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The Wall that Protects Europe

 

                              Lest we forget what happened on September 1, 1938.

Posted on Tuesday, March 15, 2022

War, International Law, and Russia's Inhumane Crimes against the People of Ukraine by Glen Brown

Though Russia began its war with Ukraine in 2014, it was on February 24, 2022 that we began to witness a widespread and unlimited brutality of artillery and aerial bombing of innocent non-combatants.

To try to comprehend this brutality and terror on a sovereign nation, according to Quincy Wright, an American political scientist: “It may be said that wars usually result (1) technologically, because of the need of political power confronted by rivals continually to increase itself in order to survive, (2) legally, because of the tendency of a system of law to assume that the state is completely sovereign, (3) sociologically, because of the utility of external war as a means of integrating societies in time of emergency, and (4) psychologically, because persons cannot satisfy the human disposition to dominate except through identification with a sovereign group.”1 William James, a nineteenth century American philosopher, historian and psychologist, believed war is a permanent obligation, “a biological and sociological necessity, uncontrolled by ordinary psychological checks and motives.”2

In examining the sociological and psychological aspects of war, it appears that aggressive behavior is both a personal and social phenomenon as well as a manifestation of the same drive system: the instinct to unify is as strong as the instinct to destroy. However, it is the organization of political parties and the ideologies of nation-states that give sanction to personal aggression, for war is often a product of in-group thinking, an identification of the self with a nation-state focused upon an out-group, and “once war begins, there are no moral limits, only practical ones, only the limitations of force itself.”3 

It has been stated that rights of non-combatants are protected by international law, “derived from positive compacts or treaties between governments, binding in justice, but ceasing to bind when the other party [or aggressor] has ceased to observe it.”4  Though “international law is a relatively precise body of rules, defined in general and particular treaties, judicial precedents, and centuries of juristic analyses, with established international institutions, capable of making clear its applications in particular cases, [it is] not always successful in preventing violation or in applying remedies.”5

The paradoxical problem with the concept of political and legal sovereignty in international law is that it implies a nation-state is free to resort to war, even though international law also promotes (and is supposed to protect) human rights. It is true that “international law is said to allow no distinction between the foreseen and the intended consequences of an action, and that neither the League of Nations nor the United Nations contemplated enforcement of all the rules of international law. Sanctions were provided only to prevent or to stop illegal hostilities and, in the United Nations, to enforce World Court judgments. These sanctions were intended to preserve peace rather than to maintain law… If international law is to be real law, sovereignty must be subordinate to it and sanctioned by the community of nations.”6 

This, of course, would be an impossible undertaking with today’s rise in authoritarianism. In order to succeed, a peaceful world-community would depend upon moral conformity by leaders of every nation composed of diverse cultural values, political ideologies, mixed economies and nationalistic tendencies. If the truth be told in Russia, for example, it would depend upon exposing and dismantling Vladimir Putin's malicious propaganda, conspiratorial gaslighting, kleptocratic capitalism, and corrupt patronage. Now that he has shut down independent radio and television news stations and the internet, the majority of Russian people will be deceived indefinitely. The war in Ukraine can only be referred to as “a special military operation” in the media. Anyone who dares call it a war is subject to 15 years in prison. 

Furthermore, it is indisputable that Putin’s systematic and vicious annihilation of the Ukrainian people and their cultural heritage and independence is none other than what it is: a crime against humanity. What is the ultimate good which is supposed to compensate for this evil? Putin had no justifiable emergency and reasons to attack Ukraine in order to secure Russia’s survival, no just or legal cause, no right or moral intention, and no promise of a successful victory.

All attempts by western media to understand and explain Putin’s resentment and xenophobia toward the West, his intentions and rationalizations for war, such as his all-consuming ambition to restore the Soviet Union, his claim that Ukraine is not a sovereign country and belongs to Russia, his desire to eradicate the Ukrainian language and culture, his desire to aid the Separatists in their autonomy in the Donbas region, and his belief that the minority-aligned fascist militias in southeastern Ukraine and NATO’s eastern expansion are serious threats to Russia’s sovereignty..., cannot justify Russia's indiscriminate raping, torturing, killing and imprisoning innocent Ukrainian people and the kidnapping of Ukrainian children.  

Finally, let’s remember Putin’s threat to the world: “Today's Russia remains one of the most powerful nuclear states. Moreover, it has a certain advantage in several cutting-edge weapons. In this context, there should be no doubt for anyone that any potential aggressor will face defeat and ominous consequences never seen in history.” Asked recently, if an open clash could erupt between Russia and NATO, Putin replied: "Everything is possible in today's world. It's clear to everyone that it will put us a step away from full-scale World War III." 

Those of us who lived through the Cold War remember the fear of megaton nuclear bombs.  Nuclear deterrence depends upon a leader's rational perceptions and decisions that the use of nuclear weapons would ensure mutual destruction of our planet, and that both America and Russia have not only first strike capabilities but also second-strike capabilities for massive nuclear retaliation posthumously.

What is more, the admonition that an invasion of “one inch of NATO territory” will ignite a world war is a disturbing declaration. President Biden “evokes a Gestalt [the whole is greater than its parts] in which an absolute boundary is emphasized, given its certain arbitrary delineation.”7 Though some world leaders might contend that warfare can be a necessary and noble endeavor, as in the case of World War II, perhaps the greatest menace to the world today is when leaders create a scenario where World War III can become inevitable.

-Glen Brown 

Notes:

1. Wright, Quincy. A Study of War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970. p. 114.

2. James, William. “The Moral Equivalent of War.” War and Morality. Ed. Richard A. Wasserstrom. California: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1970. p. 8.

3. Walzer, Michael. “Moral Judgment in Time of War.” War and Morality. Ed. Richard A. Wasserstrom. California: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1970. p. 54.

4. Ford, John C. “The Morality of Obliteration Bombing.” War and Morality. Ed. Richard A. Wasserstrom. California: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1970. p. 17.

5. Wright, Quincy. A Study of War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970. p. 190.

6. Wright, Quincy. op. cit. pp. 200, 203.

7. Erikson, Eric H. “Wholeness and Totality.” War: Studies from Psychology, Sociology and Anthropology. Eds. Leon Bramson and George W. Goethals. New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1968. p. 128.

 

Hate, fear and bigotry is all the GOP has to offer — but will it sell?

The Republican Party no longer has anything constructive to say about anything or anyone, so what is its closing argument in the 2026 midterm elections? Hate, fear, and bigotry. On Sunday, Trump claimed that if Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed won, he’d “invite hordes of jihadis to our shores.”

We’ve become so numbed to Trump’s bigotry that it’s necessary to remind ourselves that the president of the United States is now accusing an American citizen who’s running for the Senate of posing a danger to America because he’s Muslim.

Trump’s rants against Representative Ilhan Omar draw on the same Islamophobia. He’s launched a criminal investigation against her based on an allegation that she came to the United States fraudulently. He charged recently that her real name is Ilhan Nur Said Elmi and “her last name is, incredibly, also the exact name of her brother, Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, the person they said she married and had children with.”

He’s called her “garbage” and “a scammer” who comes from “a non-country, basically. Somalia has no government, has no nothing. … All they do is run around shooting each other.” Again, the president of the United States is investigating a member of Congress because she was born in Somalia and is Muslim. Of course, hateful bigotry is nothing new for Trump. But until recently the Republican Party as a whole had avoided Trump’s bottom-feeding shite.

A few weeks ago, Senator John Kennedy, Republican of Louisiana, claimed that Dr. El-Sayed slept in an Osama “bin Laden jersey.”

On Monday, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., while campaigning against Dr. El-Sayed, falsely accused him of being associated with the Muslim Brotherhood and then baselessly claimed that the rise of the Brotherhood (an Islamist political movement founded in 1928) had created “stagnant societies” in which Arabs do not win major global awards such as Nobel Prizes and “don’t produce literature.”

I once worked for RFK Jr.’s father. Junior’s bigotry would appall Robert F. Kennedy, whose life was dedicated to fighting such crap. But when it comes to mimicking Trump’s hatefulness, no one comes as close as JD Vance.

At a recent rally in Michigan, Vance branded El-Sayed a “little weasel” who harbored hatred for the U.S. and said he should “shut his mouth and show a little gratitude” to America. Vance’s bigotry extends beyond Islamophobia. Vance has tried to suggest that Texas Democratic Senatorial candidate James Talarico is gay. Campaigning in Texas on October 13 for Talarico’s Republican opponent, Ken Paxton, Vance answered a man who shouted that he loved him by saying he felt the same but in a “platonic” way, adding: “I’m not James Talarico.”

Then, insinuating that a positive statement Talarico once made about transgender children harbored something sinister in Talarico’s past, Vance alluded to Talarico’s internet search history before admitting he was “just guessing.”

Yet Vance thinks it’s fine to weaponize childhood sexual assault. He vigorously defends Ohio Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s campaign ad featuring the estranged birth mother of Democratic candidate Amy Acton calling her daughter a “liar” and mocking her mental health — without mentioning that the mother had lost custody of Acton after Acton’s stepfather was indicted for raping Acton as a child. Vance even blasted fellow Republicans who spoke out against the ad, calling their criticism “disgusting” and telling them to “stop whining” because “politics is a tough business.”

The midterm elections are bringing out this filth because Republicans dare not talk about the economy, which they and Trump have wrecked for most people; or foreign policy, in which Canada has become an enemy and Putin a friend; or the violent dragnet of their domestic policy, in which American citizens have been shot and killed by masked ICE agents.

All they have left with which to appeal to Americans is fear of the “other,” hate of Muslims and LGBTQ+ people, and blatant bigotry toward anyone who’s different. If this is enough for a majority of voters to keep them in control of Congress and deliver them governorships, our nation is a lot worse off than I feared.

-Robert Reich, Truthdig

Reading Ulysses at the Martello Tower by Chris Hedges

 

Dublin: It is a blustery, overcast morning on the Irish coast. I am standing on the roof of the Martello Tower, looking down at bathers diving from a rock into the Forty Foot in Dublin Bay on the beach at Sandycove. I hold James Joyce’s “Ulysses.”

With nothing but the wind to disturb me, I open the book. I read the first chapter, which Joyce — who lived briefly in this decommissioned coastal fortification — set in the tower”

“Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came down from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed,” I read. “A yellow dressing-gown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned: Introibo ad altare Dei.”

The Latin translation is “I will go in to the altar of God,” the opening of Mass in the Catholic Church for centuries.

There is the stench of corruption in the opening chapter, with Mulligan intoning a dark Mass to Stephen Dedalus, who has spurned his mother’s request to pray at her deathbed. Dedalus, cast out from his father’s house, is soon exiled from the tower to wander Dublin. His refusal to bow before authority, whether embodied in the Roman Catholic Church or the British colonizers, makes him an outcast, like the novel’s protagonist, Leopold Bloom.

We too are being orphaned in our own land.

I cope with the savagery around me by reading. I retreat into past worlds and past lives. I revel in the lyricism and musicality of great writing. I heed the wisdom of our ancestors.

Joyce detests what we should all detest. War. Violence. Nationalism, including Irish nationalism. Grasping capitalists. Fatuous pundits and journalists. Pseudo-intellectuals. Utopian dreamers. Pompous politicians. Bullies and brutes. He distrusts causes and noble ideals. 

Joyce knows the more inflated the rhetoric — “the big words that make us so unhappy,” as Dedalus says in the novel — the more the demand for human sacrifice. He chronicles the foibles, idiosyncrasies and struggles that define our lives. Like V. S. Pritchett — another writer I love — he reminds us that no one is ordinary.

Joyce’s heroes do not adorn recruitment posters enticing young men to fight in the suicidal folly of World War I, underway when he wrote much of the novel. Bloom’s bodily functions, including defecation and masturbation, are described in detail, scenes that led to the book being banned for obscenity in the United States and Britain and in the Soviet Union for “not conforming to the policy of socialist realism.”

But the point was to bring Bloom down to earth. Bloom is unmistakably human, yet filled with pathos, empathy and a desperate yearning for love. Heroism, Joyce shows us, is defined by the ability to endure suffering, rather than inflict it.

There is much in this world, from the genocide in Gaza to the consolidation of fascism in the U.S., which warrants despair. But when it becomes overwhelming, there is the reassuring comfort of novels like “Ulysses,” which is set on one day, June 16, 1904. It improbably casts a Jewish advertising salesman as a hero, as a modern Odysseus, struggling to hold on to goodness and kindness in a world where the cruel and heartless triumph.

The vulgar, such as the cad and womanizer Blazes Boylan in the novel — like Donald Trump — lack Bloom’s capacity for introspection. Words, for them, conceal more than they reveal. Joyce’s characters are portrayed with all our human complexity, ambiguity and inconsistency. They struggle with the contradictory and warring fragments of human nature — our plurality of identities.

Joyce, who lived in self-imposed exile in Paris, did not socialize with the literary grandees and fashionable denizens who congregated in the exclusive Faubourg Saint-Germain salons. His intimate circle encompassed waiters, fruit vendors, bank clerks and hotel concierges. The salons entranced Marcel Proust until Proust confronted their cruelty and hypocrisy in the final volume of “In Search of Lost Time.”

Joyce had little time for the bookish, the pretentious and pedants. At a dinner in Paris, to the consternation of the hosts, he chatted with Proust not about modernism and literature, but their physical ailments and shared fondness for dark chocolate truffles.

Proust, Joyce recalled, “would only talk about duchesses, while I was more concerned with their chambermaids.”

Marxist critics, like many of Joyce’s contemporaries, recoiled at his depiction of our irrevocably flawed human nature and his disdain for the myth of human progress. For Joyce, we are not headed toward a classless utopia, or any utopia.

“I don’t know why they attack me,” Joyce said to his friend Eugene Jolas. “Nobody in any of my books is worth more than a thousand pounds.”

He understood that national myths are used to obscure our looming mortality, to create meaning out of chaos and to fool us into thinking we are bigger than ourselves. Joyce revels in the messiness of life, puncturing our self-delusions and the ways we present ourselves to the world. He obliterates the fatuous binary narratives we spin out in the name of conventional morality.

“If we go to him thinking he may be the apostle of brotherhood, he shows us brothers in violent quarrel,” Richard Ellmann writes in his biography of Joyce. “If we go to him to find a defender of the family, he presents his central hero — the cuckold. If we ask him to be the celebrant of the isolated individual, Joyce shows isolation making him morose and defenseless. If we look for the spokesman of life, he introduces us to the dead.”

Late in the afternoon, rain clouds lowering overhead, I go to Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin to see the graves of famous revolutionaries, including Roger Casement. Casement, who exposed Belgian atrocities in the Congo, was a fierce opponent of the British Empire, which Dedalus sums up as composed of “beer, beef, business, bibles, bulldogs, battleships, buggery and bishops.”

Casement was originally buried on the grounds of Pentonville Prison in London, where he was hanged for treason after attempting to smuggle 20,000 Mosin-Nagant 1891 rifles, along with machine guns and millions of rounds of ammunition from Germany to arm Irish nationalists in the ill-fated 1916 uprising. His body was repatriated to Ireland in 1965, where he lay in state in Dublin for five days and received a full state funeral with military honors.

I stand before the graves of the Irish revolutionaries Michael Collins and Countess Constance Markievicz. I peer up at the 180-foot granite tower marking the tomb of Daniel O’Connell, the 19th-century nationalist leader. I stop at the grave of Maud Gonne, the actress and activist who the poet William Butler Yeats compared to Helen of Troy and who spurned his numerous marriage proposals.

“I have spread my dreams under your feet,” Yeats writes. “Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.”

Joyce models the chapters in his book on the episodes in “The Odyssey,” but his intentions diverge radically from Homer. Homer celebrates the military prowess and martial feats Joyce despises. Critics have busied themselves, and wasted our time, scouring “Ulysses” and Homer for parallels, mistaking Joyce’s superstructure for Joyce’s vision.

Joyce sets chapter six in this 124-acre graveyard that now holds 1.5 million souls. Odysseus in “The Odyssey” descends to Hades to meet the prophet Tiresias to discover how he can return to Ithaca. In Joyce’s hands, Hades does not conjure up spirits or prophecies but the awful finality of death.

Bloom attends the funeral in the cemetery for the drunkard Paddy Dignam. Bloom mourns the loss of his son, Rudy, who died 11 days after his birth a decade earlier. He envisions him as a young boy in an Eton suit. He remembers his father, who killed himself by drinking poison and, in his suicide note, begged Bloom to take care of his dog Athos. He struggles with the knowledge that in the afternoon his wife, Molly, has a rendezvous with her lover, Blazes Boylan. He endures the antisemitic slights of his fellow mourners. He looks at the plot where Rudy and his mother are buried and imagines his own burial.

He surveys the acres of tombs around him with their “saddened angles, crosses, broken pillars, family vaults, stone hopes praying with upcast eyes.” “How many!” he says. “All these here once walked round Dublin. Faithful departed. As you are now so once were we.” He watches the cemetery caretaker in a “well cut frock coat” who he suspects is weighing up the mourners “to see which will go next.”

“Well it is a long rest,” he thinks of those buried around him. “Feel no more. It’s the moment you feel. Must be damned unpleasant. Can’t believe it at first. Mistake must be: someone else. Try the house opposite. Wait, I wanted to. I haven’t yet. Then darkened death chamber. Light they want. Whispering around you. Would you like to see a priest?

“Then rambling and wandering. Delirium all you hid all your life. The death struggle. His sleep is not natural. Press his lower eyelid. Watching his nose pointed is his jaw sinking are the soles of his feet yellow. Pull the pillow away and finish it off on the floor since he’s doomed. Devil in that picture of sinner’s death showing him a woman. Dying to embrace her in his shirt. Last act of Lucia. Shall I nevermore behold thee? Bam! Expires. Gone at last. People talk about you a bit: forget you. Don’t forget to pray for him. Remember him in your prayers. Even Parnell. Ivy day dying out. Then they follow: dropping into a hole one after the other.”

He sees “an obese grey rat” along the side of a crypt and thinks, “one of those chaps would make short work of a fellow. Pick his bones clean no matter who it was… Wonder does the news go about whenever a fresh one is let down. Underground communication. We learned that from them. Wouldn’t be surprised. Regular square feed for them. Flies come before he’s well dead. Got wind of Dignam. They wouldn’t care about the smell of it.”

There are sections of “Ulysses” that should be read out loud. Joyce wrote about Dublin’s red-light district, Night town, as if it were a play. 

The characters’ names are set off in capital letters and there are italicized stage directions. Molly’s soliloquy at the end of the book, which lacks punctuation, is also better heard, as I was able to do when Eunice Wong performed it on stage in New York. RTÉ, Ireland’s national broadcaster, produced an audiobook of “Ulysses” in 1982 with a different actor for each character. You can link to the recording here.

We are not headed for a good place. The walls are closing in. We too are becoming outcasts. Novels such as “Ulysses,” as Dedalus says, provide “the eternal affirmation” of the human spirit. They remind us why we were put on this earth. They make us feel less alone. They sustain our souls.

-Chris Hedges

A Poster in my Library

Losing in Court Isn’t Enough: DOJ Must Be Sanctioned

In the run-up to the midterms, district and circuit federal court judges have done an admirable job in beating back absurd, abusive Trump regime legal maneuvers that are utterly lacking in merit. Moreover, they are apparently designed to either disrupt the midterms or assure the unraveling autocrat in the Oval Office that his dutiful lackeys at the Justice Department are doing everything possible to try to do just that. Alternatively, the flurry of vindictive actions against long-held presidential enemies — such as Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and former FBI director James Comey — is simply meant to distract the addled president; catnip for a demented feline, if you will.

The range of abusive, nonsensical actions is breathtaking:

-Sending an unverified list of semi-suspected noncitizen voters to have their ballots set aside;

-Rushing to the 9^th Circuit prematurely for relief;

-Challenging the results of a not-yet-transpired Alaska Senate race;

-Pounding on doors to interrogate suspected noncitizen voters;

-Defying a district court in racing to destroy hundreds of trees at the East Potomac Golf Course (and then coming up with a cock and bull story that contradicts Trump’s own social media post that this is not part of a “final plan”);

-Filing an “information” (not seeking or failing and not obtaining) indictment to try to fudge the statute of limitations in a third vindictive effort to prosecute James Comey;

-Rummaging through decades-old immigration paperwork to try to strip Rep. Omar of citizenship.

While it remains a mystery how any federal court official issued a search warrant for Omar’s home, overall the courts — to their credit — have rebuffed DOJ’s legal gamesmanship, often in exceptionally harsh language.

From the 9^th Circuit’s snub of the non-emergency, “emergency” appeal in California:

The United States’s claimed emergency, at least in part, is a self-constructed one. At least part of the delay here is attributable to the United States’s own delay in filing suit, in realizing that existing California state law governs the issuance and processing of ballots, in recognizing that California has millions of registered voters and processes ballots on a schedule aligned with that scale, and in communicating to the court its desired relief.

The concurrence from Trump-appointed Judge Bennett was even more dismissive (and on the merits, to boot):

Despite these various mechanisms to challenge the eligibility of a voter, Plaintiff prefers that this court require a different procedure to effectuate a challenge to over 20,000 voters solely because, in a different context, the California Legislature permits the segregation of ballots. See Cal. Code Regs. tit. 2, § 20363 (providing for the segregation of ballots in a recount). But Plaintiff’s preference does not carry with it the force of law. . . .

Beyond the infeasibility of and risks associated with segregating tens of thousands of ballots, Defendants also lack the ability to verify voters’ citizenship status before December 4, 2026—the deadline for counties to certify their election results to the Secretary of State. . . . Plaintiff seeks equitable relief, asking us to order Defendants to set aside vote-by-mail ballots from over 20,000 individuals whom Plaintiff believes are likely noncitizens. 

But Plaintiff offers no workable plan as to how this could be accomplished, let alone how it could be accomplished without burdening Defendants more than necessary. Instead, Plaintiff simply claims that California has an existing regulation, Cal. Code Regs. tit. 2, § 20363, which provides for ballot segregation. But as discussed, that regulation is inapplicable.

From the golf course case, Judge Ana Reyes all but called the government lawyers a pack of liars (multiple times):

The Government felled hundreds of trees from East Potomac Golf Course without real notice even though it knew of the scheduled removal at least a week prior. And even though the Court literally warned against bulldozers bulldozing on no real notice. … And even though the Court was equally clear that it did not want an act-first ask-forgiveness-later situation. … All this is concerning. 

The Government appears to have set the timing of the tree removal and late notice to impede Plaintiffs’ ability to seek Court intervention. And its recent actions call into question other representations it has made to the Court over these many months. …

Government counsel argues that President Trump, who discussed the Plan to redesign the Course no fewer than five times, has “at most . . . has given preliminary thought to” the Washington National Plan. That claim does not square with the record. The Court cannot disbelieve the President’s clear, repeated statements of fact when those statements find support in the record and the Government has presented no credible evidence to contradict him.

And yet, even defeats for the government’s patently frivolous actions and refreshing rebukes from courts leave us unmoved. The government, particularly Attorney General Todd Blanche and his flunkies, suffer no adverse consequences from trying every trick in the book — no matter how frivolous, no matter how legally unsound and constitutionally abusive. Indeed, they may well get ‘atta boys for having angered federal court judges.

Donald Trump gives US Attorney General Todd Blanche a pat on the back after a roundtable in the East Room of the White House on October 21, 2026. (Photo by SAUL LOEB / AFP via Getty Images)

Unless and until DOJ lawyers themselves face sanctions pursuant to Rule 11 and referral to state bar associations for misconduct, the incentive to keep abusing the federal court system will remain. Frankly, handing out more-than-justified sanctions would stiffen the spines of DOJ attorneys, encouraging them to push back against their political bosses. 

Ultimately, contempt citations (of the sort now the subject of heated litigation in the D.C. Circuit, concerning the Trump regime’s defiance of Judge James Boasberg’s directive to turn around planes filled with deportees headed to CECOT) may be required to halt this relentless assault on the rule of law.

Aside from a new president, the most effective and entirely justified remedy for such widespread, shameless abuse of the justice system is impeachment of Attorney General Todd Blanche. Even before the current spate of lawless, partisan actions, Blanche’s record (e.g., ongoing defiance of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, refusal to investigate publicly disclosed instances of graft involving the president’s inner circle) and his repeated appearances in partisan campaign settings violate his oath of office and make a mockery of his department’s title (“Justice” Department).

In sum, courts deserve kudos for holding the line against Trump autocratic abuses. But extraordinary times and unprecedented abuse require that they do more. Sanctions and contempt citations must be meted out when appropriate. The new Congress will have an obligation to act as well, starting with the impeachment of an unfit partisan hack occupying the august role of attorney general.

-Jennifer Rubin, The Contrarian is community-supported. Help fund bold journalism and critical lawsuits to stop Trump’s corruption by becoming a paid subscriber. Join the fight now.

 

Yes, we are insignificant!

 

-NASA

As for the Orange Monkey

 

As for the Orange Monkey (a slur on monkeys), we now know openly and easily de facto just what a Russian kompromat he was and has always been. Impeached but not found guilty by the weak and frightened Republicans, Schiff warned that without penalty he will stage a revolt again. 

He was right, just as they all were in the DOJ in finding him closely connected to Russian influence.  We are stuck with a traitor who gives aid and comfort to the enemy in front of us all. He is exactly what we all supposed and feared from the day they came down the escalator to announce his hatred for non-whites and desire to be the only one to make us great again. 

A suspected pedophile, hated by his mother, unable to manage an honest business, abhorred by real businessmen in New York, without any love or even consideration for people, teaching his twisted children to be disgusting grifters like himself, so stupidly tricked into a war that has undermined our current economy, and ruined the reputation of a country honored and valued for its rule of law and largesse. He’s truly a waste of flesh. 

-John Dillon