Autogolpe
- Mike Dickey
- Feb 11
- 3 min read
"I promise, America will soon be the Cybertruck of countries—uglier than you could have imagined, built for rich chuds, borderline inoperable, and on fire."
-Elon Musk
Okay, he never actually said that. The line was lifted from a satirical essay in McSweeney's Internet Tendency, a page I've run across on-and-off for years but now have rediscovered as it arrives at an ideal moment for very erudite, biting satire. You ought to check it out.
Peg's not at work today. She's reading me celebrity trivia from her phone as I write this.
I reckon this is what retirement is going to look like.
A very busy day today, doing paperwork for Peg, answering questions from Jayme as she works to get the venue open this month, and practicing law while struggling with all these productivity multipliers that don't seem to work. I may have to go back to the paradigm of a brick-and-mortar office, a chain smoking divorcee paralegal with a chip on her shoulder, and a file cabinet crammed with actual papers I can touch when I need to find something. Feeling nostalgic for the old ways as my practice sits largely paralyzed.
Then there's the autogolpe in DC. In case you missed it, we're at the inflexion point of this constitutional crisis--right now, today.
Yesterday a federal judge in Rhode Island found that the executive branch had violated a temporary restraining order by failing to restore funding that had been frozen by the pimply DOGE mafia.
chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.rid.58912/gov.uscourts.rid.58912.96.0_5.pdf
You should read the order--it's pretty short and to the point.
Note, you nonlawyers out there, that it's not an order to show cause, an interesting twist. If you or I violated a TRO, the judge would almost certainly issue an OTSC, directing us to explain ourselves or be held in contempt of court. A contempt citation, in turn, could result in anything from the striking of pleadings to fines to "coercive incarceration", basically putting us in jail until we complied.
But not here.
Rather, the unelected minions of a ketamine addled fascist continue to run amok, with the blessing of Cadet Bonespurs. There will be no consequences. JD Vance has as much as said the administration plans to ignore the multiple TROs emanating from federal courts all over the U.S.
Note that those federal courts are all in blue states, where the rule of law still means something. There are two reasons for that. The first is obvious---no state attorney general in the neo-Confederacy is going to run up the steps of the nearest federal courthouse to keep the fascists from stopping funding to their hospitals, schools, and farms. That would be political suicide, given that a majority of their constituents voted for this nonsense, and now sit slack-jawed and confused as their hospitals, schools, and farms run out of money.
The second reason is a little more sinister. There's some talk out there, which I'll categorize as such because I haven't seen actual evidence, that the folks in the red states needing the grant money released are simply going directly to Dear Leader to obtain an exception to the freeze, so the Right Kind of Americans can continue to feed at the trough while the ones who pay the majority of the taxes, but didn't support MAGA, get left out in the cold. So, in a way, this freeze is a vehicle to divert money from blue state to red, and divert power from our sclerotic legislative branch to the executive.
So there's that. Someone should take my Horseshoe Republic proposal seriously.
Right now I'm mostly furious at my neighbors for doing this, for destroying a country I've loved and fought for. I don't want to feel this way. It's not healthy.
But things are as they are. It's not Trump Derangement Syndrome when these things are actually happening.
So I'll end where I began, with humor from McSweeney's that hits the nail on the head regarding who's to blame for this moment.
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