Judge McAfee, the Smart Idiot

I’m kind of fascinated by Judge Scott McAfee since he seems like a smart idiot. Smart because he’s a judge, an idiot because he let Fani Willis off the hook but not her boyfriend.  Apparently he’s lying about not having an affair prior to 2021 but she’s not. Go figure. 

McAfee doesn’t seem the type to be a liberal idiot. He’s left no bread trail, meaning he didn’t go to an Ivy League school nor a diversity hire.  The only thing that can explain it is he is Gov Brian Kemp’s boy.  Kemp owns him.  So now we try to understand what drives Kemp. And that’s not easy either.  It’s likely just the endemic corruption that afflicts many a state party, especially those with a string of victories by one political party. (We certainly see it in Ohio.) Kemp was born into a prominent family with a history of political power and became a protege of former Democrat Sonny Perdue. 

The interesting thing about the heritage line of these Georgia politicians is they seem to be plucked from obscurity. I don’t know if they are failed or compromised businessmen, but they come to politics later in life. Perdue was a 45-year old when he started out. Kemp was 40. Raffensperger, a Kemp “out of nowhere” pick was 57. 

You could spin that as a good thing, for sure, but the problem is that guys like Kemp and Raffensperger weren’t doing it on their own (like, say, Trump) but were handpicked by the “good old boys”--perhaps with strings attached.

The whole thing is probably as simple as the “new normal” in which judges consider themselves political figures. Many are nakedly political, like Fani Willis and Jack Smith. Others are political in the sense that they don’t follow the law so much as try to appease both parties with some sort of compromise. Either situation is sort of the death of the rule of law. 

The Devil's Already Down in Georgia

Good points from John Eastman, a patriot being sued for being a good American: 

 "An order of mendacity."  That, in my opinion, is a fancy way of saying, "They lied through their teeth," yet that is how Fulton County, Georgia Superior Court Judge McAfee described the motion to disqualify hearing testimony of District Attorney Fani Willis and Nathan Wade, her lover, whom she hired (and paid more than $700,000) to be the lead prosecutor in the unprecedented criminal case against former President Trump, me, and 17 others. On Friday, the Judge ordered one or the other of them to step aside because of the "appearance of impropriety" that their "tremendous lapse in judgment" had created.  Wade promptly did so, leaving Fani Willis and her office to continue to prosecute the case.  This morning, my co-defendants filed a motion for permission to take an immediate appeal of the decision that allowed Willis to continue with the case despite her own "appearance of impropriety."  So this chapter of the soap opera this is the Georgia criminal case is not yet over.  And although the Judge also last week dismissed 6 of the counts in the indictment, including 1 in which I was named, 35 counts (including 8 against me) still remain, so there is still a long and costly road ahead that is keeping "Georgia on my mind."

Moreover, "mendacity" about the affair is not the most important of the falsities arising out of this criminal case.  The whole case is built on the premise that those who challenged illegality in the conduct of the 2020 election were somehow part of a criminal enterprise because, you know, the government has told us that the election was perfect.  As I've noted elsewhere, that is an authoritarian -- even Orwellian -- assertion:  "We're the government, and you had better accept what we tell you, or else." 

One of my co-defendants issued subpoenas to election officials in Georgia to obtain the election data needed to prove whether the claims of election illegality were true.  You would think that pubic officials would want to get to the truth of that important question -- either to take steps to prevent such illegality from occurring again, or to lay such claims to rest.  But they have instead fought the subpoenas tooth and nail.  We await a decision by the Court on their motions to quash the subpoenas. 

Thankfully, people are starting to wake up to the dangers of this "lawfare," not just to me personally but to our adversarial system of justice more broadly.  Joy Pullman published a couple of great articles at The Federalist last month, titled "Democrats Work To Strip All Opponents Of Representation In Court" and "Effective Republican Attorneys General Get Slapped With Politicized Ethics Charges."...

What's a Little Perjury Among Friends?

Knowing a lot about politics is kind of embarrassing, like how some bodybuilders have overdeveloped muscles that are just for show with little underlying strength. For one thing, the political figures in our current milieu are not worth much. It's not much different than following Taylor Swift or a soap opera.  It’s kind of silly for any of us to think we’re “represented” by bought-off politicians.  Prof. Jeffrey Sachs, a Harvard and current Colombian professor who is a “global leader in sustainable development” said “it has been said that after the Kennedy assassination, there has been no president. They have only been factotums of the system since then."  

I wasn’t really following the case against Judge Fani Willis until she had the audacity to perjure herself on the stand. Before that she was just some hack who was after Donald Trump. But it gets more interesting when she and her lover and their friend all get up on the stand and lie their asses off.  I thought this might be a decent test case to how our beleaguered justice system is going. And the judge in the case, McAfee, failed, naturally. He seemed not the least offended by folks coming into his courtroom and lying their asses off. He ended up “splitting the baby”, amazingly. He sanctioned the lover, but allows Fani to go forward with her case against Trump. It’s silly, but then he was a contributor to Fani’s campaign a few years ago so I’m not sure how I expected it to go otherwise. I just want to believe in the rule of law, naive as that sounds. Naturally it’ll be appealed but it’s sobering to think that perhaps the only dependable court in the land is the court of last resort, the Supreme Court. And that’s only as long as the conservatives on the court live. 

Some famous writer in the Roman Empire once said that Rome is falling, yes, but you can live well during a fall. That’s pretty much the goal now. Live well as the country rotteth. Steve Bannon said anyone under 35 is screwed, which seems about right. 

The only thing interesting about current politics is the upcoming presidential race because it's a fascinating experiment to see the limits of our democracy. Will the true powers allow Trump? Yes Trump got elected in ’16 but that still feels accidental somehow, like they weren’t prepared. It’s akin to how Rocky Balboa did well against Apollo Creed simply because Creed didn’t take him seriously, didn’t train hard for him. Or how if Ohio U. beat OSU and then OSU was highly motivated and prepared the second time. Of course, the bad guys already won in 2020 so there’s no reason to think they won’t in 2024. On the other hand, the poll numbers currently at least sure favor Trump and Biden has an abysmal record. It’s a titanic struggle, as Marty Brennaman used to say at the end of Reds games. The suspense is real.