Meet the, the man arrested in connection with that “False Flag,” eee-vul, bomb throwin’, Libtard, Dimmycrat, Anti-Trump, “mob” attempt to make Republicans look bad

What?!?!?! He's a registered Republican? What!?!?!?
He loves Trump?!?!?!?! What? That only proves there must
be a conspiracy to smear the conspiracy!

Hey, don’t ask cranky me who’s been sending all those bombs to everybody from George Soros, to Cory Booker, to Robert DeNiro, to Hillary Clinton. Ask the far-right-edge-of-the-right-wing media star John Cardillo. Here's what he said: 

“Investigators need to take a serious look at far left groups like #Antifa when investigating the bombs sent to Soros, Obama, and the Clintons, These smell like the false flag tactics of unhinged leftists who know they’re losing.”

Or ask Bill Mitchell who tweeted:  

Bill Mitchell‏Verified account @mitchellvii

These "explosive packages" being sent to the #Media and high profile Democrats has Soros astro-turfing written all over it so the media can paint the #GOP as "the dangerous mob." Pure BS.

8:24 AM - 24 Oct 2018

Or perhaps you'd like a little Rush Limbaugh with your morning cup of conspiracy bile: 

It doesn't make any sense for a Republican or conservative to do this....But flip that around. Would it make a lot of sense for a Democrat operative or Democrat-inculcated lunatic to do it? Because things are not working out the way they thought. Do not forget this. It’s why I’ve spent so much time dwelling on this today and the psychology that’s attached to this. This is not going the way they have assured us for the last nine months it was gonna go. More importantly, it’s not going the way they believed it was gonna go. They believe their lies, remember.

So now we have an FBI arrest of the dude who the FBI has said is implicated in  the case. And what's he like? Well, here are his outstanding characteristics, distilled from a report in the New York Times:

• Registered Republican
• "Older American" (Age 56)
• Criminal history going back to 1991 includes felony theft, drugs, fraud, and having been accused of threatening to use a pipe bomb
• Petitioned for bankruptcy in 2012
• Live with his mom and the time of the bankruptcy
• Note on his bankruptcy petition said, “has no furniture.”
• Appears to have been living in a van, whose windows were covered with “crazy conspiratorial stickers” according to one witness

In other words, he's the kind of loser who seems naturally drawn to Donald Trump. Come to think of it, who else is an older American, got involved in what appears to have been a fraud (Hint: Trump University), and went bankrupt a few times (or at least his businesses did.)

I'm thinking....I'm thinking....I see an orange cloud.

What happened to Jamal Khashoggi: Version 12.7.9

MBS Mohammad bin Salman prior to his most recent

nose job (Art work courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

When this cranky space last delved into the fate of the Saudi Journalist Jamal Kashoggi, who wrote for the Washington Post and happened to be in Istanbul, where he walked into the Saudi consulate  and never walked out again, we considered 11 partial scenarios of what might have actually happened.

Fortunately, we now have the official Saudi version. No no, not that version. I mean the latest version. Well then, versions. All of which Donald Trump believes. And also Jared.

So we now can authoritatively and confidently report:

A cordial invitation

to come home to Riyadh

Khashoggi did go to the consulate. Although we previously said he was never here, and then that he was here but he left, we now admit that we decided to invite him home to Saudi Arabia for, um, high level discussions.

However, once Khashoggi realized that he was being invited by fifteen husky-looking security guys, most of whom were half his age and twice his size, and also by a forensic pathologist armed with a bone saw, Khashoggi decided that he was the Karate Kid and got very unsuitably pugnacious.

Badly-made body parts

keep falling off Khashoggi

Khashoggi went on the attack against these perfectly innocent security people, who had been flown in just that day merely to keep Khashoggi feeling secure. However, the ingrate started a fight. Naturally the security guys had to fight back to protect themselves. During the scuffle, all the fingers on Kashoggi’s hands accidentally fell off. I mean, some of these newspaper writers are really shoddily constructed.

However, Khashoggi stubbornly kept on fighting. So one of the security guys tried to subdue him with a strangle hold, during which Kashoggi’s head accidentally fell off. And he still kept on fighting. Eventually his arms and legs accidentally fell off, too.

To return Khashoggi safely home to Riyadh in his condition, we put him in seven trunks and suitcases, which we put in the back of the car. Why all that luggage? So that in case one or two pieces of luggage got lost (you know how airlines are) we could still put most of him back together. 

The old rolled-up

Arabian rug trick

What about the story that we gave him to a “local cooperator" rolled up in a rug? Well, that’s true, also. But after the local cooperator got the rug home and spread it out on his living room floor, he gave Khashoggi back to us because the bloodstained body parts didn’t go with the rest of the decor. So we had to start all over again.

What's that? What's a "cooperator," you ask? Don't ask.

Anyway, there's the issue of Khashoggi’s clothing. We didn’t want to cut his clothing up into pieces because it’s so hard to find a decent tailor shop to mend clothing in Riyadh, so we gave it to one of our security people to wear. We told him not to go out like that, but you know, some of these young guys don’t listen. Or you think they’re listening, but all the time they’re swiping their cell phones and tapping the Like button on videos of the latest public beheading in Riyadh, or the news photographs of little children starving to death in Yemen.

Now we know you find this all rather far-fetched, but it’s all up-to-the-minute true, and will be for at least another two minutes. And even your Trump administration believes every word. Trump behaves as if he believes it. Jared, the Middle East maven isn’t denying it. We even bombed a Yemeni school bus for him the other day, just to demonstrate our sincerity. And Mnuchin is going to our little conference. No boycott after all.

Car? What car?

What about that abandoned Mercedes — or was it two abandoned Mercedes-es? — from the Saudi consulate that the Saudis then decided to reclaim after Turkish forensic teams started to search them? Whaddaya complaining about? We cleaned off the bloodstains before we abandoned them.

Yes but what about…..?

Sorry no more questions until we issue version 13.1.2.

“In the first place, we didn’t do it. In the second place, we only did it by accident. In the third place, somebody else did it. In the fourth place….”

Your basic bone saw, frequently carried by Saudi tourists in 

Istanbul, in case they stumble across any bones that need sawing

From the New York Times:

WASHINGTON — Saudi Arabia was preparing an alternative explanation of the fate of a dissident journalist on Monday, saying he died at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul two weeks ago in an interrogation gone wrong, according to a person familiar with the kingdom’s plans. In Washington, President Trump echoed the possibility that Jamal Khashoggi was the victim of “rogue killers.”

Yeah. Right-oh. The story is getting a bit….shall we say plastic? The goop-y tale keeps melting down and re-forming, and melting down again, sometimes taking on an extra weird shape with the interpretive assistance of some guy in the White House named  Donald Whatzisname.

For openers, there was a Saudi journalist named Jamal Khashoggi. He was critical of the new regime of Mohammed Bin Salman, or MBS for short, who seems to be in the midst of a semi-hostile takeover the whole House of Saud Incorporated, or in other words, the country.

Heads you win!

(Also, heads you lose.)

MBS puts out that he’s a great liberalizer. He’s bringing Saudi Arabia into the modern age by letting women drive. At the same time he’s arresting the women who led the movement to let women drive. 

There are rumors around that some of those women may face the death penalty, in a country where people are put to death by getting their head chopped off with a sword. This proves, I suppose, that you can have your steering wheel and decapitate it too. Or something like that.

Well, because of his criticism, Kashoggi feels Saudi Arabia heating up for him faster than even the rest of the planet. So he skedaddles and becomes an American resident. He gets a gig writing for the Washington Post, but then ends up in Istanbul where he has a fiancée he decides to marry. 

In order to do that in Turkey, he needs a certificate of divorce from his previous marriage in Saudi Arabia. He calls the nearest Saudi consulate and asks how he can get his divorce certificate. They act, if you’re old enough to remember, like that big friendly guy in a 1970s TV spot for Florida tourism (was it Bob Barker?) who used to wave his arm and say, “C’mon down!”

The Saudi Arabian

Roach Motel

So Kashoghi goes to the consulate. It turns out to be a Saudi version of the Roach Motel. Dissidents check in, but they don’t check out. 

The Turks have security video which has played on TV ad nauseam showing Kashoggi going in. There are no videos as of October 16th of his coming out. At least, not in one piece. 

Meanwhile, a platoon of thug-y looking guys gets off two charted airplanes from Riyadh to Istanbul, and shows up at the Saudi consulate. For some reason they have a bone saw. A day later they all go home, with big suitcases. 

Now Kashogghi is missing.  Here are some some explanations we’ve since heard from the Saudis, along with some others that we expect to hear any minute.

1. He was never here.
2. He was here but he left.
3. You don’t have footage of him leaving because he left via the back door.
4. Well, okay, he was here and we arrested him. But only for questioning.
5. Well, we wanted to question him and then send him back to Saudi Arabia, but some strange rogue guys accidentally killed him, so it’s not like we’re responsible or anything, and furthermore MBS knows nothing about this. Anyway, that’s how Khashogghi managed to leave through the back door — in a lot of different suitcases.
6. The bone saw? Oh, nothing premeditated. That was just to saw up our camel for camel cutlets at a consulate reception for Mike Pompeo.
7. Where were the camel cutlets?

   

   Also, what happened to the camel? Whaddya mean, what camel?

   We decided, what with American companies cancelling on us left and right, that just for Pompeo to have one lousy camel cutlet we could not cut up our camel.
8. We are not executing the women who led the movement to let women drive in Saudi Arabia. We are merely temporarily removing their heads for their own protection.
9. Well, okay, that’s technically decapitation, but some rogue executioner is doing it, completely without sanction from the House of Saud.
10. What, back to Khashogghi again? We’ll refer you to what Donald Trump said about Khashoggi’s so-called mysterious disappearance, and this is an exact paraphrase: “Do you want to lose $300 billion worth of military orders, or what?” You know, business is business. I mean, it’s not as if we’ve kidnapped, tortured and killed any American citizens….yet.
11. Okay, we’re going to say this one more time. Khashogghi was never here. And furthermore, we never heard of him. Now please deposit our multi-billion dollar check and send those damn Boeing jets. We still have a ton of schools and hospitals in Yemen to bomb.

Here comes Karma, ready to bite Brett Kavanugh in the butt

Source: Wikimedia Commons

“What goes around comes around,”  Brett Kavanaugh declared ominously. This almost-Buddhist pronouncement came during the second round of Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on September 27th. Kavanaugh was responding to to sexual molestation charges against him that the committee was pondering. 

Buddhist wisdom?

Or threat of revenge?

Buddhist or not, "What goes around comes around" sounded to some like a veiled threat to use his judicial power on the Supreme Court for revenge against those who’d opposed his nomination. As such it was intemperate, injudicious, and not to put too fine a point on it, sleazy. 

Kavanaugh later claimed that his speech, which history may remember as the  “I like beer” speech, was the consequence of his emotions getting the better of his judicial temperament. As if the words just flew spontaneously out of his mouth. Hardly so.

Scripted emotion?

If his emotions got the better of him, they did so very methodically. If you’ll recall, Kavanaugh was reading from a ring binder full of notes, and frequently looking down and turning the pages as he spoke. 

So somebody — whether Kavanaugh or somebody else — had deliberately and calmly written that “emotional” speech. 

Clearly, his emotions must have been as spontaneous as a hooker’s faked orgasm. He even thought to have lots — and lots! — of bottles of water on hand. It’s as if he knew exactly how long his so-called spontaneity would last, and — perhaps from rehearsals — how dry it would make his throat.

Well, as Kavanaugh told us, what goes around does come around — and now it’s coming for Brett Kavanaugh, even as he takes his seat on the Supreme Court.

Forget the hoots and jeers and raucous laughter generated by comedians mocking Kavanaugh’s testimony at the Senate. 

That’s small potatoes. I’m talking about the national outrage that is already spurring others to pinpoint acts of actual perjury that Kavanaugh may have committed over the years.

Down-and-dirty

outright lies

Last week, Newsweek published a whole compendium of them headlined, “The Lies that Could Still Sink Brett Kavanaugh.” We’re not talking about little fibs here, or even Trump-style fictional hyperbole about whose crowds were bigger. We’re talking about down-and-dirty outright lies about matters ranging from the impeachment of a previous president, to Kavanaugh’s assistance in permitting the physical torture of human beings.

The entire bill of particulars warrants your attention, which you can give, if you haven’t already done so, by going here. But let me quote my two favorites:

1. May 9, 2006, SJC nomination hearing to the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, response to Senator Richard Durbin (D-IL) and the late Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA), again about his knowledge of the “Memogate” emails.“I’m not aware of the memos, I never saw such memos that I think you’re referring to. I mean, I don’t know what the universe of memos might be, but I do know that I never received any memos and was not aware of any such memos.”Distance from the Truth: Kavanaugh made the denial under oath multiple times to committee members. Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT), however, recently posted confidential emails on Twitter that he says were in Kavanaugh’s possession, proving his previous denials are, Leahy wrote, “just FALSE!” 

2. May 9, 2006, SJC hearing on Kavanaugh’s nomination to the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, response to Senator Durbin (D-Ill.) about the judicial nomination of William Haynes, the Pentagon’s director of torture policy during the George W. Bush administration.
“I was not involved and am not involved in the questions about the rules governing detention of combatants or—and so I do not have the involvement with that.”
Distance from the Truth: Kavanaugh has since been doubly implicated, both in significant involvement with Haynes’ judicial confirmation for Bush and in having a hand in Bush detention and interrogation policies. Newly discovered emails from 2002 prove the former, Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL) charged last month, and “show that Kavanaugh played a substantial role in the decision to nominate Haynes.”

The karma of Kavanaugh’s lies now lays in wait for him. It may be inactive for the moment. But sooner or later, both the Senate and House will have a Democratic majority. When that happens, Kavanaugh will almost assuredly be subject to the humiliation of impeachment and removal. Further, since perjury is involved, it is always possible that perjury charges may be brought against him.

Let him live with that while, the hot breath of Karma blowing in his ear, as he goes about attempting to undo everything civilized that has happened in the United States for over a century: Minority voting rights,  Obamacare,  Social Security, Medicare, birth control, abortion rights, voting rights, and who knows what else. He most certainly must know that Karma is half a pace behind him, waiting for the right moment to pounce.

And sooner or later, it will.

Brett Kavanaugh, Christine Blasey Ford, and the case of the compartmentalized rapist — a meditation

It's possible that when Robert Louis Stevenson wrote this book 

he was on to something bigger than he guessed. [Illustration via

Wikimedia Commons.]

Back in the early 1980s, about the same time that Christine Blasey Ford says she was sexually abused by Brett Kavanaugh in the DC area, an advertising colleague of mine, a suit-and-tie kind of guy from the account management side, got arrested for rape in New Jersey. 

And not just for one rape. He was accused — and later convicted — for being a serial rapist. His modus operandi was to hide in the bushes in a park, and then jump out and attack women who were jogging by themselves.

Shock and disbelief

He was a husky, good-looking, college-educated midwesterner — and his arrest threw many of his women co-workers into shock. True, we were working for a small oddball advertising agency that was exceptionally laggard in cleaning up its sexist behavior. But he was not perceived as one of the male chauvinists.

“He was the only guy in account management who looked out for us,” one of the young women on staff told me. “He treated us fairly. He mentored me. I worked late with him lots of times. So did other women. We trusted him.”

I recalled a conversation he and I had, perhaps a year before that, when almost out of the blue he asked if I thought some rape victims were “asking for it.”

“No," I replied. "I mean, asking how could they ask for it? Who asks to get raped?” 

“Well, you know…just asking for it.”

Mentor or predator?

That brief conversation helps explain to me how a “nice guy” who helped and mentored his women co-workers could also be a brutal sexual predator.

 In an office setting he was always a perfect gentleman, and always a kindly mentor to the women  he knew. But the office setting, office attire, and office behavior were in just one compartment of his mind. A strange woman in nylon jogging shorts, her bare legs exposed, running through the park, was in another compartment, the “asking for it” compartment. And therefore she was fair game for rape. 

He was Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde, depending on which mental compartment was open for business at the moment.

By the way, I looked him up on the Internet before starting to write this. He’s out of prison now, living in New Jersey, looking middle-aged and overweight. His time in prison seems to have given him a thuggish look. I found him and his photograph on a registered sex offender website.

A hypothesis about Kavanaugh

So what does he have to do with Brett Kavanaugh? Bear with me a bit more while I explain a hypothesis.

Many people somehow sort others into distinctively separate compartments There might be a “nice” compartment and and “asking for it” compartment. Or there might be “matters to me” and “insignificant to me” compartments.

I’ve had male friends who’ve had brief extramarital flings and didn’t quite grasp the shocked and furious response of their wives, because the affairs these guys had “didn’t mean anything.” The guys sincerely didn’t understand, at least not on a visceral level, why their wives were upset by what they saw as a "trivial" affair.

Which brings me finally to Kavanaugh. Do I believe that he is mostly straight arrow, goes to church every Sunday, loves his family, teaches his daughter to pray, and never tells off-color jokes in mixed company? Absolutely.

I also believe Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony that Kavanaugh yanked her into a bedroom when they were both teen-agers, tried unsuccessfully to pull her clothing off, forcibly ran his hands over her body, covered her mouth with his hand so that she couldn't scream for help, ground his hips against her — and then laughed about it with a friend. 

Ford's testimony about the laughter between Kavanaugh and another friend tells me something. It says that Ford was in an “insignificant” compartment, unlike the 45 or so women who were former Catholic prep school or law colleagues of Kavanaugh, and who wrote in support of him. 

Ford simply didn’t matter all that much to him. Little wonder Kavanaugh can claim none of this happened. Even if he was cold sober, Ford fit in the wrong compartment, and was therefore easily forgotten. 

Or perhaps Kavanaugh does remember, at least a little bit. No matter. In either case, how outrageous it must seem that someone from the compartment reserved for people who don't matter can emerge after three decades from nowhere important to sully his name and damage his career.

Tirades and tears

And so Kavanaugh launches into a raging tirade before a Congressional committee, alternately red-faced and weeping. I believe both the rage and the tears. I believe he is apoplectically furious that this person, a woman of no significance to him, has the temerity to ruin his reputation. And I believe his weepy self-pitying disbelief that somebody from the Nobody Compartment has done this to him.

I also believe he has no place on any Federal bench, whether in an appeals court or the Supreme Court. Neither the tears, nor the tirades, nor the allegations of drunkenness, nor the very believable ones of sexual predation comport with judicial temperament.

Eleven reasons why Supreme Court Justice nominee Brett Kavanaugh is not guilty of sexual abuse (as overheard by The New York Crank while listening to the news)

Brett Kavanaugh swearing about something else.
Photo: Wikimedia commons

By now,  you must be from Mars if you don’t know that a college professor named Christine Blasey Ford has accused Brett Kavanaugh, Donald Trump’s choice for the next seat on the Supreme Court, of sexual abuse.

Here’s why any red-blooded American can ignore the charges and cheer on Senate Republicans as they ram through Kavanaugh’s confirmation before some damn FBI investigation gets in the way and accidentally reveals a bunch of stupid facts.

1. Kavanaugh says he didn’t do it. Since everybody says he’s a “family man,” what more evidence of his innocence do you need?

2. Even if he did do it, he did it when he was still a high school student, so it doesn’t count because boys will be boys. 

3. It happened so many years ago that the statute of limitations has expired, therefore it doesn’t count. Not that anybody’s saying he did it. They’re just saying.

4. 65-or-so of Kavanaugh's closest high school women friends “spontaneously” wrote to say they know Brett Kavanaugh and he’s  a straight arrow. Anybody who had 65 close women friends in high school and who can get them all to say he’s a great guy, is a guy who couldn’t possibly have tried to commit rape because, umm, uh, something something something. Right?

5. Maybe it happened, but somebody else did it. In fact, the person who did do it is Kavanaugh's evil twin, whose name is Doppelgänger Kavanaugh.

6. The FBI should not be invited to investigate, because investigating stuff is so not what the FBI does. Even President Trump says so. Besides, if Kavanaugh had done it, they would have investigated, but since they didn’t investigate, there’s nothing to investigate, otherwise they would have investigated.

7. The fact that Ford took and passed a lie detector test proves nothing, since lie detector tests are not admissible in court. Even though there is no court. Of course, if she flunked a lie detector test, that would be another matter entirely. Ditto, if Kavanaugh took a lie detector test and passed. But he won’t take a lie detector test because he’s innocent, so why should he have to take it? (Not that he wouldn’t pass it if he did take it.)

8. The Drudge Report says Ford is a “mad” and a “troubled” professor. Therefore Kavanaugh couldn’t possibly have tried to rape her.

9. She got lousy review on Rate My Professors dot com. Of course, the websites Grabien and the Gateway Pundit, which pointed out those lousy ratings, failed to point out that they had the wrong Professor Ford at the wrong university. But both last names begin with the letter F, so close enough, right? Especially since one student rated the wrong Professor Ford as “the worst teacher I ever had.” What other proof would you need that the other Professor Ford is lying about a sexual assault?

10. The charges against Kavanaugh should be investigated by an impartial outside counsel appointed and approved by the Republican majority of  a Senate Judiciary Committee. How much more impartial can you get?

11. It’s a mere coincidence that Garrett Ventry, who was a Senate Whitewash Committee’s — I mean Judiciary Committee’s  — aide has stepped down after denying evidence that he was fired from a different political job in part because of a sexual  harassment allegation against him. In fact he denies that he’s any more guilty than Kavanaugh but resigned “to avoid causing any distraction from the work of the committee." Because, you know, nothing will distract you from looking into sex more than sex will distract you from looking into sex. Or something like that. 

And furthermore: I've just belatedly come across Franklin Graham's weigh-in on this matter. “Well, there wasn’t a crime that was committed. These are two teenagers and it’s obvious that she said no and he respected it and walked away.” Obvious how? Not according to Kavanaugh, who says it never happened at all. And certainly not according to Kristine Blasey Ford, who says he lay on top of her, put his hand over her mouth so she couldn't scream, felt her up and dry humped her. So where does Graham come off with his analysis? My best guess is, in a moment of divine inspiration, he averaged "never happened" with "sexual abuse" and came up a harmless incident in which Kavanaugh gave it the old high school try and she said no, so he left. And also, I am Film Commissioner by Popular Acclaim for the planet Uranus.

More and more I'm thinking that the Republicans feel such a terrible urgency to silence Kristine Blasey Ford and hide the whole thing under the rug because there's much worse — much much worse — still capable of coming out.