The Trump indictment by Jack Smith is a watershed event

The New Neo Posted on by

We’ve known for quite some time that it was coming. And yet – I don’t know about you, but for me the fact that the shoe finally dropped has nevertheless been profoundly shocking and disturbing. That’s why I’ve written so much about it, and plan to write a great deal more about it.

Regular readers here know my history with Trump. During the 2016 campaign I very much distrusted him and did not want him to become the nominee, in part because I thought he would lose against a candidate – Hillary Clinton – who seemed very beatable. But then he won, I paid attention to his actual presidency, and I was mostly pleased with what he did as president and made that quite clear. At the same time, I was outraged at the unrelenting assault mounted by the left on his presidency, his legitimacy as a president, and on anyone who would work with him or support him. Trump’s enemies wrapped themselves in the mantle of righteousness, with a form of stolen valor from WWII by calling themselves the Resistance. And of course, by inference, Trump was the Nazi.

Now they continue to wrap themselves in that mantle as they use the tactics of tyrannical regimes around the world to indict Trump in a venue where the deck is stacked against him, in the continued aim to destroy by lawfare what they could not destroy in 2016. That destruction is not just of Trump as a person, of the lawyers who advised him (the as-yet-unindicted co-conspirators), but of his supporters and anyone who might work for him in the future. The left goes after Trump this way, realizing that half of America wants him back in office and agrees with him for the most part, and huge numbers of Americans think the 2020 was either outright fraudulent or at least unfairly rigged. It is a big F-you to those Americans. And worse, it’s a big warning, as was the prosecution/persecution of the J6 defendants: cross us, and we’ll destroy you, too.

The media has prepared the way, and continues to do their bidding, so that many people are truly unaware of what this means for America. The left counts on the ignorance of those people, their indoctrination, and most of all their lack of knowledge about how the safeguards in the American legal system are meant to work.

Sorry to be such a downer.

A bit more upbeat is this interview with one of Trump’s lawyers. Also, see this from Alan Dershowitz and this from Jonathan Turley.

I believe the problem is that all these niceties of law will mean nothing to the DC judge and jury trying Trump, just as they mean nothing to most of Trump’s enemies. They use them when they see they might benefit from them, and discard them when they don’t.

Seals and selkies and silkies

The New Neo Posted on by

I was going to use this video for one of my open threads:

But after I watched it, I suddenly felt a strong urge to find some clips from the 1994 movie The Secret of Roan Inish. I hadn’t thought of that film in many many years, but I remember it as unique and full of mystery. Here are two short segments that convey that sense. John Lynch is just marvelous here; he’s the guy telling the story to the little girl:

I learned an interesting fact by looking up Lynch’s Wiki page. It turns out that his sister Susan Lynch played the selkie in Roan Inish.

And lastly, to continue my train of thought, there’s this:

More reflections on the Trump J6 indictment and what it signifies about our legal system

The New Neo Posted on by

Andrew C. McCarthy talks to Megyn Kelly about Smith’s charges against Trump:

And Julie Kelly – who is a leading expert on the J6 trials so far – talks to Megyn Kelly about the Trump indictment:

I find these clips very depressing. Not just about Trump, although there’s that; but about the utter corruption of the DOJ and so much of the legal system in America. The left must feel quite sure that they not only will win the 2024 election, but that any rebellion that might come as a result of Trump’s conviction will be put down very effectively. They certainly showed their capacity for that in their prosecution/persecution of anyone connected with J6, even those who merely entered the Capitol thinking they were allowed to do so and who were not violent.

What is happening now to Trump in terms of Lawfare against him is also the result of thirty years of the undermining of the legal education system as it used to be. I went to law school prior to those years, and although some of my professors were liberals and Democrats, they had a certain respect for the law. That basic respect would not have allowed them to do something like this to a former president, even one of the opposing party. But starting in the 1980s and gaining momentum during the 1990s, legal education was transformed by critical legal studies, which maintained that laws were merely power by another name. Law became, not a thing to be respected as a process that despite its imperfections is nevertheless the best way we have developed to protect us all from an overbearing and tyrannical governmental enforcement system, but a tool by which to dismantle those aspects of society that the left doesn’t like. After all, if it’s all about power and hierarchy, the left needs to be on top of that hierarchy, and there’s no need to protect the rights of the opposition along the way.

Donald Trump is their number one enemy, and the people who support him are to be destroyed as well. That’s what the J6 prosecutions have been about.

One of the comments at YouTube to one of the above videos:

I feel sick about this. It feels like our country as we know it is over.

NOTE: The unindicted co-conspirators are mostly Trump’s former lawyers. The object of this, of course, is to have a further chilling effect on legal representation for him. It has become a minefield for anyone who might work for him (note that Carlos De Oliveira, the Mar-al-Lago property manager, has been charged in connection with the documents case, which also sends the same message to those who might want to work for Trump). Charging Trump’s lawyers for giving him legal advice is another way in which the left isn’t just undermining Trump and the right, they’re undermining the entire legal system, which works on respect for the adversary system and the idea that lawyers can give their clients legal advice, even if it includes “novel theories” with which the other side doesn’t agree.

A new type of pain medication?

The New Neo Posted on by

And a supposedly non-addictive one.

Of course, many painkillers that ended up being addictive were originally touted as non-addictive, so I would be cautious. On the other hand, this drug works through a different mechanism:

The pill, known for now as VX-548, targets a particular sodium channel that is active only in the body’s peripheral sensory nerves, where it helps transmit pain signals to the brain. The idea is that inhibiting the channel might ease pain without serious systemic side effects — including the risk of addiction and abuse associated with opioids.

In an early trial, researchers found some promising evidence that the drug can take the edge off of post-surgery pain.

That would be great, but what would be even greater would be a new drug for chronic pain, in particular neuropathic pain. I have quite a bit of personal experience with neuropathic pain – unfortunately. I’ve written about it on this blog. One of those posts is this one from 2014, which also touts a possible new drug for pain, in that case neuropathic pain. I’m not sure whatever happened to that drug …

At any rate, this latest medication might also be used some day for neuropathic pain, its developers are saying:

A Vertex spokesperson said the company has started an early trial of VX-548 for neuropathic pain. That’s pain caused by nerve damage, such as diabetic neuropathy.

Waxman said the need for new neuropathic pain therapies is “great,” and peripheral sodium channels should be studied as targets for treatment. But any such therapy would be down the road.

The rest of this post is an excerpt from what I’d previously written about neuropathic pain:

We all know what pain from an injury feels like. But if you’re fortunate, you don’t know – and will never have to learn from personal experience – what neuropathic pain is like.

Nerves ordinarily conduct pain impulses when tissues are damaged, but that sort of pain corresponds to the degree of injury and is time-limited. Once healing occurs, the pain (or almost all of it) goes away. Neuropathic pain is different; it arises from injury to the nerves themselves. They become disordered in a host of ways, and the quality of the pain impulses is quite different from that of the more familiar types of pain, and has a marked tendency to become chronic…

Not that much is known about nerve pain today, and it remains exceedingly difficult to treat. But about twenty years ago, when I began to deal with it myself, it was the relative Dark Ages of pain control.

When I hurt my arms it was terrifying; the pain felt like nothing I’d ever had before, and it was with me 24/7. The best I can do to describe it is to say that among its many horrific qualities was the feeling of having sustained a severe sunburn on the entire surface of both arms. But with a real sunburn, there are salves and ointments to apply, you know why you’re hurting, and you know that in a few days the pain will go away.

This pain was different. It waxed and waned in odd and erratic fashion, although it tended to be at its worst at night, which made sleep nearly impossible and the nights a long drawn-out torment. It wasn’t just the burning, either. There was also tingling and stabbing pain and severe achiness and exquisite sensitivity and weakness and pressure and all sorts of odd sensations that gave me the feeling that my body had become a sadistic trickster bent on driving me mad …

What’s more, although most pain is a warning sign that something is being damaged (stove, hot, get away!), neuropathic pain appears to have no reasonable purpose at all. No tissue is being harmed, and yet the pain goes on and on and on. You can see why a successful treatment for neuropathic pain would be a boon to humankind.

Is this Jack Smith’s endgame?

The New Neo Posted on by

I was planning to write a piece advancing a certain thesis about one of Jack Smith’s goals in the Trump J6 case, but this person beat me to it.

So I’ll just quote the gist of it:

…[W]hat jumps out to me is that Smith is pushing for an early trial date not to provide a quick resolution and to “do justice”; rather, Smith wants a partisan DC jury to quickly convict Trump, thus setting up Smith’s next level of political gamesmanship. Smith wants Trump’s conviction to be heard and decided by the Supreme Court, knowing full well that a Trump conviction has no chance of affirmation at SCOTUS. Smith is counting on it. Smith wants the Supreme Court to vacate his almost certain conviction in order to enflame the Democratic base. He wants to hand Joe Biden another “the Supreme Court is illegitimate” gift …

Smith isn’t dumb. He expects his conviction to be vacated. In fact, he’s counting on it.

I would add that it’s win/win for Smith. In other words, if SCOTUS happens to uphold a Trump conviction, that’s good too. But if it doesn’t, that’s fodder for the “Illegitimate Court” shrieks.

NOTE: And by the way, although I write as though Smith is acting alone, he most definitely is not. This is a group effort, and I mean the Democrat Party and its leaders, and of course Garland. Smith wouldn’t be acting without their help and approval.

Trump case glitch?

The New Neo Posted on by

Hmmm:

Special counsel Jack Smith’s office may not have fully reviewed thousands of pages of records turned over by former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik before seeking an indictment of former President Donald Trump Tuesday, says Kerik’s attorney, Tim Parlatore …

The documents were submitted to Smith on July 23, according to emails reviewed by CBS News. A source close to Kerik’s legal team said at the time that they believed the records, which include sworn affidavits from people raising concerns about the integrity of the 2020 presidential contest, show there was a genuine effort to investigate claims of voter fraud in the last election …

Parlatore said he was “stunned” when, after the indictment came down, the prosecutor contacted him asking for the records he said he had already provided. Parlatore said the “records are absolutely exculpatory.”

Probably won’t matter, considering the venue and the judge.

One of the many ridiculous things about this case is that it treats the idea that fraud may have occurred in the 2020 election as so preposterous that of course Trump didn’t believe it. However, it’s something half of America believes. And not only that; it’s something that has never been proved or disproved and what’s more, the way that voting occurred and was documented assures us that it cannot be proved or disproved. But the left wants to label the half of America who thinks fraud probably occurred as being stupidheads brainwashed by Trump and the right and their terrible cynical disinformation about it.

ADDENDUM: Additional possible prosecutorial misconduct is described here. I don’t think it will matter, unless the case ends up in the Supreme Court. And I doubt that would happen prior to the 2024 election, although I suppose it’s possible. Then again, the Democrats have covered themselves by having multiple prosecutions of Trump.

On the thinking of liberal Democrats

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Yawrate” writes:

I think it’s important to make a distinction between Dem leftists and Dem liberals. The leftists are destructive and driven by a need for power and they gin up support from many aggrieved leftist useful idiots that are perfectly willing to burn, loot and murder. We are not going to be changing their minds.

But the Dem liberals are the key and the mystery. They are reasonable people. I know many of them. But they can’t vote any other way but Democrat. They just won’t change their minds even after seeing the destruction of modern society and the havoc wrought by the leftists. That is the mystery. What value do they see in the modern Democrat party? And many of them are fairly conservative. But we can’t give up on them because they are the key to conservative electoral success.

Maybe they’re all like Garrison Keillor. They support Dems because they want to perceived as “nice”.

Actually, I think it’s necessary to make a distinction between Democrat leftist activists, less-committed leftists, and Democrat liberals. The leftist activists tend to be as Yawrate described. But even some of them are driven, as are many of the less-committed leftists, by idealism as well as the conviction that this time leftism will be done correctly. Or, even if it won’t be perfect and lead to Utopia, it will lead to something better than what we have now – and, even more importantly, something better than what the evil, bigoted, religiously fanatic, woman-hating, science-hating right would have in store if the right ever got into power again.

You may think it preposterous that anyone could still believe all of that, but I can assure you that a significant number do. If you’ve been marinated in this thinking from birth or from your college years, and you are surrounded by those who think more or less that way as well, and the papers and websites you read and visit say the same and stir up more and more fear, and you don’t know too many people on the right, and you see Donald Trump and think he’s icky – why, then, it’s not hard to think that way. It’s much much harder to abandon that sort of thinking.

As for what for want of a better word I’ll call “liberals,” most of the ones I know – and I know plenty – don’t like the details of politics very much. That wouldn’t be such a pernicious thing if in fact the press, even the liberal press, was interested in presenting fairly objective news. But it’s not. So if you’re the sort of person who just reads the headlines, or listens to a cable news station now and then while double-tasking, you can easily go for your entire life without learning the details that would make a difference.

To a certain extent, for much of my life I used to fit that description in the previous paragraph. Politics and politicians were so distasteful to me, and I was so busy with other things, that a lot of fairly big stories were simply a couple of sentences floating around somewhere in my consciousness. Now and then if something particularly moved me I’d pay special attention, but most things were more at the periphery of my awareness. Also, of course, for the most part the nation was going along pretty well compared to now. So I could afford – at least I thought I could afford – the luxury of not paying such close attention.

All that changed over twenty years ago, but that’s a story I’ve already told. For me, though, once I paid close attention, I got a lot of surprises. Some of those surprises were even about the past, about things I thought I knew but really didn’t know all that well. But the biggest surprise was that I didn’t so much become a conservative as discover that I had always been a conservative without really understanding what that word “conservative” meant. I had understand only what non-conservatives said it meant.

As “Yawrate” writes, some modern-day Democrat liberals who always vote Democrat – as I had, until the year 2004 – are actually pretty conservative. I find that is true among many of my Democrat friends, as well. However, they don’t see it that way, and what I think is even more important is that their vision of what “conservative” is and what it means is shaped by the leftist MSM. Or perhaps they once knew a person on the right who really was a bigoted, loudmouthed SOB. And in their minds this person then came to stand for most or all conservatives.

I agree with “Yawrate” that “we can’t give up on them because they are the key.” But although I’ve tried, I don’t know how to reach them – partly because most of them refuse to talk about politics anyway, so the opportunity isn’t even there.

[NOTE: I also suggest you follow the links in this comment of mine if you want to read more of my thoughts on this subject.]