Brothers Judd Blog

If two New Hampshire men aren't a match for the Devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians. -Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943)

Presidents

Crusader State W

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED:

The Iraq War was a Success (Simon Maass, June 13, 2024, Providence)

In terms of its objectives, Operation Iraqi Freedom was a clear success. Saddam Hussein was deposed, tried and executed with ease. “We achieved our goals,” as John Bolton put it. Even so, the Iraq War is usually characterized as the poster child for American failure in foreign affairs, a perception based on questionable assumptions. […]

Eli Lake lists several indicators of Iraq’s progress since the invasion. In the two intervening decades, the country’s GDP ballooned approximately tenfold, while life expectancy, literacy rates, and the prevalence of cell phone plans also increased. According to the World Bank, Iraq’s GDP per capita declined from 2000 to 2003, but rose quite swiftly thereafter – that is, it actually started to grow following the invasion. Currently, it is nearly at an all-time high. The suicide rate remained roughly unchanged by the war, while infant mortality continued to diminish.[…]

As Alan Dowd writes, “it pays to recall that Saddam murdered 600,000 Iraqis.”If one includes deaths incurred during his war of aggression against Iran, that figure is reasonable. Human Rights Watch famously estimated the number of people “disappeared,” then killed, by the Ba’athist regime at “between 250,000 and 290,000 people.” This number was based on just the government’s major sprees of detentions and killings.

David French compares Iraq to neighboring Syria, which also had a Ba’athist dictatorship. That tyranny was not overthrown. When the Arab Spring swept across the Middle East, Syria was plunged into a civil war which has made the country “a charnel house.” We can supplement this point with some numbers. According to the UN, the decade from 2011 to 2021 saw over 350,000 deaths in the Syrian Civil War. Combined with Iraq Body Count’s figure, this implies that, despite having a smaller population, Syria experienced more deaths from falling into civil war than Iraq experienced from an American invasion. This illustrates that the lack of American intervention does not mean many people will not suffer. Furthermore, the Syrian Network for Human Rights currently estimates that “Syrian regime forces and Iranian militias” are responsible for 87% of the war’s civilian casualties. Note also that Syria’s population plummeted after its civil war began, whereas Iraq’s kept rising fairly smoothly after the invasion.

The critics generally prefer dictators keeping their Third World populations quiet to messy democracies.

All Comedy is Conservative It's a RICO case

SUBLIME:

“Letter From the Rikers Island Jail”

By “Donald J. Trump”

[As dictated to Steven F. Hayward]

[With apologies to Martin Luther King’s “Letter from the Birmingham Jail”]

Dear Losers and Haters:

While confined here in the Rikers Island Jail, I came across your recent Statement calling my past and present activities “extreme,” “reckless” and a “threat to democracy.” Always do I leap to point out what losers you all are! If I didn’t answer all of the attacks thrown my way, my secretaries and staff would have little to do, and Truth Social would go broke. But since you are all such complete haters I wouldn’t want to pass up the chance to remind everyone again. Sad!

FDR Identitarianism

IT DID HAPPEN HERE:

Roosevelt’s Revolution: a review of The New Deal’s War on the Bill of Rights: The Untold Story of FDR’s Concentration Camps, Censorship, and Mass Surveillance
By David T. Beito (Reviewed by Michael Lucchese., University Bookman)

Perhaps no single group suffered more, though, from Roosevelt’s policies than Japanese Americans. In a moment of wartime paranoia, Roosevelt blatantly disregarded the civil rights of over 120,000 Japanese people, two thirds of whom were U.S. citizens, and sent them to internment camps. Beito does not hold back in his description of the dreadful conditions they faced. He outlines Roosevelt’s genuine racial animus against East Asians, which he describes as “amateur eugenicist views,” and successfully argues that the president was “the man who was chiefly responsible” for these outright tyrannies. Beito even compares the internment camps to the concentration camps established by communist and fascist regimes around the same time.

Japanese internment is among the darkest moments in American history, and Beito does a real service confronting its sordid realities. The United States government did not right these wrongs until President Reagan signed a bill providing restitution to surviving victims, and even today the crimes committed by Roosevelt’s regime are too often forgotten. The episode should serve as a bleak reminder of what happens when the Bill of Rights is thrown out.

It's a RICO case

ORANGE IS THE NEW ORANGE:

Donald Trump had lots of negative opinions about felons. Now he is one. (Lois Beckett, Jun 2024, The Guardian)


Donald Trump has spent years complaining that American police and the criminal legal system should be “very much tougher”, arguing that some criminals should not be protected by civil liberties, police should rough up suspects and a much wider range of people should face the death penalty for breaking the law.

Now that the former president has been convicted on 34 felony counts for falsifying business records, Trump is arguing that the US legal system is out of control. “If they can do this to me, they can do this to anyone,” he said on Friday.


Here’s a recap of some of Trump’s notable comments about “felons” and “criminals” – and a look at how the convict himself has actually been treated.

It's a RICO case

STILL TIGHTENING:

The other 54 criminal charges Trump faces (Derek Hawkins, Nick Mourtoupalas and Azi Paybarah, May 30, 2024, Washington Post)


A New York jury convicted Donald Trump on Thursday of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to conceal money paid to adult-film actress Stormy Daniels in 2016, to prevent her from speaking publicly about a sexual encounter she claims they had years earlier.

But that conviction is just one of the legal obstacles the former president faces. There are also 54 criminal charges spread across three other cases. Two cases are related to Trump’s alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election, which he lost; and the third is about classified documents that Trump allegedly took after he left the White House.

Joe Biden

RICHARD BEN CRAMER TRIED TO WARN THEM:

Joe Biden Is a Lousy Politician (Matthew Continetti, May 14, 2024, AEI)

We pretend that the chief executive and his inner circle have a deep and mystical insight into the mood of voters and how best to shape public attitudes. The reason for this illusion is that there is only one president at a time. Winning the White House is an enormous task. To achieve it, the president and his team must build a national coalition. They must earn a mandate. They have got to know what they are doing.

That’s the cover story. Every so often, though, a president comes along who dashes the nation’s expectations of fitness, capacity, and suitability for office. The president may be an honorable man or an effective demagogue. His record may be admirable or mixed. But, at some point, his poll numbers go south. Nothing goes right. None of his solutions work. Looking back, it appears as if he were doomed from the start.

Such was the fate shared by Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush, and Donald Trump. They belong to a club no one wants to join: a motley crew of one-termers. It may soon welcome a new member named Joseph Robinette Biden Jr.

All Joe was hired to do was beat Donald. No one thought he’d be an effective executive. He should have chosen a capable vp and resigned once his job was done.

It's a RICO case

THE TIGHTENING NOOSE:

Star witness Michael Cohen says Trump was intimately involved in all aspects of hush money scheme (MICHAEL R. SISAK, JILL COLVIN, ERIC TUCKER AND JAKE OFFENHARTZ, May 13, 2024, NY Times)


“We need to stop this from getting out,” Cohen quoted Trump as telling him in reference to porn actor Stormy Daniels’ account of a sexual encounter with Trump a decade earlier. The then-candidate was especially anxious about how the story would affect his standing with female voters.

A similar episode occurred when Cohen alerted Trump that a Playboy model was alleging that she and Trump had an extramarital affair. “Make sure it doesn’t get released,” was Cohen’s message to Trump, the lawyer said. The woman, Karen McDougal, was paid $150,000 in an arrangement that was made after Trump received a “complete and total update on everything that transpired.”

“What I was doing, I was doing at the direction of and benefit of Mr. Trump,” Cohen testified.

Lincoln Republican Liberty

NOT JUST rEPUBLICAN BUT REPUBLICAN:

Exploring Our Ancient Faith (Lucas Morel, 5/05/24, Public Discourse)

So what did Lincoln mean by “our ancient faith”? In his 1854 speech at Peoria, Illinois, what Guelzo rightly calls “the greatest speech he had yet uttered,” Lincoln identified the Declaration of Independence as the source of America’s ancient faith: “If the negro is a man, why then my ancient faith teaches me that ‘all men are created equal;’ and that there can be no moral right in connection with one man’s making a slave of another.” That Lincoln turned the humanity of black people into a rhetorical question made clear his concern that America was at risk of losing its claim to be a free country. Lincoln then added that “according to our ancient faith, the just powers of governments are derived from the consent of the governed.” Only by “re-adopt[ing] the Declaration of Independence, and with it, the practices, and policy, which harmonize with it,” could the union of American states be “worthy of the saving.”

Lincoln’s nemesis, Stephen Douglas, emphatically disagreed. Quoting Lincoln, Guelzo recounts that Douglas employed the “lullaby” of popular sovereignty to “tranquilize the whole country” into thinking “there would be no more slavery agitation in or out of Congress, and the vexed question would be left entirely to the people of the territories.” Most importantly, Guelzo adds that the “real damage came from the implication that ‘popular sovereignty’ was real democracy, that democracy had no bedrock of principle beyond the mechanics of democratic process.” As committed to democracy as Lincoln was, vox populi, vox Dei was never his mantra the way it was for Douglas. Those, like Douglas, who did not see that the equality principle of the Declaration of Independence included all people regardless of race, essentially taught citizens “that there is no right principle of action but self-interest.”

It's a RICO case

IT’S A rico CASE:

THE COURTROOM(S) CAMPAIGN (Politico 4/25/24)

Over the course of roughly 24 hours since yesterday morning, Trump …

… was revealed as an “unindicted co-conspirator” in the “fake electors” scheme in Michigan during a court proceeding;

… was identified as “unindicted co-conspirator 1” in a slate of new grand jury indictments over Arizona’s “fake electors” scheme that saw his former attorney RUDY GIULIANI and former White House chief of staff MARK MEADOWS both charged;

… will be the subject of a Supreme Court case today as the justices hear oral arguments over his claims of immunity from criminal prosecution stemming from his attempts to overturn the 2020 election;

… will return to a Manhattan courtroom for another day of testimony from former National Enquirer chief DAVID PECKER in his criminal trial for alleged election interference and business fraud; and

… could see the judge in that case, JUAN MERCHAN, rule on whether he violated a gag order.

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