… threatens to sue The Lincoln Project.
With Rudolph Giuliani busy “reach[ing] into his legal briefs and whip[ping] out his subpoenas,” Trumps in search of a real tough-guy attorney have returned to the source — Mr. FUCK YOU HOW DARE YOU I KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE YOU FUCKING SHIT — Marc Kasowitz to defend their honor. Marc’s late-night threatening demented rant to a stranger who dared to question his ways made all the papers back in 2017; since then, he has maintained his gentle humble disposition.
He brags to friends he makes anywhere from $10 million to $30 million per year. He owns an apartment in a white-glove building on Park Avenue and a mansion in Westchester County. He travels by private jet and, when in New York, is driven around in a black Cadillac SUV. He owns at least two horses, according to a lawsuit Kasowitz once filed against his daughter’s equestrian stable.
From the start, [his firm,] Kasowitz Benson had a hard-drinking culture that its leaders epitomized.
“It’s like a time warp,” said one former employee, citing the firm’s “macho, scotch-drinking, fist-fighting” ethos. Multiple former attorneys said they saw Kasowitz under the influence at the office, an accusation Kasowitz denies.
He’s currently being sued by several ex-colleagues – it looks as though he stiffed them cuz his firm is losing money.
So if, like Ivanka and Jared, you want your honor restored, it’s hard to think of a more honorable guy than our old buddy Marc. Marc follows goodness and mercy all the days of his life, and his righteous indignation on behalf of innocents trampled by the bad boys at The Lincoln Project just sounds so right.
But it might be an uphill legal battle. Recall Lara Trump’s explanation that an angry mob at a Trump rally screaming LOCK HER UP LOCK HER UP about recently imperiled Gretchen Whitmer was simply part of a “fun, light, atmosphere.” Did Jared say No it wasn’t. It was obviously a threatening thing to do, and I hereby disavow it?
Of course he didn’t, because as Lara points out it was clearly all in fun! How could the advertisement in question, which doesn’t even promise to put Jared and his wife in prison, aim to create anything other than a fun, light, atmosphere?
The former president now enjoys an unprecedented level of control over the Republican national apparatus. He can freely raid the RNC’s dwindling campaign coffers for legal defense money and appoint family members to key positions while personally directing House Republicans’ disastrous investigations into Joe and Hunter Biden. Trump’s total dominance of the Republican Party is a remarkable thing to behold.
But Republicans’ willingness to bow to Trump on nearly every issue is making their party staggeringly unpopular with voters — and not just the rank and file. Colorado Rep. Ken Buck stunned Capitol Hill on Tuesday by announcing that he’d simply had enough of Trumpism (“This place keeps going downhill and I don’t need to spend more time here.”) and would resign in just about a week. In an interview with CNN, Buck slammed Congress as “dysfunctional” and remarked that many of his constituents were sick of Trump.
Und so weiter. Title: TRUMP’S GOP IS ALREADY DYING.
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Listen, my children, and you shall hear, of the ways of capitalism you and UD hold so dear.
Hunter-gatherers persisted in their way of life for thousands of years, slave cultures for almost as long and feudal societies for many centuries. In contrast, capitalism transforms everything it touches.
It’s not just brands that are constantly changing. Companies and industries are created and destroyed in an incessant stream of innovation, while human relationships are dissolved and reinvented in novel forms... [S]ociety … is being continuously transformed by market forces … Looking to a future in which the market permeates every corner of life, Marx wrote in The Communist Manifesto: “Everything that is solid melts into air”... The gyrations of the market are such that no-one can know what will have value even a few years ahead... This state of perpetual unrest is the permanent revolution of capitalism …
For UD, the most powerful, most poignant, current example of this truth is the contrast between Madonna — exhausted, barely gyrating, surgeried-up, a real living deadster — and her replacement, Taylor Swift… Capitalist society demands constant newness, incessant novelty, fresh gyrations, and it demands it mercilessly.
Trump intuits all of this, and has done his bit by generating stupendous levels of personal and political drama, sustaining that ever-changing drama over decades. But like his iconic has-been shadow, he too is beginning to lose his restless audience. His latest mavericky move – appointing Kim Yo Jong to run the Republican National Committee – snapped his increasingly bored followers to attention yet again, but isn’t going as planned. Lara’s “purge of the unfaithful” has creeped people out rather than excited them. And that’s because even his routine – even his – is becoming subject to capitalism’s iron law – all that is solid melts into air.
We can expect Trump’s novelty-desperation to become more radical even as it loses its effectiveness. Watch for him and Lara to divorce their partners, marry each other in a joint ceremony with 93 year old Rupert Murdoch and his fifth, and immediately announce Lara’s pregnancy. Gotta keep up!
Duh. One glance at Lady Lara de Bourgh (about whom we have had WHAT to say on this blog) instantly brings to mind Mr Collins’ praise of her precursor in Pride and Prejudice: “What affability! What condescension!”
But if you’re a little slow on the uptake, Tom Nichols at The Atlantic will help focus your attention on this notorious aspect of High Trumpworld, composed of vulgarians like Catherine de Bourgh who look down on vulgarians like Mr Collins.
That Foxworld and Trumpworld have a special horror of the yahoos who gather ’round them/vote for them is hardly surprising: Anxious about their own social standing, they can’t help but watch in dismay/cynicism as an embarrassing rabble tries to touch their hems. A dude like Jared Kushner, who affects aristocracy but in fact hails from the basest money mafias, can’t help but lose his latte when hopeless schlumps sidle up. He’s counting on his new fifty million dollar house on a heavily policed island to keep them out.
Anyhoo we’re focused on this matter again because of new revelations around UD‘s favorite ongoing billion dollar lawsuit, in which Dominion, a voting machine company, seeks damages for having been slandered by Fox broadcasters, who as one denounced Dominion as a malicious part of the Soros-engineered conspiracy to keep DJT from his second presidency. Dominion says all the Fox broadcasters knew they were lying when they assured the rabble the election, with important help from Dominion, had really scout’s honor been stolen. But now that Fox emails from the time have been released, it turns out… Dominion’s right!
Hyping false claims about election fraud was a way for Fox to win its audience back…
The network knew, of course, that Trump’s lawyer Sidney Powell, a chief promoter of Dominion conspiracy theories, was a delusional fantasist. The legal brief reveals that some of her claims about Dominion were based on an email Powell had received from someone who claimed to be capable of “time travel in a semiconscious state.” On Nov. 18, 2020, Carlson told Ingraham: “Sidney Powell is lying by the way. Caught her. It’s insane.” Ingraham wrote back that Powell was a “complete nut.”
… “Respecting this audience whether we agree or not is critical,” Hannity texted on Nov. 24. It’s a version of respect indistinguishable from contempt.
The New York Post relegated Donald Trump’s declaration of his candidacy for president on Tuesday night to page 26 of this morning’s edition of the paper, hinting at the announcement on the front page with the demeaning teaser “Florida Man Makes Announcement.”
Many university medical school positions come with words like “voluntary” and “courtesy” attached; unlike tenured medical faculty, clinical faculty enjoy little more than the professional use of titles like “professor,” and, if you’re Bandy Lee, affiliations like “Yale.”
Untenured, and needing to be renewed every few years, associated medical faculty positions are fragile. As Lee – famous for having led the “Trump is dangerously insane” charge – has just discovered. Yale has fired her – chosen not to renew her, if you like – because in diagnosing a public figure without ever having met him, let alone analyzed him in a professional setting, she broke the Goldwater Rule. What really tipped Yale over, though, was a letter of complaint it received from rich, well-connected, and incredibly litigious Alan Dershowitz, also branded psychotic by Lee, and not happy about it. Lee is suing Yale.
First, a quick, surgical contrast between tenured and untenured at Yale medical school. Michael Simons, a powerful, tenured presence there, was found guilty of sexual harassment way back in 2013. And then – wow.
Details from Simons’ case date back to 2010, when he sent a romantic letter to a female junior colleague, who subsequently told him that she did not reciprocate his feelings. According to Simons’ complaint, the letter was “a declaration of love and romantic interest of the sort men have sent to women from time immemorial.”
She started up a relationship with another doctor who subsequently faced professional difficulties, which the two alleged was due to Simons’ interference.
In 2013, the junior colleague filed a sexual harassment complaint with the University-Wide Committee on Sexual Misconduct. Former Connecticut Superior Court Judge Beverly Hodgson investigated the claim and found Simons guilty of sexual harassment, and the UWC recommended he be suspended as chief of cardiology for five years. Simons appealed and the suspension was ultimately reduced to 18 months.
But details of the proceedings surfaced in a subsequent New York Times investigation. Later in 2013, Simons resigned as chief of cardiology, and his complaint alleges the University forced his resignation due to the public outcry.
Simons continued to hold the position of the Robert W. Berliner chair of cardiology until Nancy Berliner ’75 MED ’79, the daughter of Robert Berliner and a former professor at the School of Medicine, objected to Simons’ professorship. In July of 2018, the University transferred Simons to the Von Zedtwitz Chair.
The action prompted public backlash, including an open letter from medical school students, alumni and faculty that amassed more than 1,000 signatures. The University then removed Simons from the position.
In October 2019, Simons filed a complaint against the University.
Hey, why not find a third chair! If not the Berliner, then the Von Zedtwitz, and if not the Von Zedtwitz the … something from the middle of the alphabet… Berliner comes early, Von Zedtwitz at the end… maybe Mr Simons would care to see something in a Smith?
And yes, you read that right – it’s been twenty years since Simons purportedly harassed, and he remains in excellent, though non-chaired, status at Yale. He also remains an infuriated, vengeful troublemaker, a scalpel in the side of the school, which first dealt with him by conferring multiple chairs upon him, and now spends its time simultaneously boasting he’s on the faculty and angrily batting down his latest litigation.
Yale’s folie à deux with the hugely compensated, hugely pissed Simons will play on till the cows come home cuz that’s how tenure rolls.
And now back to Bandy Lee. Her fragile condition means that punishment for something maybe a bit less egregious than fucking with the junior staff is rapid dismissal.
UD blows somewhat hot and cold on Lee and her fellow invoke the 25th amendment Trump-diagnosers. No one who watched Trump in his notorious debate with Biden could fail to be grateful to Lee and Co for having, years before, laid out the framework for understanding the obscenity playing out in front of us. In short, they weren’t far off in their clinical appraisal of Trump.
OTOH: It really is a crude, easily corruptible, and unethical sort of thing, using your position as a professional analyst to lend special credibility to a judgment as extreme as mentally unfit for office. UD‘s extended remarks on the matter are here.
On Sunday, [a Yale student] wrote on Twitter that it’s easy to forget, in an “insular” place such as Yale, that, when students who behave badly graduate, “they don’t disappear but instead become part of the fabric of society, & a certain type ascends & ascends.” It’s “been unbearable at times to watch men I know have hurt my friends ascend within clubs to leadership,” she continued, adding, “How will we feel seeing which of them rise in their fields, our fields, invincible & untouchable?”
There’s a reason they call it predatory capitalism, babe.
Read and learn.
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You want more on predatory?
Pure. Animal. Kingdom.
I witnessed efforts by Mark Judge, Brett Kavanaugh and others to “target” particular girls so they could be taken advantage of; it was usually a girl that was especially vulnerable because she was alone at the party or shy.
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Even when they become a global laughingstock, there’s always a faithful retainer to tell them otherwise.