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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsCan someone please explain Barr to me -- seriously
I understand Trump. He's a criminal con artist in debt to the Russian mob. But what does Barr get out of his treason? Is Barr a Dominionist, who wants to install a Christian Taliban government?
Funtatlaguy
(10,862 posts)Dorian Gray
(13,479 posts)It's perplexing to me. But so are all the Trumpists who are working in this government.)
I mean, I guess I get Stephen Miller. This is his only shot.
Skidmore
(37,364 posts)the Catholic extremism of Trump's theocrats. Theocrats and autocrats have need of each other.
dewsgirl
(14,961 posts)the Family on Netflix, it offers frightening insight into what is happening within the highest levels of our government. All cabinet members are involved in extreme religious sects. Real Handmaid's Tale type stuff.
Paragraph from the Handmaid's Tale.
When they slaughtered Congress, we didn't wake up. When they blamed terrorists and suspended the Constitution, we didn't wake up then either," she continues. "They said it would be temporary. Nothing changes instantaneously.
I'm not saying they would be able to pull something like this off, but I have no doubt if they could they would.
Kaiserguy
(740 posts)there is of imposing his brand of nut job religion on the rest of us and will do whatever it takes to keep Trump in power until that happens. He will lie , cheat and steal to keep Trump in power. Our job is to make damn sure that Barr and his kind don't get to make their insane dream come true.
thesquanderer
(11,972 posts)Yavin4
(35,421 posts).
Atticus
(15,124 posts)existential threat to all that is decent in America.
democratisphere
(17,235 posts)Barr is flying the world trying to dig up and/or fabricate "dirt" on drumpf's Democratic political opposition. Barr attempted to obstruct the findings of the Mueller Report. Almost ALL rethuglicons have become totally corrupted by the drumpf family, administration, rethuglicon Congress and their wealthiest supporters. And still THEY ALL persist. The AG of the DOJ acts like a hitman from Toledo. Their in your face attitude and arrogance is mind blowing!
siriuslll
(23 posts)....but I don't think he's necessarily tRump's fixer.
He showed up as AG to stop the investigation into Iran-Contra by suggesting that Bush Sr. use Presidential power to pardon those implicated and convicted. He drives the bulldozer when Republicans want to bury something.
There's something ghoulish about him. He is the poster child for the banality of evil.
uponit7771
(90,304 posts)... rule for the most part.
Kid Berwyn
(14,803 posts)"At the center of the criticism is the chief articulator of Bush's imperial presidency," we reported in 1992, "the man who wrote the legal rationale for the Gulf War, the Panama invasion, and the officially sanctioned kidnapping of foreign nationals abroad"
by FRANK SNEPP
The Village Voice, APRIL 18, 2019
Snip...
For the next two years, as chief of the Justice Departments Office of Legal Counsel, Barr played a key role in shaping Richard Thornburghs stormy tenure as attorney general. In a job that was essentially political, he helped maintain the administrations ideological purity by screening out judicial candidates who werent conservative enough. He also drafted two key documents rationalizing the U.S. invasion of Panama and the seizure of General Manuel Noriega.
Snip...
In mid 1990, as Thornburghs own problems with Congress deepened, Barr was tapped to run interference, and was named deputy attorney general. The appointment came just in time for him to draft another landmark tract for the administration, the legal pretext for the undeclared war against Iraq. It would have made any Nixonite proud. Explaining it later to Congress, Barr said he believed there was a gray zone between a declared offensive war and an emergency defensive action where there is latitude for the president, if he believes that the vital interests of the United States are threatened by foreign military attack, there is room for him to respond.
Barr did not make clear how the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait equaled an attack on vital American interests, but to his credit, at the moment of decision itself, he did counsel the president to soften the impact of his unilateral rush to war by seeking a declaration of congressional support. That piece of advice, much akin to Johnsons leveraging of the Tonkin Gulf resolution, helped to keep the naysayers at bay.
Barrs service to the administration, however, wasnt limited simply to such flashes of political savvy. In 1991 he became active in stone-walling the Iraqgate and the BCCI investigations and further gratified conservatives by keeping up the tattoo on their favorite hot-button issues. Embracing immigration policy as his own, he helped craft an exception rule that automatically barred HIV-positive sufferers from entering the country. Civil libertarians charged illegal discrimination and even racism, since many of those excluded were black Haitians. Barr assured Congress that the policy was meant only to keep out people who might be thrown back on public welfare.
Flogging another conservative hobbyhorse, Barr fought hard as deputy AG to keep federal courts from expanding their right to review state criminal convictions on writs of habeas corpus. As a devout Catholic, he also pandered to the antiabortion crowd, even torquing the law in August 1991 to advance their crusade. The challenge came when a federal judge in Wichita issued an order barring anti-abortion demonstrators from blocking access to a clinic. The Justice Department intervened to try to force a lifting of the ban. Later asked about this by Congress, Barr gave an exquisitely technical rationale, asserting that though the demonstrators were lawbreakers . . . treading on other peoples rights, they should be dealt with in state court, not federal court thus the federal judges order was unenforceable.
Continues...
https://www.villagevoice.com/2019/04/18/attorney-general-william-barr-is-the-best-reason-to-vote-for-clinton/
Just Us a guy who doesnt believe all are equal under law.