Month: November 2017

The gripping story of the DNC hackby digby

This is your long-read assignment of the week-end. You don’t have to read it all now, but I urge you to read the whole thing at some point. If you want to understand the Russian hacking story, this is an important addition to the body of knowledge. This is an excerpt:

The Clinton campaign was no easy target; several former employees said the organization put particular stress on digital safety.

Work emails were protected by two-factor authentication, a technique that uses a second passcode to keep accounts secure. Most messages were deleted after 30 days and staff went through phishing drills. Security awareness even followed the campaigners into the bathroom, where someone put a picture of a toothbrush under the words: “You shouldn’t share your passwords either.”

Two-factor authentication may have slowed the hackers, but it didn’t stop them. After repeated attempts to break into various staffers’ hillaryclinton.com accounts, the hackers turned to the personal Gmail addresses. It was there on March 19 that they targeted top Clinton lieutenants — including campaign manager Robby Mook, senior adviser Jake Sullivan and political fixer Philippe Reines.

A malicious link was generated for Podesta at 11:28 a.m. Moscow time, the AP found. Documents subsequently published by WikiLeaks show that the rogue email arrived in his inbox six minutes later. The link was clicked twice.

Podesta’s messages — at least 50,000 of them — were in the hackers’ hands.

Though the heart of the campaign was now compromised, the hacking efforts continued. Three new volleys of malicious messages were generated on the 22nd, 23rd and 25th of March, targeting communications director Jennifer Palmieri and Clinton confidante Huma Abedin, among others.

The torrent of phishing emails caught the attention of the FBI, which had spent the previous six months urging the Democratic National Committee in Washington to raise its shield against suspected Russian hacking. In late March, FBI agents paid a visit to Clinton’s Brooklyn headquarters, where they were received warily, given the agency’s investigation into the candidate’s use of a private email server while secretary of state.

Signs posted in a bathroom at Hillary Clinton’s campaign headquarters in Brooklyn were put up to remind campaign workers to keep their computers and passwords secure. (AP Photo/Julie Pace)

The phishing messages also caught the attention of Secureworks, a subsidiary of Dell Technologies, which had been following Fancy Bear, whom Secureworks codenamed Iron Twilight.

Fancy Bear had made a critical mistake.

It fumbled a setting in the Bitly link-shortening service that it was using to sneak its emails past Google’s spam filter. The blunder exposed whom they were targeting.

It was late March when Secureworks discovered the hackers were going after Democrats.

“As soon as we started seeing some of those hillaryclinton.com email addresses coming through, the DNC email addresses, we realized it’s going to be an interesting twist to this,” said Rafe Pilling, a senior security researcher with Secureworks.

By early April Fancy Bear was getting increasingly aggressive, the AP found. More than 60 bogus emails were prepared for Clinton campaign and DNC staffers on April 6 alone, and the hackers began hunting for Democrats beyond New York and Washington, targeting the digital communications director for Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf and a deputy director in the office of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

The group’s hackers seemed particularly interested in Democratic officials working on voter registration issues: Pratt Wiley, the DNC’s then-director of voter protection, had been targeted as far back as October 2015 and the hackers tried to pry open his inbox as many as 15 times over six months.

I keep hearing people saying that this had nothing to do with the Russians trying to help Donald Trump. The fact that they only did this to Democrats would seem to indicate otherwise.

Anyway, read it all when you have time. It’s actually quite a gripping story. And it’s totally depressing that the Republicans in congress are so corrupt, stupid or confused that they are going to do everything they can to make sure it happens again.

What was it they used to call that? Objectively pro-fascist? Something like that.

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Bringing in the sheepby digby

He’s a very good boy who loves his job:

A young sheepdog lent new meaning to the phrase “bringing the sheep home” after he led a flock straight into a farmer’s home.

Rosalyn Edwards was working in her kitchen on Wednesday 25 October, when she suddenly started to hear strange noises.

When she turned around she was stunned to discover her Border collie puppy, Rocky, had proudly led nine sheep into her house.

The seven-month-old sheepdog-in-training had taken advantage of an open gate to usher the sheep through into the Edwards’ home in Devon via the back door.

Mrs Edwards, 40, said: “I thought it was funny at the time, but then there was quite a lot of wee, poo and mud everywhere. It took me a little while to clean it all up.

“My son and husband had gone out into the field, and the gate was left open. Rocky got them out and led them to the house.

“I was in the kitchen and heard a noise. I turned around and the sheep were just standing there. There were about nine of them.

“I took the children into another room and then tried to guide the sheep out.”

Mrs Edwards later posted a video of the livestock melee in her home on Facebook, in which she and her husband, Andrew, 41, can be heard trying to shoo the animals from their home.

Eventually the flock was marched out via the porch at the front of their home, leaving a trail of muck in their wake.

Mrs Edwards added: “Rocky did look quite pleased with himself, but he’s going to need more training.

“He brought a whole new meaning to ‘bringing the sheep home’.”

The petulance epidemic
by Tom Sullivan

A tweet by venture capitalist Nick Hanauer jumped out from the Twitter machine this week:

People don’t get paid what they are worth. They get paid what they negotiate. https://t.co/GaaNXupjPX— Nick Hanauer (@NickHanauer) November 3, 2017

You remember Hanauer for his “controversial” TED talk saying billionaires such as himself weren’t gods. Furthermore (I’m paraphrasing), people should stop taking seriously their claims to special status and privileges as “job creators.” Just a short mental jump away from “the Creator,” Hanauer added.

The JCs’ preferred narrative has worked its way so deeply into the public consciousness that Americans elected an arrogant, narcissistic, supposed billionaire as president one year ago. For who better to run a government that’s not a business as though it were? Oddly enough, he’s proven as superior at running a government as Facebook proved at sniffing out political ads purchased with rubles.

Like many plutocrats, he reacts badly to not getting his way and the deference royalty wealth demands.

The New York Times reported this week that another of the president’s fraternity killed off his own business rather than treat employees as respected partners:

A week ago, reporters and editors in the combined newsroom of DNAinfo and Gothamist, two of New York City’s leading digital purveyors of local news, celebrated victory in their vote to join a union.

On Thursday, they lost their jobs, as Joe Ricketts, the billionaire founder of TD Ameritrade who owned the sites, shut them down.

Digital media is a tough business, to be sure. Still, Ricketts’ approach to to his employees was familiarly authoritarian. He wrote before the vote, “As long as it’s my money that’s paying for everything, I intend to be the one making the decisions about the direction of the business.” When he couldn’t get his way, he threw a tantrum and broke his toy.

Hamilton Nolan writes about the closure in a New York Times op-ed:

Joe Ricketts, the founder of TD Ameritrade whose family owns the Chicago Cubs, is worth more than $2 billion. He is the owner of DNAinfo, a local news site that covered New York City and Chicago with unparalleled skill, as well as Gothamist, a network of city-oriented websites that DNAinfo bought this year. He is also a major right-wing political donor of rather flexible morality. During the last presidential primaries, Mr. Ricketts spent millions of dollars funding ads that portrayed Donald Trump as an untrustworthy, dangerous misogynist. Once Mr. Trump secured the nomination, Mr. Ricketts spent a million dollars to support him.

One might think that such flexibility would allow Mr. Ricketts to bend but not break when faced with every plutocrat’s worst nightmare: a few dozen modestly paid employees who collectively bargain for better working conditions.

Like Martin Blank, the assassin whose Army psych profile showed a certain “moral flexibility” too, one would think Ricketts might roll with it. But no. Spending millions for and against the same untrustworthy, dangerous misogynist is one thing. But negotiate for better wages with serfs who challenge his position in the social pecking order? Well, they had it coming.

To give the Ricketts decision more context, Nolan adds:

It is worth being clear about exactly what happened here, so that no one gets too smug. DNAinfo was never profitable, but Mr. Ricketts was happy to invest in it for eight years, praising its work all along. Gothamist, on the other hand, was profitable, and a fairly recent addition to the company. One week after the New York team unionized, Mr. Ricketts shut it all down. He did not try to sell the company to someone else. Instead of bargaining with 27 unionized employees in New York City, he chose to lay off 115 people across America. And, as a final thumb in the eye, he initially pulled the entire site’s archives down (they are now back up), so his newly unemployed workers lost access to their published work. Then, presumably, he went to bed in his $29 million apartment.

It is unfortunate that petulance got left out of the Deadly Sins. It seems to be epidemic.

Now, if only the American electorate would stop fawning over people who believe their wealth confers on them the right to rule, we might put this country right again. We did it before. We might even pay people decently, too.

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

It can happen hereby digby

I don’t have a soother for you tonight. I have this instead, which is anything but soothing. It’s from Jonathan Schwarz talking about a new film called “A Night at the Garden.” The following is just an excerpt of his piece a accompanying the film. Be sure to click over for the rest of the story. It will haunt your dreams:

Curry’s film, watchable above, is just six minutes long, and is a tiny masterpiece. It should be taught in history and filmmaking courses, as well as in classes about human psychology.

On its surface, it’s simply about a rally held by the German-American Bund in February 1939 at the old Madison Square Garden at Eighth Avenue and 50th Street in Manhattan.

The Bund – meaning “federation” – never metastasized to any appreciable size. Estimates vary, but its dues-paying membership did not top 25,000. However, it was allied with the Christian Front, an organization inspired by the notorious anti-Semitic demagogue Father Charles Coughlin. Tens of millions of Americans tuned into Coughlin’s weekly radio show; one of his slogans was “Less care for internationalism and more concern for national prosperity.”

The Christian Front helped turn out a capacity crowd of almost 20,000 people. It’s particularly notable that this was possible in New York, then as now a symbol of liberalism, and suggests both organizations enjoyed significant passive local support far beyond those who attended.

The marquee outside reads that it is a “Pro American Rally” — to be followed the next day by the Rangers playing the Detroit Red Wings, and the day after that by Fordham facing Pittsburgh in college basketball. The night begins with marchers filing in with dozens of American flags and then standing before a huge backdrop of George Washington.

The main speaker is Fritz Kuhn, a naturalized German immigrant and head of the Bund. On the one hand, everything about him screams that he’s a buffoon and a grifter. He declares they are there “to demand that our government shall be returned to the American people who founded it” in a heavy accent that makes him sound exactly like Adolf Hilter. Even Nazi Germany’s ambassador to the U.S. found Kuhn embarrassing, once describing him as “stupid, noisy, and absurd.”

But on the other hand, no one in the Garden seems to notice or care. To the crowd’s delighted laughter, Kuhn speaks about how “the Jewish-controlled press” continually lies about him, depicting him as “a creature with horns, a cloven hoof, and a long tail.”

Then one man, 26-year-old Isadore Greenbaum, rushes the stage. Kuhn’s uniformed minions immediately seize and beat him. At some point, as the New York police grab Greenbaum and hustle him offstage, his pants are pulled down. Kuhn smirks, and the audience erupts in glee.

The movie ends with a soprano trilling the “Star-Spangled Banner.”

The next day the New York Times reported that the Bund had raised almost $8,500, the equivalent of about $150,000 now. Later that year Kuhn was convicted of embezzling all that and more — $250,000 in today’s money — from his devoted followers.

The Times article quotes leftist protesters claiming that they “were trampled by mounted police and brutally beaten by uniformed and plainclothes policemen” outside the Garden. A retired colonel complained that the costumes of many of the Bund men “would mislead the people” that they were “wearing a part of the United States uniform.”

Finally, the Times notes, the journalist Dorothy Thompson was present, and at one point was temporarily evicted for laughing. Years before, Thompson had been the Berlin bureau chief for the New York Post, and covered the rise of fascism before she was expelled from Germany in 1934. At the time of the Bund rally, she was married to Sinclair Lewis, who wrote “It Can’t Happen Here.”

Several years after the events of “A Night at the Garden,” Thompson contributed a famed article to Harper’s Magazine called “Who Goes Nazi?” In it she describes a “macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi. By now, I think I know.”

“Nazism,” Thompson said, “has nothing to do with race and nationality. It appeals to a certain type of mind. … The frustrated and humiliated intellectual, the rich and scared speculator, the spoiled son, the labor tyrant, the fellow who has achieved success by smelling out the wind of success — they would all go Nazi.”

Curry learned about the Bund rally six months ago from a friend writing a screenplay that takes place in 1939. At first, he says, he was incredulous, because he was sure that if there had been an enormous rally of American Nazis in the middle of New York City, “I definitely would have heard about that.”
But it had happened. It had simply dropped out of history. Curry found previous documentaries that used short snippets of film from that night, and engaged archival researcher Rich Remsberg to try to locate more.

Remsberg found footage scattered across the country, including at the National Archives and UCLA. There were two remarkable things about it. First, much of it was 35 mm, rather than the standard 16 or 8 mm for newsreels, so the images are surprisingly high-quality. Second, everything captured inside Madison Square Garden appears to have been shot by the Bund itself. The staging is done so skillfully it seems certain they had studied Nazi Germany’s cinematography.

Curry took the footage and used it to assemble a film that is crafty in the extreme. There are no talking head historians or narration to tell you what to feel. Instead, it leaves you with the space to decide how to feel about it for yourself.

Most notably, there is no mention of the present day United States. “Regular, nonpolitically minded Americans who watch it,” Curry hopes, “will become a tiny bit more aware of the way that, throughout history, demagogues [have] used sarcasm and humor and mob violence to whip up audiences that were otherwise decent people.”

In particular, he points to a pan of the roaring crowd after Greenbaum has been attacked and degraded: “You can see thousands of people who are in suits and dresses and hats who were probably nice to their neighbors.”

Yep. Seems familiar. Very familiar.

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QOTD: Charlie Pierceby digby

Charlie Pierce is great as always. Read his words of wisdom. Here’s the kicker:

I honestly believe that the Democratic Party does not yet appreciate the fact that it is the only viable political vehicle capable of resisting the existential threat that is Trumpism, nor does it realize that time is growing very short. At the moment, it can’t get out of its own way and the clock is ticking ever louder.

Democrats suck. You know it. I know it. But at this point it’s all we’ve got. Maybe we could just keep it together long enough to deal with Hitler and then go back to fighting amongst ourselves? If we don’t, there might not be anything left to fight over.

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Donald Trump: Swamp Kingby digby

While we all fulminate over ancient history, Trump is living large on his yacht as it motors all over the swamp like it owns the place. This story in Newsweek about Trump’s blatant corruption in office seems almost quaint but it’s certainly worth paying attention to:

[A]s the presidential inauguration approached, anticipation bubbled through the sulfurous nexus of Capitol Hill politicians, special interest groups and their K Street lobbyists, the media, the establishment and just about everyone else who had dismissed Trump and his slogans as a publicity stunt. There was now a question, rather urgently in need of an answer: Was he serious about all that “swamp” stuff?

Not really, revealed former House Speaker and loyal Trump supporter Newt Gingrich, admitting to NPR on December 21 that “drain the swamp” was never a genuine promise. “I’m told he now just disclaims that,” Gingrich said a month before Trump was to assume the Oval Office. “He now says it was cute, but he doesn’t want to use it anymore.”Someone from Trump Tower must have placed an angry call, because the former speaker soon tweeted that he’d overstated the case. But that didn’t kill the story. That same day, Politico wondered if “drain the swamp” would be Trump’s “first broken promise.” It cited the access-peddling lobbying firm of Trump’s first campaign manager, Corey R. Lewandowski, as well as the consulting firm with troubling foreign ties run by his incoming national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn. “Trump and his allies have engaged in some of the same practices they accused Hillary Clinton of exploiting and vowed to change,” Politico wrote.Now, a year after the election—and more than a year after Trump first made that pledge to the American people—many observers believe the swamp has grown into a sinkhole that threatens to swallow the entire Trump administration. The number of White House officials currently facing questions, lawsuits or investigation is astonishing: Trump, being sued for violating the “emoluments clause” of the U.S. Constitution by running his Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C.; Paul J. Manafort, the second Trump campaign manager, indicted on money laundering charges in late October; Flynn, for undisclosed lobbying work done on behalf of the Turkish government; son-in-law and consigliere Jared Kushner, for failing to disclose $1 billion in loans tied to his real-estate company; and at least six Cabinet heads being investigated for or asked about exorbitant travel expenses, security details or business dealings.

An allegation of corruption is, of course, not proof that corruption took place, but when has the American body politic ever awaited certitude before passing judgment? “The most corrupt presidency and administration we’ve ever had,” says Zephyr Teachout, a Fordham University law professor who authored a book titled Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin’s Snuff Box to Citizens United.To supporters of the president, charges of corruption are being leveled with undue zeal by anti-Trump forces that will say or do anything to thwart the president’s agenda and lead to his removal from office. “President Trump came to Washington to drain the swamp and is following through on his promises,” White House deputy press secretary Raj S. Shah told me, citing Trump’s executive order on ethics, the elevation to deputy status of ethics lawyers in the White House counsel’s office and “unprecedented steps to rein in waste of taxpayer funds.”Trump friend Christopher Ruddy, the publisher of conservative outlet Newsmax, laughed off the suggestion that Trump would enter public service to enrich himself, as critics have suggested. At the same time, he added, “I don’t think it’s like they wake up in the morning and say, ‘How can we drain the swamp today?'”

Ruddy thinks Trump can only do so much to fulfill his promise on ethics. “At the end of the day, the swamp rules,” he told me, referencing the enormous class of unelected technocrats that will outlast Trump’s presidency, as well as all the ones that come after.But according to the presidential historian Robert Dallek, no American leader has acted with more unadulterated self-interest as Trump. Dallek says that in terms of outright corruption, Trump is worse than both Ulysses S. Grant and Warren G. Harding, presidents who oversaw the most flagrant instances of graft in American political history. Grant’s stellar reputation as a Civil War general is tarnished in part by the Whiskey Ring scandal, in which Treasury Department officials stole taxes from alcohol distillers; members of Harding’s administration plundered oil reserves in Teapot Dome, a rock outcropping in Wyoming that has lent its name to the most notorious example of government corruption in American political history. In both cases, the fault of the president was in his lack of oversight. As far as Dallek is concerned, something more nefarious is at work in the White House of Donald Trump.“What makes this different,” Dallek says, “is that the president can’t seem to speak the truth about a host of things.” Trump isn’t just allowing corruption, in Dallek’s view, but encouraging it. “The fish rots from the head,” he reminds.

Representative Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland, the ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, puts the matter even more bluntly: “I’ve never seen anything like this.”

There’s more. It’s astonishing considering that he’s even now accusing his former rival of bullshit corruption conspiracies and the media is still eating it up.

When all is said and done and Trump is out of office, the Democrats will be accused of corruption and authoritarian “jack-booted thug” behavior by the Republicans and they’ll be left sputtering “but, but … Donald Trump..” and it won’t make a bit of difference.

Nonetheless, it’s good to document the atrocities. Someone will want to study all this someday.

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“The greatest memory of all time”by digby

Sure he has the greatest memory of all time. That goes without saying. But it’s not perfect.

President Donald Trump said Friday that he didn’t “remember much” about the now controversial March 2016 meeting with his foreign policy advisers, including George Papadopoulos.

In the clearest connection between the campaign and Russian efforts to meddle in the 2016 election, Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about interactions with foreign officials close to the Russian government, according to court documents unsealed this week.

“I don’t remember much about that meeting,” Trump said on the South Lawn before leaving for his five-country, 12-day trip in Asia. “It was a very unimportant meeting, took place a long time, don’t remember much about it.”

“One is the great memories of all time.” @realDonaldTrump pic.twitter.com/T037EmEidQ— John Aravosis (@aravosis) November 3, 2017

I’d like to say that one of these days his bragging is going to get him into trouble but … why bother? Maybe it will and maybe it won’t but it’s quite clear that this kind of narcissism seems perfectly normal to tens of millions of Americans. So who knows? In the future everyone could be sociopathic megalomaniacs who lie as easily as they breathe. Maybe he’s in the vanguard.

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Donald Trump wants the Justice Department to investigate Clinton for the 2015 primaryby digby

No seriously, he is pushing every single day for federal police agencies to prosecute his defeated opponent. I know that many people enjoy seeing him do it and would love nothing than to see him “lock her up” and stage a big show trial on TV. But this is dangerous, dangerous stuff. Horrible.

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If only impeachment didn’t require Republicansby digby

I wrote about the calls for Trump’s impeachment for Salon this morning. I’m all for it, of course. But I hope nobody thinks it’s likely to work. After all, it depends on Republicans doing their duty:
If you live in certain media markets in the country, over the last couple of weeks you may have seen an ad running on cable news channels that features billionaire Tom Steyer making the case that Donald Trump should be impeached. Here it is, in case you have better things to do than watch TV:

Trump threatens our Constitution, our freedoms, and our lives. It’s time to begin impeachment proceedings. Join us. https://t.co/L5Azj0p6oA pic.twitter.com/rqQkt2aMn8

— Tom Steyer (@TomSteyer) October 20, 2017

I have to admit I love the ad. It expresses my feelings perfectly, laying out some of the many reasons why it’s insane that a man like Donald Trump is president of the United States. Steyer told Newsweek that Trump is “an immediate danger to the health and safety of America, given the president’s recent threats to Americans’ First Amendment rights, his statements provoking conflict with North Korea, his relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin, his inadequate response to white nationalist violence and his decision to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement.” He added, “This is not a time for ‘patience’ — Donald Trump is not fit for office. It is evident that there is zero reason to believe ‘he can be a good president.'”

Yes, yes and yes, all of that is true. It has been almost a year since the election and I still can’t quite believe it happened.

That view isn’t shared by one prominent American who had a little Twitter tantrum when he saw it on “Fox & Friends” one morning:

Wacky & totally unhinged Tom Steyer, who has been fighting me and my Make America Great Again agenda from beginning, never wins elections!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 27, 2017

Steyer’s ad has only been up and running since Oct. 20, and has already garnered more than a million signatures for the petition to impeach Trump at needtoimpeach.com. It seems to have hit a nerve.

The national desire to remove Trump from office, by any means necessary, seems to be growing. Public Policy Polling asked the question last week:

PPP’s newest national poll finds a record level of support for impeaching Donald Trump. 49% of voters support impeaching him, to 41% who are opposed to doing so. This marks the 6th month in a row we’ve found a plurality of voters in favor of impeaching Trump, and it’s the closest we’ve found to a majority.

Even when the question isn’t asked outright one can easily infer from almost all of the recent polling that President Trump does not have the trust of the American people. That PPP poll showed that “only 37% of voters think he’s honest, to 56% who say he’s not.” Fifty-two percent of those surveyed flat-out called him a liar, which is of course correct.

Meanwhile, the latest ABC/Washington Post poll shows that 49 percent of Americans believe Trump has actually committed a crime, compared to just 44 percent who say he hasn’t. And 53 percent believes that the special prosecutor indictments this week were likely a sign of broader crimes in the Trump campaign.

All this is taking place as Trump’s approval ratings are generally mired in the 30s. He hit 33 percent in the Gallup tracking poll early in the week and the newest Pew Research poll has him at a 34 percent approval to 59 percent disapproval, a five-point decline since June. That survey shows that twice as many strongly disapprove of the president’s job performance as strongly approve (51 percent to 25 percent).

The bottom line is that Donald Trump is deeply unpopular with the public and getting more so by the day. Unfortunately, here is the harsh reality: No matter how many petitions people sign or how low his approval ratings go, the chances of impeachment are almost nil.

Sure, it seems as though it should be a breeze. After all, the Republicans impeached President Bill Clinton over lying about an extramarital affair just 20 years ago. Surely this malfeasance in office and potential lawbreaking will lead to the same thing. But it’s important to keep in mind that Clinton was impeached by a Republican majority, and was of course acquitted in the Senate, where a two-thirds majority is required to convict and remove the president from office. (That part has never happened.) In these polarized times, impeachment is a partisan affair and Republicans are exceptionally unlikely to impeach and convict one of their own.

But frankly, it would be tough no matter what. As Jonathan Rauch laid out in Lawfare a while back, Richard Nixon held on for almost two years despite the fact that his approval ratings fell precipitously as the Watergate scandal wore. They dropped all the way to the mid-20s and never recovered. Even back then, in more bipartisan times, there was one big reason for that:

The critical variable was not overall approval but Republican approval. … In 1974, as today, Republican legislators were fearful of the political consequences of abandoning a Republican president who enjoyed Republican partisans’ support. That was one reason they protected him for so long. So a key question becomes: when did the Republican base sour on Nixon, making it safe for party leaders to eject him?

The answer is that it never did. Nixon maintained a majority of Republican support the whole time. A delegation of congressional Republicans, led by Sen. Barry Goldwater, went to the White House to tell him he’d lost their support after the Supreme Court ordered him to turn over the tapes of his Oval Office conversations to investigators. For all his flaws, Nixon was an intelligent man. He understood he was facing an impeachment trial and decided to resign instead.

Trump understands nothing. Today’s GOP congress is petrified of its base, more than 80 percent of whom are still solidly behind Trump. Furthermore, Trump and Nixon are very different animals. Nixon clung to the facade of his own rectitude while Trump, in Rauch’s words, has “weaponized flagrance.” His followers have eagerly embraced his aberrant and unstable behavior, and at this point it’s hard to imagine what would pry them loose. After all, Trump has bragged that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue in broad daylight and not alienate his supporters. To this point, the evidence suggests he’s right.

None of this is to say that pursuing impeachment would be wrong. If it’s not appropriate for Donald Trump, then what in the world is it even there for? Sometimes a cause is worth pursuing even if it’s bound to fail. But with the Republican Party being what it is, it would be foolish for anyone to pin her hopes on impeachment as a means of ending this nightmare.

Je suis le département d’étatby digby
Trump received plaudits and compliments from Laura Ingraham last night in what they laughingly called an “interview”. Trump explained that he doesn’t need a stinking state department:

INGRAHAM: Your state department still has some unfilled positions. Are you worried that the state department doesn’t have enough Donald Trump nominees in there to push your vision through? Because other state departments, including Reagan’s at times, undermined agendas. There is a concern that the State Department is currently undermining your agenda.

TRUMP: So we don’t need all the people that they want. You know, don’t forget, I’m a business person and I tell my people, when you don’t need to fill slots, don’t fill them. But we have some people that I’m not happy with there.

INGRAHAM: But assistant secretary of state – you’re not getting rid of that position.

TRUMP: Let me tell you — the one that matters is me. I am the only one that matters. Because when it comes to it, that’s what the policy will be. You have seen that strongly.

Yes, we have seen that “strongly.”

Ingraham is just a self-aggrandizing opportunist lowering herself to new depths. He, of course, is a fucking moron.

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