Showing posts with label Republican. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Republican. Show all posts

Tuesday, October 19, 2021

powell2 -- free note


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THE ABSURD TIMES

 

 

 

 


 

 



 


 A little late, but it makes the point.



Well, I guess I have to get this out of my system before I finish what I was about to send out. That fact that Colin Powell was black, or African American, or Jamacian American, in no way excuses his role in supporting the war on Iraq. The sources he claimed to have as "solid" were confessions obtained through torture and some German, somewhere. He probably didn't know this, so we don't know what he would have done if he did. He was also praised for his "service" in Viet Nam. OK, so he is not one of my heros.

 

However, what is being done in his name is pretty disgusting even for the republicans.  Yes, he finally died of covid and had been vaccinated, but he also had a severe disease that affected the immune system, it was terminal in itself, and also was afflicted with Parkinson's, although that has not been expanded on and it doesn't matter if it is. But for our media to just put it out there and leave the impression that vaccination leads to death is, well, an american failing, again.

 

His Chief of Staff Wilkerson has done a good jon of showing how he was used by Cheney, Bush, and others and we refer you to him. Meanwhile, here is a transcript. I'd ask for further distribution, but save that for the next issue (which has been rudely interrupted by this development):

 

We look at the life and legacy of Colin Powell, who is best known for giving false testimony to the U.N. Security Council in 2003 about nonexistent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, paving the way for the U.S. invasion and occupation that would kill over 1 million Iraqis. Powell, who was the first Black secretary of state, the first Black and youngest chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the first Black national security adviser, died on Monday due to blood cancer and Parkinson's disease that left him vulnerable to infection from COVID-19. Tributes poured in from top U.S. leaders in both Republican and Democratic circles on Monday, but in other parts of the world Powell is remembered very differently. We speak with journalist and author Roberto Lovato, and Clarence Lusane, activist, journalist and political science professor at Howard University. Lusane describes Powell as "a complicated political figure who leaves a complicated legacy" whose public image was "in conflict with many of the policies of the party he supported and the administration in which he was involved." Assessing Powell's role in U.S. invasions around the world, from Vietnam to Central America, Lovato says "he's made a career out of being a good soldier and supporting U.S. mass murder around the world, but evading the credit for it."

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GUESTS

Clarence Lusane

author, activist, journalist and professor at Howard University, where he is director of the International Affairs Program and former chair of the Department of Political Science.

Roberto Lovato

award-winning journalist and author.




Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: President Biden ordered flags at the White House to be flown at half-staff in honor of General Colin Powell, who died Monday at the age of 84. Powell was the first Black secretary of state, the first Black and youngest chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the first Black national security adviser. On Monday, tributes poured in from both Republican and Democratic leaders. President Biden called Powell a, quote, "patriot of unmatched honor and dignity."

But in other parts of the world, Powell is remembered very differently. In Iraq, the journalist Muntadhar al-Zaidi, who famously threw a shoe at President George W. Bush, tweeted that he was sad Powell had died before being tried for his crimes in Iraq. While serving as secretary of state under Bush, General Powell played a pivotal role in paving the way for the U.S. invasion. It was February 5th, 2003, that Powell addressed the United Nations Security Council and made the case for a first strike on Iraq. Powell's message was clear: Iraq possessed extremely dangerous weapons of mass destruction, and Saddam Hussein was systematically trying to deceive U.N. inspectors by hiding the prohibited weapons.

SECRETARY OF STATE COLIN POWELL: One of the most worrisome things that emerges from the thick intelligence file we have on Iraq's biological weapons is the existence of mobile production facilities used to make biological agents. Let me take you inside that intelligence file and share with you what we know from eyewitness accounts. We have firsthand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails. The trucks and train cars are easily moved and are designed to evade detection by inspectors. In a matter of months, they can produce a quantity of biological poison equal to the entire amount that Iraq claimed to have produced in the years prior to the Gulf War.

AMY GOODMAN: All of Colin Powell's main claims about weapons of mass destruction turned out to be false. He later described the speech as a "blot" on his record.

But the 2003 speech was not the first time General Powell had falsely alleged Iraq had WMDs. In 1991, during the Persian Gulf War, the U.S. bombed Iraq's only baby formula factory. At the time, General Powell said, quote, "It is not an infant formula factory. … It was a biological weapons facility, of that we are sure," he said. Well, U.N. investigators later confirmed the bombed factory was in fact making baby formula.

While many in Iraq consider Powell to be a war criminal, just like they consider George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, Powell has long been celebrated at home. Colin Powell was born in Harlem in 1937. His parents had both immigrated from Jamaica. He was educated in public schools, including City College of New York, before he joined the military through ROTC. He served two tours in Vietnam. He was later accused of helping to whitewash the My Lai massacre, when U.S. soldiers slaughtered up to 500 villagers, most of them women and children and the elderly. While investigating an account of the massacre filed by a soldier, Powell wrote, quote, "In direct refutation of this portrayal is the fact that relations between American soldiers and the Vietnamese people are excellent," he said.

Powell spent 35 years in the military, rising to chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In the 1980s, he helped shape U.S. military policy in Latin America at a time when U.S.-backed forces killed hundreds of thousands of people in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala and other countries. Powell also helped oversee the U.S. invasion of Panama and the Persian Gulf War.

From 2001 to 2005, he served as secretary of state under George W. Bush. After working under three Republican presidents, General Powell made headlines in 2008 when he endorsed Barack Obama for president just two weeks before Election Day. Earlier this year, General Powell said he no longer considered himself a Republican, following the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol.

General Colin Powell died on Monday. His family said he died from COVID-19 complications. He was struggling with both Parkinson's disease and multiple myeloma, which left him severely immunocompromised.

To talk more about Powell's life and legacy, we're joined by two guests. Roberto Lovato is with us, award-winning journalist, author of Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and Revolution in the Americas. He has closely tracked General Powell's history in Latin America. We're also joined by Clarence Lusane, professor at Howard University. He's author of many books, including Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice: Foreign Policy, Race, and the New American Century.

Professor Lusane, let's begin with you. If you can talk about the legacy of Colin Powell?

CLARENCE LUSANE: Thank you, Amy. And thank your other guests.

So, Powell leaves a very — he was a complicated political figure who leaves a complicated legacy. As you outlined in your introduction, Powell has a rise-from-the-bottom story that really captured the imagination of many people. He rose from growing up in poor areas, or at least low-income areas, in New York to become fourth in line to president, when he became the secretary of state.

In the early 1990s, he was championed by both Democrats and Republicans and recruited by both to run for president. He declined in 1995. And when he declined, he announced that he was joining the Republican Party. Now, the Republican Party he joined in 1995 was the Republican Party of Newt Gingrich, and it did not seem to be a fit. Colin was pro-choice, pro-affirmative action, pro-immigration, called for gun control, all of which the Republican Party, under Newt Gingrich and going forward, have been against.

As you point out, he joins the George W. Bush administration, the very first choice, in fact, of George W. Bush for his Cabinet because Powell has the international gravitas and respect that nobody else in and around George W. Bush has. But he never really fit in. And in the first eight or nine months of the George W. Bush administration, Powell lost fight after fight after fight when Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and others, who were what we call the neoconservatives, the neocons, were really running the administration. And there was a pretty good bet that Powell was not going to last until the end of the year. But then September 11 happens. Powell, always the loyal soldier, decides to stay, but he's still very isolated. He says that they basically saw him as a milk carton. They put him in the refrigerator, and when they needed him, they would bring him off the shelf, and then they would put him back. They brought him off the shelf in 2003 to talk at the U.N. because there was no one else in the administration who could get the attention and at least some belated respect. And Colin Powell went and gave that talk, which was, from A to Z, false. But he was the only one in the administration, and then, of course, a year and a half later, he's gone.

But he's complicated because, in many ways, he did not fit in with the Republican Party, even though he did not leave until early this year. But he increasingly, and anyone who was a moderate, and particularly Black moderates, simply had no place in the Republican Party. And so, he endorses Obama, he endorses Biden, he endorses Hillary Clinton — or at least he votes for them. So he really had moved and been moved out of the Republican Party for many years. But he really wasn't a Democrat or seen as a progressive, either, again, because of a long history of aggression internationally, going all the way back to Reagan and the Contras and all of the foreign policy controversies of the 1980s, and then under the Bush administration, which not only included Iraq but also included the Bush policies towards Cuba, towards Venezuela, their policies around Africa, all of which increasingly isolated Colin Powell from the progressive communities.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Professor, I wanted to ask you, in terms of the need for both the Democrats and the Republicans to repeatedly lionize and hold up General Powell especially, but then as Secretary of State Powell, as a key and important American speaker, given the fact that the U.S. military — of all the institutions in American society, none is more racially diverse, it seems to me, than the U.S. military, with about 40% or more than 40% of the troops as people of color. So, could you talk about the importance of Powell as a figure, given the demographics and the changes in the American military?

CLARENCE LUSANE: Thanks, Juan.

So, part of the capital that Colin Powell bills is precisely because he rises up to the top of an institution, one of the few that had not seemed to be tainted by political partisanship, and he rises up and becomes the head, becomes the head of Joint Chiefs of Staff. And Powell's personality is not a belligerent one, one that we have, unfortunately, come to see more and more in military figures and political figures, and Powell's activism relative to addressing issues of race. So, when we think of the conservative African Americans who are in and around the Republican Party — the Clarence Thomases, the Candace Owens — those types tend to come to mind. But there were African American conservatives who took positions that were supportive of issues related to the Black community and were active and supportive of civil rights. So, Powell fits into that, and so that gave him some cachet. He spoke at my graduation at Howard University in 1994 and talked about issues of racism, issues of being socially engaged. You're not going to find that coming from virtually any of the people we think of as Black Republicans these days. So, that gave Colin Powell a different kind of public-facing image, which was in conflict, again, with many of the policies in the party that he supported and in the administration in which he was involved.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I'd like to also bring in Robert Lovato into the discussion. And, Roberto, I'm wondering if you could talk especially about — people forget that back in the invasion of Panama that not only was Colin Powell a key figure, but that the secretary of defense at the time was Dick Cheney.

ROBERTO LOVATO: Yeah. Thank you, Juan and Amy. I'm glad to be back with you.

The story of Colin Powell in Central America and other parts of the world is what I would call a tragic tale of militarism in the service of declining empire. And it also previews what I call the age of intersectional empire, that Clarence laid out a little bit of, in terms of how race is being deployed by the militaristic, bipartisan consensus elites in the United States. And so, Panama comes about, remember, right after the Central America engagements in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and that was preceded by the Vietnam War, when you have a decline in the morale and the sensibilities of the U.S. military, having suffered a defeat, a severe defeat, in Vietnam. And so, Powell was part of a cadre of leaders trying to figure out how to create a post-Vietnam animus for the U.S. military machine.

But one thing I want to make clear is that the Powell doctrine of overwhelming force, bringing in the public into supporting U.S. war, clearly defined national security objectives and other things that define what they call the Powell-Weinberger doctrine, are still war policies. And so, Colin Powell's political career was one thing, in terms of race and being pro-abortion, but in terms of militarism, it was clear. In El Chorrillo neighborhood, which taxi drivers in Panama still call the "little Hiroshima," you know, hundreds of people were killed. They're still excavating mass grave sites of the invasion of Panama. And so, you know — and prior to that, remember, Powell was an assistant to then-secretary of defense, under the Reagan administration, Caspar Weinberger, who was charged with looking — overseeing military policy in Central America, which, instead of going into what they called asymmetrical warfare, like they did in Vietnam and got beat up, the militarists, like Colin Powell, decided to stray away from those kinds of war and fight them through proxies, and instead focus on building up to get big, you know, state-to-state military wars. And so, the fight against Manuel Noriega, also on false pretenses, was a preview and a preparation for the state-to-state war that followed in Kuwait and Iraq.

AMY GOODMAN: And in that U.S. invasion of Panama that he spearheaded, can you talk about who died, Clarence Lusane, in Panama? We're not just talking about abstract, intellectual, you know, policy issues.

CLARENCE LUSANE: No, that's exactly right, as Ron [sic] laid out. I actually went to Panama. I went with another reporter, Stan Woods from out of Chicago. We went down after the invasion, and it was horrific. As was mentioned, there were mass graves. There were the total destruction of neighborhoods. They bombed — these were poor neighborhoods, we should be clear. So, there were wealthy neighborhoods that were surgically missed, while they bombed neighborhoods that had not only been active, but had been — you know, very much embodied people who live there. So, it was a horrific invasion. And Powell said nothing about it. It was similar to other military endeavors by the Bush administration and Reagan administration. Powell was silent on the consequences that thousands and thousands and thousands of people — and hundreds of thousands of people died in Iraq, but certainly thousands of people died in Panama. And there still has not been an accounting for that particularly horrible invasion.

AMY GOODMAN: And these were a heavily Black population of Panama.

CLARENCE LUSANE: And these were Afro-Panamanians. That's exactly right.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Roberto Lovato, go a little before the invasion of Panama to explain the Iran-Contra deal and the role of General Powell at the time. The invasion of Panama was under George H.W. Bush, and the Iran-Contra deal, of course, was when he was vice president, when it was President Ronald Reagan, the ultimately illegal deal to sell weapons to Iran, take that money and illegally support the Contras, which was against, at the time, the Boland Amendment, that said the U.S. could not support the counterrevolutionaries in Nicaragua.

ROBERTO LOVATO: So, Powell, we have to remember, was what he himself called the, quote, "chief administration advocate" for the Contras. The U.S. sponsored an insurgency to try to overthrow the Nicaraguan Sandinista government. I mean, Human Rights Watch and other organizations around the world have documented tens of thousands of people killed, nuns raped, children destroyed by the Contras. And Colin Powell would go on to say that "I have no regrets about my role" and that he fought very hard to get support for the Contras. So, Powell, as assistant secretary to Caspar Weinberger, was privy to information about the arms for hostages and giving money to the Contras deal, but managed to evade judgment, unlike Weinberger, who was indicted and condemned, and then, I believe, pardoned, thanks to lobbying by Colin Powell.

And so, Powell has proven skillful not just in terms of kind of helping reengineer the post-Vietnam military, but he's also been skillful at evading political judgment, as we saw with My Lai, as we see in Iran-Contra. And, you know, having this idea that the one, quote-unquote, "blot" on his record is the lies around Iraq is a travesty, because he's made a career out of, you know, being a good soldier and supporting U.S. mass murder around the world, but evading the credit for it. So, this is — yeah, I'll leave it there.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah. And I'm wondering if you could talk, Roberto, a little bit about, for instance, his legacy in terms of arming and training the Salvadoran Army, and including his relation with José Napoleón Duarte, who was the president of El Salvador in the 1980s.

ROBERTO LOVATO: Yeah. Powell was one of the Reagan administration's point people in Central America and, as the point person, helped to tee up and then legitimate, when necessary, the Salvadoran military dictatorships and the Guatemalan and other militaries in the region that were responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocents — and so, in the case of Guatemala, like 200,000 or more mostly Mayan Indigenous people. And so, like, in 1983, for example, Powell was part of a fact-finding kind of mission, that included Jeane Kirkpatrick and Weinberger, to go and see if the Salvadoran — to go confirm the Salvadoran military and government were doing the right thing under Duarte. And, you know, they found that they were doing the right thing and that the U.S. should continue heavily funding and training these murderous militaries. He never said anything about the fact that just a year before and a couple of years before, the massacre of El Sumpul, where about 600 people were killed, was perpetrated by the U.S.-backed Salvadoran government; the massacre of El Mozote, where a thousand people were killed, an entire town wiped out, half of the victims under age 12, and half of those children under age 12 were under age 6. Powell seemed to have amnesia about that, along with Elliott Abrams, another, I would say, war criminal. And El Calabozo and other massacres were completely ignored.

And so, we see Powell playing a role in Central America over the years, from the early '80s all the way 'til the end of the war. And, you know, Powell was very sophisticated and smart in terms of moving with the times, so that when it called for a hard line at the beginning of the Reagan era, he was there. When it called for — remember, in 1989, the FMLN guerrillas, for example, we launched an offensive in the capital of San Salvador to basically demonstrate to the U.S. government and the Salvadoran government, that it was supporting, that they couldn't defeat the FMLN guerrillas. And so, that worked. It was basically — the offensive showed that the guerrillas were able to enter into the capital and fight on their own terms. So, Powell and the Bush administration, you know, seeing this, pivoted and pushed the Salvadoran government to peace. Now, some historians will call Powell a peacenik almost, a liberal, which, I mean, if you're comparing him to like Alexander Haig or some just uber fascist like that, then, yeah, but in the larger scheme of empire and militarism, Colin Powell has been, you know, was always, a loyal cadre to mass-murdering empire.

AMY GOODMAN: So, let's go back to Colin Powell's 2003 speech at the U.N., where he falsely accused Iraq of possessing weapons of mass destruction.

SECRETARY OF STATE COLIN POWELL: Every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.

AMY GOODMAN: All of General Powell's main claims about weapons of mass destruction turned out to be false. But at the time, most of the media took Powell at his word. The invasion of Iraq began six weeks after he made his speech at the United Nations. He himself recognized it was the final nail in the coffin for so many, because he had called himself a "reluctant warrior." He had dragged his feet on the war, and President Bush wanted his support to be the voice and face of this war. In 2013, Democracy Now! spoke to Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell from 2002 to 2005. Wilkerson helped prepare Powell's infamous U.N. speech, which he later renounced. Wilkerson said Powell himself was suspicious of the intelligence and wanted to delete any reference in the speech to ties between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.

COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON: The seminal moment, as we were out at Langley and Colin Powell was getting ready to throw everything out of his presentation that had anything to do with terrorism — that is, substantial contacts between Baghdad and al-Qaeda, in particular — as he was getting — he was really angry. He took me in a room by myself and literally attacked me over it. And I said, "Boss, let's throw it out. I have as many doubts about it as you do. Let's throw it out." And so, we made a decision right there to throw it out.

Within 30 minutes of the secretary having made that decision and instructed me to do so, George Tenet showed up with a bombshell. And the bombshell was that a high-level al-Qaeda operative, under interrogation, had revealed substantial contacts between al-Qaeda and Baghdad.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that is the chief of staff of former Secretary of State Colin Powell. He is an Army colonel, Lawrence Wilkerson. In 2009, Sam Husseini of the Institute for Public Accuracy questioned Colin Powell about the false claims he made during the U.N. speech, that was based in part on false information provided by prisoners who had been tortured.

SAM HUSSEINI: General, can you talk about the al-Libi case and the link between torture and the production of tortured evidence for war?

COLIN POWELL: I don't have any details on the al-Libi case.

SAM HUSSEINI: Can you tell us when you learned that some of the evidence that you used in front of the U.N. was based on torture? When did you learn that?

COLIN POWELL: I don't know that. I don't know what information you're referring to, so I can't answer.

SAM HUSSEINI: Your chief of staff, Wilkerson, has written about this.

COLIN POWELL: So what? [inaudible] Mr. Wilkerson.

SAM HUSSEINI: So, you'd think you'd know about it.

COLIN POWELL: The information I presented to the U.N. was vetted by the CIA. Every word came from the CIA. And they stood behind all that information. I don't know that any of them would believe that torture was involved. I don't know that as a fact. There's a lot of speculation, particularly by people who never attended any of these meetings. But I'm not aware of that.

AMY GOODMAN: Clarence Lusane, we're going to give you the final word. Again, this speech, he would late call a "blot" on his career.

CLARENCE LUSANE: So, the thing to remember about that period is that the entire global community was against the invasion. So, when Colin Powell and the Bush administration says that they were vetting this information, they were not listening not only to their allies, they were not listening to what the United Nations itself was actually doing and had essentially proven that there were no weapons of mass destruction. But the administration was determined to go, and Colin Powell basically acceded to that, as he would do both prior to that speech, as he did with the World Conference Against Racism, when the United States and Israel were the only two countries that pulled out, and as he would do after the invasion of Iraq on other policies by the George W. Bush administration, until he was finally driven out. So, there does have to be an accounting for that record. There's no way to kind of pretty it up. It was atrocious. And again, hundreds of thousands — in some estimates, up to a million — people died as a result of that war.


 








Friday, March 24, 2017

The Absurd as Official Policy


THE ABSURD TIMES


Trump's budget favors the military, so illustrated a way to solve starvation.



"Nonsense and utterly ridiculous" was said by the UK in reference to Trump's wiretapping claims.  It could easily be extended to every single other justification for anything he does.  In fact, the Absurd has taken on greater significance since Trump took office.





ABSURDITY BECOMES REPUBLICAN AGENDA UNDER TRUMPISM

[BTW: We have just received the transcript of the Franken questioning and will attaché it to the end of this week's edition.]



Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in the recent hearings on the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court.  It may take a few more words to make this clear, but it is wroth reading to the end, I assure you. 



Gorsuch has shown tremendous, almost unmatched creativity, in devising a multitude of ways in which to say absolutely nothing of any value in evaluating him for such a position.  Only one Senator, Al Franken, who has no law degree, was able to penetrate this façade of blank badinage. 



He asked Gorsuch a simple question, one about a trucker in which he was driving in 17 degree below zero temperatures and the trailer brakes froze.  He called the company and was told to wait for the repairs.  Three hours later, he had fallen asleep, a victim to hypothermia, and was woken only by a cell phone call from his brother.  Since he had called the company several times with the same result and instructions, he detatched the trailer and drove the cab to a source of heat.  Upon his return 15 minutes later, he was fired for not following orders.  All courts, including the Department of Labor, ruled in his favor except Gorsuch who insisted that "that was the law". 



Now it gets interesting.  Franken asked him about his dissent.  Another reply saying nothing.  Franken then said he did not have a law degree, but he had been on this committee for eight years and actually paid attention and was familiar with the doctrine of Absurdity.  Now Gorsuch said that the doctrine only applied to "Scrivener's errors."  Ok, so what's a scrivener?  It goes way back to before the invention of typewriters and law clerks, scriveners, hand copied documents and sometimes spelled a word wrong or even skipped a line or put in the wrong date. 



Today, it simply means a typo, although I personally encountered one myself when I was treating addicts as patients.  Sometimes they were committed by a judge for treatment for mental health reasons and once a judge literally committed herself to the care of my patient (I was one of those troublesome ones who actually read the legal documents).  Now, this would be considered a scrivener's error, even though, since in her case I did argue a case pro se  and in retrospect did feel that she was a good candidate for mental treatment.  Still, I sent it back for correction.



Now, are you still with me?  Well, never mind.  Gorsuch was wrong.  Here is a definition of the doctrine of Absurdity:



The common sense of man approves the judgment mentioned by Pufendorf [sic. Puffendorf], that the Bolognian law which enacted 'that whoever drew blood in the streets should be punished with the utmost severity', did not extend to the surgeon who opened the vein of a person that fell down in the street in a fit. The same common sense accepts the ruling, cited by Plowden, that the statute of 1st Edward II, which enacts that a prisoner who breaks prison shall be guilty of a felony, does not extend to a prisoner who breaks out when the prison is on fire – 'for he is not to be hanged because he would not stay to be burnt'.



At any rate, Franken attacked by pointing out that he had his prior career in identifying absurdity and pointing it out (as a comedian, or comedy writer), and then attacked, asking he what he would do.  Getting no response, Franken said "well, I can tell you what everyone else here would do" and then left the questioning.  That was the one bright spot in the entire hearing and it made Franken more popular than all of his work on Saturday Night Live.



That is only one example.  However, if Gorsuch cannot tell the difference between a scrivener's error and the Doctrine of Absurdity, it is the equivalent of a layperson not being able to tell his ass from a hole in the ground.



**

Conservativism: the belief that human beings are to be treated with as much contempt as possible.



**

Trumpism: See conservativism.



**

There was to be more about healthcare and the like, but the transcript is too important to omit as Gorsuch could be with this country for 30 or 40 years:



We feature an extended excerpt of Senator Al Franken (D-MN) grilling Supreme Court nominee Judge Neil Gorsuch during his Supreme Court confirmation hearing about the so-called frozen trucker case of Alphonse Maddin. Gorsuch ruled it was right for Maddin to be fired after he disobeyed a supervisor and abandoned the trailer that he was driving, because he was on the verge of freezing to death. "It is absurd to say this company is in its rights to fire him because he made the choice of possibly dying from freezing to death or causing other people to die possibly by driving in an unsafe vehicle," says Sen. Franken. "It makes me question your judgment."



TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to Senator Al Franken, who questioned Judge Gorsuch on the Alphonse Maddin, the so-called frozen trucker, case during the confirmation hearing.


SEN. AL FRANKEN: A couple hours goes by. The heater is not working in his cab. It's 14 below zero, 14 below zero. He calls in, and he says, "My feet, I can't feel. I can't feel my feet. My torso—I'm beginning not to be able to feel my torso." And they say, "Hang on. Hang on. Wait for us." OK, now he actually falls asleep. And at 1:18 a.m., his cousin, I think—cousin calls him and wakes him up. And his cousin says that he is slurring his speech and he doesn't make much sense. Now, Mayo Clinic in Minnesota says that is hypothermia. And he had fallen asleep. If you fall asleep waiting under 14-below-zero weather, you can freeze to death. You can die.

He calls them back, and his supervisor says, "Wait. You've got to wait." So he has a couple of choices here: wait or take the trailer out with the frozen brakes onto the interstate. Now, when those brakes are locked and you're pulling that load on a trailer with brakes locked, you can go maybe, what, 10, 15 miles an hour? Now, what's that like on an interstate? Say you're going 75 miles an hour. Someone's going 75 miles an hour. They come over a hill and slam into that trailer. Also, he's got hypothermia. He's a little woozy, probably figures that's not too safe. I don't think you'd want to be on the road with him, would you, Judge?

JUDGE NEIL GORSUCH: Senator—

SEN. AL FRANKEN: You would, or not?

JUDGE NEIL GORSUCH: I—

SEN. AL FRANKEN: It's a really easy yes or no.

JUDGE NEIL GORSUCH: Would I want to be on—would I want be on the road with him?

SEN. AL FRANKEN: Yeah.

JUDGE NEIL GORSUCH: With the hitched trailer or the unhitched trailer, Senator?

SEN. AL FRANKEN: Well, either, but especially with the hitched trailer with the locked brakes.

JUDGE NEIL GORSUCH: No, I don't think that was a serious option. I agree with you.

SEN. AL FRANKEN: OK, I thought that was—I wouldn't want to be there, either.

JUDGE NEIL GORSUCH: Yeah. An unhitched trailer—

SEN. AL FRANKEN: And so, what he does is he unhitches it—

JUDGE NEIL GORSUCH: Right.

SEN. AL FRANKEN: —and goes off in the cab.

JUDGE NEIL GORSUCH: And then I believe he comes back 15 minutes later.

SEN. AL FRANKEN: And he comes back after he gets warm, so that he can be there when it gets repaired.

JUDGE NEIL GORSUCH: Right.

SEN. AL FRANKEN: OK. Gets fired. He gets fired. And the rest of the judges all go, "That's ridiculous. He shouldn't—you can't fire a guy for doing that." It was—there were two safety issues here: one, the possibility of freezing to death, or driving with that rig in a very, very—a very dangerous way. Which would you have chosen? Which would you have done, Judge?

JUDGE NEIL GORSUCH: Oh, Senator, I don't know what I would have done if I were in his shoes, and I don't blame him at all, for a moment, for doing what he did do.

SEN. AL FRANKEN: But—but—but—

JUDGE NEIL GORSUCH: I empathize with him entirely.

SEN. AL FRANKEN: OK, just you've—we've been talking about this case. Don't—you don't—you haven't decided what you would have done? You haven't thought about, for a second, what you would have done in his case?

JUDGE NEIL GORSUCH: Oh, Senator, I thought a lot about this case, because I—

SEN. AL FRANKEN: And what would you have done?

JUDGE NEIL GORSUCH: I totally empathize and understand—

SEN. AL FRANKEN: I'm asking you a question. Please answer questions.

JUDGE NEIL GORSUCH: Senator, I don't know. I wasn't in the man's shoes. But I understand why he did—

SEN. AL FRANKEN: You don't know what you would have done.

JUDGE NEIL GORSUCH: I understand—

SEN. AL FRANKEN: OK, I'll tell you what I would have done. I would have done exactly what he did.

JUDGE NEIL GORSUCH: Yeah, I understand that.

SEN. AL FRANKEN: I think everybody here would have done exactly what he did. And I think that's an easy answer, frankly. I don't know why you had difficulty answering that. OK, so you decide to write a thing in dissent. If you read your dissent, you don't say it was like subzero. You say it was cold out. The facts that you describe in your dissent are very minimal. But here's the—here is the law that—and you go to the language of the law, and you talk about that: "I go to the law." "A person may not discharge an employee who refuses to operate a vehicle because the employee has reasonable apprehension of serious injury to the employee or the public because of the vehicle's hazardous safety or security condition." That's the law. And you decided that they had the right to fire him, even though this law says you may not discharge an employee who refuses to operate a vehicle, because he did operate the vehicle. Is that right? That's your—that's how you decided, right?

JUDGE NEIL GORSUCH: That's the gist of it.

SEN. AL FRANKEN: Well, no, is that how you decided? That's what you decided, right?

JUDGE NEIL GORSUCH: Senator, there are a lot more words in the opinions, both in the majority, by my colleagues, and in dissent. But that—I'm happy to agree with you. That's the gist of it.

SEN. AL FRANKEN: Right. Well, that's what you've said. And I—look, I'm not a lawyer. But I've been on this committee for about eight years. And I've paid some attention. So, I know that what you're talking about here is the plain meaning rule. Here's what the rule means. When the plain meaning of a statute is clear on its face, when its meaning is obvious, courts have no business looking beyond the meaning to the statute's purpose. And that's what you used, right?

JUDGE NEIL GORSUCH: That's what was argued to us by both sides, Senator.

SEN. AL FRANKEN: But that's what you—that's what you used.

JUDGE NEIL GORSUCH: Yeah. Both sides—

SEN. AL FRANKEN: That's right. OK.

JUDGE NEIL GORSUCH: —argued that the plain meeting supported their—

SEN. AL FRANKEN: Yeah, and you used it to come to your conclusion.

JUDGE NEIL GORSUCH: But both sides did.

SEN. AL FRANKEN: But the plain meaning rule has an exception. When using the plain meaning rule would create an absurd result, courts should depart from the plain meaning. It is absurd to say this company is in its rights to fire him because he made the choice of possibly dying from freezing to death or causing other people to die possibly by driving an unsafe vehicle. That's absurd. Now, I had a career in identifying absurdity, and I know it when I see it. And it makes me—you know, it makes me question your judgment.

AMY GOODMAN: That's Senator Al Franken, former comedian, before he was a senator, questioning Judge Neil Gorsuch about the Alphonse Maddin case, the so-called frozen trucker case. Again, Judge Gorsuch was alone, among seven judges, to rule that the company was right to fire Alphonse Maddin. As we wrap up, we're still with Maddin's attorney, Robert Fetter. I want to talk about the timing of Judge Gorsuch's dissent. When the candidate Donald Trump gave his list of Supreme Court justices that he would choose if he were to be president, Gorsuch was not on that list. That was in May. Bob Fetter, the decision was handed out—when was it? The dissent handed out by Judge Gorsuch, August 8th last year, on the frozen trucker case. When the second list came out in September, Gorsuch was added to Trump's list. Can you talk about the significance of this?

ROBERT FETTER: Yeah. It's certainly a set of circumstances that, after he was nominated, it certainly rung a bell with me that he was not on the initial list. He writes a—he has this case on his desk where he can show just how uncompassionate he can be and how far he's able to take extreme textualism in order to rule in favor of a company and corporate interest. Certainly, if I were the Chamber of Commerce or other business interest and I saw that decision, that signals to me that this is my kind of guy. Then he appears on the second list, which, of course, we all know it now, that that decision was outsourced to the Federalist Society and Heritage. And those groups certainly would have saw that decision, a very recent decision, and said, "This is the type of guy that we want on the Supreme Court, because he's going to be pro-business." And they've indicated they're very happy with his nomination, because he is pro-business. Pro-business is not a judicial philosophy. It is fine for a legislator to be pro-business, if he can get elected on that basis. But not for a judge. When you're pro-business as a judge, you're just biased. And we cannot accept bias on the United States Supreme Court.

AMY GOODMAN: Robert Fetter, I want to thank you for being with us, labor lawyer, partner at Miller Cohen firm in Detroit, represented truck driver Alphonse Maddin in his wrongful termination lawsuit.

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