I Love New York--and the American Way

In the beautiful way we have seen human life continue to go on after the enormity of violent terror attacks in so many other places, New York, with an of course expanded police presence, enjoyed a Halloween parade, enjoying pretend frights in the face of the real frights that terrorists prefer that people would cower to. 

This is because life must go on. With every due recognition of the pain and sorrow of those affected, the families and loved ones of the slain and the living victims of this execrable harm, and the loved ones who stand by them to support their changed lives, I wish you every comfort--including this, that your continued life, and all you do right now, can be the greatest gesture against terror by simply going on. Do you, and be you, and love who you love, and change not one thing, and tell the hate mongers of the world they are not big enough, nor bad enough, nor hateful enough, to make you anything diminished by their disruption. They are the small, the needy, the hateful, the damaged. The terrorist need to see hate prosper, chaos reign, destruction pertain, is the desire of people without the imagination to make, build, or even see a better future. It is for the living to live. 

They that gloat over the dead can stay with the graves. 

What is more, for me, anyway, is that the US hold fast to our creedal values. It is something of a periodic vogue for Know-Nothings to run down our Constitutional freedoms or even propose that some people deserve to be treated differently because of some quality of their actions that make them differently "personned"--that make them less-than to receive due process, and the full and correct judgment of our US legal system. 

We might not ever entirely understand what makes a Sayfullo Saipov.  Any number of people of any country of origin or religion might come here to the United States and live completely blameless and productive lives. I do not think that the error of society that created a murderer should be compounded to create a makeshift justice intermediary that condones the lynch-mob instinct and proves that terror can change us. We should be better, and stronger, and less panicked, than this. And no one should be so crass as to try to score points with poor information. 

We are stronger for keeping our faith in our system. I do not trust those who choose such a moment to run it down.  This is not leadership. It is parasitism.

This TrumpWorld Grab-Bag Means Business

It's been a long while since I've done an in-earnest "TrumpWorld Grab-Bag"--and it's probably overdue. You know, what with the actual weird stuff Trump tries to do, badly, like manage a nuclear crisis with North Korea, pass any kind of legislation at all, and try to act like a sensible, emotion-having human being when something like Hurricane Harvey strikes millions of people, it's sometimes easy to be distracted enough to not recall that there is abundant evidence of fuckery about many, many, Russian contacts prior to his sort of shocking 2016 electoral win. 

Take the weird "WV" memo Rick Dearborn got trying to set up a meet between Trump and Putin.  By email. ("But TrumpWorld emails" should totally become a thing.) Take, also, the email correspondence between Trump lawyer Michael Cohen and Russian satellite/money launderer Felix Sater.

The Felix Sater connection seems damn interesting.  Here's the thing--what I guess a "collusion" rap might look like is "quid pro quo". Well, we had the Trump Jr, Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort thing that was set up with any number of folks, where there seemed to be a deal regarding loosening sanctions in exchange for oppo on Hillary Clinton if ever Trump became president--meh. We're supposed to believe the intelligence in that meeting never went anywhere--and the same thing with Sater and such a juicy quote as:

“Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it,” Mr. Sater wrote in an email. “I will get all of Putins team to buy in on this, I will manage this process.”

Seems so ambitious and so exactly like what anyone would be looking for in re: smoking Trump/Russia gun, right?

But who even knows what constitutes adequately culpable these days, right? We could rationally note that there's a potential "quid pro quo" regarding a potential Moscow Tower and allowing Russia to take over Ukraine without a hassle. It's almost like you can find multiple business reasons why Trump was running for president, and Russian interests might have wanted to help him out. There's a reason Manafort is particularly on the hook. And what about Rep. Dana Rohrabacher's attempt to 'splain Julian Assange to the White House? This is pretty obviously weird, right?

I definitely think this grab-bag is shaping up to have a definite financial aspect. The combined powers of Special Counsel Robert Mueller and NY AG Eric Schneiderman  are most likely looking at money laundering specifically, with an emphasis on making cases on people Trump can't pardon. Because they understood the Arpaio message, and know better than Trump how this game is played.

Doesn't Seem Housebroken

I suppose that's a bit of a crude way to describe my general impression of former US Rep. Anthony Weiner's recent admissions, but I think it's safe to say, there could definitely be cruder ways to put it. As of his resignation from the House two years ago, I was pretty well done with interest in his political career, and haven't put a lot of stock in his "comeback" to run for mayor of NYC. In the first place, his original problem struck me as being a kind of gross immaturity, and if he hadn't already gotten an idea of the loaded game he was playing with his public image the first time around, well, two years isn't a lot of time for growing up and figuring out What Not to Do.  It looks like a bad case of what we'd call "boundary issues"-and learning where the acceptable boundaries are and how to respect them is best learned as a pup.

But also, with the recent revelations of alter ego "Carlos Danger", I think I'm getting the picture (just as an educated guess) that skirting the boundaries and testing reactions is a part of the thrill of the kind of transgressive play that Weiner likes. To use the "housebroken" analogy--you can't really scold someone for making a mess of things if they thrive on the scolding, or you'll just see more messes.

Now, that doesn't mean he can't be a brilliant guy or a good politician in other ways, and if he had a cause that wasn't ultimately self-serving, and wanted to throw himself into it, I'd be like--"Go! Do that thing!" But running for an office like mayor of New York and having one of these "wife awkwardly supportive at his side" press dealios as he weathers yet another self-set sex-themed media time-bomb? No, I think he's burning up the oxygen in the race and needs to take his going-up-in-flames-ass outside, now.

Does that sound prudish of me? Well, I think the problem is, he hasn't been respectful of some of the women he's been all up in the sextmoshine with before, and all speculation about how his wife feels about this aside, she is a professional politico too, and this isn't really a big help for her, either.  It isn't just a thing he does without consequences and respecting other people's consent. I could care less what he was into--if he could balance it with his public life intelligently. That sure isn't what it looks like. And it hurts his political allies.

He should probably get out of the race, is all. Maybe he can throw his support to someone else, be a  consigliere to a candidate he believes in, but just...not ...be the candidate himself. Nothing personal.

(Everything personal.)