Gotta love Truth Social, Trump's gift to prosecutors

 Gotta love Truth Social, Trump's gift to prosecutors

By Hal Brown

In progress

Left to right: Alvin Bragg, Fani Willis, Jack Smith, Leticia James

 I read this article in RAWSTORY - it was the inspiration for today's blog.

Excerpt:

Donald Trump's inability to stop talking about his legal problems, and his penchant for floating possible defenses on his social media accounts, will likely come back to haunt him, explained one legal expert.

During an appearance on MSNBC early Sunday morning, former Army prosecutor Glenn Kirschner was asked by host Katie Phang about the former president's inability to keep quiet while he is under multiple investigations.

For Trump, "talking" means posting on Truth Social. Whether he actually speaks out loud or types when he makes these posts remains to be reported, but it hardly matters.

I have little doubt that Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, Fulton County, GA DA Fani Willis , DOJ Special Counsel Jack Smith, and NY State AG Leticia James have staffers monitoring all of Trump's Truth Social posts in real time and taking screenshots of them lest he decides to remove them.

Trump's mental health has been progressively deteriorated ever since he lost the election. As much as he psychologically denies the legal jeopardy he's in and his losing his position as the unquestioned Demi-god of the GOP it has to be roiling around somewhere in his psyche. 

He's a self-involved megalomanic and malignant narcissist whose modus operandi to being attacked of disrespected even in fairly mild way is to escalate to a DefCon 1 level counter-attack.

Clinically he exhibits narcissistic rage:

Narcissistic rage can be defined as intense anger, aggression, or passive-aggression when a narcissist experiences a setback or disappointment, which shatters his (or her) illusions of grandiosity, entitlement, and superiority, and triggers inner inadequacy, shame, and vulnerability.

Examples of narcissistic rage range from intense outbursts and sudden fits of anger, to passive-aggressive acts such as simmering resentment, icy silence, deliberate neglect, or cutting sarcasm. What distinguishes narcissistic rage from normal anger is that it is usually unreasonable, disproportional, and cuttingly aggressive (or intensely passive-aggressive), all because the narcissists’ wants and wishes are not being catered to. It is a blow to their superficial, idealized self-image. Reference

He behaves like a child who has problems with impulse control who is having a temper tantrum when he doesn't get his way. Once a tantrum starts there's a point of no return where the child, or adult in people like Trump, is no longer considering the negative consequences.

There was a time when Trump felt, with some justification, that he owned Twitter. Trump posted more than 56,571 tweets before he was banned from Twitter.

After the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago Trump made over 50 posts (he calls the "truths") in one day. 

The former president has written a total of 51 "truths" on the social media platform he set up after getting permanently banned from Twitter, while also sharing dozens more posts from other accounts since early Tuesday morning.

Among Trump's Truth Social posts were attacks on the FBI, including one alleging the agency told Facebook the Hunter Biden "laptop from Hell" story was Russian disinformation "when they knew very well that it was not."

Trump added in the Tuesday night post that the "fake statement" from the FBI changed the outcome of the 2020 election by "millions of votes, and it was by no means the only corruption which took place." NEWSWEEK

 One of the difficulties in prosecuting some cases is the "he said, she said" conflicting testimonies of eye witnesses. If there's no recording of a conversation it can often be left up to a jury to decide whether to believe the witness or the defendant.

In this age of social media a post has become the equivalent of the spoken word. All Trump can do to deny something that was posted of Trump Social is to claim someone else made the post.

This claim would ring hollow in front of a jury. It would be a version of a kid telling his teacher that "the dog ate my homework" and expecting the claim to be believed.

Addendum:

As I finish up today's blog I checked in with my favorite breaking news website, RAWSTORY, and this was on top of their page:

Excerpt:

Early Sunday morning Donald Trump reacted to the mass shooting in Monterrey Park, California that claimed at least ten lives by tieing it to the treatment of those who have been indicted or convicted for participating in the Jan 6 insurrection...

....

RELATED: Trump is handing investigators 'incriminating evidence from heaven': legal expert

Taking to his Truth Social account, he began, "10 dead in California shooting, horrible gun wielding ANTIFA protest against our great police in Atlanta - Nothing will happen to them despite night of rage and destruction."

That was followed by, "Yet our January 6th protestors, over a Rigged Election, have had their lives ruined despite nobody killed except true Patriot Ashli B."

"This situation will be fully rectified after 2024 Election. Thank you!" he concluded.

Note that the article has a link to the story that prompted be to write this blog. Screengrab below:

Thanks, Trump, for making my case!

DOJ assures Jim Jordan will become Jimmy the Snarling Jester Jordan

 DOJ  assures Jim Jordan will become Jimmy the Snarling Jester Jordan 

By Hal Brown

My illustration added this image to one of Jim Jordan which I modified from a color photo.:

There are jesters and there are jesters.

Click below to enlarge. 

Lower right: In Batman, Jester is the son of the Joker and Harley Quinn. His mother sent him to be trained by an assassin in order to fulfill his father's wish to kill the heroes.

I added my illustration to the article 

DOJ signals to Jim Jordan that it won’t share information about pending investigations from The Hill, but it could be on any of the various stories about this announcement from the Justice Department.

I have no doubt that the bloodthirsty Jim Jordan is salivating at the prospect of pouncing wolf-like onto his Democratic Party victims and devouring them with his incisive incisors.

This DOJ announcement is more than a "not so fast buddy boy." The Department of Justice is telling him in no uncertain terms what the J in DOJ stands for. They are telling him that he is not the king of the hill (and The Hill) that he fancies himself.

My understanding is that the DOJ may comply if asked, or subpoenaed, to provide information about other matters besides ongoing investigations, in other words, about concluded investigations. The fly in in ointment for Jordan is this from The Hill:

Assistant Attorney General Carlos Uriarte said in the letter, obtained by Politico on Friday. “Longstanding Department policy prevents us from confirming or denying the existence of pending investigations in response to congressional requests or providing non-public information about our investigations.” 

If I am interpreting this correctly, all the DOJ has to do is refuse to provide information without explaining why they are doing so.

If or when the DOJ provides information I think Jordan will find that he is on a snipe hunt, literally a fool's or jester's errand. They will bluster and bloviate about all the damning evidence of malfeasance they'd uncovered, but like with Benghazi time will show that there was no there .

The same goes for attempts by the Oversight Committee looking into the so-called weaponization of the DOJ,    as they spin their wheels investigating the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the origins of Covid, Big Tech, oh, and the biggest nothing-burger, Hunter Biden. 

No - there - there... not here, not here, not here, not there, not there, not there, sorry dudes and dudettes, not anywhere.

Jim Jordan, the former wrestling champion in the 134 lb. weight class,  and OSU wrestling coach accused of covering up sexual abuse at the college (something that earned him the nickname of Gym Jordan) likes to fleck his muscles. 

Like the typical winning wrestler on the mat, Jordan is very aggressive. I had a couple of friends in high school who wrestled. One of them went on to be a college wrestler. He handily pinned me in about a minute in an intramural wrestling competition. I can attest to the fact that although very aggressive when in a match, they were mild mannered everywhere else.

Not so with Jim Jordan. Not only is he aggressive but obnoxiously so. If he was the least bit likable we might have cause to be a tiny bit worried. The same goes for just about every prominent House Republican. For example, likable in the same sentence with Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Matt Gaetz, Paul Gosar, and others, is the very definition of an oxymoron. 

Update: On MSNBC commentary, an observation that if DOJ refuses to give some information the House committee can take it to court, but these cases can take months or even years to resolve.

Republican never-Trumper Stewart Stevens just noted what I did mentioning Marjorie Taylor Greene and (I think) Paul Gosar saying that they aren't even likable people and who would want to be sitting next to them.

Will the public ever recognize instantly who the initials JRB stands for?

 Will the public ever recognize instantly who the initials JRB stands for?

By Hal Brown

Look up FDR and you will find...

 247,000,000 results on Google. The initials LBJ and JFK are readily associated with the two presidents.

Look up JRB on Google and while there are 8,820,000 results none, at least on the first page, refer to Joseph Robinette Biden.

Click above to enlarge

The text I used for the illustration on this blog is from this Salon article by historian Robert S. McElvaine's article ... 

Of course some presidents no matter where history ever ranks them end up being referred to by three initials even when their middle names were fairly well known. Harry S. Truman never became HST, for example.

The reference to President Biden as JRB, who is usually referred to as Joe Biden rather than Joseph Biden, jumped out at me. I think using the three initials was an attempt by the author to equate him with FDR and LBJ.

I agree with the author's assessment. 

I think that Biden's (JRB's if you prefer) accomplishments have been drowned out in the GOP noice machine. He's been like Pablo Casals or Jascha Heifetz playing a solo during  a shit-throwing battle between screeching monkeys.

After describing the accomplishments that he uses to justify why FDR and LBJ were great presidents the author explains why he thinks Biden's two-year record stacks up well against "the very high bars set" by FDR and LBJ. Here are bullet points:

• The $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan to stimulate the economy.
• The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act to provide for repairs and extensions to the nation's roads, bridges, railroads, water systems and broadband. 
• The PACT Act, expanding health care and benefits for those who were exposed to toxic substances during their military service. 
• The CHIPS and Science Act, funding advanced scientific research and investing $53 billion to manufacture silicone microchips in the U.S. 
• The Inflation Reduction Act, which does more than any previous legislation to mitigate climate change, allows Medicare to negotiate with Big Pharma to cut prescription drug prices, begins to crack down on tax evasion by corporations and the very rich and much more. 
• The Respect for Marriage Act, protecting both same-sex and interracial marriage.
• A reform of the Electoral Count Act, making it more difficult to overturn an election, and reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act.
• Biden has also excelled on the international stage far more than Roosevelt did in his first two years — and more than Johnson ever did. Biden rallied the forces of democracy to oppose Vladimir Putin's authoritarian aggression and aid Ukraine and revived NATO, which Trump had on the verge of collapse.

The future not only for JRB, for American democracy itself, depends on how well Democrats are able to, one, get enough voters to know about these accomplishments, and two and perhaps just as or more importantly, to care about how these benefit them personally.

Those who prefer to have a fascist authoritarian America where minority groups are marginalized (or worse) are a lost cause.  In their MAGA slogan "again" is a yearning for a pre-Civil War Confederacy. 

Those with even a rudimentary grasp of history wouldn't be bothered by the similarities between the rise of Hitler in the 1930's and what is happening in the United States today. To the contrary, they would applaud it.

--------- Addendum---------

Other articles by Robert S. McElvaine:

WHATTAYA THINK OF “SLEEPY JOE” & “DYSFUNCTIONAL” DEMOCRATS NOW, AMERICA? Aug. 2022

 

Seven days in July: America's moment of political climate change Aug. 2022

-------

Coincidentally, as I was finishing up this story the Cincinnati mayor was being interviewed on "Morning Joe" about how Biden's infrastructure bill was helping his city from improving transportation to increasing funding to the police in order to enable them to hire community resource officers to deal with mental health calls.

Postscripts:

Jennifer Rubin in a Washington Post Q&A answers this question: Will Republican lunacy ever cost them any significant number of voters?

There are multiple groups of voters who continue to support GOP candidates. The first is the hardcore cultists, who are beyond reason and persuasion. The second includes business interests, which go along for the tax cuts and anti-regulation policies. Those people are more reachable if they fear House Republcians are inviting economic chaos.

The final group includes habitual Republicans with an inordinate fear of Democrats. They can also be swayed. These are the voters who at some level understand that Biden is not a raving socialist; that our economy is recovering; that our international standing has improved; and that the side that is radical is the GOP. Biden's appeal to bipartisanship, good faith efforts to address the border and popular economic measures (e.g., infrastructure investments) are effective in persuading this group. Overall, the best thing going for Democrats is the unhinged, irresponsible conduct of the MAGA House.

-----

I posted links to this on Facebook, Tribel, Mastodon, and Twitter. On the latter I included the most popular hashtags with Biden including the one with the highest number, BidenWorstPresdientInHistory. I'll add replies to this tweet here if I get any.

Here's my tweet:

New Zealand PM resigns, gives Tucker Carlson excuse to insult her looks and to make outlandish claims

 New Zealand PM resigns, gives Tucker Carlson an excuse to insult her looks and to make outlandish claims

By Hal Brown

By DonkeyHotey

 

I follow even minor New Zealand news because I have friends who live there and I often send them stories which end up being reported in the American media.

When I looked at The New York Times this morning I saw this on their website:

On MSNBC (click image to enlarge)

It was the top story on HUFFPOST:

Meanwhile on a major New Zealand news website the stories about the resignation appeared under an article about a wild kiwi egg:

The resignation gave Tucker "Tucking" Carlson an opportunity to demonstrate once again that he resides in a dark odiferous world of toxicity somewhere below pond slime.

I didn't know anything about her until today. From my reading today it became more than evident that  she has empathy. Carlson has antipathy to empathy and democracy and truth.

Tucker Carlson Announces Jacinda Ardern's Resignation By Mocking Her Appearance, HUFFPOST The giddy Fox News host made over-the-top claims about the outgoing prime minister.

HUFFPOST emphasized Carlson's mocking Ardern as "the lady with the big teeth" in the title, but this isn't his most disgusting comment.

He called her “an appalling abuser of human rights of her own people” who’s the “most authoritarian leader that country has ever had.”

What was the horrendous abuse of human rights? 

It was her taking stringent measures to stop the spread of Covid-19. Unmentioned of course is the fact that they were extraordinarily successful:

Click above for story

Then Carlson went a step further, you really have to watch his delivery to get the flavor of how he said these words:

“What are the chances she was a puppet of the Chinese government?We don’t have enough evidence to prove that, but we would rate that as about 100% likely.”

Click above

Tucker Carlson towers over also-rans like Alex Jones for the title of the most egregious and influential lying far-right propaganda purveyors. 

He would, and should, be seen as a caricature like the DonkeyHotey depiction I used to illustrate this blog story. 

He should be the blundering clown stumbling like a two-sheets to the wind drunk onto the the circus arena.  

Comment below or on Facebook or on Mastodon. You can make a reply on Twitter too.

Addendum:

Click above to read ABC News article

\

.

This is what well-known Australian actor Sam Neal tweeted:

 

Will Manhattan DA's case against Trump have deadly tentacles

 Will Manhattan DA's case against Trump have deadly tentacles

By Hal Brown

I read this article in RAWSTORY and the phrase shown above leaped off the page and sent me to DuckDuckGo Images to find man-of-war jellyfish.

The article begins:

Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg may finally have changed his mind about indicting former president Donald Trump.

The recent conviction of the Trump Organization and its chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg gave a glimpse of evidence that could tie the ex-president directly to the tax fraud scheme, such as a memo he signed approving chief operating officer Matthew Calamari’s illegal request to reduce his taxed salary to cover the cost of his untaxed corporate apartment, reported The Daily Beast.

Here's the portion about the tentacles:

“This case has tentacles,” said Duncan Levin, a former prosecutor who now represents Jennifer Weisselberg and has been communicating with investigators.

The district attorney's office declined to comment on what Bragg meant about another chapter, but former prosecutors from that office say their experience leads them to believe prosecutors will go after Trump.

“For people who want a certain outcome — to go after Trump — it gives hope," said Catherine A. Christian, a former assistant district attorney who investigated financial fraud. "They’re going to be thorough. I’m doubtful he would have said ‘next chapter’ if they weren’t looking."

To tell the unvarnished truth I don't have anything particularly original to say about this. I just wanted an excuse to make a couple of illustrations. I leave it to readers to indulge in fantasies about the Teflon don Don falling into a jellyfish swarm.

I think he might a need a full immersion wetsuit rather than a coating of Teflon to protect him from the jellyfish swarming around him not only in New York (cue music video) but also in Georgia (cue video two).

Update:

Irrelevant to today's story, items to share:

Funniest puniest of the week:

More seriously, everyone should share this image.

This hopefully will be the final straw to break for Santos and humiliate McCarthy. It would be truly great if McCarthy has to take steps to remove him from the House, and at least to immediately kick him off his committee assignments. There are a number of Republicans who shoot their dogs because they can't hunt anymore, but far more are dog lovers. I just wish more articles shared this photo:

More people should see the video in this article. It is of a former Santos roommate describing how he used the Jewish sounding name Zebrosky on his GoFundMe pages because Jews give more money. 

"He would say, 'oh well, that Jew will give more if you're a Jew," Morey-Parker quoted his former roommate.

I wouldn't say that you can make a firm judgement of how smart someone is by how they look, but then again.... (article)

.....Comment below or on Facebook or on Mastodon. You can make a reply on Twitter too.

GOP in center of circular firing squad

GOP in center of circular firing squad

By Hal Brown

THE TITLE of the article below SAYS FRAGILE, I'd add "fractious about to fracture" to this title, and change the photo (click to see how below) - this dark triad, this danger to democracy if they have power, fighting among themselves can only instill hope for those who fear they will bring a fascist autocracy (MAGAism and America First) to the country.

I made my own version of the photo used to illustrate the article. Click above to enlarge. Here's the meaning of Dark Triad.

Also on RAWSTORY:

'Don’t be ugly!' Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert quarrel noisily in House restroom

The article in Daily Beast is behind a paywall but you can see their illustration:

We all watched the soap opera of the fight over McCarthy's nomination to be Speaker of the House which included an actual attempted assault.

One would think that this travesty for Republicans would have taught them a lesson about public fighting and even supposedly private bathroom outbursts of acrimony.

Too bad Debbie Dingell didn't take and share a video of the so-called noisy quarrel. It was called a near-screaming match between Greene and Boebert. Classy person that she is, Dingell said "what happens in the ladies room stays in the ladies room."

Who actually reported the incident - since apparently it was't Dingell, hasn't been reported. It would be interesting to know who it was, especially if it was a Republican.

I don't see any avenue for the leaders of the GOP to remedy the situation by holding their version of the Mafia's Apalachin Meeting which was held to stop the feuding between various Mafia families. (It would have succeeded had not the police noticed all the out-of-state cars headed into a sleepy village and raided the meeting.)

The sociopaths in the Mafia knew what was best for their greater good. Not so with the sociopaths in the GOP because their narcissism overrides their good sense.

The self-defeating actions of the Republicans don't just involve individuals. For example as Thom Hartmann reports in "House Republicans are playing with fire" in Rawstory+ "the House Republican threat to crash our economy if Democrats don’t agree to gut aid to higher education, the EPA, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid... are playing with fire and appear to be blissfully ignorant of how destructive it could become." He writes:

Will this be our entre into Strauss and Howe’s “Fourth Turning”? Will House Republicans provoke a worldwide repeat of the Republican Great Depression that, history suggests, could easily lead the planet into another world war? 

Anybody who thinks cooler heads will prevail like they did in 2011 doesn’t know these Republicans. 

If they’re willing to offer excuses for Trump trying to overthrow the government of the United States, there truly are no guardrails to protect our nation from their avarice, stupidity, and willingness to destroy America for personal and political gain.

Buckle up. We’re in for a wild ride.

The term circular firing squad comes to mind thinking of what the Republican Party has devolved into. Ready, aim, fire!

_________________________

Related from Salon:

Heroes and villains: Fascists now control Congress — we can't afford to pretend otherwise

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