Fuckface’s legal team resigns.

Likely replacements.

Or maybe this is the female genital mutilator’s best friend’s moment to shine!

We are appalled by the blatant disregard shown by some of our own coreligionists for the age-old requirements of our own Torah, as well as the dictates of common sense. We watch in horror as some segments of the community conduct large weddings and pack synagogues and places of study with those who too often disregard masking and social-distancing requirements. We are mortified by street demonstrators who have burnt garbage, engaged in crude rhetoric and even physically targeted dissenting ultra-Orthodox Jews.

Orthodox Jews begin to do what they should have done long ago: Draw a very bright line between recognizable members of a shared Jewish faith and irresponsible, violent, cultists.

Where, by the way, is Alan Dershowitz, a man who has been the voice of all things Jewish/Israeli for decades? Where is his condemnation? Or does he not condemn?

UD‘s developing a crush on Elizabeth Dye, a writer for Above the Law. You should read her full piece on Dersh’s latest lawsuit; here are some highlights.

Alan Dershowitz is suing CNN for $300 million because the network defamatorily failed to quote a full paragraph of his arglebargling about Donald Trump’s impeachment, giving viewers the entirely false impression that the famed lawyer has lost his damn mind…

Were you under the impression that Dersh might have ruined his own reputation by going on Laura Ingraham’s show to shout about his “perfect, perfect sex life” …?

Or maybe your esteem started flagging at the quixotic attempt to quiet doubters by proving that he never not ever had sex with underage girls when he was hanging out with Jeffrey Epstein, an effort Dersh has bolstered by protracted litigation and public efforts to Zapruder the flight logs to show that he only went to Epstein’s sex island in the company of his wife.

… Might Americans have decided the famed constitutional scholar had lost a step when he took to the airways to assure Americans that he only got one massage at Jeffrey Epstein’s house, from an “old Russian woman,” and he kept his underwear on the whole time? Or when he threatened to sue CBS because a fictional character made a joke about it?

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Und so so so so so so weiter. Put DERSHOWITZ in my search engine for much more madness.

UD‘s explanation for the 82 year old Dershowitz’s behavior? It is part of his personal longevity routine. Not Blue Zone, but Sue Zone: As long as he’s bitterly embroiled in litigation with everyone in the world, his heart pumps lustily; he lives to sue another day. It’s the Jarndyce v. Jarndyce anti-jaundice treatment. And you gotta admit: It’s working.

Which – I’m having trouble keeping track, but … – which I think is the next thing that’s gonna happen to Alan Dershowitz.

… but …

Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule, currently enjoying his three minutes of fame onaccounta this concentration camp witticism, offers Alan Dershowitz serious competition in the Most Fucked Up Harvard Law Professor contest.

Since converting to Catholicism, Vermeule is now an advocate of integralism, a Roman Catholic political doctrine which calls for the abolition of the division between church and state, in order that the resulting state – which integralists deny would be a theocracy – can promote a religiously-determined “Highest Good” in place of the personal autonomy of a liberal democracy. Their ideal is to create this new confessional Catholic regime through “strategic raillement,” or transformation from within institutions and bureaucracies, rather than by winning elections. The groundwork for a full integralist regime would then be in place when liberal democracy dies. The new state would “exercise coercion over baptized citizens in a manner different from non-baptized citizens.” To achieve this end, Vermeule advocates giving confirmed Catholics priority in immigration, allowing them to “jump immediately to the head of the queue.” Vermeule describes this as being essential to “the eventual formation of the Empire of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and ultimately the world government required by natural law.”

Gloriosky.

Dershowitz’s l’etat, c’est moi argument in front of the nation has sent the country’s defense apparatus into a spin. The Pentagon’s first act: Banning him from the well of the Senate and letting the tabloids take over as his sudden flight to Miami (“the Harvard professor surfaced in Florida”) becomes a diverting sideshow. Operation Send Out the Clown smuggles the 81-year-old to the retirement capital of the world and keeps him there under supervision, allowing him out for media appearances so demented as to make the president look normal. Long-range goal: With Thomas Markle as their model, intelligence strategists will allow Alan Dershowitz’s gibbering self-regard to reduce him to an innocuous joke.

Donald Trump, Ken Starr and Alan Dershowitz have joined together in a pervy, hypocritical cabal to argue that Trump did not smirch the Constitution.

[Senate Republicans] know Trump did what he’s accused of and don’t care. Writing to Politico’s John F. Harris, a Trump supporter recently described the president as “our O.J.,” an apt analogy for Republicans’ vengeful determination to give a guilty man impunity. (As it happens, Trump will be represented by one of O.J. Simpson’s old lawyers, Alan Dershowitz, at his Senate trial.)

UD once sat on a committee, at George Washington University, with a colleague from psychiatry who, whenever it was his turn to talk, mainly recited his cv. I got this award; I’m noted around the world for that… We all stared at each other and shifted uncomfortably when he spoke…

Regan Books published this man’s masterwork, Bush on the Couch, an idiotic psychoanalysis of George W Bush (UD, a deep-blue democrat, has nothing good to say about that president, but knows a hatchet job when she sees one). Discerning readers from Fidel Castro to some LaRouchie loved the book and it’s become an instant classic among people who couldn’t give a shit about the Goldwater Rule (you’re not supposed to psychoanalyze people you’ve never even met, let alone exchanged two words with). In her naivete, UD thought she’d seen the end of this hugely embarrassing genre.

Now another president UD can’t stand – the current one – is on the receiving end of a far more insidious psychiatrists’ campaign, one that – as Jeffrey Lieberman points out – does significant damage to a discipline whose scientific status – with people like UD‘s colleague around – is already mighty shaky. Led by Yale’s Bandy X. Lee, a bunch of psychiatrists published a … multivariate? … psychoanalysis of Trump, with Lee insisting he’s so nuts he has to be butterfly netted or the world will come to an end. As Andrew O’Hehir puts it, in Lee’s “strand of the multiverse, Trump is heading for a catastrophic health crisis or … an involuntary psychiatric hospitalization, and we won’t have to worry about defeating him in the November election because he’ll be dead or on a ventilator or shouting at the walls in a padded room.”

Amy Barnhorst, a UC Davis psychiatrist who works with people who really do need involuntary psychiatric holds, comments:

I think it’s a really bad way to go. It’s not just inappropriate and would be really ineffective, but I think it’s very damaging to our profession and the patients we take care of to suggest something like that.

A mental health hold is a very delicate tool that we use for people who very badly need treatment but aren’t able to accept that treatment. It’s not something that should be thrown around as a punishment for your enemies.

… Surgeons don’t go around lopping off the feet of their enemy in order to debilitate them. We shouldn’t go around applying mental health holds to people we don’t like in order to debilitate them.

A writer at WBUR, a person with mental health problems, amplifies her point:

Lee’s comments are … disturbing because they paint with such a broad brush. Like Trump’s insults being parroted by his followers in everyday conversation, it is easy to take Lee’s words and swing them in any direction, not just at Trump.

What is astonishing is the degree to which we embrace this kind of [thing]. We seem unable to accept the idea that the president’s behavior is not abnormal even if it is abhorrent.

Indeed, Lee does seem rather in the line of the notorious Soviet psychiatric establishment, swinging damaging charges of mental illness in any direction.

And there’s some sort of mondo bizarro logic in her having now swung directly into the tortured path of none other than Alan Dershowitz. Dershowitz has sent a formal complaint to Yale about her, because she called him nuts too. In response to Dersh, she’s gone full Joan of Arc and I tell you, mes petites! It’s a mad mad mad mad world.

… Trubu Show.

[Joe] Lockhart … said Trump should add Michael Avenatti to a defense team of Rudy Giuliani and Alan Dershowitz for the “Three Stooges defense.”

Color UD ambivalent about Christianity Today having spilled the beans.

Dramatically, as in O’Neill’s great play and a zillion others like it, it’s only fun to watch until someone… you know… coughs it up. Until that moment at the very end (“I… am… George… I am…”) when the obvious truth everyone’s been lying about gets very flatly stated, we sit and watch in delighted suspense, in excited anxious awareness, in a tense condition of enlightenment, astonishment, pity, euphoria, dread, amusement, fear…

When Mitt Romney wrote his beautiful editorial spilling the beans, UD felt a dramatic let-down. When Christianity Today did the same thing, she felt the same onrush of flaccidity. You know how everyone loves to quote Have you no sense of decency? Blah. Play up! Play up! And play the game!

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UPDATE: Trubu Roi’s Run Far From Over!

The long-running American version of Jarry’s Ubu the King (UD‘s posts about The Trubu Show go way back: put Trubu in my search engine) runs on. As UD suggests above, the citizen in her desperately wants the show to end, while the aesthete can’t help lovin this seniors gone wild caper, this Hangover franchise for mature audiences. Every time hoary Rudy Giuliani loses his shit and slobbers that “Soros is hardly a Jew. I’m more of a Jew than Soros is,” every time naughty octogenarian Alan Dershowitz describes the New Yorker’s editor as a neo-Nazi-friendly fraud, the girl can’t help it: She’s giggling in the wings, she’s having a grand time, she doesn’t want it to end. She doesn’t want Trubu psychiatrist Keith Ablow to lose his license; she floods with excitement when she sees the names Mike Huckabee, Michelle Bachman, Jerry Falwell Jr. and Ralph Reed lined up together in a cast list. She’s watching her very own, her native, La Grande Bouffe, where eventually one of Trubu’s Grand Old Men will sit at a piano, play a few chords, and fart himself to death.

Uh… What was that first thing? Well, it wasn’t in Alan Dershowitz’s original defense of his legal activity, but UD thinks he must have overlooked it, so she has added it to his list. Dershowitz is not merely the legal savior of Claus von Bulow, OJ Simpson, Michael Milken, Mike Tyson, and a raft of other innocents; he also helped keep the world safe for female genital mutilation by assisting the defense of Jumana Nagarwala. Don’t sell yourself short, Dersh! You’ve done so much for the civil liberties of butchers.

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And your life’s work on behalf of Jews has been awfully selective, hasn’t it? When John Yoo called Jewish war hero Alexander Vindman a traitor on a Fox news segment which included you, you smiled and said the White House legal team needed more people like Yoo.

Both you and Yoo have been backtracking like crazy – unsurprisingly, Vindman’s lawyer is preparing to go after Yoo for slander – and I can’t blame you. Nor can I blame the 92nd Street Y for having nothing to do with you.

“It was shocking how tight he was going to be in retirement,” Cooperman said… “I’m just saying that it’s not an impressive amount of capital for two people that were leading physicians for their entire work life,” Cooperman went on. “You know, I lost more today than they spent a lifetime accumulating.”

Just to get you situated pronto in le monde Léon, if I may, where ten million dollars is a shocking shortfall, a humiliating failure, and an opportunity to shoot one’s mouth off about one’s own incomparable booty… Did bribery help Leon? Did insider trading (he had to pay a five million dollar fine to make the SEC go away in that one) help Leon? Is it fair for him to compare himself to two sadly fraud-challenged physicians who probably didn’t even engage in theft of medicaid funds?

In the political realm, Leon loves to bat designated-belligerent-billionaire-hitter. He hit one out of the park with Obama – said he never worked a day in his life; said he was just like Hitler! And now he’s taking a big ol’ swing at Elizabeth Warren, who had the temerity to remind people that he had to settle that big ol’ insider trading charge (this was long after he settled the bribery charge). (Why did he settle the insider trading charge? He said he was going to fight it.)

[Cooperman called] Warren “disgraceful” in an interview with CNBC. “She doesn’t know who the f— she’s tweeting. I gave away more in the year than she has in her whole f—-ing lifetime,” Cooperman continued. Cooperman also said he “won” his case involving insider trading, though he actually just settled it with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

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Someone should write an essay about that favorite word of the rogue: DISGRACEFUL. DISGRACEFUL. DEEZGRAITZFOOLLLL. The president, Giuliani, Dershowitz – all of our country’s highest-profile, most wretched rogues, use it all the time. Such a prim prissy word – the sort of thing you associate with Margaret Dumont – and yet all these guys – who are clearly Groucho Marx in the matter – are doing her. They’re doing Dumont! Why, I never! Really! There are certain conventions!

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UPDATE: It takes a strong man to cry. On national tv.

At 81, Harvard’s highest-profile emeritus has chosen to close out his life anticly and frantically suing everyone in sight. And in return getting sued.

Like his doubles in desuetude, Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani, he has long been a naughty boy, a game-player, a rule-breaker, and he intends to go down swinging as the rule of law catches up with him. But as he is very old, his punches aren’t landing. He and his doubles are hollow men.

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when 
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless

Observers try to capture the convoluted farce Alan Dershowitz has made of his life:

[E]very argument he makes creates even worse fallout: Don’t just deny… demand they sue you! Then get sued. Don’t just litigate the case… get [David] Boies kicked off! End up facing [brilliant litigator] Chuck Cooper. Don’t just claim [Virginia] Giuffre’s mistaken [about your sexual crimes]… accuse Boies of blackmailing you! Get sued by Boies.

He might have quietly settled various cases against him; he might have retreated to Martha’s Vineyard, as the lights dimmed, with a little dignity. Instead, this bizarre American figure, this deflated pop-up doll, keeps trying to pop. We cannot help watching him. And his doubles.

Here we go round the prickly pricks
Prickly pricks prickly pricks
Here we go round the prickly pricks
At five o’clock in the morning. 

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UPDATE: Portrait of a man drowning.