This Brave New World, XLIII
Jan. 6 hearings ...
in tv's light the gray-haired man
mumbling,
fake news, I won, I won
in his room on the psych ward
FYI: Vanity Fair, June 9: Ivanka Trump: Hell, Yeah. I knew My Father's stolen election claims were BULLSHIT. And The New Yorker: June 13: Bill Barr Calls “Bullshit” on Trump’s Election Lies
Trump’s former Attorney General told Trump this to his face. Among his choice words about various claims by the Trump legal team: “bullshit,” “completely bullshit,” “absolute rubbish,” “idiotic,” “bogus,” “stupid,” “crazy,” “crazy stuff,” “complete nonsense,” and “a great, great disservice to the country.” What’s more, Barr added, if Trump actually believed the garbage he was spewing about the election, then he had become dangerously “detached from reality.”...be the surprise star witness, debunking his former boss’s fantastical and malicious election falsehoods with a derision that bordered on outright contempt.
And Democracy Now, June 15: “Conspiratorial Mindset”: From Nixon to Trump, Lessons for Jan. 6 Hearing 50 Years After Watergate
The 50th anniversary of the Watergate burglary in 1972 this Friday comes as public hearings are underway by the House committee investigating the January 6 Capitol insurrection. We speak with Garrett Graff, author of “Watergate: A New History,” about critical lessons and historical parallels between the defining controversies of the Nixon and Trump presidencies. Rather than isolated crimes, Watergate and January 6 should be seen as culminating events of U.S. presidencies that share a “dark, criminal, conspiratorial mindset that drives and links together so many of their scandals,” says Graff.
...what we now really understand about Watergate was that it was less an event and more a mindset, that that Watergate burglary was the equivalent of America walking into the second or third act of a play that had been underway for years at that point, and that Watergate is really about this dark, criminal, paranoid, conspiratorial mindset that Richard Nixon brings to the White House that permeates the upper ranks of his administration, that drives the actions of so many aides, including men like John Ehrlichman, who we heard from a moment ago, and that Watergate really becomes an umbrella for about a dozen interrelated but distinct scandals, all of which stem from presidential abuses of power, abuses of American civil liberties, the Nixon administration’s attempts to weaponize the government against its political enemies, and that carry straight from the campaign of 1968 through the summer of ’74, when Nixon finally resigns from office.
And so, my book and sort of where history, I think, is settling on the Watergate story is to look at the burglary as really just one event in this six years of, at least until then, unprecedented corruption and criminality inside the White House....
Added:
rat-tat-tat-tat ...
the length of a siren
this sultry night
Added:
Everything as Usual
on the power line
a crow's caw-caw-caw ...
holding a gun, the young man
whose face shadowed by the brim
of his MAGA hat
midnight gunshots ...
a siren deepening
the silence
among the neighbours
who know each other too well
FYI: MAGA stands for "Make America Great Again."
