Month: December 2017

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A damaged and dangerous president is feeling his power
by digby

Against the wishes of his staff, Trump decided to sit down and chat for half an hour with the New York Times yesterday. And he really let it all hang out. Here are a few excerpts on one particular terrifying issue just to give you a flavor:

SCHMIDT: What’s your expectation on Mueller? When do you —

TRUMP: I have no expectation. I can only tell you that there is absolutely no collusion. Everybody knows it. And you know who knows it better than anybody? The Democrats. They walk around blinking at each other.

SCHMIDT: But when do you think he’ll be done in regards to you —

TRUMP: I don’t know.

SCHMIDT: But does that bother you?

TRUMP: No, it doesn’t bother me because I hope that he’s going to be fair. I think that he’s going to be fair. And based on that [inaudible]. There’s been no collusion. But I think he’s going to be fair. And if he’s fair — because everybody knows the answer already, Michael. I want you to treat me fairly. O.K.?

SCHMIDT: Believe me. This is —

TRUMP: Everybody knows the answer already. There was no collusion. None whatsoever.

He said there was no collusion 16 times. Protest much?

Throughout this part of the interview he talks like The Godfather. he keeps saying “I won’t do what I have the power to do as long as I’m treated fairly, which means that everyone will be fine as long as he and his are exonerated. If not — off with their heads.

By that he means Hillary Clinton.

TRUMP: [Inaudible.] There was tremendous collusion on behalf of the Russians and the Democrats. There was no collusion with respect to my campaign. I think I’ll be treated fairly. Timingwise, I can’t tell you. I just don’t know. But I think we’ll be treated fairly.

SCHMIDT: You control the Justice Department. Should they reopen that email investigation?

Here’s the threat:

TRUMP: What I’ve done is, I have absolute right to do what I want to do with the Justice Department. But for purposes of hopefully thinking I’m going to be treated fairly, I’ve stayed uninvolved with this particular matter.

Be nice and maybe I won’t LOCK HER UP.

And think about what he said there: “I have absolute right to do what I want to do with the Justice Department.”

If the Republican party allows him to do it, he can do it. That’s absolutely correct. The power lies with them. Everything depends upon their integrity, their willingness to defend the constitution and rein in a rogue president who becomes an authoritarian.

Do you feel confident about that?

Then he quoted alleged liberal Alan Dershowitz saying that collusion isn’t  crime.

No. 1, there is no collusion, No. 2, collusion is not a crime, but even if it was a crime, there was no collusion. And he said that very strongly. He said there was no collusion. And he has studied this thing very closely. I’ve seen him a number of times. There is no collusion, and even if there was, it’s not a crime. But there’s no collusion. I don’t even say [inaudible]. I don’t even go that far.

He slagged Sessions for recusing himself again and added this:

TRUMP: I don’t want to get into loyalty, but I will tell you that, I will say this: Holder protected President Obama. Totally protected him. When you look at the I.R.S. scandal, when you look at the guns for whatever, when you look at all of the tremendous, ah, real problems they had, not made-up problems like Russian collusion, these were real problems. 

When you look at the things that they did, and Holder protected the president. And I have great respect for that, I’ll be honest, I have great respect for that.

He is an authoritarian thug. He believes he has total power. And as I pointed out above, he does — as long as his unctuous sycophants in the GOP support him. Together, they actually do have total power. He can fire the entire top layer of the Justice Department until he finds a toady to do his bidding.

And he can follow his favorite president, Andrew Jackson’s edict when the Supreme Court ruled against him,  “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!”

His off-the-cuff comments indicate that he is completely capable of doing such a thing because he’s a deranged, delusional egomaniac who is completely unschooled in the constitution and has no respect for its underlying principles anyway.

This next year is going to be a big test. He has not found humility in the office. He is more grandiose than ever and he’s feeling his oats. If the Democrats can hold him back for a year, we might be able to stop him with a congressional check on his power in 2019. But that hope is all we have. The Republicans have shown they are not going to stop him.

Fasten your seat belts. 2018 is going to be a very tumultuous year, a make or break year. I’ll be here documenting what’s going on and I’ll try to keep my head, but it won’t be easy. This isn’t normal, people. It’s the biggest test of our system since 1860.

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The Flynn leak
by digby

I found it interesting that the Trump camp leaked that they were ready to rip Michael Flynn as a liar if necessary since it signals that they are worried. It seems bit weird to send this message since Flynn has already agreed to cooperate. Of course they’re going to call him a liar if he says something to harm their man? They’re defense attorneys.

This article in VF lays out the possibility that Trump and Flynn really are pals and that the legal team was talking out of school with this leak. Maybe Flynn really doesn’t have anything damning to say and maybe Mueller just wanted to get his case off the table. But that seems unlikely. They then lay out a possibility I haven’t heard before:

[Y]esterday’s leak is equally interesting as political strategy. It signals to Trump’s conservative media allies—who have already tried to paint Flynn as an Obama plant—that they are free to turn up the attacks on Flynn, to trash him as one more enemy of the president, which in turn embellishes Trump’s outsider image with his hard-core voters. Perhaps more significantly, the leak signals to Flynn that if he follows through on his plea deal and testifies damningly against Trump, the general can forget about a presidential pardon. On the other hand, if Flynn were to buck Mueller—to re-flip, so to speak—a pardon would still be possible.

Mueller, however, seems to have wisely anticipated such a chess move: by crafting a plea deal that basically guarantees Flynn won’t serve any time in jail, the special counsel reduced the temptation to not cooperate and be rewarded by a pardon.

All of which might help explain the recent weird tweet by Flynn’s brother, who told Trump it is “about time you pardoned General Flynn.” It was understandable as sibling sympathy—but it also came across as strangely anxious. “Flynn has a great deal—I know he’s going to be a felon, but he’s going to get probation, and all he has to do is testify about something that’s not so important,” Wisenberg says. “So why is his brother worried?”

Perhaps, Wisenberg speculates, there is a second, secret plea agreement between Flynn and Mueller, one that contains more explosive evidence of a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia. A separate, hidden plea would be highly unusual, but it would explain the apparent thinness of the public plea agreement.

“Mueller would have thoroughly de-briefed Flynn before making the plea deal, and this was a sweetheart deal,” says Peter Zeidenberg, who was part of the prosecution team in the Scooter Libby leak case and is now a defense attorney. “They know what Flynn is going to be saying.” Maybe it will be underwhelming. Trump’s team doesn’t seem willing to count on that.

Nobody knows anything about anything, of course. This is all just idle speculation. But I was reminded of this from Flynn’s lawyer back in the spring:

“General Flynn certainly has a story to tell, and he very much wants to tell it, should the circumstances permit.”

Call me crazy, but it’s doubtful that the “story” was about how he made a phone call during the transition that he totally thought was fine and then lied about it for no good reason at all.

Obviously, this could all be nothing and Flynn is just a sideshow. We’ll find out soon enough.

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“Hey look, over half the country hates me!”
by digby

A) Obama was at 51% with 10% unemployment in December of 2009 B) Trump  is actually at 37% and has 4.1% unemployment C) he’s a liar

CNN:

But the truth, across almost every reputable poll, is that Trump’s approval ratings have lagged behind those of nearly all of his predecessors, including Obama, since day one of his presidency.

The cleanest comparison between the approval ratings of the two presidents is Gallup’s daily tracking polls, which are released as both three-day rolling averages and weekly averages. The three-day averages released on December 28, 2009 — the day Trump cited in his tweet — showed 51% approval for Obama with 43% disapproval. On December 28 of this year, Gallup released a three-day average showing 38% approval for Trump with 56% disapproval.

The weekly numbers tell a similar story: For the week ending December 27, 2009, 51% approved of Obama, and for the week ending December 24, 2017, 37% approved of Trump.
That gap is mirrored in other polls with long-term trends and similar methodologies now as they had in 2009.

In CNN’s polling among all adults, 35% approved of Trump in mid-December 2017, while Obama held a 54% approval rating in December 2009. CBS News finds a 14-point gap between Obama’s approval then (50%) and Trump’s approval now (36%). NBC News and The Wall Street Journal show a smaller 6-point gap on approval, but Trump’s disapproval number (56%) tops Obama’s by 10 points (46%). And the Quinnipiac University poll finds a 9-point gap between Trump’s approval (37%) and Obama’s positive rating (46%) among registered voters.

Trump’s tweeted claim rests on the findings of a daily tracking poll conducted by Rasmussen Reports. Those findings come from a poll conducted using a mix of online interviews and those conducted via calls to landline telephones by a recorded voice interviewer rather than a live person. They claim to interview likely voters, without specifying in what election those people are likely to cast ballots, nor how they are identified. Polls conducted this way do not meet CNN’s standards for reporting, because they can under-represent certain segments of the population.

Rasmussen’s polling received a C+ rating in FiveThirtyEight’s most recent pollster rankings, and it has been found to lean toward the GOP when compared with other pollsters, which means it typically understated support for Obama and has a tendency to overstate support for Trump when compared with other polls.

He’s totally uninformed and dim about policy and his strategic abilities are really just a feral survival instinct. But polling is something he knows about and understands. So, I think this is a case of sheer mendacity to fool his rubes. He looks at the real polling, you know he does. And he knows he’s failing. He just doesn’t want his cult followers to know it.

The truth is that his cult doesn’t need him to tell them this. They believe he’s a genius and nothing he does will shake most of them out of their devotion. But it’s telling that he feels the need to shore them up anyway. He must know there’s some slippage.

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QOTD: who else?
by digby

Trump in his New York Times interview:

I know more about the big bills. … Than any president that’s ever been in office. Whether it’s health care and taxes. Especially taxes. And if I didn’t, I couldn’t have persuaded a hundred. … You ask Mark Meadows [inaudible]. … I couldn’t have persuaded a hundred congressmen to go along with the bill. The first bill, you know, that was ultimately, shockingly rejected … I know the details of taxes better than anybody. Better than the greatest C.P.A. I know the details of health care better than most, better than most. And if I didn’t, I couldn’t have talked all these people into doing ultimately only to be rejected…

Ezra Klein explains what’s going on here:

In psychology, there’s an idea known as the Dunning-Kruger effect. It refers to research by David Dunning and Justin Kruger that found the least competent people often believe they are the most competent because they “lack the very expertise needed to recognize how badly they’re doing.” This dynamic helps explain comments like the one Trump makes here.

Over the course of reporting on the Trump White House, I have spoken to people who brief Trump and people who have been briefed by him. I’ve talked to policy experts who have sat in the Oval Office explaining their ideas to the president and to members of Congress who have listened to the president sell his ideas to them. I’ve talked to both Democrats and Republicans who have occupied these roles. In all cases, their judgment of Trump is identical: He is not just notably uninformed but also notably difficult to inform — his attention span is thin, he hears what he wants to hear, he wanders off topic, he has trouble following complex arguments. Trump has trouble following his briefings or even correctly repeating what he has heard.

For the layperson, this is called being a “fucking moron.”

There’s a lot more in this interview that Ezra tries to unpack, especially on health care, which is just startlingly ignorant even for Trump.

And then there’s this:

Yeah, China. … China’s been. … I like very much President Xi.He treated me better than anybody’s ever been treated in the history of China. You know that. The presentations. … One of the great two days of anybody’s life and memory having to do with China. He’s a friend of mine, he likes me, I like him, we have a great chemistry together…

Perhaps I should give Ezra the quote of the day:

This is the president of the United States speaking to the New York Times. His comments are, by turns, incoherent, incorrect, conspiratorial, delusional, self-aggrandizing, and underinformed. This is not a partisan judgment — indeed, the interview is rarely coherent or specific enough to classify the points Trump makes on a recognizable left-right spectrum. As has been true since he entered American politics, Trump is interested in Trump — over the course of the interview, he mentions his Electoral College strategy seven times, in each case using it to underscore his political savvy and to suggest that he could easily have won the popular vote if he had tried.

I am not a medical professional, and I will not pretend to know what is truly happening here. It’s become a common conversation topic in Washington to muse on whether the president is suffering from some form of cognitive decline or psychological malady. I don’t think those hypotheses are necessary or meaningful. Whatever the cause, it is plainly obvious from Trump’s words that this is not a man fit to be president, that he is not well or capable in some fundamental way. That is an uncomfortable thing to say, and so many prefer not to say it, but Trump does not occupy a job where such deficiencies can be safely ignored.

He’s right.They cannot be ignored. But there are serious limits to what we can do about it I’m sorry to say. We have a psychologically deranged president and out system depends upon members of his own party turning on him to restrain his power.

They aren’t doing it.

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Trump’s delusions are catching
by digby

I wrote about Newt Gingrich’s latest for Salon this morning. Looks like he’s just as delusional as Trump:

As we come to the end of this stressful Year One, and political observers look back on the carnage wrought by Donald Trump, there are a few rays of hope. While Trump touts his nonexistent successes and fatuously claims to be the most accomplished president in history, the people who crunch numbers are noting that the Democratic edge in the generic 2018 congressional midterm ballot is reaching historic levels.

Harry Enten at FiveThirtyEight put it this way:

The Democratic advantage in the FiveThirtyEight generic ballot aggregate is up to about 12 points, 49.6 percent to 37.4 percent. That average, like the CNN poll, also shows Republicans in worse shape right now than any other majority party at this point in the midterm cycle since at least the 1938 election.

He had previously calculated that in order for the Democrats to flip the House, considering their disadvantage from gerrymandering, they would have to be up by 5.5 to 8 points. According to him, there are as many as 103 GOP-held seats that could be in danger. Obviously, most of those Republicans will win because incumbents almost always do. But consider the 2010 election, when the GOP had a seven-point advantage in the generic poll and there were 101 Democratic seats in possible danger. The Republicans won 65 of them. It happens.

Of course, public opinion can change over the course of a year. But Enten points out that, historically, “most large shifts on the generic ballot from this point onward have occurred against the party that holds the White House. Once you take into account who holds the White House, the generic ballot at this point is usually predictive of the midterm House result.” In other words, the Democrats have a very good chance of taking back control of at least the House — and possibly even winning back the Senate.

One might assume the Republicans would be rending their garments over this. There have been reports of major infighting among the White House staff over the political operation, and numerous strategy memos and think pieces have discussed how to deal with what could be a major turnover next year. There are signs that the House and Senate are at odds over the best strategy. Paul Ryan, evidently full of confidence after passing his huge tax cut for wealthy donors, wants to push on with his dream of destroying Social Security and Medicare, while Mitch McConnell remembers that most GOP voters are over 65 and says it’s a no-go.

President Trump, meanwhile, apparently believes he can dupe the Democrats into joining the presidential ring-kissing rituals to which Republicans have recently committed themselves. He has announced his intention to pass big bipartisan bills, after which everyone in the whole country will want to vote for the GOP. Trump believes a lot of ridiculous things.

But even Trump isn’t as optimistic about 2018 as his close adviser Newt Gingrich. The former speaker has taken to Fox News to proclaim that because of all the fake news and lying about Donald Trump, “the size of the GOP victory in 2018 will be an enormous shock.” He quotes a political blogger named Barry Casselman, who argues that because Roy Moore lost the seat in Alabama and the Democrats forced Al Franken from the Senate, the Republicans will win more seats in 2018 and it could be a big red wave instead of a blue wave. Gingrich doesn’t really explain how this would works, but he was obviously impressed by the idea.

Gingrich also points to a column by Scott Adams — the cartoonist who draws “Dilbert” — which lists 20 supposedly incorrect political opinions about Trump. These include such misguided judgments as “Trump’s tweeting will cause huge problems,” “Trump will not work effectively with leaders of other countries” and “Trump is incompetent.” According to Adams, holding such wrong opinions requires that one stop talking about politics altogether, to which Gingrich adds that by Adams’ standard, “most elite ‘analysts’ would have to be quiet, because they have been so consistently wrong about Trump.”

Mostly, however, Gingrich believes that 2018 will become a red wave of epic proportions because of the massive tax cut, about which he claims the liberal fake news media has poisoned the minds of the American public. He says that when average Americans find out how rich they are, thanks to Donald Trump and the Republicans, they will come out and vote in droves for the GOP.

Setting aside the nonsensical notion that a few hundred dollars will be “life-changing” to middle-class families, or that they aren’t aware that the wealthiest Americans are being showered with millions of dollars in tax breaks as a reward for supporting Republican politicians, let’s take a moment to recall that Newt Gingrich has always been wrong about everything. Back in his heyday during the 1990s, he had one great moment of victory in 1994 when he and his class of self-styled revolutionaries took over the Congress in a midterm rebuke to Bill Clinton’s unpopular presidency. Clinton had an approval rating that year that bounced between 45 and 50 percent, numbers Donald Trump can only dream of.

You’d think Gingrich would remember that, or at least recall the moment of his great downfall in the next midterm election four years later, as colorfully described by CNN at the time:

In the same cloud of outrage and optimism that has been wrapped around him all year, Gingrich took to the phones on the afternoon of Election Day still predicting that the President would be made to pay for his sins and that the Republicans would pick up six to 30 seats. But as the hours passed, the numbers just kept getting worse, and by 10 p.m. the Republicans were barely breaking even in the House. Then another seat looked vulnerable. Then seven more. Then, around 10:45, 13 seats. “At that point, we thought we lost the House,” one said later. When the last returns came in, Gingrich had lost five seats — a setback not matched since 1822. “Well,” said Gingrich when it was all over, “we all misjudged this one.”

It was Gingrich who had insisted they would win big, and after that he was out as speaker within 48 hours. I’m willing to bet that his powers of prognostication haven’t improved any with the passage of time.

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How do we survive the lying?
by digby

The president of Bizarroworld had the best first year of any president in history:

Trump says that his administration has had “more legislation passed, including the record was Harry Truman… and we broke that record.”

GovTrack says that Trump has signed the fewest bills into law by this point in any recent president’s first year https://t.co/G3qwYOnv70 pic.twitter.com/iIMH9gJLET

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) December 27, 2017

President Donald Trump on Wednesday told firefighters that he had signed more legislation at this point in his presidential career than any previous president. “We got a lot of legislation passed,” Trump said Wednesday, according to a pool report. “But I believe—and you would have to ask those folks who will know the real answer—we have more legislation passed, including the record was Harry Truman a long time ago. And we broke that record, so we got a lot done.”

In actuality, Trump has signed 96 bills, the fewest of any president since before Truman. Trump may have been referencing a similar claim his then-press secretary Sean Spicer made in April, when Trump had signed 28 bills, slightly more than other modern presidents had signed at that point in their terms, but considerably less than predecessors like Truman and Roosevelt.

I think this is the most disorienting aspect of the Trump era. We’ve certainly had presidents who lie before. In fact, they probably all lied to one degree or another. Most people are not 100% scrupulously honest. Indeed, there is ample evidence that some lied to create a rationale to take the nation into war, which is probably the most consequential lie one can imagine.

But this is something else. It’s beyond lying. It’s delusional.

Trump literally lies more than anyone I’ve ever encountered in my life. And I’ve known some liars. In his case, it’s almost always as an act self-aggrandizement although he will do it to defend against criticism as well. But it’s about him, one way or another. And he seems to be impervious to any facts that may contradict him.

His money and now his power have bought him sycophants who will reinforce his lies. His fantasies are fed by others who seek their own ends by catering to his delusions.

I am reminded of this interesting piece in TNR from a few months back about historical imperial madmen. I think it’s safe to say that Trump fits into that mold quite comfortably.

In Nicholas Hytner’s 1994 film, The Madness of King George (adapted from a stage play by Alan Bennett), William Pitt, the king’s prime minister, muses to his parliamentary colleagues:

We consider ourselves blessed in our constitution. We tell ourselves our Parliament is the envy of the world. But we live in the health and well-being of the sovereign as much as any vizier does the Sultan.

Despite George III’s obvious lunacy and incompetence, by then quite advanced, neither a fractious parliament nor the maneuvering of George’s foppish and covetous eldest son can quite seem to do anything about it. (When, eventually, they do succeed in declaring a regency, the king, to their grave disappointment, recovers his senses and returns.) Even in his earlier, more lucid moments, the king was odd and ineffectual, a self-repeating martinet prone to forgetting that America was no longer The Colonies and tut-tutting his ministers for their lack of marital and reproductive commitment. By the time the king is running around the countryside in his nightshirt and producing pots of blue piss, the business of the kingdom has ground well and truly to a halt. “Is the king ill?” the Prince of Wales is asked over dinner.

“He’s not well,” the prince drawls…

And here we return to Donald Trump, whose press conference last week read like an Ionesco play, an absurdist dialogue composed of elementary phrases from a textbook designed to teach foreigners a second language. He hemmed, hawed, cajoled, made faces, whispered, referred off-handedly to “nuclear holocaust,” asked an African-American reporter if she could set up a meeting with black people in Congress. He talked about blowing up a Russian ship, and yelled that he wasn’t going to tell anyone about his secret plans to do something to North Korea. He complained about the military giving advance warning of assaults on Mosul—he doesn’t understand that they do so to give civilians time to flee—and in so doing, he did a bunch of funny voices. It was all quite bonkers; you can look that one up in the DSM.

As far as anyone could tell from the video feeds, the entire senior staff of the nascent administration was right there, sitting in the front row. Like any royal court, this one is beset by factionalism and infighting; everyone is in charge, and so no one is. The president is so whacky, so moody, so changeable that they must attend his every public appearance and study every nonsensical utterance in order to attempt to divine where, for the next ten seconds or so, his attention might alight and then use the opportunity to promote their own advantage.

The Republican Congress, which through contrivance and deliberate inaction, has absented itself from responsibility for war, economic policy, and strategic investment and become little more than a House-of-Commons shouting-chamber to an expansive, imperial Executive, sat in its offices watching aghast before dialing their favorite reporters to privately complain that the President of These United States is a goddamn looney tune.

The result is a paradoxical feeling of panicked inertness, a sense of a rapidly unfolding crisis that is at the same time encased, immoveable, in amber. Is the president ill? Well, he’s not well. And yet, while we hope that he will be carted off, or at least held in check by whichever of his advisers and secretaries is the least odious, we are also—like all those ministers and congresspeople—transfixed.

Transfixed we are. But at least we have an election coming up in less than a year in which we can create a check on his power and send a message to his sycophants that they do not have the support of anyone but their own little cadre. Meanwhile, we cannot look away no matter how disorienting this whole thing becomes.

I don’t know what to do about all the lies except try to keep my grasp on reality and not succumb to the ongoing attempts to normalize this royal lunacy. And it is happening. Just look at this:

He was going to sign it no matter what they said. This was wholly gratuitous. They are succumbing.

Anyway, I plan to do my best to keep documenting the atrocities and analyzing what they mean. It’s how I keep my sanity in all this. I hope that it helps you keep yours as well, at least a little bit.

If you feel like dropping a little something into the Hullabaloo kitty over this holiday period, I would be most appreciative.

Together we can get through this.

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The weariness factor
by Tom Sullivan

Combined with relentless propaganda from right-wing TV and radio, the “fake news” mantra of the duffer-in-chief has helped polarize and numb the citizenry to facts in ways that are a threat to the republic. So, it might be wise to review Thomas Jefferson’s take on the importance of an informed citizenry in context:

Our new constitution, of which you speak also, has succeeded beyond what I apprehended it would have done. I did not at first believe that 11. states out of 13. would have consented to a plan consolidating them so much into one. A change in their dispositions, which had taken place since I left them, had rendered this consolidation necessary, that is to say, had called for a federal government which could walk upon it’s own legs, without leaning for support on the state legislatures. A sense of this necessity, and a submission to it, is to me a new and consolatory proof that wherever the people are well informed they can be trusted with their own government; that whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights.

A jaundiced viewer surveying on our present situation might wonder whether those who believe they should rule are deliberately creating a disinformation environment where the people can neither be trusted with governing nor set things right.

Digby last night reviewed Margaret Sullivan’s Washington Post column about her listening tour of upstate New York. She wanted to glean the perspective on the media outside the Beltway. Sullivan found people have tired of talking heads panels brought in to analyze minor developments and fill time on 24-hour cable. After a while, it was just “people’s ideas and a lot of people arguing,” one person told her. “You’re not always getting the whole story,” said another. “I wish the bickering would stop,” said a third.

It is that weariness that Senator-elect Doug Jones used to win his race in Alabama earlier this month. Jones’ chief media strategist Joe Trippi told Ezra Klein the race was a dead heat from start to finish. But their central insight was voters “already exhausted by the chaos and hostility of Trump’s Washington” were open to an alternative that brought back a modicum of stability. Roy Moore, the law defying, gun-toting cowboy twice removed from the Alabama Supreme Court was more chaos.

Trippi said on The Ezra Klein Show (transcript at Vox):

I think Trump, even with his own supporters who like him, has created enough hostility and chaos that voters don’t want more of it. They can tolerate it with him, but they don’t want more. I think there is an almost infinite hunger in the country right now for ending the division, the hatred, the hate talk.

Although she was surveying people’s attitude towards the news, Sullivan’s experience listening to people she met near Buffalo offers some support for Trippi’s assessment. The campaign’s path to winning came though not inflaming passions, but calming them. The Washington Post’s allegations of child molestation by Roy Moore hurt him, but Jones could have won without them. The Post story actually worked against Jones, Trippi said:

The key to us having a chance was to detribalize the politics of the state. If Alabama was reacting to the tribal politics of our times, there was no way for us to win. And in a weird way, the allegations created tribalism again. You either believe the charges or you don’t believe the charges. Suddenly, we’re back into Republicans who don’t believe the charges; it’s the media out to get Roy Moore. He’s able to start tribalizing the race. Trump begins coming in with him. And every time that happened, Roy Moore would open a lead.

Yet Jones did not run as a conservative Democrat as others do in southern states. He is pro-choice and wasn’t going to back away from that position. Then again, he didn’t broadcast his progressivism, Klein observed. Trippi explained:

He’s the kind of person that would go out and say, “We don’t agree. Let me explain to you why I’m where I’m at, and why I think we should try to find a way for us to get to some middle ground on this.” Now they could reject that. And Doug Jones was a realist. If that’s why he got rejected, he could live with that.

I actually think we got a lot of people voting for us because people knew where he stood. They believed him. So then if he says he wants to reach common ground, then maybe he really does. I think there was an authenticity to him, and a credibility to him, that Moore didn’t have.

The question is do Democrats win in 2018 by turning up the temperature or by turning it down? Trippi tells Klein:

I think the big question mark in our heads as we were arguing for common ground was what do rank-and-file Democrats do when they see this? Do we somehow deenergize those people who really are appalled by what’s going on with Trump? Again, we’re monitoring everything, and what happened was Republican women started to move to us, younger Republicans started to move to us, and the intensity among Democrats didn’t diminish; in fact, over time, it kept building and building.

Plus, Jones’ track record in prosecuting the Klan didn’t hurt with black voters in Alabama. Neither did having an opponent like Roy Moore.

Trippi’s assessment may apply only to this unique race in Alabama. Then again, it worked in Alabama. I could throw a stone here and hit plenty of progressives activists primed to campaign further and more in-your-face to the left in 2018. If the DCCC and the DSCC are true to form, they will read Trippi’s analysis as supporting recruitment of more centrist Blue Dogs, despite the fact they could not weather the storms of 2010 and 2014. If voters want Republicans, they’ll vote for the real deal over Republican-lite.

But Jones may have walked a path of calm honesty — not backing away from progressive stands and pivoting to the middle — for which there is hidden demand. Just as Margaret Sullivan found a hunger for “fairness, depth, and accuracy” outside the media crucible where controversy sells soap.

Trump fed people what many were hungry for. Jones’ win in Alabama suggests maybe they’ve already had their fill.

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

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Who’s peddling fake news? Everybody! 
by digby

Margaret Sullivan wrote a great column in the Washington Post about the notion that half of American now believes the media is peddling fake news. She quotes some of her angry readers, including one who says he voted for Trump just to spite the liberal media even though he knows Trump is a buffoon. (Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face…)

Anyway, Sullivan took up the advice of some of her readers to get out into the country to talk to people whom these readers were sure would back up their view that nobody believes the fake news media anymore. What she found was quite interesting:

Just as Hastings suggested, I would go to diners, flea markets and pizza joints. I’d pull up a bar stool at the irresistibly named Paulette’s Blue Collar Inn. I would shop at Dick’s Sporting Goods, with its large gun department. I’d go to Mass at Most Precious Blood Church. And I would listen. 

By the end of my journey, I had interviewed 35 people and chatted with dozens of others. I found very little of what I feared most. And I discovered that some stereotypes about the way heartland Americans view the media don’t quite hold up.

She shares her discussions with several people and it’s mostly what you would expect. People say they don’t like the “attitude” and the bickering they see on TV and they think the print media is full of lies. This is true especially the ones who don’t vote and don’t follow the news. Even the ones who pay attention are jaded but they aren’t as angry or hostile as the readers who send emails calling Sullivan the c-word.

To me this is one of those subjects for which everyone (and I would include myself) is going to have a cynical response. If someone asks me about the news business I will readily admit that I think right wing media is propaganda and that mainstream media is too often driven by corporate profits and group think and that left wing media can be blinded by naive ideology. I don’t dismiss any of it out of hand, not even the right wing which I observe keenly because it’s so powerful. But I’m not going to cheerlead the media — and I’m part of it!  Why would anyone?

But mostly,  I think it’s just a reflexive response, like “politicians on both sides are in it for the money” or “Washington is out of touch.” It’s what people think they are supposed to say because it’s contentious. Only the most argumentative among us want to mix it up over politics and media in this country. It’s a social minefield. Most people aren’t that emotionally invested. So they say “oh they’re all a bunch of liars” and move on.

Sullivan consulted an expert, Tom Rosenstiel, the author of seminal journalism books and the director of the American Press Institute, who said that most people like their own media, the same way they like their own congressman. I suspect it’s the same way they think their own town or state is great it’s just that the rest of the country is going to hell in a handbasket. (James and Deborah Fallows have a new book coming out that gets into that subject that I’m anxious to read.)

Anyway, it’s a good lesson for all of us to keep in our heads. If you spend a lot of time on social media, you are probably not getting holistic view of how politics plays out in every day life for most Americans.  Sullivan thinks of the people she interviewed and concludes, “if we follow their advice — if we pursue fairness, depth, accuracy — we may not save a democracy that so many feel is under siege, and we will still probably get our share of obscene phone calls and emails, but we’ll have done a job that’s worth doing.”

I won’t be dropping the “attitude,” myself. It’s who I am. But on the whole that sounds right to me.

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Look who Fox News names as the naughtiest people of 2017
by digby

Crooks and Liars caught Fox News’ “naughty” list for 2017. If you want to watch irony commit suicide, check it out.

You will particularly enjoy their number one “naughty” politician Nancy Pelosi, whom they intro by saying “if you stick up for a creep, especially an octogenarian sexual harasser, that puts you on a special list of naughty.”

No, this guy didn’t come up:

Here are a few of Hannity’s comments defending Trump’s pussy grabbing:

Hannity shrugged off accusations against Trump, arguing, “King David had 500 concubines for crying out loud!” [Fox News, Hannity, 10/7/16] 

Hannity suggested that one of Trump’s accusers may have “welcome[d]” the sexual assault. [Media Matters, 10/13/16] 

Hannity mocked one of Trump’s accusers: “Donald Trump groped me on a plane. It was all right for the first 15 minutes, but then he went too far.” [Media Matters, 10/14/17] 

Hannity on Trump accusers: “Just saying ‘help’ would solve the problem.” [Media Matters, 10/20/17] 

Hannity called accusations of sexual assault against Trump “an attempt to neutralize the WikiLeaks revelations,” referring to the stories generated from hacked Democratic emails. [Media Matters, 10/13/16]

They didn’t mention this guy either:

Hannity: Many women who report sexual harassment “will lie to make money.” [Media Matters, 11/9/17]

Hannity: “Then you have false allegations that are made, and — how do you determine? It’s ‘He said, she [said].’” [Media Matters, 11/9/17]

Hannity: “How do you know if it’s true? How do we — what’s true? What’s not true? How do you ascertain the truth?” [Media Matters, 11/9/17]

Hannity: “We do have Ten Commandments. One of the commandments is ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness.’ We know human beings break, with regularity, the other nine commandments. Did they break this one?” [Media Matters, 11/9/17]

Hannity: “But then also, are there false allegations? And when it’s ‘he said, she said’ or whatever, how do you tell the difference?” [Premiere Radio Networks, Media Matters, 11/9/17]

Hannity invoked the Duke Lacrosse team case; Michael Brown, who was shot by a white cop in Ferguson, MO; George Zimmerman, who fatally shot Trayvon Martin; and Freddie Gray, who was killed in police custody to suggest there’s a history of accusers lying. [Media Matters, 11/9/17]

Hannity: The “swamp,” “the sewer,” and the “establishment” are out to get Moore. [Media Matters,11/9/17]

Hannity: The Wash. Post “hates anything Republican, anything conservative.” [Media Matters, 11/9/17]

By the way, the other “naughty ones” were two black women and a Trump critic.

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Factoid o’ the day: patriarchy edition
by digby

Hahaha

Americans see fundamental differences between men and women, but men and women have different views on the cause of these differences.

Majorities of women who see gender differences in the way people express their feelings, excel at work and approach parenting say differences between men and women are mostly based on societal expectations.

Men who see differences in these areas tend to believe biology is the root.

What can you do? All this “inequality” is just what nature intended.

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