"A Gang Of Criminals Are In Charge"

 

This is one of the better encapsulations of the state of things right now:

“Remove justice, and what are kingdoms but gangs of criminals on a large scale?”

Augustine made this suggestion 1,600 years ago, in The City of God. Today, in the country of Trump, we’re getting a convincing demonstration of Augustine’s proposition. Justice has been removed and a gang of criminals are in charge.

They’re certainly acting on a large scale. Their expertise ranges from ordering war crimes to covering up sex crimes to engaging in all manner of financial criminality. They’re a diverse bunch, from tough guys outfitted in combat gear and masks rampaging through the streets of our cities, to smooth operators in tuxedoes who mingle with ease at state dinners. Their ranks encompass experienced criminals and newbies. They commit novel crimes and cover up old ones. Allies who had the misfortune to be caught—or were too bumbling to succeed—get pardons from the boss.

It’s all a veritable festival of law-scorning; an amazing smorgasbord of law-breaking. And it turns out that if a president aggressively shuns any concern for justice and is willing to demonstrate utter contempt for the law—if he then disables the Department of Justice and the judge advocates general and almost all other internal checks and mechanisms of accountability—his gang can get away with a heck of a lot. They don’t even have to shoot particularly straight.

And so we have an administration that embraces and pursues criminality greedily and shamelessly. They’re so far unpunished, and there doesn’t seem to be much expectation that they will be punished. [snip]

It was somewhat heartening to see the Republican chairmen of the Senate and House Armed Services Committees join the Democratic ranking members in expressing alarm at the reports of the killing of the survivors. They said they were going to look into what happened. We’ll see how far they’re really willing to go.

And we’ll see if, perhaps, as they explore accountability in that one arena, they’ll dip their toes into the many others. We’ll see if anyone is willing to act against the mind-boggling and pervasive grift of Trump and cronies, and their subordination of foreign and domestic policies to their own personal financial interests. We’ll see if they push back against the rampant use of the pardon power in return for what are effectively bribes. We’ll see if they’re willing to treat this White House as what it truly is: a hot bed of corruption; a grift operation wrapped in the emblems of the state.

Not to try to stop the reckless criminality of this administration is to collude in it. It is to accept the collapse of our experiment in republican self-government into rule by a lawless gang.

That's part of a post by former Republican Bill Kristol at "The Bulwark," going after the most corrupt and evil regime in our history with hammer and tongs. Better late than never, Kristol votes Democratic now and often pens or Skeets some of the most incisive, biting critiques of the Malignant Fascist and his "hot bed of corruption" regime of anyone on the planet.

We've written before of the need, once this nightmare is over (and it will be someday), for this country to undergo as thorough a de-Nazification reform as occurred in Germany after World War II: renew our alliances and reform the military, laws, courts, media -- all the institutions of civil society where the works of this regime have corrupted and eaten away the progress of the last 75 years (let's start with demolishing the MF's golden ballroom and removing all the gilded trappings in the White House and restore the East Wing).   To not thoroughly cleanse ourselves of this gang of criminals and their pervasive rot would be to fatally repeat the mistakes of the last four years.

(Photo:  the crime boss MF's mug shot / Fulton County, GA, jail)