Aquarian Weekly
10/3/18

I LOVE POLITICS
The Unraveling of Judge Kavanaugh & The Heinous Beauty of our Human Experiment

I love politics.

Always have. It is my grand flaw. I am mostly angry, somewhat dazzled by art, music and certainly the written word, I love to drink gin, smoke cigars, read until I pass out, love women (especially my wife, Erin and my daughter, Scarlet) and I love politics.

I would not have spent five minutes of my time on the subject much less the past 20 years penning this column or the prior 15 years as a freelancer, deriving pleasure and inspiration from its most heinous and glorious gifts. Whether Watergate or Iran/Contra, Monica Lewinsky, the 2000 election being tossed into a constitutional crisis, the intrigue and fistfights over health care and illegal wars and the kneejerk spastic reaction to 9/11 or even the more mundane bloodbaths over budgets and, my favorite, social issues. All of it is sadomasochistic thrill ride for me.

You see, I understand politics. I get what happens to people when they are in the midst of them and what it does to their brains and their nether regions and how it can at once titillate and mutilate. It always baffles me when people don’t get it. It’s like golfers or sexual deviants. They get it. You might not. But they really get it.

But nothing is more seductive than the every-once-in-a-while moment when political desperation kicks in – when politicians become like cornered animals and toss decorum, principle, almost everything they supposedly stood for or believed in and torch it in a self-immolated public bonfire. That is what the nation witnessed yesterday on Capitol Hill when Republican and Democratic senators put on the show of shows. Shouting and crying – citizens bearing their souls, righteous grandstanding, contemptuous lawyers, families paraded out like human billboards, staged interruptions and sweet-lord-jesus-there’s-a-fire speechifying – it had it all. And while it blessedly proved we are as fucked up a nation as can possibly be imagined that fancies itself “free”, I do not agree with these third-grade assessments about how it has lowered our public discourse and disgraced the “world’s greatest deliberative body”. That kind of hyperbole seems downright goofy when considering it happened in the same room as the McCarthy Hearings or the fact that a man who left a woman to drown in the car he ran into a Massachusetts lake was allowed to work there for nearly half a century.

Nevertheless, what happened yesterday was an education in both political mastery/buffoonery that reveals a great deal about the putrid, horrifying and wonderfully disgusting aspects of America.

And so, Judge Brett Kavanaugh, as conservative and politically motivated judge as we have seen being considered for a lifetime appointment to the highest court in the land, appointed by the way, by an accidental criminal game show host man-child president, had all but been confirmed for some weeks, as he should, when the majority (and this is part of the putrid, horrifying and wonderfully disgusting aspects) is sitting with the power and therefore the right to confirm him. I only mention the “putrid” part because the previous president had appointed his nominee during his last year in office and the GOP-led senate decided to ignore the constitution and not even put that individual up for a vote for ten months and then when the last judge was up for a vote, they changed the procedure from overwhelming majority to mere majority to ram him through.

You see, Republicans have been fighting to swing the Supreme Court in their favor for decades. This, like health care for Democrats in 2009, which many of these same Republicans rightfully decried as a political disaster, has been a slow and deliberate slog to try and dominate the courts in the hopes to overturn marriage equality and Roe v Wade and defend corporations and banks and gun manufacturers and whatever defies the majority will of the people. This is what elections – gerrymandering, fear-mongering and electoral colleges – add up to. Elections, it should be mentioned, Democrats have been losing pretty consistently for the past dozen years or so on the local and legislative level.

The idea that a woman may or may not have been sexually assaulted by a judicial nominee is a speed bump to all this. FBI investigations? Witnesses? Search for truth? This is a kind of game and the people in it mere players. This is what politics is and has always been – from Washington’s crushing of the Whiskey Rebellion to Jackson’s Native American death march to Lincoln’s bribing of senators to LBJ’s and GW Bush’s phony intelligence – it is an immutable law, like physics and an AP reporter refusing to pick up a check. When Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, charmingly nervous and intellectually elastic, came forth with 36 year-old allegations, Democrats saw a golden opportunity and that left Republicans, hemorrhaging educated women voters of all races, to have to have a hearing. But the very fact that there is a committee vote to confirm Kavanaugh after that fiasco as I write this proves there was little point to any of it, but to perform the duties of politics.

Nothing is more seductive than the every-once-in-a-while moment when political desperation kicks in.

Oh, those who don’t “get it” will predictably accuse this space, aptly titled Reality Check, of cynicism again, but come on, who was under the impression any of this was real? I guess it was as real as Johnny Cochran’s brilliant defense of O.J. Simpson by making it about LA cops. LA cops were racist and corrupt, but O.J. Simpson also killed two people. O.J. got off. And this is where we ended up yesterday. Kavanaugh probably sexually assaulted women, as did Donald J. Trump, but he will be on the Supreme Court, appointed by President Trump. Politics.

For the record, I believe Dr. Ford. She had no motive to come forward and lie. She was absolutely exploited by Democrats, but the idea that she was a conspiratorial tool as Kavanaugh shouted in his creepy snot-filled, cry-fest (excellent job coached by the Breitbart crowd to play angry and get Senator Lindsey Graham, angling for a job in the Department of Defense, to wake up), is asinine. Sitting on national television in the glare of that horde of miscreants had no pay off for Ford. Being Supreme Court Justice for life does. Kavanaugh had every reason to lie his ass off, as his friend and purported culprit, Mark Judge, who said he has no recollection of events, had to. What do you expect him to do, admit to assisting in a sexual assault?

Dr. Ford gets nothing out of this deal other than death threats, grief and ignominy. Kavanaugh gets to be on the Supreme Court. Again, he has every reason to lie. She has none. Plus, and this is important, not once, when asked about a half-dozen times if his impassioned plea to clear his name would benefit from a full non-politically tainted investigation – something you would need to do to make absolutely certain you are not a criminal, and something Dr. Ford agreed to – he declined to answer even no. Kavanaugh is hiding something. She is not. That’s what you get from that. You demand an investigation when you spend a half hour screaming and crying like a mental patient – to clear your name and reveal this woman as a fraud. I get being pissed, as Kavanaugh clearly was, but I do not get not wanting clear evidence that I was not guilty. The rest is pure political theater to get a gig from politicians. Period.

And why did Republicans choose a woman prosecutor to ask questions of Dr. Ford? To save political blowback. Why did they steamroll her once Kavanaugh showed up? To gain political points.

I love politics.

Speaking of which, I have been asked for weeks now if the two women/moderate Republican senators, Lisa Ann Murkowski and Susan Collins, from Alaska and Maine respectively, or Democratic West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin would scuttle this vote by denying Kavanaugh his seat. I do not. Makes no political sense. As I write this the American Bar Association has called for an investigation of this alleged crime and several outlets, including the leading Jesuit periodical (Kavanaugh was attending a Jesuit high school, Georgetown Prep when this all supposedly went down), have rescinded their support for the candidate. However, these people are living in the real world of consequences and conscience and ideological purity. This has zero to do with politics. Those things are actually a detriment to the artform. It makes no political sense for any of those senators to vote no on Kavanaugh. For Republicans, the fallout would be disastrous at the polls in November, as the deluge of Democratic fervor would be exacerbated by GOP voters staying home (the same thing that killed Hillary Clinton in 2016, as crestfallen Bernie Sanders’ backers refused to cast a vote for her). And with an election so close in a “Red State”, why would Munchin risk his hide? For principle? Law? Guts?

What makes politics such a wonderfully damaging subject to dive into – here, week after week – is what it reveals about the core of our nation, of every nation. How much shit would Senators Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham eat, both personally and professionally eviscerated by this president, to get a politically motivated Supreme Court judge seated? A lot of shit. They wallowed in it yesterday, as did the Democrats in a desperate attempt to give a flying fart about a wronged woman, when so many of them defended Bill Clinton over and over again.

Brett Kavanaugh said this yesterday, in a desperate attempt to achieve his goal and make this all about politics: “This whole two-week effort has been a calculated and orchestrated political hit, fueled with apparent pent-up anger about President Trump and the 2016 election. Fear that has been unfairly stoked about my judicial record. Revenge on behalf of the Clintons, and millions of dollars in money from outside left-wing opposition groups.”

None of that statement has a thing to do with law or the Supreme Court or defending one’s self. That is a political attack on the opposition. Politics. Plain and simple. That could have been written by FDR or Hitler.

And that is why I love politics.

May Benjamin Disraeli have mercy on my soul.

Aquarian Weekly
9/5/18

CATHOLIC CHURCH’S ONGOING CHILD RAPE PROBLEM

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For they preach, but do not practice. They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to move them with their finger.
– Matthew 23:13

Holy shit.

A few weeks ago, a grand jury report shed light on internal documents from six Catholic dioceses in Pennsylvania that show that more than 300 “predator priests” have been credibly accused of sexually abusing more than 1,000 child victims. And it could be more. “We believe that the real number of children whose records were lost or who were afraid ever to come forward is in the thousands,” the grand jury report states.

Also from the report: “Priests were raping little boys and girls, and the men of God who were responsible for them not only did nothing; they hid it all. For decades. Monsignors, auxiliary bishops, bishops, archbishops, cardinals have mostly been protected; many, including some named in this report, have been promoted.”

Promoted.

Rape = Promotion.

Let that sink in. I’ll give you a minute.

How’s that sitting with you?

I repeat, holy shit.

Let me ask this question as succinctly and as straight forward as I can: If there is an organization that has repeatedly been outed for decades with the perpetuation of child abuse and systemic pedophilia that has run rampart throughout the Catholic Church all over the world, but specifically here in the U.S., why should it be allowed to continue as such?

This is a serious issue. Right? Children being raped by priests and the institution hiding it from the public and the continued protection of predators against children being either mostly ignored or at least in a twisted sense being accepted as some kind of “new normal” these days is sort of important, no? And this in an era when outlandish reactions to say something like ISIS in the Middle East and the embarrassingly moronic current reaction by this federal government and many of our citizens to illegal immigration, both of which is treated as if the wolf is at the door. But where is the outrage and special taskforce or movement to oust the Catholic Church from our shores as a dangerous, predatory, criminal organization?

Where is the major presser from Attorney General Jeff Sessions – obsessed with jailing brown people and pot users – about launching a major investigation, fuck that, a War on the Catholic Church?

Three hundred priests protected by an organization that systemically rapes children, boys AND, by the way, girls, lest we get the usual “gays are predators” nonsense from the Bigot Brigade. This happens. Here. In our country; where we have concentration camps for the children of illegal immigrants. A multi-billion dollar untaxed conglomerate is raping kids and not only making excuses for it and/or covering it up, but spending millions to do so.

Millions of dollars, I might add, given into baskets by Catholics, who unfortunately for them are complicit in this unchecked horror show.

Paying for rape.

“Priests were raping little boys and girls, and the men of God who were responsible for them not only did nothing; they hid it all. For decades.”

This gets a HOLY SHIT.

The grand jury described the church’s methods as “a playbook for concealing the truth” after FBI agents identified a series of practices they found in diocese files.

And to make it even more sickening, this has been a discussion of fact for more than half a century here and for over a century in counties like Ireland, which has now begun a rightful public uproar for the church to do something about it, like holding the current Pope responsible. None of this, though, seems to resonate here, where there are now Religious Freedom Task Forces. What is that? A group that decides the best way to hide pedophiles?

How about we demand the Vatican extricate Pope Francis to our shores to stand trial for this heinous crime?

This is what we would do if a foreign or domestic organization’s CEO was pulling this shit, so why not the Pope?

Really, it is the timeline and the ignoring and the excusing and the hiding and the covering up that is the final mind-blower. This ain’t this week’s problem. This is what the Catholic Church does. It has become a haven for child rapists and, apparently, seemingly no one there cares a lick beyond protecting their money-making scheme. But the fact that we here in secular/law land don’t care is the bigger issue.

Example: Every night Chris Matthews, an avowed Catholic who was educated in its system and sent his children to Catholic universities, goes on TV and decries the gutless Republicans who continue to walk like zombies in the disdainful shadow of this buffoon president of ours. However, the day this news broke, he admitted he would still go to church. This is the length and breadth of hypocrisy. Or is it? Do we have some kind of disconnect to our religious institutions? Do we allow it to continue this behavior because they are beyond reproach? And if this is true (and after reading this, who doesn’t’ think so?) then how dangerous is this whole thing?

Aside from the violent retribution, what is the difference between an untouchable, untaxable, outside-the-law religious group imposing its dogma on the public at large and the dreaded Sharia law we’re all supposed to be frightened of?

Yeah…nothing.

Now, lest anyone think this is another case of Campion slamming organized religion and its bloated institutions, I think it is interesting this investigation came out of Pennsylvania, (the report covers six dioceses in Allentown, Erie, Greensburg, Harrisburg, Pittsburgh and Scranton) as the 2012 Penn State incident regarding a massive cover up of years of sexual abuse by the now infamous Jerry Sandusky went from a national disgrace to what officials at Penn State currently call “a complicated complex and emotional” situation. In other words, we went from disgust to contemplation in a few years. Hell, even the NCAA reduced what were initially slap-on-the-wrist penalties after two years. Apparently, religion and football and the passage of time make it okay for us to accept the raping of children.

People still venerate Penn State saint, Joe Paterno, who covered up these crimes for years.

Rape = Veneration.

I am out of holy shits.

Best argument of all: This grand jury report came out two weeks ago. Last evening I watched six reports about how Donald Trump, American flag fan, doesn’t know how to color it in. Yeah, I get it, the president is an idiot. But there are children being raped right now in this country and the rapists are being promoted by a non-taxable, untouchable institution protected by superstitious nonsense.

That is the story.

What are we doing about it?

Nothing.

Okay…one more…

Holy shit.

Aquarian Weekly
8/29/18

TUESDAY, AUGUST 21, 2018 – THE DAY THE RAVEN TAPPED FOR MR. TRUMP

As to Count Number Seven, on or about the summer of 2016, in coordination with, and at the direction of, a candidate for federal office, I and the CEO of a media company at the request of the candidate worked together to keep an individual with information that would be harmful to the candidate and to the campaign from publicly disclosing this information. After a number of discussions, we eventually accomplished the goal by the media company entering into a contract with the individual under which she received compensation of $150,000. I participated in this conduct, which on my part took place in Manhattan, for the principle purpose of influencing the election.

Michael Cohen, personal lawyer to Donald J. Trump, President of the United States, under oath as part of a guilty plea to eight counts of tax evasion, fraud and felony charges for illegal use of campaign funds during the 2016 presidential campaign to cover up incriminating information against candidate Trump – The Southern District of NY Court, August 21, 2018.

Startled at the stillness broken by reply so aptly spoken,
“Doubtless,” said I, “what it utters is its only stock and store
Caught from some unhappy master whom unmerciful Disaster
Followed fast and followed faster till his songs one burden bore—
Till the dirges of his Hope that melancholy burden bore
Of ‘Never—nevermore’.”
– Edgar Allen Poe, “The Raven”

Tuesday August 21, 2018; the day that tipped speculation and hearsay and mounting circumstantial evidence that the president of the United States has committed high crimes and misdemeanors into physical evidence corroborated by witnesses who were directed by him to commit these crimes. What transpired on that day will change the paradigm of these charges, rumors and speculation and put things squarely in the category of fact. So much so even the man for whom lying is a second language has gone out of his way to shift the “I did not know about nor pay any money to Stormy Daniels” to “I did not use campaign funds, it was my money…I paid it.”

One thing you have to say for Donald Trump, once he’s accused of a crime, like say obstructing justice, when he fired the FBI Director investigating him over “the Russian thing” and then admitting it on NBC a day later, he loves to proudly cop to it. What he pulled on Fox & Friends less than 24 hours after his personal lawyer pushed the first in many dominoes that threaten to reveal the dark and putrid underbelly of his erratically dumb and dangerous presidency is quite remarkable. In the same interview he became the first president in my lifetime, and I would confidently guess the first one ever, to actually utter the word impeachment as some demented form of brain-farting pre-defense.

But what of the cheap hood “attorney” that fired the first of many blows to take down El Douche?

Michael Cohen is one of those creatures that seem to gravitate and thrive and are later discarded as pond scum by our current Game Show President. His word is likely as trustworthy as Donald Trump’s, which, as noted, is not at all trustworthy. (A composite of fact checking web sites have Trump making roughly 4,229 false or misleading claims in 558 days, a staggering 7.58 lies a day). To be frank, Cohen’s gig was less “attorney” in any conventional sense and more “fixer” for Trump, which means he was paid (and handsomely for this crime, nearly half a million) to cover over the odd misdemeanor and side-stepping of annoying laws that are needed for the rich and douchy. But mostly, and most importantly, Cohen is a pussy. Faced with eight counts and pleading guilty and making a plea deal sounds about right whether he is telling the truth or not. He does not want to go to jail for the rest of his life for Trump or anyone. The people in and around Trump tend to see the world as this Us vs. Them concept, very mob like, kind of how this president has handled everything for over 30 years. Trump even loves combing the mob lexicon for terms like “flip” and “rat” to explain all this. This is just Cohen doing the Trump thing.

So maybe Cohen is lying his ass off.

However, prosecutors don’t offer plea deals without hard, corroborating evidence; tapes, documents, paper-trails. So if Cohen is not lying his ass off, the only thing keeping this president from facing impeachment hearings is his party staying in power and continuing its partisan and gutless pursuit of agenda over the constitution or the integrity of the nation or whatever bullshit people convince themselves of to make you think America is some kind of moral compass spun true north by a patriarchal god figure.

Campaign finance law is a felony. Committing a felony is a high crime. High crimes are impeachable.

Game. Set. Match.

Remember when Republicans went after Bill Clinton for Whitewater and someone stumbled on evidence the president was getting hummers from an intern and Clinton told his sucker wife and the rest of the suckers it was a “Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy” and then lied under oath leading to impeachment? This is like that, but far worse. This affected a national election decided by 77,000 votes, lending to the kind of thing Trump and his supporters hate – unlike that bullshit about Barack Obama’s birth certificate this idiot had up his sleeve years ago – introducing the argument that we are dealing with an illegitimate presidency.

And then…on the same day Cohen buried his former boss whom he said just a few months ago would “take a bullet for”, the president’s former campaign manager was found guilty of eight counts of tax evasion and money laundering and all the stuff that forces Trump from releasing his tax returns. For now, this has nothing to do with the president, which is all he cares about as he praises a man going to jail for at least a decade and faces a second more serious trial in DC. But Manafort did not get asked to run the Trump campaign when it appeared to be going off the rails in the summer of 2016 on a whim. Manafort and Trump run in the same circles and use the same banks to launder money and avoid taxes and cheat the other poor sap Americans who have to pay them.

If I can take a moment to reiterate how many times Trump praises criminals, Kim Jong-un, Vladimir Putin, and now Paul Manafort. Not sure what this says about the man. You and your maker decide.

Campaign finance law is a felony. Committing a felony is a high crime. High crimes are impeachable.

But, wait, there’s more!

By dinnertime on that fateful date history will one day record as the political equivalent of explosive diarrhea, came the biggest, baddest heat-seeking missile launched directly at El Douche.

Suddenly the most dangerous man in America is Lanny Davis. In an ironically delicious twist of fate, Bill Clinton’s former White House counsel and enthusiastic Donald Trump despiser has wormed his way into advising Cohen to eviscerate what is left of this punchline presidency. Davis, as if taking a victory lap worthy of the man he plans to take down, went on every cable show known to modern man, except FOX News, which was showing pictures of Trump kissing a blow-up doll of the Virgin Mary atop a tank running over Mexicans, to say that his client is itching to tell everything about the infamous June, 9, 2016 Trump Tower meeting in which Donnie Junior got mixed up with the Russians. The one that tipped off the FBI and then, well, daddy fired the director, which led to the appointment of the special counsel, which tipped off authorities to Michael Cohen, Attorney at Law.

In fact, the very next day Cohen was subpoenaed by New York City’s attorney general for illegal shenanigans involving the ruse that is the Trump Foundation raided by the Trump Campaign to embezzle hush money to pay off porn stars. Normally the attorney will return these calls. Cohen made it himself, begging to reveal illicit details about the president’s shady shit, which caused Davis to tell the world that the infamous Steele Dossier – slowly but surely seeming to be corroborated by events since its release – may indeed be correct about Michael Cohen’s arranging payments to Russian spies to get dirt on Hillary Clinton.

And if this is true, not even Orin Hatch, David Nunez, Sean Hannity or the ghost of George Washington can keep this president from impeachment, which is becoming very likely if the Democrats take control of congress in a few months.

And then the dominoes kept on falling.

Two days after the Cohen plea, longtime Trump supporter and media henchman, David Pecker, the CEO of American Media Inc. (the “CEO of a media company” implicated in Cohen’s plea), who runs a submental supermarket rag called the National Enquirer, which has acted as the media arm of Trump’s seedy celebrity and purchased dozens of stories to keep quiet on his various extra-marital affairs, illegal real estate deals and the other nefarious crap these cretins do before breakfast, was granted immunity to unload this cache of embarrassment into the hands of Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

Jot this down, kids; August 21, 2018.

The day the raven tapped on the White House door, asked for Mr. Trump, and uttered “Nevermore”.

Aquarian Weekly
7/25/18

WHERE WERE YOU WHEN THE PRESIDENT COMMITTED TREASON?

Intelligence gathered by the FBI, CIA, and NSA, concludes with high confidence that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the U.S. presidential election.
– Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) Report, January 5, 2018

I have President Putin. He just said it’s not Russia. I will say this. I don’t see any reason why it would be.
– Donald J. Trump, Helsinki, Finland, July 15, 2018

Treason – The crime of betraying one’s country.

– Miriam-Websters Dictionary

Sometime in the afternoon of Monday, July 15, 2018 the president of the United States stood on a stage, mere feet from arguably the most dangerous and powerful international tyrant of the early 21st century, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and defended him against the entirety of his government’s intelligence community that has all the evidence needed to convict the Russian government of its ongoing cyber war against America. It was, even for this moronic stooge of a chief executive, a stunning achievement; he managed in a few sentences to betray the sovereignty of the nation he purports to lead on foreign soil while simultaneously acting like the weakest lapdog this nation has sent into any summit. Donald J. Trump, the 46th president of this republic boldly told the world without coercion – filled with the kind of icky compliments he saved for the other tyrant that suckered him last month, North Korea’s Kim Jong-un – that Russian and Putin are now the big players on the world stage and the U.S. will gladly rubber stamp its aggression against its neighboring nations, its war crimes in Syria and the overt acts of war against us.

By its very definition, and coming from a president, these words amount to treason.

And in case that assertion might be consumed as columnist hyperbole, even the zombie-eyed Kool-Aid cultists who have defended every goofy thing Trump has done since he stumbled into 1400 Pennsylvania Avenue echoed similar rhetoric the minute he left that podium. Most of the state-run TV hosts at FOX News had a fit. Newt Gingrich…Newt Gingrich! The man who has a poster of a shirtless Trump hugging a money bag over his bed ripped him a new asshole. CIA, State Department and Homeland Security officials had to issue statements rebuking this craziness, and even heretofore frightened congressional Republicans took to the airwaves to decry him as some kind of capitulating traitor that looked guiltier now over all this collusion talk than ever before.

Of course, this major gaff meets crime in the continuing saga of the Trump era begs several interpretations, but to begin it is hard to ignore that this president has already been shadowed by the FBI in the summer of his campaign due to Russian ties and is currently under investigation by a special counsel on this very point. Even the man for whom he did backflips to ass-kiss buried him when Putin openly admitted in the same presser that he wanted no part of a Hillary Clinton presidency. She was, as she was as Secretary of State, going to lean hard on Putin’s shenanigans as Trump spent most of the campaign complimenting Putin and making excuses for his abysmal reign, and then followed this up for two years as president denying every fact, every arrest, and every piece of evidence that Russia was deeply invested and unprecedentedly manipulative of our democratic system.

The results of what Trump did can only be seen these ways; you choose: 1. Our president is a Russian special agent. 2. Trump is in Putin’s back pocket because he helped hand him the presidency. 3. The Russian government has a ton of evidence of Trump’s wildly analyzed and duly reported decades of illegal Russian business dealings and money laundering or the alleged photos of hookers pissing on him. 4. Trump is the stupidest person you have ever seen with absolutely no sense of self-preservation and literally makes up every sentence that bounds around his mostly empty cranium the millisecond it leaves his mouth or runs down his fingers into the sub-mental blather that make up his imbecilic tweets.

I vote for the last one.

Being an egotistical mouth-breather is no excuse for selling your country down the river on the world stage at the behest of a tyrant.

I do not think Trump has some Russian grand plan. Trump has no plan, grand or otherwise. This whole thing is just another reality show and PR campaign to make him feel loved by his dead father. The fact that he is using this nation to work through these issues doesn’t necessarily bother me, but it is getting tiresome. I truly believe he spends more time on manipulating that hair of his than anything to do with international intrigue. He knows we all think the Russians helped him and about half the people who had anything to do with him becoming president has/had Russian ties, and many of them have been arrested or indicted to this end. He is a megalomaniac who wants everyone to think he does everything by himself and only he can do it and everyone else is a stupid idiot. The narrative that Putin handed him the gig and controls his every move pisses him off – even the implication of it, quite apparently, as his years of angry tweets and endless comments; he actually spent part of the presser talking about Hillary Clinton and the electoral college. This whole thing sends him into a frothing rage. Also, his knee-jerk response to everything since the 1980s lets you know he gives no thought to what he is about to think or say, so yeah…it’s that.

However, being an egotistical mouth-breather is no excuse for selling your country down the river on the world stage at the behest of a tyrant.

Donald Trump committed treason. This is what the history books will record down through the centuries and this is what the tattered and embarrassed fallout for America will be after July 15, 2018.

Of course, once Trump returned from Finland he was confronted with this shitstorm and got some lackey to whip up a mea culpa, which he read in Clintonian splendor, a little bit of the Checkers Speech meets Reagonesque, “I don’t recall” trying on his best Manny Ramirez, “I really meant…” None of which anyone with a functioned cerebellum bought. So he predictably took to Twitter and went all Kanye West meets the teenage girl down the block and unleashed on everyone but himself. Blah blah blah, same Trump shit.

THEN…

Some enterprising people who still give a crap about this country noticed that in the same appearance the president let out (once again, self-inflicted wounds) that in his two-hour private Putin meeting with only interpreters in the room that the administration has still not framed for the American people, he was considering allowing an American citizen and former Russian Ambassador Michael McFaul to be interrogated by the Russian government.

Once again…shit storm. And then half-assed explanations from the press secretary, followed soon by a qualification that, um, no that ain’t happening – this after the Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense told the press that there would be resignations in the face of such madness.

Somewhere in there another Russian agent, this time on American soil, was arrested for working with National Rifle Association to gain funds and enact espionage on Democratic candidates during the 2016 campaign.

THEN…

Without the knowledge of anyone in the United Stated government, you know, the people he chose to do these jobs framed in the Constitution, Trump announced he has invited Vladimir Putin to the White House. On live national television in the middle of an interview, Trump’s Director of National Intelligence heard the special announcement and did what amounts to a double-take before sitting silently for a good 30 seconds and stammering, “That should be something.”

By this morning, things are moving so fast for all I know Putin is sitting at Trump’s desk right now, the president is back to denying the Russians had anything to do with election meddling and to this date his administration has done absolutely nothing to prevent it from happening again this November.

So, where were you when the president of the United States committed treason? Then did it again? Then made flimsy excuses for it? Then denied he made excuses? Then reneged on the excuses? And then invited an enemy of the state to hang out in the people’s house?

I was here, at The Desk, where I have been for 20 years, and not since 9/11 have I had a column that had to be written as early in the week as this one.

Where were you?

Aquarian Weekly
7/11/18

EXPLAINING “ROE v. WADE” IN THE AGE OF STUPID

Now that Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy will be retiring from the highest court in the land after three decades there is the very real possibility that the person the president chooses will be vehemently anti-abortion and therefore nearly every case some of the less-enlightened states have been trying to push up to the Supreme Court will find a sympathetic ear, making it harder for women to have control over their reproductive rights and even put into jeopardy the 1973 Court ruling of Roe v. Wade that is at the heart of the Religious Right movement and a precious resource for those who happen to own the equipment the government will then be allowed to control, namely women, which is why I am always baffled when women vote Republican, but that is a subject for another column.

This is about the constitutionality of Roe v. Wade and where it stands in the pantheon of decisions based on that little document which keep lunatics like Donald Trump from turning this whole shebang into his personal Atlantic City mob quest.

Speaking of our game show president, it will be his (gulp!) decision to replace Justice Kennedy for the next generation. And, to be kind, Trump’s choices of personnel have been woefully subpar. If we’re honest, which we have consistently tried to be here for two decades, his choices have been horrifyingly abysmal. Have you seen Donald Trump’s closest confident and lawyer lately? In custody. His campaign manager? In jail. His choice for the man to run the EPA had to finally quit after some 14 investigations, the head of Education is uneducated, there is a surgeon running HUD, the Secretary of State ran EXXON, and then there is Anthony “The Mooch” Scaramucci, so you get the point. There is a very good chance if Trump is involved in making personnel decisions they will definitely be awful. Supreme Court? He’s already sent one ideologue there.

But take El Douche’s failings aside, and let’s concentrate on the wider religious conservative movement in this country since the 1980s – you could go back to Nixon’s Silent Majority and Southern Strategy, but I think that is under-cutting the influence of the Religious Right on the Reagan Administration and the puritanical return to dumbness which percolated during that decade – and what that has done to the political direction of the Right since then and its concentration on Roe v. Wade.

This has always been a major sticking point for what began this sort of mangled quasi-Christian thing called Evangelicals in the 1980s that made shitloads of cash for insipid mouth breathers like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and their ilk, who for some weird reason (First Amendment mostly) were allowed to bring their voodoo shit into the vox populi, or the dumbing down of political discourse. Their witch-doctor influence was paramount in creating a mutated wing of the Republican Party that before was filled with mostly multi-issued economic voters. The legalization of abortion was to many of these people the culmination of the eroding of the nation’s moral center the minute they allowed Elvis Presley to shake his ass on network television in 1956.

The 1960s broke these people and by the 70s the Culture Wars were in full swing. The attempt to return the culture back to pre-Elvis-ass-shaking days fell to Ronald Reagan, who believed the Viet Nam War was a success and all the Shiny City on the Hill stuff that was co-opted by the mobilization of the Religious Right to stop things like the Equal Rights Amendment, convincing women that they would have to share bathrooms and work on a shipping dock if passed. And, of course, right smack in the middle of all this drug-addled, sexually depravity came Legal Abortion!

I have found no one who thinks the government should control your liver, brain, heart, stomach, so why the uterus?

How these frightened shut-ins mostly see abortion, and it turns out they are partly correct, is that it is a form of infanticide. And I get it, as I have family members and good friends who are (and I hate this word, because some of these people are hunters, pro-war and pro death penalty, so as a word-man I find these semantics foul) Pro-Life. However, despite my libertine bent (I believe all vices should be legal, as it is the bedrock of liberty promised by our little document and a key part of this human experiment called America) I feel for this argument. I am vehemently Pro-Choice, what Pro-Lifers like to call Pro-Abortion, but that is like saying someone who is all about the Second Amendment is Pro-Murder. It’s silly and falls into the category of stupid, and since we are smack in the middle of the Age of Stupid it is important to explain why I support the Roe v. Wade decision and why it is important to the foundation of our liberty and is the correct and sound decision by the Court and what many in the country (a majority of which support Roe v Wade – roughly six out of ten) believe.

Roe v. Wade is not about abortion, although it is the key result of the decision, it is about the government’s right to enter the bodies of tax paying citizens and control the results. God forbid you’re a victim of rape, you then have to carry the child of your rapist? What if your life is in danger, you roll the dice? This is the problem with asking, “What about the rights of the fetus?” That is not a thing, a fetus does not have rights. You know who does have rights? The woman carrying the fetus.

Forget abortion. What if the government decides that the pancreas is negatively affecting the national health? It can then, with no Roe v Wade president, order a national removal of the pancreas. This is not science fiction, it can happen. What if the government decides that there are too many people on this continent? National crisis! You know how many liberties we’ve surrendered because of those two words? The food supplies are low, like in China back when they instituted its draconian law of one child per family, which resulted in forced abortions and the murder of thousands of female babies because, shit we need a boy to keep the family name going. The government will then have the right to make a law that forces people to have only one child and that through the eradication of Roe v. Wade ironically gives it the right to command forced abortions. Again, it is possible, because Roe v. Wade is not about abortion, it is about the government controlling the human body.

Nobody, no matter what political stance you support, thinks this is a good idea. I have found no one who thinks the government should control your liver, brain, heart, stomach, so why the uterus?

This is what happens when you allow people to use the Bible to control our laws. My favorite is the Ten Commandments, which states that merely coveting things is a sin, thus illegal (religious crazy people’s interpretation). It is not the basis of law. It is religion, and it should be separated from the state as the founders intended. The law should protect the citizen, whose rights are provided by the Constitution, not a religious document. This is why there is no slavery or women vote, because some enterprising soul chucked the Bible nonsense and went with citizen rights. Roe v. Wade protects citizen rights. Period. I am for that, not abortions or the rest of it. Rights. Citizens.

Ignorance of what was behind the Roe v Wade decision is what should disturb clear-thinking Americans who cherish liberty. But ignorance is kind of in now, and this is why so many Evangelicals continue to support easily the most immoral fucker we’ve elected president since the Civil War.

But this space is about fighting ignorance, so there’s that.

Citizen.

Rights.

Aquarian Weekly
6/20/18

THE KIM JONG-UN SHOW
When Two Ego-Mad Lunatics Masturbate on Official Documents & a U.S. President Praises a Murderous Thug

One thing I’ll say for Donald J. Trump as president, he really does outdo his idiocy on historical levels.

For the first time in over a half century a North Korean leader meets with a U.S president and it is one of the most flaccid, useless, innocuous occurrences in the grandest tradition of phot-op, international politics. Nothing was officially decided, as two tyrannical goofballs whose relationship with anything resembling truth is a kind of rhetorical hide-and-seek anyway, told each other a bunch of stuff and then signed a paper saying they told each other a bunch of stuff.

Nothing is binding. Nothing is permanent or specific. No one has to do anything said or signed. There are no consequences or concessions ratified by either of these men’s governments. Either of them, who have made reneging on deals a religious art form, can walk away from this right now as I write this. Of course those who worship these dinks celebrate and those who despise them complain, while people paying attention to detail wonder what the fuck just transpired.

Enter Reality Check.

First off, I support any weirdly constructed attempt to stop human annihilation. This is why I supported the new way in which the Barack Obama administration dealt with Iran in their nuclear deal, which had way more teeth than this farce and was mocked openly and then trashed by the same guy who signed on with one of the worst murdering, human rights monsters on the planet. Shit, even those who mock Neville Chamberlain’s Munich capitulation to Adolf Hitler in 1938 understand he did it to “keep the peace”, which was all the rave in discussing what went down when Kim Jong-un met with Trump in Singapore this past week. “Stopping the war games” as our game show president couched it, mirroring in many ways major “agreements” with this family dynasty over the past three administrations that started out with lots of promises and “good will” and ended up with the proliferation of nuclear weapons and a crazy man threatening the U.S.

I should say at this juncture it is merely an opening salvo, but nonetheless a one-sided one. Jong-un was the winner here – not North Korea or South Korea or America or the Asia as a whole. He is still very much the same Jong-un, a maniac who slaughters and jails his people and murders Americans and members of his own family and children etc, and is still sitting on tons of weaponry, of which he expressed only the desire to end all of that with, again, no specifics or dates/deadlines or agreeing to inspectors or really any concessions beyond, “Sure, let’s give this a try”, which rings as hollow as whatever Hitler told Chamberlain to continue to carve up Europe.

What has changed is Jung-un’s perception in the West and in China, which is what he wanted. Sitting next to the leader of the free world and historically shaking his hand is a bigger deal for an ostracized tyrant, who is deep in sanctions and surrounded by enemies within and without, than it is for an American president, who has nothing to gain by sitting with this loon beyond a hollow political “win” and the low-bar prospect that he is so insane that the two of these men mere months ago were dick-fighting with millions of lives at stake.

So what we’re celebrating, if that is what is happening, is that there wasn’t the egotistical massacre of innocents by two rich kids who woke up on third and think they hit a triple or as the New Republic nailed it: “Nepotism Solidarity” telling each other whatever they wanted to hear to claim victory.

It is also important, though, to point out that while being constantly compared to Hitler, Bush II and Obama and now Trump are not, but you know who is a good one for this name-calling? Kim Jong-un. And if in 1938 American flags were touching up against Swastika flags like what happened in Singapore last week, probably 80 to 85 percent of Americans would not have minded, as many in this country hardly blinked. In fact, that was about the percentage of Americans interested in getting involved in “Hitler’s war” in the summer of 1941 until that December when the Japanese re-introduced us to world politics. But all of that is in our review mirror and to see that pomp paraded before the world cameras made me a tad queasy, but what was truly sickening was the outpouring of ass-kissing our president bestowed on this North Korean Hitler that is hard for even me to comprehend.

Nothing was officially decided, as two tyrannical goofballs … told each other a bunch of stuff and then signed a paper saying they told each other a bunch of stuff.

Despite working for peace or during war time – cold or otherwise – never did FDR publicly condone personally or ideologically Stalin nor did Reagan of Gorbachev, and neither did Obama when dealing with Iranian leaders. This was queer, eerie and painful stuff when considering Trump never had to go this far. Why would he say these things? And repeat them over and over on American television. It is pure madness.

For a fun exercise let’s put up Jung-un’s crimes next to Trump’s praise of him.

Come on, it’s hilariously horrifying:

Millions of North Koreans have died from forced starvations to keep people in line with the draconian 300-page Commission of Inquiry that “operates an all-encompassing indoctrination machine that takes root from childhood to propagate an official personality cult and to manufacture absolute obedience” to Mr. Kim.

Trump to Seann Hannity on June 12: “He’s got a very good personality, he’s funny, and he’s very, very smart. He’s a great negotiator, and he’s a very strategic kind of a guy. We got along very well from the very beginning. I think we understand each other.”

Since Mr. Kim assumed power in 2011, taking over from his father, Kim Jong-il, he has consolidated his power through executions. In the first six years as leader, he has ordered the executions of at least 340 people, according to the Institute for National Security Strategy, a think tank arm of the National Intelligence Service. In 2016, Kim Yong-jin, the deputy premier for education, was killed in front of a firing squad after showing “disrespectful posture” in a meeting. Hyon Yong-chol, a general over the armed forces, fell asleep in a meeting. He was executed with an antiaircraft gun.

Trump to Brett Baier on June 13: “He’s a tough guy. Hey, when you take over a country, tough country, with tough people, and you take it over from your father, I don’t care who you are, what you are, how much of an advantage you have – if you can do that at 27 years old, that’s one in 10,000 could do that.”

Up to 120,000 inmates were in the country’s four major political prisons in 2014 and were subjected to gruesome conditions, according to the United Nations report. Prisoners are starved, forced to work, tortured and raped. Reproductive rights are denied through forced abortions and infanticide. Some are executed — sometimes in public. Hundreds of thousands of political prisoners have died in the camps over the past 50 years, the United Nations report found.

Trump to ABC News on June 12: “Yeah, but so have a lot of other people have done some really bad things. I mean, I could go through a lot of nations where a lot of bad things were done.”

Rape and other forms of torture, beatings and brutal interrogations are common for people whose alleged crimes might have been nothing more than falling asleep at a political event or playing foreign music. Mothers were in some cases reportedly forced to watch the infanticide of their newborn infants.

Trump to Fox and Friends, June 15: “Hey, he is the head of a country and I mean he is the strong head. Don’t let anyone think anything different. He speaks and his people sit up at attention. I want my people to do the same.”

Um…what?

And on and on it goes…still. It is quite exhausting how this man goes out of his way to put Kim Jung-un on a pedestal.

Why?

For apparently nothing, or close to nothing or…to find the low-bar…keep an Asia peninsula from annihilation.

This is now the foreign policy of the United States of America.

Aquarian Weekly
6/13/18

THE LOST CHILDREN OF AMERICA
U.S. Border Stations Overrun by Our New National Sin

It is June of 2018 in the United States of America. Right now 550 children have been stripped from their parents and are being detained in over-crowded border stations funded by your tax dollars. Three hundred of these children are in custody for over the 72-hour period allowed by law. They are being held against their will away from their family. Held in a de facto concentration camp. This is happening now. June, 2018. Here in the United States. Children. Detention Camps.

These are children of refugees seeking asylum. They have not been convicted of any crime – they have just been charged, and most have the valid defense that they are legitimately fleeing persecution. Seeking asylum at our borders is a legal right protected under U.S. law.

But law is a tricky thing for this present administration.

Who is good with this?

The United States federal government has demanded by writ of a “no tolerance” policy – another haphazardly thrown together tyrannical baby-tantrum by our game show president, echoed by his damaged and bleating troll of an attorney general and enacted by the puppets of this jack-booted regime. In a horrifying scene reminiscent of the mass exodus of Native Americans from their land during the 1830 Indian Removal Act signed by the monster on our twenty-dollar bill (Donald Trump’s hero), President Andrew Jackson, the Customs and Border Protection agents have been running out of space to shelter the hundreds of migrant children who have been separated from their parents at the United States border.

I am also reminded of another of Trump’s heroes, Dwight D. Eisenhower and his Operation Wetback, a truly ignominious slice of Americana enacted on Mexican Americans in 1954, which stunningly the current president of the United States heralded during several Republican debates. Or how about Franklin Roosevelt’s Japanese relocation camps?

Shall we go on?

Refugee children being ripped from parents and detained with our money. You are paying for this. Let it sink in.

Regardless of how you fall on this politically or ideologically or even (gulp!) morally, this is not how this whole concept of America is supposed to go, even when duly considering its ugly, petty, racist, violent past. This is 2018 and it is disgusting, embarrassing and pathetic.

This, I guess, is what all the hoopla surrounding the Guantanamo Bay terrorist prison camp was about for the past seventeen years. My take has always been that once you practice in terrorism you then hand in your society ticket. But what exactly did these children do but be born?

Fun Fact: The idiots who support this are the same ones who cannot stop telling women what to do with their bodies to save “unborn children”, while these already fully-formed children apparently don’t count.

Even the original plan for housing the children; keeping them in custody at U.S. border stations, and eventually military bases or detention facilities away from their parents, is so patently abhorrent it is hard to believe we can muster the anger to be pissed about some weird, self-absorbed hissy fit this child president conjured this week to keep professional black athletes from the White House for having the audacity to protest the systemic murder of innocents. This nonsense was all the rage this week, and more stuff about how whatever is left of Rudy Giuliani’s sanity, drowning out children being detained away from their parents at the border on our dime.

This has become Mr. Trump’s Iraq. Now we have, instead of U.S. Marines acting as traffic cops and relocation directors, Human Service’s Office of Refugee Resettlement officers acting as babysitters. They are neither trained nor equipped for caring for in many cases mere toddlers. That’s correct, I’m writing this right now; toddlers are alone, being cared for by strangers with no experience in this.

All of this might not be the sexiest news, but it will soon be history. This generation will have to remember this and it will be another sad chapter in our long putrid story of lunatics besmirching the very flag and institutions this joke president and his cabal spend all their hot air defending.

It is during these times when Twain’s “we get the leaders we deserve” axiom comes home for me. This is our country now. This is where we have sunk. Refugee children being ripped from parents and detained with our money. You are paying for this. Let it sink in. You work, they take part of your earnings, and then enact this egregious shit. You and me, we own this. It is ours.

Does this feel right to you?

The actions of this banana republic, this soulless, mean-spirited machine is our current legacy. I ask, and the answer may be yes, and for that, I cannot argue; but is any of this acceptable to you?

Children.

Detainment camps.

June of 2018 in the United States of America.