Watching the Train Wreck from My Porch

 The internist knows everything, but can do nothing; the surgeon knows nothing, but can do everything; the pathologist knows everything and can do everything, but too late.

--Old Housestaff proverb

Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost.

--H.D. Thoreau

It is a man's opinion of himself which determines his fate.

--H.D. Thoreau

Being an old decrepit bag of bones, that's what's ridiculous. Gettin' old.

--Sam the Lion, "The Last Picture Show."

In high school, Mad Dog could see there was no point asking his teachers any questions because they were, with some rare exceptions, only a page ahead of him in the textbook. Asking really interesting questions of these people was only likely to create embarrassment. That changed in college, where asking the professor a question elicited not only an enlightening answer, but often ignited a whole rocket launch of erudition, unexpected, delightful and taking Mad Dog into realms unanticipated and enriching. But that was only true for the humanities--in science classes, he was more or less back to high school, and the answers to his questions were evasive.  In medical school the most important questions were often answered: "I don't know. If you want to find out, here's the study you'd have to do." Often, the older doctors had seen things and they could tell you the important information that what you were seeing in a patient was either to be expected or unexpected, which was important. The professors in medical school knew more than the students. But so did the nurses. We were all told as interns to ask the nurses who knew way more medicine than we did as new medical school graduates, and boy did they ever.

On rounds one day, a man who had just been sent to the ward after a week in the cardiac care unit for a heart attack told us he was having a little tightness in his chest, and then he suddenly asked for a bed pan: the two nurses looked at each other in alarm--one rolled down the head of his bed and the other ran for the Crash Cart where all the medications and equipment for cardiac resuscitation were kept. Sure enough, before Mad Dog had time to even ask what all the fuss was about, the patient arrested and he was resuscitated successfully because the nurses were slapping all the Bristojets of lidocaine in our hands, and had the chest pads for the electric cardioverter in place within seconds. They knew that telltale signal of vagal release which preceded cardiac arrest.

Now, in his dotage, Mad Dog can see the signals: He has seen it all before. He knows that the Trumpish use of the word "antisemitism" has nothing to do with any desire to protect Jews from abuse, but is simply a replacement motif for anti-intellectualism, for resentment of professors at elite universities who think they are better than other people, and smarter and higher class. But rather than resorting to "effete intellectuals" or "nattering nabobs of negativism" like Spiro Agnew, Trump can do what autocrats do, he can find a victim to create and defend. So he is the champion of resistance to antisemitism, which gives him license to wreck universities, to dance on the graves of those smartass professors and university presidents. 

New Hampshire Howl, Obadiah Youngblood

Richard Hofstadter wrote about Anti Intellectualism in American Life in the 1960's. Then it was Senator Joseph McCarthy, who was pointing to the universities as the haven of Communists, elitists and people who thought they were better than everyone else.

So these are the hallmarks of the disease Mad Dog knows, has seen before. 

But, as Bill Clinton once observed about retirement: "When I was President, I had to be very careful about what I said; every word, every phrase I used was dissected, analyzed and often came back to haunt me. Now, out of office I can say whatever I want, what I really believe. Trouble is, nobody cares. Nobody even listens."

And so that's Mad Dog, sitting on his porch in New Hampshire, watching the slow motion train wreck, seeing masked men in bullet proof vests, abduct people for looking Hispanic, speaking Spanish or working on a roof or in a yard landscaping, and the Supreme Court says that's all just fine and reasonable. 

And now we have a national police, which the Germans called their Gestapo; we call it ICE. ICE, to Mad Dog's ear is way cooler. Cool as ICE. ICEMAN cometh. ICE in his veins. IIIIICE!

Oh, that's the disease all right. Get the crash cart. Get out the paddles. 

But no, Mad Dog is just an old decrepit bag of bones, watching the new generation rise, and he watches this with eyes which have had the youth bled from them by the hard sleet and snow winters, seeing the sham with well earned cynicism. But, like the elders of Peyton Place, sometimes, against all the warnings of better judgment, he turns his tired winter eyes toward heaven, to seek the first traces of a false softening. (Thanks, Ms. Metalious.)

Carleigh Bariont

Now, there is a youngster, full of hope, running in the Democratic primary for Congress, Carleigh Beriont. She has children in the Hampton public schools and she is a graduate of Mt. Holyoke College and holds several degrees including a PhD from Harvard. She is "running for the children," best as Mad Dog can discern. She is a "quality candidate."

Which is why Mad Dog thinks she doesn't have a chance.

Mad Dog holds three diplomas from Ivy League universities and he knows exactly what those degrees mean and what they do not mean.

Successful students, Mad Dog thinks are the Eddie Haskells of the world. Mad Dog realizes 99% of his readership has no idea who Eddie Haskell was, because they were too young to watch "Leave it to Beaver." But the Ivy League was filled with Eddie Haskell's. You can google it, thank God. (Even Bubbles, of The Wire, made Leave It to Beaver allusions, a complete anachronism, and a jarringly out of character reference, but not even David Simon could resist citing that generational/cultural touchstone. Basically, the crowd which remembers "All Shook Up," will not need to google. If you do, you are forgiven.)

***

Mad Dog has  observed elections, candidates and public opinion for 17 years in New Hampshire and he has formulated Rule One of Candidacy in this state: The most obvious, best choice for any office never wins. That is the one sure thing you can bet on.

Terence O'Rourke

When Terence O'Rourke ran for the same seat in a Congressional primary with eleven candidate some years ago, he was head and shoulders above everyone else in the crowd. He had enough educational bone fides (Marquette University BA, Tulane Law, JD) but he was also a combat veteran, an Army Ranger, winner of a bronze star (which he never mentioned, unless directly asked) and an all around stellar human being. He came in dead last by a country mile. People round here thought he was "too aggressive," not nice enough. 

Senator Klobuchar

When Amy Klobuchar came to New Hampshire during primary season, running for the Presidential nomination, Mad Dog looked at her resume`: Yale undergrad, University of Chicago Law. Uh-oh, he thought.

The thing about Ivy Leaguers is they tend to be company men. Which is to say, they tend to be careful not to offend. They have got into their prestigious places not by rebelling but by regurgitating, by playing the game, by pleasing people, by learning not to annoy those who have some power over their fates.

So Mad Dog asked Senator Klobuchar: "You have told us about all the programs and policies you hope to enact. But how do you propose to defeat a candidate of charisma with a campaign of policy?"

Mad Dog saw a brief flicker of incomprehension, then panic, flit across the Senator's face. Then she collected herself and she said, "Well, I think I have charisma!"

Clearly, not a question she had thought about or been prepared for, and she managed to dredge up a laugh line, but, nevertheless, telling.

Had Senator Klobuchar pulled Mad Dog aside and said, "I'll come by and sit on your porch and we'll chat about this," Mad Dog would have made the time. He would have told her what she was up against is a man who had made his public image over a decade, who rejected the carefully parsed, well formed paragraphs, who was not afraid to offend, who owned "authenticity" and if she wanted to beat that guy she'd need to start swinging for the fences and stop playing to simply not lose. She'd have to be outrageous. She might have replied, "Bernie is already doing that and getting nowhere." And Mad Dog would have said, "But he's not pretty or young or from the Midwest."

Senator Klobuchar never came  to sit on Mad Dog's porch. Neither will Carleigh Beriont. 

No loss for them.

Mad Dog will have no answers for them. 

But he believes he has, at least, managed to ask the right question.

Measles, Influenza, Covid: Tales from the Crypt

 

Of all the people Mad Dog has seen die, and there were scores of them who died when he was training, one stands out from the rest. 

It's not entirely clear why, but likely has something to do with her youth and the unexpected nature of her course of illness.

Mad Dog had seen people die with great regularity at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital for Cancer and Allied Diseases, but they had cancer and were expected to die and when they did, some of them welcomed death.

This woman was 21 years old and brought to the emergency room by her boyfriend. The ER resident called Mad Dog down saying, "She just looks...dusky."

The admission game in the ER is that the ER resident has to justify why he thinks a patient is sick enough to require admission because the intern getting that patient is going to be working for hours no matter how sick or not sick the patient may be, and the intern wants to be convinced the case justifies all that effort. 

But in this case, the ER resident was not calling an intern, he was calling Mad Dog, who by then was a senior resident, and it was Mad Dog's job to decide if the patient was sick enough to warrant a precious ICU bed. In those days even a big city hospital like The New York Hospital only had 12 intensive care unit beds, and those were on the Cardiac Care Unit and were, theoretically reserved for people with heart attacks, usually men in their 50's, but here the resident was pitching admitting this 21 year old woman to the CCU, and she had no heart problems. 

What she had was "dusky." Even in the fluorescent lights of the Emergency Room, you could see it. Dusky means sort of gray/blue. 

Mad Dog's job was to look at her and say either yes or no. If it was no, she'd go the ward, where each nurse had a dozen patients and more at night, and this was just before midnight. 

She was lethargic, but awake, not comatose, and the ER resident had done blood gases and her oxygen level was 60, which had to be a mistake.  Arterial blood oxygen was 90-98% not 60. This was in the days before those little finger gizmos which show you your oxygen saturation--to know the arterial oxygen level you had to stick an artery--usually we used the radial artery in the wrist and then plop the syringe in an ice cup and press on the wrist for 15 uninterrupted minutes. Sometimes, if you missed the artery you hit the vein next door and Mad Dog thought the ER resident had inadvertently sent off venous blood.

This being night time, there was no nurse to do the compression, so Mad Dog did all that and then ran the cup up to the lab on the 9th floor. By the time he got back to the ER, breathless and wondering what his own blood oxygen level might be, the lab tech was on the phone with the results: 60, again. And Mad Dog knew for sure that was an arterial blood--the syringe had pumped up a centimeter with each heart beat, just the way it should have. 

So Mad Dog wheeled her gurney up the the CCU where the intern and resident were nowhere to be seen, busy with other crises and Mad Dog remained with her for a while. She just got bluer and bluer and more and more obtunded and before we even had a chance to put her on a respirator, she arrested (cardiac arrest) and died right in front of us, the nurse and Mad Dog. 

It was flu season, so the hospital was packed, every bed occupied, some patients on beds in hallways, and when the autopsy results came back we understood why she never stood a chance: Her lungs were the consistency of liver. Normally lungs are sponge like, pretty fluffy and light and moist, but these lungs were thick and heavy and maroon, and there was no way air would come into contact with the delicate blood vessels carrying the red blood cells which were supposed to pick up oxygen across the delicate alveolar vascular spaces. 

The influenza test was positive. 

She had died of influenza.

Mad Dog presented her case to a half dozen conferences, asking everyone what he could have done differently. He knew he should have intubated her--put her on a respirator in the ER, but that was difficult and had its own risks and would have delayed getting her to the CCU. But beyond that, Mad Dog was looking for answers from the graybeards, the guys who had tricks up their sleeves, who had seen everything and done everything.

 But as he gave the story, he saw the flash of recognition in all the older doctors' faces: They had all seen patients die of influenza.

"This is what influenza does," they would say, shaking their heads. "It just does that." 

Not to everyone, influenza does that, but to a high enough percentage that more people and more soldiers died of influenza in 1918 Europe than died from bombs and bullets on the battlefield.

When COVID hit New York City, Mad Dog's son was doing his residency at Mt. Sinai. They had long refrigerated 18 wheel rigs parked outside the hospital on Fifth Avenue--to receive the bodies. The hospital morgue was overflowing. He had to strip down in the hallway outside his apartment and put  his scrubs and mask in a black plastic garbage bag, and walk straight to the shower before seeing his wife and baby. 

Given the death rate of COVID, early on in that pandemic in 2020,  about 3-4 million Americans were projected to die from that virus. In that first year only 1 million died, once the vaccine became available. "Only" a million died. Death statistics are endlessly arguable, but it's pretty clear the vaccine saved lives, and not just the lives of people at the far end of their lives, but little kids, twenty-somethings, all through the age ranges.

Watching "Gone with the Wind" in a movie theater Mad Dog was struck by the audience reaction when Scarlett O'Hara gets the letter which announces that her husband had died, not in combat, but from measles, in camp. 

The audience laughed.

Mad Dog knew why they laughed. Scarlett's husband was a well meaning nerd, a half man, not virile or a warrior and it seemed perfect that he would die of a child's disease, to which no strong man would succumb.

But, of course, measles took the lives of thousands of soldiers in their camps, men who had never been vaccinated or even exposed to measles because they lived isolated on farms. 

But, of course, to that 1974 audience, living in New York City, in an age of universal vaccination, these folks had never seen measles, nor heard much about it. Measles seemed to these 20th century New Yorkers a ridiculous thing to die from.

When you think about it, in the 21st century, it still is a ridiculous thing to die from. But watching someone die from measles does not seem ridiculous. It is bleak, maddening, agonizing.

And we will see more of that now. Because of just a few men, our President and his chosen new vaccine expert, RFKJR. Neither should ever be forgiven that. 

Diptheria has just claimed several victims. Influenza will always claim victims, but fewer if enough people get vaccinated. COVID is less likely now to claim the young, but it will still claim some unvaccinated. And measles now is doing its terrible work again.

Measles does that. It just kills people with a pneumonia. That X Ray at the top of this blog post is a measles pneumonia. 

Who? Me? No! You!

  

President Trump took to FOXNEWS to decry left wing radicals who equate right wingers with Nazis.

Elon Musk, MAGA man, Trump Was Right About Everything

He points to the killing of Charlie Kirk as an expression of radical left wing dogma driving violent attacks on upstanding right wing advocates, as if lefties are just so violent and right wingers are just innocently speaking their minds and being violently attacked for expressing their opinions. And these violent attacks, Trump says are simply integral, part and parcel, inexorably connected to left wing ideology and their playbook.

(Of course, the left says exactly that about Trump and his MAGA adherents.) 

Charlottesville Unite The Right Marchers

He took special umbrage at the left characterizing the right as "Nazis." After Charlottesville, where United the Right (UTR)  demonstrators staged a torch light parade mimicking the Nazi torch light parades of the 1930's which was their signature stagecraft, and UTR men wore swastikas and other Nazi emblems and runes, Trump said there were very fine people on both sides.

Terrence O'Rourke

As Terrence O'Rourke, a New Hampshire Congressional candidate said at the time: "We are in a very divided state of mind nowadays, but as divided as we are, I would have thought that we could all agree on one thing: There is no such thing as a very fine Nazi."

Very Fine Nazis

Trump retreated, and said he didn't mean the Nazis were very fine, just the rest of the non Nazi UTR. (One advantage of Trump's imprecision of speech is you never can be quite sure what he means, or who he's talking about exactly, so he can always say you didn't understand what he was really saying.)

But looking at the UTR parade, it is difficult to tell who among the United The Right were not Nazis.

During his interview, Trump railed against the leftists whose rhetoric he said was direct incitement to the murder of Charlie Kirk and Trump added: "We have radical left lunatics out there and we just have to beat the hell out of them."

Later, when reminded that this statement itself constitutes a incitement to violence, he said, well, he was talking about beating the hell out of them at the polls. (You didn't understand me. Of course we understood him, but he could not stick with what he actually meant.)

But this sort of endorsement of beatings and violence is longstanding and consistent with Trump: In November, 2015 when a Black Lives Matter activist was beaten in front of his stage at one of his rallies, he remarked, "what he was doing was so bad, maybe he should have been roughed up." Roughed as in beaten to a bloody pulp while Trump watched on approvingly, from the stage.

For those of us who've read a little history, we know that the street thugs of the Nazis was a very big part of their tactic to gain power. They simply walked along the street and beat up people who expressed any sort of opposition. When Goering was appointed to head the Reichstag (parliament), he encouraged his Nazi delegates to beat up opposing legislators and called his opponents "pigs" and "filthy Jews." In the halls of parliament. Beating people up, of course, makes democracy nigh on impossible--it's hard to debate contentious issues if you know it's going to end up in a brawl every time. There's only so much ultimate fight club a legislature can bear.

When mobs broke through windows and doors during the January 6, Capitol insurrection, and beat police officers unconscious Trump called those men "unbelievable patriots," and after they were convicted and sentenced in courts of law, he pardoned them. So he likes the ruffians, the real men, the manly man, and that is part of what he sells. It's what makes women feel safer with him in power. He's tough enough to protect them against all those imaginary illegal immigrant rapists. 

The cruelty is the point, as many have observed.

We sometimes forget how violent January 6th actually was, but look at this video, enlarge it and you will be reminded what these patriots, these ordinary tourists really were like.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/11/us/capitol-mob-violence-police.html

So, when Trump complains about the radical left being inflammatory,  is this not the kettle calling the pot black?

Is this not simply another instance of Trump following the advice of Joseph Goebbels n to simply, "accuse the other side of whatever they say you are doing wrong."

But if it quacks like a Nazi duck, and if it walks like a Nazi duck, then it likely is a Sieg Heil Nazi duck. 

Violence

 

President Trump has ordered all federal buildings to lower flags to half mast to honor and mourn Charlie Kirk, a Trump supporter and conservative influencer Mad Dog had never heard of until he was shot.

Minnesota At Half Mast

Trump blamed the assassination on the "radical left," although no one has been arrested for the murder. It may have been Hunter Biden, for all we know. Or maybe Obama, who was born in Kenya. Or maybe Hillary is up to shooting people again, like Vince Foster. But definitely not Jeffrey Epstein, who, you know, committed suicide while in custody.

When the Democratic Speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives was murdered along with her husband and another Democratic legislator and his wife wounded by the same gunman, who carried with him a victim list of other Democrats, nothing emanated from the White House decrying political violence.

When Trump was asked if he had called Minnesota governor after the murders to express condolences he said, "I think the governor of Minnesota is so whacked out. I'm not calling him. Why would I call him? I could calla and say, "Hi, how you doing?' Uh, the guy doesn't have a clue. He's a mess. I could be nice and call, but why waste the time?"

So Trump wastes no tears on people who probably would never vote for him.  He doesn't like guys who got captured and became prisoners of war, because Trump is a tough guy with heel spurs. He would never get captured because he would never actually enlist in the cause of defending America by arms. 

When a gunman attacked the CDC offices in Atlanta and shot dead a defending policeman, flags were not flown at half mast honoring a government employee defending other government employees.

When fifteen Nazis were shot dead as they attacked police in the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, which failed to put Hitler in power, Hitler established monuments, established an annual march re-enacting the failed coup and established a commemorative flag, the Blood Flag in their honor.

During the Weimar years, more than 500 political assassinations bloodied the streets and buildings, all but 10 were directed by Nazis at more liberal politicians.

This is no surprise, because part of the appeal of right winger is machismo, masculinity, strength, the threat of violence. That's why torch light parades are a right wing thing--they are meant to evoke not love, but fear.

"For all those who draw the sword, will die by the sword," Jesus told Peter (Matthew 26.52.) This can be understood to extend beyond swords to guns but also to simple exhortation toward physical force ("rough him up") and street thugs in masks manhandling men for speaking Spanish and looking Hispanic, for looking like an "alien" to White cops,  without warrant, without ceremony, without restraint, without process.

People in cities should not be afraid to walk outside, Mr. Trump has said, the criminals should fear Mr. Trump and his supporters. I am strong. Fear me! I will do violence to you, or my fans will. Just try heckling me at one of my rallies and see what happens: you will be "roughed up."

Nothing is yet certain about the motivation of whoever shot Mr. Kirk. The assumption on the right has been he was murdered as a martyr to the cause of right wing righteousness. 

Or, we may never know. Mr. Trump, of course, already knows.

But whatever the reason, Mr. Trump and the MAGA mob have provided one: Violence, they will claim is the exclusive weapon of the radical left, while the MAGA mob, which delights in pummeling hecklers at Trump rallies, which delights in the images of a cowboy hat wearing sheriff on a horse whipping a Haitian man at a border crossing, that's not violent; the right can only be the victim of violence, never the perpetrator.  

Of course, no side has a monopoly on political violence.

But one side invokes the threat of violence to get its way, to stimulate its followers into a mob. 

 

ADDENDUM:

Great Minds Think Alike Dept:

(Actually, this is not Great Minds thinking alike, so much as mediocre mind stumbles toward the same conclusion a great mind reached in more expeditious fashion: The day after Mad Dog posted, Paul Krugman showed why he's widely read and celebrated by posting on the same topic.)

Krugman: "Waving the Bloody Shirt"

At this point what do we know about who killed Charlie Kirk, and why?

Nothing. And we may never know anything. In part that’s because there appears to have been a rapid degradation in the FBI’s effectiveness since Trump appointees took over and prioritized political loyalty over competence.

The fact that Kirk was a right-winger doesn’t mean that the shooter was a left-winger. There are many possible stories you can invent about what may have motivated the assassination. What we do know is that no prominent Democrat has called for violence against Republicans, and no prominent Democrat has celebrated Kirk’s death.

Whoever did this, there’s just no rational way you can blame this on “the left.”

Also, whatever motivated this murder, it’s simply a fact that over the past decade right-wing extremists have killed many more people than left-wing extremists:

And Trump — who has repeatedly incited mob violence since his first campaign — clearly wants to use the Kirk killing as an excuse for more violence and intimidation. “We have radical left lunatics out there,” declared Trump, “and we just have to beat the hell out of them.” An utterly malign appeal to mob violence from a sitting president, particularly outrageous since no one knows who killed Kirk and why.

And let’s be clear: everyone — Republicans, business leaders, and more — who decided, in effect, to forget about Jan. 6 helped set the stage for this malignancy.

So while we want to know what lay behind Kirk’s assassination, the important story right now is Trump’s intent to use the killing to incite violence against anyone who stands in his way.

--Mad Dog

Justice Sonia Sotomayor on Colbert

 The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upone probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particular describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

--Fourth Amendment, United States Constitution

Justice Sonia Sotomayor appeared on Stephen Colbert, an event which Mad Dog could not miss.

What is a Supreme Court justice doing on a comedy show which has morphed into a platform for liberal resistance to MAGA world? 

Is she not supposed to be at least pretending to be impartial, unbiased and not political?

Justices are allowed to write and plug books, presumably claiming their first amendment rights to free speech, and so they do appear on the public airways and that is supposed to be okay; at least it's done. And Sotomayor, ostensibly, had a book to plug.

Colbert pursued her on two topics: the recent Shadow Docket case, Noem v Vasquez Perdomo in which the Court allowed ICE agents to stop and detain people simply because they 1/are speaking Spanish, 2/ look Latino or 3/are found to be hanging out at jobs which are low paying and known to be jobs frequently done by illegal immigrants. 

So that sort of profiling is just fine with the 6 member majority. 

Think about that: The Supreme Court has now said that police or ICE can throw you into a van because you have committed the crime of walking while Brown, of looking Hispanic. This is justified because we know that it is Hispanics who commit the crime of crossing into this country without permission, so it only makes sense to grab anyone who looks Hispanic and may be on or near a worksite or at a Taco Bell. 

The same sort of thing happens when a young Black male is walking down the street, thrown up against a wall by white police because it's an established fact that young Black males commit murder with handguns in the ghetto at higher rates than other groups, and being a member of a group, a class of citizen which has a high crime rate is now justification for the police to frisk and detain you. 

This means that to the White policeman you have only one meaningful characteristic: You are Black. Or you are Brown. And the Court agrees with that.

If the police had grabbed you because you had another characteristic, say being over six feet tall, or having a Mohican haircut, or a nose piercing or wearing dreadlocks or a bandana, or because you did not bow in the direction of the policeman, what would the Court have said about that justification of "probable cause" ?  

When the police detain you, for being Black, must they read you your Miranda rights?

The whole idea of restraining police behavior is meant to protect citizens against police who have guns and back up from simply acting as the playground bully.

The plain fact is law and order are only a virtue if there is order in the execution of the law--it does not work if the government imposes order by the unrestrained actions of agents of the government who are simply sadists, racists or thugs. Then you have oppression, not law and order.

And Justice Sotomayor knows this; apparently Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Roberts and Coney-Barret do not. None of these guys have ever been strip searched, thrown into a van, held in jail without due process or, for that matter, ridden in a boat which was bombed without being searched, because it looked suspicious in the eyes of the White guys in the airplane.

Sotomayor disagreed with this violation of restraint imposed by the Fourth Amendment, and, in her dissent, she said, at the conclusion of her 30 page dissent:

"The Fourth Amendment protects every individual's constitutional right to be 'free from arbitrary interference by law officers'...After today, that may no longer be true for those who happen to look a certain way, speak a certain way and to work a certain type of legitimate job that pays very little. Because this is unconscionably irreconcilable with our Nation's constitutional guarantees, I dissent."

Mad Dog has read the rest of the 30 pages, and Justice Sotomayor addresses the arguments of her colleagues in the 6 person majority patiently, but, in the end, she finds what they did, the opinion they expressed to be unconscionable. Now, during her responses to Colbert's gentle probing, she maintained that people can hold objectionable and even obnoxious opinions but these same people have some good in them. 

Nevertheless, she has said her six colleagues are unconscionable. 

As Robert Kennedy, Jr. would say, "The two things are both true at the same time."

Mad Dog, for one, cannot see that these two things can be true at the same time. Sometimes the evil that people do is so toxic it poisons and contaminates any clean, good things about them.

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/25a169_5h25.pdf

Oh, you can quibble and say, well she did not call them unconscionable; she simply said their opinion in this case was unconscionable, but that is a distinction without a difference--it is like saying that concentration camp guard acted in an unconscionable way by leading those people into a gas chamber, but apart from that unconscionable practice, he has a lot of good in him, and he has his own crosses to bear with a mother and wife and children and dog who depend upon him and to whom he shows nothing but love and for whom he sacrifices.

Justice Sotomayor is in a tough spot. She does not want the public to lose all faith in the Supreme Court of the United States, to which she has dedicated a good chunk of her life, in which she places great value, or once placed great value. 

But she allows that the Court can only rule by persuasion--it has no army and it has no power to tax or raise or withhold funds. She implores the public to read the individual opinions of the various justices, which she says often provide arguments you may not have thought of, if you take time to "aude alteram partem," i.e. hear the other side.

And Mad Dog has done just this. It is true that even in decisions which sound patently absurd, when you hear the details of a particular case, and when you slog through the thinking of a particular justice, you can see he is trying to persuade. For Mad Dog, one instructive exercise was reading Antonin Scalia's opinion in DC v Heller, a case disallowing the statute of the District of Columbia which bans private citizens from keeping guns in their homes or walking about with guns without license from the chief of police.

Scalia tried to undo generations of legal opinion which said that the second amendment guaranteed the right of the people to keep and bear arms only if they were members of a militia, i.e. part of a military group authorized to keep and bear arms for the purpose of keeping a free society free.  Scalia did mental back flips, teasing out the meaning of the word "people" as a "term of art" and he did the same for "militia," all in a lame effort to explain the unique exception of the Second Amendment being the only place in the Constitution where the reason a right is granted is explained, i.e. to keep  society free by citizens who are part of a government sanctioned military.

His machinations are, in the end, pitiful and one can only feel sorry for him. He loved his guns, and in fact he died at a gun shooting retreat, and he was determined to make the country safe for gun owners and gun enthusiasts and he was determined to work his way back to the ruling that guns are just dandy and government should keep it's government hands of his guns and the guns of gun lovers.

Famously, he also loved opera and attended the Washington opera with Justice Ginsberg, and they both fostered that idea that the members of the court should fight like cats in chambers, but all without personal animus. Even though a decision might allow government agents license to bludgeon, imprison and abuse disadvantaged citizens, may make some citizens' lives a living hell, the justices can go out to dinner and eat well, then attend the opera, while the ghetto seethes.

The fact is, neither Justice Ginsberg or Justice Sotomayor can convince anyone that insisting on seeing the good heart in the justices who embrace practices which are the essence of racism, not color blindness but color driven, is a good thing. The only justification you need to manhandle, handcuff and VAN-dalize a Hispanic man is he looked suspicious to you, being Brown and being a roofer.

Once Hitler was named Chancellor and his henchmen, Goering and Hess were in place, there was a collapse of civility in the Reichstag chambers--Nazi members beat up opposing parliament members in the chambers and shouted "Pigs!" and "Jews!" and made any sort of actual debate impossible. 

Sotomayor, in her insistence that we hear the other side and see the good in the hearts of the MAGA mob is blind to the truth about the opposition, which is no longer a loyal opposition. She insists on treating the MAGA mob as a loyal opposition, when they are not loyal, only an opposition, and in fact, members of an insurrection.

She did mention she was a prosecutor and saw in her work people who were irredeemable and simply bad. So she knows there are people in the world who are evil.

But she has not yet, apparently, realized she is facing in Trump, RFKJR, Stephen Miller, Noem, the whole MAGA mob a different set of human beings.

And even Goering always tried to justify his own violence by claiming it was the other side which started the violence. Goons often claim they were the victims and their own violence was justified by the guy they violated. Goons deny throwing the first punch as a matter of tactic.

Trump, standing at the podium of a rally in Alabama in 2015, watching a crowd beating a heckler said, "Maybe he should have been roughed up, because it was absolutely disgusting what he was [saying]."

So there it is: the SA street thugs at the Trump rally beat a man for exercising his right to free speech and Trump endorses the violence, but he, and all of MAGA world are the victims.

A MAGAhead drives his car into a group of protesters at Charlottesville, killing one, after a torch light parade the night before. Now, remember, torch light parades were the hallmark of the Nazis, after which street beatings of opponents always followed. The Charlottesville Unite the Right mob did not have to wear swastikas to be understood as Nazis. And yet, Mr. Trump said there were very fine people on both sides of that event, as if there is such a thing as a very fine Nazi.  In his famous opinion in which he said "Freedom of speech does not mean you can falsely shout 'Fire' in a crowded theater," Oliver Wendel Holmes noted that speech has to be always judged "in the context" of when it is said. That's where "incitement to riot" comes from.

So Trump and his MAGA mob have been using the language of violence since his first run for Presidency, but they always deny they are the violent ones--it's only their adversaries who are violent. It's always the fault of Biden and Obama and Hillary.

And Justices Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch belong in that MAGA mob rogues' gallery.

We are past the point where listening to the other side is a viable practice. The other side is not listening to us.

Occupy those Democrat Cities!

 

Street Crime, law and order has been a sure fire way to whip up the middle class dating back way before George H.W. Bush invoked Willie Horton 37 years ago, as the symbol of how Democrats coddle dangerous criminals while Republicans are strong, macho men who keep them in check.  

Willie Horton was released from jail only to promptly murder someone and that, Bush said, was all the fault of his Democratic opponent who was soft on crime and wanted to free dangerous Black males to prey on vulnerable White women because all the Democrats care about was not violating Mr. Horton's civil rights.

Randy Newman's "Rednecks" slyly punctured the idea that tough, white guys could prevent violence in the cities of Roxbury (Boston), Chicago, Cleveland, East St. Louis and San Francisco by simply unleashing rednecks to go about "keeping the Niggers down."

Because there is always a racial element to this theme, Democrats have been leery of joining in the cry to punish and suppress the criminal element for fear of being seen as just another force of "keeping the Niggers down." So the Republicans have made this issue their own, not being afraid as being seen as being anti Black.

But, of course, there is another dimension to all this when you go beyond talking about increased police activities, or police tactics like "stop and frisk" which targeted young Black males, who, after all, statistically were more likely than other groups to be carrying weapons and committing crimes with those guns in the inner cities where they lived and you go to the option of simply stationing armies with powerful war weapons and tanks on street corners or patrolling neighborhoods.

Armies in neighborhoods have been tried and failed in other settings, most notably Ireland, where, during "The Troubles" British troops were deployed to violent streets of Belfast and ordinary street crime, robberies, non politically inspired murders did not decrease. In fact, Professor Google tells us conventional crime actually increased during the time regular police, who at least knew the neighborhoods and the people living in them were replaced by military patrols. And getting cooperation from local community folks identifying who done it and when and where and maybe why was forfeit once the troops arrived. 

There has been the feeble defense that this deployment of troops to the Black inner city is not actually about "keeping the Niggers down," but it is an enlightened, compassionate and welcomed effort to protect minority folk from the depredations of criminals in those neighborhoods, because, actually, the majority of victims are minority folks, law abiding, innocent people caught in the cross fire and preyed upon by criminals who could be contained if only we'd send in the troops. No, we're not playing the RACE CARD, we are protecting the minorities! This is all for their own good! This sounds to Mad Dog like the lame excuse that we are only sending our troops into the Sudetenland because those nasty locals are harassing and murdering and raping German speaking local citizens who need the German army to protect them.  Despots always need a victimized group to protect. 

There are actual ways of studying what drives violence, gun deaths in certain parts of cities. The most famous study was "The Boston Miracle" where professors, criminologists actually tried to understand what drove killings in Boston, and they discovered the vast majority were driven by small "crews" who sold and distributed crack cocaine. These were young men, less than 1% of the city's population committing more than 60% of homicides.

The researchers were surprised it was not poverty, per se, but macho stuff, being disrespected, drug marketing territory violations and insults which drove murders. Interventions from government guided by this understanding with buy ins from police dropped the murder rate precipitately in Boston and the tactics were embraced and used in other cities with similar results.

Of course, for many cities government by Democrats, street crime has been drastically reduced, most often confined to certain neighborhoods.

Exceptionally, criminals stalk affluent people in rich neighborhoods, car jacking, murdering or raping, but if you are talking about policy, that is a rule by which resources are guided, you would not deploy your anti crime units be they police or army to patrol rich White neighborhoods. You put them where the crime is. As Willie Sutton said, when asked why he robbed banks: "Because that's where the money is." Yet another Willie instructing.

Then you get the exceptional case, like the horrific murder of a young Ukrainian woman on a bus by a deranged Black man, who was caught on video stabbing her in the neck fatally, for no apparent reason--there was no reason beyond his schizophrenia. And now Trump has his new Willie Horton. This happened in Charlotte, North Carolina, a blue city in a Red State. The mayor is a Democrat, which is reason enough to send troops with bayonets, tanks and cruise missiles to Charlotte. 

Send in the National Guard!