Another fortnight has come and gone—and not just any fortnight. Continuing a trend that began in 2015—and mirroring, in the political realm, the ratcheting up of global temperatures and resultant climatic catastrophes—this has been the 290th consecutive fortnight to have been worse than the one before.
Appropriately, this one kicked off under cover of darkness. In the early morning hours of Saturday, August 8th, the full Senate voted, in effect, to combine the offices of Attorney General of the United States of America with that of Mr. Fixit of the Trump Organization. So, your mother was right: nothing good happens after midnight.
Nine years earlier, in the White House, as questions were being asked about his associations with unsavory Russians, the distinctive, plaintive call of the orange-hued Queens Grifter was heard: “Where’s my Roy Cohn?”
Cohn entered history in the Red Scare of the late-1940s and early 1950s. In many ways, this period was similar to the Red Scare of the 1880s and 1890s, and to the Red Scare of the late 1910s and 1920. It was Cohn who set it apart from those earlier exercises in rampant capitalist hysteria.
As red-baiting Senator Joseph McCarthy’s top hatchet man, Cohn cut quite a figure: a closeted gay alcoholic who associated with mobsters and inept plastic surgeons, by the twilight of his career he looked as if he might have been, perhaps as a result of some unfortunate misunderstanding, dipped, upside down, into a boiling vat of something nasty.
Our current president, early in his own career, when he rode around in a Cadillac while collecting rent for his daddy, was mentored by that ghoulish late-era Cohn, and loved him deeply. He learned from him whatever grasping and duplicitous principles he had not already picked up from his own abusive father.
Now, as #47, his call has at last been answered. Todd Blanche is no Roy Cohn—he’s too good looking, for one thing—but his past performance, despite his long, long string of losses in court, has demonstrated his utter and abject fealty. Earlier this month another of the president’s myriad former lawyers said, “Todd Blanche makes Roy Cohn look like a jaywalker when it comes to the crimes that he’s willing to commit for the president.”
On Sunday, Blanche appeared on “Meet the Press.” According to reporting in the Washington Post, he “rejected the idea an attorney general should act independently of the president, saying, ‘No, I’m not going to pledge that.’” He added that Trump would “never ask me to do something unethical or illegal.
“This narrative that’s mostly pushed by the left and pushed by the media that the president’s going to pull me aside and ask me to do something illegal is completely a false narrative, not true, will not happen, and hasn’t happened,” thus making it clear that he planned to set the Department of Justice back, ethically speaking, more than half a century, to a time when Attorney Generals smoked pipes, had their wives forcibly injected with sedatives, arranged payoffs to silence witnesses, and, if caught, did their time in the federal pen without complaining.
This may be a propitious time to question—if one has not already—the purported infallibility of our Sacred Founding Fathers. Whither their much-vaunted Checks and Balances?
It’s probably too late to throw ourselves on the mercy of the Supreme Court, the luxury-loving cabal which runs the third branch of our government. Made up mostly now of cranks hand-picked by noted religious zealot Leonard Leo, it was they who, in a hideous version of House-Flippers of the Potomac, jammed the Unitary Executive Branch™ down the nation’s collective throat in the first place.
That leaves, as our last resort, the 119th Congress. Cold comfort there, since it’s proving to be the Boston Corbett* of Federal branches. Those spineless toadies are neither willing nor able to restrain a criminal president with the AG on his side.
Publishers used to think of “reader retention” as the art of keeping the audience coming back for more. These days the challenge is to avoid driving them to self-destruction.
Fortunately, we do have a bit of good news: it looks like most of us are fed up to the gills, and willing to shake things up to change them. NPR reported on August 10th that a new poll shows, “there is significant support for upending winner-take-all U.S. House elections and single-member congressional districts.” Incumbents will, of course, be reluctant to nuke the system that put them in power, but fixourhouse.org has a clever strategem for overcoming that.
Getting this done won’t be easy. It may require the strategic use of a few pitchforks and torches. The way things have been going, though, they’re coming anyway.
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* Thomas H. “Boston” Corbett, at the age of 26, castrated himself with a pair of scissors hoping that would lessen his troublesome urge to consort with prostitutes. Later he presaged Jack Ruby by nearly a century when he shot John Wilkes Boothe.
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