“Everyone Hates Soros-Backed LA DA George Gascon…Including His Own Prosecutors’

The New Neo Posted on by

That’s the title of this piece at BattleSwarm Blog about the possible recall of George Gascon.

I submit, however, that it actually should read “especially his own prosecutors.” Lawyers don’t – or at least, until the last few years, didn’t – go into the prosecution biz to wink at criminals, coddle them, and set them free to commit more crimes.

When Gascon was elected as LA’s top prosecutor, he immediately issued a pack of directives that sent the prosecutors under him reeling:

“So, filing deputies are forced to choose between obeying the special directive and decline filing the prior strike allegations — or — follow the statute and file the strike allegations. So the choice is horrible: Line DDAs (those with active cases) either decline to join the motion to dismiss the strikes, or make the motion to dismiss the strikes. In other words, here’s the choice as a sworn DDA: Disobey a written directive by your elected boss, or violate your oath and risk bar discipline for not following clear statutory and decisional law.

“No one should be put to this choice–and yet, 1,200 DDAs are now being asked to make these choices on the hour during the workday.

“This is wrong.”

Please also see this post of mine from shortly after his election.

Here’s a recent article at Substack:

In February, the prosecutors’ union, the Association of Deputy District Attorneys, conducted a vote to see where its members stood on the recall: Nearly 98 percent supported it…

To a person, these prosecutors said that the problem was that Gascon had portrayed himself on the campaign trail as a progressive, and they thought that was a lie. They thought that he was captive to a radical agenda; that he wanted to blow the whole place up; that Black Lives Matter was now in charge of the criminal-justice system in Los Angeles; and that all of this was hurting the people the activists claimed to care about the most…

Gascon didn’t see it that way, of course. He imagined himself a man of the future—forward-looking, free of the old assumptions about cops and prosecutors and the meaning of criminal justice…

Gascon…had caught a killer, 30-foot wave in the summer of 2020. “I think that it was something that helped Gascon get elected, but I don’t have any confidence that that’s who Gascon is,” said Laurie Levenson, a former federal prosecutor who now runs Loyola Marymount University’s Project for the Innocent, which seeks to overturn wrongful convictions. “I think that’s the big question: do we know who Gascon is?”

Actually, everyone should have already known who Gascon was. There was no excuse for ignorance on that score. It’s not as though Gascon had never been a DA before; he had. He was the San Francisco DA from 2011 to 2018 (although he didn’t resign till 2019). He had a track record:

During Gascon’s time as District Attorney, property crime increased by 49%. Some of Gascon’s critics have blamed this increase on his office’s reluctance to file charges against “High-level” offenders; during Gascon’s tenure, misdemeanor charges were only filed in 40% of cases presented by the San Francisco Police Department. Having worked with Gascon, San Francisco Mayor London Breed and City Attorney Dennis Herrera declined to endorse him in his bid to become the District Attorney of Los Angeles County; Breed and Herrera instead endorsed his opponent, the incumbent Jackie Lacey.

There’s lot more at the link about his tenure as San Francisco’s DA, and all of it is very much in line with his performance in LA. If it’s a tad less extreme, that’s only because the left hadn’t gone full out yet, but it was certainly extreme enough to let the voters of LA know what they were in for.

Not only that, get a load of this:

…Gavin Newsom appointed him the interim District Attorney when Kamala Harris was elected to Attorney General. Even though he’d never tried a case, let alone prosecuted a case…

That fact alone should have been a red flag the size of LA itself. Apparently it didn’t matter. If you read the article from which it came, written on his departure from the San Francisco DA office and entitled “Don’t Let the Door Hit You on the Way Out: A former San Francisco prosecutor reflects on George Gascon’s time as District Attorney,” you get an idea of how awful his tenure was there and how much he was hated by prosecutors.

If no one in LA knew, they certainly should have known.

From the Substack article:

Since Gascon took office, roughly 300 deputy D.A.s have left. On top of that, job applications are down. The D.A.’s Office usually hires every two to three years, and it gets about 2,000 applications each hiring season. This year, 240 people applied for 60 spots, a longtime deputy D.A. told me. “And you should see who these people are,” he said. “It’s people who no one else will hire.”

Even if Gascon is recalled, his successor will have his or her work cut out trying to repair the destruction Gascon has wreaked.

Am I the only person on the right who has some sympathy for Biden’s press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre?

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a criticism that’s typical of what I read about her:

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre always manages to surprise me. I used to think that Jen Psaki was the worst White House Press Secretary I’d ever seen, but Jean-Pierre has changed my opinion in short order. Her tenure has been rocky from the get-go, with her performances widely panned for her lack of preparation, dodging of questions, and frequent need to read directly from her notes.

Other times she just beclowns herself. She recently claimed that the economy is in a better position now than it has been historically.

No, really, she did.

But she really proved how bad she was during an interview with CNN this week when she said that Americans should remember how things were when Biden took office.

“We have to remember where this country was more than a year ago when he walked into office,” she told CNN’s Don Lemon.

And she thought that was a good talking point?

Thing is, there are no good talking points for Jean-Pierre to fall back on. What can she say? Granted, I certainly don’t admire her for signing on to be an apologist for and booster of a corrupt president and a party dragging the country precipitously down. But whatever her reasons – personal belief system, personal ambition, all of the above or none of the above – her job is impossible. All she can do is preach to the choir, and weakly at that.

Plus – and this is actually the reason for my relative sympathy for her – she doesn’t have the snotty snark that Psaki had, the sheer duping delight I often saw in Psaki’s affect as she lied through her teeth without hesitation or shame. I think that what is perceived as Jean-Pierre’s failings may actually represent a problem she has with being required to constantly lie with no shame whatsoever (a problem that didn’t seem to perturb Psaki at all).

Maybe I’m giving Jean-Pierre too much benefit of the doubt; probably most of you think I am. But that’s what I see in her – or at least a glimmer of it.

Let’s revisit the common claim that mass shooters are fatherless

The New Neo Posted on by

Since the Uvalde shooting, I’ve been reading statement after statement, as though it’s a proven fact, that school shooters and other mass murdering shooters are usually fatherless, disproportionately so. The people saying this don’t usually feel they have to prove it; isn’t it a self-evident, previously proven, truth?

Not really.

I had read such claims years ago, researched them, and written this post about the facts I discovered, which indicated no particular increased incidence of fatherlessness in this group. Please read it. I found that most if not all of those claims that cited a source had referred to this article, which turned out to be incorrect in its statement that the 27 largest mass shootings in the US had been perpetrated by 26 shooters who were fatherless.

But by now, “mass shooters are fatherless” and “mass school shooters are fatherless” are common and well-established but false memes on the right. False memes are the left’s specialty, but the right is not immune to the practice. After all, it makes sense: fatherlessness is bad (I agree) and the American family has been undermined for years (I agree), as well as men and fathers having been marginalized and maligned (I agree). I believe these trends have had dire and wide-reaching consequences.

But those trends are not responsible for everything that’s bad. Nor are all fathers automatically good. Neither can father-presence change those children who are psychopaths or otherwise so deeply troubled that it’s not clear what (if any) timely intervention would have prevented their violence. And no, these things can’t be predicted well enough to lock up all the teenagers who show any danger signs at all. Most haven’t committed prior offenses for which they can be charged and incarcerated and/or hospitalized for long enough. We’d have to lock up enormous numbers of young people for a very long time, who would not be likely to have hurt anyone, in order to prevent the few from harming people. And even then we’d probably miss some of the worst.

Why am I going over this ground again? I think it bears repeating. One reason I think it’s a dangerous thing to think that it’s all or even primarily about fatherlessness is that it is a much too simplistic explanation for something that is far more complex. When I say the phenomenon is complex, I mean it is poorly understood but seems to be some combination of genetics, bad parenting or lack thereof, contagion effect, the desire to be famous if only for carnage, the breakdown of families and communities in general, fatherlessness, drugs, limitations and flaws of the mental health treatment system, and probably an additional host of things that I haven’t mentioned in that list.

By the way, the same is true for assertions about the role of SSRIs. It is by no means a simple or clear matter; read this for a short discussion of some of the many pitfalls of doing research to try to find out. I’ve written two posts on related issues, this and this.

So, what of Ramos, the Uvalde murderer? We haven’t heard much about his father, although we’ve heard quite a bit about his grandparents (he shot his grandmother in the face before going to the school) and his mother. I wrote this post about the criminal histories of his father and his mother. But I also read this interview with his father; I think it’s fascinating. If you read it, you’ll discover this [emphasis mine]:

The Daily Beast spoke with Ramos on the porch of his girlfriend’s home east of Uvalde, where he has been living for several years. The house and the bushes outside were adorned with blue and white streamers for a graduating senior. At times, the tough-spoken Texan broke into tears….

He claimed to have no idea why his son became so violent, or why he chose to target the school.

But he said he did notice one change in his son in recent months: a pair of boxing gloves he’d purchased and started testing out at a local park. “I said, ‘Mijo, one day somebody’s going to kick your ass,’” Ramos recalled. “I started seeing different changes in him like that.”

The younger Ramos reportedly had a poor relationship with his mother and had dropped out of high school ahead of his graduation this year. His father admitted he had not spent much time with him lately because he was employed outside Uvalde—he digs holes around utility poles for inspection—and because of the pandemic.

His own mother was suffering from cancer, Ramos said, and he could not risk being exposed to the coronavirus. He added that his son grew frustrated with the COVID precautions about a month ago and refused to speak to him. Ramos has not seen him since.

“My mom tells me he probably would have shot me too, because he would always say I didn’t love him,” he told The Daily Beast…

For his own part, the father has a lengthy criminal record which includes at least one conviction for assault and causing bodily injury to a family member. He said he was currently estranged from his daughter—the gunman’s sister—who he said was also upset with him for not spending enough time with the family…

It doesn’t seem at all clear to me that more time with this guy would have helped. I tend to think the answer in this particular case is “no.”

It also seems to me that some of the shooter’s problems and isolation, as well as his internet involvement, may have been exacerbated by the COVID lockdowns, which seem to have roughly coincided with the beginning of his steepest decline. I can’t find where I read it, but I recall an article saying that he had quit going to high school about a year ago, and the interview with his father also indicates that part of the reason the son had cut off communication with his father in that last month was related to COVID restrictions imposed by the father because of the sick paternal grandmother.

More [emphasis mine]:

[The elder] Ramos said his son frequently complained about his maternal grandmother, who was in the hospital recovering from her injuries this week. He said he offered to let his son move in with his own parents, but that the teenager declined, citing the lack of WiFi. (The teenager’s final dispute with his maternal grandmother before he shot her was reportedly about his phone bill.)

To me, this history reveals a father who was in touch until recently but not living in the home for years, but whose influence probably was mostly pernicious when he had been living in the home and in his further contacts. Disruptions and dysfunction are all over the place in this family, and I think I’m on safe ground saying we just don’t know enough to sort out all the ways in which it was a mess.

I wish we did. But we don’t, and I don’t think simplistic but incorrect assumptions are the answer. I happen to think that the shooter actually may have been a psychopath, which I’m basing on reports from acquaintances that he “loved hurting animals.” That is a strong diagnostic sign for serious emotional disturbance and may be connected with violent psychopathy, and if so it’s a grim prognosis.

This is the sort of highly disturbing behavior I’m talking about:

Others [acquaintances] alleged that Ramos boasted about torturing animals and aired his acts of animal abuse on the French live streaming platform Yubo.

A Yubo user told ABC News that Ramos would “put cats in plastic bags, suspend them inside, throw them at the ground and throw them at people’s houses”. They claimed that Ramos would display these videos while laughing and boasting about how he and his friends “did it all the time”.

Nothing I have written in this post should be understood to mean that I don’t think fatherlessness and divorce are big problems and cause all sorts of turmoil. But they aren’t necessarily what’s wrong with these shooters, and they certainly aren’t all that’s wrong, although I have little doubt they sometimes contribute. But as my previous research showed, a lot of these shooters are in intact families with involved fathers – including the Columbine shooters, something a great many people don’t seem to know.

I’m going to close with a poem by A. E. Houseman which was written some time between 1895 and 1922. The first time I read it, when I was about thirteen years old, I got a cold chill. I still get a cold chill when I read it, although I’m no longer thirteen. I think poets sometimes express truths – and mysteries – that cannot be accessed in other ways:

THE CULPRIT

The night my father got me
His mind was not on me;
He did not plague his fancy
To muse if I should be
The son you see.

The day my mother bore me
She was a fool and glad,
For all the pain I cost her,
That she had borne the lad
That borne she had.

My mother and my father
Out of the light they lie;
The warrant would not find them,
And here ’tis only I
Shall hang so high.

Oh let not man remember
The soul that God forgot,
But fetch the county kerchief
And noose me in the knot,
And I will rot.

For so the game is ended
That should not have begun.
My father and my mother
They had a likely son,
And I have none.

Show me the man and I’ll show you…

The New Neo Posted on by

…the crime the administrative violation.

Reality must be made to conform to pro-Democratic propaganda whenever possible. We can’t have the propagandists turn out to be liars.

For example:

The Department of Homeland Security is preparing to discipline “multiple” horseback Border Patrol agents involved in the infamous “whipping” incident of Haitian migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border back in September.

A federal source told Fox News an announcement on the matter is expected within the coming days.

The source said that DHS will be putting forth proposals to discipline the agents who will have a chance to respond to the charges. The charges, Fox News is told, are “administrative violations,” and do not amount to criminal conduct – of which the agents were previously cleared.

By the way, Fox, how about making it clear in that first sentence that the “whipping” charge was fake? I know you’ve got it in scare quotes, but those could be seen as quotes and a lot of people still think that whipping was involved. You’ve got the same problem in the headline, too. If a reader stops there – and you know that many will – the reader might get a false impression and never get to these later paragraphs, that do lay it out properly:

Many Democrats and media outlets falsely described the agents’ long reins, which they use to control their horses, as “whips.”

ABC, CBS and NBC pushed the debunked claim that Border Patrol agents were whipping Haitian migrants, but didn’t bother to inform viewers that it was discredited.

Now, maybe this will blow over yet. But the whole thing is ominous.

Open thread 6/16/22

The New Neo Posted on by

I looked at quite a few videos on this same subject: the “Mid-Atlantic” or “Transatlantic” American accent. But they all had the same odd flaw: they all used Cary Grant as an example of one of the Americans sporting this accent. Odd. Cary Grant – aka Archibald Leach – was British. He came here with a troupe from England at 16 and stayed, becoming a US citizen when he was 28.

“Woman” is becoming a four-letter word

The New Neo Posted on by

How do you write an article about tampons and for the most part avoid using the word “women” when talking about menstruation?

Like this:

People who menstruate are saying it’s hard to find tampons on store shelves across the U.S. right now, as supply chain upsets reach the feminine care aisle.

“I just went to 5 different Walgreens [and] the shelves are CLEARED,” said one Twitter user this past week, while people on Reddit have posted about empty shelves going back months.

The shortage stems from a combination of factory staffing challenges, transportation bottlenecks, and the rising costs of key raw materials used to make the products, tampon makers say.

The word “women” only occurs later in the article, and in a more general way:

It’s another supply chain problem where women are bearing the brunt of the cost…

She’s met women who don’t have the resources to make multiple trips to the store…

Why is it so difficult for the woke to say “women who menstruate”?

Although every person who menstruates is indeed a biological woman, there is a small group of people that NPR doesn’t wish to offend here: the subset of biological women who believe that they are actually men and who wish to be regarded as people who were always men right from birth, who also have not had any surgery to remove their uteri and therefore still have periods, and to whom pointing out that they were born as women by using the phrase “menstruating women” would be to insult and offend them mightily by somehow hinting that they remain women. This group by no means includes all trans women (people born as men who transition to a female identity), and yet NPR and other groups turn themselves into linguistic pretzels – and sound ridiculous – in a story such as this.

Matt Walsh’s film “What Is a Woman?” points out how difficult – nay impossible – it is these days for professionals in the trans-affirming field to even define the word “woman,” except as “it’s whatever a person thinks it is.”

I cannot help but think of this. It was made in 1979, and is even more brilliant today than it was then:

Go on Joe, nationalize the oil companies

The New Neo Posted on by

We know you want to:

President Biden may resort to using emergency powers if American oil companies don’t increase output at their refineries, the president told oil CEOs in a series of letters Wednesday.

Biden’s statement blames oil companies for running “historically high profit margins” even as Americans experience surging gas prices. Biden has recently faced criticism for a lack of executive action aimed at curbing inflation.

“There is no question that Vladimir Putin is principally responsible for the intense financial pain the American people and their families are bearing,” Biden wrote. “But amid a war that has raised gasoline prices more than $1.70 per gallon, historically high refinery profit margins are worsening that pain.”

No question about it; all our economic woes are due to a combination of Putin Putin Putin and price-gouging oil companies. I don’t even think Biden believes this; then again, it’s hard to know what’s going on in his somewhat-cognitively-challenged mind.

More here:

Why would business people want to increase production in such an uncertain environment where the government has declared them the enemy?

Biden talks about being in a “war” and the war affecting things. He’s right — except the war is the one he declared on the energy industry. He’s blaming the victims of his war. The purpose of this is to play to his leftist base who believe this lie that it’s because of gouging oil companies. They don’t ask why these oil companies weren’t gouging us all under Trump? But that’s what this letter is about — to say, “See? I threatened them with a strongly worded letter.”

How many people are fooled by this, or approve of it? I don’t think anyone who isn’t already in the Democrats’ camp, and perhaps not even all of them.

Southern Texas district votes for a conservative in special election

The New Neo Posted on by

Mayra Flores has won in a special election in the 34th congressional district of Texas:

Flores, who had 51% of the vote to Democratic candidate Dan Sanchez’ 43% when The Associated Press called the race, will become the first Mexican-born congresswoman to serve in the House. Her family moved to the United States when she was 6 years old.

Flores will finish out the remainder of Vela’s term, which expires in January, and Republicans were eager to win the seat and gain new ground in the Lone Star state to represent the district that spans east of San Antonio with parts along the coast to Brownsville. As currently drawn, the 34th Congressional District will essentially be dissolved later this year after a newly redrawn map favoring current 15th Congressional District Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, the Democratic nominee for November’s general election to represent the 34th District, was constructed.

So this will only last till November, and then the playing field will be changed and the Democrat will be more favored – unless he’s not. It may not be enough to carry him over the finish in this district, even then. The district is very heavily Hispanic. In addition, Flores will be “the first Republican to represent the Rio Grande Valley area since Reconstruction.” That’s a long long time.

For decades I’ve been reading that Americans of Hispanic origin often are culturally conservative, and that some day that will be reflected in their voting. Perhaps that day is starting to come, and Flores’ victory yesterday is not the only sign of it. There was evidence in the 2020 election that the southern area of Texas has been getting more and more favorable to the GOP, and polls have indicated the same thing.

It would be tremendously ironic if the Democrats’ decades-long recipe for permanent election dominance – to allow a great deal of immigration from the Southern hemisphere including and especially illegal immigration, in hopes of attaining that permanent majority because of course those people and their descendants will continue to vote Democratic in perpetuity – turns out to have been a huge miscalculation.

Those locks on classroom doors

The New Neo Posted on by

In discussions of what happened during the Uvalde school shooting, the issue of doors and locks has come up several times. In my research on previous school shootings, I noticed that in a lot of those cases the classroom doors had no locks, and the teachers and students were reduced to piling up tables and chairs in front of the doors and trying to hide. As we know, however, the classrooms at Robb Elementary had locks.

I found this informative article that explains quite a bit about the history and types of classroom locks, and even sheds some light on the mechanism by which I think the classroom doors may have locked in Uvalde:

In the aftermath of the Sandy Hook tragedy in 2012 [where the classrooms did not have locks], the Sandy Hook Advisory Commission recommended in its final report that all classrooms have doors that can be locked from the inside.

“The Commission cannot emphasize enough the importance of this recommendation,” its report stated. “The testimony and other evidence presented to the Commission reveals that there has never been an event in which an active shooter breached a locked classroom door.”

Later, however, in the 2018 Parkland shooting – as I discovered from my reading – the shooter shot his victims through the windows of locked classroom doors.

More about the lock recommendations after Sandy Hook:

“You have to balance security, safety and accessibility along with convenience,” said Lori Greene, Codes and Resources Manager for Allegion…For example, some schools have a policy allowing teachers to leave their doors pre-locked and then use a magnet to prevent the door from closing all the way. This allows for easy re-entry while also being quickly bypassed in the event of an emergency.

It’s also unfortunately against the fire safety code (if the classroom doors are fire-rated). And in at least one school shooting, the assailant removed the magnet and closed the locked door, preventing school staff from entering the classroom.

In that shooting the gun jammed after one person was killed, allowing other students to jump the shooter, who was their classmate. So it was nothing like the situation in Uvalde; the shooter was stopped quickly and no police were involved.

More about locks:

Devising the perfect classroom lock has been, as Cook said, “a balancing act.” Teachers needed to be able to lock their classroom doors: (1) quickly and easily; (2) without inviting student tampering; and (preferably) (3) without needing a key or other tool present.

When schools first started implementing classroom door locks [some had them considerably before the Sandy Hook shooting and recommendations], Cook explains, they used so-called “office function locks,” which locked from inside the room with the push of a button. As any parent could guess, this setup led to mischievous students locking their teachers out of the room. So what is known as the traditional classroom lock was developed, which can only be locked with a key. It also can only be locked from outside the classroom.

However, after the Columbine school shooting in 1999, it became clear that requiring teachers to open a classroom door in order to lock it was no longer a safe option.

Finally, a solution: the classroom security function lock was developed. With this lock, a key on either side of the door could lock the outside lever while the inside lever remains unlocked. This lock allows free exit from the room at any time while also keeping locking power in the hands of authorized personnel. While still requiring a key, this lock successfully met the first two criteria.

I had been puzzled by what one student who survived Uvalde said in an interview, which was that the teacher couldn’t find the key to lock the door in time. This makes me think that this arrangement, the classroom security function lock with an inner key, was in place in Robb Elementary classrooms.

As usual I have questions. At what point did Robb Elementary implement its key policy, and what type of locks were in use, and did this affect the problem police had finding the correct key and getting into the classrooms? It certainly may have affected the problem the teacher had in locking the door, if that girl’s description is accurate. If so, this points out how difficult it is to design a fail-safe system.

If the room had been locked in time, I doubt the perp could have gotten in; at least he would almost certainly have had great difficulty in doing so. Would he nevertheless have been able to shoot through the doors (or windows in doors if they had them in Uvalde, as in Parkland?). But at least he would have been more accessible to police if he’d been forced to stay in the hallway to shoot, because he couldn’t open the classroom doors. The terrible irony at Robb Elementary is that the locks that were meant to protect the children ended up protecting the shooter in those two classrooms.

I haven’t read anything that addresses the question of whether the second classroom’s outer door was locked in time by the teacher there. I’ve concluded the second classroom probably was locked in time, but I don’t know for sure. I have read from several sources – including an interview with the male teacher who was wounded but survived – that the way the perp entered that second classroom was through an inner door that connected the two classrooms. I would guess that that inner door was not locked and that perhaps it wasn’t even lockable. I have read that it was a door to a bathroom for the two classes, and I think you wouldn’t ordinarily want small children to be able to lock themselves in the bathroom.

Who would ever have envisioned this horror-show scenario in real life, whereby only one unlocked door could make two classrooms vulnerable? Granted, I don’t know whether that’s the way it happened, but that’s the only thing that accounts for all the facts I’ve heard so far. Of course, there’s a lot we still don’t know, so my opinion could change.

The uses of the January 6th Congressional hearing: setting the scene for the criminal indictment of Trump?

The New Neo Posted on by

Let’s talk about January 6th, say Democrats and a few NeverTrumpers. Let’s talk about it again and again and again.

Perhaps the House will decide to impeach Trump for the third time; they seem rather addicted to it. And now that Trump’s out of office, they’re aching to criminally indict him, too. I think part of this new January 6th thrust is a desire to lay the groundwork for a possible indictment, which isn’t allowed while a person is president but can occur afterwards, although it never has in this country.

The above link about indicting Trump isn’t an isolated article, either – it’s quite a popular topic in the MSM. For example, here’s NBC – and note the emphasis on Cheney, who as a Republican who hates Trump with a white-hot passion is especially useful for the purpose:

Liz Cheney’s powerful remarks at Thursday night’s Jan. 6 congressional hearing on the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol — which sounded a lot like a lawyer’s opening statement at a criminal trial — have renewed a debate in legal circles about whether the Justice Department could, and should, prosecute Donald Trump.

With a growing body of evidence that Cheney and others say points to criminal acts involving Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, Attorney General Merrick Garland may ultimately be faced with an excruciatingly difficult decision about whether prosecuting a former president is in the national interest.

“Excruciatingly difficult”? The “difficulty” for Garland, excruciating or not, lies in concern about whether it could succeed without sparking a backlash of extremely worrisome proportions.

It’s not just Trump they’re thinking about indicting, either:

[Garland’s] deputy, Lisa Monaco, has confirmed that prosecutors were looking into the legal ramifications for those who took part in schemes to push slates of fake Electoral College members declaring Trump the winner of states Joe Biden won.

More ruminations:

Filing criminal charges against Trump in connection with his efforts to overturn the election “will very likely spark civil unrest, and maybe even civil war,” said Barbara McQuade, an NBC legal analyst and a former U.S. attorney.

But, she said, “I think not charging is even worse, because not charging means you failed to hold someone criminally accountable who tried to subvert our democracy.”

Ah yes, Ms. McQuade – like, perhaps, the many many folks who cooked up Russiagate? I’m sure you’d be in favor of holding them criminally accountable, in your zealous and evenhanded quest to uphold American democracy.

Many legal experts said it would not be necessary to link Trump to the mobs who stormed the Capitol in order to charge him. They said there was ample evidence that he participated in a corrupt scheme to overturn the election.

“I can imagine an indictment that includes all seven schemes,” McQuade said. “But if the DOJ can prove any one of them, that would be enough.”

In other words, said Rosenberg, “Did he conspire with at least one other person to obstruct Congress and to thwart the counting of the electoral votes?”

As has happened before at the hands of Democrats (see also this), and is certainly not a criminal undertaking. But as that great defender of democracy Beria said, show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime.

I wonder whether the Democrats and the DOJ will really indict Trump, or whether they’re too frightened of the consequences were they to do it.

No former president has ever been indicted. And a presidential administration of one party charging a president of another party — no matter how much prosecutors insist the decision was made on the facts and the law — would create an uncomfortable precedent.

“Uncomfortable” – you know, like tight shoes. Nothing to get all that upset about. And it’s not that it would be wrong to do, oh no – it’s that it sets a bad precedent because if Republicans ever get back in power they might even do it to the Democrats in retaliation.

“I don’t think we want to be the kind of country where this happens often,” McQuade said.

Certainly not often – just to powerful Republicans we hate.

Biden would have the legal authority to make the final decision about whether to prosecute, but experts are divided on whether he should get involved.

“That’s a fascinating question,” Eliason said. “It feels to me that the president would have to weigh in. We are talking about this monumental decision. Biden was elected, not Garland. At some point this becomes a policy question, not strictly a legal one.”

McQuade disagreed: “It would be a terrible idea. I think you cannot loop in the president. You can give him a heads up, but I don’t think you consult him. That undermines this idea of an independent Justice Department.”

Comedy gold! It would undermine the idea that the DOJ is independent – because until now, we all had that idea, didn’t we?

The article has humorous aspects, but there really is nothing funny about it. This is what we’ve come to.