Digby

oddly blank 4/19

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AN 11 25

Founded in Nigeria in 2002 — the year after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon — Boko Haram has been a frequent source of violence in that country for 23 years. The far-right jihadist group, often compared to al-Qaeda, favors overthrowing Nigeria's democratic republic and replacing it with an Islamist dictatorship governed by strict fundamentalist Shariah law — specifically, a Sunni version. Boko Haram has a long history of violent attacks on both Christians and Muslims (including Shiites as well as fellow Sunnis they consider too liberal).

U.S. President Donald Trump is now threatening military action against Boko Haram, vowing to "protect Christians." And his messaging is specifically focused on Christianity, not Sunni and Shiite Muslims in Nigeria who fear Boko Haram.

In an article published on November 4, Salon's Heather Digby Parton examines the influence that far-right white fundamentalist evangelicals and "Christian nationalists" are having on Trump's Nigeria policy. And one of them is Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

"Whatever the case, this appears to be based upon misinformation," Parton explains. "Nigeria is dealing with the Boko Haram extremist group, which does target Christians. But it also threatens Muslims who don't accept its radical form of Islam, as well as those who are sympathetic to the Nigerian government. Most experts and analysts reject the assertion that this is some kind of Christian genocide. Trump may have wanted to give a little something to his 'cherished Christians,' as he sometimes refers to his evangelical supporters, but Hegseth is a much more interesting case."

Parton continues, "This is, after all, a man who wrote a book called 'American Crusade,' which The Guardian described as 'depicting Islam as a natural, historic enemy of the west; presents distorted versions of Muslim doctrine in Great Replacement-style racist conspiracy theories; treats leftists and Muslims as bound together in their efforts to subvert the U.S.; and idolizes medieval crusaders."

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Parton warns that evangelical Hegseth embraces an extreme form of far-right Christian fundamentalism. In this book, the former Fox News host calls for "followers of Christ to take up the sword in defense of their faith."

"Hegseth is also a member of an extreme far-right sect called the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches that also believes in militant Christianity," Parton warns. "It's heavily influenced by reconstructionism, a theology that religion scholar Julie Ingersoll describes as believing 'it's the job of Christians to exercise dominion over the whole world.' In short, Hegseth is a serious Christian nationalist, and there could be nothing more satisfying for him than to muster a fighting force to wage war against Muslims in a foreign land in the name of Jesus Christ."

Parton continues, "It sounds medieval, and it is…. Whether they will follow through on this is anyone's guess. At some point, one might hope that a few of the Christians who are clamoring for the U.S. to go into Nigeria with 'guns-a-blazing' might spare a thought for their fellow followers of Christ who are being terrorized every single day right here in America at the hands of an oppressive government that is deporting them to face certain persecution."

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AN 9 25

The far-right National Conservatism Conference used to be an event that many traditional Goldwater and McCain conservatives made a point of avoiding. But with President Donald Trump's MAGA movement now dominating the GOP, NatCon is drawing a lot more attention in Republican circles.

In an article published on September 13, Salon's Heather Digby Parton points to growing interest in NatCon as a troubling example of how much Christianity's lunatic fringe is influencing the GOP and the MAGA movement.

Describing the most recent NatCon gathering — which was held in Washington, D.C. in early September — Parton explains, "'Overturn Obergefell' was one featured panel, the AP's Joey Cappelletti reported. 'The Bible and American Renewal' was another. The conference, he wrote, 'underscored the movement's vision of an America rooted in limited immigration, Christian identity and the preservation of what speakers called the nation's traditional culture' — which is putting it very mildly. It certainly doesn’t seem there was much talk of individual freedom, free markets or liberty of any kind, and that is a big change from the conservative movement that has dominated Republican politics since the Reagan Administration."

The far-right NatCon gathering should not be confused with National Council for Mental Wellbeing event that is also abbreviated NatCon. The health event was held in Philadelphia in May, not in Washington, D.C. in early September, and has zero connection to the political event.

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This year's political NatCon, Parton observes, featured some prominent figures in the Trump Administration — including National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard; Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget and a key architect of Project 2025; and border czar Tom Homan.

"But perhaps the most revealing moment was a viral speech by Missouri GOP Sen. Eric Schmitt titled 'What is an American?' in which he made the claim that the country belongs to the descendants of white Europeans who took the land from the violent Native Americans fair and square because they were just plain superior," Parton observes. "He said straight out: 'America doesn't belong to them — it belongs to us.… We can no longer apologize for who we are. Our people tamed the continent, built a civilization from the wilderness. We Americans are the sons and daughters of the Christian pilgrims who poured out onto the ocean's shores.'"

Schmitt, Parton adds, even promoted the Great Replacement Theory during his speech.

A recurring theme of NatCon, Parton warns, is that the U.S. is not only a Christian nation — it is a white Christian nation.

"It's tempting to write off NatCon, and Schmitt's speech in particular, as an example of a bunch of right-wing kooks indulging their little fever dream of creating a white Christian autocracy," Parton stresses. "But these are powerful people now, and if there's any person in government who is trying to create 'a pastiche of past glories' — largely by erasing the true American past, both good and bad — it's the most powerful one of all, Donald Trump, who has certainly discovered that 'you can just do things!'"

Parton continues, "Nobody paid attention to Project 2025 until it was too late, and look where that got us. It would be foolish to make that same mistake again."

*Heather Digby Parton's full article for Salon is available at this link.

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After surviving an assassination attempt at a campaign rally in Western Pennsylvania on July 13, Donald Trump promised to bring a message of "unity" to the 2024 Republican National Convention. And the acceptance speech he delivered during the last night of the convention, Trump said, was toned down from the "tough" one he originally had in mind.

During the convention, Trump and his allies were feeling confident in his ability to defeat President Joe Biden. But only three days after the convention ended, Biden ended his reelection campaign and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for president. And in only a week, Harris' presidential campaign had fundraised more than $200 million.

In a biting article published on July 29, Salon's Heather Digby Parton reports that Trump has ditched the "unity" theme and "squandered" the momentum he enjoyed during the convention.

At a rally in Minnesota on Saturday, July 27, Parton observes, Trump "admitted that all that talk about 'unity' was just momentary hype."

Trump told the crowd, "I want to be nice. They all say, 'I think he's changed. I think he's changed since two weeks ago. Something affected him'…. No, I haven't changed. Maybe I've gotten worse. Because I get angry at the incompetence that I witness every single day."

Parton, in response, argues that Trump "must be talking about his campaign."

"It's understandable that he's angry, but he has no one to blame but himself," Parton explains. "Despite having been given a priceless gift with that awful debate and an assassination attempt that mercifully missed, he's now slipping in the polls and is saddled with a national joke of a vice-presidential candidate."

Parton continues, "Donald Trump was born lucky, but he has a unique gift for squandering it through hubris and ineptitude. And yes, he's gotten worse."

*Read Heather Digby Parton's full article for Salonat this link.

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One of the most mysterious chapters of former Attorney General Bill Barr's tenure at the Department of Justice got a little sunlight last week when the New York Times published a deeply reported piece on the Durham Investigation, Donald Trump's "investigation of the Mueller investigation." We knew that Special Counsel John Durham, a man whose reputation was one of seriousness and rectitude, had only brought two prosecutions but failed to win convictions in both. And we knew that there had been turmoil in his office with several people resigning at what seemed to be pivotal moments in the case. But, until now, we didn't know the details — and they are explosive.

The Times story, reportedby Charlie Savage, Adam Goldman and Katie Benner,essentially reveals that the investigation which was supposed to blow the lid off of the Russia investigation by proving that it was a "partisan witch hunt," was itself a witch hunt — only on behalf of Trump. Barr was enabling and covering for Trump throughout his tenure as we saw with his preemptive press conference to diminish the Mueller Report and mislead the public as to its conclusions and his willingness to back Trump's strategy to discredit Vote-By Mail during the 2020 campaign. Even when he finally deserted the sinking ship in December of 2020, his letter of resignation showered Trump with praise even as he knew he was plotting to obstruct the peaceful transfer of power. But the Durham investigation was his personal project and it turns out that it was a monstrous abuse of power.

The whole point of naming a Special Counsel is to remove the taint of political interference by keeping a distance between the politically appointed Attorney General and the investigation. Barr did not do that. In fact, he directly participated in the probe by traveling overseas to the United Kingdom and Italy with Durham to interrogate their intelligence officials about whether they helped American investigators frame Trump which apparently offended them to no end since they did nothing of the sort. Durham and Barr became bosom buddies, throwing back scotch together at the end of the work day and having dinner on a regular basis. And Barr, who was convinced that the CIA had created the whole "Russia hoax," eagerly ran interference with the Intelligence agencies for him as needed. Evidently, Durham was very taken with Barr and agreed from the get-go that Trump had been set up.

We had previously heard that Barr and Durham went to Italy on some sort of Hardy Boys expedition, but now we learn that they had been told by Italian authorities about some very credible information that Trump had committed serious financial crimes. Barr and Durham realized that it wasn't something they could completely ignore (as much as they probably wanted to) so Barr assigned that case to Durham instead of another prosecutor and opened a criminal investigation. This was then leaked to the public in a way that implied they had found evidence of criminal behavior on the part of the FBI, the intelligence agencies or possibly even Hillary Clinton. They certainly didn't let on that they were investigating Trump.

From what we know, Durham quietly closed that "investigation" without much fuss. Considering the rest of their behavior one can't help but suspect that he and Barr either didn't look too closely or decided that revealing Trump's crimes wasn't worth jeopardizing their crusade to expose the "deep state."

This is stunningly unethical behavior by an Attorney General. But we shouldn't be too surprised. After all, Barr got the job in the first place by sending an unsolicited letter to Trump in which he criticized the Mueller investigation by claiming that a president can't obstruct justice. In fact, Barr pretty clearly believes former president Richard Nixon's famous line "when a president does it it's not illegal" since his view, accordingto legal expert Marty Lederman, was that "the president has absolute constitutional authority over actions by executive branch officers in carrying out law enforcement powers given to them by Congress." If you ever wondered where Trump got the idea that the Constitution gave him the power to "do whatever I want," look no further than Bill Barr.

He and Durham colluded together for months and came up with zilch. There simply was no evidence that the FBI, DOJ, CIA or the Mueller team had done anything untoward. But that didn't stop Durham. He decided to focus on Trump's bête noire Hillary Clinton and he brought a couple of cases designed to show that she set Trump up with bogus claims of Russian collusion. That blew up in his face too. He's still in business today doing what we don't know, yet Attorney General Merrick Garland doesn't seem to be willing to pull the plug.

As a New York Times op-ed by David Firestone points out, this exposè pretty much destroys Barr's attempt to rehabilitate himself with the public. He famously dissed Trump repeatedly in his January 6 Committee testimony andwrote a book in which he turns on his former boss, calling him "detached from reality" and urging Republicans not to nominate him for the presidency in 2024. But he narrows his criticism to the post-election period conveniently forgetting the previous four years of incompetence, corruption and mental instability which Barr encouraged. It's a little too little and way too late.

Unfortunately, while Barr's lame attempt at rehabilitation may have finally been put on ice by these latest revelations, the conspiracy theories that fueled it have not. As Firestone notes:

Republicans in the House are launching a new snipe hunt for proof that these same government offices were "weaponized" against conservatives, an expedition that is likely to be no more effective than Mr. Durham's and Mr. Barr's.

In fact, now that I think about it, this might be the one thing that will make Bill Barr and John Durham look good by comparison. These House extremists will air every half baked, fever dream of twitter randos and QAnon weirdos in public hearings and present them as facts. At least Barr and Durham mostly kept their conspiracy theories to themselves over scotch and prime rib. That's about the best you can say for them

an 1 23 no lnx? vid? twt

https://www.alternet.org/jim-jordan-2659274405/

Will Republicans blow up the global economy? They’re sure going to try

Heather Digby Parton and Salon January 18, 2023

We barely had time to catch our breath from the wild spectacle of the Republicans finally electing a speaker when their next spectacle started with a bang. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen abruptly announced that the U.S. will hit the so-called debt ceiling on Jan 19, putting the issue immediately on the front burner. The government can move money around to keep paying its bills until some time next summer, but this is already shaping up to be an exhausting, months-long battle royale. It's probably a good thing that they're getting an early start since the MAGA House majority seems to need some serious remedial instruction on how the world works.

That's not to say that debt-ceiling standoffs are some core tactic of the MAGA movement. In fact, Republicans raised the debt ceiling three times during the Trump administration with no fuss at all. They never felt it necessary to try to persuade Trump to cut spending, and the Freedom Caucus didn't utter a peep as he massively increased the deficit. These hostage situations are reserved for times when the GOP holds the House and a Democrat is in the White House. Shocking, I know.

This debt ceiling vote is a ritual with no real purpose. The government made the decision during World War I, for reasons that should have been temporary, to require a vote to agree to pay the nation's bills. This makes no sense: Congress already voted to spend the money, so it's ridiculous to require another vote to pay it out. In fact, after the Civil War, the drafters of the 14th Amendment, concerned that Southern Democrats (pretty much the MAGA types of that day and age) would make good on their threat to disavow the national debt incurred during the war, explicitly wrote into the Constitution the words, "the validity of the public debt of the United States … shall not be questioned."

There were some brief confrontations in earlier years, but it was really Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich who pioneered this modern right-wing terrorist strategy and it was perfected by the Tea Party members during the Obama administration. The Tea Party standoffs in 2011 and 2013 are still vivid in the minds of many in Washington who endured both the battles and the consequences, which were at once political and substantial. Those were among the ugliest fights in modern political memory and came distressingly close to crashing the world economy. This new crew, most of whom were not round for those bruising confrontations, is champing at the bit to see if they can get that done this time.

Not only are payments for necessary services, from Social Security and Medicare to food safety and even the sacred-to-Republicans border security at risk, as the Washington Post's Catherine Rampbell explains, this could tip the entire global economy, already in a fragile state, over into crisis:

Until now, U.S. debt has been considered virtually risk-free. The riskiness of all other assets around the world is benchmarked against the relative safety of U.S. Treasury securities. If the U.S. government reveals itself to be an unreliable borrower, however, expect to see shockwaves course through every other financial market, as many question how safe (or not) those other investments might be. This is the last thing the economy needs amid fears of a global recession.

The bottom line is that this debate is ridiculous. Unfortunately, the Republican Party is even more ridiculous these days, so we are destined to play chicken with the good faith and credit of the U.S. government every time these circumstances present themselves.

It should be noted that all of this was evident when the Democrats still had the House majority, which was more than willing to raise the debt ceiling during December's lame-duck session. Unfortunately, the Diva Twins, meaning Sens. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia, refused to eliminate the filibuster or use the budget reconciliation process to get it done.

Luckily, not all Democrats fail to grasp the moment.Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii phrased things perfectly, channeling Michael Corleone in "The Godfather Part II," when asked what Democrats might be willing to offer Republicans: "In exchange for not crashing the United States economy, you get nothing." Regarding demands that Democrats sit down with their opponents at the negotiating table, he replied, "We have to tell them there is no table."

You can't negotiate with people who behave the way these Republicans are behaving. They aren't just delusional but also massively ignorant about what they're attempting to do. Take, for example, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, just named to the House Oversight and Homeland Security committees, who said this on Steve Bannon's podcast shortly after the November election:

What we have to do is, Republicans, when we're in control of the purse and we're setting these appropriation bills, and our budget is — we have to refuse to raise the debt ceiling. We have to get spending back under control and we have to do that by any means possible. And if that means a government shutdown, then I'll be calling for a government shutdown. Because this government — and you can see the people support what I'm saying, Steve – because this government shut our country down with those COVID shutdowns.

That is literally gibberish, completely incomprehensible. Rep Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., made an even dumber comment:

\u201c We cannot raise the debt ceiling. Democrats have carelessly spent our taxpayer money and devalued our currency. They've made their bed, so they must lie in it.\u201d

— Rep Andy Biggs (@Rep Andy Biggs) 1673981066

That doesn't make any sense either. Our currency is not "devalued," and that's got nothing to do with the debt ceiling in any case. He apparently doesn't even grasp that taking the debt ceiling hostage is about trying to force Democrats to agree to massive spending cuts in the future, in exchange for paying the bills today. Evidently he doesn't want to pay them at all.

Here's some more gibberish from the actual speaker of the House, when asked about Democrats' demands for a clean debt ceiling increase:

Would you just keep doing that? Or would you change the behavior? We're six months away? Why wouldn't we sit down and change this behavior so that we would put ourselves on a more fiscally strong position?

Here's another idea that's always popular on the right — which would be necessary if they really plan to eliminate the national debt completely, as McCarthy apparently promised in his backroom deals during the speakership saga:

\u201c Holy shit. Top Republican Rick Allen (R-GA) was just recorded saying his party is going after Social Security because people want to work longer.\u201d (h/t @SSWorks)\u201d

— No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen (@No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen) 1673900286

Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio is at least a bit more coherent, recognizing that Republicans may have stepped on the third rail with talk about cutting military spending, which one of the backroom negotiators, Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, says was never on the table. Jordan said, "Military cuts could be made by eliminating 'woke policies' & re-examining aid to Ukraine, allowing the government to focus more on troops and weapons systems." There's also been talk about eliminating much of the officer corps, which would be an interesting experiment.

Hilariously, Republicans are trying to spin the impending mess this way:

Rep. Good (R-VA): I hope the President and the Senate would not risk a government shutdown or some kind of a government default by recklessly rejecting spending cuts\u201d

— Acyn (@Acyn) 1673904721

That's cute, but it's not going to fly. Republicans have already shown the whole country that they are wildly unhinged, and nobody will mistake which party is being reckless and which isn't.

It's also clear that they don't care. Donald Trump, their battered spiritual guru, explains what it's really all about:

It's about putting on a spectacle to own the libs, of course. What else would it be? Trump may have lost some of his mojo but his legacy is secure. The Republican Party is still MAGA all the way down.

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Bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell recently posted some thoughts on the subject of high school sports, of all things. High schools do a good job at elevating elite athletes, he wrote, to the detriment of students of more average ability, or who lack parents who could afford to pay for soccer or baseball camps starting at age six.

Gladwell, who is a lifelong, serious runner — and can run a mile at age 55 nearly as fast as I did when I was 15 and winning races on the track team — came up with a law he named after himself: In any sporting endeavor, elite achievement comes at the cost of mass participation.

We can easily expand Gladwell's Law to the whole of society. Don't many of us view life in America as a dispiriting continuation of the ruthless, often shallow competitions of high school? And our thinking about how we relate to so-called elites can be complicated by our culturally driven feelings of envy and shame.

At least arguably, America's national sport is not played with a ball. It's electoral politics, which has always had elements of ruthless competition but used to be a lot more "sporting" than it is now. At its best, politics is about knowledge, hard work, compromise, mutual respect and some acknowledgment of shared goals, even alongside vigorous disagreement. None of those qualities are evident in the churlish zero-sum gamethat the Republican Party, with its backs against the demographic wall, has played in recent years.

This sea-change goes back at least as far as 1994, when Newt Gingrich invited Rush Limbaugh to train the incoming Republican House majority on how best to despise your political opponents and push disinformation and conspiracy theories. It was either un-American or, sadly, quintessentially American at the time, and has since metastasized into the right's embrace of false narratives, ever-wilder conspiracy theories, and authoritarianism — which is epitomized by a certain orange-hued former president, but certainly not limited to him.

We see prissy, stuck-up, wholly self-interested Ivy Leaguers like Ted Cruz (Princeton; Harvard Law), Josh Hawley (Stanford; Yale Law), Ron DeSantis (Yale; Harvard Law) andmuch of Trump's inner circle playing good ol' boys, affecting down-home dialects, and decrying the "elites" on the left who supposedly dominate American business, politics and culture. This would be merely laughable if they weren't also insisting that religious liberty means that everyone must live by the retrograde religious dogma they pretend to believe.

The Trumpist cult and other far-right political organizations around the globe continue to profitably press their pseudo-populist game planof going after elites (often the "educated elites") to inflame and enrage the mind of the common citizen.

If we know something about the role of actual elites throughout history, we know that they have understood the power of anger and contempt in motivating the masses; while a helping hand may be quickly forgotten (or even resented), an insult, real or imagined, locks itself in memory.

When the phony Wharton grad who reluctantly departed from the White House in January 2021 said they were happy not to take that as an obvious insult. How, exactly, did he intend it? Both as contempt and affection. Any con man keeps a special place in his black-hole heart for people who cannot, or will not, see how he is hoodwinking them. None of us finds it easy to deal with the cognitive dissonance of realizing we may be wrong.

While Republican politicians have for decades praised and catered to the needs of oligarchs (as well as the merely wealthy who merely dream of being oligarchs), creating the greatest income disparity since the Roaring '20s, they have simultaneously encouraged working- and middle-class Americans to resent people who went to college and quite likely graduate school and have become specialists in various fields: historians, scientists, journalists, civil servants, elementary school teachers. Somehow, in this demented narrative, those professions are part of an administrative system that thwarts ordinary people's quest for freedom, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. (And some of them asked you and your kids to wear a mask during a global health crisis.)

The "elites" despised by the actual Republican elites like Cruz, Hawley and DeSantis are, of course, the people able to expose their grifting, their disinformation campaigns, their flouting of the rules, their contempt for the rule of law (at least as it applies to them) and their determination to retain power at any cost. They and their compatriots in propagandaTV andsocial media are bringing authoritarianism to America under a marketing label borrowed from Hungary: "illiberal democracy."

Today's Christian fascists don't ask what Jesus would do; they ask what Viktor Orbán would do. Anti-immigrant "Christians" get a kick out of seeing red-state governors troll the libs by using real human beings as pawns in a deliberately cruel media spectacle.

As these beliefs begin to spread in cult-like fashion, then teachers, judges, health experts, academics and even members of law enforcement — whom Republicans have always claimed to venerate — become objects of derision, even death threats.

In this classic divide-and-conquer move,[us vs them, polarization]the right has worked hard to get Americans to believe the worst possible things about elites, those conspiratorial, secular liberals who read books, believe that science and history should be based in research rather than political agendas and maintain a naive faith in democracy and the rule of law.

Such has been the power of this slow brainwashing that the right has gleefully separated brothers from sisters, children from parents, and friends from friends. The MSNBC–New York Times side regrets the loss of political comity; theFox–Wall Street Journal side [murdoch] cries for insurrection or civil war, or just shrugs at such threats.

All of this (or at least a lot of it) has been in service of aphony,shameless,sexually predatory,pathologically insecure,malignant narcissist who somehow (surprising even himself) was elected president, impeached twice and refused to concede defeat after losing by more than 7 million votes, inciting a violent, if amateurish, insurrection.

Meanwhile, there really are elites in America — you know, the people who went to school with Hawley and Cruz and DeSantis and can afford multiple residences, exotic vacations, well-tended stock portfolios and Washington lobbyists. Those elites are still pushing discredited Reagan-era "trickle-down" economics, working to destroy the last threadbare remnants of the social safety net and gleefully eroding democracy — all while laughing at how easy it was to convince the "people" to look somewhere else.

ref

https://www.salon.com/2021/02/19/from-newt-gingrich-to-donald-trump-rush-limbaughs-legacy-is-the-modern-gop/

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from Newt Gingrich to Donald Trump: Rush Limbaugh's legacy is the modern GOP

The right-wing cult Rush Limbaugh created was appropriated by Donald Trump — and lives on

By HEATHER DIGBY PARTON

Columnist

PUBLISHED FEBRUARY 19, 2021

Back in 2014, former Trump staffer Sam Nunberg was assigned to listen to talk radio all day and summarize the talking points for his boss as he assessed whether he was going to enter the presidential race. Trump had already learned the power of the right-wing media when he flirted with a run in 2012 by flogging the absurd "Birther" conspiracy theory and had decided that if he ran it would be as a Republican. But he didn't really know right-wing media. His experience with talk radio over the years had been with Howard Stern, whose show appealed to a different crowd. He was a TV guy and in those days he watched CNN as much as he watched Fox News.

So he got the notes and picked out the issues that appealed to him, like immigration and terrorism, and chose a few about which he was clueless but were crowd-pleasers like railing against "common core." He picked up some discrete stories that seemed to resonate with the GOP base such as the story of "Bowe Bergdahl, the dirty, rotten traitor" which also signaled his aggressive attitude toward military matters. And, of course, he added his own hobby horses like foreign trade which fit into this issue matrix perfectly since it was driven by the same xenophobia that drove the anti-immigrant fervor that was already at fever pitch on the right.

As it turned out, Trump was perfectly suited to become the first Republican nominee to run exclusively on the culture war issues that had animated conservative talk radio for the previous two decades. He may not have been a listener but he was a member of the tribe. And because he was naive about politics he had no sense that projecting the worst of hate radio was politically dangerous so he just put it all out there, unfiltered. I think most observers, including his GOP rivals, assumed that would be the kiss of death. Instead, it turned out to be massively popular among Republican voters.

They should have known, of course. The right had been primed for such a thing for years. And there is no one more responsible for that than Rush Limbaugh.

His radio show almost single-handedly created the culture war narrative that has come to define conservative politics. It's not that Limbaugh came up with every element on his own. There were plenty of racists, xenophobes, sexists, religious hypocrites and violent extremists long before he came along. But he found a way to synthesize their point of view into one over-arching worldview: coastal elites, Black people, immigrants, gays, feminazis and environmentalists are your enemy and they want to destroy America.

Seeing its organizing potential back in the early 90s, backbench congressman Newt Gingrich turned Limbaugh's narrative into a partisan weapon, launching a program designed to teach fledgling, right-wing politicians how to talk about themselves as heroic warriors for the American way and portray their political opponents as depraved savages bent on destroying everything Real Americans hold dear. When the Republicans won the House majority for the first time in decades in 1994, Limbaugh was made an honorary member of the freshman class. The new House Speaker said he couldn't have done it without him.

Gingrich was right. And there would have been no Donald Trump without Limbaugh either because there would have been no Trump base without him. Gingrich may have turned partisan, electoral politics into a blood sport but it was Rush Limbaugh who brought in the fans.

Limbaugh passed away this week and the right-wing encomiums to his decency and intellectual prowess are unsurprising but infuriating nonetheless. I don't think any single political figure other than Donald Trump has ever been this polarizing, so seeing these flowery tributes to his decency and fine character is hard to take. But if there's one thing the entire country, regardless of party or ideology, can agree upon it's that Rush Limbaugh is one of the most influential political figures of our time. His mean-spirited, crude "guy at the end of the bar" routine was the template for all of right-wing media and remains so today.

And for a time, the mainstream media was more than willing to accept him as one of their own. Back in 2002, the former Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-SD, complained that Limbaugh had unleashed a torrent of invective against him, resulting in death threats to Daschle's family. The reaction from then Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz was stunning:

Has Tom Daschle lost a couple of screws? Did the normally mild-mannered senator accuse Rush Limbaugh of inciting violence? He came pretty darn close. There were cameras there. You can watch the replay.

We can understand that Daschle is down, just having lost his majority leader's job and absorbed plenty of blame for this month's Democratic debacle. What we can't understand is how the South Dakotan can suggest that a mainstream conservative with a huge radio following is somehow whipping up wackos to threaten Daschle and his family.

Has the senator listened to Rush lately? Sure, he aggressively pokes fun at Democrats and lionizes Republicans, but mainly about policy. He's so mainstream that those right-wingers Tom Brokaw and Tim Russert had him on their Election Night coverage.

Limbaugh had indeed appeared on election night coverage, shocking anyone who knew what a depraved character assassin he was. The idea that he "poked fun" at Democrats "mainly about policy" was beyond absurd. After all, this was the man who shared insane conspiracy theories for years, like the one that claimed Vince Foster had been murdered in an apartment owned by Hillary Clinton. The mainstream media were finally forced to stop featuring Limbaugh after he made racist comments on ESPN, but that only made him more powerful in the GOP. Nicole Hemmer, author of "Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics", observed:

As Limbaugh's political strength became evident, many Republican politicians felt they couldn't cross him, or run the risk of alienating his millions of listeners, Hemmer said. "Many of these listeners didn't care if Rush Limbaugh crossed the line (of propriety)," she said. "They cared more about loyalty to him than any kind of underlying set of principles."

As you can see, the cult Limbaugh created was simply appropriated by Donald Trump. The "Us vs Them" ethos fit him to a T. He saw no need to pander to anyone but his own voters and set about demonizing those who didn't vote for him, even to the point of threatening to withhold federal aid and favoring the states that voted for him. And he in turn has inspired a whole new generation of politicians to follow his example:[desantis?]

Rush Limbaugh's legacy will, unfortunately, live on in the Republican politicians who grew up listening to his derisive, contemptuous rhetoric and then watched as Donald Trump used it to wield power. He created a monster and we'll, unfortunately, be living with it for a long time to come.

By HEATHER DIGBY PARTON

Heather Digby Parton, also known as "Digby," is a contributing writer to Salon. She was the winner of the 2014 Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/did-donald-trump-steal-the-election-2648992261/

digby

Back in September, Politico's Anita Kumar reportedthat for the previous year the Trump campaign had been assembling a team of election lawyers from all over the country to familiarize themselves in local election laws and prepare "prewritten legal pleadings that can be hurried to the courthouse the day after the election, as wrangling begins over close results and a crush of mail-in ballots." The effort was led by "a 20-person team of lawyers" from major law firms who were overseeing a strategy in "key states the Trump campaign is targeting, like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan." It sounded like a very serious and professional operation, one which came as no surprise to me, since Republicans have specialized in disenfranchising Democratic voters for many decades.

Trump himself repeatedly made clear on the campaign trail what he planned to do, from contesting the validity of mail-in ballots to declaring himself the winner on election night regardless of whether the votes had been counted and filing a flurry of lawsuits contesting the election with an eye toward having "his" judges (including newly-minted Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett) deliver the election to him if necessary. I don't think anyone can possibly say they are surprised at how he has reacted to losing the election.

In the weeks before Nov. 3, Trump did have that team of high-powered legal talent arguing cases around mail-in ballots and shifting deadlines in various states, some of which did make it to the Supreme Court. But then the election actually happened and vote-counting began, and since then Trump's crack team has been been remarkably unsuccessful. The good lawyers have either been pressured to to quit orthrew in the towel themselves as it became patently obvious that they had no evidence of voter fraud.

That hasn't stopped Trump from plowing ahead anyway with the self-described "elite strike force" led by his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, last seen prior to the election with his hand down his pants in the latest Borat movie and famously presiding over a post-election press conference at a landscaping company next door to a sex shop and a crematorium. Trump was evidently impressed by Rudy's performance in both venues, because he gave the former LifeLock spokesman (hat tip to Salon's Roger Sollenberger) full authority to conduct the legal strategy to overturn the election results by any means necessary.

CNN reports that Giuliani has taken full control. For instance, upset by what he was hearing from three of the lawyers assigned to argue one of the Pennsylvania cases, the man once described as "America's mayor" fired them on the spot and took over the case — which was being argued the very next day — himself. He hadn't been inside a courtroom in more than 30 years, and it showed. He was very nearly laughed out of court.

Giuliani was undaunted. He immediately pulled together the other members of the "elite strike force": Sidney Powell, who is former national security adviser Michael Flynn's Fox News lawyer; veteran right-wing husband and wife team Victoria Toensing and Joe diGenova, also Fox News lawyers; and over-the-top Trump defender and campaign lawyer Jenna Ellis. None of them have any expertise in election law, but then they don't have a legal strategy either.

Having lost over and over again in court, Trump and his team have switched to their Plan B, which, as longtime Democratic strategist Chris Marshall spelled out in detail in Salon on Thursday, is to delay the certification of the vote in certain states and try to get Republican legislatures to assign electors to vote for Donald Trump instead of the actual winner, Joe Biden. This is based on the theory that if they can create enough chaos around the election results, Republican loyalists will rise to the occasion and "save democracy" from the Democrats, who are allegedly stealing the election.

This idea has been pushed by conservative talk show host Mark Levin and picked up by the right wing as a way to keep their beloved president in office for at least four more years. It's a theory that is very unlikely to prevail, particularly since the Supreme Court just decided a case on "faithless electors" last July, in which the justices made it very clear that whatever the founders may have anticipated in the 18th century, our democracy today demands that electors express the will of the people. It will take some convoluted intellectual gyrations for them to conclude that state officials can simply change the results at their discretion.

In order to blow the smoke as thick as possible, Giuliani and the "strike force" held a press conference at Republican National Committee headquarters on Thursday which was so surreal that it may have displaced the COVID task force briefing where Trump suggested that people might inject disinfectant as the all-time weirdest press conference of the Trump era.

Giuliani, Powell and Ellis held forth for 90 minutes, going full Infowars and throwing out one insane conspiracy theory after another. They said that Dominion voting machines had been created by former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez (who has been dead for seven years) and financed by George Soros, the Clinton Foundation and "communistic" countries China and Cuba. Just in case that didn't work, the corrupt Democrats had also rigged the vote with a sophisticated computer hack that was only foiled because Trump won so overwhelmingly that it tripped up the algorithm which allowed the "strike force" to catch them in the act. Also, the mail-in ballots were fraudulent because so many of them were filled out properly. (Yes! The fact that there were very few problems with mail-in votes was somehow evidence they were fake!)

Meanwhile, rivulets of black liquid were running down Giuliani's face as if he were an extra in an Alice Cooper video from the 1970s. The assumption is that it was some kind of temporary hair dye. But it could have been embalming fluid, for all we know.

Powell later made the rounds to expand on their theory and she made no bones about what they hope to do:

You'll notice that she just blithely uses the term "overturn," as if that were perfectly normal.

If that doesn't work, the "strike force" are also talking about a Plan C, which would be to delay the vote certification for so long that the states can't send Biden's required 270 electors to Congress by the deadline, which under the 12th Amendment to the Constitution would throw the election to the House, where every state's delegation gets one vote. As luck would have it Republicans hold 26 of the 50 delegations. Surprise!

Is any of this remotely possible? Sure. It's unlikely, but it's possible. It's tempting to think this is all so nuts that it could never possibly happen, but we thought everything Donald Trump has done over the past five years was nuts, and here we are. All our hand-wringing about this plot being un-American and destructive to our democracy is sadly irrelevant — not just to the preposterous Giuliani and the equally preposterous Trump but to the entire Republican Party. They have learned the power of total shamelessness, and it is profound. I would never count them out.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/trump-2648944660/

trump holds party hostage

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/trump-supporters-really-think-hell-win-and-could-turn-dangerous-if-he-loses/

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/gop-knows-they-face-a-sweeping-defeat-in-two-weeks-but-their-latest-pseudo-scandal-may-keep-hope-alive/

One of the many nerve-wracking questions Americans facing with the 2020 presidential election is whether all the bizarre conspiracy theories that have sprung up in the last few years will outlast the Trump administration. Are we in for a prolonged period of this level of lunacy in our politics?

Maybe. There are a bunch of QAnon-curious Republican candidateswho apparently believe that the Democratic Party is led by satanic, flesh-eating pedophiles and that John F. Kennedy Jr. (who isn't actually dead) will be reappearing any day now to help Donald Trump save the children and put the country back on the right track. Let's just say it's not beyond the realm of possibility that there will be a Q Caucus in the next congress.

Philip Bump of the Washington Post reported on Tuesday that a recent Yahoo/YouGov poll showed that while a minority of GOP voters say they believe in QAnon, 50% of Republicans (fifty percent! That's half of them!) claim to believe that high-level Democrats are involved in child sex-trafficking rings, and more than 50% believe that Donald Trump is working behind the scenes to dismantle them. This idea goes back to 2016 and Pizzagate, so it's possible that many of these Republicans don't even know they're spouting QAnon conspiracy theories. But what's the difference? Clearly tens of millions of Republicans have, as Joe Biden said on the stump the other day, "gone 'round the bend."

This really shouldn't surprise us. Facebook has been the vehicle for spreading this and many other ridiculous conspiracy theories about COVID and antifa and Black Lives Matter and much else during the Trump years. These viral lies are not confined to weird corners of the internet or Alex Jones and Infowars anymore.

I can't hazard a guess as to what happens if the supposed savior of the children is defeated and has to leave the White House. Will the conspiracy theory just die out, as the rest of the country averts its eyes from the people who were big believers and try to forget that they lost their faculties during the Trump years? That's probably the best-case scenario. The worst-case scenario involves QAnon adherents deciding they need to take matters into their own hands.

The fever may break once the chaos agent is out of the White House. As Bump pointed out in that Washington Post article, part of the reason some people gravitate to these elaborate conspiracies is because they need to feel that someone, somewhere, is pulling the strings because otherwise everything feels out of control. Perversely, if Trump loses, these people may actually calm down. Even if they don't, what's left of the GOP establishment is likely to distance itself as much as possible from the kookier conspiracists. It's bad for business.

But that doesn't mean that they're going to give up conspiracy theories and pseudo-scandal-mongering altogether. It is, after all, one of their favorite political weapons. Many of us recall (or have read about) the endless Whitewater investigations into the Southern-gothic arcana of Arkansas politics, when Republican congressmen shot watermelons in their backyards and the Beltway media trekked across the country, reporting back as if they were on the first manned mission to Mars. It went on for years, cost a lot of money and destroyed quite a few Arkansans, but never found any wrongdoing by Bill and Hillary Clinton.

And let's not forget the more recent Benghazi crusade, which current House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy announced was conducted entirely for partisan political purposes and which led to the equally vacuous**"Clinton email scandal**." There are many more where that came from, which often telegraphed openly as partisan attacks, but which the media gobbles up like baby birds being fed worms by their mother.

The Hunter Biden "scandal" has all the hallmarks of one of those patented GOP mudslinging operations. It's not as wild as a pedophile ring in a pizza parlor, but it's got lots of hurtful personal slander and ugly calumny to keep the folks entertained. That it has a Russia-Ukraine element makes it especially fun for those who want payback for Donald Trump being exposed as the most useful of idiots in the past four years.

The "scandal" itself is actually nothing more than an example of the very common (and admittedly skeevy) business practice of hiring the family members of important people for the purpose of obtaining favors, gaining access or simply being viewed in a favorable light. Hunter Biden clearly made a mistake in joining the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company, while his father was vice president. The apparent conflict of interest was obvious to literally everyone. But Republican charges that Joe Biden granted a favor to Burisma by having the Ukrainian government fire a prosecutor that was investigating the company are flat-out provably false. It's true that Biden (along with virtually the entire Western alliance) pressured the Kyiv government to fire Viktor Shokin, the prosecutor in question. But one of the reasons was because Shokin wasn't investigating Burisma. There was no favor done on Hunter Biden's behalf. If anything, it was the opposite.

Republicans know this. Everyone knows this. This "scandal" has been dismissed by the new Ukrainian government, the U.S. intelligence services, and the Senate Intelligence Committee. It is 100% phony. And yet it's likely to continue for years if Joe Biden becomes the next president, because the Republican Party and the entire right-wing media sphere will make sure of it.

Salon's Roger Sollenberger reported on the latest twist in the phony scandal — the "discovery" of Hunter Biden's laptop, with dubious provenance, by Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon. Reporting in the right-wing press is filled with the sort of salacious gossip they love to peddle to keep the story dribbling out and hopefully entice the mainstream press to run with the story. (Indeed, you can feel an anxious desire to go there, among supposedly respectable reporters.)

Does the laptop really belong to Hunter Biden? Are the emails real? Did he arrange for his boss at Burisma to meet his father? Who knows? Butit doesn't matter because nothing will change the fact that Joe Biden's actions were the opposite of what Republicans are pretending to investigate him for, and they know it. They are once again knowingly misleading the public.

If the Democrats manage to gain a majority in the Senate and hold on to the House, the GOP will be deprived of its ability to run this new crusade through Congress with multiple investigations, as they did with Benghazi. But unless something unusual happens, such as Rudy Giuliani being indicted as a foreign agent (which is not outside the realm of possibility), Republicans will keep this one going by whatever means they can fine and hope that a big backlash, along the lines of the Tea Party wave of 2010, carries them back into the majority in the 2022 midterms. If that happens, get ready for the circus to come to town.

If Joe Biden is elected president two weeks from now, the QAnon insanity could end up as just another hallucinogenic flashback of the increasingly surreal Trump era. Hunter Biden and Burisma, unfortunately, will be with us for a while.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/mcconnell-is-betting-democrats-dont-have-the-will-to-fight-fire-with-fire-biden-should-prove-them-wrong

...Back in 2013, then-Congressman Tom Cotton introduced a bill in the House called the "Stop Court-Packing Act" which would have eliminated three seats on the D.C. Court of Appeals. That seems like a strange title, but it gives away the game. He was trying to stop President Obama from being able to fill those three empty seats. Senator John Cornyn, R-Texas, agreed, writing a piece in the National Review called "Don't let the Democrats pack the DC Circuit." Keep in mind that these were legitimate vacancies.

As it happens, McConnell kept those and many other seats open so that a Republicans could fill them, so they needn't have worried. And he's very proud of it:

...

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/bill-barr-has-proved-himself-to-be-trumps-most-dangerous-ally/

digby

many of us have long warned that this fall would see a dirty campaign without precedent, that Donald Trump would stop at nothing to foment chaos, and so forth. But up till now there has been a certain abstractness about it. Who knew exactly what form it would take and whether it would have any real effect?

It’s here, and it’s not abstract any longer. What was assumed to be just more of the usual Trump lunacy is starting to feel terrifying. He and his campaign really are pulling out all the stops and they are doing it in the middle of a deadly pandemic that has ravaged the people and destroyed the economy. Creating even more disorder and turmoil in the middle of this crisis, in an effort to concoct or create an electoral victory he will not have earned legitimately, is over-the-top even for him.

This week the president gave a number of interviews and rallies in which he sounded more unhinged than usual. In fact, they were so bad that if his plans only depended upon him, we could probably feel a bit reassured. Unfortunately, his henchmen all seem to be on board and none more so than Attorney General Bill Barr, who appeared on CNN Wednesday and signaled that he’s prepared to enlist the Department of Justice and federal law enforcement in Trump’s election chaos strategy.

Barr always has an arrogant, supercilious attitude, whether he’s facing Congress or members of the media. But he was downright angry with anchor Wolf Blitzer and it took him off his usual game.More than any other interview I can remember, this one revealed that Barr’s insolence is actually cover for the fact that he really doesn’t know what he’s talking about. The man who once told the New York Times that investigating the silly, manufactured Clinton-related Uranium One “scandal” was more justified than any probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election still sees the world from the perspective of a Fox News viewer, rather than as the leader of the federal government’s most powerful law enforcement agency. And like his boss, Barr is much too egotistical to have a clue how ignorant that makes him.

he showed how little he knows or cares about the ethics of his position by saying that he wouldn’t talk about the case of Jacob Blake case (the Black man in Kenosha, Wisconsin, who was shot seven times in the back by a police officer) and then proceeded to share his conclusion that Blake was armed and in the process of committing a felony. When Blitzer pointed out that this was not established fact, Barr came back with “I’ve stated what I believe …” In other words, he was prejudging the facts of the case on television, which totally taints the Justice Department’s investigation.

He couldn’t simply say, “I won’t comment on the case because the department is investigating,” as any other attorney general would have done. That was because Barr clearly has a political agenda, which became more explicit as he went on to deny the existence of systemic racism. He said that “the narrative that the police are on some, you know, epidemic of shooting unarmed Black men is simply a false narrative and also the narrative that that’s based on race.” He elaborated on this by saying that Black men are stopped more often by police is not the result of racism but rather of “stereotypes” about Black people being criminals. In other words, he doesn’t even know what racism is, nor does he have the self-awareness to know that his own antediluvian attitudes are racist — another thing he has in common with President Trump. (I really shouldn’t have to say this, but Barr is wrong about all of this.)

Barr blatantly lied when he said that Russia hasn’t been interfering in the election up until now and that China is a greater threat to the integrity of the process,despite the fact that the U.S. intelligence community and the FBI have said the opposite. Indeed, the very next day the Department of Homeland Security issued a bulletin saying it has high confidence that “Russian malign influence actors” have targeted the absentee voting process “by spreading disinformation” since at least March:

Russian state media and proxy websites in mid-August 2020 criticized the integrity of expanded and universal vote-by-mail, claiming ineligible voters could receive ballots due to out-of-date voter rolls, leaving a vast amount of ballots unaccounted for and vulnerable to tampering. These websites also alleged that vote-by-mail processes would overburden the U.S. Postal Service and local boards of election delaying vote tabulation and creating more opportunities for fraud and error.

The attorney general must be on their mailing list because these were exactly the arguments he set forth in the CNN interview, at one point getting very testy with Blitzer on the subject. He insisted that the nation is “playing with fire” by changing the method of voting in this election, fatuously insisting that it will cause people to lose faith in the process — which of course is exactly what he is doing in spreading this hysterical propaganda.

When Blitzer asked him about Trump’s recent exhortation to his voters to vote by mail and then go to the polls to try to vote again, the attorney general said he couldn’t comment because he didn’t know the laws in individual states, as if any of them allowed voting twice in the same election. When quizzed about how many cases of voter fraud the Justice Department is pursuing, he said he didn’t know, althoughhe did mention one case that purportedly had 1,700 cases of mail-in voter fraud.That story was totally wrong and the DOJ had to issue a correction saying Barr had been given incorrect information.

Barr’s most ludicrous contention was that foreign countries are going to counterfeit ballots and mail them in. He has no evidence other than what he calls “logic” to back up this ridiculous claim, which proves how divorced from reality the attorney general of the United States actually is. The Washington Post’s Philip Bump explains:

For one thing, any number of those ballots would conflict with existing submitted ballots and be rejected. For another, ballots meet particular design and production standards that would need to be matched. But most important, ballots submitted by mail are validated upon receipt, usually by matching the ballot’s signature to the recorded signature for the voter. As a forgery expert with whom we spoke in June made clear, this would be nearly impossible to fake.

Barr is essentially spreading a ludicrous conspiracy theory about foreign interference with mail-in ballots, while also helping a foreign adversary interfere in the election by spreading several different conspiracy theories. It’s insane.

We’ve long known that Barr was happily performing the role of Trump’s “Roy Cohn,” seeing his primary role as leader of the Justice Department as leading a war against Trump’s political enemies. But Barr is also a true believer, not just a cynical fraud. His willingness to distort the rule of law to benefit his patron, while at the same time falling down the rabbit hole of one right-wing conspiracy theory after another, is the very definition of Trumpism in action. And he’s not even trying to hide it.

stokes violence then sez only he can stop THOSE PPL:

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/trumps-signal-to-his-followers-is-clear-violence-and-chaos-are-my-only-hope/

no twt vid link

prez trump’s signal to his followers is clear: Violence and chaos are my only hope

Written by Heather Digby Parton / Salon August 31, 2020

President Trump was having a normal one on Sunday morning, tweeting and retweeting 89 times over the course of three and a half hours. Many of them were tweets of polling numbers from obscure firms showing him in the lead after the Republican convention. But most of the tweets and retweets were incitement to violence among his true believers and complaints about “Democrat cities,” an ongoing mantra which he seems to think is a slam dunk to get him re-elected.

He repeatedly insulted and mocked Joe Biden, of course, and Portland, Oregon Mayor Ted Wheeler will undoubtedly have to change his phone number after the president of the United States posted it on Twitter so his followers could call and demand his resignation.

He also showed support for one of his fans in Wisconsin:

[]

It was a manic tweet spree and one that couldn’t have show the president’s state of mind any more clearly. Biden has said Trump is “rooting for violence,” and I don’t think anyone can reasonably argue with that.

In fact, Trump’s surrogates are saying it right out loud. Fox News’ Chris Wallace asked Trump campaign adviser Lara Trump whether she agreed with White House counselorKellyanne Conway’s assertion that “the more chaos and anarchy and vandalism and violence reigns, the better it is for the very clear choice on who’s best on public safety and law and order.” Lara answered, “Well, I think it paints a very clear picture.” She might as well have said, “You go, boys!”

On CNN on Sunday, Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., agreed with Trump that the shootings by a 17-year-old Trump fan last Tuesday night in Kenosha were understandable:[]

What the president did was he offered to surge manpower and resources so the violence could end. The governor did not accept that that day, that night tragically two people lost their lives because citizens took matters into their own hands. I’m not for vigilantism. I’m not sure that’s what was happening. People felt, because the governor — local officials were looking for help.The governor did not accept the help, and so there was not the resolve to end the rioting, and so people took matters into their own hands, and that’s what ended up happening. People die.

Johnson is confused about everything, as usual. Trump publicly berated Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers for failing to call in the National Guard hours after Evers had already done so, telling his followers that Evers wasn’t protecting the city. Johnson basically said that people felt they needed to take matters into their own hands because the president had lied to them and told them the governor wasn’t protecting them. Yet somehow he’s against vigilantism. Everything about that is a grotesque inversion of anything one could call “law and order.”

Trump was at it again later on Sunday, tweeting in response to a press conference by Wheeler, the Portland mayor. Trump called him a “dummy” and ranted on, saying, “He would like to blame me and the federal government for going in, but he hasn’t seen anything yet. We have only been there with a small group to defend our U.S. courthouse, because he couldn’t do it.”

Conway’s little gaffe in which she admitted that the White House and the Trump campaign believe street violence is good for them illuminates the president’s fanning of the flames. He has finally grasped that he cannot unilaterally sending in a bunch of federal cops, as he did in Washington to stage his photo-op last June. Instead, he’s not-very-subtly signaling to his gun-toting fans that they are going to have to take action on their own if they hope to scare people into voting for him. Leave the propaganda to him, just ramp up the chaos.

He tweeted that MAGA “protesters” who came to Portland in a caravan on Saturday night were “Great Patriots!” and later explained why their behavior was understandable:

The Atlantic’s Ron Brownstein wondered on Twitter whether “suburban voters look at these pictures and say, ‘yes, where I belong is in the same political coalition as men who crowd into pickup trucks w/guns, as in Bosnia 1998 or a Third World dictatorship?'” (Those huge flags flying behind them reminded me of men crowded “into pickup trucks w/guns,” as in news photographs of ISIS fighters.)

It’s a jarringly familiar sight, but it doesn’t look like anything we’ve seen in America before.

There was an actual shooting that night and someone died. It’s unclear what exactly happened. But it is very clear that this kind of confrontation is something that Trump and his henchmen are actively stoking for political gain.

As I wrote on Friday, this is hardly the first time Trump has deployed crude, racist fear-mongering. He’s been doing it for years, going all the way back to the full-page Central Park Five ad. If it isn’t marauding gangs of Black teenagers, it’s Muslim terrorists or Mexican rapists or left-wing anarchists. There’s always some bogeyman coming to get you.

The only thing he knows how to do is point a finger at “the other” and then promise people that he’s the only one who can save them. He feels confident that he’s got the troops to back him up, one way or the other. He gave an interview with Breitbart back in 2019 in which he made this explicit:

You know, the left plays a tougher game, it’s very funny. I actually think that the people on the right are tougher, but they don’t play it tougher. Okay? I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump — I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough — until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.

Yes, it would be very bad. The question is whether or not anyone will believe that Donald Trump is the man who can save America from all this mayhem he is creating. After all, he’s been promising to do that ever since he came down that elevator. Here he is at the 2016 Republican convention:

I guess that’s yet another promise he’ll fulfill after he makes America Great Again — Again.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/one-moment-in-bill-barrs-testimony-clearly-exposed-his-compete-fealty-to-trumps-delusion-and-lies

Digby Parton / Salon July 29, 2020

Attorney General Bill Barr finally showed up for his long-scheduled hearing before the House Judiciary Committee and once again proved himself to be Trump’s eager henchman. He didn’t read aloud some of the more incendiary parts of his opening statement (which as Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga., observed, “reads like it was written by Alex Jones or Roger Stone”) but for all his braying about “the law” his arrogant attitude and slippery answers left no doubt about where his allegiance lies. Let’s just say Trump doesn’t have to worry about Barr’s loyalty.

The list of Barr’s odious comments is a mile long, starting with his fatuous answers regarding the question of systemic racism in policing. He evidently thinks it’s cute, just as his boss does, to insist that “more white people are shot by police than Black people” when responding to the question of why Black people, who make up only 13 percent of the U.S. population, account for 25 percent of those shot and killed by police since 2015 while “non-Hispanic” whites, who are more than 60 percent of the population, only account for 45 percent. This answer is insulting to the intelligence of the American people.

Barr also obfuscated, dissembled, misled and evaded questions about his interference in cases on behalf of Trump’s cronies, the firing and reassigning of U.S. attorneys working on cases involving the president, the shocking events at Lafayette Square in June and his inconsistency in applying federal laws to benefit the president, while ignoring them when they don’t. As hard as it is to believe, he even took it upon himself to strenuously defend the president’s botched COVID-19 response in great detail, something he could have easily avoided by saying it isn’t his purview.

But no, Barr had the temerity to use some of Trump’s most spectacularly absurd excuses by blaming the Obama administration, which hasn’t been in office for three and a half years, for allegedly destroying the CDC and failing to replenish the national stockpile of PPE. If there was one moment that captured Barr’s total immersion in Trump’s ocean of self-deception and lies, it was that series of inane talking points.

There is a whole lot to worry about with what Barr is doing right now, not the least of which is covering up Trump’s corruption and pushing paramilitary responses against peaceful protests. But after listening to his testimony, I think it’s the potential for direct interference in the presidential election by Barr and the Justice Department that should have every American on high alert.

Consider that Barr’s opening statement referred to the Russia investigation as “bogus,” ignoring the fact that, among other things, Robert Mueller and multiple House and Senate committees have established that Russia interfered in the 2016 election on behalf of Donald Trump. This would also indicate that Barr is completely unconcerned about another propaganda or hacking campaign happening as we speak, despite repeated warnings from the FBI the U.S. intelligence agencies and Congress.

That just isn’t something the attorney general of the United States cares about. When asked if it was OK to solicit or accept foreign assistance in an election campaign, he even responded, Indeed, he even went so far as to answer, “It depends what kind of assistance.” He caught himself, so when he was asked the same question again he said, “No.” It’s a felony, after all. But I think it’s pretty clear that he believes when Trump asks for assistance from Russia, Ukraine and China — all of which we’ve seen him do publicly — it is just fine.

On the other hand, Barr has invented out of whole cloth a new concern that hostile governments will alter the election results by “manufacturing mail-in ballots,” citing zero actual evidence but rather his “common sense” as proof. That’s because there is no evidence. Many states provide no-excuse absentee ballots and five states have total vote by mail. Oregon, for instance, has done it since 1998, without any hint of such a problem.

Earlier in the hearing, Barr had made it clear that he sent federal troops into Portland because protesters were harming a federal building. When asked why he had backed the right ofarmed protesters who stormed the Michigan state capitol, some of whom threatened the governor with lynching and beheading, he claimed not to have been aware of that and mumbled something about defending religious freedom. He indicated that he’s only concerned with federal offenses.

Rep. Greg Stanton, D-Ariz., pointed out that Trump has suggested that no ballots should be counted after Election Day and asked Barr, “If the president asks you to intervene and try to stop states from counting legal ballots after Election Day, will you do the right thing and refuse?”

Barr responded, “I will follow the law.” He separately said he would “enforce” the law. So that means if a state has issued a ruling saying that votes cannot be counted if they were postmarked before Election Day but didn’t arrive until after that, he would be willing to intervene on behalf of the president to ensure those votes weren’t counted.

Anyone who lived through the Florida 2000 election debacle should know that this is not a matter for federal law enforcement. Elections are run by the states. If there’s a dispute it goes to the courts and in a worst-case scenario to the Congress. Barr has no authority to intervene at all in how states count and tabulate their votes, but judging from his recent behavior, I doubt that would stop him. With Barr, “follow the law,” seems to mean “do whatever benefits Donald Trump and hurts his enemies.”

When Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., asked Barr whether he had discussed the presidential campaign with Trump, the attorney general said he couldn’t talk about his private conversations but blithely admitted that they talk about the campaign in Cabinet meetings and said nobody should be surprised that the election comes up. Actually, they should be both surprised and alarmed. The AG is supposed to be the most removed from politics of all high-level administration officials and neither the president nor anyone else should not be talking to him about the campaign or the election. (You may recall the furious rending of garments on the right when Attorney General Loretta Lynch met with Bill Clinton for 15 minutes in 2016.)

Perhaps most chilling was Barr’s answer to Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., who asked whether Barr himself would leave office on Jan. 20, 2021, if Trump loses the election but tries to remain in the White House. “Well, if the results are clear, I would leave office,” the attorney general said. He did not elaborate further, but considering that the president is already saying that mail-in voting will somehow “rig” the election, something Barr claims to believe is thoroughly possible, his unwillingness to simply say that he would leave office if Trump loses is more than a little bit disturbing.

When Nadler asked Barr whether he had ever discussed the presidential campaign with Trump he also asked whether they had discussed the “current or future deployment of federal law enforcement” within the context of Trump’s re-election campaign. Barr answered, “I’m not going to get into my discussions with the president.”

It would have been completely acceptable for him to simply say no to such an explosive suggestion. You have to wonder why he didn’t.

no lnx

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/trump-uses-his-weird-grip-on-republicans-to-stoke-a-nihilistic-culture-war/

no lnx pix

trump uses his weird grip on Republicans to stoke a nihilistic culture war

Donald J. Trump holding a rally in Panama City Beach, Florida, on May 8, 2019 // Office of the President of the United States/Donald J. Trump

Written by Heather Digby Parton / Salon May 29, 2020

I don’t think there’s ever been a U.S. president with more influence with his political base that Donald Trump. All presidents are defended by those who support them, of course. Even the most unpopular failures have diehard fans who stick with them to the bitter end.

But Trump is unusual in that he has only ever attempted to govern on behalf of the people who support him and has no feeling of responsibility toward any other citizens. He has taken the already polarized Republican Party and turned it into a cult of personality. His influence over the 40 to 45% of the population who seem to idolize him is immense.

Perhaps it’s because Trump was a celebrity with a TV show long before he entered politics that makes his fans love him so unconditionally. Whatever it is, Trump and his supporters have an unusually personal and almost intimate bond. It’s clear after three and a half tumultuous years that they will follow his lead no matter what.

The political implications of this are profound. This weird relationship between president and base now completely dominates the Republican Party, apparently making it impossible for any prominent national figure in the party to allow even the smallest daylight between himself or herself and Trump. (Frankly, very few even seem to be trying.)

The red MAGA hat serves as an official symbol of Trump loyalty, and there is a certain part of his following that uses it as a tool of intimidation. Even more disturbing, there has been a spate of mass shootings and other acts of violence by people who have named Trump or his ideas as motivation.

In order to maintain his supporters’ devotion, Trump has stoked the culture wars at every turn, ruthlessly dividing the country in order to keep his fans engaged. They receive such hypocritical gestures of solidarity as his newfound “pro-life” zealotry with enthusiastic gratitude — but what they really love are his brutal assaults on those they consider their political and cultural enemies. In that, Trump and his base are one.

So it should come as no surprise that when Trump faced the first crisis of his presidency that was not of his own making — and failed to meet the challenge — he would reflexively fall back on culture-war tactics to reinforce his base. His response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been abysmal, with the death toll now over 100,000 and the economy in dire straits. After bungling the response so badly that it will be studied by historians for centuries as an example of poor leadership, Trump is returning to his original instinct, which was simply to deny that the whole thing mattered, or was even happening.

His supporters have eagerly followed his lead, defying public health guidelines and demanding that their governors “reopen” immediately (or in Trump’s own words of incitement, that they “liberate” their states.) Trump clearly believes that he can wish away the virus — or at least people’s concern about the virus — by pretending that the crisis is over and that we can go back to normal.

As we speak, he’s arguing with the state government of North Carolina about the Republican National Convention, which is scheduled for late August in Charlotte. Republican officials had reportedly been discussing how they could stage the event while observing CDC social distancing guidelines, and everything had been going smoothly. Trump, however, wants his big party, and wants it to be crammed with people screaming ecstatically at his every word. What he doesn’t want is anyone wearing masks.

In fact, wearing a mask, or rather not wearing one, is fast becoming as much of a symbol of Trump fealty as those red MAGA hats. Trump’s allies on Fox News have pushed it hard among the faithful (with the unexpected exception of Sean Hannity.)

Acyn Torabi

@Acyn

Laura’s war against masks continues

Embedded video

As Salon’s Igor Derysh reports, studies show that people who watch Fox are far more inclined to defy public health guidelines. But really, it’s Trump himself who has turned masks into a culture-war symbol by ostentatiously refusing to wear one.

This makes little sense, of course, if he genuinely wants to reopen the country in a way that allows workers and consumers to feel safe going about their business. Masks and social distancing are common-sense ways to begin doing that, and normalizing that behavior will bring back the economy more quickly. But Trump has decided to pretend that the crisis is over, as I said earlier, and mask-wearing and social distancing don’t exactly send that message.

I also suspect that his resistance is largely due to vanity. The man truly believes that wearing one will make him look foolish (which can only be described as amazing) and he may also have concerns about the mask rubbing off his thick orange makeup.

All of this comes as he’s also implying it’s somehow weak, unmanly and un-American to wear one. In fact, he’s seized upon this as a new attack line against Joe Biden:

Judd Legum

@JuddLegum

New Trump ads on Facebook mock Biden for wearing a mask

View image on Twitter

Some Republicans are actually pushing back on this, notably state governors who will have to deal with the resurgence of cases if people follow Trump’s dangerous example. Even Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has urged people to wear them. It’s hard to know why these dissenters are stepping up now, but maybe it’s because they see something really dark and ugly taking hold among the Trump faithful.

For instance, Republicans in the Pennsylvania legislature who have been railing against public health measures turned out to have concealed the fact that one of their own members had contracted the virus. They quarantined themselves but never told their Democratic colleagues, allowing them to potentially expose their family members and loved ones without knowing it.

According to the Washington Post, there are businesses in various parts of the country now barring customers from wearing masks in their establishments. This was from an interview with Kevin Smith, proprietor of the Liberty Tree Tavern in Elgin, Texas:

“If we’re only allowed to be at 25 percent capacity, I want them to be the 25 percent of people that aren’t p—–, that aren’t sheep,” Smith told The Washington Post. “Being scared all the time isn’t good for your health. It suppresses your immune system.”

Trump posted this tweet yesterday, cutely pretending that he was just making an observation:

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

So many different viewpoints! https://twitter.com/leesmithdc/status/1265629746450358273 …

Lee Smith

@LeeSmithDC

Terrific ?@molmccann? piece in ?@FDRLST? — masks aren’t about public health but social control. Image of Biden in black mask endorses culture of silence, slavery, and social death. https://thefederalist.com/2020/05/27/mandatory-masks-arent-about-safety-theyre-about-social-control/ …

39.6K

5:16 AM - May 28, 2020

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The science is clear on this: Masks work. If everyone wore them when they were out in public it would make a significant difference in slowing the transmission of the virus. These people are pretending to be tough, but in reality they’re just following the example of the president and living in denial.

Imagine a world where, instead of behaving so foolishly, Trump modeled sensible behavior by wearing a mask and social distancing and encouraging businesses to open up responsibly? His followers would buy red MAGA masks by the truckload and turn social distancing into the mark of macho American individualism. But he can’t do that, of course, because stoking the culture war is literally his last hope of winning re-election.

omfg baaaaaaccckkk!?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/the-terrifying-return-of-karl-rove-a-republican-character-assassin-joins-trumps-team/

digby

There have been many rumors in recent weeks that the Trump campaign is starting to disintegrate. This is not surprising. All you have to do is read Trump’s Twitter feed to see that the president does not like bad news and he will kill any messenger who brings it to him. Lately, there has been a whole lot of bad campaign news.

The New York Times has reported that Trump has been getting so angry at the decaying poll numbers that he yelled at campaign manager Brad Parscale and threatened to sue him during a heated phone call. (Parscale reportedly replied, “I love you too,” and flew up to Washingon right away to mend fences.)

Indeed, the polls have not been looking good for Trump, but then they haven’t looked very good his entire term. An impeached president whose approval rating has always hovered around 42% doesn’t have a lot of room for error to begin with. Now that he’s shown what a disastrous leader he is in a crisis, there very little prospect that it’s going to improve.

Naturally, Trump blames his campaign operatives for this because he will never accept responsibility for anything that goes wrong. Parscale has been just a bit too high-profile recently, even getting celebrity treatment from the New York Times, which is the sort of thing that makes the boss very angry. He doesn’t like to share the spotlight, particularly with someone who seems to be making buckets of money while working for him.

The Never Trumper PAC known as The Lincoln Project yanked Trump’s chain with that information this week, running another one of its ads pointedly designed to get under the president’s thin skin.[vids death star ]

setting aside the macabre tastelessness of calling your campaign operation the “Death Star” while your candidate is recklessly mismanaging a runaway epidemic that has killed close to 100,000 of his own people, even as a pop-culture reference it’s absurdly off-base. Does Parscale know that things didn’t end well for the Death Star?

Parscale has cultivated a close relationship with Jared Kushner, the son Trump never had, so he’s probably safe. But you never know with Trump. His 2016 campaign cycled through a number of campaign operatives, some of whom are now either in prison or awaiting sentencing. There have been whispers that Trump might bring back Corey Lewandowski or Steve Bannon, but Javanka never cared for either of them so they’re probably off the table. If things get really desperate, I suppose he can always pardon Roger Stone and Paul Manafort and bring them back on board.

The sad fact is that Trump’s options are limited. While the entire Republican establishment has not just capitulated to Trump but now eagerly supports him, it’s interesting to note that so many high-profile GOP campaign strategists have gone the other way. There simply aren’t very many experienced people Trump can call for help.

But there is one guy: Karl Rove, the man they used to call “Bush’s Brain,” whom George W. Bush affectionately dubbed “Turd Blossom.” Rove has backed away from active campaigning in recent years, preferring to drop his pearls of wisdom on Fox News and advise the dark-money super PAC American Crossroads, which he founded back in 2010. But reports this week suggest that despite Trump’s antipathy for the Bush family, Turd Blossom may be back in the saddle, advising Trump on how to salvage those swing states he sees slipping away.

According to NBC News, Rove has been quietly worming his way into the campaign for some time:

Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale has consulted Rove since the 2018 midterm elections, per three people familiar with the discussions. Before the pandemic, Rove had advised the Trump campaign it could be modeled, in some ways, after the Bush 2004 re-election race.

Of course he did. He certainly wouldn’t want to remind anyone of his total meltdown on Fox News on election night in 2012, when he refused to accept that Republican nominee Mitt Romney had lost Ohio, and with it the election, insisting that his own numbers were more reliable. Romney’s family had to call and tell Rove to back down so the candidate could concede with some measure of dignity.

In fact, Rove is a perfect addition to the Trump team. For all his reputation as a “data guy” and number-cruncher,he’s really just an old-fashioned Republican character assassin. The New York Times has reported that Rove had a recent meeting with Trump and warned him “that he had fallen behind in the task of damaging [Joe] Biden, people familiar with the meeting said.” That’s the kind of tactic in which Rove specializes.

Rove first came to national attention as George W. Bush’s campaign manager in 2000. According to James Moore and Wayne Slater’s book “Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential,” Rove was personally behind one of the most scurrilous episodes in GOP campaign history. He allegedly came up with the infamous push poll used in South Carolina to undermine support for Sen. John McCain with outright racist innuendo: “Would you be more likely or less likely to vote for John McCain for president if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?”

But then, Rove was a Lee Atwater protégé, so what else would one expect?

Crudely tearing down the opponent isn’t the only way in which Rove is particularly suited to be a Trump adviser. He was always exalted among the Beltway press for his supposed genius in figuring out that you should attack your opponents on their perceived strengths. For instance, the Bush campaign attacked John Kerry over his Vietnam War record in the 2004 election, when that was considered Kerry’s ace in the hole. In reality, Rove was always projecting his own candidate’s weaknesses onto his opponent. In that election, Bush had had to contend with the fact that he had started a useless war in Iraq and had himself dodged the draft, so the campaign’s best recourse was to make Kerry look like a liar and a coward.

I hardly have to tell you how Trumpian that is. If Rove can get Trump to actually listen to him — which he probably won’t, since Trump won’t listen to anyone — it could be a formidable partnership.

Karl Rove won elections through the clever manipulation of the media with lots of talk about “the math,” the supposed inevitability of Republican victory and his own inflated mystique. In that regard, he mirrors Parscale, the high-living Trump campaign manager who has snookered the press into believing he’s a high-tech genius possessed of secret knowledge and endless resources. Both of them managed to slip their clients into a first term with a dubious Electoral College victory and a popular-vote defeat. It remains to be seen if Parscale can replicate Rove’s second-term victory in 2004, in which Bush won the popular vote, but almost lost the Electoral College.

Bush’s Brain and Trump’s ego are going to ride Brad Parscale’s Death Star into November. Fasten your seatbelts; it’s going to be a bumpy flight.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/is-grim-reaper-mitch-mcconnell-finally-facing-his-day-of-reckoning/

Thursday’s White House coronavirus rally will go down in history as the day the president directed the scientists to investigate whether ultraviolet light can somehow be put inside COVID-19 patients to kill the virus, or whether disinfectant can be injected into their lungs to clean them. He was very proud of himself, obviously believing that he’d discovered some kind of breakthrough after hearing a briefing about how ordinary people can kill the virus in their homes. [twt vid]

One shudders to think what it must be like to be in meetings with this person. It brings to mind former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s famous quote after trying to teach him some basics about international relations: “He’s a fucking moron.”

Katherine Eban’s reporting for Vanity Fair about the White House hydroxychloroquine debacle reveals that Trump sent government health agencies into a tailspin trying to fulfill his desire for a miracle cure. So if anyone was thinking that these “directives” from Dr. Trump are ignored, we now know better. We can only imagine what kind of “trials” for internal UV light and Clorox cures they are scrambling to set up as we speak.

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But that wasn’t the only disturbing thing Trump had to say. One might have thought he’d spend the entire rally patting himself on the back for Thursday’s passage of the CARE Act extension to help small business, but he seemed uninterested in that. When asked about the desperately needed help for state and local government, which he’d previously said he favored, this was the president’s response: [tet]

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is planning to use this crisis to break the backs of public employee pension funds in liberal states and punish people who vote for Democrats. On Wednesday, McConnell told right-wing radio personality Hugh Hewitt that state and local governments facing revenue shortfalls from this crisis, some of which are forced by law to balance their budgets, may have to go bankrupt because he has no plans to allow the federal government to help them out.

He said these states and cities can use this crisis to solve their “pension problem,” and that he’s saving he’s saving future generations from their fiscal irresponsibility. He later made clear just exactly which states he was talking about by putting out a memorandum in which he described the states requesting help as “Blue State Bailouts.”

Of course the man who blithely passed massive tax cuts for the rich and allowed military spending to grow to unprecedented levels over the past three years, without batting an eye, is now deeply concerned about budget deficits in Democratic states.

This announcement was met with a sharp retort from New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who will be faced with even more devastation if he’s forced to lay off first responders, firefighters, teachers and other state and municipal employees in the epicenter of the pandemic. Cuomo said:

It really is offensive. You talk about one issue where you think you can get past partisanship and pettiness, and now you talk about helping communities where people are dying, and you say they are blue states? If there was ever a time for humanity and decency … and a time to stop your obsessive political bias and anger, now is the time.

Rep. Peter King, a Republican from a suburban district on Long Island — where many of New York City’s police officers, firefighters and other public-sector workers live — was equally unamused:

McConnell’s dismissive remark that States devastated by Coronavirus should go bankrupt rather than get the federal assistance they need and deserve is shameful and indefensible. To say that it is “free money” to provide funds for cops, firefighters and healthcare workers makes McConnell the Marie Antoinette of the Senate.

It’s hard to see what Trump and the Republicans have to gain by this outrageous abdication of responsibility. After all, it isn’t only blue states that are affected by this virus. States that Trump needs to win the election — and that McConnell needs to hold the Senate — are also in dire need. Any hope of an economic upturn will be out of the question if half the country is in a state of financial ruin.

But this is McConnell’s style, and a reflection of his nihilistic worldview in general. He and his fellow travelers have decided that the coronavirus is mainly a problem for their political enemies, and they are going to seize the opportunity to kick them when they’re down. It’s hitting cities and black and brown people especially hard, and those people in those places don’t vote for Republicans. Cuomo said it plainly on Wednesday:

What he’s saying is the blue states are the states that have the coronavirus problem. They are Democrats — so why should he bail out the blue areas?

In fact, under current law state governments are unable to declare bankruptcy, and they can’t easily borrow money due to constitutional budgetary constraints. So the federal government is their only hope. If McConnell holds firm, vast numbers of public employees will lose their jobs since the states will simply be unable to pay them. Of course, for the likes of McConnell, that’s a feature not a bug. If services for vulnerable citizens have to be eliminated in the middle of a global catastrophe, that’s just fine too.

As for McConnell’s alleged worries about where the money will come from, as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman pointed out last week, this is the time for federal borrowing:

Right now, the economy is awash in excess savings with nowhere to go. The interest rate on inflation-protected federal bonds is minus 0.56 percent; in effect, investors are willing to pay our government to make use of their money. Financing economic relief just isn’t a problem.

Anyway, we know for sure that Mitch McConnell has no real concerns about deficits or borrowing. After all, he had no qualms about offering “bailouts” to big companies with virtually no oversight just two weeks ago when he insisted, “We have an obligation to the American people to deal with this emergency.”

It’s unclear exactly how McConnell hopes to thread the needle of only helping red states while leaving the blue states twisting in the wind. But he’ll have to find a way, because plenty of red states are going to need the same kind of help. Perhaps he thinks he can hold any further aid hostage until blue-state governors agree to eliminate public employee pensions, but that’s a tricky business when his own voters will be hostages as well. But McConnell doesn’t gleefully call himself “the Grim Reaper” for nothing. If anyone’s willing to risk his own constituents’ lives to score political points, it’s him.

This upcoming campaign should be one for the books. The incumbent president and his party have decided that their best bet to win over the country during an unprecedented crisis will be too give as much money as possible to big business, force states into bankruptcy and destroy the pensions of cops, firefighters and teachers as the pile of dead bodies gets higher and higher.

McConnell famously said back in 2009 that his job was to make Barack Obama a one-term president. He failed. It looks as though he may get the job done for Donald Trump instead — while destroying the country in the process.

several like this/ 420 an

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/stoking-divisions-and-driving-a-new-explosion-in-the-pandemic-republicans-think-they-can-win-through-sheer-chaos

digby no lnx

...

FreedomWorks, the instrumental force behind the Tea Party, “is holding weekly virtual town halls with members of Congress, igniting an activist base of thousands of supporters across the nation to back up the effort” led by right-wing commentator Stephen Moore.the Associated Press reported. Other right-wing groups vocally opposing shutdowns include Americans for Prosperity, an organization funded by the Koch brothers, and the conservative Heritage Foundation. There is even a connection to the family of Trump’s Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos. As Michigan’s governor noted, the DeVos family foundation helped fund Facebook ads for this week’s protest.

Pro-gun activists have gotten in on the act as well. It’s an astroturf Tea Party reunion tour. If there’s one thing that riles up the right wing, it’s apparently the government trying to save lives.

‘There’s no pandemic…Media’s the cancer’ — People across the U.S., many of whom are vocal Trump supporters, are protesting stay-at-home orders.

COVID-19 has killed more than 37,000 people in America within the last 7 weeks. pic.twitter.com/2xtbPXfjz9

— NowThis (@nowthisnews) April 19, 2020

Trump has personally praised the protesters, as has Vice President Pence, even as they both pretend to care about their new guidelines for opening up the country.

All of this seems odd, considering that common sense and all legitimate scientific advice says that prematurely letting our guard down will likely lead to a resurgence of the epidemic, which means shutting down the economy all over again, with even worse consequences. But there’s a method to their madness. As chaotic and dysfunctional as they are at governing, Trump and the Republicans are united on their electoral strategy. They’ve decided that opening up the economy as soon as possible is their ticket to re-election.

According to Politico, conservatives are still convinced that a highly divisive strategy focused entirely on their base voters divisive, is the way to go, even in the midst of an unprecedented public health crisis:

Trump-supported activists are protesting strict stay-at-home orders. Conservative groups’ internal polling in red-leaning and swing states show a significant uptick in Americans who favor reopening the country. A growing chorus of Republican lawmakers across the nation are on board.

“If you don’t see something start to happen … you’re going to see a conservative revolt by our base,” said Adam Brandon, president of FreedomWorks, a conservative group which recently polled on reopening the economy. “The worst strategy for him is to keep things shut until August. Trump is basically going to win or lose his election right now, in the next month.”

Yes, that would be the same FreedomWorks that is ginning up the protests, along with the other big money groups financed by the likes of Charles Koch. Big-money donors seem to have activated their astroturf groups to get people out in the streets to make sure that Trump feels the pressure from his beloved base to open up the economy. These donors care about preserving their power, privilege and profit margins, but Trump only cares about the November election. They are manipulating him, and his supporters, to make him believe that his ends are aligned with theirs.

Republicans in Congress are doing their part as well. The bill coming up for a vote this week to refill the small-business bailout fund is missing something vital that Democrats and governors of both parties have been begging for: help for state and local governments, many of which are in dire economic trouble and hamstrung by balanced-budget requirements.

You might think that providing them with federal funds to keep the lights on would be a no-brainer. But according to Axios, Republicans will use this prospect as a cudgel to force states to reopen: “The thinking among some Trump administration officials is that many states should be reopening their governments soon and that additional funding could deter them from doing so.”

If anyone thinks that depriving aid won’t hurt Trump’s political enemies more than his allies, they still don’t understand how he plays this game. (There’s already evidence that more federal aid has gone to red states.) This may end up being the most destructive thing Trump has done, at least in economic terms.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/trump-and-his-allies-have-made-a-dark-calculation-reopening-at-any-price-is-his-only-path-to-re-election/

no lnx

Trump and his allies have made a dark calculation — ‘reopening’ at any price is his only path to re-election

Written by HeatherDigby Parton / Salon April 15, 2020

It seems like only yesterday that everyone was lamenting the lack of COVID-19 tests and vital medical equipment, and now we are supposedly ready to “reopen the country.” That’s because it was only yesterday — and it will be the same tomorrow. There are still not enough tests and not enough medical equipment. But because the worst hotspots, including New York City are muddling through at or near the apex of the pandemic curve — dealing with the ravages of this virus day after day as the bodies pile up but new cases level off — President Trump is trying to change the subject away from his failures to a premature declaration of victory.

His coronavirus rallies (aka “press briefings”) this week have been hostile affairs, with the president on the defensive trying to push back against the devastating cascade of reporting that has laid bare the fiasco of his response to the pandemic. But by once again attempting to downplay the current state of the crisis, he seems intent upon making exactly the same mistakes he made before.

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes astutely observed on his Tuesday night show that Trump made three essential errors at the beginning of the crisis.

He failed to take it seriously and appreciate the terrible danger of a pandemic.

The administration did not move quickly, with the lead time, it had to prepare adequate testing.

He focused on the problem of the economy, thinking of it as somehow more important than — and separate from — the epidemic.

Inadequate testing left public health professionals flying blind for weeks and Trump’s lack of understanding of the threat meant that officials waited far too long to issue social distancing guidelines and initiate any meaningful public health response. Trump spent most of his time making happy talk to pump up the stock market, which made it almost impossible for the government to adjust for new information or switch gears when something wasn’t working, because he was deeply invested in saying everything was going great.

As Hayes pointed out, Trump learned nothing from that experience and has remained focused on himself and his re-election prospects above everything else — so he’s doing exactly the same things all over again.

Trump still fails to appreciate the deadliness of this virus, now bragging openly that because the models no longer suggest hundreds of thousands of deaths, he has handled the crisis “perfectly.” Now that he’s concentrating on “reopening the country,” he again fails to understand that testing and contact tracing on a massive scale is absolutely necessary to avoid a terrible resurgence of the outbreak.

Indeed, he still doesn’t seem to understand that asymptomatic people can spread the virus. At last Friday’s coronavirus rally, Trump said widespread testing was not needed because “people aren’t going to go to the hospital, people aren’t going to get sick. It will be gone and it won’t be that much longer.” (The public health experts undoubtedly pounded their heads on their desks when they heard that one.)

He has totally abdicated, once again, the responsibility to make sure that testing is available:

The president, who rolled out a partnership for testing in parking lots at major retailers in mid-March, now says fed govt “can’t be thinking about” testing in a Wal-Mart parking lot, but states should. The testing never lived up to the promises the president rolled out.

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) April 14, 2020

And of course, Trump still sees the economy as the greater problem, without understanding that these things are all connected, and that dealing with the epidemic is necessary before the economy can recover. Simply telling people to go back to work, go back to the mall and go out to dinner doesn’t mean they are going to do it if they think it might kill them. He can’t just magically wish this all away.

So, what are we really looking at in terms of “opening up the country”? He’s been talking about it almost from the start but it’s never been clear exactly what he means. He spent a couple of months just hoping the virus would miraculously go away or suggesting that his miracle cure, hydroxychloroquine, would bring an abrupt end to the crisis and he could go back to talking about Hunter Biden every day.

That didn’t work out, so now he’s pushing the “reopening” as some kind of edict from the mountaintop. On Monday he made the startling announcement that he had the “absolute authority” to order state governors to reopen. Someone must have informed him we actually have a written constitution and he isn’t a king, so he walked that back a bit on Tuesday, saying that he would be “working with” governors and he expected they would do as he suggested.

Lurking underneath that comment was the implicit threat that if they didn’t, he might not be able to “help” them any further with federal assistance:

We’re going to have some very strong recommendations for the governors. We’re going to work with the governors and the governors are going to do a good job.

And if they don’t do a good job we’re going to come down on them very hard, we’ll have no other choice.

That’s a dark threat. No, Trump doesn’t have “absolute authority” over the states, but he has plenty of power that he can use. We’ve already seen it in action. He has made it quite clear that if the states need something they’d better kiss the ring, famously saying of governors who were pleading for ventilators, “It’s a two-way street. They have to treat us well also. They can’t say, ‘Oh, gee, we should get this, we should get that.'”

It has been demonstrated that he’s more than willing to pass out favors to loyal political allies like Rep. Lee Zeldin, R-N.Y., or Republicans in tough re-election races such as Sen. Cory Gardner of Colorado and Sen. Martha McSally of Arizona. Jared Kushner floated in like an apparition at one White House rally and talked about getting a phone call from one of Trump’s New York cronies, and then rushing out some needed supplies right away.

It seems obvious that Trump and some of the people who are whispering in his ear are making the calculation that losing tens of thousands more lives than necessary is just the price that has to be paid. Rep. Trey Hollingsworth, an Indiana Republican may have articulated this idea more clearly than Trump ever has in an interview on Tuesday:

It is always the American government’s position to say, in the choice between the loss of our way of life as Americans and the loss of life, of American lives, we have to always choose the latter.

Our GDP is supposed to be down 20% alone this quarter. It is policymakers’ decision to put on our big-boy and big-girl pants and say it is the lesser of these two evils. It is not zero evil, but it is the lesser of these two evils and we intend to move forward that direction. That is our responsibility and to abdicate that is to insult the Americans that voted us into office.

The one’s who are still alive anyway.

This is the policy that Trump himself reportedly called “letting the wave just wash over the country” — to which Dr. Anthony Fauci responded, “Mr. President, many people would die.”

Trump may be deeply ignorant, but he understood that part. Like Hollingsworth, he just sees the preventable deaths of Americans as a necessary evil to get what he calls “the greatest economy in the history of the world” back on track before November.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/trump-chose-to-do-nothing-for-weeks-now-were-in-a-crisis-with-thousands-of-deaths-and-no-end-in-sight/

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/heres-the-real-reason-bill-barr-has-re-emerged-to-give-us-a-double-dose-of-crazy/

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Here’s the real reason Bill Barr has re-emerged to give us a double dose of crazy

Written by Heather Digby Parton / Salon April 10, 2020

New White House chief of staff Mark Meadows announced this week that onetime Trump campaign spokesperson Kayleigh McEnany will become the White House press secretary. The campaign is looking for a replacement and it seems that Attorney General William Barr may be auditioning for the role. Judging from his two-night interview with Laura Ingraham, he is as enthusiastic about the boss as one of the famed Mar-a-Lago Trumpettes.

We hadn’t heard much from Barr since he was scathingly chastised by a federal judge last month for his “lack of candor” in public descriptions of the Mueller report, saying that Barr had “distorted the findings” of the April 2019 report in his notorious press conference and a letter to lawmakers. The judge demanded a full copy of the Mueller report to review in order to decide whether to reveal the entire document, without redactions.

It’s not every day that the attorney general of the United States is personally castigated by a federal judge. But it was obviously too much to hope that Barr had taken his criticism to heart and had decided to play it straight. His return to the spotlight this week showed that while he may not have contracted the coronavirus, his Fox News brain rot is still raging out of control.

Ingraham has two main hobbyhorses at the moment. She believes that the response to the virus is an attack on civil liberties and that the quick cure for the disease is Dr. Trump’s magic elixir, hydroxychloroquine. She also believes that anyone who disagrees with this is part of a plot to take down her beloved president. So it was within that framework that Barr gave his interview, and he did not disappoint.

Under intense questioning about whether freedom of religion was being infringed by the shutdown, he managed to say that public health measures are acceptable for a short period and then went on to parrot Trump’s maxim that “the cure can’t be worse than the disease,” and even suggesting that more people will die of cancer because researchers are unable to continue their work during the shutdown. He made it clear that he thinks the government should be opened sooner rather than later:

I think we have to be very careful to make sure this is — you know, that the draconian measures that are being adopted are fully justified, and there are not alternative ways of protecting people. And I think, you know, when this — when this period of time is — at the end of April expires, I think we have to allow people to adapt more than we have and not just tell people to go home and hide under the bed,

The “adaptations” he had in mind were unclear, recommending vague “protocols” for restaurants and throwing around terms like “PPE” as if he were the head epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health.For all his alleged concern with civil liberties he seemed to indicate that he thinks restrictions on travel would be a positive consequence of this crisis. At least that’s what it sounded like, since he talked about stricter border laws being a good way to prevent pandemics. After all, viruses don’t recognize citizenship or nationality. If you can’t let people come in, in an attempt to protect yourself from infection, you can’t let people out either. Otherwise, they might bring it back.

It was obvious that Barr has been spending a lot of time watching Fox News. Unprompted, he let loose with a hydroxychloroquine rant worthy of Sean Hannity himself:

Acyn Torabi

@Acyn

Barr says he’s disappointed about partisanship during the pandemic because the President has acted statesmanlike and worked with all the governors while dealing with gotcha questions from the media.He goes on to accuse the media of leading a jihad against Hydroxychloroquine

Embedded video

Barr apparently missed this exchange on his favorite channel the other day in which Dr. William Haseltine, a renowned biologist and retired Harvard professor, took Fox News host Dana Perino to task for pushing this drug with little evidence to back it up.

Lis Power

@LisPower1

Fox anchor: Can you tell me your thoughts on the drug that is used normally to treat malaria.

Dr. Haseltine: It's sad to me that people are promoting that drug.

Anchor: But what about the anecdotal evidence?

Haseltine: That's complete and utter nonsense. Irresponsible.

Embedded video

The blowback over this alleged miracle cure being relentlessly touted by Trump and his friends at Fox News isn’t coming from the press or the Democrats. It’s coming from the medical community, which is appalled that the president of the United States would use his platform to push unproven drugs based on the recommendation of TV quacks and his own “feelings.”

I guess everyone’s an armchair epidemiologist these days, but the Fox News coronavirus coverage is actually dangerous. The fact that the president and the attorney general consider their blather as a basis for policymaking is kind of terrifying.

...

https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/trump-has-filled-the-government-with-his-corrupt-lackeys-spoiler-that-hasnt-worked-out-well-for-the-rest-of-us/

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Trump has filled the government with his corrupt lackeys. Spoiler: That hasn’t worked out well for the rest of us

Written by Heather Digby Parton/ Salon March 27, 2020

In February of 2017, in the very early days of the Trump administration, Steve Bannon, then the White House strategic adviser, appeared at the annual gathering of the Conservative Political Action Committee and described the new administration’s three “lines of thought.” The first had to do with sovereignty or “America First.” The second was what he called “economic nationalism” ( Trump’s trade war). And the third he called “the deconstruction of the administrative state.”

At the time it was assumed that this meant deregulation, a long-held goal of the conservative movement, by another name. And in fact the Trump administration has taken a wrecking ball to environmental and workplace regulation, mostly under the radar. Even the coronavirus pandemic has been used as an opportunity to drastically reduce regulations on pollution.

But whatever Bannon may have thought, “deconstruction of the administrative state” wasn’t part of any ideological “line of thought,” because Donald Trump doesn’t think that way. What it really meant was the degradation and delegitimization of the nonpolitical career officials who run the federal government on a daily basis. This had nothing to do with some theoretical commitment to small government. It was all about a commitment to Donald Trump.

These officials, whether in the intelligence community, the Department of Justice, the Pentagon, the EPA, Homeland Security or the State Department, are all tasked with seeing that rules, norms, regulations and laws are followed and impartial facts and data are produced so the government and the private sector can make rational decisions. They had to be marginalized in order to protect this inept, impulsive, narcissistic president, who had no understanding of how government works and no knowledge of what his job entailed.

Trump’s allies have been relentless in their mission. The turnover in the first three years of this administration has been staggering. When agency heads weren’t forced to leave because of blatant corruption they were pushed out ignominiously for anything from perceived personal slights to jealousy over too much positive attention from the press to differences over his reckless policy decisions. And he has most often decided not to name permanent replacements but to leave “acting” heads in charge, ostensibly because he likes the flexibility. The truth is that he has taken to placing unqualified cronies in important jobs who probably couldn’t get Senate approval, and leaving a large number of jobs unfilled.

This has left the Justice Department in a state of near-mutiny under the leadership of top Trump henchman Bill Barr, while the intelligence community tries to avoid telling Trump anything he doesn’t want to hear and the State Department is staffed by people who have no idea what American foreign policy is from one day to the next.But I think most Americans assumed that the workings of the federal public health agencies would be beneath the notice of the president and would therefore hum along without much interference. That turns out to be wrong too, and for obvious reasons. The agencies are interlocking, and if one is being undermined they all are.The New York Times recently reported that Trump’s propensity for hiring loyalists without experience and leaving many positions unfilled has made the response to the coronavirus pandemic erratic and incompetent at all levels of government.

At Homeland Security, 20 senior positions are either vacant or filled by acting officials, including acting secretary Chad Wolf, who appeared completely clueless in a recent Senate hearing. Workers in the Department of Veterans Affairs had to order medical supplies from Amazon because their leaders are so inexperienced in disasters they didn’t plan ahead for patients at VA hospitals during the pandemic.And if you’re wondering what went wrong at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, ProPublica reported on Thursday that from the beginning that agency was in total chaos trying to deal with the pandemic, a crisis that is specifically in its wheelhouse. It wasn’t just that the tests they developed didn’t work or that they inexplicably refused to use the test German scientists had developed for the World Health Organization. The agency was failing at its most basic function.:

On Feb. 13, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sent out an email with what the author described as an “URGENT” call for help. The agency was struggling with one of its most important duties: keeping track of Americans suspected of having the novel coronavirus. It had “an ongoing issue” with organizing — and sometimes flat-out losing — forms sent by local agencies about people thought to be infected. The email listed job postings for people who could track or retrieve this paperwork.

Trump has insisted over and over again that no one could have predicted that something like this, which of course is complete nonsense. The Obama administration had set up a pandemic team within the National Security Council, which ran potential scenarios for the incoming administration in January of 2017 as part of a legally required transition exercise. Roughly two-thirds of the Trump representatives who attended that meeting are no longer serving in the administration anyway, another example of how the huge turnover has contributed to the botched response. In any case, former national security adviser John Bolton disbanded the team when he joined the White House, so there is hardly anyone around who would have benefited from those briefings anyway.

But according to Politico, the Obama folks left a “playbook” behind that outlined everything the new administration needed to know to begin the coordination of the various agencies and distribution of materials as well as other helpful guidance. Apparently, that guidance was thrown onto a shelf somewhere, and has been gathering dust ever since.

None of that is surprising. When Trump was asked at one of his White House coronavirus campaign rallies if he’d called any of the former presidents for advice, he replied that he thinks he’s doing an incredible job and said, “I don’t think I’m going to learn much.”

On Thursday, he blamed the Obama administration for his own lack of preparation, garnering this response:

https://twitter.com/JeremyKonyndyk/status/1243299159890894854

Trump’s habit from the beginning has been to fire anyone who follows the law or science if he feels that threatens him in any way. So this Washington Post story about the “cadre of right-wing news sites” who are agitating for the firing of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases chief Dr. Anthony Fauci is all too predictable, considering Trump’s track record. They object to Fauci’s insistence that the data and the course of the virus must determine when the guidelines for social distancing can be lifted. Why? Because he is “an agent of the ‘deep state’ that Trump has vowed to dismantle.” Of course.

And so the administrative state continues to be deconstructed, one dead American at a time.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/a-pandemic-is-laying-bare-the-gops-blatant-corruption-and-recklessness/

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A pandemic is laying bare the GOP’s blatant corruption and recklessness

President Donald J. Trump applauds during the federal judicial confirmation milestone event Wednesday, Nov. 6, 2019, in the East Room of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Julianna Luz)

Written by Heather Digby Parton / Salon March 20, 2020

As we watch states around the country start to shut down, one by one, as if the lights were all going out across the country, there is plenty of discussion about President Trump’s bungled response and his compulsion to deliver happy talk and disinformation to the American people. Now that he is unable to hold his beloved rallies and has taken over the daily coronavirus briefing, the opportunities for the latter are unfortunately multiplying. His performances before the cameras every day are getting more and more surreal.

On Thursday, Trump came before the country touting a supposed wonder drug that he promised looked like a major breakthrough. (In fact, it’s a standard antimalarial medication.) As usual, the experts had to walk that back later, saying that it’s just one of many drugs being considered as a possible treatment but they won’t know for months. Reports coming from within the administration confirm that the bungling continues unabated. Between Jared’ Kushner’s “shadow task force” and turf wars among the various players, it seems nobody really knows who’s running the show. It certainly isn’t Trump, who is clearly spending most of his time watching Fox News and the stock market ticker.

There was a time when we might have expected Republicans in Congress to wake up from their stupor and exert some leadership in the face of a president’s overwhelming incompetence in such a crisis. Sure, maybe they felt it was no big deal that he engaged in a criminal cover-up from the moment he took his oath, or that he extorted a foreign leader to smear his political opponent.

Maybe it doesn’t mean anything to them that he’s pretty much dismantled the executive branch as a functional part of government and completely destroyed America’s reputation abroad. Assaulting the press, nepotism, rampant corruption and intentionally dividing the country into warring camps obviously aren’t things that keep them up at night.

But you would have thought GOP lawmakers might be just a little bit concerned about their own voters getting sick and dying in droves. Not to mention the collapse of the world economy.

Unfortunately, leading Republicans don’t seem all that worked up about it, or at least not in public. Recall that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell adjourned the Senate for three days last week. He didn’t feel it was necessary to stay in session so they could put together an emergency economic package to help the millions of workers and owners who have lost their jobs and businesses overnight.

He had priorities and they didn’t include trying to mitigate the effects of what appears to be an impending economic meltdown:

Sherrod Brown

@SenSherrodBrown

This is why Mitch McConnell sent the Senate home for the weekend. To join Brett Kavanaugh at an oath ceremony for one of his judicial nominees.

Unbelievable.https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/mcconnell-absent-from-negotiations-on-coronavirus-economic-relief-package/2020/03/13/7f5f495e-6541-11ea-b3fc-7841686c5c57_story.html …

McConnell finally reconvened the Senate this week and Republicans came up with their own plan on Thursday evening — over which, unfortunately, the GOP caucus is still squabbling. Politico’s Jake Sherman reports that Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.. and new White House chief of staff Mark Meadows are lobbying Trump to reject the idea of immediate cash payments. Apparently they don’t think it’s important to get money into the hands of the millions of people whose incomes have abruptly dried up, and prefer an increase in unemployment benefits. (Why this should be either/or is beyond me. Clearly, we need both.)

They aren’t the only Republican senators who don’t like the bill McConnell came up with, with some favoring loans to small businesses and others arguing against bailouts. As they continue to bicker amongst themselves. many are displaying their ignorance, shallowness and irresponsibility during this emergency.

Here’s Alaska’s long-serving solo congressman, Rep. Don Young, sounding like one of those drunken kids on spring break in Fort Lauderdale, characterizing the response to the epidemic as “hysteria” and exhorting a group of senior citizens not to follow the instructions of public health experts:

This beer virus I call it — they call it a coronavirus, I call it a beer virus — how do you like that? It attacks our senior citizens. Now, I’m one of you. I still say we have to as a nation, as a state, to go forth with our everyday activities.

Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin expressed his skepticism as well:

I’m not denying what a nasty disease COVID-19 can be, and how it’s obviously devastating to somewhere between 1 and 3.4 percent of the population. But that means 97 to 99 percent will get through this and develop immunities and will be able to move beyond this. But we don’t shut down our economy because tens of thousands of people die on the highways. It’s a risk we accept so we can move about. We don’t shut down our economies because tens of thousands of people die from the common flu.

Johnson is a multimillionaire businessman, but he seems to be a bit confused about numbers. Traffic accidents account for about 34,000 deaths per year in the U.S. If the coronavirus kills 1 to 3.4 percent of the population, that would add up to somewhere between 3 and 11 million people. I suspect that could be pretty bad for business, but what do I know?

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., wasted everyone’s time with an irrelevant amendment and gave a speech in which he referred to immigrants as “non-people.” Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said he couldn’t understand why Chinese people would be upset that Trump is calling this disease the “Chinese virus”because “Spain never got upset when we referred to the Spanish flu in 1918 and 1919.” (They did get upset. That pandemic originated in Kansas, but Spain was the only country not under wartime censorship so that’s where it was first reported. That’s not a good precedent.)

The Republicans have lost the ability to legislate, even in an emergency. All they know how to do is confirm unqualified judges and protect Donald Trump from accountability.

Well, actually — they also know how to look out for No. 1. NPR reported on Thursday that Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., had given a private briefing to some influential big donors on Feb. 27. As chairman of the Intelligence Committee as well as co-author of the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act, Burr was in a good position to know what was coming down. He warned this select audience that the coronavirus was akin to the 1918 flu pandemic and that we might have to close schools, curtail travel and call out the military.

Here’s what the president was telling the American people at that time:

Aaron Rupar

@atrupar

“We’re going to be pretty soon at only 5 people, and we could be at just 1 or 2 people over the next short period of time” — Trump on US coronavirus cases on February 26 (there are now more than 10,000 cases in the country)

Embedded video

JM Rieger

@RiegerReport

Trump earlier today on coronavirus:

“It’s going to disappear one day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear. And from our shores, you know, it could get worse before it gets better, could maybe go away, we’ll see what happens. Nobody really knows.”

Embedded video

ProPublica reported later on Thursday that Burr had sold millions of dollars worth of stock days before he gave his big-donor buddies this helpful heads-up. As it happens, Sen. Kelly Loeffler, R-Ga., whose husband just happens to be the chairman and CEO of the New York Stock Exchange, also dumped millions of dollars worth of stock immediately after a full Senate briefing on the virus by the subcommittee on health.

How likely is it that they are the only ones?

Everyone thinks the Republican establishment is afraid of Donald Trump. This entire episode suggests that’s not true. It isn’t that they’re afraid of him. They’re just like him.

===

https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/s-the-christian-right-now-in-charge-of-public-health-inside-the-trump-administration

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Inside Mike Pence’s secret Christian empire

Jim Domen, founder of Church United, and VP Mike Pence,

Written by Heather Digby Parton March 9, 2020

If you’ve been following the latest news on the coronavirus outbreak, you probably saw at least some snippets of President Trump’s visit to the CDC last Friday. It will stand as one of the most astonishing appearances by this or any other president — and that’s saying something. When asked if he regretted firing the entire staff of the Office of Pandemic Preparation, Trump said, “This is something that you can never really think is going to happen.” He said that everyone who wants to be tested for this virus can get tested, which is not even close to true. He called Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington state, who is on the front lines dealing with this epidemic, a “snake.”

He made it clear that he wants to cook the numbers so it doesn’t look as if the nation is in the midst of an epidemic. This has been obvious from the outset, but for the president to come out and say it is something else again:

Mostly, however, he patted himself on the back:

You know, my uncle was a great person. He was at MIT. He taught at MIT for, I think, like a record number of years. He was a great super genius. Dr. John Trump. I like this stuff. I really get it. People are surprised that I understand it. Every one of these doctors said, “How do you know so much about this?” Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should have done that instead of running for President.

As Wired science reporter Adam Rogers wrote:

As a reporter, in general I’m not supposed to say something like this, but: The president’s statements to the press were terrifying. That press availability was a repudiation of good science and good crisis management from inside one of the world’s most respected scientific institutions.

Let’s put that another way: The CDC was considered one of the world’s most respected scientific institutions. It has not been covering itself in glory during this crisis.

The most unnerving aspect of the government response so far has not been Trump’s gibberish. He’s in over his head and it shows, as usual. And we know from his response to Hurricane Maria and other natural disasters that his only concern in a crisis is for his own political well-being. But I wouldn’t have expected to hear the director of the CDC, Robert Redfield, laud Trump like a Fox News pundit:

It’s a full-blown ritual at this point for members of the Trump cabinet and Republicans in Congress to genuflect to the president as if he were a 15th-century pope. And we know that public health experts have had to tread very softly in order not to upset him.

Still, it was surprising to hear such a slavering tribute from a scientist in the midst of a global health crisis. Likewise, it was strange to hear the highly esteemed U.S. global AIDS coordinator, Dr. Deborah Birx, make similar comments when she was introduced as part of the coronavirus task force back on March 2:

It is clear the early work of the president over travel restrictions and the ability quarantine has bought us the time and space to have this task force be very effective. I have never worked with such incredible scientists and thoughtful policy leaders…

It seemed just a bit over the top. But these two weren’t the only ones:

There’s something important happening under the surface here. It may not simply be that these health policy professionals are trying to keep the kooky president happy so they can do their work on behalf of the country. They may be Trump true believers.

U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams, for instance, is a Mike Pence crony who previously served as the Indiana state health commissioner.He was intimately involved in the horrific HIV outbreak in that state, where Pence refused to authorize a needle exchange program until a number of people had died unnecessarily. Naturally, Trump appointed him surgeon general.

Redfield and Birx are both evangelical Christians who have been associated with HIV research for many years, going back to the 1980s. Birx runs PEPFAR, George W. Bush’s global AIDS initiative, and both she and Redfield have been involved with Children’s AIDS Fund International, which lobbies for abstinence-only sex education around the world.

The Washington Post reported back in 2018 that they belong to a network run by an important power broker in the evangelical world:

Evangelical activist Shepherd Smith has spent more than three decades cultivating relationships with leading AIDS researchers and policymakers to promote abstinence-only sex education and other programs. Those connections now could influence government programs and funding within the Trump administration. Among the most prominent: Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention…

[His wife] Anita Smith is now a consultant within PEPFAR to Deborah Birx, a physician and ambassador at large who oversees the program’s estimated $5 billion annual budget. Birx is also a former board member of Children’s AIDS Fund International and served until she was hired by the CDC in 2005, a PEPFAR spokesman said.

Anita Smith was hired by Birx to “improve prevention programs aimed at preteen girls.” I’m pretty sure we know what she recommended.

Redfield and Birx both served in the military doing AIDS research in the mid-1980s. Redfield is well-known for recommending measures that were considered extreme even within the Reagan administration, including the forced quarantine of AIDS patients. He later had a financial interest in an HIV vaccine that didn’t work, but which he continued to push. Birx, on the other hand, has maintained a stellar reputation.

To be clear, none of this means that these people aren’t qualified for the jobs they hold. They both have medical degrees and relevant experience. But they seem to be part of a conservative subculture of evangelical Christians who have found a foothold in the Trump administration clustered around Mike Pence’s office. Along millions of other evangelicals, it appears they really believe in Donald Trump.

Setting ideology aside, however, what Trump wants these people to do — cover up his own ignorance and incompetence — is totally at odds with what they must know is best for the health of the American public. Is their worshipful admiration for this man blinding them to the need to communicate honestly with the American people about this crisis? Because that would explain a lot.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/trump-names-right-wing-troll-to-lead-intelligence-agencies/

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Trump names right-wing troll to lead intelligence agencies

Written by Heather Digby Parton / Salon February 21, 2020

Sen. Susan Collins of Maine has had a long career in politics, and I’m sure she has many accomplishments that she’s proud of. But I’m afraid she’s going to be remembered for one thing and one thing only: Her declaration that President Trump had “learned his lesson” after his impeachment trial in the Senate. That would have been a ridiculous rationale for voting to acquit any president on the evidence in that case, but saying it about Trump was downright laughable. He has proved that every single day since the trial ended.

Right out of the box he vowed revenge. He attacked Sen. Mitt Romney, the one Republican who voted to convict him in the Senate trial, and then immediately set about firing witnesses who had testified against him, including the twin brother of Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, for no apparent reason.

Trump has pushed the Senate Republican majority and the Department of Justice to help him exact his vengeance by investigating professionals who were involved in the Russia and Ukraine investigation. His apparent collusion with Attorney General Bill Barr to interfere in criminal cases has caused a near-insurrection within the Department of Justice.

This week Trump went on a pardon spree, freeing a list of people who had been convicted of corruption, sending yet another obvious message to those inside and outside the justice system that he is unencumbered by the rule of law. It remains to be seen if he will pardon his old pal Roger Stone, now that he’s been sentenced to 40 months in prison. But if he has any fear that Stone has information to trade, you can be sure he’ll do it.

That’s just a partial list of “lessons” Trump has learned since the Senate failed to do its duty, and I’m sure I’m leaving some out. But the announcement on Thursday that Trump will name his ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell, as the new acting director of national security may be the most shocking action of recent weeks.

Grenell is one of the most odious Trump toadies in the administration, and that’s really saying something. Like so many others, he came to Trump’s attention as a sharp-tongued Fox News personality. It’s likely that Trump didn’t know much about him other than the fact he was a big fan. That’s all it takes. Truthfully, if he’d known Grenell’s whole story he would like him even more.

Grenell held a few PR flak jobs in the government, working for the likes of John Bolton at the UN, where he was universally reviled.But he is best known as a Twitter troll, just like the president. He quit Romney’s presidential campaign in 2012, where he’d been hired as a foreign policy spokesman, after his Twitter feed was revealed to be full of nasty comments. During the 2016 campaign, he got back in the game and really made a name for himself as a crude and vicious Trump supporter.

Needless to say, Trump loved it and gave him the plum job of U.S. ambassador to Berlin, where he immediately alienated everyone in sight. On his very first day on the job, referencing the fact that Trump had withdrawn from the Iran nuclear deal, Grenell tweeted that “Germans doing business in Iran should wind down operations immediately.” Obviously he had no authority to dictate any such thing, and people in Germany were not amused, to say the least. Leaders of two German political parties have called him a “brat” and a “failure” and requested that he be withdrawn. No such luck.

Grenell has gone on to cultivate the far right in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, particularly Austrian chancellor Sebastian Kurz, the “boyish face” of his country’s far-right government. Grenell told Breitbart that he wanted to “empower” Kurz and others like him in Europe, which exceeds the job description of ambassador just a wee bit.

Most recently, he was implicated in the baroque Ukraine scandal, and particularly in the side plot involving Lev Parnas and Ukrainian oligarch Dmytro Firtash. Parnas was reportedly instructed (perhaps by Rudy Giuliani) to ask Grenell for a heads-up if the Department of Justice decided to seek Firtash’s extradition to the U.S. Grenell apparently agreed to do it, which was probably illegal.

Grenell’s name has been floating all over the Trump administration for a while, mentioned as a possible national security adviser after Bolton’s departure or a potential secretary of state if Mike Pompeo quits. He has no qualifications for any such posts, other than his personal fealty to Donald Trump.

The professionals in the intelligence community are reportedly very alarmed by Grenell’s appointment, as they should be. The DNI oversees all the U.S. intelligence services and has access to all the most important capabilities and secrets. It is unclear whether Grenell even has a top-level security clearance or could qualify for one.

This appointment was announced as yet another “acting” assignment, which seems odd since an acting DNI, Joseph Maguire, was already in place. (He has filled the job since last August, when Dan Coats departed.) Administration sources have said that Grenell will only serve until Trump nominates someone for the permanent position, which would require Senate confirmation, and won’t resign his position in Germany. So why put in another placeholder?

Late on Thursday, the Washington Post and the New York Times reported the answer: Trump wanted Maguire out immediately because his department had briefed the House Intelligence Committee last week and told members that the Russian government is once again interfering in the presidential campaign on Trump’s behalf. As usual, Trump is livid that members of his administration actually performed their legal and constitutional duties, and is determined to punish those who did. He was especially angry that Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff, D-Calif., a major villain in Trump World, was given this information.

Aside from Maguire, the second-ranking official in the DNI’s office, longtime intelligence professional Andrew Hallman, also announced his departure, leaving the top echelon without experienced leadership. But never fear, another Trumpian hack is on the way. According to Politico, hyper-partisan henchman Kash Patel, the former aide to Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif.,who played an important role in House Republicans’ attempts to discredit the Russia investigation, will come on board as “senior adviser” to Grenell.

It’s clear that Trump has moved his most dedicated disciples into the DNI’s office in order to prevent any more briefings on Russian interference on his behalf and to ensure that the intelligence community is brought to heel. Between this and Bill Barr’s unlimited mandate to investigate the intelligence on election interference from 2016, one can assume that the purge of anyone Trump considers a threat within the intelligence agencies or the Justice Department is now in full effect.

So in a sense Susan Collins was right. Trump has learned his lesson: Only proven Trump loyalists will run national security and federal law enforcement from now on. What could possibly go wrong?

Heather Digby Parton, also known as “Digby,” is a contributing writer to Salon. She was the winner of the 2014 Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/lev-parnas-spins-wild-crazy-stories-and-most-of-them-are-true/

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Lev Parnas spins wild, crazy stories — and most of them are true

Written by Heather Digby Parton / Salon January 17, 2020

Following the rules of an anachronistic 18th-century ritual, the House managers walked in formation to the Senate to deliver the articles of impeachment on Thursday. The sergeant at arms informed the senators that if they speak during the trial they could be imprisoned, and then the chief justice arrived in his robes accompanied by four senators. He then administered the constitutionally prescribed oath to deliver impartial justice to the assembled senators, after which, one by one, they signed their names to a book. The only thing missing was the white wigs.

Meanwhile, the president was shriek-tweeting in all caps, “I JUST GOT IMPEACHED FOR MAKING A PERFECT PHONE CALL!”

It was weird. But then, what isn’t weird in this administration?

Only in the Trump era would we have a bombshell witness appear on the night before the trial, loaded down with pictures and video and written evidence, much of it in Russian. I’m speaking of Lev Parnas, of course, who served as Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani’s bagman in the plot to extort a political smear job against Joe Biden from the Ukrainian government.

Parnas was arrested in October for campaign finance violations, along with his partner Igor Fruman. But until federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York returned records they had seized during the arrest, and a judge cleared them to be sent to the House Intelligence Committee last week, we didn’t know specifically what he’d been up to in the Ukraine scandal.

On Monday, the House released some of the documents to the public, which included text messages — lots of text messages — between Parnas, Giuliani and any number of other players. The trial starts on Tuesday so presumably, the lawyers working for the House managers are pulling all-nighters to put together the timeline based upon all the records provided by their own witnesses, FOIA requests and Parnas to both corroborate his story and present an understandable narrative of what happened in Kyiv and in Washington.

They have not interviewed Parnas, as far as I know, but he’s been giving TV interviews so they should be able to determine some of what they can corroborate and what they can’t. He’s an accused criminal, but as TV prosecutors have been saying on a loop for the past few days, it’s usually criminals who give evidence against other criminals. They’re the ones who know where their fellow criminals buried the bodies.

Parnas revealed a lot of juicy details in his interview with Rachel Maddow on MSNBC. It’s hard to know right now what was most important. There’s a ton of color about the Trump hotel in Washington being essentially like a mobsters’ “social club” where hangers-on gather in the lobby and the bar, while insiders get invited into the inner sanctums where the real deals are made. It’s a GOP power center that just happens to put money directly into the president’s personal bank account. Imagine that.

Parnas also claimed that the shocking texts between him and a fringe character named Robert Hyde, in which Hyde indicated that he had Marie Yovanovitch, the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, under surveillance, were all just a joke. Apparently, both the U.S. government and the Ukrainian government weren’t entirely convinced, since the FBI “visited” Hyde on Thursday and the Ukrainians finally gave Trump his investigation, although not quite the one he wanted. They have also announced they are looking into this allegation.

The new information I find most interesting at first glance is that we now know the withholding of military aid and a White House visit in exchange for the announcement of an investigation into Biden and the 2016 election was only one of three different quid-pro-quos in this plot.

It’s been a puzzle from the very beginning as to why the administration was so determined to push Yovanovitch out of her post. She was something of an anti-corruption crusader, but it hasn’t been clear exactly why Giuliani and his henchmen pushed so hard to get her fired.

According to text messages provided by Parnas, it was just another transaction. Getting rid of Yovanovitch was the price they had to pay to obtain the cooperation of one of the crooked Ukrainian prosecutors, Yuri Lutsenko, who agreed to investigate Biden if they delivered. Despite all their hard work getting Yovanovitch fired — and it was really hard, according to Parnas — Lutsenko’s patron, then-President Petro Poroshenko, lost the election and was replaced last year by Volodymyr Zelensky. (Out of office, Lutsenko later pulled a Trump and reneged on the agreement, telling the press he never found anything on Biden.)

The other quid pro quo is more sinister. Giuliani got word that Dmitry Firtash, a Ukrainian gas oligarch with ties to the Kremlin, had dirt on Burisma, the firm that had Joe Biden’s son Hunter on its board. Naturally, Giuliani was excited. Firtash was being represented by Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing, two long-time GOP legal operatives who had been involved in the Ukraine plot, along with a right-wing reporter John Solomon. Firtash wanted to avoid extradition from Austria to the U.S., where he is wanted on bribery and racketeering charges. According to Parnas, Firtash agreed to share his information in exchange for having his extradition order lifted. Giuliani, Toensing and diGenova all worked together to try to make that happen.

Elements of this story were already known, but Parnas suggested in his interview with Maddow that Attorney General Bill Barr was also “on the team.” He didn’t offer any direct evidence of this and the Department of Justice denies knowing anything about it. But it once more raises the question of why Trump told Zelensky during the “perfect call” to cooperate with both Giuliani and Barr.

Parnas said he came forward because he’s afraid of Barr’s Justice Department, which is astonishing considering the lowlife elements he’s been palling around with. Since Parnas is under federal indictment that seems like a reckless thing to say. But he says everyone is running scared since Trump managed to consolidate power after naming Barr, so his only real hope lies in going public.

This is a crazy story but we already knew that most of it is true. As tantalizing as these new details are, they don’t entirely fill in the picture of Rudy Giuliani’s scheme and how Trump’s Washington works. What was true a month ago remains true today: The president of the United States and his personal lawyer plotted to extort the leaders of a foreign country into interfering in the presidential election by smearing his political rival. New information comes out every day and none of it will ever change that fact.

Heather Digby Parton, also known as “Digby,” is a contributing writer to Salon. She was the winner of the 2014 Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism.

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Why Trump’s embrace of Eddie Gallagher is so dangerous

Written by Heather Digby Parton / Salon December 30, 2019

Judging by his Twitter feed and a few appearances before the cameras, President Trump doesn’t seem to be enjoying his holiday break down at Mar-a-Lago. In fact, his tweeting is so obsessive and downright strange it even has some of his staunchest allies telling him he should put the phone down for a while. It’s obvious that the standoff between House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is driving him to distraction. If that was part of Pelosi’s plan, it’s working.

Nonetheless, as I noted last week, this hasn’t stopped the merriment at Trump’s commercial resort property. Despite his assertion during the annual Christmas Day phone call to the troops that he works constantly when he’s at “the winter White House,” he’s been playing golf, hosting parties and hobnobbing with pals and paying guests.Among those honored guests was Eddie Gallagher, the former Navy SEAL who was accused of war crimes. The Daily Mail reported on the festivities in detail, including pictures of Gallagher and his wife with the president and first lady as well as Donald Trump Jr. Mrs. Gallagher reportedly gushed, “God bless the Trump family and all they are doing for this country!”

As you probably know, Gallagher was acquitted of murdering an injured ISIS fighter in a controversial military trial. After hearing about the case from Fox News commentator Pete Hegseth and former New York police commissioner Bernard Kerik — a convicted felon and buddy of Rudy Giuliani — Trump took the nearly unprecedented step of interfering in the military justice system and ordering Gallagher released from pre-trial confinement. Despite Gallagher’s conviction on a lesser charge, Trump countermanded Navy commanders and restored him to his previous rank, allowing him to keep his SEAL pin, which resulted in the dismissal of Navy Secretary Richard Spencer.

Trump has also pardoned two other members of the military accused or convicted of war crimes, even bringing them up on stage with him at a recent fundraiser. He has reportedly told allies he wants those men to campaign with him next year. We will almost certainly see them at the Republican convention. They are MAGA heroes.

Although Trump campaigned in 2016 by endorsing torture, atrocities and mass executions, even going so far as to proclaim that it was important to “take out the families,” it’s still shocking that he’s openly embracing accused war criminals, calling Gallagher “one of the ultimate fighters” and a “very tough guy.”

After the New York Times’ explosive story on Gallagher last Friday, in which we saw the original testimony of his fellow SEALs and footage of the moments before the killing of the sedated ISIS fighter, it’s almost impossible to wrap your mind around the idea that this man was feted at the “winter White House” just last week.

As the Times reported, this was “the first opportunity outside the courtroom to hear directly from the men of Alpha platoon, SEAL Team 7,”

whose blistering testimony about their platoon chief was dismissed by President Trump when he upended the military code of justice to protect Chief Gallagher from the punishment. “The guy is freaking evil,” Special Operator Miller told investigators. “The guy was toxic,” Special Operator First Class Joshua Vriens, a sniper, said in a separate interview. “You could tell he was perfectly O.K. with killing anybody that was moving,” Special Operator First Class Corey Scott, a medic in the platoon, told the investigators.

The culture of the special forces requires a deep sense of loyalty and code of silence. It’s clear that the decision to come forward was very difficult, but what they had witnessed had obviously caused them great anguish. Gallagher says these SEALs accused him of all these crimes because they are cowards who were failing in their duties, and he has instructed his lawyer to sue the New York Times reporter who wrote the story. (You can see why he and Trump have formed such a bond.)

These anecdotes are overwhelming and disturbing. Seeing the text messages and the video of the witnesses makes it even more disturbing that Gallagher is still walking the streets, particularly since there is no dispute that he stabbed the sedated teenager:

Gallagher initially tended to the boy. Then according to seven members of the platoon, he stabbed him. One of them, Craig Miller, said he saw blood gush from the boy’s jugular, a stream of liquid like the kind that one sees when a baby is “throwing up.” Gallagher later texted his friends a photo of the dead boy: “Good story behind this,” he wrote. “Got him with my hunting knife.”

He was acquitted when one of the accusers, a medic who had been given immunity, explained that he was the one who had actually killed the stabbed teenager by cutting off his air-supply to end his suffering.

Nobody knows exactly what happened, but what with all the high-profile presidential interference and an apparently mishandled prosecution, Gallagher got off the hook. Perhaps that was the correct outcome. The state — in this case, the military — has to prove the case it brings and apparently failed to bring the right one.

But it’s impossible to see those videos and read those texts and come away believing that justice was done. Perhaps even more importantly, you can’t read that story and believe society is safe with Eddie Gallagher walking free, much less being treated as a hero by the most powerful man on earth.

The military itself has suffered a great wound as well. It would have been bad enough for Gallagher to be acquitted due to poor lawyering. But that’s how the system works, and sometimes guilty people get away with murder. But Trump’s interference has disrupted a delicate constitutional balance, in which the nonpartisan military is commanded by the civilian president and regulated by the U.S. Congress. As law professor Deborah Pearlstein wrote in the Atlantic:

Watching the president of the United States reward the violation of the most fundamental laws of war, inflaming America’s enemies and alienating America’s allies, was bad enough. But the president’s action appeared to be an intervention in otherwise semi-independent legal and disciplinary processes inside the military — an intervention for the purpose of currying favor with his political base. The pardons — driven by Fox News and reinforced by political rallies — added to the appearance, and reality, that the president regards the military as a tool of partisan politics, not as an institution whose unique constitutional position he has a duty to protect.

The military was the last government institution his ignorance and solipsism hadn’t managed to compromise. But he has finally gotten to that as well.

Heather Digby Parton, also known as “Digby,” is a contributing writer to Salon. She was the winner of the 2014 Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/republicans-dont-even-pretend-to-care-about-laws-now-what-they-unleash-after-impeachment-will-be-really-ugly/

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Republicans don’t even pretend to care about laws now. What they unleash after impeachment will be really ugly

Written by Heather Digby Parton / Salon December 16, 2019

In the past, despite their differences, our political leaders were in agreement that to at least preserve the ideals behind our democratic system it was important to pay lip service to the spirit of the law. For instance, during the Iraq war, the Bush administration committed war crimes. But officials didn’t come right out and say, “Yes, we torture people. What are you going to do about it?” There were consequences to openly defying the law, which they knew could get quite serious down the road. They understood that to openly endorse war crimes was to let an ugly, dangerous genie out of the bottle. So they claimed it wasn’t actually torture and pretended that they believed torture was wrong, insisting they would never do such a thing.

The old-fashioned trope that describes this is, “Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue.” It’s certainly not an ideal way for leaders to behave. They should follow the law and the Constitution, and if they don’t they should be held accountable. But declaring war on virtue all together and embracing vice as your organizing principle is what mobsters and tyrants do. That’s what’s happening under President Trump.

During the 2016 campaign, he proudly declared that he meant to torture, kill civilians and “take the spoils” of war if he wanted to. Today, he’s pardoning war criminals and bringing them up on stage at political events. While he does lie profusely and conspires with his henchmen, much of his alleged criminal behavior in the White House has been done right out in the open. He admitted he fired former FBI Director James Comey because Comey was investigating him. He dangled pardons and intimidated witnesses in public statements. Most recently he released a transcript of a phone call in which he tried to coerce a foreign leader to smear his political rival, calling it “perfect.”

Now Republican leaders are following his lead. They don’t bother to pretend that they are following rules anymore, or make arguments based on a common understanding of what the Constitution requires. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has announced he has no plans to even feign seriousness with the Senate impeachment trial of Trump. He has said right out in the open that he planned to follow the president’s lead and do whatever Trump wants him to do.

But it’s Trump’s most ardent sycophant, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who is really letting it all hang out:

Graham was in Qatar this past weekend for that nation’s annual international forum, looking for every camera he could find to flagrantly defy the oath he will take before he sits as a juror in the Senate trial. He told CNN, “This thing will come to the Senate, and it will die quickly, and I will do everything I can to make it die quickly.” When asked if he thought that was an appropriate thing to say under the circumstances, he replied, “Well, I must think so because I’m doing it. I am trying to give a pretty clear signal I have made up my mind. I’m not trying to pretend to be a fair juror here. What I see coming, happening today, is just partisan nonsense.”

That’s not how it’s supposed to work. Graham, of all people, knows this. He is the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and was a House manager during Bill Clinton’s impeachment. There are dozens of YouTube clips floating around that show Graham arguing for open-minded fairness in that trial. Let’s just say that if Graham’s a hypocrite, which he is, it’s not in service of any virtue. It’s in service to Donald Trump, the Republican Party and himself.

Graham does seem to have a strategy with all this loose talk. The argument between the White House and the senators who want to put this behind them as quickly as possible continues to rage over whether or not to hold a full trial with witnesses called by both sides or a pro forma process that takes the reports offered by the House Judiciary Committee and simply votes up or down on whether to convict. The president signaled on Friday that he was open to either approach but reports keep surfacing that he wants to put on a big show and leading Senate Republicans are having a hard time talking him out of it.

I suspect that Graham and McConnell have cooked up a deal with Trump for the perfunctory proceeding and a quick acquittal, with the promise that they will pursue the Ukraine charges against Joe Biden and the Democratic Party in the Senate after the trial is over. Graham has been promising investigations ever since he took the gavel in January, but hasn’t managed to get any of it done yet.

Trump may hold him to his latest promise. He might agree to a short trial, but he wants his pound of flesh. So does his lawyer Rudy Giuliani, the former hero of 9/11 who is now staring down the barrel of a federal indictment.

Giuliani just returned from Ukraine where he’s been “gathering evidence” on a couple of brand new scandals allegedly involving Adam Schiff, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. He’s been tweeting about some of it and it all sounds absolutely bonkers.

Giuliani has met with the president to tell him all about this stuff and you can be sure that, acquittal or not, Trump will not let it go.

Graham told Margaret Brennan on “Face the Nation” on Sunday, “Rudy, if you want to come and tell us what you found, I’ll be glad to talk to you. We can look at what Rudy’s got on Joe Biden, Hunter Biden and anything else you want to look at after impeachment. But if Rudy wants to come to the Judiciary Committee and testify about what he found, he’s welcome to do so.”

After that we’ll have Bill Barr’s extravaganza starring his hand-picked special counsel, John Durham next summer., just in time for the conventions. And who knows what Trump’s foreign friends have on tap?

It’s clear that impeachment is just a bump in the road for Trump and the Republicans. Once it’s over, they plan to continue with the lies and smears and betrayals without even taking a breath. The main lesson they have learned from his leadership is that it’s a waste of time to even pretend to care about the rule of law or the Constitution unless it serves their partisan political needs. That ugly genie is out of the bottle now, and I don’t know what it will take to put it back in.

Heather Digby Parton, also known as “Digby,” is a contributing writer to Salon. She was the winner of the 2014 Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism.

Two years of Republican government has been an incompetent circus — and even worse than we expected

Heather Digby Parton / SalonDecember 24, 2018

So long, Republican Congress, and good riddance.

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Two years of Republican government has been an incompetent circus — and even worse than we expected

Written by Heather Digby Parton / Salon December 24, 2018

Poor Paul Ryan. The golden boy of the Ayn Rand crowd was once assumed to be a future president, or at least one of the great statesmen of the Republican Party. He was considered a rarity among Republican pols — a policy wonk with the polish and personality of Ronald Reagan. (I know that sounds crazy, but people really did think that.)

When Barack Obama came into office he saw Ryan as a partner in reducing the federal deficit and the White House went out of its way to feature him prominently in various domestic policy "summits" that were held in the early months of that administration. Obama's opinion changed after he tried to negotiate with Ryan and his cohorts in the House Republican leadership, but it took years for the political media to see Ryan for what he really was: a callow ideologue without much character when the chips were down.

Paul Krugman had his number back in 2010:

Mr. Ryan has become the Republican Party’s poster child for new ideas thanks to his "Roadmap for America’s Future,” a plan for a major overhaul of federal spending and taxes. News media coverage has been overwhelmingly favorable; on Monday, The Washington Post put a glowing profile of Mr. Ryan on its front page, portraying him as the G.O.P.’s fiscal conscience. He’s often described with phrases like “intellectually audacious.”

But it’s the audacity of dopes. Mr. Ryan isn’t offering fresh food for thought; he’s serving up leftovers from the 1990s, drenched in flimflam sauce.

But oh, did they love those blue, blue eyes of his.

Ryan never wanted to be House speaker. He wanted to be president. But when John Boehner was finally forced out by the Freedom Caucus and his heir apparent, Kevin McCarthy, tanked his chances with loose talk about using the Benghazi hearings to hurt Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, Ryan was the only person all Republicans could agree on. He reluctantly signed on. And in doing that he ended up signing his political death warrant.

Ryan's performance as speaker showed him to be feckless, hypocritical and weak in just about every way. He couldn't control his crazies on the one hand and couldn't deal effectively with the crazy in the White House on the other. He ended up being a yes-man for an unfit president who didn't even understand how the three branches of government work. Krugman nailed it again this year upon word of Ryan's retirement. Commenting on the media's surprise, even now, that Ryan and his cohorts have blown the deficit up to unprecedented proportions and happily enabled Donald Trump, Krugman wrote:

[T]he principles they claimed to have never had anything to do with their actual goals. In particular, Republicans haven’t abandoned their concerns about budget deficits, because they never cared about deficits; they only faked concern as an excuse to cut social programs.

And if you ask why Ryan never took a stand against Trumpian corruption, why he never showed any concern about Trump’s authoritarian tendencies, what ever made you think he would take such a stand? Again, if you look at Ryan’s actions, not the character he played to gullible audiences, he has never shown himself willing to sacrifice anything he wants — not one dime — on behalf of his professed principles. Why on earth would you expect him to stick his neck out to defend the rule of law?

Surprise. Paul Ryan is just another partisan hack. Still, I don't think even I expected him to be as terrible at the job as he has been. As he takes his farewell tour, which President Trump generously stepped all over with his silly government shutdown, it pays to recall just what a disaster he has been and the rubble he leaves in his wake.

First, let's recall that when Boehner saw the writing on the wall, he at least made a deal to keep the government open and raise the spending limit for two years as a parting gift to the American people. Granted, he wasn't negotiating with an insane president, but he did have the insane Freedom Caucus in the House, allied with the meddling Ted Cruz in the Senate at the time. He spent every last chit trying to calm things down on his way out the door. Ryan's just rolled along with all of Trump's lurching about on the budget and the wall and is leaving in the midst of total chaos.

We have finally reached the end of this two-year period of total Republican control of the government. It's important to look at what they did when they had it. They managed to pack the courts with unfit, inexperienced extremists in the mold of the man who nominated them. No matter how few people agree with their agenda or vote for them in the future, they will have a strong influence through the extremist right-wing judiciary they have installed in lifetime positions. That's one mission they actually accomplished. Of course, that had nothing to do with Paul Ryan.

They managed to get tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, their Holy Grail, enacted. That was just a generous gift to their big donors, no strings attached and no expectation that it would benefit average Americans. It hasn't.

They just passed a criminal justice reform package that was backed by the Koch brothers and other big-money libertarian types, one suspects just in time to help a spate of rich white guys heading off to jail. (Presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner pushed this through having lived through his father's incarceration for fraud. What a family.)

They couldn't get Obamacare repealed, although Trump's minions have been working overtime to sabotage it from within. They didn't get Trump's wall. The national debt has exploded and the president is on the verge of being impeached. That's quite a record.

But don't worry. This will work out just fine for them. It's just a more extreme version of what they always do. They wreck the economy and destroy all faith in government. Then when the Democrats win as a result of their malfeasance, they stand on the sidelines and wail about fiscal responsibility and demand that Democrats cut services for average people. Like clockwork, rich media celebrities will undoubtedly stroke their chins and sagely advise the people to "grow up" and "take their medicine" by giving up things like health care and retirement security.

Look for Paul Ryan to be batting those baby blues and wringing his hands on TV over debt and deficits any day now. It's a beautiful scam and it's been working for decades. If you didn't know better you'd almost think they planned it this way.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/the-web-of-crazy-that-may-bring-down-a-president/

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The web of crazy that may bring down a president

"Trump refuses to honor John McCain" by cizauskas is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Written by Heather Digby Parton / Salon October 4, 2019

Last weekend, for the first time, one of Donald Trump’s former insiders appeared on television and openly discussed the metastasizing Ukraine scandal in clear and concise terms. Former homeland security adviser Tom Bossert appeared on ABC’s “This Week”:

This Week

@ThisWeekABC

Former Homeland Security adviser Tom Bossert on impeachment inquiry against Pres. Trump: "It is a bad day and a bad week for the president and for this country if he is asking for political dirt on an opponent." https://abcn.ws/2mhOgOy

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Tom Bossert says Pres. Trump needs to "move forward" from focus on 2016 collusion allegations: "If he continues to focus on that white whale, it's going to bring him down. Enough." https://abcn.ws/2ojcGb3

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Bossert was talking about two of the strands of what turns out to be a convoluted set of interlocking conspiracy theories, all of which involve Rudy Giuliani and all of which are, quite frankly, completely nuts.

There’s the one about former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and the “Black Ledger,” which forms one strand of the ludicrous “Ukraine framed Russia to help Hillary Clinton” 2016 collusion theory. Manafort knows his way around Ukraine and Giuliani has reportedly been consulting with him in prison, where Manafort is serving time for various felonies he committed during his work there.

The “CrowdStrike scandal” mentioned by Bossert intersects with the “Black Ledger” theory. This one holds that the security firm that first identified the Russians as being behind the Democratic National Committee hack was actually owned by a Ukrainian (it isn’t and never has been) and was in on the plot — as were the FBI and the DNC, including murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich, who supposedly did the actual hacking as an “inside job.” All of it is utter nonsense. (The New York Times’ Scott Shane did a nice report on how Trump got hooked on this stuff.)

There’s also Attorney General William Barr’s “investigation of the investigation” which has him gallivanting all over the globe trying to prove that the CIA had it in for Trump and set up the bogus Russia investigation to trap him. This must also means that Robert Mueller was in on the scheme, since his team indicted a whole bunch of Russians.

As I said, Rudy Giuliani is at the center of all of these conspiracy theories, working under the influence of a couple of Ukrainian conmen in Florida with the full participation of his client, the president of the United States. They are both wallowing in the right-wing fever swamps and it’s as fetid and poisonous as Chernobyl during the meltdown.

Of course, there is also the other big Ukraine scandal that has gotten Trump into such hot water: the alleged influence-peddling extravaganza around Joe and Hunter Biden. As is his wont, Trump has blurted out a confession of wrongdoing, admitting that he asked the Ukrainian president to gather some dirt on his potential political rival as Trump was inexplicably holding up promised military aid. On Thursday, he said it again, adding that he thinks China should investigate the Bidens as well — in the same breath that he made new threats about the ongoing trade war. He just can’t quit self-impeaching.

Later on Thursday evening, the House Intelligence Committee released transcripts of Trump’s Ukraine and EU ambassadors and envoys texting back and forth about Trump’s “crazy” quid pro quo, which makes clear that they were all aware of what was going on and were either trying to document their displeasure or cover the whole business up. They worked very hard to get Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to sign a statement saying his government was taking up the investigation of Joe and Hunter Biden. in exchange for a visit to the White House and the release of nearly $400 million in military aid. To his credit, Zelensky didn’t do it, perhaps understanding that he was dealing with people who were unreliable.

Unlike all the other Ukraine scandals, this Biden conspiracy didn’t spring from the right-wing fever swamps, nor did Rudy Giuliani “uncover it” as he likes to brag he did. This one was a professional hit job carried out by the same team that brought you “Clinton Cash,” the book about the Clinton Foundation that formed the basis of the “Crooked Hillary” campaign.

This time it was a book called “Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends,” by “Clinton Cash” author Peter Schweizer, who is now an editor at Breitbart News and president of the Government Accountability Institute, a nonprofit he founded with Steve Bannon and right-wing billionaire Rebekah Mercer. Its purpose is clear enough: To launder far-right smears and dirty tricks.

I wrote about this gang back in 2015 for Salon when Schweizer gulled the New York Times and the Washington Post into partnering with him on the Clinton story, apparently convincing them that the man who wrote “Architects of Ruin: How Big Government Liberals Ruined the Global Economy and Will Do It Again if We Don’t Stop Them” was a straight journalist just looking for a little accountability. The book was a huge success at what it set out to do: Tar Hillary Clinton as a corrupt criminal. Why not do it again with Joe Biden, who everyone knew was likely to run against Trump in 2020?

This time, with the notable exception of a couple of dubious stories in the New York Times, the media didn’t bite on the Biden story with quite the same eagerness. Bloomberg’s Joshua Green points out in this article on the subject that while it didn’t catch on in the mainstream press, it was huge in the conservative media, which apparently bothered Bannon a great deal. After all, the GAI was formed to push its smears into the mainstream. Stories that exist only in the conservative bubble simply don’t have the same power to move the broader electorate.

Green notes that because Trump mainlines conservative media, he saw the story as very beneficial to his cause, adding that “what differentiates Trump from other power-consumers of conservative media is that he’s the president and was willing to use his governmental powers to attack a political rival.” Indeed he was. And it was a big mistake — it finally got the Democrats off the dime on impeachment.

Schweizer denies working with Giuliani or the White House. But then, he didn’t have to. He planted the seeds and then Fox News and Rush Limbaugh and the Trump and Rudy show made it grow. Green writes:

[T]here’s no question the anti-Biden effort has boomeranged on Trump, who is suddenly under siege from the Democrats’ fast-moving impeachment inquiry. … At this point, no one can say what effect all this will have on the 2020 election. But it looks increasingly like it won’t be the one that Biden’s antagonists, from Trump to Schweizer, were aiming for.

It’s possible this will end up hurting Joe Biden, as these smears almost always do. But it’s hurting Trump even more. And to be honest, I’m not sure that Schweizer and company care that much. If a pain in the neck like Donald Trump gets caught in the crossfire I doubt they’ll lose any sleep over it. Political hitmen aren’t sentimental. They just move on to their next assignment.

Heather Digby Parton, also known as “Digby,” is a contributing writer to Salon. She was the winner of the 2014 Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/the-unlikely-rise-and-spectacular-fall-of-john-bolton/

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The unlikely rise and spectacular fall of John Bolton

Written by Heather Digby Parton / Salon September 11, 2019

When John Bolton was named as Donald Trump’s national security adviser I was as stunned as anyone. After all, he’s well known as a man who wants to blow up the world while Trump is a man who thinks he can bring world peace by offering condo development deals to dictators and terrorists. They didn’t seem like a good match. I did, however, think they might find a meeting of the minds under certain circumstances. After all, if a war were to happen, they share a similar philosophy about how it should be fought:

Trump’s words, both in public and private, describe a view that wars should be brutal and swift, waged with overwhelming firepower and, in some cases, with little regard for civilian casualties. Victory over America’s enemies for the president is often a matter of bombing “the s— out of them,” as he said on the campaign trail.

Neither Trump or Bolton have any use for nation-building and both are contemptuous of America’s allies as well. But other than a shared love for brutality they really didn’t have anything in common. If Trump didn’t hire people just because they’re on Fox News, he would have known that an egomaniacal super-hawk with a taste for fierce bureaucratic infighting wouldn’t mesh with his own belief that he can con anyone into doing his bidding by the sheer force of his personality.

Yesterday, Trump tweeted that he’d fired Bolton, and Bolton immediately fired back that he’d offered his resignation. Since Trump is the more notorious liar, I’m going to assume Bolton is telling the truth. From the sound of it, Bolton’s going to make a whole lot of money on a book, probably set to come out right before the election. Trump may regret not keeping him in the fold.

This has been a long time coming, with Bolton clashing with everyone else in the administration and being publicly humiliated at every turn. But the precipitating event seems to have been last weekend’s Camp David debacle in which Bolton adamantly opposed Trump’s plan to bring Taliban leaders to the U.S. a few days before the 9/11 anniversary. He wasn’t the only one, of course. It was a daft idea. But he seems to have been the one who spoke up and became the fall guy for that embarrassment.

Bolton never accepted that Trump doesn’t have a geopolitical view or a foreign policy philosophy. He just wants to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Unfortunately, he’s convinced he can do it simply by holding a photo op.

Never Trumper David Frum described the dynamic on MSNBC:

This is a story about fantasy and envy. The president’s fantasy about being a great deal-maker and his envy of President Obama’s peace prize. Zalmay Khalilzad, our former ambassador to Afghanistan, was running a process of negotiation with the Taliban to see if an agreement could be reached. About the first of September, he seems to have reached some kind of interim deal. What should have happened at that point [is] it goes into the government and different agencies look at it and say, “Do we like it, can we look at it, do we go forward, do we stop?” Trump got the smell of this and thought, “This is a done deal, Zalmay is going to get the credit, he’s going to get the Nobel Peace Prize.”

Frum added that Trump “wanted to be Jimmy Carter without the work.”

Everything about that had to make Bolton crazy. Nothing could be more antithetical to his hawkish views than making peace in the first place, let alone doing so out of shallow self-interest. One assumes he didn’t hold back his dismay. So his time was up.

Bolton had been working at cross purposes with Trump and the rest of the administration from the beginning. His legacy will be a bunch of failed initiatives and bad judgment. Most impressive of those failures was on Venezuela, the one policy he managed to persuade Trump to undertake. He was the main mover behind the campaign to push out President Nicolás Maduro and back opposition leader Juan Guaidó by imposing sanctions on the country under the assumption that Maduro would go quickly. That didn’t happen and Trump lost interest, seeing yet another opportunity to be a hero go down the drain.

As a long-time North Korea hawk who had been instrumental in George W. Bush’s failed policy and who had openly advocated bombing the country for years, Bolton had been pushing the administration to get tough with Kim Jong-un. Trump, of course, believes that his supposed friendship with the North Korean leader will persuade the dictator to give up his nuclear weapons. North Korea is a problem from hell, but any day that Kim hasn’t launched one of his nukes is a good day. So Trump’s delusions are at least buying time until someone who knows what he or she is doing can take over.

And then there’s Iran, Bolton’s great white whale. He has been agitating for war with Iran for decades now, and every time he seems to get close it slides out of his grasp. During the Bush years the plans were at the ready but even that administration, burned badly in Iraq, didn’t pull the trigger. Watching from the wilderness during the Obama administration, Bolton no doubt felt deeply frustrated by the nuclear deal and undoubtedly felt that if nothing else, as national security adviser he would be able to get Trump to make his longed-for regime change happen. Trump was an Iran hawk too, after all.

Once again, Bolton misunderstood what Trump was after. The president knows nothing about Iran or the Middle East. He withdrew from the nuclear deal not because he wanted to go to war but because he wanted to make his own deal and have a big ceremony announcing that he can make better deals than Obama.

The results of all this have been disastrous. American foreign policy is failing everywhere in the world. From Trump’s reckless trade war with China to North Korea (which tested more missiles this week) to Iran, Afghanistan and everywhere else it’s a mess. But John Bolton was the one person in Trump’s orbit who has consistently tried to get him to go to war.

Trump wants to economically dominate other countries, backed up by military force. He wants to be hailed as a great hero and dealmaker who solved intractable problems with his personal acumen and charm. He is incapable of doing any of that, of course. But at least with Bolton gone, we don’t have to fear that one day the president will wake up and realize he’s failed on all those counts with the nation’s most aggressive über-hawk whispering in his ear that he can get what he wants by using overwhelming military force. In the Trump era, that’s about the best we can hope for.

fake fight / wwf ?

AN 919

https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/why-has-donald-trump-turned-on-fox-news/

no lnx

Why has Donald Trump turned on Fox News?

Written by Heather Digby Parton / Salon September 5, 2019

I wrote on Tuesday about Trump’s allegedly “innovative” strategy to attack the media, pointing out that conservatives have been doing this for decades. They’ve been “working the refs” of the mainstream media since before Richard Nixon’s day. Trump even has an enemies list, although his wrinkle on that authoritarian impulse is to tweet out the names of the people he considers enemies while Nixon had the good grace to keep it secret.

Trump has recently seemed a bit confused about all this. Perhaps the stress is getting to him. But lately he’s been “working the refs” at Fox News, apparently upset that they have had the temerity to interview people, at least once in a while, who express views opposed to Trump’s. He’s been exploding about this on his Twitter feed:

@realDonaldTrump

Aug 28, 2019

Just watched @FoxNews heavily promoting the Democrats through their DNC Communications Director, spewing out whatever she wanted with zero pushback by anchor, @SandraSmithFox. Terrible considering that Fox couldn’t even land a debate, the Dems give them NOTHING! @CNN & @MSNBC....

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

....are all in for the Open Border Socialists (or beyond). Fox hires “give Hillary the questions” @donnabrazile, Juan Williams and low ratings Shep Smith. HOPELESS & CLUELESS! They should go all the way LEFT and I will still find a way to Win - That’s what I do, Win. Too Bad!....

That’s not how it’s supposed to work. Fox News has always allowed Democrats to come on the air from time to time in order to keep up the pretense that it’s a legitimate news organization. They even used to feature some liberal-leaning pundits just so they could say they were “fair and balanced.”

This was always nonsense, of course. The whole point of the network was to provide a right-wing media outlet to benefit the Republican Party. As Russell Crowe, playing Roger Ailes in the recent Showtime “The Loudest Voice,” put it:

Cable is about one thing: niche. The loyalty of a passionate few. We need to program directly to the viewer who is predisposed to buying what we’re trying to sell. In politics it’s called “turning out the base. “If we can do that, then they will never change the channel. And what is that niche? Well, I think it is conservatives. It’s roughly half the damn country.

The show is based on the book of the same name by Gabriel Sherman about Ailes and Fox News. I don’t know if that quote is taken from that research, but it certainly conveys Ailes’ vision. After years of pummeling the mainstream media for being liberal, conservatives had prepared the ground for a right-wing news network posing as an objective news organization. In order to maintain that fiction, it was important that they at least pay lip service to some objectivity in the news side even as their bombastic opinion stars like Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity fed the audience the red meat that Ailes knew would keep them coming back for more.

Ailes supported the Trump campaign — after resisting it at first —but he was in the middle of his own horrific sexual harassment scandal and in failing health. He was forced out of the network before Trump was elected and was relegated to helping the candidate prep for the debates against Hillary Clinton. (That reportedly didn’t go well, although the parties involved didn’t agree on why. ) But prior to that falling out, there had been talk that Ailes and Trump were planning to start a new TV network if Trump lost the election. Obviously that didn’t happen although if Trump is defeated in 2020 there’s a good chance that plan will be revived in some form. It’s impossible to believe that Trump will be able to let go of the media spotlight. He would certainly have a built-in audience, potentially poached from Fox News.

Trump has openly shared his supposed reasons for being hostile to his favorite network. He is angry at recent Fox News poll which show, as do all the other reputable polls, that a large majority of Americans disapprove of him personally and are opposed to his policies. After a recent survey showing that the top five Democratic candidates would beat him handily if the election were held today, he told reporters:

I don’t believe it. I don’t believe it. Every place I go we have lines outside. Fox has changed. And my worst polls have always been from Fox. There’s something going on at Fox, I’ll tell you right now. And I’m not happy with it.

The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake pointed out that other polling shows that among those who “strongly approve” of Trump, a vast majority trust Fox News more than any other network. He knows that many of his voters see the poll numbers and may wonder why he’s always talking about how successful he is. So he needs to discredit Fox — forcing his fans to take sides and choose who to believe.

But it isn’t just the poll that has him fuming:

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

....I don’t want to Win for myself, I only want to Win for the people. The New @FoxNews is letting millions of GREAT people down! We have to start looking for a new News Outlet. Fox isn’tworking for usanymore!

That even got Trump fanboy Brit Hume’s hackles up and he replied, “Fox News isn’t supposed to work for you.” Trump can be forgiven for making that mistake. Fox has been slavishly devoted to him since Ailes first set the wheels in motion during the 2016 campaign. Neil Cavuto ranted for some minutes about “integrity” and the like. But others began fawning to the point of outright delusion:

Kyle Griffin

@kylegriffin1

Joe Walsh: "Stuart, do you believe this president lies?"

Fox Biz host Stuart Varney: "No."

Walsh: "You don't believe he's ever lied?"

Varney: "He exaggerates and spins."

Walsh: "Okay, do you believe he's ever told the American people a lie?"

Varney: "No."

[vid]

Rupert Murdoch turned over the running of Fox Corp. to his eldest son, Lachlan, just before the sale of the company’s entertainment division to Disney. It hasn’t gone all that well. Fox News had already lost a step since Ailes departed and it’s been getting worse. It isn’t the slick production it once was, largely abandoning its pretense at being a major network and pretty much simply adopting the crude Breitbart-Trump line. There has been nonstop controversy over the network’s turn to overt white nationalism, with advertisers leaving in droves. Reporters and pundits are at each other’s throats, with the channel’s biggest star, Sean Hannity, in open revolt.

Meanwhile, the younger, supposedly more liberal son, James Murdoch, who was responsible for the embarrassing phone hacking scandal in Britain, is said to be increasingly “troubled” by the direction of the network and is thinking of taking some of his billions and buying a rival network (as well, perhaps, as a comic book publisher.) There have been reports of Rupert possibly coming back to right the ship, despite his age and his health problems.

As in the HBO drama “Succession,” which is clearly based on the Murdoch clan, the saga of Trump and Fox News is really about the extreme ineptitude and weakness of second-generation heirs to great fortunes. As Lucy Prebble, a writer and executive producer of the show, told the BBC, “Everybody is a coward, everybody is an idiot and everybody is trying to cover their back almost all of the time.” That sure does sound familiar.

The writer Hugh Montgomery observed that “Succession” is “part of a reckoning with the particular strain of rich white men who continue to have a grip on the Western political and media establishment — and have, arguably, or very clearly, abused that power to monstrous effect.” I’m afraid that reckoning still has a way to go.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/misogyny-and-white-supremacy-its-time-to-fight-these-closely-linked-sources-of-violence/

no lnx

Misogyny and white supremacy: It’s time to fight these closely-linked sources of violence

Written by Heather Digby Parton / Salon August 12, 2019

It’s been a little over a week since the deadly shootings in El Paso and Dayton and, as usual, the nation’s attention is already turning to other things. In the Trump era, there’s always something horrible happening. The Democratic presidential candidates have put gun safety policies at the top of their agenda and perhaps it will stay there. But Mitch McConnell is still in Kentucky vaguely waving his hands about some kind of legislation, clearly assuming the country will have moved on by the time Congress reconvenes next month. This ritual response to mass murder is sadly predictable.

But before we leave this latest episode of horrific violence behind, it’s important to note that a new understanding has come out of these events about the nature of the threat we face. It’s not only from easy access to guns but about the ideology that’s driving some of these recent incidents. The mainstreaming of white supremacist language by conservative media — and by President Trump’s rhetoric — have been recognized as a contributing factor in the growing white power movement in the United States. That’s an important step to gaining an understanding of this phenomenon.

The threat of white supremacist violence has been with us for a long time, of course. But it has picked up in recent years and the government has been lax in confronting it, mainly because Republican politicians have a fit any time the topic is raised. (This should have sounded some alarm bells about the mainstreaming of this ideology long ago.) Law enforcement has long been aware that the advent of the internet has created fertile ground for recruitment and conversion and that the movement was spreading, but wasn’t given the resources to deal with it. Perhaps that will change, although it’s hard to see that happening any time soon when the president himself insists the threat does not exist:

Asked if he thinks white nationalism is a rising threat, Trump says, “I don’t really. I think it’s a small group of people that have very, very serious problems.”

Trump goes on to say he thinks it’s too early to draw conclusions about what motivated New Zealand mosque shooter. pic.twitter.com/maTx55ruCb

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 15, 2019

But the El Paso massacre by a white supremacist wasn’t the only deadly violence on that awful weekend in America. In Dayton, Ohio, a 24-year-old man killed nine people in another mass shooting, and his motivation is murkier. Apparently, the accused shooter’s social media accounts showed that he identified with progressive politics, expressing admiration for Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. But that may be less important than the apparent fact that he also had a fetish for guns and held crude and violent misogynistic beliefs. Although law enforcement officials have drawn no public conclusions about the shooter’s motive, ABC News reported on Sunday that they believed the shooter had “demonstrated a misogyny that was far more extreme than any of his political leanings.”

“Extreme” doesn’t really cover it. This man had been expelled from school for writing a “rape list” and was reportedly a singer in a “pornogrind” band — a tiny heavy metal subculture that celebrates extreme violence against women. (Although this musical genre is intentionally disgusting, it’s been around for years and has not previously been implicated in any acts of violence.) It appears the authorities believe the shooter’s motives weren’t explicitly political but rather tied somehow to his hatred of women.

Obviously a leftist can also be a violent misogynist, but left-wing politics doesn’t feature misogyny as part and parcel of its ideology. Generally speaking, the left rejects sexism and is open to a feminist critique of gender-based violence. In that regard, the Dayton shooter seems to have had more in common with the white supremacists than anyone on the left.

The Anti-Defamation League issued a report last year titled “When Women are the Enemy: The Intersection of Misogyny and White Supremacy,” finding that hatred of women is often “a gateway into the white supremacist world.” That report found that cultural changes and the focus on gender equality in progressive politics inspire some men to turn to far-right, white supremacist movements that see women in highly traditional gender roles. Among “white power” and neo-Nazi groups, whose explicit aim is to repopulate the white race (so that black and brown people do no “replace” them), women are encouraged to bear as many children as possible. (In that they are echoed by mainstream white nationalists such as Tucker Carlson of Fox News.)

Jessica Reeve, the author of the ADL report, told the Independent:

There’s a profoundly anti-woman undercurrent to many white supremacist/alt right online exchanges, and that can easily veer from disrespect into the full-on promotion of violence, including rape. This is even more evident if you visit incel and MRA boards, where anger towards and hatred of women is the primary focus — and participants celebrate and encourage misogynist violence.

In other words, there seems to be a strong correlation between the people who believe they are being robbed of their rightful status by people of color and those who believe they are being robbed of their status by women. These overlapping forms of resentment and anger can all too easily lead to violence. Sometimes this is limited to “ordinary” domestic abuse, which remains widespread in America. Sometimes it results in lethal horror such as Dayton.

A recent New York Times article explored the issue of misogyny in these mass shootings. Much as the white supremacists of 8chan and similar forums have celebrated the mass killings of Jews, Mexicans and Muslims, online groups of “incels” have also celebrated the killing of women, especially the infamous case of Elliot Rodger, the young man who killed six people in 2014 in Isla Vista, California, a day after posting an online video vowing revenge on women who had declined his advances. The Times cited a more recent example: “Alek Minassian, who drove a van onto a sidewalk in Toronto in 2018, killing 10 people, had posted a message on Facebook minutes before the attack praising Mr. Rodger.”

It appears that the demographic and personality profile that can lead to white supremacist violence is not much different the demographic and personality profile that leads to misogynist violence. In fact, these killers often seem irrationally angry with everyone who isn’t a white male.

I hardly think it’s necessary to point out that our president is right in the middle of this phenomenon as well. The ADL paper reports that after Trump’s “Access Hollywood” tape was released during the 2016 campaign, notorious neo-Nazi Richard Spencer defended the then-candidate, saying that “at some part of every woman’s soul, they want to be taken by a strong man.” Trump’s overt racism isn’t the only reason these extremists love the guy.

Much has been made of the fact that authorities have been starved of resources to combat this white supremacist threat. There is now some hope that will change. As important as that is, it’s time to put some resources — and some serious thought — into combatting misogynist violence as well.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/trumps-second-term-would-be-terrifying-heres-why/

If President Trump manages to win re-election it will be in no small part due to the fact that he’s exhausted the opposition with so much outrageous conduct that regular people simply can’t find the emotional energy to engage in the fight anymore. This week we are expecting to see the result of Attorney General Bill Barr’s redacted version of the Mueller report. It’s very possible that it will leave us with that now familiar feeling that we can believe the president or believe our lying eyes.

We know we saw Trump praising Russian President Vladimir Putin in truly odd fashion throughout the 2016 campaign. We know we saw him deny the Intelligence community’s unanimous conclusion that the Russians interfered in the election, and we know he lied repeatedly to the public about a major real estate deal he was negotiating during the campaign, all of which was at best suspicious and at worst disqualifying. Yet, even if the report lays out in colorful detail that although investigators “did not establish” that Trump committed a crime but did establish that he was ignorant and unethical, it will go down as a victory for him. That’s how degraded our standards have become in just two short years.

So far the country has survived, even if we are a bit worse for wear. But consider the fact that the more Trump gets away with, the bolder he is becoming. Last week we learned that the president of the United States is offering pardons to officials who will agree to break the law. CNN reported:

During President Donald Trump’s visit to the border at Calexico, California, a week ago, where he told border agents to block asylum seekers from entering the US contrary to US law, the President also told the commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, Kevin McAleenan, that if he were sent to jail as a result of blocking those migrants from entering the US, the President would grant him a pardon, senior administration officials tell CNN.

It’s unknown whether Trump ever made a similar offer to the recently fired Homeland Security secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, but we do know that he repeatedly exhorted her to break the law. The New York Times reported:

The president called Ms. Nielsen at home early in the mornings to demand that she take action to stop migrants from entering the country, including doing things that were clearly illegal, such as blocking all migrants from seeking asylum. She repeatedly noted the limitations imposed on her department by federal laws, court settlements and international obligations.

The White House denies all this, of course. But it’s completely believable because he does these things in public as well as privately. He recently told the press, “We have to get rid of judges” and said that border patrol agents should defy the judiciary if they were told to allow asylum seekers’ claims. At one point after he sent troops to the border he changed the rules of engagement:

Anybody throwing stones, rocks, like they did to Mexico … where they badly hurt police and soldiers of Mexico, we will consider that a firearm because there’s not much difference when you get hit in the face with a rock. … They want to throw rocks at our military, our military fights back. We’re going to consider it — I told them, consider it a rifle.

This would be illegal for both the military and the border patrol and Trump later walked back the order saying he “hoped” the military wouldn’t have to shoot people.

Of course that’s not the only time Trump has told government officials to break the law. Former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has said he often had to tell the president he was proposing illegal actions, and that when Trump was told he couldn’t do that he’d become very frustrated. (Keep in mind that Tillerson came from the private sector, just like Trump, but somehow seemed to have a basic understanding of ethics and the law.)

And recall this disturbing report from a few months back:

President Trump told the White House counsel in the spring that he wanted to order the Justice Department to prosecute two of his political adversaries: his 2016 challenger, Hillary Clinton, and the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey, according to two people familiar with the conversation. The lawyer, Donald F. McGahn II, rebuffed the president, saying that he had no authority to order a prosecution. Mr. McGahn said that while he could request an investigation, that too could prompt accusations of abuse of power. To underscore his point, Mr. McGahn had White House lawyers write a memo for Mr. Trump warning that if he asked law enforcement to investigate his rivals, he could face a range of consequences, including possible impeachment.

It appears that Trump’s new attorney general may not have quite the same qualms as the former McGahn. Barr has agreed to re-investigate the “origins” of the Russia probe and previously said he believed the bogus Uranium One scandal should be further examined. You’ll notice that Trump has made his personal wishes about this very clear:

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

Why should Radical Left Democrats in Congress have a right to retry and examine the $35,000,000 (two years in the making) No Collusion Mueller Report, when the crime committed was by Crooked Hillary, the DNC and Dirty Cops? Attorney General Barr will make the decision!

The list of Trump’s lawlessness since he’s been in office is very long. And it isn’t just him. Aside from the unprecedented number of corrupt officials who have been forced to resign, his entireadministration is defying any laws it sees as barriers to its political agenda. Just last week, the Treasury Department has indicated it plans to defy the law that allows Congress to obtain the president’s tax returns. It’s just what they do.

This has been a strong feature of the administration from the beginning. I think the idea was best articulated by the man who is Trump’s closest adviser on immigration, White House adviser Stephen Miller. He put it this way back in February of 2017 when the first “Muslim ban” executive order was signed:

The end result of this … is that our opponents, the media and the whole world will soon see as we begin to take further actions, that the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned.

So far the courts have been able to stop the president’s lawbreaking for the most part. But if he wins re-election, whether he “gets rid of judges” or simply relies on all the new right-wing appointees Mitch McConnell has rushed through on a Senate assembly line, it’s reasonable to assume his “substantial” powers will be questioned far less often.