Poodle on Hannah Arendt, Donald Trump, and Flooding the Zone 

WHEN GOOD DOGS GO BAD: Like a lot of guys, I’ve had the habit of falling for safely unavailable women. Initially, my wife looked like one. But after 33 years of marriage, I guess she wasn’t that safe. Sometimes lightning manages to strike its target. My latest infatuation, however, appears to be lightning proof. She’s been dead since 1975. If she was still alive, she would now be 120. Maybe you’ve heard of her: Her name is Hannah Arendt.

Yes, that Hannah Arendt.

For those tuning in late, Hannah was a Jewish German-born philosopher-political scientist who studied authoritarianism for a living and is most famous for coining the phrase “the banality of evil” when reporting on the war-crime trials of famous Nazis. She had a wicked way with words, chain-smoked cigarettes, laughed husky, and radiated a feral, fearless intelligence. She also had a sly toothy grin that suggested mischief might come  knocking on the door.

Hannah Arendt wasn’t particularly good looking. She was hot. 

In recent months, Arendt has been resurrected from the grave thanks to the arrival of Donald J. Trump on the global stage. All his authoritarian bosom buddies — popping up like a case of terminal acne — helped call her back too. As a result, you can’t go anywhere on the world wide web these days without tripping over one of her quotes. She’s become an unlikely meme machine, a post-mortem social influencer. “If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies,” she said in a relatively recent interview, “but rather that nobody believes anything any longer.”

Trump and his campaign people call that “Flooding the zone,” a phrase they lifted from professional football speak.

In the same interview, Arendt also said, “The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen.” Admittedly, the inclusion of this last comment qualifies as self-serving on my part. But it happens to be true. I don’t care how many zones get flooded to the contrary.

I dredge up all this high-minded platitud-inty because just this week Donald J and his undeniably inventive team of legal thugs just sued the Des Moines Register newspaper and its highly respected pollster J. Ann Selzer because the Register published a Selzer poll shortly before the election indicating Kamala Harris up ahead by a few votes. Trump wound up winning Iowa by double digits. Selzer, a pollster of some repute and integrity, fell on her sword and retired. But she’s hardly the first pollster to get things wrong. Trump, however, will most definitely be the first elected official to sue a pollster on the grounds that her poll results — and the Register’s decision to publish them — were tantamount to election interference. The case has since been moved to federal court, and it will probably be rejected on the grounds of its inherent silliness.

Still, it’s enough to make a cynic blush.

Does that mean Trump can sue me too? After all, I amplified Selzer’s poll results in my ill-fated column, assuring everyone that Harris was going to win and that women voters would be saving our collective bacon.

Or maybe Elon Musk can now sue me for getting the name of the oversight agency wrong that will be hosting a series of three public hearings to discuss the environmental impact of all the sonic booms we’re hearing now because of SpaceX — Musk’s rocket ship company — and its new, accelerated launch schedule from Vandenberg. I said it was Fish and Wildlife. It turns out it’s the Air Force. It was a dumb mistake. Embarrassing even. Before, I would have responded by saying, “So, sue me.” Now, I suppose, he just might.

In the past year, the number of SpaceX launches from Vandenberg increased from six to 36 to 50. That’s where we’re at now: 50 a year. That will change to 100. Real soon. Each launch I am told — but I won’t say by which agency — has two sonic booms. One on the way up and a bigger one on the way down. You don’t necessarily hear every single one. It all depends on the angle and the atmospheric conditions. 

But when you get woken up at 5:30 in the morning — or 3:20 a.m. like this past Saturday — you don’t forget. And you sure as hell don’t forgive. Especially not when the vast majority of all launches have no immediate military or national security application. It’s all about Elon elongating even more what’s already plenty long enough.

But all that’s small potatoes compared to the Big Enchilada Trump has up his sleeve. You may have heard how ABC News — owned by Disney Corp — settled a libel suit filed by Trump to the tune of $15 million. ABC commentator George Stephanopoulos erroneously reported that Trump had been found guilty by a New York jury of raping writer E. Jean Carroll back in the 1990s. Carroll wrote a book in 2019 in which she levelled these charges. This led to a subsequent civil lawsuit for rape and defamation.

For the record, Stephanopoulos got it wrong. The jury found Trump guilty of “sexual abuse” in the civil case, not rape. Under New York law, “digital penetration” legally qualifies as “sexual abuse,” not rape. So to prove rape, you must demonstrate penile penetration. Given how the judge in the case issued a written decision stating — and in some detail — that both forms of penetration are considered to be rape under “the common parlance,” I’d suggest Stephanopoulos’s confusion is understandable.

There’s been a lot of uproar that ABC chose to settle rather than fight. I get it. After all, Carroll was awarded $5 million by a jury in the first trial for sexual abuse defamation. As usual, Trump denied it ever happened, denied knowing who Carroll was, and pointed out she wasn’t his type anyway. Carroll testified that Trump attacked after they met in a chance and playful encounter by the lingerie section of a high-end department store, where he banged her head up against the wall and yanked down her tights before inserting into her whatever he inserted.

In a follow-up trial on the same issues, a subsequent jury would award Carroll $83 million. Naturally, Trump would argue he should be immune because he uttered whatever the jury construed to be defamatory while functioning as President of the United States.

Flooding the zone, anyone? 

Given these facts, why wouldn’t ABC fight it out in court? One theory holds that Disney — ABC’s parent company — caved as yet another demonstration of spineless obsequiousness by corporate America in the face of Cyclone Trump.

The other explanation is more chilling, yet more sympathetic. The  typical defense in this case would be for ABC to assert Trump is a public figure, that it was an honest mistake, that there was no malice, issue a correction, and then apologize. This is the law that’s governed the land since 1964 when the U.S. Supreme Court issued its landmark free speech ruling known as the Sullivan Ruling. In that case, the court argued that free and unfettered civic debate — even if rough around the edges — was of vital importance.

If the media could get sued by elected officials or other movers and shakers for making honest reporting mistakes, the justices expressed alarm at the chilling impact that would have on free speech. For politicians and big shots to file libel suits, the justices ruled, the plaintiffs had to demonstrate actual malice by the reporters involved. In other words, that they got the facts wrong on purpose because they wanted to damage someone’s reputation.

That’s a high bar. Trump has no use for the Sullivan case protections. Justice Clarence Thomas has made it clear he has no interest in the Sullivan protections, even though the case involved a southern sheriff suing Martin Luther King Jr. for disparaging remarks King had made in a paid political advertisement about the racism of a southern town. 

With the Supreme Court majority having swung so far in favor of populist plutocrats and imperious autocrats, there’s good reason to wonder if the Sullivan protections will go down the same garbage disposal as Roe v Wade.

So if ABC took a dive, then it was a strategic dive. Whether that’s enough to save Sullivan, I have my doubts. If you think the media now is bad — and a lot is — you ain’t seen nothing yet. American Pravda, here we come.

That’s enough to choke even an unflinching bad ass like Hannah Arendt.

It’s not that we believe the lies; It’s that we don’t believe anything.

And she wasn’t talking about Santa Claus.

It’s called flooding the zone.