Week of 11/28/2022

The Coward of the Country
– by David Matthews 2

“No one is above the law.”

It’s a very simple statement.  There are no exceptions to it.  There are no conditions attached to it.  It’s either true or it isn’t.

If you make the pronouncement that “no one is above the law”, you have an obligation to support it, and, if you have that responsibility, you are obligated to carry it out.  If you cannot, then you are both a liar and a coward.  It is that simple.

Ever since he took office as America’s highest prosecutor, Attorney General Merrick Garland has continually proclaimed that no one is above the law.  That he would carry out his duties, no matter where that leads.

Yes, that has led him to arrest and charge hundreds of people who took part in the January 6^th insurrection.  That has led him to arrest and charge the confidant to the Narcissist, Stephen Bannon, with contempt of Congress.

But there is one person that Garland has systematically refused to prosecute, and that is the narcissist that formerly served as the President of the United States, Donald John Trump.

Yes, Garland authorized the search of the narcissist’s Mar a Lago home for classified documents that he was not supposed to take from the White House.  And supposedly that was something Garland was reluctant to do except that the weight of the evidence presented demanded he approve the search warrant.  But executing a search warrant is not the same as executing an arrest warrant.  It’s just another slow step towards possible criminal charges, emphasis on the “slow” part.

Some progressives have been saying that Garland has just been meticulous. He’s supposedly “building” the case, working up from the lowly red-hat foot soldiers that stormed the Capital Building to “eventually” get to the narcissist.  Strangely enough, the House Select Committee investigating the January 6^th insurrection had no problem connecting the dots with their information and their witnesses, and they started much later than the Department of Justice.

Then there is the fact that, from the moment Garland took office, there has been a report sitting on his desk from retired judge Robert Mueller outlining clear charges that could be filed against The Florida Guy from the moment he left the White House in January of 2021.  A report that, despite claims of vindication from Garland’s predecessor, would lead to criminal charges if Garland so chose to file them.  So the question is… why hasn’t he?  All the groundwork was already laid out by Mueller back in 2019.  The only reason why Mueller didn’t file charges then was because he was under directives to not indict a sitting president.  But that person is no longer president and hasn’t been president since January 21, 2021.  Even Mueller himself told Congress that his successor could at any time file those charges against the narcissist.  So, again, why hasn’t Garland done that?

And now, just a week before this article’s posting, the Attorney General has announced that he has appointed a special council to handle the investigations involving the narcissist.  This coming just after the orange fascist announced his intentions to run for President of the United States in 2024, and supposedly was Garland’s justification to appoint a special council.

Understand that this commentator has been calling for a special council or special prosecutor since last year.  I was the one saying we need special prosecutors instead of a needless Congressional commission.  And yet, that commission has done far more to investigate The Florida Guy and his accomplices than Garland apparently did.  In fact, Garland had to be goaded into just arresting Bannon for contempt.  We have prosecutors on three levels of government dragging their sorry butts, and the only charges being filed so far are civil ones.

Let’s get brutally honest here… it is this commentator’s speculation that Attorney General Garland is a coward.  This decision to appoint a special council now, rather than earlier, is just another way for Garland to simply run out the clock for himself, which is precisely what the narcissist wants.

Garland could have used the Mueller Report to file charges against The Florida Guy last year.  He didn’t.  There was plenty of time for him to bring charges before the “big announcement”, which you know the narcissist was going to make regardless of how the midterms ended up.  He didn’t do that.  He didn’t need to demand the January 6^th Commission to share their evidence.  His people should have already had evidence, if he was serious about bringing charges against the narcissist instead of just prosecuting the red-hats and letting them get off light.

By dragging out the process, by running out the clock, by being a coward and not doing the job, Garland is showing that someone *is* apparently above the law.  That the very statement he made when he took office and continues to make to this day is nothing but a bold-faced lie.  And that does far more damage to the office he holds than anything that the narcissist and his cronies ever did.

 

Week of 11/21/2022

It’s Time For The Beltway Media To Go Home
– by David Matthews 2

Picture this: it’s 1972 and Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein get wind of a failed break-in at the Democratic National Committee office at the Watergate Complex.  They get a steady stream of information from someone high in the Executive Branch that this failed burglary was the work of operatives at the behest of the President of the United States, that the bungled operation was covered up, and that records were being destroyed.

Now you have these relatively young reporters who see this story of intrigue and political chicanery and abuse of power and you’d think that the first thing they’d want to do is take it to their editor.  The world’s got to know, right?  These are downright crimes being committed on behalf of the President of the United States!

But in this case, they say… nope.  They’ll put this all in a book and have it published after President Richard Nixon leaves office and make so much money off it.

Thankfully they didn’t do that.  Thankfully they brought it out in the pages of their paper with the help of their anonymous source and that led to investigations and convictions and the resignation of a sitting president before he could be impeached.

But imagine how things would have been so different if Woodward and Bernstein behaved like some of today’s beltway reporters and chose a book deal over exposing the truth.

There’s been this idea that I’ve been jogging around for a while now, and that is that maybe it’s time for the air-fluffed ego-driven media that have infested the political cesspool to go home.  You have all these people who serve as “White House correspondents” and members of the “press pool” in Washington who pretty much operate in their own little world.  They don’t really report as much as they regurgitate press statements and try to get a quick quote or soundbite.

Some conservative goes in front of the camera and says that whatever government spending idea is up for consideration will supposedly create inflation, and the press just passes it on like it’s the truth.  They don’t mention that our current global inflation is not caused by spending money on fixing bridges or on giving aid to struggling families, but because of supply chain issues following a global pandemic, because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and because of corporate profiteering.  Nope.  The media doesn’t correct the conservative talking point.  They just regurgitate the lie and treat it as a truth.

The beltway media is guilty of eternally passing the myth of “both sides”, spreading this asinine notion that no matter what one dominant political party does, that somehow the other party did something just as bad if not worse at some point in the past.  They can’t tell you when, but they claim that it exists nonetheless.  This “both-sides” mindset validates the worst of political activities, giving extremists a green light to do whatever they want and say whatever they want.

The beltway media is certainly guilty of creating the political monstrosity called Donald John Trump; giving him nonstop coverage from the moment he descended from the Trump Tower escalator in 2015 and continues even to this article’s posting, long after he left the White House and now seeks to regain it for 2024.  He received more coverage from the media than any candidate for the past two presidential elections, not to mention the midterms in between.  They essentially made him, even more so than the rest of the media did in the decades before that point.

And now the newest thing for some of these reporters is to do a book about all of the things that went on concerning “that Florida Guy”, and here we learn some of the things that went on that were not previously revealed.  And perhaps there would be some things that we should have known about while the narcissist was still in the White House.  Too bad they had to keep those to themselves until after that certain person was no longer in office.

Yes, I get that Bob Woodward still does interviews and publishes books and he’s come out with some real zingers too.  But understand that he’s not doing that as a reporter like he did in his days with the Washington Post.  He can take the time and interview people and publish books because that is what he is today.  He is an editor and an interviewer and an author, not an investigative reporter.  And it actually surprises me that certain people – aka “that Florida Guy” – are able to be as candid as they are with Woodward knowing that what they tell him will be in his next book.

You look at the media’s fixation with eternal polls and polling, with so-called “experts” claiming to know what voters are thinking, and then acting all surprised when those same experts and those same polls are all wrong after each election.  And then they sit on their talk shows and pontificate about being wrong and why do they even bother with polls and what should be done about it – ignoring the obvious solution of firing all the pollsters for their continual incompetence.  If a financial advisor was this wrong on Wall Street as pollsters are in politics, they’d be out of a job already.

It seems like the beltway media, more so than the rest of the air-fluffed ego-driven institution, are treating this all like a game.  Politics have real consequences for people, but these guys just act like it’s fantasy.

Let’s get brutally honest here… I think it is time to send them all home.  All of the “pool” reporters.  All of the “Washington correspondents”.  The whole beltway crew.  Close up the offices and send them back home.

Let these folks cover tractor pulls and dog shows.  Let them cover town hall and city hall and county commissioner meetings. Let them talk with actual people who work hard for a living and aren’t getting helped by special interest groups.  Let them work in a world where being wrong has consequences and they can’t just “both-sides” it.

And in their place, bring in a new group of reporters to cover the cesspool of politics.  People who are hungry and determined to find the truth and to report the truth, regardless of political faction.  Like Woodward and Bernstein used to be in the 1970’s.  Looking to get the truth out instead of getting a book published.

Newspapers love to give themselves little slogans like “All the news that’s fit to print” and “Democracy dies in darkness”.  But the truth is that the business of reporting the news is lost when the media treats the news like a game.  And it’s not done in darkness.  It’s being done in broad daylight.  That has certainly the case when it comes to reporting on politics, and that needs to end.

Week of 11/14/2022

One Does Not Move On From The Trump Cult
– by David Matthews 2

So the 2022 Mid-term Shenanigans have come and gone… and even though there are still a handful of races yet to be counted and tabulated and one runoff in Georgia for the U.S. Senate still to come, it’s pretty much clear that there was no “red wave” or “red tsunami” or any other kind of sweeping Trump Party victory across the country that has been continually predicted ever since the Democrats took control of Congress and the White House in 2021.

Remember all those times that the air-fluffed ego-driven media and all the Trump Party members from Minority Leader Mitch “The Bitch” McConnell all the way down to your red-hat-wearing MAGA neighbor kept on promising that the Trump Party would prevail in 2022?  All those times when the so-called “experts” continually said that “the party in power always loses big in the midterms”?

Yeah, that didn’t happen.  It was a dud.  A failure.  A fizzle instead of a flash.

Yes, the Party of the Malignant Narcissist did get some victories.  Georgia’s governor kept his job, as did Florida’s fascist leader, and some noxious figures like Marco Rubio and Marjorie Taylor Greene somehow got re-elected.  But most of if not all of the “big stars” of MAGA world lost.

TV personality Dr. Mehmet Oz was more “Meh” than “Met” as he soundly lost in Pennsylvania’s U.S. Senate race to outgoing Lt. Governor John Fetterman.  Fetterman had suffered a stroke earlier in the year and clearly still had some communication issues, but that did not stop his campaign or stop the voters from choosing him over the carpetbagging TV personality who couldn’t tell you what store he was shopping in, or that you don’t make a crudité with asparagus, a huge head of broccoli, and salsa.

Ditto for that state’s MAGA extremist candidate for governor, who thinks that women who have had abortions should be criminally charged with murder and who still denies the results of the 2020 election.  The Christian nationalist lost and lost soundly to his Dem opponent.

Here in Georgia, Hershel Walker, the fake-badge hypocrite who has as much of a hard time telling the truth as his orange-skinned sponsor, ended up losing the popular vote in his quest to be a U.S. Senator and is only in a runoff (as of this article’s posting) because of some archaic election rules about a 50+1 requirement.  And yet, it’s almost pointless because, as of this past Saturday evening, the Dems retained majority control of the Senate, so the runoff race between Walker and Senator Raphael Warnock is whether the Dems will have an extra seat.

All-in-all, it was a bad election for the Party of “The Florida Guy”, especially when it came to many of the orange narcissist’s picks.  They were as much the biggest losers as the “yooge” loser that personally endorsed them.  Bigly.

So now the talk is for the Party of Hate and Fear to “move on” from their self-appointed messiah.  Well, that and enact revenge on the younger generation that voted overwhelming against them by trying to repeal the 26^th Amendment.  Because, you know, the Party of Voter Suppression does that sort of thing.

But, yeah, a lot of the voices in the Party of Stochastic Terrorism are saying it’s time to go away from Narcissist Donald Trump and find someone else to lead the way for them in 2024.  Some are saying that Fascist Florida’s newly-reelected fascist governor would be perfect.  Others are looking to the deplorable and despicable Cancun Karen, Senator Ted Cruz.  And still others are just saying anyone other than Don the Con will do.

Right.  Like that’s going to happen.

Let’s get brutally honest here… one does not just “move on” from a cult group, no matter if it’s religious or athletic or economic or political in nature.  It’s not like shopping at Walmart, where you can simply find another all-purpose store or to go online.  Cults demand rigid conformity and unquestionable loyalty.  And that is precisely what the Trump Party, formerly known as the “Republicans” or the “GOP”, is right now.  It’s not a “political party” that one can join and6 associate with or leave at your whim.  It is a political cult.  One that does not tolerate dissention or opposition from their chosen leaders.

The conservatives have spent decades crafting and molding their base into a cult mindset.  People like the late Rush Limbaugh, like Sean Hannity and the rest of the Murdoch-owned personalities, like the televangelists and their special interest support groups.  They demanded adherence to their gospel of conservative mindsets, of false promises, and of ginned-up social crusades.  A cult without a leader, but a cult nevertheless.  That worked for them at the time.  Then one stepped up to be that leader.

And, make no mistake about it, Narcissist Donald Trump *is* the Trump Party’s cult leader, whether the party players want to accept it or not.  It became his party back in 2020, when their own party platform was turned into a fealty pledge, and it has become even more *his* personal party now more than ever.  They sold their souls and whatever principles they may have once held to their leader in exchange for power and they are stuck with it and him.

Certainly the narcissist himself and his followers will not want to “move on”.    Congresswoman Greene herself has already publicly warned Fascist Florida’s governor not to run in 2024.  Other followers have made it clear that only their orange messiah should run for the White House again.  His own malignant narcissism requires him to be the center of attention, whether or not he has a chance of winning.  He cannot just sit back and watch as the world focuses its attention on anyone other than him.

The same applies to the members of the air-fluffed ego-driven media, including and especially those partisan propaganda mills that call themselves “news”.  Many of these services created the sensation known as Narcissist Trump, selling the myth that he is this awesome “success story” that could do no wrong.  They gave him front-page and first-article status since he descended from that Trump Tower escalator in 2015, and, even after he had to leave the White House, they continue to give him undue attention.  They helped to create the monster and they continue to feed it today.

There is only one possible way to end the cult movement that doesn’t require violence and death, and that would be to have the narcissist indicted, arrested, and convicted for the crimes he has committed.  Whether it is by federal or state or county prosecutors, whether it is national or local jurisdiction, or both, having him indicted, charged, arrested, and defending himself from criminal charges would take his focus off politics.  And him behind bars, where he cannot be making business deals, fleecing his followers for money, or posting on social media, would effectively end his church.  If only there were prosecutors with the courage to do their jobs.

Cults and their leaders do not go quietly into that good night.  They don’t fade away into obscurity by themselves. They’re either broken by outside forces or else they break themselves through tragedy.  Look at Germany in the 1940’s.  Look at the Branch Davidians.  Look at Heaven’s Gate.  Look at Iraq under Saddam Hussein.  Look at the various Ponzi schemes that relied on a cult mentality.  None of them ended on their own.  All of them ended with disaster and ruin.  The only question is how this cult should end.