Teapot Dome, the Bush-Cheney-Halliburton Redistribution of Wealth, and the financial scandals of the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant are insufficient.
We literally have to compare this—to again use John Cleese’s line—this crew of a governmental pirate ship to Batman villains. All Batman villains. All of them in one movie, like the Adam West movie with the Joker, the Penguin, the Riddler, Catwoman, and the other denizens of what the filmmakers dubbed “United Underworld.”
Let’s meet them.
And let’s dub them Citizens United Underworld.
Starting in the cabinet—and this first one may be the least offensive.
The nominee for secretary of defense, James Mattis. Who noted that it’s fun to shoot some people. And who, per federal law, is not eligible to become secretary of defense until May 22, 2020, because a secretary of defense must be retired seven years from active military service. Trump’s going to get them to waive that.
Waive this: Mattis is on the board of General Dynamics. Which makes tanks and submarines and other stuff the Pentagon buys.
And he may be the best of them.
Betsy DeVos, secretary of education nominee. Big advocate of spending public money on religious schools and fifteen years ago told a conference of Christians that doing so was an opportunity to “advance God’s kingdom.”
Secretary of education. Under a president-elect who said we should be teaching patriotism in schools.
The would-be secretary of health and human services: congressman and orthopedic surgeon Tom Price. He is a member of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, which opposes vaccination programs in schools, suggested a link between abortion and breast cancer, and once posted an article on its website that postulated that presidential candidate Barack Obama was so popular because in his speeches he was using a hidden form of hypnosis.
A secretary of health and human services who is a member of an organization full of anti-vaxxers, and who believes in Hypnotoad.
The attorney general you know.
Jeff Sessions, the senator representing the Keebler Elf Magic Tree. Prosecuted black voters in Alabama for voting. Allegedly called the ACLU and the NAACP “un-American.” Admitted during testimony to the Senate that he believed the NAACP and another group “may have taken positions that I consider to be averse to the security interests of the United States.”
The other group was . . . the National Council of Churches.
Transportation secretary nominee Elaine Chao. From the Bush administration, where she was labor secretary and where she drastically cut the roster of mine safety inspectors, and the number of mine inspections, just before eighteen miners and three rescue workers were killed at Sago, West Virginia, and Crandall Canyon, Utah.
Plus she’s married to Senator Mitch McConnell, which suggests she has no judgment whatsoever.
Wilbur Ross, Commerce.
The supposed wizard of the distressed assets business.
Except that his funds tanked after he bet on dry bulk shipping . . . and Greek banks.
Greek banks.
Even I know not to invest in Greek banks.
Trump’s man for Treasury: Steve Mnuchin.
Seven years ago, he and his cronies bought a failed mortgage company, IndyMac. They foreclosed on as many as 36,000 homeowners, including one woman—aged ninety—after a payment error.
She owed twenty-seven cents.
So Mnuchin’s company threw her out.
Over twenty-seven cents.
*
Here are a few Batman villains mentioned, but not yet named, for other cabinet posts.
At the Department of Agriculture: Sid Miller.
Called Hillary Clinton the c-word.
Also has a Facebook page filled with fake news, including details of the secret Houston jihadist training camp that doesn’t exist.
Possible secretary of the interior: former Arizona governor Jan Brewer, who once insisted the desert covering her state’s border with Mexico was full of severed heads.
Rumored at Veterans Affairs: Scott Brown. Former Massachusetts senator. Former nude model.
Prospective head of the Office of Management and Budget: Gary Cohn. President of Goldman Sachs.
Goldman Sachs: the company Trump alleged Hillary Clinton was in the pocket of.
Goldman Sachs: which Trump supporters chanted at Ted Cruz.
Goldman Sachs: which reports that current Republican tax plans will increase the debt to $1 trillion by 2020, but that Trump’s tax plan will increase it to one . . . and a half trillion.
At Homeland Security: Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke, who has had four deaths in his jail since April and, when a county supervisor criticized him over that, called for the county supervisor to be prosecuted.
Clarke also insisted that the presidential election was rigged, and thus “it is pitchfork-and-torches time in America!”
After Trump won the election that Clarke insisted was rigged, Clarke didn’t understand why anybody was protesting: “These temper tantrums from these radical anarchists must be quelled,” he said. “There is no legitimate reason to protest the will of the people.”
Yeah—in a sanity test, I’m not betting on him to pass.
Then there’s ex–campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, who could wind up somewhere.
She got into a shouting match last week with Clinton campaign people. When their manager accused Conway of providing “a platform for white supremacists,” Conway feigned shock, said, “Hashtag he’s your president,” and later whined that she took the comment personally.
She should. If you abetted Trump, you’re either a white supremacist or somebody who doesn’t mind white supremacists, Kellyanne Conway. Which is worse.
Named to non-cabinet positions:
Senior counselor and chief strategist: Stephen Bannon.
From Breitbart, a website that makes shit up.
Last week, as the idiot-elect walked near and then amid a group of photographers and reporters, Bannon asked a press aide, “Who are all these photographers and why are they here?”
There came the answer, “This is the press pool.”
Chief. Of. Strategery . . . you say?
Deputy national security adviser: K. T. McFarland, who six years ago called a secrets leaker a “terrorist.”
That was Julian Assange.
That was before Julian Assange started working to get Trump elected.
McFarland’s website, Twitter account, and Facebook page were all scrubbed off the internet this week.
*
One overview: This tweet from somebody named Bruce Mehlman, mocking the Bernie Sanders tweet about the Trump administration “of, by, and for the millionaires and billionaires.”
“Interesting to see Democrats’ selective populism . . .” he writes. “Rich Obama nominees get confirmed, rich Trump nominees get attacked.”
The net worth of the nine Obama people there?
A combined $497,600,000. Which is a lot less.
A lot less—the combined worth of the nine rich Obama appointees is one-fifth of what Wilbur Ross is worth alone. One-tenth of what Betsy DeVos is worth alone.
*
Oh, and one guy I left out.
Former lieutenant general, now national security adviser, Michael Flynn, who thinks CNN and MSNBC are state-run television.
Who has taken payments from the Russians.
And who was, of course, one of those jackasses who spread the false internet story that Hillary Clinton was involved in some kind of child sex ring centered in a Washington restaurant.
A restaurant into which walked—last Sunday—a man carrying an assault rifle, who said he was there to “self-investigate” the story.
“National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.”
He coul
d’ve gotten innocent Americans killed . . . with his computer; Trump wants him to tell him when to start blowing things up.
General Flynn has no business in any government, except perhaps that of North Korea.
But therein lies the problem with Batman villains. They’re so over-the-top, you think they can’t be real. And then along comes Donald Trump.
And for the record, Trump is not the Puzzler from Batman. That was actor Maurice Evans.
Any similarity is purely coincidental.
RUSSIA
Post date • MONDAY, DECEMBER 12
We are at war with Russia.
Or, perhaps more correctly, we have lost a war with Russia, without a battle.
We are no longer a sovereign nation.
We are no longer a democracy.
We are no longer a free people.
We are the victims of a bloodless coup—so far a bloodless coup—engineered by Russia with, at best, the traitorous indifference of the Republican Party and Donald John Trump, a man who, to borrow a phrase from another December long ago, will live in infamy.
In five weeks’ time—unless desperate measures are taken—we will hand over the government to a man who lost the popular vote by more than John F. Kennedy and George W. Bush won it by, a man whom the Russians wanted to run our country for them, a man whom the Russians got to run our country for them, a man for whom the Russians interfered with our elections—which is an act of war.
And in this country?
We have conceded defeat.
Some experts—John Kasich’s strategist, John Weaver, for one—have compared this to Pearl Harbor. Even the hard-right ex-congressman Joe Walsh says, “Republican silence will be tantamount to treason.” Some others, too, have proved courageous.
Trump, self-destructive to the last, issued a childish statement mocking the CIA but, as Tim Dickinson of Rolling Stone noted, not denying anything.
But the vast majority of Republicans have said nothing. And the vast majority of Democrats have said nothing. And the vast majority of the media has said nothing. The president has said nothing close . . . to enough.
The CIA and the FBI and Homeland Security—the institutions whose interest in freedom we on the left most frequently distrust—they have said something. They said it first to congressional and Senate Republicans and Democrats in September—dire warnings, warnings that Mitch McConnell and other Republicans buried—warnings that the Russians, using computer hacking and perhaps other means, were not merely trying to discredit the election but to achieve the specific outcome of electing their man Trump.
And finally, at the very last hour, some of those who did the briefings and some of those who received them leaked the details. To The New York Times, The Washington Post, CBS News, Reuters—in a torrent of anguished honesty.
They said something.
They said something as the president-not-elect began to veer toward appointing as secretary of state—as our diplomatic face to the world—the CEO of Exxon, who three years ago received the Order of Friendship from . . .Vladimir Putin.
They said something as the members of the Electoral College prepared to gather next Monday to finalize this coup, some unaware that half of the states they represent permit them by law to vote for someone other than the candidate to whom they are pledged, and that only thirty-eight of them need to do so to prevent the coup.
They said something as one especially chilling detail in one of the reports sailed by: that “the Russians hacked the Republican National Committee’s computer systems in addition to their attacks on Democratic organizations, but did not release whatever information they gleaned from the Republican networks.”
It is a short leap from that conclusion—and it is anything but a conspiracy theory—to wondering whether the Russians hacked the RNC and have kept what they found, to make sure Trump and the Republicans . . . obeyed.
*
The president of the United States, who at this rate will be the last freely elected president of the United States, made, in his measured way, a gesture last Friday that perhaps opened the door for these horrifying revelations of a coup by an outside power, nearly complete. He asked for a full report.
But we do not have time for a full report.
Barack Obama has twice stood in front of America, in front of the world, in front of history, and said, “I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
Today is the time for him to do so!
He must immediately declassify and release all relevant materials held by the FBI, the CIA, the DHS, and the other intelligence and security services, and in the White House, and anywhere else.
And the attorney general must immediately appoint a special prosecutor to investigate what Donald Trump knew and when he knew it, and what, if any, collusive links exist now or existed earlier between the Russian Federation and the Republican National Committee. If Trump does grab power, he can try to dismiss this special prosecutor, but he will at least have to get the courts to sanction it.
*
There are no arguments of security or face-saving or intelligence secrecy or national interest that carry any weight now. How much worse can it get if America is told the unvarnished, unprocessed, unredacted truth about this coup? We are already on the precipice of losing the freedom and independence of this nation!
The attorney general must tell us, so that we may defend ourselves.
He must tell the electors of the Electoral College so that, microscopic as the chance may be, they can still prevent this cataclysm.
There is no time for a full report or a measured analysis or recommendations to prevent interference in our future elections, because permitting Donald Trump to assume the office of president reduces the chance that we will have future elections.
The nation and all of our freedoms hang by a thread, and the military apparatus of this country is about to be handed over to scum who are beholden to scum—Russian scum.
As things are today, January 20 will not be an inauguration, but the end of the United States as an independent country. It will not be a peaceful change of power; it will be a usurpation, and the usurper has no validity, no credibility, and no authority under the Constitution.
This is a reality that will become the only reality until this country rids itself of Donald John Trump. He is not a president; he is a puppet put in power by Vladimir Putin.
And those who ignore these elemental, existential facts—Democrats or Republicans—are traitors to this country and will immediately—and forever after—be held accountable.
“I’M, LIKE, A SMART PERSON”
Post date • TUESDAY, DECEMBER 13
He has been put into the White House by the evil of another nation, and yet all our politicians will do is promise reports and committees whose words will be too measured and too late . . .
And now he will not listen to the daily intelligence briefings.
“I’m, like, a smart person,” he said Sunday—factually correct, incidentally. Perhaps like a smart person, but not actually a smart person.
“I’m, like, a smart person. I don’t have to be told the same thing and the same words every single day for the next eight years.”
He will not attend the daily intelligence briefings.
“If something should change from this point, immediately call me. I’m available on one minute’s notice.”
But he would not necessarily believe the daily intelligence briefings anyway.
After the wave of reports about the intelligence agencies confirming Russia’s intervention in our election:
“These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.”
No, actually, the intelligence a
gencies kept insisting that there were no such weapons, and they kept having their reports thrown back in their face by the administration of a president who was, like, a smart person and knew better.
“The election ended a long time ago in one of the biggest Electoral College victories in history.”
The Electoral College vote hasn’t happened yet.
If no pledged elector changes his vote, his margin will be the thirteenth smallest in history.
But he knows better.
He always knows better.
A CIA conclusion that the Russians interfered with our sovereignty, our freedoms, our elections, to put him in office?
“I think it’s ridiculous. I think it’s just another excuse. I don’t believe it.”
Who was the last president who would not listen to the daily intelligence briefings?
How many Americans were killed because George W. Bush did not listen to the President’s Daily Brief from the intelligence community?
Three thousand on 9/11 and seven thousand more U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Because what do you need intelligence for if you’re . . . like . . . a smart person?
*
And still, it is worse.
Because from all that we have covered in this space for three months—the day in October when Trump slipped up and repeated the same mistaken attribution of a quote that a Russian propaganda site had made; the day his confidant praised WikiLeaks and intimated something bad was going to happen to John Podesta just before Podesta’s emails were hacked and released by WikiLeaks; all the evidence of Russia’s personal manipulation of Trump through his cronies, like Paul Manafort and Carter Page and Roger Stone, and now through Vladimir Putin’s pals like would-be Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and the putrid Congressman Dana Rohrabacher . . .
Because all of that—and more—suggests that Donald Trump isn’t just a stupid man’s idea of what, like, a smart man would be; he is a man whose assumption that he has the inside information, and everybody else is just guessing, appears to be based on knowledge provided to him . . . by Russia.
Trump Is F*cking Crazy (This Is Not a Joke) Page 17