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Month: November 2016

Trump says no to peace talks

Trump says no to peace talks


by digby

Before Donald Trump won the presidency, Democratic foreign policy circles hummed with talk that an outgoing President Barack Obama could take a last stab at peace talks between the Israelis and the Palestinians. 

But now that they’re on the verge of power, Trump aides say Obama shouldn’t even think about taking such steps.

I have heard there is serious discussion of immediately moving the embassy to Jerusalem.  He has promised to undo the Iran deal and withdraw from the Paris Climate accords. These are all eminently doable since the right wing of the GOP agrees with him.

And on 60 Minutes last night Trump reiterated his desire to help Russia bomb Syrian civilians into oblivion to deliver the country back to the murderous Assad regime.

“In the past 24 hours, I’ve seen embassies all over town, foreign journalists, officials in foreign capitals reaching out to anybody they can find to try to get a sense of what does Trump foreign policy look like with regard to my country, my issue, whatever it is, because there has not been a huge amount of detail spelled out during a campaign,” said Richard Fontaine, president of the Center for a New American Security

I am quite sure that the world is reorienting their security posture and reorienting quickly.  The world’s only superpower is now run by a cretinous madman.

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Hold onto your spleens @BloggersRUs

Hold onto your spleens
by Tom Sullivan

But first, hold onto this phone number: (202) 225-0600. That’s the number for Speaker of the House Paul Ryan. You will want to use it in a minute.

Q: When is Medicare not Medicare?
A: When it’s been Trumped.

No, I don’t think that’s funny either. Or this: Ryan Plans to Phase Out Medicare in 2017. Josh Marshall looks at statements (including false ones) Paul Ryan made to Fox’s Special Report:

First, Ryan claims that Obamacare has put Medicare under deeper financial stress. Precisely the opposite is true. And it’s so straightforward Ryan unquestionably knows this. The Affordable Care Act actually extended Medicare’s solvency by more than a decade. Ryan’s claim is flat out false.

Second, I’ve heard a few people say that it’s not 100% clear here that Ryan is calling for Medicare Phase Out. It is 100% clear. Ryan has a standard, openly enunciated position in favor of Medicare Phase Out. It’s on his website. It’s explained explicitly right there.

Ryan says current beneficiaries will be allowed to keep their Medicare. Says. But after the cord is cut between current and future beneficiaries, everything is fair game. For those entering the system, Ryan proposes phasing out Medicare and replacing it private insurance with subsidies to help seniors afford the private insurance. That is unquestionably what it means because that is what Ryan says. So if you’re nearing retirement and looking forward to going on Medicare, good luck. You’re going to get private insurance but you’ll get some subsidies from the government to pay the bill.

When Ryan’s done he’ll still call what’s left Medicare. You know, the way what’s left after a lobotomy they still call your brain.

The Washington Post and other analysts concur with Marshall:

As for whether Medicare is “going broke,” the program’s trustees say that the “Part A” trust fund — the costliest component of Medicare, covering hospital visits — is set to become insolvent in 2028. In 2009, before the passage of the Affordable Care Act, however, the trustees projected that fund would be insolvent in 2017.

The latest projections from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office show that Medicare spending is set to rise from the current level of about 3 percent of gross domestic product to more than 5 percent of GDP in 2040. But that is considerably less growth than the CBO projected before the passage of the Affordable Care Act, which showed Medicare spending in the realm of 7 percent around 2040. In the next 10 years alone, the difference between those projections could amount to $2 trillion, according to an analysis by the liberal Center for American Progress.

Doesn’t matter. These characters despise safety net programs that obviate God’s own law of the jungle. And they’ve never been too shy about it amongst themselves. But in public, voters must be herded to the cliff with dulcet phrases like “strengthening Medicare” and “premium-support payment” and “reform aimed to empower individuals,” but these are euphemisms for gutting Medicare the way “counterinsurgency strikes” once meant B-52s carpet-bombing Cambodia.

That number again is (202) 225-0600.

Harper’s looks at how Republicans have spun funding Medicare on Capitol Hill:

The big question is who should bear the burden of necessary revenue increases—taxpayers or Medicare beneficiaries. So far the answer from the government, many economists, and conservative advocacy groups is, unequivocally, the beneficiaries. Moon and her colleagues note that the “potential depletion of the trust fund in the future is taken as ‘proof’ that benefits must be reduced.” But in a subsequent interview, she warns that as more of the cost burden is shifted to the beneficiaries, “the likely reaction will be that benefits become so small Medicare won’t remain viable. It would destroy the program.”

It’s ironic that when it comes to one of the government’s most popular public programs, there’s no talk of raising taxes—an option polls show much of the public is willing to support. The failure of policymakers to consider revenue increases reflects the success of the right’s thirty-year crusade to change the conversation. “Those of us at the Heritage Foundation and allied public-policy institutions like the American Enterprise Institute have effectively defined the terms of the debate on Medicare reform,” says Robert Moffit, a senior fellow at Heritage. The Democrats, he adds, “are debating our proposals. We’re not debating theirs.” Former Iowa senator Tom Harkin tells me that his fellow Democrats were poor strategists, always finding themselves in rearguard actions trying to block provisions they didn’t like. “The Democrats were talking a good game for the immediacy, not the long term. It’s like checkers,” he says. “They knew how to block the next move, but were not seeing the row lined up at the back of the board.”

Here we are again, in a rearguard action against what appears, for all intents and purposes, to be an incoming administration intent on sweeping away the last remnants of the Old Republic. Except the Wall Street Journal reports Lord Flauntleroy didn’t realize he’d have to hire all his own stormtroopers:

He’s back: Chappelle on Trump’s America

He’s back: Chappelle on Trump’s America

By Dennis Hartley

After 11 years in the wilderness, Dave Chappelle came home to TV (well, for one night). His monologue on SNL last night was brilliant, hitting just the right tone to cap off America’s most TFU week ever:

He’s still got it! It was one of the best SNL episodes in recent memory:

Yeah, I know-too close for comfort. But the best sketch was all Dave:

I don’t know about you, but I needed that. Give this man a show-now!

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ICE is going to needs some reinforcements

ICE is going to needs some reinforcements

by digby

… a deportation force perhaps?

In a “60 Minutes” interview scheduled to air Sunday, President-elect Donald Trump said he planned to immediately deport two to three million undocumented immigrants after his inauguration next January.

“What we are going to do is get the people that are criminal and have criminal records, gang members, drug dealers, where a lot of these people, probably 2 million, it could be even 3 million, we are getting them out of our country or we are going to incarcerate,” Trump told 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl, according to a preview of the interview released by CBS. “But we’re getting them out of our country. They’re here illegally.”

Stahl had pressed Trump about his campaign pledge to deport “millions and millions of undocumented immigrants.” Trump told her that after securing the border, his administration would make a “determination” on the remaining undocumented immigrants in the country.

“After the border is secure and after everything gets normalized, we’re going to make a determination on the people that they’re talking about — who are terrific people. They’re terrific people, but we are gonna make a determination at that,” Trump said. “But before we make that determination…it’s very important, we are going to secure our border.”

His comments echoed those he had made at the start of his campaign: “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” Trump had said last June when he announced his candidacy. “They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

Two or three million people deported or incarcerated. He says it like it’s nothing. It’s perfectly normal.

Two or three million people!!!

It’s not a campaign anymore. This grotesque monster is going to be the president with more power in his tiny hands than any other person on the planet.

It’s not about economic anxiety folks. It’s about authoritarianism. Always was.

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One reason for low turnout

One reason for low turnout

by digby

Neither Trump or Clinton managed to get huge turnout. She did better than he did but it wasn’t enough in the right places.

This is one of the reasons:

This election was so relentless negative and the people who don’t like that are the kind of people who might just turn away and not vote. Trump voters aren’t sensitive about negativity. They’re fighters. They liked it. Just look at the difference between the fresh face young women cheering “deal me in” with the angry people at the Trump rallies screaming “lock her up!” and “Build that wall.”

Let’s just say it’s a fair guess that Trump’s relentless insults about Clinton being a criminal, with the help of the media and the FBI, made some of her voters just not want to deal with the election. And perversely, her campaign may have contributed to the whole atmosphere by relentlessly showing the hideous Trump footage, turning off some of her own people in the procesl. I don’t think I talked to a person anywhere in the last month who wasn’t eager to get the whole over with.

The old adage is that Republicans fall in line and Democrats fall in love. This campaign made it very hard to feel anything but nauseous. I think Trump understands that stuff better than most — it’s a bully tactic, after all. Beat up on the weaker kid and send a message to everyone else: stay off the playground.

A lot of people may have just decided to stay off the playground.

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Keeping Dear Leader’s secrets

Keeping Dear Leader’s secrets

by digby

He sounds serious to me. But then I’ve always seen him as an authoritarian thug rather than an entertaining buffoon so it doesn’t surprise me.

Donald Trump has suggested that, if elected, he’d make political appointees sign a sweeping non-disclosure agreement similar to one that he requires campaign workers to sign.

He may have some leeway to do so.

Interviews given and memoirs written by former cabinet members are a crucial source of information for presidential historians. Former Secretaries of State Hillary Clinton, Madeleine Albright, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and Henry Kissinger have all written accounts of their time in the executive branch, along with former Defense Secretary Robert Gates and former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, to name just a few.

But Trump doesn’t approve.

In a March interview with The Washington Post, Trump was asked whether he’d make government employees sign confidentiality agreements. “I think they should,” he replied.

Trump conceded that “there could be some kind of a law that you can’t do this,” but then he continued: “When people are chosen by a man to go into government at high levels and then they leave government and they write a book about a man and say a lot of things that were really guarded and personal, I don’t like that.”

Post reporter Bob Woodward pointed out that government employees received their salaries not from the president but from the taxpayers. That prompted Trump to agree that “in the federal government it’s a different thing. So it’s something I would think about. But you know, I do right now — I have thousands and thousands of employees, many thousands, and every one of them has an agreement.”

Could Trump prevent his top appointees from disclosing whatever information he chose — even after they left the government?

“Trump could likely fashion something like [that] in the White House.” said Norman Eisen, special counsel to President Barack Obama in 2009-11. “It would be unusual,” Eisen explained, “to expand non-disclosure to extend outside the typical area of classified and sensitive information,” but “he could try to do it by an executive order requiring his appointees to sign a written pledge not to disclose.”

“It is a troubling prospect,” Eisen said, “one of many presented by a Trump presidency.”

The confidentiality agreement Trump uses in his campaign is extremely wide in scope, protecting no fewer than four generations of the Trump family. Its definition of confidential information includes taxes, financial statements, contracts, schedules, appointments, meetings, conversations and notes of “Mr. Trump, any family member, any Trump company or any Family Member Company.” The term “family member” is defined to include Trump’s children and “their respective spouses, children and grandchildren, if any, and Mr. Trump’s siblings and their respective spouses and children, if any.”

The campaign confidentiality agreement also requires that employees and volunteers “during the term of [their] service and at all times thereafter” agree not to “disparage publicly” Trump, any Trump company, any Trump family member or any Trump family member’s business enterprise…

Richard Painter, chief ethics lawyer to President George W. Bush in 2005-07, said that as president Trump would enjoy very broad latitude to require non-disclosure from top aides. “He can order them to do what he wants them to do,” Painter said, “and fire them if they don’t, but that’s been true anyway.” The only real restriction, he said, would be that a non-disclosure agreement couldn’t violate existing laws like the Freedom of Information Act.

But Painter said Trump could not act to enforce non-disclosure agreements as president the way he can as a private citizen. Samaha agreed. “I just doubt the president’s lawyers would craft the policy this way,” Samaha said, “unless the idea is to send a message, even if it’s legally unenforceable.”

Eisen is less sanguine. The federal government may lack the power to make a non-disclosure agreement stick, he said, but it still has the power to try. On his way to courtroom defeat, a President Trump could run up legal costs for any ex-government appointee who aspired to speak freely of his time in office.

“The Attorney General could be ordered to enforce this,” Eisen said. “That threat would have a tremendous chilling effect. The ordinary person is going to be afraid to take on the full weight of the U.S. government.”

He made all his volunteers agree to sign one. He sued his ex-wife and many others for failing to adhere to one’s they’d signed.

Here’s one story of how Trump rolls on this issue:


Trump went to court in early 2006, claiming that he had been libeled in the book “TrumpNation: The Art of Being The Donald,” by Timothy L. O’Brien, then a business reporter at the New York Times. The book briefly addressed Trump’s claims about his net worth, which was then, as it is now, the subject of a great deal of bluster, speculation and opacity.

O’Brien concluded that Trump was worth substantially less than what Trump publicly claimed, an assertion that prompted the business mogul to sue O’Brien and his publisher, Warner Books. He claimed harm to his business and sought $5 billion in damages.

The lawsuit is one of many that Trump has leveled at adversaries and former business partners over the years. But this one may have gone straight to the heart of Trump’s “brand.” Trump pursued it for five years, spending more than $1 million in legal fees, apparently to protect a fundamental aspect of his identity and mythos: That he is not merely very rich but clearly, most sincerely, super rich.

More than a decade later, the issue still clearly stings Trump. O’Brien, he said in an interview Tuesday, “is a whack job, a total nut job . . . one of the sleaziest people I’ve ever done business with. He wrote a book knowing it was totally false. He didn’t know what the assets were, and he disregarded their value. He really did set out with the intent to harm.”

To Trump’s great exasperation, O’Brien showed that there are good reasons to doubt Trump’s assertion that he was worth “five to six billion” dollars in 2005. (In a campaign-disclosure form filed in July, Trump claimed he is now worth more than $10 billion.) Based on documents and interviews with Trump and his associates, O’Brien estimated that Trump had inflated his bankroll as much as 20 times over. Subtracting debts and other liabilities, O’Brien says, Trump’s net worth was pegged at $150 million to $250 million, based on estimates by people with direct knowledge of Trump’s finances.

The suit may have settled the basic question — what is Trump worth? — but the public never got a glimpse of the answer. Trump supplied records and documents, including tax returns that he has declined to release during his campaign, but those were sealed by the court.

In any case, Trump was unable to show that O’Brien had acted with “reckless disregard” for the truth, the standard for sustaining a libel claim against a public figure.

“We blew him up on the whole notion that I set out with reckless disregard and malice,” says O’Brien, now the editor of Bloomberg View. “My lawyers drew and quartered him” on that issue.

The limited public record of the lawsuit includes interesting revelations. One is Trump’s admission, under questioning from O’Brien’s attorneys during a deposition, that he relied on his own “feelings” to assess the value of his holdings.

An attorney asked: Feelings?

“Yes, even my own feelings as to where the world is, where the world is going, and that can change rapidly from day to day,” Trump said, according to the court record. “Then you have a September 11th, and you don’t feel so good about yourself and you don’t feel so good about the world and you don’t feel so good about New York City. Then you have a year later, and the city is as hot as a pistol. Even months after that it was a different feeling. So yeah, even my own feelings affect my value to myself.”

The statement effectively validated O’Brien’s skeptical take on Trump’s self-reporting, which O’Brien characterized as Trump’s “verbal billions.”

A superior court judge in New Jersey ruled that Trump had no case and dismissed his suit in 2009. An appeals court affirmed that decision two years later.

Ultimately, Trump rationalized his defeat this way: “Essentially the judge just said, ‘Trump is too famous,’ ” he told the Atlantic magazine in 2013. “ ‘He’s so famous that you’re allowed to say anything you want about him.’ Well, I disagree with that.”

Well, not exactly.

Both courts cited a lack of “clear and convincing” evidence to satisfy the basic legal test for libeling someone as well known as Trump: willful disregard for the truth. The appeals court noted O’Brien’s diligent and extensive efforts to research Trump’s wealth.

Trump said in an interview that he knew he couldn’t win the suit but brought it anyway to make a point. “I spent a couple of bucks on legal fees, and they spent a whole lot more. I did it to make his life miserable, which I’m happy about.”

O’Brien notes that his reporting on Trump’s wealth consisted of only a few pages of his 288-page book, which was rife with passages about Trump’s “checkered” business career.

So why did Trump ignore the rest and take such offense at the net-worth discussion?

“It’s a measure of his deep insecurity,” O’Brien said. “His wealth and the size of his wealth . . . are integral to how he wants people to perceive him. He looks at the Forbes 400 [list of wealthiest Americans] as the pecking order, and his ego and standing are wrapped up in it. People who are comfortable with their wealth don’t need to brag about it. He’s not in that category.”

As it happens, Trump’s lawsuit and the publicity surrounding it did little to help “TrumpNation.” The book “didn’t sell particularly well,” O’Brien said.

Trump takes some credit for that. “I didn’t read the book,” he said. “I didn’t have time to read it. What I did do was make sure people knew it was false.”

But the author did get one last laugh. In a two-can-play-at-this-game column last year, he facetiously asserted that he, like Trump, was personally worth $10 billion. How did he make such an extraordinary figure? Among other things, O’Brien assessed his home at $6 billion, his aging Ford Escape at $3 billion, and his son’s Pokemon card collection at $100 million.

Absurd, yes. But that’s how rich he personally felt at the time.

It’s a lonely Hallelujah Thanks #KateMcKinnon @rtraister

It’s a lonely Hallelujah

by digby


I’ve told the truth, I didn’t come to fool you
And even though it all went wrong
I’ll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah


If this means anything to you, go read this by Rebecca Traister: Hillary Clinton Didn’t Shatter the Glass Ceiling. This Is What Broke Instead.

It’s the best thing you’ll read about what Clinton’s loss says about women, about Democratic politics, about America. Please read the whole thing. This is just a short excerpt:

Spending eight years in the White House made Hillary a part of the Democratic firmament, a celebrity who rubbed elbows with the rich and powerful. Which of course helped her when she embarked on her own political career, becoming the first woman senator from the State of New York. By the time she made her first bid for the White House in 2008, she — unlike all the women who had preceded her in presidential bids — had both the money and support of the party Establishment. Her decision to go work for her former rival Barack Obama further ensconced her in the Democratic Party’s highest echelons, which led to the sense of her 2016 run as inevitable, unstoppable.

It is a piteous irony that in finding a way past the specific hurdles long set before women with presidential ambitions — fund-raising and the support of a major party — Hillary Clinton also offered up to her opponents, on the left and the right, the ammunition to undercut the historic nature of her candidacy. The very fact that she had close relationships with big donors and garnered the support of major political institutions made her part of the political elite, vulnerable to the anti-­Establishment rhetoric of both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. It also kept her from being understood or celebrated as the historic outsider that, as a member of a gender historically denied access to executive power, she was. In debates, when attacked as a member of the corrupt global oligarchy, Clinton would bleat about being a woman, a grandmother, different from literally everyone else ever to have been on a general-election presidential-debate stage, yet her claims never really landed. Perhaps it is a remarkable twist of fate that the outsider candidate was too much of an insider for the election she ran in, or perhaps part of today’s fury at insider institutions stems from a resentment that women like Hillary Clinton can infiltrate them. Either way, in figuring out how a woman might win, she lost.

In the final stretch of her general-election campaign, Hillary Clinton did become discernible as a woman — thanks, in large part, to Donald Trump. When he dismissed her as a “nasty woman,” when he said that she lacked stamina, when he said she didn’t look presidential, when he said that she’d walked in front of him at a debate and that he “wasn’t impressed.” When he stood menacingly behind her at the second debate, radiating his desire to punish her, spitting out his plan to imprison her should he be elected, attempting to humiliate her with women who had accused her husband of sexual misconduct. Suddenly, millions of American women remembered that no matter her wealth, or her immersion in the political ruling class, in the end, she was being treated like a woman — a woman who had dared to challenge and embarrass an angry man. A lot of women could relate.

Then there was the infamous pussy-grabbing tape. Bob Kerrey notes, with the surprise felt by many men, how “that tape of Trump reminded us of the way we used to be, and let us know that it’s still going on! Now it’s more likely to be condemned, as opposed to being rewarded, because it wasn’t that long ago that it was rewarded. And it’s the reason we haven’t had a woman president.”

The story of women in America is closely intertwined with the story of the country’s other structurally disadvantaged groups, even if those groups have sometimes fought with each other over a too-small piece of the pie. But in this election cycle, faced with a candidate spouting sexism and racism along with anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim and anti-Semitic tirades, those groups, and their symbolic representatives, began to step up to flank Clinton. People who had reasons to distrust Hillary Clinton, especially African-­Americans who were angry about the long-term repercussions of Bill Clinton’s crime bill, began to get over them to try to help Clinton win a historic presidency. There was Michelle Obama, against whose husband Hillary Clinton had so bitterly fought in 2008, arriving to give clear, heart-wrenching voice to women’s anger at the culture of sexual assault. There was Elizabeth Warren, in defiance of the narrative about her chilly relationship with Clinton, making the impassioned case for progressive economic reform that Clinton herself had a hard time making, in part because her husband’s welfare-reform legislation had exacerbated the class divide. Clinton herself spoke more openly about her own advantages, about systemic racism, about the biases and resentments that made Michelle Obama’s time as First Lady more fraught than hers.

This coalition-building was not just an illusion produced by a few high-wattage appearances. A poll released by the nonpartisan African-American Research Collaborative the Friday before Election Day found that while black voters were most motivated by jobs, 89 percent of respondents also were invested in comprehensive immigration reform, and support for same-sex marriage had risen 11 points since 2012 to 61 percent. Issues that used to divide marginalized populations — recall the passage of Prop 8 in 2008, thanks in part to a lack of support for gay rights among the African-American voters who turned out for Obama — seemed to be, slowly but righteously, becoming common cause. The prospect of a truly intersectional Democratic movement seemed possible — not just possible but key to electing the first woman president, a woman who would not only shore up the Supreme Court but who was running on promises of comprehensive immigration reform, paid family leave, subsidized child care, a higher minimum wage, the repeal of the Hyde Amendment, and criminal-justice reform, all of which would of course have trouble getting past an obstructionist Congress, but nonetheless composed a blueprint for the future, an interlocking set of fixes that might begin to address structural barriers to equality. A more integrated progressive future was a glimmer in the eye of our sitting president, his would-be successor, and the coalition of voters that appeared to be forming behind her.

That was our mistake. And it’s possible that we must now reevaluate the historic victory of Barack Obama in light of the fact that he was elected at a moment of global crisis in the shadow of a disastrous war perpetrated by his predecessor of the opposing party. Maybe that’s really what was happening. Desperation, not progress.

Or maybe it’s just always two steps forward one step back — or in this case, two steps forward a hundred steps back.

Traister concludes with this:

We are in a period of tremendous national turmoil. What we are seeing is a backlash not just against Clinton’s candidacy but against the entire eight years of the Obama administration. It’s not just about who gets to be president. It’s about who gets to vote for the president, who gets to stay in America and make their families here and how those families get to be configured. It’s about who controls the culture, who makes the art, who makes the policies, whom those policies benefit and whom they harm.

As Clinton pointed out that Sunday at the Mt. Airy Church of God in Christ, the spaces between advances in our society are often long ones: Nearly 100 years passed between African-Americans being guaranteed the right to vote by the 15th Amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Of all the women who attended the convention at Seneca Falls in 1848, only one of them lived to see women get the vote in 1920. A few of those women who recall the passage of the 19th Amendment, and many more black women who had to fight for their franchise in the Jim Crow South, got to vote for a woman for president on Tuesday. They won’t live to see a woman inaugurated. But … someday, someone.

Please click over to read the whole wonderful article and share it with your social media streams.

The hunt for that affirming flame

The hunt for that affirming flame


by digby






Neal Gabler:

America died on Nov. 8, 2016, not with a bang or a whimper, but at its own hand via electoral suicide. We the people chose a man who has shredded our values, our morals, our compassion, our tolerance, our decency, our sense of common purpose, our very identity — all the things that, however tenuously, made a nation out of a country.

Whatever place we now live in is not the same place it was on Nov. 7. No matter how the rest of the world looked at us on Nov. 7, they will now look at us differently. We are likely to be a pariah country. And we are lost for it. As I surveyed the ruin of that country this gray Wednesday morning, I found weary consolation in W.H. Auden’s poem, September 1, 1939, which concludes:

“Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.”

I hunt for that affirming flame.

This generally has been called the “hate election” because everyone professed to hate both candidates. It turned out to be the hate election because, and let’s not mince words, of the hatefulness of the electorate. In the years to come, we will brace for the violence, the anger, the racism, the misogyny, the xenophobia, the nativism, the white sense of grievance that will undoubtedly be unleashed now that we have destroyed the values that have bound us.

We all knew these hatreds lurked under the thinnest veneer of civility. That civility finally is gone. In its absence, we may realize just how imperative that politesse was. It is the way we managed to coexist.

If there is a single sentence that characterizes the election, it is this: “He says the things I’m thinking.” That may be what is so terrifying. Who knew that so many tens of millions of white Americans were thinking unconscionable things about their fellow Americans? Who knew that tens of millions of white men felt so emasculated by women and challenged by minorities? Who knew that after years of seeming progress on race and gender, tens of millions of white Americans lived in seething resentment, waiting for a demagogue to arrive who would legitimize their worst selves and channel them into political power? Perhaps we had been living in a fool’s paradise. Now we aren’t.

This country has survived a civil war, two world wars, and a great depression. There are many who say we will survive this, too. Maybe we will, but we won’t survive unscathed. We know too much about each other to heal. No more can we pretend that we are exceptional or good or progressive or united. We are none of those things. Nor can we pretend that democracy works and that elections have more or less happy endings. Democracy only functions when its participants abide by certain conventions, certain codes of conduct and a respect for the process.

The virus that kills democracy is extremism because extremism disables those codes. Republicans have disrespected the process for decades. They have regarded any Democratic president as illegitimate. They have proudly boasted of preventing popularly elected Democrats from effecting policy and have asserted that only Republicans have the right to determine the nation’s course. They have worked tirelessly to make sure that the government cannot govern and to redefine the purpose of government as prevention rather than effectuation. In short, they haven’t believed in democracy for a long time, and the media never called them out on it.

Democracy can’t cope with extremism. Only violence and time can defeat it. The first is unacceptable, the second takes too long. Though Trump is an extremist, I have a feeling that he will be a very popular president and one likely to be re-elected by a substantial margin, no matter what he does or fails to do. That’s because ever since the days of Ronald Reagan, rhetoric has obviated action, speechifying has superseded governing.

Trump was absolutely correct when he bragged that he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and his supporters wouldn’t care. It was a dictator’s ugly vaunt, but one that recognized this election never was about policy or economics or the “right path/wrong path,” or even values. It was about venting. So long as Trump vented their grievances, his all-white supporters didn’t care about anything else. He is smart enough to know that won’t change in the presidency. In fact, it is only likely to intensify. White America, Trump’s America, just wants to hear its anger bellowed. This is one time when the Bully Pulpit will be literal.

The media can’t be let off the hook for enabling an authoritarian to get to the White House. Long before he considered a presidential run, he was a media creation — a regular in the gossip pages, a photo on magazine covers, the bankrupt (morally and otherwise) mogul who hired and fired on The Apprentice. When he ran, the media treated him not as a candidate, but as a celebrity, and so treated him differently from ordinary pols. The media gave him free publicity, trumpeted his shenanigans, blasted out his tweets, allowed him to phone in his interviews, fell into his traps and generally kowtowed until they suddenly discovered that this joke could actually become president.

Just as Trump has shredded our values, our nation and our democracy, he has shredded the media. In this, as in his politics, he is only the latest avatar of a process that began long before his candidacy. Just as the sainted Ronald Reagan created an unbridgeable chasm between rich and poor that the Republicans would later exploit against Democrats, conservatives delegitimized mainstream journalism so that they could fill the vacuum.

Retiring conservative talk show host Charlie Sykes complained that after years of bashing from the right wing, the mainstream media no longer could perform their function as reporters, observers, fact dispensers, and even truth tellers, and he said we needed them. Like Goebbels before them, conservatives understood that they had to create their own facts, their own truths, their own reality. They have done so, and in so doing effectively destroyed the very idea of objectivity. Trump can lie constantly only because white America has accepted an Orwellian sense of truth — the truth pulled inside out.

With Trump’s election, I think that the ideal of an objective, truthful journalism is dead, never to be revived. Like Nixon and Sarah Palin before him, Trump ran against the media, boomeranging off the public’s contempt for the press. He ran against what he regarded as media elitism and bias, and he ran on the idea that the press disdained working-class white America. Among the many now-widening divides in the country, this is a big one, the divide between the media and working-class whites, because it creates a Wild West of information – a media ecology in which nothing can be believed except what you already believe.

With the mainstream media so delegitimized — a delegitimization for which they bear a good deal of blame, not having had the courage to take on lies and expose false equivalencies — they have very little role to play going forward in our politics. I suspect most of them will surrender to Trumpism — if they were able to normalize Trump as a candidate, they will no doubt normalize him as president. Cable news may even welcome him as a continuous entertainment and ratings booster. And in any case, like Reagan, he is bulletproof. The media cannot touch him, even if they wanted to. Presumably, there will be some courageous guerillas in the mainstream press, a kind of Resistance, who will try to fact-check him. But there will be few of them, and they will be whistling in the wind. Trump, like all dictators, is his own truth.

What’s more, Trump already has promised to take his war on the press into courtrooms and the halls of Congress. He wants to loosen libel protections, and he has threatened Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos of Amazon with an antitrust suit. Individual journalists have reason to fear him as well. He has already singled out NBC’s Katy Tur, perhaps the best of the television reporters, so that she needed the Secret Service to escort her from one of his rallies. Jewish journalists who have criticized Trump have been subjected to vicious anti-Semitism and intimidation from the alt-right. For the press, this is likely to be the new normal in an America in which white supremacists, neo-Nazi militias, racists, sexists, homophobes and anti-Semites have been legitimized by a new president who “says what I’m thinking.” It will be open season.

This converts the media from reporters to targets, and they have little recourse. Still, if anyone points the way forward, it may be New York Times columnist David Brooks. Brooks is no paragon. He always had seemed to willfully neglect modern Republicanism’s incipient fascism (now no longer incipient), and he was an apologist for conservative self-enrichment and bigotry. But this campaign season, Brooks pretty much dispensed with politics. He seemed to have arrived at the conclusion that no good could possibly come of any of this and retreated into spirituality. What Brooks promoted were values of mutual respect, a bolder sense of civic engagement, an emphasis on community and neighborhood, and overall a belief in trickle-up decency rather than trickle-down economics. He is not hopeful, but he hasn’t lost all hope.

For those of us now languishing in despair, this may be a prescription for rejuvenation. We have lost the country, but by refocusing, we may have gained our own little patch of the world and, more granularly, our own family. For journalists, Brooks may show how political reporting, which, as I said, is likely to be irrelevant in the Trump age, might yield to a broader moral context in which one considers the effect that policy, strategy and governance have not only on our physical and economic well-being but also on our spiritual well-being. In a society that is likely to be fractious and odious, we need a national conversation on values. The media could help start it.

But the disempowered media may have one more role to fill: They must bear witness. Many years from now, future generations will need to know what happened to us and how it happened. They will need to know how disgruntled white Americans, full of self-righteous indignation, found a way to take back a country they felt they were entitled to and which they believed had been lost. They will need to know about the ugliness and evil that destroyed us as a nation after great men like Lincoln and Roosevelt guided us through previous crises and kept our values intact. They will need to know, and they will need a vigorous, engaged, moral media to tell them. They will also need us.

We are not living for ourselves anymore in this country. Now we are living for history.

Land spreading out so far and wide by @BloggersRUs

Land spreading out so far and wide
by Tom Sullivan


2012 presidential election results on a population cartogram.

There are a lot of unspoken assumptions tied up in how we talk about this country and what it means. In an article yesterday (I can’t seem to find again – FOUND it) about Medicare privatization, a Heritage Foundation spokesman noted how they had successfully defined the terms of the discussion so that Democrats were discussing conservative proposals, but “we aren’t debating theirs.” Privatization is on the table. Raising Medicare taxes is not.

In the wake of Tuesday’s election of Donald Trump, the interests of the white working class are getting a lot of attention. This raises concerns that rural interests will move to the head of the line for some time, pushing out those of other members of the Democrats’ progressive coalition. In the same way some among the white working class chose to read Black Live Matter as if it meant only Black Lives Matter, progressives might not want to make the same mistake should Democrats start examining why they lost the Rust Belt and rural America. Politics is not a zero sum game. (And yeah, it’s not as if the white working class has not gotten more than its share of attention already. Losing their preferential position is what all the squawking is about.)

But contra what I wrote yesterday about rural America, James Fallows observed last night in a string of tweets that how we talk about election results nationwide reflects some deep assumptions about how we think about this country and how it is already weighted in rural America’s direction. It’s something I have noticed before, but let James Fallows tell it:

Let me just compile the rest:

2. to say that this is a red country. What they’re pointing to is land, which we already know. But you should think about that.

3. Because it used to be in this country, even for whites, that to vote, you had to have property.

4. And now the media is looking at a graph of land, of essentially physical property, to convey political power.

5. And the reality is, that has everything to do with how these districts were envisioned in the first place.

6. When someone points to a map that has a county with maybe a few hundred people, they’re operating in this very old frame

7. Which is basically, do you have land, do you have property? Then you are a person who has a vote.

8. It’s very necessary to push back on that psychology. It’s not overt, but that’s what they’re doing.

9. Our political structure should not be conveyed in imagery that suggests that people who live together, often on top of each other,

10. do not count. Especially when ultimately, we’re looking at some of the most populous but also diverse places.

11. And on that map, to say, well this is a red country because you have this small group of white people with this land

12. And over here, this group of a greater mass of people, much more diverse, they have very little land.

13. That’s part of a very old history and symbolism that reflects a country that is not who we are, where some are valued less.

14. It’s important to resist these images, even though they are mundane because they sow a psychological fabric

15. that covers, constrains and suffocates our political discussion so that it is focused on the fewest people possible.

It is why conservatives look at maps and boast about how many square miles (rather than citizens) are represented by Republicans. As we saw in the electoral maps, maps can be deceiving.

Also, don’t tell the president-elect his actual land holdings are not yoooge.

Majority for dummies

Majority for dummies

by digby

Ted Nugent at Trump rally: “I’ve gotcher blue state right here!”

I always thought it was funny that the Supreme Court relied on an argument that counting certain votes would dilute the votes of others in Bush vs Gore. Because, you know, Al Gore won the popular vote.  And 16 years later we have another Democrat winning the popular vote and losing the electoral college.

And then there’s this:

The White House may not be the only institution in Washington that Democrats lost on Tuesday despite getting more votes than Republicans. 

It turns out that Democrats also got more votes for the U.S. Senate than Republicans, and yet Republicans maintained their majority on Capitol Hill. 

In results that are still preliminary, 45.2 million Americans cast a vote for a Democratic Senate candidate, while 39.3 million Americans voted for a Republican. 

The problem for Democrats is that, much like the Electoral College, the number of votes matters less than where those votes are cast.

Real American votes are just a little bit more valuable …

It’s a mighty strange democracy we’ve got these days.

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