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.
Now that he’s gleefully invoked an oncoming civil war, the leader of the free world has inspired a tsunami of some of Scathing Online Schoolmarm‘s favorite words — from Republicans as much as Democrats. These are strong, uncompromising words; these are words that do not mince words. These are not words like inappropriate, questionable, offensive; they are words like disgusting, repellent, and repulsive. Vile, abhorrent, contemptible. Ghastly, loathsome, fetid.
Everyone calls the Isettes “brides” – jihadi brides, ISIS brides, I.S. brides… Sheer sexism, mes petites; a way of cutesying them and why? Everyone knows it’s Always a terrorist; never a bride; everyone gets that it’s like the first page of DeLillo’s cult classic (if you will) Mao II, which describes a mass Moonie wedding in Yankee Stadium: “grouped in twos, eternal boy-girl.”
Anonymous commandeered fuck-couplings (‘Ms Begum said her only role in the caliphate was to “make babies”) don’t really strike UD as very bridey…
Maybe you’re different. Maybe when you think of a filthy tenth century setting in which brainless degenerates deposit sperm after getting themselves sexually excited by watching beheadings you picture a dewy girl in a gown, catching her breath before saying I do… Ms Begum spent her nights fucking men she was directed to fuck and her sweltering days swaddled in black – you can call this way of life many things, but the adjective “bridal” doesn’t pop to mind.
Marsha gets to be not a murderer. She gets to be Mom.
As the debate over repatriating some of the most dangerous people in the world proceeds, UD hopes that the press will gradually phase out the whole bride thing.
[Before Hunter Biden’s legal but unethical activity in Ukraine,] there was already a template… for how insiders in a gas-rich kleptocracy could exploit … a [government] crisis using Western “advisers” to facilitate and legitimize their plunder—and how those Westerners could profit handsomely from it. A dozen-plus years earlier, amid the collapse of the U.S.S.R. of which Ukraine was a part, a clutch of oligarchs rifled the crown jewels of a vast nation. We know some of their names, in some cases because of the work of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office: Oleg Deripaska, Viktor Vekselberg, Dmitry Rybolovlev, Leonard Blavatnik. That heist also was assisted by U.S. consultants, many of whom had posts at Harvard and at least one of whom was a protégé of future Treasury Secretary Larry Summers.
Yes, she’s talking about Professor Andrei Shleifer, whose greed cost Harvard millions, but all is forgiven.
*****************
UD wants very badly to see the end of Trump.
Yet she also thanks Chayes for focusing on a particularly disgusting practice.
Scratch into the bios of many former U.S. officials who were in charge of foreign or security policy in administrations of either party, and you will find “consulting” firms and hedge-fund gigs monetizing their names and connections.
Crazy old farts never die; they simply go to seed in public. Whether you’re singling out Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, Moscow Mitch, Alan Dershowitz, Placido Domingo, Bill Cosby, Robert Byrd, or Strom Thurmond (I think the last two are dead) for your viewing pleasure, there’s always something clinically fascinating about old fart flame-out.
As the walls close in on him, expect to see Trump, like Ronald Reagan with Nancy, clutching Melania’s hand and calling her Mommy.
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.
“It is undisputed that Rick Singer prayed on Stephen [Semprevivo], and parents like him, in his 25-million-dollar racketeering bonanza, that to some real extent makes Stephen a victim,” [the Varsity Blues parent’s lawyer] wrote.
Carrying a gun isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. I learned that most people I encountered actually didn’t feel better knowing that I had a gun. And, though I tried to keep it concealed in a hip holster under a shirt or jacket, the people who inevitably did glimpse it frequently wondered why I had it and whether my gun or my presence put them in danger — like the staff and customers who panicked at that Walmart in Missouri. Even the people who knew and trusted me — knowing that I was a responsible gun owner who had been threatened — wondered if being near me in public exposed them to … danger …
… it’s SO much like this one – so much like hunderts of ‘merican boy deaths – that I thought I’d throw it into the mix.
A man, [who had earlier consumed alcohol and taken a Percocet pain for which he didn’t have a prescription], admiring a friend’s pistol during a gathering of friends, accidentally shot and killed another man with it …
[The shooter] had asked to hold a visitor’s pistol, which was loaded but did not have a bullet in the chamber. While admiring the gun, [he] pulled its slide back and simultaneously squeezed its trigger, police said, citing the witnesses’ accounts.
One of the visitors said he tried to warn [him] that he had loaded a bullet into the pistol’s chamber when he pulled the slide back, but it was too late — he had already fired the gun.
If [Judge Loretta] Preska’s deployment of sarcasm is any indication, I’d say that the Dershowitz team should be sweating. The judge asked pointed questions to both sides but I thought she was a lot more skeptical of the arguments that Dershowitz’s legal team was putting forward.
A number of times, Preska said to Dershowitz’s lawyers, Howard Cooper and Imran Ansari, about their arguments, “I don’t get it.” For instance, Preska asked why Dershowitz failed to raise the conflict issue about Boies Schiller’s representation of [Virginia] Giuffre in previous litigations related to the Epstein matter, though the professor made noises about doing so. (Dershowitz claims that Boies Schiller has a conflict because its partner Carlos Sires had offered to represent him after Giuffre accused the professor of sexual abuse, and that he had sent the firm confidential information as a result.)
When Dershowitz’s lawyer Ansari argued that he’s now raising the conflict issue because he’s being directly sued for defamation, Preska was unimpressed and shot back, “What difference should that make?”
Nor was she impressed by Ansari’s suggestion that Boies Schiller used dirty tactics. “Why are you telling me this?” Preska asked. “I don’t care.”
And she seemed even more unconvinced that Dershowitz had established a client/lawyer relationship with Boies Schiller that would merit the firm’s disqualification. She noted that when told by Sires that the firm could not represent him, Dershowitz replied in an email: “Darn. I was really hoping that you could come on board.”
Preska hammered away at that response.
“It’s the subjunctive,” she said. “He’s not writing back and saying, ‘Holy Moly, you said you’d represent me.’ He’s saying, ‘I was hoping you could do it.’”
At that point, Ansari looked stumped. He reminded me of myself as a law student during moot court. Scared.
