American Suckers
News broke Monday evening that Sidney Powell, the former President’s lawyer, then not lawyer, then lawyer again, had responded to a billion dollar defamation suit by the company who made the voting machines that she, said corrupt ex-President, and myriad other lawyers representing him, claimed were part of a looney world-wide conspiracy to deny the true and righteous of his electoral destiny. These claims were the oxygen for the fevered mind of a despicable man and his dark, aggrieved followers, and he used the great and terrible powers of his office to influence those followers to treason as a result.
Ms. Powell’s response? Let’s go to the invaluable Dispatch for an extended quote from its “The Kraken is Backtrackin’” :
But Powell may have flown too close to the sun. She was hit with a $1.3 billion defamation lawsuit in January from Dominion alleging she spread her false claims about the company’s machines deleting or flipping votes “to financially enrich herself, to raise her public profile, and to ingratiate herself to Donald Trump.”
Now that Powell is facing real consequences for her rhetoric, she is singing a different tune. Seeking to dismiss Dominion’s lawsuit, the pro-Trump lawyer and her legal team filed a motion on Monday arguing that “no reasonable person would conclude that [Powell’s] statements were truly statements of fact.”
Rather, Powell and her attorneys argue, her allegations about Dominion were political in nature, and therefore, citing an earlier case, “prone to exaggeration and hyperbole.” And she claims Dominion’s suit makes her case for her.
“Indeed, Plaintiffs themselves characterize the statements at issue as ‘wild accusations’ and ‘outlandish claims,’” the motion continues. “Such characterization of the allegedly defamatory statements further support Defendants’ position that reasonable people would not accept such statements as fact but view them only as claims that await testing by the courts through the adversary process.”
In other words, what I was saying was such utter bullshit that no one should have taken it seriously, and that because it was such utter bullshit I should not suffer any consequences.
Those in control of their faculties knew it was a con from the beginning. They were validated in this knowledge by dozens of courts seeing nothing but innuendo and lie in the specious claims of Ms. Powell and others. They knew that a carnival barker was feeding his mouth-breathing supporters with a steady diet of lies, and had Trump’s followers retained even a shred of human decency, they would have known it too. Instead, those followers comforted themselves with conspiracies (child molestation, cannibalism, etc) aimed at the duly elected President, even as they sunk deeper into the fantasy of stolen elections.
Great swathes of the American public are revealed for being the suckers they genuinely are. The easily influenced, the dark-hearted, generally apolitical—these people can be dismissed to return to the state of seething grievance that colored their pitiful lives before Cheeto Jesus came along. The people for whom Dante’s seventh ring are reserved are those who should have known better. The informed. The intelligent. In many cases, the elected. They knew all along that the claims upon which the ex-President’s case were built amounted to nothing. They hid behind the false front of due process, extending to this most evil of men a seemingly unending supply of grace to underpin his criminal manipulation and insurrection. The ENTIRE TREASONOUS ACT of January 6th was built on this farrago of lies, they supported and enabled it, and they share in its consequences.
Murder in Atlanta
Eight people were killed last week in the Atlanta area when a wing-nut with a sex addiction decided the best way to deal with it would be to kill those who had been his suppliers. Six of the eight were Asian women who worked at the establishments he frequented, which led to an immediate outcry from the practitioners of identity and intersectionality that this was once again, an example of violence and hate against the Asian American community. While it seems likely that there has been an increase in such violence and hate—especially since the virus began and an adolescent President decided to turn its name into a schoolyard taunt—there is a bit of base-stealing going on here, as there isn’t a whole lot of evidence that the killer had anything against Asians generally. Put another way, were Bulgarians to have achieved the market share of the sex trade that “Asian Spas” seem to enjoy, Wing Nut Killer would have been targeting Bulgarians.
That said, there have been some really ugly incidents recently in which Asians were targeted, and there have been anecdotal reports of harassment associating ethnic origin and the ongoing pandemic. Not cool.
Apropos of nothing further than the oddities of modern intersectionality, I give you the following:
First Meal Out Since COVID
On Saturday night, my neighbor across the way texted me to see if I wanted to go to breakfast with him on Sunday morning. It has been a while since we connected, and it was good to hear from him. Needing to be up early anyway to see Catherine off on a trip, I immediately said yes, though on further reflection, it occurred to me that a moment had passed. This would be my first meal out with another human being since we locked down a year ago.
I’ve eaten at restaurants a handful of times, but only on travel and by myself. We do take-out like fiends, but this was a no-joke, just-like the old days trip to a restaurant with another life form. I was genuinely excited for it. Sunday dawned bright and beautiful, and my friend drove up just after 8. We drove to our local airport here in lovely Easton, MD to the Sugar Buns Airport Café, a place we’d been before. It was just like my dim memories of our past breakfasts there, with serviceable coffee, a decent omelet, and oddly bland sausage links. But it wasn’t about the food. It was about being in a restaurant, sitting across from good conversation, remembering once again what normal feels like.
March Madness
My Virginia Cavaliers did what many thought they’d do in the first round of the tournament, and that was lose to Ohio University. UVA hadn’t practiced much in the previous week because of COVID, had traveled to Indianapolis only the day before, and had their clearing virus tests at 1:15AM on game day. But none of this was the cause of Virginia losing, as they pretty much played like they played in a third of their games this year, and their poor shooting was kinda what we’d seen from them in the last few games. This was (unfortunately) a team that had problems from the start, and whose elevated ranking to begin the season had a lot more to do with how much writers love Coach Tony Bennett than it did any real evidence. Virginia pretty much proved that only being able to feature three big dudes chucking up threes is a high risk strategy.