Eric Adams just doesn't know how to grift

 

I read the entire indictment issued by federal prosecutors that outlines Mayor Adams’ attempt to play with the big guys. Since influence peddling and favor-trading for campaign cash is how our system runs, it’s a bit much to see Adams tackled for business as usual. Unfortunately for Adams, he didn’t learn the basics on how it’s done.

Adams should have had better instruction from the real experts in how to move in power circles and get everyone’s back mutually scratched smoothly and silently. He didn’t get the right lawyers who know how to do deals without leaving tracks.

Adams and his staff thought they were slick OGs who had parleyed themselves into power and could sail into the big time. In fact, they’re nouveau hustlers with sloppy methods.

A good chunk of the evidence federal prosecutors have lined up against Adams is based on text messages. Text messages?? Seriously, did these folks really not get the memo about how none of that is safe or private? They even write things like, Let’s not text each other about this!

I sat on a jury last year in which a kid who conceivably could have gotten away with a serious crime screwed himself by texting incriminating statements. You get the exact same vibe from reading Adams’ staff work.

And who’s bright idea was it to organize the cash slurry for Adams’ campaigns through Turkiye? Anyone with a pulse knows that you rely on Israeli cash nowadays, and nobody will dare bother you. Some powerful people had to be very unhappy about city government being penetrated by a Muslim country. Ukraine, okay, maybe some East Europeans, solid Anglo allies elsewhere, no problem. But Istanbul? Not done!

It's almost sad to see how cheaply Adams was seduced by things like a business class seat on Turkish Airlines and a few days in a luxury hotel. No wonder we went along with Bloomberg for so long since he could buy the same hotel out of his petty cash box.

New York City tries to lessen the influence of big money in elections by matching small donations with public funds 8 to 1. That’s real money, and Adams stole it, essentially, by lining up illegal major donations and hiding them through straw donors, like a business guy’s driver who then gets reimbursed by the boss. It’s a very old game, and everyone knows it goes on. But that’s why you need experts in covering it up.

Intrepid muckrakers at The City dug up the details, which started the investigative ball rolling. (Everyone should subscribe to their daily bulletin and send them money.) While that took work, it wasn’t hard to unravel the corrupt threads.

Adams might beat the bribery charge because the Supreme Court helpfully limited those prosecutions to provable quid pro quos. But the manipulation of campaign finance restrictions is clearly laid out; I can’t see how he escapes those counts. His career is over, and the fantasies of moving on to national office and even the White House (yes, there are delusional messages in that vein) are consigned to dreamland.

That said, liberal New York shouldn’t wallow in self-righteousness because we put Eric Adams in office, and we can’t pretend we didn’t know what he was about. People succumbed to fear-mongering over crime in the subways, and Adams, a former cop, promised to pour police officers onto the platforms, which he did. We all know perfectly well what a policing response means, and we got what the majority asked for—a baton-led response to social ills. The tabloids and Murdoch’s empire were delighted and now keep up the drumbeat of scare stories so that the only possible response to the current failing policy is to double down on it.

Adams’s shamelessness was on display even before he took office. He smiled glibly and was surrounded by dubious comrades with disturbing records. His word salads could compete with Kamala’s indecipherable ramblings, and his interest in keeping the rich and powerful happy was obvious from Day One. But we demanded SAFETY above all else, and we got cops everywhere, which isn’t that but reassures white people. The sad evidence that Adams was in it for himself should have been a bright red warning light. But our overlords reminded us to be scared, and we did what they suggested. Will we do better next time?

 

World War Two started 85 years ago

[M.Świerczyński, "Warsaw, 1945"] 

“The unmentionable odour of death/Offends the September night.”

            —W.H. Auden, “September 1, 1939”

It all looks so inevitable in retrospect: the build-up of a dictatorial, war-mongering regime, the feckless response from neighboring states, the indifference to pogroms, the sniggering glee at the crushing of local communists and perhaps a coming blow to the hated Russians, and finally the gigantic explosion of all-out war, Europe consumed, quickly conquered, eventually destroyed. Sixty million dead.

Our historical memory of World War 2 is of the triumph of decency over barbarism, performed by the “Greatest Generation.” The principal lesson we carried away is to avoid “appeasement,” how Naziism arose and flourished step by step without resistance until there were no options left except a cataclysmic slaughter. The war carried off 3% of the world population, including 20% of Poland’s (5 million) and 15% of the USSR’s (26 million).

We hear quite a bit about the 1938 Munich debacle that remains the symbol of how foolish it is to attempt diplomacy with an organically aggressive state and ever to trust its promises. There is no historical figure more mocked than Neville Chamberlain returning from his final powwow with Hitler flourishing a sheaf of papers that guaranteed Czech independence.

Sullivan and Blinken share the honors as today’s Chamberlain. They flit from capital to capital emitting hollow phrases about peace and ceasefires while winking broadly to the Israelis to hurry up and complete the massacre. The world looks on placidly as real-time pogroms are committed before our eyes. Erstwhile defenders of “the rules-based order” stand by as the indulged warfare state attacks multiple enemies. America’s allies insist only that each victim stand down and never retaliate.

As their client state openly trumpets its supremacist underpinnings and applauds marauding soldiers and police as they commit atrocities and upload them to YouTube, the West turns instead to domestic dissidents, bans anti-genocide organizations, jails reporters on “terrorism” charges,  and declares the use of the term “Zionist” to be a racial slur. 

Israel may yet get its wish to drag the world into another conflagration. If they succeed, we will look back at this period as the moment when the world failed to learn the key lesson of World War Two and doomed itself to a tragic repeat.

 

Sarajevo on my mind

 

[Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the Hapsburg heir, and his wife minutes before their deaths.]

If we’re in a rerun of 1938 and Vladimir Putin = Hitler, then obviously we must avoid negotiation (“appeasement”) and quickly reindustrialize to save decency and democracy. 

But what if we’re actually reliving a different historical period, say, 1914?

That was an era in which the last round of extended European bloodletting—the Napoleonic wars—was a distant memory, already a full century in the past. Those disasters were ancient history. Governments were afraid of revolution at home (1848, 1871, 1905, etc.) but not too worried about a little inter-state dust-up. They knew how to handle those.

A lot has been written about how Europe stumbled into WorldWar 1 and how no one had anticipated the enormous destruction that followed. Given that human beings haven’t changed much, we can imagine that Europe’s leaders, then as now, were confident of their respective strengths, determined not to be pushed around by [insert enemy country X], and bursting with patriotic, martial spirit. No doubt they had all read The Iliad in the original Greek. 

What sparked the Great War was the assassination of the heir to the Hapsburg throne and his wife by a Serbian nationalist. “The killing put both Austria-Hungary and Russia, which saw itself as the Serbians’ protector, in a bind. Neither one of them wanted to back down and appear weak.” Can’t appear weak! Rival alliances mobilized; armies faced off; ultimata issued forth; war ensued. But that was then.

As it turned out, stopping the war turned out to be a lot harder than setting it off. It ground on for 4 years and left 20 million dead out of a European population of some 500-plus million.

We’re not quite 100 years removed from the last cataclysm, the bloodletting of the 1940s that killed another 60 million. But hardly anyone alive today lived through that as a conscious adult.

From watching our leaders sleepwalk us towards the next round, I guess they’re comfortable with the vastly increased destructive power of modern weapons. Nukes, introduced in 1945, have remained taboo since then, but from the way world leaders talk, they’re back in play, just in case. After all, there are 8 billion of us now—maybe they’re relaxed about knocking that down to 7, a masspopulation cull as a sort of greening event, something to get us closer to Net Zero—meaning emissions, of course, not people. 

Israel is said to have a couple hundred nukes,  and many commentators say they’re not doing well at present. In any case, it’s hard to see what “success” might look like for them. A million dead Palestinians? Two million? Expulsion of the rest into Jordan and Egypt? Provoking a war between Iran and the U.S.?

All these rosy scenarios lead to a regional conflagration, and it seems that our Christian Zionists are cool with that. Armageddon is supposed to bring on the Rapture, so that’s exciting since it will mostly occur several thousand miles from Oklahoma. Maybe that’s what got them out of their seats 58 times at the recent Nuremberg rally.

And hey, assassination is back! Just like in 1914! Yes, assassination is an okay thing to do if you’re a U.S. client state. We certainly practice it ourselves when we feel the need. No one on our side is bothered by the latest iterations visited on Lebanon and Iran. It’s just policy: we kill our enemies. What could go wrong?

Probably nothing. No doubt cooler heads will prevail.

And yet, I got Sarajevo, June 28, 1914, on my mind.

Losing a war upends governance

 

“War is hell,” said General Sherman, and he was winning. It’s worse than hell when you lose, especially for the folks at the top who always promise glorious triumphs when sounding the trumpet to get the war going.

Biden may be old and sick, but if he were presiding over victory in one of his wars, I’m not sure anyone could have browbeaten him into stepping aside. FDR was half dead in 1944 when he ran for his fourth term, and he carried 38 states.

When wars go badly, the disgruntled tend to keep quiet about it even in countries where dissenters aren’t shot. Loyalty to the boys (and girls) in uniform requires that citizens keep “supporting” them long past the point when doubts about the outcome are impossible to ignore.

Unhappiness about the progress of warmaking is therefore likely to be sublimated, channeled into other forms of discontent. I lived through an illustrative episode in my adolescence watching support for LBJ, a wildly popular figure in 1964, collapse.

Of course, there were others factors aside from the Vietnam quagmire. Johnson pushed through major civil rights legislation and alienated racists. Some people disliked the introduction of Medicare and Medicaid although there was a broad national consensus in their favor. He was an effective horse-trader and acknowledged to be a master politician.

But Johnson’s decision to gamble everything on war in Asia did him in. The death toll was unacceptable—of Americans, that is. (After Vietnam, the war party kept the body counts way down.)

Nixon promised to put an end to the war and then, once in office, escalated. It wasn’t for a proud militarist to preside over humiliating battlefield defeat. Eventually, he too was ousted, ostensibly over electoral shenanigans that would be scarcely noticed today.

The unpopular war had undermined two presidents. Young draftees kept dying—until compulsory service ended in 1971. Atrocity tales filtered back home, even before the notorious My Lai massacre came to light. The secret expansion into Cambodia sparked new horrified amazement.

All the while, official discourse was dominated by Kissingerian types promising that things were going just fine, that we should stick with the leadership just a little longer, and that dissent aided the enemy. Extreme militarists continued to denounce grumblers and call for even heavier bombing of North Vietnam’s cities and ports, even for nuking them. Demagogues encouraged blue-collar workers to attack antiwar protests and to hate “draft dodgers” and peaceniks.

But a substantial minority of the population viewed all this as profoundly immoral as well as stupid. Happy talk about progress on the battlefield wasn’t as convincing in 1971, ‘72, ‘73, even as Nixon racked up a historic electoral victory over George McGovern. Nixon’s support was broad but paper-thin. Less than 2 years after his historic 49-state victory, Nixon was out.

Fast forward to today: we’re doing great in Ukraine; Russia is a gas station parading as a country (Nigeria with snow); its soldiers are drunks; and its equipment is all rusty. No one can challenge mighty NATO with the greatest fighting force in history behind it. Any day now, the Ukrainians will bounce back and chase Putin/Hitler’s armies back into Russia, which will then collapse and shatter into various parts, just like in 1991.

And Joe Biden is at the top of his game and not at all senile.

The defeat of the West in its European war of choice will be far more destabilizing than the ragtag departure from 20 years of occupation in Afghanistan. No one will take the blame for the debacle because in this country we don’t do responsibility. But someone will have to preside over it, and a likely candidate is someone expendable, a last-minute placeholder pushed into the spotlight at exactly the worst moment.

In 1974 it was Leslie Lynch King, Jr., who had been shoehorned into the vice presidency just months before after an old-fashioned cash-in-shoeboxes scandal. Leslie was better known by the name he adopted after his mother got remarried—to Gerald Ford, Sr.

Poor Leslie/Gerald was left holding the bag as the helicopters sailed away from the rooftop of the Saigon embassy. Who will get that undesirable job when the U.S. decides that Ukraine is Europe’s problem and walks away from another ignominious debacle?

Welcome, President Kamala.

 

Pending Questions

By coincidence, I just finished James W. Douglass’s JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters. It led me to wonder aloud—and comment to friends—about the possibility of assassination—pre-July 13.

Douglass compiled a mass of information about the 2-plus years of Kennedy’s presidency, the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Test Ban Treaty, and Kennedy’s readiness for neutrality in Laos and allegedly Vietnam. Everything that the war party hated.

I hadn’t known how eager Kennedy’s military chiefs were to follow up the Bay of Pigs with an invasion and, in some cases (Remember Curtis LeMay?) to launch a nuclear strike on the USSR. They hated JFK’s compromises in Southeast Asia and resisted disarmament.

They weren’t called neocons back then, but the mentality is recognizable in the unified war party of today, those calling always for more escalation, more belligerence, more “force projection,” and of course more spending on all the supposedly necessary weapons.

Today, like back then, anyone resisting or questioning the drumbeat of war was and is quickly labeled a wuss and a softie for starters, followed by accusations of doing the enemy’s bidding, a virtual or actual traitor (a la Russiagate). Back then, you were smeared as a pinko or outright commie; today’s equivalent is “agent of Putin,” someone who fails to see him as the new Hitler and probably has a secret bank account in rubles. Kennedy had a hard slog getting Senate approval of the Test Ban Treaty until it became clear that he had a potent ally: the American people.

Douglass’s thesis is that the war party—what we have begun to call the Deep State now, headquartered at the CIA—hated JFK and had him whacked. They then covered up the inconvenient facts, threatened and harassed skeptics and witnesses, and quietly eliminated any who wouldn’t shut up. (That list is extensive.) He marshals disturbing evidence to support his conclusions.

Douglass shows through 400 pages how a conspiracy at that level can work with relative ease once people realize the power of the forces determined to impose their official narrative. Many people had important facts that undermined the Oswald-as-assassin story, but they quickly saw how dangerous it was to stick to their stories, even for the first autopsy pathologists who clearly saw the front-entry bullet wound in the president’s remains and later allowed themselves to be misinterpreted.

There’s a lot we don’t know about the July 13 shooting, and old-fashioned incompetence should never be dismissed as an explanation. Why should the Secret Service function any better than the rest of our crumbling institutions?

That said, in piecing together the truth about the attempt on Trump’s life, we should be alert to stonewalling, crazy claims of easily disprovable facts, and especially pressures on eyewitnesses to unsay what they’ve already stated on the record and on camera. We should watch the composition of investigative bodies, check the members’ connections to the intelligence and Homeland Security agencies, and pay attention to the handling of forensic evidence.

We should listen carefully for news of the dead shooter’s recent movements and contacts and an explanation of his curiously opaque past.

Meanwhile, I am frankly shocked by how many people close to me find the attempted murder worthy of kinda-sorta jokes about how close the shooter came. Spare me your sick humor—assassination is no substitute for politics, and also, be careful what you endorse. What goes around, comes around as  Trump—himself the proud assassin of an Iranian general—should recall.  

2024: A Space-out Odyssey

 

 

Joe Biden’s debate meltdown exposed the lies we’ve been systematically fed for months—probably years—about his health and mental capacities.

That’s one set of lies. There are others.

Narrative management is a useful skill, perhaps more highly developed here given our foundational relationship to the art of selling. We really know how to establish a story line and pitch it relentlessly.

At the same time, all those generations of commercial culture have induced in us a certain degree of skepticism. Growing up as consumers, caveat emptor comes with our mothers’ milk. We know how the game is played: you paint me a fantastical picture, and I discount two-thirds of it. We expect to be hustled and fed a line by everyone—peddlers of cars, toys, stocks, or flood insurance, office-seekers, and now modernity’s latest curse, paid “influencers.”

But while we understand that success isn’t dependent on a pitch’s attachment to facts, that doesn’t mean we like being cheated. Plenty of Biden sympathizers are royally pissed off that the party pooh-bahs shepherded rickety Joe through rigged or non-existent primaries to keep him carefully screened off from anything that would have exposed his disqualifying frailty.

Our cowed and complicit news outlets played along even though they must have known. Announcing that the emperor not only had no clothes but no working mind meant professional ostracism at least, as experienced by Axios reporter Alex Thompson, one of the few who dared to go off script.

The debate debacle leaves the Democrat establishment with no pleasant options. Early polls are predictably bad and set to get worse as safe blue states—New Hampshire, Colorado, Minnesota, Virginia, New Mexico—move into the toss-up column, and that’s after just one week. More are likely to follow. Dumping Biden might stop the bleeding—or make it worse. At this rate Trump could pull off a Nixon- (1972) or Reagan- (1980) level landslide.

All the horserace talk, while amusing, obscures the other acts of narrative massage that are about to blow up messily. For example, we’ve been promised that our mighty (and expensive) military machine would power noble Ukraine to victory against Russia.

I remember an early panel discussion featuring Axis-of-Evil speechwriter David Frum (now a Democrat since it’s the war party). Frum confidently predicted that the Russian army would collapse as the troops were offered pleasant lives in Barcelona in exchange for deserting. Biden himself crowed that the Russian ruble would soon be “rubble.”  

Two years later, Russia is dictating terms of surrender, which become more humiliating with each iteration. That one will be harder to spin, and the panic over Biden’s Madame Tussaud act will pale in comparison.

Like the Biden dementia taboo, no one was allowed to question the fairy story about Ukraine’s imminent triumph. No one could doubt that Russia was a gas station parading as a country, “Nigeria with snow,” a failed, beaten state with drunk soldiers and rusty weapons. No one could suggest a compromise settlement or question the ongoing war and slaughter. That was all considered naïve Putin-enabling, the equivalent of cheering the Munich surrender of 1938.

We will pay a high price for the successful suppression of critical engagement, the homogenization of permitted speech, and the proliferation of bogus “disinformation” monitors, a.k.a. censorship boards policing our public debates. Like feeble Joe wandering off the public stage, we have been reduced to repeating stock lines and expecting rounds of stormy applause.

Reality has begun to bite. It won’t be pretty.

 

Cheap Thrills

 

The manifest delight among the anti-Trump camp over his conviction in the hooker payoff case will be short-lived.

Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s pursuit of Trump on the flimsy case of felonious falsification of business records in furtherance of some vaguely defined higher crime has produced a frisson of satisfaction among assorted Democrats, liberals, and those who find the man appalling for a variety of good reasons. But it will undermine the case against him that really matters—his conspiracy to steal the election of 2020.

Among the people I have seen send cheers heavenward at the jury’s multiple guilty verdicts, remarkably few—none in fact—can explain to me the details of the accusations or the legal reasoning behind condemning him 34 times for essentially a single episode. To all appearances, they don’t really care. He’s guilty, he's a felon, and that’s that.

His supporters, equally removed from or uninterested in the tedious minutiae of the case, think he’s being prosecuting for paying off a hooker, which they don’t see as a crime (correctly) and are easily persuaded that he’s being singled out in a political vendetta. The convoluted reasoning that convinced a jury to convict escapes them, as well it might. I’ve read a lot about it, and it escapes me.

As for criminalized sex, Bill Clinton pretended not to know where his cigar ended up, and Republicans made endless damp hay out of that. In the end, nobody really cared.

Yeah, I know, it’s not the sex per se but Trump’s signature on documents that called the payoff legal fees—the sort of thing that Hillary’s campaign did to obscure its role in the origins of the Russiagate hoax.

As CNN summarized, “The FEC concluded that the Clinton campaign and DNC misreported the money that funded the [Steele] dossier, masking it as ‘legal services’ and ‘legal and compliance consulting’ instead of opposition research.” The DNC eventually coughed up $113,000 in fines, but no one faced prosecution over it. Given the number of documents signed by various DNC officials covering up the oppo research as payments to lawyers, the Clintons’ allies would certainly be looking at hundreds of felonies under the Bragg jurisprudence.

But the hundred grand was worth every penny as the Steele dossier, secretly funded by the Clinton campaign, led to years of propaganda over Trump’s alleged “back channel” to Moscow and “Russian interference” in the 2016 election, fact-free concepts most Democrats still revere to this day, their team’s happy BlueAnon conspiracy.

The Clintons got off Scot-free after years of peddling these far more consequential falsehoods, utilizing the full power of the surveillance state to do so. Do we think dumb middle Americans didn’t notice?

Unfortunately, a whole slew of Trumpians also think that some combination of phony absentee ballots and computerized vote manipulation caused Trump to lose several key swing states in 2020, that he really won, and that any attempt to disprove their paranoid certainties is bogus, biased, partisan trickery.

Given the partisan trickery involved in the Bragg prosecution, they have a point. When the Dem-leaning establishment gets around to their criminal cases against Trump and his minions for things like organizing fake slates of Republican electors for VP Pence to accept as valid, egging on the Georgia secretary of state to “find” Trump another 18,000 votes and flip the state, and encouraging his loyal yahoos to break into the Capitol to intimidate congress members into voting their way, the whole thing will fall flat. It will look like yet another lame excuse to “get” Donald Trump and prevent him from staging a comeback campaign.

Trump deeply discredited himself with the post-vote events of 2020-21, and a disciplined political and legal team could have pursued Trump for trashing our electoral process. He and his sleazebag lawyers did plenty, and there was no need to make shit up.

Instead, they put on a series of judicial spectacles so that they can label Trump a felon during the campaign and thereby can keep their jobs for another four years.

Ever since Trump sailed down the escalator to announce his bid in 2016, we have relentlessly heard how his candidacy was a joke, how the “walls are closing in” on his fake presidency, and how his comeback for a second term is doomed. The chorus of imminent victory over Trumpism is now about as credible as the Ukrainian vow to retake Crimea.

Any American not living in a cave knows that there is plenty of felonious behavior taking place around us, especially at the top of our get-it-while-you-can political establishment. A few of us even think things like instituting a torture regime, sending off troops to conquer foreign countries for no reason, smashing the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments to bits, and presiding over a genocidal slaughter of defenseless civilians are also arguably criminal acts. Slamming a political enemy over crimes of the willie while ignoring the mountainous slurry of sleaze threatening to drown our fragile polity is a good way to discredit everything for which we once held a modicum of respect.