We knew that others would enter the fray of the fraying prez. And so it is that two knowledgeable sources tell the New York Times
Trump

pushed the Australian prime minister during a recent telephone call to help Attorney General William P. Barr gather information for a Justice Department inquiry that Mr. Trump hopes will discredit the Mueller investigation…

Nice comment from a NYT reader:

Maybe Trump can ring up the ambassador to Nevis and see if he has any dirt on Alexander Hamilton. That way, he can undermine and discredit this pesky thing called the U.S. Constitution.

Recognizing Trump as pure Père Ubu, this blog in 2016 featured some posts imagining a new American version of Jarry’s great play whose main character is Trubu. Trump’s Grand Victory silenced UD‘s parodic energy, but the powerful reemergence – under impeachment pressure – of the man’s ubuesque character has me, if not penning an additional scene or two of Trubu Roi, at least turning to one of Ubu’s greatest perceivers, Roger Shattuck.

(A comment of Timothy Snyder’s on the Rachel Maddow Show had me thinking Trubu thoughts again; he described Trump’s “scorn for the idea of law… [For him,] there isn’t really law. It’s just a joke.” Instantly I pictured vile, hilarious, obscene Ubu rolling around the stage slashing and burning because everything except his power over other people is a joke.)

Shattuck:

[Ubu is] the representative of primitive earthy conduct, unrelieved by any insight into his own monstrosity, uncontrollable as an elephant on the rampage… [M]ankind in the shape of Ubu dredges the depths of its nature…

Can we really laugh at Ubu, at his character?  It is doubtful, for he lacks the necessary vulnerability,  the vestiges of original sin.  Not without dread, we mock, rather, his childish innocence and primitive soul and cannot harm him.  He remains a threat because he can destroy at will, and the political horrors of the twentieth century make the lesson disturbingly real… Jarry’s humor [in the play] may be regarded as a psychological refusal to repress distasteful images.  He laughed and invited us to laugh at Ubu’s most monstrous behavior, not because we are immune – we are, in fact, deathly afraid of the ‘truth’ of Ubu  – but because it is a means of domesticating fear and pain… [Humor] demands that we reckon with the realities of human nature and the world without falling into grimness and despair.

In other words:

Keep smiling through
Just like you always do
‘Till the blue skies drive the dark clouds far away

Bless him. Go fund him.

When you see all the numbers, it’s astounding that it’s taken this long for the idiotic authoritarianism of the haredim to be pushed aside in Israel.

[A] solid majority of Israeli Jews wants government policy to be far less influenced by Jewish law than it is now.

A total of 64 percent of respondents want there to be separation of religion and state in Israel, while 68 percent want Israel to recognize civil marriages.

Sixty-four percent do not want any religious body to have governmental authority in Israel, according to the poll. At present, Israel’s Orthodox Chief Rabbinate controls marriage, divorce, burial and other affairs in Israel.

A total of 62 percent want Israel to recognize a range of Jewish conversion ceremonies — not just Orthodox ones.

Not in Pakistan it don’t, babe. Shush. Stay in Saudi.

Not that Saudi is safe from the evil intentions of women who insist on being free.

If you truly wish to live where all the women wear burqas, there’s always Al Hol.

She loves the mad things they say, the mad things they do – in airplanes, on city streets, in schools, at archeological sites… She has been able to count on them for madcap anti-democratic action lo all these years.

Nor does she think the very bad outcome for them in the latest Israeli election will stop them from wrapping themselves in cellophane on jetliners or spitting at insufficiently orthodox eight year old girls and calling them whores, etc., etc. After all, God calls them to this behavior.

No, now that they’re cornered by a secular country that hates them, UD expects the ultras to go positively batshit with rage and paranoia.

But, as one observer points out, the election results have thrown a wrench in Bibi’s effort to shut down Israel’s Supreme Court (“Netanyahu does not have the votes to get himself a government that will … tinker with the Supreme Court“), which means that the extreme and endemic law-breaking of the ultras will be punished. And that will be fun to watch too.

UD‘s favorite headline so far from Israel’s close election.

Headlines like At Last, Israelis Are Turning Away From Their Medieval Religious Maniacs certainly sound promising, but even if a secular coalition prevails, Israel will still need to do something about its many varieties of other right-wing cultists. Not only that, but any felt threat to the ultraorthodox will have the haredim pouring into the streets and burning down their neighborhoods. (Note, in the headline, the word maniacs.)

… where things got violent between burqa and non-burqa factions on a college campus there. Burqas have now been banned from the school. It would be good to know who started things. If the model for this sort of outbreak is Tunisia, yikes.

Airport security people in Canada tell a girl to remove her hijab for a moment, and the girl makes a HUMONGOUS fuss and her father threatens to sue over this horror etc. Meanwhile, in the real world, more and more Iranian women are being imprisoned for lengthy periods of time in some of that country’s most dangerous prisons because of their courageous militancy against the compulsory hijab and myriad other theocratic repressions.

Assuming you have any interest at all in the business of women – girls – veiling themselves or being made to veil, UD suggests you’ll spend your time more wisely attending to the women of Iran.

… vagina…’

… receives some legal backing in England, where a high court judge has turned down a request to reinstate an ISIS member’s citizenship.

The father of a British-born student who travelled to Syria to join Islamic State (IS) has lost a legal fight to keep his son’s UK citizenship after he was stripped of it by the former home secretary Amber Rudd in 2017.  

Abdullah Islam had wanted his 22-year-old son, Ashraf Mahmud Islam, who joined IS aged 18 and is now being held in a Kurdish-run military prison in Syria, brought back to the UK to face justice and to be protected from facing the death penalty.

However, in the first case of its kind in the High Court, his case was rejected on Wednesday in a judgement which could set a precedent for other alleged British IS fighters and their wives who face or have had their citizenship revoked.

The judge’s remarks were scathing.

My posts on the issue can be found here (it’s the first seven entries).

Music to UD‘s ears: An ultraorthodox man demands that a woman sitting next to him on an El Al flight move because he refuses to sit next to women. Instead of letting him rant on and eventually force the woman to move, the flight director tells him what it says in UD‘s headline: Fuck off.

As long as Israel’s courts remain real courts (not guaranteed!), her heroine, Anat Hoffman, who with her organization brought the suit that forced gender equality on El Al, will keep winning virtually every case she brings, just the way she won this one.

Hoffman was on this particular plane; she witnessed the exchange.

I was proud to hear the flight director use the exact wording as promised by El Al in court. It was as if she were reading from the verdict itself, stating in no uncertain terms that the in-flight staff would not ask the woman to change her seat. If the staff had acted differently, and if they had, in any way, asked the female passenger to change her seat ‘for everyone’s benefit,’ I would have encouraged her to sue El Al. That passenger did not know it, but she had all of IRAC—a powerful ally—standing behind her.

Before the flight director finally issued an ultimatum to this man, other people on the plane began to pressure the woman to move, practically bringing her to tears. But, as UD‘s beloved Christopher Hitchens used to say, “Enough with clerical and religious bullying and intimidation.”

That was 2016; since then, Angela Merkel has called for a ban.

With its eyes on the Netherlands, where a ban just went into effect, Merkel’s party has once again brought up the matter. It will not go away, and Germany, which already has a partial ban, will eventually get a full one.

‘Quick! Hypertonic saline!’

‘Fuck that. Get this chick an abbayah.’