SPEECH 

What is "speech"?

The dictionary defines it as "the expression of or the ability to express thoughts and feelings by articulate sounds"; "the communication or expression of thoughts in spoken words"; "exchange of spoken words: conversation"; "something that is spoken: utterance"; "a usually public discourse: address"; and "a formal address or discourse delivered to an audience".

What does it mean to say something is "free"?

The dictionary defines that as "not costing or charging anything".

If you put the two together, "free speech" would be the "cost" free "expression of thoughts or feeling by articulate sounds" or "cost" free "spoken words", "conversation", "utterance[s]", "public discourse[s] or "formal address[es]".

Costs, of course, are two-way streets.  

Generally speaking, a cost is what an actor is charged for the privilege of doing or buying something. If he is charged nothing, he is doing or buying something for free. Costs, however, are also the charges imposed on others by our acts. In that sense, one's acts are free only if, in addition to not requiring payment by us, they also do not impose costs on others.

In the United States, conservatives like Vice President JD Vance and Elon Musk claim to be "free speech absolutists". But they really aren't. A free speech absolutist would protect speech if it was both cost free to the speaker and cost free to the receiver.  If that speech imposed costs or burdens on the receiver, he would be open to mitigating or eliminating those costs or at least balancing them against the cost-free rights of the speaker.  

Vance and Musk, however, are not free speech absolutists in that sense. 

Rather they are "cost-free-to-the-speaker speech" absolutists. 

The costs imposed on all others are ignored. 

Last week in Munich, Vance upbraided Europeans for violating his version of speech absolutism.  

Given its Nazi past, Germany's penal code makes it illegal to publicly deny the Holocaust, prohibits the dissemination of Nazi or neo-Nazi propaganda (including sharing swastikas and wearing SS uniforms), and criminalizes hate speech that assaults individuals based on their race or national, ethnic or religious background. 

Also in response to that fascist past, Germany's two major political parties -- the Social Democratic Party (SDP) and Christian Democratic Union (CDU) -- have for years adhered to a policy of not aligning with far-right parties like the current AfD (Alternative for Germany) to form any national government.  

This so-called "firewall" against AfD participation  has been erected in response to AfD's extremism. That extremism includes state party leaders who have embraced Nazi slogans, minimized Germany's Nazi past and trivialized the Holocaust. It also includes AfD's participation in a secret conference in 2023 in Potsdam that was attended by at least one Austrian neo-Nazi and called for the mass deportation of "non-assimilated" Germans. In 2017, ten AfD-ers were part of  a Facebook group that posted a meme of Anne Frank's face on a pizza box labelled "oven fresh". 

In his speech in Munich last week, Vice President Vance criticized Germany for refusing to listen to or allow participation in its affairs by right wing groups like AfD and specifically said "there's no room for firewalls."

The immediate reaction to his speech  from Germany was . . .

Disgust.

As The New York Times reported, German Chancellor Olaf Scholtz "accused Mr. Vance of effectively violating a commitment to never again allow Germany to be led by fascists who could repeat the horrors of the Holocaust."  As Scholz put it, "A commitment to 'never again' is not reconcilable with support for AfD". He was then joined in his criticism by Friedrich Merz, the CDU's candidate for Chancellor.

For Germans, any speech flirting with its Nazi past, minimizing the Holocaust or allowing its national government to include parties that associate with neo-Nazis is not free.  Contrary to Vance's claim that democracy requires space and respect for AfD, Germans understand that the kind of thought and speech either accepted or even tolerated by AfD could ultimately kill the post-Nazi democracy they have carefully created and preserved over the last now almost eighty years. 

They understand this because, in the 1920s and early 1930s, this was the kind of speech Hitler and his supporters used to create the political foothold that ultimately resulted in the Weimar Republic appointing him Chancellor.  

It was also the kind of speech that destroyed that republic once the Nazis assumed power.

Democracies can commit suicide.

In the 1930s, Germany's did.

And for that reason, today's Germans do not permit speech that could resurrect that atrocity.

Closer to home, Vance’s demand that Germany remove its restraints on AfD has been seconded by Elon Musk . . .

Who . . .

When not taking an illegal blowtorch to either federal employees or Congressionally sanctioned spending . . .

Has actually endorsed the AfD in its campaign to win Germany’s current federal election. 

This, however, is just another manifestation of Musk’s one-way version of free speech. 

And like Vance’s, it is a version that ignores the costs it imposes on the rest of us. 

In October 2022, Musk acquired Twitter.

Within hours of doing so, he reinstated the suspended account of the Great Britain's  neo-Nazi Britain First party. He also reinstated the account of Donald Trump . . .

Which Twitter's prior owners had suspended in the wake of the January 2021 insurrection and Trump's attempted coup.

For Musk, this was just the beginning.

After he purchased Twitter in 2022 and re-branded it as X in 2023, the amount of disinformation and hate speech  on the site went up dramatically. Hate speech went up by half, transphobic and homosexual slurs by more than 60%. There are now three times more anti-Black tweets than there were pre-Musk. In November 2023 the EU stopped advertising on the site given the rise in hate speech on it, and in Ireland, as other social media took down hate speech that X refused to eliminate, the Prime Minister called for incitement to hatred legislation. 

In response, Musk said "the Irish PM hates the Irish people." 

Musk's one way view of free speech is enhanced in his specific case with the "more for me but not for thee" bonus that comes with being the billionaire owner of a large social media platform.

In July 2024, Musk endorsed Trump for president. In November, a study by the Queensland University of Technology in Australia found that, after that endorsement, Musk's posts on Twitter received 138% more views and 238% more retweets. Because these increases "outpaced the general engagement trends observed across the platform" (or, in other words, were much higher than any trend then associated with Trump or Musk generally), they suggested "algorithmic bias" (a suggestion confirmed by The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post). The only thing that made this bias suggested rather than proven was the limited data to which the research team had access.

"More for me but not for thee" is the bonus awarded speech by those with money.  

It was created in 1976 when the Supreme Court in Buckley v. Valeo equated money with speech and was enhanced in 2010 when the Court in Citizens United eliminated the ban on corporate campaign contributions. Together, these two decisions have resulted in speech monopolies. Corporations and the billionaires that own Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and major mainstream media outlets like The Washington Post get to buy or control as much speech as they want.

The rest of us get to buy only as much as we can afford.  

The First Amendment to the Constitution states that "Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech or of the press, or the right of the people to peaceably assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances." 

Though America (unlike Germany and many other European countries) takes an expansive view of the kind of speech protected, and a more or less total view of the kind of political speech protected, the Founders did not necessarily accept that view. During the Revolution, James Madison promoted the prosecution of Loyalists and the burning of their pamphlets, and while Madison was generating the Bill of Rights, Thomas Jefferson wrote him proposing this for the First Amendment:

"The people shall not be deprived or abridged of their right to speak, to write or otherwise to publish anything but false facts affecting injuriously the life, liberty, property, or reputation of others or affecting the peace of the confederacy with foreign nations."  

This would have imposed a limitation on the scope of protected political speech.

One reason this limitation did not make it into the actual text of the First Amendment was Madison's fear that moving beyond a statement of  "simple, acknowledged principles" would have made ratification more difficult. Madison wanted to avoid disputes that might arise later (and presumably be resolved later as well). 

Another reason, however, is that the architecture of political speech in the 18th century was relatively simple. There were printing presses, pamphlets, some newspapers and public meetings or assemblies. There wasn't telegraphy, television or the internet and the cost of participation was de minimis.  Simple principles would do because the universe of likely speech was relatively small and monopolized by no one.

None of that is true today. 

In fact, the contrary is the case. 

The philosophical foundation for America's expansive view of free speech is the view that truth and falsehood compete in a marketplace of ideas for which no regulation is needed and any imposed likely to do more harm than good.  Vance and Musk support that view and believe (falsely) that it is (or should be) shared by western democracies generally. 

In truth, however, instant mass communication through the internet on various social media and other platforms is now routine and a handful of billionaires (among them, Musk himself)  control those outlets. And the consequence of their world of one-way free speech and the Supreme Court's of monetized speech is a uniquely dysfunctional marketplace of ideas. 

The speech protected is largely the billionaire's own, whether that billionaire is Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg . . .

Or Donald Trump. 

And truth does not always get to compete in that marketplace.  

In fact, as the accession of Trump . . .

The debased acquiescence of Musk, Zuckerberg and Bezos. . . 

And the historic example of Weimar Germany . . .

Prove . . .

It can easily be overwhelmed.

CHAOS, COMEDY AND CORRUPTION IN TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY AMERICA

The political hills and valleys of the last twenty-five years have been a confusing sight to behold.  

Today is February 5, 2025.

It is also my 25th wedding anniversary.

As it turns out, things have worked out better for me than for the country.

On February 5, 2000, Bill Clinton was President and Al Gore was Vice President. The country was at peace. the economy was humming, there was no deficit,  the right to choose existed and peace in the middle east was still possible. Among the actual "firsts" the year would occasion, there were -- in addition to my second marriage (which can only happen once) -- the following:

The first NYC subway series (between the Mets and Yankees) since 1956; 

The first civil union law protecting same sex couples (kudos to Vermont); 

The first patient receiving a totally artificial heart that beat and pumped blood (the Jarvik heart); 

The first crew visiting the international space station; and 

The first presidential election since 1888 in which the winner (George W. Bush) received fewer votes than the loser (Al Gore).

That last first was a precursor of sorts.

A warning of the darker days that would emerge over the course of the next quarter century. 

In 2000, Bill Clinton's extracurricular activities were among the reasons Bush II was able to claim the moral high ground and beat Al Gore. Sixteen years later, however, X-rated bragging about grabbing was ignored by the voters. And eight years after that, not even an adjudication of sexual assault could get in the way of Trump's return to the White House. 

In that same period, a similar hypocritical path was travelled on the issue of voting.

Or, more precisely, on the issue of vote- counting.

In 2000, America's electorate did not decide the presidential election. Instead, in stopping the vote count in Florida and enjoining that state from manually curing an almost certain undercount for Gore, the Supreme Court did. In 2020, by way of contrast, America's electorate did get to decide the election. This time, however, the party that stole the election  through litigation in 2000 tried to steal it through insurrection in 2020. 

History tells us this effort failed.  

The insurrection was stopped.

Biden won and took office. 

But did it fail? 

For four years, the principal insurrectionist lied about the result.

In 2024, that insurrectionist was allowed to run again. 

This time he won.

Do the voters care that their president is a sexual predator?

Do they care that their president is fine with coups in his favor?

Some do. 

More than half apparently do not.

Or, at the very least, they do not care enough.

Because they have allowed it.

When I was young and overwhelmed, I made lists. I tucked them in books and from time to time unfolded them to either check off an item or cross one out. I checked off the items on the list which amounted to chores or jobs I had completed. I crossed out those which had resolved themselves -- those irrational fears that had evaporated . . . 

Or even the rational ones which good luck or a generous friend (or God) had miraculously resolved.

Sometimes the list was short.

Sometimes it was long.

If America made such a list today . . .

It would be long

Here it is.

1. J6 Pardons 

2. Fired J6 Attorneys

3. Investigating the FBI's J6 investigators.

4. Fired Inspectors General.

5. Impoundment.

6. Federal Employee Buy outs.

7. Musk's Digital Coup.

8.The End of USAID.

9. Greenland.

10. Panama.

11. Tariffs.

12. Gaza

13. The Cabinet of Fools

This is a baker's dozen of problems and potential catastrophes.

All crying out for confrontation on any citizen's to do list.

I'm one of the 75 million Americans who voted for Harris and can confidently say . . .

We are already tired of  this shit.

What to do?

In my list-making days, I discovered there was utility in paring the list down, in reducing it to a more manageable size. I also discovered there are a number of ways to do this. One is to know when your problem has really become someone else's.  Another is to recognize general solutions that solve a number of problems. A third is to laugh.

For purposes of relief, let's start with the comedic stuff.

Over the weekend Trump threatened 25% tariffs against Mexico and Canada and on Monday, as the actual point at which they were to take effect was about to arrive and markets were tanking, Trump caved and postponed them for thirty days. Both Canada and Mexico had made it clear they would respond with their own tariffs on American imports. And Trump's plan was universally derided for the significant inflation it would cause . . . 

And the unnecessary ill will it immediately bred.

(At an NHL game in Ottawa over the weekend, fans booed when the Star-Spangled Banner was sung. At an NBA game in Toronto, they did the same. Canada is the country that saved Americans who otherwise would have been taken hostage by Iran in 1979 and then secreted them to safety. It's pretty much impossible to piss Canadians off. Trump, however, managed to do so.)

Like all bullies, Trump punches down. 

He only picks fights with those who are weaker. 

Canada is causing America no problems at all. Contrary to Trump's claim, the amount of fentanyl passing through Canada is negligible; you could fit it in one suitcase. For its part Mexico is aggressively trying to combat the problems that pass through its borders and over ours. Nevertheless, and true to form in this case, two of our friendliest allies and biggest trading partners were to be saddled with 25% duties while China, which is causing problems ranging from the widespread theft of intellectual property to the illegal production of all the precursor chemicals needed to manufacture fentanyl, and against whom strategic tariffs have bipartisan support, was slapped with only a 10% surcharge.

Like most confronted bullies, Trump also (and usually) loses.  

In this case, he packaged his last-minute decisions to pull back as the result of concessions made by Canada and Mexico.  Those putative concessions, however, had nothing to do with his tariff threat. Mexico said it would deploy troops to its northern (our southern) border it had promised to send in 2021 and are already there, and Canada promised to implement a border plan it had approved back in December.  

In short, Trump got nothing.

This will likely be a recurring theme in Trump 2.0, a reprise perhaps of the various unfulfilled "infrastructure weeks" in his earlier term.  To this, however, must also be added Trump's twitter-visions on Greenland and Panama and Gaza.  None of them will become American states or territories or (in the case of Gaza) latter-day occupation zones (`a la Berlin after World War II) in the next four years. Nor will Trump use military force against a NATO ally (Denmark, which owns Greenland) or a party to a treaty we signed decades ago (Panama) or in Gaza (which would be insane). 

Trump is barely willing to fight wars that need fighting and do not cost American lives (e.g., Ukraine).

I doubt he will fight ones that are unnecessary and would be costly in ways that can't be counted.

That does not mean he will not forever tweet and boast and threaten.

He will.

Empty rhetoric is his specialty.

So just laugh

Call it Greenland week.

Or Panama week.

Or Gaza week

Or better yet . . . 

Granaza week.

That leaves two sets of problems on the list that cannot be laughed away (2 through 6 and 7 through 8) and two items (1 and 13) which will plague MAGA more than the rest of us going forward.

The solution to the first set is litigation on the one hand and mobilization on the other. Any civil service employee who is fired can sue the government.  I expect many will. Some already  have (see below). Similarly, impoundment, buyouts, ending the Agency for International Development, or any refusal to cut Treasury checks, sharing of personal identifying information or use of digital access to abolish statutorily established and sanctioned departments, divisions or expenditures is illegal. 

In her Letters From an American on Tuesday, Heather Cox Richardson noted that Trump's billionaire apparatchik, Elon Musk, has "taken control of the US Treasury payments system" and "claims to have been cancelling those transactions he thinks wasteful." According to Richardson, he then "went on to the General Services Administration" and told "regional managers . . . to begin ending the leases on federal offices."  SBA employees report Musk has "gotten into that agency's human resources, contracts and payment systems" and, says Richardson, "By this afternoon Musk people were digging into the data of the Department of Education with an eye to dismantling it from the inside". This morning, Richardson's Letter cited  a report that one of Musk's 25-year-old engineers "had the privilege to write code on the programs for the Bureau of Fiscal Services that control more than 20% of the US economy".

What could possibly go wrong?

All of this is more than suspect.

Most of it is also illegal.

And the lawsuits have already begun.

Last week, the National Treasury Employees Union filed suit to stop  Trump's Executive Order removing federal employees from civil service  protection.  On Monday, Trump's initial spending freeze or impoundment was enjoined by the federal District Court in DC as that case proceeds through the courts. Also on Monday, three employees unions sued Trump for violating federal privacy laws by allowing the Treasury to share data with Musk and his twenty-something data nerds, and eleven state attorneys general warned federal employees not to take Trump's buy-out offers seriously. As they put it, the "offers are nothing more than the latest attack on federal workers and the services they provide" and "are not guaranteed". On Tuesday, anonymous FBI agents filed a class action to stop Trump from publicizing their names and firing any agents who investigated the J6 cases. Previously, state AGs had also sued to stop Trump's spending freezes and a Rhode Island federal judge had granted a temporary restraining order doing so.

Trump, the so-called disrupter who now runs the second branch of government, has created the impression of endless action over the course of the first two weeks of his latest presidency. 

Given his moves, however, the busiest branch over the next four years will not be the Executive.  

It will be the Judiciary.

There are those who think judicial decrees will not matter, that Trump will simply ignore them. Maybe so (at which point revolution will be the only alternative). But he hasn't in the past. He has been contemptuous of courts and used either the office he held or was running for to protect that contempt from the consequences it would otherwise meet.  But he hasn't ignored the orders and the greater threat is that the Supreme Court will endorse his dictatorial impulses. Two weeks ago, I asked The New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger if he thought New York Times v. Sullivan would survive this Supreme Court. His laconic "we'll see" was not inspiring.  

Stay tuned. 

In the meantime, two problems will not go away and will plague Trump 2.0 every day going forward.

The first is the pardons issued the J6 insurrectionists.

The second is his Cabinet of Fools

Two-thirds of Americans despise the J6 pardons. Every time Trump yells law and order, we will yawn.  He is and forever will be the guy who pardoned cop killers.  He is also the only president who orchestrated an attempted coup, pardoned his fellow coup-plotters, and then (eventually) fired the patriots who prosecuted the coup in the first place.

That will never change.

Meanwhile . . .

Bobby Kennedy still thinks vaccines may cause autism.

Tulsi Gabbard cannot recognize a traitor.

Kash Patel's enemies list is in print.

And sooner or later . . .

You just know . . .

Pete Hegseth will take a drink.

TWO KINGS

Yesterday was January 20, 2025.

Because it was the third Monday in January, it was a national holiday set aside to honor Dr. Martin Luther King. Jr. Because of the Twentieth Amendment to the Constitution, it was also the day the President of the United States takes office. Because of a whole host of factors that cumulatively give notice to the potential for perversion overtaking our politics in this first quarter of the twenty-first century, it was also the day that Donald Trump became America's 47th President.

The contrast between Dr. King and Donald Trump could not be greater. 

King preached non-violence in the service of justice and optimistically held that, while "the arc of the moral universe is long," it "bends toward justice." When he delivered his famous "I Have A Dream" speech before the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, however, he was much more  focused on "the fierce urgency of now" than on that arc. 

"This is not the time," King said, "to engage in the luxury of cooling off or the tranquilizing drug of gradualism."  In fact, he argued, it was time for the exact opposite, warning America that it would "be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment", that the country would "have a rude awakening" if it "return[ed] to business as usual."

He did not base his predicted "awakening" on fact-free rhetoric.

Nor was his eloquence spun out of  dystopian fiction.

For the hundred years that had passed since Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, King explained, the nation had "defaulted" on the "promissory note to which every American was . . . heir." That "note was a promise that all men . . . would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."  

"Instead of honoring that sacred obligation," however, "America ha[d] given the Negro people a bad check, a check that ha[d] come back marked 'insufficient funds.'"

This would not do.

"We refuse to believe the bank of justice is bankrupt," he asserted. "We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation."

So, he concluded . . .

"We have come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and security of justice."

Most of us remember Dr. King's speech because of what followed. 

His dream  . . .

Laid out in five stanzas.

It was a dream . . .

Where America "will . . . live out the true meaning of its creed . . . that all men are created equal'";

Where Georgia's former slaves and former slave owners will "sit down at the table of brotherhood";

Where Mississippi's "heat of oppression" will be "transform[ed] into an oasis of freedom and justice";

Where "one day", even "in Alabama with its vicious racists", black and white children will be able to join hands "as sisters and brothers"; and

Where his "children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

Lots of Americans think King's dream has been fulfilled.

Americans of color, however, know it has not.

They earn less, get sicker, die sooner and are arrested more often than their white countrymen.  They pay more for their houses, their food, their cars and their clothes.  They do not get to fail up. Their history is either denied or suppressed. And, worst of all, remedies are now deemed racist so they can then be rescinded.

The check has not yet cleared.

Perhaps the best evidence of how far we have not come was also on display yesterday in the Inauguration of Donald Trump as America's 47th President.

One of the un-sung (and often un-noticed) portions of Dr. King's "I Have A Dream" speech is the message he delivered to his fellow sufferers:

"There is something I must say to my people, who stand on the warm threshold which leads to the palace of justice. In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force."

Whatever else can be said of Donald Trump, it is certainly the case that he could have never credibly uttered those words.  

For the entire nine years of his political career, bitterness and hatred have been his closest allies. He lives in their world, forever using the former to stoke the latter and vice versa. Far from rejecting violence as a means to any political end, he has advocated it. 

In his campaigns he has more than once encouraged supporters to beat up their opponents and on January 6, 2021, he incited a riot designed to overthrow the 2020 election he lost (and to this day has refused to concede)  and then stood by silently and refused to call off the violence.  The Capitol was ransacked.  The electoral vote count was stopped.

Five people died.

Yesterday, he pardoned or commuted the sentences of more than 1,600 J6 convicts, including those who had violently attacked the police and others who were serving decades long  sentences for seditious conspiracy on account of their efforts to effectively orchestrate a violent coup and keep him in the White House.

Earlier in the day, he had issued a firehose of executive orders, one of which declared a national emergency at the southern border. Another cancelled the appointments of over 27,000 whose asylum hearings had been scheduled. A third purports to end birthright citizenship.

The last of these directives is almost certainly unconstitutional.  The 14th Amendment guarantees birthright citizenship, no executive order can eliminate it, and today eight states and the District of Columbia sued to stop the Trump Administration from denying it. In explaining their lawsuit, New Jersey's attorney general noted that presidents, though powerful, are not kings. 

As to asylum, Trump cannot end it but he can (and now has) complicate it. The app through which the Biden Administration had allowed asylum hearings to be scheduled has been shut down and 27,000 whose appointments through it were cancelled must now find a new way.  As for the newly declared southern border emergency, it does not exist. In fact, illegal crossings there are at a four-year low. Of course, eliminating the CBP One app may increase illegal crossings and thus create the not-yet-existing emergency Trump's order (falsely) asserts to be upon us.

Everyone knows Trump is a pathological liar and yesterday was no different. 

Fact checkers had a field day with his twenty-nine minute Inaugural Address and follow-on extemporaneous comments throughout the day. 

He repeated all his standard lies -- the ones about Biden having indicted him (Biden didn't), foreigners paying tariffs (they don't), the border being overrun by illegals released from mental institutions (not happening), 571 miles of newly built border wall in his first administration (off by over 100, even counting repairs to existing walls), Nancy Pelosi rejecting his offer of  National Guard troops on January 6 (didn't happen), the House's J6 select committee destroying evidence (it didn't), and the 2020 election being "rigged" (it wasn't).

He even added some new ones -- claiming "record inflation" during the Biden Administration (nope, the record -- 23.7% -- was set on Trump's own watch in 2020); asserting his opponents tried to rig the election he just won (I guess to overcome the narrowness of his win, a sort of reprise of his claims in 2016 that he would have won the popular vote against Hillary if illegals had not cast ballots); and charging that China runs the Panama Canal (it doesn't, but Trump wants it "back" and appears ready to take it back, by force if necessary).

So that was our yesterday.

One King had a dream.

The other returned as a nightmare.

AND YET IT MOVES

In 1616, the Catholic Church decided that heliocentrism -- the Copernican view that the Earth revolved around the Sun and was not the center of the Universe -- was heresy. The decision was made by the Roman Inquisition, the Church's set of formal tribunals set up in the wake of the Protestant Reformation to enforce it teachings and punish those who denied them. 

By the time the Church made its decision in 1616, heliocentrism as a reasonable hypothesis had been around for a hundred years and fairly conclusive proof either for it or against pure geocentricity had existed for at least six. That proof came in the form of observations of the full phases of  Venus and of the moons orbiting Jupiter, both which Galileo made with his telescope in 1609 and published in 1610. Under the Ptolemaic or geocentric theory, only two Venetian phases could have been observed given the fixed place of Earth and the orbit of the Sun and Venus around it; and under that theory no moons could have orbited Jupiter (because all planets and their moons orbited Earth). 

Once Galileo made his observations, the gig was up. 

Though pure heliocentrism would only become irrefutable two hundred years later with observation of its required stellar parallax, pure geocentricity was dead.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this created a problem for the hierarchs in the Catholic Church. 

For much of the prior century the Church had been at (un)holy war with the Protestant Reformation on the issue of who got to say what the Bible actually meant. The Pope and his Cardinals were not remotely willing to give up the Church's -- in other words, their --  claimed right to being the  final arbiter of the matter. That said, however, from the point at which Copernicus first offered heliocentrism as a hypothesis in 1514 until the point at which the Inquisition condemned the view as heretical in 1616, the Church had been more or less ambivalent on the issue. Throughout much of the sixteenth century, it acknowledged heliocentrism as a hypothesis and watched it compete (unsuccessfully) with both the governing Ptolemaic paradigm and Tycho Brahe's geocentric alternative allowing other planets to revolve around the Sun even as the Earth remained immovable.

That all changed, however, in 1616.

When . . .

Politics got in the way of truth.

The conventional wisdom is that Biblical inerrancy killed heliocentrism and was the reason Galileo was banned from teaching or defending the doctrine in 1616 and then ultimately put under house arrest in 1633 for having violated the ban. At least a half dozen statements in the Psalms and Old Testament said the earth was immovable and in another, Moses' second in command, Joshua, makes the moving Sun stand still. 

All of this, however, was also true throughout the sixteenth century when the Church was tolerating Copernicus and his followers. 

What changed is that, in addition to reporting his observations of the Venetian phases and Jupiter's moons, Galileo weighed in on the authority and meaning of the Bible itself. In a famous letter to a friend in December 1613, he argued that the Bible's authority extended only to matters of faith; that science had to have the last word on whether the Earth moved or the Sun stood still; and that even if one cited the Bible on the issue, parts of its narrative were more consistent with Copernicus than Ptolemy. 

Today, none of this is controversial, either in or outside the Catholic Church.

Back then, however, all of it was -- as we lawyers would say -- a bad move.

Kind of like telling a judge he is full of it.

Even if he (or she) is, you are going to lose.

And so . . .

Galileo did.

On February 19, 1616, the Inquisition issued a unanimous report holding heliocentrism "foolish and absurd in philosophy and formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts in many places the sense of the Holy Scripture". The next day it ordered Galileo to "abstain completely from teaching or defending the doctrine or from discussing it" and seventeen years later, after he wrote and published his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, the Inquisition tried him again.  This second time, it found him "vehemently suspect of heresy", required him to "abjure, curse and detest" heliocentrism and sentenced him to house arrest. Publication of any of his existing or future work was forbidden. 

In 1642, still under house arrest, he died.

In many respects, Galileo's second trial was an utter farce. 

He wrote Dialogue after a new Pope (Urban VIII) asked him to lay out the cases for and against heliocentrism without taking a position advocating the doctrine but specifically including the Pope's own views against it. This he did, and in 1632 the book was published with both papal permission and the Inquisition's authorization. Six months later, however, the Pope banned the book and sent it to the Inquisition for examination, apparently having become enraged in the interim that his position had been conveyed through the mouth of the dialogue's Aristotelian (whom Galileo had named Simplicio, which in the vernacular Italian of the time was understood to mean "simpleton", and whose geocentric claims were systematically refuted by the dialogue's impartial Copernican proponent).

Back then, of course, hell hath no fury . . .

Like a Pope insulted.

Following his second trial, and either immediately after he had complied with the ordered abjuration or after he was transferred to house arrest at his own home, Galileo reportedly looked at the sky and then at the ground.

He then muttered . . . 

"E pur si muove."

"And yet it moves." 

It was the truth that set him -- and later, us -- free, the one no insulted pope or false decree could ignore . . .

Or change.

There is no contemporary record that Galileo made this statement.  It was mentioned for the first time in print in 1757 and was also part of a painting that may (or may not) have been created in the mid-1640s shortly after Galileo's death.

Those who dispute the authenticity of the remark note that it would not have been in Galileo's interest to make it.

Which is true.

But it is also true that, throughout his life, Galileo was not particularly circumspect when it came to commenting on the Church hierarchy's unscientific nonsense.

A long time ago, I was interviewed by a federal prosecutor in a case where a colleague (who later pled guilty) was accused of overbilling the government.  I had had my own run-ins with this guy, am not subtle,  and, to put it mildly, did not think highly of him. In any case, during the interview, the prosecutor asked if I had once said this would-be defendant was going to "wind up in jail" given his dishonesty. At the time, I had no recollection of saying this and said so to the prosecutor. I also told him, however, that I was not saying those who reported this statement to him were wrong.

Because . . .

As I put it . . .

It certainly sounded like something I would have said.

That's where I am with "And yet it moves".

It sure sounds like something Galileo would have said.

Yesterday was January 6, 2025.  

Four years ago to that day, Donald Trump unleashed a violent mob on lawmakers assembled on Capitol Hill to certify Trump's loss of the presidency to Joe Biden. 

Since then, Trump has regularly injected the lie that he won the 2020 election into the political veins of the American electorate, derided and condemned any effort by the courts or Congress to hold him accountable for having attempted to orchestrate a coup, and treated violent and disgusting J6 insurrectionists as political prisoners and hostages he intends to free.

Since then, two American institutions -- the United States Senate and the Supreme Court -- have failed miserably in the performance of their specific Constitutional duties, the first in failing to muster the courage needed to have sixty-seven of its members find Trump guilty of the obvious high crime and misdemeanor that January 6 was and the second in refusing to remove him from the 2024 presidential ballot given the 14th Amendment's blanket ban on insurrectionists holding any civil or military office.

Since then, Trump has also fully turned the Republican Party and its supporters into an army of fellow-travelers and deniers who affirm and rubber stamp his lies, ignore his immorality and dishonesty, and pretend chaos  is a substitute for competence.

And since then he has been (narrowly) elected the 47th president of the United States.

There is another America out there.

Amidst the wreckage that is today and may be the next four years, it is an America true to its "better angels" and best self. Perhaps faintly (these days) but still unmistakably, you can see that America if you look.  It is there in the decency of Jimmy Carter, the courage of Liz Cheney, the determination of Juan Merchan, the grace of Kamala Harris, the competence of Joe Biden and the humanity of Archbishop Robert McElroy. It is also there in the 215 House Democrats, 45 Senate Democrats and two Independents who certified the November presidential election.

Honorably doing yesterday . . .

What 147 Republicans, a soon to be ex-president and thousands of his deranged supporters . . .

Could not do four years ago.

E pur si muove.

CHRISTMAS 2024 -- FINDING GOD IN DARK TIMES

We are always being told to remember the original message of Christmas.

It's not supposed to be about the gifts and the parties, the cards and the carolers, the tree and the lights. It's not supposed to be about the long lines, crowded airports or frenzied families traveling to and fro. It's not supposed to be about the twelve days or seven fishes or eight reindeer.

Or the stockings hung by the chimney. 

Or St. Nicholas.

It's supposed to be about a visit.

By God . . .

To this world . . .

At a Roman backwater . . .

In  a small tribe . . .

As a real man.

And when you think about that seriously, and park all the seasonal tinsel and tumult, the claim is either the most important and earth-shattering thing to have ever happened in human history . . .

Or it is completely nuts.

Each side has had its proponents.

There have been times in the last two thousand plus years when individuals actually looked back in complete shock at the importance of the event.  Upon his own death in 363 CE, Emperor Julian (the Apostate) reportedly lamented the death of paganism and early triumph of Christianity with "Galilean, you have won." Others were in awe. Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel. Hopkin's wrote God's Grandeur. In the former, the Galilean becomes part of a biblical world order painted on five hundred square meters of a vaulted ceiling, in the latter the light that dispels the dark as the trinitarian "Holy Ghost over the bent/World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings."

There have been other times -- more prevalent of late -- when individuals looked back aghast at the irrationality of the claim and the disasters created in its name. This era's so-called Four Horsemen of New Atheism -- Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett -- are (or, in the now-deceased Hitchens and Dennett cases, were) contemporary spokesmen for this view. With Hitchens and Harris, the principal gripe is with organized religion; to the extent God dies in their world, it is more on account of what His followers have authored in His name. With Dawkins and Dennett, however,  whether He was there in the first place is the question (they think He was not).

Looking for evidence that God exists is, in my mind, a futile endeavor. 

Evidence of something entirely out of this world cannot really be found in this world. 

The Christian paradigm, of course, contests this claim. Its fundamental contention is "No, the real, actual first century (CE)  Jesus of Nazareth in this world is evidence that God too is here. He is the one who came, saw and conquered, albeit in ways Caesar could never have imagined". But the so-called evidence for this God-man is the Resurrection. Which its proponents admit is a miracle. And which, therefore,  more or less removes it from the realm of evidence (at least of the this-world sort).

So . . .

I look elsewhere.

In 1968, Hannah Arendt published Men In Dark Times. It is a collection of essays she wrote over twelve years about individuals who lived in the dark time of the mid-twentieth century, a time "when there was only wrong and no outrage". 

Though "there was," she wrote, "nothing secret or mysterious about" that dark time, "it was by no means visible to all" or "at all easy to perceive".  To the contrary, she explained, "until the very moment when catastrophe overtook everything and everybody, it was covered up not by realities but by the highly efficient talk and double talk of . . . official representatives who, without interruption and in many ingenious variations, explained away unpleasant facts and justified concerns." 

In this "camouflage[d] . . . public realm", she concluded, the function of which is to otherwise "throw light upon the affairs of men" to "show in word and deed, for better and worse, who they are and what they can do", darkness comes "when this light is extinguished by . . . speech that does not disclose what is but sweeps it under the carpet, by exhortations, moral and otherwise, that, under the pretext of upholding old truths, degrade all truth to meaningless triviality."

It was odd for Arendt to find my God in that time and place.

But, nevertheless, there He was.

The subject of Arendt's third essay is Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli.  Known to the world since 1958 as Pope John XXIII, Arendt titles her essay with the Pope's given name. My guess is that was intentional. Unknown and unsung at the time Catholic church elders could not agree on Pius XII's successor, they thought he would be "provisional, transitional" and "without much consequence." Throughout his life, however, Roncalli "made Christ his model".  

The "suffering" Christ.

The "gentle and humble" Christ.

"Knowing perfectly well," as Arendt, quoting the young Roncalli, explained, "that to be 'similar to the good Jesus' meant 'to be treated as a madman'".

And so . . .

The John who became a pope was simply the Roncalli who had been a real Christian. He talked (endlessly). And to everyone. He laughed (fully). And with anyone.  He cursed (mildly). But never in God's name.  "Shit" was acceptable; "Jesus, Mary and Joseph" was not. He was not patronizing. He was the fourth (and first son) of twelve children raised by farmers and molded by late 19th century Catholic Action, the church's alternative to the unstable state (from which it was then estranged) that created the cooperatives and credit banks Catholics like the Roncallis used to buy their farms. Born in 1881, he was a seminarian at 12, a priest at 22, and a Bishop at 43.  

Throughout his career, he was loyal to the institutional church.

But his loyalty never interfered with his ability to see and tell the truth about its leaders.

Or his country's . . .

Or the world's.

The popes he most admired in his lifetime were Leo XIII (1878-1903) and Benedict XV (1914-1922). These two were sandwiched between all the Piuses, Leo between Pius IX and X and Benedict between the latter and Pius XI (and then XII).  Leo and Benedict became famous, respectively, as the worker's pope and as a peacemaker. 

The Piuses IX and X were either reactionary or paranoid.  Pius IX became a prisoner of the Vatican after the Italian revolution and the fall of the papal states and forbade Italian Catholics from participating in politics; he was also the pope who shepherded the specious doctrine of infallibility though Vatican I, the council he more or less rigged to vote his way. Pius X manufactured the so-called "modernist heresy" designed to insulate Catholicism from religion not aligned with papal dictate or science and history not the product of medieval scholasticism.

Fortunately for the later church, however, Roncalli grew up under Leo and, upon ordination, became secretary to a modernist bishop -- Giacomo Radini-Tedeschi -- who Pius X had sidelined to Angelo's hometown.  

Radini-Tedeschi was the anti-pope.  

He was a fan of Catholic Action (which Pius X despised), supported striking workers, introduced science labs to the educations of future priests, and thought "authority" (papal and otherwise) had to be "harmonized" with "freedom" rather than deny it. 

The young Roncalli became an ardent supporter.

He found his own historic models in the Counter-Reformation's Charles Borromeo and Cesare Baronius. Through the sacrifice, service and scholarship of the first (a rich nobleman who gave it all up and reformed a debauched church) and the rational historic analysis of the second (who told Galileo, before the latter's trial, that "The Bible teaches us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go"), he avoided the intellectual poverty of anti-modernism without succumbing to the moral poverty of scientific positivism.

By the time he became a Bishop, he was fully formed. 

And so formed, he spoke truth to power in his dark time. 

He did not let the Vatican's efforts in negotiating and securing its own state (in the Lateran Accords) stop or limit his condemnation of Mussolini's fascism. And when he did it from the pulpit, he was given a one-way ticket out of Italy and exiled to Bulgaria as an apostolic visitor. He spent ten years there. Nor did he let the Vatican's later hesitancy with Hitler get in the way of his own honesty with German diplomats. During World War II, he was the Vatican's Apostolic Delegate to Turkey; Franz von Papen was Germany's Ambassador to Turkey at the same time. When von Papen sought his help in securing Vatican support for Germany once it  was at war with communist (and therefore anti-Catholic) Russia, Roncalli bluntly asked "And what shall I say about the millions of Jews your countrymen are murdering in Poland and Germany?" 

His opposition was also more than just talk.

Throughout World War II, his "baptisms of convenience"; "immigration certificates to Palestine"; refugees list from Istanbul Rabbi Markus; and personal interventions on behalf of Bulgarian Jews, Romanian Jews, Hungarian Jews, Italian Jews, orphaned Transnistrian children on a refugee ship, and those held in the Jasenovac and the Sered concentration camps, literally saved thousands from the final solution.

And later . . .

As Pope . . .

Long after it was over and just before he died . . .

He begged for forgiveness. 

Invoking the last words of the Jesus he imitated, he wrote a prayer to be delivered in Catholic churches throughout the world :

"We are conscious today that many, many centuries of blindness have cloaked our eyes so that we can no longer see the beauty of Thy chosen people nor recognize in their faces the features of our privileged brethren.  We realize that the mark of Cain stands upon our foreheads.  Across the centuries our brother Abel has lain in blood which we drew, or shed tears we caused by forgetting Thy love. Forgive us for the curse we falsely attached to their name as Jews. Forgive us for crucifying Thee a second time in their flesh. For we know not what we did."

Roncalli's courage and witness to the truth in his time did not make him God or establish that there is one. It was evidence, however, of the power that imitation -- in his case, of Christ -- can have, the good it can do, the barriers it can break, the evil it can block, even the (just) wars it can win. 

It is, unfortunately, taken seriously by the world as a whole only (or mostly) after the fact.  Before the moment "catastrophe over[takes] everything and everybody", when the imitator is being "treated as a madman", the world's default position is to ignore the witness, soften and even deny the truth.  In Roncalli's time, it meant sending him to Bulgaria lest he get in the way of "normalizing" the Vatican's relationship with Mussolini's fascist Italy. In ours, it means bowing to Donald Trump, pretending (illegal) immigrants are inhuman, pretending truths about him are defamatory, ignoring or accepting his pathological lying and misogyny, prosecuting his enemies, attacking the free press, killing critical stories or editorials, abandoning Ukraine and rubber-stamping appointments to high positions of those whose first (and in some cases only) qualification is a sycophantic obedience to Trump himself. 

So much of this is exactly what happened in Italy in the 1920s and Germany in the 1930s. Fascism was immoral long before the Holocaust.

And it also could have been stopped long before then.

"'Do not obey in advance' is the main lesson of the twentieth century," says Tim Snyder. In his book On Tyranny, it is also "the first lesson". "Most of the power of authoritarianism,"  he explains, "is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what is more repressive, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do."

Roncalli wouldn't do that in his time.

But his time did not listen until it was too late.

Nor are many, perhaps most, in ours.

And that, in a strange but not un-Biblical way, may be even more "evidence" for my God.

Because . . .

In His time . . .

The Galilean was ignored too.

Merry Christmas.

THE PARDON

In a political world that these days mixes Kafkaesque nightmares with Orwellian lies in almost equal measure, comes now the pardon of Hunter Biden by his father, the President.

The president's pardon power is plenary.  

He can issue one for any reason or no reason.

Nevertheless, the Department of Justice has a whole unit --  the Office of the Pardon Attorney -- whose job it is to evaluate the sea of requests sent to the Oval Office. 

To do so, it has created -- and create is the operative word here -- a set of standards it applies to those requests. 

Thus . . .

In the Office of the Pardon Attorney, an applicant has to wait five years from the point of conviction to apply.  The Pardon Attorney evaluates  the post-conviction conduct, character and reputation of the applicant. He considers the seriousness of his crime, the impact a pardon might have on others, and the extent to which the applicant has accepted responsibility for his criminal conduct. 

None of those standards matter legally.

Yet they exist.

The apparent ultimate goal is to determine whether one who petitions for a pardon is worthy of one.

So . . .

Was Hunter Biden worthy?

As one might expect in today's polarized political world, opinions on that question are divided. As far as I can tell, they fall into the following five categories:

1. Absolutely not;

2. Absolutely f---ing not;

3. No, but understandable;

4. Absolutely, on the merits; and

5.  Absolutely, given the next president.

I fall into Category 5, despise 2, am sympathetic to 1 and 3 and (therefore) less so to 4.  

Category 1 is occupied by purists in the Democratic party who think the President has sacrificed principle. It includes the we-can-never-act-like-them crowd who consider such sacrifices fatal. Category 3 is occupied by those same Democrats but stifles the outrage by conceding any father in the President's situation might have done the same thing.  Category 4 is the ground upon which the Biden himself has for the most part chosen to stand.

Category 2 is peopled by the GOP's MAGA hypocrites who applauded Trump's own unparalleled abuse of the pardon power in his first term.  

In that first term, Trump gave pardons or commutations to friends, relatives and assorted hangers on, most if not all of whom had committed crimes far more serious than Hunter Biden's. Trump's recipients included political henchman Roger Stone (convicted of false statements, witness tampering, and obstruction), campaign manager and Russian-colluder Paul Manafort (guilty of tax fraud, bank fraud, failure to disclose hidden foreign accounts, and sentenced to 47 months imprisonment), former National Security Adviser General Flynn (originally pled guilty to false statements), the loud mouth architect of MAGA authoritarianism, Steve Bannon (charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering), seven criminally convicted Republican Congressman (for crimes that included bribery, securities fraud, tax evasion and campaign violations), and his relative, Charles Kushner (convicted of tax evasion and witness tampering; Kushner is daughter Ivanka's father-in-law and Trump's now-proposed Ambassador to France). 

Category 2 folks deserve no sympathy. 

In fact, because their hypocrisy knows no bounds, irritating them is an advantage.

The best defense of the pardon is what awaited Hunter Biden going forward, not a watering-down of what he did in the past. 

President Biden, however, is being pummeled now because he is focusing more on what occurred in the past than on what awaited his son in the future. 

In that vein, the President's argument is that the gun and tax charges to which Hunter either pled or on which he was found guilty were overkill. In the case of the former,  the younger Biden lied on a form by saying he was not a drug addict at the time he purchased the gun. Because he only had the gun for a week (his sister-in-law wisely threw it away) and never committed any crimes with it, the general practice, had it been followed, would have been to not file a charge, especially given the fact that the would-be defendant was in recovery and years sober by the time the conduct was investigated.  In the case of the latter, the taxes Hunter owed were paid in their entirety, as was the interest and all the penalties, and these types of cases are often if not typically resolved administratively with civil penalties.

This overkill boat, however, is leaky.  

Apart from the fact that both crimes are often tried and not resolved administratively, addiction is not a defense to years-long tax evasion and honest answers on background questions are among the little we have left in what remains of any effort to keep guns out of the hands of people who should not have them. There's a reason addicts and guns are a bad mix. Guns are dangerous and addicts are unstable. 

And there's no "I love my son" exception to those facts.

The justification for the pardon, therefore, cannot be found in US Attorney (and Special Counsel)  David Weiss's prosecution. That prosecution may have been aggressive.  But it was not selective. 

The justification, however, can be found in what awaited Hunter Biden.

The world changed on November 5. 

America elected Donald Trump and Trump has pledged to take revenge on his perceived enemies.  

Among those perceived enemies are the Bidens in general and Hunter Biden in particular. 

Trump has been gunning for Hunter for years and has never let up on his claim that Hunter and/or his father were taking bribes from Ukraine or were otherwise engaged in illegal conduct in connection with Hunter's (obviously) nepotistic seat on the board of Burisma.  Though these charges have been investigated by the GOP for years, no evidence whatsoever has been found to sustain them. In fact, the very evidence the GOP relied upon for the charge -- a statement from FBI informant Alexander Smirnov -- has been deemed false by Weiss, who -- apart from indicting Hunter --  has also indicted Smirnov for lying to investigators and making false claims that the Bidens had accepted bribes from Burisma.

Trump also blames Joe Biden for the two federal indictments levelled against him in connection with the attempted coup on January 6, 2021 and his subsequent theft and illegal storage of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. All of this is also baseless. President Biden had nothing to do with those indictments.  They were brought by a Special Counsel who Biden did not appoint. So fastidious was the due process given Trump that he was able to delay the cases until after the election. Given the DOJ's policy against prosecuting sitting presidents, they have now been dismissed. 

Nor, contrary to the GOP's amen-chorus of Trump enablers, were the indictments the product of "lawfare" or "weaponization" of the Department of Justice. There was more than enough evidence to indict the former President on both charges, and though we will not know for a while (and maybe never) whether there was enough to convict him, that was the way to bet. Trump endorsed a scheme to deem fake electors legitimate. On January 6, 2021, he watched his supporters assault police and ransack the Capitol for hours before telling them to leave (which they did upon his order). Back in Florida after his administration ended, he lied about classified and highly sensitive documents he had taken and failed to return, and then tried to over-up his crimes and destroy evidence with the help of idiot-loyalists.

He is now committed to appointing sycophants to run the Justice Department and the FBI.  

His first nominee for Attorney General -- former Rep. Matt Gaetz -- spent years repeating Trump's "weaponization" lie and his second -- Florida's ex-Attorney General Pam Bondi -- is a 2020 election denier who defended Trump in his first impeachment trial and has promised to "prosecute the prosecutors" who indicted Trump during the Biden administration.  

His putative FBI Director -- Kash Patel --  has pledged to "find the conspirators -- not just in government, but in the media . . . who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections." As Patel put it, "We're going to come after you. Whether it's criminally or civilly, we'll figure that out."  In his 2022 book Government Gangsters, Patel actually named the sixty people he intends to "come after".  The list is a Who's Who of Trump opponents and critics. It includes President Biden, Vice President Harris, Attorney General Merrick Garland, former President Obama, Hillary Clinton, Robert Mueller, and witnesses who testified against Trump, some before the US House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack, others in Trump's two impeachment trials.

These are not people who can be counted on to uphold the rule of law and they are not people Joe Biden is obliged to assume will proceed in good faith.  The far greater likelihood is that they will turn the Justice Department and the FBI into a today's version of McCarthyism. In the 1950s, Wisconsin's then-junior Senator said he had lists of "known communists" working in the US State Department. He didn't but numerous lives were ruined as he pretended otherwise. Today's McCarthyism pretends Trump won an election he lost and wants to prosecute the very people who tried to hold him accountable for his attempted coup. To insure this occurs, Trump is appointing fellow travelers at DOJ (Bondi)  and the FBI (Patel).

For them . . .

Hunter Biden was a target in waiting.  

It wasn't going to end with guns and taxes. 

Regardless of the facts.

Consider this possibility:

Hunter Biden was scheduled to be sentenced this month. Assume, for purposes of argument, that he was able to avoid serving time in jail and was given an extended probationary sentence and fines, neither of which would be uncommon given the victim-less nature of the gun crime and the full payments (back tax, interest and penalties) on the tax charge.

How do you think Trump, Bondi, Patel and the beholden-GOP would have reacted? 

What do you think Trump would have ordered Bondi and Patel to do on the afternoon of January 20, 2025?

For starters . . .

Fire Weiss, who obviously does not think Hunter or the President were bribed by Burisma?

Joe Biden was not obliged to find out.

Viewed as a life raft for a guy who did not deserve one, the pardon of Hunter Biden is an abuse of the rule of law.

But . . .

Viewed as a barrier that stops a fascist and his loyalists from turning the law into a machine that fulfills his own asinined grievances, pathological narcissism, and baseless conspiracy theories . . .

It is an act of statesmanship.

In light of the lethal possibilities that flow from Trump's inherent narcissism, Bondi's loyalty and Patel's hit list . . .

I hope there are many more.