Disorder in the court

 

Sometimes it just doesn’t “pay” to risk going to court with a case disordered…

 

…and thus we see yet another Marilyn Manson accuser “settle” for what Manson attorneys called “pennies on the dollar” at the last moment before trial. This time it was “musician” Chloe Black (uncovered by Colonel Kurtz)…

 

…who was only identified as “Jane Doe” by the mainstream media. Black apparently claimed Manson raped and threatened to kill her, but somehow “suppressed” the memory of it until she got into cahoots with Evan Rachel Wood and company, apparently in an effort to change the “narrative” in what they regarded as “embarrassing” for them to have taken part in (in Wood’s case, she needed someone else to blame in order to “explain” to her kid why she did those “very edgy” things).

It appears that Manson’s team wanted this to go to trial, as they had a very good chance of winning, including testimony from a well-known expert on repressed memory who would refute Black’s “re-remembrances” as well as her self-damaging deposition and text messages. It seems that Black, knowing how bad her case was, wanted to “settle” for the big bucks, but with Manson apparently willing to take it to trial she had to “settle” for whatever she could get, which we are told was much less than she hoped. 

Of course as “Jane Doe” she wants the “freedom” to tell her tale “anonymously,” but apparently that does not include her deposition taken under oath and the threatening text messages that suggested Black was a nutcase, as Manson’s lawyers suggested if she was actually interested in telling the truth. Of course Black claims she was under “stress” during the deposition because of the presence of that “scary man” Manson, but perhaps it was that she didn't want him there because it would have been easier for her to tell lies.

Meanwhile, the “Mad House” mania in Congress continued after the far-right members who behave as if they are off their medication sought to make a push to remove Kevin McCarthy from the speakership out of juvenile vindictiveness. Of course Matt Gaetz is taking his turn, after Paul Gosar, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert, to take center stage in exhibiting the current state of disorder in the House. 

Talk by “moderates” of expelling Gaetz from the House Ethics Committee was denounced by Greene, who claims it will not be “tolerated” by Republican voters; well maybe not by MAGA voters anyways, and I’m sure a majority of voters are wondering “this is what we voted for?” At least when Democrats were in control they actually tried to do something useful.

We saw the insanity last week when a “deal” was brokered among House Republicans that cut non-defense and “homeland security” spending by 30 percent that wasn’t going to fly in the Senate anyways, but was still voted down by the MAGAmaniacs before McCarthy and the Republican “moderates” made a deal with Democrats, getting just one concession—removing $300 million in aid to Ukraine, which only proves again the pro-Russia, pro-authoritarian impulses of the far-right—in the temporary stopgap measure halting a government shutdown. 

To update, it appears that Gaetz and company, out for blood, put their eight votes together with the Democrats to actually oust McCarthy from the speakership. Why did the Democrats do this? Do they expect a more far-right speaker to take charge, and turn the House more chaotic than it already is, especially with Republicans in swing districts wanting nothing to do with what the far-right wants to do? They probably know that outside the MAGAverse, voters are confused and irritated by the direction Republicans are going and the failure of the House to get anything done. Statistica notes that

Congressional approval, particularly over the past few years, has not been high. Americans tend to see Congress as a group of ineffectual politicians who are out of touch with their constituents. The 118^th Congress began in 2023 with a rocky start. The Democratic Party maintains control of the Senate, but Republicans took back control of the House of Representatives after the 2022 midterm elections. The House caught media attention from its first days with a contentious fight for the position of Speaker of the House. Representative Kevin McCarthy was eventually sworn in as Speaker after a historic fifteen rounds of voting. Despite the current Congress having a historic share of women and being the most diverse Congress in American history, very little has been done to improve the opinion of Americans regarding its central lawmaking body.

Ye of little faith:

However, Americans tend not to have much confidence in many of the institutions in the United States. Additionally, public confidence in the ability of the Republican and Democratic parties to work together has decreased drastically between 2008 and 2022, with nearly 60 percent of Americans having no confidence the parties can govern in a bipartisan way.

Some MAGAmainiacs are calling for the formation of a “third party,” the “MAGA Party,” which one suspects will only backfire spectacularly. Perhaps Greene should hope that voters are not looking too closely at what she and her cohorts are doing.

Meanwhile, Trump is the very definition of a mind disordered. He has made various claims that he “stands," meaning between the “people”—or rather his “people”—and such things as anarchy, which on January 6 he apparently decided to fall down instead. Of course Trump and the far-right are the principle source of the “anarchy,” making outlandish claims that might arouse the insensible “base” for whom no amount of sensible talk will settle their disordered minds; most others (we hope) recognize the typical partisan smoke without fire, but it is dangerous to ignore it because just sometimes there is fire where there is smoke. 

If Trump "stands" for anything, it is with those who supported those 30 percent cuts in social programs, for which he stands between the people who need them and those who support their needs against Trump's own "class." Trump's persona as a "somebody" to his insensible supporters who don't understand this is almost wholly a media creation and an ongoing publicity stunt that never should have been allowed past "go" when it came to public office.  Even Trump's supposed business acumen is such that if he didn’t have his father’s business to "build" on, he’d just be another Duddy Kravitz, lying and cheating his way to being a “somebody.”

Trump mostly appeals to two kinds of  people who are not billionaires: the white nationalist nativist type, and those whose intellectual capacity does not extend beyond provincial concerns. In a campaign speech in Iowa, Trump complained about electric cars and how heavy the batteries are, and how they would likely sink ferry boats: 

But if I’m sitting down and that boat’s going down and I am on top of the battery and the water starts swelling in, I am getting concerned. Then I look 10 yards to my left and I see a shark over there. So I have a choice of electrocution or shark. You know what I’m going to take? Electrocution. I will take electrocution every single time.

So what was the point of that? First it indicates that it takes him awhile to figure out something is wrong, and then that he’d rather die sitting like an idiot in his car while the boat sinks? It’s completely nuts and shows how Trump’s mind wanders and cannot focus on a problem at hand, rather letting fringe characters with evil agendas like Stephen Miller run the show. This is what is meant by Trump being unfit to be president.

As if we didn’t have enough evidence of this, Trump provided more at his South Carolina rally, first insuring that his listeners were in the right mood by stirring up racism with the usual rants about the border (Biden has “abolished” the border), and that “Millions and millions of people, many of them from jails from other countries, are being dumped into our country.” Well, I suppose Trump does remember watching Scarface…

 

…and from such sources we suspect someone as superficial and reading adverse as Trump gets most of his “learning.” He goes on:  “You can take the five worst presidents in American history and put them together, and they would not have done the damage Joe Biden has done in just 13 months.” Presidential historians polled by C-Span shows that Biden would at least have “company” if that was actually “true”...

 

 

...based on these poll results:

 

Note that Trump ranked last in "moral authority" and "administrative skills." Trump went on: “It was always ‘America first.’ Very simple, very simple. It’s all about America first. It was also about ‘make America great again,’ but it was about America first because that’s how you make it great.” How exactly is America made “great” when it alienates allies and engages in inept foreign policy with no “end game”—North Korea and Iran, for example? “We also have to clean out the rot of our failed foreign policy establishment.” Yeah, and it started with getting him out of office. 

By the way, the Republican head of the House Foreign Relations Committee intends to ban foreign aid to Egypt until it improves its "human rights record." That's funny, Republicans didn't think much of the human rights of Central Americans during the Eighties when it was funding and arming right-wing murder regimes. And one suspects that Egypt could just say that the U.S. is an unreliable "ally" and check out what China or Russia has to offer them.

And how is dividing this country supposed to make it great? What did Abraham Lincoln say? “A house divided cannot stand”? “We’re losing our country. It’s no different than if we had lost it in a war.” McKay Coppins wrote in The Atlantic how this all really started, with Newt Gingrich:

But few figures in modern history have done more than Gingrich to lay the groundwork for Trump’s rise. During his two decades in Congress, he pioneered a style of partisan combat—replete with name-calling, conspiracy theories, and strategic obstructionism—that poisoned America’s political culture and plunged Washington into permanent dysfunction. Gingrich’s career can perhaps be best understood as a grand exercise in devolution—an effort to strip American politics of the civilizing traits it had developed over time and return it to its most primal essence.

Trump and the far-right like to talk about how they expect their supporters to lay down their lives if need be for their vision of America; Trump continues: 

The fate of any nation ultimately depends upon the willingness of its citizens to lay down – and they must do this – lay down their very lives to defend their country. If we allow the Marxists and communists and socialists to teach our children to hate America, there will be no one left to defend our flag or to protect our great country or its freedom. 

Of course Trump spreads the hate around pretty thick, and his supporters think their opinions about others not like them should have the force of law. The problem is that this country is supposed to stand for something—like personal liberty, which means everyone is entitled to their opinion or how they live their life whether someone else likes it or not, which is something that a fascist like Ron DeSantis doesn’t understand and why he isn’t fit to be president either. 

If you don’t want to listen, then don’t listen, and it goes both ways. Unfortunately people who want to save democracy in this country must listen and take appropriate action at the polls; we can’t be allowed to be knocked out insensible by the MAGA Stooges and their Trump-appointed judges, because then it will be too late for the "jury" to vote on the matter: