The party of law and order

[Admin]

It's actually a curious campaign theme, when Trump posed as the law and order candidate in his acceptance speech. Consider the following:

• Trump lambasted a US judge (on the grounds that he was from Mexican descent!) for being biased in the case against Trump University
  
• Trump lambasted Comey, the Republican(!) prosecutor who argued there are no sufficient grounds to indict Hillary for her private email server, arguing Comey is part of a cover-up (one might assess these claims here)
  
• Trump lambasted the Baltimore prosecutor who indicted police in the Freddy Gray case, arguing she should prosecute herself
  

See the pattern? Trump is all law and order, as long as he agrees with the decisions taken. If they go against him, he doesn't hesitate to utter racist remarks (the Mexican judge), or stuff that's clearly conspiracy nonsense (Comey), only for people simply doing their job, like the Baltimore prosecutors. It's what prosecutors do, they prosecute. 

It isn't exactly that there were no grounds whatsoever, Freddie Gray died in the back of a police van, he was handcuffed, without seat-belt and (repeatedly) denied medical help.

[Martin K]

And of course, inciting a foreign (and pretty hostile) power to hack the servers of a presidential candidate (even if it might not be illegal) is dubious enough for just about everybody (including his VP candidate) to distance themselves from that.

[Admin]

Hmm..

Republicans used to claim to favor the rule of law. Yet what happened when a Republican candidate for Congress in Montana was accused of body-slamming a reporter and cited for misdemeanor assault?
The conservative commentator Laura Ingraham wanted to know why he went crying to the police.
"Did anyone get his lunch money stolen today and then run to tell the recess monitor?" she tweeted.

Of course, this is what the police are for: They investigate crimes and enforce laws, so we don't have to get into physical altercations with Republican candidates who really don't want to discuss the Congressional Budget Office's score for the Republican healthcare bill.

Calling the police when a man grabs you by the throat and slams you to the floor, as witnesses have described — while you and he are both at work and he is a candidate for Congress — is what an adult does in a civilized society.

The Gianforte body-slam and how the GOP is stuck in a high-school mindset - Business Insider

[Admin]

“Democrats have become the party of crime,” President Donald Trump declared on Thursday night at a rally in Missoula, Montana. At the same rally, Trump praised as “my kind of guy” a member of Congress who violently attacked a reporter, choked him, and then lied to the police about his crime.

Just a week before, Trump had praised his party as the party of “law and order and justice.” And only a week before that, The New York Times had published a huge, meticulously detailed report alleging decades of deliberate financial and tax fraud by Trump and his family.

It’s not just the president. In July, Donald Trump Jr. seemed extremely concerned about the potential for political rhetoric to incite violence. He condemned threats against Rand Paul, speculating that they had been incited by Maxine Waters, the California representative who had said, at a political rally, “If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.” On October 18, Donald Trump Jr. campaigned in Michigan alongside Ted Nugent, the NRA board member who has delivered death threats against Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, whom he called a “subhuman mongrel.”

Trump's GOP Moves Beyond Hypocrisy - The Atlantic

[Admin]

Her point is captured in the headline: “The GOP Has a Choice: Fight Anti-Trump Coup Effort or Surrender Government to Democrats.” What is most notable is that Hemingway isn’t counseling Republicans to gather evidence and identify witnesses to defend the president during the impeachment inquiry. Instead, she points to what has been labeled the “Brooks Brothers Riot” during the recount of the 2000 election in Florida. As Joe Conason wrote at the time, that was the moment Republicans abandoned the rule of law. That lawless incident was the “bourgeois riot” of Nov. 22, incited on the airwaves by Rush Limbaugh and a Cuban-American radio station, and then praised on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal the next day by Paul Gigot (who also regularly appears on the very civilized and genteel PBS Newshour). According to Mr. Gigot, the white riot that stopped the manual counting of votes in Miami-Dade was sparked by a command to “shut it down” from Representative John Sweeney of upstate New York.

In other words, an elected Republican Congressman-who took an oath to uphold the Constitution and laws of the United States-unashamedly incited a mob. What Mr. Gigot omitted from his eyewitness account of that event showed up in the pages of The New York Times, which reported that “several people were trampled, punched or kicked” during a fracas outside the office of the county supervisor of elections that continued until sheriff’s deputies restored order. Republican thugs also assaulted the Democratic county chairman because they mistakenly believed that he had absconded with a single ballot.

That is what Hemingway is recommending when she urges the GOP to fight. But she’s not merely talking about fighting against the impeachment process. What we are facing now is not partisan warfare…It represents a fatal threat to our system of government, and if this coup succeeds — whether through impeachment proceedings, or through an election that (if the last three years are any indication) the other side is clearly willing to steal by hook or by crook — the nation will cease to be a constitutional, democratic republic. Hemingway just set the stage for Republicans to claim that the 2020 election was stolen if Trump loses, all without providing a shred of evidence. Her remedy is to abandon the rule of law and engage mobs in an effort to intimidate their opponents. To the extent that the Federalist is representative of “establishment Republicans,” it is impossible to capture the danger of what is being proposed.

Conservative columnist urges the GOP to abandon the rule of law – Alternet.org

[Admin]

A former judge selected to advise on a path forward in the criminal case against Michael Flynn is accusing the Justice Department of exercising a “gross abuse of prosecutorial power” to protect an ally of President Donald Trump, distorting known facts and legal principles to shield Flynn from a jail sentence. The former federal judge, John Gleeson, skewered Attorney General Bill Barr’s handling of the case, describing it as an “irregular” effort that courts would “scoff” at were the subject anyone other than an ally of Trump. The 82-page excoriation featured a painstaking reconstruction of the Flynn case and accused DOJ of contradicting its own arguments and precedents to justify dropping the case against Flynn. “Even recognizing that the Government is entitled to deference in assessing the strength of its case, these claims are not credible,” Gleeson wrote. “Indeed, they are preposterous.”

'Everything about this is irregular': Ex-judge tapped to review Flynn case blasts Trump DOJ - POLITICO

• And this from the President who profiles himself as the law and order President..
  

[Admin]

Depending on how – and whom – you count, Bannon was the seventh former close Trump adviser to be arrested, face charges, plead guilty or to be convicted of a crime since the 45th president took office.

'Conmen, grifters and criminals': why is Trump's circle so at odds with the law? | US news | The Guardian

[Admin]

Discussing the recent police killing of a self-described anti-fascist suspected of fatally shooting a far-right activist in Portland, Oregon, President Donald Trump openly endorsed extrajudicial executions in a Fox News interview Saturday, declaring that “there has to be retribution.” “I put out, ‘When are you going to go get him?’ And the U.S. Marshals went in to get him,” the president told Fox News host Jeanine Pirro, referring to Michael Forest Reinoehl. “This guy was a violent criminal, and the U.S. Marshals killed him. And I’ll tell you something—that’s the way it has to be. There has to be retribution.”

‘There has to be retribution’: Trump openly endorses extrajudicial killings of suspects by law enforcement – Alternet.org

[Admin]

A controversial environment chief in the Trump administration has said he has no intention of leaving his post after a US district court judge deemed his tenure and ongoing occupation of the position illegal. William Perry Pendley, head of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), said this week that the judge’s ruling “has no impact, no impact whatsoever”.

Trump's public lands chief refuses to leave his post despite judge's order | Environment | The Guardian

[Admin]

Author Jeff Sharlet has spent years interviewing conservatives and found many unassuming Americans are ready and eager for violence against their political enemies. Sharlet's latest book, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War, is the result of more than a dozen years of reporting on the religious right, compiling numerous interviews conducted throughout the Midwest and Great Plains, and he's more worried than ever about the possibility of civil war, reported The Guardian.

"I’ve been writing about the right for a long time," he told the newspaper. "I’m always interested in the margins of things that tell us about what’s happening at the center. An undertow is a metaphor for that, for the force that’s been pulling us to this place for a long time. If you’d asked me 10 years ago if I ever thought another civil war would be possible in the United States, I would have said no. But to think so [now] is to not understand that the right in America is as dangerous as it is."."

'They’re ready for executions': Author sounds alarm after interviewing 'ordinary' conservatives - Alternet.org