Louisiana Voice

Over the past four years, President Trump’s policies and investments in science and technology ensure America stands ready to solve today’s most pressing challenges and that our workforce is prepared for tomorrow’s innovations. For years to come, these achievements will guarantee the United States remains the world’s leader in research, discovery and the advancement of industries that will shape our future.”

—Ivanka Trump, writing in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Report, which listed Trump’s accomplishments, including “ending the Covid-19 pandemic.” [Oh, well then…]

It is part of the price of leadership of this great and free nation to be the target of clever satirists. You have given the gift of laughter to our people. May we never grow so somber or self-important that we fail to appreciate the humor in our lives.”

—Lyndon Johnson, in a letter to the Smothers Brothers after being parodied by them on numerous occasions. [Say what you want about LBJ – he was crude, his Vietnam War was a disaster – he showed more class with that one quote than Trump could ever hope to show in a lifetime.]

The reason we were able to do what we did in 2016, 2018 and 2020 is because we had the majority.”

—Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. [And yet, that same majority was unable – or unwilling – to provide relief to those who have lost jobs because of the coronavirus. Says something about you, Mitch.]

The Republican majority is lighting its credibility on fire. … The next time the American people give Democrats a majority in this chamber, you will have forfeited the right to tell us how to run that majority.”

—Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, on how the worm can turn should the Democrats gain control of the Senate next week. [Republicans have demonstrated that when they are the majority, they forget the meaning of compromise.]

In a significant shift since 2000, the GOP has taken to demonizing and encouraging violence against its opponents, adopting attitudes and tactics comparable to ruling nationalist parties in Hungary, India, Poland and Turkey.”

—Conclusion of a new study conducted by the V-Dem Institute of the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, as reported in The Guardian.

We fear that Attorney General Barr intends to use the DOJ’s vast law enforcement powers to undermine our most fundamental democratic value: free and fair elections. Given Attorney General Barr’s demonstrated willingness to use the Department to help President Trump politically, the media and the public should view any election-related activity by the DOJ—including any announcement or findings related to the Durham investigation—with appropriate skepticism.”

—Letter signed by more than 1,000 former Justice Department employees worried about possible election day interference by the Trump administration.

NOT A TRUMP QUOTE, but it should be (with apologies to Cavin & Hobbes):

“This one’s tricky. You have to use imaginary numbers, like eleventeen …”

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Judge Randall Bethancourt just can’t seem to help popping up in news reports on the 32^nd Judicial District Court in Terrebonne Parish. And that’s not necessarily good.

First, there was that embarrassing STORY  three years ago when Bethancourt signed an illegal search warrant over a blog post critical of then-Sheriff Jerry Larpenter in which the blogger’s home was raided by the sheriff’s department and all the computers in the household – including those of the blogger’s children – were confiscated.

It took a federal judge about a nanosecond to dress Bethancourt and Larpenter down and to give them a verbal lesson on the First Amendment that guarantees freedom of speech. The blogger’s resulting lawsuit cost Larpenter’s office about a quarter of a million dollars to settle.

Now, a Terrebonne Parish attorney who is challenging Bethancourt’s reelection bid in next Tuesday’s election is claiming that Parish President Gordon Dove and others are paying voters up to $150 to vote for Bethancourt, up substantially from the $5 fee paid voters back in the days of Earl Long.

Dove, of course, denies the allegations and defies the alligators but the one-time chairman of the House Committee on Natural Resources and Environment has had his own problems with the law in the past. His Dual Trucking Co. was CITED  by the Montana Department of Environmental Equality for dumping oilfield radioactive waste from the nearby Bakken Oilfield back in 2014. (You may have seen the irony of the chairman of the House Committee on Natural Resources and Environment being cited for dumping radioactive waste.)

That wasn’t the only incident, though. Vacco Marine, Inc., a company owned by Dove, was the subject of several investigations, negative reports, citations, and compliance orders by and from the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) over a period of several years, records show.

Also in 2014, while presiding over a meeting of the Natural Resources Committee, he joined 12 other members in passing an amendment to SB 469 that made the prohibition against suing oil companies for damages to the state’s wetlands and marshes retroactive.

So much for looking out for the environment.

But back to Bethancourt.

His honor has found himself embroiled in a couple of volatile controversies – besides the vote-buying claim – heading into next Tuesday’s election. Neither has any direct link to the election but either or both could figure in the outcome.

One is a bitter dispute between grandparents and son over the grandparents’ visitation rights to their grandson, a dispute that has gone into litigation in which resulting legal fees and fines have reportedly bankrupted the child’s parents. Caught in the middle is a seven-year-old child who has been the victim of this tug of war for four years now with no end in sight.

The other involves accusations that Bethancourt falsified court records in a separate case to show that a defendant was brought before a magistrate after his arrest when he was not.

Without more intimate familiarization with the details of the cases and charges of vote-buying, it’s impossible to provide a full-blown, detailed account of events in the 32^nd JDC. But knowing what we do know about Larpenter, Gordon Dove, and Bethancourt’s willingness to sign that illegal search warrant back in 2017 (and the resultant settlement by Larpenter with the subject of that raid), suffice it to say Terrebonne Parish is a unique parish, politically speaking, where elected officials have long operated as a law unto themselves and where just about anything goes.

Like storms out on the Gulf, corrupt politicians were accepted as a fact of life in Louisiana 75 years ago and little has changed in Terrebonne in the ensuing decades.

And people generally deserve the kind of government they elect.

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“[T]hese are people that believe ‘Lord of the Rings’ is a documentary. And the fact that we’re trying to appeal to them is just ridiculous. [I]f we’re looking at misinformation to pander to a subset of voters, I think we’ve lost our way.”

—U.S. Rep. Denver Riggleman (R-VA), slamming members of his own party who buy into the conspiracy theories promoted by QAanon.

Amy Coney Barrett, confirmed. Happy Birthday, Hillary Clinton!

—Tweet from the House Judiciary Republicans following confirmation of Barrett to the Supreme Court. [Nothing quite like a sore winner.]

All this focus on Clinton has me concerned she won’t win the 2020 election. Smart of the GOP to troll her childishly about the new justice in a stolen seat who’s going to take our health insurance away during a deadly pandemic. It’s almost as good as their 2018 election strategy.

—Tweet from Walter Shaub.

Imagine an entire political party having the emotional intelligence of a petty six-year-old who didn’t get invited to a birthday party – oh, wait, I didn’t have to imagine.

—Tweet by Amanda Webster.

As someone who was a Republican when it was a principles-based party, I am repulsed by its current juvenilism. Why don’t you all grow up?

—Tweet by Steve Metz.

“One thing we’ve seen in a lot of the Black community, which is mostly Democrat, is that President Trump’s policies are the policies that can help people break out of the problems that they’re complaining about. But he can’t want them to be successful more than they want to be successful.”

—Jared Kushner, aka Ken Doll, on Fox & Friends. [Nothing like invoking a time-worn stereotype to reap votes for the president who “has done more for Blacks than any president except (maybe) Lincoln” and who is “the least racist person in the room.”]

The president should be focused on the economy and moving the country forward and making sure his team working on the vaccine has every asset possible. The president has a tendency to always make it about him, and this is one story where he should let others take the spotlight.”

—Republican fundraiser Dan Eberhart.

NOT A TRUMP QUOTE, but it should be (with apologies to Cavin & Hobbes):

“I’m not dumb. I just have a command of thoroughly wrong information.”

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Yes, Joe Biden has what appears to be a comfortable 9-point lead over Donald Trump in national polls going into the final week of the 2020 campaign.

And yes, Joe Biden retains a fairly consistent lead in the so-called swing states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona, and North Carolina.

And yes, some of the braver (or more reckless) prognosticators even give him a slight edge in places like Texas, Florida and Ohio and a fighting chance in states like Georgia and Colorado.

And granted, early voting appears to be astonishingly top-heavy with Democrat voters, which should certainly be good news for Biden.

One hopelessly optimistic observer even gives a whopping landslide, or tsunami advantage in electoral votes of 411 to 127 (270 are needed to win) to Biden.

Biden, meanwhile, keeps urging his supporters to think like they’re behind and needing votes. He’s pushing for a groundswell of support to win in such a way that Trump can only slink away into oblivion and console himself on Twitter.

To become overconfident at this point could be a critical mistake of monumental proportions.

For a lesson of what can happen in the dark corners on election night, one need only look to the 2002 gubernatorial contest in Alabama.

Don Siegelman was the popular Democratic governor with an eye on seeking the Democratic nomination for president in a few years. He had been elected to all four of the top statewide offices – secretary of state, attorney general, lieutenant governor, and governor. After 26 years in state government, there was nowhere for him to go but up.

But then the unspeakable happened. An unspeakable named Karl Rove. Yep, that Karl Rove, the same one who helped to minimize the vote in Democratic areas of Florida in 2000, keeping thousands of people from voting (sound familiar?) and who engineered an Ohio victory for George W. Bush in 2004 when it appeared that W was on the ropes in his own reelection bid.

Siegelman led in all the polls against U.S. Rep. Bob Riley, whose biggest claim to fame was his abysmal attendance record in Congress and his failure to pay taxes for several years (does that sound familiar?).

W came to Alabama twice, once raising more than $4 million for Riley. Some of that $4 million was suspected to have come from Jack Abramoff’s Indian casino client, the Mississippi Choctaw Indians.

Be that as it may, on election night, Riley refused to concede, proclaiming the results from Baldwin County (located on the eastern side of Mobile Bay) were not in yet.

When those results were finally reported, Riley polled 31,052 votes to Siegelman’s 19,070 but with the statewide lead Siegelman already had, the networks called the race for the governor.

At 4 a.m., Siegelman, who had gone to bed victorious, was awakened by an urgent call for him to come to his office because “they’re trying to steal the election.”

Someone had changed the Baldwin County totals after the courthouse closed and 6,000 votes for Siegelman had somehow found their way into the Riley column. It was explained as a “computer glitch,” a glitch that occurred, incredibly, in only one precinct.

But it was enough to propel Riley into the governor’s office in a classic case of a stolen election. Siegelman had few options, what with a Republican State Supreme Court, a Republican attorney general, Republican federal judges hand-picked by Rove and appointed by W, and Alabama’s Republican U.S. senators (again…sound familiar?).

Fast forward to the 2020 presidential election. We have a Democrat who is leading in all the polls and who is favored to win. But we have a Republican Senate, a Republican Supreme Court and a Republican attorney general every bit as devious, if not as skilled and subtle, as Karl Rove.

There’s more to the Siegelman story, of course. He tried a comeback four years later but thanks to Rove and a highly partisan Republican U.S. attorney, he was instead indicted tried and convicted of taking bribes even though he never accepted for his own benefit a penny of the money raised to support a state lottery designed to pay college tuition for every Alabama kid who wanted to attend an Alabama college or university.

Siegelman spent most of his federal prison term at the federal minimum-security prison in Oakdale, Louisiana, where he became friends with another prisoner of some renown – Edwin Edwards, four-time governor of Louisiana.

Siegelman has written a book about how the 2002 election was stolen from him by Rove and about his trial before a judge he had investigated while attorney general – a judge later forced from the bench after beating the hell out of his wife.

The book, while accurate by all accounts, might seem somewhat self-serving to some who might also think it could have had more impact had it been written by someone who was unbiased and detached from the emotion-packed events of the inner workings of the Alabama political machinations.

But then, someone not so involved in the day-to-day details of those tumultuous events could never have done the story justice.

Still, the book, Stealing Our Democracy: How the Political Assassination of a Governor Threatens Our Nation, is an eye-opener into the realities of American politics and as such, is an important work that should be required reading for all political science majors everywhere, not just in Alabama.

Alabama and the 2002 gubernatorial election could well be a microcosm for the 2020 U.S. presidential campaign and election and Siegelman’s book is an extraordinary primer for what we’re now going through as a nation.

And whatever you do, don’t take your eyes off William Barr.

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Donald — I appreciate the free publicity for Borat! I admit, I don’t find you funny either. But yet the whole world laughs at you. I’m always looking for people to play racist buffoons, and you’ll need a job after Jan. 20. Let’s talk!”

—Sacha Baron Cohen, responding to Donald Trump’s criticism of his film “Borat 2.”

Gulett’s contributions have not been accepted by oversight; they were brought to the attention of the Trump campaign as long ago as July 2018.”

—Tom Sykes, writing for The Daily Beast, Aug. 31, 2020, about contributions to Donald Trump’s campaign by Converse, Louisiana (Sabine Parish) Aryan Nations advocate Morris Gulett, self-described leader of the Church of Jesus Christ Christian.

Nothing has changed about our plans. I still intend to build a church building and the World Headquarters for Aryan Nations WILL continue to be right here in Louisiana. This is my home. I am here to stay till death do I part from this earth. I will not be swayed from my job as the Senior Pastor of the Church of Jesus Christ Christian or the World Leader of Aryan Nations. And I or Aryan Nations will not be run off or discouraged by the Jews, Negros, Queers, Mestizos or Mulattoes of the diversity cult. As I said of this once great Christian Republic in the interview, diversity is NOT our greatest strength, but our greatest weakness. Diversity is what will be the demise and total destruction of this nation and the chief purveyors of tolerance, diversity and multiculturalism know that too.”

—Email from white supremacist Trump supporter Morris Gulett, to KSLA-TV News, Shreveport, Feb. 20, 2012.

That’s the whole point of Q. It puts concepts out there, but it’s also about ‘do your own research ’cause I’m too lazy to tell you what to think.’ Though they pretend to care about children, in reality, QAnon doesn’t. They just care about portraying a specific group as part of this child-trafficking ring.”

—Marc André Argentino, who has studied QAnon extensively, speaking of its vast, unfounded conspiracy theories, including one that says Joe Biden is a pedophile.

I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”

—Donald Trump, speaking about Jeffery Epstein in 2002, the man he now says he barely knew.

NOT A TRUMP QUOTE, but it should be (with apologies to Cavin & Hobbes):

Trump: I’ll bet you a quarter I’m smarter than you.

Joe Biden: You’re on. Maybe you’d like to increase the wager?

Trump: Yeah. Let’s double it and make it 35 cents.

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