Month: July 2016

The GOP argument in a nutshell


by digby

The best-selling button at the RNC

This observation by Josh Marshall is important:

Numerous speakers from the dais, including some of the top speakers of the evening, called for Hillary Clinton to be imprisoned. At least two – and I think more – actually led the crowd in chants of “lock her up!” There has never been any evidence of criminal activity on Clinton’s part. An investigation with a lot of pressure to find something amiss concluded that no charges should be recommended against her and that no prosecutor would bring charges against Clinton for anything connected to her private email server.

It goes without saying that it is a highly dangerous development when one presidential nominee and his supporters make into a rallying cry that their opposing candidate should be imprisoned. This is not Russia. This is not some rickety Latin American Republic from half a century ago. This is America. For all our failings and foibles this is not a path we’ve ever gone down.

This is not a disagreement about a matter of law: it is a demand for vengeance and punishment, one rooted in the pathologies of the current Trumpite right and inevitably to some extent about the fact that Clinton is a woman. If you have a chance rewatch the speeches by Rudy Giuliani or even more ret. Gen Michael Flynn. These are not normal convention speeches. It is only a small skip and a jump to the state legislator in West Virginia who demanded Clinton by executed by hanging on the National Mall. In such a climate, don’t fool yourself: worse can happen.

This is the way authoritarians think to be sure. And the Trump Party is authoritarian through and through. But this sloganeering about how Clinton belongs in jail is sadly not confined to the right. There is an element of the left which consistently says the same thing, at least if my social media feeds are any example, with certain members of my own tribe calling for Clinton to be dragged off in chains for … well, the crimes don’t really matter.

I’ve never seen anything quite like it. I remember calls in the past for Karl Rove to be “frog-marched” to jail for his role in the Plame scandal. But the calls to jail Clinton are of an other variety, going back to a famous column by William Safire back in the 1990s in which he claimed that she was about to be indicted. Of course,she never was despite tens of millions of dollars and a totally unaccountable hostile independent prosecutor on the trail. In fact,  she never lied about all the things everyone said she lied about. But the idea of locking this woman up for something persists and it is one that really seems to appeal to a certain segment of the American population.

There is an entire cottage industry devoted to this meme.  Indeed, there were reports that there were pre-printed signs like these in the crowd at the RNC last night:

This is a disturbing one: gun lube:

This is some sick stuff and it would be really nice if people who hate Clinton but aren’t completely batshit crazy would at least find a different way to express their loathing.

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Plagiarism is a “shared value” according to Dr Ben

by digby

You cannot make stuff like this up:

“If Melania’s speech is similar to Michelle Obama’s speech, that should make us all very happy because we should be saying, whether we’re Democrats or Republicans, we share the same values,” he told reporters after addressing a Florida GOP delegation breakfast at a hotel here 20 minutes outside Cleveland, where the RNC is taking place.

“If we happen to share values, we should celebrate that, not try to make it into a controversy,” he added.

His comments come as Melania Trump faces intense scrutiny over a portion of her Monday night speech that echoed, nearly word for word, part of the first lady’s 2008 address at the Democratic National Convention. The Trump campaign insists that Melania Trump’s speech was not plagiarized, and Carson echoed that.

“I don’t think they were plagiarized. I think there are general principles that are very valuable to Americans, and of course to express those principles you’re going to use similar language,” Carson said.

He would say that, of course:

Carson, a former presidential candidate himself, is no stranger to dealing with fallout from plagiarism. In 2015, he apologized for examples of plagiarism found in his book, “America the Beautiful.”

Pressed on why he apologized then, if he was willing to wave off evidence of plagiarism now, he said as he ducked into a car, “Because I don’t like to keep a controversy going. I like to talk about positive things.”

Meanwhile the rest of the GOP reacts as expected. Paul Manafort blamed it all on Hillary Clinton saying it’s yet another example of her smearing any women who opposes her. (No, I don’t know how he spit that one out either.) And then there’s this:

Yes, they have are officially losing it.

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by digby

This really happened. pic.twitter.com/GWHJlWUPLp

— Jon Passantino (@passantino) July 19, 2016

So did this:

Patricia Smith stood on the stage of the Republican National Convention and emotionally blamed the death of her son in Benghazi, Libya, on Hillary Clinton. Suddenly, Fox News Channel cut away to interview the party’s presumptive presidential nominee, Donald Trump. 

For nearly 11 minutes on Monday night, Trump overshadowed his party’s convention with a telephone interview that provided no major news but allowed him to brag about his primary victories, attack the news media and plug his wife’s upcoming speech. 

This was supposed to be the week that Trump finally stopped fighting for the nomination and pivoted to the general-election campaign. This was supposed to be the week that he stayed in the wings, like presumptive nominees usually do, and allowed others to introduce him and explain why he should be president. It was supposed to be the week that Trump showed voters a softer, more personable and compassionate side. 

But on the first day of the four-day GOP convention, Trump showed that he’s unable to yield the stage and a prime-time audience to others. 

He started the day by calling Fox News Channel to accuse President Obama of using “body language” that encourages racial division and anti-police sentiments that lead to the killing of police officers. For the rest of the day, he boomeranged between the spotlight and the shadows — disappearing for hours, then reemerging with an angry tweet or an unexpected interview. There was even a pre-taped interview that aired on the Golf Channel during the convention.

Fear and Loathing in Cleveland

by digby

As the keynote speaker Senator Joni Ernst was on stage

I wrote about Day 1 for Salon this morning:

The first day of the Republican National Convention started off with a bang. Even before the event was gaveled into order Donald Trump’s campaign chairman Paul Manafort picked a huge fight with Ohio Governor John Kasich for reasons that made little sense to anyone. He went on all the morning news shows to denounce Kasich for being “petulant” claiming he’s “embarrassing his party in Ohio.”
for failing to attend the convention in his own state. The Governor’s adviser John Weaver told the New York Times, “Manafort’s problem, after all those years on the lam with thugs and autocrats, is that he can’t recognize principle and integrity.”

What happened on the convention floor later that day was anything but normal as the Never Trump delegates wanted a roll call vote to change the rules and the party chair blatantly knocked them down resulting in boos, catcalls and delegate walkouts:

Video: Drama in Cleveland — GOP delegates shouting down the chair, demanding a roll call vote https://t.co/RZMXLZG8cL

— Bradd Jaffy (@BraddJaffy) July 18, 2016

That’s not something we’ve seen at a political convention since the 70s at least.  But then Trump’s whole campaign is a throwback to that era so it isn’t surprising.

Let’s just say that as the Republicans  prepared for their big opening night of “party unity” it seemed to be as elusive as ever. But as the evening festivities unfolded it became obvious that there was one overriding theme that might just do the job: fear and loathing of foreigners and Hillary Clinton. In other words, a CPAC convention.

It started out fairly light. The first few speakers of the evening were examples of the exciting celebrities Trump had been promising for the last month or so. They opened with the star of Duck Dynasty, Willie Robertson who joked about how he and Trump were both reality stars with hot wives, which I’m fairly sure was the first time anyone’s ever said that in a presidential endorsement speech. He was followed by former TV star Scott Baio who, along with soap actor Antonio Sabato Jr (appearing later in the program) may have been assumed to be Latino outreach despite the fact that they are actually Italian Americans. There were no real Hispanics featured on opening night anyway.

Then came former Texas Governor Rick Perry, last heard railing against “Trumpism” as a cancer on the Republican Party. He didn’t mention Trump at all, instead using his time to introduce war hero Marcus Luttrell who gave a heartfelt speech about patriotism and duty leading up to a message for the kids today: “your war is here,you don’t have to go searching for it…Who among you are going to step up and take the fight to the enemy because it’s here!”

Next was a searing speech from Patricia Smith, the mother of one of the four people killed in Benghazi who blamed Hillary Clinton personally for the death of her son and joined the crowd when they shouted and chanted that Clinton belongs in jail, the first of many such eruptions during the evening. It was a rather sad and disturbing performance.  The two men who wrote the book “13 Hours: The Inside Account of What Really Happened in Benghazi,” then droned on for what seemed like 14 hours recounting details of the event, also blaming Hillary Clinton for everything. Perhaps these people need to have a chat with Trey Gowdy while they’re in Cleveland.

Onward to the Mexican criminal portion of the program. There were more memorials to the dead with the siblings of a border patrol agent and several more grieving people whose relatives were killed by drunk undocumented immigrants and gang members, which is also Hillary Clinton’s fault.

Milwaukee Sheriff David Clark followed with a fiery fearmongering speech about law and order. His message in a nutshell:

What we witnessed in Ferguson, and Baltimore, and Baton Rouge was a collapse of the social order. So many of the actions of the Occupy Movement and Black Lives Matter transcends peaceful protests and violates the code of conduct we rely on — I call it anarchy.”

I think you can guess who is to blame for that, not just Clinton — who belongs in jail herself — but Barack Obama who has achieved his goal of dividing the country.

Senator Tom Cotton gave a traditional GOP hawk speech, barely mentioning Trump, that didn’t set anyone on fire and Senator Jeff Sessions weirdly talked about trade and the economy as if he’d gotten the wrong instructions from the convention planners. And then came Giuliani with the night’s traditional barn burner, described by the National Memo’s Joe Conason on twitter as Mussolini meets Mr Magoo.  Among his many contributions to the scarefest was “there is no more time for us left to revive our great country! No more time to repeat our mistakes of the past!” signaling the end of the world apparently.

The crowd was very revved up when the stage filled with mist and the shadow of The Donald appeared to emerge out of it. There he was, the man himself who came to introduce his wife Melania, which he did in unusually succinct fashion after proclaiming “we’re gonna win” several times. Melania gave a nice speech which in my notes I called “the most professional sounding speech of the night.” As it turns out it “bears striking similarities” to Michelle Obama’s 2008 DNC speech so that actually makes sense. In fact, it’s pretty clearly plagiarized. As I write this nobody really knows exactly how this happened, but it’s hardly surprising considering that Trump himself has blatantly lifted every one of his slogans from Reagan and Nixon without ever acknowledging it.

After Melania Trump left the stage people began filtering out of the hall since she’d been billed as the main attraction but the speeches went on and on afterwards with a bizarre, rambling speech from retired general Michael Flynn that sounded like it too was plagiarized — from “Dr. Strangelove.” Senator Joni Ernst spoke to a hall that was two thirds empty and there were even more people speaking late into the night after she was done.  For a convention that was supposed to be showbiz slick, the first night certainly had a haphazard feeling to it.

It finally, blessedly, came to an end with a prayer from the odd televangelist Paula White, who was rumored to have “brought Trump to Christ.”  She said that never as before our nation needs prayer because “honesty has been outlawed.” That’s going a bit far, but it was at least temporarily suspended at the Quicken Loans Center in Cleveland last night.

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Christmas in July

by digby

Just a little hair of the dog …

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Lock her up!
by Tom Sullivan

Hillary Clinton was the focus last night at the RNC convention in Cleveland when cultural resentment wasn’t in the spotlight. In spite of the fact that Melania Trump’s speech introducing her husband was supposed to be the headline event, speakers had Clinton in their sights all night.

Attacks on Clinton went beyond the “Hillary for Prison 2016” tee shirts worn in the streets by followers of Alex Jones. Pat Smith, mother of one of the U.S. Foreign Service officers killed in Benghazi, told the crowd Clinton “ought to be wearing stripes.” Mocking Clinton’s pantsuits, Colorado Senate nominee Darryl Glenn in his speech suggested Clinton “deserves a bright orange jumpsuit.” By the time retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn delivered his fiery, but rambling “Wake up, America!” message about politicians failing to win wars, the crowd had begun shouting, “Lock her up! Lock her up! Lock her up!” The general joined in.

“BURN THE WITCH!” would not have seemed out of place.

Several speakers — most prominently former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani — insisted on loudly repeating “radical Islamic terrorism” as if it were some kind of Harry Potterish incantation learned in a Defence Against the Dark Arts class at Hogwarts. (A spell, they implied, the feckless Muggle occupying the White House refuses to deploy.) The recitation strangely echoed #BlackLivesMatter protests after Sandra Bland’s death in police custody: #SayHerName. You can bet that was accidental.

What might not have been accidental were passages in Melania Trump’s speech (probably the best of the night) her writers appeared to have lifted from Michelle Obama’s speech at the 2008 Democratic convention. New York Public Radio’s Mike Hearn (among others) thought that was a bit obvious:

So that's pretty blatant, right? pic.twitter.com/EPnHME7afV— Mike Hearn (@mikehearn) July 19, 2016

It was, as several others noted, a pretty dark night, one about fears and threats and enemies. Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst’s speech was all about ISIS being in your town and on your street, coming to kill you in your beds with their long, curved knives. Not exactly “Morning in America.” An LBJ campaign video criticizing Barry Goldwater captures the unease more mainstream Republicans might be feeling about now (h/t Nancy LeTourneau):

Months more where last night came from.

by digby

Congressman Steve King on All In:

… Esquire writer Charles Pierce declared that the 2016 Republican National Convention would be the last time “old white people” would command the attention of the Republican Party. 

“This whole business does get a little tired, Charlie,” King said. “I would ask you to go back through history and figure out where are these contributions that have been made by these other categories of people that you are talking about, where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to civilization?” 

“Than white people?” MSNBC host Chris Hayes interjected. 

“Than—than western civilization itself that’s rooted in western Europe, eastern Europe and the United States of America, and every place where christianity settled the world,” King said. “That’s all of western civilization.”

Letting it all hang out on day one.

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QOTD: Trump’s ghost

They think Reality TV is real #Hissecretweapon

by digby

His biggest selling point

In light of the post below about Trump’s dominance among non-college educated white Americans, this piece by Rick Perlstein about two RNC delegates is amazing. I have no idea what her educational level is, but she seems to be someone who watches TV and lives inside the GOP cocoon.

Linda Luccesse is a handsome woman in her 60s, soft-spoken and calm, tastefully accessorized in some very smart silver jersey that matched the silver hair she pulled back in a ponytail. We sat down outside a Starbucks in Park Ridge, where she lives and used to own a dance studio, and she asked me about the publication I was working for:

“This is a Republican paper?”

“No, the New Republic.”

“So are you national?”

Lucchese is not what you’d call a political insider. She’s never been involved before in a campaign, she said, “Because I’ve never been gung-ho about politicians. But when I heard that Trump was going to be running, I found his website and saw that I was, you know, in favor.” She signed up, and received an email from a Trump campaign coordinator. “You know, ‘Does anyone want to be a delegate?’ So I said I was interested,” and the Trump campaign guy replied, “‘Get these papers in to me.’

“So I sent in, you know, the few papers he needed, and, you know, lo and behold, I was picked as one. And then my name was on the ballot.”

She signed up on the website, and received an email from a Trump campaign coordinator. “You know, ‘Does anyone want to be a delegate?’”

She has no idea why she was one of three potential delegates chosen by the Trump campaign; she suspects it might have been her punctuality. “Because I know most people drag their feet on a lot of things. I pay my bills a month in advance, so there are never any late fees or anything.” She also has no idea why she ended up as the only Trump-pledged candidate to win election for one of the three delegate spots for the ninth district; she never heard back from the Trump campaign with any guidance, nor did she ever campaign. “Though I did go to one Republican club meeting around here. They wanted candidates for different things to voice their opinion, so I went for the heck of it, and, um, voiced my opinion as everyone else did at that time, because everyone was running. So that was about it.” It was her first political speech.

One way or another, she ended up winning, bound for Cleveland. There was a congratulatory email; maybe a few others; she doesn’t really recall. “I didn’t keep the emails, or anything like that. But, um, it was virtually that simplistic.” Sic.

I asked Luchesse what attracted her to Trump.

“Well, I was impressed with—he’s been in the public eye for so long. And there hasn’t really been anything negative about him. Yes, he did have his girlfriend Marla on the side, but he married her, had a kid, whatever. But his television show, I was impressed how he handled it, that he had two advisers,” whose advice he weighed. “And all those celebrities that he went through: You never heard anything negative about him. They seemed to sit there—and there was quite a variety of celebrities on that show—they seemed to sit there, and they showed him respect. They didn’t have to be there. They could have done charity work. In so many other venues. But I was impressed at how he handled it: You know, he listened to those two advisers he had, and then he came up with some rationalization between the two suggestions. And he moved on it. You know, right or wrong, he moved on it. You know: ‘You’re fired. Because you didn’t do this or this.’”

That quality of decisiveness, she said, is “why a lot of congressman are scared of him: ‘He’s going to point the finger at me if he finds what I do. Trump is going to call me out.’”

Lucchese’s voice lowered conspiratorially when she observed that Park Ridge, where she’s lived for 36 years, is Hillary Rodham Clinton’s hometown. “You know, they don’t even know what I know about this town. I’ve had a business here. So I know the town.” (I asked her for details. They were underwhelming.)

I asked if she’d seen Hillary’s latest commercial.

“Probably not.”

I said, “It involves the man of the hour.”

“Of course. She’s gotta attack him.”

I showed her the new ad, which it turned out she had seen. It’s the one that features little children staring at TV screens as Trump says awful, offensive things. Luchesse’s eyes darkened as she watched. “You know, they could do the same on Hillary.”

She explained her theory that Senator Clinton must have had something awful on Barack Obama, which was how she blackmailed him into becoming Secretary of State Clinton—and that she, in turn, must have had something awful on Obama, or else why would he have forced her out of that job? I noted that Clinton left to run for president, with the president’s support, an interpretation that left her unimpressed: George H.W. Bush didn’t stop being vice president when he ran for president, did he?

I asked Luchesse what she thought of the media coverage of Trump. She was not impressed. “They have to report something sensational,” she said, “so they can get the Nobel Prize or whatever.”

The right has no monopoly on conspiracy theories these days although they have been at it longer. And I’m going to guess that if a reality TV star had run as a Democrat a lot of these same people would have voted for him. This isn’t about politics.

Be sure to read the rest of Perlstein’s story about the Kasich delegate he spoke to. Let’s just say it’s quite a contrast.

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Trump’s voters all have one thing in common

by digby

This is a good piece by Nate Cohn in the NY Times about the current polling and what it means. He explains how the cumulative info shows Clinton with a consistent lead and explains why and how it breaks down. This is it in a nutshell:

The polls tell a very clear story about the country’s divisions in an era of sweeping economic and demographic shifts. For white voters with a college degree and nonwhite voters, the 2016 presidential election must look and feel like a landslide. Mr. Trump trails by as large or larger margins among these voters as John McCain did in 2008.

But the story is very different for white voters without a college degree, who remain a very large bloc of voters in the electorate. Here, Mrs. Clinton is doing far worse than President Obama last time. On balance, these two shifts have canceled out — leaving Mrs. Clinton ahead by roughly the same margin as Mr. Obama was in pre-election polls from 2012.

These big demographic divides have added confusion to the polls in battleground states. Those states have such different demographic characteristics that Mrs. Clinton has seemed to fare very well in some states while struggling in others.

On balance, Mrs. Clinton is excelling in diverse and well-educated states like Virginia, Colorado and even North Carolina. But she is struggling to match Mr. Obama in less educated or less diverse places in the Midwest and Northeast, like Iowa, Ohio, New Hampshire, or even Maine’s Second Congressional District. Yet Mrs. Clinton appears to be tied or ahead even in these states. The combination gives her a strong advantage in the Electoral College.

Polls right now aren’t very predictive of anything so it all had to be taken with a grain of salt. But as Cohn explains once the conventions are done and the expected bounces fade (or don’t) we will have an idea of where we stand. Right now we should all just take a deep breath.

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