Posts Tagged ‘BARACK OBAMA’
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In Bureaucracy, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Politics, Social commentary on July 15, 2024 at 12:22 am
“We mock you. We mock your fear. We want your fear. It’s going to be accountability. We are taking apart the administrative state. We’re going to destroy the deep state, and we’re going to hold everybody responsible that put this republic in the situation its in today.
“Accountability, responsibility. And that will come with authority. The authority of Donald J. Trump as the 47th president of the United States.”
The speaker was Steve Bannon, former Trump campaign manager and White House advisor. And he was issuing a warning to everyone who didn’t enthusiastically accept Donald Trump as his Once and Future Fuhrer.
Steve Rannon
Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Threats of violence have become common among Republicans since 2015, when Trump first ran for President. And they continue to cast a shadow over the 2024 Presidential campaign.
On March 16, 2016, Trump warned Republicans that if he didn’t win the GOP nomination in July, his supporters would literally riot: “I think you’d have riots. I think you would see problems like you’ve never seen before. I think bad things would happen. I really do. I wouldn’t lead it, but I think bad things would happen.”
An NBC reporter summed it up as: “The message to Republicans was clear: ‘Nice convention you got there, shame if something happened to it.’”
Eight years later, on March 16, 2024, Trump made a similar threat: “Now if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole—that’s gonna be the least of it….If this election isn’t won, I’m not sure that you’ll ever have another election in this country.”
Donald Trump
On August 9, 2016, Trump told a rally in Wilmington, North Carolina: “Hillary [Clinton] wants to abolish, essentially abolish, the Second Amendment. If she gets to pick her [Supreme Court] judges, nothing you can do folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know.”
This was Trump’s “dog-whistle” attempt to incite the assassination of Hillary Clinton—and it was so seen by responsible authorities: “Well, let me say if someone else said that outside of the hall, he’d be in the back of a police wagon now, with the Secret Service questioning him,” said Michael Hayden, former head of the CIA and National Security Agency (NSA).
In Cincinnati, a Trump supporter threatened to forcibly remove Clinton from the White House if she won the race: “If she’s in office, I hope we can start a coup. She should be in prison or shot. That’s how I feel about it,”
Dan Bowman, a 50-year-old contractor, said of Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee. “We’re going to have a revolution and take them out of office if that’s what it takes. There’s going to be a lot of bloodshed. But that’s what it’s going to take….I would do whatever I can for my country.”
In a June 19, 2015 editorial, Rolling Stone writer Jeb Lund had noted:
“The Republican Party has weaponized its supporters, made violence a virtue and, with almost every pronouncement for 50 years, given them an enemy politicized, racialized and indivisible.
“Movement conservatives have fetishized a tendentious and ahistorical reading of the Second Amendment to the point that the Constitution itself somehow paradoxically ‘legitimizes’ an armed insurrection against the government created by it.
“This is no longer an argument about whether one party’s beliefs are beneficial or harmful, but an attitude that labels leftism so antithetical to the American idea that empowering it on any level is an act of usurpation.”
Consider:
On January 8, 2011, Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was shot in the head while meeting with constituents outside a grocery store in Tucson, Arizona. After a miraculous recovery, she continues to struggle with language and has lost 50% of her vision in both eyes.
Rep. Gabrielle Giffords
She vowed to return to her former Congressional duties, but was forced to resign for health reasons in 2012.
Giffords was only one victim of a shooting spree that claimed the lives of six people and left 13 others wounded.
Also killed was Arizona’s chief U.S. District judge, John Roll, who had just stopped by to see his friend Giffords after celebrating Mass.
Although the actual shooter, Jared Lee Loughner, was immediately arrested, those who fanned the flames of political violence that consumed 19 people that day have remained unpunished.
Consider the circumstances behind the shootings:
John Roll is Arizona’s chief federal judge. Appointed in 2006, he wins acclaim as a respected jurist and leader who pushes to beef up the court’s strained bench to handle a growing number of border crime-related cases.
In 2009, he becomes a target for threats after allowing a $32 million civil-rights lawsuit by illegal aliens to proceed against a local rancher. The case arouses the fury of local talk radio hosts, who encourage their audiences to threaten Roll’s life.
In one afternoon, Roll logs more than 200 threatening phone calls. Callers threaten the judge and his family. They post personal information about Roll online.
Roll and his wife are placed under fulltime protection by deputy U.S. marshals. Roll finds living under security “unnerving and invasive.”
Authorities identify four men believed responsible for the threats. But Roll declines to press charges on the advice of the Marshals Service.
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In Bureaucracy, History, Military, Politics, Social commentary on July 12, 2024 at 12:15 am
“Who are we?” asks Christian G. Appy in the opening of his 2015 book, American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity.
For Appy, it’s impossible to understand the enormous impact of the Vietnam war on the United States without first understanding the image that Americans had of themselves before that conflict. And he describes that image as:
“The broad faith that the United States [was] a unique force for good in the world, superior not only in its military and economic power but in the quality of its government and institutions, the character and morality of its people, and its way of life…..
“It was still unimaginable to most Americans that their own nation would wage aggressive war and justify it with unfounded claims, that it would support undemocratic governments reviled by their own people, and that American troops would be sent to fight in countries where they were widely regarded not as liberators but as imperialist invaders.”
Appy contends that, for millions of Americans, the Vietnam war dealt a mortal blow to that tremendously appealing self-image.
Yet for millions more, the United States remains an exemplary nation with a divine mission to lead other nations—willingly or unwillingly—to follow its example. And those Americans become furious when anyone—especially a foreigner—dares question that belief.
On September 11, 2013, the New York Times published an Op-Ed (guest editorial) from Russian President Vladimir Putin, entitled: “A Plea for Caution from Russia: What Putin Has to Say to Americans About Syria.”
To no one’s surprise, Putin strongly opposed an American air strike on Syria. Its “President” (i.e., dictator) Bashir al-Assad, is a close ally of Russia. Just as his late father and dictator, Hafez al-Assad, was a close ally of the Soviet Union.
And Putin is a former member of the KGB, the infamous secret police which ruled the Soviet Union from its birth in 1917 to its collapse in 1991.In his September 11 guest editorial in the New York Times, Putin offered the expected Russian take on Syria:
- Poison gas was used in Syria.
- It wasn’t used by the Syrian Army.
- “Opposition forces [used it] to provoke intervention by their powerful foreign patrons.”
- “There are few champions of democracy in Syria. But there are more than enough [al] Qaeda fighters and extremists of all stripes battling the government.”
But it’s the concluding paragraph that enraged American politicians the most—especially Right-wing ones. In it, Putin took exception with American “exceptionalism.”
Referring to then-President Barack Obama, Putin wrote:
“And I would rather disagree with a case he made on American exceptionalism, stating that the United States’ policy is ‘what makes America different. It’s what makes us exceptional.’
“It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation. There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy. Their policies differ, too.
“We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal.”
Vladimir Putin
Putin has never publicly shown any interest in religion. But by invoking “the Lord,” he was able to turn the Christian beliefs of his Western audience into a useful weapon.
Americans’ outrage quickly erupted.
“I was insulted,” then-House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) told reporters when asked for his blunt reaction to the editorial.
“I have to be honest with you, I was at dinner, and I almost wanted to vomit,” said U.S. Senator Bob Menendez (D-New Jersey).
Putin had dared to question the self-righteousness of American foreign policy—and those who make it.
Making his case for war with Syria, Obama had said: “America is not the world’s policeman….But when, with modest effort and risk, we can stop children from being gassed to death, and thereby make our own children safer over the long run, I believe we should act.
“That’s what makes America different. That’s what makes us exceptional. With humility, but with resolve, let us never lose sight of that essential truth.”
Barack Obama
In short: Because we consider ourselves “exceptional,” we have the divine right to do whatever we want.
It’s not necessary to see Putin as a champion of democracy (he isn’t) to see the truth in this part of his editorial:
“It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation.”
From 1938 to 1969, the House Un-American Activities Committee sought to define what was “American” and what was “Un-American.”
As if “American” stood for all things virtuous.
Whoever heard of an “Un-French Activities Committee”? Or an “Un-German” or “Un-British” one?
The late S.I. Hayakawa was a professor of semantics (the study of the relationship between words and what they stand for).In his bestselling book, Language in Thought and Action, he observed that a person has four ways of responding to a message:
- Accept the speaker and his message.
- Accept the speaker but reject the message.
- Accept the message but reject the speaker.
- Reject the message and the speaker.
In this case, Americans might want to consider #3 where “American exceptionalism” is concerned.
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In Bureaucracy, Entertainment, History, Politics, Social commentary on July 8, 2024 at 12:10 am
Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump to become the 46th President of the United States on January 20, 2021.
But before scoring that victory, he racked up a series of incredible adventures as a private investigator—in fiction.
In Hope Never Dies: An Obama-Biden Mystery, author Andrew Shaffer has fashioned a novel that is half-mystery, half-bromance.
Vice President Joe Biden has just left the Obama White House and doesn’t know what to do with the rest of his life. Then Finn Donnelly, his favorite railroad conductor, dies in a suspicious accident, leaving behind an ailing wife and a trail of clues.
To unravel the mystery, “Amtrak Joe” calls on the skills of his former boss: Barack Obama, the 44th President of the United States. Together they scour biker bars, cheap motels and other memorable haunts throughout Delaware.![]()
Then Biden unearths a disturbing truth about his longtime—and now dead—friend. This, in turn, leads Biden and Obama to uncover the sinister forces behind America’s opioid epidemic.
The book is pure fantasy fun, as evidenced from this review by Alexandra Alter in The New York Times:
“[Hope Never Dies is] a roughly 300-page work of political fanfiction, an escapist fantasy that will likely appeal to liberals pining for the previous administration, longing for the Obama-Biden team to emerge from political retirement as action heroes. But it’s also at times a surprisingly earnest story about estranged friends who are reunited under strange circumstances.”
A reader named Casey, reviewing the novel for Goodreads, writes: “While Shaffer could have leaned into nostalgia alone, he’s written a solid mystery with the characters fleshed out as more than just clichés.
“The reader really feels Biden’s longing to be helpful and his anguish over seeing 44’s legacy undone so quickly by an individual who shall remain nameless. (The presidential zings in this book are incredible, truly.)
“The tension between the two rings as true as it did when they were in office….By all means, this book shouldn’t work as well as it does. For a few hours, I got to enjoy the company of politicians who behaved like adults (mostly). It sure was nice.”
Contrasting with the relatively lighthearted fictional images of Joe Biden and Barack Obama is the immensely darker one of Donald Trump.
Don Winslow offers Trump an extended cameo appearance in The Border, his massive, 736-page novel about America’s war on drugs—and the horrific violence it has spawned in Mexico. It’s the third of a trilogy of novels vividly portraying the violent costs of an unwinnable conflict.
Art Keller is a dedicated agent of the Federal Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). For over 40 years, he has waged all-out war on Adán Barrera, the godfather of the powerful Sinaloa Cartel.
Appointed director of the DEA, Keller now faces a series of deadly enemies:
- A heroin epidemic surging across America;
- Hitmen who want to kill him;
- Politicians who want to sabotage his agenda; and
- An incoming administration that’s allied with the very drug traffickers he’s trying to destroy.
And heading this administration is John Dennison—Donald Trump in all but name—who:
- Gratuitously insults people on Twitter;
- Fires a Special Counsel;
- Gets blackmailed by a woman he once bedded; and
- Colludes with drug traffickers for a multi-million dollar loan to finance his Presidential campaign.
Whereas the reviews for Hope Never Dies were as upbeat as the book itself, those of The Border reflect the novel’s mercilessly grim take on a war that can’t be won.
Los Angeles Times: “The Border is intricate, mean and swift, a sprawling canvass of characters including narco kingpins, a Guatemalan stowaway, a Staten Island heroin addict, a kinky hit woman, a barely veiled Donald Trump and DEA agent Art Keller, who….has been noble and merciless, a conflicted wanderer who makes America face the transgressions committed in its name.”
Rolling Stone: “Clocking in at over 700 pages, it is his most overtly political installment yet. He takes on the Trump administration directly, creating a fictional candidate, then president, who stokes racist fears of Mexicans, campaigns on ‘building the wall’ and, along with his venal son-in-law, gets caught up in a shady real estate deal involving Cartel money.”
NPR: “The Border becomes a book for our times. Like Shakespeare, it makes a three-act drama of our modern moment. Like Shakespeare’s plays, it shows us a world that is our own, a history that is our own, a burden that is our own, rendered out into the rhythm of scenes and arcs, chapters and parts.”
Obama concentrated the full force of his attention on reforming American healthcare—by making it available to millions whose insurance refused to provide coverage.
Trump’s top priority was to separate the United States from Mexico with an impenetrable wall—and he even diverted $3.6 billion from Pentagon funding to pay for it.
Like John F. Kennedy, Barack Obama will likely be positively remembered as much for what he tried to do as what he succeeded at doing.
Like Richard M. Nixon, Donald Trump will likely be remembered as a menacing stain on American history.
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In Bureaucracy, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Military, Politics, Social commentary on June 26, 2024 at 12:11 am
Donald Trump made a return to waterboarding terrorism suspects a prime issue in his campaign for the 2016 Republican Presidential nomination.
And a March 30, 2016 Reuters/lpsos poll showed that nearly two-thirds of Americans believed that the use of torture could be justified to force suspected terrorists to talk.
A growing fear by Americans of Islamic terrorism had been ignited by a series of deadly Islamic terrorist attacks in Europe and the United States.
Frightening a prisoner in Iraq
In fact, however, torture, generally, and waterboarding in particular, have proven worthless at obtaining reliable information.
Victims will say anything they think their captors want to hear to stop the agony.
Yoshia Chee, a Special Forces veteran of Vietnam, recalled his use of torture against suspected Vietcong:
“One of the favorite things was popping one of their eyeballs out with a spoon….
“If I had one of my eyeballs hanging out, I’d say I killed Kennedy. I’d agree to anything in the whole world.
“We would do that, and they still wouldn’t talk….You rarely got anything out of them. Just more hatred. More reason to fight back.”
Click here: Strange Ground: An Oral History Of Americans In Vietnam, 1945-1975: Harry Maurer: 9780306808395: Amazon.com: Books
During the George W. Bush Presidency, the CIA relied on harsh physical punishments—beatings, humiliations and waterboarding—to convince suspects to talk. These were euphemistically referred to as “enhanced interrogation techniques.”
Upon assuming the Presidency in 2009, Barack Obama ordered an immediate halt to such methods. Since then, Republicans generally and their Presidential aspirants in particular have harshly criticized Obama’s decision.
Like Trump, they claimed that Obama had endangered American security in the name of Political Correctness. In turn, Obama argued that the use of torture produces unreliable information and inflames Muslim hatred of America.
Meanwhile, the FBI applied its traditional “kill them with kindness” approach to interrogation. And agents found this yielded far greater results.
For one thing, most Al Qaeda members relished appearing before grand juries.
Unlike organized crime members, they were talkative—and even tried to proselytize to the jury members. They were proud of what they had done—and wanted to talk.
“This is what the FBI does,” said Mike Rolince, an FBI expert on counter-terrorism. “Nearly 100% of the terrorists we’ve taken into custody have confessed. The CIA wasn’t trained. They don’t do interrogations.”
According to The Threat Matrix: The FBI at War in the Age of Global Terror (2011) jihadists had been taught to expect severe torture at the hands of American interrogators.
Writes Author Garrett M. Graff:
“Often, in the FBI’s experience, their best cooperation came when detainees realized they weren’t going to get tortured, that the United States wasn’t the Great Satan. Interrogators were figuring out…that not playing into Al Qaeda’s propaganda could produce victories.”
And the FBI isn’t alone in believing that acts of simple humanity can turn even sworn enemies into allies.
No less an authority on “real-politick” than Niccolo Machiavelli reached the same conclusion more than 500 years ago.
In his small and notorious book, The Prince, he writes about the methods a ruler must use to gain power. But in his larger and lesser-known masterwork, The Discourses, he outlines the ways that liberty can be maintained in a republic.
Niccolo Machiavelli
For Machiavelli, only a well-protected state can hope for peace and prosperity. Toward that end, he wrote at length about the best ways to succeed militarily. And in war, humanity can prevail at least as often as inhumanity.
Consider the following example from The Discourses:
Camillus [a Roman general] was besieging the city of the Faliscians, and had surrounded it….A teacher charged with the education of the children of some of the noblest families of that city [to ingratiate himself] with Camillus and the Romans, led these children…into the Roman camp.
And presenting them to Camillus [the teacher] said to him: “By means of these children as hostages, you will be able to compel the city to surrender.”
Camillus not only declined the offer but had the teacher stripped and his hands tied behind his back….[Then Camillus] had a rod put into the hands of each of the children…[and] directed them to whip [the teacher] all the way back to the city.
Upon learning this fact, the citizens of Faliscia were so much touched by the humanity and integrity of Camillus, that they surrendered the place to him without any further defense.
This example shows that an act of humanity and benevolence will at all times have more influence over the minds of men than violence and ferocity.
It also proves that provinces and cities which no armies…could conquer, have yielded to an act of humanity, benevolence, chastity or generosity.
This truth should be remembered whenever Right-wingers brag about their patriotism and willingness to “get tough“ with America’s enemies.
Many—like Newt Gingrich, Rudolph Giuliani, Rick Santorum, Eduardo “Ted” Cruz and Donald Trump—strenuously avoided military service. These “chickenhawks” talk tough and are always ready to send others into battle—but keep themselves well out of harm’s way.
Such men are not merely contemptible; they are dangerous.
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In Bureaucracy, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Military, Politics, Social commentary on June 25, 2024 at 12:10 am
As Donald Trump campaigned for the Presidency in 2016, nearly two-thirds of Americans endorsed the use of torture to force suspected terrorists to talk, according to a March 30, 2016 Reuters/lpsos poll.
A growing fear by Americans of Islamic terrorism had been ignited by a series of deadly Islamic terrorist attacks in Europe and the United States.
- On November 13, 2015 in Paris, France, terrorists belonging to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) killed more than 100 people.
- On December 2, 2015, a married Islamic couple shot and killed 14 people at the Department of Public Health in San Bernardino, California.
- And on March 22, 2016, a series of ISIS attacks struck Brussels, Belgium. Two explosions at the city’s main international airport and a third in a subway station killed 31 persons and injured 270 more.
Click here: Most Americans Say Torturing Suspected Terrorists Is Justifiable
And the chief beneficiary of this growing fear among Americans proved to be Donald Trump.
Donald Trump
Since declaring his candidacy for the 2016 Republican nomination for President in June, 2015, Trump made the use of torture a major campaign issue. He promised to end the waterboarding ban that President Barack Obama declared at the start of his term in 2009.
During a campaign event at Arizona’s Sun City retirement community, Trump said he would reinstate waterboarding and techniques that are “so much worse” and “much stronger.”
“Don’t tell me it doesn’t work—torture works,” Trump said. “Okay, folks? Torture—you know, half these guys [say]: ‘torture doesn’t work.’ Believe me, it works. Okay?”
How he knew it worked remained unclear, since he had never served in the military or law enforcement.
And in a February 15. 2016 Op-Ed piece for USA Today, Trump declared: “I will do whatever it takes.
“I have made it clear in my campaign that I would support and endorse the use of enhanced interrogation techniques if the use of these methods would enhance the protection and safety of the nation,” he wrote.
“Though the effectiveness of many of these methods may be in dispute, nothing should be taken off the table when American lives are at stake.
“The enemy is cutting off the heads of Christians and drowning them in cages, and yet we are too politically correct to respond in kind.”
The Reuters/lpsos online poll of 1,976 Americans occurred between March 22 and 28, 2016. Among its findings:
- About 25% said that the use of torture can “often” be justified against suspected terrorists.
- Another 38% said such tactics were “sometimes” appropriate in order to obtain information.
- Only 15% opposed torture under all circumstances.
Past surveys found Americans less comfortable with the controversial tactic.
In 2014, a poll by Amnesty International revealed that about 45% of Americans supported the use of torture against terrorism suspects.
Unfortunately for Americans, the truth about torture generally—and waterboarding in particular—-is that it doesn’t work.
Victims will say anything they think their captors want to hear to stop the agony. And, in fact, subsequent investigations have shown that just that happened with Al Qaeda suspects.
Humiliating a captive at Abu Ghraib Prison
Shortly after the invasion of Afghanistan in October, 2001, hundreds of Al Qaeda members started falling into American hands. And so did a great many others who were simply accused by rival warlords of being Al Qaeda members.
The only way to learn if Al Qaeda was planning any more 9/11-style attacks on the United States was to interrogate those suspected captives. The question was: How?
The CIA and the Pentagon quickly took the “gloves off” approach. Their methods included such “stress techniques” as playing loud music and flashing strobe lights to keep detainees awake.
Some were “softened up” prior to interrogation by “third-degree” beatings. And still others were waterboarded.
In 2003, an FBI agent observing a CIA “interrogation” at Guantanamo, Cuba, was stunned to see a detainee sitting on the floor, wrapped in an Israeli flag. Nearby, music blared and strobe slights flashed.
In Osama bin Laden’s 1998 declaration of war against America, he had accused the country of being controlled by the Jews, saying the United States “served the Jews’ petty state.”
Draping an Islamic captive with an Israeli flag could only confirm such propaganda.
The FBI, on the other hand, followed its traditional “kill them with kindness” approach to interrogation.
Pat D’Amuro, a veteran FBI agent who had led the Bureau’s investigation into the 1998 bombing of the American embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, warned FBI Director Robert Mueller III:
The FBI should not be a party in the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques.” They wouldn’t work and wouldn’t produce the dramatic results the CIA hoped for.
But there was a bigger danger, D’Amuro warned: “We’ll be handing every future defense attorney Giglio material.”
The Supreme Court had ruled in Giglio vs. the United States (1972) that the personal credibility of a government official was admissible in court.
Any FBI agent who made use of extra-legal interrogation techniques could potentially have that issue raised every time he testified in court on any other matter.
It was a defense attorney’s dream-come-true recipe for impeaching an agent’s credibility—and thus ruin his investigative career.
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In Business, History, Law, Medical, Politics, Social commentary on June 21, 2024 at 12:05 am
On October 3, 2022, former President Donald Trump filed a lawsuit against CNN for defamation.
Seeking $475 million in punitive damages, he charged the network with conducting a “campaign of libel and slander” against him.
Trump claimed that CNN had used its influence to defeat him politically.
“As a part of its concerted effort to tilt the political balance to the left, CNN has tried to taint the Plaintiff with a series of ever-more scandalous, false, and defamatory labels of ‘racist,’ ‘Russian lackey,’ ‘insurrectionist,’ and ultimately ‘Hitler,'” the lawsuit claimed.
The lawsuit focused largely on CNN’s use of the term, “The Big Lie,” to describe Trump’s false claims that widespread voter fraud cost him the 2020 Presidential election.
The phrase dates from Adolf Hitler’s use of it in his autobiography, Mein Kampf: People “more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.”
Trump’s lawsuit claimed “The Big Lie” had been used in referring to him more than 7,700 times on CNN since January, 2021.
In addition, the lawsuit cited instances where CNN compared Trump to Hitler. In a January, 2022 report, Fareed Zakaria provided footage of Germany’s dictator.
On July 28, 2023, a federal judge in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, threw out Trump’s defamation lawsuit.
U.S. Judge Raag Singhal, who was nominated by Trump in 2019, said CNN’s words were opinion, not fact, and therefore could not be the subject of a defamation claim.
“CNN’s statements while repugnant, were not, as a matter of law, defamatory,” wrote Singhal. “Being ‘Hitler-like’ is not a verifiable statement of fact that would support a defamation claim.”
Trump, in fact, had zero chance of winning his lawsuit.
First: Donald Trump is a public figure—arguably the most public figure in the world. Plaintiffs who are public figures or government officials must prove themselves victims of actual malice to collect damages.
In the landmark case, New York Times v. Sullivan (1964) the Supreme Court declared that actual malice occurs when a statement is made “with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.”
This is a more stringent standard than private citizens have to meet, which is negligence.
Donald Trump
Second: Truth is an absolute defense against libel (unless the plaintiff is suing for invasion of privacy). And Trump’s history as a liar, criminal and traitor has been thoroughly established.
Liar:
- He created the lie that Barack Obama—whose birth certificate states unequivocally that he was born in Hawaii—was not an American citizen. The reason: To de-legitimize Obama as a Presidential candidate and President.
- Throughout 2020, he repeatedly lied about the dangers of COVID-19—attacking medical experts who urged citizens to mask up and social distance. As a result, by the time he left office, 400,000 Americans had died of COVID.
Criminal:
- He has been forced to shut down his Trump Foundation and forced to pay more than $2 million in court-ordered damages to eight different charities for illegally misusing charitable funds at the Foundation for political purposes.
- He was also forced to close his unaccredited Trump University for scamming its students. He had promised to teach them “the secrets of success” in the real estate industry—then delivered nothing. In 2016, a federal court approved a $25 million settlement with many of those students.
Traitor:
- On July 9, 2016, high-ranking members of his Presidential campaign met at Trump Tower with at least two lobbyists who had ties to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. The reason: To obtain “dirt” on Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.
- On July 27, 2016, Trump said at a press conference in Doral, Florida: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you are able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing [from Democratic Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s computer]. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”
These incidents were nothing less than treason—inviting a foreign power, hostile to the United States, to interfere in its Presidential election.
Third—and perhaps the most important of all: In a libel suit, the plaintiff must answer—under oath—all questions put to him by the defendant’s attorneys.
Trump, better than anyone, knows the depths of his own criminality. Just as Al Capone knew his notoriety for evil would make it impossible for him to win a libel suit, so does Trump.
On August 10, 2022, he invoked his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination nearly 450 times during a deposition at the office of New York Attorney General Letitia James, in its probe into the Trump Organization’s business practices.
And during April-May, 2024 trial for paying hush-money to porn “star” Stormy Daniels, he refused to take the witness stand.
If he refused to testify as a litigant in a libel suit, the suit would be dismissed by the judge.
So why did he file a defamation suit against CNN?
Money—not by winning an impossible lawsuit, but by raising it from his gullible and Fascistic followers.
He could claim “The court system is rigged against me.” And know that his Stormtrumper army would gladly empty their pockets—to pay his ever-mounting legal expenses.
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In Bureaucracy, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Military, Politics, Social commentary on June 14, 2024 at 12:11 am
When Andrew Jackson, seventh President of the United States from 1829 to 1837, was close to death, he asked his doctor: “What act of my administration will be most severely condemned by future Americans?”
“Perhaps the removal of the bank deposits,” said the doctor—referring to Jackson’s withdrawal of U.S. Government monies from the first Bank of the United States.
That act had destroyed the bank, which Jackson had believed was a source of political corruption.
“Oh, no!” said Jackson.
Andrew Jackson
Then, his eyes blazing, Jackson raged: “I can tell you. Posterity will condemn me more because I was persuaded not to hang John C. Calhoun as a traitor than for any other act in my life!”
John C. Calhoun had once been Vice President under Jackson and later a United States Senator from South Carolina. His fiery rhetoric and radical theories of “nullification” played a major part in bringing on the Civil War (1861-1865).
John C. Calhoun
Calhoun was an outspoken proponent of slavery, which he declared to be a “positive good” rather than a “necessary evil.” He supported states’ rights and nullification—by which states could declare null and void federal laws they deemed unconstitutional.
Over time, Southern states’ threats of “nullification” turned to threats of “secession” from the Union—and then civil war.
The resulting carnage destroyed at least 750,000 lives. More Americans died in that war than have been killed in all the major wars fought by the United States since.
When it ended, America was reinvented as a new, unified nation—and one where slavery was now banned by the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Equally important, the Federal Government had now set a precedent for using overwhelming military power to force states to remain in the Union.
But in 2012, within days of Barack Obama’s decisive winning of another four years as President, residents across the country filed secession petitions to the Obama administration’s “We the People” program.
States whose residents filed secession petitions included:
Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Nevada, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington (state), West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming.
Abraham Lincoln dedicated his Presidency—and sacrificed his life—to ensure the preservation of a truly United States.
And Robert E. Lee—the defeated South’s greatest general—spent the last five years of his life trying to put the Civil War behind him and persuade his fellow Southerners to accept their place in the Union.
But today avowed racists, Fascists and other champions of treason are working hard to destroy that union—and unleash a second Civil War.
On January 6, 2021, they illegally attacked the United States Capitol Building to halt the counting of Electoral College votes of the 2020 Presidential election. Their goal: Pressure Congress to overturn the election of former Vice President Joseph Biden’s in favor of President Donald Trump.
Not one of the Senators or Representatives who supported this treason has been indicted, let alone convicted.
And most importantly, the man who incited that treason—former President Donald Trump—has not been tried for it. He continues to spread the Big Lie that the election was “stolen” from him.
And most of his 74 million voters stand ready to commit additional acts of violence to “restore” him to office.
President Joseph Biden should follow Andrew Jackson’s example—before treasonous acts become the order of the day.
He should warn Stormtrumpers and Right-wing militia leaders that the United States Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines stand ready to squelch further outbreaks of treason. And that he will send modern-day counterparts of Union General William Tecumseh Sherman to wherever they are needed.
Sherman’s March through Georgia
Sherman cut a swath of destruction through Georgia during his now-famous “March to the Sea.” In a letter to his commanding general, Ulysses S. Grant, he expressed his formula for dealing with domestic terrorists:
“They cannot be made to love us, but they may be made to fear us. We cannot change the hearts of those people of the South.
“But we can make war so terrible that they will realize the fact that….they are still mortal and should exhaust all peaceful remedies before they fly to war.”
And Sherman’s counsel is backed up by none other than Niccolo Machiavelli, the father of modern political science.
In his masterwork, The Discouorses, he outlines the consequences of allowing lawbreakers to go unpunished:
“…Having established rewards for good actions and penalties for evil ones, and having rewarded a citizen for conduct who afterwards commits a wrong, he should be chastised for that without regard to his previous merits….
“For if a citizen who has rendered some eminent service to the state should add to the reputation and influence which he has thereby acquired the confident audacity of being able to commit any wrong without fear of punishment, he will in a little while become so insolent and overbearing as to put an end to all power of the law.”
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In Entertainment, History, RELIGION, Social commentary on May 31, 2024 at 12:10 am
Miley Cyrus has been called the “Teen Queen” of the 2000s. She is also one of the few child stars with a successful musical career as an adult.
The daughter of country singer Billy Ray Cyrus, she became a teen idol at 13 as Hannah Montana in the Disney Channel television series (2006-2011) of that name. As Hannah Montana, she achieved success on the Billboard charts with two number-one soundtracks.
But on March 1, 2012, she outraged the Christian Right by committing the ultimate sin: She believed in science.
She posted a tweet featuring a photo of the physicist Lawrence Krauss: “Beautiful.”
But it wasn’t what then-19-year-old Cyrus wrote that enraged the “kill-for-Christ” types. It was the words—from Krauss—emblazoned against the photo.
Miley Cyrus
EVERY ATOM IN YOUR BODY CAME FROM A STAR THAT EXPLODED. AND, THE ATOMS IN YOUR LEFT HAND PROBABLY CAME FROM A DIFFERENT STAR THAN THE ATOMS IN YOUR RIGHT HAND.
IT REALLY IS THE MOST POETIC THING I KNOW ABOUT THE UNIVERSE.
YOU ARE ALL STARDUST.
YOU COULDN’T BE HERE IF STARS HADN’T EXPLODED, BECAUSE THE ELEMENTS (THE CARBON, NITROGEN, OXYGEN AND ALL THE THINGS THAT MATTER FOR EVOLUTION) WEREN’T CREATED AT THE BEGINNING OF TIME, THEY WERE CREATED IN STARS.
SO FORGET JESUS. STARS DIED SO YOU COULD LIVE.
And it was those three words—“SO FORGET JESUS”—that roused right-wing Christians to deluge Cyrus’ twitter account with insults and death threats. Among these:
“So are you no longer a Christian? Forget Jesus??? Seriously? What has happened to you out there in the famous world? What????”
“You seriously believe that crap? It’s so ridiculously stupid. Go to hell.”
Cyrus quickly made it clear she didn’t intend to meekly accept such aggression. She tweeted: “U have nothing better 2 do than hate? That saddens me. Im surrounded by love Im sorry 4 whatever happened 2 make u so bitter.
“How can people take the love out of science and bring hate into religion so easily?” she asked and then quoted Albert Einstein:
“It makes me sad to think the world is this way. Like Einstein says ‘Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind.’”
She demanded that Twitter (now known as “X”) police itself against the cyber-bullies who often use its service.
Twitter said that its users should just block their harassers.
That ignored the question: If you start getting scores—or hundreds—of insulting and threatening tweets, are you supposed to take the time to block each one?
Twitter said that it would investigate violent threats, but then slopped the problem back onto the victim.
According to the Twitter Help Center:
“Contact local Law Enforcement or Trusted Individuals: We will investigate reports of violent threats but please remember we are not the police and we cannot actively work with the police to report incidents that you report to us.
“If something has gone beyond the point of a personal conflict and has turned into actual violent threats that you feel are credible, call the police.”
In short, you’re on your own.
All of which raised the question: Why do so many people who claim to be filled with Christian love instantly resort to insults, threats or violence simply because someone has dared to express a different religious opinion?
Could it be that then-Senator Barack Obama was more insightful than many fundamentalist Christians wanted to admit?
It was at an April 6, 2008 San Francisco fundraising event that the Presidential candidate said:
“You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them….
“So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
Of course, if Obama had said this about conditions in the Arab world, millions of these same fundamentalist Christians would have wildly applauded.
Obama took a lot of heat from Christian fundamentalists for his comment. But it remains true that the anger so many of these people aimed at Cyrus is out of all proportion to the “damage” inflicted by her single word: “Beautiful.”
She was not:
- Preventing anyone from worshipping as s/he pleased;
- Urging the Federal Government to ban religious worship;
- Promoting some other faith—such as Islam—over that of Christianity.
She was merely agreeing with an observation—and an opinion—of an internationally-renowned physicist.
You can agree with her. Or disagree with her. Or ignore her completely.
But Cyrus has every right to believe as she wishes.
As do fundamentalists—who believe that a man who died 2,000 years ago is going to magically return from the grave to make everything wonderful.
Clearly, many religious people—of all faiths—desperately need to remember the words of the French philosopher Voltaire: “I do not agree with what you say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.”
And he warned: “Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices.”
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In Bureaucracy, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Politics, Social commentary on May 14, 2024 at 12:10 am
Donald Trump’s followers are doing what even the Mafia has never dared: Threatening the lives of FBI agents and openly challenging the authority of the Justice Department.
On August 8, 2022, the FBI, under a search warrant issued by the Justice Department, seized 11 sets of classified documents from the former President’s home at Mar-a-Lago. These included four sets that were classified as “top secret,” according to the unsealed search warrant.
Since then, Trump’s legions of fanatical Right-wing followers have vented their fury at a wide range of their self-declared enemies: President Joe Biden, Democrats, Attorney General Merrick Garland, the Justice Department—-and especially the FBI.
On August 12, 2022, the FBI and Department of Homeland Security [DHS] issued a joint Intelligence bulletin warning of the increased threats aimed at federal law enforcement agencies.
FBI seal
“Since 8 August 2022, the FBI and DHS have identified multiple articulated threats and calls for the targeted killing of judicial, law enforcement, and government officials associated with the Palm Beach search, including the federal judge who approved the Palm Beach search warrant.
“The FBI and DHS have also observed the personal identifying information of possible targets of violence, such as home addresses and identification of family members, disseminated online as additional targets.”
“These threats are occurring primarily online and across multiple platforms, including social media sites, web forums, video sharing platforms, and image boards. The FBI and DHS would like to ensure that law enforcement, court, and government personnel are aware of the range of threats and criminal and violent incidents.
“The FBI and DHS have observed an increase in violent threats posted on social media against federal officials and facilities, including a threat to place a so-called dirty bomb in front of FBI Headquarters and issuing general calls for ‘civil war’ and ‘armed rebellion.'”
Even the Mafia—with one or two exceptions—has never threatened the lives of FBI agents. And when individual mobsters did, they found the consequences frightening.
In April, 1963, four New York mobsters knocked FBI agent John Foley to the ground, and then severely beat and kicked him. Foley had been conducting surveillance at the Brooklyn funeral of Carmine “The Doctor” Lombardozzi, a capo in the Gambino Mafia Family.
The FBI retaliated by launching an all-out war against the Gambinos. Agents leaned on the cartel’s boss, underboss, counselor and lieutenants. The Bureau also intensified the use of illegal electronic surveillance (wiretaps and hidden microphones) against the mobsters.
Map of Mafia families
Angelo Bruno, the boss of the Philadelphia crime syndicate, unwittingly informed a hidden microphone about how the FBI brutally drove home the message to “boss of all bosses” Carlo Gambino:
BRUNO: “They [the FBI] went to Carlo and named all his capos [lieutenants] to him. The FBI asked him: “Did you change the laws in your family, that you could hit FBI men, punch and kick them? Well, this is the test—that if you change the laws, and now you are going to hit FBI men, every time we pick up one of your people we are going to break their heads for them.’
“And, really, they picked up our guy, they almost killed him, the FBI. They don’t do that, you know. But they picked up one of his fellows and crippled him. They said, ‘This is an example. Now, the next time anyone lays a hand on an FBI man, that’s just a warning. There’s nothing else we have got to tell you.'”
Word traveled quickly through the nationwide organized crime network—and its leaders decreed there should be no further assaults on FBI agents.
The FBI may be gearing up to declare war on the radical Right. And it could be done the same way the FBI destroyed the Ku Klux Klan in the mid-1960s.
Klansmen had shot, lynched and bombed their way across the Deep South, especially in Alabama and Mississippi. Many Southern sheriffs and police chiefs were Klan sympathizers, if not outright members and accomplices.
On June 21, 1964, three civil rights workers disappeared in Philadelphia, Mississippi.
President Lyndon B. Johnson called J. Edgar Hoover, the legendary director of the FBI, and ordered an all-out investigation: “I want you to have the same kind of Intelligence [on the Klan] that you have on the communists.”
Poster for missing civil rights workers
For decades, Hoover had refused to tackle white hate groups. And, in truth, no President had been willing to give him the order to do so. But now a President had given him such an order.
In August, the FBI uncovered the bodies of the three missing civil rights activists—Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney.
On September 2, 1964, the Bureau launched a full-blown counterintelligence program against the Klan—COINTELPRO—WHITE HATE in FBI-speak.
Tim Weiner, author of Enemies: A History of the FBI, chronicles the methods used by the Bureau:
“WHITE-HATE intensified in the fall of 1964. It involved all the techniques in the FBI’s long-running attack on the Left. Once a week….FBI agents interrogated all known members of the White Knights of the KKK, blaming other Klansmen for being snitches and naming names, sowing deep suspicion among Klan members. Few knew who was an informer and who was not.”
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In Bureaucracy, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Military, Politics, Social commentary on April 12, 2024 at 12:13 am
During his 12-year reign, Adolf Hitler was the target of at least 42 assassination plots. The most famous of these was the one of July 20, 1944.
- So far as is known, Donald Trump has not been the target of even one.
In Hitler’s case, the plotters were officers of the German general staff—who believed the Fuhrer was leading Germany into a war it could not hope to win.
After the war’s outbreak (on September 1, 1939) most of the plotters were motivated by a desire to end the war before Allied—and especially Russian—soldiers reached Germany. But many plotters were motivated by sheer horror at the wholesale slaughters taking place in Poland and Russia.
Adolf Hitler
- In Trump’s case, a non-violent method for removal existed in the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution. This allows the Vice President and a majority of the Cabinet to recommend the removal of the President when he is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” The Vice President then becomes President.
- No Cabinet members had the courage to invoke this.
- Within the Senate and House of Representatives, Republicans acted as a rubber stamp for his every infamy. When he praised North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong-On or attacked Vietnam POW John McCain, they stayed silent. When he falsely charged massive voter fraud, Republicans stayed silent or loudly parroted his lies.
- Their most notorious example of ambition-fueled cowardice occurred on February 5, 2020. That was when the Republican-dominated Senate—ignoring the overwhelming evidence against him—acquitted Trump on both impeachment articles: Obstruction of Congress and abuse of power.
- At the Pentagon, American generals stood mute as Trump repeatedly sided with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin against the FBI, CIA and National Security Agency—and even gave classified CIA Intelligence to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
- And just as high-ranking field marshals in Hitler’s Wehrmacht held their tongues when he insulted them, so, too, did American generals when Trump belittled their intelligence and even patriotism.
- When Trump arbitrarily decided to remove American forces from Syria and Afghanistan, Secretary of Defense James Mattis resigned in protest in 2018. But then he was simply replaced by Mark Esper.
- Despite the fact that many of these men regularly came into contact with Trump, not one of them apparently plotted his removal.
- Similarly, Trump repeatedly attacked the integrity of the men and women of the FBI—even firing its director, James Comey, for daring to investigate Russia’s subversion of the 2016 election. If its agents—steeped in Federal criminal law—built a case for Trump’s indictment and prosecution, it has never come to light.
- Neither did any of his Secret Service agents register the slightest protest, despite his arrogant behavior toward them. He forced them to work without pay during his 35-day government shutdown in 2018. And he forced them to accompany him to COVID-infected states—both during the Presidential campaign and afterward. Many of them became stricken with this often fatal disease as a result.
Donald Trump
On November 3, 2020, 81,255,933 Democratic voters elected former Vice President Joseph Biden the 46th President of the United States. Trump, running for a second term, got 74,196,153 votes.
Yet almost two months after the election, Trump refused to concede, insisting that he won—and repeatedly claiming falsely that he is the victim of massive vote fraud.
This toxic lie was feverishly embraced by millions of Right-wingers, and cast a shadow of illegitimacy over the Biden administration.
This refusal to acknowledge the outcome initially denied Biden access to the money, information-sharing and machinery traditionally accorded the President-elect. Trump himself was the beneficiary of such assistance in 2016, after his win over Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
Only on November 23, 2020 was Biden acknowledged as the winner by the General Services Administration, as the Trump administration finally began the formal transition process.
Meanwhile, the COVID-19 pandemic raged across the country. More than 400,000 Americans died, by the time Trump left office. Hospitals were filled to capacity, and millions faced starvation and/or eviction.
Yet Trump remained obsessed with his loss, and did nothing to coordinate the Federal response to the pandemic.
Trump’s refusal to accept reality posed an unprecedented danger to democracy: No presidential candidate had ever refused to concede defeat once all the votes were counted and legal challenges resolved.
By refusing to commit to a peaceful transfer of power, Trump took on the classic mantle of of a dictator.
Right-wing Virginia State Senator Amanda Chase urged Trump to declare martial law and allow the military to “oversee” another election. So did disgraced ex-National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, whom Trump pardoned for lying to the FBI about private talks he had with a Russian official.
Reports have surfaced that Trump considered doing so.
History has recorded an active German resistance movement against Adolf Hitler—including no fewer than at least 42 assassination attempts. And posterity has honored its members, many of whom died heroically for standing firm against a brutal tyrant.
To its eternal shame, the same cannot be said of America during the reign of Donald Trump.
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REPUBLICANS: PREDATORS, NOT PACIFISTS: PART ONE (OF FIVE)
In Bureaucracy, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Politics, Social commentary on July 15, 2024 at 12:22 am“We mock you. We mock your fear. We want your fear. It’s going to be accountability. We are taking apart the administrative state. We’re going to destroy the deep state, and we’re going to hold everybody responsible that put this republic in the situation its in today.
“Accountability, responsibility. And that will come with authority. The authority of Donald J. Trump as the 47th president of the United States.”
The speaker was Steve Bannon, former Trump campaign manager and White House advisor. And he was issuing a warning to everyone who didn’t enthusiastically accept Donald Trump as his Once and Future Fuhrer.
Steve Rannon
Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Threats of violence have become common among Republicans since 2015, when Trump first ran for President. And they continue to cast a shadow over the 2024 Presidential campaign.
On March 16, 2016, Trump warned Republicans that if he didn’t win the GOP nomination in July, his supporters would literally riot: “I think you’d have riots. I think you would see problems like you’ve never seen before. I think bad things would happen. I really do. I wouldn’t lead it, but I think bad things would happen.”
An NBC reporter summed it up as: “The message to Republicans was clear: ‘Nice convention you got there, shame if something happened to it.’”
Eight years later, on March 16, 2024, Trump made a similar threat: “Now if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole—that’s gonna be the least of it….If this election isn’t won, I’m not sure that you’ll ever have another election in this country.”
Donald Trump
On August 9, 2016, Trump told a rally in Wilmington, North Carolina: “Hillary [Clinton] wants to abolish, essentially abolish, the Second Amendment. If she gets to pick her [Supreme Court] judges, nothing you can do folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know.”
This was Trump’s “dog-whistle” attempt to incite the assassination of Hillary Clinton—and it was so seen by responsible authorities: “Well, let me say if someone else said that outside of the hall, he’d be in the back of a police wagon now, with the Secret Service questioning him,” said Michael Hayden, former head of the CIA and National Security Agency (NSA).
In Cincinnati, a Trump supporter threatened to forcibly remove Clinton from the White House if she won the race: “If she’s in office, I hope we can start a coup. She should be in prison or shot. That’s how I feel about it,”
Dan Bowman, a 50-year-old contractor, said of Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee. “We’re going to have a revolution and take them out of office if that’s what it takes. There’s going to be a lot of bloodshed. But that’s what it’s going to take….I would do whatever I can for my country.”
In a June 19, 2015 editorial, Rolling Stone writer Jeb Lund had noted:
“The Republican Party has weaponized its supporters, made violence a virtue and, with almost every pronouncement for 50 years, given them an enemy politicized, racialized and indivisible.
“Movement conservatives have fetishized a tendentious and ahistorical reading of the Second Amendment to the point that the Constitution itself somehow paradoxically ‘legitimizes’ an armed insurrection against the government created by it.
“This is no longer an argument about whether one party’s beliefs are beneficial or harmful, but an attitude that labels leftism so antithetical to the American idea that empowering it on any level is an act of usurpation.”
Consider:
On January 8, 2011, Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was shot in the head while meeting with constituents outside a grocery store in Tucson, Arizona. After a miraculous recovery, she continues to struggle with language and has lost 50% of her vision in both eyes.
Rep. Gabrielle Giffords
She vowed to return to her former Congressional duties, but was forced to resign for health reasons in 2012.
Giffords was only one victim of a shooting spree that claimed the lives of six people and left 13 others wounded.
Also killed was Arizona’s chief U.S. District judge, John Roll, who had just stopped by to see his friend Giffords after celebrating Mass.
Although the actual shooter, Jared Lee Loughner, was immediately arrested, those who fanned the flames of political violence that consumed 19 people that day have remained unpunished.
Consider the circumstances behind the shootings:
John Roll is Arizona’s chief federal judge. Appointed in 2006, he wins acclaim as a respected jurist and leader who pushes to beef up the court’s strained bench to handle a growing number of border crime-related cases.
In 2009, he becomes a target for threats after allowing a $32 million civil-rights lawsuit by illegal aliens to proceed against a local rancher. The case arouses the fury of local talk radio hosts, who encourage their audiences to threaten Roll’s life.
In one afternoon, Roll logs more than 200 threatening phone calls. Callers threaten the judge and his family. They post personal information about Roll online.
Roll and his wife are placed under fulltime protection by deputy U.S. marshals. Roll finds living under security “unnerving and invasive.”
Authorities identify four men believed responsible for the threats. But Roll declines to press charges on the advice of the Marshals Service.
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