599 U.S., slip op. at 31 n.11 (Sotomayor, J., dissenting).

We remember there used to be a guy who taught at Harvard named Larry Tribe who was thought to know something about Constitutional Law.  What'd he have to say?

the entire case was based on entirely hypothetical 'worries' that the web designer claimed to have about how the state's officers might come after her under the state anti-discrimination laws if a same-sex couple were to ask her to design a wedding site for them and if she were to refuse," Tribe said. "In my view, the disgraceful fact...is the very fact that the Supreme Court's majority was willing to render what amounted to an advisory opinion that it would never have done but for its eagerness to denigrate same-sex marriage and LGBTQ rights generally and that, under Article III, it had no business doing."

Got it.

By the way, the requirement that services be publicly offered is why the drivel about whether Steven Spielberg could be forced into directing a movie whose ideology he disagreed with fails the laugh test.  If, as, and when Spielberg opens up a Movies 'r Us on Rodeo Drive, the apologists for judicial discrimination against LGBTQ couples can try the argument again.

There's also a third case that's still churning in the lower courts concerning an effort by anti-abortion doctors to prohibit the use of medication abortion.  We've held forth on this already, but suffice it to say that the forced-birth ideologues pushing the case do not in fact have an injury other than the political desire to torment women seeking abortions.

What is to be done?

You might be expecting the usual lecture about voting for Biden and real Democrats (a group that does not include heroin-deranged anti-vaxxer Bobby Kennedy, Jr.).

But that covers all bent Supreme Court decisions, including in cases where they had unquestioned authority to make their decision (including alas the abortion ruling itself).

For the subset of lawless decisions issued by a court without authority to do so, we suggest an additional tool once used by an old country lawyer named Abraham Lincoln.  In 1861, with Maryland teetering on the brink of insurrection (which if successful would have left Washington surrounded and the Union cause lost), Lincoln ordered the arrest of among other subversives one John Merryman by the military authorities.

When Chief Justice Taney (who had decided four years earlier that Black people weren't people after all) ordered Merryman's release, “Lincoln refused to obey it....Whatever the respective merits of Taney's and Lincoln's position, Taney commanded no troops and could not enforce his opinion, while Lincoln did and could.” J. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom 288-89.

The Supreme Court has been wrong before

If a figure as devoted to the preservation of the nation and the Constitution as Abe Lincoln could justify ignoring Supreme Court decisions, maybe we should stop and think.

At least when the Court is plainly acting outside its Article III powers and simply imposing its political will, we'd argue that we have a responsibility to reject the tyranny of the judiciary.

Imagine what would happen.  In the case of student loans, Biden would simply state that no one has to pay $10,000 in loans.  Who would enforce nonpayment?  Who has a right to object?  The supposed website designer case is more difficult, because lower federal courts would like feel bound to enforce 303 Creative, but other states could argue that the precedent is worthless because it was issued without the power to do so.  

To the objection that ignoring or defying any Supreme Court decision threatens the rule of law, we would ask who is threatening the rule of law?  Is it those who insist that the Court obey the Article III limits on its power, or is it six bent Republicans ignoring the law to impose their political judgments on the rest of us?

A Court that feels empowered to act as an unelected and permanently Republican legislature seems like the greatest threat to law and order we face (outside the potential re-election of a Russian-owned corrupt disloyal sex criminal).

Many years ago, Prof. Alexander Bickel wrote a famous defense of the Supreme Court called The Least Dangerous Branch.  

What do we do when it becomes the most dangerous?

Liz Cheney's Priorities: They're Not Ours

By Political Editor David Bloviator and
Legal Correspondent Saori Shiroseki

As we pick through the wreckage of our constitutional order this morning and wake up to a world in which a tyrannical bent Republican court has in essence carried out a coup against the political branches by issuing decisions without the power to do so under the Constitution, our thoughts naturally turn to – our supposed BFF, Liz Cheney.

Cheney, who has reinvented herself as the Savior of the Republic for being among the few Republicans willing to state the obvious truth that Trump is a subversive corrupt danger to our country, has some shocking thoughts on the next Presidential election:

“I really believe, and I’ve never believed something as strongly as I know this, that the single most important thing for the country is Donald Trump can’t be anywhere near the Oval Office again,” she said.

Oooh, so close.

As shown by the path of destruction wrought in just the last week by a Court six of whose Justices were appointed by Republicans, the most important thing for the country is that Joe Biden must be re-elected next year.

See the difference?

If you think that Trump is the problem, not Republicans, then you must think that one of the other clowns challenging the Tangerine-Faced Defendant for the nomination would less less of a threat.  Would they?

Let's take the man who is nominally in second place, although fading faster than David Brooks' elevation of Lobsterman Jordan Peterson, Ron “Go-Go Boots” DeSantis.

DeSantis apparently agrees with every one of Trump's democracy-busting positions.  His claim is that he could do a better job of creating an extremist right wing dictatorship. 

His position about the violent conspiracy to overthrow the U.S. Government on January 6, 2021 can be described as nothing to see here people, move along:

We warned you about your friend Liz Cheney

DeSantis has sought to downplay the events of that day and hasn’t ruled out pardoning the rioters or even Trump himself. 

Pardoning the Traitor-in-Chief is of course an act in furtherance of sedition.  Embracing such a possibility demonstrates to even the meanest intelligence (other than Liz Cheney) that DeSantis is also a clear and present threat to democracy. 

If that position is not disqualifying, DeSantis has spent the last five years turning Florida into a dictatorship, by disenfranchising hundreds of thousands of ex-prisoners, punishing corporations for disagreeing with him, wiping out academic freedom in state colleges, and terrorizing school boards into banning books that hurt the feelings of white supremacist morons.

None of that appears to bother Liz Cheney.

We could go down the list of Republican hacks and wannabes but really what difference would it make?  None of them are willing to condemn the January 6 insurrection or state that they will not vote for Trump if he is the nominee.  

Crucially, would you expect any of them to nominate for the Supreme Court anyone other than an extremist whack job wrapped up for them by America's Lord Chancellor,  Leonard Leo?

And has Liz Cheney ruled out supporting any of these cats and dogs?

Instead of forthrightly condemning them, she had more general criticism of the current state of American politics:

“And what we’ve done in our politics is create a situation where we’re electing idiots,” she added, prompting applause from the audience. She added later “I think electing serious people can't be partisan.”

Before you get too choked up with longing for the days when our politics were dominated by Republicans who supposedly weren't idiots, let's remind you of a little history:

You don't know who this guy is, do you?  Neither does Liz Cheney!

Would you believe that he was a Republican Vice President of the United States?  Until he had to resign in disgrace because he had accepted envelopes full of cash representing kickbacks from state contractors?

Does anyone think that Spiro T. Agnew was not an idiot?

But he was just the first in a long line of Republican idiots that Liz overlooks.  What about St. Ronald of Bitburg, who didn't understand why those Hebrews threw a fit just because he saw fit to place a wreath at a German cemetery containing graves of Hitler's SS war criminals?

Or St. Ronald's successor, George H.W. Bush, who bequeathed Clarence Thomas to us by saying not at all idiotically:

The “best man” for the job? Even today, you have to appreciate the breathtaking insouciance of the lie, coming from a Yale aristocrat who wouldn't have let Thomas chauffeur his mother around Prout's Neck.

By the way, whatever happened to Thomas's extreme views on affirmative action?  Any updates?

Republicans, before they were idiots

And closer to Liz herself, what about the idiots who failed to take the al-Qaeda terrorist threat seriously before 9/11 and then used it as a pretext to invade a country that had nothing to do with it, with disastrous results?  

The point, other than rubbishing Liz Cheney just for the fun of it (kind of like her position about torturing detainees), is that our Wonderful Republican Allies have been trying for years now to claim that there is a huge and inexplicable gap separating the leader of the Republican Party, ex-Pres. Tiny Toadstool, from all other serious non-idiotic non-subversive non-white supremacist Republicans past and present.

But even a cursory review of history demonstrates that there's isn't a dime's worth of difference between racist Republican idiots of yesterday and today.  

And anyone who maintains the fallacy that the Tangerine-Faced Defendant can be chopped off the otherwise-healthy Republican oak is not our friend.  Worse, she's not a friend of what's left of our constitutional order.

Three lethal threats to democracy: where did they learn this stuff?

By Yard Correspondent Larry Lowell with
Nellie Bly in Washington

Among the many beloved features of The New York Times, in addition to its toxic stew of white op-ed columnists and its habit of selling section fronts on Sunday to flacks trying to wrangle some free publicity for their washed-up clients, is its weekly news quiz.

We don't have an original idea in our heads, so we thought we'd try one ourselves.  

Here it is: What do three of the biggest white male threats to democracy have in common?

Answer below.

But to help you, let's introduce the three schmucks in question.

Our first threat is a household name, sort of, not because of anything he did, but because he is a survivor of America's greatest political dynasty.  Say hello to Bobby Kennedy, Jr.!

Bobby's running for President.  Like his dad.  Unlike his dad, who ran on a platform of social justice, Bobby Jr. is relying on lethal anti-vax drivel, plus spouting insane pro-Putin talking points.  In 2023 America, that's a crowd pleaser, at least if the crowd is drawn from the Republican base.

More specifically,

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the son of a US Attorney General and nephew of a president, has turned the Kennedy legacy upside down. Beginning in 2003, RFK Jr. abandoned his promising career as an environmental advocate to embrace the libertarian agenda of anti-vaccine and anti-science activism—a fascinating and dangerous U-turn from self-sacrifice to self-serving. 

There are a lot of self-serving politicians out there. But only a few have embraced ideas that have led to the deaths of countless innocents (Although to be sure George W. Bush qualifies in that league and may even top the table.):

[Bobby] Kennedy[, Jr.] continued to spread anti-vaccine hysteria, emerging as a walking public health hazard. In June 2019 he visited Samoa, appearing in public with a prominent local anti-vaccination figure.

By that September, the island nation was in the grip of a measles outbreak that eventually took the lives of more than 80 people. Experts blamed the outbreak on a sharp drop in measles vaccination rates, which had fallen to about 34% in 2018 from 74% the year before.

While the epidemic was still in full cry that November, Kennedy wrote to the Samoan prime minister denying that the outbreak could be blamed on "the so-called 'anti-vaccine' movement," and pointed his finger instead at "a defective vaccine" that failed to target a "mutated" virus and allowed it to spread to children.

"It is a regrettable possibility that these children are [casualties] of Merck's vaccine," he wrote. The veteran pseudoscience debunker David Gorski described the letter as "a masterpiece of antivaccine dissembling, misinformation, distortion, and lies," seemingly aimed at providing cover for anti-vaccine quacks trying to deflect responsibility for "discouraging people from vaccinating their children."

The grief-stricken parents of Samoa must be excited about Bobby's candidacy.

It's no wonder that the greatest support for Bobby's candidacy comes from Republican plug-uglies and social media hacks with a demonstrated record of subverting American democracy:

This week RFK Jr., with the blessing of no less than agent provocateur Steve Bannon filed papers with the Federal Election Commission stating his intent to oppose President Joe Biden for the 2024 Democratic Presidential Nomination, 

And of course the perpetually clueless forced-birther Ross Douthat believes that the remedy for Bobby's toxic anti-vax insanity is to debate him [link removed due to pisspoor content], which would of course not at all have the paradoxical effect of bringing his drivel to a broader audience of stooges.

If you are so interested in hearing Bobby's ravings you will have an opportunity to do so at this no doubt Chautauqua-like event:

 

Moms for Liberty being of course the extremist anti-knowledge hate mongers financed by Charlie Koch and other great plutocratic contributors to fair and free debate.

The Republicans behind Bobby's campaign intend to use him as a spoiler to take a bite out of Joe Biden in the hopes that it will be sufficient to peel off enough Jill Stein voters to rig the 2024 election.  Who's to say they're wrong?

Moving along, let's meet our next horrible subverter of democracy, Mark “Lumpy”Penn.  Your first understandable reaction might be: who tf is Mark Penn?

He's been finagling around politics for decades now, supposedly in the service of responsible “centrism.”  He once found a willing audience in Bill and Hillary Clinton (when they were not taking advice from whore-toe-polisher Dick Morris), but was kicked to the curb by Hillary Clinton in 2007 when she realized what everyone else had known for years: he was full of s***.

The New York Times story gives a handy capsule of his corrupt loathsomeness:

Mark Penn, the pollster who has advised Bill and Hillary Clinton since 1996, stepped down under pressure on Sunday as the chief political strategist for Mrs. Clinton’s struggling presidential campaign after his private business arrangements again clashed with her campaign positions.

Mr. Penn, who was widely disliked by Mrs. Clinton’s fiercest loyalists and had bitterly feuded with many of them, sealed his fate last week by meeting with officials from Colombia, which hired him to help secure passage of a bilateral trade treaty with the United States that Mrs. Clinton, a senator from New York, opposes.

Mr. Penn met with the Colombians in his role as chief executive of Burson-Marsteller, a global public relations firm. He has refused to sever his ties to the company, which also represented Countrywide Financial, the nation’s largest mortgage lender, and through a subsidiary represented Blackwater Worldwide, the military contractor blamed for numerous civilian deaths in Iraq.

He sounds nice.  

Since that time he has nursed his grudge against the Clintons and by extension all Democrats, all the while pocketing a pantload of cash from his flackery.  His latest act of vengeance is a dirty tricks operation disingenuously called No Labels, which he runs with his no doubt charming wife Nancy Jacobson and buckets of dark money from Republican plutocrats eager to undermine Biden's re-election prospects:

Jim Messina, the Montana-bred Obama reelection campaign manager prone to colorful language, suggested that Jacobson and Penn were straining for power and attention. They “are sort of no longer relevant within the party,” he told me, “so now they’re going outside the party looking for relevancy.” Messina also trashed the group as essentially fronting for Trump. “Besides giving directly to Donald Trump’s campaign, the best thing you can do to elect Donald Trump is to support No Labels,” Messina said.

Update – maybe his wife Nancy Jacobson isn't that nice after all:

Ex-aides said there is incredibly high turnover. And according to one former staffer, No Labels executives would ask employees to write positive reviews on the job-posting and workplace review site Glassdoor to counteract the more numerous bad ones. Asked if that was the case, Jacobson simply shrugged and casually said, “yeah.” 

Oh.  And sounds like she married the right guy:

But politics these days is merely Penn’s hobby. Even while he worked for Hillary, he was an executive inside a PR firm owned by WPP. He left in 2012 after it became clear that Sorrell, then CEO, would never let him run the giant holding company. (Sorrell remarked pointedly that Penn’s successor was “collegial with good people skills.”) 

Copy that.

But the issue is not Lumpy's repellent personality.  It's that he is one of the chief conspirators in a shadowy scheme to mobilize dirty Republican money behind running a third party candidate to swing the election to Donald Trump (or if the Twice-Indicted Sex Offender strokes out before Election Day or whatever equally abhorrent stooge the Republicans nominate):

And Penn’s wife, Nancy Jacobson, runs No Labels, the purportedly hard-core moderate outside group currently working to prop up a serious third-party “unity ticket” in 2024. That ticket could spell doom for Joe Biden and Democrats hoping to keep control of the White House—and keep Donald Trump out of it.

Our final entry in today's news quiz is a much quieter but in his own way even more dangerous and subversive figure: Chief Justice John Roberts.

What's he doing lumped in with Bobby and Lumpy?  Is it just that he presides benignly over the most corrupt and illegitimate Supreme Court since, oh, maybe, the one that tried to chuck out the New Deal or the one that said Black persons weren't – persons? Sure, that's part of it, not to mention his own persistent grotesque conflict of interest: his spouse trousers (or I'm sure like the good Catholic girl she is, skirts) millions in placement fees from the same monstrous Washington law firms that appear every f***king term before her husband.

We're sure she doesn't kiss and tell her hubby which of those firms have been naughty or nice, because they're all lining up to get in good with Mrs. Chief Justice.  Wouldn't you?  Anyway, thanks to the laughably lax Supreme Court ethics rules, us plebeians will never know.

That's not the real problem though.  The real problem is that Roberts has spent virtually his entire legal career, first as a right-wing bureaucrat, then as a Bush campaign mouthpiece, and now in his current gig working feverishly and successfully to undermine American democracy:

 More specifically, according to the Brennan Center:

Ten years ago, the Supreme Court eviscerated a central component of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder. That decision removed the requirement for jurisdictions with histories of racial discrimination in voting to obtain federal approval for new voting policies — a process called “preclearance.” Without this guardrail, voters lost a bulwark against discriminatory voting policies, and states previously subject to preclearance were free to implement discriminatory restrictions on voting access without advance checks. Many states did exactly that.

Along with a prior decision narrowly interpreting constitutional protections for voting rights, Shelby County also sent a message to the nation that the federal courts would no longer play their historic role as a robust protector of voting rights. In the years since, the Court has repeatedly confirmed this, signaling to states that they could pass restrictive voting laws without fear of legal consequence.

And who wielded the knife?  John Roberts, that's who:

 

Politico's takedown explained that Roberts's ludicrous Shelby County opinion voided in effect the preclearance provisions of the Voting Rights Act on the grounds that lots had changed since Congress first specified which parts of the country had to preclear changes in voting laws with the Justice Department.  (As the Brennan Center's data, supra, established, maybe they haven't changed that much).  He also cried about the cruelty endured by states and counties who had to preclear their changes while watching tearfully places like Massachusetts that were not subject to preclearance.

As a result Southern states, ruled by white supremacist Republicans, have passed many laws intended to limit the ability of Democrats to vote without oversight from the Justice Department.  And it's worked great – for white Republicans.

And now the moment America has been waiting for.  The question was: What do three of the biggest white male threats to democracy have in common? 

The answer is – and we must have absolute silence [The Spy is often greeted by absolute silence – Ed. McMahon]: all three scourges entered Harvard College on the same bright September day in 1972.

Which gives rise to (but does not beg, thank you Dartmouth) the question: is Harvard to blame?

Alas we only have photos of John Roberts' freshman year

We think in large part yes.  We will attest that Bobby and Lumpy entered Harvard as egregious a**holes.  We don't know about John Roberts, alone in his room with his bong.

But Harvard certainly played a major role in their shameful deportment since.  There they learned to speak authoritatively on subjects about which they knew nothing.  There they learned to ignore the views of others, especially non-white non-male non-Harvard graduates.  There they learned that they were entitled to impose their ridiculous views on others, no matter what harm resulted.

And there they learned, even though Professor Henry Kissinger had already left his office in Littauer for a career as a war criminal and Nixon prayer partner, that they knew best and if others didn't understand that, it was a sign of their third-rate intellect.  And therefore, according to the great Prof. Kissinger, they better duck.

We humbly suggest that Harvard take a break from selling off its schools and paving Allston to ensure that this doesn't happen again.  Perhaps to their Core Curriculum they should add courses like “Just Because You're Here, You Don't Know What You're Talking About,” “Shut Up and Listen,” or even “Try Not To F**k Everything Up For The Rest of Us.”

The chances of this happening are in our estimate slim to none, because courses like this might get young minds to think the same things about their professors, whom they observe at a respectful distance from the 82d row of Sanders Theater.

And if there's one lesson known to every faculty member of the Finagling Plutocrat (formerly Harvard) School of Arts & Sciences, it's that humility is for losers.

Nick Kristof discovers the real threat to America: arrogant liberals!

By Meta-Content Generator A.J. Liebling with
Spy Archivist Aula Minerva

We spend a lot of time wailing about the idiotic ramblings of New York Times columnists like Maureen Dowd, Soprassata Dave Brooks, Bretbug, Pamela Pill, Six-Months Tom, and Ross, the boy no one would have lunch with in Leverett House.  

We owe them an apology, because there is no reason to single out these hacks for obloquy while ignoring the crap churned out by former Oregon Gov. Nick Kristof.

With democracy under attack, the republic hanging by a thread, and generations of social progress being rolled back by white supremacists and a blatantly illegitimate and corrupt Supreme Court, Gov. Kristof says today that the real problem is, wait for it,

Gov. Kristof has some thoughts about liberals

Wait some more.

Better sit down with a stiff drink.

OK, it's liberal arrogance.

And it's not just liberal arrogance today.  It's liberal arrogance since we don't know the Henry Wallace campaign of 1948, apparently:

It was easy for my generation of baby boomer liberals to be humble, because we had much to be humble about. Many on the left had erred on what was perhaps the most important issue of the 20th century, global totalitarianism: Too many had been soft on Soviet Communism or Chinese Maoism.

We're a boomer, too. In fact we may even be older than Gov. Kristof.  

And unlike the Governor, we remember the 1960's.  We remember a lot of old white guys, Democratic and Republican, lecturing us endlessly about Soviet Communism and the threat of what they called Red China.

Their solution to that threat was Vietnam.

Opposing the pointless, bloody, counterproductive, unwinnable, and essentially stupid enterprise of Vietnam was held out to us for years as a requirement for showing we were serious about opposing global totalitarianism and Soviet and Chinese expansionism.

It was all bollocks, as history shows.  Over a million died in Southeast Asia to prove to Nick Kristof's satisfaction how serious liberals were about the “threat” of “global totalitarianism.”

In fact, when confronted by the real specter of Soviet Communism on the march,

 serious white men so very concerned about stopping global totalitarianism did -- nothing:

By the way, not sending in the Army to resist the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia was of course the right decision.  But you can't blame it on liberals.

And fun fact: the anti-war critique of Vietnam was right in 1965 and every year thereafter.  If you resolutely opposed the insanity of Vietnam and its spinoffs in Cambodia and Laos (brought to you by beloved serious centenarian Henry Kissinger), you were liberal.  You were right.  And if you want to take a victory lap, by all means do so.

Why weren't they fighting global totalitarianism?

Gov. Kristof must have been too busy measuring the drapes in the Oregon State House to remember the second great battle of the 1960's: the struggle for civil rights.  If you were a liberal who supported desegregating the South, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act, and then actually did not go ballistic when someone proposed building moderate-income housing in your lily-white suburb or busing Black children into your beautiful schools, you were right again.

Where are we so far?  

Anti-war and pro-civil rights liberals were right about everything in the 1960's.  Let's now focus on the Governor's attack on modern-day progressives.  Guess what: it's also bollocks!

What are liberals wrong about today?  You'll never guess (if you have wisely chosen not to read the last five years of the Times's pisspoor Op-Ed page):

I fear that liberals react to all this by inflating with self-righteousness. One lesson of history — and of ancient Greek playwrights like Aeschylus — is that it’s dangerous to become too full of yourself. Just ask Oedipus. (But hurry, because there are progressive calls to cancel classics.)

Yeah, liberals are too full of themselves, says this extremely humble bloviator.

Although it's hard-right extremists that are yanking books out of school libraries because they are “pornographic” (like Amanda Gorman's Inauguration Day poem delivered to an audience of millions without apparent harm), it's those insufferable progressives that want to throw Homer in the dumpster.

Quick quiz: name a liberal arts college in America today where you can't read Homer or Plato.  We'll wait.  At Gov. Kristof's beloved University of Oregon, you can study:

 

Where did Kristof get his stupid point about the liberal attack on classical literature?  Click on the handy link he provided and you get an essay attacking some academic who argues that the classics can only be understand by placing them in the context of a culture that he says engaged in systematic racism and sexism.

Well, maybe that's one way to look at it.  You can agree or disagree.  But no one is saying you can't read Homer.  He's saying that the proper way to read Homer is in the context of his culture, which is hardly a radical, liberal, or progressive idea.  It's just an idea that's been around a long time.

Speaking of understanding the Greeks, it's remarkable that the same people who love to attack progressives as so woke are also the ones who love to attack the sexual practices of people like Plato and Aristotle.  To them, Plato's Symposium is nothing more than a grooming party. Is it any wonder that Xantippe was so irritable?  If Florida Gov. Ron “Puddin' Fingers” DeSantis can censor books about penguins with two daddies, wait until he gets his mitts on Socrates and his boys.  But you don't hear Gov. Kristof talking about the arrogance of the anti-gay right.

We actually had a fine classical education, starting with Latin in seventh grade.  After years of exposure to thrilling tales of Caesar, hard pressed on all sides by the Gauls, bringing up his legions by means of forced marches, we decided that the purpose of taking Latin (rather than something useful and important, like Spanish) was to brand the student as a member of a small elite who could study obscure and exotic things because they would never have to worry about making a living.

Then we got to college and read (in translation) the Greek classics.  As Bertie Wooster would say, they were cracking.  You should read them.  They have lessons for us, but they aren't about how we should be more humble in dealing with Republican extremism. And they certainly weren't about passing off tired clichés as daring original thought.

There's more but you catch the drift: his attack on supposedly arrogant liberals is a falsified both-sides litany of tired tropes. 

People say dumb s*** all the time.  The New York Times Op-Ed page proves this every day, and 12 times on Sunday.  That doesn't mean there's any equivalence to be drawn between occasional clangers served up by those on the left and the well-funded widely-supported Republican attack on free inquiry, thought, and history itself.

Maybe not being able to grasp this very obvious point was the reason that Nick Kristof was not chosen by the people of Oregon to serve as their Governor.

It could also be because he wasn't an Oregon resident under state law, which he thought didn't apply to the great moderate minds of the Times Editorial Pages.  You can talk about Icarus all you want, but it was Nick Kristof who had to be fished out of the drink off the coast of Oregon.

Special Bonus Edition: A Republican Double Play

The obituary page of The Massachusetts Spy

By Luke Reschuss
Obituary Editor

Although Henry Kissinger inexplicably remains alive (see infra), the Grim Reaper finally collected two of his most loathsome Republican contemporaries: insane bigots Pat Robertson and James Watt.

Pat's infamy proved more durable than Jim's, but the passing of both is well worth celebrating because their despicable deeds, and the undeserved respect they were accorded by journalists that should have known better, shine a brilliant light on the intimate relationship between evil Republican bigotry, plutocracy, and subversion then and now.

At a time when our new Wonderful Republican Allies are maintaining with a straight face and a handsome home-studio backdrop that everything was grand in their old party until it was unaccountably hijacked in 2016, let's take a look at the two Republican stiffs and how they helped create the Republican world that now cheers every indictment of their treasonous Tangerine-Faced Leader.

We'll start with Jim Watt, an egregious Western whack job in the mold of Dick Cheney, whom St. Ronald of Bitburg installed as Secretary of the Interior to undercut the halting progress that his predecessor, the then-reviled and now-beloved Jimmy Carter, made toward energy conservation.  (In an early example of the kind of crowd-pleasing performative spite that is the sole animating force of all Republican acts today, St. Ronald removed the solar panels that Carter had installed on the roof of the White House.) 

Lovable St. Ronny brought Jim in to strip mine if not sell our national parks and wilderness.  According to The New York Times, he did his level best:

But it wasn't just his relentless pursuit of environmental degradation that marked him as a pioneering modern Republican.  It was three other loathsome qualities that paved the way for today's indicted Republican front-runner:

1.  Claiming his terrible selfish deeds were inspired by God Almighty.  It wasn't just that ol' Jim hated the natural world; it was that as a devout Christian, he was expecting to be raptured up to Heaven at any time and so why not let Exxon drill next to Old Faithful while we're just hanging around:

James Watt had a bold vision for Yellowstone

After taking office in 1981, Mr. Watt was asked at a hearing of the House Interior Committee if he favored preserving wilderness areas for future generations. ...

He replied, “I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns.”

Mr. Watt’s response startled some committee members, but seemed to explain his intention to ease restrictions on the use of millions of acres of public lands. 

Jesus H. Christ.

2. Impugning the patriotism of his political opponents.  Some people might think we should save our wilderness; others think that we should strip mine the Grand Canyon.  People can disagree.  Not according to Watt:

Mr. Watt attacked critics aggressively. “I never use the words Democrats and Republicans,” he said in a favorite line. “It’s liberals and Americans.” He became the Republican Party’s third most sought-after speaker, after President Reagan and George Bush, who was then vice president. 

That's the punch line: the Republican yahoos ate this stuff up. Scoundrels from George W. Bush up to and including Ted Cruz noticed.

3. Crude insult comedy. Like every other aspect of his miserable Adderall-addicted life, the Tangerine-Faced Victim stole his insult comedy bit.  Republicans have been working on their Jack E. Leonard routines for 40 years.  Jim Watt thrilled the Republican faithful with his crude attacks on those who wanted to protect the environment from Watt's big money owners.

St. Ronnie didn't blink when Watt pioneered today's common Republican threat to shoot their political opponents: “If the troubles from environmentalists cannot be solved in the jury box or the ballot box,” he remarked flippantly, “perhaps the cartridge box should be used.” [Wait for laff]

But back in the pre-Trump 1980's it was still possible for Republicans to go too far:

He committed his last gaffe in a talk to a business group. Upset by a Senate vote barring him from leasing any more federal land for coal mining, he described a panel reviewing his coal-leasing policies as having “every kind of mixture — I have a Black. I have a woman, two Jews and a cripple.”

Even though the line killed in the room, his boss, who knew how to pitch the dog whistle so only the white dogs could hear it, had had enough.  Watt was out, but the Reagan Administration's war on the environment continued under the able leadership of one of St. Ronnie's favorite enforcers, Bill Clark.

By the way, even during the Reagan Administration, the threat of global warming was clear:

An atmospheric greenhouse effect caused primarily by the burning of fossil fuels will make the Earth a hotter and more difficult place to live during the next century.... As concentrations of [greenhouse] gases increase in the atmosphere, global temperatures will rise, changing precipitation patterns and raising the sea level, probably causing droughts across the nation's agricultural heartland, as well as coastal flooding. The climate expected by the end of the 21st century resembles none that man has ever experienced, warming by an average of six degrees Fahrenheit or more.

Disruption of human habitat, agricultural patterns and ocean productivity could interrupt food supplies in some areas, change relationships among nations, generate large population shifts and lead to bitter global conflict. Entire ecosystems, such as the Arctic tundra, may be destroyed.

The Republican position, then as now, was to do nothing and drill, baby, drill.  But it was more fun to focus on Watt's feud with the Beach Boys.

As odious as he was, Watt's influence pales in comparison to the bigot lunatic Holy Roller who made a fortune dispensing supposedly Christian bigotry on TV while transforming the Republican Party into a tool of his fellow white racists.

Despite his profuse schmearing of religiosity, Robertson was a child of privilege who after graduating from Yale Law School parlayed a Korean War draft deferment through the efforts of his politically powerful father (no doubt inspiring ol' Bone Spurs' draft-dodging years later) into many years of louche fun as a NYC lounge lizard. 

Figuring out that the safest path to wealth and power was pretending to profess Christianity, he turned an obscure UHF TV station into a $1,900,000,000 media empire.  Talk about the wages of sin!

As Greg Sargent and Ron Perlstein recapitulated in a memorial, um, tribute, the results were catastrophic:

[Sargent:] Robertson relentlessly demonized gay people. Between that and him making abortion central to GOP politics, his influence on the party is felt today in the end of abortion rights, in extreme anti-choice laws on the state level and in the right’s attacks on LGBTQ people.

[Perlstein;] Yes, yes, yes. Every time a riot breaks out at a school board meeting because the board wants to recognize that gay people exist, that’s Pat Robertson’s shadow. Every time a crusade against teaching the history of race in America leads to a school limiting access to Amanda Gorman’s inaugural poem, that’s Pat Robertson’s shadow.

If you want to talk about the overturning of Roe v. Wade and women who are dying because of it, look at his response to 9/11, when he and Jerry Falwell go on camera and say that God has given us what we deserve. The villains they cite are the ACLU, the “paganists,” the “gays and lesbians” and the “abortionists.”

Pat Robertson was the world's greatest Christian

You should read the whole column for yourself, which make an irrefutable case for the historical fact that Republicans have mobilized bigotry and greed for decades to debase our country and destroy democracy, no matter how many ex-Republican flacks and shills try to tell you otherwise, Rick Wilson.

The hypocrisy was world-class.  But that's not really the point.  The point is that neither Watt nor Robertson could have done nearly as much harm had not the press, ever eager to burnish its pretense of “objectivity,” refused to tell the truth about these corrupt bigots.

Watt was eulogized by the Times after his departure thusly:

Mr. Watt's policies and his administrative procedures affecting the public lands and resources placed under his stewardship at the Interior Department, along with his aggressive style in carrying out those policies, also generated an erosive tide of ill will against him and the Administration he served, a tide that had been rising almost since the day he took office. But Mr. Watt had the support of many, especially in the West and on the Republican right, as an able administrator and successful advocate of developing public resources as an impetus to economic growth.  

Watt's bigotry was treated not as a shocking indictment of the Reagan Administration's casual racism and plutocrat-lovin' white supremacy but as a harmless “gaffe” while his failure to save us from global warming while there was still time was a matter of “style.”

But the media's failure to call out the nonstop eructations of religious hatred from Robertson and fellow bigot grifters like Jerry Falwell was far more profound.  Here's a representative sample from The New York Times in 1980, which described a busy and influential gang of nice devout Republicans until you got a long way down:

Equal rights for sexual perverts?  Whatever do they mean by that?  And what's so evil about Gloria Steinem? Or indeed equal rights for women?  Back in 1980, the Times's deep reporting didn't take that plunge.

By allowing hatemongers to pass themselves off as ordinary friendly Christians, the media first whitewashed and then legitimized the injection of this insane hatred and bigotry into the political bloodstream.  Once there, like untreated syphilis, it infects, inflames, and sickens every part of the body politic.  

And they're still at it!  Here's a bog-standard sample from The New York Times in March, 2023:

Conservative evangelical politics have both expanded and moved sharply rightward, animated by a new slate of issues like opposition to race and history curriculums in schools and L.G.B.T.Q. rights, and shaped by the Covid-19 lockdowns of 2020 and 2021, which some pastors rallied against as a grave affront to religious freedom.  

This language appears to be a long euphemism for the following facts about white supremacist Christian Republicans: 1) they are opposed to teaching the truth about America's shameful history of systemic racism because that truth undercuts their unearned grievance, 2) they seek to shame, shun, discriminate, and torment LGBTQ individuals purely on the basis of their own bigotry, and 3) a large number of them propagate lethal unscientific anti-vax anti-public health lies that prevent the country from protecting itself against a fatal disease that has thus far claimed 1,400,000 human lives.

That's the objective truth.  If only the media could bring itself to report it, the skies over Manhattan might not be glowing orange with choking lethal smoke.  That prospect would be limited to Watt's and Robertson's new home for eternity.

Blowing Out 500,000 Candles to Celebrate the 100th Birthday of Henry "the Mad Bomber" Kissinger

By Meta-Content Generator A.J. Liebling
with Bill Kilgore reporting from Ho Chi Minh City

War criminal, serial liar, and Nixon confederate Henry Kissinger turned 100 this week (even as vastly better people like Tina Turner died much younger).  The press, which has given this dissembling poseur a free ride since 1968, was all in on the celebration.

First, for those of you younger than, um, 50, let's start with a little background on this great son of the Harvard (now Some Finagler) Faculty of Arts and Sciences, courtesy of The Nation:

We'll get a little deeper into the napalm-charred weeds but Anthony Bourdain's assessment remains painfully accurate:

“Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia – the fruits of his genius for statesmanship – and you will never understand why he’s not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Milošević.”

What was Anthony so mad about? Just this:

Henry Kissinger says Good Morning Cambodia

Kissinger, who’d been appointed national security adviser, advised Nixon to order the bombing of Cambodia to pressure Hanoi to return to the negotiating table. Nixon and Kissinger were desperate to resume the talks that they had helped sabotage, and their desperation manifested itself in ferocity. “‘Savage’ was a word that was used again and again” in discussing what needed to be done in Southeast Asia, recalled one of Kissinger’s aides. Bombing Cambodia (a country the US wasn’t at war with), which would eventually break the country and lead to the rise of the Khmer Rouge, was illegal. So it had to be done in secret. The pressure to keep it secret spread paranoia within the administration, leading Kissinger and Nixon to ask J. Edgar Hoover to tap the phones of administration officials. Daniel Ellsberg’s Pentagon Papers leak sent Kissinger into a panic. He was afraid that since Ellsberg had access to the papers, he might also know what Kissinger was doing in Cambodia.

To impress North Vietnam, Kissinger ordered the secret bombing of a country the United States was not at war with.  That bombing took the lives of between 150,000 and 500,000 Cambodians (with the lack of precision testimony to the scale and brutality of the assault).  God knows how many more were crippled or wounded.

Fun fact: North Vietnam was not impressed.

Kissinger's war crimes had been preceded by actual crimes, including treason on behalf of his patron Dick Nixon before the 1968 election:

Still a Harvard professor, .. Kissinger, “on his own,” offered to pass along information he had received from an aide attending the peace talks. . . .At the end of October, Kissinger told the Nixon campaign, “They’re breaking out the champagne in Paris.” Hours later, President Johnson suspended the bombing. A peace deal might have pushed Hubert Humphrey, who was closing in on Nixon in the polls, over the top. Nixon’s people acted quickly; they urged the South Vietnamese to derail the talks.

Through wiretaps and intercepts, President Johnson learned that Nixon’s campaign was telling the South Vietnamese “to hold on until after the election.” If the White House had gone public with this information, the outrage might also have swung the election to Humphrey. But Johnson hesitated. “This is treason,” he said....

But we're not mainly interested in Kissinger's litany of war crimes and blunders, including green-lighting barbaric crimes against civilians by the Chilean and Argentine military dictatorships, his insane advocacy of nuclear war in Europe while still locked in a cubicle in Littauer, his pointless prolongation of the Vietnam War for three sanguinary years, or his endless toadying to the increasingly paranoid and unhinged Dick Nixon, including an Oval Office prayer session.

We're interested in Kissinger's decades of success in generating gushing press coverage like this:

Kissinger has always enjoyed a favorable press

As if recoiling from their own sudden doggedness in exposing Nixon’s crimes, reporters and news anchors rallied around Kissinger. While the rest of the White House was revealed as a bunch of two-bit thugs, Kissinger remained someone America could believe in. “We were half-convinced that nothing was beyond the capacity of this remarkable man,” ABC News’ Ted Koppel said in a 1974 documentary, describing Kissinger as “the most admired man in America.” He was, Koppel added, “the best thing we’ve got going for us.”

Koppel's idiotic fawning drivel was the rule.  Marvin Kalb, once a well-regarded journalist for CBS News, sold his soul to get Henry's cooperation on a book that would make him a pantload of royalties:

Marvin Kalb was granted the ultimate honor of an exclusive television interview. They give credit where it is due, beginning their page of acknowledgments with this offer of appreciation: “Our thanks go first to Henry A. Kissinger, who, as an historian as well as a statesman, understands the critical importance of primary sourcing. He has been generous with his time and his knowledge.” It can fairly be said that his generosity has been rewarded.

How times have changed!  Now that Nixon's criminality and the insane brutal futility of the Vietnam War (and its Cambodian and Laotian spinoffs) have passed into incontrovertible history, Kissinger...still gets a fawning reception from the press on the no doubt auspicious occasion of his 100th birthday.

The Washington Post had the nerve to publish an op-ed by an objective source – Henry's non-war-criminal son David, explaining Henry's secret to a long and healthy life.  The correct answer of course was a sociopathic lack of shame or guilt, but instead David told us

His mind is a heat-seeking weapon that identifies and grapples with the existential challenges of the day. In the 1950s, the issue was the rise of nuclear weapons and their threat to humanity. 

His actual position was that we should use nuclear weapons in Europe to prove how big and strong we are, an idiotic view that he adopted to suck up to Nelson Rockefeller and other Cold Warriors who might be able to advance Henry's career.  (And his mind, supposedly attracted by heat, somehow never spent even one minute regretting the bombs that burnt Cambodia towns and children.)

To balance out that piece, the Post published another P.O.S. patronizing those who did not join the birthday celebrations.

But the younger generation — or at least, the left-leaning among them — is indeed letting its own thoughts (and, yes, emotions) be known on the internet. There, making light of Kissinger’s eventual death — and remarkable longevity — has been a popular meme for years. 

Really? How popular is it? We waste a lot of time on the Internet, and we've never seen it, although we have spotted many mentions of the people who have been outlived by Liza Minelli, who is not a war criminal.

The piece did make glancing reference to Kissinger's atrocities in Cambodia but dropped the issue upon quoting this breathtakingly arrogant non-response from the Great Prevaricator:

“This is a program you’re doing because I’m gonna be 100 years old. And you’re picking a topic of something that happened 60 years ago. You have to know that it was a necessary step. Now, the younger generation feels that if they can raise their emotions, they don’t have to think. If they think, they won’t ask that question.”

We have thought about it, because hundreds of thousands of Cambodians, Chileans, and Argentinians aren't alive to think about it for themselves.

We think that in the year 2023 the media's continuing to ignore Kissinger's criminality while treating him as a statesman is almost as dangerous as their continuing to ignore the Republican Party's participation in subversion and insurrection while treating it as a legitimate part of American politics.

In other words, it's an insult to everyone we remember on this Memorial Day and every thing they fought for.