Good lord, this is getting complicated!
by digby
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| Holiday soother: a little Joey |
First, thank you all again for contributing to the Annual Hullabaloo Holiday Fundraiser. It warms my heart that you value this humble little project and I can’t begin to tell you how grateful I am.
This has been an interesting morning waiting for the Flynn sentencing and watching the right wingers suddenly become paralyzed after having extolled the virtues of Judge Emmett Sullivan as someone who would expose the Deep State conspiracy to destroy the patriot Donald Trump. That didn’t happen. Sullivan is a skeptic of government power but he isn’t a fool.
You have to forgive them. They are authoritarians by nature so they aren’t used to being on the other side of the fence and they don’t really understand how this works. Civil libertarians care about checking government power and there is ample evidence that the president of the United States and a former Marine General and National Security Adviser are incompetent, unstable and unethical. And we are learning that even the best case scenario shows that those characteristics led both of them to be criminal and disloyal. (The worst case scenario is ….. bad.)
These are the most powerful positions in the world and somebody, somewhere, has to step in in a situation such as this. Preferably it would be the congress but because the Republican Party is batshit insane and politically suicidal the judicial system is the only check on this criminality and gross abuse of executive power at the moment. Sullivan is the type of judge who doesn’t think high government officials should get special treatment and he apparently thinks that’s what Flynn was getting.
It’s possible that by the time you read this Trump will have already pardoned his man Flynn. Who knows? He’s very much on edge right now and anything can happen. Stay tuned.
I don’t have the skills of a Marcy Wheeler at parsing dense legal filings and government documents to suss out the underlying meaning. I depend on her to do that. But I do spend a lot of time reading and synthesizing the political news and trying to put it together in an understandable way for people who don’t have the time or inclination to do that. Years of watching the right wing has given me a pretty good instinct about how that faction works and right now that’s something to which we must pay especially close attention. Donald Trump is a walking social and political crisis and the underlying structure that enables him is key to whether or not we get through this intact.
We have to stay awake right now as exhausted as we are by all this. I promise that I will throw cold water on my face each morning and keep doing what I do to try to help us all sort through it. If stopping by from time to time helps you feel like you aren’t going completely crazy I hope you’ll find it in your heart to drop a little something in the Hullabaloo stocking to help me keep the light on for another year.
The paypal buttons are on the sidebar and below as is the snail mail address.
As always I am immensely grateful for your continued loyalty and interest in my scribbles.
And I wish all of you Very Happy Hollandaise!
cheers — digby
Digby’s Hullabaloo
2801 Ocean Park Blvd.
Box 157
Santa Monica, Ca 90405