In case you don’t have time to read all the books, here’s a quick summation.
[THREAD]
1/ Peter Strzok: Putin has so much control over Donald John Trump that it’s a blinking red national security risk.
2/ Bob Woodward: Trump knew exactly in early February what the virus was & how it spread, but chose to sit on his small hands & let it spread because he thought it would help his re-election chances by killing voters in NY, NJ, and CA.
3/ Michael Cohen: Trump made “overt and covert attempts to get Russia to interfere in the 2016 election.”
4/ Mary Trump: Trump suffers from a toxic combination of mental health disorders and psychoses, and has been effectively institutionalized his entire life. If left to his own devices, he would not survive, because he can’t function in the world without lots of help.
5/ Andrew Weissman: the DOJ neutered the Mueller investigation by not allowing him to look into Trump’s finances, which is where the crimes are, and Mueller made this worse by not being more overt in the Report.
6/ Stephanie Winston Wolkoff: Melania is a grifter, too.
7/ James Comey: Trump is basically the notorious mobster Sammy the Bull.
8/ David Enrich: Deutsche Bank started off as the bank of choice for Nazis, and has not much changed its standards for clients since then.
9/ Sarah Huckabee Sanders: Trump tried to pimp me out to the only man on earth who finds me attractive.
10/ HR McMaster: [insert 800-page lecture on geopolitics]
11/ John Bolton: I was hoping to make money on what I know, but it looks like I will go to prison AND not make money. Oops.
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On January 19, 2021, in the last hours of his presidency, Donald Trump wrote a memo in which he announced that the “binder of materials” received from the FBI via the DOJ a month prior was “declassified to the maximum extent possible.”
This was less than a week after Trump’s second impeachment—just 13 days after his MAGA horde besieged the Capitol in a failed attempt to thwart the peaceful transition of power.
Trump’s presidential Sharpie was busy that morning. On January 19, 2021, he issued pardons for, among many others: Steve Bannon, Elliott Broidy, Jeanine Pirro’s ex-husband Alex, and the disgraced art dealer Helly Nahmad, who had run an illegal gambling operation at Trump Tower.
Elaborating on #DebateNight thoughts that I shared on last night's Five 8 show.
[THREAD]
1/ Why the Dem freakout after the debate? We are all traumatized by 2016, and Biden's performance in the debate triggered our collective trauma. "No! Not again!" Hence the panic.
2/ Where does the panic come from? Is it fear that Joe can't do the job? No. Because we know he can. He's done it for 3.5 years at the highest possible level. The government is in good hands with Joe/Kamala. No worries there. None.
Alito's comments here are similar to remarks made by Rev. C. John McCloskey, Opus Dei priest and spiritual godfather to the Catholic extremist Leonard Leo cabal, to Charles Pierce 21 years ago. He, too, regarded the so-called culture wars as a Manichean struggle.
"Do I think it’s possible for someone who believes in the sanctity of marriage, the sanctity of life...to choose to survive w/ people who think it’s OK to kill women & children or for—quote—homosexual cpls to exist and be recognized? No, I don’t think that’s possible,” he said.
"But, unfortunately, in the past, these types of things have tended to end this way. If American Catholics feel that’s troubling, let them. I don’t feel it’s troubling at all.”
Like many leaders of the reactionary right—Mike Johnson, Mike Davis, Stephen Miller, and so on—the current head of the Heritage Foundation has a dull, forgettable name: Kevin Roberts.
[THREAD]
2/ Roberts has a winsome smile, a PhD in U.S. history, a background in academia, & a well-earned reputation as a nice guy. Who could have imagined that this bright, friendly Gen Xer would be leading a Christian conservative counter-reformation—a crusade to end American democracy?
3/ In 2013, Roberts, who is Catholic, became the second president of Wyoming Catholic College, a strict, almost monastic institution est. in 2007 that provides “a rigorous immersion in...the spiritual heritage of the Catholic Church”—and that will throw you out if you hook up.
If action is character, as F. Scott Fitzgerald proposed, then it is instructive to look at the life of Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson in reverse, Benjamin Button style. . .
[THREAD]
1/ It is the night before Veteran’s Day, 2021. On his primetime Fox News program, Tucker Carlson argues that the U.S. should back Russia, and not Ukraine, in the escalating conflict between the two countries. “Why would we take Ukraine’s side and not Russia’s side?”
2/ He insists that choosing Putin’s dictatorship over Zelensky’s democracy is a no-brainer because of “energy reserves.” This is either breathtaking ignorance of the region’s history or straight-up Kremlin propaganda. Or, I suppose, both.