THE FIGHT CONTINUES

For everyone still spluttering with rage over Federal District Court Judge Aileen Cannon’s assault on the legal system of the United States yesterday, allow me to make a major point at the outset here:

The action likely will have no effect on the timing of any future action, since the Department of Justice would not be indicting Donald Trump for espionage and obstruction of justice before November 8 in any case. The Department has a rule against taking legal actions that can effect an election within 60 days of that election, and 62 days is “close enough.”

A lot can and will happen in the next 62 days.

And what happens outside the legal system in the next 62 days is how Donald Trump will be dealt with. Trunp’s threat is political, not judicial, and really cannot be permanently dealt with through the judicial system. Trump sitting in prison is as much a threat as Trump spouting his bullshit and lies at his hatealong in Wilkes Barre on Saturday.

Trump and his threat, and the threat of the Thousand Year MAGA, will be dealt with politically, and it will go away when it is defeated politically and not before and not by any other agency or action.

Depend on it.

And that of course means there is no authority figure we can turn to in order to solve the problem, no Daddy or Mommy to tell us the monster under the bed is gone forever.

The solution to the threat of Donald Trump will only be solved by our actions, by the decision made by we, the People of the United States of America.

This Sunday is the 80th anniversary of the Battle of Edson’s Ridge on Guadalcanal. It was the closest the Japanese came to retaking the island. Things were so dire that the Marine commander, General Alexander Vandegrift, met at 0200 hours with his senior officers, with the sound of the gunfire only a mile away on the ridge that overlooked the entire Marine perimeter around Henderson field, to discuss what it would take to move the Marines who survived the Japanese victory that appeared likely, to move them into the interior of the island where they would start a guerrilla campaign against the victors. The battle was turned at dawn by three Army fliers in a terrible airplane, the P-400 Airacobra, which had two things in its favor: a 37mm cannon in the nose that could chew up anything it hit, and two .50 caliber machine guns that could cut a wide swath through a jungle. The only four P-400s that worked were loaded up to take off at dawn. Three made it into the air: the first one got off the muddy runway and into the air; the second got mired in the mud and crashed and exploded at the end of the runway; the third was halfway down the runway when the second exploded, and the pilot got off the ground so low he flew through the explosion; the fourth pilot stood on his brakes, ran the engine to full power and lifted off 3/4 of the way down the runway, managing to fly over the explosion. A minute later they were over the battlefield in the first light of dawn and they caught the enemy by surprise. They strafed till they ran out of ammo. And they broke the attack. Gudalcanal was saved till the next crisis, and then the next and the next until all of a sudden, the enemy had no way to continue the fight. And that last battle, two months after Edson’s Ridge, was won because Admiral Halsey went “all in;” he put all his chips on that final hand because that was the only thing he could do.

The point of telling that story here is that you never know what’s going to work in a difficult situation until you have to try it.

We have to be willing to go “all in” and put all the chips on the final push now, which will come to its decision a week short of the 80th anniversary of that final fight at Guadalcanal.

And fortunately, we have one big thing going for us: Donald Trump, the biggest fuckwit in American history. He is a moron and his minions are idiots. But I suggest the next movie you download and watch should be “The Return of the King,” the third film in the LOTR trilogy. Things get very tight there, there are plenty of opportunities for failure and plenty of moments where a viewer will think hat failure has happened. And then they win. That’s what makes it a good story for now.

It’s been difficult, these past seven years; we’ve been hit non-stop with preposterous lies, vicious attacks, savaging of our rule of law and any number of uncivil and undemocratic "malignancies" from the sick mind of the creature Dahlia Lithwick recently referred to as "the great greased watermelon that is the former president."

A majority of Americans are suffering from this onslaught of constant fascist tactics blasted at us by a puffed and painted buffoon with his bullhorn of uncontrollable bullshit.

Judge Aileen Cannon’s decision to appoint a special master is going to live in disgrace in the nation’s jurisprudence. Anyone capable of reading comprehension has cause to be angry and disillusioned.

But all this outrage by competent legal scholars like Neal Katyal and others who have pointed out the failures in Judge Cannon’s reasoning misses the point. For all the Trump judges, all those Federalist Society clones, we are not working from the point of judicial competence as a framework now. These decisions are simply cut-and-pasted together - with the singular goal of protecting Donald Trump or advancing the partisan interests of the Thousand Year MAGA. They don’t care what they look like or read as. By that measure, this is not a terrible decision - it’s a great one that protects The Leader.

In the non-right-wing legal world we’re still in a normal legal framework of contending judicial philosophies in which the main aim is to maintain respect and deference to the rule of law.

But the judiciary has been hijacked and corrupted by Mitch “leave no vacancy open” McConnell’s years-long campaign to turn the country back through the appointment of Federalist Society reactionaries dedicated to the proposition of overturning every judicial decision since 1937 when the Supreme Court ended its battle with Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, of taking the rule of law back to before 1932.

However, politically, nothing Judge Cannon did in her order changes the fact that Donald Trump is on course to be indicted by the Department of Justice for Espionage and Obstruction of Justice.

I said at the outset and I will re-state here: the DOJ was never going to indict Trump before the midterms because DOJ policy discourages indictments within 60 days of an election. 62 days is “close enough.”

However, Judge Cannon’s order does guarantee that Trump’s theft of government documents will be on the front page for months if not years. Trump’s inevitable appeals to the Eleventh Circuit and the Supreme Court will keep his treason on the front pages. Republicans will have to continue defending the indefensible.

There is even a silver lining to Judge Cannon’s decision, since after the special master concludes that what the filter team did was right, that decision will insulate the Justice Department in the actions that will then flow from that decision.

But the really important thing is that we are now dealing with A Tale of Two Speeches.

President Biden’s speech last Thursday identified Trump and MAGA Republicans as a threat to democracy.

Saturday, Trump’s speech in Pennsylvania proved the truth of Biden’s words.

Being incapable of self-control, Trump walked right into the trap the president set for him. His direct attacks by Biden put him over the edge. And that is exactly where Democrats want Trump in the run-up to the midterms. Biden responded on Monday by attacking Trump again by name. And again, Trump the malignant narcissist couldn’t hold back.

Every time Trump opens his mouth, he makes the 2022 election a referendum on him, rather than the referendum on Biden that Republicans wanted.

David Frum summed it up best in his Atlantic article, “Biden Laid the Trap. Trump Walked Into It”:

“In 2016, Hillary Clinton warned that Donald Trump was a fool who could be baited with a tweet. This past Thursday night, in Philadelphia, Joe Biden upped the ante by asking, in effect: What idiot thing might the former president do if baited with a whole speech? On Saturday night, the world got its answer.

“For the 2022 election cycle, smart Republicans had a clear and simple plan: Don’t let the election be about Trump. Make it about gas prices, or crime, or the border, or race, or sex education, or anything—anything but Trump. Trump lost the popular vote in 2016. He lost control of the House in 2018. He lost the presidency in 2020. He lost both Senate seats in Georgia in 2021. Republicans had good reason to dread the havoc he’d create if he joined the fight in 2022.

“Biden came to Philadelphia to deliver a wound to Trump’s boundless yet fragile ego. Trump obliged with a monstrously self-involved meltdown 48 hours later. And now his party has nowhere to hide. Trump has overwritten his name on every Republican line of every ballot in 2022.”

That’s a perfect description of Trump’s two-hour narcissistic Orgy of Oldies.

He attacked Philadelphia, Pennsylvania’s largest city, for its “all-time murder record” in 2022.

He reprised the “Pocahontas” attack on Elizabeth Warren.

He claimed the FBI planted evidence at Mar-a-Lago.

He called for the death penalty for drug dealers.

He got the crowd to boo aid to Ukraine during the Russian invasion.

He called COVID-19 “China dust.”

He called for a ban on electric vehicles.

He saved special bile for the FBI and DOJ, saying: “The FBI and the Justice Department have become vicious monsters, controlled by radical left scoundrels, lawyers and the media, who tell them what to do.” He then pointed at the reporters in back covering the event, who were booed and threatened by the audience of mouth-breathers.

He complained about the FBI searching his closets for stolen government documents, inadvertently reminding everyone that the FBI had actually found stolen government documents in his closet, and in his bathroom.

But the most bizarre was his claim that he “met with Mark Zuckerberg last week at the White House.”

Searches for “Effects of Adderall” began trending during the speech.

Republicans hoped Trump would not be on the ballot in 2022, they planned their campaign on that one thing.

Trump is doing everything he can to dash their hopes.

As Joe Biden said in response to a heckler on Monday, “Look, everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.” Trump is proving that in spades.

For the moment, what’s necessary is for the Department of Justice to immediately appeal this decision through an expedited process to get it overruled. There’s a good chance that won’t happen because the corruption goes to the very top.

At the Battle of Edson’s Ridge, the Marines in the frontline foxholes were quickly surrounded and bypassed by the enemy as they swarmed out of the jungle and up the ridge in the darkness. They didn’t run. They fought hand-to-hand, they fought in twos and threes, they fought alone. They were marksmen and they killed as many of the enemy as they could, with their fire from the rear and the sides surprising and disrupting and confusing the enemy. They didn’t stop unless they were dead.

That’s a good lesson for the next 62 days. Do we stand and fight in the darkness regardless?

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