We’ve got some real winners in this administration. Bill Barr keeps earning a star for his standout performance, though.
You know, putting a national lockdown, stay at home orders, is like house arrest. Other than slavery, which was a different kind of restraint, this is the greatest intrusion on civil liberties in American history,Barr said as a round of applause came from the crowd.
How dare he. As we all know, the orders that we not go play on the freeway is a greater intrusion on civil liberties. The law that requires that we wear a seatbelt is a greater intrusion. Traffic laws in general are a greater intrusion — who are these authoritarians who insist that I need a license to drive and have to respect the rules of the road? The state even has hired thugs in cars to enforce those!
Doesn’t the government tell people to stay safe inside when there is a tornado? Public safety isn’t an intrusion on civil liberties, other than your liberty to do stupid things and die.
Then he goes on to accuse the Justice Department of being full of preschoolers.
It might be a good philosophy for a Montessori preschool, but it is no way to run a federal agency,
You know, he’s in charge of the Justice Department. I guess he wants to run it all by himself?
So, you’re allowed to congregate in the streets if you’re spreading a contagious disease, but not to exercise your constitutional rights. Makes perfect fascist sense.
An unlimited supply of free dumb for the people.
Bill Barr even gets this wrong.
.1. What about putting Japanese-American citizens in concentration camps during World War II. For the non-crime of being of Japanese-Americans.
Even at the time this was cuckoo.
.2. Closer to tody, what about those concentration camps on our southern border for Hispanic children?
Conditions are horrible.
ICE/Border Patrol has lost or never had the paperwork for most of those kids and they may never be reunited with their families again.
This is a crime against humanity and Bill Barr is complicit in it.
Bill Barr is an amoral fascist.
He said a few months ago, that “history is written by the winners.”
It’s clear he meant the winners, that is the GOP, can do whatever they want.
Rule of Law is dead.
It’s now just about power.
For the US Attorney General, this is a historic low point.
IMO, Bill Barr has earned himself an indictment, and a lifetime sentence in prison.
Maybe that will happen if the Democrats win the next election.
After all, history is written by the winners!!!
I wonder how the people who object to face masks because “freedum” would react to people wandering around starkers for the same reasons?
There is a precedent for tossing crooked US AG’s into prison.
Nixon’s Attorney General, John Mitchell went to prison.
Mentioning slavery in the same breath as being expected to wear a mask at the supermarket is reprehensible. The “house arrest” comparison doesn’t even hold up. Nobody was required to stay at home, and even the slight restrictions in place were barely enforced. By the time it looked like there was a chance of getting the contagion under control, there were already rightwing lawyers like Harmeet Dhillon whining “house arrest” and intimidating those state governments that were compensating for the total lack of federal leadership. They made damn sure that there was no possibility of reducing new cases to the point where contact tracing was possible.
I have been told the US is “exceptional” among Western nations, but it took this pandemic to appreciate that we are literally ungovernable. Even when a majority of Americans are willing to get behind crisis measures, a minority with no sense of civic responsibility empowered by lawyers will make sure that we fail. And we have. Worldometers shows we have passed Italy in COVID-19 deaths per million. Congratulations!
The White House still hasn’t taken down it’s dead-letter guidelines for “Opening America” https://www.whitehouse.gov/openingamerica/ Uh, did Barr look at this? Despite his preferences, it does seem to empower states to introduce restrictions until there are some signs of improvement.
The notion of Barr as civil libertarian is also ludicrous. Wearing a mask is practically slavery, whine whine, but peaceful demonstrations with explicit constitutional protection are “sedition” that the federal government needs to crush.
Trump can sure pick ’em though. Finding an AG worse that Jeff Sessions is an accomplishment. (And I was once naive enough to think John Ashcroft could set the standard for worst AG.) Barr is also an Opus Dei cultist (not a member but with close ties), believes in an autocratic presidency, seems to get all his information from rightwing news sources and buys into as many conspiracy theories as the average Alex Jones listener.
Obviously, he needs to go.
The Trumpist strategy, Project! Project! Project! Do it preemptively, do it loudly, and do it often. Floods the zone and hacks stupid people’s brains every time.
Those injunctions against murder are pretty oppressive too. Come to think of it, these guys are big fans of the Old Testament in general – there’s an awful lot of Thou Shalt Not in there. Hypocrisy much?
Sorry, but I am suddenly having spontaneous fantasies of putting Bill Barr in leg irons. “It’s a different kind of restraint” I’ll explain, but “Don’t worry. You don’t have to wear a mask.” as I cough in his direction.
This is good bit darker than the one in which I demand increasingly stringent forms of ID from Stephen Miller and insist that I have no idea who he is.
(Seriously, I am not usually like this.)
I’m recalling a name, one that remains infamous via her nickname.
Mary Mallon, aka, Typhoid Mary. Forcibly quarantined repeatedly, but I guess we didn’t have a Constitution back then. Or something.
Barr, ever eager to become as popular as genital herpes, also threatened to charge protestors with sedition, while ignoring the illegal private militias running around with firearms.
In other joyous news, apparently, the federal agencies who love to beat up reporters and peaceful protestors, to thereby allow the imPOTUS to hold a bible upside down (after ejecting the parish priest from his own church property) apparently had requested a special device designed to make one feel as if one’s skin is being burned off from the National Guard, as well as secured over 7000 rounds of live ammunition, while preparing for their attack on peaceful protestors.
7000 rounds of real bullets, because nothing makes America great like machine gunning peaceful citizens, who were lawfully assembled.
Next up, even money, all Democratic party members in the House and Senate being arrested? It’s not as if Barr lied about 1700 faked ballots that no one in the nation knows anything about…
I have long felt since I was a teenager in the 60’s that there was a certain percent of the conservatives that did not believe in democracy. It is now becoming clear to me that I was being optimistic probably because of my youth. The majority of the modern conservative republican party does not even seem to believe in the rule of law let alone in any other of the principles of democracy. They do not even bother with the pretense any more. The old Soviet Union fell and after a period became what it was of old an autocratic imperial power ruled by a criminal syndicate. What are we becoming?
uncle frogy
@12
A failed state of some sort or other. The choice is between an autocratic charnel house or an ineffectual sham democracy, but I don’t think it ends well either way. (Hope springs eternal, though, and at this point I’d at least prefer to delay the inevitable.)
I agree that Republicans in particular have no respect for rule of law, probably never did, and the ones who did are limited to The Atlantic editorial staff. Yes, they have all been lying the entire time, and “serious people” have been making excuses for them.
I wrote another anti-Trump parody, in case anyone is interested. It is the only coping mechanism I have. As Trumpworld gets worse and worse, so do my parodies.
https://archiveofourown.org/works/26443192
It’s called “Creatures of the Swamp,” and it stars AOC as our intrepid heroine. Barr doesn’t make the cut this time, there are only so many clowns I can put into each anti-Trump, anti-MAGA screed…
When we talk about repression, the same public health officials who want to make me wear a mask are the same ones who force me to wear pants in a restaurant. I suspect they are the ones who insist that nearly ALL beaches NOT be clothing optional. Myself, I think society might be better if more people wore less clothes, but, NO, my view is oppressed by these people in the name of “society’s health and well-being.” That certainly is almost as bad as slavery, isn’t it, AG Barr?
Of course there is something behind compelling individual behavior that keeps society safe. What a jack ass.