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Month: November 2016

In like Flynn

In like Flynn

by digby

This new profile of General Mike Flynn in the New Yorker is … chilling.

McChrystal, who was appointed to run jsoc in 2003, brought Flynn in as his intelligence chief to help him shake up the organization. Flynn was one of the few high-ranking officers who disdained the Army’s culture of conformity. But McChrystal also knew he had to protect Flynn from that same culture. He “boxed him in,” someone who had worked with both men told me last week, by encouraging Flynn to keep his outbursts in check and surrounding him with subordinates who would challenge the unsubstantiated theories he tended to indulge.

In mid-2007, Flynn returned home with three years of jsoc secrets in his head. He had witnessed close-quarters combat and killings. He had helped load the bodies of dead and wounded Seal Team 6 and Delta Force warriors into evacuation helicopters. Like his comrades, he had spent twenty hours a day, seven days a week, focussed on killing the enemy. Sometimes women and children were killed, too. He wouldn’t even take a break to attend his son’s wedding, a moment of personal sacrifice he mentions often when reflecting on those days.

In 2012, Flynn became director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, in charge of all military attachés and defense-intelligence collection around the world. He ran into serious trouble almost immediately. I’ve spoken with some two dozen former colleagues who were close to Flynn then, members of the D.I.A. and the military, and some who worked with him in civilian roles. They all like Flynn personally. But they described how he lurched from one priority to another and had trouble building a loyal team. “He made a lot of changes,” one close observer of Flynn’s time at the D.I.A. told me. “Not in a strategic way—A to Z—but back and forth.”

Flynn also began to seek the Washington spotlight. But, without loyal junior officers at his side to vet his facts, he found even more trouble. His subordinates started a list of what they called “Flynn facts,” things he would say that weren’t true, like when he asserted that three-quarters of all new cell phones were bought by Africans or, later, that Iran had killed more Americans than Al Qaeda. In private, his staff tried to dissuade him from repeating these lines.

Flynn’s temper also flared. He berated people in front of colleagues. Soon, according to former associates, a parallel power structure developed within the D.I.A. to fence him in, and to keep the nearly seventeen-thousand-person agency working. “He created massive antibodies in the building,” the former colleague said.

Flynn had been on the job just eighteen months when James Clapper told him he had to go. Clapper said that he could stay for another nine months, until his successor was vetted and confirmed, according to two people familiar with their conversation. Flynn was livid.

After he left government, Flynn followed the path of many other retired generals and got on the television and speaking circuit. He wrote a book with Michael Ledeen, a controversial neoconservative foreign-policy analyst, about defeating terrorism. Islam is not a religion, Flynn and Ledeen wrote, but a political ideology bent on destroying Judeo-Christian civilization. Flynn began saying that he had been fired because President Obama disagreed with his views on terrorism and wanted to hide the growth of isis. I haven’t found anyone yet who heard him say this while he was still in the military. In the past, I’ve asked Flynn directly about this claim; he has told me that he doesn’t have any proof—it’s just something he feels was true. (Flynn did not respond to requests for comment for this article.)

As Flynn’s public comments became more and more shrill, McChrystal, Mullen, and others called Flynn to urge him to “tone it down,” a person familiar with each attempt told me. But Flynn had found a new boss, Trump, who enlisted him in the fight against the Republican and Democratic Party establishments. Flynn was ready. At the Republican National Convention, Flynn boiled over in front of an audience of millions. He led the crowd in chants of “Lock her up! Lock her up!” His former colleagues say they were shocked by what they saw.

What Flynn saw was corruption: Clinton, the media, the Justice Department, the intelligence community—they are all corrupt. I spoke to Flynn three months ago, while working on a profile of him for the Washington Post. “Is this some kind of hatchet job!” he roared into the phone when I asked why, exactly, he thought Clinton should be in jail.

Here’s the video of the interview:

Poetry not prose by @BloggersRUs

Poetry not prose
by Tom Sullivan

“That won’t work down South,” the consultant said not in those exact words.

I’d managed an invitation to a private, side event at the 2012 DNC convention in Charlotte. It was the kickoff party for a project supposed to marry data and micro-targeting with messaging somehow. The presenters were well-intentioned political activists who’d found a way to monetize their hobby the way New Age mantra-preneurs did with their spiritual journeys. The former Hill staffer-turned-consultant was there with local movers and shakers looking for a data-driven shortcut out of the wilderness. The 2010 midterms had been a slaughter.

The presentation felt more like New Dem than born-again progressive. Asked if this was related somehow to a narratives project in Washington state, the consultant said he knew about that. But, he said, the “heroes and villains” stuff wouldn’t work in the South. “Meet Dr. [Joseph] Campbell,” a friend remarked later, noting that the Celtic ballads ubiquitous across the South are straight-up heroes-and-villains stories. The “Star Wars” saga is built on that foundation. Hollywood writers make their livings from crafting compelling stories and wonder at Democrats who place so much confidence instead in technological terrors.

Which brings us to Mark McKinnon’s 2016 post-mortem at Daily Beast. McKinnon is a media consultant who has worked for both Democrats and Republicans. “I’ve always believed there should be at least a little bit of art along with science in politics and life,” he writes. McKinnon feels that what Clinton lacked and Donald Trump had was a compelling narrative:

Trump told a story. We think about story usually in a cultural frame: movies, books, music. But it’s just as true for campaigns. Voters are attracted to candidates who lay out a storyline. Losing campaigns communicate unconnected streams of information, ideas, speeches. Winning campaigns create a narrative architecture that ties it all together into something meaningful and coherent, as I articulated last year in a short New York Times op-documentary.

How do you tell a story? Identify a threat and/or an opportunity. Establish victims of the threat or denied opportunity. Suggest villains that impose the threat or deny the opportunity. Propose solutions. Reveal the hero.

Not that Trump’s story was that coherent, but it was a story.

That’s what Trump did. The reality TV star understands the power of narrative. He identified a threat: outside forces trying to change the way we live. And an opportunity: make America great again. He established victims: blue-collar workers who have lost jobs or experienced a declining standard of living. He suggested villains: Mexican immigrants, China, establishment elites. He proposed solutions: build a wall, tear up unfair trade deals. And the hero was revealed, Donald Trump.

Hillary Clinton offered issues, prescriptions and policies. “Campaigning and governing demand different skill sets,” McKinnon writes. “Hillary Clinton was as qualified as anyone who has ever run for the office of president.” But where Bill “campaigns in poetry … she campaigns in prose.” That moment in 2008 when she let her guard down and teared up in New Hampshire after losing Iowa showed her to be authentically human says McKinnon (and everyone I know who has met her up close). That moment erased a double-digit deficit in 24 hours and she won New Hampshire.

McKinnon asks what I’ve been asking, “Why didn’t that lesson stick?”

My day job is in technology. But as McKinnon says, my job involves a little bit of art along with science. Yes, I use a computer and some high-dollar software. But it’s basically a fancy calculator to confirm a design I know will work from experience. Most of what I do is by “feel.” Democrats need to turn off the targeting computer and trust their feelings more.

Ingraham for Deportation Czar?

Ingraham for Deportation Czar?

by digby

It’s her portfolio, after all:

The popular conservative radio talk show host is willing to accept the position of White House press secretary in Donald Trump’s administration, but she wants a bigger title, a role in policymaking and a seat at the decision-making table with the president, according to a source familiar with the discussions.
[…]
Ingraham has made no secret of her interest in the press secretary gig, a high-profile position that could put her in front of the White House press corps —and in front of the cameras —every day. Ingraham, a Fox News contributor and former Supreme Court clerk, is against same-sex marriage and was a supporter of Trump’s proposal to ban Muslims from entering the U.S. during the campaign – a ban he has softened on since clinching the Republican nomination last May.

“I would say it’s not broad enough,” Ingraham said on her radio show in December of 2015.

Ingraham has confirmed that her name is in the mix and hinted, in her public comments addressing the speculation, that she wants a role in shaping the Trump agenda. But she apparently wants a title that elevates her beyond just dominating the spin cycle.

I’d like to give a big shout-out to ABC for mainstreaming this odious bigot.

Oh, I’m sorry, I’m not allowed to call anyone an odious bigot. Let me re-phrase that: I’d like to give ABC a big shout-out for mainstreaming this person who is feeling anxious about a changing America and is hurt by the left’s cruel and unjust characterization of her as someone who is less than empathetic toward ethnic and racial minorities.

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Another nutter

Another nutter

by digby

Trump named a new member to his “national security” team. (I put that in scare quotes because his team is so scary.)

President-elect Donald J. Trump on Friday named K. T. McFarland, an aide to three Republican White Houses and a frequent Fox News commentator, to the position of deputy national security adviser, as he continues to fill his foreign policy staff with aides who have hard-line views on the fight against terrorism.

Ms. McFarland, like Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, the president-elect’s choice for national security adviser, has been highly critical of President Obama’s approach to combating terrorism, saying he has not acknowledged the threat that global Islamism poses to Western civilization.
[…]
Ms. McFarland, who will not require Senate confirmation, worked for the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations. From 1970 to 1976, she was an adviser to Henry A. Kissinger on the National Security Council. She also ran unsuccessfully in a 2006 Republican Senate primary race for the seat held by Hillary Clinton.

This is just the kind of person you want in the White House to keep Trump, Bannon and Flynn steady:

A Republican challenger to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is bizarrely claiming that the former first lady has been spying in her bedroom window and flying helicopters over her house in the Hamptons, witnesses told The Post yesterday.

Former Reagan-era Pentagon official Kathleen “KT” McFarland stunned a crowd of Suffolk County Republicans on Thursday by saying:

“Hillary Clinton is really worried about me, and is so worried, in fact, that she had helicopters flying over my house in Southampton today taking pictures,” according to a prominent GOP activist who was at the event.

“She wasn’t joking, she was very, very serious, and she also claimed that Clinton’s people were taking pictures across the street from her house in Manhattan, taking pictures from an apartment across the street from her bedroom,” added the eyewitness, who is not involved in the Senate race.

She hasn’t been in the White House for over 30 years and has spent the last few spouting lunacy on Fox News, but I guess this counts for “experience” in Trumpworld.

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Dreaming of a white Christmas (IYKWIM)

Dreaming of a white Christmas (IYKWIM)

by digby

Get ’em while they’re hot:

President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign is holding a Black Friday sale at its online merchandise store.

Supporters can take advantage of extended discounts to buy memorabilia from the campaign, including foam fingers and t-shirts with slogans such as “History is watching us now.”

“President-elect Trump loves a great deal,” reads a Friday promotional email from the campaign. “And in honor of Black Friday, Mr. Trump is extending a 30%-OFF DEAL at the Official Store for Trump Gear.”

On Wednesday, the campaign unveiled a $149 Christmas ornament version of its famous “Make America Great Again” hats.

The most recent filing from the campaign, which shows the group’s financial standing up to October 19, shows that it had $16 million cash on hand and $2.1 million in debt going into the final weeks of the race.

They’re also selling this hideous thing on Amazon. And the reviews are in:

I’m holding out for the “grab ’em by the pussy” mug to go on sale, myself.

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Let the public humiliation rituals begin

Let the public humiliation rituals begin

by digby

I suspect that Romney may be considering taking the Secretary of State job because he feels a duty to try to moderate Trump’s worst instincts and present a calm and reassuring face to the world. (I could be wrong. Maybe he’s just another ambitious GOP suck-up.)

But if that’s what he’s doing, apologizing would be a terrible mistake. It would show the world that Trump expects everyone to bow down before him, show fealty, abase themselves. Giving the world a public display of such dominating, bullying behavior is not a good idea. If Trump wants Romney he and his virtual brownshirts need to treat him with respect. Otherwise, there’s no earthly reason for him to do it.

Fox News is reporting that Donald Trump’s transition team wants Mitt Romney to publicly apologize for railing against the president-elect during the campaign.

A transition official told Fox’s Ed Henry that some in Trump’s inner circle want the former Massachusetts governor to apologize in order to be seriously considered for the secretary of State.

Trump is reportedly considering whether to pick Romney or former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani for the coveted cabinet position.

Giuliani is the preferred choice of Trump’s loyalists and grassroots supporters, while Romney is a favorite of establishment conservatives.

“It’s not about that I don’t care for Mitt personally, but I’m still very unhappy that Mitt did everything he could to derail Donald Trump,” said Trump supporter Mike Huckabee in a Fox interview on Wednesday.

“There’s only one way that I think Mitt Romney could even be considered for a post like that and that is he goes to a microphone in a very public place and repudiates everything he said in that famous Salt Lake City speech, and everything he said after that,” Huckabee said, referring to a famous anti-Trump speech Romney gave in March.

Just say no Mitt. It won’t just hurt you it will hurt the country to give in to this.

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Trump’s little helpers

Trump’s little helpers


by digby

I assume you’ve heard about Donald Trump Jr meeting with Russians in Paris last month. And you know how much Trump admires and respects Vladimir Putin. I guess all that’s not completely beyond the norm. Perhaps he just has a different view of geopolitics and maybe it will all work out. I’m not crazy about authoritarian thugs wherever they are, but that’s just me.

However, this is a brave new world and it’s very, very concerning, regardless of who’s doing it. I don’t think we have any idea of just how pernicious this is:

The flood of “fake news” this election season got support from a sophisticated Russian propaganda campaign that created and spread misleading articles online with the goal of punishing Democrat Hillary Clinton, helping Republican Donald Trump and undermining faith in American democracy, say independent researchers who tracked the operation.

Russia’s increasingly sophisticated propaganda machinery — including thousands of botnets, teams of paid human “trolls,” and networks of websites and social-media accounts — echoed and amplified right-wing sites across the Internet as they portrayed Clinton as a criminal hiding potentially fatal health problems and preparing to hand control of the nation to a shadowy cabal of global financiers. The effort also sought to heighten the appearance of international tensions and promote fear of looming hostilities with nuclear-armed Russia.

Two teams of independent researchers found that the Russians exploited American-made technology platforms to attack U.S. democracy at a particularly vulnerable moment, as an insurgent candidate harnessed a wide range of grievances to claim the White House. The sophistication of the Russian tactics may complicate efforts by Facebook and Google to crack down on “fake news,” as they have vowed to do after widespread complaints about the problem.

There is no way to know whether the Russian campaign proved decisive in electing Trump, but researchers portray it as part of a broadly effective strategy of sowing distrust in U.S. democracy and its leaders. The tactics included penetrating the computers of election officials in several states and releasing troves of hacked emails that embarrassed Clinton in the final months of her campaign.

“They want to essentially erode faith in the U.S. government or U.S. government interests,” said Clint Watts, a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute who along with two other researchers has tracked Russian propaganda since 2014. “This was their standard mode during the Cold War. The problem is that this was hard to do before social media.”

During a Facebook live discussion, reporter Caitlin Dewey explained how fake news sites use Facebook as a vehicle to function and make money.(The Washington Post)

Watts’s report on this work, with colleagues Andrew Weisburd and J.M. Berger, appeared on the national security online magazine War on the Rocks this month under the headline “Trolling for Trump: How Russia Is Trying to Destroy Our Democracy.” Another group, called PropOrNot, a nonpartisan collection of researchers with foreign policy, military and technology backgrounds, planned to release its own findings Friday showing the startling reach and effectiveness of Russian propaganda campaigns.

The researchers used Internet analytics tools to trace the origins of particular tweets and mapped the connections among social-media accounts that consistently delivered synchronized messages. Identifying website codes sometimes revealed common ownership. In other cases, exact phrases or sentences were echoed by sites and social-media accounts in rapid succession, signaling membership in connected networks controlled by a single entity.

PropOrNot’s monitoring report, which was provided to The Washington Post in advance of its public release, identifies more than 200 websites as routine peddlers of Russian propaganda during the election season, with combined audiences of at least 15 million Americans. On Facebook, PropOrNot estimates that stories planted or promoted by the disinformation campaign were viewed more than 213 million times.

I think we can be sure that the Trump administration isn’t going to be interested in pursuing this, for obvious reasons.


Some players in this online echo chamber were knowingly part of the propaganda campaign, the researchers concluded, while others were “useful idiots” — a term born of the Cold War to describe people or institutions that unknowingly assisted Soviet Union propaganda efforts.

I am going to be generous and assume that Trump and his family of wealthy morons are among the useful idiots as well. But who knows? Trump is driven solely by his business opportunities and we know that he has exposure to Russian financial interests so it’s possible that he had some “incentives” to sign on.

Here’s just one example of how this worked. I watched it in real time, wrote about it, but had no idea about the fake news aspect of it. Drudge and his minions pushed it hard as well (and so did more than few anti-Clinton lefties.)

The speed and coordination of these efforts allowed Russian-backed phony news to outcompete traditional news organizations for audience. Some of the first and most alarming tweets after Clinton fell ill at a Sept. 11 memorial event in New York, for example, came from Russian botnets and trolls, researchers found. (She was treated for pneumonia and returned to the campaign trail a few days later.)

This followed a spate of other misleading stories in August about Clinton’s supposedly troubled health. The Daily Beast debunked a particularly widely read piece in an article that reached 1,700 Facebook accounts and was read online more than 30,000 times. But the PropOrNot researchers found that the version supported by Russian propaganda reached 90,000 Facebook accounts and was read more than 8 million times. The researchers said the true Daily Beast story was like “shouting into a hurricane” of false stories supported by the Russians.

I get a lot of correspondence from right wingers because I write a daily column for Salon.  You can imagine how horrific it is. The “health” story was huge, and my email was full of people writing to me with gross stories about Clinton’s catheter falling out (which is why she had to go to the bathroom during the debate) and tales of her having to travel with a doctor to quickly inject her with seizure medication while she was on stage. There were dozens of different conspiracy theories floating around.

I guess we can feel comforted by some idea that this election was decided because Clinton’s ads didn’t target the right people in the rust belt with messages about jobs and trade. I’m sure that had an effect and I’m sure that the Democrats will adjust their messages to appeal to those folks with an intensity we haven’t seen since the Reagan era. (The argument about how to do that will rage on.)

But they might just be missing the forest for the trees. Many of those people may be hearing some other messages from their “trusted” friends on Facebook that supersede the normal political channels.

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The Russians are coming by @BloggersRUs

The Russians are coming
by Tom Sullivan

Among their weaponry are such diverse elements as….

Fake news distributed with a goal of “punishing Democrat Hillary Clinton, helping Republican Donald Trump and undermining faith in American democracy” came with an accent according to the Washington Post:

Two teams of independent researchers found that the Russians exploited American-made technology platforms to attack U.S. democracy at a particularly vulnerable moment, as an insurgent candidate harnessed a wide range of grievances to claim the White House. The sophistication of the Russian tactics may complicate efforts by Facebook and Google to crack down on “fake news,” as they have vowed to do after widespread complaints about the problem.

[…]

“The way that this propaganda apparatus supported Trump was equivalent to some massive amount of a media buy,” said the executive director of PropOrNot, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid being targeted by Russia’s legions of skilled hackers. “It was like Russia was running a super PAC for Trump’s campaign. . . . It worked.”

Researchers from the national security blog War on the Rocks published their report days before the election under the headline “Trolling for Trump: How Russia Is Trying to Destroy Our Democracy”:

[M]ost observers are missing the point. Russia is helping Trump’s campaign, yes, but it is not doing so solely or even necessarily with the goal of placing him in the Oval Office. Rather, these efforts seek to produce a divided electorate and a president with no clear mandate to govern. The ultimate objective is to diminish and tarnish American democracy. Unfortunately, that effort is going very well indeed.

The War on the Rocks account continues:

This “computational propaganda,” a term coined by Philip Howard, has the cumulative effect of creating Clayton A. Davis at Indiana University calls a “majority illusion, where many people appear to believe something ….which makes that thing more credible.” The net result is an American information environment where citizens and even subject-matter experts are hard-pressed to distinguish fact from fiction. They are unsure who to trust and thus more willing to believe anything that supports their personal biases and preferences.

Another research team from PropOrNot expects to release its findings today. Both teams have been examining digital fingerprints left by “Russia’s honeypots, hecklers, and hackers.” PropOrNot’s researchers believe stories planted or promoted on Facebook as part of the disinformation campaign were viewed over 213 million times:

Some players in this online echo chamber were knowingly part of the propaganda campaign, the researchers concluded, while others were “useful idiots” — a term born of the Cold War to describe people or institutions that unknowingly assisted the propaganda efforts of the Soviet Union.

You may even have had Thanksgiving dinner with some.

War on the Rocks detailed the objectives of the social media effort to “strengthen Russia’s position over Western democracies”:

  • Undermine citizen confidence in democratic governance;
  • Foment and exacerbate divisive political fractures;
  • Erode trust between citizens and elected officials and democratic institutions;
  • Popularize Russian policy agendas within foreign populations;
  • Create general distrust or confusion over information sources by blurring the lines between fact and fiction

I’d like to know whether the Russians learned that last trick from Fox News or the other way around.

A Rand report, according to the Post, dubbed the Russian propaganda efforts “a ‘firehose of falsehood’ because of their speed, power and relentlessness.” Whether a president elect who takes little interest in a daily intelligence briefing (no money in it?) and blows off the opinions of 17 national intelligence agencies regarding Russian involvement will only make the Russians’ jobs easier. And they are not done yet:

There are many possible scenarios for the future direction of Russian active measures. Additional damaging information may have been withheld from documented hacks of U.S. political actors, and as-yet undisclosed information — perhaps from a hack of Republican Party emails already suggested by some media reports— may emerge after the election regardless of who wins. Should Russia conduct such data dumps through Wikileaks, for instance, it would create an appearance of balance while also damaging the Republican Party, which almost certainly has at least as much embarrassing material as the DNC. Regardless of who wins, Russian operators might save particularly damaging information for release after the inauguration, when talk of impeachment could further diminish his or her influence in Washington and abroad.

[…]

Meanwhile, the story continues. In late October 2016, Kremlin-linked accounts and bots once again began pushing a White House petition, this time to “remove George Soros-owned voting machines from 16 states.” Of course, no such machines exist, but that didn’t prevent the petition from racking up nearly 129,000 signatures.

That would be the same George Soros the Russian president Putin did not … oh, what’s the use?

A cancer on the body politic

A cancer on the body politic

by digby

This piece by Columbia Journalism Review in which they interviewed various reporters about covering the Trump campaign is interesting.

This one struck me:

25 August 2015: Univision anchor and journalist Jorge Ramos is ejected from a Trump press conference in Iowa. Other media organizations are later banned from covering Trump events

Jorge Ramos, anchor, Univision and Fusion: In that press conference only two journalists defended me: Tom Llamas from ABC and Kasie Hunt from MSNBC. All the other journalists didn’t say anything. I think that the way we covered Trump at the beginning of his campaign was seriously flawed. The New York Times, the LA Times, Politico and the Washington Post [in September] called Donald Trump a liar. [But] it took 13 months for them to do that. At the beginning, it was seriously inappropriate.

This was when I knew something was up. I thought, if they don’t take him seriously and he’s just a joke, why aren’t they defending one of their own on principle?

They didn’t. And they let him grow like a cancer.

Read the whole thing. The press needs to have an autopsy. Something went very, very wrong.