Friday, March 31, 2023

Cut The Cord

I'm SO glad I don't have cable. Oh, Lindsay, you're such a card! (Don't quit your day job.) (No, I don't think he's referring to BLM "getting away with it" in protests years ago.  I think he's referring to the Southern view of NYC as "lawless" and the current ranting that a Black DA won't prosecute "real crime" while he chases Trump for "hiding an affair from his wife."  Lindsay is not at all original, nor all that subtle in his racism.)
In a post on The Donald, one member wrote, “This cannot go unpunished,” adding that Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg "needs to pay dearly.”

....

Another member, which Vice News describes as an "influential neo-Nazi account on Telegram," wrote, “The whole trans terrorist thing must have been polling badly so they decided to indict Trump based on the testimony of a lying jew and lying whore."

Soros?

“Can’t we put a bounty on Bragg’s head? Time to fight lawlessness with lawlessness,” one user wrote. In response, someone said: “Hey man a lot of us are thinking the same thing, but if I said what should really happen I'd be charged with ‘terroristic threats.’” Another added: “The unjustified prosecution of President Trump is state terrorism. Respond to terrorism with terrorism.”

Dear DOJ:  1000 arrests.  Message received.

Another user referring to the heightened security the day after the indictment, wrote: “Hopefully, it will be remembered as a day of slaughter.”

“They want you p---ed. Looks like WW3 could be off the table for now, so onto plan B: civil war," another user wrote.

Talk is cheap. Law enforcement should keep an eye on these people, but between talk and action there is a wide, wide gap.  Randos on the intertoobs talking tough from their basements is not Proud Boys and Oath Keepers stockpiling armaments in a New York (this time) hotel room and making plans to attack the Manhattan courthouse.  "Plan B: civil war"?  Right.  You and what army?  These guys aren't as big a threat as Timothy McVeigh was.
"Order Unsealing A Grand Jury Matter"  Just dropping that here to remind you Gym Jordan & Co. ain't got shit, ain't gonna get shit, ain't nothin' but shit themselves.  Bragg couldn't even report he'd filed the indictment with the court until this order.  Courts don't play.  Jordan isn't playing, either.  He's eating his crayons.  (If you're particular, this document memorializes an order the court probably entered verbally following the hearing referenced therein yesterday.  So Bragg didn't overstep by announcing the indictment yesterday.  But is Jordan ever going to so much as get Bragg before a committee?  No.) Maybe for pundits and cable talking heads. I think the rest of us will be just fine.  Because, hand to God, the "stress test" for democracy was 4 years of Trump in the White House, and the way he completely mishandled Covid, producing cracks and fractures and anxieties and angers we'll be dealing with for a generation or longer.  Although I still think the salubrious effect of covid was to make many workers re-evaluate their relationship to their jobs and their employers (more demanding to remain work from home; organizing unions in their workplace who can't work from home (Starbucks, etc.)  Every cloud a silver lining.)  This is the "American system" cleaning up from the party and setting the chairs back up they way they should be.  "Stress test"?  Shit, man, I was here for Vietnam and civil rights and Nixon and Reagan.  "Stress test" my ass.

In the interest of blog post economy, I'm gonna just join up another post with this one, like some kind of unholy chimera:
Now do leaning on state officials to get the election results you want.

Then do hiding classified documents and obstructing the search to recover them, combined with conspiring to unleash a violent mob on the Congress when in session in order to overturn the results of an election you didn't win.
And how many times can J.D. Vance blame the subways of New York for indictments in Georgia and by the DOJ? How many racist tropes can they invoke over classified documents and "perfect" phone calls and "BE THERE! WILL BE WILD!"?

Well, I'm sure they'll come up with something.

Meanwhile, there's a criminal case to prosecute.  And the quality of that prosecution rests as much on Trump's defense as it does on the prosecution's case.  Yes, the latter has the burden of proof.  But they've had a year in a grand jury to prepare to meet that burden.  That significantly shifts the burden to the defense, to explain away everything the indictment says Trump did (whatever that is).  Yes, there will be motions to dismiss (it would be malpractice not to); and motions for change of venue (again, malpractice not to).  But the latter probably won't work because Trump has ginned up most of the publicity here (who said he'd be arraigned two weeks ago?).  The dismissals probably won't work, either.  I don't think Bragg is that bad at his job, nor are Trump's lawyers that good.

There's a reason Trump has crappy lawyers, and it's because he's the client from hell.  But crappy lawyers present crappy cases.  Including all the suits to set aside the 2020 election, how many cases has Trump won in court recently?  How well do his legal arguments do? Most of them end up sounding like Trump translated through a lawyer's vocabulary, and little more.  There are fundamental differences between the ways lawyers argue in court and politicians argue in public, and even greater divergence between legal arguments and the arguments of tinpot dictators and petty demagogues.  Trump makes his lawyers sound like him.

I ask again:  how many arguments have his lawyers won since he started hiring lawyers en masse to challenge the 2020 election, and to defend him against civil and criminal investigations?  Everything he's taken to court, in the form of motions of one kind and another (or the civil "suit," if that's what it was, against the DOJ over MAL documents), has been a loss (in the cited case, and absolute spanking, even of the judge).  He's not winning anywhere, and part of the reason for that is the lawyers he hires, and has to hire, because he won't listen to his lawyers.

Put it this way:  OJ had his "Dream Team."  He hired them, and he shut up and let them work.  And he won.  Trump doesn't have a "Dream Team" because even if he put one together, he'd never shut up and let them work.  There's some talk of a possible "gag order" in the Manhattan case.  If there ever is one, it'll be because Trump won't shut up.  And the more he talks, the more he hurts himself in trial.  He can't use that as a defense that the jury pool is tainted; not when he's the one tainting it.  He can't use that as any kind of defense at all.  But the prosecution can use it against him.

Trump really is his own worst enemy.
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1 comment:

  1. ntodd1:09 PM

    I am suddenly reminded of an old TV ad for some Time-Life book series on the 60s, which somberly intoned something about how our country had "never been more divided." Um...I thought the Civil War was pretty divisive.

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