Mostly Monday Reads: A little too much Biggus Dickus Energy

“American Oligarchs parade to MAGAville to grovel before the newborn king.” John Buss, @johnbuss.bsky.social

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

I feel like I’m spending far too much time in Spamalot and Life of Brian, where the President-Elect, Incontinia Buttocks, makes pronouncements with his First Lady, Biggus Dickus, watching over his shoulder.  It’s been weird watching all the Tech Bros and Nepo Babies running to Mara Lardo to bend the knee. They are undoubtedly trying to encourage tariffs to take out other American Businesses, not theirs. The next act of resistance will be flying my flag at half-mast on January 20th.  I have also heard a few folks are flying Pirate Flags, too. I’m already trying to envision a massive blizzard in the District.  Maybe I can get the local VooDoo Priestess to join in. Naughtiest Maximus (pictured up top)has already shown up to kiss Incontina Buttocks. Melania even showed up for a visit by Justin Trudeau, who was closely watched by his wife. I imagine there’s never been this much ass licked before ascension.

So, I agree with this headline from Public Notice.  Noah Berlesky speaks for us all.  “Kash Patel’s nomination signals how bad things can get. The worst timeline comes into view.”  I hope the Republican Senators find their balls before this one comes up for review. That is if he or any of them come up for Senate review, which would be close to following the Rule of Law for President-Elect Incontinia Buttocks.

Patel is considered unqualified for the post even by staunch Trump-supporting conservatives. He’s made it clear he intends to use his power to attack the “deep state,” which he frames as a needed populist purge of a corrupt establishment. But in reality, Patel is poised to use the resources of the FBI to target Trump’s political opponents and criminalize resistance.

Rather than reforming the FBI, Patel and Trump are promising to embrace the worst of the bureau’s legacy, extending its use as an authoritarian cudgel to pursue grudges and crush dissent. The FBI, with its often ugly history, is a blunt instrument that Trump is intent on weaponizing — a goal that mostly eluded him during his first term when he failed to completely bend the bureau to his will.

Patel’s primary qualification for running the FBI is a spotless record of doing whatever Trump wants him to do. He was an undistinguished Florida defense attorney and DOJ staffer until 2017, when he was hired to work for the House Permanent Select Committee, which at the time was led by MAGA flunky Devin Nunes.

Patel headed the committee’s investigation of Russian interference on behalf of Trump in the 2016 campaign. He was the main author of the “Nunes memo,” a partisan attack on the Justice Department intended to obscure links between Trump’s campaign and Russia. Trump was delighted by Patel’s open hackery and declassified the document despite Justice Department objections.

…

Following Trump’s reluctant departure from office, Patel continued to serve as a willing and eager jack-of-all-lies.

Patel failed to show up for at least one deposition before the January 6 Committee, which wanted to talk to him about his role in Trump’s coup plotting. Trump gave Patel access to his presidential records, supposedly to write an account of his term that denied Russian collusion in the 2016 election. When it became clear that Trump had improperly removed some classified presidential records, Patel rushed to his defense, claiming in an interview with Breitbart that Trump had magically declassified everything. But other Trump administration officials disputed that, and Patel ended up testifying before a grand jury in return for immunity.

So, we will see more of Lickus Bottomus, Bottom for short.

Fortunately, the actual President still has power.  He gave his son, Hunter, a blanket pardon, so Trump has one less person to torment. Let’s hope First Dog Commander can get one, too.

He’s also giving ambassador positions to cronies, criminals, and children’s inlaws. This is from the BBC. “Trump chooses Jared Kushner’s father for ambassador to France.”  I guess he’ll be out there searching for the next Trump properties.

President-elect Donald Trump announced Saturday that he has selected Charles Kushner as his pick for ambassador to France.

Mr Kushner is a real-estate developer and the father of Jared Kushner, husband of his daughter Ivanka Trump. Trump pardoned Mr Kushner during his first term, waving away a federal conviction in 2020.

In a post to his social media site Truth Social, Trump said Mr Kushner is “a tremendous business leader, philanthropist, & dealmaker, who will be a strong advocate representing our Country & its interests”.

The nomination appears to be the first administration position that Trump has formally offered to a relative since his re-election.

Trump’s first real pardons will likely be all the felons and traitors on January 6.  They’ll be joining whatever form of the SS gets dreamed up by Tulsi Gabard and Pam Bondi.  These are the two Vestal Virgins that worship Incontina Buttocks.  It’s said the VVs are always chosen before puberty and guard the sacred hearth where all the evidence is burned. Matt Gaetz will likely be installed as a White House Satyr in charge of recruiting initiates.

Of course,  we’re discovering much more about the other Satyr still on the Cabinet list, Pete Hegseth.  This is from The New Yorker, as reported by Jane Mayer. “Pete Hegseth’s Secret History. A whistle-blower report and other documents suggest that Trump’s nominee to run the Pentagon was forced out of previous leadership positions for financial mismanagement, sexist behavior, and being repeatedly intoxicated on the job.” Thanks to BB for following his Bacchanalian romps.

After the recent revelation that Pete Hegseth had secretly paid a financial settlement to a woman who had accused him of raping her in 2017, President-elect Donald Trump stood by his choice of Hegseth to become the next Secretary of Defense. Trump’s communications director, Steven Cheung, issued a statement noting that Hegseth, who has denied wrongdoing, has not been charged with any crime. “President Trump is nominating high-caliber and extremely qualified candidates to serve in his administration,” Cheung maintained.

But Hegseth’s record before becoming a full-time Fox News TV host, in 2017, raises additional questions about his suitability to run the world’s largest and most lethal military force. A trail of documents, corroborated by the accounts of former colleagues, indicates that Hegseth was forced to step down by both of the two nonprofit advocacy groups that he ran—Veterans for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America—in the face of serious allegations of financial mismanagement, sexual impropriety, and personal misconduct. Remember, Satyrs often attempted to seduce or rape nymphs and mortal women alike, usually with little success.  That’s why most of them rely on money to get the deeds done.

A previously undisclosed whistle-blower report on Hegseth’s tenure as the president of Concerned Veterans for America, from 2013 until 2016, describes him as being repeatedly intoxicated while acting in his official capacity—to the point of needing to be carried out of the organization’s events. The detailed seven-page report—which was compiled by multiple former C.V.A. employees and sent to the organization’s senior management in February 2015—states that, at one point, Hegseth had to be restrained while drunk from joining the dancers on the stage of a Louisiana strip club, where he had brought his team. The report also says that Hegseth, who was married at the time, and other members of his management team sexually pursued the organization’s female staffers, whom they divided into two groups—the “party girls” and the “not party girls.” In addition, the report asserts that, under Hegseth’s leadership, the organization became a hostile workplace that ignored serious accusations of impropriety, including an allegation made by a female employee that another employee on Hegseth’s staff had attempted to sexually assault her at the Louisiana strip club. In a separate letter of complaint, which was sent to the organization in late 2015, a different former employee described Hegseth being at a bar in the early-morning hours of May 29, 2015, while on an official tour through Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, drunkenly chanting “Kill All Muslims! Kill All Muslims!”

In response to questions from this magazine, Tim Parlatore, a lawyer for Hegseth, replied with the following statement, which he said came from “an advisor” to Hegseth: “We’re not going to comment on outlandish claims laundered through The New Yorker by a petty and jealous disgruntled former associate of Mr. Hegseth’s. Get back to us when you try your first attempt at actual journalism.”

Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut and a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, described the report of Hegseth’s drinking as alarming and disqualifying. In a phone interview, Blumenthal, who currently leads the Senate committee that will review Hegseth’s nomination, told me, “Much as we might be sympathetic to people with continuing alcohol problems, they shouldn’t be at the top of our national-security structure.” Blumenthal went on, “It’s dangerous. The Secretary of Defense is involved in every issue of national security. He’s involved in the use of nuclear weapons. He’s the one who approves sending troops into combat. He approves drone strikes that may involve civilian casualties. Literally life-and-death issues are in the hands of the Secretary of Defense, and entrusting these kinds of issues to someone who might be incapacitated for any reason is a risk we cannot take.”

Let’s go back to Pam Bondage for this analysis by Marci of Empty Wheel. “America Just Failed the Test of Responding to Trump’s Politicized Prosecutions.”  This really puts Biden’s Pardon of his son in place.  We know what’s coming next, and Well, it ain’t that pretty at all.

Let’s imagine that, two years from now, Pam Bondi rolls out charges against some onetime adversary of Donald Trump. To the extent that journalists will still be employed and reading court filings, to the extent that prosecutors under Emil Bove (who at SDNY oversaw a team sanctioned for discovery violations) comply with discovery requirements, the adversary in question learns the following about his prosecution:

• The case started when an investigator started looking into a transnational trafficking network
• The investigator discovered that the prominent adversary had paid one of the sex workers trafficked in the network
• Rather than pursuing the traffickers, the investigator used the payment for sex as cause to open an investigation
• Of course, no one is going to charge a John … so the investigator starts pulling divorce records and four year old tax returns to try to move from that payment for sex work to something that can be charged
• Then the investigator started incorporating oppo research from Peter Schweizer into his investigation
• Kash Patel’s FBI set up protected ways to accept tips from Trump supporters who’ve doctored documents to create a crime
• Trump called up Bondi and told her to take more aggressive steps
• Trump called up foreign leaders asking for help on this prosecution
• Bondi then set up a way to launder that information from foreign sources, including known spies, into the investigation of the adversary
• Patel’s FBI asked a partisan informant to fabricate claims against the adversary
• Trump publicly called out prosecutors — resulting in them and their children being followed — because they had not yet charged his adversary
• Ultimately, the adversary got charged on 5-year old dirt, and only then, after charging, did prosecutors quickly do the investigative work to win the case at trial

Now, as I’ve described it, you surely imagine you’d say, wow, that looks like a thoroughly corrupt prosecution, a clear case of Trump using DOJ to punish his adversaries.

Right?

It’s not so much that investigators didn’t, after the fact, find a crime to charge. They did. If you investigate most high profile people long enough, you’ll find something to charge, particularly if multiple people come to DOJ with doctored evidence to help create that crime.

It’s that someone found the name of an adversary in the digital records of crimes that were more important to investigate, and instead of pursuing that crime, used the electronic record as an excuse to keep looking until they found some evidence of a crime against Trump’s adversary.

Everyone would recognize that’s what happened, right?

Of course not. Of course no one would recognize that that was a political prosecution.

We need no further proof than the fact that none of those very same details showed up in any of the coverage of the Hunter Biden investigation. Not now that he has been pardoned. Not when all these details came out last year. Not in any of the retrospectives of the times Trump demanded investigations on his adversaries.

What will happen instead is that a bunch of self-important DC scribes will chase the most salacious allegations, provide endless headlines about sex workers and wild parties. The DC scribes will ignore every detail about the legal investigation — every one!! — and instead use the prosecution as an opportunity to sell political scandal. And also, they will point to their Tiger Beat coverage as proof, they say, they are not politically biased.

Rather than diligently rooting out the obviously politicized prosecution, the press will be complicit in it.

And rather than deciding that the adversary was the target of an obviously politicized prosecution, American public opinion would instead decide that the adversary was icky, and because he is icky, his statements about Trump cannot be credited.

That is what political prosecutions look like. That is, of course, precisely what the Hunter Biden prosecution was (ignoring the assurances from prosecutors who say no one with the fact set Hunter faced would be charged). Every single bullet has an analogue in the Hunter Biden case. That obviously political prosecution is what happened.

Once the GOP got the House majority, they did nothing else but platform these claims, which a different set of self-important scribes treated as an interesting process story, not an obvious case of a great abuse of government power.

And now that Biden has pardoned his son, the very same self important scribes who ignored all the signs this was a political prosecution, are giving non-stop coverage to a pardon that — unlike those of Trump’s Coffee Boy, National Security Adviser, campaign manager, personal lawyer, and rat-fucker — are not about self-protection, most with no mention of all the evidence Trump ordered up this prosecution to target Joe Biden.

The question is, what are we going to do about this, now that we have rock solid proof the press establishment is not only incapable, but wildly uninterested, in rooting out this kind of politicized prosecution — at least not when they can instead sell scandal?

In the face of seeing Pam Bondi and Kash Patel preparing to redouble efforts to find politicized prosecutions against Donald Trump’s adversaries, Joe Biden chose to end the process, with his son, at least.

I’m actually on the record opposing the pardon — but not for the reasons everyone else is. I don’t think pardoning Hunter in this circumstance is corrupt. I take Biden at his word that he changed his mind about pardoning Hunter. I’m far more interested in Trump admitting he was lying about his plans to implement Project 2025 than that Biden reneged on assurances no one much believed anyway.

I oppose the pardon because it eliminates Hunter’s standing to appeal and with those appeals to begin telling the story that the media chose to ignore. I oppose the pardon because if we don’t start laying out how Trump already politicized DOJ while there’s a good base of legitimate judges in place, it’ll be far too late.

I frankly will give Biden a pass on this, knowing that he’d never do it if Harris was on her way to inauguration.  I know the Rule of Law is important. But how do we know what will be left of that once Trump takes office?  Frankly, I hope he’s staying up nights Trump-proofing things.  All you have to do is go to the Memeorandum page to see how obsessed the legacy media is with this action.

• Betsy Woodruff Swan / Politico: We haven’t seen a pardon as sweeping as Hunter Biden’s in generations
• Ivana Saric / Axios: What to know about presidents pardoning family members and allies …
• Rebecca Shabad / NBC News: White House press secretary defends Hunter Biden pardon: ‘Enough is enough’
• Alexander Burns / Politico: Joe Biden’s Parting Insult
• Alexander B. Howard / CIVIC TEXTS: On pardons, smartglasses, an authoritarian administration, and a case of the Cyber Mondays

Okay, let me address that last one.  Here are Alexander’s thoughts.

I understand why President Biden pardoned his son, even if I believe doing so set a terrible precedent at the exact wrong time in our history, along with breaking a promise he had repeatedly made for years.

It’s the icing on a rotten cake, in terms of allowing the appearance of corruption to fester and then issuing a sweeping pardon to encompass all acts for a decade, presumably to head off Trump persecuting Hunter Biden further.

I do not, however, buy arguments that Biden’s pardon someone now gives permission to Trump to abuse the pardon power or accelerates the shredding of constitutional and legal norms that the Trump administration began 8 years ago. Trump.

On his way out the door, Trump pardoned dozens of his supporters, including those convicted of far worse crimes that lying about substance abuse when buying a gun or tax offense. He’s been dangling pardons to people convicted of assaulting federal police or engaging in seditious conspiracy. There is no good faith from that quarter, so do not treat his claims about the abuse of the pardon power with any seriousness.

Yeah, what he said.  And also what he said on this.

As Tom Nichols observed in the Atlantic, commenting on Trump’s nomination of a conspiracy theorist who has promised to weaponize federal law enforcement against his political enemies and the press to lead the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI, “If you want to assemble the infrastructure of an authoritarian government, this is how you do it.”

Republican Senators are now a final bulwark against tyranny, after failing to uphold their oath by removing a corrupt demagogue from power & banning Trump from office in his second impeachment trial. The initial signs are not promising, but enough lawmakers are expressing doubt about appointing a

Every institution has now failed to check and balance Trump’s corruption and criminal conspiracies, from the Justice Department to Congress.

Worse lies ahead, if Trump is successful in installing loyalists across the defense, law enforcement, and intelligence agencies.

A transition insider told Axios that Trump “no longer listens to people, usually Senators, who tell him ‘that’s not how it’s done’ or ‘it doesn’t work that way.’ He no longer accepts that rationale.”

Senators must choose between their oaths to our Constitution, or Trump.

Yes, don’t forget the Senate.

The Romans used the name senatus for their most important seat of government, which derives from senexmeaning ‘old’ and meant ‘assembly of old men’ with a connotation of wisdom and experience. Members were sometimes referred to as ‘fathers’ orpatres, and so this combination of ideas illustrates that the Senate was a body designed to provide reasoned and balanced guidance to the Roman state and its people.

And, originally, our Senate was designed to “protect the rights of individual states and safeguard minority opinion in a system of government designed to give greater power to the national government.”

The Senate has two important and specific duties. Senators are empowered to conduct impeachment proceedings of high federal officials, are tasked with exercising the power of advice and consent on treaties, and play an important role in the confirmation (or denial) of certain appointments including ambassadors and judicial court justices.

You can’t look at those two things; one from an explanation of historical Rome, and the bottom one is Senate.gov describing itself to realize the institution has morphed. But then we still have to look at the voters to determine how someone as nauseating as Ted Cruz continues to weasel his way back into office.  Those two important and specific duties of Senators have not been carried out very well in the times of Incontinia Buttocks. What happens in the Senate and what doesn’t happen in the Senate will materially impact our lives.  I’m not certain that my two Senators are reachable, although Cassidy has done the right thing several times, much to my surprise. I’m not sure it will help, but all I can think of right now is that we all need to hold their feet to the fire or be consumed by it.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

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