6/10/23

 Saturday, June 10, 2023

In bed at 10:15, up at 6:10., watching a bunny forage under the bottle brush buckeye.  61℉, a high of 78, W wind at 9 mph, 3 to 16 mph during the day with gusts up to 29 mph,   Sunrise was at 5:11, sunset at 8:31, 15+19.

The Cult of Trump.  I started the morning going to YouTube and tuning into Mary Trump's podcast addressing the federal indictment of her Uncle Donald.  (Why am I thinking of Huey, Dewey, and Louie Duck, and their Uncle Donald?)   I hadn't known there was such a podcast but, surprise!  I thought I would perhaps see her as a guest on some talk or news show, but instead watched this podcast with her, Dahlia Lithwick, Norm Ornstein, and others discussing the indictment.  The most chilling parts were the references to Trump as a cult leader and a sort of good and innocent Jesus figure being crucified by evil Deep State forces and the references to the mobilization of diffuse militia-type actors preparing to go to war against ubiquitous evildoers, i.e., anyone supporting the government's persecution of 'the real POTUS,' from whom the election was stolen.  Republican congressman Clay Higgins from Lafayette, LA, tweeted: "“President Trump said he has been summoned to appear at the Federal Courthouse in Miami on Tuesday, at 3 PM. This is a perimeter probe from the oppressors. Hold. rPOTUS has this. Buckle up. 1/50K know your bridges. Rock steady calm. That is all.”  This cryptic message is apparently militia talk for 'get ready to do battle', just the sort of thing I've been worried about with my thoughts of Timothy McVeigh, Waco, and the OKC bombing.  "Though Higgins did not respond to a request for clarification, author, journalist, and professor Jeff Sharlet took his words as a call for war. Sharlet's latest book, "The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War," is an in-depth look at right-wing extremism.   “Take this seriously,” Sharlet wrote Friday. “’ Perimeter probe’: Higgins thinks indictment precedes bigger attack. ‘rPOTUS’: real POTUS, Trump. ‘Hold’: stand back & stand by. ‘Buckle up’: prepare for war. ‘1/50 k’: military scale maps (mostly publicly available that show nearby military installations). ‘Know your bridges’: militia speak for prepare to seize bridges.”"  Which brings us to  . . .

Lord Brougham and Queen Caroline's Case.  From the editorial page of this morning's WaPo: "[I[t is the Justice Department’s duty to assure that no person, not even a former president, is beyond the reach of the law — regardless of the discord or division doing so could sow." In 1820, the notorious English Queen Caroline was tried for adultery in the House of Commons and was represented by Henry, Lord Brougham who had evidence that Caroline's husband, King George IV had, before his marriage to Caroline, been married to a twice-widowed Roman Catholic, a marriage that would have disqualified him from the throne under the Royal Marriages Act of 1772, the 1689 Bill of Rights, and the 1770 Act of Settlement.  Brougham threatened to use the evidence and to call into question the legitimacy of the King's sovereignty.  

"[A]n advocate knows but one duty, and, cost what it may, he must discharge it. Be the consequences what they may, to any other persons, powers, principalities, dominions or nations, an advocate is bound to do his duty" to his client" 

and also

 "[A]n advocate, by the sacred duty of his connection with his client, knows, in the discharge of that office, but one person in the world, that client and none other. To save that client by all expedient means -to protect that client at all  hazards and costs to all others, and among others to himself - is the highest and most unquestioned of his duties; and he must not regard the alarm, the suffering, the torment, the destruction, which he may bring upon any other; nay, separating even the duties of a patriot from those of an advocate, he must go on reckless of the consequences, if his fate it should unhappily be, to involve his country in confusion for his client."  

This conception of a lawyer's duty of zealous advocacy is, not surprisingly, controversial but it seems to be embraced today by the Editorial Board of the WaPo.  Quaere whether the Board will feel the same way about future issues of trial or plea bargain and sentencing if a conviction is obtained.  In its dealings with Trump, when if ever should the Department of Justice modify action it would ordinarily take precisely because the defendant is Trump and precisely because of concern over 'the discord or division' that may result from the Department's actions?  The schadenfreude that I and millions of others feel over Trump's finally getting a bit of comeuppance in his lifetime of wrongdoing has to be tempered by serious concerns posed by right-wing thuggery, by the Timothy McVeighs of our world.

LTMW at one of the chipmunks that live underneath the stoop by our front door.  I don't know how many of them live in that burrow, but it's at least two because sometimes I see the two of them together on top of the stoop and then scurrying back underneath when I open the screen door.  

Earlier today and once before I think I may have seen a blue-gray gnatcatcher checking out our nesting materials cage.  I'm pretty sure it was gray, bigger than a hummingbird and smaller than a chickadee.  

I used a couple of wood shims to raise the squirrel baffle on the triple shepherd's crook.  It's working, at least for now.  The squirrels are beside themselves.  I'm feeling some guilt (or compassion.)