Friday, March 31 2023
In bed at 11:30, awake at 5:50, up at 6:10 with painful toes, back, CPP, and tinnitus, let Lilly out. 42℉ drizzly weather, thunder & lightning during the night. High today of 57℉!!!!, rainy & windy day ahead, wind now S at 11 mph, 4 to 21 mph during the day, gusts up to 38 mph. Total rainfall today will be .85 inches. Sunrise at 6:34, sunset at 7:16, 12+41
No one is above the law. DJT has finally been indicted by the Manhattan grand jury led by DA Alvin Bragg. Rumor has it the indictment has 34 counts, most if not all related to the 'hush money' paid to Stormy Daniels by Atty. Michael Cohen, the fixer, and reimbursed by Trump personally and his company. The on-screen personalities at MSNBC have been ecstatic, Ari Melber, Joy Reid, Rachel Maddow, and Lawrence O'Donnell, all spinning on their heels. I hear talk of 'no one is above the law' and have to laugh. The main alleged crime for which he has finally been indicted occurred in the Fall of 2016. Michael Cohen was indicted in federal court by SDNY, pled and found guilty, and incarcerated in federal prison for a year. His indictment noted that he acted on behalf of "Individual 1," known to be DJT. U. S. Attorney General William Barr short-circuited any prosecution of DJT's role in the payoff. The feds have never charged DJT with the crime that put Cohen in prison. Alvin Bragg himself refused to pursue the case until recently when for some reason he finally changed his mind. Now, years after DJT's orchestration of Cohen's crime became nationally notorious, and a year after lead investigators Mark Pomerantzland Carey Dunne resigned in disgust over Bragg's refusal to charge DJT and a month after Pomerantz published his book People v. Donald Trump, Bragg finally has obtained an indictment. No one is above the law? Stop peeing on my shoe and telling me it's raining out. Anyone with a billion dollars and the ability to hire a stable full of skillful lawyers who can exhaust the resources of a prosecutor's office is above the law. So it has always been, so it is now, so it will continue to be. How many bankers were indicted and imprisoned after the 2008 financial system catastrophe?
Lower Back pain all morning. Out of commission.
From Casualties of War The chaplain to whom Erickson spoke: "“I decided I was hearing an individual who wished he could have saved that girl but hadn’t been able to,” Kirk told me. I can assure you I wasn’t being paranoid in thinking he might be shot in the back for seeing me. In war—at least, the war we were in—it was nothing unusual to hear shots that were unexplained, to find a body that might or might not have been shot in combat. Where we were, it was a time and place for thousands of men to play for keeps, and that certainly included Meserve and the others in the patrol, because if they wanted to eliminate Sven as a potential witness they had the M-16s to do it with.” This reminds me of my friend and college roommate Tom Devitt who served as an artillery officer in Vietnam and whose first duty assignment there was replacing a battery XO who had been 'fragged' in his tent by another Marine. Just thinking of this article/book and of the crime of kidnapping, rape, and murder of a young Vietnamese woman and the more commonplace crimes of killing Vietnamese men who may or may not have been enemy combatants makes me almost nauseous.
I finished the article/book. It is a short but devastating read. In the end, each of the 4 defendants had his sentence for the kidnapping, rape, and murder of 19-year-old Phan Thi Mao either reduced or dismissed. It reminds me of course of Lt. William Calley and the slaughter at My Lai. We forget the role that racism played in the war, how little we valued the lives of the Vietnamese, how unable to tell friend from foe among them, how free we felt to force them to leave their homes and rice fields to move to 'strategic hamlets,' how entitled we felt to drop high explosive and incendiary bombs on them, to spray toxic defoliants over their land, to shoot artillery shells and M16/A-15 bullets into their bodies. Part of Phan Thi Mao's skull was blown off by the M16 rounds shot into her 19-year-old body. Her body moldered for three weeks on Hill 192 before the Army forensics team picked up the parts of her body as evidence and carried her away in a body bag. All of this happened in 1966, the year I left Vietnam. I remember hearing rumors of Marines throwing captured VCs out of helicopters and of other Marines collecting severed ears of Vietnamese KIAs. How cavalier we were about what we were doing to the Vietnamese, to ourselves. How indifferent.
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