Just ended a brutal month of nonstop commitments and responsibilities, both personal and work related, that left me no free time to do anything. I just crossed the finish line yesterday, and the natural high I’m on is difficult to put into words. I’m a free bird for the first time in weeks, and this free bird you cannot tame.
The first of these was going to Florida to stay with my mother for a week while she recuperated from a stent surgery she had in late January. She couldn’t walk well or lift anything, so my sisters and I took turns staying with her afterwards. Sister J. did the most. She set up the hospital for the surgery, talked to the doctors, and then stayed with Moms in the hospital and then at home for another week afterwards. She cooked, stocked the fridge, and coordinated a lot while she was in the process of job hunting. I know how big a deal this was. Not just because I understood it myself–it’s not easy to take care of someone while you’re doing multiple job interviews–but also because my mother made sure to laud my sister’s blue ribbon efforts while passive-aggressively comparing them to my apparently mediocre performance. Actually, there was nothing passive about it. It was quite direct. My mother does nothing passively.
Anywho, with one or two mild speedbumps given our well-documented political differences, I think I managed it well overall. We didn’t have a single argument over politics, which I think is progress. We did argue about other things, like why I had to drive her to her mailbox which was located a three minute walk away, instead of having her give me the key and letting me walk there myself to get her accumulated mail. She didn’t think I’d be able to figure out which mailbox was hers, even though there were only 15-20 of them, and they all had numbers on them. Dumb shit like that.
I took Moms to the Mayo Clinic up in Jacksonville for a follow up appointment, bought her groceries, helped her with some bills and tax stuff, all while having to work and prepare for my first trial in years. I had my office ship two monitors, a keyboard, and cable connections to her house so I could set up a makeshift office in one of her bedrooms. I worked full days nearly every day I was down there while trying to be available to her at the same time. It wasn’t easy doing both, and my stress level was pretty amped given my concern for her condition and how much work I knew was waiting for me on my return to New York. I didn’t match Sister J.’s gold star achievements, but I reminded my mother that it was entirely appropriate for Sister J. to be carrying more of the load for her in adulthood since she’s the one who gave her the most headaches as a kid, while Sister T. and I were perfect angels by comparison.
Once I got back, it was balls to the wall preparing for a multimillion-dollar, two-week trial with my mentor and work colleague. This meant pulling relevant documents from a 70,000-page document production, organizing 140 trial exhibits, analyzing fact issues, scheduling and preparing witnesses for testimony, and drafting cross-examination and direct testimony outlines, among other things. A ton of work that had me pulling 12-14 hour days nearly every day for the past two weeks, something I haven’t done in a very long time. Thankfully, Ex., who’s a lawyer and does plenty of trials herself, understood and was able to take M. for most of this time, just like I do when she has a trial. M. was annoyed because we were mostly apart for back to back weeks, and I wasn’t able to give her much attention during that time, which she’s not used to. I didn’t like it either.
One thing a lot of people don’t understand about civil litigation attorneys because they only know them from television and movies is that only 2-5% of civil cases go to trial. 95-98% of cases settle before trial to avoid high costs, delays, and uncertain outcomes. Once you get in front of a judge, jury, or panel of arbitrators, you have no idea what they’re going to do, even if you feel like you have a strong case. It’s a huge risk. By the time cases get to trial, clients have invested a ton of money in the case already. So every case involves an ongoing cost-benefit and risk analysis as you gather facts, research the law, and make strategic decisions.
The rarity of trials is a big reason why every litigator’s legal experience and skills vary so much. The development of a lawyer’s legal skills is totally dependent on their professional opportunities. If you never have a chance to do something, you’re never going to develop that skill. Since 95% of cases settle before trial, there are few opportunities for litigation attorneys to try cases and develop the skills that go with them: doing opening and closing statements, applying the rules of evidence, doing directs of one’s own witnesses, and most importantly, learning how to cross-examine a hostile witness and do it effectively. This is why, unless you work for a government agency and try a ton of cases, many litigators never develop trial skills. Especially if, like me, you work at a private law firm. If a case gets to trial, most law firm clients and partners are not comfortable entrusting young and inexperienced attorneys with things like cross-examination at trial, which can blow up your entire case if you don’t do it right. Firms address this with onsite and offsite trainings and by letting young lawyers take depositions, which involve similar skills, but they’re not the same doing a cross-examination during a trial with a paying client and your colleagues watching you and all the pressure that goes along with it. So even though I’ve been practicing for thirty years now, I’ve had very few opportunities to try cases and even fewer opportunities to cross-examine a hostile witness in a trial. Most of my work in this regard has been to second-chair a partner, prepare the case, and do direct testimony of tangential witnesses, or cross-examine plaintiffs in smaller cases.
This all ended two days ago, when I finally got the chance to cross-examine a plaintiff in a multimillion dollar case with the client present and my mentor and colleague–a guy I absolutely love and hope never retires–sitting next to me. Let me tell you, I had a blast. Not only did I thoroughly enjoy myself, I think I might actually be good at it.
Not gonna lie though, I stressed about this for a week and barely slept as my turn at the wheel kept getting delayed, first by the snow we got two weeks ago, and then by how slow the trial itself was proceeding. Not because I didn’t think I couldn’t do it. I knew I could. But whenever I have to do something for the first time, especially something big like this, with the client watching, I’m anxious about it. If things go sideways–as they sometimes do on a cross-examination–they could potentially tell my colleague “Don’t let this guy do this again in a case for us. You handle it from now on.” It’s stressful. So this was a professional skill test for me. A huge opportunity for me to get more trial work, show my colleagues what I can do (they all talk and word gets around on things like this), and take my career to another level.
I haven’t had a chance like this in years, and I did not want to fuck it up. So no, I didn’t sleep much waiting for the day to arrive. As I was going through this, I thought of what I told M. when she was stressing about having to do a short speech in her English class a few months ago, which she hadn’t done before. I said “The anticipation is the worst part of it because this is new to you. Once you get rolling, you’re going to be fine. You’re better than you think. Try not to focus on it too much until you get up there. You grow the most by stepping outside of your comfort zone and doing something new. I believe in you, and I know you’re going to do a great job. Just wait until you’re done — you’re going to feel amazing afterwards!”
Easy for me to say. When I told her about my upcoming cross-examination, how anxious I was, and how I was doing something new just like she did a few months ago, she said: “Don’t screw it up, Dad.”
Ah, 12 year-olds. And where did that snarky sarcasm come from??
Finally, two days ago, it was my turn at the wheel. As I’d advised my daughter, the anticipation had been the worst part. Once I got rolling, momentum took over and got me through it with none of the angst I’d been experiencing for a week. I cross-examined this person for two full days, even as I started coming down with a cold that almost caused me to lose my voice. That would have sucked given all the work I’d put in and how rare an opportunity this was for me. But praise be, I got through it.
The goal in cross-examination is to ask the witnesses questions you know the answer to, while not sounding like an asshole, get them on the “Yes Train,” and force them to make critical admissions that you can use to convince the judge, jury, or arbitrators that you are right and the other side is wrong in your closing argument. Then they’ll hopefully rule in your favor and you can go buy yourself a nice steak and bottle of wine to celebrate.
In every litigator’s dream, a cross-examination looks just like this:
Okay, I wasn’t Tom Cruise in ‘A Few Good Men,’ and my cross was far from perfect, but I managed to get the plaintiff on the Yes Train. I got some great admissions from him that I think will blow their case up. The client seemed happy, and after it was over, my colleague told me that I did a great job, which made me extremely proud and happy because I really look up to the guy. We still have another few days of trial left that will pick up again in a few weeks, but these past two weeks of trial prep, culminating in my two-day cross, are definitely in the top three highlights of my entire legal career. Hopefully we’ll win and all this work will be worth it, but even if we don’t, I now have a few new arrows in my quiver, and I finally filled a big professional gap in my skills that’s been driving me nuts for years.
Being this busy the past month has been exhausting, and I’m definitely happy to have a break now, but the downside is I now have more time to resume my focus on current events and the utter disaster–yet another disaster–that’s unfolding in the Middle East. I’m firmly of the opinion that George Bush got his ‘Axis of Evil’ list wrong 24 years ago. The Axis of Evil is actually the United States, Israel, and Russia, not 2002 Iraq, North Korea, and Iran. Any objective observer can see that it’s the former three countries who are responsible for the most death, destruction, and murder in the world over the past 20-50 years, not the latter three. I mean, let’s be serious. Those latter three countries certainly have authoritarian elements, and they’re not saints. But how many wars have those countries started, and how many people have they killed as compared to the United States, Israel, and Russia? It’s not even close.
Just because you’re a “democracy” (supposedly) doesn’t mean you’re not capable of “evil,” however one chooses to define that word. In fact, democracies have committed some of the worst atrocities in human history. Richard Nixon absolutely decimated Cambodia and Laos with bombs in the 1970s, on the heels of the destruction of Vietnam and all the atrocities and war crimes that accompanied it. The United States is also responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis in the 2000s, something no American ever hears about because we’re propagandized to death in this country. Israel’s ongoing and historical crimes are self-evident, as are those of Russia.
So let’s call a spade a spade, shall we? Right now, the American military is being used as a mercenary death squad by a pedo-fascist President and his lackeys to kill peasant drug-runners in Latin America, kidnap a Venezuelan President after killing 100 people, blockade and starve Cuba, and now, to attack Iran for the second time in a year after using diplomacy as another rope-a-dope to stall and buy time to get our military assets into the battle theater.
We assassinated Iran’s religious and political leader and one of the most significant Shia leaders in the world–the Ayatollah Khameini, a one-armed, 86 year-old man who was dying of prostate cancer and refused to leave his residence when we bombed Iran because he wanted to die a martyr–as well as members of Khameini’s family, including his young grand-daughter.
In the opening days of the war, American planes bombed a girls’ school building and buried 175 young girls between the ages of 7 and 12 under a mountain of rubble, killing them all. We know we did it. It’s not even in question. This is an absolutely HORRIFIC war crime on par with the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War. Not only is this horror barely reported in the United States, we are so arrogant that we haven’t even apologized for it, just like we never issued a formal, direct apology to Iran after the USS Vincennes shot down an Iranian passenger flight by mistake in 1988, killing all 290 passengers, including 66 children. We killed 290 innocent people by mistake–a horrific mistake–and we were too arrogant and callous to even fucking apologize.
Before turning against him in the 1990s, we also supported dictator Saddam Hussein after he invaded Iran in the 1980s and massacred hundreds of thousands of Iranian troops and civilians with his army and chemical weapons. The Iranian death toll in that war ranges from 300,000 to 1 million. Iraq invaded and attacked Iran, not the other way around, and we supported it.
In the late 1970s under Jimmy Carter, we sheltered the repressive Shah of Iran, an American/UK-installed “monarch” dictator who ran SAVAK, a brutal secret police that the CIA helped create, which imprisoned, tortured, and killed Iranian political dissidents for decades. In 1979, the Shah got cancer and left Iran for exile in the United States. This was followed by an Iranian revolution that led to the creation of an Islamic Republic that continues to this day. When the United States refused to return the Shah to face justice in Iran, Iranians overran our embassy and took our diplomats (and spies) hostage for more than a year. Most Americans who are my age or older remember that hostage situation quite well, but have no clue why these hostages were taken in the first place. Those hostages cost Carter re-election and were only released when Reagan cut a secret deal with Iran to wait until after the presidential election to release them. This secret Reagan/Iran connection eventually led to the Iran-Contra scandal, when the Reagan Administration illegally trafficked arms to Iran to fund the contras in Nicaragua contrary to a congressional embargo.
In 1953, the United States and UK helped overthrow Mohammad Mossadegh, a DEMOCRATICALLY ELECTED secular leader (which we supposedly like and want now), because he nationalized the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. Imagine wanting to have control over and profit from your country’s own natural resources! How dare you! Then they installed the aforementioned puppet dictator Shah Reza Pahlavi, who did what the U.S. and U.K. wanted: he split ownership of Iran’s oil production between Iran and Western countries until the Iranian revolution put an end to that parasitic horseshit in 1979.
I could write about this for days and would love to, because most Americans are so goddamned clueless about what Iran is and how complicit the United States is in what it became and still is today. Iran has every reason to hate the United States, not the other way around. Iran’s repressive Islamic theocracy is one of the best examples of the blowback that results from myopic American foreign policy and interventionism. This will likely be exceeded when a more sophisticated and technologically advanced ISIS 2.0 terrorist group that is being formed as I type these words (thanks to the war crimes of Israel and the United States over the past three years) finds a way to attack Americans within the United States with drones and other weapons. We will all feel that impact soon enough, I’m afraid. That day is absolutely coming.
But this is 2026, not 1953, 1979, or 1988. Thanks to Israel’s Mossad operative Jeffrey Epstein, who, with CIA complicity, operated a sex-trafficking pedophile ring in which American and foreign girls were trafficked, abused, raped, and even killed for two decades to generate enough blackmail/extortion material to control the most powerful pedophiles in the world, including the most notorious of them all–the current President of the United States–we are now acting as Israel’s attack dog and mercenary army against Iran. There’s no other explanation for this new war of choice, which appears to be headed towards having American boots on the ground yet again in the Middle East, in a mountainous country comprised of 92 million people that’s virtually impossible to take over by force.
This war is not in America’s national interest. Iran is nowhere near close to a nuclear weapon. Even the Pentagon and our intelligence services are saying this through media leaks. Iran did not attack us. We attacked IT. Twice. Attacking Iran may not be in our national interest, but destroying its civilian infrastructure, killing its leaders, and trying to start a civil war and turn Iran into another chaotic and bloody Syria is definitely in ISRAEL’s interest. Israel desperately wants a fractured and weakened Iran that can’t respond to Israeli bombs and “mowing the lawn,” just like Lebanon, Syria, and Gaza can’t respond. Israel wants to be the biggest hegemon in the region, and it doesn’t give two fucks if Iranians die and Iran becomes another failed state like Afghanistan in the process.
But the United States SHOULD care because we know where this leads. History shows where it leads. Be careful what you wish for.
And so what has Iran done in response to being sneak attacked twice in a year by the United States and Israel? It’s doing what any sovereign country would do. It’s defending itself. Iran doesn’t have the capabilities of the United States military or even the Israeli military in many ways. So it’s using asymmetric warfare instead. It’s attacking the dozen plus American military bases that ring Iran. It’s attacking embassies that are being used as intelligence bases to coordinate strikes on Iran. It’s attacking hotels that are housing American military who evacuated the bases we knew would be bombed and who are using other civilians in those hotels as human shields, something we and Israel routinely accuse Hamas and other resistance groups of doing. It’s going after each and every Gulf State that houses American military bases and allows them to be used to attack it. It’s closing the Strait of Hormuz and attacking the global economy in an effort to cause enough pain to rich Gulf States, many of which have bribed Trump and Kushner with impunity, to end to this war and teach the United States, Israel, and their corrupt and complicit Arab allies a lesson they won’t forget.
Who can blame Iran in this situation? I sure as hell don’t. Iran learned a lot from the 12-day war a year ago. It adapted.
No one wants a regional war, but this is what the United States and Israel have unleashed on the world. Corrupt Gulf States like the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, and Bahrain are now realizing that there’s a cost to hosting and allying with the United States, and they will not be defended when the shit hits the fan. Israel is the priority. Always Israel.
I don’t like seeing cities like Dubai bombed, obviously. I know people who used to live there, and I’m sure they still have people they care about who may be in harm’s way. My aforementioned mentor and work colleague has a daughter and granddaughter living in Abu Dhabi – I think they just managed to get out of there. I don’t like any of this. I’m totally against this war, and I certainly don’t want to see Americans dying in this poorly-planned, ill-conceived, politically-driven conflict or its aftermath. I also hate seeing innocent Iranians who did nothing to invite this horror on themselves, die at the hands of two rogue states like the United States and Israel. We just murdered 175 innocent girls for fuck’s sake.
But one has to ask Why is this happening and who is to blame for it?
The way I see it, it’s not Iran. It’s Israel, first and foremost, immediately followed by the United States. This disaster is on them (us). Iran didn’t start this war. Iran didn’t attack anyone. Israel and the United States did. Iran was trying to negotiate with the United States when it killed Khamenei and tried to decapitate Iran’s entire religious and political leadership. Iran acted in good faith. The United States didn’t. The United States acted like a snake. Incredibly, unlike Bush, Trump hasn’t even bothered to lie to the American public about the reasons for this terrorist war. Polls show that the American public is overwhelmingly against this war, as well it should be.
When dozens of Americans start coming home in flag-draped coffins–which is already starting to happen–there will be even more public outrage. Every American should be asking why should our people die for Israel? With the billions of dollars we send to that deplorable, parasite, apartheid colony every year, why can’t it fight its own wars? Why do we keep having to save its Chickenhawk ass?
So once again, I find myself vehemently opposed to something that my country is doing to the world. This is getting seriously fucking old. Once again I feel helpless to do anything about it, other than trying to share my beliefs about this new horror with people I know. Thanks to social media, information is as much a weapon of war today as the bombs we are dropping on the heads of innocent people. Words, photos, and video can change the world by doing something that all the drones, missiles, and bombs we are using to kill people can’t do. Words, photos, and video can change hearts, minds, and public opinion overnight. So to the extent possible, we need to keep using them because they are powerful weapons that even the strongest military in the world can’t defeat. Israel will find this out soon enough. The next generation will pull the plug on our counterproductive relationship with that rabid and entitled country. I believe this in my bones.
Once enough Americans turn against this Israel-generated terrorist war, once enough Americans come to understand that Israel is a bloodsucking Epstein inventor and a blackmailing parasite, not a friend or ally to the United States, we can start to make the world a better place. Until then, all we can do is mourn all the death and destruction that United States and Israel are causing, while opposing this new slaughter to anyone who will listen.
