Donald Trump, the greatest failure in American history, betrayed the United States of America and desecrated the presidential oath of office.
Twice impeached and charged with 37 felony counts over his alleged misconduct involving the nation’s most sensitive secrets, Donald Trump will soon be held accountable for inciting an insurrection against the US Constitution and trying to take political power illegally. He attempted to incite a coup d’état. It was planned, organized and executed from within his White House. It was seditious and criminal.
There is no betrayal against the American flag that equals Trump’s since the Civil War. His treachery equals that of Jefferson Davis. He attacked what he swore to preserve, protect and defend. He assaulted the sacrifices and memory of 250 years of patriots who built the United States with his outlandish misconduct. His presidency was a national humiliation without respite.
His current candidacy is our national herpes. He is America’s loathsome canker and most exquisite scum bag. He is rotten, dishonest, staggeringly corrupt, bombastic, ignorant and cruel. He combines imbecility and arrogance into a potent weapon, which for some reason has found appeal among America’s vast taker and victim classes. Wherever grievance is a virtue and self-pity heroic, a Trump flag will be flying high. The pathetic and weak need their heroes too, after all.
All of the graves in the American cemetery that lies above Omaha Beach face west, back across the Atlantic Ocean towards the United States. The graves are laid out in perfect symmetry. It is an American army at permanent rest. Each died in combat against a profound evil. They died so that darkness would not fall over the world. How are we measuring up?
Donald Trump is a criminal and an abomination. He is a grotesquerie. He tried to burn America down. What he did was criminal, and no one is above the law in America. He is a shameful man and his bill has come due — finally.
WASHINGTON, DC – OCTOBER 04: Attorney General of Alabama Steve Marshall speaks to members of the press after the oral argument of the Merrill v. Milligan case at the U.S. Supreme Court on October 4, 2022. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)Getty Images
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This is an opinion column.
Steve Marshall’s gonna make you pay. In more ways than one.
And a new law will help him shield some of those getting paid.
Marshall has convinced Alabama to award a $30,000 contract to a lawyer to “ensure that the Equal Rights Amendment is not illegally added to the U.S, Constitution,” and another $108,000 for a lawyer who specializes in challenging federal actions, which Marshall should be good at by now.
And if you add up the lawyers – and the doctors and psychologists who claim to be experts in gender identity – the Alabama Legislature’s Contract Review Committee over the last two years has awarded up to $2.7 million in contracts to help Marshall defend the state’s anti-trans laws. Some of those contracts were passed last year and renewed this year.
The state has already paid more than $400,000 to those defenders, including $20,000 to Dianna T. Kenny, an Australian critic of transgender politics, and $28,000 to controversial James Cantor, a Canadian sexologist who is a darling of the anti-trans crowd but has been labeled a troll by trans advocates. He quit the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality after being criticized for his views.
Who knows when it will end? The money will pile up, but don’t expect to find out how much more about what “experts” might get paid, thanks to a bill pushed by Marshall this year. The AG – he dares not defend your right to transparency in his government – is now allowed to redact the names of people hired for professional services related to lawsuits. That doesn’t include the lawyers themselves.
We won’t have a right to know who they are. We just pay for them. One way or another.
And on we go.
The Legislature’s Contract Review Committee last week approved contracts worth $975,000 for five lawyers from Washington D.C.’s Cooper & Kirk, as the Alabama Reflector first reported. Another lawyer, Christopher Mills, was granted a $180,000 contract for the same type of work, and has already been paid $91,900 over the last two years.
At the same meeting the panel reapproved contracts to pay one lawyer, Bill Lunsford, up to $14.9 million over the next two years. That’s money we’re spending to defend Alabama’s odious prison system, instead of spending it on fixing prisons. That includes $9.9 million over two years to defend a suit the U.S. Justice Department filed against Alabama for failing to protect inmates from each other and from guards.
Lunsford has already been paid $17.8 million over the last five years, state finance records show, prompting Rep. Chris England to refer to Lunsford as his own “government agency at this point.”
Mandy Spiers, a lawyer for the Alabama Department of Corrections, told members of the Contract Review Committee the agency has no choice but to fight the case with outside lawyers picked by the attorney general
“The attorney general’s office has prohibited us from settling this case, multiple times,” she said of the federal government’s case against Alabama.
She also reminded them that Marshall in April stripped the “Deputy AG” designations from ADOC lawyers, so they can no longer represent the system in cases.
“So we are unable to bring any of them in-house,” she said.
Marshall’s office has not responded to questions about the fiscal responsibility of it all. Much less the humanity.
But Rep. England, a member of the Contract Review Committee, said the current contracts are just a fraction of what you will have to pay to defend this admittedly deeply flawed prison system.
“I’m not hung up on $9.9 million. I’m hung up on well over a hundred million dollars over the life of this litigation that’s going to the same …attorney,” England said.
And there’s the thing. We are throwing big money away to defend something any reasonable person would see as wrong. An overcrowded, understaffed prison system rife with death, disease, rape, assault, extortion, assault, drugs and indifference.
England, a lawyer, said it, too.
“There’s not much dispute in terms of liability here, in terms of our issues and overcrowding and conditions and staffing and so forth,” he said. “So a lot of this just continues to drag on and it just ends up costing us a lot more money instead of just trying to figure out a way to work it out.”
We spend huge amounts of money to fight the culture wars, to protect our ability to discriminate, and to ignore our own flaws.
We pay for our sins in millions of ways.
Steve Marshall makes sure of it. Just don’t ask who we paid.
John Archibald is a two-time Pulitzer winner at AL.com.
The classified documents case really is strong. Remember the case against Hilary Clinton concerning her emails? Trump was President and the evidence to be brought into play, and the charges’ seriousness, are orders of magnitude greater than Clinton’s.
But what will be most interesting to watch is not Trump and his eminently predictable reaction—a performance of bravado and flat denial written in capitals—but his followers. From Rep. Jim Jordan down to the grassroots MAGA base, there will be an air of desperation as well a sense of entrenchment. We can easily imagine a scenario where few of them will fall by the wayside.
After all, we know as well as anyone how difficult it can be to give up on God.
The tales of deconversion that many writers and readers have experienced here at OnlySky and at any number of repositories for skeptical and secular folk are chock full of psychological and sociological anguish. For those MAGA fans, that potential anguish is far less desirable than fighting like an injured bear backed into a corner.
We should expect some serious guttural roaring and flailing of paws.
The problem is, those paws can flail and do some damage. Let us hop that there is no violence that comes from such an indictment in the way we observed on Jan 6th. They’ve got form.
As I have said before, Christian theologians and apologists have one job: to maintain the primacy—the moral perfection—of both God and the Bible. Everything they do is to maintain both at the apex of reality. Such believers hold to a presupposition of the goodness of God and his awesome revelation.
Whether it be in dealing with slavery or rape in the Bible, or understanding suffering and evil in the world, one “truth” must be held: the Bible and God are untouchably awesome and simply cannot be at fault. Theology is then created to muddy the waters, claim that atheists have no right to make moral judgments, blame humans for God’s design and creation faults, and ultimately get God off the hook.
Because God cannot be anything but morally perfect.
Trump is a divine member of the MAGA pantheon, positioned just above Yahweh, and just below…no other entitity in human conception. When Trump is so obviously in trouble because he has so obviously broken a list of rules longer than one of his golf courses, then his followers have to engage in mental gymnastics just as theologians do to explain ebola in light of their supposedly all-loving God.
This is cognitive dissonance reduction. Cognitive dissonance is the disharmony we experience in our minds when we hold a core belief and are then confronted with evidence against that belief. Our brains do not like disharmony and so go through a number of mental processes in an attempt to harmonize the contradiction.
The overarching lesson to be learned here is that people will go to extraordinary lengths to maintain a core belief. This might mean experiencing one of the following:
Adapting the core belief marginally.
Ignoring the contrary data—burying one’s head in the sand.
Compartmentalizing the contrary data and core belief.
Adapting the contrary data.
Denying the contrary data.
Delegitimizing the source of the new data.
Reducing the importance or value of either the contrary data or the core belief.
Whataboutism.
Attacking the messenger of the contrary data.
The recent indictment won’t touch the die-hard believers—data bouncing off the impenetrable Trumpian rock of core belief like morality trying to enter into the mind of their leader. There are stark similarities between Trump and God, or, more accurately, between the die-hard supporters of Donald J. Trump and Christian apologists.
Trump is their god, and cannot be budged from the zenith of political worship. Therefore, for the Trump apologist, conspiracy theories muddy the waters, whataboutery obfuscates by pointing at faults in others, blame is apportioned to Clinton, Obama, Biden, and, well, anybody else other than Trump and… (refer to the list above). Because Trump, to them at least, cannot be anything but morally perfect.
This is no better witnessed than at Trump rallies—political megachurches, if you will—where he whips his supporters into a political fervor. And just as the poor attendees of megachurches so often overlook the obscene wealth of their church leaders, and overlook their often multitudinous moral shortcomings, so too do Trump cultists.
The next few months, especially if further court cases being to gain traction, will be a mighty test for the cognitive dissonance reduction abilities of so many in the GOP, from Marjorie Taylor Greene to Matt Gaetz, and from your neighbor to your work colleague. Humans are strange things, and the likelihood is that Trump’s overtly criminal behavior (that they wouldn’t, for a second, have stood for had it been committed by a Democrat politician) will most probably be excused by so many of his followers.
Perhaps a Trump 2.0 will turn up and allow those cast adrift on the rotten ship Trump, drifting on the currents of borrowed time, to wholesale escape to a new vessel.
And yet the USS DeSantis sunk before it could even leave port.
The problem is, even if Trump sinks, all of those aboard will have no option but to jump ship. But they can all swim. And when they finally get ashore, they’ll be angry as hell.
I encourage you to read these articles (and watch the videos) to gain understanding and perspective concerning the historical federal case of United States of America vs. Donald J. Trump.
I encourage you to read these articles (and watch the videos) to gain understanding and perspective concerning the historical federal case of United States of America vs. Donald J. Trump.
I encourage you to read these articles (and watch the videos) to gain understanding and perspective concerning the historical federal case of United States of America vs. Donald J. Trump.
I encourage you to read these articles (and watch the videos) to gain understanding and perspective concerning the historical federal case of United States of America vs. Donald J. Trump.
I encourage you to read these articles (and watch the videos) to gain understanding and perspective concerning the historical federal case of United States of America vs. Donald J. Trump.
I encourage you to read these articles (and watch the videos) to gain understanding and perspective concerning the historical federal case of United States of America vs. Donald J. Trump.
I encourage you to read these articles (and watch the videos) to gain understanding and perspective concerning the historical federal case of United States of America vs. Donald J. Trump.
by 
The Pencil-Driven Life 