Republican "Facts"

He’s clear [sic] got a message that works. If you look at what Trumpism is to the Republican Party, it’s the highest vote-getter that we’ve ever received. We grew the party in all ethnic communities — African-American, Latino, Asians. You know, he received the largest non-white vote in 60 years. I think the Republican Party is doing fine under Trump. The ball just didn’t bounce his way. That’s what happens when you play these sports.” 

            Bryan Lanza, speaking on the BBC Newshour podcast, 11/7/20

 

Boy howdy, donnit take all kinds? Even in an age of truly bizarre claims of "alternative facts" and "fake news," this one caught me totally off guard.

The spin is absolutely dizzying. Fortunately I was raking leaves when I heard this and could steady myself with my rake. But the depth of this guy's depraved indifference to Consensus Reality left me stunned. And in awe.

Now, this Bryan Lanza is an interesting character. Formerly a communications director for the Trump campaign and transition team in 2016-17, he has since cultivated ties to Ukraine, just as the White House was under investigation for pushing their president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, for dirt on the Bidens. That didn't go anywhere, of course, but apparently neither did Lanza. More's the pity.

At any rate, he's hardly an impartial, or even a rational observer. He is on record as calling the Congressional investigation of Mr. Trump a "sham impeachment" and a "partisan coup."* He's one of those hyaena-like creatures who seem to exist in the public sphere mainly to bark in time to whatever the Duke of Deceit says is the topic du jour. He and Kellyanne Conway and Sarah Huckabee-Sanders and Sean Spicer and Devin Nunes and Lindsay Graham and...

And today the theme is denying the Duke's demise at the ballot box, a sausage that the Suffering Trumpists will no doubt swallow whole ... that is, if they actually bother to listen to the BBC, which I doubt few will do. It ain't American, and we're trying to Make/Keep 'Merca great.

Where to begin? This whole statement is low-hanging fruit. Let's start at the beginning, then: Trumpism is the highest vote-getter in GOP history. In the original version broadcast on the BBC, he added that the D of D had gotten the "second-highest vote total in history." Obviously, no one wins an election by getting the second highest vote total! You win by getting the most votes. 

And in fact, had the GOP not cheated by removing hundreds of thousands of left-leaning voters in MI, WI and NC,** the D of D would never have been elected in the first place, 'cause he lost the popular vote that time, too!

Surely the actual brains in the GOP must grasp this basic arithmetic: The "Trump coalition" is a losing coalition. He turned out some 5 or 6 million more votes this time, but then, so did Biden...and more. Unless you are prepared to steal every election from now until 2100, Trumpism is a losing bet, and that cannot be lost on the Cold Calculators in the GOP establishment.

Lanza says they grew the GOP's share of minority voters this time round. And that's partly true: They went from 10% of the African-American vote in 2016 to 12% — hardly a stunning turnaround. But for the Latinx community, well...Biden actually outperformed HRC this time — 66% vs. 65%!*** How that counts as "growing the base" is a mystery to me. 

Yes, the key was in FL, where Cubans seem to have gone for the D of D in larger numbers. But that hardly counts as a major win for him: Elsewhere and among other nationalities, a huge turnout by younger Latinx voters more than offset the Duke's gains in FL and south TX (which did not matter to the election, anyway).

Since when has the Cuban community been the sole representative of the Latinx population in the US? Only when the Liar-in-Chief is involved!

But the most startling comment of all comes right at the end: Politics — the management of power and authority to govern over 300 million people — is just a game with a ball that might bounce here or might bounce there. 

I mean, this gesture at being "philosophical" is truly astonishing, if you
really stop and think about it. Lanza is saying that what people actually  want from their government is nothing more than a whim, a matter of chance that depends upon the weather, maybe, like a capricious bouncing ball...Oh well, if you don't win today, it has nothing to do with what you said or did, or who you really are. It's all about making the ball bounce the right way. Ahem.

A bouncing ball

Even more: With this one, blithe comment, he can dismiss all the failings of the Republican Party under Trump. Trump's defeat at the ballot box has nothing to do with his behavior, nothing to do with fundamentally bad policies, nothing to do with the grift and ethical violations and obstruction of justice that #45 has engaged in and that the Party has enabled at every turn.

I mean, to actually advertise one's callousness like that. Wow! The sobering thing is that I actually have no doubt at all that that is how many important people in the GOP actually think. Not the rank and file, mind you. No, they are the victims of this philosophy. 

But behind the curtain, the machinery that keeps the great lie-machine turning out hooey in Republicanville, that absolutely does think this way. And so it's time for all Republicans of good heart to get out the lie detectors.

* https://www.thedailybeast.com/andriy-yermak-key-ukrainian-figure-in-impeachment-probe-spotted-with-former-trump-adviser-bryan-lanza

** See Greg Palast's reporting on Kris Kobach's Interstate Crosscheck program. Suddenly the incomprehensibles of 2016 will start to make a lot more sense.

*** https://www.sfchronicle.com/local-politics/article/Latino-voters-overwhelmingly-supported-Biden-in-15705786.php and https://en.as.com/en/2020/11/10/latest_news/1604967286_230805.html and https://www.politico.com/news/2020/11/06/why-biden-lost-the-latino-vote-florida-texas-434735

Polling for the Duke of Deceit

"Fuck you, we did a good job!"

- Nate Silver

Polling, so the Republican meme goes, fails because the pollsters don’t report on enough White people. They point to the surprises of 2016, and no doubt will trumpet the Duke of Deceit’s outperforming himself in 2020, as evidence that polling is fundamentally flawed exclusively because of liberal bias, and should therefore not be trusted.

The irony in this declaration is stunning, really, when you consider the depths of dishonesty that the GOP itself has sunk to in order to maintain its toehold on power in the face of being the minority party in the United States.* We can trace a straight line from the complete hooey of Reaganomics** to the absolute barrage of bullshit that has emanated from the Duke of Deceit and the Turtle over the past four years. 

The Duke, defeated

Everywhere you turn, whether you look at the income impacts of their economic policies, the global and economic effects of their foreign policies, their pronouncements on the “successes” of their routinely bad presidents, their claims to be upholding “American values,” or (most recently) their bad-faith manipulation of the norms of governance, you see one consistent theme: Republicans will say or do anything — anything — to get elected, even if it is not true, fails to coincide with reality, or even conflicts with something they said or did last year or 20 minutes ago. 

Mitch "The Turtle" McConnell

This may be somewhat less true at the state and local levels (though having lived in a red region of a blue state for more than a decade, I am skeptical even of that!), but one cannot doubt that the Duke of Deceit is not really an aberration in the longer-term scheme of things. Rather, he is the apotheosis of the Republican ethos to lie loudly and long. 

The situation has gotten so bad — and indeed, they have gotten so bad at it — even a few halfway honest Republican candidates (mostly those trying to survive in blue states) have found themselves stepping back from the brink that the D of D is dragging them toward. They find ways to “support the president” even as they mumble some denials of most of what he actually says.

The trouble is, of course, that Consensus Reality cannot be denied forever. What has postponed the Coming Reckoning has mainly been the peculiar slant that the electoral system and the structure of the United States itself can lend to unpopular ideas. Because every state is guaranteed at least one Representative and two Senators, regardless of population, and because there is a huge swath of the country that is relatively sparsely populated, the GOP has been able to maintain a grip on the Congress that outweighs its overall popularity. 

The Framers, in their wisdom, decided that the masses cannot be trusted and have to be balanced by an “upper chamber” that gives equal representation to every state. (So much for “original intent.”) Moreover, at the level of the Chief Executive, the Electoral College puts a thumb on the electoral scales, giving significantly more weight to minority opinions.***

Not the Sun

But in the end, just as we must all be compelled to admit that it is the sun and not the moon that shines in the daytime, so, too must this overly influential minority of Americans eventually come to accept that tax cuts do not pay for themselves, that consumers and not CEO’s are the real “job creators,” that everyone does have a vested interest in everyone else’s health, and that mankind is indeed destroying the environment that it depends upon for survival (and that there is no Planet B).†

So let us return, then, to the subject at hand: The lie that polling cannot be trusted because of blah blah blah. As Nate Silver’s fivethirtyeight.com, the industry standard among polling aggregators, has repeatedly pointed out, the polls in 2016 were not that far off, in fact. Among the last 10 elections, 2016 falls close to the middle (#4 of 10) in terms of accuracy in predicting the final outcome of the election. Prior to 2016, you have to go all the way back to Truman’s “surprising” victory in 1948 to find polling that was actually, strikingly wrong.†† 

Certainly when it came to the popular vote, the polls were largely within their own margin of error in 2016. If anything was a surprise, it was Trump’s dubious “victories” by less than 75k votes in exactly three states (WI, MI and PA — three states that had participated in Kris Kobach’s remarkably anti-democratic Interstate Crosscheck system, which systematically removed hundreds of thousands of voters from the voting rolls…oddly enough, mostly from liberal-leaning voting blocs: Latinx and Black communities in cities). The only “surprise” here is that the “liberal” MSM has been so lax in covering the shenanigans that stole the election for the Duke. 

Indeed, returning to fivethirtyeight again, even as they were giving HRC >80% chance of winning in 2016, they were also pointing out that there were significant numbers of undecided voters in swing states that could tip the scales in the Duke’s favor. And that is (more or less, and ignoring the shenanigans just mentioned) what happened. Even the poll aggregators were pointing out that the Duke did have a path to victory. If you didn’t know that, you weren’t paying attention.

What was true four years ago has proven true again this time round: The polls predicted a Biden popular-vote victory all along, and lo and behold, that is what has happened. And the aggregators were saying all along that FL would be tough for either candidate to win outright. And they were predicting AZ and NV to lean Biden (which they did), and MI and WI to go for Biden (which they did), and that PA was going to be the tipping-point state (which it turned out to be – though Biden holding NV and AZ meant he doesn’t need PA).

Having said all this, it is true that there seems to have been a tiny red neap tide (one hesitates to call it a wave, since it has not put DT into the White House — only lawsuits can do that at this point). It made some of the popular votes closer than expected. What is going on with that?

Well it seems to me that one of the chief problems that pollsters face is that they are dependent upon the honesty of their respondents. If people are not willing to tell you what they really think, you are stuck. And in an environment completely awash in lies and deceit, where one candidate has run the country on complete bullshit and acted in the most shameful ways while promoting a complete disregard for facts and honest assessments of reality, it would not be surprising at all if one found lots and lots of otherwise decent ordinary people who were ashamed to admit publicly that they are Trumpists. Lies beget lies and the bad money drives out the good. (See my blog on that subject, actually....)

Jesus

Think of all the so-called Christians who turned out in droves for him in 2016 and at rallies throughout his presidency — even as he thoroughly trampled upon the most basic principles of Christian conduct (kindness, honesty, humility, respectfulness…). Whatever happened to "by their fruits ye shall know them"? (Matthew 7:15-20)

I don’t know (and I don’t care) how they have been sleeping at night, but I would not be at all surprised to discover that like their hero, they have been willing to lie and claim they are independents when pollsters came knocking. Not all of them, perhaps, but it wouldn’t take many of them to skew the polls in the tiny amounts we are seeing in this election. 

Non-Jesus 
Purveyor of Kool-Ade

By supporting the Duke of Deceit, they have abandoned all rational claim to be following Jesus, for the sake of a chance to impose their wretched beliefs on everyone else. “Sheep become like shepherds, and shepherds like sheep,” wrote Tolkien, and it’s true. 

And “in for a penny, in for a pound,” as the British say.

* Don't believe this statement? Consider: In recent elections, Democrats have earned millions more votes for Congress than Republicans, even when the GOP has taken control of both houses, as they did from 2001 to 2007; in the six presidential elections in the current century, Republicans have garnered a majority of the popular vote exactly once (in 2004, when incumbent W was running during two major wars); on virtually every issue (including abortion), traditional Republican positions are unpopular — often by wide margins. Only the peculiarities of our constitutional system, the Electoral College, and gerrymandering keep them in the game at all.

** www.nytimes.com/2017/12/26/business/economy/tax-cuts incomes.html

*** For example, North Dakota has three electors for a population of around 760k (one EC vote for about every 253k people); California, with a population of over 39 million has 55 electors (about 710k people per EC vote).

† https://soundcloud.com/user-56350616/planet-b

†† www.nature.com/articles/s41562-018-0315-6; fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-polls-are-all-right/;   www.thecrosstab.com/2017/01/03/history-polling-error-us-uk/.

Picture credits: the conversation.com; howtolivebullshitfree.com; forbes.com.

Bad money drives out good.

When Donald J. Trump emerged as a viable candidate during the 2018 election cycle, many of us thought it was a joke, a marketing ploy. The Republican primary had been turned into a clown show, a circus that ultimately would only serve to promote the Trump brand. Not a particularly fun circus to watch, mind you, but a freak show nonetheless, fascinating in the way that a serious auto accident draws the attention of every driver in every lane. We did not grasp how someone so verbally inept, so angrily narcissistic, so vehemently artificial and addicted to falsehood, could actually win the nomination of the party.

And when he did win the nomination, and faced off against a rational, well-spoken woman — a well-mannered woman with supreme qualifications, a clear reality-based program, and demonstrated leadership ability — too many of us assumed that there was no way that this Impostor could garner enough votes to win. Anyone looking objectively at the facts could see that one of these candidates was actually qualified for the job, and the other patently was not, neither in terms of accomplishments nor in character. Surely, we thought, when the chips are down a majority of the population will run away from this ugliness, this thinly-veiled racism, this crassness, these lies. Or at least, stay home.

I will leave a postmortem of the 2016 election for another time. Suffice it to say that, in fact, enough people did opt for baloney over a proper meal, fabrication over fact, rage rather than rational thought. Too few of us ever expected that actual electoral malfeasance† would be able to turn a loser into a winner and  put the Baron of Bullshit in office. 

We should have seen this coming.

A fried baloney sandwich from Amazon

Not just because it was time for the legitimate rage of the economically disenfranchised to be heard. Not just because he might be addled, but it is a very clever brand of addled. Not even because the fascist Right will stop at nothing less than Complete Control of the wealthiest, most powerful nation on the planet.

No, above all the tempest and cacophony of the collapse of reason, we should have seen this coming because, as Gresham's Law will have it, bad money drives out good.

Some examples of bad money.

If you dilute currency, the corrupted coin will eventually become the standard and no one will expect you to trade in the real thing. This is a truism that time and again has shown its value and applicability to many other aspects of social relations, beyond the “merely economic.”

It is time we all paid attention to this axiom, because the US has reached a point where the coin of the land has become so debased, so fundamentally cheapened and degraded, that tens of millions of people — fully a third of the country and nearly half of those who actually bother to vote — literally are unable to discern what is valuable from what is simply showy. Their rage at having been systematically fleeced for generations has given them a hunger for distraction that cannot be sated with bracing doses of truth. Television ruined my country, I have long maintained.

More examples.

This is true on “both sides of the aisle,” as we say, though perhaps somewhat less so on the Left at the moment. But consider how many otherwise “liberal” folks absolutely abandoned rational thought simply because their candidate did not win the primary. In a strange, mirror-universe reaction to the rejection of Bernie Sanders, a shocking number of “liberals” took leave of their senses and began treating HRC as if she was simply a female DJT. The good coin of clear-headed, rational decision making was driven out by the bad coin of ideologically-driven false equivalence.

(Yes, I mean you, all you Bernie Bros and Never-Clintoners and Jill-Stein-voting ideologues — I am calling all y’all out, because you bear a share of the blame for what is happening now!)  

DJT ≠ HRC

In the years since that election, I have heard many, many voices crying, “This is not who we are!” People are justifiably shocked at the depth of the current president’s depraved indifference even to the people who voted for him. They just want it all to go away. They want to think that we, as a nation, are somehow better than Donald J. Trump and his crude, fumbling, fuming White hostility. And sure, I would like to think that, too.

But I know we are not. If the Trump presidency serves any higher purpose at all, it is to show us just how debased we actually are as a culture and a society. Trump’s callous indifference to the suffering of others has always been there, dyed into the wool of our national psyche. How else do you explain the mass extermination of the Native Peoples that our nation carried out for well over a century, right under our noses, with mostly cheering from the crowds of onlookers…and with barely a whisper of it in school textbooks? 

How else can you account for, not just the two and a half centuries of chattel slavery, but the subsequent century and a half of enforced subservience of Brown to White, socially, economically, politically…in virtually every area? Subservience that continues to this day, currently disguised within a bogus system called “equal opportunity.” Occasional exceptions notwithstanding, how is it that, except for the entertainment industry (which includes sports, by the way), African Americans as a group continue to swim upstream against a torrent of economic tides and public-health failures?

How else would you account for our addiction to a prosperity built by standing on the necks of millions of people in this hemisphere and beyond? If we truly are as magnanimous and so on as we imagine ourselves to be, how do we account for the invasion of Mexico in the 1840s (the “halls of Montezuma” in the Marine anthem) and the many, many subsequent incursions, interferences, terrorisms and economic pillagings of Latin America throughout our history even up to today? Again, largely celebrated (or conveniently ignored) by the majority of Americans.

How else do you explain our collective willingness to bomb other countries into oblivion for profit, on the flimsiest of pretenses and completely against our own alleged values? From Hiroshima to Hanoi to Iraq, our victims have been silenced and stashed off camera. Only the economic consequences stop us from obliterating Iran right now. There are millions upon millions in this country who would do it without a second thought…just to try to feel better. ‘Cause killing people on the other side of the world, while you yourself are being robbed by your own, is strangely satisfying. It’s like a video game.

Some clearer minds.

(Again, even if “clearer minds have prevailed” this does not erase the urge, the passion, for violence and destruction that permeates so much of the American collective psyche.)

Some delicious frozen vegetables.

Do you know who picked the frozen vegetables you bought yesterday in the supermarket? The odds are overwhelming that it was a Brown migrant worker who can barely support a family, who lacks basic healthcare protections and is exposed to god-knows-what toxic herbicides and pesticides, and whose children go wanting for education. How does that happen, if we are the kind and gracious nation we imagine ourselves to be — how does that happen if we are not, in some measure, Donald J. Trump?

These days, as the coronavirus pandemic scorches a path through our society, sickening and killing the elderly, the infirm and the healthcare worker alike, we have people nevertheless protesting the measures that will save lives — shouting nasty, meanspirited insults at healthcare workers and blocking routes to hospitals, and killing people outright who try to enforce the simplest of public health measures. How does that happen in a society that is, allegedly, generous and concerned for humanity?

The irony is almost beautiful

These same people who are screaming about their rights to control their bodies have and will continue to turn out by the millions to vote against women having full control of their bodies…based upon a religious belief. How does that happen in a country allegedly separating religion from governance for the good of all?

Rage against the despoiling of Middle America is bubbling and boiling over. It is about time. But where is it turned — against the perpetrators of this epic thievery? Nope. Instead they attack the foreigner, the Other, the Liberal, anybody and everybody but the actual criminals. That there are millions of Americans who deplore all this does not change the fact that millions upon millions of others are prepared to completely abandon every last high ideal they claim to espouse in order to lay blame, rather than take responsibility for knowing and changing. 

Perps, all.

Willful, ignorant hatred. It is as American as apple pie. Always has been. 

An unindicted co-conspirator and an accessory after the fact.

And now we have the latest incarnation of the “this-is-not-who-we-are” canard: The appeal to us not to go back to “business as usual” after the pandemic has passed. I applaud the sentiment, I really do. I, too, wish that somehow we could forget who we are and become a different people after we “restart the economy.”

But I do not think that is realistic, because it assumes that underneath it all we are “better than that.” And we are not. Not as far as I have seen in my 58 years as an American.

“Not going back to business as usual” would require a complete overhaul of American culture, one so thorough and counter to the powerful stream of the very cultural and economic interests we love, that I simply cannot imagine how it will happen. We have to start wanting things that are so utterly foreign to our way of life and thought that it seems impossible to hope for:

☞ We will have to want to trust people we do not know.

☞ We will have to seek out facts, rather than float along on comfortable fictions.

☞ We will have to take responsibility — real, biting responsibility — for all that we do and all that we have done to the world and to the planet…and then change those things

☞ We will have to totally overhaul our economic system so that it really does reward effort and simplicity and punishes greed and acquisitiveness.

☞ We will have to celebrate taking delight in being, rather than in things.

☞ We will have to start yearning for commonality rather than individuality, for community rather than dispersion. 

☞ We will have to quell our fascination with screens and images and entertainment, because a) screens are unhealthy to produce and unhealthy to use, and b) they promote bogus intimacy and debased companionship.

☞ Perhaps most important of all: We will have to reorganize our economy so that we stop killing the planet. We have to turn away from technological solutions that bring new and more complicated problems with them. Among other things, this means we have to refocus our attention on basic industries, beginning with sustainable, chemical-free agriculture. 

All these things are of a piece, really, because together they point to a fundamental reality that people in the US as a group are steadfastly trying not to see. 

We are out of balance. The false coin has long ago driven out the real thing. Apart from those who are truly economically disadvantaged in our society (a growing number, to be sure), people have no idea just how bad, how crass and ugly and heartless, our society has become, and indeed, how it has always in some measure been. Certainly in my lifetime. If they traveled to other countries, where people live better in real communities and so on, they might come to understand this. But they don’t.

This is, of course, not a new refrain. There have been back-to-simplicity, back-to-community critiques of our society before. From the hippies, to the beats, to the labor movement of the early 20^th century, to the social reformers of the Progressive Era, to the utopian communities of the 19^th century, such ideas have a robust and noble heritage in our country. What is notable is how little impact they have had on our society as a whole.* 

Yes, labor unions have made working life better for millions, unionized and not…until Americans allowed themselves to be convinced by Capital that unions were no longer needed. And look where we are. Back in a world that worships Capital and the God of the Market, a world where workers survive at the whim of their employers, whose margins are constructed by relying on the nation's meagre social safety net...even while Americans celebrate the achievements of greed.

Yes, the Progressive Era did produce some lasting changes in the way poor people and immigrants are treated in the US. But it did not stop the march of Capital toward the utter domination and thorough marketing of everything. Ironically, the Great Depression produced far more progress in limiting the power of Capital in our country. And yet, we have seen in the decades since the gradual grinding down of all that progress and the inexorable shift of the Commons out of public hands and into the voracious maw of a “private sector” that is deeply jealous of its own grotesque success.

Yes, the beat generation and the youth rebellion of the 1960s and 70s did produce some measurable changes in social norms. People dress more freely, people speak more freely, people consume more freely than they did in, say, 1955. Rock and roll, blue jeans, and marijuana, are here to stay. We have “more choices,” as if Choice were the point. 

A happy penguin baby.

Yet the various cultural movements exemplified by beat poetry, be-bop, rock music, punk/new wave, rap and hip-hop only managed to move the needle enough to attract the attention of Capital, which then chewed it all up and regurgitated it like a meal for a baby penguin. Be-bop became a drug-laced cop-out. The youth rebellion settled into a comfortable, consumable middle age. Punk became a hairstyle, and hip-hop has been completely defanged. All of them are big money these days.

Like jousting at a marshmallow, each successive movement, each successive rebellion, gets absorbed. And whatever is interesting, challenging, dangerous, anything subversive of money-making freedom, gets leached out. Things get better…a little bit…for some…but no one ever, ever takes up the reason for the rebellion in the first place.

We let it happen, collectively, because, underneath it all, Americans do not care. We don’t. If we cared, if we really cared, we would attend to the facts. If we cared, we would do the hard work of understanding not just the what, but the why. If we cared we would shout NO in our loudest collective voices to the plundering of our environment, the looting of foreign countries, and the abuse of strangers at our doors. 

But we don’t. We squeak and try not to sabotage our wonderful system. This is who we are: drunk on our prosperity (and worse, drunk on the illusion that we can achieve the prosperity of our 1%). Insensitive to the murders committed in our name, we are prepared to blame anyone and everyone (even little children) for our own failings as members of humanity.

A very good use of a pitchfork, just now.

So no, I don’t buy it: DJT and all he represents is who we are. He is the apotheosis of our ugliest dreams, trotted out and given the actual power to loot anything and everything, while shouting insults at anyone who gainsays us. All in our name. The knuckleheads who actually voted for him should, by all logic, be sharpening their pitchforks.

But they’re not. 


Because this is who we are.

Don’t believe me? 


Don’t agree? 

Show me, America!

† It can and it did. Greg Palast's work has been both trenchant and prescient, and I highly recommend you read what he has uncovered about Interstate Crosscheck and its impact on the 2016 election.
* For an outstanding expression of this sentiment from one of my forebears, go read Howl by Alan Ginsberg. He said much the same thing more than half a century ago...and said it better.

Picture credits: National Review, Biography.com, The Wall Street Journal the White House, Britannica.com, BBC.co.uk, Amazon.com, Wikipedia.com, YouTube.com, magic.wizards.com, sciencephoto.com.

Lawyers, Damn Lawyers, and Alan

For I tell you that unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and the Pharisees, you will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

  Matthew 5:20 (English Standard Version)

What’s brown and looks good on a lawyer? A Doberman!

Of all the professions that require extensive training and elaborate education, lawyers are probably the least respected by the Average American. They’re right up there with college professors. Lawyers, as a group, just have a lousy reputation. Even Jesus thought so (scribes and Pharisees were members of society in his time who were deeply invested in holding up the law).

Most people are suspicious of lawyers…until they need one, which happens a lot. And I suspect that many people in need of legal services shrug their shoulders and bow to the necessity, while holding their noses: Modern society is saturated with law and legal strictures, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Imagine American society without the laws to protect individuals from the predations of businesses and other individuals. Imagine the environment, without laws. If you look at American society today, with its violence and shortsightedness and crass materialism, it’s frightening, actually, to think of having no legal boundaries at all, far worse than the prospect of occasionally having to hire a lawyer to protect you.

Now there are lawyers and lawyers, and they are not all cut from the same cloth. There are some (not enough, in my opinion) who eschew the high-profile tracks in the profession and instead represent people who really, really need help, who need someone to stand up for them when no one else will. Such women and men are, in my opinion, people of noble character and deserve every bit of the respect that their education and training merit, and more. I have known a few people like this in my day: defending workers taken advantage of by large corporations, standing up for immigrants in the face of the security state, challenging companies who break environmental protection laws, and so on.

Other lawyers, for whatever reason and by whatever means, exist to serve other interests — protecting estates, property rights cases, personal injury lawsuits, defamation, and so on. These people are not necessarily bad, nor even unprincipled. But while they have been hired to create a legal argument on behalf of their clients, they do not necessarily agree with that argument, nor even with their clients. Their job is to make the case, regardless of their own feelings about the people involved.

And I suspect that this is one reason why so many people revile lawyers and make sardonic jokes about them: In the end, you never really know where such lawyers stand personally. You cannot gauge their real, moral center merely by what they say in the brief or in court. Like actors in Elizabethan times, who were regarded as lowlife creatures by proper society because their job was to pretend to be someone else, lawyers in modern society have an obligation to do and say things that may sound unconscionable…or at least morally questionable…without suffering any consequences. Everyone understands that they are, well, just hired guns.

So if lawyers are the unquestionably Good Guys defending the defenseless, these are damn lawyers, as in “I need a damn lawyer.”

But there is yet another class of lawyers, one whose words and deeds go beyond the “moral neutrality” of the damn lawyer to embrace the truly pernicious. Whatever their personal principles (if any), they are prepared to defend their clients with utterly indefensible arguments, for a fee. They skulk behind the screen of the damn lawyer’s professionalism, but in fact such creatures exist merely to profit, personally and financially, from making hay out of horse shit, and they truly do not care what the real consequences of their arguments will be. If they did, they would never make them.

Some hay

If they really cared, if they really had a soul, if they actually were willing to take responsibility, they would never say or do the things they do in their work. In a sense, you can indeed gauge the moral compass of such people, because if they had a moral center, they would never be caught dead saying some of the things they say. 

Who knows? Maybe they even actually agree with the arguments they are making. But one thing is certain: They like the money better than they hate the consequences of their arguments. They will tell you that they are taking those six- and seven-figure fees because “everyone is entitled to representation.”

Some horse shit

But think about it, for a second. Is that really true? Is it really true that everyone deserves representation, at any cost, by any argument at all? Are we really prepared to absolve such men and women of responsibility for making dangerous and irresponsible arguments…just because they are lawyers? Is there nothing that is out of bounds, no argument that is so pernicious that it should not be seriously entertained in a formal setting?

Well, consider then the following statements from one such “lawyer”:

Every public official that I know believes that his election is in the public interest…And if a president does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment. 

Impeachment. Not removal from office. Impeachment. This statement was made on the floor of the US Senate in response to a question from a senator. 

This lawyer is suggesting that the POTUS can reasonably conclude that his actions are, by definition, in the public interest, and therefore cannot even be called to question for acting entirely to his own advantage and profit, regardless of the opinions of, say, members of the other branches of the government. 

The implications, the consequences, of such an argument are breathtaking. It is literally the same as saying that the POTUS is in fact a king, who is free to see no distinction between himself and the government he was elected to administer. L’état, c’est lui!

Now the lawyer who said this is not stupid. He is a highly-educated man who has built a very profitable career out of being seen as smart and clever. He did not get where he is today by not understanding what his own words mean. He must surely have known that this argument is literally an invitation to dictatorship.

But at the same time, it is probable that this lawyer himself does not actually believe this argument. Anyway, he is now desperately trying to walk it back.

No, this was red meat, a cynical, one-off defense of indefensible behavior, tossed out to see if it “sticks,” but also subject to “retraction” and other kinds of obfuscation if it does not. It is thus, not a measure of this man’s “professionalism” but of the emptiness that is his soul, the hollowed-out carcass of whatever moral center he was raised with. He will quite literally say anything to defend his client, no matter how pernicious.

* Picture credits:  hayandforage.com, ft.com