Law & Disorder

Martial Law? Our collective trip down the rabbit hole of hate, despair and destruction continues.  Yesterday demonstrators demonstrated, bands of looters looted, and Trump Trumped as the COVID mortality count climbed to 105,000. The demonstrators were largely peaceful, however their message was tarnished by the gangs of looters who followed in their wake.  Trump, who was really angry that reports about him being been rushed into the White House bunker over the weekend made him look weak began his day by repeatedly tweeting out “Law & Order,” and by that he was referring to the days of Richard Nixon and George Wallace rather than the long running TV series.  He then lashed out at state governors on a conference call labeling them weak and telling them that if they didn’t take back the streets and use force to confront protesters, they would look like “fools,” saying that they had to “dominate” or they’d be “wasting their time.” He also told them that they had to arrest unruly demonstrators, throwing them into jail for “ten years.” Remember that term, maybe someday we’ll get to apply it to him or some other members of his crime family. Notably, Trump wasn’t even supposed to be on the governor call, he surprised them by stepping into the shoes of VP Pence who had been its original host.  In any case his message didn’t go over well with a number of the blue state governors, in particular Illinois’ Governor Pritzker was outspoken, pushing back hard with the two shared some pretty harsh words.  We know that because someone leaked the whole call to the press. 

Call out the Troops: Later in the day, the inflamed Trump who has clearly rejected the idea of even pretending to address the root of the demonstrators’ complaints, went to the podium to declare himself the law and order president.  The moment was heavily orchestrated.  Before he even stepped out of the White House, military units dispersed a crowd of boisterous but peaceful demonstrators hanging out on nearby Lafayette Square.  They did that by shooting tear gas at them because what democratic leader doesn’t have tear gas shot at peaceful demonstrators? The sole purpose of that exercise was to clear the path for Trump who delivered one of his harsh toned Stephen Miller-ish speeches, where he threatened to unleash “his” military forces across the nation to states that fail to follow his directive to deal with demonstrators harshly, before sauntering across the street to St John’s Church.  That was the furthest distance any of us have seen him walk in the three years that he’s been in office.  Upon arriving at the church he raised a bible high in the air, stopped long enough to take some pictures with his “team,” an entirely white group that included Attorney General Barr, chief of staff Mark Meadows, press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, Attorney General Bill Barr, Defense Secretary Mark Esper, Ivanka and Jared, though the face masked Ivanka hid in the background during the picture taking likely because her mask violated her father’s “masks are weak” edict.  Following the photo op moment Trump marched back to the White House.  He didn’t do any praying, the church and bible were just props for his base and future fund raisers.  His charade didn’t go over well with Reverend Mariann Budde, the bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, who learned of Trump’s visit to St. John’s by watching it on the news. She said that she was “outraged, adding that she didn’t want Trump speaking for St. John’s.  Sadly, his TV moment probably wowed his most dedicated followers, particularly the ones who value their guns over all else, as Trump managed to squeeze a homage to their second amendment rights into his speech, a call for them to take up arms against the rest of us?  As to Trump’s threats to unleash the military on uncooperative states, though he can send troops into Washington DC since it is federal rather than a state, it’s not totally clear that he can send troops without first being asked to do so by presiding governors but when has that stopped Trump or his trusty lawyer Barr from doing anything nefarious?

Et Cetera:  An independent autopsy conducted by George Floyd’s family concluded that he did in fact die by asphyxiation from pressure on his neck despite an earlier assertion of the local Minnesota coroner that he just happened to die while he was being asphyxiated.  Neither Canada nor the UK are all that interested in having Putin, who Trump not so coincidentally spoke with yesterday maybe to get some tips on crowd control, attend the upcoming G7 meeting whenever it gets held.  Emmet Sullivan, the federal judge presiding over the Michael Flynn case, filed his brief defending his refusal to quickly dismiss the charge that Flynn lied to the FBI, asserting that his court has authority to review the Justice Department’s recent decision to drop the prosecution while pointing out that Flynn also committed a few other crimes that went unpunished only because he pleaded guilty to the lying and promised to cooperate before he didn’t. On the social network front, while Mark Zuckerberg has been quietly advising Trump to try to tone things down, a pointless exercise that reveals a lot about Zuckerberg’s own tendencies, Twitter has continued to show some guts.  Yesterday, their “checkers” took down a few tweets, some from white nationalists pretending to be those Antifa “terrorists” that Trump’s been targeting , and another one by Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz, the Trump mini me, who they say has been glorifying violence.  And former VP Biden went out in public again, holding a meeting of his own with some church leaders not that he got much coverage because with Trump sucking the oxygen out of the air, how could he?

#Sigh #StaySafe