Parody Songs: The music recycles

Parody songs have been available on the internet for years.

I just discovered them.

Mr. Tangerine Man

The internet approaches the characteristics of the divine. It is omniscient, omnipresent, and infinite. The omniscient and omnipresent parts can be spooky and invasive. I browsed to buy a reflector disk to put at the bottom of my driveway, and then for a week I got ads for traffic barriers suitable for a construction company. "Alexa" and "Siri" are listening to you. Like, Santa Claus in the song, "she knows when you've been sleeping, she knows when you're awake." 

The "infinite" aspect of the internet means one can get lost in areas one doesn't know exist. Did you know there are thousands, maybe millions of parody songs, written by creative people who put new words to familiar music? If there is a well-known song, then someone sang it with new words. 

The Beatles wrote "I'm a Loser."

I'm a loser
And I lost someone who's near to me
I'm a loser
And I'm not what I appear to be

Although I laugh and I act like a clown
Beneath this mask I am wearing a frown

That song was just begging to be re-purposed in Trump-dominated political era.

Gerald Murphy set me off onto an expedition into the territory of parody songs. He did it by sending me two examples of words and music of a TV theme song. He wrote parodies based the theme song from "The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp." Murphy is a dramatist, playwright, and a retired high school teacher, now living in Medford. The song he chose reveals his generation, since the Wyatt Earp series was introduced in 1955, four days before "Gunsmoke." Wyatt Earp ran for six years. This theme song became familiar to a generation of boys because it introduced -- and re-introduced --  the Wyatt Earp character for 229 episodes, beginning with the sound of a gunshot.

Click

Here are the lyrics Murphy wrote in just prior to the 2016 election:

CHORUS

Donald Trump, Donald Trump,

Brave, courageous and bold

Long live his fame and long live his glory
And long may his story be told.

Oh, they held a debate and the Donald was great
Though the questions he got were unkind
And he said to Jeb Bush “You can just kiss my tush”!
And he left all the others behind. (REPEAT CHORUS)

He’s in love with casinos, and hates the Latinos
And he’ll make them pay for the fence.
He said Megyn Kelly was dirty and smelly
I tell ya, the guy makes good sense! (REPEAT CHORUS)

When the votes are all in we all know he will win
Though some voters think he is odd.
There ain’t no temptation to beg for donations
‘Cause Donald is richer than God! (REPEAT CHORUS)

Oh, he is the latest and he is the greatest.
He’s headed to Chesapeake Bay.
You better beware, don’t make fun of his hair
If you do, there will be hell toupee! (REPEAT CHORUS)

A week ago, Murphy went back to the same song with this new version:

CHORUS

Donald Trump, Donald Trump,
Fat and angry and old.
Long live his grift and fraudulent swindles
As he sits on his toilet of gold!

His foes were all waiting their turn for debating
It’s Ronny, and Mikey and Chris
And Nikki and Timmy and V. Ramaswamy
The other ones you can dismiss! (REPEAT CHORUS)

Instead of debating, these clowns should be waiting
For Donald to fall from his thrown.
‘Cause Trump won’t debate 'em. Instead he’ll outwait ‘em
And watch as they sink like a stone.(REPEAT CHORUS)

Where does one find well-done parody videos? Try these:

Trump, Let it Go, from Frozen: https://youtu.be/n4r6mH_GThk

Mr. Tangerine Man: https://youtu.be/CAlvBMwN_7UParody

Fifty Ways to Leave the White House: https://youtu.be/_QybcBH6rSw

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Understanding the Trump voter.

"Cause I'm just a soul whose intentions are good
Oh Lord, please don't let me be misunderstood."
         "Don't let me be misunderstood." Hit song for The Animals, 1965

Maybe Democrats misunderstood Trump's appeal. Maybe it only looked like poorly-closeted racism. 

Maybe Trump's supporters believe in a fair and just universe. 

I am probably overthinking this. 

Maybe the Trump phenomenon is simple, another outbreak in a line of charismatic authoritarians adept with a powerful medium. Trump joins Adolph Hitler, Father Coughlin, and Joseph McCarthy. Or maybe the simple explanation is the economics of for-profit media. Trump supporters are hooked on Fox News, with its nonstop propaganda of outrage. Maybe Trump's support can be best understood by demographics. Trump's supporters skew less-educated, less-urban. They skew more likely male, more religious, more Southern, more working class, more White, and higher on tests of supposed "racial animus." 

Pundits can't get away from that racial angle. Trump appeals to racism, pundits explain. Poll questions that asked about whether Black poverty is explained by racism or if Blacks should just work harder and improve their own circumstances show a strong skew.

The Simpsons TV show summarized conventional thinking about Trump and race.

"NOT RACIST. BUT #1 WITH RACISTS."

That consensus fueled a reaction on the left. Democrats ramped up the progressive project of finding racism everywhere. They said it was systemic and pervasive, sometimes overt and sometimes subtle, hiding in presumably neutral places. In laws. In zoning. In standardized tests. In cultural norms. In math. Most people don't think they are racist and they resent the blanket accusation. Thus the "war on woke."

Maybe Democrats misunderstood Trump's appeal. Maybe it only looked like poorly-closeted racism. Some research at Harvard's Department of Government gives an alternate perspective: The "just world" hypothesis. That world view also helps explain conspiratorial thinking on the political right. Trump supporters believe in a just world.

In the "just world" understanding of events, people get what they deserve. Karma is at work. The world is orderly, whether that order is apparent or not. God -- or a secular universe --  has a plan for everything. Misfortune is apparent, but why? People get the just consequences of their sins. In the "just world" view, notions of systemic racism or prejudice being engines of circumstance are thought to be shallow excuses. If people are poor it is their fault. Some arenas of life confirm a "just world" view. People who study hard or work hard tend to do better than slackers. Aesop explained it. The prudent and diligent ant survives; the foolish grasshopper dies. In the "just world" view, Democrats who attribute misfortune to unfair systems with Critical Race Theory are making a profound mistake about how the world works. 

The "just world" notion runs into trouble when misfortune happens to oneself or to one's team, tribe, or country. It couldn't be our fault. Something must have cheated the system. Rigged it. Depending on the situation it might be Jews who stabbed Germany in the back. Maybe communist infiltrators in the State Department. Maybe vote-switching tabulators, RINO election officers, or "2,000 mules" bringing in counterfeit ballots. It is something secretive and malevolent. It requires bad actors, infiltrators, and turncoats. The "just world" hypothesis invites conspiracy thinking. It shifts blame.

Trump is a uniquely persuasive leader. Fox News' financial incentives were made clear to them after they announced that Arizona went for Biden. They could not report Trump's loss without shedding audience. They chose to keep their audience so they amplified Trump's message. GOP governors, senators, other potential influencers initially dared to counter the message, but they saw the Trump-Fox tidal wave of support among voters and got out of its way. It is safer to suggest that lifelong Republicans like Attorney Generals Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr, that FBI Director Christopher Wray, Election Cybersecurity Chief Christopher Krebs, Republican state election officials, and Trump-appointed judges are all in on a conspiracy than it is to deny the conspiracy. 

In a just world bad things don't "just happen." Steve Bannon has a sign displayed in his War Room studio. One can buy a tee shirt repeating it. It is a way to say there are conspiracies while denying there are conspiracies. 

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Easy Sunday: The Summer of Love

 August, 1967

"If you're going to San Francisco
Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair.
If you're going to San Francisco
You're gonna meet some gentle people there.
For those who come to San Francisco
Summertime will be a love-in there."

     Written by John Phillips, of the Mamas and the Papas. Sung by Scott McKenzie

Click: If You're Going to San Francisco

August 20 is high season for cantaloupes in Southern Oregon. I have grown them nearly every summer since I was 11 years old. 

Cantaloupe seasons fade into a fuzzy blend, but August of 1967 remains distinct.

I don't grow melons commercially anymore. Growing cantaloupes for sale means carrying 40-pound bins of melons to the edge of a row to put into the back of a pickup truck, and then to unload them into a wash basin, then to repack melons in 44-pound boxes, sold as 40-pounds so as to give "good weight." Then to reload them, bring them to market to unload them and stack the boxes so the produce people can take over. About three years ago I began getting back-aches and tingles down my arms in August of every year. It was time to stop. Now I just grow a few to eat myself, for old time's sake.

I was firmly rooted in place in August, 1967. I had two jobs and a girlfriend. But on the AM radio in the family Chrysler Newport, I could hear sounds of something new and enticing. The music was like the green light in the distance that represented hope for Gatsby in The Great Gatsby, a book we were assigned to read in Mrs. Lininger's English class my junior year in high school. He could see the light, but like Daisy, the woman he longed for, it was out of reach.

I have a framed photo of myself in the cantaloupe field taken in August, 1967. I am on the right, with my father and younger brother, David, the one holding watermelons. To the left are two cousins, Mike and Doug Sage, visiting from Syracuse, New York.  

I am wearing my forest-fire-fighting clothes in the photo. Five days a week, from 10:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m., I stood ready to put out forest fires in the low-elevation brush lands that dry out each summer in our Mediterranean climate. That job gave me time in the mornings to rush to the farm at daylight, pick the melons that came ripe the previous day, and get them to Mr. Blunt's fruit stand and to Thunderbird Supermarket, then be at work at 10:00. I earned about $750 every summer fighting forest fires and another $1,250 from my half of the melon crop: $2,000 saved per summer. Tuition at Harvard in 1967 was $1,760. I could earn and save a Harvard tuition. In mid-August, 1967 I had four more weeks before I got onto the plane for Boston.

I remember feeling I was on the brink of something, so close but still so far. There was college, of course, but there was also something big for my generation happening only 6 hours away by car. "Hippies" -- guys with long hair and beards; women who wore loose blouses and no bra -- were crowding into San Francisco. They had shed old modes of thinking, we thought. There was a new music sound I could hear on AM radio that made prior-years' songs of surfing and daddy's T-Bird seem childish. Bob Dylan sang that Mr. Jones didn't know what was going on. Barry McGuire warned we were on the eve of destruction. There was a new generation of music: Jefferson Airplane, The Byrds, the Grateful Dead, Simon and Garfunkel, and Jimi Hendrix. Their music suggested change was underway. There were endless possibilities. Our generation had an anthem:

All across the nation such a strange vibration
People in motion.
There's a whole generation with a new explanation

People in motion, people in motion.

The open-ended future lay before us. Our parent's generation had screwed up everything, we thought, but not to worry. We were going to fix everything.

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What kills us

Americans visiting the U.K. sometimes step out in front of buses and are killed.

They are looking the wrong direction.

Warning on U.K. crosswalk

Americans die mostly of heart disease, cancer, and strokes. That fact is a sign of success in a nation's health. Those are diseases of old age. In centuries past, before vaccinations for infectious diseases and modern plumbing, people died at young ages from smallpox, tuberculosis, and typhoid.

Here is what Americans died from in 2021:

Covid was number three in 2021. It was top of mind as a health concern for Democrats two years ago. It was less so for Republicans, many of whom were re-defining Covid less as a potentially-fatal infectious disease and instead as a source of government over-reach. I use the 2021 chart because Covid is re-emerging. There is a summer spike in Covid cases.

Life is full of risks and random luck, but we all know the story of increasing one's chances of a long healthy life: Don't smoke, have a healthy weight, eat right, don't drink too much, exercise. It is important but boring. 

A poll this week reported what health risks capture our attention:

Here is a chart with another version of the mis-match between what kills us and what the media puts in headlines. "AIRPORT BOMB FOUND" gets clicks. "EAT HEALTHY FOOD" does not.

It is not clear to me that anything less than a N95 mask does much good to protect me from Covid, but paper masks probably help a little. The data show Covid vaccinations do reduce risk of serious illness for older people. Democrats probably should get vaccinated for Covid, along with ones for the flu and shingles. Do so proudly.

Republicans who suspect that vaccines are a suspicious plot by the Biden administration, Dr. Fauci, Bill Gates, George Soros, and the drug companies can suit themselves. We are at the "protect yourself" phase of the pandemic. I assume anyone and everyone could have it. I hope that between vaccinations and the post-infection interventions now available, I can survive Covid if I get it. JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association, reported that because of greater vaccine acceptance by Democrats than by Republicans, Republicans had a 15% higher death rate from Covid than did Democrats. I feel sorry for Republicans but, as Leslie Gore sang back in my youth, "It my party and I'll cry if I want to." It's their party and they can vaccinate if they want to. 

By 2022 U.S. life expectancy had dropped by 2.5 years from its pre-Covid 1999 level. Over 267,000 Americans died of Covid in 2022. That year the Global Terrorism Index counted 11 American deaths from terrorism.

It is best to look both ways when stepping onto a crosswalk. Pay particular attention to the likely direction of the oncoming bus. 

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Rosalynn Carter. Thanks.

Rosalynn Carter turns 96 today

She is spending the day quietly at home with her husband of 77 years, former president Jimmy Carter.

Best wishes and happy birthday. Thank you, Rosalynn and Jimmy Carter.

It will be a quiet birthday with her husband, who is now in hospice. She said she will eat a cupcake and have some peanut-butter flavored ice cream. She will release a burst of butterflies in the garden from the home where she was born in 1927. She has always loved butterflies.

Bill Clinton and Barack Obama had every right to get rich after their presidency. And they did. Former president Gerald Ford was appointed to the board of Citibank after his presidency, and I got to shake his hand and nod a greeting when he was a "featured guest" at a convention at the Greenbriar resort, held as a reward event for some of Citibank's Financial Advisors. Gerald Ford also held board positions at American Express and Primerica, as well as 20th Century Fox. The companies were cashing in by having him as a headliner for events like the one I attended. He was cashing in because he could. He was a celebrity.

Harry and Bess Truman took the train back to Independence, Missouri after his presidency to return to their modest home. He had no income beyond a small Army pension. Seeing his situation, Congress decided to award a pension to former presidents. Harry Truman declined offers of board positions, consultancies, and endorsement opportunities. He said that the office of the president belonged to the people, not to him.  

"I could never lend myself to any transaction, however respectable that would commercialize on the prestige and dignity of the office of the presidency." 

The Trumans and Carters seem quaint. The New York Times reported that Bill Clinton received $150,000 per speech and earned $40 million in the years immediately after his presidency. Ronald Reagan gave two 20-minute speeches in Japan immediately after leaving office. He was paid $2 million for them. George W. Bush has given some 200 paid speeches at fees of about $150,000. He is available now, with speeches arranged by the Washington Speakers Bureau.

Washington Speakers Bureau

Democrat, Republican -- they all do it. Except Jimmy Carter. 

I do not blame or condemn the Clintons and the Obamas. Cashing in on celebrity is legal. It is so easy to cash in on celebrity that even very troubled people like Hunter Biden can do it. It is considered so normal that there is barely need for disguise or subterfuge. Jared Kushner was the White House liaison handling Middle East negotiations between the U.S., Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Egypt. The Qatar government, using the vehicle of an American hedge fund, Brookfield Property Partners, purchased a 99 year lease on Jared Kushner's distressed property, 666 Fifth Avenue. Kushner desperately needed a sale and Qatar paid far above market price, bailing him out. It looks bad, but it is legal. The public notices. Senators complain but the deal goes through. It becomes part of the accepted way of doing things. The public's cynicism grows. It sets the stage for normalizing other examples of high-dollar dealmaking. Immediately after leaving the White House the Saudi government invests $2 billion in Jared Kushner's brand new hedge fund with annual fees of 1.25%, plus 20% of profits as a bonus, if there are profits. Sweet. It looks bad, but it is legal. Public cynicism grows more, with thoughts like these going through heads:

All politicians are corrupt. Politics is corrupt. Cheat if you can. It is a fixed game. Don't be a sap. Don't be a goody-goody. Everybody does it.

I fully expect grift and avarice from the Trumps. It is their brand. His standard is not whether it is or looks ethical. His standard is the lowest possible one: Is it clearly, provably so very illegal that even Lindsay Graham will refuse to defend him. 

We had an opportunity to hope for something different from Obama. His book sales were big enough to set the family up for life. He could have stopped with that. He could have renewed the Truman-Carter norm. It would re-affirm that the honorable path is not set by markets and self-interest, but by the public interest that shows that high office is about service. George Washington could have been king or dictator, but he declined it in favor of the common good of a republic. People who remember that history honor it. As Commander in Chief Obama called on others to risk themselves and sacrifice for the common good. People see the revolving door of political office to corporate cash, and it feeds their belief that politics is corrupt. The Obamas saw the effect of the Goldman Sachs speeches on Hillary Clinton's reputation. He was warned. Obama is still young. There is time for Obama to shape his legacy. 

Jimmy and Roslyn Carter did it right. Jimmy Carter rarely got speaking fees. When he did, he donated them to charity. "We give money. We don't take it," he said. He and Roslyn live in the ranch style house they owned back in 1961. They live simply and well.

I honor the Carters. 

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Jewish Homeland

Can a place be a "Jewish homeland" and not be a "racist state?"

Basic-Law Israel

"Basic Principles (a) The Land of Israel is the historical homeland of the Jewish People in which the State of Israel was established. (b) The State of Israel is the nation state of the Jewish People in which is realizes its natural, cultural, religious and historical right to determination. (c) The realization of this right to national self-determination is exclusive in the Jewish People."

The motto of the United States is "Out of Many, One." It has a founding principle that all men are created equal. That is an ideal more honored than practiced. American Indians were removed, Blacks enslaved and segregated, Chinese excluded, Japanese interred, Jews subject to quotas, Mormons killed, Muslims blocked at the borders, and Mexican immigrants called rapists and criminals. American history has contradictions.

Other countries have different founding principles and different contradictions. The nation of Israel affirms that its founding principle is that Israel is for Jews. Fresh in the memory of Jews is being a victim of a mass program of ethnic cleansing, the holocaust. Yet the historic land of Israel was not a blank slate to be created anew. Christians and Muslims lived there and had for centuries, people with homes, farms, businesses, and sacred places of their own. What is Israel to do with them?

Herb Rothschild is a retired professor of English. During his working years he was a political activist on behalf of world peace and civil rights for Black Americans. He is still doing that work, advocating for peace and justice. He lives in Talent, Oregon.

Rothschild

Guest Post by Herb Rothschild

At a conference for the progressive organization Netroots Nation on July 15, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) made comments critical of Israel. In the course of them she called Israel “a racist state.” The next day she apologized for using the term “racist," although she affirmed her criticism of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.

Her apology was in vain. Her Republican and Democratic colleagues fell over themselves in the race to distance themselves from her. On July 18, the U.S. House of Representatives voted 412-9 for a non-binding resolution declaring that “the State of Israel is not a racist or apartheid state,” that “Congress rejects all forms of antisemitism and xenophobia," and that “the United States will always be a staunch partner and supporter of Israel.”

Source: https://ifamericansknew.org

For defenders of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, I would guess that debates about whether Israel is rightly called a “racist state” or an “apartheid state” are a welcome distraction from the main point--that Israel continues to appropriate land that belonged to the Palestinians. The map I’ve provided tells the story of Jewish expansion.

To go with it, here are the historic population figures (rounded to thousands):

1900: 24,000 Jews, 499,000 others (mostly Muslims)

1914: 39,000 Jews, 602,000 others

1944: 529,000 Jews, 1,061,000 others

2014: 6.1 million Jews, 6.2 million others

What the map doesn’t provide is evidence that, from the beginning of Zionism, the intention was to encompass within a Jewish state as much of what Zionists called Eretz Israel, the Biblical land of Israel, as they could get, and they have worked at realizing that intention since the first settlements at the beginning of the last century to the most recent settlements in the occupied West Bank. What follows is documentation of my assertion.

"[We Zionists will] spirit the penniless population across the border [of the Jewish state] by denying it employment . . . Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly." Diary of Theodore Herzl, co-founder of the Zionist movement, entry dated June 12, 1895.

“The Islamic soul must be broomed [ethnically cleansed] out of Eretz-Yisrael.” Also, "There is no choice: the Arabs must make room for the Jews of Eretz Israel. If it was possible to transfer the Baltic peoples, it is also possible to move the Palestinian Arabs.” Ze'ev Jabotinsky, spiritual father of the Likud Party, in a letter dated November 1939 to a Revisionist colleague in the U.S.

"There is no other way than to transfer the Arabs from here to neighboring countries, all of them." Also, "Not one village, not one [Arab] tribe should be left.” Diary entries of Yosef Weitz, director of the Transfer Committee Israel created in 1948, the year of its founding.

"The compulsory transfer of the Arabs . . . could give us something which we never had [even in Biblical times].” Also, "With compulsory transfer we will have a vast area . . . I support compulsory transfer. I don't see anything immoral in it." David Ben-Gurion, first prime minister of Israel, quoted in Benny Morris, “Righteous Victims: A history of the Zionist-Arab conflict, 1881-1999.”

"It is not as though there was a Palestinian people . . . and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them . . . they did not exist." Golda Meir, prime minister of Israel 1969-1974, quoted in The Washington Post, June 16, 1969.

"There is no Zionism, colonization, or Jewish state without the eviction of the Arabs and the expropriation of their lands." Ariel Sharon, prime minister of Israel 2001-2006, quoted in the New York Times, 1998.

In April, 2019, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to annex portions of the West Bank.

So what shall we call a people who displaces by force a native population? How about “White American”?

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Not "free speech." Crimes.

"Whatabout Barbara Boxer after the 1994 presidential vote in Ohio!"
"Whatabout Al Gore after the 2000 presidential vote in Florida!"
"Whatabout Stacy Abrams after the 2018 Georgia governor's election!"

We are going to hear a lot about those in the months ahead.

They are not equivalent to what Trump did. 

Over the years some prominent Democrats have questioned the vote on elections. In making the case that Trump's prosecution is a "witch hunt," Republicans and their friendly media are asserting that what Trump did in the 2020 election was similar to what Democrats have done. Republicans criticized Democrats, but did not prosecute them. It is unfair! Trump is singled out!

Americans have a free speech right to protest the fairness of an election process and the accuracy of the vote count. There is a legal way to do this.

Barbara Boxer in the U.S. Senate and Tubbs Jones in the U.S. House challenged the electoral vote count in Ohio. Boxer said in a press conference:

This is my opening shot to be able to focus the light of truth on these terrible problems in the electoral system. While we have men and women dying to bring democracy abroad, we've got to make it the best it can be here at home, and that's why I'm doing this.

It was an hour of political theater. Presidential candidate John Kerry said he would not take part in the protest, saying:

Our legal teams on the ground have found no evidence that would change the outcome of the election.

Kerry, a sitting Senator, said that he would be introducing legislation to improve accountability and transparency in future elections.

In 2000 a series of problems involving incompletely detached "chads" from ballot punch cards made the vote count questionable in Florida. With a vote count margin of 537 votes out of almost six million, the rules on how to count and recount questionable ballots moved the winner back and forth between Al Gore and George Bush. The Supreme Court intervened and in a five to four vote, with justices following the party of the president that appointed them, decided a technical point in a way that gave the margin of victory to Bush. Al Gore announced that he would accept the decision of the Court.

In 2018 Democratic candidate Stacey Abrams lost a close election for Georgia governor to Brian Kemp, then the chief election official for the state. He had done a wholesale purge of 500,000 from the voter rolls, the largest cancellation of voter registrations in U.S. history, according to the Atlanta Constitution. The purge had a disparate effect on the electorate, causing more poor people, young people, and Blacks to be de-registered. Abrams conceded the election, saying 

I acknowledge that former Secretary of State Brian Kemp will be certified as the victor in the 2018 gubernatorial election.

She went on to say

But to watch an elected official who claims to represent the people in this state baldly pin his hopes for election on suppression of the people's democratic right to vote has been truly appalling.

Her response was to file a lawsuit in the courts and to set about registering the 800,000 new voters who were eligible to vote in the 2000 election.

The words and actions taken in these three instances were legal and reasonable. At the time Republicans accused the Democrats of being "sore losers" --  as Democrats now accuse Trump. But there is a giant difference between these three instances and what Trump and his allies have done.

Trump did not accept the evidence of audits and the adjudication of the courts. He ignores and denies their decisions. He went beyond the free speech right to protest. He took illegal actions by creating a conspiracy to defraud the United States.  As the House January 6 Committee and the Jack Smith and Georgia indictments outline, Trump orchestrated a multi-pronged plan. The group action included false statements proposed in a Department of Justice letter to state legislatures stating that the DoJ found evidence of fraud, pressure and threats on state officials to reverse the vote in their states, an attempt to solicit a false confession from an election worker, managing creation of fraudulent certificates of election in multiple states, and an effort to get the Vice President to discard valid electoral votes. Those fraudulent elector ballots stating that they were "duly elected" were not spontaneously created in the states by over-eager and hopeful partisans. They were part of a plan, coordinated at the highest levels in the White House. So was the effort to plant false information about the findings of the Department of Justice.  Acting deputy AG Richard Donoghue's contemporaneous notes, quoting Trump, read.

Donoghue: "That's an exact quote from the president, yes."

Trump is not being indicted for his claims about the election. He has a free speech right to say what he wants, whether there is evidence for it or not. But it is criminal to do a series of acts to create fraudulent documents to carry out a fraudulent goal. It is criminal to do so in the context of urging public officials to disobey their oaths of office.

Republicans claim many Democrats despise Trump. They are correct. Many Democrats think he is dangerous and corrupt. That would be reason to impeach him, a political venue. The indictments are now in a legal venue. The question for investigators, prosecutors, and the trial court juries is not whether Trump is dangerous, corrupt, or despicable in their minds. It is whether or not he did criminal acts. There is substantial evidence that he did.

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