First, an H/T (Hit Tip) — Un sombrero de punta para a mi hermano de fraternidad — for sending a link to today's essay by The New Yorker's Andrew (Andy) Borowitz. Handy Andy claimed that the Department of Homeland Security was having difficulties with large number of unmarked, dark vans in the DHS motor pool. And there are rumors about the DHS laundry's difficulty linking unmarked camo uniforms with DHS agents. If this is (fair & balanced) fulfillment of the old US military acronym — SNAFU — so be it. [x YouTube]
"The Liar Tweets Tonight" (Parody of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight")
By Roy Zimmerman and The ReZisters, featuring Sandy Riccardi
[x The New Yorker]
Confused Federal Agents Unable To Determine Which Unmarked Vans In The DHS Garage In DC Are Theirs
By Andrew (Andy) Borowitz
TagCrowd Cloud provides a visual summary of the blog post below
Donald Trump’s plan to dispatch troops to several American cities has hit a major snag, as federal agents have been unable to determine which unmarked van in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) parking garage is theirs.
According to one agent who spoke on condition of anonymity, hundreds of agents are currently wandering around the huge DHS garage in Washington, fruitlessly attempting to locate the correct unmarked van.
“It’s like a baggage-claim nightmare,” the agent complained. “Many unmarked vans look alike.”
Although sending unmarked vans to cities “seemed like a really cool idea at first,” the ensuing confusion might be a compelling reason to “maybe think about going with marked vans instead,” the frustrated agent said.
Speaking to reporters, the acting head of the Department of Homeland Security, Chad Wolf, said that agents’ inability to locate the correct unmarked vans had been “exaggerated,” and added that he was working with the DHS laundry to insure that agents stop receiving other agents’ unmarked uniforms. ###
[Andrew (Andy) Borowitz is the creator the Borowitz Report, a Web site that is a lot funnier than the stuff posted by Matt Drudge and his ilk. Borowitz is a comedian and writer whose work appears regularly in The New Yorker. He is the first winner of the National Press Club's humor award and has won seven Dot-Comedy Awards for his web site. His most recent book (and Amazon's Best Kindle Single of the Year) is An Unexpected Twist (2012). See his other books here. Borowitz received a BA, magna cum laude (English) from Harvard University (MA).]
After the 2016 election, Yale history professor Timothy Snyder eerily foresaw the likelihood that The *ILK (*Impeached But Not Removed) Lyin' King would likely follow the authoritarian playbook that was perfected in the 1930s in Germany, Italy, and Spain. Brown Shirts (Germany), Black Shirts (Italy), and Blue Shirts (Spain) took to the streets to attack "the enemies of The State." Now, in Portland, men in camo uniforms without identification descended on Portland streets to confront protestors. The rationale was that the paramilitary force was sent to Portland to "protect" the US Courthouse and other federal buildings. Professor Snyder warned us: "Beware the paramilitaries" because those were the chosen forces to bring German, Italian, and Spanish authoritarian movements to power in those countries. If this is a (fair & balanced) demonstration that history can repeat itself, so be it.
PS; The source of this blog's noms de stylo serpent reference to the three women on the NY Fishwrap's Op-Ed staff began with this 2001 essay by The Cobra (Maureen Dowd) who's been joined by her distaff colleagues: The Krait (Gail Collins), and — most recently — The Viper (Michelle Goldberg). [x YouTube]
"The Liar Tweets Tonight" (Parody of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight")
By Roy Zimmerman and The ReZisters, featuring Sandy Riccardi
[x NY Fishwrap]
Trump’s Occupation Of American Cities Has Begun
By The Viper (Michelle Goldberg)
TagCrowd Cloud provides a visual summary of the blog post below
The month after Donald Trump’s inauguration, the Yale historian Timothy Snyder published the best-selling book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century (2017). It was part of a small flood of titles meant to help Americans find their bearings as the new president laid siege to liberal democracy.
One of Snyder’s lessons was, “Be wary of paramilitaries.” He wrote, “When the pro-leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the end has come.” In 2017, the idea of unidentified agents in camouflage snatching leftists off the streets without warrants might have seemed like a febrile Resistance fantasy. Now it’s happening.
According to a lawsuit filed by Oregon’s attorney general, Ellen Rosenblum, on Friday, federal agents “have been using unmarked vehicles to drive around downtown Portland, detain protesters, and place them into the officers’ unmarked vehicles” since at least last Tuesday. The protesters are neither arrested nor told why they’re being held.
There’s no way to know the affiliation of all the agents — they’ve been wearing military fatigues with patches that just say “Police” — but The Times reported that some of them are part of a specialized Border Patrol group “that normally is tasked with investigating drug smuggling organizations.”
The Trump administration has announced that it intends to send a similar force to other cities; on Monday, The Chicago Tribune reported on plans to deploy about 150 federal agents to Chicago. “I don’t need invitations by the state,” Chad Wolf, acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, said on Fox News Monday, adding, “We’re going to do that whether they like us there or not.”
In Portland, we see what such an occupation looks like. Oregon Public Broadcasting reported on 29-year-old Mark Pettibone, who early last Wednesday was grabbed off the street by unidentified men, hustled into an unmarked minivan and taken to a holding cell in the federal courthouse. He was eventually released without learning who had abducted him.
A federal agent shot 26-year-old Donavan La Bella in the head with an impact munition; he was hospitalized and needed reconstructive surgery. In a widely circulated video, a 53-year-old Navy veteran was pepper sprayed and beaten after approaching federal agents to ask them about their oaths to the Constitution, leaving him with two broken bones.
There’s something particularly terrifying in the use of Border Patrol agents against American dissidents. After the attack on protesters near the White House last month, the military pushed back on Trump’s attempts to turn it against the citizenry. Police officers in many cities are willing to brutalize demonstrators, but they’re under local control. US Customs and Border Protection [CBP], however, is under federal authority, has leadership that’s fanatically devoted to Trump and is saturated with far-right politics.
“It doesn’t surprise me that Donald Trump picked CBP to be the ones to go over to Portland and do this,” Representative Joaquin Castro, Democrat of Texas, told me. “It has been a very problematic agency in terms of respecting human rights and in terms of respecting the law.”
It is true that CBP is not an extragovernmental militia, and so might not fit precisely into Snyder’s On Tyranny schema. But when I spoke to Snyder on Monday, he suggested the distinction isn’t that significant. “The state is allowed to use force, but the state is allowed to use force according to rules,” he said. These agents, operating outside their normal roles, are by all appearances behaving lawlessly.
Snyder pointed out that the history of autocracy offers several examples of border agents being used against regime enemies.
“This is a classic way that violence happens in authoritarian regimes, whether it’s Franco’s Spain or whether it’s the Russian Empire,” said Snyder. “The people who are getting used to committing violence on the border are then brought in to commit violence against people in the interior.”
Castro worries that since the agents are unidentified, far-right groups could easily masquerade as them to go after their enemies on the left. “It becomes more likely the more that this tactic is used,” he said. “I think it’s unconstitutional and dangerous and heading towards fascism.”
On Friday, the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, tweeted about what’s happening in Portland: “Trump and his storm troopers must be stopped.” She didn’t mention what Congress plans to do to stop them, but the House will soon vote on a homeland security appropriations bill. People outraged about the administration’s police-state tactics should demand, at a minimum, that Congress hold up the department’s funding until those tactics are halted.
Through the Trump years, there’s been a debate about whether the president’s authoritarianism is tempered by his incompetence. Those who think concern about fascism is overblown can cite several instances when the administration has been beaten back after overreaching. But all too often the White House has persevered, deforming American life until what once seemed like worst-case scenarios become the status quo.
Trump has already established that his allies, like Michael Flynn and Roger Stone, are above the law. What happens now will tell us how many of us are below it. ###
[Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights, and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment issues. She received a BA (English) from the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo and an MS (journalism) from the University of California at Berkeley.]
