As soon as I saw the headline today about Coates, my first thought was “This is not good.” Not just because of what Barr is threatening to do with intelligence - although that is indeed some scary shit - but more so the fact that Trump is now really and truly staffing the Executive with loyalists and threatening to remake the bureaucracy in his own image.
What do you think the FBI will look like when he keeps going through directors, when he forces out Wray, and then forces out the guy after him? What do you think prosecutors at the Department of Justice will be like when Barr’s finished doing his kitchen remodeling in that agency? What do you think federal courts will look like when Trump and McConnell are done filling them with ideological radicals? He’s setting this up to go after his enemies, and Mueller reminded Trump this week that he has every reason in the world to do so.
As I’ve said before, when the law came looking for Trump, when career civil servants vowed to uphold the rule of law, and when Democrats vowed to be the party that defended those who did, 2020 was no longer a presidential election; it’s a referendum on Trump’s survival. If he wins, he will crush his enemies.
So far as I can tell, there’s no reasonable argument to be made by any common understanding of the word “hero” that would put Cummings into that bucket. He is one of the few people in Congress who seems to be steadily and reasonably fulfilling their oath of office (see also Richard Burr, Tim Scott, and Steve Cohen), but I shudder to think that we would call that heroism.
On the other hand, the Commander in Chief is a guy who embezzled from a charity for US veterans so, on the balance of where we are politically, we’re probably not too far away from that shudder.
I wish I could dismiss this with that common Pit refrain about you drinking too much, but: this is the cold sober truth.
Coats is a Republican, but he’s one of those old-school Republicans who don’t believe in prostrating themselves before the Dear Leader. So of course his days have been numbered for a long time, now.
His replacement apparently secured the job just days ago with his performance attacking Mueller:
So this partisan hack will make sure our intelligence services are purged of those who decline to pledge personal loyalty to Il Douche.
When I’ve gone “chicken little” in these threads, it’s not because I’ve believed that we’re all going to be tossed into a salt mine for posting too much on SDMB. That’s not really what life in an authoritarian country looks or feels like. Life in an authoritarian country means that big business can cheat you out of money, force you to work overtime without paying, trick you into believing you have insurance you don’t really have, poison your drinking water, pump filth into the air you breathe, make the cars you drive and the planes you fly much more dangerous, the food you eat contaminated, the apartments you live in affordable one month, completely unaffordable the next…and there’s not a fucking thing you can do about it, because everyone knows that elections are probably a sham and that guy in the agency who promised to look into your grievance works for the guy who’s taking money from an investor in some business that’s ruining your life. That’s what life in an authoritarian country looks like. And that’s the world I’m afraid we’re heading into.
Good article, good post. But I think I can refute at least a word of Sumner’s opinion, namely that it isn’t the case that every. single. source. of information is blocked. For example, there are things like the journals Nature or Applied Chemistry, to name just two. The IPCC report is still available if you want to make an evidence-based argument for climate change. So, public sources of information still exist, and our own eyes of course.
Not sure what to do about all of this though. It is starting to look like some kind of fascist emergency, yet I can feel my own denial because of the comfortable above-it-all bubble I (fortunately) inhabit. Maybe things won’t go full-tilt crazy, right?
But, I’ve had the nightmare about The Autocrat for many years, going back long before Trump. When a nightmare comes true, well, it’s not good. Does it seem like a nightmare coming true to you dopers? The mass detentions on the border are kind of a nightmare, whether they are literally concentration camps or not. The unprecedented silence out of the executive branch is certainly ominous- everybody who knows anything seems to be behaving like one of Trump’s NDA-silenced whores, bound with tape over their mouths. Isn’t that an image straight from Trump’s speeches?
What do we do next? Sumner thinks Trump will ignore even the Supreme Court if they order him to hand over information. That is at least a forward looking statement; we don’t know yet. Will the House send their Sergeant at Arms to apprehend Barr &etc. for their blatant flouting of subpoenas and the law generally? Are they “spineless wienies” again if they don’t? Are the Dems spineless wienies for being caught flat-footed by such an assault of criminality?
Well, tell me if there is really an assault of criminality afoot in America these days. If so, then there is a nightmare scenario playing out. If not, I’m overly paranoid and too reactive towards all the sensationalist shit flying around lately. But the complete stonewall of information in defiance of subpoenas and the law is hard to ignore.
Oh, you can do that with anyone’s disjointed ramblings. Just cut it into lines and stanzas and publish it as “free verse.”
I have a copy somewhere of the “Poetry of Phil Rizzuto,” where someone took his bizarre, non-sequitur-filled baseball commentary and did the same thing. It was faintly amusing, whereas I don’t think the Trump book would be.
I love how they pasted his head onto Dylan Thomas’s body for the cover photo, though.
Heck, there’s even a thread here dedicated to the “found poetry” of Donald Trump!
(I like poetry, as well – hell, that was partially my major – and the Don’s blatherings lend themselves quite well to this type of found poetry treatment.)
No. I said that something Trump could do to help the impoverished citizens of Baltimore would be to veto any minimum wage legislation that made it to his desk.