Tuesday, March 26, 2019

It's Not Nuthin'


The press is acting as if the Mueller investigation struck out. We don't know the details yet, since they have not released the report, but it appears that Mueller decided that he did not have evidence to charge anyone in the campaign with 1.working with the Russians to fill US media with fake news and propaganda, and 2.working directly with Russians to hack the DNC email system.

I think it is likely that we will discover there is more to the obstruction of justice issue than AG Barr is suggesting in his summary. But again, we haven't seen the report.

Also, remember, the number is not known exactly but twelve to nineteen other investigations have spun out of Mueller's narrowly focused project. These involve dirty business with the Russians as well as crime in Trump's real estate businesses, security violations in the awarding of clearances, fraud and money-laundering, emoluments and profiteering by the Trump family taking advantage of his political office, and more.

Many of us thought that Mueller was going to chase down the many criminal threads that he uncovered while investigating the narrow topic of Trump campaign collaboration with Russia, but instead he passed them off to other agencies. Republicans can crow that Mueller found "nothing" but that is not what history is going to remember.

In the meantime, here is a list culled from Buzzfeed of the people Muller has charged.
George Papadopoulos Charged: July 28, 2017
Status: Sentenced and served 14 days in prison

Paul Manafort Charged: Oct. 30, 2017
Status: Sentenced and serving nearly seven years in prison

Rick Gates Charged: Oct. 30, 2017
Status: Cooperating and awaiting sentencing

Michael Flynn Charged: Nov. 30, 2017
Status: Cooperating and awaiting sentencing

Alex van der Zwaan Charged: Feb. 16, 2018
Status: Sentenced and served 30 days in prison

Internet Research Agency Charged: Feb. 16, 2018
(two other Russian entities, and 13 Russian individuals)
Status: One defendant fighting the charges

Richard Pinedo Charged: Feb. 7, 2018
Status: Sentenced and serving six months in prison

Konstantin Kilimnik Charged: June 8, 2018
Status: Charges pending, never participated in court

Viktor Netyksho and 12 members of the Russian intelligence agency GRU Charged: July 13, 2018
Status: Charges pending, never participated in court

Michael Cohen Charged: Nov. 29, 2018
Status: Sentenced and about to serve three years in prison

Roger Stone Charged: Jan. 24, 2019
Status: Fighting the charges
As others have pointed out, if Mueller had saved these up and announced them when he released the report, nobody would be saying it's nuthin'.

Sunday, March 17, 2019

Another Massacre in the Name of White People

The killing in New Zealand leaves us with an especially hopeless feeling. Even as the ambulances were still arriving at the mosques the news announcers had to mention that Christchurch is a beautiful city. New Zealand has always seemed to us like a pristine, peaceful little paradise nation, healthy and happy. And yet the death toll now has reached fifty, as another festering boil of hate pops.

The killer left a 74-page document explaining why he was doing what he did. It all makes sense to him, and in fact the tone of the manifesto is perfectly calm, articulate, it's well-organized. The problem, as he sees it, is that white Europeans are being "invaded" by other groups. He didn't care what other groups; he is opposed to all of them, unless they stay in their own territory. I think it is important for understanding the problem to note that he also didn't care that New Zealand was once Maori land, colonized by English-speaking outsiders. As long as the invaders are his own group, he is okay with it. It's all about us versus them as absolutes, all about seeing the world from your own point of view, exclusively.

If you are to take a larger view of the situation, a "God's-eye view," as they call it, it is clear that you cannot have every group of people who call themselves "us" killing off every other group of "them." Mathematically that doesn't work; the answer is zero. The beauty of the human species is that we are able to adopt the Gods-eye view sometimes, to see the other side's point of view, and to negotiate agreements where "we" get what we need and "they" do, too. Sometimes it even happens that we join together in a bigger, better "us." Individuals who are heavily invested in their own group's identity might resist such a merger, seeing it as a loss of identity or denigration of their existing in-group. For some this is such a threat that mass violence and even war seem like a reasonable reaction. It is tragic when innocent people who have never considered such perverse thoughts are gunned down randomly while living their routine lives.

A few quotes from the New Zealand murderer's statement:
We are experiencing an invasion on a level never seen before in history. Millions of people pouring across our borders, legally. Invited by the state and corporate entities to replace the White people who have failed to reproduce, failed to create the cheap labour, new consumers and tax base that the corporations and states need to thrive.

... we must deal with both the invaders within our lands and the invaders that seek to enter our lands.

... We must crush immigration and deport those invaders already living on our soil. It is not just a matter of our prosperity, but the very survival of our people.

... [I carried out the attack] to most of all show the invaders that our lands will never be their lands, our homelands are our own and that, as long as a white man still lives, they will NEVER conquer our lands and they will never replace our people... To directly reduce immigration rates to European lands by intimidating and physically removing the invaders themselves.
(I am not going to link to his manifesto.)

The word "invader" appeared fifty-five times in the assassin's statement.

Later in the day, our President adopted the killer's language in describing the us-versus-them viewpoint that white nationalists bring to the American discourse.
People hate the word “invasion,” but that’s what it is. It’s an invasion of drugs and criminals and people. We have no idea who they are, but we capture them because border security is so good. But they’re put in a very bad position, and we’re bursting at the seams. Literally, bursting at the seams.

...You can only do so much. And the only option then is to release them, but we can’t do that either. Because when you release them, they come into our society, and in many cases they’re stone-cold criminals. And in many cases, and in some cases, you have killers coming in and murderers coming in, and we’re not going to allow that to happen. Remarks by President Trump on the National Security and Humanitarian Crisis on our Southern Border
Pundits have wondered whether Trump intentionally used the killer's language, or if it was just a coincidence. It's a pretty good question, but we have no way of knowing what Trump had heard when he delivered these remarks -- I would bet that he had not read any seventy-four-page manifesto, but maybe an aide had quoted a few lines to him. His mention that "people hate the word 'invasion'" suggests he was consciously referring to the New Zealand manifesto. And maybe not, maybe Trump and the New Zealand murderer are simply two mouthpieces expressing the same ideology, and happened to pick the same easy words to describe their beliefs.

In describing a world in which "we" are being invaded by stone-cold criminals, killers and murderers, the obvious inference is that "we" need to defend ourselves. Invasion is a military term, and it calls for counterattack. Latent domestic terrorists in the United States and around the world hear his message and understand what he is saying they have to do. This is going to get worse before it gets better.

Wednesday, March 06, 2019

A Civil War Would Be Complicated

The Washington Post had an article noting that a few Americans are talking about having a civil war.
At a moment when the country has never seemed angrier, two political commentators from opposite sides of the divide concurred last week on one point, nearly unthinkable until recently: The country is on the verge of “civil war.”

First came former U.S. attorney Joseph diGenova, a Fox News regular and ally of President Trump. “We are in a civil war,” he said. “The suggestion that there’s ever going to be civil discourse in this country for the foreseeable future is over. . . . It’s going to be total war.”

The next day, Nicolle Wallace, a former Republican operative turned MSNBC commentator and Trump critic, played a clip of diGenova’s commentary on her show and agreed with him — although she placed the blame squarely on the president.

Trump, she said, “greenlit a war in this country around race. And if you think about the most dangerous thing he’s done, that might be it.” In America, talk turns to something unspoken for 150 years: Civil war
The article goes on to quote other commentators who seem to be trying to stir up the violence of a civil war. Well, it does seem like the country is pretty divided.

But I have a couple of questions about how this would work. Like, the first Civil War had some geographical boundaries, for instance the Mason-Dixon line, and those above the line were fighting against those below the line. Union states, Confederate states, with borders between them. So what are you gonna do now, say, "Bill next door and I, and the guy in the house on the other side of him, and also the people across the street, are on one side, and the other people next door, the guy in the green house over there, and the family on the corner are on the other side..." I don't see that working somehow. It's not going to be red states against blue states, because the percentages are 60/40-ish in a lot of places. Never mind the Trump guy down the block with the liberal wife. What you gonna do, fight your own kids?

My other question is: what do they want? This is a serious question. I understand being against stuff, against taxes and bureaucracy and political correctness, but it does not appear that conservatives have proposed any alternative. For example, you hate Obamacare, okay, so what do you have that's better? Just "getting rid of it" sounds good on paper, the peasants with their pitchforks love the idea, but what happens when your own family member needs medical attention? Are there parts of the country where people really want the government to be one branch of a New York crime syndicate, laundering money and cheating people and lying? What is it they want?

Whatever they want, they do not seem to be able to say it out loud. Maybe it's just because of political correctness and the liberal media, but they obviously want racism back -- so why don't they say so? Why don't they just say, we want a Second Amendment for white people but not black people? We want women to be required to live as sex objects or unpaid domestic servants -- if that's what they want then they should just say so. Why not just say out loud, we want more black people in prison and more white people -- especially white collar criminals -- let out? Can they say, we want Mexicans to work in our yards and hotels and harvest our vegetables but we don't want them to have any of the benefits of citizenship (and we don't want to have to mix with them socially)? Why don't they just say, we want to be ruled by the rich, who should not be bound by the laws that apply to the rest of us? Then we would know what the alternative is that they are going to fight this civil war over.

They are willing to push the country to the point where a civil war seems possible, yet they are afraid to say out loud what they really stand for. If there is a civil war and the conservatives win, "owning the libs" does not provide guidance for running a country.

Here's where I think this civil-war idea is going to break down. I think that as we get closer and closer, conservatives will realize that they would not want to live in a country that conforms to their beliefs. The stable state for America is a somewhat liberal government that disaffected and resentful white conservatives can complain about.

Trump did not expect to win the the election, and conservatives do not really know what to do with the power they have now. Even with both houses of Congress and the Presidency they could not pass any of their favorite bills -- they did not make anything better, even by their own standards. They just want to complain. They can rebel against the government if they want, and we can have a civil war, but they will be sorry, whether they win or lose.