Oh poor Donald, turn that frown upside-down

Oh poor Donald, turn that frown upside-down

By Hal Brown

If it's really getting through to Donald Trump that the predictions coming from the likes of George Conway that he could actually end up in prison then the photo (below) used for the article in RAWSTORY about what Conway said on "Morning Joe" earlier today would be appropriate. 

While I can't manage to muster any empathy for the malignant narcissist, sadist, and bully who has proved willing to do anything to maintain his dictatorial power, perhaps I can at least eke out a smidgen of sympathy for the poor man. Hmmm... is there anything smaller than a smidgen? 

I want Trump to suffer the pangs of anxiety over the legal peril he is in,  but if he had a fleeting moment of angst and if, an if as big as the planet Jupiter, I wanted to cheer him up I'd have to reenforce his delusion of being invulnerable. In that remote or remotest possibility I'd tell him to turn his frown upside-down.

Here's the Rawstory article about what Conway said with my illustrative magic added.

Conway told MSNBC's "Morning Joe" that although Trump's inciting the Jan. 6 insurrection was probably the most serious crime Trump has committed it would be a difficult case to prove. He said that the easiest case to prove was his likely violation of the Espionage Act. Conway said:

"That to me is the shortest distance between Donald Trump and an orange jumpsuit is that case. It's so simple. It's like the U.S. attorney trying to bring a big mob case against the Five Families and trying to connect it up to the boss and all of a sudden they get the call from the NYPD saying, hey, the big boss is loading jewelry on a truck at Kennedy Airport, and you know, that's what happened here."

"He's caught red-handed. Basically what he's done, refusing to give the documents back upon request is sufficient under the Espionage Act, and he's done that, and then you have the aggravating facts about how the volume of documents and the lying and how long it's dragged on. I don't know how they don't bring the case."

George Conway has been a thorn in Trump's side as his profile has increased as much as his girth since he became a Trump turncoat. He's penned OpEds and has been a frequent guest on MSNBC.

I can't find any recent articles about whether Trump still watches Morning Joe, however in 2017 it was clear that he did. This is from:

Trump Tweets Disgustingly Sexist Attack Against 'Morning Joe' Host

The president said Mika Brzezinski "was bleeding badly from a face-lift."

President Donald Trump attacked Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski Thursday morning, insulting Brzezinski’s physical appearance in two unmistakably sexist tweets.

I heard poorly rated @Morning_Joe speaks badly of me (don't watch anymore). Then how come low I.Q. Crazy Mika, along with Psycho Joe, came..

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 29, 2017

...to Mar-a-Lago 3 nights in a row around New Year's Eve, and insisted on joining me. She was bleeding badly from a face-lift. I said no!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 29, 2017

Brzezinski appeared to respond to the president’s tweets with an image of a Cheerios box that says “Made For Little Hands.”

My sense is that while Trump, the inveterate television watcher, luxuriates in being praised on Fox News shows even he may not be able to resist checking in with "Morning Joe" to see what his nemeses are saying about him. 

He knows that if he blasts out a Truth Social post about anything said about him on "Morning Joe" or any other MSNBC show, he'll only give them publicity so I think he'll be able to restrain his impulses since there isn't a damn thing he can do to shut them up.suits as his 

Trump may avoid the wardrobe change into an orange jumpsuit, but if he's paying attention to what's happening in New York he may have to think twice about buying expensive new suits when can't squeeze into a girdle anymore:

Illustration by Wren McDonald for The New Yorker

New York AG asks judge to bar Trump from moving assets to new company he formed amid fraud lawsuit 

and

If Elon Muck buys Twitter, what with it's much larger audience than Truth Social has, I expect we'll see more impulsive tweets especially in the early morning when Trump may be groggy and not be able to sensibly resist engaging in a Twitter war with Joe and Mika. Assuming Trump come back to Twitter this will be fun to follow. 

Here's a comment on this story from Ben Kalom:

Most of us would not wish him the Demolition Man one-liner I often quote to folks in jest, "Be Well, John Spartan!"

"I want Trump to suffer the pangs of anxiety over the legal peril he is in, ..."

Naw. a snarky "Naw!" I want his frown to become a perma-frown, like permafrost. I want his risorius muscles to atrophy to the point he cannot chew food properly, and a bolus migrates across the epiglottus into his cephalic tracheal opening and permanently obstructs it.

I want more than the pangs of anxiety.

I literally want the Big Mac attack to attack him.

I want his "Glorious, magnificent, stupendous, spektak-a-lur" bulls**t to end as a one liner obit, "Choked on a fried chicken bone..."

The only way this cult of personality ends is ...

The people need their human sacrifice. They need their blood lust sated.

Find him a bunker, let him join his "hero" Adolph in ending this sickness...

Then, maybe, just maybe, we can all recover... just a little bit... before we have to deal with the next anointed one...

The Conway interview has already made it into this Salon article:

While some legal experts believe that there is evidence to charge Trump with obstruction, conservative attorney George Conway predicted that the "shortest distance between Donald Trump and an orange jumpsuit" is a case showing that he violated the Espionage Act.

 "He's caught red-handed," Conway told MSNBC. "Basically what he's done, refusing to give the documents back upon request is sufficient under the Espionage Act, and he's done that, and then you have the aggravating facts about how the volume of documents and the lying and how long it's dragged on. I don't know how they don't bring the case."

Viral video showed organizers cutting open the fish to reveal a total of 10 weights, each weighing either 8 or 12 ounces.

As Fisher yelled, "We got weights in fish!" the angry crowd booed the men, who were immediately disqualified.

On Tuesday, authorities seized a boat and trailer belonging to Comisnky that was used during the tournament.

If convicted, the pair could face a year in prison and a $2,500 fine on each of the felony counts.

The men are not expected to be arraigned until later this month, and it was not immediately clear whether they had retained an attorney.

 

Moment of Zen (click to enlarge):

Some thoughts about Putin's Russia and Trump's MAGAmerica

Some thoughts about Putin's Russia and Trump's MAGAmerica

by Hal Brown 

I used for a background this natural-color image which combines cloud-free data from over 500 Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR) orbits with shaded relief Digital Terrain Elevation models from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) and other sources. It shows an astonishing diversity of geological features, ecological systems and human landscapes. I meant it to show how from space there are no state lines.

I'll start with the comment I put on the following David Ignatious column in today's Washington Post (subscription):

The parallels between Russia under Putin and what the of MAGA part United States has become struck me. Even if Trump never gets a second term his MAGA cult will remain with us. They envision a United States chillingly similar to those who want Russia to be an imperial fascist country. The equation to describe these segments of the two countries looks like Russian First = America First. The remedy is the kind of transformation that occurred in Germany after World War II.  I don't know how this can happen without the resounding military defeat the NAZI regime suffered. It will require not only a victory of morality over immorality for both countries, but a moral awakening among a large portion of those who adhered to the belief that ultra-nationalism was their credo.

These are what I thought were the most important observations in the column. As you read them substitute how the Ukrainians view Russia with how you view MAGAmerica and how you think these MAGA cultists want the United States to be.

Through Ukrainian eyes, this terrible conflict has become a clash of civilizations. They argue that most Russians support Putin’s brutal war in the way that most Germans supported Adolf Hitler. Unless Russia as a nation abandons the imperial dreams that Putin has evoked, the conflict cannot be resolved through negotiations.

“Russia has to go through the same process that Germany did after World War II,” presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak insisted Saturday in an interview with me and the other members of a group organized by the German Marshall Fund, of which I’m a trustee. “If Russian society doesn’t understand what they’ve done, the world will be brought into chaos.” He enthusiastically predicts that postwar Russia will dissolve into five or six smaller nations.

The word "rebirth" below jumped out at me:

For me, thinking about how this war ends juxtaposes two conflicting lessons of the 20th century. Historians generally agree that the punitive peace imposed on Germany after World War I helped bring on the vicious Nazi quest for revenge. But historians also agree that the decisive outcome of World War II, with Germany and Japan pounded into unconditional surrender, allowed the miraculous postwar rebirth of both countries.

I would rephrase the last paragraph...

Surely, this is a war worth winning. I don’t want to see Russia destroyed, and I think any argument that it is forever an alien civilization is wrong. But the ideology that Putin represents, and that many Russians embrace, must be defeated.

 ... in this way:

Surely, the war against MAGAmerica a war that Democracy loving Americans must win. MAGAmerica can't be literally destroyed the way NAZI Germany as a military machine was. MAGAmerica is currently a country within a country. I think any argument that it is forever an alien civilization is wrong.  But the ideology that Trump and his cult represents, and that many Americans embrace, must be defeated. Those who "reside" in MAGAmerica can't be exiled. They have to be rehabilitated.

This will be a long arduous process which would ideally follow the kind of Democratic Party win in November which Michael Moore predicted (and I wrote about here). 

It would be too much to hope that Rupert Murdock fired his Hitler-Mini-Me money makers, in particular Tucker Carlson. It would certainly help if these ultra-nationalists didn't have a major television platform. 

Obviously it would help the most if Donald Trump, probably reinstated on Twitter, would at least develop severe chronic laryngitis.

We can't be naive. If Trump was indicted, tried, and found guilty of any crimes, and even sentenced to prison or home confinement this would have a huge backlash as his cult would believe he was a victim of the "deep state" and would make him into a living martyr. 

No matter what the January 6th Committee reveals, no matter whether that have incontrovertible proof as to Trump's culpability in more than inciting the attack on the Capitol but being part of a felonious conspiracy it won't matter to these MAGAmericans. They will take this as his being the most patriotic of all patriots.

Liberals like us see articles like this (top) and this (bottom) and hope for eye-popping revelations.

It won't matter because for the MAGAmericans "fascist" is simply a word describing the country they want to live in and the promotion of violence is laudable as long as it is their violence.

We see articles like “Utterly devastating”: Legal experts say DOJ filing “pulverizes all of Trump’s arguments” to SCOTUS on Salon but while this news pleases us, it hardly matters because show me a resident of MAGAmerica who reads Salon or even follows news about the legal peril Trump is in and I'll show you a  Where's Waldo where some prankster decided not to put Waldo in the picture.

By chance as I completed this David Ignatius was being interviewed about this column on Morning Joe. There's a good chance that if you are reading this you are a regular viewer of MSNBC and you may even read their website but we can't delude ourselves that any warnings about what Donald Trump's American fascism would look like in reality are even heard by residents of MAGAmerica. I summarized the David Montgomery Washington Post Magazine article "What Will Happen to America if Trump Wins Again? Experts Helped Us Game It Out" here. 

What is horrifying is that diehard MAGAmericans want the country to look like this.

Main blog page

The blog archives are on the right at the top of the page. Here are the last three editions:

• The horror of a second Trump presidency
• Could Michael Moore be right again? Is he Carnac t...
• What does it mean when a former federal prosecutor...

The horror of a second Trump presidency

A Washington Post Magazine article excerpted by Hal Brown

If you don't subscribe to the WaPo here are the bullet points from this article:

What Will Happen to America if Trump Wins Again? Experts Helped Us Game It Out.

The scenarios are ... grim.

By David Montgomery (scroll down to see author's profile)

October 10, 2022 at 10:00 a.m. 

From the article:

To help game out the consequences of another Trump administration, I turned to 21 experts in the presidency, political science, public administration, the military, intelligence, foreign affairs, economics and civil rights. They sketched chillingly plausible chains of potential actions and reactions that could unravel the nation (if Trump is reelected).

Based on what these experts described, here are the three phases described in the article:

Phase 1: Trump seizes control of the government

… He installs super loyalists.

... He governs without Senate advice and consent.

... He creates a MAGA civil service.

Phase 2: Trump deploys the military aggressively at home, while retreating abroad.

... He uses the military to promote his own political power.

In such a scenario, the response of other elements of the federal government and federal law enforcement could be unpredictable. “What that order does is that it fractures the American federal government, because you give an order like that to fire on American civilians and then maybe some agencies will pick it up and some won’t,” says Timothy Snyder, a historian at Yale University who writes about freedom and tyranny. “There’s a very real possibility that giving an order like that leads not to protest being put down, but it leads to some Americans in uniform firing on other Americans in uniform, with the people on both sides being convinced that they are doing the lawful and correct thing.

... American global leadership is finished — much to Putin’s delight.

... Intelligence work is harmed.

Phase 3: Political violence and democratic collapse? It’s possible.

... Ideological, racial and ethnic tensions ramp up.

... The bonds that bind the Union loosen.

... The chances of civil war increase.

That’s when the potential for violent conflict is real. For those studying the implications of these trends, “there’s no scenario that worries us more than that the wheels just come off completely from the restraints against violence in the United States,” says Diamond, of Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute. “My biggest concern is what citizens would do to citizens, and what citizens might do to legitimately constituted government authority.”

... 

Could it happen here? Would it be that bad? The message of prophets of democratic doom can sound over-the-top — “crackpot, practically,” acknowledges Wilentz, the Princeton historian. But to dismiss it, they say, would be naive — and they urge vigilance and civic engagement to prevent the nightmare from coming true. 

The article concludes:

After four more years of nihilistic energy like that, the experience of being American could well have been transformed into something unrecognizable. “If Trump wins, I don’t imagine some kind of normal inauguration in ’29,” (Timothy) Snyder says. “If we want a normal inauguration in ’29, we need one in ’25 which involves somebody else.”

Author profile, David Montgomery

Washington, D.C.

Staff writer for the Washington Post Magazine

Education: Princeton University; University of Michigan

David Montgomery was a reporter at the Buffalo News before joining The Washington Post in 1993. He covered Prince George’s County, politics in Maryland and life in D.C., then became a feature writer in the Style section. Now he writes features and profiles for the Washington Post Magazine.

Honors and Awards: 2022 Climate Narratives Prize, 2nd Place, Arizona State University, for "The Search for Environmental Hope" ; 2018 Excellence-in-Features, 2nd Place, Society for Features Journalism, for "After the Fall," the story of a Confederate statue in Demopolis, AL 

Languages spoken in addition to English: Spanish

Afterword: 

Michael Cohen isn't an expert in any of the fields that would provide the type of bonafides that the author of the Post article sought to ask their predictions about the consequences of another Trump presidency. However, he is the only one who knew Trump up close and personal, who was very familiar with his modus operandi and, significantly, helped him implement his nefarious schemes. With this in mind it is worthwhile to consider what he predicts in this article: 

Keep up with news of interest to progressives as it breaks with coverage from all over the Internet on RawStory

They also cross-publish with Salon, and summarize article published on websites which you need to subscribe to in order toe read them, The New York Times and Washington Post for example. They have an active c0mment section.

Could Michael Moore be right again? Is he Carnac the Magnificent?

 Could Michael Moore be right again?

Is he Carnac the Magnificent?

By Hal Brown

If you are too young to remember... 

Longtime (Johny Carson) sidekick Ed McMahon ritualistically and bombastically introduced the Carnac routines. The announcement implied Carnac was responsible for some scandal or disaster currently in the news, as "And now, the great seer, soothsayer, and sage, Carnac the Magnificent." After Carnac entered and stumbled, Ed would continue as follows:

"I hold in my hand the envelopes. As a child of four can plainly see, these envelopes have been hermetically sealed. They've been kept in a mayonnaise jar on Funk and Wagnalls' porch since noon today. NO ONE [at this shout, Carnac always acts startled] knows the contents of these envelopes – but you, in your mystical and borderline divine way, will ascertain the answers having never before heard the questions."

The act involved a variation of the magician's billet reading trick: divining the answer to a question written on a card sealed inside one of the envelopes, announcing it to the audience, then tearing open the envelope to reveal the question. The comedy came from an unexpected question following a seemingly straightforward answer.  Wikipedia

Let's hope he is when it come to this prediction...

Excerpt:

In his next "tsunami of truth," Moore reminded readers that despite all the ways that the media tends to make the American right seem massively powerful, they're really just a big bunch of losers. Republicans have lost the popular vote in seven of the eight last elections. As Moore explains it, "Only because of the slave states' demand for the Electoral College — and the Republicans' #1 job of gerrymandering and voter suppression — do we even have to still deal with their misogyny, their destruction of Planet Earth, their love of guns and greed, and their laser-focused mission to bury our Democracy."

 

That leads to the next installment: Republicans will lose because this time around they are "running the biggest batch of nutters nationwide in American electoral history."  He then promises to offer a list of the top 10 "biggest whackadoodles on the Republican side of the ballot."

 

If one is a famous enough pundit or personality and makes a prediction that goes against what others of the same ilk are saying and they are correct then they are lauded as being both brilliant and prescient. 

If they are wrong then their prediction is usually ignored unless they are really famous. Some many people of note predicted that there was no way Donald Trump could beat the highly qualified Hillary Clinton. There was so much egg on so many faces that no single person got smeared with being egregiously wrong. There was plenty of egg to go around.

I hope Michael Moore is proved to be right about his prediction that a tsunami of truth will hit the American electorate.

Keep up with news of interest to progressives as it breaks with coverage from all over the Internet on RawStory

They also cross-publish with Salon, and summarize article published on websites which you need to subscribe to in order toe read them, The New York Times and Washington Post for example. They have an active c0mment section.

What does it mean when a former federal prosecutor say the DOJ should stop playing Trump's reindeer games?

 What does it mean when a former federal prosecutor say the DOJ should stop playing Trump's reindeer games?

By Hal Brown

Click image to read article. Screen grab adapted with free use image

I didn't understand what was meant by the reference e to reindeer games in this quote the title and text from former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner who said enough is enough and the DOJ needs to indict him in the Katie Phang show in the above article:

"Donald Trump is now exposing himself as somebody who is willing to take property that he stole and leverage it to his own benefit for other information that he wants, that he has no right to, from the federal government," he elaborated. "I analogize it to a situation where your neighbor stole your TV, and then said if you want to back give me $500. Well in concrete terms, that's what Donald Trump was doing with these stolen documents."

"I do wish that the Department of Justice would stop playing Donald Trump's reindeer games, stop playing on Donald Trump's playing field because civil litigation is Donald Trump's playing field and it's where he can best weaponize the delay that is inherent in the civil litigation process and you know how the DOJ can put an end to all of that? Indict him in federal district court in Washington D.C." he insisted.

"Reindeer Games" is the name of an American action crime thriller starring from 2000 American action crime thriller film directed by John Frankenheimer in his final feature directorial outing before his 2002 death. It stars Ben Affleck, Gary Sinise, Charlize Theron, and Dennis Farina. 

The use of the term "reindeer games" puzzled me so I did some research. Here's the plot of the movie which takes place around Christmas.

I decided to look up the meaning and it then became clear why Kirschner used it.

Reindeer games is a colloquial expression generally used for the bullying activities of a clique or for festivities around the Christmas season.

Here's an excerpt from the article about the term.

As early as the 1960s, lesson plans suggest Christmas-themed reindeer games children can play, referencing the song (Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer). These games, while allusive, are fun-spirited, whereas the phrase reindeer games took on a snarkier tone in mainstream culture as a term for the cruel or bullying actions popular in-groups used to exclude outsiders.

The 1988 dark comedy Heathers notably features such a use of reindeer games when a snooty clique leader (Kim Walker) delivers a threat to an unruly follower (Winona Ryder) to change high schools: “Transfer to Washington. Transfer to Jefferson. No one at Westerburg is going to let you play their reindeer games.”

Reindeer games also supplied the title of a 2000 thriller starring Ben Affleck and Charlize Theron. Set during Christmas, Reindeer Games is about a complex casino heist (the robbers dress up in Santa Claus suits) and the various manipulative “games,” or deceptions, they end up having to play to pull it off. Reindeer games, here, is used ironically for Christmas-set scheming.

Of course what Trump and his "clique" are doing is doing what Trump does all the time as a classic bully. He's a malignant narcissist whose stock in trade is being a bully. 

Malignant narcissism is a psychological syndrome comprising an extreme mix of narcissism, antisocial behavior, aggression, and sadism. Grandiose, and always ready to raise hostility levels, the malignant narcissist undermines families and organizations in which they are involved, and dehumanizes the people with whom they associate  Wikipedia

Perhaps I am out of it when it comes to understanding some colloquial expressions, but I think many viewers of the Katie Phang show or readers of RAWSTORY won't know exactly what was meant by the reindeer games reference although in context it sounds like it is just a term referring to another nasty Trumpian manipulation.

Comment on this story on Twitter or on Facebook

Below, as I find stories,

with my own comments.

Hunter Biden

Republicans are salivating about the prospect of winning one or both houses of Congress so they can open committee investigations into Hunter Biden. However, waste of time as this would be, ultimately whether he's prosecuted or not is a decision that rests with the DOJ. 

The decision about this is, as the headline above shows, is anything but simple. If the the. U.S. attorney who will make this decision follows the rules and usual procedure, it will be difficult to claim the fix was in. Here's why:

 The decision of whether to charge the younger Biden will be made by David C. Weiss, the U.S. attorney in Delaware who was appointed by former President Donald Trump. Unlike other U.S. attorneys, he has not been replaced by Biden. Attorney General Merrick Garland has also promised not to interfere in Weiss’ decision. According to Garland,“We put the investigation in the hands of a Trump appointee from the previous administration.”

Two pots stories from AXIOS:

I suppose Gov. Abbott thinks most Texans smoke Marlboros or chew tobacco and figures nobody in Texas uses pot.

Trump on Twitter again?

If Musk buys Twitter and allows Trump, who was banned, back will he succumb to having a much larger audience or be content to keep using the platform he had created just for him to get his message out. Perhaps he'd stay on Truth Social as the following quote from The Hill article says he will. Or maybe he has some much ego, or money, or both invested in his platform he will stick with it.

Elon Musk’s renewed interest in purchasing Twitter is again raising the prospect that its most famously banned user could be allowed back.

Former President Trump has been adamant that he will stick with Truth Social, the fledgling social media platform he helped found, regardless of whether he is welcomed back to Twitter. But experts and Trump allies believe the allure of the massive Twitter audience would be too great to resist, putting his future there front and center as the Musk deal shows new signs of life.

As things stand now just about all the posts he puts on Truth Social make the news so it may not mean much to him to be able to put the same messages on Twitter. Twitter has a major drawback for him. This is that his tweets generate many critical and sarcastic replies, some with snarky illustrations, with a few of the most biting or nasty being republished on various websites.

Here's a related article which is from The Miami Herald:

Behind the scenes of how Trump’s Truth Social was born, and how it could fall apart 

Aside from losing face it's hard to see if Trump would lose anything else if Truth Social went under: According to the article the former president put up no equity but controls almost all of Trump Media’s stock.

With Trump not posting there, the platform which was supposed to attract a range of conservative posters failed to do so. It was primarily a way for Trump to get his message out to his cult. He's the one who is keeping it afloat.

From The Herald: In mid-August 2022, Trump was reported to have 3.9 million Truth Social followers. He previously had 89 million on Twitter and 34 million on Facebook before the twice-impeached president was banned for repeatedly claiming the 2020 election was “stolen” from him.

Michael Cohen, a tale of redemption, addresses the fate of Donald Trump

I was talking to a friend on the phone when Michael Cohen was on MSNBC. I said that he was a tale of redemption that I really believed in, or wanted to. I am generally cynical abut such things. I think of the inmates who find Jesus in prison to impress the parole board. With Cohen I think he is probably or mostly sincere even though taking the stance he has keeps him in the public eye and will help him sell books.

 I'll maintain some skepticism which is why is say he's probably or mostly sincere. I still can't help liking the guy.

Below is an interview with him:

Hometown News: Portland Police

I'd like to know what the Portland police considered a higher priority than a call reporting someone with a gun outside a school, anyone, let alone a call from a school official. They should have responded within minutes with more than one car. Have an EMT unit respond also seemed appropriate. I know downtown traffic can be bad at times but Portland p0lice cars have lights and sirens.

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