Books Not Mooks
The fans are pelting the clumsy, overpaid and corrupted players with 6 year old hot dog buns as the Mook Crooks roster keeps growing
It’s useful to review the School of Thought of the Mook Crooks who’ve been busy hijacking the government of the US.
Steve Bannon: ”I’m a Leninist. Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal, too.”
Also Steve Bannon:
”The women that would lead this country would be pro-family, they would have husbands, they would love their children. They wouldn't be a bunch of dykes that came from the Seven Sisters schools up in New England. That drives the left insane and that's why they hate [conservative] women."
Along the way, Bannon has attacked every ‘Other’ group in existence: ‘Whiney’ Jews, Women, Hollywood, government employees, the media, liberals, academics, Democrats, Republicans, Baby Boomers, human rights activists, Muslims.
Haven’t heard any complaints from him about Nazis, bullies, dictators, Communists, or the ultra-wealthy, the ones who actually exploit, endanger and murder people. It’s a lucrative gig, schlepping for the deadly and powerful if you’re willing to sell your soul to get it.
Bannon’s just one of many who parlay privileged upbringings, chance encounters and an educated sales pitch specifically tailored to an audience. The unshaven, casually dressed disheveled Bannon was ‘dressed down’ to address working class voters from his former Brooks Brothers outfits when he was working on Wall Street or trying to make inroads in a film career. On the plus side, he’s a college educated, smart guy, but the lack of an ethical base is an old routine that was first developed at the dawn of humankind.
It’s consistent with the law of supply and demand. There’s always a market for a capable mook, so there’s always gonna be an eager labor pool of brownnosers, some of whom are perfectly comfortable wearing brown shirts.
The very powerful they cater to are often very guarded about their aims and motivations, so they need mooks to bear the brunt of criticism and oversight, along with legal mooks who can stall and delay government agencies and courts and work on acceptable plea deals when someone digs out a law breach (AKA: a crime)
David Bossie, the propaganda filmmaker who tied in with Bannon, was the guy who got the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. Not only did that negate the McCain Feingold Act that limited campaign finance spending, but it blew apart spending limits stretching back more than a century. Within a week of that decision a lower court expanded it, which has since caused a huge rise in Super PACS with the identities of many donors hidden from public view. Dark money has influenced our elections for the past decade due to these twin decisions.
Conspiracy theorists might wonder, since the appeals court members included Brett Kavanaugh and Merrick Garland but that second Speechnow.org v. FEC decision was bipartisan and unanimous, which should kill that speculation. The SCOTUS decision in the Citizens United decision, though, deserves fresh reconsideration, however.
In his dissenting opinion, Justice John Paul Stevens insisted the court's ruling represented "At bottom, the Court's opinion is thus a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self government since the founding, and who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt. It is a strange time to repudiate that common sense. While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics."
His extensive 90 page dissent (the longest dissent in more than 40 years) was joined by Justices Sotomayor, Ginsburg and Breyer. So SCOTUS was split between the liberals and conservatives with swing vote Anthony Kennedy joining the conservatives for their win.
A subsequent ruling in McCutchen v. FEC (2014) further cemented the power of big money to have an outsized influence on US elections.
Donald Trump made it clear by the summer of 2020 that he was going to call the election rigged if he lost. An attorney mook, Sidney Powell, spent months pursuing frivolous claims of a fraudulent vote count in numerous states and has jeopardized her ongoing legal career after numerous admonitions for having no evidence to support her claims. Everyone Trump touches seems to follow similar paths to disrepute or - for proven insurrectionists - to prison sentences.
And one, in particular, is causing extreme concern this past week, the wife of the longest serving Associate Justice, Clarence Thomas.
It’s not the first time she’s drawn criticism for her extreme support of Trump. From January, Newsweek reported:
Some social media users called on Thomas to retire or suggested he should be removed from the nation's highest court after he was the sole dissenting vote in Trump's bid to keep certain documents from the House of Representatives' Select Committee investigating the events of January 6, 2021.
And this week provided the revelation that she was texting Trump’s Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows, from Election Day up to the insurrection effort and texting crazy conspiracy theories as well. Another Trump legal adviser, John Eastman, may have been the original author of the plan to try and steal the election from Joe Biden and the majority of US voters, but he’s blocking all inquiries as hard as he can. It’s what useful mooks do.
But it’s Clarence Thomas that needs to be investigated anew. Not only has he gone solo in blocking access to Trump’s records (which could reveal his wife’s complicity in the planned coup and insurrection), but in those old decisions that opened the doors to the fast multiplying SuperPAC dark money flows, Thomas called repeatedly for even more extensive donor anonymity than any other justice did. It certainly makes one wonder whether either Thomas was a dark money donor.
The worst case scenarios envisioned by the dissenting justices in the Citizens United decision have come to pass. The American majority no longer believes elections are valid and they question whether the SCOTUS itself is infested with mooks who have permanently tilted all federal elections to favor who the wealthy and powerful want. Study after study has demonstrated that more wins for Republicans have been the result in the decade since.
It’s the first time since the South seceded and provoked the Civil War that the white majority has felt what people of color have experienced for most of American history: a justice system that provides justice for none but the privileged few.
Lest any forget, the GOP has only won the popular vote once in the past 8 presidential elections and the two times they lost the electoral vote, one SCOTUS decision awarded the election to the loser and this time, we got an insurrection.
Plus a Supreme Court that can no longer be trusted at all because it’s being infiltrated by mooks too.
All laws henceforth are null and void till SCOTUS cleans up its act which isn’t likely to happen. Clarence Thomas, during his confirmation hearing, railed that he was being treated like an uppity Negro undergoing a high tech lynching. Now he’s just a mook who’ll use every legal trick he can find to avoid hanging himself.
I doubt the January 6th Committee will push hard for Thomas to recuse or resign, but I think it’s fully understandable why most Americans will regard the SCOTUS as just another tool of the wealthy to drive the last nail in the coffin of American democracy. Trump is not alone in causing its demise.
As I’m in possession of a desktop computer that may be dying, be forewarned that my newsletters may be interrupted for up to 3 days in the coming week. I have the funds to resolve this issue, but if a new hard drive is required, the reinstall of software and other backed up items will impede my writing temporarily.
With so much happening, the investigation of the insurrection, the prosecution of insurrectionists, Vladimir Putin’s war crimes, the Ketanji Brown Jackson confirmation struggle, the dangerous religious extremists ready to launch a holy war against everyone critical of Trump, I hate to miss out on any reporting during these very disturbing hours.
I’ve heard a lot of fear expressed about WWIII or a Civil War but I encourage supporters of a healthy, functional democracy to suppress those fears. In the event of any potential combat, remember that it’s not the first time the defenders of justice and democracy have responded to the call to fight, and to win. We cannot afford the cost of letting corrupt and evil people win.