The Master Of Corruption And His Subjects

 

We're offering this extended excerpt from Francis Wilkinson's op/ ed in yesterday's Los Angeles Times because it powerfully distills the essence of the rot pervasive in the cult of the Malignant Loser, most recently seen in the corrupt workings of the Republican Supreme Court:

I have badly underestimated Donald Trump. Thursday was the day that his justices — it turns out that they are indeed his justices on the Supreme Court, just as he claimed — got it through my thick head: Trump is not just competent but masterful. He is not just capable, he is supreme.

Because Trump is clumsy at his alleged crimes, surrounding himself with flagrant thugs, telling obvious lies, leaving prolific trails of damning evidence, offering ridiculous defenses for indefensible conduct, I had long concluded that he is incompetent at crookery along with his other manifest failings. That’s true as far as it goes. But for all his mad greed and compulsive lawlessness, for all his sleaze and stupidity, crime is ultimately not Trump’s game. Trump is nothing like a master criminal. But he is a master of something far more sinister and complex: corruption.

Crime is a largely private endeavor. Corruption is public. It seeps into the muscle and sinew of democratic society and institutions; it devours from within. The Supreme Court, drunk on arrogated power, cut loose from rudimentary ethics, has been eaten alive by it. But the court is just one plot of a vast terrain that Trump has conquered — not with crime, but corruption.  [snip]

Trump has already succeeded at corrupting much of what’s corruptible. Government. Elections. Foreign policy. Democracy. Religion. Above all, people, and mostly men. Truckloads, boatloads, tiki-torch-parade-loads, courtloads of weak men all standing in the shadow that Trump casts.

The Republican Party has been corrupted absolutely. House Republicans have combined McCarthyism with Larry, Moe and Curlyism to twist Congress to comically corrupt ends — all to serve the greater degeneracy of Trump. In the Senate, the young hyenas, Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), study Trump’s demagogy and lick their chops, hoping for a turn at democracy’s carcass.

The establishment has utterly caved. Former Atty. Gen. William Barr’s endorsement of Trump this week, after having called Trump unfit, a psychologically damaged incompetent who cares only about himself, was barely newsworthy. What is Barr but another in the long line of weak men, one more debased Republican offering fealty to the grease king? Trump thanked Barr by humiliating him again.

But it was the Republican Supreme Court — mostly men again — that put the shiv a little deeper in democracy’s back this week. Originalists or textualists, all sounded more or less Trumpist as they seriously entertained Trump’s argument that his assaults on the constitutional order are protected by the Constitution itself. There is no way to make honest sense of such a liar’s mash. But Larry, Moe and Curly aren’t just chairing committees in Congress. They wear robes and furrowed brows now, too. And they seem eager to pretend that crimes are just constitutional exercises of power, and that one ex-president is a king.

Richard Nixon, a self-made, and self-corrupted, man who studied geopolitics and government assiduously, never achieved such a broad subjugation of American values and institutions. Trump, the ignorant, n’er-do-well heir to his father’s crooked fortune, has achieved so much more. Trump hasn’t just captured the trenches of conservative America, he has taken the commanding heights. He owns all of it, from the most racist backwater saloon to the Federalist Society clubhouse. They are his corrupted subjects. He is their corrupt and demented king. If he can somehow get through the next few perilous months, he may yet render corruption sacred, and the republic irredeemable.

We may yet be irredeemable as a democratic republic, whether or not the Malignant Loser succeeds in winning the election.  Rot this pervasive isn't eradicated by one or two elections.  Does anyone doubt that if he loses he will call for a violent reaction?  Does anyone doubt that if he wins he'll forever change our country into the dystopian authoritarian regime he so admires in Russia, China, North Korea and elsewhere?  Institutions?  We've seen Masha Gessen's timeless warning that our institutions will not save us repeated over and over again.  For now, we need to hope for the best but be prepared for the worst.

(Photo:  Trump at the National Prayer Breakfast on Feb. 6, 2020, following the Senate's acquittal of him in his first impeachment trial / Evan Vucci, AP)

Monday Pre-Election Reading

As always, please go to the links for the full articles/ op eds (and, if you haven't already, VOTE tomorrow!).

Francis Wilkinson writes about the pervasive racism in the Republican Party, and offers poll after poll illuminating how their base has shifted ever further into the dark recesses of racial resentment and ignorance.  Here's his conclusion:

Preservation of a racial hierarchy is the glue that holds much of the GOP’s rickety planks together. It’s the basis of Trump’s call to end birthright citizenship. [snip] 

The broader electorate may be ready to reject GOP control of at least the House on Tuesday. Perhaps that will deter Republicans from advancing their race war. But it’s possible that they’ve steeped in their resentments for too long, and traveled with Trump too far. They may not want to go back, or even know how to.  (our emphasis)

Republicans need to be defeated at all levels, over and over again.

Leonard Pitts, Jr., puts it bluntly:

... Tuesday is about what we do for ourselves, for our country. It is about whether those of us who see this madness for what it is acquiesce to it or whether, like the guy in Rockwell’s painting, we stand up and speak out. It shouldn’t be a hard choice. 

If you find this calamity unacceptable, make your case. 

If you think we should be better than this, raise your voice. 

If you are disgusted and appalled, make yourself heard. 

Because we could absolutely lose America. Or, we could save it. 

What do you say?

We say, Republicans need to be defeated at all levels, over and over again.

"Trump is on the ballot.  Vote accordingly."  ABC News:

President Donald Trump has repeatedly refused to accept any responsibility for inciting violence in American communities, dismissing critics who have pointed to his rhetoric as a potential source of inspiration for some citizens acting on bigoted beliefs. [snip] 

But a nationwide review conducted by ABC News has identified at least 17 criminal cases where Trump's name was invoked in direct connection with violent acts, threats of violence or allegations of assault. 

Nearly all -- 16 of 17 -- cases identified by ABC News are striking in that court documents and direct evidence reflect someone echoing presidential rhetoric, not protesting it. ABC News was unable to find any such case echoing presidential rhetoric when Barack Obama or George W. Bush were in the White House.  (our emphasis)

Republicans need to be defeated at all levels, over and over again.

Meanwhile, here's more on the vote- suppressing, racist über- Trumper running for governor of Georgia while simultaneously running the election there, Georgia Secretary of State Brian "No Show" Kemp, and his banana Republican last- minute effort to smear Democrats for his fraud- friendly voting system:

But the latest appalling move by Kemp to publicly accuse the Democrats of hacking without evidence is even worse than that: Kemp has been one of the few state election officials to refuse help from the federal Department of Homeland Security to deter foreign and domestic hacking of voter registration databases. After computer scientists demonstrated the insecurity of the state’s voting system, he was sued for having perhaps the most vulnerable election system in the country. His office has been plausibly accused of destroying evidence, which would have helped to prove the vulnerabilities of the state election system.  [snip]

 ... [The latest episode] shows Democrats, like many others, pointing out the glaring security flaws in Georgia’s voting system. To turn this around and blame Democrats is an act of political chutzpah by an election official on par with nothing else I’ve seen. 

It is bad enough there is a partisan election official running Georgia’s elections. It is also bad enough that this partisan election official is in charge of his very own election, an election where he is running in a very tight race against Democrat Stacey Abrams, and that he has engaged in acts of voters suppression aimed to decrease the turnout for the candidate who would be this nation’s first black woman to win a governor’s mansion. It is still worse that we have an election official who, according to audio leaked to Rolling Stone, expressed concern about the state’s citizens exercising their rights to vote via absentee ballot: “[Democrats] have just an unprecedented number of [absentee ballot applications],” he said, “which is something that continues to concern us, especially if everybody uses and exercises their right to vote—which they absolutely can—and mail those ballots in, we gotta have heavy turnout to offset that.” 

But what Kemp has done now goes beyond the pale. He’s accused his opponents of election tampering without evidence on the eve of the election, and plastered the incendiary charge on an official state website in the days before his office will administer that election. This is some banana republic stuff.  (our emphasis)

This speaks for us:

There are few more disgracefully corrupt figures in American public life than Kemp. He should be nowhere in the vicinity of a position of public trust. Enabler of Russian interference in our elections, racist scoundrel.

— Norman Ornstein (@NormOrnstein) November 4, 2018

Republicans need to be defeated at all levels, especially this shitbag Kemp.

As always, we close with a recommendation to check out Infidel 753's link round- up for a great assortment of interesting political, social, universal, etc., topics.  A fine way to start the week.