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New McCarthy, same old McCarthyism.

Anyone who bans teaching American history has no right to shape America’s future.

“But what about the lurkers?”

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

The willow is too close to the house.

Bark louder, little dog.

Accountability, motherfuckers.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

A Senator Walker would also be an insult to reason, rationality, and decency.

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. let’s win this.

Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

I like you, you’re my kind of trouble.

A dilettante blog from the great progressive state of West Virginia.

Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

You can’t love your country only when you win.

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

Give the craziest people you know everything they want and hope they don’t ask for more? Great plan.

The next time the wall street journal editorial board speaks the truth will be the first.

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / If Loving This is Wrong, I Don’t Want to be Right

If Loving This is Wrong, I Don’t Want to be Right

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If I remember the law I learned by watching The Sopranos, the feds always called up Tony when they started wiretaps on Ralphie and Paulie Walnuts. Also, remind me who was running the DOJ in 2019?

Reader Interactions

105Comments

  2. 2.

    Lex

    First they came for Rudy Giuliani, and I said nothing, because I was rolling on the floor, laughing my ass off.

  3. 3.

    SiubhanDuinne

    The DOJ in late 2019 covertly obtained access to my iCloud and never notified me.

    Get off of my cloud. You missed a golden opportunity for a title there, mistermix.

  9. 9.

    Tim C.

    @bbleh: I’ve seen interviews with 80s Rudy and he was *different*   I don’t know if it’s age, disease or the fact that something early in Clinton’s first term seemed to drop Republican IQs by about 25 points nation-wide,  but he clearly used to be different.

  10. 10.

    randy khan

    I normally would think that somebody who prosecuted (well, had press conferences announcing the prosecution of) mob bosses and drug dealers would know that targets never are informed about wiretaps and other forms of surveillance while they’re happening.  But Rudy is a special case.

  13. 13.

    germy

    “Future Governor of New York” expresses outrage over the treatment of his father

    Burnett: You need probably cause to get a warrant
    A. Giuliani: Only a corrupt Obama judge would sign it. No other judge would sign it.
    Burnett: Do you have proof no other judge would sign?
    A. Giuliani: No. Do YOU have any? pic.twitter.com/9l7BzgnehU

    — Andrew Feinberg (@AndrewFeinberg) April 29, 2021

  16. 16.

    Mudbrush

    @Tim C.: No, it makes me feel better about our chances to believe that top level republicans really are this dumb and venal. No cognitive decline necessary.

  17. 17.

    Betty Cracker

    @germy: I was reading that this morning with amazement. OMFG, I was thinking, what an idiot. On the other hand, Greenberg knew he was dealing with characters as amoral and mendacious as himself, so maybe he considered the screenshots leverage. He even alluded to that in the correspondence with Stone, i.e., “I have to do what’s best for my family.”

    Good lord. Also, does anyone know if it’s against the law to flat-out auction off pardons, which was obviously what was going on in Trump’s final days in office? I’m guessing no because only 46 people have held the office of POTUS and the body of law developed to address the unique powers of that office seems…insufficient.

  18. 18.

    Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes

    @germy:

    Kinda wanting to see the list of Trump pardons again. Wondering about the sales that Stone brokered (that skeezy little governor of Illinois whose name escapes me comes to mind).

  20. 20.

    Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes

    @germy:

    Nobody can try and convince me that Gums Giuliani isn’t Gary Busey’s love child.

  23. 23.

    wjs

    What’s even funnier is that there is NO SHORTAGE of people who are ready to send Rudy money for his defense fund. It’s like an endless river of grifting, and the cash flows to these people whenever they launch their latest grievance campaign on, of course, Fox News.

  25. 25.

    Amir Khalid

    @Betty Cracker:
    Glenn Kirshner has been saying the DoJ should be able to ignore a Trump pardon if it can establish that the pardon was corruptly given, but acknowledges that this needs to be tested in court.

  27. 27.

    Another Scott

    @Betty Cracker: A certain IL governor says that it’s illegal to sell favors.  Though SCOTUS did say that selling the office was ok for VA Gov McDonnell, so there’s that.  :-/

    I’m sure Garland and the DoJ are looking over TFG’s pardons very carefully…

    Cheers,

    Scott.

  28. 28.

    mrmoshpotato

    @wjs: ?Grift grift grift your ass gently down the stream, merrily merrily merrily merrily, trash will give you money ?

  29. 29.

    Gin & Tonic

    Boy, would I love to see Rudy extradited to Ukraine. Prisons there are … different than US Federal lockups.

  30. 30.

    PST

    @Betty Cracker:

    Also, does anyone know if it’s against the law to flat-out auction off pardons, which was obviously what was going on in Trump’s final days in office?

    It is illegal to bribe an office holder to perform an official act. On the other hand, it is perfectly all right to hire a lawyer to prepare an application for a pardon. (I suspect it is also okay to pay a non-lawyer to do so, but I haven’t checked.) So there will be both legal and illegal circumstances in which someone is handing someone else a pile of money hoping that the end result will be a pardon. My best guess is that in the end, what matters is whether the official is getting personal benefit out of the transaction.

  32. 32.

    SFAW

    If again, nothing is done, you could be next.

    Especially if you’re one of those “Americans” trying to subvert democracy, performs myriad corrupt acts, tries to overturn a fair-and-square elections whilst using the Big Lie as “justification,” etc etc

    Relative to his tweet: the retweets (or whatever they’re called) below his post are all the usual  suspects (KayLIE McInane-y, Uday (or Qusay), Mike PompousAss0; their insanity and lying was like having a flashback to TFG’s Reign of Terror. I especially liked Andy Biggs’s “worst President ever” comment. Basically, “YOU’RE the puppet!” from yet another traitorous moron.

  33. 33.

    mrmoshpotato

    @Another Scott:

    A certain IL governor says that it’s illegal to sell favors.

    Haha!  Definitely a non-Rethuglican governor!

    ETA – Or are you talking about bitchass Blago?  Fuck Blago!

  35. 35.

    Gin & Tonic

    US Embassy Moscow has reportedly ceased issuing visas. If only the EU would follow suit.

  36. 36.

    Soprano2

    @PST: You also have to love Joel Greenberg’s correspondence with Roger Stone.

    Has that been independently verified? Seems almost too good to be true.

  37. 37.

    germy

    Anyone else notice this in the DailyBeast Matt Gaetz story, the part when Stone tells Greenberg how he’s been abandoned by Gaetz?

    “What I don’t understand is why [Matt Gaetz] would not help me at all and actually told me not to help you which I tried to do anyway. In the end it would not have mattered. Cipollone killed everything we wanted to get done and that includes stuff MG wanted,” Stone wrote.

    “Ok. He actually said not to help me? Wow,” Greenberg replied.

  40. 40.

    Betty Cracker

    @germy: That jumped out at me too. Here’s hoping he saved up all kinds of dirt to dump on Gaetz’s head. Since he was screenshotting Stone’s comms on a disappearing messages app, it’s not unreasonable to hope he kept dirt on LOTS of Repubs…

    ETA: My hope is that this includes DeSantis, who was/is a close friend of Gaetz and has been photographed hanging out with Greenberg…

  41. 41.

    germy

    There's good reporting and then there's this: "As part of the effort to obtain a pardon, Greenberg wrote multiple drafts of his confession letter. The Daily Beast obtained two typed versions and an earlier handwritten one." https://t.co/AFDeg3G1OZ

    — Brad Heath (@bradheath) April 30, 2021

  42. 42.

    BruceFromOhio

    The DOJ in late 2019 covertly obtained access to my iCloud and never notified me.

    There is so much to love in this. Speculating wildly, are the littler fish now actively flipping on the bigger fish? Or is it simply that with the election now gone from the rear-view mirror, DoJ is just putting the finishing touches on what it started?

    May have to move up from popcorn to pizza and wings, this could be a really long movie.

    ETA: Anybody at Fascist News still talking about John Kerry?

  45. 45.

    Ken

    @Betty Cracker: Also, does anyone know if it’s against the law to flat-out auction off pardons, which was obviously what was going on in Trump’s final days in office?

    I don’t know about the law, but Dante put them in the Eighth Circle of Hell, fifth bolgia, where they are submerged in boiling tar. That may also be the source of the popular image of devils with pitchforks came from — they patrol the banks, making sure no one tries to get out.

  46. 46.

    Soprano2

    @Betty Cracker: @Another Scott: The McDonnell case completely ruined my faith in the justice system’s ability to enforce public corruption laws.

    When they were prosecuting Senator Menendez I kept saying that because of the McDonnell precedent they would never get a conviction and it was a waste of time to even try the case. And yeah, they’ve made it extremely hard to enforce public corruption laws.

  48. 48.

    Soprano2

    @BruceFromOhio: May have to move up from popcorn to pizza and wings, this could be a really long movie.

    Better hurry up and buy those wings, there’s a nationwide shortage right now.

  50. 50.

    artem1s

    @Tim C.:

     I don’t know if it’s age, disease or the fact that something early in Clinton’s first term seemed to drop Republican IQs by about 25 points nation-wide,

    Low level lead poisoning.  Anyone who owned a car or lived near a road was exposed to lead gasoline and it went on well past the date where the US finally gave up adding lead to our gas. It’s in the soil and when that soil is disturbed it’s in the air. Living in metro areas means worse exposure but living outside cities didn’t necessarily give you a pass on exposure either.  My grandfather’s farm and every farm like it typically had a 50 or 100 gallon tank sitting by the barn to fill up the tractors and combines.  Those tanks leaked and many of them just rotted away into the soil once the farmhouse was abandoned in the middle of a nice shiny new subdivision.  Highway on and off ramps have high levels of lead in the soil.  Unless that soil is removed, it sits there, blowing it’s poison around on the drafts of semis and coal-rolling SUVs.  Ever change your own oil? I did a lot in my 20s and 30s.

    The 1970/80s PSAs showing little black kids eating paint chips was as big a disinformation campaign as anything we see today.  Blame it on house paint, the poors and those people too stupid to know any better than to eat paint – companies can always count on racism to aid them in their disinformation campaigns! Twenty-thirty years of that and the car companies don’t have to retool their factories to build cars that don’t need lead gas to run.

    The effects of heavy metal poisoning are cumulative and tend to show more up as we age.  There are a lot of studies on the effects of high levels of lead exposure, like eating paint and drinking the water in Flint.  Drops in violent crime can be correlated with the banning of lead gasoline in the nineties.  But I’m sure it’s really because we locked all the bad guys up in for-profit prisons, right?

    There are probably lots of studies about the low level effects but those are probably sitting in some vault in BP or Exxon or Shell. Now Oil and Gas and Car companies get to spend another 3 decades blaming lead poisoning on water pipes.

    Car culture poisoned this country with a mindset and now we are seeing the effects in one of the last generations suffering from low level lead poisoning – at least in America.  Who knows how many cases of Alzheimer’s and other degenerative diseases could have been avoided. The death toll goes far beyond road accidents.  All the way to countries in the Middle East and the rest of the planet who had to bear the weight of our need for cheap gasoline and fast, fast cars.

  51. 51.

    raven

    If it’s the 10th Anniversary of killing OBL is it also the 10th Anniversary of Obama ridiculing Trump at the dinner?

  52. 52.

    leeleeFL

    @Tim C.: He was still a dick!  I worked in Manhattan for a time while he was Mayor.  If anything, 9-11 was a catalyst for him and too many others.  He knew his bullshit decisions about communications equipment helped cause many of the deaths of the First-Responders, and so he launched himself into the shitheaded performance artist we have seen since.  Besides, I liked someone’s opinion that he went after the American Mob to empower the Russian Mob.  It’s pretty obvious he has ties in Mother (fucker) Russia.

  53. 53.

    jimmiraybob

    “…you could be next.“

    File under: “When I start my career in interstate and international crime.”

  56. 56.

    Betty Cracker

    @Soprano2: Yep — that thought crossed my mind too during the trial of Menendez, another obvious crook who skated. Biden has about a million things on his plate, but I hope he gets around to pushing for stronger public corruption legislation eventually. He said some encouraging things about the issue during the campaign. I think this is a topic Dems can use to really set themselves apart from Republicans in the eyes of low-info “both sides” types.

  58. 58.

    Ken

    @robmassing: Right, Obama was running things through 2019. Biden didn’t take over until early 2020, which is when half a million people died of a bungled pandemic response, and cities were filled with rioters and looters.

  59. 59.

    germy

    LIFE RULE #767865: Beware of those who have been told they were very smart their entire lives and may actually believe it.

    — SPIES&VESPERS (@SpiesVespers) April 30, 2021

  61. 61.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    If again, nothing is done, you could be next.

    That’s exactly the point of the political project you were involved with, you self centered, little gnomish mother fucking idiot.

  62. 62.

    patrick II

    There is no attorney client privilege when there is a crime being committed . You can’t tell your lawyer to go shoot someone on fifth avenue, which he promptly does, and expect privilege. Giuliani has lost all sense of what a crime is.

  63. 63.

    Uncle Cosmo

    After 14 months of The Plague Year, it’s finally happened: Someone I’ve met & interacted with IRL has died of COVID-19.

    The decedent was the sister of a girl I met in HS; I met her when I renewed acquaintance with her sister long years later. Both awesomely stubborn re whatever beliefs they’d arrived at, no discussion allowed. But while my original acquaintance’s beliefs are generally reasonable, her deceased sister was a brash unabashed RWNJ – within 90 seconds of whenever we met we’d be screaming at each other.

    From what I understand, the sister loudly decried COVID as a “liebrul” hoax and vaccination a “Deep State” plot – until recently when That Fucking Former Guy finally said people should get the shot (2 months after he secretly got his own). Whereupon she signed up for one – too late.

    The surviving sister is absolutely livid & blames TFFG. If Mango Mussolini were to show up walking down the same street as her, by the time she got through with his worthless carcass there wouldn’t be enough left to bury.

  68. 68.

    Ken

    @mrmoshpotato: Yes, I was riffing on that, specifically the attempt to blame Obama for the Great Recession which started a year before he took office.

    Along those lines, I think I saw a screencap of Fox from a month or so ago, with the chyron screaming “HALF A MILLION DEAD UNDER BIDEN”.  But I haven’t seen anything similar since, so maybe they found that even their viewers won’t swallow every lie?

  69. 69.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @Tim C.: My bet is drugs, as in the prescription legal kind.  My mother has the same kind of inability to see the negative consequences and it’s clearly from all the drugs she takes for the pain from her damaged knees and back.

  70. 70.

    SFAW

    @leeleeFL:

    Besides, I liked someone’s opinion that he went after the American Mob to empower the Russian Mob.

    Yeah, he and his father were a regular crime-fighting Dynamic Duo.

  71. 71.

    MomSense

    Why TF is Ralph Reed  on my tv?  I had forgotten all about that smarmy, corrupt, a$$hole.

  74. 74.

    Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes

    @germy:

    Who knew that Cipollone would be the voice of reason and morality in the end?

  75. 75.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @Jeffro: Were talking about people who believe 12 ft tall, shape shifting, bay eating, alien, lizards control our civilization.

  77. 77.

    PST

    I realize this is the end of the line for this thread, but I have a short article to recommend from the Yale Journal of Regulation that clarifies the federal bribery statute nicely. Congress can’t outlaw performance of an official act, but it can outlaw (and has outlawed) accepting or agreeing to accept a bribe to perform such an official act. Performing the act cannot be an element of the crime in itself, but it can be evidence that a bribe was accepted or agreed to. Finally, the article cites authority that the bribery statue, 18 USC 201, applies to the President.

  78. 78.

    rp

    If again, nothing is done, you could be next.

    Well…yes. The primary reason we prosecute and punish criminals is to deter other people from committing crimes. “If you act like this stupid a-hole, we’ll come after you next.”

  82. 82.

    patrick II

    @Ken:

    Therefore the “if”.  But it seems crazy for that to be allowed since it essentially throws law and the entire legal system out of the window for a sitting president. Does he want to poison his political opponent?  OK, self pardon for him and his henchmen.

  83. 83.

    Other MJS

    @artem1s: ​
    Much has been made of the “people start pollution; people can stop it” PSA; thanks for reminding us about this.

  84. 84.

    BruceFromOhio

    @Ken:

    Along those lines, I think I saw a screencap of Fox from a month or so ago, with the chyron screaming “HALF A MILLION DEAD UNDER BIDEN”. But I haven’t seen anything similar since, so maybe they found that even their viewers won’t swallow every lie?

    It’s too much spice along with “200 MILLION VACCINATED” and “ANTI-VAXXERS CLAIM VACCINES CONTAIN MICROCHIPS”, the poor bastards can only handle so much at once.

  86. 86.

    Adrian Lesher

    @Tim C.: Giuliani has been a racist flamethrower for a long time. Remember the police riot during his campaign for mayor? He’s also been an authoritarian for a long time. Remember how he tried to postpone the mayoral election so he could hold on to power after 9/11?

  88. 88.

    Betty Cracker

    @Uncle Cosmo: That’s terrible. I bet there are many stories like that, and the orange asshole could have saved a lot of followers if he had acted like a normal leader and promoted the vaccine that he received in secret.

  92. 92.

    Barbara

    @SiubhanDuinne: ​Did he think they would call him first and ask? I have no idea what they are looking for but if it was improperly obtained he can file a motion to suppress. He should let his lawyers do the taking for him in court.

  93. 93.

    Tim C.

    @Adrian Lesher: Sorry,  I wasn’t clear enough.

    I’m talking more 1980s Rudy.  I saw interviews with him when he was a US Attorney.   Clearly coherent and understanding organized crime.   For all I know he was a racist nutjob then too, but he certainly was much more presentable and coherent then.

  94. 94.

    Tim C.

    @Betty Cracker: The thing that keeps me up at night:

    If he had just shut the fuck up and told people to wear their masks, he would have coasted to re-election.    He was so chickenshit, that he never really grasped that he had a cult that would follow him anywhere as long as he hated on brown people.   He could have just blamed Mexico and China and told people that’s why they needed a mask.    It would have been perfect for him.

    But he’s too dumb to see it.

  97. 97.

    cursorial

    I so, so wish there is video of the Giuliani raid. From this story  :

    Giuliani said that the federal agents took “seven or eight electronic items of mine,” according to Mediaite. After they declined to take two or three hard drives, Giuliani says that he urged them to reconsider, claiming that they belonged to Hunter Biden.

  98. 98.

    karen marie

    @Betty Cracker: I wouldn’t give Greenberg that much credit. My guess is he screenshot the messages to give him time to read and comprehend.  Ten seconds are only long enough to read something once.

  99. 99.

    WaterGirl

    @karen marie: I agree.  10 seconds was a silly choice; it only leads to the opposite behavior of what was intended or hoped for.

    Just like sites that make you change your password all the time – if it was once a year you could probably remember it, but when you have to change it all the fucking time, people have to write it down.  So much for security.

    It never ceases to amaze me that so many people seem to lack the ability to draw a dotted line from one thing to the likely outcome.

  100. 100.

    karen marie

    @artem1s: I read something a while back that suggested an increased crime rate among an older age group – 50 to 60 – could be explained by cumulative effect of lead on aging brains.

  104. 104.

    SteverinoCT

    @Betty Cracker: 

    Since he was screenshotting Stone’s comms on a disappearing messages app

    Since in context it said the timer was set to as little as ten seconds, I suspect he was screenshotting them just to be able to read them before they disappeared.

  105. 105.

    Bill Arnold

    @Jeffro:

    then when did trumpov get into office and become the “father of the vaccine”?

    That’s a different timeline. There are two parallel entangled timelines in the Trump multiverse; the blame timeline, and the credit timeline.

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