Left Jabs

  Since the holidays are a perfect time to not write, that’s exactly what I’m not doing. Rather, let's look, once again, at this article from last February, just to see how little has changed. Incredibly, mainstream media organizations remain uninterested in Trump’s life of crime, now in its fifth decade. More incredibly, they refuse to acknowledge his clear and present threat to national security, even as they report its details. With that in mind, consider this piece a brief primer on what the world continues to ignore. It’s time for us to accept what the mainstream media refuses to acknowledge: that Donald Trump is a Russian asset and, as such, a grave security risk to the nation. Witting or not. Criminal or not. Whether he’s a master spy or a useful idiot, it doesn’t matter how he got there. Trump is a longtime front man, money launderer, and generally shady operator for both the criminal organizations and intelligence communities of eastern Europe. And wh...

  The Republican party, now composed almost exclusively of Trump-addled know-nothings, has been busy handing Democrats all the talking points they can use for next year’s election. From such talking points we can expect to see gut-punching ads that star all your favorite Republicans, in all their splendid fraudulence. The idea is to hang them with their own words. Make them own the lies they tell on camera. Let those lies be the fuel for the attack ads against them. Treat the whole GOP as a target-rich environment, where everywhere you look there’s another liar. Feel free to target them without mercy. The ability to lie, shamelessly and constantly, is a core skill of Republican politicians. These bought-and-paid-for toadies have signed up for any posturing they’re called on to do, the more theatrical the better. They’re trained to lie effortlessly, and to maintain their lies, no matter who calls them on it, or how sharply it contradicts the lies they told the ...

  There has been, of late, a deep dread circulating among Democrats pondering the gloomy prospect of a second Trump presidency. It’s hard to blame them. Despite an unusually good economy and a general prosperity we had no right to expect, incipient feelings of pessimism are being shamelessly stoked by the media. Each day, we’re showered with stories ominously portending a Trump-led coup. They invite us to cower at the thought of Trumpian storm troopers determined to capture the government, jail their enemies, replace the entire civil service, and flip a collective middle finger at NATO. They conjure terrifying images of forced-birth camps for women, deportation camps for immigrants, and concentration camps for gays, Jews, Muslims, and all people of color. Which is more camping than most of us want to do. But I think we need to take a breath. Because no matter how I parse the inputs I’m getting, I cannot conceive of a reasonable scenario where Donald Trump ...

  Before the Washington football team formally changed its name to the Commanders — a remarkably lame choice — I openly advocated for calling the team the Washington Subpoenas. Subpoenas are the penalty flags of the legal system. And what could be more Washington than being caught in a personal foul for unsportsmanlike conduct? Or unnecessary roughness. Hunter Biden has subpoenas going in two directions. He’s answering subpoenas from James Comer’s “Impeach Joe Biden” House Committee. And he’s issuing subpoenas to, among others, Bill Barr over Barr’s actions and inactions as Trump’s Attorney General. It is no doubt a sordid story, but we’re only getting small pieces of it. These dueling subpoenas are of two different types: congressional and judicial. Congressional subpoenas, it turns out, don’t carry nearly the same weight as those issued by a court of law. So it’s important to distinguish between the two types of subpoenas — congressional vs judicial — ...

  Thanksgiving has come and gone, and I’ve written not a word in a week. Here, therefore, is an oldie from September 2021, a sort of backgrounder on the Heritage Foundation, whose “fellows” are even now hard at work on Project 2025 , which they hope will finish off democracy once and for all.    How many times, over the last few decades, have we heard mention of the Heritage Foundation, and thought nothing of it? It’s always been one of those names in the background, just below the surface of the discussion. It’s often accompanied by the words “conservative think tank,” which led me to wonder what they think about. Especially in this age of big lies, insurrection, and election subversion. So I took a closer look. Turns out, “think tank” is an apt description, because these are the guys who do the actual thinking — such as it is — for the Republican party. Ever since Reagan, Heritage has provided Republicans with the specious reasoning they use to...

  A funny thing happened on the way to the 2024 horserace. The mainstream media brought Hitler into the conversation. Trump gave them no choice. He kept amping up his rants in terms that were so explicitly Nazi, so lifted — practically verbatim — from Hitler’s speeches, that it was hard for them to keep ignoring what they’ve willfully ignored for so long. When Trump used the word ‘vermin’ in his Veteran’s Day speech , he was taking a whole chapter from the fascism playbook. Whether he knew it or not. Dehumanization — the art of equating human beings with insects — is a classic stochastic terrorism technique, beloved of dictators the world over. In Rwanda in the nineties, the Hutu tribe openly called its rival Tutsis “cockroaches” on the radio, inciting its members to exterminate them with machetes, which they did. We’ll probably never know who actually wrote the Vermin speech — Stephen Miller or Steve Bannon are likely suspects — but we can be sure it wasn...

  Donald Trump has achieved his life’s work. All he ever wanted was to be rich and famous, and he certainly has a claim on both. But the results are mixed, and in both cases, he might have been more careful what he wished for. Rich? Rich was something bestowed on him by his father, despite an obvious dearth of business aptitude. Somehow, through sheer chutzpah, he managed to impersonate a self-made tycoon for forty years. More than that, he lived rich, flamboyantly so, and not enough people questioned where that money came from. We now know that astonishing amounts of his gains were ill-gotten, but we still don’t know the real extent of those gains — or losses, for that matter — and may never. But as his assets get sent into receivership in the next months and years, we’ll learn more about the murky business practices that were covered up by Alan Weisselberg’s cooked books and false valuations, and we might even learn how rich Trump actually is. Or was. Or was...