Justice denied
I keep thinking of the old expression that justice delayed is justice denied; despite the fact the feds have rounded up and are convicting hundreds of the deluded pawns of the mad would-be-dictator of our country, the undeniable fomenters of this attempted coup d’etat, frustratingly, still walk free as we approach the 1st anniversary of that event!
The former president, more than anyone else I’ve ever heard of, illustrates just how broken is our country’s criminal justice system. Those lacking in financial resources (disproportionately people of color), are often railroaded into pleading guilty, sometimes for crimes that they didn’t even commit, rather than waiting for months in custody because they can’t raise their bail money. At the opposite end of the spectrum; Donald Trump is a lifelong unindicted career criminal; from stiffing just about everyone who has ever worked for him, to ripping off his own relatives, to thieving openly and greedily from the public purse through massive tax fraud. Those are just the first things that come to mind.
The great journalist and author David Cay Johnston, who has been observing ‘The Donald’ longer than just about anyone, recounts an anecdote from Donald’s youth, where the next door family had a baby that they would occasionally put out on the back porch to enjoy the sunlight. Young Donald, just for fun, would take small pebbles and throw them at the baby for entertainment; a game he would call, ‘make the baby cry’. When the outraged neighbors caught him the act, of course he denied it, and of course his uber rich family protected him. This has been his MO for his whole life! Hire enough lawyers to delay legal proceedings for so long that you wear down and bankrupt your opponent. This seems to be the strategy that he is currently employing with the congressional inquiry into the events of last January 6.
I was so delighted today to hear that a federal Court of Appeals had turned down his BS appeal to shield his presidential records from scrutiny. Why it took so many months to come to this open and shut common sense decision eludes me; I mean why bother having presidential records of meetings, calls, conversations etc. if the government itself is prohibited from looking at them?! Absurd!
Unfortunately my joy at hearing this was brief indeed; in practically the next sentence the radio announcer said that, “the last word on this might have to come from the Supreme Court”. Ahhhrrrgh! To hand over the fate of our democracy to that shameless, degraded institution, after Trump and his many enablers had been able to install three (!) utterly disgusting human beings to it, makes me want to vomit!
Think about it; adding to the porn addict sexual harasser who perjured himself up and down in his appointment hearings (helped along mightily, for some reason, by the youthful Joseph Biden), however much he likes to wrap himself in the Bible and the cross, his votes have been most un-christlike. A less thoughtful, automatic vote to the right of the late ultra rightist Antonin Scalia, he always sides with the powerful and the rich over the rest of us. Neil Gorsuch, like so many of his fellows there on the court, is a Catholic, who has done little or nothing to distinguish himself. As Trump promised his fanatical antiabortion base, he would appoint only ‘justices’ preapproved by the Kochfunded
Federalist Society who will vote to overturn Roe.
Next, is there a more contemptible human being than Brett Kavanaugh? I mean, instead of admitting to his college frat house attempted gang rape, he did a repeat of Thomas’s perjure-fest, and the gutless congress, of course, took the man’s word over the woman’s (what else is new?). How disgusting was that, when in an attempt to clarify the vocabulary in emails etc. from the time, they blithely accepted his explanation that ‘boofing’ referred to flatulence. While I do not consider myself too provincial, the term was new to me, but I soon learned from younger folks what its common usage is; the consumption of alcohol (usually beer) rectally. I guess his moniker, among his frat buddies as, “the boofing king”. I guess he really likes beer!
But really, THIS is the guy who is going to occupy a lifelong position of telling us all what is right and good what we may and may not do?! Give me a break!
And the hits just keep coming! Amy Cony Barrett, a member of the bizarre Catholic cult which inspired the dystopian novel and movie, ‘A Handmaid’s Tale’, distinguished herself the other day during arguments about Roe by stating that, since there are safe harbor laws where a mother can give up her baby at birth without penalty, it should be no undue burden to, say, require an abused 15-yearold to bring her violent rapist father’s baby to term and then give it away.
You can’t make this stuff up. The thought of turning the very idea of democracy and representing the will of the people over to the gaggle of mental cases on the Supreme Court chills me to the bone.