Etiquette



DP Etiquette

First rule: Don't be a jackass.

Other rules: Do not attack or insult people you disagree with. Engage with facts, logic and beliefs. Out of respect for others, please provide some sources for the facts and truths you rely on if you are asked for that. If emotion is getting out of hand, get it back in hand. To limit dehumanizing people, don't call people or whole groups of people disrespectful names, e.g., stupid, dumb or liar. Insulting people is counterproductive to rational discussion. Insult makes people angry and defensive. All points of view are welcome, right, center, left and elsewhere. Just disagree, but don't be belligerent or reject inconvenient facts, truths or defensible reasoning.

Saturday, May 17, 2025

MAGA bits: MAGA-rotted federal agents and judges; DoJ planes to shame innocents

The Intercept reports in an article, ICE Duped a Federal Judge Into Allowing Raid on Columbia Student Dorms, about how weak the US Constitution and rule of law can be under a Trump judge. ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) submitted an affidavit to the judge that misstated basic facts and the applicable federal law according to The Intercept article. Despite being blatantly illegal and flawed, the Trump judge nonetheless signed off, authorizing ICE to search two students’ dorm rooms based on the assertion that Columbia might be “harboring” them in violation of federal law. 

Now that it has been MAGAfied and weaponized, ICE probably lied in the affidavit. But, being MAGAfied, ICE have been grossly incompetent and ignorant of the law. The affidavit falsely claimed that Columbia University was “harboring” students by refusing ICE access to nonpublic campus areas without judicial warrants. ICE simply ignored the fact that only immigration judges, not ICE or the State Department, could determine lawful status. Under 8 U.S.C. § 1324, harboring requires proof of intentional concealment or shielding of noncitizens from detection, a standard not met by the university’s refusal to grant warrantless entry. The judge’s failure to demand clarity on these distinctions shows either ghastly ignorance of immigration law, or MAGA-style contempt for it.

Its a Trump judge!: The judge who authorized the defective ICE search warrant targeting Columbia University student dorm rooms was Magistrate Judge Robert Lehrburger of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York. Lehrburger, appointed to his position on October 30, 2017, was nominated under the Trump administration and has been a federal magistrate judge. This is more evidence of djt MAGA weaponizing ICE, the federal judiciary and immigration enforcement against dissent. The affidavit was a fig leaf for ICE and the judge to justify planned unconstitutional searches and arrests.

Magistrate judges are appointed by federal district court judges to eight-year terms. One of their primary jobs is to rule on search warrants and preliminary proceedings, as in this case. They are there to protect the 4th Amendment prohibition against illegal searches and seizures. Given the blatant illegality of the ICE search warrant affidavit, it is reasonable to believe that Lehrburger is a corrupt, authoritarian MAGA judge who holds the rule of law in contempt, just as djt does. 

Lehrburger should be impeached and removed from the bench. But given how MAGA operates, djt will probably nominate him for a permanent federal judge position. One can consider what is a gigantic boo-boo to be Lehrburger’s formal application for a federal judge position under djt.
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NBC News reports about a DoJ plan to publicly shame people who it wants to criminally prosecute but can't find evidence for an indictment: DOJ 'weaponization' group will shame individuals it can't charge with crimes, new head says. djt appointed elite MAGA thug Ed Martin to head the DoJ’s “Weaponization Working Group.” This group was established by Attorney General and criminal MAGA thug Pam Bondi in response to a djt EO. The MRS (MAGA revenge squad) will investigate prosecutors who previously launched investigations into Trump and his allies. The MRS knows it will almost always find little to no evidence of illegality. But the DoJ has been ordered by djt to do something! 

Hence thug Martin’s brilliant idea of shaming people who broke no laws but instead tried to vindicate laws as part of their jobs. Martin said at a press conference that the MRS will “name and shame” people it believes did “bad things to the American people” but cannot be charged with any crime. What bad things? Investigating and prosecuting crimes by djt, the traitors in djt’s 1/6 coup attempt and other MAGA elites.

In a gigantic blast of insulting cynical mendacity, Martin said that transparency is the MRS’s top priority. He hypocritically argues that exposing what happened is necessary to avoid the appearance of politically motivated prosecutions, which he accused the Biden administration of conducting in secret. What a lying, morally rotted, scumbag & hypocrite.

Thursday, May 15, 2025

The Convenient Scapegoating of Joe Biden: A Critique of Jake Tapper's new book & the Democratic establishment’s rewrite of history

 


PD, May 15, 2025
 
Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign was built on a promise: to be a “bridge” to normalcy, implying a one-term president who would defeat Donald Trump, restore stability, and keep the “existential threat” of Trumpism at bay. Yet, by 2024, Biden’s refusal to step aside despite clear cognitive decline led to a catastrophic failure of that promise, handing Trump a second term. Now, Democratic insiders and media elites are admitting this failure—but they’re also rewriting history to absolve themselves, blaming Biden and a small circle of loyalists while ignoring their own complicity. This narrative doesn’t hold up to scrutiny, and its implications for how we understand the 2024 election—and the future of the Democratic Party—are profound.
 
The Establishment’s Admission: Biden’s Run Cost Democrats the Election
 
Democratic insiders, including David Plouffe, a senior adviser to Kamala Harris’ 2024 campaign, and media figures like CNN’s Jake Tapper, have acknowledged that Biden’s decision to run for reelection doomed the Democrats. In Tapper’s new book Original Sin, co-authored with Alex Thompson, insiders lament that Biden’s decline—supposedly evident since 2015, according to the authors, following the death of his son Beau—was hidden by a small group of family and aides, leading to a disastrous 2024 campaign.[^1] Plouffe, quoted in a May 13, 2025, New Yorker article, is blunt: “And it’s all Biden. By deciding to run for reëlection and then waiting more than three weeks after the debate to bow out, Plouffe added, ‘He totally fucked us.’ As a result, Democrats stumbled into the fall of 2024 with an untested nominee and growing public mistrust of a White House that had been gaslighting the American people.”[^2]
 
Tapper’s own words in the New Yorker drive the point home: “Biden had framed his entire Presidency as a pitched battle to prevent Trump from returning to the Oval Office. By not relinquishing power and refusing to be honest with himself and the country about his decline, he guaranteed it.”[^3] This admission is stark: Biden’s number one promise—to be a bridge away from Trump and MAGA—was a spectacular failure. But the establishment’s narrative pins the blame on Biden’s “narcissistic and egotistical” personality and a tight-knit circle of loyalists, including his family and aides like Anita Dunn and Ron Klain.
 
A Narrative That Doesn’t Withstand Scrutiny
 
This thesis—that Biden and a small insular group single-handedly orchestrated a cover-up of his decline—cannot withstand empirical scrutiny. The record shows a systemic failure involving the Democratic Party, Congress, and major media outlets, all of whom either ignored or actively downplayed Biden’s struggles during his presidency, when he was widely embraced as fit to lead.
 
As early as late 2022, Biden’s cognitive decline was glaring. He held fewer press conferences than any modern president—only 11 solo ones by the end of 2023, compared to Trump’s 22 in a similar period.[^4] By 2023, Biden had largely stopped speaking impromptu, relying on teleprompters or softball interviews with allies like MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace, which were often cringeworthy. A June 2024 Time Magazine interview revealed Biden arriving with a dozen aides, who frequently interjected to “guide” the conversation, with Biden struggling to complete sentences and mixing up basic details like the timeline of his vice presidency.[^5] Livestream footage—such as Biden freezing for nearly a minute at a Juneteenth event on June 10, 2024—showed him lost on stages or motionless while others danced around him.[^6] These clips, often circulated by right-wing sources, were dismissed by outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post as “cheap fakes,” a term used to discredit unedited footage.[^7]
 
Media outlets with access to insider accounts, like The Wall Street Journal’s June 2024 exposé on Biden’s cognitive lapses, were attacked for their reporting. The Journal detailed Biden’s confusion in meetings—forgetting names, needing aides to finish his thoughts, and freezing mid-sentence—based on interviews with over 45 sources across party lines.[^8] Yet, Poynter labeled the piece “foul,” citing reliance on anonymous and partisan sources like Kevin McCarthy, while ignoring its substance.[^9] CNN’s Jake Tapper, now a critic of Biden in Original Sin, was among the loudest defenders at the time, dismissing the Journal’s report as a “hit piece” in June 2024 and attacking Rep. Dean Phillips for raising Biden’s age during a February 2024 interview.[^10] Tapper’s on-air defense of Biden continued into Spring 2024, with clips compiled by Glenn Greenwald showing him calling concerns about Biden’s health “misinformation.”[^11]
 
The Democratic Party itself was complicit, and party leaders outside Biden’s inner circle continue to stonewall on their role, directly contradicting the book’s narrative of a small-scale cover-up. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, when pressed by CNN’s Kasie Hunt on May 14, 2025, about whether he knew Biden was unfit for a second term, repeatedly said, “We’re looking forward,” refusing to engage.[^12] MSNBC’s Katy Tur asked Schumer about a specific anecdote in Original Sin—a June 2024 fundraiser where Biden failed to recognize George Clooney, the same month Schumer claimed on X that Biden was “in command and impressive” in meetings—but he gave the same non-answer.[^13] House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Sen. Amy Klobuchar echoed this deflection, with Jeffries saying, “We’re not looking backward,” and Klobuchar telling NBC’s Kristen Welker, “We’re not on the History Channel right now.”[^14] These leaders are not part of Biden’s inner circle, yet their stonewalling suggests they were complicit in the cover-up, not deceived by a White House operation as the book claims. If the deception was truly “all Biden” and limited to a small group gaslighting the public, why are senior Democrats outside that circle still refusing to admit what they knew, even after the election? This contradiction, highlighted by Tapper’s own reporting, undermines the book’s attempt to isolate blame to Biden and his loyalists, pointing instead to a broader systemic failure within the party leadership.
 
Media figures who enabled this narrative are now playing “gotcha” with these insiders. Kasie Hunt, who covered Congress for MSNBC during Biden’s presidency and rarely challenged his fitness, pressed Schumer hard in her CNN interview. MSNBC’s Katy Tur, who interviewed Biden sympathetically in 2023, now grills Democrats on their past defenses. This shift highlights their own complicity—they had the platform to raise concerns earlier but chose not to, likely to preserve access and avoid backlash.
Even influential allies like George Clooney failed to act on clear warning signs. At the June 2024 fundraiser, Biden’s failure to recognize Clooney was a “terrifying” moment, yet Clooney continued to lead the charge as part of Biden’s fundraiser elite, hosting events to bolster his campaign.[^15] It wasn’t until after Biden’s disastrous June 27, 2024, debate that Clooney spoke out, publishing a July 10, 2024, op-ed in The New York Times calling for Biden to step aside.[^16] Now hailed as a moral voice for helping push Biden out, Clooney’s earlier silence enabled the very outcome he later decried, undermining the narrative of his courage.
 
Rank-and-File Democrats: Avoiding a Reckoning
 
While the establishment admits Biden’s failure, many rank-and-file Democrats reject the need for a reckoning, framing critics like Tapper as the real betrayers who handed Trump the election. A search for “Jake Tapper” on X reveals pages of comments under his May 14, 2025, post, expressing animosity—not for his hypocrisy in defending Biden on air until 2024, which would be warranted, but for daring to question Biden’s fitness at all. These Democrats argue that Biden was capable of serving another term and that, had he won, he would now be a functioning president in good shape, keeping Trump out of office. This mindset is epitomized by accounts like
@What46HasDone
, whose handle—“You Should’ve Said Nicer Things About Joe Biden”—and 60,000 followers reflect the belief that more positive coverage could have sustained Biden’s campaign, a view echoed by prominent voices like influential X user, Brooklyn Dad Defiant, with his million-strong following. This fantasy—that Biden was fit for the job and could have continued fooling the public with the party and media’s support—ignores the reality of his public struggles, from his limited press conferences to his visible freezes in livestream footage. By clinging to this denial, these Democrats avoid accountability for the party’s broader failures, perpetuating the same mindset that enabled Biden’s run and led to the Democratic collapse in 2024

 
Why This Matters: The Danger of a Sanitized History
 
This scapegoating of Biden and his inner circle matters because it erases the broader accountability of the Democratic establishment and media elites. If this narrative becomes the orthodox history in left-of-center scholarship and journalism, the lessons of this hubris and top-down cover-up will be lost. The cowardice of those who knew but stayed silent—except in rare, on-background whispers—will be forgotten. The attack-dog behavior of figures like Tapper, who dismissed legitimate concerns while defending Biden on air, will be buried. The complicity of allies like Clooney, who saw Biden’s decline firsthand but continued to fundraise until it was politically safe to speak out, will be whitewashed. The constant party and media denials of livestream footage—evidence that citizens could see with their own eyes—will be swallowed by an implausible conspiracy story about one man and his entourage. Biden and his insiders played a significant role, no doubt, but the idea that this cover-up could have been carried out without widespread buy-in from the party, Congress, and media is an insult to citizens who deserve to know how we got here.

The 2024 election wasn’t just a failure of Biden—it was a failure of the Democratic ecosystem that propped him up. Insiders like Plouffe, Schumer, and media figures like Tapper, who now profit from books like Original Sin while evading their own roles, must be held accountable. The New Yorker article captures their self-victimization, but it ignores the systemic denial that enabled Biden’s run. The contradiction between the book’s claim of a small-scale cover-up and the stonewalling of party leaders like Schumer—who were not part of Biden’s inner circle but still refuse to admit what they knew—reveals the depth of this systemic failure. We must reject this sanitized history and demand a full reckoning—from the party leaders who stonewalled, the media who dismissed the truth, and the grassroots who refused to see the warning signs. Only then can the Democratic Party learn from its mistakes and rebuild trust with the American people.

Endnotes
 
[^1]: Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, Penguin Press, May 20, 2025.
[^2]: The New Yorker, “The Democrats’ Reckoning,” May 13, 2025.
[^4]: American Presidency Project, “Presidential News Conferences,” accessed May 15, 2025.
[^5]: Time Magazine, “Biden’s Final Test,” June 2024.
[^6]: Newsweek, “Biden’s Awkward Moment at Juneteenth Event Sparks Debate,” June 12, 2024.
[^7]: The New York Times, “The ‘Cheap Fake’ Campaign Against Biden,” June 2024.
[^8]: The Wall Street Journal, “Behind Closed Doors: Biden’s Struggles with Clarity,” June 4, 2024.
[^9]: Poynter, “The Wall Street Journal’s Story on Biden’s Mental Fitness: Fair or Foul?,” June 7, 2024.
[^10]: CNN, The Lead with Jake Tapper, June 2024; CNN, Interview with Dean Phillips, February 2024.
[^11]: Glenn Greenwald, System Update, May 2025.
[^12]: Fox News, “Schumer, Democrats Dodge Questions About Brutal Biden Revelations with ‘Looking Forward’ Talking Point,” May 14, 2025.
[^15]: Axios, “Biden Didn't Recognize George Clooney at Fundraiser: New Book,” May 13, 2025.
[^16]: George Clooney, “I Love Joe Biden, But We Need a New Nominee,” The New York Times, July 10, 2024.


A vulgar criticism of MAGA elites and milder criticism of MAGA rank & file

Leslie Jones absolutely rips "goofy" MAGA elites in this vulgar but fully deserved 9-minute rant. If vulgarity is not what you're in the mood for, just ignore this. I thought it was hilarious.  


News bits: The rule of law commentary; Protecting white collar thieves; Regarding the 2020 election

Former federal US Court of Appeals judge Michael Luttig wrote a long essay about the rule of law for the Atlantic, The End of Rule of Law in America. Apparently, he sees the situation about the same as me. His main points are the same things I've been howling about at least since 2017. He says djt and MAGA elites are contemptuous of judicial authority, citing djt and his DoJ defying a direct USSC order and some other corrupt dictator stuff. 

He also points to the weaponization and politization of government, citing djt targeting major law firms, e.g., Perkins Coie, WilmerHale, with executive orders barring them from federal contracts for representing his critics, and forcing large firms into free legal service agreements amounting to almost $1 billion. So far, federal courts have blocked these orders as unconstitutional, with one judge calling them a “shocking abuse of power.” Well, duh! He has also sent his corrupt MAGA DoJ on blatantly politically motivated bogus revenge cases, such as investigating former official Chris Krebs for correctly contradicting Trump’s false election fraud claims.

Luttig sees, like I do, clearly unconstitutional actions by djt and MAGA elites such as invoking the Alien Enemies Act. That act was intended to justify mass deportations without due process in wartime. Federal courts have rejected that dangerous authoritarian crackpottery, but djt and his MAGA DoJ are not backing down. Finally, Luttig points to djt’s pardoned of >1,200 January 6 rioters and escalated his revenge rhetoric against the judiciary, attacking and framing judges who rule against his criminality and law breaking as obstacles to his agenda.
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I’ve argued here about a gazillion times that djt and MAGA elites want to be free from the rule of law. They want to accumulate vast amounts of wealth and power without much or any personal or corporate risk from committing what few crimes are left that restrain major white collar criminals. That includes most MAGA elites and djt himself.  Welp folks, now djt has called off the dogs, telling federal law enforcement to stop going after white collar criminals like djt himself, and instead hunt down and prosecute or persecute immigrants. Medeiaite reports about this in an articleTrump Admin Orders FBI to Deprioritize White Collar Crime, Shift Focus to Immigration. The Trump administration told the FBI to significantly reduce its focus on white-collar crime investigations and instead prioritize immigration enforcement. This change constitutes a major policy shift for federal law enforcement agencies, which have historically not been primarily responsible for immigration enforcement. 

djt’s order came with a memo from MAGA thug Matthew Galeotti, head of the DoJ’s criminal division. Galeotti’s memo told prosecutors to narrow the scope of white-collar cases, minimize the length and collateral impact of investigations, and avoid imposing unnecessary burdens on American businesses

Narrow the scope of white-collar crime investigations and prosecutions? Avoid imposing unnecessary burdens on American businesses? WTF! Believe it or not, this is kleptocracy incarnate.
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PNAS published the results of a massive audit of the 2020 election, Audits of the 2020 American election show an accurate vote count. As we all expected, there was very little voter fraud or any other kind of election fraud. Authoritarian-kleptocrat djt and elite MAGA thugs are insulting, cynical liars and morally rotten thieves. The PNAS article comments: 

This study quantifies the accuracy of vote counting in a collection of highly contested and consequential electoral contests. We compiled every available audit of votes cast in the 2020 United States elections at the county level or higher, and we used this election audit database to produce nation-scale numerical estimates of how accurately votes were counted. We find that the net error rate in counting presidential votes was on the order of thousandths of a percent, with similarly inconsequential errors for other state and federal contests.

The dataset includes all available postelection tabulation audits, spanning 856 regional governments across 27 states, with 71,702,471 individual votes and a further 1,210,528 ballots, including about 6.2% of all votes cast for Donald Trump and 6.9% of those cast for Joe Biden. We find that election audits shifted the net presidential vote count by only about 0.007%, with similarly minuscule errors across all major types of electoral contests.