Words Matter: Depravity as Far as the Eye Can See

Subbasement of the Ministry of Snark in Washington, D.C. and from other undisclosed locations

across America and around the world.

“Hello and welcome to DSR's Words Matter of David Rothkoff, I am joined as always by the”

ever just barely getting by Norm Ornstein, How Are You Norm? David, I can't change my usual satutation about as well as could be expected and after having my Sator interrupted the last night by the low energy, low-beating president, and it's not getting much better.

Well, in the just community we refer to him differently, refer to him as Ferro.

Okay, if that's a Passover joke and nobody outside the community is going to get that, let's move on, you know, I disagree with that because this is the week in which Charlton Heston as Moses and the Ten Commandments will be all over television and so even people who are not a part of the community will understand that the reference to Ferro means you'll Brenner. Yeah, exactly, really, really good point. So there's so many things going

“on Norm that I think what I'd like to do is play the word association because that”

can reduce, of course, the amount of talking I have to do. So let's just start with two words,

Pam Bondi. Well, there are so many words one could use. So I will tell you what I tweeted out after hearing this news, which is, Pam Bondi wasn't fired because of her corrupt lawless distortion of the Justice Department into a partisan avenue for political retribution. She was fired in spite of that. And she was fired for one reason. It's very clear, which is that she screwed up on the Epstein files instead of being able to deep six every one

of the many, many thousands of references to Trump, including some that pointed directly to criminal behavior on his part. She ended up despite defying the law and keeping most of those records hidden away, let out plenty that brought Trump right into the web of

“criminal behavior. So that's why Pam Bondi was fired. Now we have her apparently replaced”

on the interim basis with Todd Blanche. And it says, if you said Siri, who is somebody who could be a temporary replacement for Pam Bondi who would be even worse, that's the answer you would get. And apparently he is signaling that he wants to put in his EPA director Lee Zeldon who is, at least as bad if not worse than Pam Bondi. I mean, she's, the articles that I've read have said that that was one of the reasons

that she was fired, the other was she wasn't willing to go after his political enemies as aggressively as he would like. Yeah, you know, it's just mind boggling. But of course, at least we're getting rid of one of these horrible cabinet members. And we, you know, we have more news, another just to switch the subject a little bit with all of them being just horrors that the VA cut

out, excuse me, the VA cut out a veteran housing program, which apparently is resulting in very substantial number of veterans who are going to lose their homes. Pam Collins, the secretary of veterans affairs, has devastated veterans health care, has left a lot of veterans with mental health challenges and PTSD facing the prospect or possibility

of ailment or finding that the lines are much longer, the weights are terrible, and the

quality of service is even worse. And he might be the best of what remains of this comedy of criminal horrors who make up Trump's cabinet. There is no best. There doesn't have to be a best. They're all just a bunch of the worst

“idiots as far as the eye can see. But let me just go back. I mean, that's a very important”

story. We talked about it in our daily show earlier today. And I want to come back to it. But Todd Blanch can't possibly be confirmed as attorney general. If he is the guy who offered gelane Maxwell, the sweetheart deal that she got, right? I mean, I mean, he's so he's just going to end up being acting for indefinite period of time or something. Well, we have the vacancies act, which basically says you can fill a Senate confirmable position temporarily

with somebody who has for another position been confirmed by the Senate. Now, there's a time limit on that. But if you go back to Trump's first term, he regularly violated that law with no consequence. But I would take slight issue with you, David. This is, there are two words here, Republican Senate. And if you say cannot possibly be confirmed, doesn't work. If you look at the number of people who in any reasonable administration with any honest

Senate should never have been confirmed. There are dozens and dozens, if not more, who are

in judge ships or executive branch positions, because the Republican Senate jams them through. And if they're really bad, what happens is they'll get two or possibly three Republican senators voting against them. Susan Collins, Lisa McCowski, and sometimes Bill Cassidy, all doing it, knowing that there's still going to be a minimum of 50, 50 vote and JD Vancell cast the type ranking vote. So it's with a wink and a nod. And I think not only

Todd Blanche, but somebody even worse than Todd Blanche, Emil Bove, who was confirmed for a judgeship, a court of appeals, judgeship, even worse in terms of having fundamental integrity or any of the qualities you would want in a justice department, confirmed for a lifetime appointment as a judge. So anybody could be confirmed by this group of embarrassments.

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So let me ask you a question. What I used to be in the government back during the John Adams Administration, the people who were permanent government employees had a lot of control over how things went in their departments, because they had the ability to speak up, stand up,

“leak to the press, use all these tools. That's how we got all these stories about the deep”

state. The Justice Department is full of people who grade integrity, literally tens of thousands of them. At what point do they stand up and say, no, I was asked to do this illegal thing. No, they're asking me to do this illegal thing. No, they're undermining the Justice Department. Why isn't there more whistle blowing in this Administration?

That's a very good question. And of course, the reality is the Justice Department may be full

of people with integrity, but it's less full than it was at the beginning of this Administration,

and make decisions in the civil rights division, in the public integrity section,

in the criminal division, and almost across the board. But you're right. There are people in line positions who still have the qualities that you would want in an honest Justice Department. Let me ask you a question, Norm, and I'm sure all of our listeners are glad to know you're counting gross spam, by the way. But I want to pick up on the Pam Bondy thing and I want to pick up on the DOJ thing. And I'm going to do it in a really subtle way. So I'm going to

bring it up, and then you're going to think, this is an opportunity for me to talk about something else.

“So here's a here and here goes. What do you think the pardon deal is with Pam Bondy?”

I mean, what do you think the pardon deal is with each one of these people? Because I read in the new Republic that the pardon process is extremely corrupt in this Administration, and at this article by Member of Congress and somebody else I forget. So could you tell me about this? Oh, can I tell you about this? Yes. So this has been a hobby horse of mine for a while, and I joined with Madeline Dean, who's a terrific member of the house from Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, just north of Philadelphia.

We have never seen anything like this, and Pam Bondy's role in the pardon process was to make

“sure that the pardon attorney who had objected to some of what Trump was trying to do in misusing”

his pardon power, and the one in particular I should note was that the actor Mel Gibson, best known for being a drunken anti-Semite and racist, I guess you would say, although he's also been in some notable movies, had been convicted of domestic assault, lost his gun privileges, and wanted a pardon so that he could regain a gun. And the pardon attorney said, "No, you cannot do that," and she got fired, and that's one of the roles that Pam Bondy played.

But what we know is, starting on day one, when Trump issued a blanket pardon to everybody who had been

“involved in January 6th, including violent criminals, including those convicted of seditious conspiracy.”

He pardoned them all. Now, many of them are trying to go through a back door in a completely corrupted administration and get money for what they claim was an overreaction by the capital police. It boggles the mind. Now, that's one, that's started this process. But what we have seen is many different kinds of pardon's done by Trump that make every cringe-worthy pardon done by some of his predecessors. There were some by every modern predecessor, usually at the end of

their administrations, that really were pretty awful, but they are the equivalent of Jaywalking compared to Trump's murder. So we have, most recently, the story that's been a more dominant one, Joseph Schwartz of New Jersey, who had a ton of nursing homes. He had spread his tentacles for his company, just as an example, to Arkansas. And one of the nursing homes in Arkansas, there was a woman with Parkinson's and what they were told in the nursing home was,

you cannot feed this person manually because she will choke on food. She did, she died. They found scrambled eggs in her lungs and her different passages. The family sued got a major judgment,

never got a dime. They managed to pull out of Arkansas and other places. And then,

faced with serious issues, Schwartz did a scam with the payroll taxes for his employees to the tune of $39 million was convicted of fraud, ordered to repay people and sentenced to three years in jail, three months into that sentence, Trump pardoned him. What we know is that Schwartz spent at least

had lawyers and lobbyists having a field day here, making money to get criminals out. We have

“drug dealers. We have people with the most unsavory backgrounds possible. We have people who have”

defrauded Americans of hundreds of millions. Some would say as much as a billion and a half dollars, Trump has pardoned them all and stiffed all the people who have been screwed in the process. And

we've never seen anything close to this. And what Madeleine and I wrote is the whole idea of a

pardon power was built on the notion of mercy. You do it because sometimes courts will convict people wrongly. Sometimes they will give them sentences that simply do not fit the nature of the crime. It goes back to the early days of Great Britain and it was supposed to be surrounding mercy, not corruption by taking money, by rewarding your friends, by getting your lobbyist bodies

“to make a ton of money so that you can do something that is absolutely wrong in the process.”

And as we've seen, Pam Bondi just before she left, joined with Trump in this notion of, we're going to go after fraud and we've seen JD Vance say, we're going to go after the big fraudsters. They're not going after the fraud that is the worst we've ever seen in this country coming straight from the president of the United States. So what do we need to do? You know, the framers understood that we might get somebody who would be misused this power, but they thought,

well, we've always got impeachment. They did not anticipate a president as openly corrupt as Donald

Trump. And we've got to think about a constitutional amendment that would put some curbs on this

“power to reach the corruption out of it. So that's what you get for asking me that, a simple question.”

Well, I knew I was going to get that because the articles entitled Trump's corrupt partners may well be the most corrupt thing about him. And it's posted on April 2nd at the New Republic by Norm and Madeleine Dean. And it's real important. And it's a crucial issue

norm on a number of levels. You know, one of the great ironies of their campaign against fraud,

which is being led by a political fraud JD Vance is of course that campaign is a fraud because they're not going after, as you say, real fraudsters. They're going after poorer people. And you know, it's manifest in the fact that although Trump hasn't gotten much done since he's become president, he has been really good for criminals, 4,500 people who attacked the Capitol in January 6. But we heard just a couple of days ago that I was at 30,000 pending criminal cases were dropped

so that people could go within the, the DOJ and turn their attention to immigration issues. And then you've got all these partners on top of this. It's, it literally, it is a a day. Not to mention the fact that their criminals all over the, the, the administration itself. If you're a criminal, meanwhile, you know, one of the things that Trump said that resonates with your comment about the Veterans Administration and just the general focus of this administration

to place yesterday when he was asked what could be done about child care in the United States. And he said, we can't afford child care in the United States because we have wars to fight and we'll leave scams like that and Medicare to the States. He views programs that help ordinary people like the people in the VA who are being turned into the street, like people on Medicare and Medicaid who are losing their coverage, like kids who do not have day care. Frankly,

like the kids that he's thrown into prisons across the country, as, you know, the people to be punished as his targets. And it really is the most sort of start example of how morally depraved this administration is. So true. And, you know, the nicest descriptor we could use for him is sociopath.

screwing are his supporters. They're the people he ran to win over by telling them that he would

“take care of them. And instead, he is shafting them all over the place. You know, one other thing”

that occurred to me especially again yesterday as well about Donald Trump. He went on and on in his speech last night about how we don't need the Straits of Hormuz doesn't do anything for us. It's these other countries that need the oil. Let them reopen it because we are energy independent. It's just us. We don't need anybody else. We got all the oil we want. Although we can also, of course, now steal more oil from Venezuela. And what struck me about this among many other things that

struck me about it was how utterly ignorant of fundamental economics this man who brags regularly about how he graduated from the Wharton School at Penn in economics has no understanding of the

“global nature of the oil market. Why our prices have gone up and will go up even more has no”

understanding that, well, we have enough oil in theory to cover the needs of Americans. We actually import oil because the nature of our oil and the nature of our refineries is such that we need a different kind of oil in many cases to make up for what we have. And then we export the excess of what we are not going to use. And then you go back to the tariffs. He has no clue what a tariff is or what

trade is actually about. This man has an understanding of economics that wouldn't pass a third grade

level along with all of the benevolence, malevolence, excuse me. He is dumb as opposed. Well, that is true. One of the interesting things, though, is I don't think he paid any attention

“to any of the classes he took at Wharton, which by the way, he took at Wharton Undergrad,”

which is not really the Wharton School of Business as it stands now. And he misrepresents what kind of education he had or ignored. But I don't think he paid attention if the economics had to do with anybody else. What he cares about is the economics that have to do with him,

which is how he has done made $5 billion since he became president. Yeah, illegally.

Or the economics that have to do with his friends. I noticed today speaking of the straight-of-war moves. There was a little presentation that Steve Ratner, former Treasury official, did in which he was talking about what were the consequences of Trump's absolutely bizarre decision to lift sanctions on Russian oil. And he has also lifted sanctions on Iranian oil. And you've got to ask yourself, well, you know, is this a big deal or not? Well, by lifting the

sanctions on Russian oil and by pushing up the price of oil, we are now directing at the rate of

$20 billion a month, new money into the coffers of the Kremlin. It is just an astonishing thing.

And you look, and it's all about does it serve him. He wants $200 billion as a supplemental for this war, which he thought was going to make him look powerful. And when he said, oh, we can't afford childcare, I happen to know that to do 100 to do permanent pre-K for every kid in America, costs $190 billion. So it would cost less than this misbegotten war for a month than to provide for kids, but it doesn't help him. It doesn't advance his goals. Same with Venezuela. We have

not advanced democracy in Venezuela. We have not done anything good for Venezuela. We got rid of the head of the regime, went to the number two person, and Trump said, give us some oil, and the money from that oil may be going into an account that he benefits from. And that's enough, because it's all about what goes into his account, it's really sort of the ultimate expression of narcissism, where unless it directly benefits him, it's not good. I mean, you may call it

narcissistic psychopath. But let's even look for Venezuela at a moment beyond the oil.

We have as cabinet members bragging that they've looted the Venezuelan central bank of their gold supply, 100 pounds of gold, that they brought back here. God knows where that's going to go. So it's all about looting in that case. But let's look at the giving Russia a free pass. Russia has been helping Iran against the United States when the Iranians were able to bomb an American

“air base in Saudi Arabia, taking out wildly expensive and very important military equipment on that”

airfield. They were only able to do it because Russia gave them the satellite images to tell them exactly

where to go. Russia is helping Iran kill and name American military forces and Trump's response to that is to give them more money. And you know, let's even, we've talked about the Justice Department, what has to be a tremendous demoralization of the honest people in that department who have remained in place. Let's look at the military for a moment. We had Pete Higgsith, the other day, revoke the promotions to one star general of two women and two African American men.

And these are promotions that were brought up because they were recommended by the troops,

“by those who have seen the leadership qualities of those who deserve to be promoted to general”

he did not revoke those promotions or block those promotions because there was something in their records or backgrounds that would make them suspect or less worthy. He did it because they were black and female. And we know that at least one of the motivations was that he did not want to stand as did neither did Trump, at ceremonies next to a black woman. So you can only imagine not just for them, but for other women, for other people of color in the military, for others who are not in

those categories, but recognize the leadership of the ones who were just blocked in their promotions. What does that do to morale within the military? And if you are following things, if you are a soldier, in the Middle East, not sure. You don't have to be in or immediately around Iran. If you are in any of the American bases in other countries in the Gulf or in Israel, you know that he is giving aid and comfort to Russia, which is helping provide

Iran with the resources to kill them. And their commander in chief instead of saying we are not standing for this is saying go ahead, have some more oil, have some more money that you can use to help rearm Iran and to use against civilians in Ukraine. It's beyond belief. Yeah, although anybody who doesn't believe that he's sitting here helping Russia out after 10

“years of this really needs to go take a long nap, have a shower and do a rethink, okay?”

Because there's plenty of evidence to suggest that he's been doing lots of stuff for Russia since the outset, and he continues to do it. And I wrote an article myself that was in the Daily Beast where I sometimes write articles about his speech and I said, you know, although the speech was full of lies, if you don't deep enough, you found out the reason that they were lies. And that is he can't tell the truth about this. And the reason he can't tell the truth about this is that none of our

objectives have been achieved. Our national security has actually been heard. But what is, you know, also true, is that there has been one big winner. And the big winner is Russia. Sanctions have been lifted, the price of oil has gone up weapons that we're going to be directed to Ukraine have been used in Iran. There's more demand for them in the Middle East. Ukraine is going to get less of these weapons. That's going to make it easier for the Russians to

continue their illegal war against Ukraine. And at top of all of this, last night in his speech,

bright idea of the moment that when he is thinking about doing is pulling out of NATO.

For 80 years, NATO has been the foundation, or, you know, the pillar of American national security. The most important alliance in the history of the world, the reason there was not World War III. And Donald Trump is pulling out of it because he can't figure out a way to get a penny out of it.

“He's not able to scam out of it. And who does that benefit more than anybody else, Russia?”

So it's just really an astonishing turn of events. And if I told you at any other point in your career that a US president wanted to pull out of NATO, which, by the way, is illegal and there's a Congress passed a law that said nobody could do because they knew we would try, that, you know, you would say that's not it's literally it's the kind of thing where somebody should be not impeached. They should be launched through the roof of the White House, and by an injector seat,

because it is so incredibly irresponsible. You know, I watched Marco Rubio a little bit earlier today, tried to defend this idea of crapping all over NATO, and one should add that Trump either lies about or more likely just doesn't understand. NATO is a defensive treaty. It is countries pledging to come to the defense of one of their members who is facing a military attack or assault. And our allies in NATO have come to

our defense in many places, in many ways, but to see Rubio making effort to defend this, to see Rubio not step back from the other thing that Trump threatened the last night and has done before. Commit war crimes against Ukraine, excuse me, against Iran, send them back into the Stone Age, take out their electrical plants, take out their water decalinization plants, so that all of the

hundred million or more people in Iran will not have power, will not have water, war crimes,

and it, you know, may be think a little bit. I'm not sure if I have more contempt for those like Stephen Miller who believe all of this stuff, or for the people like Marco Rubio, who know better, who've abandoned every bit of whatever moral fiber they have, every position that they've held in the past, to grasp for power, kiss Trump's ass, and hope that by sticking around, maybe they'll be in the line of succession when Trump finally departs.

“They're both despicable kinds of people, and I think in the end having been through all of this,”

I have more contempt for the Marco Rubio's of the world.

So I would say at this point in the second term of Trump, you're a little negative on it.

You know, I'm glad you suck that out. It's why you value the subtlety of your mind. My, yeah, it's pretty subtle. I'm not even noticeable to many. Well, no, once again, we've covered a lot of granted. You know, the average person might listen to this and think, wait a minute, they were talking about Pambandi, then they were talking about top lunch, then they were talking about the veteran's administration, then they were talking about

partners, then they were talking about programs for kids, then they were talking about the Warren Venezuela, then they were talking about the Warren Iran, then they were talking about Russia, then they were talking about Marco Rubio, and that, you know, it seems like just a big jumbolya of subjects, what could they possibly have in common? But it seems to me that they're all directly connected, not just because Trump's involved with them, not just because

they're being mismanaged, not just because they drive cruelty, but because all of them are driven by profound corruption, and it's not a jumbolya. It's a fabric. All of these things are woven together

“by the concept of this malevolent irresponsible government, bright, you agree with me? Can we end?”

Can we end on a note of agreement? That is all so true, and so eloquently put. It's all about

I can hear in the background my dog barking, which means that we are out of time for this podcast,

“and frankly, we want to save all of you from having to listen to the dog bark. So thanks, Grizzlye,”

for barking. Thanks, Norm. Thanks, Joe, for producing this. Thanks, everybody, for listening.

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In any event, we'll be back. We'll be back with more of this Go Read Norm's article now, and we'll see you soon. Bye-bye.