Month: October 2017

Politics and Reality Radio: GOP Tax Deform; Trump’s ACA Sabotage; Marcotte on #MeToowith Joshua Holland
This week, we kick off the show with a discussion of the GOP’s plans for “tax reform” with Frank Clemente, director of Americans for Tax Fairness. Spoiler alert: Bad economics + staggering hypocrisy about deficits = a muddled mess.
Then we welcome Sam Berger, a senior policy advisor at The Center for American Progress who’s been tracking the Trump regime’s efforts to undermine the Affordable Care Act. You’ve no doubt heard talk of “sabotage,” but it’s probably worse than you thought.

Finally, Salon columnist Amanda Marcotte joins us to consider whether the outpouring of revelations of sexual harassment and other abuses that have followed Harvey Weinstein’s fall signal a paradigm change or just a bump in misogyny’s long road.

Playlist:
Brave Combo: “Jeopardy”
Mozart Heroes: “Mozart’s Symphony No 40/ Metallica’s Enter the Sandman”
College Humor: “The Beatles vs. Joan Jett vs. Cypress Hill vs. House Of Pain vs. Rage Against The Machine Mashup”
John Lurie National Orchestra: “Let’s Get Ready to Rumba”

As always, you can also subscribe to the show on iTunes, Soundcloud or Podbean.

Uranium One 101by digby

This short primer on the uranium deal that Sebastian Gorka says should send Hillary Clinton to the chair will clear up any questions you might have about whether or not there’s anything to it:

President Trump, there’s a very good reason Congress isn’t investigating Hillary Clinton’s “big uranium deal” with Russia.

It’s because the story is absolute crap — as you well know.

• No, Hillary Clinton didn’t “sell America’s uranium.” She didn’t own it, or control it, and never had. This entire accusation is a farce.

In 2010 the stockholders of a Canadian mining company, Uranium One, accepted a bid from the Russian nuclear-energy agency, Rosatom, for a majority of their shares. They cashed out.

There is a very good reason no politician or organization tried to halt the uranium deal. It wasn’t controversial.
Uranium One was a worldwide producer. Among its assets were some U.S. uranium mines.

The decision was taken by pension-fund managers, other institutional investors and private investors from Canada, the U.S., Europe and elsewhere.

The deal had previously been approved by company management and independent directors on the board.

This is what’s known as “private property,” “commerce” and “capitalism.” Trump should read up on it.

The burden of proof for a U.S. government official to intervene in a Canadian stock-market transaction would have to be pretty high.

• No, Hillary didn’t “approve” the sale, either. She was just one of 14 — count ’em, 14 — people who sat on a U.S. government committee that might, in theory, have intervened but didn’t.

The others on the committee included the secretaries of the Treasury, homeland security, energy and defense; the White House budget director; the attorney general; and the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers.

So, as far as we know, none of them said peep.

The committee could have intervened if it thought the deal threatened U.S. national security.

Others who could also have intervened in the deal, but saw no reason to, included the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and regulators in Canada and elsewhere.

• There is a very good reason none of those people or organizations tried to halt the deal. It wasn’t controversial. And if it weren’t for Trump’s cynical demagoguery, it wouldn’t be now.

America is a bit player in worldwide uranium production, and the amount involved was about half a percent — yes, really — of global supply.

Furthermore, uranium has been a drag on the international markets for years. There’s too much of it around. Miners are giving it away for less than it costs to dig up. There was no reason to think of it as an especially precious resource.

In 2010, when Russia agreed to this deal, the price of uranium had already fallen by 75% in three years. And since then it’s halved again. (But uranium prices have perked up a bit since Trump’s election. Long-suffering investors are hoping he’ll approve more nuclear reactors and buy lots more warheads. It’s another reason Vladimir Putin has reason to be so pleased with his protégé.)

• Finally, it’s worth remembering that this entire “story” was whipped up like a meringue by Peter Schweizer, a far-right hack at Breitbart. And, like a meringue, it’s almost all air.

If you want to delve deeper into the law around this, this piece at Lawfare is well worth reading.

Suffice to say the whole thing is a patented bullshit Clinton scandal. The Villagers love that more than anything on earth. They’ll follow the Trump story, of course. It’s real. But they’ll follow this too. To be “fair and balanced.”

On the other hand, this is good:

Have you ever seen Wolf Blitzer do this? Brian Williams? pic.twitter.com/qqBxg3EDir— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) October 29, 2017

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He’s losing’ it. But that doesn’t mean he won’t use it.by digby

America, your president is very upset. He’s tweeting like a madman.Flailing wildly about the person he defeated a year into his presidency. This is not normal. None of this is normal.

That’s lunacy. And Projection. And panic.

But don’t feel too much schadenfreude. He’s still the most powerful man in the world. And if they really want to do this they probably can. And frankly, I’m not sure that anyone would try too hard to stop him.

People didn’t really give a shit when the Republican Convention went full Salem Witch Trial,after all. The press just kept pimping her emails and a good many Democrats figured she deserved it. So, don’t be too surprised if Hillary Clinton actually get prosecuted for something. I’m watching MSNBC right now and they’re going on and on about how Clinton “had to know” about the funding of Fusion/GPS and how this really “raises questions” even though it’s completely irrelevant to anything.This is how these scandals work. They are empty, but the press eagerly takes the right’s bullshit and spreads it around (“just asking questions”) until everyone thinks there must be something to it or the media wouldn’t be talking about it all the time.

A GOP strategist on TV last week said he was surprised to find the base in his home state livid because the one thing they really wanted was to see Hillary Clinton locked up. Don’t think Trump and Sessions don’t know that. If they decide to fight fire with fury, they could do it. Don’t put it past them.

Update: Trump’s lawyer Ty Cobb gave a statement saying these tweets have nothing at all to do with the Mueller investigation, no sirree. He wouldn’t want anyone to think the president is trying to obstruct justice again …

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They’re serious, people. Don’t treat it like a joke.by digby
Almost 6 months ago, on May 10th I wrote about the Comey firing in a column for Salon that was headlined,” Why did Trump fire Comey? Does the president want to shut down the Russia probe or reopen the Clinton email investigation? Could be both” and I concluded it with this:

The Trump administration has done everything it could think of to derail this Russian investigation, from firing acting Attorney General Sally Yates and U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara to employing the hapless Rep. Devin Nunes to distract the press with a three-ring circus around Trump’s fantastical allegations in a tweet that President Barack Obama had wiretapped Trump Tower. It has convinced Republicans in Congress to shriek about leaks and “unmasking,” both of which they were perfectly fine with until now. They smeared former national security adviser Susan Rice and former President Barack Obama. Now this

I wonder if one of the reasons the White House fell upon the excuse that Comey mishandled the Clinton case was to create a reason to reopen that case. The condemnation of Comey in the Justice Department memo could easily be read as criticism that he failed to indict Clinton, if you wanted to see it that way. Certainly that’s what Trump has always claimed to believe.

Considering the White House’s increasingly frantic efforts to sidetrack and mislead, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Trump officials try to do this. The one thing Trump’s loyal fans would love more than anything else would be the fulfillment of his promise to “lock her up.”

Last night on Fox News:

News that special counsel Robert Mueller will reveal the first indictment associated with his investigation of potential collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia on Monday has some people at Fox News very agitated .

In an angry opening statement on Saturday night, Fox News’ Jeanine Pirro called for Hillary Clinton to be jailed.

“It’s time to shut it down, turn the tables and lock her up,” Pirro said.

Pirro said that the justification for Clinton’s incarceration was the Uranium One “scandal,” a theory introduced by Steve Bannon in July 2016 and repeatedlydiscredited.

Pirro also called for the immediate firing of special counsel Robert Mueller and Rod Rosenstein, the Deputy Attorney General who appointed Mueller. She cited Mueller role as head of the FBI when the sale of Uranium One to the Russians was approved, as well as his friendship with former FBI Director James Comey.

“The special counsel’s office must be shut down,” Pirro said. According to Pirro it is “nothing more than a cabal of individuals relying on false evidence to impeach Donald Trump.”

In recent days a number of Trump allies, including Chris Christie and Congressman Trent Franks, have called on Mueller to resign.

Significantly, Trump has close ties to Pirro and has used her show to deliver political messages in the past. In March, during the height of his feud of House Speaker Paul Ryan, Trump sent this cryptic tweet.

Watch @JudgeJeanine on @FoxNews tonight at 9:00 P.M.— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 25, 2017

“Paul Ryan needs to step down as speaker of the House,” Pirro said in her opening of the show that night. “The reason? He failed to deliver the votes on his health care bill.”

After her diatribe on Saturday night, she brought on Congressman Ron DeSantis (R-FL), another Trump ally, to react.

“That was a pretty strong opening statement. You are right on a number of those things,’ DeSantis said.

They’re using the “Uranium” deal in this case. But Try Gowdy is re-opening the email investigation too. So, they’re covering their bases.

I think they’re serious. I have always thought they were serious.

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Monday! Monday! Monday!
by Tom Sullivan

All hell could break loose on Monday.

NBC News reports that indictments are due on Monday in the probe by special counsel Robert Mueller into Russian interference in the 2016 election:

Mueller’s Special Counsel’s Office will make public an indictment on Monday, a U.S. official with firsthand knowledge of the process confirmed to NBC News, without disclosing the name of the target or the nature of the charges. The timing was confirmed by a second source familiar with the matter.

Sean Hannity is already melting down (#BonfireoftheHannity). Twitter banned Roger Stone after a blizzard of vile tweets threatening CNN anchors late Friday. CNN broke the news Friday night that special counsel Robert Mueller had filed the first (sealed) indictments in his investigation into Russian election meddling. And/or money laundering. And/or obstruction of justice. And/or who-knows-what. There are no other details. Only speculation:

The lack of information, on a case that could have major ramifications for the president, left many current and former Trump advisers livid, focusing their rage on how the information leaked and on a forever target: Hillary Clinton.

“It is unusual for prosecutors to file indictments under seal and then have it leak out,” said Mark Corallo, a former spokesman for Trump’s legal team, noting that the only people in the loop would be the prosecutors and agents on Mueller’s team, the grand jurors and the judge. “This was an ill-advised leak of information,” Corallo added. “I’m disgusted by the tactics of the prosecutors to leak the information.”

But Renato Mariotti, a former federal prosecutor in Chicago, told Politico his “gut” read is that the news came from a defense attorney “who was told to have his client in court on Monday.”

Saturday night, Fox News’ Jeanine Pirro demanded the investigation be shut down and Hillary Clinton jailed over Fox’s nth made-for-TV scandal. The ever-diabolical Clinton was not so diabolical she couldn’t engineer a win last fall, but Fox would never let that get in the way of a rant. Especially when they are desperate to divert public attention from what may or may not be White House-connected arrests this week. Studio walls must be plastered with new and old scandals in hopes that one or more will stick with Fox viewers.

It would be comical if it were not so pathological. But distraction has worked before for Fox.

Just off the phone with my third reader of the day who says she (all have been women) never heard of "grab em by the p—y," or allegations against Trump. "You're making that up," last one told me, explaining that she listens to Fox every day, so she's up on the news.— Monica Hesse (@MonicaHesse) October 27, 2017

But the level of venom from the right has gotten out of hand, going from outrage to outright incitement. More people are going to get hurt.

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

Saturday Night at the Movies
Fright night at the art house: A Top 10 list
By Dennis Hartley

Since Halloween is coming up before my next weekly post, I thought I would do a little early trick-or-treating tonight (wait…you don’t think 61 is too old to trick-or-treat…is it?). Now, I enjoy a good old fashioned creature feature as much as the next person, but tonight’s recommendations largely eschew the vampires, werewolves, axe-murderers and chainsaw-wielders. Okay, we’ve got a few aliens, and (possibly) the odd zombie or ghost; but these are films where the volume knob on the sense of dread is left up the viewer’s discretion. The “horror” is in the eye of the beholder.
Alphabetically:

Blue Velvet– Any film that begins with the discovery of a severed human ear, roiling with ants amid a dreamy, idealized milieu beneath the blue suburban skies instantly commands your full attention. Writer-director David Lynch not only grabs you with this 1986 mystery thriller, but practically pushes you face-first into the dark and seedy mulch that lurks under all those verdant, freshly mowed lawns and happy smiling faces.

The detached appendage in question is found by an all-American “boy next door” (Kyle MacLachlan), who is about to get a crash course in the evil that men do. He is joined in his sleuthing caper by a Nancy Drew-ish Laura Dern. But they’re not the most interesting characters. That honor goes to the troubled young woman at the center of the mystery (Isabella Rossellini) and her boyfriend (Dennis Hopper). Hopper is frightening as the 100% pure bat shit crazy Frank Booth, one of the all-time great screen heavies.

Brotherhood of the Wolf– If I told you that the best martial arts film of the 1990s features an 18th-century French libertine/naturalist/philosopher and his enigmatic “blood-brother” (an Iroquois mystic) who are on the prowl for a supernaturally huge, man-eating lupine creature terrorizing the countryside-would you avoid eye contact and scurry to the other side of the street? Christophe Gans’ film defies category; Dangerous Liaisons meets Captain Kronos-Vampire Hunter by way of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is the best I can do. Artfully photographed, handsomely mounted and surprising at every turn.

Don’t Look Now– This is a tough film to describe without risking spoilers, so I’ll be brief. Based on a Daphne du Maurier story, this haunting, one-of-a-kind 1974 psychological thriller from Nicholas Roeg stars Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie as a couple who are coming to grips with the tragic death of their little girl. Roeg slowly percolates an ever-creeping sense of impending doom, drenched in the Gothic atmosphere of Venice.

In the Realms of the Unreal– Artist Henry Darger is not usually mentioned in the same breath as Picasso, but he is a fascinating study. Darger was a recluse who worked as a janitor for his entire adult life. He had no significant relationships of record and died in obscurity in 1973. While sorting out the contents of the small Chicago apartment he had lived in for years, his landlady discovered a treasury of artwork and writings, including over 300 paintings.

The centerpiece was an epic, 15,000-page illustrated novel, which Darger had meticulously notated in long hand over a period of decades; it was literally his life’s work. The subject at hand: An entire mythic alternate universe populated mostly by young, naked hermaphrodites, whom he dubbed the “Vivian Girls”.
Although it’s tempting to dismiss Darger as a perv, until you have actually seen the astounding breadth of Darger’s imaginary world, spilled out over so many pages and so much canvas, it’s hard to convey how weirdly compelling it all is (especially if you view an actual exhibit, which I had the chance to see). The doc mixes Darger’s bio with animation of his work (actors read excerpts from the tome). Truth is stranger than fiction.

Liquid Sky– A diminutive, parasitic alien (who seems to have a particular delectation for NYC club kids, models and performance artists) lands on an East Village rooftop and starts mainlining off the limbic systems of junkies and sex addicts…right at the moment that they, you know…reach the maximum peak of pleasure center stimulation (I suppose that makes the alien a dopamine junkie?). Just don’t think about the science too hard. The main attraction here is the inventive photography and the fascinatingly bizarre performance (or non-performance) by (co-screen writer) Anne Carlisle, who tackles two roles-a female fashion model who becomes the alien’s primary host, and a gay male model. Director Slava Zsukerman helped compose the compelling electronic music score.

Mystery Train-Elvis’ ghost shakes, rattles and rolls (literally and figuratively) all throughout Jim Jarmusch’s culture clash dramedy/love letter to the “Memphis Sound”. In his typically droll and deadpan manner, Jarmusch constructs a series of episodic vignettes that loosely intersect at a seedy hotel. You’ve gotta love any movie that has Screamin’ Jay Hawkins as a night clerk. Also be on the lookout for music legends Rufus Thomas and Joe Strummer, and you will hear the mellifluous voice of Tom Waits on the radio (undoubtedly a call back to his DJ character in Jarmusch’s previous film, Down by Law).

The Night Porter– Director Liliana Cavani uses a depiction of sadomasochism and sexual politics as an allusion to the horrors of Hitler’s Germany. Dirk Bogarde and Charlotte Rampling are broodingly decadent as a former SS officer and a concentration camp survivor, respectively, who become entwined in a twisted, doomed relationship years after WW2. You’d have to search high and low to find two braver performances than Bogarde and Rampling give here. I think the film has been misunderstood over the years; it frequently gets lumped in with (and is dismissed as) Nazi kitsch exploitation fare like Ilsa, SheWolf of the SS or Salon Kitty. Disturbing, repulsive…yet weirdly mesmerizing.

Upstream Color– Not that my original take on Shane Carruth’s 2013 film was negative (it leaned toward ambivalent), but apparently this is one of those films that grows on you; the more time I’ve had to ponder it, the more I have come to appreciate it (most films I see nowadays are forgotten by the time I get back to my car). To say it’s a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma is understatement. To say that it redefines the meaning of “Wha…?!” is more apt.

A woman (Amy Seimitz) is abducted, then forced to ingest a creepy-crawly whatsit that places her into a docile and suggestible state. Her kidnapper however turns out to be not so much Buffalo Bill, but more Terence McKenna. Long story short, next thing she knows, she’s back behind the wheel of her car, parked near a cornfield, and spends the rest of the movie retrieving memories of her bizarre experience in bits and pieces. As do we. You have been warned.

Venus in Furs (aka Paroxismus)- Jess Franco’s 1969 Gothic horror-psychedelic sexploitation fest was inspired by a conversation the director once had with trumpeter Chet Baker. Maria Rohm portrays a mysterious siren that pops into a nightclub one foggy night, and stirs the loins of a brooding jazz trumpeter (played with a perpetually puzzled expression by James “Moondoggie” Darren). Darren follows Rohm to the back room of a mansion, just in time to witness her ritualistic demise at the hands of a decadent playboy (Klaus Kinski) and several of his kinky socialite friends.
Sometime later, Darren is playing his trumpet on the beach, where Rohm’s body is seen washing ashore (you following this so far?). Next thing we know, she has “revived” and sets out to wreak revenge on her tormentors, in between torrid love scenes with Darren. Does she (or her “killers”) actually exist, outside of Darren’s mind? This visually arresting mash-up of Carnival of Souls and Blow-up is a bit dubious as to narrative, but heavy on atmosphere.

Wake in Fright– Considered one of the great lost entries from Australia’s own “new wave” movement back in the 70s, Ted Kotcheff’s unique psychological thriller concerns a burned-out teacher (Gary Bond) who works in a one-room schoolhouse somewhere in the Outback. Headed back to Sydney to visit his girlfriend over the school holiday, he takes the train to Bundanyabba, where he will need to lodge for one night.
“The Yabba” is one of those burgs where the clannish regulars at the local pub take an unhealthy interest in strangers, starting with the “friendly” town cop (Chips Rafferty) who bullies the teacher into getting blotto. This kick starts a lost weekend that lasts for days.

The ensuing booze-soaked debaucheries have to be seen to be believed; particularly an unnerving and surreal sequence involving a drunken nocturnal kangaroo hunt (a lengthy disclaimer in the end credits may not assuage animal lovers’ worst fears, but at least acknowledges their potential sensitivities). The general atmosphere of dread is tempered by blackly comic dialog (Evan Jones adapted from Kenneth Cook’s novel). Splendid performances abound, especially from Donald Pleasance as a boozy MD.

Posts with related themes:

Frightfully Amusing: Top 10 Horror Comedies
The Docu-Horror Picture Show: Top 10 Documentaries for Halloween
Creepy Lodgers and Seedy Inns: The 10 Worst Places to Stay in the Movies
13 Songs the Lord Never Taught Us: A Halloween Mixtape

More reviews at Den of Cinema
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–Dennis Hartley

There’s always a tweetby digby

He’s such a class act, isn’t he?

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Will reality bite? by digby
Here is a great deep dive by Andrew O’Hehir about our weird state of unreality
An excerpt:

Trump recently authorized the release of an extensive trove of government documents relating to the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy, an event that is often understood to have disordered the American psyche and that unquestionably sent us down the path of conspiracy theory and fake news and collective fantasy. There’s an obvious and terrible irony at work here, or perhaps symmetry: The president who seemed to represent America at its most idealistic and cosmopolitan, and the one who represents us at our most cynical and closed-minded; the president whose death is shrouded in rumors about the Russians, the CIA and the Mob, and the one whose dubious ascent to power was (perhaps) enabled by a strikingly similar cast of characters. Trump is JFK in the Upside Down.
Predictably, the new National Archives dump is nowhere close to the full accounting Trump had promised; historians will still be arguing about the JFK assassination 100 years after everyone who lived through it is dead, and 100 years after that. Kennedy’s death was not the beginning of the American tendency to believe in fanciful, improbable unified theories of everything, a topic I discussed recently with author and journalist Kurt Andersen, whose new book “Fantasyland” traces that current back into our nation’s prehistory.

But Dallas 1963 was definitely a moment when a whole bunch of crazy crept out from under the rug, and it’s noteworthy that Trump himself (and a large proportion of his voters) are the right age to have been shaped by the JFK assassination and the years of turmoil that followed it. I don’t think it’s fair, however, to blame “grassy knoll” conspiracy theorists for the degradation of reality, even if somebody like Alex Jones, with his lizard men on the moon and “false flag” mass shootings and endless, borderline-pornographic Hillary Clinton fantasies, is their direct descendant. You also can’t blame Trump voters or Republicans in general or the culture of the 1960s or postmodern critical theory. Those are all symptoms. What led us from “ask not what your country can do for you” to “#Fake News is DISTORTING DEMOCRACY” was mostly the contradictions of human history, and I don’t think any of us knows what to do about that.

Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous aphorism about the death of God was a diagnostic remark, not a celebration: Human society was going to have big problems in the 20th century, observed the melancholy German, because even people who claimed to be guided by Christian morality didn’t actually believe in it anymore. You couldn’t come up with a more spectacular example than Donald Trump and his sanctimonious supporters on the Christian right, of course, but the real problem is bigger than that.

God and the church were viewed for several centuries in the West as custodians of an external, unshakable reality that conferred power on kings and princes. Many dreadful things were done in their name, and many glorious works of art created. But all that started to fade with Martin Luther, as Andersen’s book observes. Religion became a private and subjective affair, subject to infinite variations, which inescapably meant the loss of most of its power. Even a showboating fanatic like Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore, or a million more like him, can’t turn that around. (Indeed, Moore’s behavior suggests he is less concerned with divine power than his own.)

With the coming of the Enlightenment, the cobwebs of superstition and pseudo-reality were supposed to be swept out of human society by the real reality of Science and Reason and Democracy and other grand abstractions. Why did that happen only incompletely, or temporarily? That might be the central question of modern history — and perhaps of philosophy, psychology, political science and a whole bunch of literature as well. But even without a graduate degree, we can conclude that there was considerable hubris at work, and that the balance between competing narratives of meaning was more complicated than it looked in Rousseau or Jefferson’s time.

One answer might be that human beings thrive on stories. We need myth. If you’re anything like me, when you get home from work you’ll flip on Hulu or Netflix to soak up some middlebrow moral parable aimed predominantly at people of your class and background. Another answer lies in Nietzsche’s central insight, which was more or less that all systems of thought are always power relations in disguise. That doesn’t mean that no such systems are better than others, or that there’s no such thing as objective reality. There are facts out there about how Kennedy was killed in 1963, and about how Trump was elected in 2016 — but we are never likely to know them for sure, or to agree about them.

There’s more. This is the view from 30,000 feet and it’s actually extremely bracing even though it’s scary as hell considering the stakes in the nuclear age.

Another day in Trump’s Americaby digby
This is all fine. Nothing unusual at all about American southern racists organizing on Russian media. Perfectly normal.

BREAKING: White nationalists march in to Shelbyville chanting "Closed borders, white nation, now we start the deportation." pic.twitter.com/0KeuEKCIQv— Natalie Allison (@natalie_allison) October 28, 2017

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Cult of personality? You betcha.
by digby

I’ve been calling the Trump phenomenon a cult of personality for a while now. This is because I have observed that it doesn’t matter what he says or does, his followers will continue to support him and they are demanding that everyone else do so as well. The cult is infecting the political leadership as well.

Here’s how Wikipedia defines it:

A cult of personality arises when a regime uses mass media, propaganda, or other methods such as Government-organized demonstrations to create an idealized, heroic, and at times worshipful image of a leader, often through unquestioning flattery and praise. A cult of personality is similar to divinization, except that it is established by mass media and propaganda usually by the state, especially in totalitarian (or sometimes authoritarian) states. The term was developed by Nikita Khrushchev’s initially secret speech On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences given on the final day of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, February 25, 1956, which criticized the lionization of Josef Stalin (and by implication his Communist contemporaries – Kim Il-Sung and Mao Zedong), and its contrariness to the originators of Marxist doctrine.

We have two mass medias in this country. One is the mainstream media, the other is the right wing media which tens of millions watch and read. They are the cult and they are powerful.

Here’s something from Greg Sargent this past week on the subject:

The Glorious Republican Civil War of 2017 isn’t really a battle over policy or ideology. It isn’t even quite the clash of grand agendas we constantly read about — the supposed showdown between populist economic nationalism on one side, and limited government conservatism, free trade and internationalism on the other.

Instead, the GOP civil war is really a battle over whether Republican lawmakers should — or should not — genuflect before President Trump. The battle is over whether they should — or should not — applaud his racism, his authoritarianism and his obvious pleasure in dispensing abuse and sowing racial division. It’s also over whether Republicans should submit to Trump’s ongoing insistence that his lack of major accomplishments is fully the fault of Republicans who failed his greatness.

The Post reports that allies of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) have hit on a new strategy for countering Stephen K. Bannon’s insurgency. Bannon’s challengers are running on the idea that they constitute the true bearers of the Trumpist banner against a GOP establishment that has allegedly betrayed Trumpism. The strategy is to walk a careful line, avoiding attacking Trump while linking Bannon’s version of Trumpism “to white nationalism to discredit him and the candidates he will support.”

The notion that the GOP civil war is really about whether to genuflect to Trump’s racism and authoritarianism helps resolve some glaring disconnects in our politics that make little sense under any other interpretation.

For instance: The GOP civil war does not align with any major policy dispute now underway among Republicans. The New York Times reports that Republicans see the general goal of cutting taxes (with the largest benefits going to the rich) as tonic to unite the party. The real disagreements on taxes revolve around whether the plan will end state and local deductions (which is opposed by Republicans whose constituents would lose out) and whether the plan should balloon the deficit.

In other words, there is no serious disagreement between the Bannon wing and the GOP establishment on the goal of cutting taxes to the great benefit of the wealthy, while skyrocketing the deficit. Meanwhile, on Obamacare, the main disagreement arose when a few moderates couldn’t stomach its enormously regressive rollback of health-care coverage. There are no Bannon/populist objections to the GOP establishment position on taxes or health care, even though there should be ones in line with Trump’s campaign vows to soak the rich and protect the safety net for aging working-class and rural white voters.

My frame also helps explain how Trump and his allies can continually cast GOP leaders as betrayers of Trump, even though they all agree on the same big-ticket goals on health care and taxes. GOP leaders react to Trump’s worst abuses by condemning them where they have to, and playing them down where possible, while always retreating to the idea that Republicans will all get along on tax reform. When Trump allies blast the GOP establishment as sellouts, they are saying two things — that GOP leaders are both insufficiently enthusiastic about his ongoing employment of white identity politics and that they are failing his agenda in some sense that never has to be defined. Their loyalty is suspect on both fronts.

Bannon understands the power of this narrative, and he’s exploiting it for his own murky purposes. He is building a movement around the idea that Trump is both winning everywhere and being failed everywhere. Bannon tells Trump voters that Trump is winning when he is pilloried by elites (including Republicans) for failing to denounce the Charlottesville white supremacists. Bannon tells Trump voters that black football players should be kneeling in thanks to Trump, because Trump is winning for America in spite of having “no help.” This Bannon play goes way back. As Joshua Green’s biography reports, as soon as Trump secured the nomination, Bannon immediately exaggerated the threat that the GOP establishment would steal the nomination, to rally “Pepe” (Trump nation) to “stomp their a–.”

The GOP civil war is really over how Republicans should react to Trump’s bigotry and authoritarianism, and about how they should react when Trump demands that they admit that they are the losers when things go wrong. This is why Sens. Jeff Flake and Bob Corker focused their criticism on those particular excesses; why other Republicans were reluctant to endorse that criticism; and why Trump easily brushed them off by ridiculing them as losers. This is not to say there are no meaningful policy divisions — if Trump pulls out of NAFTA, there will be a real schism — but rather that they pale in importance to these larger story lines. Trump put it well in this tweet:

Jeff Flake, with an 18% approval rating in Arizona, said “a lot of my colleagues have spoken out.” Really, they just gave me a standing O!

We don’t know if that actually happened, or if it did, why Republicans applauded Trump. But what Trump means by this is that Republicans have no choice but to applaud him even though he damn well will keep doing all the things that Flake and Corker protested, and even though they also find those things distasteful or horrifying. And as it happens, Trump is right.

I agree.

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