There are no longer any ifs, ands, buts, or maybes. This morning, when Salvadoran dictator/Trump houseboy Bukele looked as the assembled press, surrounded by the leading crooks of Maladministration II, with a smirking Donald Trump beside him, and said “Of course I’m not sending him back” in answer to the question would his government cooperate with the Unitd States government to return the wrongly-arrested, mistakenly rendered, innocent man Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the United States, the move to defy the federal court system is complete.
And they have done it while pretending in their Kabuki Theater that they are complying with the court’s order by a word game over the meaning of the word “facilitate” that brings to mind Slick Willy’s answer “That depends on what your definition of the word ‘is’ is” to the question of whether or not he got a blowjob from a White House intern young enough to be his daughter. Alleged Attorney General Bondi - who has been in the bag for Trump for the past 20 years - said with a stright face, “That’s up to El Salvador if they want to return him. That’s not up to us. That’s not up to us. If they want to return him, we would facilitate it, meaning provide a plane.” The bad faith is so obvious it makes one want to puke. Like 90% of the other men rendered to the CECOT concentration camp, Abrego Garcia has fewer criminal convictions than the convicted felon returned to power by people so shallow and ignorant that they let a $2 increase in the price of eggs determine their vote last November.
That this tinpot Central American Thug - a thing no different from the Somozas and the other Central American pimps we installed in the governments of those countries over the past 150 years - can plausibly claim his ability to act independently of the United States government boggles the mind of anyone who has studied that history of bad faith over the decades. Bukele has the power to free Abrego Garcia and send him back to the U.S. on an American plane without “smuggling” anyone or anything. All that would have to happen is for Trump to tell his servant to do the job. But neither side wants that outcome, and so they both pretend it’s the other’s responsibility. That anyone takes any of this obvious bullshit seriously for ten New York seconds is incredible. Hearing that worthless oxygen thief “Liddle Marco” (in the 2016 words of his now-leader) declare during the meeting that “no court in the United States has a right to conduct the foreign policy of the United States” was cringe inducing to think this piece of shit once thought himself qualified to run for president, and that the other 99 shitbirds in the Senate would vote unanimously to approve him for the position of Secretary of State proves the worthlessness of this entire government.
That moment mut have felt wonderful for the convicted felon sitting next to “the world’s coolest dictator,” since Trump has wanted to be able to stick his thumb in the eye of the justice system for 50-plus years, ever since he and his KKK white supremacist father were charged by the DOJ with violating the Civil Rights Act for refusing to rent apartments to African-American applicants. He learned this lesson from the great traitor Roy Cohn well.
Chief Justice Roberts - now obviously the worst Chief Justice in the history of the Supreme Court - might now be ruing the day he issued this criminal in the White House with a Get Out Of Jail Free Card when he declared Trump is above the law and cannot be held accountable for any crime committed while in office if said crime is associated with his “official duties” as president. Such a rule was unnecessary for 234 years, when we lived in what can now be seen as the fool’s paradise where no one thought a United States President would consider committing a crime in furtherance of a presidential decision on any topic.
Anti-Federalist Patrick Henry has now been proven right, that the founders were profoundly wrong as well as hopelessly naive, not to put a measure in the Constitution while writing it in 1788 to insure a method of turning out a bad man who found his way into the office of president, other than the ineffectual operation of impeachment once political parties came to dominate the political process. Once the system allowed for a primary personal allegiance to a private (i.e. non-governmental) political body ahead of any allegiance to the Constitution and the government it established, the question of when would a criminal on the scale of Donald Trump have to be dealt with by a political system that had no measure with which to properly opposed him was merely one of time.
That it has happened now might be surprising, but that it would happen at some point should not have been. But it was, because Patrick Henry and the others who doubted the infallibility of James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and the other Revered Founding Fathers were written out of the foundational myth of this country in the role of Founding Fathers and portrayed in history as small-minded men who were unable to deal with the virtuous perfection of the imperfect document known as the Constitution of the United States of America. Thus no one had to read Henry’s 1788 speech, but rather concentrate on the Federalist Papers to assure us that all would be well and wonderful in the newly-created republic, one which would only be governed by virtuous men because only virtuous men would seek such power and responsibility. The illogic was there from the beginning because Founding Fathers are just the guys who won the last argument on the last day of the debate.
We were left with no ability to conceive that such a man as Trump would show up, let alone with the ability to understand he would do as he has done. My late German friend who survived the “twelve bad years” in Germany told me that the reasons the Nazis were so successful from the start was that it was imposible to convince a majority of the voters that such a thing could happen. “It can’t happen here” was as prevalent a belief among the liberals of Germany as it has been among the liberals here. And now we have the same result.
Donald Trump and the MAGAs have established a concentration camp in front of our eyes just as the Nazis did with Dachau in the first year of their maladministration. And the first innocent has been sent there, with the government declaring he will never leave that place alive.
And without the process to protect tyhe country against a criminal like Trump, which Patrick Henry deemed so important that its lack of presence in the final document was what led him to vote against the document’s adoption as the Constitution, we are as unable to rid ourselves of this criminal cabal masquerading as a government as Henry predicted 237 years ago that we would be.
I admit I was one of the millions who believed the mythology of the genius of the Founders in the Grand Mythology that is most of what passes for American History; I bought the propaganda that Patrick Henry and the others who saw Madison’s fakery for what it were men unable to see the Big Picture, who worried about such squalid things that we didn’t even have to find out what those “squalid things” were, since they failed to believe in The Greatness of American Exceptionalism.
The only thing exceptional about this country is the exceptional stupidity of most of those who have been elected to office in this government since 1790, and the even more exceptional stupidity of those of us who voted to put them there. When the Real Test came, they and we have been found wanting. The system doesn’t run itself, as too many of us assumed it would.
It’s not robust, it’s incredibly more fragile than the finest Ming vase. And it was our responsibility not to let it fall to the floor and be smashed.
The rhetorical game being played out, in which Maladministtation II pretends it lacks the power to ask for Abrego Garcia to be returned while its chosen pimp Bukele pretends he doesn’t have the power to return him, while the news media reports this obvious horse hockey with a straight face, is an expression of Trump’s obvious contempt for the Supreme Court, and for the rule of law and for the government he and the rest of these people all swore public oaths to defend and protect. And its contempt for all of us.
We deserve this, for being blind and ignorant to the threat right in front of us, for the past 40 years. It’s a bitter lesson, one I hope hasn’t been learned too late.
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I have a question about the Presidential Get Out of Jail Free card according to which a President has immunity from criminal prosecution for acts performed as part of his "official" duties. How do we determine a President's "official" duties? Article II of the Constitution tells us. Among the Article II enumerated duties is the requirement that the President "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." So, if a President breaks a Law, that breaking of the Law can in no way constitute an "official" duty since it is the President's "official" duty to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." It seems to me that the Get Out of Jail Free Card contains the seeds of its own self-immolation: The President gets Immunity for breaking a Law that is part of his "official" duties, but Article II says that breaking a Law can never be part of his "official" duties. richtergh@gmailcom
Yes. And not with a bang, but a whimper. Thanks for the reference to Patrick Henry.