The question is not what he did: he tried to overthrow the 2020 presidential election by conceiving the fake elector scheme and participating in the conspiracy. It isn’t whether he did it: he admitted as much in the state of Georgia when he pleaded guilty to conspiracy to file false documents, a felony.
I must be one of the earliest victims of TDS. I actually have despised him and took action against him in June of 2016. I had heard at my American Legion Post that the AL was going to endorse him.
So, I wrote a letter to the AL National Commander asking that the AL not do that (and they didn't).
Here is the unedited letter I wrote:
7/29/16
Dear Commander Barnett,
I am hoping that the AL does not endorse Donald Trump. I am presently a member of Post 78, Humboldt AZ.
As a Vietnam vet (Navy LT, Attack Squadron 52 and Army Advisory Team 86, SVN), I would be disgusted if the AL backed Draft-Dodger Trump---but that is just one of many reasons.
The AL should never back any candidate that not only favors TORTURE, but wishes to do more of it---and Trump has said this more than once. I saw that torture does not work in SVN; mostly, it damages the men doing it. I stopped it whenever I saw it. Furthermore, it deeply endangers our men who get captured. Yet, just yesterday, Trump said that the Geneva Convention “is out of date.”
Any educated appraisal of Trump’s behavior would come to the conclusion that, at the very least, Trump is mentally ill.
To repeat, I am hoping that the AL does not endorse Donald Trump. I really would not want to be a part of any organization which backs Trump.
My kind nudged him out in the early 90s and ever since then has been on a warpath against us.
The vid goes to my consistent critique of the press who had full access to Trump's shenanigans over the decades yet decided in 2015 how much fun it would be to frame the election was President/CinC as a [faux] billionaire playbpy business man OUTSIDER w/ the consummate INSIDER, a woman who served her state, country, and gender for 4 decades.
Then James Comey decided to go OUTSIDE his authority and smear HRC with his extra-judical rant and finished if off in late Oct with jeez America, everyone knows it takes weeks to search an electronic email file, not <minute like the rest of us.
One must think of the Republican Party as a cult. It is definitely no longer a political party. Like Jim Jones, if Trump said take poison for the good of the Party, there would be people who would gladly do it. Remember those people taking bleach after Trump suggested it? These are cult members. It is a sickness. A deep, deep sickness taken on by humans with fragile minds.
It’s simply ETTD. Those of us who are logical and who have common sense can never expect to understand it. I’d worry about us if we could. Liberals get accused of “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” It’s his followers who have it.
www tip: When I come across an abbreviation like ETTD that I don't recognize on a website I highlight it and among choices offered I select "search Duckduckgo." A pageful of ETTD definitions appears in another tab. If you still use the google search engine, it probably does something similar to duckduckgo's action. (A little less simply, you can also clear the address box, type a mystery term there, and search,) —df
It’s mind boggling that a guy with these credentials would get sucked into the proverbial DJT machine. Which only goes to show that folks with brains and credentials can do stupid, too…just think of all the MAGA with Ivy League degrees. 🙄🙄
Great point, start with the S.Ct. and move on down to the Senate MAGA frauds, JD Vance, Cruz, Hawley. They've been told their entire lives how smart they are and begin to believe they're an entitled class who should rule over the rest of us.
That’s a key difference between the two. Democrats want to govern to make our lives better and Rethuglicans want to rule over us and steal everything they can.
Not just steal, but actively work to inflict maximum pain, suffering, anguish and humiliation on: people of color, uppity women, homosexuals, immigrants.
Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. I can only assume that Kenny the Cheese acted in true Trumpian fashion - with expectation of a major role in the second Trump Administration.
trump derangement syndrome is actually a thing; It occurs when you find a trump supporter that doesn't believe that trump is a pathological liar and a malignant narcissist.
When I tell that to trumpistas who have actually claimed that I suffer from tds, that is what I tell them. It shuts most of them up because trumpistas aren't a very bright lot.
I grew up in the Washington DC area, thinking that we needed two political parties. And I still think we need two political parties. It’s just appears that one of the parties has moved out of their own brains and left no forwarding address. They have completely detached from the whole purpose of their existence. If it wasn’t so scary, it would be almost humorous.
But in these times we are living in, There’s nothing funny about it.
Did you know that the story now is that lemmings don’t deliberately commit suicide, but rather they become confused during periods of mass migration triggered by population density? Of course, either way they tend to go in the wrong direction and wind up in quite a mess.
Walt Disney had lemmings killed in making a movie to portray the suicide myth. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Wilderness_(film). Wikipedia says that the Disney company blames its filmmaker and claims that Walt Disney didn't know about it.
Just read this. Never knew this. Wow. This explains so much. Particularly why we used to refer to Disney once as ‘the great Satan” . Insidious fuckers.
I understand how this wayward kid has been a thorn in Larry Tribe's side. He was not only an outstanding student of his, but a researcher, as well. What I don't understand is how a lowlife gets hold of formerly smart and normal people, turns them around, and ruins their lives. I just can't track the expected reward.
You are right Margo, Chesboro was on a fast track to success and as much wealth as he could want or need to live a very nice life, all he needed to do was demonstrate ethics, so what could possibly make him want to throw that all away. He switched teams and went from working with people of integrity to working with a bunch of felons who talked him into joining them. If there was a woman involved I might think he did it for love ❤️, people me included have been known to do crazy things for love, but money, he was basically set already.
I don't think it was money that turned Chesebro's head.
Suggestive starting points for addressing our puzzlement about how Chesebro went astray might be some of the personal stories traversed in a two films:
You're on to something here. Years ago, I was subjected to some fairly mild brain sudsing by a Scientology advocate. I was very briefly sucked down into that cesspool. Luckily I surfaced without mental harm. Many do not. Thankful my brain cells were not submerged.
You'd have to offer some kind of persuasive arguments and define your terms - they are not ethically smarter, that's for sure. But none of those academic citadels are on the level of some underfunded community college, get real!
The problems lie elsewhere - if anything, it makes more sense that the very fact they are surrounded by extremely intelligent instructors and students, are used to studying demanding subjects and getting top grades, and can visualize access to all the good things of life, generates in some of them an extreme hubris, an "arrogance of power and success."
Not that Harvard, UCLA, Stanford and Columbia are not vastly better colleges than most others - that's a kind of lazy, unexamined populism.
Besides which, these Ivy League grads and those graduating from comparable schools who lurched into the Trump cult and/or the right wing, remain statistical outliers. Most of their fellow alumni are as mystified by it as anyone on here!
A comprehensive failure to look within and find anything besides me, me , me and q anon. It's quite an extensive list of convicted felons the donvict surrounds himself with.
A big problem is that Trump has superior marketing and branding skills, and twists the narrative to suit his aims. We're still letting him get away with claiming that the Mueller report exonerated him, and that the two impeachments were "hoaxes" where his conduct was vindicated. The Dems have to start labeling every reference to perennial loser Trump as "Convicted Felon DJT" and repeating that Deadbeat Don owes $540M in unpaid civil verdicts. I thought it was great to see today that Trump's gun permit, if any, was revoked. Maybe a real-life consequence that MAGA can appreciate.
Agree with you that Trump is not deranged. He’s plain old mean, misogynistic, demeaning, and dangerous. Cheseboro somehow got hooked onto the R Train, thinking his idea was superior and foolproof. But hey, look who is the fool!
But you know Marlene that he almost pulled it off, I don’t think people have any idea how close we came, if Pence had caved, maybe the only time in his life he showed a backbone, Grasley was ready to go, if it went back to the states or to the House, Biden would have never been sworn in, if they had adjourned until the next morning, Alito was ready to get involved, same outcome, no Biden presidency. Pelosi deserves credit and praise for calling the proceedings back to order amidst the carnage that was the capitol. As much as I dislike him, “Fly Bait” came through for the nation when it really mattered, I credit Dan Quayle for telling him how he had to act, he was under enormous pressure to go along with the maggot fever dream. So close…………
I so agree with you, Dick! The “guy with the fly” did come through and so did good ole Dan Quayle which just about had me fainting. Yep, Alito and Grassley (why is he still alive??) would have gone headfirst into this debacle had Pence faltered. Nancy gets a lot of praise from me on all aspects. Her coolness during the worst times of our lives and theirs is one for the history books.
I've worked with a number of Harvard/Yale grads and many seemed gifted in dreaming up elaborate theories that had no practical chance of success, yet would struggle to complete an everyday legal task. It's more fun to deal with dreams than actually accomplishing something.
I have written about this here, so I will try to keep this short. There is a distinct personality type, "malignant narcissist", that accounts for a lot of the worst evil in this world. Trump is an archtype. So was Adolph Hitler. Maybe Jimmy Jones, too, although I haven't studied him. It is bad enough what they do all by themselves, but they derange and spread their madness to others. I bought the books and did a deep dive into this after I sometimes found executives infecting and badly damaging some of my corporate clients. An easy read: M. Scott Peck's works, eg, "People of the Lie", as well as in a chapter of "The Road Less Traveled".
"Peck characterizes evil as a malignant type of self-righteousness in which there is an active rather than passive refusal to tolerate imperfection (sin) and its consequent guilt . . "
I've been fascinated since junior high by border crossers, some of whom become literal or figurative traitors. High in my early pantheon was St. John Philby, an upper-class Briton who became a confidant and adviser to Ibn Saud. You may not recognize his name, but you'll almost certainly recognize that of his son Kim, the "third man" in what eventually became known as the Cambridge 5. I devoured books like THE GOD THAT FAILED, accounts by Arthur Koestler and five other men about how they'd become disillusioned with Communism. In the newspapers I followed the likes of Kathy Boudin and Bill Ayres, affluent USians who immersed themselves in "revolutionary" violence on behalf of the working class and/or Black people.
So now I'm intrigued by Kenneth Chesebro, not because he's an especially interesting character but because he seems to fit the pattern that's fascinated me for so many decades. I don't know the details of his trajectory, but it doesn't really surprise me. I want to know more. Was he one of those guys who follows the expected path then discovers something radically different that really fires him up?
Me, from the beginning I've been applying "Trump Derangement Syndrome" to MAGAs and, now, the entire Republican Party. But it's part of a pattern that long predates Trump. The "land of the free, home of the brave" may pride itself on its "democracy," but the anti-democratic currents within it go way, way back, and funny thing, many of their exemplars graduated from Harvard or Yale. (Both St. John Philby and son Kim were graduates of Cambridge.) Time to reckon seriously with it, and with the white Christian evangelical movement running alongside it.
That Cambridge cell fascinates me and a helluva lot of other people. But here's something I know about, a Kathy Boudin footnote. She grew up five houses-of-separation down the block from where I've lived most of my life. And I was gawking into the smolderig pit after the explosion destroyed what had been the house on 11th Street when the cops suddenly cleared the block. They had just discovered evidence that the cause was not a gas leak, rather was a bomb being built by Kathy and Weather Underground co-conspirators.
Kathy was a red diaper baby, daughter of a renowned lawyer, niece of revered journalist I. F. Stone. (In hindsight, some thought she was trying to establish her own credentials.) What far fewer people know is that Kathy was also the sister of highly respected conservative D.C. judge Michael Boudin.
After the dust settled, the (ginko) treebed's low fence in front of their parents' house long featured a plaque engraved, "Jean and Leonard Boudin / They passed this way". A year or two ago vandals pried off the soldered plaque, presumably for the bronze. It wasn't replaced.
I knew about Leonard Boudin -- having come of political age in the wake of 1968, when he, Kunstler, and a couple of others were in the headlines a lot -- but not about the I. F. Stone connection. Don't think I ever knew about brother Michael the judge.
Oddly enough, I'm intrigued about the stolen plaque. Yesterday I was at the unveiling of a replacement plaque on the Vineyard's American American Heritage Trail. The original was pried off a rock and stolen from its fairly out-of-the-way location. We've been assuming this was the work of some disgruntled racist, but now I'm wondering if it had to do with the metal, which I think was bronze but will check to be sure.
Yup, poet Jean Boudin and Izzy Stone were siblings. Leonard was no choirboy. I never read Susan Braudy's 'Family Circle: The Boudins and the Aristocracy of the Left' but remember when it shocked a few readers. Michael is kind of intriguing. A 1992 nyt profile goes on a bit about how close father and son were. … Judging by the effort it must have taken to dislodge the plaque here, motivation for taking them must be pretty strong.
I must be one of the earliest victims of TDS. I actually have despised him and took action against him in June of 2016. I had heard at my American Legion Post that the AL was going to endorse him.
So, I wrote a letter to the AL National Commander asking that the AL not do that (and they didn't).
Here is the unedited letter I wrote:
7/29/16
Dear Commander Barnett,
I am hoping that the AL does not endorse Donald Trump. I am presently a member of Post 78, Humboldt AZ.
As a Vietnam vet (Navy LT, Attack Squadron 52 and Army Advisory Team 86, SVN), I would be disgusted if the AL backed Draft-Dodger Trump---but that is just one of many reasons.
The AL should never back any candidate that not only favors TORTURE, but wishes to do more of it---and Trump has said this more than once. I saw that torture does not work in SVN; mostly, it damages the men doing it. I stopped it whenever I saw it. Furthermore, it deeply endangers our men who get captured. Yet, just yesterday, Trump said that the Geneva Convention “is out of date.”
Any educated appraisal of Trump’s behavior would come to the conclusion that, at the very least, Trump is mentally ill.
To repeat, I am hoping that the AL does not endorse Donald Trump. I really would not want to be a part of any organization which backs Trump.
Very Respectfully,
/s/ R.G. Hope
Good for you. I love your letter and so glad you did that. Thank you.
Was a great read, Rich.
My kind nudged him out in the early 90s and ever since then has been on a warpath against us.
The vid goes to my consistent critique of the press who had full access to Trump's shenanigans over the decades yet decided in 2015 how much fun it would be to frame the election was President/CinC as a [faux] billionaire playbpy business man OUTSIDER w/ the consummate INSIDER, a woman who served her state, country, and gender for 4 decades.
Then James Comey decided to go OUTSIDE his authority and smear HRC with his extra-judical rant and finished if off in late Oct with jeez America, everyone knows it takes weeks to search an electronic email file, not <minute like the rest of us.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VM943wt1xLA
“Everything Trump touches, dies”. I just hope not America
And yet, I very much fear it will be so, that it has been foreshadowed and ordained.
One must think of the Republican Party as a cult. It is definitely no longer a political party. Like Jim Jones, if Trump said take poison for the good of the Party, there would be people who would gladly do it. Remember those people taking bleach after Trump suggested it? These are cult members. It is a sickness. A deep, deep sickness taken on by humans with fragile minds.
It’s simply ETTD. Those of us who are logical and who have common sense can never expect to understand it. I’d worry about us if we could. Liberals get accused of “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” It’s his followers who have it.
Everything is projection with MAGAts.
Jane, what is ETTD?
Everything tRump Touches Dies
www tip: When I come across an abbreviation like ETTD that I don't recognize on a website I highlight it and among choices offered I select "search Duckduckgo." A pageful of ETTD definitions appears in another tab. If you still use the google search engine, it probably does something similar to duckduckgo's action. (A little less simply, you can also clear the address box, type a mystery term there, and search,) —df
It’s mind boggling that a guy with these credentials would get sucked into the proverbial DJT machine. Which only goes to show that folks with brains and credentials can do stupid, too…just think of all the MAGA with Ivy League degrees. 🙄🙄
Great point, start with the S.Ct. and move on down to the Senate MAGA frauds, JD Vance, Cruz, Hawley. They've been told their entire lives how smart they are and begin to believe they're an entitled class who should rule over the rest of us.
That’s a key difference between the two. Democrats want to govern to make our lives better and Rethuglicans want to rule over us and steal everything they can.
Not just steal, but actively work to inflict maximum pain, suffering, anguish and humiliation on: people of color, uppity women, homosexuals, immigrants.
The point being, the more pain, the less “uppity”.
Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. I can only assume that Kenny the Cheese acted in true Trumpian fashion - with expectation of a major role in the second Trump Administration.
It's gluttony and a maniacal thirst for power.
*Stupid* is the right term (as I've attempted to explain elsewhere in this discussion).
trump derangement syndrome is actually a thing; It occurs when you find a trump supporter that doesn't believe that trump is a pathological liar and a malignant narcissist.
When I tell that to trumpistas who have actually claimed that I suffer from tds, that is what I tell them. It shuts most of them up because trumpistas aren't a very bright lot.
Lucian, you are so effing good. Grateful for your gift.
I grew up in the Washington DC area, thinking that we needed two political parties. And I still think we need two political parties. It’s just appears that one of the parties has moved out of their own brains and left no forwarding address. They have completely detached from the whole purpose of their existence. If it wasn’t so scary, it would be almost humorous.
But in these times we are living in, There’s nothing funny about it.
Did you know that the story now is that lemmings don’t deliberately commit suicide, but rather they become confused during periods of mass migration triggered by population density? Of course, either way they tend to go in the wrong direction and wind up in quite a mess.
….familiar doesn’t it?
Walt Disney had lemmings killed in making a movie to portray the suicide myth. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Wilderness_(film). Wikipedia says that the Disney company blames its filmmaker and claims that Walt Disney didn't know about it.
Just read this. Never knew this. Wow. This explains so much. Particularly why we used to refer to Disney once as ‘the great Satan” . Insidious fuckers.
I understand how this wayward kid has been a thorn in Larry Tribe's side. He was not only an outstanding student of his, but a researcher, as well. What I don't understand is how a lowlife gets hold of formerly smart and normal people, turns them around, and ruins their lives. I just can't track the expected reward.
You are right Margo, Chesboro was on a fast track to success and as much wealth as he could want or need to live a very nice life, all he needed to do was demonstrate ethics, so what could possibly make him want to throw that all away. He switched teams and went from working with people of integrity to working with a bunch of felons who talked him into joining them. If there was a woman involved I might think he did it for love ❤️, people me included have been known to do crazy things for love, but money, he was basically set already.
I don't think it was money that turned Chesebro's head.
Suggestive starting points for addressing our puzzlement about how Chesebro went astray might be some of the personal stories traversed in a two films:
(1) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Going_Clear_(film), based onLawrence Wright's *Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief*
(2) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Wild_Country
You're on to something here. Years ago, I was subjected to some fairly mild brain sudsing by a Scientology advocate. I was very briefly sucked down into that cesspool. Luckily I surfaced without mental harm. Many do not. Thankful my brain cells were not submerged.
Happy for you, truly.
Foaming at the mouth Trump has MHD and his followers are chewing in the same rabid bone.
Ps, wisely NYPD canceled Donnie's carry permit.
Thank Goodness or he will shoot someone on 5th avenue since he is a very angry man who wants love however, doesn't know how to get it at all!
What? Wasn't what trump had with Stormy and McDougal real love? /s
I'm not sure that will stop him from carrying. He truly believes laws don't apply to him.
Your correct.
As for Kings and Donald
"Rules are for Fools:
Harvard, UCLA, Stanford, Columbia, etc, aren't any smarter or any stupider then anywhere else.
You'd have to offer some kind of persuasive arguments and define your terms - they are not ethically smarter, that's for sure. But none of those academic citadels are on the level of some underfunded community college, get real!
The problems lie elsewhere - if anything, it makes more sense that the very fact they are surrounded by extremely intelligent instructors and students, are used to studying demanding subjects and getting top grades, and can visualize access to all the good things of life, generates in some of them an extreme hubris, an "arrogance of power and success."
Not that Harvard, UCLA, Stanford and Columbia are not vastly better colleges than most others - that's a kind of lazy, unexamined populism.
Besides which, these Ivy League grads and those graduating from comparable schools who lurched into the Trump cult and/or the right wing, remain statistical outliers. Most of their fellow alumni are as mystified by it as anyone on here!
I would use the word 'vulnerable'
A comprehensive failure to look within and find anything besides me, me , me and q anon. It's quite an extensive list of convicted felons the donvict surrounds himself with.
A big problem is that Trump has superior marketing and branding skills, and twists the narrative to suit his aims. We're still letting him get away with claiming that the Mueller report exonerated him, and that the two impeachments were "hoaxes" where his conduct was vindicated. The Dems have to start labeling every reference to perennial loser Trump as "Convicted Felon DJT" and repeating that Deadbeat Don owes $540M in unpaid civil verdicts. I thought it was great to see today that Trump's gun permit, if any, was revoked. Maybe a real-life consequence that MAGA can appreciate.
Agree with you that Trump is not deranged. He’s plain old mean, misogynistic, demeaning, and dangerous. Cheseboro somehow got hooked onto the R Train, thinking his idea was superior and foolproof. But hey, look who is the fool!
But you know Marlene that he almost pulled it off, I don’t think people have any idea how close we came, if Pence had caved, maybe the only time in his life he showed a backbone, Grasley was ready to go, if it went back to the states or to the House, Biden would have never been sworn in, if they had adjourned until the next morning, Alito was ready to get involved, same outcome, no Biden presidency. Pelosi deserves credit and praise for calling the proceedings back to order amidst the carnage that was the capitol. As much as I dislike him, “Fly Bait” came through for the nation when it really mattered, I credit Dan Quayle for telling him how he had to act, he was under enormous pressure to go along with the maggot fever dream. So close…………
I so agree with you, Dick! The “guy with the fly” did come through and so did good ole Dan Quayle which just about had me fainting. Yep, Alito and Grassley (why is he still alive??) would have gone headfirst into this debacle had Pence faltered. Nancy gets a lot of praise from me on all aspects. Her coolness during the worst times of our lives and theirs is one for the history books.
I've worked with a number of Harvard/Yale grads and many seemed gifted in dreaming up elaborate theories that had no practical chance of success, yet would struggle to complete an everyday legal task. It's more fun to deal with dreams than actually accomplishing something.
All the negative things you attribute to trump, are NOT mutually exclusive with trump being deranged. I believe he is all those things plus deranged.
Here's a couple and there may be more. OOD https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/oppositional-defiant-disorder/symptoms-causes/syc-20375831 and NPD https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/narcissistic-personality-disorder/symptoms-causes/syc-20366662
I just think we don't understand the power of such mental disorders and the ultimate unhealthy mental weakness of people in our society.
I have written about this here, so I will try to keep this short. There is a distinct personality type, "malignant narcissist", that accounts for a lot of the worst evil in this world. Trump is an archtype. So was Adolph Hitler. Maybe Jimmy Jones, too, although I haven't studied him. It is bad enough what they do all by themselves, but they derange and spread their madness to others. I bought the books and did a deep dive into this after I sometimes found executives infecting and badly damaging some of my corporate clients. An easy read: M. Scott Peck's works, eg, "People of the Lie", as well as in a chapter of "The Road Less Traveled".
"Peck characterizes evil as a malignant type of self-righteousness in which there is an active rather than passive refusal to tolerate imperfection (sin) and its consequent guilt . . "
I've been fascinated since junior high by border crossers, some of whom become literal or figurative traitors. High in my early pantheon was St. John Philby, an upper-class Briton who became a confidant and adviser to Ibn Saud. You may not recognize his name, but you'll almost certainly recognize that of his son Kim, the "third man" in what eventually became known as the Cambridge 5. I devoured books like THE GOD THAT FAILED, accounts by Arthur Koestler and five other men about how they'd become disillusioned with Communism. In the newspapers I followed the likes of Kathy Boudin and Bill Ayres, affluent USians who immersed themselves in "revolutionary" violence on behalf of the working class and/or Black people.
So now I'm intrigued by Kenneth Chesebro, not because he's an especially interesting character but because he seems to fit the pattern that's fascinated me for so many decades. I don't know the details of his trajectory, but it doesn't really surprise me. I want to know more. Was he one of those guys who follows the expected path then discovers something radically different that really fires him up?
Me, from the beginning I've been applying "Trump Derangement Syndrome" to MAGAs and, now, the entire Republican Party. But it's part of a pattern that long predates Trump. The "land of the free, home of the brave" may pride itself on its "democracy," but the anti-democratic currents within it go way, way back, and funny thing, many of their exemplars graduated from Harvard or Yale. (Both St. John Philby and son Kim were graduates of Cambridge.) Time to reckon seriously with it, and with the white Christian evangelical movement running alongside it.
That Cambridge cell fascinates me and a helluva lot of other people. But here's something I know about, a Kathy Boudin footnote. She grew up five houses-of-separation down the block from where I've lived most of my life. And I was gawking into the smolderig pit after the explosion destroyed what had been the house on 11th Street when the cops suddenly cleared the block. They had just discovered evidence that the cause was not a gas leak, rather was a bomb being built by Kathy and Weather Underground co-conspirators.
Kathy was a red diaper baby, daughter of a renowned lawyer, niece of revered journalist I. F. Stone. (In hindsight, some thought she was trying to establish her own credentials.) What far fewer people know is that Kathy was also the sister of highly respected conservative D.C. judge Michael Boudin.
After the dust settled, the (ginko) treebed's low fence in front of their parents' house long featured a plaque engraved, "Jean and Leonard Boudin / They passed this way". A year or two ago vandals pried off the soldered plaque, presumably for the bronze. It wasn't replaced.
I knew about Leonard Boudin -- having come of political age in the wake of 1968, when he, Kunstler, and a couple of others were in the headlines a lot -- but not about the I. F. Stone connection. Don't think I ever knew about brother Michael the judge.
Oddly enough, I'm intrigued about the stolen plaque. Yesterday I was at the unveiling of a replacement plaque on the Vineyard's American American Heritage Trail. The original was pried off a rock and stolen from its fairly out-of-the-way location. We've been assuming this was the work of some disgruntled racist, but now I'm wondering if it had to do with the metal, which I think was bronze but will check to be sure.
Yup, poet Jean Boudin and Izzy Stone were siblings. Leonard was no choirboy. I never read Susan Braudy's 'Family Circle: The Boudins and the Aristocracy of the Left' but remember when it shocked a few readers. Michael is kind of intriguing. A 1992 nyt profile goes on a bit about how close father and son were. … Judging by the effort it must have taken to dislodge the plaque here, motivation for taking them must be pretty strong.