05 October 2017

Handmaid's Tale redux?



Recent correspondence with a Trumpian friend led me to take my crystal ball -- she insists on being called Futura -- out of the closet and dust it off. Though not the latest 2017 model, she still had some modern artificial intelligence improvements: speech, predictive algorithms, and a split screen option that displayed two possible future scenarios.

Scenario I  

Futura said that obviously Mueller's Russia investigation is looking deep into the White House, up to and including the President. Bannon was right: firing Comey was a colossal mistake, which, taken together with President's own statements, has created a strong inference that Trump's motive was to obstruct the FBI's Russia inquiry. Add in the scores of misleading filings by Jared Kushner re his Russia meetings, the misleading statements by Donald Junior regarding that now-crowded meeting with representatives of the Putin's government, (the statement Junior offered up to Congress was reportedly drafted and/or approved by Senior,) the evident misdeeds of Trump associates like Manafort, Flynn, et al, and the vise tightens. 

Futie pointed out that each week had brought another turn of the screw. The no-knock search warrant of Manafort's home told us that for sure Mueller believed a crime has been committed.  Mueller's inquiry into the White House documents revealed the direction (or at least one of them) of the prosecutor's attack.  And the recent overheard conversation that the White House counsel may be hiding some documents from Mueller adds drive to the assault on the President.

I asked her how much pressure Trump could take before he fires Mueller.

Futie pointed out that this president does not have a great track record of stability. He is vain and impulsive. So on screen One, she projects that, ignoring the advice of his advisers, Trump will fire Mueller along with anybody else who threatens him. What will the Congress do? Futura predicted the craven Republican House likely would not impeach. But if they did, she said,Trump would quit in a huff before the Senate ever got to vote, and we would get Pence.

II.

The second scenario projects that by 2020, Trump has so far withstood a not-yet-completed Mueller inquiry (it took three and half years before they got the goods on Nixon), and so in June of that year, the president does the following:

 i) appears on Fox and Family and declares himself "The Greatest President Of All Time,"

 ii) follows this up with a series of victory-lap rallies where his partisans hysterically chant, "Four More and Then the Wall,"

iii) pardons all his former campaign chairs, cabinet members, children, in-laws, and Putin's mishpoche, and 

iv) tweets that The Donald is ending the run of this Reality Show while it is still Number One in the ratings. He is retiring.

Futura then shows the Pence/Cruz ticket winning an electoral college victory over the Dem's Biden/Bernie ticket, despite a six million popular vote deficit. (This fantasy is not so fantastic. We have a growing problem not contemplated by the Founders, who did not plan on party politics and current population shifts towards the cities. Today, 70 percent of the population elects 30 percent of the Senate. Gerrymandering and population shifts lock in a House Republican majority despite a substantial Democratic popular vote victory. It happened in 2016 and will happen again in 2020.) 

In both scenarios, with Pence at the big desk in the oval office, the Gorsuch nomination begins to look like it is the result of a left-wing conspiracy. The president's next confirmed appointments to the Supreme Court are disciples of Judge Roy Moore, and perhaps Senator Moore himself. The result is a kind of Handmaid's Tale redux: Pence's Indiana ban on Planned Parenthood goes national, and is OK'd by the Supremes. Wade, Griswold, Windsor, Obergefell, and Lawrence are reversed, with the result that states are again free to ban abortions and criminalize the use of contraceptives (even by married couples) as Connecticut did until its statute was struck down by the Court in 1965. The states will also be free to ban same-sex marriage and once again make consensual homosexual conduct a felony. The result is the Court effectively amends the First, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments of Constitution so that certain religious views trump the Bill of Rights.

When my elbow accidentally nudged Futura to the edge of the table, I did not try to stop its crash to the floor, and quickly took the smoking fragments out to the curbside trash bin.
......................

Remember the days when the biggest argument against impeaching Nixon was that Agnew was Vice President? The smart guys figured it out, got rid of Agnew, and then got rid of Nixon. What we need now is more smart guys.  We need a Pence scandal. Something big. Bigger even than Pence getting caught lunching with a woman when his wife was not present.

....................

N.B.  I drafted this piece two weeks ago and put it aside.  I wondered if the "Handmaid's Tale" reference was a bit over the top. But a couple of days ago, I went back to my draft after reading a frightening item in the NYTimes. It reported on the nomination of a law professor, Amy Coney Barrett, to a seat on the Seventh Circuit, and noted she was "often mentioned as a potential candidate for the high court, especially if Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg were to retire."

Though the candidate did not reveal it on the questionnaire she submitted to the Senate, she is a member of "small, tightly knit Christian group called 'People of Praise.'" There are 1,800 members in the world. The article continues:

Some of the group’s practises would surprise many faithful Catholics. Members of the group swear a lifelong oath of loyalty, called a covenant, to one another, and are assigned and are accountable to a personal adviser, called a “head” for men and a “handmaid” for women. The group teaches that husbands are the heads of their wives and should take authority over the family... .
.......
The group believes in prophecy, speaking in tongues and divine healings ... .
If, at this point, you need to lie down for a bit, please do so. Only after you recover should you consider reading the entire article. You will probably then need to lie down again. Or have a double scotch. Or both. Here it is:

https://nyti.ms/2yuVSOa

Me, I'm going out to the trash and see if I can repair Futura and apologize to her.





















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