I wrote this before Judge McAfee’s decision — “appearance of impropriety”? His decision states there was no impropriety, no conflict of interests, so WTF! McAfee only serves to make my furious point below.
McAfee has Comey-fied Fani Wallis.
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Rumors, smears, knee-jerkery, lies, misogyny, upside-down-ism, racism, slavery and unadulterated stupidity: this story has it all.
What it doesn’t have is facts and logic. But that’s not entirely why I’m steaming mad.
Out of a hole in the Georgia earth came slithering an accusation of…what was it again? Conflict of interest? A, gulp, man friend? A romantic relationship? Was that it?
Before I digested the actual story, I was myself guilty of knee-jerkery — for which I am deeply sorry and deeply grateful, since it pushed me to…what do we call it? Gather facts and think about them. Yeah, that’s what we call it.
My knee-jerkery was easy-peasy, which pretty much defines knee-jerkery. When I first picked up on the oozing surface slime, I gasped, “Oh no! Not Fani!” Before I really knew anything, I found myself thinking, “Not good judgment, Fani.”
“Not good judgment” was what I later heard from others, too. But by that time, I found myself in passionate objection mode. “Not good judgment”? About what? That she was seeing, dating, involved with — whatever you want to call it — a man?
Gee whiz. “You know, she does get to have a boyfriend,” I said. I mean, unless there is some secret warped moral code in the South that says female district attorneys must take the veil during prosecutions?
But oh, wait. This is not just about “female district attorneys,” but a Black female district attorney.
Soon I quickly dispensed with the “conflict of interest” nonsense. Fani Willis has been seeing a man who was…one of Trump’s defense attorneys? No. One of Trump’s co-defendants? Uh-uh. So maybe she was dating the judge? (Who, by the way, once worked under Fani Willis in the DA’s office. So murmur that phrase again, “conflict of interest.”)
Not. She was involved with a man who was…part of her prosecution team.
Where’s the conflict?
(Seems I must remind everyone how we hard-working humans often meet our future mates. We meet where we spend most of our days, i.e., at the office. Once upon a time [and maybe even today, although I fervently hope not], businesses frowned upon romantic connections between their employees. Yet quite a number of my friends and relatives defied those employers by falling in love and marrying mates they met in their working world.)
Once I learned that the lawyers for Michael Roman — the actual indicted alleged criminal here, one of the ones who is not Fani Willis — tried to bring into court apparently illegally acquired cell phone location data to suggest that Willis’s man friend had been around Willis’s house, at night…well. Let’s all throw up, in concert.
Now look at what Wikipedia says about this indicted Michael Roman and his glorious career:
Michael Roman is an American political operative and opposition researcher.[1][2] Roman was a staffer for President Donald Trump from 2017 to 2018.[1][3] He subsequently worked for the Trump 2020 campaign as director of election day operations.[4] Prior to working for Trump, Roman ran an in-house intelligence unit for the Koch brothers.[4]
Roman has a history of making misleading and unsubstantiated claims about voter fraud.[4][5] On Election Day in 2020, he posted baseless and deceptive claims of voter fraud.[6] He delivered the list of false electors for Michigan and Wisconsin to US Representative Mike Kelly who provided them to US Senator Ron Johnson. Staff of Ron Johnson tried to get these lists to Vice President Mike Pence before the count of the electoral votes on January 6, 2021.[7]
They call it “oppo research.” I call it dirty tricks. Usually it involves distorting or inventing facts to smear an opponent. Here, though, Roman and his lawyers didn’t bother with distortion. They formed a Peeping Tom Club, peering obscenely into Fani Willis’s private life and accusing her of…having a private life — which in no way interfered with her work as prosecutor and was, therefore, none of their business.
So what were they doing?
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Here’s a short relevant tale about a specific kind of racism I’ve encountered in my own private life.
I once knew a man who had worked in Democratic presidential politics. White Jewish guy with a Harvard law degree. Was born and had lived his entire life in the suburbs, cloistered in all-white suburbs often gated and guarded by armed moonlighting cops. (It’s important to understand that, while his work was in cities, he traveled into them via car or suburban trains.)
On day we were driving through a Black neighborhood in D.C. where a few elderly men were gathered on the sidewalk outside a store, chatting. He glanced at them and muttered, “Drug dealers.” I told him bluntly that was racist and explained specifically why it was racist.
He was offended, argued he couldn’t be racist: he had worked on historic civil rights legislation when he was employed at the White House.
Yes. He said that.
Is that when Martin Luther King came up in the conversation? For me, MLK, Jr was and is a towering American visionary and a political genius. But this dude had some deep secret knowledge about MLK which, he was sure, would bring down my hero.
“He’s not such a good character,” he sneered. As evidence, he told me he’d seen the FBI secret files (compiled by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI) on MLK containing details about MLK’s sex life. Sometimes with white women.
I was appalled — but not the way this guy wanted me to be. I had had an epiphany about the underpinnings of white racism: prurience. These white guys (and some of their handmaidens) have a sick and fearful focus on the sex lives of Black people. It’s atavism, a slave-owner mentality. Black people’s freedom exists only if the white masters allow it.
And that means that their private lives can be watched through the spy holes they’ve drilled. Don’t like it? Too bad. They’ll purse their lips and mutter you’ve got a “conflict of interests.”
Stupid, irrational and utterly repulsive.