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Month: June 2017

The flurry to lift the sanctions

The flurry to lift the sanctions

by digby

I feel as though this story didn’t get enough play last week and it should because it adds something important to the picture of the Trump mindset as they came into office. I don’t know if it denotes some kind of nefarious activity with respect to Russia. We’ll find something out about that soon enough.

But it does denote a group of people so mind-bendingly dumb that they seemingly had no idea how it would look if they did this, despite the fact that the news had been talking about Russian involvement in the election for months.

Anyway, this story by Michael Isikoff is the first I’ve seen that shows a serious effort to lift sanctions immediately:

In the early weeks of the Trump administration, former Obama administration officials and State Department staffers fought an intense, behind-the-scenes battle to head off efforts by incoming officials to normalize relations with Russia, according to multiple sources familiar with the events.

Unknown to the public at the time, top Trump administration officials, almost as soon as they took office, tasked State Department staffers with developing proposals for the lifting of economic sanctions, the return of diplomatic compounds and other steps to relieve tensions with Moscow.

These efforts to relax or remove punitive measures imposed by President Obama in retaliation for Russia’s intervention in Ukraine and meddling in the 2016 election alarmed some State Department officials, who immediately began lobbying congressional leaders to quickly pass legislation to block the move, the sources said.

“There was serious consideration by the White House to unilaterally rescind the sanctions,” said Dan Fried, a veteran State Department official who served as chief U.S. coordinator for sanctions policy until he retired in late February. He said in the first few weeks of the administration, he received several “panicky” calls from U.S. government officials who told him they had been directed to develop a sanctions-lifting package and imploring him, “Please, my God, can’t you stop this?”

Fried said he grew so concerned that he contacted Capitol Hill allies — including Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md., the ranking minority member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee — to urge them to move quickly to pass legislation that would “codify” the sanctions in place, making it difficult for President Trump to remove them.

Tom Malinowski, who had just stepped down as President Obama’s assistant secretary of state for human rights, told Yahoo News he too joined the effort to lobby Congress after learning from former colleagues that the administration was developing a plan to lift sanctions — and possibly arrange a summit between Trump and Russian president Vladimir Putin — as part of an effort to achieve a “grand bargain” with Moscow. “It would have been a win-win for Moscow,” said Malinowski, who only days before he left office announced his own round of sanctions against senior Russian officials for human rights abuses under a law known as the Magnitsky Act.

The previously unreported efforts by Fried and others to check the Trump administration’s policy moves cast new light on the unseen tensions over Russia policy during the early days of the new administration.

It also potentially takes on new significance for congressional and Justice Department investigators in light of reports that before the administration took office Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and his chief foreign policy adviser, Michael Flynn, discussed setting up a private channel of communications with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak — talks that appear to have laid the groundwork for the proposals that began circulating right after the inauguration.

A senior White House official confirmed that the administration began exploring changes in Russia sanctions as part of a broader policy review that is still ongoing. “We’ve been reviewing all the sanctions — and this is not exclusive to Russia,” the official said. “All the sanctions regimes have mechanisms built in to alleviate them. It’s been our hope that the Russians would take advantage of that” by living up to Moscow’s agreement to end the Ukraine conflict, but they did not do so.

To be sure, President Trump’s interest in improving relations with Moscow was hardly a secret during last year’s presidential campaign. “If we can make a great deal for our country and get along with Russia, that would be a tremendous thing,” Trump said in a April 28, 2016, Fox News interview. “I would love to try it.”

But there was nothing said in public about specific steps the new administration took toward reaching the kind of deal the president had talked about during the campaign — without requiring the Russians to acknowledge responsibility for the annexation of Crimea or Moscow’s “influence campaign” during the 2016 election.

Just days after President Trump took office, officials who had moved into the secretary of state’s seventh-floor office sent a “tasking” order to the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs to develop a menu of options to improve relations with Russia as part of a deal in exchange for Russian cooperation in the war against the Islamic State in Syria, according to two former officials. Those options were to include sanctions relief as well as other steps that were a high priority for Moscow, including the return of two diplomatic compounds — one on Long Island and the other on Maryland’s Eastern Shore — that were shut by President Obama on Dec. 29 on the grounds that they were being used for espionage purposes. (The return of the compounds is again being actively considered by the administration, according to a Washington Post report Thursday.) “Obviously, the Russians have been agitating about this,” the senior White House official said when asked about the compounds, or “dachas,” as the Russians call them. But it would be inaccurate to report there has been an agreement to return them without some reciprocal move on Moscow’s part.

Since this was the same State Department bureau that had helped develop the punitive measures in the first place, and actively pushed for them under the leadership of Assistant Secretary Victoria Nuland, who had just resigned, the tasking order left staffers feeling “deeply uncomfortable,” said one source, who asked not to be identified.

These concerns led some department officials to also reach out to Malinowski, an Obama political appointee who had just stepped down. Malinowski said he, like Fried, called Cardin and other congressional allies, including aides to Sen. John McCain, and urged them to codify the sanctions — effectively locking them in place — before Trump could lift them

The lobbying effort produced some immediate results: On Feb. 7, Cardin and Sen. Lindsay Graham introduced bipartisan legislation to bar the administration from granting sanctions relief without first submitting a proposal to do so for congressional review. “Russia has done nothing to be rewarded with sanctions relief,” Graham said in a statement at the time. If the U.S. were to lift sanctions without “verifiable progress” by Russia in living up to agreements in Ukraine, “we would lose all credibility in the eyes of our allies in Europe and around he world,” added Cardin in his own statement. (A spokesman for Cardin told Yahoo News in an emailed statement: “I can also confirm that the senator did hear from senior Obama officials encouraging him to take sanctions steps, but that he had already been considering it as well.”)

The proposed bill lost some of its urgency six days later when Flynn resigned as White House national security adviser following disclosures he had discussed political sanctions relief with Kislyak during the transition and misrepresented those talks to Vice President Mike Pence. After that, “it didn’t take too long for it to become clear that if they lifted sanctions, there would be a political firestorm,” Malinowski said.

But the political battles over the issue are far from over. Cardin, McCain and Graham are separately pushing another sanctions bill — imposing tough new measures in response to Russia’s election interference. The measures have so far been blocked for consideration within the Senate Foreign Relations Committee by its chairman, Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., who says he wants to first hear the administration’s position on the issue.

In the meantime, Malinowksi said he is concerned that there may be other, less public ways the administration can undermine the Russian sanctions. He noted that much of their force results from parallel sanctions imposed by the European Union, whose members must unanimously renew them each year.

“I had this nightmare vision of [White House senior adviser ] Steve Bannon or [National Security Council staffer] Sebastian Gorka calling in the Hungarian ambassador and telling them President Trump would not be displeased” if his country opposed the renewal of sanctions, he said.

Th fact that this was happening so fast is the tell.  None of these people had a clue what they were doing and obviously didn’t bother to consult with anyone who did. Considering the delicacy of the matter and the intense interest by the press in all things Russian, why would this be so high on the agenda?

I don’t know. My operating assumption is that these people are all unusually stupid.  But they did seem to be stupid in some very specific ways that were bound to draw suspicion. How stupid could they be?

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He loves his little cracker and his little wine

He loves his little cracker and his little wine


by digby

And we horrible liberals are to blame for Trump because of our alleged lack of respect for religion? This buffoon hasn’t done even the tiniest bit of reading on the subject and yet he remains extremely popular among the religion right:

Two days before his presidential inauguration, Donald Trump greeted a pair of visitors at his office in Trump Tower.

As a swarm of reporters waited in the gilded lobby, the Rev. Patrick O’Connor, the senior pastor at the First Presbyterian Church in Queens, and the Rev. Scott Black Johnston, the senior pastor of Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, arrived to pray with the next president.

From behind his desk on the 26th floor, Trump faced the Celtic cross at the top of the steeple of Johnston’s church, located a block south on Fifth Avenue. When Johnston pointed it out to Trump, the President-elect responded by marveling at the thick glass on the windows of his office — bulletproof panels installed after the election.

It was clear that Trump was still preoccupied with his November victory, and pleased with his performance with one constituency in particular.

“I did very, very well with evangelicals in the polls,” Trump interjected in the middle of the conversation — previously unreported comments that were described to me by both pastors.

They gently reminded Trump that neither of them was an evangelical.

“Well, what are you then?” Trump asked.

They explained they were mainline Protestants, the same Christian tradition in which Trump, a self-described Presbyterian, was raised and claims membership. Like many mainline pastors, they told the President-elect, they lead diverse congregations.

Trump nodded along, then posed another question to the two men: “But you’re all Christians?”

“Yes, we’re all Christians.”

QOTD: from their lips to God’s ear edition

QOTD: from their lips to God’s ear edition

by digby

Let’s hope this is true:

  • Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC): “It’s unlikely that we will get a health care deal, which means that most of my time has been spent trying to figure out solutions to Iowa losing all of its insurers … I don’t see a comprehensive health care plan this year.”
  • Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ): “There are some still saying that we’ll vote before the August break. I have a hard time believing that.”
  • Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI): Suggesting a short-term bill to stabilize the marketplace followed by a more long-term repeal effort, “To me, this may be a two-part process. I would admit that’s probably a minority view in the Republican Senate right now.”
It won’t solve the problem of Trump sabotaging the ACA so that he can blame Democrats as he’s openly says he believes would redound to his favor politically:

I tell Paul Ryan and all of the folks that we’re working with very hard — Dr. Tom Price, very talented guy — but I tell them from a purely political standpoint, the single-best thing we can do is nothing. Let it implode completely — it’s already imploding. You see the carriers are all leaving. I mean, it’s a disaster. 

But two years don’t do anything. The Democrats will come to us and beg for help.
 

He has no understanding of the political opposition. In fact, he’s a complete disaster when it comes to any sort of negotiating tactics. After he said that he tacked on a perfunctory disclaimer that it wouldn’t be “good” for the American people but he doesn’t really give a damn. He thinks this is a great way to force Democrats to make a deal. 
He’s wrong.  He’s playing games with people’s lives in the balance and everybody knows it.
But as long as they don’t succeed in repealing the law we’re better off. 
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It’s not how many they are but where they are many by @BloggersRUs

It’s not how many they are but where they are many
by Tom Sullivan


2016 presidential vote by county.

The America Prospect posted a large cache of articles Thursday on how Democrats can win back the white working class. Those are fighting words for friends still bitter about Hillary Clinton’s loss and Donald Trump’s win last November 8. There is fear that in pursuing Moby Fred, the great White Male, Democrats will abandon their diverse, urban progressive base. As if voters in predominantly rural, predominantly white, red states are a) racists, b) christo-fascists, and c) conservatives diametrically opposed to everything progressives hold dear. (Not to paint with a broad brush or anything.) As if that’s true, and as if forfeiting rural districts is a real choice.

Stanley Greenberg suggests the issue actually is broader, “Democrats don’t have a ‘white working-class problem.’ They have a ‘working-class problem’” that includes minorities, unmarried women, and millennials. But my interest this morning is in reaching rural voters.

Truth is, rural voters are not monolithic. Even Democrats among them are not even consistent about how they vote, making projecting Democratic turnout in my R+14, 91 percent white, 56 percent rural congressional district rather complicated. There are old-school, Yellow Dog Democrats who wouldn’t vote Republican if you put a gun to their heads. We have voters registered as Democrats, raised as Democrats, who have always been Democrats, yet vote Republican; they just never changed registration. Others are conservative-leaning Democrats who faithfully vote Democrat in state and local elections, but vote Republican in presidential races. (Montana and North Carolina both voted for Trump in November and elected Democrats for governor.) Two couples I love dearly are former Republicans who “saw the right” and crossed over. Another former Republican and Democratic organizer retains his Republican registration as camouflage.

Plus, there are growing numbers of independents put off by established politicians of both parties. Donald Trump won my mountain district last November. In the primary, Bernie Sanders beat Hillary Clinton by over ten points.

If you don’t live in one of the 32 states where Republicans have a lock on the state legislature, you may have the luxury of writing off the rural working class. The rest of us don’t.* Those are voters (not all white and not all male) I need if Democrats here ever expect to get back control of the North Carolina legislature. Inconveniently, they don’t live in state House and Senate districts with coffee houses and brew pubs on every corner. Hillary Clinton may have won three million more votes than Donald Trump, but — besides winning her the presidency — they would have done more good if they were concentrated in some state House and Senate districts Democrats need to win back before the next redistricting. With the white working class, it’s not how many they are but where they are many. Geography matters. And unlike some other groups in the Democrats’ coalition, they vote regularly.

In perhaps the most significant of the American Prospect posts, “Winning (Some) Middle-of-the-Road Working-Class Whites,” Andrew Levison examines the opinions of a battery of focus groups Hart Research carefully selected to uncover how persuadable voters in rural districts make their choices:

In discussions about the white working class, in particular, the objective frequently becomes defined as “winning back the white working class” in general rather than “winning back the persuadable sector of the working class.” The first is an impractical objective that leads to impractical strategic ideas; the second is the basis for any successful political strategy.

So the Hart Research/Fair Deal project sought voters with less than a college education who were either independent or weak Democrats or Republicans. In heterogeneous groups, the loudest, most doctrinaire tend to hold the floor and the middle-of-the-roaders go unheard. So the Hart Research grouped “young men, older men, young women, and older women” together. People among like-minded peers tend to speak more freely.

What they found was that many are “cultural traditionalists,” but that is not the same as being conservative. They value hard work, small business, and being independent, but are not “free enterprise” or “free market” zealots. They want work that provides a sense of pride and accomplishment. They support the military. But Levison found something interesting:

It is rarely understood that for working-class people, a career in the military is widely seen as profoundly admirable, because military service upholds and honors very deeply held and distinctly working-class values: ruggedness and bravery, teamwork and group solidarity, loyalty and self-sacrifice. In the rest of American culture, these virtues are given a much lower value than more middle-class values like intellectual ability, acquisitiveness, ambition, competiveness, and the achievement of material success. For high school–educated young men and women who are often not “successful” in these latter terms, the armed forces provide them with the opportunity to be seen as role models and heroes to their parents, families, friends, and communities. In the eyes of working-class Americans, “our men and women in uniform” are in essence the most important “working-class heroes.”

And these voters value tolerance. Levison writes:

In the focus groups, tolerant attitudes appeared again and again. Workers expressed “live and let live” attitudes about a wide range of issues connected to privacy, choice, and freedom. Various participants insisted that they “don’t want to try to run other people’s lives.” They were willing to accept a wide range of behavior that they personally might object to as long as it did not impinge on their own choices and way of life.

Lizz Winstead tells a joke about encountering such voters while canvassing for marriage equality in Minnesota. She puts on her best Minnesota accent to voice a woman who told her, “Well, I don’t know if I want two guys getting married … but I don’t want to be a jerk about it.” These are those voters. Unlike doctrinaire conservatives, they take an “on the one hand, on the other hand” view of issues. Use of the word “but” is not just a fluke, but common.

The flip side of such workers’ support for tolerance, however, is a demand for respect for their own choices, lifestyle, and views. The men in the focus groups felt that the traditional values they were taught as children are good values and deserve respect. They deeply value core elements of traditional working-class culture like religious faith, patriotism and individual responsibility, and they do not accept the view that such values should be treated as inherently ignorant or reactionary. In fact, it is this dismissal of their values and culture that produces the greatest antagonism toward Democrats and progressives.

Tolerance cuts both ways, and these voters are keenly aware of it.

Perhaps the biggest obstacle to winning such voters is their intense distrust of both parties. Levison writes:

“Common sense,” “middle of the road” white workers don’t see politicians as divided into left or right. They see them as all part of a single corrupt and parasitic new ruling class. Their hostility constitutes a modern form of class consciousness.

But they don’t view the world through the same lens as ideological conservatives. They don’t recite a list of conservative policies. They want candidates who see themselves as public servants of sound character, and ethical, not self-seekers who view politics as a vehicle for personal enrichment.

Yet just as there are Democrats who won’t vote for Republicans under any circumstances, there are some working class voters who feel the same about Democrats. Quantifying the persuadables among them is the trickiest bit. Candidates will walk a fine line to attract such voters without watering down the messages that activate Democratic base voters to go to the polls:

At the level of congressional districts and other more local elections, the GOP now routinely wins elections for a vast range of offices in significant measure by winning the support of very substantial majorities of white working-class voters. The GOP dominance among these voters then gives them control of state governments and the House of Representatives, resulting in conservative “veto power” over all social reform. To contest this dominance, Democrats must run campaigns in many districts where white working people are the largest single group in the electorate.

But we are where we are, in part, because Democrats chasing the “emerging Democratic majority” saw changing demographics as favoring them in presidential and statewide races. They abandoned the countryside, focusing instead on the concentrations of blue voters in the cities. That left the plains and mountain states and rural counties (and their elected seats) to the tender mercies of Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. Ask the South Vietnamese how holding the cities and leaving the countryside to their opponents worked out.

* Blue America is backing a Bernie Sanders organizer, Matt Coffay, in NC-11, one of those “red zones” that Sanders carried in the 2016 presidential primary.

Friday Night Soother: some good news in a bad week

Friday Night Soother: some good news in a bad week


by digby

Sea Cow Baby Boom Is Good News for Great Barrier Reef

It’s rare to hear good news about Australia’s ailing Great Barrier Reef, but some of its larger animals are surviving against the odds.

Populations of dugongs—a relative of the manatee—have surged throughout the southern region of the coral reef, according to newly released aerial surveys, taken in November.

What’s more, the rotund marine mammals seem to be experiencing a baby boom. Of the 5,500 animals counted, 10 percent were calves, says the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority report.

The last survey, in 2011, had found no calves at all following a powerful cyclone that stripped away seagrass, the herbivores’ favorite food. (See “3D-Printed Reefs Offer Hope in Coral Bleaching Crisis.”)

Since then, seagrass meadows have recovered along the shorelines, and so have dugongs. Females require a lot of the nutritious plants to have their babies.

It’s “excellent news for this species, which is listed as vulnerable to extinction by the International Union for Conservation of Nature,” report co-author Susan Sobtzick, a coastal and estuarine ecologist at James Cook University, says by email.

To be sure, storms and flooding, which are increasing due to global warming, have a devastating effect on these sea grasses and therefore, the animals. So it’s still a big challenge. But for right now, let’s just be happy that we have a year in which a nearly extinct species is coming back.

They are lovely:

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Burying the truth on torture

Burying the truth on torture

by digby

Trump was adamant about his support for torture during the campaign. He said he “loved” waterboarding and wanted to do “much worse.”  And he said that terrorists “chopping off heads” meant the US needs to fight fire with fire.

So, this is sadly not surprising:

The Trump administration has begun returning copies of a voluminous 2014 Senate report about the Central Intelligence Agency’s detention and interrogation program to Congress, complying with the demand of a top Republican senator who has criticized the report for being shoddy and excessively critical of the C.I.A.

The Trump administration’s move, described by multiple congressional officials, raises the possibility that copies of the 6,700-page report could be locked in Senate vaults for good — exempt from laws requiring that government records eventually become public. The C.I.A., the office of the Director of National Intelligence and the C.I.A.’s inspector general have returned their copies of the report, the officials said.

The report is the result of a yearslong investigation into the C.I.A. program by Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee, telling the story of how — in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks — the C.I.A. began capturing terrorism suspects and interrogating them in secret prisons beyond the reach of the American judicial and military legal systems. The central conclusion of the report is that the spy agency’s interrogation methods — including waterboarding, sleep deprivation and other kinds of torture — were far more brutal and less effective than the C.I.A. described to policy makers, Congress and the public.

It is the most comprehensive accounting of the Bush-era program that exists, and a declassified executive summary of the report was made public in December 2014 — with the support of some Republicans on the committee.
The committee, which was then run by Democrats, also sent copies of the entire classified report to at least eight federal agencies, asking that they incorporate the report into their records — a move that would have made it subject to requests under the Freedom of Information Act. That law, which allows citizens, the media and other groups to request access to information held by the federal government, does not apply to congressional records.

The agencies all refused, and instead kept their copies of the report locked up and unread, prompting the American Civil Liberties Union to sue the C.I.A. for access to the full Senate document.

After Republicans took over the Senate in early 2015, Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina, the Republican chairman of the committee, asked the Obama administration to return all the copies of the report that had been sent to the C.I.A., the Pentagon, the Justice Department and other executive-branch agencies.
The Obama administration instead left the matter to the courts, and the case was still being heard when the Trump administration took over. It ended in April, clearing the way for the agencies to return their copies of the report.

Mr. Burr has called the report nothing more than a “footnote in history.” His committee is now conducting an investigation into whether any of Mr. Trump’s campaign advisers or associates assisted in the Russian effort to disrupt last year’s presidential campaign.

The return of the report to the Senate committee “is extremely disturbing on a number of levels,” said Katherine Hawkins, senior counsel at the Constitution Project, an advocacy organization. “First, it remains absurd that no one in the executive branch will open the full report. Second, Senator Burr’s ongoing attempts to bury the torture report casts doubt on his willingness to follow the facts to conclusions that would damage the administration in the Russia probe.”

The C.I.A. and the office of the Director of National Intelligence both declined to comment.

The full report is not expected to offer evidence of previously undisclosed interrogation techniques, but the interrogation sessions are said to be described in great detail. The report explains the origins of the program and identifies the officials involved, and also offers details on the role of each agency in the secret prison program.

The Obama administration should have released it. Now it may be disappeared forever.

I have to wonder if the Intelligence Community has developed any understanding that their behavior in smashing civilized norms during that dark period led directly to the malevolent cretin we have in the White House today. They seem to be alarmed by him. Perhaps they should take a look in the mirror.

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Trump is a cynical climate denialist

Trump is a cynical climate denialist

by digby

That “climategate” scandal was on of the first examples of how hacking could be used to sow confusion and disinformation. Trump was on it.


Dylan Matthews at Vox investigated his “evolution” on the subject:

Long before he even declared his run for the White House, Donald Trump has been issuing periodic statements affirming his belief that man-made global warming is a myth, meant to stifle US manufacturing. While as recently as 2009 he was cosigning letters with other business leaders calling for “meaningful and effective measures to control climate change,” since about 2011 he has been tweeting his climate denialism regularly, a denialism that culminated in his exiting the Paris climate agreement on Thursday.

Matthews found dozens of tweets on the subject from 2011 on, when Trump decided he was going to run for president.

They are all just as stupid as these:

It’s not like it isn’t clear exactly what he’s doing. He’s pimping the white nationalist, alt-right, America First GFY Breitbart agenda and using this issue to do it.

It’s basically “the USA has  the biggest … hands on this plant and we do what we want, when we want and if you don’t like it STFU and get out of the way. “

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“We win, they lose, nothing else matters”

“We win, they lose, nothing else matters”

by digby

I wrote about the ongoing civil war in the GOP for Salon this morning:

Generally speaking after an election loss the Democratic Party goes into a metaphorical circular firing squad and everybody simultaneously pulls the trigger. In common beltway parlance this is known as “Democrats in disarray” and the pundits spend many hours gleefully covering the tears and recriminations as the party tears itself apart.

This post election season has not disappointed. But all in all, it’s actually been a fairly civil affair by comparison to previous years. The congressional caucuses are united in opposition to Trump and the Republicans and all signs point to a strong turn out in the mid-terms in 2018. So despite plenty of squabbling on social media, the usual internecine battles have been relatively subdued.

What is more interesting is that the Republican Party, which has everything — the congress, the courts, the White House and a majority of state houses all over the country — seems to be coming apart at the seams. This is, to say the least, unusual. But then it’s also not usual that winning political parties elect intellectually inadequate, inexperienced, incompetent, narcissistic celebrities to lead them. It is causing more than a little distress at a time when the party should be in a position to enact a sweeping agenda.

This doesn’t mean that party officials aren’t enabling the president. As I wrote in this earlier piece, the GOP leadership has a lot to answer for and their cowardice and hypocrisy will be remembered for the ages. But even as they continue to excuse their leader’s monumental unfitness, they are finding it almost impossible to coalesce into anything resembling a successful working majority, despite a remarkable degree of ideological coherence.

It remains to be seen whether or not the leadership under Ryan and McConnell can corral their caucus and get some major legislation onto Donald Trump’s desk. We’ll know they are in very serious trouble if they fail to pass their Holy Grail, the monstrous tax cuts for the wealthy. One suspects if nothing else they will find a way to get that one done.

But the more interesting argument is happening among the thought leaders in the party. This past week all out war broke out among the Never Trump faction and the Trump loyalists. Here’s one skirmish that took place on CNN on Wednesday night between two conservatives, Matt Lewis of The Daily Beast and Jay Sekulow of the Center for Law and American Justice

Sekulow was spouting the White House party line while Lewis was standing up for the Republican former US Attorney and FBI director. It was all in the family. And nothing is as vicious as a family fight.

There was another tempestuous row among conservatives this week, one that exposes the fundamental nature of the disagreement. Last Tuesday, talk show host Dennis Prager published an essay in National Review excoriating conservatives for failing to fall in line behind President Trump. He wrote that these anti-Trumpers didn’t understand that the nation is involved in an existential battle with liberalism. He explained:

“On the other hand, I, and other conservative Trump supporters, do. That is why, after vigorously opposing Trump’s candidacy during the Republican primaries, I vigorously supported him once he won the nomination. I believed then, as I do now, that America was doomed if a Democrat had been elected president.” 

He begged them to join the war effort:

They can accept an imperfect reality and acknowledge that we are in a civil war, and that Trump, with all his flaws, is our general. If this general is going to win, he needs the best fighters. But too many of them, some of the best minds of the conservative movement, are AWOL. I beg them: Please report for duty.

The idea that Hillary Clinton presented an existential threat that had to be stopped by any means necessary is not original. I wrote about the influential essay called “The Flight 93 election”by someone going as Publius Decius Mus (real name Michael Anton who is currently serving as a White House national security adviser) which made that same case. That essay was inspired by the people of Flight 93 on 9/11 who opted to risk taking the plane down rather than let it head toward Washington and crash into the capitol.

Anton’s metaphor suggested that it was better to empower Trump to crash the ship of state rather than allow Hillary Clinton to crash it because her victory would result in “vindictive persecution against resistance and dissent.” His cri de coeur was “I want my party to live. I want my country to live. I want my people to live.” By “my people” he explicitly meant white conservatives.

Prager’s thesis is a little bit more optimistic. He believes that liberalism can be defeated if only the right will stick together. His view is nicely distilled by the writer Kurt Schlicter who tweeted this in response:

But Prager got plenty of blowback from fellow conservatives as well. It seems that some of his compatriots don’t see liberals as an enemy so pernicious that they must be vanquished. The New York Times’ Ross Douthat answered the essay with a series of tweets:

During the campaign pro-Trumpers insisted that never-Trumpers were acquiescent to a Hillary presidency. In a sense, we were .But now a Hillary presidency is off the table…Now we’re just being asked to pretend that Trump is a good president when he’s obviously an incompetent one. No thanks…it just can’t be the Flight 93 election every minute of every day of every year of his presidential term.

He doesn’t seem to buy the notion that the “Hillary presidency” was just a momentary manifestation of the toxic liberalism Prager, Anton and Schlicter believe must be eliminated from American life altogether, thus requiring conservatives to support anything and everything Donald Trump might do.

National Review anti-Trump writers Jonah Goldberg, David French, Erick Erickson, and Dan McLaughlin all responded to Prager’s piece with various degrees of indignation. And Matt Lewis of the Daily Beast and the aforementioned outburst on CNN referenced a number of other instances of blind Trump worship, including White House spokesperson Hope Hicks’ recent paean to Trump that sounds more like a North Korean propaganda statement about their Dear Leader.  And he makes an important observation:

Trump supporters, it seems to me, are more disposed to prize authoritarian traits like loyalty and hierarchy. For these Trump apologists, the analogies never end. He is our general. Sometimes he’s our daddy. Sometimes he’s our CEO. Whether it’s paternalistic, militaristic, or capitalistic, there are numerous ways to be subservient to him. Pick your favorite!

It turns out these people disdain conservative pointy headed intellectuals just as much as liberal pointy headed intellectuals.It took the election of a man totally outside the conservative movement for the elite thought leaders to see that.

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The Instant Trump decided to leave the Paris accords [updated] @spockosbrain

The Instant Trump decided to leave the Paris accords [UPDATED]

By Spocko

Watch this video.
UPDATE BELOW

At about 23 seconds in you can see the moment when Trump decided to leave the Paris accords.

I’m quite serious. The “President of Paris” humiliated him on the world stage. They all laughed at him. Trump strikes back in the biggest way he can.

“You all got together with Obama and made a deal? Guess what? I’m the big dog now and I’m going to piss on your deal.”

Any talk you hear later about saving coal jobs is simply backfill–after the fact reasons to make the decision seem reasonable to others.

 I’ve seen this behavior many times with powerful men, a decision is made for purely emotional reasons then the people around him scramble to create an acceptable reason for why it was done.

This is revenge for a personal slight. It will end up hurting America economically and could lead to the death of millions around the world. But the important thing is that Trump  “won” the handshake game.

Just read this in the Washington Post. It WAS a handshake that made the decision for him!

If he needed a nudge, though, one came from France over the weekend. Macron was quoted in a French journal talking about his white-knuckled handshake with Trump at their first meeting in Brussels, where the newly elected French president gripped Trump’s hand tightly and would not let go for six long seconds in a show of alpha-male fortitude.

“My handshake was not innocent,” Macron said. He likened Trump to a pair of authoritarian strongmen — Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan — and said that he was purposefully forceful because he believed his encounter with Trump was “a moment of truth.” 

Hearing smack-talk from the Frenchman 31 years his junior irritated and bewildered Trump, aides said.

A few days later, Trump got his revenge. He proclaimed from the Rose Garden, “I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris.”

 Trump will punish the whole world over a slight.

It was fun to poke the bear during the campaign. We now know what he does when he has power. This isn’t fun.

 Sam Seder and Cliff Schecter talked about it this morning on the Majority Report and came to the same conclusion that I did about Trump’s BS reasons, but whereas Sam thinks it’s okay for Marcon to keep trolling him, I don’t.

There is a line from the movie Broken Arrow

How many times do I have to tell you, please don’t shoot at the thermal nuclear weapons.

This is real life example of the old, “maybe he is crazy enough to do it” strategy about nukes. Only I don’t think it’s a strategy.

This is Trump pushing the red button. It’s just in slow motion.