On the Disappearance of "Issa"

Thomas Massie
Because no one should have to look at
Stephen Miller

This piece is a little different, because what Curmie had literally already written and was about to post turned out to be… redundant? outdated? Something.  Issa’s Facebook page disappeared before Curmie could get his essay up online.  Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is unclear, but it is certainly a thing.  

So here’s what’s going to happen here: what Curmie originally wrote is indented below; the only changes are the removal of links that no longer work.  (Links to sources other than Issa’s FB page still work, and are included.)  New commentary appears with regular margins.  The photo and its cutline were about to be added, but hadn’t yet been attached; we’ll pretend they had been, though.

One of Curmie’s Facebook friends posted this link from the Issa FB page, describing Rep. Thomas Massie’s questioning of the despicable Stephen Miller.  It describes Massie’s demand to know what happened to $1.4 billion, supposedly spent on building a 230-mile stretch of border wall that (wait for it) doesn’t actually exist.  There’s a link to a video describing a huge conspiracy: everyone from companies contracted to provide the special concrete used for the wall to supervisors who signed for shipments that never happened or the confirmed the completion of construction that was never even started is implicated.  So is Miller himself, at least for incompetence if not for grift.  And when Massie pressed Miller, the response was 143 seconds of silence.  143 seconds!  A record!

Except.

There was something  little hinky (to use Curmie’s mom’s term) about that story.  For one thing, it was already three or four days old when Curmie saw it.  Curmie won’t claim to be absolutely au courant with everything happening in the world, but it did seem odd that he hadn’t seen anything about a story this big within the first day or two.  He suspected something was amiss, so he fired up the Google machine to see what other sources had said.  Trouble was, they hadn’t.  Not CNN.  Not NBC, or PBS, or NPR, or ABC.  Not the Washington Post or The Guardian, or even the North Platte Weekly Pennysaver.  No one, other than a couple of places that essentially cited the story Curmie had already seen.  Not looking good in the authenticity department.

There’s also a link in that takes you to a site at with a URL that includes the sequence “jervisfamily.com.”  Now, that’s a reliable news outlet!  Note: this blog isn’t a news source, either.  It’s an opinion/analysis site, but at least it links to news sites, and doesn’t pretend to objectivity.

Somewhere along the line, Curmie also came across a “video” of those alleged events.  Curiously, we never hear Congressman Massie or Mr. Miller, only a narrator.  (The version Curmie first encountered has a female narrator but he can’t seem to re-trace his steps to find it now; here’s a variation on the theme with a male narrator.)  More significantly, we never see Miller when he’s not talking.  Maybe Curmie is relying too much on his theatre background here, but it would seem to him that if what you’re touting is silence, maybe we ought to see that moment, huh?

But wait!  That’s not all!  (Please insert he usual apologies for the late-night infomercial reference here, Gentle Reader.)  This story has a few cousins out there.  There’s the one about an $890 million wire transfer through the Caymans; this one was shot down by Scopes two days later. One presumes they’ll do the same with a bunch of others when they have the time.  Oh, and you thought that 143 seconds of silence were significant?  Well, in other Things That Never Happened, Representative Jared Moskowitz got Miller to shut up for 167 seconds about $2.7 billion in missing disaster relief money, and Representative Jasmine Crockett achieved 271 seconds (!) of silence in questioning about 9.8 million missing people. 

It’s a freaking auction out there, Gentle Reader!  And it’s not just the silences that keep getting bigger.  Now there’s a $6.2 billion wire transfer, ferreted out by Representative Ted Lieu.

There were links to those other hallucinatory stories, of course.  Curmie chooses that adjective intentionally, as it has come to be the standard term for “Shit AI Made Up,” and the chances that at least a good deal of this crap is AI-generated approach ontological certitude.

At first glance, these bogus stories (and there are plenty others, featuring different Congresscritters and different minions of the Trump Regime) seem plausible.  Stephen Miller is probably the closest this country has seen to Evil Incarnate in a very long time.  (He’s scarier than Dear Leader, who is obviously mentally incompetent.)  That he would be involved in something illegal as well as morally indefensible isn’t much of a stretch.  Moscowitz, Crockett, and Lieu are among the most aggressive Democratic Congresscritters; Massie is as close to an independent thinker as the GOP can muster.  So we can understand why even an intelligent person like Curmie’s friend could be fooled at first.

But the key words are “at first.”  Even a cursory analysis reveals the flaws in these “stories.”  But confirmation bias is a real and powerful force.  We’re tempted to believe anything negative about Miller (or Hegseth or Vance or Patel…) because they’re corrupt assholes.  Thing is, though, we don’t need to make stuff up; the reality is bad enough.  Moreover, this kind of crap hurts “our side” considerably more than it helps.  It provides whataboutism ammunition for the MAGA world when we point out one of the manifold prevarications emanating from Trumpistan.  More importantly, it’s dishonest, and we shouldn’t be trafficking in that shit.  We just shouldn’t.

A dozen or so years ago, the Curmie Award went to the person deemed by Curmie’s readership to be the educator who most embarrasses the profession.  (Curmie would supply a list of nominees and readers who vote for their… erm… favorites.)  That award wasn’t created because Curmie, a professor, hates educators or education.  Quite the contrary, in fact.  He just doesn’t want to be associated with teachers or administrators who abuse students, punish them for being heroic, etc.  Similarly, he wants nothing to do with liars who happen to agree with him on some political matters.

Issa—whoever he, she, or they may be—needs to disappear.  So does Stephen Miller, but for different reasons.

Issa did, apparently, disappear.  Or was disappeared, which would be a different phenomenon.  Unlike Issa, Curmie doesn’t want to present as fact that which is even speculative, let alone demonstrably false, so he’ll just suggest that there is a reasonable likelihood that Zuck’s minions, rather than Issa, took down those posts.  If so, we’re in a more complex ethical landscape.

Obviously, there should be no censorship of opinions, even—or perhaps especially—of those that run counter to Conventional Wisdom.  Most of us think that guy Galileo may have been onto something, for example.  And we can object to the obvious double standards employed by, say, Elon Musk in forbidding certain words and not others that are more problematic; nor can we be certain that there isn’t a little selective enforcement afoot here.  Still, even the question of allowing or disallowing something that’s clearly objectively false may not be an easy call.

Even those posts can be divided into two categories, for example.  Curmie has another FB friend, actually the spouse of a friend, who posts “human interest” stories regularly.  Some of them are plausible; others are puff pieces that show some celebrity as a covert humanitarian, and are almost certainly, well, hallucinatory.  Other than increasing the reader’s susceptibility to diabetes, however, these posts are harmless.  Curmie wishes they’d disappear, but it’s clear that there was no ill will involved, just perhaps an insufficiency of skepticism.

Issa’s posts were different.  They were malicious, intended to defame individuals, and frankly it doesn’t matter whether the victim of these false allegations was a good person or an abhorrent jackass.  Curmie remembers the one time he served on a jury: it was clear the defendant was what his grandmother would call a “wrong ‘un,” but was he guilty of this particular crime?  As a host of previous posts indicate, Curmie is an avowed free speech advocate.  But libel isn’t protected by the 1st Amendment, and that’s what Issa’s posts were, even if the injured party was a public figure (and loathsome creature) like Stephen Miller.  Perhaps the “community notes” approach might be preferable, but Curmie can’t object too much to the cancellation of Issa… if, indeed, that’s what even happened.

Curmie thanks Curmiphiles Kirsten, Eric, Cheryl, and Harold for their suggestions as to how to proceed, and hopes this was a reasonable solution.

Will the Release of the Epstein Files Matter? Sort of. Maybe.

The top stories of the last few days all revolve around the “Epstein files.”  Well, them and the myriad frenzied attempts by 47 and his minions to get us to focus on literally anything else: the bullshit deployment of National Guard troops to DC to pick up trash and spread mulch, threats to do the same to New York, Chicago, and New Orleans despite court decisions that such missions are illegal, the unquestionably illegal destruction of that Venezuelan ship that may or may not have been carrying narco-terrorists…  Those distractions have failed bigly, not least because it’s all over but the final score.  The names will come out, and we have GOP Congresscritters Massey and Greene (yes, really!), among others, of course, to thank for it.

More to the point, anyone paying the slightest bit of attention has now determined that the likelihood that the President of the United States is not merely a con artist and an authoritarian bully but also a pedophile and rapist has moved out of “preponderance of the evidence” territory and into “beyond reasonable doubt.” 

Few criminals have ever acted more guilty.  The Trump administration can’t even keep its lies consistent.  The files were on Pam Bondi’s desk, but they don’t exist.  The whole thing is a Democratic hoax, but Bill Clinton’s name appears.  Curmie’s recent appreciation of Luigi Pirandello notwithstanding, anyone with the analytical skills of the dumbest kid in kindergarten knows that all of those statements can’t be true at the same time.  The only question is whether any of them are.

Certainly, moving Ghislane Maxwell to Club Fed was sufficient evidence of rampant corruption to convince all but the well and truly brainwashed, and asserting that survivors’ testimony at the press conference is “irrelevant” or that Republican legislators who exhibit even enough backbone to want the truth to come out are “hostile” certainly should have clinched the issue even for the stragglers who hadn’t long since come to that conclusion.

Of course, those who drank deep of the MAGA Kool-Aid don’t care, and those of us who dare suggest that Dear Leader is anything less than a literal godsend will continue to be called Trump Deranged, irrespective of evidence, even by people who know better (or ought to).  But the hard-core MAGAs seem to be losing at least some of their suasion in the Republican party: when you’re revealed as too big of a sicko for Marjorie Taylor Greene, the proverbial writing is on the wall.  Special elections are showing huge gains for Democrats: breaking the state legislature’s GOP super-majority in Iowa by gaining an easy victory in a district that voted for Trump by double digits a few months ago is but one example.

And that’s significant.  Curmie may find the political stances of the current crop of GOP pols more problematic than those of their predecessors of a few decades ago (yes, they’re considerably worse than Nixon or Reagan), but there are relatively few of them outside of the Manchurian Cantaloupe’s appointees who could legitimately be described as evil.  There are some, of course: Mike Johnson (aptly described by Curmie five years ago as “a hitherto unknown little turd”), Ron DeSantis, Greg Abbott and Ken Paxton come to mind.

Most, though, are simply amoral (as opposed to immoral), cowards.  Some, like Susan Collins, Rand Paul, and Lisa Murkowski, will occasionally offer a bit of token resistance before ultimately capitulating every damned time to whatever whim takes shape in what passes for a brain in the Mad King of Trumpistan.  These people cannot be trusted, full stop. 

But others—those who may not have a lot of core beliefs but sure would like to be re-elected—are beginning to recognize that servile obeisance to POTUS just might cause more problems than it solves.  The Astroturf support of billionaire mega-donors is nice, no doubt (or at least Susan Collins thinks so), but the disillusionment of the citizenry is real.  Distancing oneself from a party leader who is underwater on literally every issue, and on some of them even among Republicans, comes a little easier under those circumstances.

Curmie isn’t celebrating an imminent return to power for the Democrats, at least not yet.  The GOP’s willingness to be completely forthright in their declarations that they have no interest in representing their constituents, only in maintaining their party’s control of the government, is concerning.  The leftie press is suggesting that the Trumpsters wouldn’t be so openly seeking to gerrymander if they weren’t afraid of the results in a fair election.  Whether that’s true or not is, of course, a matter for conjecture.  It could be that the GOP seeks a supermajority, or that they’re confident in victory (remember Trump’s almost-admission that Elon Musk had manipulated the 2024 election?), anyway.

None of this is new, of course.  Curmie remembers a dozen years ago when Greg Abbott, then the Attorney General for Texas, cheerfully declared in a court document (!) that of course their most recent gerrymandering was designed specifically to increase the power of the Republican Party, but, you see, it wasn’t racially motivated (note: it was, of course), so it was OK.

And no, Gentle Reader, Curmie is not pretending that the Democrats aren’t perfectly willing to play the same game.  Indeed, they have.  But as the New York Times’s Sam Wang wrote about the 2012 election, “Both sides may do it, but one side does it more often.”  And, of course, Democrats voted 220-1 for the 2021 “For the People Act,” which would have required non-partisan commissions rather than state legislatures to establish Congressional districts; Republicans opposed the bill 209-0, with two not voting.  It was then blocked from even receiving a vote in the Senate by Mitch McConnell.

But this piece isn’t about gerrymandering… although we may return to that topic in the future.  What matters here is the extent to which the Epstein affair matters.  The answer, Curmie suspects, could be anywhere on the continuum from “a lot” to “not much.”  As noted above, everyone already knows that Trump will be implicated if that material ever becomes public.  The only question is how significantly.  But knowing in one’s brain and one’s heart that such evidence exists and being unable to deny that evidence’s existence are two different things.

Still, Trump’s boast early in the 2016 campaign that he could “stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and [not] lose voters” may be a little more true than we’d like to believe.  Certainly, anyone who ever would have actively supported Trump—as opposed to despising him less than the other candidate—is indeed sufficiently lacking in morality (or even humanity) that the only thing that would make such a person change their mind would be for Trump to stop being a racist, sexist, anti-intellectual, plutocratic homophobe.

Still, whereas such people are willing to excuse his lies, his felony convictions, his open grifting, and his incoherent bluster… they might just draw the line at raping junior high girls.  The MTGs of the world will tell the tale.  At the moment there’s a trickle of dissent.  If it stays that way, we’ll have to wait until at least next year’s midterms to see how things play out.  But even one or two significant defections could open the floodgates. All bullies—and Trump is unquestionably in that category—are cowards.  If he stops scaring people, he’s powerless, because he’s too fundamentally stupid and narcissistic to convince anyone to come around to his point of view without at least an implicit threat. 

There is another possibility, of course: that we have the distraction backwards.  If, hypothetically, the files reveal that Trump was less complicit in the Epstein/Maxwell sexual exploitation ring than we had believed, then all the attention given to the files was itself the distraction from other illegal or unethical activity.

Ultimately, though, there is one central question: will the Republicans whom Curmie once disagreed with but respected stop bowing and scraping to the Grifter-in-Chief?  It’s possible.  After all, Trump has already secured the title of Most Corrupt President in US History.  He’s not only won the race, he’s lapped the field, leaving Nixon, Harding, and Grant looking at each other wondering how to even compete with that.  But the average GOP Congresscritter demonstrates, shall we say, invertebrate tendencies. 

Will the courageous and patriotic survivors of Epstein, Maxwell, and Trump who addressed the world this week save the country?  They just might.  Unfortunately, they could be our only chance.