Trump, the next AG, and reality

Pam Bondi is out as Attorney General.

Maybe the only people surprised by this are gamblers who wagered that Bondi would be canned before Kristi Noem. It could have gone either way. (Those betting on Pete Hegseth are still frustrated, though his day will come.)

I have no sympathy for Bondi. She, like every toadie in Trump's orbit, sought to work for him. Anyone with an ounce of sense and a scintilla of integrity steers clear of Trump because to all appearances he is a terrible boss: petulant, loyal only to himself, erratic, cruel, corrupt, and incapable of accepting reality. The only reason to accept a political appointment from him is because the money and connections you could make while the grift lasts would make the grief worthwhile. And the grief will come. It always comes, because his delusional demands eventually collide with reality. When that happens, he will order you to reconcile the two. You will fail. He will can you. Lather, rinse, repeat.

I don't know who the next A.G. will be. I only know that there are plenty of grifters-in-waiting lusting after the chance to enrich themselves at the public's expense (and at the cost of their own reputations). Such grifters are the only ones willing to pretend they can bend reality to suit the cruddiest of bosses.

It's the stupidity, stupid

Political strategist James Carville famously coined "It's the economy, stupid" as the slogan for Bill Clinton's presidential campaign. For the current administration, it seems that slogan has nutated into "It's the stupidity, stupid".

Look, I don't mean to make Trump supporters mad, or even to make them feel sad. It's just that it's not possible to assess Trump's presidency, in either term, without picking up on instances of stupid behavior and stupid decision-making. And before you protest that every president does stupid things (which is true), it's the depth of the stupidity in Trump's case that is so troubling.

The latest and most egregiously stupid act on Trump's part was his commencement of war on Iran. How do I know it was stupid? Because to this day, nearly two weeks after the ordnance started flying, the administration still hasn't settled on one solid explanation for why we attacked. If you're a Trump supporter, tally up what you've heard.

Iran was a week away from a nuclear weapon! (I thought last year's Trump-ordered missile strikes eliminated their program, per Trump's own boasting.)

Iran was planning to attack us! (Haven't gotten any proof of that, and neither have the members of Congress who've been given classified briefings by administration officials.)

The ayatollah and his regime are terrible people who massacred thousands of their own people! (True enough, but oppressive leaders who massacre lots of their own people are, lamentably, not rare. Why now, and why Iran?)

Israel forced our hand! (Really? Really? You're saying that Benjamin Netanyahu can play the current administration like a cheap fiddle? You want us to see you as patsies?)

Given all the above lame (indeed, quadriplegic) excuses for sending U.S. troops into harm's way, I really shouldn't be surprised that this same president and administration were left dumbstruck that Iran responded with, among other things, a blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. Per an Atlantic piece by Phillips Payson O’Brien:

Astonishingly, President Trump and his aides were caught unprepared when Iran, under air assault from the United States and Israel, retaliated by targeting shipping in the Persian Gulf region and specifically through the Strait of Hormuz. Military planners have pointed out for decades that the waterway—through which one-fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas passes—is highly vulnerable to Iranian assault. But the Trump administration acknowledged in classified briefings, CNN reported last night, that it did not make provisions for a closure because officials assumed that such a move would hurt Iran more than the United States.

In its failure to anticipate Iran’s reaction, the administration ignored a dynamic that former Defense Secretary James Mattis, a first-term Trump appointee, was fond of pointing out: Once hostilities begin, “the enemy gets a vote.” U.S. leaders have drastically underestimated the Iranian regime’s ability to survive, adjust, and strike back. Just two weeks into a war that began at a time of the president’s choosing, the U.S. appears uncertain about what to do next.

This administration's M.O. has been on display since day 1. It is transparently impatient with what it considers dithering, which includes the kind of careful, deliberative approach that most administrations take when contemplating big decisions and big actions, especially those requiring military action. Yet if you give a damn about the lives of those you command, you must do the hard work of planning.

Maybe crying, "Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!" is exhilarating for Hegseth and Trump. But whatever their feelings or their motives, they have no goddamned business being anywhere near the chain of command because they have no fucking sense of responsibility for how they wield their power. These developmentally arrested men cosplaying at war have contempt for prudence or caution, as especially stupid men so often do.

Not planning for an eminently possible and totally foreseeable bad outcome is unbelievably stupid. Yet that's exactly what this arrogant administration did, led by its unbelievably arrogant president. What's worse is that this administration will neither recognize nor feel shame for its stupidity, because the president lacks empathy and humility and will not permit his toadies/accomplices to express either: he considers them weaknesses.

The depth of this administration's grotesque stupidity in attacking Iran is beyond obvious. If you deny that, how long can you keep your better judgment at bay? How long can you contort yourself into a pretzel to justify what cannot be justified, to excuse what cannot be excused?

The game hasn't changed

Gregory Bovino, the bullying CBP turd who led the grotesque assault on Minneapolis, has been sent packing. He'll now spend his remaining days trying to intimidate people at California's border with Mexico. (Sorry to the folks in southern CA.) Mango Mussolini's "border czar", Tom Homan, is taking Bovino's place.

Some have cheered this change, and on one level I can see why: Bovino has behaved like a villain in a C-grade movie, designed to piss off the audience enough that the otherwise uninteresting hero looks good by comparison.

The trouble — besides the fact that this isn't a movie — is that this change is purely cosmetic. The starting quarterback has been sent to the showers and the cheerleaders, like Kristi Noem, have been muzzled (for now), but the coach, Stephen Miller, and the owner, our domestic Dear Leader, haven't changed the game plan. They still want to rule with impunity and without being challenged, even rhetorically.

And Bovino might have been in charge of the occupying force, but he didn't personally and singlehandedly brutalize or kill people in Minneapolis, or anywhere else. No, he had thousands of federal goons to do the dirty work alongside him.

Those goons remain in Minneapolis. Other goons are in Maine, and Memphis, and in dozens or hundreds of other locations. Most of them are as poorly trained and badly supervised as those in Minneapolis.

Exactly one of the main players in this brutal campaign has departed. The rest stand ready to resume it as soon as the heat dies down. And by "heat", I mean the public uneasiness of Congressional Repubicans, who detest having to answer questions about blood shed by Trump's brownshirts.

So we need to keep the heat on those Republicans, by continuing to publicize the sickening, indefensible abuses by this lawless administration's shock troops. We need to awaken everyone who's sleeping through current events. We need to arouse the dormant consciences of Mango Mussolini's supporters, or at least those whose hearts haven't shriveled.

It's not over. It has barely begun.

The Reiners and Trump

Rob and Michele Reiner's murders are a tragedy, and worse, apparently a family tragedy. I feel awful for the couple's loved ones and send my sympathies as they grieve.

I won't rehash our domestic Dear Leader's remarks about Rob Reiner's murder because if you give a damn you've already heard about them or seen them for yourself. (If you don't give a damn, you can stop reading.)

Trump's remarks are totally in keeping with my estimation of his character. As such, they didn't surprise me, or not much, anyway. In the interest of doing my bit to reclaim our country's soul, however, I have to speak up about them.

Death, particularly violent death, shouldn't be fodder for politics.

Need I remind Trump supporters of how angry they were when Charlie Kirk was murdered? People who voiced their dislike of Kirk behaved insensitively in the moment; those who celebrated his death were grossly out of line. Trump supporters' outrage at such people might have stemmed in part from a sense that their side had lost an effective voice, but it also came out of a genuine sense of grief.

If you wanted people who disliked Kirk just to shut up in the immediate aftermath of his killing, remember that others feel the same way about the Reiners. And if you have the grace not to air whatever unsympathetic thoughts you have about them right now, thank you. But could you go one step further, and tell Trump that you would like him to do the same?

To tell Trump that he was out of line isn't a betrayal of him: it's an affirmation of your own soul.

To the scolding "Justices"

A lower-court judge apologized to the (self-described) conservative "Justices" Gorsuch and Kavanaugh after they "suggested that Judge Young subverted the court’s will by failing to apply an earlier emergency order".

Judge Young said on Tuesday that he had not realized he was expected to rely on a slim three-page order issued with minimal legal reasoning in April to his case dealing with a different agency.

If you'd been in Judge William G. Young's robes, you might have "erred" in the same way he did. Why? Because those rebuking "Justices" and their colleagues in the majority didn't explain themselves.

Since the beginning of President Trump’s second term, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has sided with [the] White House in nearly every case it has considered.

But it has done so relatively opaquely through more than a dozen emergency orders — unsigned opinions issued relatively quickly and without oral argument.

Unsigned orders without explanations are no damned help to lower courts when it comes time to puzzle through the Supremes' supposed intentions. Does what the Court's majority hastily "decided" about apples apply to oranges? How the hell should anybody outside the chambers know?

Neil, Brett — we need to speak plainly: may I call you by your first names? — fuck your high dudgeon.

You and your radical brethren (and your occasional sister-in-arms, Amy Coney Barrett) may be in a position to demand the obedience of your fellow robe-wearers, but you have forfeited any right to the respect of the millions of Americans who see through your pretense.

You posture as solons of the Constitution, but you have twisted its plain meaning, and that of many laws, to let an autocrat in the making steamroll over the legal safeguards the people established to prevent autocracy. You are nothing more, nor less, than dictator-enablers. You are fundamentally anti-democratic in your mindset, and as such, you have betrayed your oath to the Constitution you pretend to uphold.

What derailed you and your likeminded colleagues from what I assume was an initial commitment to justice, I don't know. What I do know is, you are on a course that millions of your fellow Americans will neither forgive nor forget.

If you have a shred of decency left, you will step out of your (echo) chambers and look at how the rest of the country sees you and your works.

If you have a heart, you will feel shame. That's okay; in fact, that's absolutely necessary. Only if you truly recognize the magnitude of your mistakes (and their consequences for others) will you find the resolve to fight until you've corrected them.

Is this what makes us great?

Stephen Marche in The Atlantic has disquieting thoughts about "Canada's Terrible New Freedom" [paywalled, sorry].

The United States is declining into authoritarianism and threatening Canada’s sovereignty. How can Canada ensure that its political, military, and economic institutions survive?

The threat is not abstract, and is already manifesting itself in more than words.

... Canada is increasing its defense spending and re-arming with Europe, not America. Trump didn’t give us much choice. In March, he announced the next generation of American fighter jets, which Canada has long purchased, by noting that he would sell an inferior version to other countries: “We like to tone them down about 10 percent, which probably makes sense because someday maybe they’re not our allies, right?” The idea that the American military would turn against Canada once seemed absurd. But the absurd has become almost predictable at this point. If the U.S. Marines are coming for American citizens, surely they could come for Canada too.

I always took a measure of pride in knowing that, whatever reservations our international friends might have about our pop culture, our customs, or our arrogance, they recognized that our hearts ultimately were in the right place.

I can no longer take such pride. The heart of the United States now is brutal, selfish, suspicious, and spiteful — which is to say, it's the spitting image of our domestic Dear Leader's.

If you're a citizen of the U.S., does our national change of heart fill you with pride? Do you think that change of heart has made our country great?

Then you have taken Trump's warped values into your own heart. I'm sorry for that because ultimately, they will leave you as embittered, as spiteful, as spiritually empty, and as unloved as he is. I wouldn't wish that on anyone. I wouldn't even wish it on Trump, but it's too late for him. I hope it's not too late for you.

Current U.S. foreign policy reflects and embodies our domestic Dear Leader's pathologies. (So does the country's domestic policy, for that matter.) I'm deeply ashamed of that. None of the United States' traditional allies deserves the chaos and malice aforethought emanating from Washington, D.C. these days. Certainly Canada, of all places, has merited and continues to merit our steadfast friendship.

I hope I live long enough to see that friendship, and many others, reestablished. Until then, great is one thing we won't be.

SCOTUS betrays us again

The right-wing so-called "Justices" of the U.S. Supreme Court has let Elon Musk's DOGE marauders access the highly sensitive personal information held by the Social Security Administration.

The order, which lifts a preliminary injunction wisely granted by a district court (an injunction upheld by a divided Fourth Circuit), was unsigned but noted that Justices Kagan, Jackson, and Sotomayor did not join the majority. Indeed, the bulk of the text of the order is devoted to their objections; the actual reasons for the majority's decision are entirely absent.

This is not a formal decision of the Court: no trial has even occurred. However, you'd think that a Court majority that gave a shit about its own legitimacy in the public's eyes would have explained why it was throwing caution to the wind and giving a bunch of arrogant, reckless, and totally unsupervised Elon Musk zealots unlimited access to our data.

Consider the Court's own summary of what goes into deciding whether to stay a preliminary injunciton. (So we're all on the same page, the "stay applicant" here is the Trump Administration.)

When considering whether to grant a stay, this Court looks to four factors: “(1) whether the stay applicant has made a strong showing that he is likely to succeed on the merits; (2) whether the applicant will be irreparably injured absent a stay; (3) whether issuance of the stay will substantially injure the other parties interested in the proceeding; and (4) where the public interest lies.” [citations omitted]

What makes the right-wing majority think the administration will succeed on the merits, in advance of a trial and in the absence of any evidence?

What irreparable injury will be inflicted if the DOGE pillagers have to wait a while? It's not like Social Security ion't working (setting aside, that is, the Trump Administration's own near-criminal mismanagement of it). Nor is the mission of DOGE, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, so urgent that it can't wait for a judge to review whether or not the administration's wrecking-ball approach to seeking "efficiency" actually passes legal and Constitutional muster.

Considering that "the other parties interested in the proceedings" include every damned citizen of the United States, not to mention lots of legal residents, staying the preliminary injunction — thus, again, permitting the lawless DOGE kids to access some of our most sensitive personal information — sure as hell will "substantially injure" the "other parties". The onus is on the SCOTUS right-wingers to say otherwise.

"Where the public interest lies" is in protecting our sensitive personal information from parties who have no damned business accessing it because they are in no legal jeopardy if they misuse their access. Again, the onus is on the SCOTUS right-wingers to explain why that's not the case.

But of course, those arrogant, dictator-friendly assholes in the right-wing majority on SCOTUS say nothing — literally not one word — to justify their aiding and abetting of Trump's autocratic power grab.

Why? Because they know no justification is possible — not if you believe in democracy and the rule of law, that is.

Which those arrogant, dictator-friendly assholes in the right-wing majority on SCOTUS emphatically do not.

To the regime's troops

Donald Trump, our domestic Dear Leader, is gutting the federal government without rhyme or reason. The one thing he can be counted on not to gut, though, are the security forces.

In the U.S. we're not accustomed to thinking in terms of "security forces". That term is reserved for other nations, covering the gamut of police, intelligence, and military personnel. In the U.S., when someone is arrested or federal property must be protected, we speak of the specific responsible agency: the FBI, the Park Service, ICE, etc.

However, those agencies and all the others operated by the federal government, like the CIA (which legally cannot operate domestically), the NSA, and the forces under the jurisdiction of the Department of Defense, can be thought of as the "security forces" of the U.S. government — and right now, they all answer to our domestic Dear Leader. He can behave like the tinpot dictators he so adores because when literal push comes to literal shove, he can call on hundreds of thousands of members of the security forces to do the dirty work.

So I address myself to you members of those security forces, because you are in a difficult moral position.

I'm sure you tell yourselves that your job is to follow orders from your superiors. So long as you do that, you say to yourselves, you aren't morally or even legally responsible for your actions.

That only gets you so far, though.

Admittedly, you almost certainly don't have enough information to judge whether the person you're hustling into your SUV off a quiet street is actually a criminal, or even a threat. You assume your bosses — the whole chain of command, in fact — are acting in good faith.

However, you do have enough agency — that is, enough free will and moral responsibility — to judge how valid that assumption of your superiors' good faith is.

You don't live under a rock. Can you defend the deportation of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, which even this administration admitted was an "administrative error"? Can you believe Trump's claim that his administration has no power to bring him back to the U.S., when this administration is paying El Salvador to hold prisoners there? Isn't it obvious that the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, would have Abrego Garcia back on a plane to the U.S. in a heartbeat if Trump asked?

Given that Trump lies so brazenly about his ability to get Abrego Garcia back to the U.S., how much confidence can you have that he acts in good faith about, well, anything? How confident can you be that Abrego Garcia is an isolated "error", that there aren't more innocent victims?

Remember, too, that Abrego Garcia has been ordered returned to the U.S. by the U.S. Supreme Court so he can be given due process, which neither he nor anyone else deported to that El Salvadoran prison has gotten. In leaving Abrego Garcia to rot in El Salvador, Trump is defying the Supreme Court.

If he doesn't consider himself bound by the orders of the Supreme Court, then what constrains him? "The law" doesn't constrain a ruler if he claims the right to say what the law is, which is what Trump has done.

How is he different from a dictator?

Your orders ultimately derive from Trump's wishes. How confident can you be that what you're doing is consistent with the actual law, much less with morality and true justice, when the man at the top no longer respects any of those things?

Trump has claimed power for himself that no man has ever claimed in this country's history, because claiming it would be unconstitutional.

You swore an oath to the Constitution, not to any one man. Whatever problems you hoped to alleviate by becoming a sworn peace officer or member of the military, can you in good conscience be part of a regime that no longer respects or abides by the Constitution?

A regime that tolerates no dissent and uses you to crush it?

A regime whose security forces, including you, abduct people off the street without identifying themselves?

A regime that uses you to deport legal residents without trial? (Those people wouldn't comply if they weren't being held at the point of your gun.)

Only you can decide whether this is a regime you can support.

Only you can decide whether you can do more good by resigning now, or by resisting from within for as long as the regime allows.

Only you can decide whether you will be able to look your children and grandchildren in the eye, and tell them that you fulfilled your Constitutional oath by following the orders of a man who betrayed his own, and know whether you're telling them the truth.

You cannot avoid making this decision every day you help to keep the regime in power.

If enough of you honor your oaths and your consciences, you can render a lawless, faithless president impotent to subvert the consitutional order further.

You are not solely responsible for restoring that constitutional order: we all have a part to play. But you will be singularly responsible if you help this lawless, faithless president to become a tyrant, ending our republic.

Krugman puts the election in perspective

Every so often, somebody echoes my own bewilderment about some nuttiness that has overtaken the populace.

This time it's New York Times columnist Paul Krugman in a piece headlined, "Why I Am Now Deeply Worried for America".

... I am, for the first time, profoundly concerned about the nation’s future. It now seems entirely possible that within the next year, American democracy could be irretrievably altered.

And the final blow won’t be the rise of political extremism — that rise certainly created the preconditions for disaster, but it has been part of the landscape for some time now. No, what may turn this menace into catastrophe is the way the hand-wringing over Biden’s age has overshadowed the real stakes in the 2024 election.

Like Krugman and virtually everyone else, I'd prefer that we were led by someone younger. I don't see immediately concerning dementia in Biden's gaffes but there's no denying that when an obviously elderly person makes such mistakes, it creates a measure of concern in onlookers. We don't need such concerns about our president (or senators, or House representatives).

But — and again, like Krugman — I look at the alternative, and then I stop fretting about Biden's age.

Maybe some people are impressed by the fact that Trump talks loud and mean. But what about what he’s actually saying in his speeches? They’re frequently rambling word salads, full of bizarre claims like his assertion on Friday that if he loses in November, “they’re going to change the name of Pennsylvania.”

Not to mention confusing Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi and mistaking E. Jean Carroll for one of his ex-wives.

As I also wrote last week, Trump’s speeches make me remember my father’s awful last year, when he suffered from sundowning — bouts of incoherence and belligerence after dark. And we’re supposed to be worried about Biden’s mental state?

If your gut prefers a forceful fathead to a soft-spoken but cogent man, now is the time to put your gut in its place and see things clearly. A loud, energetic coot who demontrated his love of autocracy, contempt for the law (not to mention morality), mile-wide mean streak, and boundless lust for money during his first term of office cannot be allowed a second term, no matter how uneasy you might be about his opponent's health.

Most of us wish we could vote for someone other than these two elderly men. Well, absent some stunning turn of events, that won't be an option in November.

Remember how you woke up every day during Trump's term dreading that he'd done something terrifyingly imbecilic or cruel or corrupt, and more often than not your fear was justified.

Under no circumstances can you vote for a demonstrably feckless, dishonest, self-deluded, corrupt man-toddler. Nor can you just sit on your hands, or throw them up in exasperation, and refuse to vote. No.

You must get over your unease with Biden and vote for him in November, because the alternative is simply unacceptable under any circumstances.

Oh Elon, just stop talking

The headline of the New York Times piece is "Elon Musk, on Rehabilitation Tour, Calls Himself ‘Aspirationally Jewish’".

"Aspirationally Jewish"? Really?

Elon Musk made his remarks after a tour of Auschwitz, the infamous Nazi death camp in southern Poland. Now, to be clear, I hope Musk was moved by what he saw. I hope the visit truly changed his heart by making him comprehend, at least a little, just how fucking not funny or daring his dalliances with and encouragement of white supremacists have been. In a word, I hope he has matured.

But if this passage is any indication, he faces an uphill battle to convince us he has learned anything.

Speaking later at a conference on antisemitism organized by the [European Jewish Association] in the nearby Polish city of Krakow, Mr. Musk said he had been “somewhat naïve” about the dangers posed by anti-Jewish sentiment because “in the circles I move in, I see no antisemitism.”

“Two-thirds of my friends are Jewish,” he said. “I’m Jewish by association. I’m aspirationally Jewish.”

In the circles I move in, I see no drug abuse. Does that mean drug abuse doesn't exist? Or might it mean I don't know what drug abuse looks like, perhaps because it's so widespread that I think it's normal?

If two-thirds of my friends are Christian, am I Christian by association? If I'm aspirationally Christian, does that somehow make me Christian?

(That would be a pretty sweet deal, getting the perks without going to church or believing Jesus died for my sins. Somehow I doubt it works that way.)

If Musk's profoundly insulting remarks belong anywhere, it would be in the mouth of a cringey, profoundly tone-deaf character in a modern sitcom. (And for that sitcom to get away with it, the show would have to be exquisitely well-written.)

Either Musk is one of those cringey, exquisitely tone-deaf people, or he's punking us in the mistaken belief he's being funny. (Come to think of it, both could be true.)

Either way, Elon, just stop talking.

Israel has the leader it chose

The New York Times' Thomas Friedman is worried for Israel. (The opinion piece is probably paywalled, like most NYT content.)

After traveling around Israel and the West Bank, I now understand why so much has changed. It is crystal clear to me that Israel is in real danger — more danger than at any other time since its War of Independence in 1948.

Friedman sees three major threats: fanatical Islamists who are better-armed and better-organized than they ever have been, surrounding Israel on all sides; the need to maintain international support from as many other nations as possible even as Israel pursues the kind of house-to-house combat that inevitably kills many innocent civilians and therefore arouses international condemnation; and finally, "the worst leader in [Israel's] history — maybe in all of Jewish history", who is temperamentally incapable of taking any steps toward a two-state solution, the only way for Israel to survive (or so I gather is Friedman's opinion).

Here's Friedman's recommendation for the first step Israelis should take toward finding a way out of this disaster.

The sooner Israel replaces Netanyahu and his far-right allies with a true center-left-center-right national unity government, the better chance it has to hold together during what is going to be a hellish war and aftermath.

Um, okay, yes, in the abstract, that's a good idea. But haven't you missed something, Tom?

Yes, those far-right fanatics who are slavering for a fully Orthodox Jewish state, shorn of the secularism that has been part of Israel's body politic since the beginning, are indeed unfit to govern. They proved it by leading Israel into this crisis. Bibi himself is an awful leader for Israel right now: by thoroughly dividing and distracting Israelis, convincing many that they had more to fear from his power grab than from any external enemy, he likely kept the military from noticing the signs of the impending attack.

However, Bibi and his allies didn't gerrymander their way into power, as Republicans have in the U.S. The extremists who surround Bibi reflect a large and growing fraction of the Israeli population.

How, Tom, is Israel supposed to create your magical center-left-center-right unity government when a huge chunk of the population is hard-right?

Bibi is in some ways uniquely bad as a leader but getting rid of him wouldn't change the bitter divisions in the population that put him in power.

R.I.P John Klezdy

You probably never heard of John Klezdy, even if you live in Illinois. You probably never heard the band for which he was lead singer, the Effigies.

These things make me sad because the Effigies are, in my not-so-modest opinion, one of the greatest unsung bands of my lifetime.

What really saddens me, though, is that John Kezdy died Saturday at the age of 64.

His death doesn't just sadden me, though: it angers me. I'm not sure why. He died a few days after he crashed into a van while cycling and I think I'm pissed because accidents are mostly preventable. I'm probably also pissed that we live in a world where a kick-ass songwriter and singer can perish without his music having reached the millions of people who need to hear his music, even if they never knew they needed it.

But I think I'm mostly pissed because John Klezdy is dead while so many overrated, overblown, and overexposed mediocrities breathe on, churning out sonic manure, sometimes to great acclaim.

John Klezdy died too fucking early. Fuck this world.

A small community isn't always a welcoming one

Jake Meador, a practicing Christian, ponders why a lot of once-practicing U.S. Christians stopped attending services. (His piece is in The Atlantic and might be behind a paywall.)

According to Meador a new book, The Great Dechurching, offers insights into the exodus. Though "religious abuse and more general moral corruption in churches" certainly is a factor, the majority of the lapsed faithful cited the pace and intensity of life in these United States. Meador characterizes the problem thus:

Contemporary America simply isn’t set up to promote mutuality, care, or common life. Rather, it is designed to maximize individual accomplishment as defined by professional and financial success. Such a system leaves precious little time or energy for forms of community that don’t contribute to one’s own professional life or, as one ages, the professional prospects of one’s children. Workism reigns in America, and because of it, community in America, religious community included, is a math problem that doesn’t add up.

(A couple of links omitted.)

Meador argues that the solution is for churches to become models of a better way of living.

What is more needed in our time than a community marked by sincere love, sharing what they have from each according to their ability and to each according to their need, eating together regularly, generously serving neighbors, and living lives of quiet virtue and prayer? A healthy church can be a safety net in the harsh American economy by offering its members material assistance in times of need: meals after a baby is born, money for rent after a layoff. Perhaps more important, it reminds people that their identity is not in their job or how much money they make; they are children of God, loved and protected and infinitely valuable.

If you're Christian, this is an appealing vision.

What about the non-Christians?

A large enough town might have enough believers of different religions and denominations to support multiple places of worship, each and all of which I suppose ought to provide an active and embracing sense of community, in Meador's vision.

What about the small towns, though? What about the places where one Christian denomination (for it will generally be a Christian denomination) dominates?

If you're a Christian teen who is LGBTQ+, will that denomination's church welcome you?

If you're a Muslim resident of that town, how can you share in a sense of community that originates in a religion that's not yours?

Oh, and what about the non-religionists? If you're an atheist or nonbeliever, can you share in a sense of community that arises from any religion?

The problem with Meador's vision, then, is that it overlooks one of the biggest problems with a small community, whether it be a church or town: it can be absolute hell for anyone who isn't perceived to fit in.

One could argue that Christian churches are specifically problematic because the Bible has a myriad of injunctions that literal-minded adherents use to make life miserable for others. However, the blind spot in Meador's vision isn't limited to churches. The furor over Jason Aldean's "Try That in a Small Town" highlights the blind spot his fans and politically likeminded people have, one that isn't about Christianity per se. Rather, it's about what it means to belong — and who gets to decide who belongs.

Aldean and his supporters don't see anything objectionable in his lyrics, and why would they? They're the ones who fit into the towns in which they live. They feel part of a close-knit near-family.

For those who are out of step or make others uncomfortable, though, it's a very different and unhappy story. In a small community someone who's different, even if harmless, may have no refuge from unremitting community disapproval (or worse). They're made to feel that they don't belong and that it's their fault.

That is what Aldean and others don't see (or won't admit). That's the dark side Aldean's lyrics bring to mind for all the nonconformists who find themselves on the outs in those supposedly idyllic communities. (The nastiness is visited on a lot of non-Whites, too, who often find themselves being seen as a threat.)

Meador's vision doesn't comfort this nonconformist, who wants no part of religion. I think centering community in churches will simply exacerbate the problems faced by nonconformists all over, because the Abrahamic religions can't help defining themselves in part by whom they exclude.

You lied, Bibi

I slammed Netanyahu in 2015 for his shameless pandering to Republicans and reactionaries. He has done nothing to endear himself to me since. To the contrary, he has only reinforced my opinion that as long as he leads Israel, the U.S. must not give Israel its unconditional support.

Not only is Bibi giving every appearance of a guilty man trying to derail the criminal case against him (in his case, by arrogating to himself and his political allies the power to smother the case, or to wipe any conviction off the record), but — because he needs help in his corrupt effort — he's allowing the most dangerously authoritarian, reactionary, and puritanical politicians in Israel to transform the country from a democracy to a theocracy with pseudodemocratic trappings — rather like Iran, one of Israel's chief enemies. (The irony seems to be lost on those ardent right-wingers — or perhaps they relish it.)

According to the New York Times, Bibi has been on a PR offensive in the U.S., trying to defend his coalition's recent passing of a highly controversial new law "that stops the [Israeli Supreme] court from overruling government decisions that it finds lacking in 'reasonableness.' "

The government argues that the doctrine gives unelected judges too much leeway to overrule elected lawmakers. Critics call it an important tool for preventing corruption and abuse of executive power.

Mr. Netanyahu’s media blitz with the American broadcasters — he also spoke with ABC — came amid mounting international concern over Israel’s domestic turmoil. The hard-line coalition’s judicial overhaul has split the country, prompted hundreds of thousands to protest for weeks on end, and cast a painful light on Israel’s widening divisions.

I won't get into the new law, which is only the first (and by all accounts, the least controversial) of three laws which, if all enacted, would hand full power to the prime minister and his or her ruling coalition.

What I want to note is Bibi's disingenous attempt to reprimand the U.S. for daring to opine on his brazen undermining of Israeli democracy.

On Thursday, Mr. Netanyahu called Mr. Biden a “great friend of Israel.” But he said Israel would ultimately reach its own decisions, adding that he had not commented on other countries’ internal debates over the limits of executive power.

Spare me, Bibi. You spoke volumes about your feelings concerning executive power when Barack Obama was in office.

His brazenly partisan appearance before Congress rubbed a lot of us the wrong way. He used our legislative body as a campaign prop for his election, and aligned himself forever more with the Republican Party. His apologists note, correctly, that there's no love lost between Netanyahu and President Obama, but his personal dislike of the President does not excuse his blatant violation of diplomatic courtesies. Bibi's appearance amounted to a slap in the face not of President Obama, but of the entire United States.

Your 2015 appearance carried your implicit rebuke to the sitting president of the United States: "Your authority, Mr. President, doesn't mean squat. If I can benefit from your nation's domestic divisions, I will and you can suck on it."

Actions speak louder than words.

You lied, Bibi. You sure as hell have "commented" on the United States' "internal debates over the limits of executive power". You weighed in on the side that says, "If a Democrat is in office, screw that president's power."

Go ahead, Bibi, keep lying to us. Keep giving us reasons to rethink our unthinking support for Israel. Keep making your country's most fanatical religious zealots its face. By doing so, you push the U.S. closer and closer to cutting its support for Israel, potentially saving us billions of dollars.

I'd feel bad for the many Israelis who oppose your government's disdain for democracy, but at least we wouldn't be abetting your most reactionary and narrow-minded citizens' worst impulses any more.

Try again, Clarence

Per a New York Times article headlined, "Justice Thomas Says He Was Advised Lavish Gifts Did Not Need to Be Reported":

Justice Clarence Thomas said on Friday that he had followed the advice of “colleagues and others in the judiciary” when he did not disclose lavish gifts and travel from a wealthy conservative donor.

In a statement released by the Supreme Court, the justice said he believed he was not required to report the trips.

“Early in my tenure at the court, I sought guidance from my colleagues and others in the judiciary, and was advised that this sort of personal hospitality from close personal friends, who did not have business before the court, was not reportable." ...

What kinds of gifts and travel are we talking about?

ProPublica revealed on Thursday that the justice had traveled by private jet and yacht at the invitation of Harlan Crow, a Texas real estate billionaire. The vacations, which took place over nearly two decades, included trips to Indonesia and to Bohemian Grove, an exclusive retreat nestled in the redwoods in Northern California.

I had seen the ProPublica headline but couldn't bring myself to read the piece. Clarence and Ginny Thomas so disdain public opinion, and are so immune to public pressure, that I figured, why bother raising my blood pressure to no good purpose?

However, Clarence's "they told me it was okay" excuse takes his contempt for public opinion and the public's intelligence to new depths.

Clarence, you know damned well that flying on a private jet isn't like being treated to dinner at Applebee's. That you can't be bothered to muster even the smallest amount of shame for your failure to disclose — that you expect us to swallow the rank excrement of "but 'they' told me it was okay" — is despicable. You have benefited from your past and present colleagues' indifference to the institution's reputation, a reputation which, thanks in no small part to you and your wife, is deservedly in the toilet.

In short, Clarence, you're full of it.

You've pledged to comply with new disclosure guidelines adopted last month. If you do, better late than never. However, I'm betting you'll still find ways to skirt the intention of those guidelines. After all, neither you nor Ginny loves being treated like the little people who have to follow the rules, do you?

How will we remember this era?

I've been reading a bit about how discredited causes are remembered. Specifically, I had my eyes opened by Susan Neiman's simultaneously scholarly and deeply personal 2019 book, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil.

Neiman compares how Germany has gone about confronting its Nazi past with how the United States has confronted the legacy of slavery. The comparison turns out to be a good deal more complicated than most of us would like, certainly the "most of us" who like to believe we're on the "right" side of history. To be an admirer of Hitler today is monstrous, no question. Yet to say that Germany has successfully grappled with Nazism and its legacy is ... well, contentious. Not all Germans believe that, and the skeptics have compelling reasons for their doubt.

Yet if Germany has had a difficult time looking itself in the mirror, the United States largely has kept its eyes closed, at least until recently.

Neiman observes that much of this country's problem grappling with the legacy of slavery arises from its refusal to examine a good century of its history, namely, the period between the end of the Civil War and the passage of civil rights legislation in the 1960s. When skeptics of systemic racism complain that slavery ended over a century ago, they take advantage of popular ignorance of Reconstruction and its backlash, the so-called "Jim Crow" era. Some historians contend that the latter era's brutality, which included lynching and mass murder, merits a more brutally honest name, like "neoslavery". I can't argue with them. To paraphrase an observation made by Martin Luther King, Jr., chattel slavery ended in 1865 but African Americans weren't truly freed for another century. If more of us understood the truth of neoslavery, how thoroughly it ground AFrican Americans down under a web of legalized terror and economic exploitation, we'd give short shrift to the willfully obtuse argument that "slavery ended over a century ago and we should move on".

So both Germany and the United States still have work to do, coming to terms with the horrific legacies of their pasts. The United States has a lot farther to go in its own journey than Germany, though.

With all that in mind, I wonder: what will our descendants a century hence make of this era's legacy? (I'm limiting myself to considering the United States from here on.)

In our time we've seen a good forty percent of the country (the actual number varies depending on context but forty percent seems to be a good overall estimate) descend into political madness. There is no other way to characterize the reactionary (not conservative) embrace of the corrupt, cartoonishly dishonest, and venemous Donald Trump. Just this week, he reasserted his dominance over his would-be challengers for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination — by being indicted in New York State.

The sheer number of verified and verifiable lies that Trump has told since he announced his candidacy in 2015 utterly disqualifies him as an authoritative or trustworthy source of information about anything. Yet millions of otherwise sane Americans repeat his assertions — echoed and embellished by far-right media and social media — with absolute confidence.

At one time I believed they were doing so purely out of spite, as a rhetorical middle finger to those of us who still have some trust in the mainstream media and, more broadly, in expertise and truth. Yet the vast majority of those millions have put their money and their health where their mouths are. They have repudiated the consensus of the medical and public-health communities that the vaccines against CoViD-19 are safe, and have refused to be vaccinated. They have done so because Trump, among others, has assailed the vaccines as toxic, or as sinister vectors for mind control.

It's worth remembering that (1) Trump himself got vaccinated, though he did his best to conceal that fact, and (2) Trump at least nominally presided over Operation Warp Speed, the government project that led to the vaccines' development. Yet millions of Trump's followers have repudiated the vaccines anyway.

To trust a compulsive liar — one who doesn't even follow his own (bad) advice — does not make sense. It makes no sense to me, and it won't make any sense to our descendants a century from now.

I remember the horror of the 1978 Jonestown Massacre in which hundreds of cultists committed suicide at the direction of the cult's leader. That was my first brush with what I've since discovered is a real vulnerability in the human psyche, one that explains adherence to horrific ideas not just by hundreds, but by millions. Sometimes the right — or rather, wrong — person comes along, able to convince a lot of people that they should put their complete trust in him. (It's almost always a man.)

Forty-five years on, we still don't have much of a handle on how cult leader Jim Jones gained his hold over his followers. I wonder if, a century from now, science will be able to explain that, or the power of our own time's literal cult hero, Trump.

Or will our descendants a century from now still struggle against the enduring, toxic legacy of the delusions Trump and likeminded allies have spread? Will his deluded message live on in a new "Lost Cause" narrative, perhaps fused with the old one that is one of the Confederacy's most evil legacies ("evil" because it tries to deny historical truth)?

Burying the Randian fantasy

I don't know if Ayn Rand's overwrought and overlong works still command respect anywhere but if they do, it's because her acolytes haven't been willing to look at the U.S. lately. And by "lately", I mean the last six or seven years.

In that time a self-proclaimed billionaire skillfully fed and rode a wave of nativism and racism into the U.S. presidency, while a verified billionaire impulsively offered to buy one of the highest-profile social media platforms, then was compelled by the courts to follow through on the offer even though he had a ton of buyer's remorse.

Rand in Atlas Shrugged envisioned the rich industrialists of her time losing patience with the deadweight they supported through their taxes and their factories. They would wall themselves off in their own little enclave where their work ethic would let them achieve greatness while the rest of the world went to hell. The message: the productive — as reflected by wealth — should be allowed to do as they pleased; only thus would paradise be achieved.

"President" Donald Trump — the quotation marks signify his all but total abdication of the responsibilities of the office, even as he availed himself of its privileges and powers — achieved exactly three things in office. He enabled the Republican-controlled Senate's installation of many federal judges; he enabled a Republican Congress' enacting of a massive tax cut whose benefits went overwhelmingly to the wealthy; and he somehow managed to oversee the creation of Operation Warp Speed, bringing us vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 in hitherto unimaginably short time. I doubt he had any significant involvement in any of these things but he signed off on them, which was all that was legally required and all he was fit to do. Otherwise, his administration and he personally were mired in corruption, mismanagement, and lies from the moment he took office. His reelection bid was repudiated by the voting public. However, his post-presidency finds him wielding a massive segment of the population, actively hostile to institutions and facts and given to cult-like worship of him, like a rusty scalpel, infecting the country with toxic divisiveness and disinformation, corroding the foundations of democracy itself.

That's what happened when we let a rich man occupy the presidency: he remade our society for the worse.

However, Trump inherited his wealth and arguably has accomplished nothing in his life except becoming a savvy marketer of his family name. He isn't a rugged, no-nonsense industrialist of the sort Rand lionized; he didn't build anything from his own genius and turn it into a massively successful business. Rand would probably have consigned him to the bleating, unworthy masses exiled from her utopia of builders.

Elon Musk, on the surface, is different. He didn't inherit his money, he made it by running companies like PayPal and Tesla. He's reputed to be a smart man. (No one who has ever worked for or with Trump would say that about him.) His companies have created products that millions use; indeed, PayPal, Tesla, and SpaceX can be said to have revolutionized their industries. (Trump's businesses have made nothing. Well, they've made him rich.)

Yet Musk isn't a great boss, by all accounts. He can be inspirational, yes, but he can be abusive almost to the point of illegality, too.

He also shares with Trump an apparently bottomless need for ego-stroking, a surprisingly thin skin, and a penchant for punishing his supposed enemies, including by turning his fanatical supporters against them. Musk's and Trump's thin skins also don't stop them from cruelly taunting others; apparently neither has ever heard the aphorism not to dish it out if you can't take it. (They're also comfortable with accommodating racism to a degree I find despicable but for this analysis that's a tangent.)

So it's no surprise to find that Musk, now sole proprietor of Twitter, is using his unfettered power there to reshape it in his image. His latest stunt (after he cashiered or drove off more than half the company's labor force and reinstated notorious trolls and disseminators of disinformation like Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene) was to suspend the accounts of those who crossed him in some way. They included an account that reported the location of his private jet and accounts belonging to journalists who have been critical of him at times.

As of today he has reinstated some but not all of them based on one of his silly Twitter polls. "The people have spoken", he wrote, as if he were just "the people's" instrument.

That's how the man who was once the world's richest is spending his days. It's not exactly the kind of hard, creative, world-improving work Rand envisioned. Nothing Musk is doing at Twitter looks like it will encourage the kind of free speech that improves society. Rather, he's encouraging humanity's vilest instincts while trying to monetize the hell out of the company while he can.

Rand, I suspect, wouldn't have minded Trump's assault on democracy. I think she had authoritarian instincts and disdained "the people"; certainly she didn't think they should run things.

However, she would be embarrassed by how petty and self-sabotaging Trump and Musk are. They aren't the avatars of human progress she made out society's wealthiest to be. They're just extraordinarily flawed men (unusually devoid of empathy, by the way, rather like I imagine Rand was) who lucked into wealth (Elon didn't found his most successful companies, remember) and used that wealth to accumulate power. What they did with that power has been disastrous not just for "the people" Rand disdained, but more importantly, for themselves. Trump invited unprecedented scrutiny of his finances, scrutiny he'd avoided before his foray into politics. (He has always been a scofflaw but before 2015 regulators and the public largely didn't care.) Musk has seen his wealth, concentrated in Tesla stock, evaporate as the stock has been hammered since his takeover of Twitter.

These two rich men were given a lot of power. They have used it so badly that most of us would rather they just went away.

Ayn Rand's paradise run by rich people is as unserious a fantasy as any ever written. The trouble is, a lot of people who take themselves seriously, like former Congresscritter Paul Ryan, take her fantasy seriously, too.

Well, we tried it in the real world, and it has been a catastrophe. Time for even true believers to give it up and consign Rand to history's landfill.

The limits of startup culture

Elon Musk has only owned Twitter for two weeks. Given his spectacular success at Tesla and SpaceX, I'd be a fool to count him or Twitter out over the long haul. I loathe his public persona and what I know of his management methods but he has made both work for him at a business level.

Nevertheless, what he has done to and with Twitter in his two-week ownership stint is kind of sublimely moronic.

Anybody can have an idea to whose shortcomings he's blind. That's why most of us chew over the idea for a while, and/or discuss it with others, before we throw ourselves into making it happen.

When you're the world's richest man, though, and you own a business outright, you can put your pet uncooked idea into effect with a snap of your fingers. Constantly being hailed online as a genius also apparently dulls your sense of caution, the hard-won knowledge the rest of us have that we can and will make mistakes when we move too fast and don't think clearly enough.

"Move fast and break things" is a motto credited to Mark Zuckerberg. It's a natural follow-on to another risk-taking motto, "It's better to seek forgiveness than to ask permission". I've worked in bureaucracies and I get the appeal of both ideas.

I can also say, I've worked in bureaucracies and I've had to clean up after brash idiots who broke things they didn't understand and therefore weren't competent to fix when the breakage caused others to suffer.

Musk, like so many tech bros, is infatuated with himself and the "obvious" correctness of his own vision. What's worse, he has a proven track record of achievements and a cheering section that I can only call terrifyingly loyal. (His online supporters act like a bully's henchmen.)

Tech bro-dom is way, way, way overestimated as an expression of genius, especially by the bros. What's far worse, though, is that its culture elevates not giving a shit about other people to practically a holy commandment.

What Musk has demonstrated in his brief stint as Twitter's sole proprietor is the limit of startup culture, of tech bro-dom, as an operating philosophy. He can move fast and break things but he can't force everyone to stay in the building while he whacks at the foundations.

He has tried, to be sure, threatening to "name and shame" advertisers who have "paused" their advertising on Twitter until the long-term picture becomes clearer. That doesn't mean he'll get them all back on board, though. His pettiness isn't charming and it isn't a desirable trait in a CEO or business owner. Arrogance, which he also has in immeasurable quantity, isn't well-tolerated either, unless it's crowned with success.

If Twitter doesn't regain its footing under Musk, it will be because of his shortcomings as a manager and as a human being.

Latest question for Judge Cannon

Judge Aileen Cannon denied DOJ's request to exempt the classified documents DOJ identified in the materials removed from Mar-a-Lago from review by the special master.

Judge Cannon, in this latest decision you explicitly declared that Donald Trump is more trustworthy in your eyes than the Department of Justice. You prefer to believe Trump's uncorroborated and flatly nonsensical assertions that the documents in question could be unclassified, rather than the expert judgment of DOJ and FBI staffers that the documents are classified.

You're willing to let not only the special master you just appointed review these documents (which has no precedent because it's a terrible idea), but Trump's attorneys as well. Trump's attorneys, who, last I checked, did not have security clearances at all, much less clearances at the extraordinarily high levels that would be needed to review these documents if they were government workers.

So here's my question to you, Judge Cannon:

Why the fuck are you endangering our national security by granting access to even potentially highly sensitive documents to whoever the fuck Trump hires as his latest legal representative?

Actually, I have a second question which might be even more important:

What the fuck is wrong with you?

Here's where you stand. You are so fucking indifferent to national security that you're okay with obliging Trump far beyond the ethics of your profession. (Admittedly it's a profession to which you're extremely new, but you're not that new to it.) You're also playing fast and loose with information so sensitive, it led to an ongoing damage assessment.

The people who worry about national security are uniformly scared about what might have happened. Yet you aren't.

So again, what the fuck is wrong with you?

You're not just a Trump toady any more. You're now a threat to our national security — because you're so fucking willing to middle-finger the government, just to show your patron that your priority is what he wants rather than justice.

Judge Cannon erred

Judge Aileen Cannon unexpectedly threw a wrench into the Justice Department's criminal investigation of Donald Trump by ordering the appointment of a special master to sift through the documents the FBI seized from Mar-a-Lago on 8 August 2022.

I went over the sequence of events that led up to the FBI's execution of a search warrant that day. Surprisingly, further revelations on an almost daily basis since then have not contradicted that basic timeline. Rather, they've only deepened the public's understanding of the reasons the Justice Department was driven to the extraordinary step of seeking a warrant against a former president of the United States.

An indisputable, well-documented fact at the heart of the investigation is, Trump repeatedly lied. He lied first to the National Archives and Records Administration, then to DOJ, by pretending on multiple occasions to comply with each organization's requests for the return of all documents that by law belong to the government, not to him. That's why DOJ had to keep returning to Mar-a-Lago and on each visit found more documents he illegally retained.

Trump has kept lying to the public, claiming variously that he declassified documents automatically (a claim all but two of his advisers will not substantiate and which, in any case, is not borne out by the documents themselves, which bear none of the legally required marks indicating they've been properly declassified) or simply that the documents rightly belong to him.

That latter claim is, to repeat, a lie. Nearly every document a president touches during his time in office is the property of the U.S. government. That's because the president is not a king, he is a public servant, like every other elected official, and what his administration produces belongs to the people.

Trump's lies have been in service of delegitimizing DOJ's criminal investigation of his mishandling of these illegally held documents. Now Judge Cannon has supported Trump's subversive campaign with her indefensible order.

She spends pages emphasizing that an ex-president is not a typical target of a criminal investigation, solemnly invoking the need to bend over backwards to ensure the appearance of justice in pursuing such an atypical target. She all but accuses the Justice Department of misconduct and treats Trump as a respectable figure for whom "reputational damage" looms large.

Her concern for his reputation is laughable. Remember, the world first learned of the FBI's 8 August entry to Mar-a-Lago from Donald Trump. He, not DOJ, attracted all the public attention.

However, that's a relatively minor defect of Cannon's bonkers decision. The much bigger problem with her order is that she bends over backwards to treat Trump with overweening deference neither he nor any ex-president deserves — certainly not when the ex-president has exhibited the bad faith Trump has.

The facts are clear. NARA and then DOJ did their level best to get Trump to comply with the law voluntarily and without undue publicity. He illegally kept hundreds of documents despite multiple attempts to gain his voluntary cooperation. Some of those documents seem to have been incredibly sensitive and their disclosure to other nations could be incredibly damaging to national security.

Judge Cannon's order disregards these outrageous and undisputed facts in favor of protecting hypothetical "rights" or "privileges" of an ex-president that the law does not recognize.

Judge Cannon doesn't state a single reason why an ex-president might legitimately claim "executive privilege" (which is understood to be the province of the current president, consistent with the idea that the privilege belongs to the office, not to its occupants individually). She merely asserts that such a claim might exist.

I can claim dragons might exist. For that to mean anything to you, though, you'd expect me to explain why. Since Judge Cannon can't be bothered to explain herself, the rest of us need not give her assertion any credence.

Even if we did, why should we deem that possibility more important than the possibility that Trump was engaged in criminal misconduct? That's exactly what Cannon does, in defiance of the balance of evidence for each — a lot of evidence for criminal misconduct, no evidence that anything Trump illegally retained somehow "belongs" to him rather than to the presidency by virtue of an unexplained "executive privilege" belonging to an ex-president.

Cannon also prioritizes the attorney-client privilege of a criminal investigation's presumed target above the national security of the United States, by putting the evidence the Office of the Director of National Intelligence needs to conduct its damage assessment in the hands of a special master. How can she expect the ODNI to share control of evidence with a third party whose mission is to remove any items from that evidence that the third party deems improperly seized? If the ODNI deems an item crucial to its damage assessment, can the special master nevertheless remove it from consideration by returning it to Trump? (Cannon's order is silent on any such conflict.) Moreover, according to a former general counsel for the FBI, the ODNI damage assessment requires assistance from the very DOJ and FBI officials whom the order forbids to review the evidence pending the completion of the special master's work!

Speaking of the special master, Judge Cannon's order totally disregards the extraordinary difficulty of finding suitable candidates. The special master in this case must be expert not just in attorney-client privilege but in executive privilege, and must have the highest security clearances or be qualified to receive them where they can only be given on a discretionary basis. Judge Cannon's disregard of the difficulty of finding a special master with these qualifications is a dereliction of her duty to safeguard the government's, and thus the public's, rights.

(By the way, that "attorney-client privilege" business raises an awkward question: why would Trump have so much attorney work product at his residence? Moreover, why would that attorney work product be intermingled with "souvenirs" from his presidency? I find it hard to believe either is normal, even for an ex-president.)

Finally, Judge Cannon suggests that both DOJ and the FBI treated Trump disrespectfully. She was bothered by the fact that the FBI allegedly seized items that it should not have, items of an indisputably personal nature. (The best-known were a couple of Trump's passports.) My understanding is that seizing items not actually covered by a search warrant is not unheard of while executing one; the mistakes are understood to have been made in good faith unless there's clear evidence of misconduct. Trump has not provided a scintilla of evidence that any misconduct occurred. By all appearances he was treated like any other investigative target, no better and no worse.

Trump was told precisely what he should not have kept from his time in office. He had ample time in which to sort those items out from his personal possessions: after all, he (illegally) had those materials for over eighteen months! If, when the FBI executed its search warrant, his personal possessions were still intermingled with those illegally retained materials (and were thus subject to seizure by the terms of the search warrant, an awkward fact Trump ignores), whose fault is that?

Judge Cannon's order rewards Trump for being a slob and a hoarder and for disregarding the plain terms of communications from NARA and DOJ, while it simultaneously ignores the terrifying danger to our national security that his disregard for the law and proper security presented (and may still present if he has more documents, or copies of the ones already removed).

Her order also rewards Trump's amply-demonstrated bad faith during this saga by treating him as if he presented clean hands and honest assertions. Indeed, her order is so inexplicably deferential to him and so heedless of his demonstrated misconduct that it calls into question her own faithfulness to the oath she took when she became a federal judge.

Without a signed confession, I can't say Judge Cannon's a zealot who was determined from the start to favor Trump no matter what. What I can say is, she erred. She erred egregiously, and to her everlasting discredit as a jurist.

[EDITED: I toned down the likely exaggeration of "thousands" of documents and "many" of them being sensitive. I also word-smithed other spots and added a citation for my assertion that the ODNI's assessment needs DOJ assistance.]