The Royal Scam

Can it be this sad designCould be the very same?A wooly man without a face

Can it be this sad design

Could be the very same?

A wooly man without a face

And a beast without a name

Nothin' here but history

Can you see what has been done?

Memory rush over me

Now I step into the sun

[Chorus]
Before the fall when they wrote it on the wall
When there wasn't even any Hollywood
They heard the call
And they wrote it on the wall
For you and me we understood

On this date in 1976, Steely Dan released its fifth album, The Royal Scam, with its best known songs being Kid Charlemagne (with THAT Larry Carlton guitar solo) and Don't Take Me Alive (with THAT OTHER Larry Carlton guitar solo).  My favorite is Sign In Stranger, with its humorous Eliot Randall guitar solo and Paul Griffen piano work.

One of the lesser known cuts is The Caves Of Altamira, from which the lyrics at top are taken.  The Cave of Altamira is located on the north coast of Spain in the small town of Santillana del Mar.  It is home to some of the most marvelous prehistoric cave art in existence.  Discovered in 1879 and now closed to the public, the cave contains a thousand meters of depictions of animals and of abstract designs.  Perhaps the only pop/rock song about cave art, but just another day in the rather odd life of Steely Dan. 

A Memorial Day Address

Memorial Day 1945.  The location: the Sicily-Rome American Cemetery in Nettuno, Italy.  At the time, approximately 20,000 American soldiers were buried in the cemetery, killed during the campaign in Sicily and the first part of the subsequent Italian campaign (Sept. 1943 - June 1944).  Over the years, many American families had the bodies of their loved ones returned to the United States.  Among the 7,858 still in the cemetery is Captain Henry Waskow, subject of the most famous column written by an American journalist in the war; Ernie Pyle (killed by the Japanese in April 1945).

The speaker was General Lucien Truscott, commander of the Fifth Army.  When he rose to speak, Truscott turned away from the audience to face the dead who he addressed in his gravelly voice.  There is no transcript of his remarks.  The most complete account we have is from Bill Mauldin, the famous Army cartoonist, who was in the audience.  Mauldin was a GI favorite because he understood the soldiers and took pokes at the top brass.  This is what he later wrote:

“When Truscott spoke he turned away from the visitors and addressed himself to the corpses he had commanded here. It was the most moving gesture I ever saw. It came from a hard-boiled old man who was incapable of planned dramatics.

“The general’s remarks were brief and extemporaneous. He apologized to the dead men for their presence here. He said everybody tells leaders it is not their fault that men get killed in war, but that every leader knows in his heart this is not altogether true.

“He said he hoped anybody here through any mistake of his would forgive him, but he realized that was asking a hell of a lot under the circumstances. . . . he would not speak about the glorious dead because he didn’t see much glory in getting killed if you were in your late teens or early twenties. He promised that if in the future he ran into anybody, especially old men, who thought death in battle was glorious, he would straighten them out. He said he thought that was the least he could do,” 

Truscott commanded a division in the invasion of Sicily and later in the advance up the Italian peninsula.  His division participated in the landing at Anzio in January 1944 and he was promoted to Corps commander in March, leading the Allied breakout in May.  His Corps landed in the invasion of Southern France in August 1944 and in December he was promoted to command of the Fifth Army in Italy, leading it in its final campaign in the spring of 1945.  In October 1945 he took over command of Third Army in Germany after General George Patton's dismissal.  He retired in 1947 and died in 1965.

In a 2023 article, the general's grandson, Lucien Truscott IV, wrote about his grandfather and that day.  Of General Truscott's time in Germany, Lucien writes:

General Dwight D. Eisenhower relieved Patton of command of the Third Army and turned command over to Grandpa, appointing him Military Governor of Bavaria and putting him in charge of all the Displaced Person camps in Southern Germany. Under Patton, Jewish survivors of the Holocaust were being kept in camps in conditions not much better than they suffered in the Nazi concentration camps. Grandpa moved the Jewish survivors into housing at German army posts he seized and arranged for a dozen Army Rabbis to be sent to Bavaria to serve the survivors. Grandpa ordered that the first Seder in Germany in over a decade be held in Munich in April of 1946, and ordered that “A Survivors Haggadah” be compiled by survivors and printed by the Third Army for the occasion. 

He then recounts a discussion that General Truscott had with Lucien IV's father, when he was preparing to ship out for the Korean War:

I knew Grandpa growing up as a boy and spent several summers with him and Grandma, Sara Randolph Truscott, at their home in Northern Virginia. I don’t recall seeing Grandpa smile much when I was a boy. The war, and what he did as a commander of U.S. soldiers, and what he saw during and after the war, left him a broken man. The only time he ever said anything about the war was to my father on the night before he shipped out to serve in the Korean War. They were standing at night after supper along a fence behind a farmhouse Grandpa had bought for his retirement in Loudon County, Virginia. Dad asked Grandpa what advice he could give him before he went to war. Dad told me it was the only time in his life he ever saw his father cry. Dad said that Grandpa began sobbing so hard, he had to lean with his arms over the fence in order to remain standing. Every Memorial Day, I remember his words to my father that night: “The bodies, the bodies, all those dead boys, the bodies…”

John Robert Fox

John Robert Fox received the Medal of Honor for his actions on December 26, 1944.  Fox was a 29 year old first lieutenant and a forward artillery observer.  He was stationed, along with eight Italian partisans, in the small Italian mountain town of Sommocolonia, when it was overrun by German soldiers.  Calling in artillery as the enemy drew closer, he finally called in a strike directly on his position, despite the risk to his own life.  The resulting barrage killed Fox and the partisans, along with about 100 Germans.  His citation is below.

Negro soldiers, as they were called then, were denied Medal of Honor consideration during World War Two.  It was only in the 1990s that an Army review commission recommended several soldiers for our country's highest honor.  In 1997 President Clinton presented the Medal of Honor to seven recipients.  For six, including Fox, the award was posthumous and presented to family members.

For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty: First Lieutenant John R. Fox distinguished himself by extraordinary heroism at the risk of his own life on 26 December 1944 in the Serchio River Valley Sector, in the vicinity of Sommocolonia, Italy. Lieutenant Fox was a member of Cannon Company, 366th Infantry, 92d Infantry Division, acting as a forward observer, while attached to the 598th Field Artillery Battalion. Christmas Day in the Serchio Valley was spent in positionswhich had been occupied for some weeks. During Christmas night, there was a gradual influx of enemy soldiers in civilian clothes and by early morning the town was largely in enemy hands. An organized attack by uniformed German formations was launched around 0400 hours, 26 December 1944. Reports were received that the area was being heavily shelled by everything the Germans had, and although most of the U.S. infantry forces withdrew from the town, Lieutenant Fox and members of his observer party remained behind on the second floor of a house, directing defensive fires. Lieutenant Fox reported at 0800 hours that the Germans were in the streets and attacking in strength. He called for artillery fire increasingly close to his own position. He told his battalion commander, "That was just where I wanted it. Bring it in 60 yards!" His commander protested that there was a heavy barrage in the area and the bombardment would be too close. Lieutenant Fox gave his adjustment, requesting that the barrage be fired. The distance was cut in half. The Germans continued to press forward in large numbers, surrounding the position. Lieutenant Fox again called for artillery fire with the commander protesting again, stating, "Fox, that will be on you!" The last communication from Lieutenant Fox was, "Fire It! There's more of them than there are of us. Give them hell!" The bodies of Lieutenant Fox and his party were found in the vicinity of his position when his position was taken. This action, by Lieutenant Fox, at the cost of his own life, inflicted heavy casualties, causing the deaths of approxamately 100 German soldiers, thereby delaying the advance of the enemy until infantry and artillery units could by reorganized to meet the attack. Lieutenant Fox's extraordinarily valorous actions exemplify the highest traditions of the military service.

Danny Peterson

There were 6 boys in my 7th-grade class, one of whom was Danny Peterson. Nicest kid you ever knew. He won the Medal of Honor, died in Vietnam in 1970. The highway that runs past our little town has been named in his honor. It's not enough, but there's not much else you can do. pic.twitter.com/Mw7imNqSSH

— Bill James Online (@billjamesonline) November 12, 2020

Danny Peterson's Medal of Honor citation:

Specialist Petersen distinguished himself while serving as an armored personnel carrier commander with Company B during a combat operation against a North Vietnamese Army  Force estimated to be of battalion size. During the initial contact with the enemy, an armored personnel carrier was disabled and the crewmen were pinned down by the heavy onslaught of enemy small arms, automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenade fire. Spec. Petersen immediately maneuvered his armored personnel carrier to a position between the disabled vehicle and the enemy. He placed suppressive fire on the enemy's well-fortified position, thereby enabling the crewmembers of the disabled personnel carrier to repair their vehicle. He then maneuvered his vehicle, while still under heavy hostile fire to within 10 feet of the enemy's defensive emplacement. After a period of intense fighting, his vehicle received a direct hit and the driver was wounded. With extraordinary courage and selfless disregard for his own safety, Spec. Petersen carried his wounded comrade 45 meters across the bullet-swept field to a secure area. He then voluntarily returned to his disabled armored personnel carrier to provide covering fire for both the other vehicles and the dismounted personnel of his platoon as they withdrew. Despite heavy fire from 3 sides, he remained with his disabled vehicle, alone and completely exposed. Spec. Petersen was standing on top of his vehicle, firing his weapon, when he was mortally wounded. His heroic and selfless actions prevented further loss of life in his platoon. Spec. Petersen's conspicuous gallantry and extraordinary heroism are in the highest traditions of the service and reflect great credit on him, his unit, and the U.S. Army.

Peterson was 20 years old when he died.

The Third Man

"As soon as I get to the bottom of this, I'll get the next plane." "Death's at the bottom of everything, Martins. Leave death to the professionals." Alida Valli and Joseph Cotten promoting 1949's The Third Man. Carol Reed was really on a roll, see also Odd Man Out + Fallen Idol. pic.twitter.com/ISrI7inGQa

— Darrell Epp (@DarrellEpp) February 13, 2024

 Great movie.

 

Sigh

 

The Durham Report: Part 4 - More Obstruction

My Part 2 post was entitled "Mueller's Obstruction of Justice".  The thesis was:

The Mueller Team Obstructs Justice & Deceptive Congressional Testimony

The Mueller Team deliberately obstructed a full investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election

The Mueller Team lied about whether it had investigated the Steele Dossier

The Mueller Team perpetrated a fraud on the American public in an attempt to influence elections and interfere with the functioning of our democracy

 

 

I recently ran across a reminder of one of the elements of obstruction I'd forgotten about in a Yahoo News article from 2020.  In 2018 and 2019 the Inspector General (IG) of the Department of Justice conducted an investigation into the circumstances under which the FISA Warrant Application and its three renewals, the last two of which were submitted by the Mueller team, was put together and the facts asserted verified before submission to the FISA Court.  The Inspector General found there were twelve material errors or omissions in the applications, all of which overstated the strength of the evidence supporting issuance of the warrant.

What I'd forgotten is that at least 27 cell phones belonging to members of the Mueller Team were wiped clean before the Inspector General had a chance to review them.   Many of the Clinton-associated lawyers working for Mueller claim this happened accidentally, though I will leave you to judge how likely this is, given that, as far as I can tell from this and other similar articles, these constitute ALL the cell phones of the key members of the team.

 

We know from the Durham Report that Robert Mueller repeatedly lied to Congress when he stated the Steele Dossier was outside his purview; contrary to his statements Mueller, after beginning work in May 2017, set up a team specifically assigned to attempt to validate the allegations in the dossier.  When that effort failed, the validation team was disbanded in September 2017 and the cover story invented.  The cell phone data, including texts, which covered that critical period, were directly relevant to both the IG and Durham investigations.  Its unavailability was a major problem for both investigations.

The irony of Mueller's obstruction is highlighted in the last two paragraphs of the Yahoo News article:

In March of last year, Mueller submitted his final report to Attorney General William Barr on the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. The report, a redacted version of which was released to Congress and the public the next month, concluded that the Trump campaign did not conspire with Russians to influence the election, but said investigators could not reach a conclusion on whether President Trump committed obstruction of justice.

Facing the Justice Department’s frustration that he left the question of obstruction open in his final report, Mueller said in May of last year that charging Trump with a crime was “not an option” since, per guidance issued by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, a sitting president cannot be indicted.

There is an error in the article.  As AG William Barr noted at the time, although the DOJ guidance was that a sitting president cannot be indicted, he was expecting a finding and recommendation from Mueller, since such an indictment could be filed after the presidency ended.

My speculation is that there were three reasons for leaving the obstruction issue ambiguous in the report (in 2019 I wrote this post summarizing the obstruction section of the Mueller report).  The first was to give the otherwise disappointed Democratic party activists and its allied media something to chew on to keep the whole phony Russia collusion story alive.

The second was despite Trump's occasional rantings about the unfairness of the investigation, the White House had given unprecedented cooperation to Mueller, turning over more than one million documents and allowing White House Counsel to be interviewed, all without raising Executive Privilege arguments.   I think that happened because Trump believed the allegations to be wrong (and he was correct) and the matter would be quickly resolved.  Given that Durham concluded that none of the Steele Dossier allegations had ever been corroborated, Trump's occasional outbursts were understandable as those of an innocent man dragged through an outrageously rigged process.  Even a DC jury might have acquitted Trump of obstruction charges!

The third reason was the Mueller team knew about how false the allegations were and further legal proceedings might expose their whole effort.

I also think that when Mueller accepted the assignment as Special Counsel in May 2017 he thought there was very likely something to the allegations regarding Trump.  Though a long-time "moderate" Republican, I've no doubt he was appalled by Trump and voted for Clinton.  More importantly, Mueller's association with the FBI goes back to his Boston days in the 1980s.  His record demonstrates he believes whatever the FBI tells him and he believed the "evidence" he was shown and the "respectable media" coverage in 2017.  He was played as a sucker for years by the corrupt Boston FBI office in the 1980s and the same happened repeatedly during his stint as FBI Director.  He was also probably starting to suffer from the mental deterioration that was evident during the 2019 Congressional hearings and thus easily manipulated to hire, and then be guided by, the partisan Democratic lawyers and Clinton supporters who staffed the investigation.

Willie Turns 93

Happy birthday, Willie Mays!  Here he is with San Francisco Giants catcher and future Hall of Fame member Buster Posey, who made his major league debut 36 years after Willie retired.

Willie Mays and Buster Posey pic.twitter.com/ldGh9JZAGT

— BaseballHistoryNut (@nut_history) December 21, 2023

Justice

Of the many legal proceedings that Donald Trump is being subjected to there is only one, or rather a portion of one, that I find has some surface plausibility - the obstruction of justice charges in the Mar-a-Largo documents case (whether he is actually guilty of the charges is another matter).  I noted in Here We Go Again that the Mar-a-Lago case is another self-inflicted wound by Trump. The rest are politically motivated, with the New York cases the most egregious.

This article by Andrew McCarthy, no friend of Trump, explains how crazy the proceedings are in the current trial regarding the payments to Stormy Daniels, due to the deliberate malfeasance of the prosecutor and judge.

Understand, most criminal cases in the United States do not take two weeks to try. There are lots of long trials, too, but to get to this stage of the proceedings and still have the subject matter of the case unaddressed is . . . highly unusual.

That’s because the case is not about what the case is about. That’s why I’m not sure how effective Bove’s shrewd point was. Judge Merchan has helped prosecutors frame the trial as a “conspiracy” case – specifically, a conspiracy to steal the 2016 election by suppressing politically damaging information (allegations of extramarital affairs), supposedly in violation of federal campaign-finance law.

I don’t want to further belabor the record regarding how there is no conspiracy charge in the indictment, how there is no such conspiracy statute in New York law, how Bragg has no authority to enforce federal campaign law, how the statute actually charged in the indictment gives him no such authority under New York constitutional law, and how – even if Bragg arguably had jurisdiction to enforce federal campaign law – the so-called hush-money payments charged (based on lawful non-disclosure agreements (NDAs)) were not campaign expenditures for which that law mandated disclosure. These points may end up being more germane on appeal – which, if Trump gets convicted, could take a year or more to process.

Merchan is letting Bragg’s prosecutors present the case as if the charge were conspiracy to suppress politically damaging information, and he slaps down Trump’s lawyers when they try to object.

As McCarthy notes, any Trump conviction will be vulnerable on appeal due to the many procedural irregularities in this case.  But since this is a political prosecution it doesn't matter, since the goal is to achieve a conviction which can be used in the presidential campaign.  Whether it is overturned after the election is irrelevant.

The New York case is the clearest example of the political double standard at play in the various Trump prosecutions.

In 2016, the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee hired FusionGPS, paying it more than $1 million to concoct the Steele Dossier, a fictitious set of allegations regarding a conspiracy between Trump and the Kremlin.(1)  The conspiracy to steal the 2016 election was an effort to divert attention from Hillary's email woes and to damage Trump during the campaign.  In inventing this allegation, the Clinton campaign utilized a series of agents who had contact with Russian intelligence and Kremlin-connected oligarchs.(2)  After the election, the FEC found that the campaign and DNC attempted to hide the purpose for which the expenditures were made and fined both a total of about $140,000.  There were no criminal charges filed regarding the conspiracy which after it failed to bring about Hillary's election was transformed into an effort to undermine the new administration of the duly elected president of the United States.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

(1)  The DOJ Inspector General report on the dossier and the FISA warrants on Carter Page implicitly found no basis for the allegations.  The Durham Report, issued in May 2023, explicitly found no support for the allegations.

 "Notably, not one of the damning allegations contained in the Steele reporting was ever corroborated: not the salacious allegations of events at the Ritz Carlton in Moscow, not the allegation of there being a 'well-developed conspiracy of co-operation' between Trump and the Russians, not the allegations of a secret meeting involving Page and certain sanctioned Russians (namely, Igor Sechin and Igor Divyekin), and not the allegation of Page serving as Manafort's conduit for information between the Russians and the Trump campaign.  This is true even after the FBI offered Steele $1 million or more for such corroboration and after Danchenko was signed up as an FBI CHS [Confidential Human Source] and paid more than $220,000 for information on other matters." (pages 236-7)

It was all a cleverly invented fiction. 

(2)  FusionGPS was, at the same time, working for a Kremlin oligarch, trying to get Congress to rescind sanctions.  Christopher Steele, hired by FusionGPS, was working for Oleg Deripaska, another Kremlin oligarch, currently under indictment in the U.S.  Steele's "major-sub-source" was Igor Danchenko, who had been subject to an unresolved U.S. counterintelligence investigation due to his connections with Russian intelligence, and one of Steele's other sources (and the source for the scandalous Moscow Ritz Carlton allegations), was Charles Dolan, a DC public relations guy who was working for the Russian Federation to improve its image in the U.S. in association with Putin's press secretary and the Kremlin's ambassador to the U.S.  Dolan had also been the Virginia Chairman for the Clinton-Gore campaign in 1992 and 1996, executive director of the Democratic Governor's Association, a senior advisor to Hillary in  the 2008 campaign and was supporting Clinton in 2016.  Dolan also authored emails asserting Danchenko was an FSB agent (the Russian successor to the Soviet KGB).  When FBI analysts identified Dolan as a source and recommended the Mueller team interview him, their request was denied and they were instructed to cease their investigation.

Indiana Boys

Reggie Miller hosts a talk with Larry Bird and Isiah Thomas.  Larry, as always is reticent but Reggie draws him out.  Isiah is always interesting.  He talks about the moment when Larry held his career in his hands and how thankful he is for how Bird handled it.  Isiah also takes Bird to task for firing him as coach when he took over as GM of the Indiana Pacers.

Coop Versus The Duke

Why does John Wayne have more staying power in the American memory than Gary Cooper who, during his lifetime, was as popular as the Duke?  An essay from Terry Teachout, the wonderful cultural critic and writer who passed away several years ago.  One of my favorite writers and someone who seemed a fundamentally decent guy.  I read everything by him though his subjects were often artists and genres I didn't care for, yet he could make me interested.  And an incredible eloquent speaker.

Nevertheless, Cooper and Wayne are likely to strike the casual observer as having been cut from the same bolt of cloth. Tony Soprano described its pattern in the first episode of The Sopranos when he asked his psychotherapist, “Whatever happened to Gary Cooper? The strong, silent type. That was an American. He wasn’t in touch with his feelings—he just did what he had to do.” Both men were not so much performers as presences, rugged-looking outdoor types who were capable of dominating the frame simply by striding into it, and when they got around to saying something, it was in craggy baritone voices that matched their weather-whacked faces.

Above all, Cooper and Wayne were leading men pur sang, the kind of personalities to whom your eyes reflexively shift whenever they’re in a shot. What a star is, they were. As Howard Hawks said, “If you don’t get a damn good actor with Wayne, he’s going to blow him right off the screen, not just by the fact that he’s good, but by his power, his strength.” Cooper was no less potently endowed with the same quality. When Niven Busch was wrestling with one of his scripts, Cooper told him, “Well, Niven, seems to me if you make me the hero it usually comes out right.” Nothing else worked for either man, which is why they were still playing leads long after their contemporaries had shifted into supporting parts.