Month: May 2016

He won’t back down

by digby

This is a man, after all, who claims to be a pious Christian but has never had to ask God for forgiveness because well … he’s perfect. When asked by Don Imus whether he should apologize to POWs as John McCain suggested he should do:

“Well I’ve actually done that, Don,” Trump replied. “You know frankly, I like John McCain, and John McCain is a hero. Also, heroes are people that are, you know, whether they get caught or don’t get caught — they’re all heroes as far as I’m concerned. And that’s the way it should be.”

“So do you regret saying that?” asked Imus.

“I don’t, you know — I like not to regret anything,” Trump said. “You do things and you say things. And what I said, frankly, is what I said. And some people like what I said, if you want to know the truth. There are many people that like what I said. You know after I said that, my poll numbers went up seven points.”

“You understand that, I mean, some people liked what I said,” added Trump. “I like John McCain, in my eyes John McCain is a hero. John McCain’s a good guy.”

Imus said someone like Trump, who got multiple Vietnam War draft deferments, shouldn’t be criticizing someone like McCain.

“I understand that. Well, I was going to college, I had student deferments. I also got a great lottery number,” Trump said.

That’s not what he’s said before about his draft status, by the way.

The New York billionaire, who was a genuine student-athlete in his youth, came away with a medical deferment in 1968 owing to bone spurs in both heels, according to his latest explanation. But in seeking to downplay that exemption as “minor” and “short-term,” Trump’s campaign raises more questions than it answers as to how he sidestepped military service during the war.
[…]
For many years, Trump — who was born June 14, 1946 — never mentioned his medical deferment, and Saturday’s explanation from his campaign again downplayed its import.

“While attending the University of Pennsylvania’s prestigious Wharton School of Finance, Mr. Trump received a minor medical deferment for bone spurs on both heels of his feet,” the statement reads.

“The medical deferment was expected to be short-term and he was therefore entered in the military draft lottery where he received an extremely high number, 356 out of 365.

“When the draft occurred, they never got near his number and he was therefore exempt from serving in the military,” the statement continues. “Although he was not a fan of the Vietnam War, yet another disaster for our country, had his draft number been selected he would have proudly served and he is tremendously grateful to all those who did.”

In an interview Sunday on ABC News “This Week” Trump stuck to this account, saying the medical deferment was “minor” and insisting that the lottery had been the deciding factor.

“I had a minor medical deferment for feet, for a bone spur of the foot, which was minor,” he said. “I was fortunate, in a sense, because I was not a believer in the Vietnam War…But I was entered into the draft and I got a very, very high draft number.”

In fact, a summary of Trump’s draft record — from the National Archives and Records Administration in Missouri and first published by the The Smoking Gun website in 2011 — tells a different story.

Trump’s medical deferment is listed for October 1968, months after he had left Wharton. And despite the campaign’s statement that it was “expected to be short-term,” there is no evidence in the records of it being dropped before the draft lottery in 1969.

The dates suggest the deferment stemmed from a Sept. 17, 1968, draft physical at the Armed Forces Center in New York described in a 1992 book on the businessman by veteran journalist Wayne Barrett. “The baseball-tennis-squash star qualified for a medical deferment,” Barrett writes, but no explanation is given of the cause.

Various news accounts in 2011 also stopped short, and the first mention of bone spurs appears to have come from Trump this past weekend.

The fact that Trump was called for a physical within months after graduating indicates that there was a very real threat of him being drafted — long before the December 1969 lottery. Any deferment was more than “minor” then. And one big question is whether Trump actively sought the deferment by bringing a letter from his own doctor to the physical citing the bone spur problem.

Young men with access to friendly family physicians had this advantage at the time in dealing with draft physicals. Lower-income individuals, with no doctor but health issues bigger than bone spurs, could find themselves approved for military service.

There was a time that something like this would be a big deal. But considering the vast number of lies he tells about everything, this is meaningless. Still, it’s interesting since he’s said that his Vietnam was avoiding venereal disease in the 1960s and going to military boarding school gave him more military training than the kind given to actual soldiers. He likes to think of himself as a warrior, that’s for sure.

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“This is the ultimate reality TV show”

by digby

I wrote about Trump and the media for Salon this morning:

In the midst of all the hoopla over the Republicans nominating someone whose slogan “Make America Great Again” includes bringing white nationalists back into the mainstream of the party, the political press is undergoing one of its periodic soul-searching exercises asking whether it bears any responsibility for the rise of Trump. The answer, of course, is yes. The amount of free airtime devoted by all three cable news networks to broadcasting his every utterance is estimated to be worth over a billion dollars in campaign ads he didn’t have to run.

The question,however, is why they did this and it’s not really a mystery. Fox News’ Chris Wallace was right up front about it last week when he said:

I have to say — I think to a certain degree, if it becomes a vicious or virtuous cycle, depending on how you view the Trump campaign, but I think we were followers, leaders in this. In other words I think that the reason we put him on so much — and I think we did, all of us, whether it was cable, whether it was broadcast, all of us put him on too much. I think to a large degree, it was because every time we did, it spiked the ratings. We were in a sense following what the ratings were, which was the response to the public. Having said that the fact that we put him on so much, it did crowd out, take a lot of the oxygen away from the other candidates. But I think at least the initial impulse was if you put him on, you get ratings and we’re in the news business.

It’s not entirely fair to blame them for doing this. The days when the networks thought of their news divisions as loss leaders in the name of civic duty is long gone. Journalism is being squeezed in all directions and the prospect of big ratings was a temptation no producer responsible for the bottom line could be expected to pass up. They were giving the people what they wanted — politics as entertainment. And say what you will about it, it has been entertaining in a horrifying exploding Hindenberg sort of way.

But let’s be honest.Nobody forced Republican voters to pull the lever for Trump. The Party offered up a dozen and a half candidates and the networks gave them what seemed like hundreds of televised debates. It’s not as if they had no exposure to the rest of the field or didn’t understand exactly what they were voting for in Trump. But that leads to a bigger question of why they like him so much and the press is doing some navel gazing about that as well.

Chris Cilizza wrote a short piece yesterday on the subject, quoting his boss the editor of the Washington Post Marty Baron (who also happens to have been the editor at the Boston Globe featured in the movie “Spotlight”):

What has taken hold is an alternate reality, a virtual reality, where lies are accepted as truth and where conspiracy theories take root in the fertile soil of falsehoods…

Fact-checking by mainstream media organizations has no effect. We are objects of suspicion, accused of hiding facts. Seeing opportunity, politicians exploit these fabrications for their own ends, repeating them — or staying silent when they know full well they are untrue…

“We must ask ourselves: How can we have a functioning democracy when we cannot agree on the most basic facts?”

Sadly, that ship may have sailed.  The piece points out that the media have, in fact, done their jobs by fact-checking a massive number of Trump’s claims and reporting his lies as lies. It has made no difference because the people who are voting for Trump don’t believe a word the mainstream media says.

Cilizza blames this on the fact that people are insulated their ideological silos where they are fed a steady diet of information that only reflects their preconceived biases and there is certainly some truth in that. For years studies have shown that people who get most of their information from say, Fox News, are more misinformed than those who get their news well … anywhere else. The idea that everyone is living in an echo chamber is not a new idea but unfortunately Cilizza, as a member of the mainstream media feels the need to create a false equivalence. He says that liberals are just as likely to do this as conservatives and there is just no evidence that this is true. Sure there are lefty media echo chambers where people reinforce each others’ biases but the right has long been the ones to make a profit at it. The Trump phenomenon should be proof enough of where it leads when people are unclear on that.

This media critique is nothing new. Read Jay Rosen at Press Think or Eric Boehlert at Media Matters going back at least a decade. Unfortunately, it seems to have taken an authentic proto-fascist winning the Republican nomination for the press to finally reckon with the fact that reality is no longer operative in the body politic. Let’s hope it isn’t too late.

Meanwhile, it’s rich to see the right wing clutching its pearls over l’affair Ben Rhodes, the arrogant White House foreign policy communications guru who was the subject of a profile in which he admitted that part of his job was to try to get the press to report favorably on administration policy, specifically on the Iran deal. There are no smelling salts left in Washington with all the conservatives fainting dead away at the mere idea of such a thing.

As it turns out, the man who wrote the profile has been hostile to any Iran negotiations, a fact which he neglected to disclose, and the reporting was more than a little bit biased as a result. Still, the entire right win media has been in a frenzy over it ever since it was published. Fox News has been particularly concerned about the ramifications of a White House cynically manipulating the press and they called in a resident expert to comment on the scandal:

“They are trying to issue a warning. That the media, an indispensable component, a pillar of our democracy – the media are not doing their jobs. And I think it’s a really important and I know that David Samuels was trying to warn all of us, because he and I covered national security – we’ve seen this happen again and again.”

“What happens when the next person comes along and tries to peddle lies, which is really what is starting to happen now. We’re not only entitled to our own opinions, we’re increasingly entitled to our own facts.”

That was Judith Miller, the disgraced former New York Times reporter who was used as a conduit for the Bush White House’s misinformation about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction which led to the misbegotten invasion of Iraq. And she said it with a straight face and a total lack of self-awareness.

Donald Trump and the political culture that enables him didn’t just spring out of nowhere. We’ve been watching the phenomenon develop for for nearly two decades and the media has enabled it every step of the way. There are many highly skilled journalists with professional integrity involved in reporting on politics but the habits and conventions developed in an earlier era are often inadequate to the task.

They certainly haven’t come close to figuring out what to do with people like Trump campaign consultant Paul Manafort who told Chris Matthews last night on MSNBC:

“This is the ultimate reality TV show — it’s the Presidency of the United States.”

I’m pretty sure Manafort knows “Reality TV” is anything but real. The Presidency of the United States, however, is as real as it gets. It’s important that the political media makes sure people know the difference. At the moment they seem to be in shock. Let’s hope they snap out of it.

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I’d buy that for a dollar
by Tom Sullivan

Department of Health and Human Services headquarters by the National Mall.
Photo by Matthew G. Bisanz via Wikimedia Commons.

Moving left again:

[A]s she tries to clinch the nomination, Mrs. Clinton is moving to the left on health care and this week took a significant step in her opponent’s direction, suggesting she would like to give people the option to buy into Medicare.

“I’m also in favor of what’s called the public option, so that people can buy into Medicare at a certain age,” Mrs. Clinton said on Monday at a campaign event in Virginia.

Mr. Sanders calls his single-payer health care plan “Medicare for all.” What Mrs. Clinton proposed was a sort of Medicare for more.

Clinton was replying to a woman who as a small-business owner is contending with the cost of health insurance. The Wall Street Journal:

The Medicare-buy-in program is significant because it is seen by many advocates as a step to a single-payer system that Mr. Sanders favors. The idea is to grow the Medicare program so that it covers more and more people until there is, one day, support for it covering everybody.

Mr. Sanders responded to the Clinton proposal by saying it was “a step in the right direction, but … not good enough.”

One of the places where Democrats have fallen down on the job is in chasing social issues to the detriment of kitchen-table issues. Social issues such as North Carolina’s #HB2, while important, are the bright, shiny objects that attract outrage, media attention, and breast-beating pronouncements, but few have the immediacy of making average people’s (and voters’) lives better in material ways the way a minimum wage increase would. Or expanding Medicare. That is why neoliberal policies from Democrats have lost working-class voters over time and why Trump’s protectionist, anti-immigrant rhetoric has gotten traction. People feel the American Dream slipping through their fingers and see few leaders fighting to save it. The Democratic Party has a way to go yet.

I know if I had Medicare opt-in I might be spending more time spreading electrons here than punching a clock in an office. But then, I’m a lousy capitalist.

Aaaaand the white supremacists officially join the party

by digby

I’m sure you all remember those robo-calls  white supremacist Trump supporters have been running all over the country. Here’s a reminder:

Well, anyhoo, the man behind them,William Johnson, has been chosen as a Trump delegate to the national convention! Mother Jones has the scoop:

Johnson got the news that he had been selected by Trump in a congratulatory email sent to him by the campaign’s California delegate coordinator, Katie Lagomarsino. “I just hope to show how I can be mainstream and have these views,” Johnson tells Mother Jones. “I can be a white nationalist and be a strong supporter of Donald Trump and be a good example to everybody.”

Johnson says that in his application to be a delegate for Trump he disclosed multiple details about his background and activism, though he did not specifically use the term “white nationalist.” The Trump campaign and Lagomarsino did not immediately respond to requests for comment…

Armed with cash from affluent donors and staffed by what the movement considers to be its top thinkers, AFP now dedicates most of its resources to supporting Trump. Johnson claims that AFP’s pro-Trump robocalls, which have delivered Johnson’s personal cellphone number to voters in seven states, have helped the party find hundreds of new members. “[Trump] is allowing us to talk about things we’ve not been able to talk about,” Johnson says. “So even if he is not elected, he has achieved great things.”

Nobody can say that Trump has no outreach to underrepresented communities in America. Mainstreaming overt racism again is quite an achievement. If anybody can do it, he can.

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[Trump’s]image among women has grown increasingly negative over the course of the primary campaign — a campaign in which Trump’s offensive comments about women became a major issue. Indeed, a majority of women now rate Trump very unfavorably.
In fact, the percentage of women who rated Trump very unfavorably in YouGov’s biweekly surveys has increased significantly — from around 45 percent in January to nearly 60 percent by the end of April. Meanwhile, the percentage of men who rated Trump very unfavorably hasn’t really changed.

This pattern is especially pronounced among political independents. The graph below shows a 20-point increase in the percentage of female independents rating Trump very unfavorably. Again, Trump’s image among independent men is more stable, making the gender gap increasingly pronounced. 

The same pattern also emerges in RAND’s Presidential Election Panel Survey (PEPS) — a project that re-interviewed more than 2,600 people in March who were also surveyed in December. Among female independents, the percentage who rated Trump very unfavorably increased from 50 percent in December to 56 percent in March. 

Male independents did not shift their views of Trump. In fact, after accounting for several other factors, gender was the only factor significantly associated with those who rated Trump more unfavorably in March than in December.

It’s not surprising to me that so many women would be appalled by Donald Trump. As I’ve said before, it’s as if the Republicans had chosen David Duke to run against Barack Obama in 2008.

But it’s also awfully depressing that so many men in this country really don’t give a damn about this. Trump can spew sexist stuff all day long and it doesn’t make them think any less of him.

Sad!

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QOTD: A loyal blackshirt

by digby

Rep. Chris Stewart (R-Utah) a month ago :

“Donald Trump does not represent Republican ideals; he is our Mussolini. Donald Trump’s approach is, ‘I am just going to do it.'”

 Rep. Chris Stwart (R-Utah) today:

“While Mr. Trump wasn’t my first choice, we must move forward and unite to defeat Hillary Clinton.”

Hey, a little fascism between friends never hurt anyone, amirite?


As Tim Murphy at Mother Jones pointed out:

As recently as a week ago, Republican lawmakers were promising to fight Trump on the beaches (or at least the convention floor in Cleveland) if necessary to stop the steak magnate from taking control of the party. Now, even the guy who compared Trump to a fascist dictator is coming on board.

 Well they never said it was a deal-breaker …
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They really hate Paul Ryan


by digby

Someone sent me this rant from some right winger and I thought I’d share it just to give you a flavor of the state of mind of your average Trump voter.  It struck me as illustrative of a fairly typical American voter in this moment:

Paul Ryan and National Review: you are no longer the “leaders” of the Republican Party. Temper tantrums and throwing your weight around appear to be from kindergarteners who want attention because their power has just been taken. If there’s anything to be learned from this Paul, it is that there’s a new sheriff in town. There is no moral to the stories of the NeverTrumpers, just immoral ones, and the shakedown won’t wash. 

The NeverTrumpers of government teat-sucklers, dependents and hangers-ons, and so-called “conservative” ideologues, after having wrongly divined what the Grand Poobahs said: Donald Trump can never win the primaries, he has no path to the convention, no one will take him seriously (while calling him a clown and ignorant), he’s not a conservative who advocated for conservative causes such as smaller government, will eat their hats. Then not the Democrats, but the NeverTrumpers, went ahead and spent almost $200 million to defeat the Republican frontrunner The People chose. 

The NRO bunch took every opportunity to remind us that Trump’s not perfect. 

Sore losers Jeb Bush’s and Lindsey Graham’s feelings are hurt and they can now renege on the deal to not back the winner? And they call Trump juvenile? 

The inconvenient facts to your narratives Paul/NRO are the alternatives to Donald you had backed. The “perfect” ones. 

Take the last two Republican nominees who lost perfectly following your game plan.

You say Trump didn’t insist on smaller government? Maybe because your Republicans in Congress have…by approving each and every one of Obama’s spending goals.

Then your clan approved two farleftwing Supremes to advance smaller government. 

The two Supremes approved Obamacare, gay marriage and transgender toilets…examples of smaller government and money well spent. 

I understand Rep Ryan. You see, I cannot add two and two as Ted and Marco also advocated for a smaller government while simultaneously advocating for a significantly larger military and projection of American power. Being a curious fellow, I’d like to know the mathematical formula for spending less while spending more? I’d like to get your take why not defunding Obamacare and allowing for unfettered illegal immigration across our borders advanced conservative values. And going along with the “Good Deal” that is Iran advanced conservative values.

On your watch Paul, Obama cut our military in half to feed his cadre of parasites, foreign invaders and No White Lives Matter, as he crushed this nation under impossible debt; Russia strafed our warships in the Baltic while threatening us with nuclear subs off the East Coast; China built military installations on newly created islands in the south Pacific filled with jetfighters manufactured from plans stolen from Obama’s military. North Korea detonated hydrogen bombs and developed ICBMs under the same nuclear disarmament pact Hillary Clinton’s husband negotiated. You allowed Obama to “negotiate” in Iran using Bill Clinton’s failed chief negotiator in North Korea, and failed to stop the $150 billion Iran is get to advance their nuclear program and terrorism with which they can threaten the world.

Last week the Administration’s chief communications strategist mocked liberals and the leftwing press by calling them clueless and admitted to cynically deceiving the People and the international community to sell the Iran “Good Deal” lie! Under your watch.
Meanwhile, Islamic extremism and terrorism has grown dramatically around the world.
And now you’re lecturing us about Donald Trump and the “shakedown” you’re wiling to agree to? 

I can understand why you’re shaking in your boots at the prospect of a Donald Trump telling you to take a walk on a flexible plank. 

Your poobahs agreed to fund the IRS to hound Donald Trump and the Patriot movement’s various organizations. And then you let Obama’s thugs to get away with it. More recently your lackeys spread the pack of lies suggesting that Trump is not a smaller government low-tax-promoting candidate. As if you were.  

Man up Paul: The Trump backers didn’t leave the Republican Party. The Republican Party playing footsies with the Democrats while stealing the nation blind left The People.
Jobless, healthcareless, futureless, fruitless, small businesses ready to be victimized by any out-of-control government agency of the moment that you failed to control, and too, the mobs of dependence, free speech restricting, and political correct leftwing windbags. 

They were your Republicans who left the authentic non-ideological conservative movement behind years before Trump even mentioned White Lives; and right now, by deliberately dividing us, empowered the political left and Hillary…with whom yours can easier deal to deceive the people. 

Whom Paul, did you have in mind as the plantation’s alternatives to Donald?
Ted Cruz who authored the amnesty program for George W. Bush? 

Or is he Marco Rubio who was the primary champion of amnesty since his first appearance?  

Or perhaps you meant pro-second amendment John Kasich who cast the  deciding vote that forced passage of Bill Clinton’s Assault Weapons Ban? Here’s Bill Clinton’s THANK YOU note verifying Kasich’s conservative values. 

For the Man with a Hammer, Everything Needs Pounding! 

Trump is more of a genuine conservative than the whiners and teat-sucklers who fund his professional critics. Donald Trump was the winner who brought out more Republicans to vote in the primaries than any other candidate in history. Meanwhile, the NeverTrumpers have consistently, deliberately, and falsely, weakened our party, just as Trump kept consistently winning against the plantation-approved pretend-conservatives. Yours Paul, are the dividers, along with President Romney – strengthened Hillary. 

Clarity: If Hillary wins, it won’t be Donald’s fault. It’ll be yours!

I have never felt sorry for Paul Ryan.  He got into bed with this crew and now he’s paying the price. But I don’t envy him.  This is the mindset of the right in Trump’s America.

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Trump’s brain trust

by digby

We are so far down the rabbit hole now we’re never coming back up. Look who Trump’s tapped to be his emissary for a “deal” with Paul Ryan, a delusional snake oil salesman with zero experience in politics.

This is the level of professionalism we can probably expect from a Trump administration:

A top emissary for presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has asked to meet privately with House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) this week in advance of Trump’s visit to Washington on Thursday, according to three people familiar with the matter.

Ben Carson, the retired neurosurgeon who has become one of Trump’s most trusted allies, reached out Monday to Ryan’s political advisers to request a private session with the speaker, according to the sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.

The outreach by Carson is an apparent effort both to soothe tensions between Trump and Ryan ahead of their highly anticipated meeting on Capitol Hill and to establish a framework for that discussion.

When reached Monday by phone, Carson’s business manager, Armstrong Williams, said Carson “is a guy who can bring people together.”

“Donald Trump trusts him and the speaker trusts him,” Williams said. “He wants to do the will of the people.”

And this:

Lewandowski, Trump’s traveling confidant and campaign manager, will be in charge of the team that will survey and vet potential vice-presidential candidates for the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, two top Republicans said. 

The two Republicans familiar with Lewandowski’s responsibilities spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss their private conversations with the Trump campaign, which is planning to ramp up the vice-presidential search in the coming weeks. 

Lewandowski formally took charge of the hunt for a running mate last week and has since been described inside and outside of the campaign as the point person for all related questions and meetings, the Republicans said. 

For the moment, he is coordinating the list of possibilities and conversing with key party figures but will soon involve a larger group of Trump allies and staff members who will contribute to the secretive selection process, they added.

You remember Lewandowski, right? The thug who manhandled a reporter and likes to mix it up with protesters? The obscure political operative and ex-cop who Trump inexplicably made his campaign manager?  I’d guess the “vetting” is going to be a little bit different than what these folks might expect …

I’s hard to know which is more concerning, Trump’s laughably inept kitchen cabinet or his own uninformed, violent megalomania. The combination is terrifying.

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The Religious Right schism is growing

by digby

I wrote about it for Salon this morning:

One of the ongoing fascinating sideshows of the Conservative Crack-up is the deep schism Trump has revealed within the Christian Right. It’s is just one of many sub-stories in the campaign but since the so-called conservative Values Voters have been such major players in GOP politics and American political life in general for decades now it’s an important one. Although there have been rumblings of discontent over the past few years as younger evangelicals with more tolerant views began to infiltrate the movement the embrace of Trump by millions of evangelical Christians is a development very few people saw coming.  (I certainly didn’t when I wrote this piece last year about the history and impending break-up of the conservative coalition between Catholics and Protestants — I ended it by saying the evangelical right was solid as a rock. Chalk that one up to yet another pundit fail.)

The current split among the evangelical right started to become obvious when Donald Trump was feted as an exalted visiting dignitary by Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University. It turned out that he had visited before and had been making gestures of friendship for some years. Jerry Falwell Jr is a big fan who says that Trump reminds him of his own father.  It became clear that this wasn’t an anomaly when Trump’s electoral success among this cohort derailed Ted Cruz’s southern strategy with which he had hoped to corner the Christian Right and therefore take the delegate lead long before the campaign got to more Godless environs. That didn’t work out, obviously, and Cruz along with everyone else was surprised by the willingness of so many people who call themselves conservative Christians to vote for man who is anything but pious and repeatedly shows that he is religiously illiterate. As it turned out a lot of those people aren’t actually all that religious themselves:

[E]vangelicals do boast higher worship attendance numbers than other faith communities, and those who do go to church regularly tend to vote and behave in ways that match the greater evangelical agenda. But that doesn’t mean they all sit in the pews every Sunday, nor does it mean they blindly accept whatever their pastor tells them: anywhere from 35 to 40 percent of evangelicals attend church occasionally, seldom, or never. You’re less likely to see this more wayward subset of evangelicalism singing hymns on Sunday morning, but they’re happy to identify as evangelicals on opinion polls anyway, and have often been the group lifted up by progressives as examples of evangelical “hypocrisy.”
[…]
As it turns out, these biblically “prodigal” evangelicals are the heart of religious support for the equally prodigal Trump: According to the Wall Street Journal, only 38 percent of Trump supporters attend worship weekly or more, compared to 56 percent of social conservative voters and 43 percent of Republican establishment voters.

For all of his advanced voter models and analysis it appears that Cruz didn’t delve deeply enough into the actual beliefs of the evangelical voter to see that many of them hold “moral values” much closer to Trump’s than to his own. Those biblically “prodigal” evangelicals tend to be divorced at higher rates than even the godless atheists, have higher incidents of premarital sex and sexually transmitted diseases and are more likely to be involved in domestic violence.  Indeed, rather than being devoted to Jesus at the moment their evangelical fervor seems to be directed at Donald Trump.

It was reported earlier that some evangelical preachers of the “prosperity gospel”  are all in with the Trump campaign which is hardly surprising. He is nothing if not conspicuously prosperous.  But as Peter Montgomery of Right Wing Watch reports, they aren’t the only ones:

What is a bit more surprising is the support Trump is getting from a leading advocate of Seven Mountains dominionism, which teaches that government and other spheres of influence — “mountains” like media, entertainment, business — are meant to be run by the right kind of Christians. Lance Wallnau is an influential leader in the Seven Mountains movement. In 2011, he declared that it is the obligation of Christians to “seize those high places” in order to bring about the return of Jesus Christ — something he has said they should do by both “overt” and “covert” means. In 2012, he said that the mountains of government, media, and economics were currently occupied by Satan.
[…]
“When God wants to move in history, he doesn’t always pick the favorite evangelical,” said Wallnau. He said that God brought Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill to power at crucial moments in history, the way He is now raising up Trump for our time. And he knows this, Wallnau said, because God told him so. Wallnau said God told him specifically that Trump is “a wrecking ball to the spirit of political correctness.” 

It’s not just the people at his rallies Trumps is bring to ecstatic states of near-worship.

But needless to say at least some members of the Christian Right are not amused, most famously the Southern Baptist convention’s Russell Moore who has written several scathing op-eds criticizing Republicans for backing Donald Trump. And just as it has happened among the other factions of the GOP coalition,  it’s broken out into open warfare.  Moore appeared on Face the Nation on Sunday and let fly:

One of the key aspects of conservativism is to say, character matters in public office and in the citizenry and virtue has an important role to play in our culture and in our politics…And so when you have conservatives who were saying in the previous Clinton era that character matters, rightly so, who now are not willing to say anything when we have this sort of reality television moral sewage coming through all over our culture and conservative who previously said we have too much awful cultural rot on television, who now want to put it on C-SPAN for the next four years and to give a model to our children really with either of these two candidates of an amoral sort of vision of America that isn’t what we believe in.

In fairness, Moore also called Clinton decadent just to be even-handed although I don’t know that she’s called anyone a pussy on the stump or discussed her genitalia in a debate.  Maybe I missed it. Trump was angry and fired back on twitter with this:

.@drmoore Russell Moore is truly a terrible representative of Evangelicals and all of the good they stand for. A nasty guy with no heart!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 9, 2016

It went back and forth with Moore hurling Bible verses at Trump and Trump undoubtedly ordering an intern to look up what they mean. But it isn’t just Moore. As Think Progress reported yesterday there are a few other Christian Right leaders registering concern:

In February, the Christian Post — an evangelical publication — took a position on a candidate for the first time in their history by publishing an impassioned take-down of Trump. And last week, at least one Liberty University board member resigned in protest after the school’s president endorsed Trump.

The Washington Post featured a story about some heartland evangelicals who are upset by the Trump victory in the Republican primary. One pastor from Nebraska named Gary Fuller poignantly put it this way: “In a sense, we feel abandoned by our party. There’s nobody left.”

It wasn’t very long ago that we were seeing magazine cover stories about preachers and other Christian leaders’ outsized influence on American politics with titles such as “Thunder on the Right” and “The Right Hand of God”. They were political powerhouses as much as religious leaders going back to the earliest iteration of the Christian Right, the Moral Majority.  They didn’t just have tremendous influence but literal veto power within the Republican party. Now, with a few notable exceptions, most of them are either signing on to the ugly proto-fascist Trump movement or sitting quietly in the back of the bus, saying little as the Republican party bows its head to an amoral man on a white horse. What would Jesus do?

Two metaphors for the Sanders campaign, and a song

by Gaius Publius

I’ve been using two metaphors to describe the movement around the Bernie Sanders campaign. One is the grain of sand in the oyster that allows the pearl material, always present, to coalesce, come together. The sand didn’t create the pearl. It just “occasioned” it. Bernie Sanders didn’t create the movement around him. He “occasioned” it.

The other is less intuitive, but much the same. When you have a gas dissolved in a liquid (CO2 in water, or coke, or whatever), and the mixture is in a glass, it’s easy to observe that streams of small bubbles seem to rise constantly from the same point on the inside of the glass. Why is that?

Nearly invisible imperfections in the glass itself, little places where the glass material isn’t perfectly smooth but almost microscopically sharp, are places where the dissolved CO2 “collects,” reforms as a gas, and rises — again and again. (Thank you, high school chemistry.)

Bernie Sanders is that place on the inside of the glass. The dissolved CO2 was always present — it’s all of us and our great discontent. Sanders just gives us a place to collect, reform, and (yes) rise up.

“Jeunesse, lève-toi”

One of my favorite songs about rising up is this one — in French, “Jeunesse, lève-toi,” in English, “Young people, rise up.” Note that the verb se lever (lit., “raise oneself”) has a number of meanings, and all of them are intended. It’s used for an uprising, a sunrise, for getting up off the ground, for getting out of bed in the morning, and more. The singer, Damien Saëz, is saying all of these things. Youth, get up. Youth, arise.

It’s not just a song of rebellion, which Saëz also sings about. It’s a song of impossible sadness as well, and a song of anger. It’s about rising up to confront and face the hurt of life itself.

It’s also impossibly beautiful. Listen. You only need to know the meaning of the title — Jeunesse, lève-toi, “Youth, get up” — to feel the impact of it.

French lyrics at the “See More” link. A taste in English (my rough translation):

Like a burst of laugh that comes,
Comes to console sadness,
Like a puff of breath that comes
To reignite the ember,
Like a whiff of sulfur gas
That gives rise to the flame,
Youth, rise up.

Against the life that comes, that goes, and
Then just gets extinguished,
Against the love we take, we hold, but
Never stays beside us,
Against the trace that gets erased
Behind us as we walk,
Youth, rise up.
…
Don’t you hear this evening sung
The song of all the dead?
Don’t you see at your fingertips
The heaven overhead?
Youth, rise up.

Youth, get up.

Youth, rise up.

Saëz is heir to the great French singer-songwriter tradition, le chanteur, la chanteuse, heir to Charles Trenet, Jacques Brel and Leo Ferré (think Bob Dylan, Rickie Lee Jones, Tom Waits), and he’s one of the best, in my opinion.

We can’t rise up when we’re in the ground, and the country in it with us. The time to rise up is now.

(A version of this piece appeared at Down With Tyranny. GP article archive here.)

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