Thank you for this. Lordy, have you been keeping track. As all these things have been reported and forgotten (or buried under other horrible news); they have been in the back of my mind, but always pushed back by the latest fiasco. To see them listed and updated is a reminder of what’s to come if he and his cretins are not dispatched to lock up of some sort. This is critical and should remain in our awareness.
Thank you. They depend on what Bannon calls "the firehose of shit." The media jumps to the next horrible thing, and the old horrible thing gets forgotten. Which is easy to do when there are SO MANY horrible things. That will only escalate if he is reinstalled.
Mainstream media only talks about the latest shiny object. They should be reporting on & tallying this stuff up every day.
My head has exploded already today - like everyday. And then sometimes I read something like “but we had no wars under thump”
I read that Blacks & Arab Americans are so upset with Biden’s continuing aid to Israel and our UN vote not pushing for a ceasefire that they will not vote for Biden. I get it. I probably wouldn’t either if I was them.
I got an email from the Jacky Rosen campaign asking for money. She used the Jewish phrase Tikkun Olam. How can anyone use that phrase & still condone Israel’s continuing attacks on Gaza AND the West Bank?
Sorry, I can’t contribute any more to her.
I read today that what Israel really wants (besides eliminating all Palestinians from what used to be called Palestine!) is the gas fields discovered off the coast of Gaza.
I fear that continuing to uphold illegal actions in Israel will cost us democracy in the US.
Most Americans are not aware of what has been going on in Israel these past years. We ignore it to our own detriment. It is turning the rest of the world against us.
I am depressed beyond belief that aiding Israel will be the reason that some will vote third party & we end up with the criminal fascist 2year old thump in the White House.
Hamas is a terrorist organization. Israel wants to eliminate Hamas, not the Palestinian people. Hamas hides behind the Palestinian people to shield themselves. Hamas wants to eliminate Israel.
And so far, the IDF has eliminated 18,000 people, the overwhelming majority of whom were not members of Hamas, but the convicted domestic terrorist Ben Gvir is in charge of expelling Palestinians from Greater Israel because that will keep Nitwityahoo - the Trump of Israel, out of the prison where his innate corruption should have put him long ago.
He is hurting Palestinians, he's hurting Israelis, he's hurting American Jews, because the rise in antisemitism is related to the Gaza invasion, and he's hurting Biden, and therefore democracy -- all to stay out of prison.
All the more reason: Criminals must be held to account!
As long as the current people are in charge -- Hamas and the Israeli leader who funded them and helped them stay in power, Bibi -- there will be no peace. The Israeli people have suffered and will continue to suffer. The Palestinian people have suffered and will continue to suffer.
Israel has a right to, and must, try and eliminate Hamas, a terrorist organization. But the ground war was a bad idea even in the moment. Bibi did exactly what Hamas wanted him to do. It's infuriating.
Much of the animus is Bibi's fault. He managed to squander the goodwill of most of the world in about two weeks. I believe that Biden has been trying to temper Bibi's more violent impulses from the get-go. I believe that's why he went there when he did-- that and to stand with the people of Israel in that moment of tragedy and horror, which was the right thing to do. This belief was confirmed in the NYT today, the story about the rift between them on how the war is being handled. Like invading Iraq -- which Biden brought up in his speech is Israel -- the invasion of Gaza was a bad idea even in the moment. Hamas did what they did to provoke this exact response. They don't care about the Palestinian people at all. They want bloodshed and chaos and world opinion on their side.
And yes, it's beyond depressing that Bibi has turned the horrors of October 7 into this. If Biden loses because of him not wanting to go to jail, that's the most depressing thing of all. And all the more reason why we have to hold our own crooks to account: Trump, Menendez, any party, they must be held to account.
Greg you write with such clarity. IMO the supremes can’t let trump get away with this latest bs of presidential immunity for his crimes. Otherwise their own power will cease. I fear that too many citizens don’t read the news (print) , they get their information from faux news or from social media and that’s unfortunate. War has been declared but many people don’t know it.
Your work is not only educational it’s also really really entertaining. I love how you add a one or two word descriptor in front of the names of tRumps co-conspirators as a reminder of the level of shit we’re talking about. I will say I still (and likely never will) understand or forgive Merritt Garland for his incompetence in letting 2 years go by before addressing the lawlessness before finally assigning a special counsel, lots of time was lost - but at least he assigned the bad-ass (see what I did there?) Jack Smith who is intelligent, committed and always thinking how to bury the former Piece of Shit. And what is this silliness about not indicting a sitting President, that is a contradiction and point of confusion when one hears “no one is above the law”. Thanks for listening
Merrick Garland, as soon as he took charge, had the DoJ investigating J6. There was 'low grade obstruction' within DoJ itself not due to Garland.
Jack Smith was appointed three days after Trump announced he was running for office to give the proper political distance. And Smith picked up all the ongoing trump investigations except those about the participants on the ground in J6.
Last, and not least, the J6 investigations and current trials and all the SC investigations and trials constitute the two largest investigations in American history. By all accounts, there was no lingering or reluctance on Garland's part. However, the disinfo psyops controlled the field of info early on while DoJ was properly quiet about its investigations (while still carrying out the whole normal scale of DoJ operations and investigations in the US).
Everyone wanted something that is slow and precise by nature to be fast; some were more easily influenced than others as to the real situation.
This is all true, but that's not the entire job. There is a PR aspect of it. Mueller fucked up that part royally. So has Garland. I get that he thinks it's ridiculous to have to keep reassuring us, but he really needed to be doing that. After all the years of blind faith in Mueller, it's the least he could have done.
Thanks, Richard. I try to sprinkle in the jokes, to keep us all sane.
Garland was a bad choice for AG. Terrible, even. The only defense is that the GOP Senate was not going to confirm anyone too overtly anti-Trump. But still.
I've read some previous comments of yours that Biden will be re-elected in 2024. As you write here, with all the co-conspirators that have been installed around the nation, will it be enough that he is re-elected? If not, what else do you think we should be doing?
Yes, I think it will be enough. Trump is old and in bad shape. He would be, what, 82 in 2028, if he's still alive. There is no dependable demagogue in the GOP to take his place. That's the one good thing about dictators -- once they die, the regime dies with them.
This is the best summary of Trump and his cronies unequal treatment under the law I have ever read. Do you write your articles for “opinions” in newspapers like WP, NYT, even newspapers like my Detroit Free Press? I wish thousands more people could see your writings.
You're correct about this. Willful ignorance has played a major role with the cult and religious evangelical leaders and especially the more educated elements surrounding FPOTUS. I do feel some of that willful ignorance was coerced one way or another.
Willful ignorance describes most of America and the rest of the world too. Most of us (including myself) thought that democracy was a self sustaining form of government, and we let "the people who knew what they were doing" handle things. The slow creep toward authoritarianism over the last 40+ years has shown us that this is not so. Some of us woke up awhile ago, but most are still sleepwalking.
Do we give up in despair? Nope. We just keep fighting.
I don’t believe in liberty and justice for all anymore. How can anyone, in the face of this onslaught of corruption you’ve so thoroughly covered? I don’t think for a minute that Trump created this monster! He’s not that smart! He’s just cunning enough and egotistical enough to make himself the public face of a monster that’s been flexing its muscles in the swamp for decades. All the corrupt “powers” that be who want a strongman government are willing to let the orange useful idiot get the publicity and take the credit, while they enjoy their enabled lawlessness. Per an Eagles song, I could be wrong but I’m not!
I agree, also. This is where I've always suspected our foreign enemies, especially ones that have been long term and have the ability to parse and dissect every bit of the Constitution and the history of the US since WWI. The key question is who is conveying the information and direction; it has to be people very close to FPOTUS: those are the really dangerous traitors.
It's such a complicated thing. There are reasons why Paxton hasn't been tried yet, and reasons Bannon remains at large (although I'm not sure I understand them), and reasons Jones has yet to pay up. It's not all the same person, people, or force. But taken together, it sends the message that the rule of law is deteriorating.
45 and his entourage have many weapons at their disposal. One stands out. Distraction to the point of exhaustion. I found myself hyperventilating when reading your excellent column. We have all fallen into Reagan's infamous debate line, " OH, now there you go again." Not that what you write, the many reminders of 45, et al crimes are the culprit, rather they keep adding into the sin bin daily enormous amounts of new material which must be reported on.
The catalog of 45isms grows daily. I feel like the marathon runner approaching the last mile, exhausted to the point of dropping. Every new addition to the sin bin creates more news. Extolling Biden's accomplishments gets overshadowed by 45's next piece of bullshit. He and his cronies as you correctly demonstrate have gotten away with so much that the populace is at the point of exhausted who cares.
Sadly we all must care and carry that care into the 2024 ballot box. If we do and we,not they win then we can drop to our knees knowing we won the marathon. And columns like your can take credit for helping at least me find a breath to get to the finish line.
It's Bannon's "firehose of shit." The media can't resist it. For years now, I've been trying to just go back and review stuff we already know, weaving in recent information. It's often illuminating.
Two good books: Mary Beard's "SPQR," an excellent one-volume history of the Kingdom, Republic and Empire, and Mike Duncan's "the Storm Before The Storm: the Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic."
History doesn't repeat but the parallels are chilling. Rome came out of the Punic Wars the strongest state in the West, a republic internally but an empire externally; over the 100 years between the Punic victory and the rise of Caesar, the Roman upper class became outrageously rich through the empire, and increasingly unwilling to accept the Republic's restrictions on their power (sound familiar?).
Just adding to this grim and foreboding survey that there is a *dynamic* with dictators and would-be dictators that takes everything you itemized to the next level ... and the next level ... and the next level...
The dynamic is simple: Oppression breeds resistance -- protest, noncompliance, even violence (think of the assassination of Heydrich) -- which the strongman is then obliged to crush. The more he crushes, the more oppression, the more desperate and determined the resistance. So the harsher the measures against it -- until it triumphs or is quelled. It's a vicious cycle and it has played out over and over: the brave are ruined or disappeared; the less brave fall in line.
At some point you have a place like Russia, where everyone knows it's a dictatorship and everyone also knows resistance is futile, so they just go about their business, a grim and oppressed people. This is the power to which Trump aspires -- and what he intends by Make America Great Again.
Thanks, Jonathan. This is a good point. The difference is that here, we are used to democracy. We are used to having rights. Dobbs is really the first time a basic right was *taken away* from us. Since then, nothing but blue wave at the ballot box.
Russia, by contrast, has been ruled by sadistic strongmen since Ivan the Terrible became the first tsar in the 16th century. Hard to overcome that generational trauma.
Thank you for this. Lordy, have you been keeping track. As all these things have been reported and forgotten (or buried under other horrible news); they have been in the back of my mind, but always pushed back by the latest fiasco. To see them listed and updated is a reminder of what’s to come if he and his cretins are not dispatched to lock up of some sort. This is critical and should remain in our awareness.
Thank you. They depend on what Bannon calls "the firehose of shit." The media jumps to the next horrible thing, and the old horrible thing gets forgotten. Which is easy to do when there are SO MANY horrible things. That will only escalate if he is reinstalled.
My worse nightmare, for the future since I'm old.
Nailed it 🎯.
Mainstream media only talks about the latest shiny object. They should be reporting on & tallying this stuff up every day.
My head has exploded already today - like everyday. And then sometimes I read something like “but we had no wars under thump”
I read that Blacks & Arab Americans are so upset with Biden’s continuing aid to Israel and our UN vote not pushing for a ceasefire that they will not vote for Biden. I get it. I probably wouldn’t either if I was them.
I got an email from the Jacky Rosen campaign asking for money. She used the Jewish phrase Tikkun Olam. How can anyone use that phrase & still condone Israel’s continuing attacks on Gaza AND the West Bank?
Sorry, I can’t contribute any more to her.
I read today that what Israel really wants (besides eliminating all Palestinians from what used to be called Palestine!) is the gas fields discovered off the coast of Gaza.
https://iacenter.org/2023/11/15/behind-israels-end-game-for-gaza-theft-of-offshore-gas-reserves/
I fear that continuing to uphold illegal actions in Israel will cost us democracy in the US.
Most Americans are not aware of what has been going on in Israel these past years. We ignore it to our own detriment. It is turning the rest of the world against us.
I am depressed beyond belief that aiding Israel will be the reason that some will vote third party & we end up with the criminal fascist 2year old thump in the White House.
Depressed beyond belief.
Hamas is a terrorist organization. Israel wants to eliminate Hamas, not the Palestinian people. Hamas hides behind the Palestinian people to shield themselves. Hamas wants to eliminate Israel.
And so far, the IDF has eliminated 18,000 people, the overwhelming majority of whom were not members of Hamas, but the convicted domestic terrorist Ben Gvir is in charge of expelling Palestinians from Greater Israel because that will keep Nitwityahoo - the Trump of Israel, out of the prison where his innate corruption should have put him long ago.
I like Nitwityahoo for Bibi. Well played.
He is hurting Palestinians, he's hurting Israelis, he's hurting American Jews, because the rise in antisemitism is related to the Gaza invasion, and he's hurting Biden, and therefore democracy -- all to stay out of prison.
All the more reason: Criminals must be held to account!
The Israeli government wants us to believe all Palestinians are Hamas. They’ve made it clear they want to be rid of them all.
As long as the current people are in charge -- Hamas and the Israeli leader who funded them and helped them stay in power, Bibi -- there will be no peace. The Israeli people have suffered and will continue to suffer. The Palestinian people have suffered and will continue to suffer.
Israel has a right to, and must, try and eliminate Hamas, a terrorist organization. But the ground war was a bad idea even in the moment. Bibi did exactly what Hamas wanted him to do. It's infuriating.
Much of the animus is Bibi's fault. He managed to squander the goodwill of most of the world in about two weeks. I believe that Biden has been trying to temper Bibi's more violent impulses from the get-go. I believe that's why he went there when he did-- that and to stand with the people of Israel in that moment of tragedy and horror, which was the right thing to do. This belief was confirmed in the NYT today, the story about the rift between them on how the war is being handled. Like invading Iraq -- which Biden brought up in his speech is Israel -- the invasion of Gaza was a bad idea even in the moment. Hamas did what they did to provoke this exact response. They don't care about the Palestinian people at all. They want bloodshed and chaos and world opinion on their side.
And yes, it's beyond depressing that Bibi has turned the horrors of October 7 into this. If Biden loses because of him not wanting to go to jail, that's the most depressing thing of all. And all the more reason why we have to hold our own crooks to account: Trump, Menendez, any party, they must be held to account.
I’m terrified of this happening too...
Thanks to you, and the rest of the fourth estate, for calling out villains, who seek to govern and harm our beautiful America.
I also thank what I call the Fifth Estate -- government officials, and judges, who dare to speak truth to power.
Yay Greg O! Please keep on going.
Billserle.com
Thank you, Bill!
Greg you write with such clarity. IMO the supremes can’t let trump get away with this latest bs of presidential immunity for his crimes. Otherwise their own power will cease. I fear that too many citizens don’t read the news (print) , they get their information from faux news or from social media and that’s unfortunate. War has been declared but many people don’t know it.
Thanks, Christine.
Yes, the war has been going on for years now. We must take this seriously or our democracy will die. It really is that simple.
It’s TUESDAY🎉😳
Your work is not only educational it’s also really really entertaining. I love how you add a one or two word descriptor in front of the names of tRumps co-conspirators as a reminder of the level of shit we’re talking about. I will say I still (and likely never will) understand or forgive Merritt Garland for his incompetence in letting 2 years go by before addressing the lawlessness before finally assigning a special counsel, lots of time was lost - but at least he assigned the bad-ass (see what I did there?) Jack Smith who is intelligent, committed and always thinking how to bury the former Piece of Shit. And what is this silliness about not indicting a sitting President, that is a contradiction and point of confusion when one hears “no one is above the law”. Thanks for listening
Merrick Garland, as soon as he took charge, had the DoJ investigating J6. There was 'low grade obstruction' within DoJ itself not due to Garland.
Jack Smith was appointed three days after Trump announced he was running for office to give the proper political distance. And Smith picked up all the ongoing trump investigations except those about the participants on the ground in J6.
Last, and not least, the J6 investigations and current trials and all the SC investigations and trials constitute the two largest investigations in American history. By all accounts, there was no lingering or reluctance on Garland's part. However, the disinfo psyops controlled the field of info early on while DoJ was properly quiet about its investigations (while still carrying out the whole normal scale of DoJ operations and investigations in the US).
Everyone wanted something that is slow and precise by nature to be fast; some were more easily influenced than others as to the real situation.
This is all true, but that's not the entire job. There is a PR aspect of it. Mueller fucked up that part royally. So has Garland. I get that he thinks it's ridiculous to have to keep reassuring us, but he really needed to be doing that. After all the years of blind faith in Mueller, it's the least he could have done.
Thanks, Richard. I try to sprinkle in the jokes, to keep us all sane.
Garland was a bad choice for AG. Terrible, even. The only defense is that the GOP Senate was not going to confirm anyone too overtly anti-Trump. But still.
A heavy read here for sure, Greg.
I've read some previous comments of yours that Biden will be re-elected in 2024. As you write here, with all the co-conspirators that have been installed around the nation, will it be enough that he is re-elected? If not, what else do you think we should be doing?
Yes, I think it will be enough. Trump is old and in bad shape. He would be, what, 82 in 2028, if he's still alive. There is no dependable demagogue in the GOP to take his place. That's the one good thing about dictators -- once they die, the regime dies with them.
These blatant miscarriages of justice and ever instance you wrote about makes me sick.
Same.
This is why I subscribe.
Thanks, Craig.
This is the best summary of Trump and his cronies unequal treatment under the law I have ever read. Do you write your articles for “opinions” in newspapers like WP, NYT, even newspapers like my Detroit Free Press? I wish thousands more people could see your writings.
Thanks, Helen. Yeah, those papers have not come calling, alas...
Democracy is not a spectator sport. Willful ignorance got us to where we are today, not the DOJ.
You're correct about this. Willful ignorance has played a major role with the cult and religious evangelical leaders and especially the more educated elements surrounding FPOTUS. I do feel some of that willful ignorance was coerced one way or another.
Willful ignorance describes most of America and the rest of the world too. Most of us (including myself) thought that democracy was a self sustaining form of government, and we let "the people who knew what they were doing" handle things. The slow creep toward authoritarianism over the last 40+ years has shown us that this is not so. Some of us woke up awhile ago, but most are still sleepwalking.
Do we give up in despair? Nope. We just keep fighting.
We never give up. No fucking way.
And if we point out that the willful ignorant are willful ignorant, we are Chicken Little, or conspiracy theorists, etc. It's maddening.
I don’t believe in liberty and justice for all anymore. How can anyone, in the face of this onslaught of corruption you’ve so thoroughly covered? I don’t think for a minute that Trump created this monster! He’s not that smart! He’s just cunning enough and egotistical enough to make himself the public face of a monster that’s been flexing its muscles in the swamp for decades. All the corrupt “powers” that be who want a strongman government are willing to let the orange useful idiot get the publicity and take the credit, while they enjoy their enabled lawlessness. Per an Eagles song, I could be wrong but I’m not!
I agree, Earl. Trump is just the bloated face of the ugly monster that has been growing for many years. This will all exist with or without him.
I agree, also. This is where I've always suspected our foreign enemies, especially ones that have been long term and have the ability to parse and dissect every bit of the Constitution and the history of the US since WWI. The key question is who is conveying the information and direction; it has to be people very close to FPOTUS: those are the really dangerous traitors.
It's such a complicated thing. There are reasons why Paxton hasn't been tried yet, and reasons Bannon remains at large (although I'm not sure I understand them), and reasons Jones has yet to pay up. It's not all the same person, people, or force. But taken together, it sends the message that the rule of law is deteriorating.
Tell me your secrets I'll tell you mine
This ain't no time to be cool
And tell all your girlfriends
You been around the world friends
That talk is for losers and fools
45 and his entourage have many weapons at their disposal. One stands out. Distraction to the point of exhaustion. I found myself hyperventilating when reading your excellent column. We have all fallen into Reagan's infamous debate line, " OH, now there you go again." Not that what you write, the many reminders of 45, et al crimes are the culprit, rather they keep adding into the sin bin daily enormous amounts of new material which must be reported on.
The catalog of 45isms grows daily. I feel like the marathon runner approaching the last mile, exhausted to the point of dropping. Every new addition to the sin bin creates more news. Extolling Biden's accomplishments gets overshadowed by 45's next piece of bullshit. He and his cronies as you correctly demonstrate have gotten away with so much that the populace is at the point of exhausted who cares.
Sadly we all must care and carry that care into the 2024 ballot box. If we do and we,not they win then we can drop to our knees knowing we won the marathon. And columns like your can take credit for helping at least me find a breath to get to the finish line.
Thank you.
It's Bannon's "firehose of shit." The media can't resist it. For years now, I've been trying to just go back and review stuff we already know, weaving in recent information. It's often illuminating.
Well, I'm glad somebody else's blood pressure is through the roof from reading the news, like mine is.
Time to re-read Plutarch on the fall of the Roman Republic.
You're right, I have to read more about that...
Two good books: Mary Beard's "SPQR," an excellent one-volume history of the Kingdom, Republic and Empire, and Mike Duncan's "the Storm Before The Storm: the Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic."
History doesn't repeat but the parallels are chilling. Rome came out of the Punic Wars the strongest state in the West, a republic internally but an empire externally; over the 100 years between the Punic victory and the rise of Caesar, the Roman upper class became outrageously rich through the empire, and increasingly unwilling to accept the Republic's restrictions on their power (sound familiar?).
Just adding to this grim and foreboding survey that there is a *dynamic* with dictators and would-be dictators that takes everything you itemized to the next level ... and the next level ... and the next level...
The dynamic is simple: Oppression breeds resistance -- protest, noncompliance, even violence (think of the assassination of Heydrich) -- which the strongman is then obliged to crush. The more he crushes, the more oppression, the more desperate and determined the resistance. So the harsher the measures against it -- until it triumphs or is quelled. It's a vicious cycle and it has played out over and over: the brave are ruined or disappeared; the less brave fall in line.
At some point you have a place like Russia, where everyone knows it's a dictatorship and everyone also knows resistance is futile, so they just go about their business, a grim and oppressed people. This is the power to which Trump aspires -- and what he intends by Make America Great Again.
Thanks, Jonathan. This is a good point. The difference is that here, we are used to democracy. We are used to having rights. Dobbs is really the first time a basic right was *taken away* from us. Since then, nothing but blue wave at the ballot box.
Russia, by contrast, has been ruled by sadistic strongmen since Ivan the Terrible became the first tsar in the 16th century. Hard to overcome that generational trauma.