March Madness is here! Not the basketball variety, of course. This year's edition of March Madness is essentially the same as last month's February Madness and the madness of the preceding thirty-six months of the Trump presidency.
FYI: “Mad as a March Hare” is an even older proverb than “Mad as a Hatter.” Most speculate that the phrase refers to the excessively energetic behavior of the hare during early months of the mating season.
An Excerpt from the Hunting of the Snark (Lewis Carroll, 1876)
The image above comes from the 1931 printing of Lewis Carroll's "The Hunting of the Snark," a nonsense poem told in eight "fits." Henry Holiday, the illustrator, chose to illustrate this scene from the end of the eighth "fit," which describes an insane man's inability to express himself. The passage, though meant to be comedic, betrays a deep sympathy with madness and the people who "suffer" it.
To the horror of all who were present that day.
He uprose in full evening dress,
And with senseless grimaces endeavored to say
What his tongue could no longer express.
Down he sank in a chair--ran his hands through his hair--
And chanted in mimsiest tones
Words whose utter inanity proved his insanity,
While he rattled a couple of bones.
"Leave him here to his fate--it is getting so late!"
I went online today and filled out my 2020 Census form. In the RACE section I scrolled to the OTHER field at bottom of the list and entered the following:
Human: Race is an arbitrary human construct used by the powerful to divide and manipulate people.
I did this because I sincerely believe that, Donald J. Trump, with help from his political and media allies, will use the information collected in that section to advance his ongoing policy of repressive, xenophobic, and racist attacks on those they view as "other" and a threat to their hold on power. I thought you'd like to know. Sincerely, George A. Denino
Trump has spent weeks downplaying the virus' outbreak.
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Dear Clueless Media,
Donald Trump said it, and you didn't listen.
You thought he was talking about his response to the coronavirus, but he was telling you much more. He was describing exactly how he manipulates the message so he can claim credit for the decisions and actions of others when they yield positive results and to deny responsibility when they fail.
He told you everything about himself on January 23, 2016 when he said, "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose any voters."
And you thought he was exaggerating.
Here's how it works:
Positions of authority come with power, specifically the power to control messaging. Trump has mastered the skill of making others do what he wants done without having to say so directly. It's a skill used by dictators, abusive spouses, pedophile priests, self-serving religious leaders, movie moguls, and con men like Trump.
Here's why it works:
Trump talks in generalities and never gives orders. Those who are bound to him by duty or financial need understand what he wants them to do, and they do it.
You, the clueless media, are no exception.
Case in point: This Week's Hot News Topic
Here are the headlines you used to describe vague statements Trump made about his desire to open up the country by Easter:
CNN: Asked who suggested the Easter date, Trump said it was him."I thought it was a beautiful time. A beautiful timeline," he said. Pressed whether it was based on data, he said: "It was based on a certain level of weeks from the time we started and it happened to arrive, we were thinking of terms of sooner. I'd love to see it come sooner."
No specifics, no orders, and you fell for it.
Instead of educating America about how Trump is conning the country; instead of showing us how he deliberately avoids taking any action or making any decision, which, while absolutely necessary, might prove ineffective and thereby detrimental to his reelection; instead of exposing how he manipulates the message, you have taken the bait, responding instead to his deliberately incoherent, contradictory, and empty rhetoric and surrendered your authority and credibility as truth tellers to him and his lies.
Need more proof? Read these quotes from the article linked at the top of this page (emphasis added):
President Donald Trump on Friday deflected blame for his administration’s lagging ability to test Americans for the coronavirus outbreak, insisting instead — without offering evidence — that fault lies with his predecessor, Barack Obama.
“I don't take responsibility at all,” Trump said defiantly, pointing to an unspecified “set of circumstances” and “rules, regulations and specifications from a different time.”
But wait! There's more.
Testifying before Congress, Michael Cohen told you exactly how Donald Trump manipulates others into doing his dirty work in order to avoid accountability, but you didn't listen or believe him.
“Everybody’s job at the Trump Organization was to protect Trump”
Michael Cohen, former attorney for President Donald Trump, testifies before the House Oversight and Reform Committee on Wednesday. (Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call)
Kentucky Republican Thomas Massie countered Connolly’s questioning by asking Cohen whether Trump had explicitly told him to lie to Congress or if Cohen had simply relied on his “intuition.”
“Did you at that time … do what you thought Mr. Trump wanted you to do, not specifically what he’s told you to do?” Massie asked.
“At times, yes,” Cohen responded.
“So you just went on your intuition?” Massie said.
“I don’t know if I would call it intuition as much as i would just say, my knowledge of what he wanted, because it happened before and I knew what he had wanted,” Cohen said.
Asked by Massie how Trump would communicate indirectly with subordinates, Cohen replied, “That’s how he speaks. He doesn’t give you questions, he doesn’t give you orders — he speaks in a code. And I understand the code because I’ve been around him for a decade.”
When Tennessee Democrat Jim Cooper, one of the more soft-spoken members of Congress, asked him whether Trump would threaten his business adversaries with physical violence, Cohen responded that he did not do it himself — rather, he would “use others within the Trump Organization.”
As they worked to draft a Constitution for the United States, the Founding Fathers had to reconcile the concerns of members with diametrically opposed opinions and positions. Their genius was to recognize that any legislative body might create for a democratic republic would face similar obstacles when drafting laws on almost any issue. Their solution was to create a process designed to force opponents to compromise in order for legislation on controversial issues to pass. The plan was predicated on the belief that elected representatives to the bicameral Congress they created would be reasonable people who would negotiate and compromise in good faith as they had attempted to do in drafting The Constitution. For over thirty years, one of our political parties has turned a blind eye to the vision of the Founding Fathers and adopted a one-party, my-way-or-the-highway approach to political action. It has used power and greed effectively trump (pun intended) reason and compromise in our government. The result has been legislative gridlock, a politically stacked Supreme Court, and the election of a totally unqualified person to the presidency. Such was the hapless state of politics in America until an invisible virus became a wild card in what appeared to be a winning hand for those seeking a perpetual one-party government. Americans can, and have been, brainwashed, misled, lied to, guilt-tripped, emotionally and religiously threatened, and legally marginalized by "leaders" claiming power granted to them from a higher authority. Those tactics don't work on viruses. The genuine threat to the lives of a significant portion of the population of the nation - indeed, of the world - has forced members of both houses of Congress of all political positions to once again bargain and compromise in good faith. It is my hope that the lesson taught by the coronavirus incursion will serve to immunize the body politic against future assaults by unbridled power and greed.
especially : exaltation of the tribe above other groups
2: strong in-group loyalty
Ditch your tribe loyalty.
Race, religion, ethnicity, gender, nationality, and politics are human constructs designed to divide us from one another. They mean absolutely nothing to viruses.
When you're a Trump Republican and the Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee you know it's your job to warn "the right people" when you learn about a threat that might impact their privileged status. You know that they're the only ones who really matter to you and your boss. The rest are just sheep to be fleeced and led to slaughter. Click the title below to read and hear the NPR report featuring a recording of Senator Richard Burr tipping off fat-cat Republicans to the real threat posed by the coronavirus sixteen days before the general public got the same news.
Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., pictured here in 2019, warned a small group of constituents on Feb. 27 about the impact of the coronavirus on the U.S., according to a secret recording obtained by NPR. Mark Wilson/Getty Images
While you were listening to Trump downplay the coronavirus threat, his lap dog in the Justice Department was working behind the scenes shutting down a case that could have shed light on the extent of Russia's interference in the 2016 presidential election. I have no proof, of course; but, given William Barr's track record as Attorney General, I suspect the national security interests the federal prosecutors said were behind the decision to abandon the case have more to do with protecting Trump than with protecting the country.
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Justice Dept. abandons prosecution of Russian firm indicted in Mueller election interference probe
Yevgeniy Prigozhin, left, a catering magnate and military contractor, is known as “Putin’s chef” because of his ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin. (Misha Japaridze/Pool/Reuters)
The Justice Department on Monday dropped its two-year-long prosecution of a Russian company charged with conspiring to defraud the U.S. government by orchestrating a social media campaign to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.
The stunning reversal came a few weeks before the case — a spinoff of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s probe — was set to go to trial.
Assistants to U.S. Attorney Timothy Shea of Washington and Assistant Attorney General for National Security John C. Demers cited an unspecified “change in the balance of the government’s proof due to a classification determination,” according to a nine-page filing accompanied by facts under seal.
Prosecutors also cited the failure of the company, Concord Management and Consulting, to comply with trial subpoenas and the submission of a “misleading, at best” affidavit by Yevgeniy Prigozhin, a co-defendant and the company’s founder. Prigozhin is a catering magnate and military contractor known as “Putin’s chef” because of his ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
This building in St. Petersburg, known as the “troll factory,” housed the Internet Research Agency. (Naira Davlashyan/AP)
“Upon careful consideration of all of the circumstances, and particularly in light of recent events . . . the government has concluded that further proceedings as to Concord . . . promotes neither the interests of justice nor the nation’s security,” federal prosecutors wrote.
“The better course is to cease litigation” against Concord and a sister catering company, also owned by Prigozhin, the prosecutors said. The government added that Concord enjoys “immunity from just punishment” even if found guilty, since it has no business presence in the United States.
The after-business-hours government request to dismiss — granted by U.S. District Judge Dabney L. Friedrich — brings an abrupt end to a case that was set to go to trial April 6.
The Concord companies were among 13 individuals and three businesses indicted in the special counsel’s investigation in February 2018 for allegedly carrying out a long-running scheme to criminally interfere with the 2016 election. Concord Management, accused of funding the effort, is the only defendant to appear in U.S. court.
Concord lead attorney Eric A. Dubelier said that the United States sought an indictment “to make a political statement regarding the outcome of the 2016 election that was grossly overstated.”
“The government’s evidence was completely devoid of any information that could establish that the defendants knew what they were doing was in violation of highly complex U.S. laws and regulations,” Dubelier said. “This was a make-believe charge to fit the facts solely for political purposes.”
The Internet Research Agency, based in St. Petersburg, was named in the indictment as the hub of efforts to allegedly trick Americans online into following and promoting Russian-fed propaganda. The material, prosecutors said, pushed voters toward then-Republican candidate Donald Trump and away from Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.
Facebook’s former chief security officer, Alex Stamos, who oversaw the social media giant’s investigation of the disinformation campaign, said he was disappointed by the Justice Department’s decision.
“The unclassified evidence I have seen with my own eyes, and that Facebook provided to DOJ in 2017, demonstrates that the Internet Research Agency conducted an influence operation aimed at driving political divisions in the U.S.,” said Stamos, who now heads a research group that studies disinformation, the Stanford Internet Observatory. “If this activity is illegal, then I don’t understand why the prosecution would turn on a classification decision.”
As the operation progressed, prosecutors said, the defendants engaged in extensive online conversations with Americans who became unwitting tools of the Russian efforts — pushing misinformation online about divisive political issues such as race relations, immigration and gun control.
The Justice Department in October 2018 announced that it had also charged Concord’s accountant and Prigozhin’s bookkeeper, Elena Khusyaynova. The government alleged that the conspiracy was ongoing in that year’s midterm congressional elections and seeking to sow “discord in the U.S. political system.”
Mueller’s office also charged a dozen Russian military intelligence officers in July 2018 with hacking the Democratic National Committee’s computers, stealing data and publishing files to disrupt the 2016 election.
Prigozhin and Concord have been hit repeatedly by U.S. sanctions over Russia’s occupation of Crimea and military actions in Ukraine in 2016, based on alleged “malicious cyber-enabled activities.”
Legal analysts from the outset viewed the Internet Research Agency indictments as partly a “name and shame” action by the special counsel’s office, since Russia does not allow its citizens to be extradited to the United States. In Monday’s filing, U.S. prosecutors accused Concord of appearing in the case to force the government to turn over trial evidence that might expose or undermine the broader investigation.
Prosecutors accused Prigozhin of submitting a declaration that officials believe “contains false and misleading statements” about why the company was unable to produce emails, Internet protocol addresses it used or other corporate information in response to subpoena.
“The United States will continue its efforts to apprehend the individual defendants and bring them before this Court to face the pending charges,” prosecutors said, but wrote, “It is no longer in the best interests of justice or the country’s national security to continue this prosecution.”
The Justice Department’s retreat comes after several controversies over Attorney General William P. Barr and top aides’ handling of Mueller-related cases. The top federal prosecutor’s office in Washington took over the Mueller cases after the special counsel’s office closed last March.
Before President Trump’s longtime political confidant Roger Stone was sentenced last month to more than three years in prison for lying to the House Intelligence Committee’s investigation of Russian interference, four career prosecutors withdrew in apparent protest of Barr’s decision to water down Stone’s sentencing recommendation.
The ensuing storm was intensified after Barr replaced former U.S. attorney Jessie K. Liu with his counselor Timothy Shea.
Critics said the department’s top political appointees appeared to be intervening in cases involving the president’s friends and aides. That perception was fed when the Justice Department tasked five outside prosecutors to review the criminal case against former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn and other politically sensitive prosecutions in the office.
Such concerns were not immediately apparent Monday in the Concord case. The filing in the case was signed by one former Mueller team member, Adam C. Jed, one of the four line prosecutors who withdrew from Stone’s case.
If you're seeking accountability and responsible leadership in this time of crisis, you won't get it from the man who occupies the Oval Office.
Below is an opinion piece from Greg Sargent of the Washington Post. You are free to like, dislike, read, or completely ignore it. I happen to believe it describes exactly what Donald Trump is doing and why he's doing it.
Determined not to be outdone by his own malice and depravity, Trump is taking new steps that threaten to make all of it worse. He’s telling millions of Americans to entirely shut out any and all correctives to his falsehoods. He’s insisting they must plug their ears to any criticism designed to hold his government accountable for the failures we’re seeing, even though such criticism could nudge the response in a more constructive direction.
Trump is now raging at the media for reporting on his botched claims about Google’s plans for a new website to steer people to testing options. Trump dramatically overpromised in this regard, forcing Google to scale down the expectations he had created.
But Trump is now blaming the media for supposedly getting this wrong, insisting the project is progressing just as he claimed. Trump tweeted: “Even in times such as these, they are not truthful.”
On the substance, this is nonsense. Trump claimed vindication based on a Google clarification that its efforts to develop the website are on track. This in no way contradicts what pressaccounts reported — that Trump vastly oversold how far along it was. This remains entirely true.
But also note Trump’s declaration that, in a larger sense, the media is not being truthful at a time of crisis. Trump is using his megaphone to tell the American people not to trust an institution they must rely on for information amid an ongoing public health emergency, all because that institution held him accountable for his own failures on this front.
Trump’s escalating attacks
This is part of a larger pattern that has escalated during this crisis. Early on, Trump raged at the media for supposedly hyping coronavirus to rattle the markets and hurt him politically. Here, too, Trump told the American people not to believe the press even as it accurately informed them about a severe public danger about which Trump himself was busy misleading them.
Then, on Friday, Trump unloaded in a fury at PBS reporter Yamiche Alcindor. What triggered (dare we say it?) Trump was a perfectly reasonable question about whether he takes responsibility for the 2018 disbanding on his watch of the White House pandemic office.
“It’s a nasty question,” Trump sneered, before declining any responsibility for what his own officials do and heaping extensive praise on his own response.
But this was an appropriately aggressive question: As the former head of that office explains, this decision actually did make things worse, facilitating Trump’s decision to minimize the crisis without internal pushback and compromising efforts to coordinate the response.
Yet Trump in essence tried to place this decision beyond scrutiny entirely and lashed out at the media for trying to hold him accountable for it.
Trump rages at accountability
As it happens, Trump has repeatedly lashed out at reporters for the very same transgression — trying to hold him accountable for his own words and deeds.
In late 2018, Trump blasted Alcindor for asking if his rhetoric emboldened white nationalism, fuming that it was a “racist question.” But it was a perfectly reasonable one. Indeed, since then, some white nationalists themselves have rejoiced that Trump pushes their messages in coded form.
Trump also unloaded on Jim Acosta after the CNN reporter pressed Trump on his repeated lies about the “caravan” of migrants. This was a clear case where Trump’s demagoguery was utterly indefensible and threatened serious civic damage, yet Trump was enraged with Acosta for confronting him over it.
Trump vastly minimized a public emergency
These attacks on the media are even more potentially destructive than usual because of what has unfolded in the background: Trump’s relentless efforts to persuade the country that coronavirus is no big deal.
They show a president who put almost no priority on public health. Trump’s priorities were different: Making the virus sound like a minor nuisance. Exaggerating his administration’s response. Blaming foreigners and, anachronistically, the Obama administration. Claiming incorrectly that the situation was improving. Trying to cheer up stock market investors.
The news media responded to this by informing the public about the gravity of the situation and by attempting to hold Trump accountable for those very same failures.
Yet all throughout, Trump has told the American people to dismiss what the media is telling them. First, Trump insisted initial reporting on the crisis was deliberately hyped to harm him. Now Trump is claiming efforts to hold him accountable for all the failings that flowed from that impulse are just more “fake news.”
The big story here is that we’re now seeing just how catastrophically unsuited Trump’s brand of autocracy truly is in the face of a crisis like this one. As Anne Applebaum details, Trump’s enforcement of a loyalty code against civil service professionals, and his retaliation against them for exposing inconvenient truths, paved the way for Trump’s pathologies to hamper the response, because “Trump has very few truth-tellers around him anymore.”
The relentless effort to discredit the very same news media that’s informing the public where he will not, and imposing a form of accountability on Trump that he would never dream of imposing on himself, is of a piece with all that. And we can only guess at how many people will be deceived and misled, at exactly the moment when they need good information the most.
