No I’m ignoring your piffle and histrionics about this event in particular, and war in general. — NOS4A2

Right. Ignoring the point I made and substituting irrelevant nonsense. We agree.

This was, according to the Whitehouse, a “decisive defensive action to protect U.S. personnel abroad”. So much for sending them to die. But as you know, no war has been started.

Soulemani was the commander of the Quds force, a terrorist organization. I’m sorry for your loss. — NOS4A2

Well if according to the white house the bad terrorists are dead and we should be thanking them, maybe it's time for that military parade? Maybe in lieu of war with Iran now that the terrorist is dead?

I’m just saying no one is sending them to go die, but to carry out military operations. That kind of pacifist rhetoric is false on its face. — NOS4A2

Right. You're just ignoring the point in favor of an irrelevant red-herring appeal to the fact that armies exist.

It was a missile attack against a terrorist organization threatening American soldiers and interests. Do you think that was stupid? Why? — NOS4A2

Because of who they killed. Apparently Soulemani was one of the most important people in Iran, protege to the Iranian Ayatollah, and one of the top-most field commanders...

Are you even reading my posts? I'm saying Trump may have just precipitated war with Iran by assassinating a member of their government.

But of course, that's neither here nor there right? War is ambivalent; blowing shit up is what soldiers are for.

But war literally involves sending soldiers to fight and risk dying.

Are you saying that soldiers join the army knowing they risk being sent to fight and die in a frivolous war? (obviously... What's your point?)

Is it that because leaders represent the people, it's actually a good and just thing when a soldier dies in a pointless war? That the politicians cannot be blamed?

You seem to be missing the point. Soldiers are duty bound to obey orders, it's what they're for; I'm telling your the orders themselves can be stupid, for which the commander in chief can be directly blamed.

Your point doesn't need to pertain to specific wars. You were suggesting that sending soldiers to die in wars isn't a negative thing because the soldiers voluntarily joined the army.

Is that not what you were suggesting?

It’s a volunteer army. — NOS4A2

Oh shoot... You got me there. How can we blame politicians for starting wars? Since the soldiers voluntarily joined the army, it's not the politicians' fault...

P.S: Trump is a draft dodger...

Some wise-ass once remarked that war consists of old men sending young men away to die.. (some old Roman dude IIRC)...

Some other dude once said that war seems sweet and romantic only to those who have never experienced it...

Conclusion: Old men who have never experienced war are sending young men to suffer and die; war kills the best of us, and we're then left with draft dodging cowards hypocritically waging war for frivolous and ultimately counter-national reasons.

Looks like the U.S and/or Israel just assassinated one of the top Iranian military officials, along with a handful of other Hezbollah commanders (and possibly from other groups) via airstrike at the Baghdad airport...

It's an outright declaration of war. And if Donnie did it, he certainly did not have congressional approval...

There could be very severe ramifications from this if there is widespread escalation.

Amazon seems to be doing rather well with mistreatment. — Coben

True, but only because automation has largely rendered their human assets more expendable. Without their automation tech, Amazon would need millions upon millions more employees to actually work, which would give the employees actual bargaining power.

I'm not sure what you mean. Are you saying that it's corrupt for lawyers to seek the maximums?

In much the same way, criminal prosecutors and criminal defense lawyers seek the maximums and minimums for their clients (the people via the state and the defendant). Even if a defense lawyer knows that their client is guilty and believes that they should be given a harsh sentence, that must not stop them from trying to get their client off with the lowest possible conviction or sentence. The prosecutor is going to try and get the severest conviction, and so to balance that out the defense must seek the minimum. Rather than a craps shoot of people getting the book thrown at them vs getting off scott free, what tends to happen is the prosecution argues why the defendant is guilty and deserves incarceration or punishment, and the defense argues why the defendant is either not guilty or more usually, why they should be given a low sentence due to "mitigating factors" after admitting guilt. Once guilt has been shown, the sentence is tempered by the judge according to those mitigating factors.

And did you reach this conclusion after a read of the texts at hand? Do you suport them, or reject them? — Banno

After a read of your original post and a few responses.

I just skimmed the Humbug article, which does make some interesting points: humbug as a violation of a communicative framework (a framework that is established by the context/initiation of the interaction). With this kind of distinction, we can say it is possible to lie or engage in humbuggery even when telling the truth (it is an outward deception based distinction).

I don't really take issue with the humbug/lying definitions, but "bull shit as misrepresenting one's enterprise" doesn't ring true; misrepresentation in my view belongs in an "outward deception" category. I prefer the connotation of self-delusion or inward/self-deception as a primary attribute of "bull shit", because it seems better delineated from lying or humbuggery, and because the ability to believe our own bull shit seems to be its organic progenitor.

Self-deception is brushed aside in the Humbug article as an impossibility, and yet I think we would all agree that such a thing (or something approximately similar to such a thing) does occur. I vaguely recall a thread about it in the past. My own formulation of self-deception is something like "rationalization"; if we want to believe something we can come to believe it through any number of unreasonable ways. Self-deception by repetition, conformation bias, and fallacious appeals (the undetected use of fallacy in one's own reasoning) are several ways I think it occurs.

The impossibility argument is underpinned by the following conceptions: "Either you know that you believe what you say or else you don't. And in either case you can't be mistaken. — Humbug article

Unless people either lack confidence in their beliefs (implying they are half or malformed), or are figuring it out as they go along, driven by their own irrational confidence.

Corporations only care about the bottom line, which is why extracting justice from them in the form of damages (cash), is an effective deterrent against such torts.

But yes, I would do the best job I could for my clients and seek the maximum; such is how the adversarial legal systems work, and their lawyers would be seeking to pay nothing, or even to counter-sue for legal fees.

This is a feature of the legal system though, not a bug.

It all goes back to this foolish enlightenment idea that giving all sides a fair chance to make their strongest case (in what is essentially a debate) is the best way to allow the truth to surface.

I think lying and bullshitting are on two separate spectra entirely (except maybe on the spectrum of self-deception vs intentional deception of others, if such a spectrum exists).

Lying has to do with misrepresenting belief (rather than truth), but bullshitting has to do with inward and outward irrational or baseless persuasion (un-truthy reasoning/lack of evidence).

I don't think we understand that we are bullshitting or spewing humbug when we are actually doing it, but we do understand when we are outright lying. So there's one plausible demarcation point: awareness.

But that's not too hard to hide from onlookers. I wonder how the French court went about weighing the evidence. — frank

I remember reading a quote that I believe was used as evidence to show intent. it went something like "Whether by the window or the door, I'll get them out by any means necessary". Mens Rea (guilty mind) is notoriously difficult to prove in many situations, but not when we have a confession establishing it. Given the severity of the harm that resulted, and the clear evidence of intent, it would actually be a pretty strong case in a civil suit. The defense would likely try to argue that their clients could not have reasonably known that their actions would result in suicides, but that defense would be assailable in many ways (namely the fact that over 30 employees killed themselves as a result (showing that severe distress is a likely ramification of their actions, and therefore reasonably foreseeable), and that even though the execs did not intend suicides, they did intend the psychological harm that precipitated them, which is the basis of the tort in question (emotional/mental distress, also called tort of outrage I believe)), and subsequently leaves them liable for the ensuing damages, including the deaths (damages being distinct from criminal guilt that is established in criminal judicial proceedings).

But when the sand-man intentionally tries to over-sand and damage some oysters into retreat to save on dismissal costs or other obstacles, then we have a harmful sand-man who is breaching the ideal that we should seek to support and bring out the best in each-other.

These execs seem to have done the exact opposite. They sought to stress and debilitate their employees in order to bring out the worst in them.

It's that malice of intent, and the harm that resulted, that generates the strongest ethical and legal issue.

I did read that they essentially terrorized the employees by moving them around into new roles they were unsuited for, and setting unrealistic productivity objectives. In some situations, there would be no plausible case against the employer because they can claim it is a part of their management strategy, but apparently there is evidence showing that they took those actions specifically to distress their employees into quitting.

The idea of a social contract is pretty useful here (I think some conceptions of tort law frame it as a formalized social contract). Because we're inexorably forced into living and working together, we have to erect limitations against harmful and deceptive practices that spread harm, (lest we all burn in a fireball of our own greed, envy, and retribution). Corporations and business entities should not be exempt from those necessary limitations (ethically speaking), lest we degenerate into being wholly owned by them with the gold, and without scruples.

I think you just made that up. — frank

They're called occupational safety and health administration laws (OSHA standards)

https://employment.findlaw.com/workplace-safety/workplace-safety-osha-and-osh-act-overview.html

You are aware that there are laws regulating what employers can and cannot do to their employees right?

I'd call that a basic duty of care. Luckily, it usually tends to gel well with the profit motive as workplace suicides tend to be bad for business. — Baden

"Duty of care" certainly applies in the employer-employee relationship. However, in tort law, duty of care pertains to "negligence" suits, but the actions of the execs were intentional. Breach of duty of care is when someone fails to do the reasonable minimum due to negligence, but an intentional tort (the intentional and unjustified causing of harm to another) is something else entirely (harsher punishments in many cases, up to and including punitive damages). Intentional torts require no breach of duty of care because we all have the implicit duty not to intentionally take actions that are reasonably likely to cause harm to others (they're harder to prove though,because we demonstrate intent instead of duty of care and a breach thereof (negligence).

That said, duty of care has probably been breached...

@frank with regard to tort law, see the above (they're guilty of intentional torts, and I expect the families/estates of the victims to sue for damages). If I was litigating for a plaintiff in a civil suit against the execs (not a lawyer, so that would be funny...), I would show the intentional tort of inflicting emotional/mental distress (and the harm caused being suicides), and seek extraordinary punitive damages.

With regard to criminal law, they were already sentenced right? "Moral harassment?" (these kinds of laws vary from state to state and nation to nation). Depending on what the execs actually did (when and how) the company could be liable for an unsafe work environment (OSHA laws), or the individuals could be found guilty of criminal harassment of some kind.

Betrayal of what exactly? — frank

It's a betrayal of the employer-employee relationship/contract.

When someone agrees to work for a company, there is an unspoken assumption that the employer won't begin harassing the new employee to death the moment it becomes financially beneficial to do so.

P.S: in terms of laws, there are all kinds of harassment statutes, a number of which specifically apply to working conditions and treatment of employees. That's what makes it criminal.

The primary targets were probably older retired-in-place types. Young workers cost less and they work harder.

A company that does that has a poor relationship with the community. — frank

Are you suggesting that the market should sort this out?

What if some disgruntled employees harassed the execs to the point that one of them commits suicide?

I'm pretty sure this is just a case of a corporation trying to steal money from people who have no way to fight back. If they want retired-in-place old folks out the door, then they need to pay the severance fees (or to take the stock hit from issuing layoffs, or whatever the fiscal reason for this was).

What the execs did was a criminal betrayal, and it should be corrected by both market forces AND punitive measures (although it looks like they got relative wrist slaps).

I only glanced at an article about this so i might be wrong, but didn't orange execs intentionally try to make people's lives and working conditions miserable with the specific intention of having them quit?

They were trying to speed up employee departures (probably because firing or laying off costs more money).

So should companies be allowed to harass their employees into quitting in order to save on severance fees?

Your attempt to directly analogize a judicial proceeding with an impeachment fails on many levels. The President has been accused vaguely of "high crimes and misdemeanors" that the House has itemized as "abuse of power" and "obstruction." There are no specific elements that must be proved for those crimes and they were created by the House ex post facto. That is the way impeachment is done, legally and constitutionally, but in a real judicial hearing it would be fundamentally unfair. There would also be a clear burden of proof (beyond a reasonable doubt), but here none is specified, a serious problem for an accused. There are also no rules of evidence, meaning hearsay, character attacks and the like might be admissible, as might be consideration of evidence outside the proceeding. — Hanover

So let me get this straight:

The founders gave the senate the power of "impeachment", the most critical and sensitive type of judicial proceedings in the land, which ought to be carried out with the highest possible degree of care and and impartiality (because it affects the welfare of everyone, and the health of the nation), because they expected them to just hold mock trials based on partisan whim?

This is, by its nature, a free for all dependent upon the subjective whims of the Senate, very doubtfully reviewable by the courts. — Hanover

So when the trial begins, the senators are going to swear an oath to uphold their subjective whims?

You just really don't fully understand the judicial process. How does this case get to the Court? Who has standing to bring it? Someone is going to sue a Senator for failing to exercise his discretion in what they believe required (under what law?) and they're going to do what? File for equitable relief (a writ of mandamus) or they're going to ask for money damages? Are you moving for contempt? You think a judge can disqualify a Senator? You just don't realize how little sense you're making. — Hanover

They could always be impeached for it (which would also happen in the senate... See the problem of partisanship being applied to impeachment?) Senatorial whims have nothing to do with it. They're oath bound to uphold the law... Impeachment is the primary tool we have for dealing with representatives who violate the law, subvert the constitution, or betray the the people...

:up:

But I much prefer a goold old fashioned pants-yank :)

Let the whole world see their resplendent new robes...

What Mitch said is definitely "unconsitutitional" (in that it controverts the constitution in rhetoric), but whether or not that speech could be criminal is shiftier than Schiff. (essentially he has a right to his opinions, and to voice them freely). His actions during the trial, and what can be proven about his actions pertaining to the trial, and what the consequences could theoretically be for such behavior in an impeachment trial, are matters yet to unfold and to be decided by a Supreme Court review (likely). Problematically, he likely will not be telecasting his collusion with Trump's defense team, so we won't be able to prove a lick of it (and again, there are not formalized laws dealing with such behavior in a senate-run trial to begin with, so it all refers back to what the Supreme Court might say about it).

I'm thankful for the honesty that people are showing (as well as for their civility).

I can just hardly restrain my grin when, at this stage, Republicans will still make an appeal to the constitution, let alone the idea of separation of powers, to argue that impeachment is a useless partisan tool.

Is it mere shortsightedness? Self service?

Or is it just the classic miasma of emotional dogma?

The oath to take the public office they preside over includes upholding the Constitution... which most certainly includes performing their role as judge regarding the guilt/innocence of the accused based upon the facts and testimony brought into evidence... — creativesoul

But it's the Senator's role to interpret and apply the constitution during an impeachment trial. If what @Hanover suggests is true, then the Senate essentially has the authority to do whatever they want, where the only recourse is voting them out (even if they gerrymander or seek to rig elections in their favor apparently). If the senate gets to decide to any degree what the constitution means or when it should be ignored, then yes, that's fucked. Another level of irony given it's the republicans who are obsessed with appealing to founder's intentions in constitutional interpretation...

Dereliction of one's solemnly sworn duty... — creativesoul

Technically there is no actual formal "jurors oath" as far as I know (or at least no defined penalties). I think in a typical civil, state or federal case, it would be obstructing the chamber (obstructing its justice). Contempt or Obstruction maybe, but probably not perjury. That said, impeachment trials are unicorns, so this is probably something the Supreme Court would get to decide.

The founders gave impeachment trial power exclusively to the senate because they assumed the upper house would be filled with the most intelligent, dedicated, and virtuous individuals from society, who would therefore be the best educated,equipped, and positioned to take the issue of impeachment seriously.

That's called "situational irony"...

You sort of made up the thing about Senators taking an oath to be impartial jurors. They represent those who elected them. — Hanover

Article 1, section 3, clause 6:

The Senate shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments. When sitting for that Purpose, they shall be on Oath or Affirmation. When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside: And no Person shall be convicted without the Concurrence of two thirds of the Members present.

When sitting for an impeachment trial, the senators shall be on oath or affirmation... The senators are essentially judge and jury, but they also aren't meant to decide what is and is not an impeachable offense (for they are already detailed in the constitution, and it's not the senate's prerogative to set precedent in constitutional law, or to ignore it's stipulations (the constitution is modified by state ratification, and interpreted by the Supreme Court.)). Because the senate is the sole authority in impeachment trials, I'm not sure if the Supreme court would or could actually rule on what is or is not an impeachable offense, but that certainly doesn't mean that senators get to cherry pick absolutely any kind of interpretation they wish( at least that's not the intent outlined in the constitution).

For example, here are the oaths that the senators agreed to for the Clinton trial:

"Do you solemnly swear that in all things appertaining to the trial of the impeachment of William Jefferson Clinton, President of the united states, not pending, you will do impartial justice according to the Constitution and laws, so help you God?"

In other words, if it is abundantly clear that the president abused his powers, but the senate decides to nullify his guilt by acquitting him anyway, then they will have violated such an oath, and even without swearing any oath or affirming any intentions, will have undermined the constitution. Clause 6 is meant to make it clear that the judicial process that is impeachment demands impartiality. Impeachment is not a political tool, despite the deepest hypocritical desires of the Republican bloc.

the separation if powers — Hanover

Abuse of power is what got us here in the first place. You can call it a "political process" like Mitch McConnell et al., but in reality when he turns around and says "I'm not an impartial juror, and I will take cues from the president's defense lawyers", it unambiguously undermines the whole separation of powers line that republicans love to flout.

If the lower house found that the president abused power and obstructed congress(and once they transmit the articles), is the senate not obligated to orchestrate a fair judicial process to get to the bottom of it?

So when Mitch says he is going to take a steaming shit on the congress by biasing the judicial process in the senate, it's actually a constitutional crisis for which there is neither precedent nor obvious solution.

I wonder... Is it a crime to violate an oath to be an impartial juror in an impeachment trial?

Think about what "most free democracy" means and you'll see why democracy doesn't work. — Metaphysician Undercover

I see why it means: democracy is not perfect, but I'm not sure why you're saying it doesn't work...

Even though Trump will probably not be impeached by the senate (there is yet a chance depending on what else comes out in the trial), the fact that congress has impeached the president (document transmission technicalities not withstanding) has been a very important thing for the future of democracy.

I know how that sounds, but the rest of the world has ostensibly been watching Trump get away with apparently criminal acts, and since America is supposed to the best and baddest and most free democracy around, it sends the message that democracy doesn't work. America still sets global precedent, and even though many Americans care more about short term expediency than highfalutin ideals, it's the highfalutin ideals (if sound) that give us long-term civil stability (both as nations and as a global community of nations).

Even with the lower house's impeachment, it is still a strong reprimand that will give future presidents pause. If every time a president commits impeachable acts we all say "but if we try to impeach then they will just get a boost in the next election cycle" then no president will ever be impeached unless the upper and lower houses have a majority against the president's party, and America will effectively become a two party dictatorship where both sides take turns jerking the wheel to spite the chassis...

It's like saying arithmetic developed by gradual steps. That's not the case. Either you have it or you don't. You don't go from 1 to the concept of infinity in a step-by-step manner. — Xtrix

Actually, yes we did...

Primitive number systems are very basic. They go something like "One, Two, Three, more than three, more than all my fingers and toes". Depending on our need for precision and high quantity arithmetic, it's not necessarily obvious at all, from the conceptual systems we use to perform it, that all the numbers between one and infinity exist..

Mathematics has evolved relatively slowly, as have our number systems. Children aren't born with inherent comprehension of arithmetic, and if we did not teach them our number system and the operations associated with it, they would likely have very limited capacity to perform arithmetic.

But given evidence for a burst in creativity a couple hundred thousand years or so ago, and given how small a time frame that really is, it's hard to believe we gradually acquired our current capacity for language. To suggest it's "still occurring to this day" is absurd. I suppose our capacity for arithmetic is also evolving? — Xtrix

There's no creativity burst 100k years ago that I'm aware of...

But yes, we're still evolving, and yes, if there are selection forces favoring math or language skills, then the underlying genetic markers which yield those inherent capacities are still being optimized by the exploratory genetic algorithm that is sexual reproduction.

Given how much more important language and maths have suddenly become in our society, we really ought to expect that this strong change in selective forces is going to have ramifications on our genetic-adaptive trajectory in the near future. I could go into a lot more detail about neuro-diversity, and why it's an important adaptive component, but the fact that we're still evolving (including our mental faculties) is strictly factual.

Round the office, implodes again; that's the Satyr's play!
Faster faster; tremendous: best!~

There's no longer any knowing,
Which direction we are going.

There's no knowing why they're crowing,
Or which way the boons are flowing.

Is it warming? Is it snowing?
Are more hurricanes a-blowing?

Not a feck of light is showing.
Shall we assume the dangers must not be growing?

Are the circus lights just a-glowing?
Or is the grisly she-reaper mowing?

Yes, the danger must be growing,
For the crowers keep on crowing.

And they're certainly not showing
Any signs that they are slowing...

Cleared of conspiracy, but what of obstruction?

The whole impeachment thing is a political process. It's simply not an objective fact finding mission. You have partisan people pushing forth political agendas, and the greatest nonsense is the talking point of the Dems where they say their objective is to protect the holy Constitution, a thing greater than themselves that transcends all party affiliation. No one on the right takes it seriously. It's seen a a coup. — Hanover

If it's just politics, - no justice, just theater -, why are republicans crying out for the show to be stopped now? If it's all just politics, the new game, same as the old game, then aren't republicans just being sore and hypocritical losers?

When Mitch et al. blocked Obama's supreme court appointment, he was just doing politics: resisting a democratically elected president in a purely partisan agenda... That's what the impeachment trial is right? So why should democrats lose a single wink over spilled republican milk?

I disagree. In fact, it's very hard to see how the capacity for language -- a digital infinite system -- could have evolved slowly. You don't go from one word to an infinite number of words in gradual steps. The language capacity evolved through some sort of rewiring of the brain, no doubt, but it's more likely this happened in an individual 200,000 or so years ago. — Xtrix

What are you basing this on?

Firstly, our capacity for language is not infinite. The number of possible sequences of sounds we can make is infinite, but we cannot sounds indefinitely. We acquire shared language at a limited rate, and we have a limited capacity to store information pertaining to language (the idea-symbol relationships encoded in the brain).

Secondly, words and language as we know them aren't the only kind of communication. As evolving social animals, our distant ancestors (the tree of hominids we're related to, and beyond) have been refining language capacity for eons. The cortical language centers of the brain don't need auditory information to do language processing, it's just a quicker and easier way to make more language signs than hand movements. This is why deaf people have sign languages that have nothing to do with sound or spoken words whatsoever (their brains repurpose the unused cortical space to do more visual processing (along with other sensory data).

Canines also have language processing centers in their brains; they're less powerful versions of us, and they cannot do vocalizations like us, but if they could you would be surprised how coherent they can be.



We've been eugenically selecting dogs that are able to understand us (at least to some extent), so it's not surprising that they're capable of performing basic feats of language.

You may want to conclude that if we can set dogs down the vocal language road in just a few thousand years of artificial selection, this is evidence of the sudden emergence of communication skills in our ancestral homonids, but we could also interpret this as evidence that the basic language and communication structures are far more ancient (and have been cooking for far longer) than Chomsky wants to reckon.

A sudden "re-wiring of the brain in an individual" is incredibly fantastical. It's entirely possible that a small adaptation which enhanced language capacity snowballed as the mutation spread and refined, but this optimization would be gradual (and is in fact still occurring to this day). Some people are born with cognitive profiles that are better or worse at language processing (for example, Autism has been linked with topological brain differences, and plausibly corresponding differences in cognitive profile, such as the trend of increased spatial reasoning capacity, and reduced social and linguistic capacities).

There is no miraculous infinite language capacity, just a varying spectra of complex learning structures, all of which take ages to emerge, optimize, and evolve. The emergence of dynamic vocal chords probably played a role in the rapid optimization of preexisting communication faculties (toward,for example, increased vocabulary capacity), but this too would have occurred gradually.

Language is a sign of intelligence... Literally....

Evolutionary endowed language capacities evolved very slowly. (Chomsky can offer no real insights there...)...

Languages themselves (accumulated and shared sets of signs) evolve less slowly, and can in fact emerge relatively rapidly (in the order of a single generation; see: creoles and twin-speak).

Language capacity and use in an individual is what develops rapidly... Like snowballs gathering more snow, more language lets you accumulate more language more quickly, and there is a very lengthy learning curve before useful returns start to diminish.

I'm not sure what Chomsky meant, but I'm sure he didn't mean that ancestral hominids suddenly started using their words.

The only one bending legal interpretations are the ones impeaching a president based on fantasy. — NOS4A2

Does repeating the word fantasy enact some kind of magical incantation?

This go-around started with a whistle-blower report, and a subsequent "transcript" which shows sufficient evidence of a high crime. (it's not a fantasy that the whistle-blower report/"transcript" is evidence, nor is it fantasy that asking a foreign government to investigate political rivals is a high crime).

You're pissing in our ears and telling us it's rain.

You don't think withholding military aid to allies in exchange for investigations into political rivals is impeachable?

You don't think we've seen seriously compelling evidence that Trump withheld military aid to Ukraine in exchange for public promises to investigate Trump's domestic political rivals?

The preponderance of the evidence strongly suggests Trump is guilty of that crime. Now we need a court of law to confirm or acquit that guilt.

I don't think the founders envisioned a system where either party takes turns filling every major office with party-loyal sycophants who are willing to bend legal interpretations or outright lie in the service (or the attack) of the high-office.

Where has all the dignity gone?