My latest column for Bayou Brief is online​. I borrow a Dwight Yoakam lyric for the title, Inside The Pocket Of Clown.
The clown in question is President* Pennywise. Inside his pocket is the mendacious minority whip from Metry, Steve Scalise.
The column was written before Scalise’s bizarre “Soviet impeachment” speech. Uh, Steve, impeachment is part of our British inheritance. There was no such thing as “Soviet impeachment.” They were not big on trials after Stalin’s death.
In the post Stalin era, the procedure was to pronounce sentence then execute the accused immediately. Sometimes by firing squad but more likely than not by a gunshot to the back of the head in the courtyard of the KGB’s Lubyanka Prison. If you’d watched The Americans, you’d know that.
I also adapted Michael F’s Pennywise image for the piece:
Thanks, man.
The last word goes to Dwight Yoakam:
OK, this is not something I’m an expert on, but I thought the bullet in the back of the head (“Give him 9 grams.”) was by the NKVD under Stalin, and was done in the basement of Lubuanka on Dzerzhinsky Street. According to Solzhenitsyn, the Soviets were actually big on trials. The only thing was, the judge was likely to accept the prosecution’s charges and assume the defendant’s claims were lies. Same with the Nazis. Very big on the letter of the law, but, same as in America, not so big on Justice. I’ve long thought one of the reasons the Nazis were so meticulous about recording their crimes was becasue they thought they would be acquitted because they were following the law.
Show trials were common during the Stalin era but became rare after his death. Later leaders thought they riled up the populace and they wanted to keep things dull. They were more into numbing the public than scaring them. The bullet to the back of the head was something pre and post 1953 era had in common.