Happy 4th of July Weekend, er’body. May the next few days be filled with beer, meat, and [intentional and harmless] explosions.
I’m sure most of you have vacations to start, so I won’t keep you.
Quick News Roundup
So Bill Cosby got out of prison. That sucks. I assumed it was on some bullshit technicality, but it turns out it was actually just egregious prosecutorial incompetence. I didn’t realize it at the time, but apparently the original prosecutor made a deal with Cosby for criminal immunity in exchange for testimony in a civil case. I guess the prosecutor didn’t think he could secure a criminal conviction with the available evidence, and took his chances with a civil proceeding. In so doing, Cosby essentially waived his 5th amendment right and testified in the civil case. But then a new prosecutor comes in and basically said “I never agreed to this deal,” and prosecutes Cosby with the testimony he gave under the guise of criminal immunity. Well, you can’t do that. That’s a clear violation of the 5th amendment. If anything, I’m surprised it got this far. How do you have an entire trial, conviction, and two years of a prison term based on evidence that should’ve been inadmissible in the first place? I’m not a lawyer, but geez. I’m kinda baffled that 1. the prosecutor would make that deal in the first place, and 2. that Cosby would take it.
So while Cosby is a monster who has deservedly had his reputation ruined and deserves to spend the rest of his life in prison, you can’t violate his constitutional rights to put him there.
In possibly the least surprising news story in recent history, the Trump Organization and its Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg were charged yesterday with 15 felony counts including several charges of tax fraud and falsifying business records.
I mean, obviously.
Anyone who’s even vaguely familiar with how Donald Trump does business — which is to say, most anyone who isn’t his ardent supporter — knows that Donald Trump is more crooked than a bucket of fish hooks.
So while this is the first instance of legal charges stemming from his business practices, I doubt it will be the last. Of course, he’ll try to spin this as a political prosecution — and hell, he might have a point. But if your insufferable politics draw attention to the crimes you’ve been committing for years, that’s not the same as a political prosecution.
These Friggin’ People, Kevin McCarthy Edition
The House of Representatives voted on Wednesday to create a select committee to investigate the attack on the Capitol on January 6th. The vote was almost entirely partisan, with a mere two Republicans — Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois — voting in favor.
House Minority Leader and craven dish rag Kevin McCarthy threatened his caucus that members who voted in favor of the measure could have their committee assignments stripped from them.
If you’re scoring at home, here are the things that Kevin McCarthy apparently considers worthy of stripping committee assignments:
Questioning why “white supremacy” or “white nationalist” is considered offensive, as happened to (thankfully former) Iowa representative Steve King; and
Voting in favor of forming a select committee to investigate the January 6th attack on the Capitol
And here’s a partial list of things that Kevin McCarthy apparently thinks doesn’t warrant stripping committee assignments:
Casual anti-Semitism
Addressing — not merely attending, but addressing — a political conference for white supremacists
Holding fundraisers with white supremacists
Needless to say, I don’t think McCarthy’s plan to close his eyes and plug his ears until this all goes away is going to be an effective strategy. Most notably because the chief driver of this entire scandal — which is to say, Donald Trump — does not want it to go away.
The effort to paint the investigation into January 6th as a partisan obsession on behalf of the Democrats falls apart when the former president puts out nearly-daily statements confirming that he still believes (or at least professes to believe) the pernicious conspiracies that led to the attack in the first place.
And, need I remind you, the entire “Hillary’s secret email server” story — which more than any other single factor can be blamed for her eventual electoral defeat — came about as the result of the Republican investigation into the attacks in Benghazi. So God knows what Democrats are going to find when they start poking around Trump’s communications concerning January 6th.
I know I bang this drum sort of a lot, but the Republican party — or, at the very least, a significant portion of the Republican party — is suffering from a form of mass hysteria. Now I know some of you might smugly chortle that Republicans have always been this way, but I would politely invite you to get bent. It wasn’t always like this. Not to this extent, and not on this scale.
And the longer McCarthy et al put off reckoning with that hysteria, the worse it’s going to be.
She’s a Grand Ol’ Flag
In honor of the 4th of July, here’s something I wrote on the occasion last year that I was pretty proud of:
Independence Day this year comes during strange times. Certainly some of the strangest during my lifetime. I think many Americans are simply tired from the events of the last several months, to the point that it seems almost impolite to enjoy ourselves. (Though I nonetheless intend to try.)
I was talking to a friend of mine recently who was feeling a bit morose about the current state of things — a feeling, all things considered, not at all unwarranted.
With the coronavirus pandemic, the lockdowns, the police incidents, the protests, the riots, our general political culture, she was wearied. Wearied to the point, she said, that she was considering taking down the American flag that she’s always had on her porch.
To that I replied, simply, [fornicate] that.
We’ve been reckoning lately with our history and our founding; and certain segments of our population would apparently prefer to focus almost exclusively on our national historic misdeeds. But if we expect people to acknowledge the ugliness in our history, we should expect just as much that they acknowledge the beauty.
It reminds me that the preamble to the Constitution references forming a “more perfect union.” The key phrase there is “more perfect.” It’s a tacit admission that this country, as founded, was not perfect. It’s not perfect now. Nor will it ever be perfect. Being formed, as we are, from the crooked timber of humanity, a perfect union is unattainable. But we should nonetheless strive to make it “more perfect.”
Were the Founding Fathers hypocrites for saying “all men are created equal with certain unalienable rights” while participating in (or at least tolerating) the widespread subjugation of fellow humans? Sure. Some of them even acknowledged as much at the time. But “hypocrite” is not a synonym for “wrong.” They merely planted the flag as close to that “perfect union” as they could get it. It would be the duty of future Americans to take up that flag and advance it closer to perfection.
We’re certainly more perfect than when we started, and dare I say more perfect now than we've ever been. That we are still far from and will never reach perfection should not diminish the progress we’ve made nor discourage us from further progress.
Our flag does not merely represent America as it is, it represents America as it should be. For all of our historic faults, our flag was carried by men waging war to rid this nation of slavery. Our flag was flown by Frederick Douglass, a man born into slavery, who praised the genius of the Declaration of Independence while simultaneously — and rightfully — shaming his contemporaries for the incomprehensible hypocrisy of perpetuating the inhumane institution under which he was born. Our flag was carried by men waging war to rid the world of Nazism. It was carried by men, like Martin Luther King Jr., who were protesting for racial equality. They didn’t protest against the flag even though it waved over a country that had denied them rights for centuries. They protested with the flag because they knew the rights and freedoms represented by that flag applied equally to them. It was their flag too.
Our flag is planted on the moon in testament to the greatest scientific achievement in the history of our species. Our flag was carried by the sailor in the South China Sea in the early 1980s, who was greeted by a boat full of refugees with the exclamation “Hello, American sailor! Hello, Freedom Man!” Millions of people throughout our history have risked their lives to come here, viewing our flag as a symbol of freedom and liberty.
Those things represent America as it should be, and things of which we should be proud. Things worth waving a flag over.
I understand that many of my fellow countrymen are dispirited right now, but we still have many things to celebrate. We also have work to do.
The president is a schmuck, sure, but presidents have been schmucks before. A noticeable portion of the country is collectively and petulantly shirking their civic duty, but it was ever thus. The current unpleasantness does not diminish the deeds of the abolitionists, the boys of Pointe du Hoc, the anti-segregationists, or of Freedom Man. Nor does it diminish our responsibility to pursue the “more perfect union.”
If a portion of our countrymen — to include the president himself — are failing, at the moment, to live up to American ideals; if the proverbial luster of the flag isn’t as bright as we would like; the solution is not to shrink away and cede the reputation of the flag and thereby the country to those who poorly represent it. The solution is to reassert our claim to the flag in pursuit of that more perfect union. It’s our flag too.
'Tis the star-spangled banner, and long may it wave, o’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.
Trient-Weekly Trivia
Wednesday’s answer:
Category: American History
Clue: He was the first American in space and later commanded the Apollo 14 flight.
Alan Shepard
Today’s clue:
Category: Freedom
Clue: The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects these five particular freedoms.
Dispatches from the Homefront
My wife had a dinner this week for a coworker that was leaving, which meant that I had solo duty for our daughter’s bedtime. Things went pretty well for a while. I’ve given her dinner by myself before. I’ve given her a bath by myself before. And throughout the evening, my daughter would occasionally ask “Mommy coming home?” and I would say, truthfully, “yeah, mommy’s coming home later.” And that was fine.
But then I started reading her bedtime books by myself, and that had never happened before; so she knew something was up.
And when I started singing her goodnight song, it finally occurred to her that mommy wasn’t coming home for bedtime.
Instant, bitter tears of abandonment. Just inconsolable.
But she calmed down eventually; and on the bright side all the sobbing seemed to wear her out because she fell asleep way faster than normal.