…diminishing returns [DOT 13/7/20]

…this might sound wildly implausible…but I don’t actually relish these little moments of potentially boring you with a light garnishing of invective sprinkled in & around a bunch of links to stories that largely repeat information that you know well enough by now to – like a world-class tennis player – start reacting appropriately before the service has been completed & I’m literally in mid-swing…so going back over something I might have banged on about before is kind of closer to the gilding of lillies than I prefer to get for the most part

…so if you’ll indulge me a little…I’d like to preface this by stating something I’d hope would be obvious because it’s one of those things where I’d really hate to find out later it wasn’t…KC left a reply to one of these posts the other day that I meant to respond to but (things being what they are) I never quite got there…& the ever-tingling leg of one Cousin Matthew (another esteemed member of our illustrious little parish) did manage a response where I had failed to so I’d like to pull the pair of them up to the front of the class a little…& want to be clear about the bit where I don’t think what I have to say implies at any level that I’m looking to correct anything either said because I’ve read the stuff they say around here & any fool can see they’re at least as astute as I am & know all sorts of shit better than I do.

…that said…I have some opinions that overlap with the comments in question that might seem like they veer off a little in places & I figure it might not entirely be a waste of everybody’s time to sketch out why a little?

The only reason Donald Trump’s tax returns are such a big deal is because Trump made them a big deal but refusing to release them.
Given how absolutely impervious to political scandal he’s been until literally this fucking year, if he has just released them, whatever blowback he would have seen would be over by now. His steadfast refusal to show them is the only thing keeping it in the news cycle.

And honestly, I think about the only thing that they’ll reveal that we don’t already know (i.e we all know he’s a craven fraudster who’s in massive debt to Russian oligarchs) is that Trump is nowhere near as rich as he claims. I think that would damage Donald’s pride more than anything criminal that could be revealed, because the only thing keeping the cash flow coming in is stupid idiots giving Donald Trump money in the hopes he can somehow not waste it all.

KC Complains A Lot

I believe the only reason President Nixon released a tax return (thereby setting a precedent) was this aura of corruption and sleaze that clung to him almost from the moment he entered public life when he ran for Congress. He had to go on TV when it was in its infancy to bat away charges of his wife inappropriately having mink coats via a shady slush fund, the famous “good Republican cloth coat” Checkers speech.

Nixon was a lot of things but he wasn’t in it for the money. After he lost the 1960 Presidential election he moved to New York and made a good living as a name partner in a Manhattan law firm. He also spent time plotting his comeback. He was very Trump-y: paranoid, thin-skinned, power-mad, pitting Americans against each other for political purposes, but he never displayed the avarice and naked greed that Trump does with the regularity of the tides.

Cousin Matthew’s Tingling Leg

…so…working backwards…naked greed & avarice displayed in abundance with the regularity of the tides…quite apart from being an elegant bit of phrasing for a deeply inelegant aspect of the god-forsaken farce currently taking place in, around, through & most especially under the auspices of the presidency…it is unequivocally a frank (though by no means full) appraisal of a characteristic of this alleged administration that is unsurprisingly a mirror of one of the defining characterstics of its loathesomely solipsistic figurehead

…Nixon…by some indescribably ironic twist of fate that surely no historian could ever have seriously expected his legacy to enjoy…was indeed a thin-skinned, power-obsessed, paranoiac who was willing to pit both Americans & their interests against one another for personal political gain…& a vastly more capable & effective president & politician than baleficient could ever pass himself off as…much less actually be

…& yet he did less harm to his nation & its citizenry…incredible as such a statement deserves to be…but as the above comment indicates much of what he did in terms of relevant precedent where the ever-tedious references to tax returns are concerned he did because of the no longer fashionable belief that it was important to avoid anything that might lend credence to plausible impropriety where candidates for high office were concerned…why, it’s quaint enough to make a person feel nostalgic, frankly

…not least when one considers that his administration looked at the possibility of pardoning those convicted for their parts in the Watergate scandal…& likewise decided that whatever the debt Nixon owed those people it would be unthinkable to pardon them by his own hand whilst on his way to an ignominious exit from the Oval Office

…indeed it’s possible that when Barr was asked directly (I believe under oath) whether it would be lawful for the current president to pardon someone for their part in a crime that (were he not currently the president) might usually be categorized along the lines of joint-enterprise he did in fact state with some clarity that such a course of action would be illegal

…another reason, no doubt, that Roger Stone’s conviction remains intact though his punishment for it has dissapated like so much hot air…which – it’s worth noting – he continues to get to contest on the basis that investigating him was improper

…not…& I want to be clear about this because it pisses me off beyond any degree I have the words to express…explicitly not on the grounds that he isn’t guilty of this & more…but on the grounds that according-to-this-particular-tenuous-reading-of-them “the rules” say it wasn’t fair to notice that he was guilty let alone ask him to prove he wasn’t

…not “I never did that shit” & not even “you ain’t got shit on me” but your actual “hey, you can’t ask me that – no fair – that’s not how this is supposed to work”

…& this is coming from the same dizzying legal intellects that like to attempt to persuade anyone who’ll listen that because the charges related to their president’s impeachment were “procedural” in nature that somehow invidates any & all claims that the reams of evidence in support of the clear & demonstrable guilt & explicit culpabilty on his part in moral, political, legal & objectively factual terms are not in any way substantive

…in no small part thanks to the lying, obfuscating, stonewalling & attempts – some successful & a great many brought to you by one Roger Stone (multiply convicted felon inexplicably outwith confinement or other punitive consequences to his very real & deeply damaging wrongdoings) – to prevent the Mueller investigation from satisfying itself in regards to its attempts to fulfill even the insanely-forgiving remit the Report makes clear was always intended to be both the limit of its efforts & the starting point from which a panolply of further & more rigorous investigations were intended to ensue pursuant to the cause of (eventual) justice…which is to say just as soon as it might reasonably be expected that the GOP wouldn’t be mortally wounded by association

…meanwhile…as KC notes…the principal revenue stream that directs funds towards DJT’s pockets is directly or indirectly bilking credulous or morally complicit supporters of his project to simultaneously denigrate, destabilize & deprecate the functional machinery of state while enriching & aggrandizing himself in ways every bit as thoroughly inappropriate as he has always & forever been in everything he has ever done…& done so very publicly…let alone the things he has so desperately & at such great cost built walls around composed of large sums of money & dubiously-justified & suspiciously-wide-ranging non-disclosure agreements & other such instruments of obfuscation

…at this point I’d like to note that compared to the shaky financial foundation that represented his business interests & assets before he announced his candidacy the amount of hay he’s been making while the campaigning sun has been shining is like a bonanza to him…it almost certainly (thanks to those porous & exteremly pliable rules that have kept so much “soft” money in the mix that it’s a wonder any of us can stomach it) even worse than the extent to which he has sought to shamelessly extort the federal goverment to contrive to profit (from the very dubiously determined costs & payments relating to things like the mandatory protection of his person) on the grounds of his own damn properties…like the golf clubs he has now spent time at some 262 times since taking office

…or…to put it another way…he has…in a manner designed to enrich himself more or less directly & very much improperly…visited his own properties at the taxpayers’ expense with the nominal purpose of engaging in an activity he suggested was improper in Obama’s case (namely to play golf) enough times that (had he not spread them out over several years instead of a single one) he would have spent at least part of every working day (assuming a five day week) for an entire calendar year pouring money from the public purse into his own pockets under the thin pretext of doing the exact thing he claimed a president ought to be too busy to do

…because…& I can not stress this enough…ripping off the people of the United States of America has always been his full-time occupation & that fact has only been exacerbated by the insane state of affairs whereby he in fact occupies the highest office of the land

…again, as KC likewise notes, this is not news any more than it’s news that were we to get a bird’s eye view of the man’s actual bottom line it would show him not so much in the hole as down a deep, dark well that might actually graduate to being properly described as a trench so deep that no amount of legitimate enterprise or retrenchment could reasonably be expected to make him whole

…but about here is where I think I diverge in the particulars from KC’s conclusions at the same time that I still think that in many respects even those parts of what he said are not wrong in so far as they go…which probably sounds confusing & is largely why this is sitting here & not in a comment responding to his where the rest of you wouldn’t have to wade through it…but here goes, since I think there’s something to be said for both ways of looking at the thing

…so, to KC’s point, it may indeed be the case that ultimately the thing he’s seeking to defend is his pride…but my mileage varies when it comes to the suggestion that his tax returns showing him not to be as rich as he pretends would be demonstrating anything we don’t already know…indeed that was at least part of the point of a couple of the links I recycled the other day…sure, he got gifted hundreds of millions of dollars…but by his own accounting he has lost sums that add up to the better part of two billion dollars…which led the IRS to notice that he outstripped the field in terms of posted losses by an impressive margin

…nationwide the business enterprises of Donald J Trump (of the lying-orange-sack-of-flop-sweat Trumps) lost more money than anyone else not just in one year but every year for some several years…he lost money literally like nobody’s business…except his…no business anywhere else in the US (possibly even in all of recorded history) has ever lost money at a more prodigious rate than the businesses of this waddling tangerine disaster artist…at least not without going the everloving fuck out of business permanently…& in many cases somebody winding up serving time in an honest-to-goodness penitentiary

…so…a man who started out with a positive number followed by eight zeroes in a line (call it $X00,000,000) & then lost dollar amounts that rack up an extra digit (let’s call this one $Y,Z00,000,000) where Z>X>Y…that man turning out not to be a rich & savvy businessman the way he made out (before, during & after his reality TV delusion-illusion – he does love a demeaning rhyme) is pretty much the opposite of seeming like new information to me

…now obviously the period to which the information from which those figures are drawn all prefigures his stint in the political arena & its attendant opportunities to avail himself of those lax campaign finance regulations…but if you wade through the mire of the information the Times dredged up with respect to his father’s tenure at the helm of their fradulently avaricious attempt at a dynastic tradition…well…there’s plenty that rises to the level of prosecutable illegality

…so I’d say the jury may still be out on whether or not evidence of substantial wrongdoing of the prosecutable variety is demonstrated within the tax documents prepared by Mazars & now to be made available to Cy Vance & the SDNY (potentially en route to being made likewise available to Congress & perhaps one day to the rest of us) but would personally argue that it isn’t merely the pratings of one orange-faced asshole that’s kept focus on the idea that there might be something worth pursuing in terms of ensuring they see the light of day

…there’s no two ways about it…if Nixon was correct that the people deserve to know if their president’s a crook…then they should know that this one not only is but that the question is already long settled everywhere but in a court of law & the minds of the willfully &/or speciously credulous

Capone went down for tax evasion, after all…but nobody thinks he wasn’t guilty of anything else that ought to have carried jailtime in its own right

…it is sadly not as fundamentally impossible as it ought to be that had said information been made available in regards to papaya pol pot its functional utility with respect to prosecuting a bit of righteous justice in terms that register as punitive even through that tangerine hide might indeed have been rendered dubiously inert long since

…much the way the thousands of other things (any one of which would have been enough to tip the scales of ignominous financial &/or political demise in times past) have dribbled off him the way urine allegedly does from a rubber sheet (that may or may not be in physical proximity to a lady whose negotiable virtue owes its allegiences to what is generally accepted to be your archetypal hostile foreign power) because that has indeed appeared to be the nature of the rabid animal the GOP has been so all-in on reducing itself to

…but…with all due respect…we don’t actually know that any more than we know for sure that there isn’t some shit in there which in the right hands couldn’t lead to an illustration of culpable & prosecutable wrongdoing even more egregious than that demostrated in that Times piece about old man Fred’s corrupt practices & the inviolable connections that foundation has to everything his favored son has ever been or represented himself as being

…so…apologies in advance…but that shit might crop up again from time to time going forward?