STOP PRESS (28 Apr., 2024)
Once again, Donald John Trump has been branded as ‘unindicted co-conspirator #1’ in a criminal trial. The MSNBC Daily reports: “A grand jury in Arizona on Wednesday indicted 18 people – including key Trump aides and allies Rudy Giuliani, Mark Meadows and Boris Epshteyn – for their involvement in an alleged ‘fake electors’ plot to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in the state.”
Yet for some reason, around 70% of Republican voters still believe him when he says it was Biden who ‘stole’ the election from Trump! (CNN poll)
(Incidentally, why has Meadows not been imprisoned for deliberately lying about his address on a voter registration form four years ago in North Carolina? Pamela Moses got six years and a day for making an honest mistake over her voter registration in Tennessee, but then, she’s Black, and he’s just puce.)
Nice try
Rightwing ‘news’ network, AON, has been forced to give up an attempt to suggest that Stormy Damiels had a sexual relationship with Michael Cohen, who then extorted the money from Trump’s election funds without Trump knowing, when their only ‘source’, her lawyer, Michael Avenatti, denied ever telling them that. AON has also had to pay out $millions to Dominion, the voting machine company they claimed had rigged the 2020 election on behalf of the Democrats – a theory still believed by millions of Trump supporters despite a similar fate befalling Fox News last year. (MSNBC)
The Witch/Liar Project
Given that the Washington Post factcheckers called Trump out over no fewer than 35 THOUSAND untrue claims during his four-year reign as the worst President in US history, with the possible exception of his genocidal C19th hero, Andrew Jackson, The Pumpkin has been wondering why the media never questions those obsessive and inflammatory statements he makes outside the courtrooms of the Union every day, whining that what is happening to him is a ‘witch hunt’ cooked up by the Biden administration and its weaponised court officials.
His current trial just getting underway in Manhattan on 34 counts of falsifying business records to conceal personal payments made illegally with campaign funds is invariably presented in the news as a single charge, of ‘paying off a porn star’ – as big a lie in its own way as Trump’s delusionary claims that he is the most persecuted President in history, a myth in which he has clearly come to believe. It is not illegal to pay off porn stars! I do it all the time.
For a start, it was Trump who began the process of ‘weaponising’ the justice department, with his futile attempts to prevent publication of the Mueller report into his campaign team’s interactions with Russian intelligence agents. A process that included firing numerous senior investigators and legal prosecutors, as well as installing a complaisant Attorney General – and Trump who packed the Supreme Court with conservatives and installed over 200 new circuit judges with lifelong tenure, many of them inexperienced or incompetent, who had expressed loyalty to him.
Then, this trial in fact began six years ago with the conviction of his former lawyer and bag-man, Michael Cohen on various charges, including tax evasion and lying to the FBI, when ‘Individual One’, as Trump was labelled in court, was branded as an ‘unindicted co-conspirator’, after Cohen had outed his former boss under oath as having ordered him to make those disguised payments. Not to one ‘porn star’ who had broken her non-disclosure agreement to announce that she and Trump had had a not particularly memorable one-night stand at a golf tournament, but to two women, including a Playboy centrefold, Karen McDougal, who admitted to a six-months long affair with the coiffed sex-pest while his wife was giving birth to their son Barron.
(A third woman, Playboy model, Shari Bechard, was allegedly paid $1.6 million to keep quiet about an abortion, responsibility for which was claimed by a Republican fundraiser and friend of the President, Elliott Broidy, although few people believed him. Again it was Cohen, Trump’s lieutenant, who arranged the payment.) The Pumpkin was delighted last night when the BBC’s north America editor, Sarah Smith, usually as supine as her predecessor John ‘Sopoor’ Sopel, finally gave a brief shout-out to McDougal after weeks of pretending that the luridly named Stormy Daniels (Stephanie Clifford) was the sole recipient of Trump’s generosity; although today, all the coverage was back to misleading normality.
Given the genesis of the case against Trump, it can hardly be described as a witch hunt inspired by Biden, who was still several years away from having any influence in the matter. While, let us not forget, Biden has himself been the genuine victim of a real witch hunt inspired by Trump, that led the President to commit yet another federal crime by witholding Congressionally-approved aid to Ukraine unless President Zelinskiy agreed to instigate a phony case against Biden and his son Hunter on corruption charges. Another instance of ‘transference’, a habit of which many psychiatrists have accused him.
Though impeached and found wanting by the lower House of Representatives, thanks to the refusal of the Senate, Republican controlled at the time, to even consider the overwhelming evidence against him, Trump has been empowered to protest his innocence of absolutely everything, and to claim that the incredible total of 91 criminal charges he is currently facing are the fantasies of a hidden ‘Deep State’ that conspires against his agenda to make America great again; while it must be obvious to anyone half-awake that his openly declared policies amount to installing a self-serving kleptocratic regime behind the walls of an isolationist and backward-looking autocracy, its criminal behaviours freed from the constraints of the almighty Constitution.
But no, here we are again, idly watching the dispiriting process of normalisation of a deranged old egotist, conducted by an amnesic media on both sides of the pond; the room, emptied of oxygen.
Fucking cheek department
* Hang on, how many articles? *
- “You’ve read 2152, to be precise. That is an awful lot of free, independent journalism!
- “It is clear that you get an incredible amount of value from our reporting, all for free. We’d like to humbly suggest that, since you are one of our most engaged and prolific readers, it would only be fair to support us financially in return.”
Uncle Bogler responds in kind to this astonishing ad hominem assault by the Editor of The Guardian – a newspaper whose owners, the Scott Trust, are sitting on a cash pile approaching one billion pounds:
Dear Ms Viner
I don’t know how old you are, if your secret agents let me live I’ll be 75 in October. Working in a newsroom, aged 20, I started reading your paper in 1970, anyway before you were born, and have no idea how many paid-for daily editions I must have bought over many years after that, supporting ‘independent journalism’ out of my hack’s meagre wage.
Eventually I switched to the digital edition, which is in theory supplied free of charge. After a while I felt you should get something in return, so I signed up for a subscription at £8 a month, about the same as I pay the New York Times and the Washington Post.
(One of them will have to go!)
Last August you demonstrated in the clearest possible terms that your journalism is far from ‘independent’, when you suspended the nation’s greatest political cartoonist, Martin Rowson, caving in under pressure from a Jewish lobby group over a preposterous allegation of antisemitism. The butt of his humour was quite clearly directed at Boris Johnson*.
No sooner had he been brought back from the sin-bin – his acerbic wit much muted – than you sacked that other brilliant cartoonist, Steve Bell, for submitting a cartoon you didn’t even publish, again making the ludicrous assertion (based on a complete misreading of the text of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice) that it was antisemitic, before any of the Tel Aviv mafia had even had a chance to exert pressure on you.
He has never returned.
Until he does, you can make whatever importunate demands you like on my pension. Splitting my own infinitives with gay abandon, I would like to humbly suggest, you can go fuck yourselves.
Independent, my arse.
(PS: don’t imagine that scrolling through your headlines looking desperately for engaging content is the same as actually reading the articles.)
- The Rowson cartoon actually showed a diminitive figure, that of Mr Richard Sharp, bearing a bag of cash towards a much larger figure, Johnson, squatting toad-like atop a pile of treasure. The story being that Sharp might be assumed to have acquired his influential position as Chairman of the BBC after assisting the prime minister to obtain surety for a loan of £800 thousand from an acqaintance. Mr Sharp just happens to be Jewish, not that anyone would have known; the Board of Deputies of British Jews objected to the caricature, whose prominent nose, they said, was an antisemitic trope. Oddly, no-one has objected to the faintly obscene depiction of Johnson as a naked fat man with a forked tongue. Mr Sharp later resigned his post.
A sense of irony
And while you’re shuffling disconcertedly in your chair and thinking, hang on, this bloke’s a closet antisemite, it might be a good time to enquire whether the UK’s Chief Rabbi, Sir Ephraim Mirvis, has any sense of historical irony?
It’s hard to imagine he has, when he kicked off his Passover ‘Thought for the Day’ on the BBC’s Today programme by instancing as an example of Jewish fortitude in the face of adversity, this week’s 80th anniversary of the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto during World War Two.
It’s a historical event which I have had the temerity to argue in a previous post has precise and uncomfortable parallels with the liquidation of Gaza and its Palestinian population, walled as they have been into a confined and overcrowded area with not enough food, water, medical supplies, autonomy and life opportunities by an occupying power exercising overwhelming and seemingly indiscriminate punitive force in the face of the people’s futile resistance to such oppression.
Or ‘self-defence’, as the generously American-resourced Netanyahu regime explains it, as after six months of attritional bombing the corrupt prime minister fighting for his political life writes his blackened name in rubble and the deaths and maiming of many thousands of children.
We witnessed last week, for instance, the death in her incubator of a newborn baby girl, rescued by emergency cesarian section from her dying mother after the entire family were killed in an Israeli airstrike, glibly explained away by one or other of the paid army liars* as an attack on a Hamas terror cell. Within a day or two, the waters had closed over the news as fresh atrocities supervened.
Which is in no way to pardon the gruesome ultraviolence with which that resistance ultimately manifested itself on 7th October, 2023; the sometimes lethal amateur rocketry over the years, or prior acts of terrorism in the 1970s by, for instance, the Palestine Liberation Organisation. But it does not help to invent a lie, that the Hamas excursion was somehow a one-off event, isolated in history, entirely characteristic, and not rooted in 75 years of Palestinian resistance to an unjust occupation creating a two-tier state that, itself, was born from the partial ethnic cleansing of the native population and the ongoing illegitimate seizure of land by hyper-religious ‘settlers’ claiming divine authority.
It was hardly what the founding president, David ben-Gurion, can have envisaged when he declared in front of the United Nations in 1948 that the nascent State of Israel was to be a secular nation that welcomed all peoples and all religions.
It’s a story that demands a sense of irony, to be honest.
- Liars? In 2023, a Palestinian woman journalist working for Al Jazeera was shot through the head while covering a protest in the occupied West Bank, involving unarmed demonstrators at a road block. A UN report concluded: Israeli forces used “lethal force without justification” when they shot and killed Shireen Abu Akleh, violating her “right to life”. The IDF claimed, falsely, that she had been hit by crossfire. The death toll among Palestinian and foreign journalists in the Gaza operation to date is 108. A military spokesman stated: “We do not target journalists”.
A propos, the British-born US commentator, Mehdi Hasan, writes in a Guardian Comment: “Since the horrific 7 October attack, the far-right Israeli government and its army of propagandists have deceived and fooled Western politicians and journalists not once or twice, but multiple times. There are almost too many lies, distortions and falsehoods to keep track of.” (www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/may/02/israel-gaza-lies-western-backers)
Quite.
Cunning linguists
Whoopee! After years of receiving two or three Comments a day written in Turkish, a language I’m afraid I don’t understand, all of them adverting (apparently approvingly) to a long-ago Post I wrote entitled ‘Your average Tory CUNT – ‘Conservative and Unionist Neo-Thatcherite’ – I have finally received one in English:
- “Thank you for being a part of our blog community! Your presence and engagement make all the difference. We’re grateful for the opportunity to share insights and knowledge with such a wonderful audience. We hope our recent post added value to your day and perhaps even sparked some new ideas. Your support fuels our passion for writing. Please continue to share your thoughts and experiences with us. Together, we can make this space even more vibrant and enriching. Thank you for your ongoing support”
It took me about three seconds to realise, they’re using AI text generation. Who are these shadowy folk, describing themselves as ‘Webturka’? And why me?
GW
And just space to squeeze in a quick global warming report:
SE Asia, 40-45 degrees C. pretty well everywhere.
Brazil: 75 towns inundated, casualties, after ‘torrential rain’ in the province of Rio Grande do Sul. A dam gives way, killing over 60.
USA: 100 tornadoes in a week, whole communities razed, at least 5 dead, more storms forecast. Northern California braces for 2 feet of snow. (See http://www.accuweather.com/en/videos/catastrophic-tornado-causes-major-damage-to-downtown-area/66a60451-8430-49c2-be27-0894eb3ee247)
China, too, has been experiencing destructive tornadoes.