Month: November 2015

Wingnut dispatch Muslim Brotherhood

by digby

Here’s a little treat from the right wing fever swamps offered up just so you’ll know what they’re getting at when you inevitably hear about it down the road:

Hillary Clinton’s longtime aide Huma Abedin’s ties to the Muslim Brotherhood are well documented and well known to Clinton and to other Washington insiders, such as Republican Senator John McCain, who defended Abedin in a speech on the Senate floor when five conservative Members of the House of Representatives called for the State Department Inspector General to look into Abedin’s fitness to hold a high level security clearance while she served as Hillary Clinton’s deputy chief of staff at the State Department.

Some observers have called the Clinton email scandal an unprecedented breach of national security. But now that it has been revealed that Huma Abedin is a central figure in the national security disaster wrought by the compromise of military and diplomatic intelligence sent and received through Hillary Clinton’s unsecured private email server, is there really no precedent for Abedin’s role in this disaster?

Actually there is, but it lies shrouded in the murk of the lies that the liberal media have constructed to obscure the truth about the penetration of the United States government by another anti-constitutional totalitarian political movement – world Communism.

Like Islam, totalitarian Communism posited the overthrow of American constitutional government and the subsequent substitution of a system that would regulate the minutest details of human existence.

And like Islam, totalitarian Communism had its active agents, “fellow travelers” and sympathizers who found their way into positions of power and influence in the United States government with the intention of undermining our constitutional system of government.

Among the most influential of those individuals whose Communist associations were revealed was Alger Hiss. Hiss held a variety of sensitive diplomatic posts during World War II and ultimately headed the San Francisco Conference that organized the United Nations. After the end of the war and the organization of the United Nations he became president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

In that capacity Hiss was a leading advocate of the United Nations and a major internationalist influence on the United States government and our policies toward the Soviet Union, an enemy state that had the goal of burying the United States, as Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev once put it.

In 1948 Hiss was outed as a secret communist by Whittaker Chambers and accused of lying during his testimony to the House Un-American Affairs Committee. Hiss denied the charge and filed a libel suit against Chambers, but after Chambers produced a number of copies of State Department documents and said they were given to him by Hiss for transmission to the Soviet Union, perjury charges were brought against Hiss when he denied before a grand jury that he had committed espionage. The Hiss-Chambers affair would prove to be the watershed case* of the investigation of Communist influence in the United States government.

It is important to remember that Hiss was never convicted of espionage, he was convicted of lying about his communist associations, and of course he lost his libel suit against Chambers when he was shown to have transmitted U.S. government secrets outside of channels.

The left and the Washington establishment have never stopped defending Hiss, or really accepted that Hiss was exactly what Chambers said he was, but the Hiss affair eventually served as a model for how to manage the congressional investigation into Communist influence in the United States government, but not in the way you might expect.

Rather than expose themselves to the prospect of a perjury charge future witnesses called before the House Un-American Affairs Committee and its Senate counterpart run by Senator Joseph McCarthy began to invoke their Fifth Amendment right to stay silent and not answer any questions about their affiliation with the Communist Party or world Communism.

Actions oddly similar to Huma Abedin’s refusal to answer under oath interrogatories regarding the Clinton email scandal.

The congressional investigations into Communist influence in the United States government were eventually brought to a close and Senator McCarthy was brought into disrepute by his famous interchange with Joseph N. Welch, chief counsel for the United States Army while it was under investigation for Communist activities by McCarthy’s Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, wherein Welch defended a junior attorney in his firm, Fred Fisher, whom McCarthy had accused of being a Communist.

Of course it does little good over sixty years later to note that Welch himself admitted that Fisher had indeed been a member of the National Lawyers Guild, a Communist front organization, but it was merely a youthful indiscretion and after all Fisher was a Harvard man, so case closed.

Except, as subsequent scholarship has shown, McCarthy was right about the penetration of the cultural institutions and government of the United States by Communists and Communist sympathizers, even if he couldn’t connect all the dots in individual cases at the time.

Writing at Breitbart in January 2014, our late friend M. Stanton Evans elaborated on, and, more relevant, quantified McCarthy’s efforts to identify Communists inside the federal government.

What Evans found in writing Blacklisted By History, his groundbreaking book about McCarthy, is that there is a good deal of information available about the Communist penetration of the United States for those who care to view it: sizable tranches of McCarthy’s papers, and those of his opponents; reams of formerly confidential data from the FBI; thousands of pages of hearing transcripts and archives of his committee and other panels of the Congress; intercepted Soviet communications and revelations from Cold War defectors; and so on.

Looking at this mass of materials and matching them up with McCarthy’s cases, Stan Evans found that the main thing to be noted is a recurring pattern of verification. 

Time and again, said Evans, we see the suspects named by McCarthy or his committee–treated at the time as hapless victims–revealed in official records as what McCarthy and company said they were–except, in the typical instance, a good deal more so.

How is this ancient Cold War history relevant to the present circumstance of Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton’s email server and the penetration of the United States government and cultural institutions by the Muslim Brotherhood?

As our friend Diana West observed in defense of her book, American Betrayal, it is rather hilarious, in a mirthless way, to hear Learned Professors still attempting to maintain the domain of “Cold War Studies” as a rather sterile realm in which the Rosenbergs, Hiss and lesser known “spies” lurked, only stealing secret formulas, never actually influencing anything, certainly not the course of American strategy or the movement of world events. (For more on this see Diana West in CHQ, “Stan Evans and Sen. McCarthy Were Right: The US Government Was Infiltrated By Communists”)

So it is with the Muslim Brotherhood; influencing the course of American policy toward Muslim nations, scrubbing American anti-terrorism policy of any reference to Islam and most of all influencing American policy to increase the wave of legal immigration from Muslim countries are not illegal – any more than Fred Fisher joining the communist-influenced National Lawyers Guild was not illegal – but they do undermine the American will to resist Islamist influence and defend constitutional government.

And there’s another parallel between Ms. Abedin and the targets of the Cold War investigation into Communist influence in the United States. Like many of the targets of the investigations of the 1950s Ms. Abedin has resisted putting herself under oath to answer questions about her actions in moving classified information from the secure State Department computer system to Hillary Clinton’s unsecured private email served where what was sent and to whom could not be tracked, or at least tracked as easily.

In 2012, when five House conservatives requested the State Department investigate whether or not it was appropriate for Ms. Abedin to hold a high level security clearance, given her long family history of ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, Senator John McCain rose to give the equivalent of Joseph Welch’s defense of Fred Fisher – calling the questions regarding Ms. Abedin’s family ties to the Muslim Brotherhood “sinister accusations [that]rest solely on a few unspecified and unsubstantiated associations of members of Huma’s family.”

And the five conservative Members of Congress were smeared in the media as Islamophobes, McCarthyites and worse.

We know, just like the Communists of the twentieth century, the Muslim Brotherhood is operating in the United States – and recruiting high level operatives such as Egypt’s former anti-American president, Mohammed Morsi, (overthrown in a popular uprising) who joined the Muslim Brotherhood after being recruited into the Muslim Students Association right here in America.

Huma Abedin’s role in the national security disaster that is unfolding in the Hillary Clinton email scandal now begs the question “why wasn’t that IG investigation conducted?”

It also begs the question “was any inquiry into whether Ms. Abedin’s family ties rendered her unsuitable for a position that involved access to classified information, especially about the Muslim Brotherhood, ever conducted?” Answering that question is of paramount urgency now that it has been revealed that Huma Abedin was at the heart of a breach of America’s most sensitive intelligence while she was Hillary Clinton’s deputy chief of staff at the State Department.

A security clearance and access to the highest levels of American military and diplomatic intelligence are not constitutional rights. It is time for Ms. Abedin to be put under oath to answer questions about her associations with the Muslim Brotherhood, whether or not she lied during her security clearance process and her role in moving classified material from the secure State Department system to the unsecure Hillary Clinton email server.

And I must point out that our wonderful FBI chief James Comey is certainly helping things with comments like this:

As Americans stood horrified at the news of a Jordanian pilot burned alive by the terrorist group known as the Islamic State, one of the top law enforcement officers in the country talked about how Mississippians can fight those kind of extremist ideals within our own borders.

FBI Director James Comey, who was in the state for the second visit of his 10-year term, said there are open cases looking into individuals who may be related to ISIS/ISIL in every state in the Union except Alaska.

“Mississippi is a great state, but like all 50 states it has troubled souls that might look to find meaning in this sick, misguided way. The challenge that we face in law enforcement is that they may be getting exposed to that poison and that training in their basement,” Comey said. “They’re sitting there consuming and may emerge from the basement to kill people of any sort, which is the call of ISIL, just kill somebody.”

So he stressed that the threat is very real, not just for military or law enforcement or the media, all of whom have been warned by the FBI that ISIS could be gunning for them, but for ordinary citizens as well.

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Jeb the fixer

by digby

15 years ago today we all started watching the news around the clock and kept doing it for over a month. It was election day and one of the greatest political dramas we’ve ever seen started that night when it turned out the presidential election was too close to call in Florida. As it happened one of the candidates’ brothers also happened to be Governor of that state — lucky for that candidate.  As you know, he won.

I wrote about that today for Salon. Jeb’s new slogan, “Jeb can fix it!” says it all:

“Circumstances have changed dramatically since I first called you,” Gore told Bush. “The state of Florida is too close to call.”

“Are you saying what I think you’re saying?” Bush asked. “Let me make sure I understand. You’re calling back to retract your concession?”

“You don’t have to be snippy about it,” said Gore.

Bush responded that the networks had already called the result and that the numbers were correct—his brother Jeb had told him.

“Your little brother,” Gore replied, “is not the ultimate authority on this.”

“I would arrive in the morning through the garage and come up on the elevators and come in through the cabinet-office door, which is downstairs, and then in the evening when I left, you know, sometimes it’d be late, depending on what was going on, I would go the same way. I would go down the elevators and out through the garage and be driven—driven to my car from the garage, just because there were a lot of people out front on the main floor, and, at least in this small pond, knowledge of my presence would have been provocative, because I have a political background.”

There’s a lot more at the link.

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ED 2015: Illegitimi non emasculatum
by Tom Sullivan

It’s five o’clock somewhere, friends say. On the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November, it’s Election Day somewhere in the United States. Don’t you have someplace to be?

If Americans were really as exceptional as we think we are, we might vote at a higher rate than we do. Because as democracies go, we suck [Pew Research]:

Nicholas Stephanopoulos makes the case for compulsory voting for the Atlantic, and for how we might get there in spite of herculean efforts by some to keep us away from the polls:

Compulsory voting isn’t as draconian as it sounds. No one is dragged to the polls against his or her will, and no one is thrown in jail for refusing to cast a ballot. Instead, a modest fine (about $20 in Australia) is levied on people who fail to show up and have no good excuse for their absence. There also isn’t any danger of political speech being compelled—a no-no under the First Amendment. People are free to do what they like with their ballots, including turning them in blank.

To find out what effect compulsory voting has on turnout, I used data from the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance to compare participation rates in countries that do and don’t require voting. Between 1945 and 2015, turnout hovered around 85 percent in compulsory voting countries (like Australia, Belgium, and Brazil). But it fell from 75 percent to 65 percent in countries with voluntary voting. Results like these may be why President Obama recently said, “If everybody voted, then it would completely change the political map in this country.”

Which is why powerful people don’t want you to.

How we get past the poll taxes, the literacy tests, the photo IDs, the Tuesdays, and the T-party Congress, Stephanopoulos suggests, is by making voting compulsory first in the cities. In a blue city in a purple state, say, and by holding city elections on the same day as federal elections:

Why would the city make this switch? Partly to save money; it’s cheaper to administer one election than two or three. Partly because higher participation is itself a democratic good. But also for the sake of partisan advantage. Registered non-voters lean substantially more Democratic than registered voters. If they were required to go to the polls, election outcomes would shift markedly to the left.

At this point, redder jurisdictions would face enormous pressure to follow the blue city’s lead. Not doing so would award the Democrats an electoral bonanza: a surge in turnout in their urban stronghold unmatched by greater participation in suburbs and exurbs. To get a sense of how strong the Republicans’ incentive would be, think back to the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, both of which came down to a single swing state. Bush prevailed in Florida and again in Ohio. But he likely wouldn’t have won if Miami and Columbus had required all their eligible voters to go to the polls.

I like it. One can easily come up with a dozen reasons why this would never work. Stephanopoulos mentions just a few.* But then, you could have said the same about ending slavery, women’s suffrage, civil rights, marriage equality, or legalizing marijuana. Eventually, as trends that start in California have a way of migrating east, the federal government would have to follow suit. That is, assuming Roberts court constitutional originalists don’t smack down the idea as an infringement of a right they just discovered in the centuries-old text. Courts are already rather selective about the right to be let alone.

Still, a 2012 quote from former Colorado Senate Majority Leader Ken Gordon (D-Denver) expresses the gist of the argument for a more perfect democracy:

“We think that voting actually is not just a private vote for the person who gets the vote, but a public good, and that the more people who vote, the more legitimate the elected officials are, and that they represent the actual values of the electorate.”

Don’t let the bastards take your vote from you. It is one of the few powers you have left.

* including the fact that in non-Home Rule states, GOP-controlled legislatures can simply prohibit cities from doing this.

Maybe these two NBC commies could host the GOP debates

by digby

I know they’re probably considered even worse than those commies at CNBC but the GOP candidates should give them a second look:

Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, the double act of MSNBC’s flagship chat show “Morning Joe,” are tasked with carrying the first-ever joint interview with both Koch brothers in the barons’ hometown of Wichita, Kansas.

“In one sitdown with Charles Koch, Joe and Mika will discuss with him his new bestselling book ‘Good Profit,’ a press release said. “Then, David will join Charles for a conversation about their unique backgrounds and lives, and their thoughts on politics.”

Unmentioned in the release is the fact that both Brzezinski and Scarborough earlier this year attended a weekend in Palm Springs, California, for the American Recovery Policy Forum, put on by the Kochs’ organization, the tax-exempt Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce.

The weekend was closed to the public and the media but nevertheless contained many members of the press — including ABC News’ Jonathan Karl — who networked with donors, business leaders and other denizens of the Koch kingdom. Also in attendance were presidential candidates Sen. Rand Paul, Sen. Ted Cruz and Sen. Marco Rubio, who headlined the event with an informal debate around “free markets and the role of government.”

Neither MSNBC nor the Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce would answer questions about whether the Koch organization paid the travel or other expenses for the MSNBC hosts.

Once the MSNBC duo returned to New York to tape their show, they treated viewers to several days of glowing reports from their trip to Kochland. Brzezinski, the resident liberal to Scarborough’s cranky-but-lovable conservative persona, raved for two days about the unappreciated passions of the “awesome” oil magnates as her male co-host nodded beside her.

“They’re definitely not what you think,” Brzezinski said the first day back. “I mean, it’s everything that you don’t think, and you don’t know,” she went on the next day. “There are different facets of the story you get to see when you actually go and observe events like this.”

“Liz Koch, ever met her?” Brzezinski continued, mentioning Charles Koch’s wife. “She’s a ball of fire! And she’s got this incredible program for helping the poorest of the poor kids in several inner cities that she’s developed.”

Her co-host, a former Republican congressman, lauded the Kochs for inviting Brzezinski to the event. “It was a great move having Mika out there as a liberal. It was, I think, very important.”

Scarborough himself boasted of a long conversation with Charles Koch, calling him a crusader against “income disparity and, mainly, crony capitalism.”

See? Those Kochs are just nice middle of the road billionaires who are worried about income inequality. Their lifetime of libertarian law-of-the-jungle economics has always been in service of helping the poor. Scarborough also said they don’t want the federal government in their pocketbooks and also not in their bedrooms.

But let’s just say that if a candidate agrees to work to keep the government out of the Kochs’ pocketbooks, they be happy to overlook the bedroom stuff. After all, they’ve supported some of the most extreme theocrats in modern politics.

But seriously, I think Mika and Joe could do a terrific job with the debates. If they’re good enough for the Kochs, they should be good enough for Donald Trump and Ben Carson.

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Projecting strength

by digby

This review of the book “The New Tsar” about Vladimir Putin sounds fascinating:

Rather than a unified theory of Putin, what Myers offers is the portrait of a man swinging from crisis to crisis with one goal: projecting strength.

Here’s a translation of some of his speeches:

“We’re gonna have so many victories … at some point it’s gonna be coming out of your ears. We’re gonna make our military so big and so strong and so great, and it will be so powerful that I don’t think we’re ever going to have to use it. Nobody’s gonna mess with us. There’s nobody bigger or better at the military than I am.”

Oh sorry that was Trump. My mistake.

Meanwhile, in Bizarroworld

by digby

Here’s Trumpie’s latest:

On the Democratic side, Trump said, “[y]ou have this crazy Wasserman Schultz — Deborah Wasserman Schultz — who is in there, a highly neurotic woman.”

“This is a woman that is a terrible person. I watch her on television. She’s a terrible person,” Trump continued. “And in all fairness, she negotiated a great deal for Hillary because they gave Hillary all softballs.”

“Unbelievable,” Bannon remarked.

“Every ball was a softball. And in fact, the other candidates weren’t even allowed to talk up against her,” Trump said.

Then he went to talk about how his dick crowds are bigger than Sanders’

In Bizarroworld, these are softballs:

First question to Clinton:

You were against same-sex marriage. Now you’re for it. You defended President Obama’s immigration policies. Now you say they’re too harsh. You supported his trade deal dozen of times. You even called it the “gold standard”. Now, suddenly, last week, you’re against it.

Will you say anything to get elected?

Follow-up:

Secretary Clinton, though, with all due respect, the question is really about political expediency. Just in July, New Hampshire, you told the crowd you’d, quote, “take a back seat to no one when it comes to progressive values.” Last month in Ohio, you said you plead guilty to, quote, “being kind of moderate and center.”

Do you change your political identity based on who you’re talking to?

First question to Sanders:

Senator Sanders. A Gallup poll says half the country would not put a socialist in the White House. You call yourself a democratic socialist. How can any kind of socialist win a general election in the United States?

First follow-up:

You – the – the Republican attack ad against you in a general election – it writes itself. You supported the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. You honeymooned in the Soviet Union. And just this weekend, you said you’re not a capitalist. Doesn’t that ad write itself?

Then Cooper asked, “let me be clear is there anyone on this stage who isn’t a capitalist?” as if this was a serious subject of debate in the Democratic Party.

More softballs:

Governor Chafee, you’ve been everything but a socialist. When you were senator from Rhode Island, you were a Republican. When you were elected governor, you were an independent. You’ve only been a Democrat for little more than two years. Why should Democratic voters trust you won’t change again?

Governor O’Malley, the concern of voters about you is that you tout our record as Baltimore’s mayor. As we all know, we all saw it. That city exploded in riots and violence in April. The current top prosecutor in Baltimore, also a Democrat, blames your zero tolerance policies for sowing the seeds of unrest. Why should Americans trust you with the country when they see what’s going on in the city that you ran for more than seven years?

Senator Webb, in 2006, you called affirmative action “state-sponsored racism.” In 2010, you wrote an op/ed saying it discriminates against whites. Given that nearly half the Democratic Party is non-white, aren’t you out of step with where the Democratic Party is now?

That’s what these wingnuts call softballs. But then the candidates didn’t whine and cry like a bunch of little babies over having to answer them. They just answered them. (Jim Webb got a little pouty about not being called on enough, but then he’s a right winger so it figures.)

As for Trump’s characterization of Wasserman-Schultz as a highly neurotic woman and a terrible person is typical for him. I have no doubt that the wingnuts are cheering it.

Update: John Amato caught Trump’s appearance on the sports show “The Herd” today. He calls Rubio a lightweight:

How come these guys all call for the smelling salts when a reporter asks them an uncomfortable question but Trump can call them every name in the book and it’s just part of the game?

There is no Republican Party

by digby

I think there’s a case to be made that the Republican party has now officially ceased to exist:

Republican campaigns agreed to take a larger role in negotiating the parameters of the upcoming presidential debates and largely cut the Republican National Committee out of the process during an unprecedented meeting of advisers for all but one campaign Sunday night.

It was a signal that efforts from the RNC to alleviate long-simmering frustrations from the campaigns over the debates, which came to a boil last week after the debate hosted by CNBC—a sister channel of NBC News and MSNBC—had fallen short.

On Sunday, the RNC told campaigns that it was appointing RNC Chief Operating Officer Sean Cairncross to assist with debate negotiations. On Friday, the committee announced that it would suspend the next debate hosted by NBC News and Telemundo over the way the CNBC debate played out, which campaigns have complained was poorly moderated and intended more to bruise the candidates than enlighten the voters.

Lindsey Graham’s campaign manager, Christian Ferry, called dinner meeting of representatives of the Republican presidential campaigns “an extremely productive evening.”

There is a starting point for the GOP operatives—”we agreed that we would like the campaigns to negotiate with the networks on format going forward,” Ferry said, and “continue to have the RNC help with logistics.”

According to Ben Carson’s campaign manager. Barry Bennett, the campaigns all agreed to circulate a questionnaire to the networks hosting the debates asking for details on their planned formats, the moderators and how long the debates will go, among other details.

The campaigns will hold a conference call before each debate to hammer out the details on a case-by-case basis, during which, Bennett said, he expects other issues of contention—like whether to hold an undercard debate and how to get more candidates involved in the main debate—to be ironed out.

John Boehner had to resign in order that the congress avoid total chaos and possibly default on the government’s debt during a presidential campaign. The RNC has just been shut out of participation in the presidential campaign. Candidates are in the employ of billionaires (or are billionaires)  who are openly bankrolling the campaigns and their Super PACs  — and requiring fealty to their needs in return.

This is no longer a political party. It is just a sales force selling snake oil to the rubes on behalf of the 1%.

Here’s one example of how that works out for those rubes:

This is why the rubes are going to Carson and Trump. They can’t stand Democrats because they are “giving away” the store to all the undeserving people of color. But somehow they’ve started to
pick up on the fact that they’re getting screwed too. I don’t know where this ends. But “Jeb will fix it” isn’t going to fix it.

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Oh holy Kinnock, Jeb

by digby

This is really something:

To most American voters (especially the younger ones), Jeb Bush’s new slogan will mostly just sound uninspired, and slightly reminiscent of Bob the Builder. But for pretty much anyone even mildly aware of British popular culture, the words “Jeb Can Fix It,” soon to be plastered on every surface his dying campaign can touch, will bring to mind just one thing: Jimmy Savile, one of the most prolific child abusers in the history of entertainment.

For unfamiliar Yanks, Savile was one of Great Britain’s most beloved and popular entertainers during his lifetime, covering the gamut from radio to television to charity work and everything in between. He was even knighted by the Queen in 1990. But after Savile died in 2011, what had long been sporadic and stifled allegations of sexual abuse began to blow up. And up and up and up.

By November of 2012, it was revealed that 450 alleged victims had come forward in the mere ten weeks since the police launched an investigation into Savile’s behavior. According to a BBC report from the time, of the hundreds of alleged victims, 82% were female and 80% were “children or young people.”

In 2014, a new report from the Health Secretary revealed that Savile also may have sexually abused patients at over 40 different hospitals he had visited under the auspice of “charity work.” With the Daily Mail writing that “Savile is thought to have abused patients aged from just five to 75.”

And before all that came to light, Jimmy Savile had a wildly popular children’s show called Jim’ll Fix It.

I have a sneaking suspicion that some late night comedians are going to have a field day with this one …

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Give them a bottle and put them to bed

by digby

Jebbers unveils his retooled campaign stump speech with a new slogan “Jeb can fix it!”. (“Reformer with results” was taken …)

It’s actually more blah, blah, blah, nothing new. But I always have to laugh when I see this considering the right’s outrageous militaristic rhetoric and level of hatred toward Democrats of all stripes. It would be funny if it weren’t so creepy:

Americans have had enough of our president’s many strawman arguments.

And, of a front-running candidate who blames a vast right wing conspiracy instead of taking personal responsibility, and who declares roughly half the country is her enemy.

If Secretary Clinton has her way, the next four years will be like the last eight: gridlock, grievance, division, demonization.

This is the only way they know how to win.

On the issue of immigration, they have written a script for Republicans, filled with grievance and resentment.

Frankly, the last thing they want is a Republican challenger who takes them out of their comfort zone of forced indignation and PC platitudes.

But let me be clear: I’m not stepping into the role of angry agitator that they have created for us, because it’s not what’s in my heart.

It is not true to the conservative cause. And, in the end, that role is just a bit part in the story of another conservative loss and another liberal victory.

That’s their plan, and I’m not going to play along.

But I fear the President has already succeeded in setting the trap for our party, bringing a new pessimism on the right.

Do they ever stop whining?

The gridlock and anger in DC is all the Democrats’ fault. And it’s true. They have only been willing to meet the Republicans two thirds of the way instead of completely capitulating on every single issue and offering them a white flag and a blow job to celebrate their surrender. If they want to end the obstruction all they have to do is do whatever the most right wing members of the GOP want them to do.

One must assume then that the fact that the Republicans are fighting viciously amongst themselves and can’t even decide how to run the House of Representatives is the fault of the Democrats. The Freedom Caucus is a radical rump group that Republicans themselves find intensely frustrating because they seem not to understand how our government is designed — or they don’t care:

“They seem to have a problem with James Madison,” quips Charlie Dent, a Republican from Pennsylvania.

I was watching Fox News’ “Outnumbered” this morning and they were extremely upset that the House and the Senate had not delivered on 100% of the GOP agenda. They were insistent that when “the American people” voted in a Republican congressional majority they had a mandate for total dominance in every way. Evidently they forgot to take civics class in high school because they would have learned about the other branches of government and understood that when you have divided government you can either go for gridlock or compromise.

This seems to be a common misunderstanding among these people. They live under the impression that the vast majority of the country agrees with them down the line and that those who don’t have no right to representation at all. That the presidency is a national election which more accurately reflects the agenda for which the majority actually does vote doesn’t seem to register.

Nobody tried harder than Presidents Clinton and Obama to meet these extremist freaks halfway. Both of them offered up beloved Democratic achievements and programs that helped the less fortunate in a quixotic attempt to forge compromises with people who gave them the back of their hands. And they did this against the wishes of the people who put them in office. They tried. They failed. Let’s hope that Democrats have finally learned their lesson.

As the Bard of Crawford Texas once said, “Fool me once … uh … won’t get fooled again.”

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The Billionaires’ It Boy

by digby

I wrote about the billionaires’ new “it boy” for Salon this morning.  I recap his seduction of the vastly wealthy used car salesman Norman Braman and the insanely rich Sheldon Adelson (who is rumored to be about to endorse him this week.) And then there are the various Koch auditions where he’s reportedly given an awesome performance each time. But last week he landed the big one: