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New London Day: Whackjobs! We want to hear from you!

Saturday, January 23, 2021

The New London Day apparently can’t afford to send it’s reporters into diners to seek out the whackos, like the New York Times, so it’s asking the whackos to come to it.

On the front page of today’s Region section there’s a little item asking whackjobs who’ve applied for pistol permits in 2020 to give the Day a call. Apparently, the Day wants to get on the same bus as the Times, seeking to understand the crazies.

Buried in all this, of course, is the unstated proposition that these people are oddities, who we must understand and to whom we must give ever so many benefits of the doubt. Normal people, you know, people who don’t stockpile weapons or go maskless during a pandemic, aren’t worth seeking out. Who cares what they think! That’s why the Times spilled endless ink on Trumpies in diners, but never, in eight years, bothered to seek out Obama voters.

This is nothing really new for the Day, which has been catering to the right for years now. Among other things they have inflicted local right wing radio host Lee Elci on us as a regular columnist, but they have, apparently, been totally unable to find a local left winger so they can be “fair and balanced”.

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Republicans lament: no fair calling us Republicans

Saturday, January 23, 2021

Pity the poor blogger, when fate deals him a hand that he cannot win. This article in the New London Day presents a challenge that requires a Mark Twain, or, at the very least, a Driftglass to come up with just the right nouns, verbs and especially adjectives to properly mock the Republicans of the City of Groton.

Poor dears! The City Republicans will not be running a slate of candidates in the May Municipal elections because, as the Coaster’s Charlie Brown of oldies sang, they can’t figure out why “everybody’s always picking on [them]”:

The City of Groton Republican Committee will not put forward candidates for the city elections in May, after prospective candidates cited concerns over “a hostile and threatening environment” for Republicans and withdrew their names from the slate.

“Over the past year and one half, the City of Groton Republican Committee identified a well-qualified slate of individuals who have shown a keen interest in running for election on the Republican ticket in the City of Groton,” according to a news release issued by the Republican Committee. But over the past week, the “prospective candidates have congruently withdrawn their names from the slate” and indicated the following three reasons for withdrawing their names:

“Over the past few months, there has been an increase in negativity toward Republicans, whether they supported Donald Trump or not during the 2020 election, by Democrats on the National, State, and local level, which has created a hostile and threatening environment for those wishing to run for election,” the release states.

“The recent improper and illegal action at the Capitol Building in Washington has created an even more negative, and visible, atmosphere towards Republicans on the Federal, State, and local (levels),” it further stated.

“Increased, nationally publicized threats, intimidation and bullying of Republicans by many liberal Democrats has created an environment causing many citizens, who were considering running for election to reconsider doing so out of concern for the safety and welfare of themselves and their family,” the release continued. “This has also raised major apprehension that they would be subjected to unjustified public ridicule and embarrassment by Democrats supporting the liberal left, should they elect to run for public office.”

Do you see my problem? How does one sum up the absurdity of the above in a few pithy sentences. Surely it can be done, but I find I can’t do it!

Let’s take a bit of a detour here, and note that the reporter apparently does not ask the City Republican Chair to cite even a single instance of “nationally publicized threats, intimidation and bullying of Republicans by many liberal Democrats”, but that’s the sort of journalistic malpractice that one learns to expect when the press deals with Republican mendacity.

The reporter herself takes a detour into New London, whose Republican town chair explains the source of the horrible treatment Republicans must endure:

She said there is a “new culture” in which it is “OK to be nasty to people because of their political affiliation.” While she said that has been the case for both parties for some time, an open hostility toward Republicans has grown for the last couple of weeks. She said there is an “immediate assumption that if you are a Republican, that you must have voted for Donald Trump, and that you must be racist and you must be all of these bad things simply because you bear the Republican political moniker — and quite frankly that’s not true.”

Funny, I thought being a member of a political party meant that you subscribed to a certain set of principles that the party embodies. I keep imagining a Gauleiter in 1932 Germany complaining to a newspaper that it’s so unfair that some people assume you support Hitler, that you’re anti-Semitic, and “all of these bad things” just because you bear the Nazi moniker. Who knows? There may have been Nazis who had their doubts about Hitler and didn’t want to kill Jews – – but they were still Nazis.

But here’s the drill, which some in the press are reinforcing: It’s time for healing, America! And that means, according to Republicans, that we must forgive them their trespasses, consign said trespasses to the memory hole, and get back to calling Democrats Socialists and radicals (see, e.g., Republican Heather Somers baseless attacks against Democrat Bob Statchen) and blaming Antifa for the acts of right wing storm troopers, as John Scott, Groton Town Chair, who is quoted in the article, recently attempted to do. They want all that forgiveness but perish the thought that they should have to confess their sins and say a sincere act of contrition, not to mention do a considerable penance.

Also, of course, we mustn’t reverse all of Trump’s racist policies because that hurts their fee-fees too. And, also, surely we can see that we should guarantee that Mitch McConnell can obstruct every single thing the Democrats and Biden want to do? You know, for the sake of unity.

Poor misunderstood Republicans. They’ve got it so rough.

Explanatory Note: I’ve referred to both the Groton City Chair and the Groton Town Chair of the Republican Party. For those not from our fair town, Groton City and Groton Town are two different, though intertwined entities. Too complicated to explain and not necessary for this post. Except that I should point out that the City is heavily Democratic, the Democrats typically sweep the municipal elections, and that’s why no one wants to run for those offices. But we shouldn’t let reality intrude too much.

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Is it okay if you’re a Democrat?

Thursday, January 21, 2021

I have to admit that I was unaware of this at the time, but apparently during the administration of he who shall go unnamed, the Supreme Court ruled that legislation shielding the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau from being fired was unconstitutional. They did it so the genius could replace a rational person with an anti-consumer zealot.

In the precious time allotted to her, Kathleen Kraninger, the zealot in question, has compiled quite a record:

Kraninger, who had no previous experience in consumer protection, immediately tried to undermine the agency’s role as a watchdog for the financial sector. She scrapped a landmark rule that restricted predatory payday lending, pressuring staff to downplay the resulting harm to consumers. And she refused to enforce a federal law that protected military personnel against a broad range of predatory lending. Her decision yanked federal support from military families who were defrauded by lenders. In the midst of the pandemic, Kraninger also approved a rule that allows debt collectors to harass Americans with limitless texts and emails demanding repayment.

Now, Joe Biden has taken advantage of that ruling, and has fired that very zealot.

So the question arises: How will the Supreme Court verbalize a reason for overturning Biden’s action without explicitly saying that it should have been understood that the ruling only applied to Republican Presidents? Who knows, we may find out soon.

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Inaugural Playlist

Wednesday, January 20, 2021

As I write this, or begin to write this, there are 21 hours and 58 minutes to go, but the end is in sight, so here’s some music to get in the right mood. I retired that some of these have no video, but you take what you can get. First up, because it’s the first that came to mind:

I have this fantasy. Just up the hill from my house, at the very top of Fort Hill, someone has been flying a Trump flag for the past four years. I would love to have a flash mob outside that house at noon on the 20th to dance to this song. For that matter, wouldn’t it be good if that mob showed up at Trump Tower.

Anyway, on to the next item. Some might argue that this should have been first, considering the occasion, but I really think Martha and the gang deserve pride of place. Anyway, here’s two versions of what we have to say is the Democrat’s theme song. One quite specific to the moment, but one performed a bit better by Mitch and the Gang. I have a soft spot for Mitch. When I was about 6 my Dad brought one of his albums home. It was one of the few we had, and I must have listened to it a hundred times. First, the up to date version:

Now Mitch and the gang:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=75V3H-FXf78&feature=share

Next up:

I’m a bit befuddled about why the video in this next one has Bob Dylan and some person I can’t identify in it, when it’s by Van Morrison. And yes, I know Van has gotten crotchety about COVID restrictions, but still..

https://youtu.be/csWSE4-Cs6k

Can’t argue with this one:

Okay, I was a bit conflicted by the next one. It certainly captures the correct spirit for the day. I last saw the movie when I was six or seven, so I can’t say for sure, but I’ve a vague impression that the movie might not hold up well, politically speaking. So rather than put in the clip from the movie, I’m going with Louis Armstrong, because who can criticize that?

Willie Nelson’s version isn’t available as an actual video, but this Kate Smith version is pretty good.

Can’t forget Randy.

Finally:

Epilogue: We’ll be celebrating, but we have to keep in mind that we can’t let it all happen again, as we don’t want the scene to the right to be repeated again. This next song isn’t quite on point, but close enough. There are a million versions of this song on youtube (well, maybe not a million) but the first time I ever heard it was on a CD I bought by this fellow, Thomas Hampson. I don’t even know why I bought it. I had never heard of the guy. It was a CD of Stephen Foster songs. Anyway, the guy has a great voice, and this is an actual live performance and as far as I’m concerned, the four years of Trump were the definition of a kind of Hard Times, not to mention that the year of the plague has not been fun.

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Another resistance hero?

Monday, January 18, 2021

On the first day of January of the worst year in many decades (that being 2020) I wrote a piece in which I made a number of predictions. Here’s one paragraph that came to mind recently:

The Republicans, in alliance with Fox News, will suddenly declare that the president is subject to the rule of law, and although they will have nothing valid on Biden, they will continue to spin conspiracy theories. William Barr will get a respectful hearing on CNN as he argues that a special prosecutor should be appointed to pursue those theories, and that Joe, seeing as he’s a Democrat, is not entitled to the benefits of the unitary executive theory. Come 2023, when the Republicans have taken back the House, and likely the Senate, they will move to impeach Biden on specious grounds, or at the very least, threaten to do so while conducting interminable investigations to distract from their primary goal of transferring our money to the already rich.

I was a bit wrong about the Biden impeachment, as one of the newly elected whackjobs intends to introduce articles of impeachment as her first official act. But, really, I think a serious effort in that direction will have to await the Republican return to majority status.

This post is about Bill Barr, who has let it be known that he heroically called bullshit on Trump’s lies about the election. He is apparently looking to get the mainstream, or at least Fox, to sanitize him so he can pontificate. He hopes, and there is a better than even chance his hopes will be fulfilled, that the catalogue of horrors and abuses of his office will be forgotten, now that he’s shown his true resistance colors. As the linked article suggests, the sanitizing has already commenced.

You have to hand it to him that he saw the way the winds were blowing, and did what was in his own interests. But in his case, he had few options. As attorney general, had he climbed on the “stop the steal” bus, he would have had to put up or shut up. The put up part wasn’t in the cards, so he chose to shut up. He had the smarts to realize that Trump would be history, whatever Barr might do, so he figured he might as well come out looking like he’d done the right thing (for once).

Guys like Hawley and Cruz had a more difficult decision to make. They aren’t looking to get punditry jobs, or otherwise pose as elder statesmen (or statesmen of any kind, for that matter). They want to be president, and they made the calculation that adding fuel to the fire would be in their best interests. It may turn out that they were right, but we won’t know for a while. It can’t help Cruz, for instance, that just about every newspaper in his state is calling for his resignation and Hawley is losing contributors, though that may be a passing fad.

Anyway, don’t be surprised if you soon see Barr on CNN telling us about the limits of presidential power. And don’t forget that if you see him there, it will be as the result of massive journalistic malpractice, for Atrios makes a good point here:

The reason to push for the shunning of everybody who worked with Trump is that we know that they knew – even more than we did – just how dangerous it was to leave that man in charge of a superpower, our superpower.
And they didn’t care.

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Somebody better investigate soon

Wednesday, January 13, 2021

This post at Hullabaloo is well worth reading. It relates the impressions of the Capitol Hill insurrection of historian Terry Bouton, who has attended multiple Washington demonstrations as an observer. His observations about the demographic makeup of the crowd are enlightening, but most interesting are his observations about the security:

There is no doubt the Capitol was left purposefully understaffed as far as law enforcement and there was no federal effort to provide support even as things turned very dark. This contrasts sharply with all of other major protests we have attended.

A lot has been made of the contrast to the overwhelming police presence at Black Lives Matters protests in the fall, and this is certainly true. But there was also A LOT more federal law enforcement presence at every single previous protest we have attended in DC.

Most of these protests involved tens of thousands of mostly white, middle-aged people (meaning race wasn’t the only reason for the disparate police presence). Even the March for Science had far more police for a non-partisan event featuring “Bill Nye the Science Guy.”

By contrast, there was a tiny federal police presence at “Stop the Steal” despite weeks of promises of violence spread on social media by well-known far-right radicals, many of whom had long histories of inciting violence.

Read it all. A thorough investigation is needed.

I expect that as calls for such an investigation increase, and as it gathers steam, we will be hearing from the Republicans that it’s all just a baseless conspiracy theory.

Notice: Not that many are likely to care, but comments are not working on this blog at the moment. I’ll be putting this notice on posts until I get the problem cleared up. That will involve attempting to contact someone at my web hosting service, which is both time consuming and aggravating in the extreme, so I’ve been putting it off until I have a few hours I can spend on hold waiting for someone to talk to me.

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John Scott knows the playbook

Tuesday, January 12, 2021

This morning’s New London Day has an article about local Republicans, many of whom are blaming Antifa for the insurrection on the 6th. John Scott, chair or the Groton Republicans, whose name has frequently appeared on this blog, was among those quoted.

In a Jan. 6 Facebook post, John Scott, the Groton RTC chairman, wrote, “I’m not convinced these people are Trump supporters. My money is on Antifa,” alongside an image of a man authorities have identified as Jacob Anthony Chansley, or Jake Angeli, of Arizona, a well-known member of far-right conspiracy group QAnon, standing in the U.S. Senate Chamber.

Chansley was charged in federal court Saturday with knowingly entering or remaining in any restricted building or grounds without lawful authority, and with violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds, according to the United State Justice Department.

Scott said by phone Monday that he now knows it was QAnon, a right-wing group that he does not support, involved in the riots and pictured in the photo he shared: “It was a fringe group that really has nothing to do with us as Republicans,” he said, adding that he thinks it’s unfortunate that Republicans are being painted with a broad brush when it “happened at the fringe level of the political world.”

I was disappointed when I read this. I was aware of the article as I took my morning bike ride, but I hadn’t yet read it. I already knew about John’s Facebook post, but not his evasive retraction. So, as I rode, I had a great idea for a post, consisting of a strident defense of John Scott. For, as anyone with a brain knows, there are but two reasons why anyone would claim that Antifa was involved in this right wing insurrection.

  1. The person in question is mentally ill, subject to delusions, or has been thoroughly propagandized.
  2. The person in question is aware that what they are saying is untrue, or, as Republicans would say, mis-speaking.

I’ve know John for years, and it was my intent to defend his honor by proving beyond a doubt that he was entitled to more than the benefit of the doubt, and that he is by no means mentally ill or deluded. Option 2 definitely applies. John was not deluded, he was merely honoring the ignoble tradition of the American right: blaming others for its own actions and, of course, feeding lies to the base, a tradition Paul Krugman documents here.

John’s retraction and deflection in the Day has proven my point for me, so my original idea went up in smoke. All the great lines I thought up on my bike ride, down the drain. Realizing he couldn’t stick with one statement which was at odds with reality, John pivoted to another. A truly deluded person would have stuck to his or her guns. They simply reject facts, whereas Republican enablers do an intricate dance when confronted with the truth. I do salute John for masterfully playing the victim card by putting down his own broad brush and hypocritically complaining about Republicans being “painted with too broad a brush”. Good one John, you’ve learned your Republican playbook. As John explains, it is terribly unfair to accuse Republicans, who have now elected QAnon people to Congress and have stoked its conspiracy theories for years, from being at all connected in any way, shape or form to the QAnon crazies. It’s just not fair. After all, he would argue, have you ever heard a Republican claim that the almost non-existent Antifa is a major actor on the left?

Oh, …wait..

Notice: Not that many are likely to care, but comments are not working on this blog at the moment. I’ll be putting this notice on posts until I get the problem cleared up. That will involve attempting to contact someone at my web hosting service, which is both time consuming and aggravating in the extreme, so I’ve been putting it off until I have a few hours I can spend on hold waiting for someone to talk to me. Actually, I must confess to being really remiss about this. It’s sort of funny that in these pandemic times, when we have so much time on our hands, we seem to do less. Or at least I do.

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Is it time to get over it yet?

Thursday, January 7, 2021

Way back in the year 2000, when the Supreme Court probably stole an election from the Democrats, an outcome that surely accelerated the tendency toward fascism in this country (George Bush and Dick Cheney are masquerading as good guys now, but they helped lay the groundwork for the very stable genius), we Democrats were advised to “get over it”, and some of us did. Even Al Gore accepted his fate with grace.

Fast forward to 2020 when there could be no reasonable doubt but that Joe Biden won the election, both in the popular vote and the Electoral College. Mysteriously, the same folks who told us to “get over it” in 2000 couldn’t bring themselves to get over it in 2020, even though, strictly speaking, there really wasn’t anything to get over.

Yesterday, the person who holds the office of President of the United States incited a physical attack on the United States Capitol and the United States Congress. That attack had been implicitly supported by a number of members of that Congress, who were prepared to contest the unquestionable result of a presidential election on the specious grounds that because their party had managed to delude a great number of people into believing that the election had been stolen, in large part because those very politicians refused to acknowledge that the election had been honestly won, it was necessary to set aside the results of that election in order to determine whether the delusions they themselves had encouraged had any substance.

It is not at all clear that the deluded Trumpers would have listened had every Republican but Trump strongly asserted the obvious: that Joe Biden won the election fair and square. They might still have believed Trump, but had the electoral vote count been treated as the formality it is, rather than as an opportunity to overthrow an election (and a Republic in the process) it is unlikely that yesterday’s events would have played out the way they did.

But as we’ve seen for Oh these many years, indeed since long before the year 2000, Republicans have no respect for the democratic process. They care only about securing power and using it to serve the interests of the autocrats.

So, if history is our guide, it is now time for the Republicans to tell us that we must get over it once again; that Trump is gone, or will be gone, and there is simply no reason to remember the past, the “past” including even yesterday’s events. Trump should now, we will be told, be considered an anomaly, despite the fact that he was a natural outgrowth of the Republican Party that supported and enabled him. That being the case, we should not hold the Republican Party responsible for the seditious acts of its followers, and perish the thought that we should attempt to hold people like Hawley and Cruz responsible for their actions. The time has come, we will be told in the next few days, to get over it. Much of the media will come around. Keep your eye on David Brooks, as he attempts to both sides it.

We will also be told that by no means should we hurt their feelings by using the “F” word against them, though fascists they are, or pointing out that they are handing their party over to some of the folks who were involved in the rioting, or that the number of arrests so far is suspiciously low, considering what happened and the ease with which so many could have been apprehended, had the planning been proper, all of which that nasty Paul Krugman is talking about, but who listens to him. No, we should keep in mind, as Lou Dobbs tells us, that in these times when the “country is dealing with trying to constrain lethal force”, something that never bothered him before, that this would be a “poor time to suggest that Capitol Hill police should draw their weapons on American citizens” since, we can infer, these Americans are mostly white and “most of whom are patriots”.

We lefties should remember that the memory hole is there for a reason, and these events should be rapidly consigned to that hole. After all, we have Hunter Biden to think about and that’s something we should never forget!

AFTERWORD: I stated above that the Supreme Court “probably” stole the election in 2000. I used the term as I wanted to be strictly accurate. They stopped a recount, which may well have tipped the scales to Gore, but may also have resulted in a Bush win. We will never know. What we do know is that the court had the mens rea, as we lawyers say, necessary to secure a conviction for attempted theft.

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More libel suits, please

Tuesday, January 5, 2021

Dominion has had some success in getting Fox to back down by threatening libel actions, and is threatening to sue Trump and his attorneys.

This may be one way in which the spread of disinformation can be halted.

Last night a group of people staged a candlelight vigil at Josh Hawley’s home, protesting his pre-announced attempt to destroy our democracy. He, in turn, accused the peaceful demonstrators of being “Antifa scumbags” who committed acts of terror and vandalism at his home. Naturally he was lying, as the videos of the entire event demonstrate.

The people involved in that demonstration were not public figures, which means that if they were to sue Hawley for libel, they would not need to prove actual malice, only that he was lying. Nowadays, it would seem the burden of proof should be on a Republican politician to prove he or she was not lying with regard to any particular statement they might make, but even sticking with the previous standard, it wouldn’t be hard to prove Hawley was lying. My dim recollection of libel law is that it is a libel per se if one is accused of a criminal act, and vandalism is a criminal act.

If these people keep getting sued, with the attendant humiliation of having to eat their words, they might just think twice before engaging in this sort of rhetoric.

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Guilty with an explanation

Tuesday, January 5, 2021

CTBlue has come into possession of the draft of a brief written by somewhat reputable lawyers retained by the very stable genius to represent him in his upcoming criminal cases, including that arising from his attempt to threaten the Georgia Secretary of State into changing the election results. This is a draft related to the Georgia case, and is clearly not the final product, as our sources tell us that it is anticipated that the number of examples of actions proving Trump’s mental illness will be greatly expanded. Our sources tell us that they have every confidence that the anticipated defense will be successful.The complete draft follows:

MEMORANDUM IN SUPPORT OF PLEA OF INSANITY

FACTS: Defendant Trump submits that he should be allowed to plead “Guilty, with an explanation” to the crimes of which he has been charged, the elements of which offenses are conclusively established by 1) an unfortunate tape recording of a conversation among the defendant, the Georgia Secretary of State, and the Secretary’s counsel, and 2) almost every word that has come out of his mouth since November 3, 2020.

The “explanation” consists of the fact that the defendant was legally insane at the time he committed the acts of which he is charged. For that matter he was insane for years and years before he committed said acts and remains insane today.

I. ARGUMENT

The court hardly needs reminding that a person is not responsible for criminal conduct if, at the time of the offense, as a result of a severe mental disease or defect, he or she was unable to appreciate the nature and quality or the wrongfulness of his or her acts.

Defendant submits that it is obvious to even the casual observer that, given this definition, he is insane. In fact, using almost any definition, it’s obvious he is insane. In support of his position, the defendant submits the following.

II. IT HAS LONG BEEN OBVIOUS THAT THE DEFENDANT IS MENTALLY ILL

The defendant’s mental illness has long been obvious, such that even obscure bloggers in Connecticut were commenting on it shortly after he was elected to the presidency by a deluded minority of American voters, and mental health professionals soon weighed in with their considered opinion that the defendant is bat-shit crazy..

In further support of this assertion, let facts be submitted to a candid world:

  • Only a mentally ill person would suggest that one should inject Lysol.
  • Only a mentally ill person would publicly brag -over and over- about winning an award that doesn’t exist.
  • Only a mentally ill person would call a news conference, answer questions for 6 minutes, and then free associate for 56 minutes.
  • Only a mentally ill person would take an unproven and dangerous drug against the advice of all experts, to which experts said person had immediate access.
  • Only a mentally ill person, charged with the responsibilities of being President of the United States, would demand that Americans waste water because he is unable to get his toilet to flush properly.
  • Only a mentally ill person would claim to see things that he never saw, unless he was lying, but that probability will be discussed in the next section of this brief.
  • Only a mentally ill person would gushingly praise a foreign leader after said foreign leader humiliated him.
  • Only a mentally ill person would expose himself to needless ridicule by altering a weather forecast with a sharpie instead of simply admitting that he is not a weather forecaster.
  • Only a mentally ill person would make the phone call at issue in this case.
  • Even in America, only a mentally ill person who was holding elective office would consider his own petty personal interests to be more important than the lives of thousands of people lost to plague due to his indifference to their plight, and only a mentally ill person, charged with such responsibility, would actively encourage people to ignore medical guidelines designed to minimize the illness and death caused by such a plague.

The foregoing is simply a sampling of links tagged by the aforementioned obscure Connecticut blogger with the tag “Trump Mental Illness”, with other examples so well known that links are not required. The undersigned attorney for the defendant has queried multiple individuals and all agree that the defendant has done so many crazy things during the course of the last four years that it has all become a blur, and that the foregoing is not even a representative sampling of the hundreds of things that defendant has done and said that establish beyond doubt that he is mentally ill. While diagnoses differ with respect to his secondary issues, most professionals agree that his primary problem is extreme narcissism.combined with a sociopathic personality, pathological lying and paranoia.

Defendant, through, and at the insistence of, his attorney, readily admits that this diagnosis is accurate, so far as it goes, though it really just describes the tip of the iceberg.

Thus, the first element of the defense, mental illness, is clearly established.

III. DUE TO HIS MENTAL ILLNESS THE DEFENDANT WAS UNABLE TO APPRECIATE THE NATURE AND QUALITY OF THE WRONGFULNESS OF HIS ACTS

This court can take judicial notice of the defendant’s conduct both before and during his term of office.

It can take notice, for instance, of the fact that fact checking organizations have established beyond doubt that you can tell when he is emitting an untruth when his mouth is open. However, defendant, through counsel, urges the court to consider that while the defendant never tells the truth, he also never lies, because he always believes his lies while they are coming out of his mouth, though he may not believe them, or believe that he said them, a minute later. The court should also take judicial notice of the undeniable fact that while the defendant, given his position, has access to the actual facts pertaining to any given situation, through intelligence briefings and other reliable sources, his mental illness has led him to prefer to believe any conspiracy theory that suits his purposes.

The court can also take judicial notice of the fact that the defendant’s entire life story establishes beyond doubt that he cannot tell right from wrong. The undersigned attorney has had prior experience with clients who cannot tell right from wrong, but those individuals would refrain from doing the wrong thing if it was explained to them that it was wrong. This defendant is incapable of even that level of behavior, because his narcissism convinces him that he is entitled to do whatever he feels is in his own self interest, even though he is often (usually?…almost always?) incapable of seeing what is actually in his best interests.The court can take judicial notice, for instance, of the undoubted fact that had he done the right thing with regard to COVID, as he was advised to do by the few experts he allowed to approach him, he might have actually won the recent election, which does make one wonder whether God sent COVID in order to save our democracy. But that question may be left to the theologians to debate.

Thus, the second element of the defense is satisfied in that the mental illness from which the defendant suffers prevents him from appreciating the difference between truth and falsehood, and to differentiate right from wrong. It remains to determine if the defendant’s mental illness was a factor in the specific crimes alleged.

IV. THE DEFENDANT IS NOT GUILTY (BY REASON OF INSANITY) OF CRIMINAL ACTS IN WHICH HE ENGAGED

In the instant case the defendant is charged with 1) threatening a state official in order to get said official to perform an illegal act; 2) attempting to overturn the results of an election; and 3) solicitation of election fraud, as well as a number of other criminal violations the undersigned is too lazy to list. As stated above, the defendant admits, again at the adamant insistence of his attorney, that his acts, had they been committed by a sane person, would be sufficient to warrant a finding of guilty on all counts.

However, as has been set forth above, the defendant suffers from a mental illness that deprives him of the ability to know right from wrong or truth from falsehood. At the moment the defendant emitted the falsehoods to the state officers in question in this case, he believed them with all his heart and soul, though as a matter of law he now stipulates that he had no rational foundation for doing so. But isn’t a lack of rationality a further proof of insanity?

When he threatened the state officials he was just doing what he has done all his life, a life in which he was never even told that such behavior was wrong, not that he would have cared. The court should also consider the further extenuating factor that his political party, rather than telling him this sort of thing was wrong, actively encouraged this behavior when only a single Republican in Congress voted to impeach or convict him of precisely the kind of behavior of which he is now accused.

So far as attempting to overturn a fairly run election, the court should bear in mind that the defendant has always lived his life believing that he should do whatever it takes to benefit himself, no matter the harm it does to others. Given his mental state, it would never occur to him that it was more important to have a functioning democracy than four more years of his incompetence.

V. CONCLUSION

It is respectfully submitted that the court should find the defendant not guilty by reason of insanity. While the defendant would prefer that he not be committed to an insane asylum for the rest of his life, he recognizes that probability, given that he is somewhat of a danger to himself, and a definite danger to others. All things considered, however, he prefers an asylum to spending the rest of his life in prison.

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED

Dewey, Cheatham and Howe
(Not affiliated with Rudy
Giuliani, Sidney Powell, or Lin Wood)

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