Month: August 2017

I wrote about Trump’s big speech for Salon this morning:

I never said that …
by Tom Sullivan

Image by Jérôme Dessommes via Creative Commons.

The New York Times’ Emily Badger examines the processes by which we identify beliefs as “fringe.” Tina Fetner, Associate Professor of Sociology at McMaster University in Ontario, believes white supremacist groups are actively trying to mainstream views once considered taboo. By staging events that get press national coverage, they are doing just that. Having a president and a major party slow to condemn those views helps normalize them as well.

Badger writes:

When norms change, the highly educated tend to adopt them the fastest. And when political leaders agree, those attitudes spread through the population the more information people have about them. When political leaders don’t agree, attitudes tend to polarize (for example, liberals say climate change is human-driven; many conservatives say that it’s not).

Polarized issues have two-sided information flows, as John Zaller, a political scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, has described it. Mr. Trump’s comments about Charlottesville raise the possibility of creating a two-sided issue out of racial equality.

“That’s what really dangerous about what’s happening right now,” said Michael Tesler, a political scientist at the University of California, Irvine. “There should be a one-sided information flow condemning Nazis. And when there’s not, it’s very problematic.”

The Center for Investigative Reporting’s “Reveal” radio program last weekend revisited the alt-right and an interview with white nationalist Richard Spencer. Host Al Letson questions Spencer’s giving a straight arm salute and saying “Hail Trump” during a speech after the president’s inauguration. That was just “being provocative,” Spencer insists, and finds it unreasonable that people might think him a Nazi because of it.

Like Grover Norquist and Ann Coulter, Spencer seems to enjoy being provocative in public appearances. It gets him attention and press. It makes him marketable. He tut-tuts any notion that his actions and statements make him complicit in inciting violence. When Coulter gets blowback, for example, she tosses her hair, rolls her eyes, sighs, and claims she was just joking. Her stock reply is lefty critics are so humorless they simply don’t get it. But a tone is set. Signals have been sent. Plausible deniability is part of her shtick. And Alex “the performance artist” Jones’ shtick, too. And Spencer’s. Personal responsibility can be shrugged off should some overzealous fan kill and injure people with a car. No one told them to do that. In the “Reveal” interview, one can almost hear Spencer toss his hair, roll his eyes, and sigh.

The exchange that most caught my attention was Spencer’s complaint that white people are losing their power in America. Letson asks, isn’t Spencer’s being “provcative” giving license to his followers to engage in violent behaviors he doesn’t expressly condone while winking at it? Spencer replies [timestamp 21:04]:

“I actually fundamentally disagree with you. I would actually say the opposite is the case. The fact is, when people have a suppressed identity — and I am referring to white people — when they are not allowed to express their sense of themselves, their sense of their extended family, and so on, in the real world …”

Letson (himself black) interrupts to point out that power in this country is solidly in the hands of the white majority. Who’s suppressing them?

Spencer replies that white people are bringing about their own demise:

“I don’t really blame black people for this. I really don’t. I blame ourselves. We are bringing about our own demise. We are removing ourselves from cultural and social power. If you say white people have accumulated a lot of wealth, yes. Where is that arrow pointing? Which direction are we headed? It is toward the loss of power for my people in North America and around the world.”

In a couple of interviews, Letson says, he never got a satisfactory answer from Spencer to the question of who he thinks is suppressing white people.

But by the provocative symbols and signals white nationalists employ, it is understood who they think is suppressing them: anyone who isn’t white. By definition. Loss or dilution of white majority power after enjoying centuries of unchallenged dominance equals “white genocide” committed by Others against them, not auto-genocide, as Spencer argues when pressed. That genocide demands a response, perhaps a violent one, is also understood, even if Spencer coyly never calls for one.

It is a perspective white nationalists, the KKK and Nazis hope to mainstream with the help of the sitting president. Because sharing power is a bad deal. Sharing isn’t part of their social contract. They scratched through that clause and initialed in the margin, or didn’t you notice?

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Accept the obvious: R.I.P Dick Gregory

by Dennis Hartley

“The most difficult thing to get people to do is to accept the obvious.”
-Dick Gregory

Man, did Dick Gregory pick a bad weekend to go. With the passing of Jerry Lewis and eclipse mania building to a fever pitch, his death in Washington D.C. this past Saturday earned him but a few perfunctory thirty second obits on network and cable newscasts.

Truth be told, Gregory was not so much a “comedian” who went out of his way to make you laugh as he was a righteous, erudite truth teller, who also happened to be very funny. He was a trickster of a sort; he would lower your guard with a perfect zinger, then seconds later he would raise your consciousness with a sharp social insight.

“Last time I was down South I walked into this restaurant, and this white waitress came up to me and said, ‘We don’t serve colored people here.’ I said: ‘that’s all right, I don’t eat colored people. Bring me a whole fried chicken.’ “
-Dick Gregory

When it came to his political activism, he didn’t just talk the talk:

[From The Los Angeles Times]

An invitation from civil rights leader Medgar Evers to speak at voter registration rallies in Jackson, Miss., in 1962 launched Gregory into what he called “the civil rights fight.” 

He was frequently arrested for his activities in the ’60s, and once spent five days in jail in Birmingham, Ala. after joining demonstrators in 1963 at the request of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. 

Gregory, who was shot in the leg while trying to help defuse the Watts riots in 1965, made a failed run for mayor of Chicago as a write-in candidate in 1967. A year later, he ran for president as a write-in candidate for the Freedom and Peace Party, a splinter group of the Peace and Freedom Party. Hunter S. Thompson was one of his most vocal supporters. 

In the late ’60s, he began going on 40-day fasts to protest the Vietnam War. 

In 1980, impatient with President Carter’s handling of the Iranian hostage crisis, he flew to Iran and began a fast, had a “ceremonial visit” with revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and met with the revolutionary students inside the embassy. After four and a half months in Iran, his weight down to 106 pounds, he returned home.

Not exactly your everday “ha-ha funny” type of clown, was he?

His activism never stopped. From today’s Democracy Now tribute (I’d recommend watching the entire tribute-its quite moving)…

Gregory became one of the most popular comedians in the country, paving the way for generations of African-American comedians. On Sunday Chris Rock wrote on Instagram, “We lost a king. They’ll never be another. Read his books. Look him up you won’t be disappointed. Unfortunately the America that produced Dick Gregory still exists.” Dick Gregory was the first African-American comedian to sit on the couch of The Tonight Show, then hosted by Jack Parr. As his popularity grew, so did his activism.
[…]
More recently, his face appeared in newspapers across the country for his community action to — approach to investigate allegations behind the CIA’s connection with drugs in the African American community. He camped out in dealer-ridden public parks and rallied community leaders to shut down head shops. He protested at CIA headquarters and was arrested. Throughout his life, Dick Gregory has been a target of FBI and police surveillance. And he was virtually banned from the entertainment arena for his political activism.

The last sentence above explains in part (sadly) why, despite his long career, you’ll find virtually no Dick Gregory performance clips on YouTube. That’s because he has essentially been blacklisted for years; there are very few archived TV or club appearances that exist.

Here’s a little taste of his early standup days:

Here’s a rare latter-day television appearance, on Arsenio in 2014:

There’s a lot of truth-telling going on in that interview. Interesting to note that Arsenio Hall’s “revival” run (that started in 2013) was cancelled soon after (file under “Things That Make You Go: ‘Hmm.’”)

“To me, seeing a great comedian is a bit like watching a musician or a poet.”

-Dick Gregory

Accept the obvious: America’s conscience has lost its Poet Laureate. R.I.P.

— Dennis Hartley

by digby

Lol!

Donald Trump will ask Americans Monday to trust him on his new Afghanistan strategy, exercising a president’s most somber duty, a decision on waging war, at a time when his own political standing is deeply compromised. 

Trump will make his first prime-time broadcast on a specific policy issue to the nation as president at 9 p.m. ET to unveil his new plan, and a potential escalation of the nation’s longest war, after a lengthy period of deliberations that carved deep splits within his administration. 

The speech will test the President’s capacity to convince Americans that he has settled on the right course of action on a major national security issue, and to unify the nation around it, despite his own depleted approval ratings and behavior that has alienated many voters in his first seven months in office. 

Trump’s first major national security address will also begin to show whether the credibility that the President has squandered, with his provocative rhetoric and frequent resort to falsehoods, will hamper his capacity to lead.

After all he said on the campaign trail the American people would be more likely to trust Carrot Top than this bozo when it comes to any military matters.

I doubt he’ll mention it in the speech but we know what he would order if he could — torture, bomb the shit out of ’em, dip bullets in pig’s blood and stage mass executions — and take all the natural resources because to the victors belong the spoils. I don’t know if that’s what they’re going to do but it’s most certainly what HE wants to do.

Shocker: The blue collar billionaire acts like Louis XIV

by digby

Not only that, they’re being worked to bone:

The Secret Service can no longer pay hundreds of agents it needs to carry out an expanded protective mission – in large part due to the sheer size of President Trump’s family and efforts necessary to secure their multiple residences up and down the East Coast.

Secret Service Director Randolph “Tex” Alles, in an interview with USA TODAY, said more than 1,000 agents have already hit the federally mandated caps for salary and overtime allowances that were meant to last the entire year.

The agency has faced a crushing workload since the height of the contentious election season, and it has not relented in the first seven months of the administration. Agents must protect Trump – who has traveled almost every weekend to his properties in Florida, New Jersey and Virginia – and his adult children whose business trips and vacations have taken them across the country and overseas.

“The president has a large family, and our responsibility is required in law,” Alles said. “I can’t change that. I have no flexibility.”

Alles said the service is grappling with an unprecedented number of White House protectees. Under Trump, 42 people have protection, a number that includes 18 members of his family. That’s up from 31 during the Obama administration.

Overwork and constant travel have also been driving a recent exodus from the Secret Service ranks, yet without congressional intervention to provide additional funding, Alles will not even be able to pay agents for the work they have already done.

The compensation crunch is so serious that the director has begun discussions with key lawmakers to raise the combined salary and overtime cap for agents, from $160,000 per year to $187,000 for at least the duration of Trump’s first term.

But even if such a proposal was approved, about 130 veteran agents would not be fully compensated for hundreds of hours already amassed, according to the agency.

“I don’t see this changing in the near term,” Alles said.

I think many people thought he’d be picking up the tab for some of this stuff. He says he’s a billionaire. Instead, the taxpayers are picking up the tab to protect Uday and Qusay as they go all over the world selling the presidency and making corrupt deals on behalf of the family business. Sweet little scam.

It’s so stupid not to be nice to the people who protect your life. I’m sure they’ll do their jobs anyway. But it’s not smart. Of course, this is Trump and his travelling family freaskshow so what do we expect?

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He likes destroyers that don’t collide with other ships, ok?

by digby

President Donald Trump on Sunday called the collision between the U.S. Navy guided missile destroyer USS John S. McCain and a tanker that left at least 10 sailors missing “too bad” before tweeting support for the sailor’s families.

“That’s too bad,” the president said when asked about the incident, according to a pool report.

Honestly, I think even Sarah Palin could do better than that.

Naturally, Breitbart blamed McMaster and Kelly both of whom Steve Bannon is clearly on a crusade to destroy:

A source with direct knowledge of these matters told Breitbart News that the original mishap from Trump that caused the “that’s too bad” flap comes because senior staff originally kept the president in the dark about the incident. The source specifically fingered new chief of staff Gen. John Kelly and embattled National Security Adviser Gen. H.R. McMaster. Kelly is a retired four star Marine General who served later as President Trump’s Secretary of Homeland Security before his promotion to White House chief of staff. McMaster is an active duty three star U.S. Army Lieutenant General.

“What went wrong is the president was not briefed and was not kept abreast as the incident developed,” the source with direct knowledge told Breitbart News late Sunday evening. “This is part of a bigger pattern of growing evidence of disrespect for the president and manipulating the information that is given to him similar to the decision with Afghanistan. The blame for this rests solely on the shoulders of two individuals — General H.R. McMaster and General Kelly — both of whom as flag officers should know better than to keep the commander-in-chief in the dark on these types of issues.”

You know, Trump should not have to be briefed to understand that when someone asks the Commander in Chief about a naval accident, even if it’s the first he’s heard of it, the correct answer isn’t “that’s too bad.”

He could have just said “no comment” and then later told the press he didn’t want to say anything because the facts were still coming in or he had to tell the families or any number of excuses. But he doesn’t know how to be president and has no ability or desire to learn. That’s not Kelly or McMaster’s fault. And there’s nothing they can do to change him.

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The Prince of Darkness has a bold new plan

by digby

I wrote about Bannon’s next move for Salon this morning:

One thing you can say for Steve Bannon, the former presidential adviser and newly returned Breitbart News executive editor, is that he knows how to make an exit. Bannon’s series of interviews both before and after being fired last Friday put chief antagonist Anthony Scaramucci’s diva departure to shame (although Twitter wags were quick to point out that the first headlines from Breitbart News certainly evoked the memory of some of “The Mooch’s” choice comments about Bannon).

Rumors had been out there since the spring that Bannon was on thin ice. And the reason given, then and now, that makes the most sense is that Donald Trump didn’t like his minion receiving so much attention. He was angry last spring when Bannon made the cover of Time, which Trump considers to be such a tremendous honor that he constantly boasts about his own covers, even going so far as to mock up fake ones for Trump properties. The headline for Bannon’s Time cover was even worse: “The Great Manipulator.”

They seemed to have papered that over until recently, when Bannon was the subject of considerable press coverage after reporter Joshua Green’s new bookabout him was published. Trump was reportedly upset that the cover featured an unappealing picture of him and that the title put Bannon’s name first. Considering the president’s overwhelming vanity and narcissism, I’m inclined to believe that was the ultimate reason he was fired.

Bannon’s departure will have little effect on the Trump administration. Even if John Kelly succeeds in making the trains run on time, that doesn’t solve the central problem of the Trump administration. Bannon was not the reason this dumpster fire of a presidency has exploded into a raging conflagration. He wasn’t mouthing the words President Trump spoke in that odious press conference last Tuesday. He didn’t force him to play chicken with the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un the week before that. He certainly didn’t have control of Trump’s Twitter account, the window to the president’s frightening mind. Other than convincing the newbie Trump that the entire government bureaucracy is a “deep state” out to get him, Bannon has been no more influential on Trump’s behavior than the latter’s son Barron.

Bannon is, however, highly influential among Trump supporters, although not as much as when he was building the Trump mystique. As conservative talk show host and Never-Trumper Charlie Sykes has been pointing out for some time, Trumpism is not a movement — it is now a full-fledged cult of personality in which the president’s followers believe themselves to be under siege from the same forces Donald Trump rails against: the media, political correctness, elites of both parties, liberals, racial and ethnic minorities. The more they see Trump being attacked the more they identify with him.

Nonetheless, as I pointed out on Friday, Bannon is a professional propagandist with a feel for the right-wing Zeitgeist. We can expect that he will be a player going forward. He told people different things in his manic series of exit interviews, at once claiming the Trump presidency was effectively over and promising to go to war on its behalf. But it’s pretty clear that Bannon is going to war for Bannon, and for a movement that he apparently believes still exists outside of Trump: “In many ways, I think I can be more effective fighting from the outside for the agenda President Trump ran on,” Bannon told The New York Times. (Emphasis mine.) “And anyone who stands in our way, we will go to war with.”

If the early stories coming out of Breitbart (which Bannon officially rejoined on Friday night) are any indication, he will first concentrate on settling scores. Here are a couple of headlines from over the weekend: “McMaster Of Disguise: Nat’l Security Adviser Endorsed Book That Advocates Quran-Kissing Apology Ceremonies” and “Report: Ivanka Trump Helped Push Steve Bannon out of the White House.”

The New York Times reported that Bannon had met with Breitbart benefactors Robert and Rebekah Mercer on Monday night to plan his post-White House strategy. According to Axios, it’s a much bigger deal than little old Breitbart.com:

Bannon has told friends he sees a massive opening to the right of Fox News, raising the possibility that he’s going to start a network. . . . He believes Fox is heading in a squishy, globalist direction as the Murdoch sons assume more power. . . . His chief financial backer, Long Island hedge fund billionaire Bob Mercer, is ready to invest big in what’s coming next, including a huge overseas expansion of Breitbart News.

Bannon may be right that Fox is a shadow of its former self. But the problem isn’t that it’s become squishy and “globalist.” It’s that for the last 20 years the whole network was pretty much a brothel, and since the departure of the sexual harasser Bill O’Reilly and the sexually harassed Megyn Kelly, its only “star” is Trump’s smarmy sycophant Sean Hannity. Most importantly, the network lost Roger Ailes at the helm, the TV impresario who understood the Fox audience and would have understood how to effectively surf the Trump wave. Ratings are down and the network seems lost without him.

So, there’s an opening in right-wing television news for something fresh. Bannon perceives of himself as an all around agitprop genius, but his terrible movies certainly don’t demonstrate that. He may turn out to be more Trump hot air than Ailes-style brilliance.

As for the Breitbart new media extravaganza, back in October, Bloomberg’s Joshua Green and Sasha Issenberg previewed Bannon’s post-election plans (presuming Trump wouldn’t win) with a big story about the site’s plans for European expansion and a Mercer-funded merger between the Trump digital operation and Breitbart.com. Bannon told Green, “I wouldn’t have come aboard, even for Trump, if I hadn’t known they were building this massive Facebook and data engine. Facebook is what propelled Breitbart to a massive audience. We know its power.”

Whether Bannon will have access to all that juicy campaign data is unknown, but since he’s funded by Mercer, a partial owner in the data mining company Cambridge Analytica, odds are he’ll have plenty of technology to work with.

It’s a new era for right-wing media (as for everyone else). For the last couple of decades the conservative media barons have been ahead of the political curve. We’re about to find out if they’ve lost their touch.

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QOTD: Roxane Gay

by digby

We are on a precipice. What happened in Charlottesville is not the end of something but, rather, the beginning. And it is from this precipice that I am reminded of everything I did not do during the 2016 election. Hindsight reminds me that resistance must be active, and constant. Resistance is the responsibility of everyone who believes in equality and demands the eradication of racism, anti-Semitism and the hatred that empowers bigots to show their truest selves in broad daylight. I am reminding myself that I should never allow my fears to quiet me. I have a voice and I am going to use it, as loudly as I can.

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A few minutes of spectacular darkness
by Tom Sullivan

If you are reading this, we are setting up already up for today’s total eclipse at an undisclosed location in the path of totality. Three hours’ drive east of here, information signs on I-40 Saturday morning between Winston-Salem and Greensboro warned of high traffic on Monday.

It’s going to be a zoo out there. The I-85 corridor in South Carolina will be inundated with visitors for the eclipse scheduled for 2:38 p.m. EDT. The path of totality spans from the Georgia welcome center nearly to Spartanburg, SC. Visitors are coming from Charlotte and points east to Atlanta and points west. From there the shadow tracks down I-26 through Columbia to Charleston, SC and out to sea.

Closer to home, mountain ridges on the Blue Ridge Parkway would make for spectacular viewing if one can get up there. But it’s two lanes and 45 mph. We expect a parking lot. Blue Ridge Public Radio advises:

Unless you’re walking to your spot to watch Monday’s total solar eclipse in Western North Carolina, you will be sitting in some kind of traffic. Authorities are expecting heavy traffic just about everywhere in the region, compounded by the fact many of the rural roads in the path of totality are only two lanes.

People I know are leaving at dawn. The eastern edge of totality passes less than an hour east of Asheville, NC.

Please pass along any reports of animal or human sacrifice to the proper authorities.

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Request a copy of For The Win, my county-level election mechanics primer, at tom.bluecentury at gmail.

The Day the Clowns Cried: R.I.P Jerry Lewis