Philip Rosmarin

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

Michiko Kakutani, a luminous and deeply intelligent writer, has today published “The Death of Truth.”

While one always hopes such a report is premature, its subtitle is “Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump,” so actually it’s obviously overdue.

The book is dedicated to those whom the American president calls “the enemy of the people:” journalists everywhere working to report the news.

The real enemy of the people, the enemy of the Constitution, the enemy of democracy, is the president himself. Kakutani writes that under Trump, “truth increasingly seems to be in the eye of the beholder, facts are fungible and socially constructed, and we often feel as if we’ve been transported to an upside-down world where assumptions and alignments in place for decades have suddenly been turned inside out.”

To Trump, she says, lying comes as naturally as breathing, He says America is reeling from crime when in fact crime rates are at historic lows. He says America is beset by waves of violent immigrants when in fact immigrants are less likely to commit violent crimes than citizens born and raised here. He calls immigrants a burden to America when in fact thirty-one of seventy-eight American Nobel prizes since 2000 were won by immigrants, when in fact immigrants and the children of immigrants have founded sixty percent of the top U.S. tech companies, with a worth of almost four trillion dollars.

“Trump’s mendacity,” she writes, “is so extreme that news organizations have resorted to assembling lengthy lists of lies he’s told, insults he’s delivered, norms he’s violated, in addition to hiring squads of fact-checkers.” Because he lies so shamelessly, she says, other politicians have been emboldened to lie just as shamelessly. Republicans “blatantly lied about the effects their tax bill would have on the deficit and social safety net…when in fact it was all about giving tax breaks to corporations and the very rich.” In other words, to their donors.

There is much more evidence in her book of Trump’s murder of the truth. Of course, outside of her book, the evidence mounts daily, almost by the hour.

To stop the lies that come so naturally to him, maybe we need to stop the breath. The perfect one to take Donald Trump’s breath away may just be the prosecutor Robert Mueller, working quietly and steadfastly these many months. It certainly won’t be the cowards who call themselves members of Congress.

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

The United States, at the direction of its president, celebrates World Refugee Day today by building new cages for concentration camps for foreign brown-skinned children.

Donald Trump is an unindicted war criminal. His war is against people of color. Daily, daily he is committing crimes against humanity.

He has imprisoned thousands of children, some as young as suckling babies, and severely deprived them of the comfort and protection of their parents, in violation of fundamental rules of international law. He is fully aware of their suffering, and actively working to hide that suffering from the people of the United States by refusing the media access to the camps.

He has ordered their incarceration and separation from their parents as part of a widespread and systematic attack directed against a civilian population, refugees who fled to this country to seek protection through asylum. He knows what he is doing, because he is doing it to force support for his idiotic promise to build a wall between the United States and Mexico. He intends that the suffering of these children be so great that members of the United States Congress don’t dare refuse to give him what he wants.

These are the legal elements of Article 7 crimes against humanity of imprisonment and torture. President Trump could be indicted for these crimes, right now, by the International Criminal Court, and should be.

His actions are a betrayal, and beneath the dignity, of the Constitution he swore an oath to preserve, protect, and defend. To him that oath was obviously no more sacred than the words on a cue card of a reality show. If there are fifty ways to describe despicable, they are combined in the one word, Trump.

Having betrayed his country, as Commander in Chief he should order himself shot. I propose a national lottery such that every citizen of the United States be given an equal chance at the honor.

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

The last time any government in the United States adopted a policy to separate young children from their parents was when we sold nigger kids as slaves. We called them niggers to distinguish them from human beings.

President Trump does the same thing to protect us from the “animals” streaming across our southern border to “infest” the United States with babies he sees as future MS-13 who will grow up, rape and kill real people, and vote for Democrats.

On the nineteenth of June, 1865, thirty-seven days after the Civil War ended, Gordon Granger, a general of the Union Army with more hair on his chin than his head, rode into Galveston, Texas, to let the niggers know the government would no longer allow their children to be sold as slaves. One woman jumped on a barrel, shouted for joy, jumped off and shouted again, and jumped on and off shouting again and again.

That day is celebrated now in forty-five of our states. Only New Hampshire, Montana, Hawaii, and the twin Dakotas celebrate something else today.

Until today, I had never heard of it, and only by freak coincidence noticed that the next episode I was going to watch of Donald Glover’s FX show “Atlanta” was titled, “Juneteenth.”

Juneteenth represents justice delayed for black people in America. Justice delayed because blacks remained slaves in Texas despite the fact that Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation came on New Year’s Day 1863. Justice delayed because blacks remained slaves in Texas despite the fact that Robert Lee surrendered the South more than two months before that massively bearded Union general rode into town.

Justice delayed because freedom won black people in America one hundred fifty years of lynchings, mass incarceration, and Jim Crow culture. For many white people in America, the Civil War never ended, the slaves never really set free. And for the first time, those people feel they have a President who truly represents them.

And for the first time, they’re probably right.

So it’s fitting that on Juneteenth 2018, refugee mothers of color are being separated from their children by order of the President of the United States.

They too now have a day to celebrate.

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

Someone asked me the other day why the hell I would call what they were doing to their kid, child abuse, and warn them that if they kept doing it they would likely be charged and they would likely need someone like me to defend them. All I’m doing is spanking him, they said, spanking him with a belt, and he needs spanking, believe me.

It reminded me of someone else I used to know.

Barbara was 25 when I first met her. She was a good-looking woman, well-formed, easy to talk to. She was the mother of three. At least, she told me she was the mother of three. There were only two children left when I met her. To Barbara, there were still three.

Lisa — her second child — was born to Barbara after she worked a year at Mustang Ranch in Nevada. We’re not talking cowboys and cattle: most people probably know Mustang is a brothel, the first licensed in that interesting state. Lisa was a trick baby; her father was a man without a name or face who passed this baby on for a few bucks.

Barbara worked there two more years before moving back home.

Two years after that, four-year-old Lisa was dead, literally by Barbara’s hand.

There were periods when she spanked Lisa as hard as she could for as long as she could. Lisa wouldn’t obey; she refused at times to eat; what hurt Barbara most, the child refused to talk to her mother.

Barbara started with spankings, but began to lose more and more control. She began to beat the child. She still called the beatings spankings, but they were hard spankings on her legs and buttocks, hard enough to hurt Barbara’s hand, and long enough that Barbara was exhausted after the spanking.

The whole time, the mother would cry, cry with the child, both of them in different kinds of pain. Barbara said that her own pain was that she had never been loved, not by her parents, not by the relatives to whom she had been shuttled back and forth during a childhood of both physical but even greater emotional abuse, not by the men who gave her three children. Certainly not by the john who gave her Lisa.

And not, she felt, by Lisa. A couple of times Lisa had told her she hated her. She asked her child why. Lisa said she didn’t know. It really hurt Barbara, so she hurt Lisa back. Sometimes with her hands, sometimes with an electric cord.

She discovered there was another person who didn’t love Barbara.

Barbara.

What it really kind of boiled down to, Barbara told me, was that Lisa was the spitting image of Barbara, and she didn’t want her to grow up and be like her. She would look at her child, and see things in herself that she didn’t like. She hated herself. After a year in prison, she told me, I still do.

Barbara would spank the child to try to get the devil out of her, she said, the devil she saw in herself.

She actually saw the beatings as a reward to herself, because afterward Lisa would make up with her mother and tell her that she loved her. Barbara pleaded with the girl, why do I have to spank you to get you to talk to me, is this what I have to do to you to get you to talk to me.

Just before Christmas was the last time Lisa talked to her mother. Barbara yanked the girl out of the street after a car screeched to a stop near Lisa. Barbara shook her, hard. I just shook her, she told me, I shook her, I don’t know how long.

That night, Barbara put her little girl to bed, tucked her in. She checked on her later to find Lisa making what she called real groggy sounds. She thought it was the flu; she would call the doctor in the morning.

In the morning, about 5:30 that morning, she went into the room, turned on the light. She noticed the covers were half off Lisa. She did what she always did, put the covers back on her.

Barbara’s hand brushed her child’s chin and it was cold, only cold, and she shook Lisa to wake her and shook her and shook her and screamed for the man who was with her that night and put her mouth on Lisa’s and tried to breathe the life back into her but it was no good and Lisa, the baby she needed to love and love her back, was gone.

Police reports showed that Barbara was hysterical when they arrived, and when the child was pronounced dead Barbara passed out.

Cause of death was a bruise on the brain. Barbara was convicted of involuntary manslaughter.

She was in prison when I met her, years after Lisa was dead. She hadn’t forgotten her daughter; in a way, she told me, Lisa still lived with her. Barbara still talked to Lisa, still longed for a reply.

She was working with parents like the one who asked me the other day why the hell I would suggest that spanking a child with a belt might be charged as child abuse. Because what happened to Barbara, what happened to Lisa, is happening right now to hundred of thousands of children and parents. In all of us is the potential to lose control. That spanking we give our child: how close to, and how far away from, we are to child abuse.

How close to, and how far away from, we are to Barbara.