Month: April 2018

Presidential l’amour among the Roman columns

by digby

I wrote about Trump and Macron for Salon this morning:

There was a time not all that long ago when the right wing of the Republican Party referred to the France as the land of “cheese eating surrender monkeys” and were so offended by its leadership’s unwillingness to blindly follow George W. Bush’s headlong march to war that they absurdly changed the name of french fries in the cafeteria to “freedom fries.”

There was a legendary exchange on CNN’s Crossfire between Tucker Carlson and French foreign policy expert Justin Vaisse over whether or not France was going to be economically devastated by American disdain for everything French.

CARLSON: But just, honestly, just correct the misperception here. This is not simply an effort by the administration to beat up on France. This is coming — there’s a deep wellspring of anti-French feeling in this country, and it’s going to have consequences. This is a bottle of French wine. This is a bottle of American wine.  

VAISSE (thick French accent): It is bigger.  

CARLSON: And it’s bigger. That’s exactly right. More forceful. There will be Americans who boycott French products. This in the end is really going to hurt France, isn’t it?  

VAISSE: No, I think it is going hurt wine lovers.

In many ways those days were no less surreal than these.

But just imagine if Tucker Carlson of 2003 had seen into the future to a day when a Republican president stood on the steps of the White House kissing and hugging and holding hands with the President of France. That happened:

“if there’s any love lost between President Trump and President Macron… you can’t tell from their body language… ” – @NicolleDWallace pic.twitter.com/JmdMRLax2P

— Deadline White House (@DeadlineWH) April 24, 2018

Ashley Parker at the Washington Post examined the dynamics of the handsy bromance:

The interactions throughout the visit, said Patti Wood, a body language expert and author of “SNAP: Making the Most of First Impressions, Body Language, and Charisma,” largely fall under a category known as “gamesmanship.”

In calling out Macron’s alleged dandruff, she said, Trump “did something called primate grooming.”

“It said, ‘We have an intimate relationship, but I’m dominant, I’m the alpha gorilla, I’m going to groom you,’ ” Wood said. “‘But I’m going to criticize you by saying you have dandruff, and I’m going to do that on the world stage and see how you handle that.”

She wasn’t the only one to make that observation:

“When the aging gorilla is confronted with the much more virile, new alpha-male, he shows submissiveness by grooming the alpha-male, but the gesture is actually a vain attempt by the old gorilla to humiliate his much younger rival.”

— Jane Goodall
pic.twitter.com/fx85I1KwVy

— Mrs. Betty Bowers (@BettyBowers) April 24, 2018

It’s funny, but it’s also weird. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like it. George W. Bush was always somewhat awkwardly familiar with fellow leaders. He used to pal around with UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and made Angela Merkel uncomfortable with his frat boy horseplay. But even he didn’t play this kind of primitive dominance game.

And it wasn’t just physical. It’s clear that President Macron came with a message about Iran and it was probably coordinated with the other European leaders. And for all of his touchy feely affection for the French leader,  in his comments at a joint photo-op and press conference, Trump stomped all over the Iran nuclear agreement calling it “insane” and “ridiculous” and he issued a threat that Iran would “have bigger problems than they ever had before” if they defied him. He went off on his usual tiresome, ill-informed rant about how the US had sent planeloads of money to Tehran to pay them off. (It was Iran’s own money.)

Macron indicated that they were talking about maybe adding some provisions that could allay Trump’s concerns and the president indicated later that he might be flexible but then retreated to his “we’ll see what happens” stance (which usually means he has no clue what he’s talking about) saying:

“Nobody knows what I’m going to do on the 12th. This is a deal with decayed foundations. It’s a bad deal, it’s a bad structure, it’s falling down. It should have never, ever been made.”

Macron’s ploy to appeal to Trump’s colossal ego in the vain and somewhat arrogant assumption that he could manipulate the ignorant leader by being his friend didn’t work in any substantive way.  He isn’t the first to have tried that gambit and he isn’t the first to have failed. Trump loves to be loved but it’s a one way street.

Just ask South Carolina Senator Lindsay Graham who spent months cultivating Trump’s friendship, flattering him and feting him and telling him what a big, strong leader he was only to be crudely and publicly demeaned when he brokered a deal to fix the DACA problem that Trump’s hardliners didn’t like. He thought he had earned the president’s trust and he probably had as far as it extends to anyone.

But Trump doesn’t understand the job of president or the issues, so he has no basis upon which to make decisions other than some primitive playground dominance game or, as far as we know, simply flipping a coin. He doesn’t know what he’s going to do because he doesn’t know anything.

This profile of H.R McMaster in this week’s New Yorker lays out in chilling and alarming detail just what an unstable, unprepared man the president is and the outrageous lengths to which people inside the administration must go to keep him from blowing up the world out of sheer ignorance, emotional volatility or some combination of both. It’s much worse than we knew.

The profile is not especially kind to McMaster who turns out to be lacking in self-awareness on a rather grand scale himself, failing  to figure out a way to maneuver or persuade this willful president to take his duty seriously and apply even a modicum of energy toward learning what he needs to know, much less govern his impulsive nature. It’s a lethal and dangerous combination which nobody knows how to deal with.  McMaster ended up impugning his own integrity and being shown the door for his trouble as have so many others who’ve come into the president’s orbit. Nobody’s reputation survives Trump.

President Macron probably doesn’t have a choice but to try to get through to him however he can but the buddy bromance won’t work. (He’s already being called “Trump’s bichon frise.”)  The only thing any foreign ally can do is prepare for the worst and hope that Trump somehow randomly chooses the right path.

The whole world is just floating on the Trump wave right now, praying it doesn’t rise up and crash over all of us. You can love him or hate him or ignore him and it won’t make a bit of difference.

Macron must realize that Trump’s newest bff is a man named John Bolton and he’s itching to tear up the Iran deal and go to war. (He is, after all, part of a foreign policy claque that used to say “everyone wants to go to Bagdad, real men want to go to Tehran.)

Well, I love this. https://t.co/ktdV2jUOxx

— Julia Louis-Dreyfus (@OfficialJLD) April 24, 2018

No DeLay in Trumpish corruption
by Tom Sullivan

Tom DeLay, former member of the United States House of Representatives.

You were expecting Honest Abe?

Mick Mulvaney, the interim director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, told banking industry executives on Tuesday that they should press lawmakers hard to pursue their agenda, and revealed that, as a congressman, he would meet only with lobbyists if they had contributed to his campaign.

“We had a hierarchy in my office in Congress,” Mr. Mulvaney, a former Republican lawmaker from South Carolina, told 1,300 bankers and lending industry officials at an American Bankers Association conference in Washington. “If you’re a lobbyist who never gave us money, I didn’t talk to you. If you’re a lobbyist who gave us money, I might talk to you.”

Now where might Mulvaney have gotten that idea and the boldness to express it in public? Maybe this from 1995 will help:

In the annals of the House Republican revolution, a pivotal moment came last April when an unsuspecting corporate lobbyist entered the inner chamber of Majority Whip Tom DeLay, whose aggressive style has earned him the nickname “the Hammer.” The Texas congressman was standing at his desk that afternoon, examining a document that listed the amounts and percentages of money that the 400 largest political action committees had contributed to Republicans and Democrats over the last two years. Those who gave heavily to the GOP were labeled “Friendly,” the others “Unfriendly.”

“See, you’re in the book,” DeLay said to his visitor, leafing through the list. At first the lobbyist was not sure where his group stood, but DeLay helped clear up his confusion. By the time the lobbyist left the congressman’s office, he knew that to be a friend of the Republican leadership his group would have to give the party a lot more money.

Tom DeLay would be convicted in 2010 of one charge of money laundering and one charge of conspiracy to commit money laundering. The conviction was later overturned.

Mulvaney made sure to mention that constituents got a hearing from him before lobbyists who had payed him. He received nearly $60,000 from payday lenders.

The New York Times reports that since taking over the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau:

… he has frozen all new investigations and slowed down existing inquiries by requiring employees to produce detailed justifications. He also sharply restricted the bureau’s access to bank data, arguing that its investigations created online security risks. And he has scaled back efforts to go after payday lenders, auto lenders and other financial services companies accused of preying on the vulnerable.

Mulvaney insists the Associated Press refer to the agency by its statutory label, the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection, you know, to lower its public profile even further. Time does not permit a review of Trump EPA head Scott Pruitt’s greatest hits. This administration puts Tom DeLay to shame.

“If you, dear reader, are thinking that the world has gone barking bonkers, then you might be one of The Decents,” writes Kathleen Parker in considering videos shot by the Syracuse University chapter of the Theta Tau fraternity. Videos that surfaced over the weekend show members mimicking a sexual assault on a disabled person. Where could they have gotten the idea for that?

The district attorney for Onondaga County ruled the videos “repulsive” but not criminal. Parker urges the expulsion of the students involved, not for racism or anti-Semitism or legally protected speech, but for behavior contributing to the “gradual unraveling of decent society.”

“Gradual” seems no longer to apply, given behaviors modeled for us in Washington. Hostility to virtually every non-white ethnic group and efforts to divide families through deportation make headlines every day. The Trump administration now wants to overturn treaty protections dating from the founding of the republic and impose work requirements on Native Americans if they want to keep their access to Medicaid:

[T]he Trump administration contends the tribes are a race rather than separate governments, and exempting them from Medicaid work rules — which have been approved in three states and are being sought by at least 10 others — would be illegal preferential treatment. “HHS believes that such an exemption would raise constitutional and federal civil rights law concerns,” according to a review by administration lawyers.

If only we could harness indecency as a power source.

* * * * * * * *

For The Win 2018 is ready for download. Request a copy of my county-level election mechanics primer at tom.bluecentury at gmail.

Poor Ronny

Incel Rebellion?

by digby

In case you were wondering what the Toronto killer was about Right Wing Watch has helpfully translated his strange worldview for you:

The young man who has been charged with the murder of 10 pedestrians and attempted murder of 13 others in a van attack in Toronto reportedly posted a Facebook status chock-full of slang coined by hyper-misogynistic men online and the extremists who attempt to court them.

The CBC and BuzzFeed have confirmed that the suspect had a message posted on his Facebook page that read: “Private (Recruit) Minassian Infantry 00010, wishing to speak to Sgt. 4chan please. C23249161. The Incel Rebellion has already begun! We will overthrow all the Chads and Stacys! All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!”

If that statement seems confusing, it’s because it is comprised almost entirely of slang used in obscure corners of the internet occupied by right-wing trolls and white supremacists.

“Sgt 4chan” is a reference to an ongoing satirical cosplay carried out by users of the anonymous message board 4chan’s “politically incorrect” group. Fictitious “armies” organized on the board carry out what they call “memetic warfare,” during which they organize social media campaigns aimed at hijacking news cycles and injecting hoaxes into public discourse. At other times, users use these tactics to troll and harass people they have decided they collectively dislike, as seen with 4chan’s sabotage of actor Shia Lebouff’s “He Will Not Divide Us” art project last year.

“Incel” is a term that’s short for “involuntarily celibate.” The term took off as the name of a deeply misogynistic Reddit group comprised of tens of thousands of mostly young men that was rife with messages bashing women and condoning rape. Reddit eventually banned the group. In a twist of irony, Elle magazine reported that the term “incel” was first coined by a woman.

“Chads and Stacys” is 4chan slang for attractive, young and well-off white men and women. Members of the “Incel” community resent “Chads and Stacys” for what they believe to be an unfair ease of having casual sexual encounters with each other. In recent months, an alt-right offshootknown as “Chad Nationalism,” has attempted to court frustrated young men by peddling them white nationalist ideologies while providing them with encouragement and advice on obtaining a muscular “Chad” body. Activists in the “Chad Nationalist” movement often speak about drawing in attractive women who adhere to male-dominant “traditional” gender roles and will give birth to multiple children in order to combat changing ethnic demographics in western countries.

Elliot Rodger was a self-labeled “kissless virgin” who wrote a manifesto on “the cruelness of women” before murdering six people in Santa Barbara in 2014. Rodger had at times identified himself as an “incel,” placing him, as The Washington Post noted at the time, in “that corner of the Internet where boys will be boys, girls will be objects, and critics will be ‘feminists,’ ‘misandrists’ or ‘enemies.’”

It’s still too soon to say whether the attacker was a right-wing extremist, but it seems clear from this social media post that he was deeply invested in the internet cesspools that right-wing extremists have historically used to court young men into their violent and hate-filled worldview.

This is yet an other one of those creepy misogynist wingnut sub-cultures that intersects with a whole bunch of other loony wingnut violence.

Nut I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that the right wing lost its collective mind yesterday screaming that this was a jihadist attack. Apparently, that wasn’t ignited by some bots or weirdos on twitter but rather some raging anti-Islam journalists in the Canadian press.

All these people are toxic. All of them.
.

The NRA’s win-win strategy

by digby

The gun control movement is making some strides. There might even be some minor changes coming down the pike as a result. But don’t think that means the NRA is on the ropes. Gun control talk is their most powerful fundraising tool:

As the student-led March for Our Lives movement captured the nation’s attention in the weeks after the Parkland shooting, the other side of the gun control debate enjoyed a banner month of its own.

The National Rifle Association’s Political Victory Fund raised $2.4 million from March 1 to March 31, the group’s first full month of political fundraising since the nation’s deadliest high school shooting on Valentine’s Day, according to filings submitted to the Federal Elections Commission. The total is $1.5 million more than the organization raised during the same time period in 2017, when it took in $884,000 in donations, and $1.6 million more than it raised in February 2018.

The $2.4 million haul is the most money raised by the NRA’s political arm in one month since June 2003, the last month when electronic federal records were readily available. It surpasses the $1.1 million and $1.5 million raised in January and February 2013, the two months after the Sandy Hook school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut.

This doesn’t mean the movement shouldn’t do what it’s doing. But it is a stark reminder that there remains a devoted faction out there that will continue to be influential on politicians until pro-gun control people vote on the issue and dilute the power of the NRA.

Every high school kid 16 years old an up today will be eligible to vote in 2020.

.

L’église c’est moi?

by digby

I’m often admonished that I must be respectful of conservative Christians. They are good people with sincere religious beliefs and heathens like me are being rude and dismissive by questioning their sincerity. But I don’t know why. They are upfront about the fact that they are now just another political faction, fighting to win by any means necessary without regard to principle or morality:

The conservative Christian coalition that helped usher President Trump into power in 2016 is planning its largest midterm election mobilization ever, with volunteers fanning out from the church pews to the streets to register voters, raise money and persuade conservatives that they cannot afford to be complacent this year.

But the cumulative weight of scandals in Mr. Trump’s private and public life is threatening to overshadow what the religious right sees as its most successful string of policy victories in a generation. And Republicans will be up against not only a resurgent liberal opposition to Mr. Trump but also the historical disadvantages that burden any party in full control of Washington, especially in the first off-year congressional elections of a president’s term.

“The midterms are going to be very, very tough for the Republicans,” said Robert Jeffress, who leads the First Baptist Dallas megachurch and is one of Mr. Trump’s most loyal evangelical supporters.

Mr. Trump, to date, has been accused by a pornographic film star and a Playboy playmate of conducting separate affairs shortly after his wife, Melania Trump, gave birth to their son. Those controversies, paired with the multiple women who accused him of groping them before the election and his own boasts of sexual aggressions, have put a spotlight on the evangelical movement and its unyielding support for the president. Critics in other parts of the Republican tent — and a few among evangelical leaders — are asking just how much obscenity, belligerence and bigotry Christians should accept.

“Now even the Christian culture is O.K. with it,” said Jim Daly, the president of Focus on the Family, one of the nation’s largest evangelical groups. “That’s the sadness,” he added. “The next time a Democrat in the presidency has a moral failure, who’s going to be able to say anything?”

But Christian conservatives contend that Mr. Trump has also more than honored his end of the bargain that brought reluctant members of their ranks along during his presidential campaign. He has begun the process of moving the American Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, won the confirmation of numerous judges and a Supreme Court Justice who seem likely to advance their anti-abortion cause, moved against transgender protections throughout the government, increased the ability of churches to organize politically and personally supported the March for Life.

“I don’t know of anyone who has worked the evangelical community more effectively than Donald Trump,” said Ralph Reed, the chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, which this year plans to devote four times the money it spent in the 2014 midterms.

In essence, many evangelical leaders have decided that airing moral qualms about the president only hurts their cause.

“His family can talk to him about issues of character,” said Penny Young Nance, the president of Concerned Women for America, an evangelical organization that is framing the midterm elections to potential donors as a civilizational struggle.

So far, the decision by most conservative evangelical leaders to double down on their support for Mr. Trump is playing out like most of the other moments when skeptics of the president believed he had finally undermined himself with his base.

A poll released last week by the Public Religion Research Institute found white evangelical approval for Mr. Trump at its highest level ever: 75 percent. Only 22 percent said they had an unfavorable view of the president.

They needn’t worry about not being able to sanctimoniously wring their hands over Democratic immorality in the future because they will not miss a beat. They’ll do it anyway. There is no need for consistency on the right. On the left it’s a fetish that cripples the Democratic Party even disallowing most evolution of ideas or changes of heart.

Anyway, the Christian right are the foot soldiers of the Republican Party, they love Trump and they are organizing to get his sycophants elected in the fall:

Much as in the 2016 presidential campaign, Christian conservative events are designed to be highly visible and to convey the movement as one united voice. Hundreds of evangelical leaders plan to gather in June at the Trump International Hotel in Washington for a conspicuous show of support for Mr. Trump. The event will be part pep rally, part strategy session.

In the states, leading religious and socially conservative groups will be propped up by the Republican National Committee, which will encourage voter registration at churches and schedule round tables with local pastors and evangelical liaisons close to the president.

Some of the organizers call themselves “the watchmen on the wall,” a reference to guards who looked over Jerusalem from the Book of Isaiah.

The message to energize Christian conservatives has twin purposes: to inspire them to celebrate their victories and to stoke enough grievance to prod them to vote.

But in a midterm election, no singular political enemy will emerge the way Hillary Clinton did in 2016. Instead, leaders of the movement plan to lean hard into a message that fans fears and grudges: that the progressive movement and national media mock Christian life and threaten everything religious conservatives have achieved in the 15 months of the Trump administration.

“Show the left that you can put labels on us, you can shame us. But we’re not giving up,” said Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council, who explained that many conservatives of faith see attacks on Mr. Trump as an attack on their judgment.

The Family Research Council has already activated its network of 15,000 churches, half of which have “culture impact ministries” that organize congregations to be more socially and civically engaged. The group’s efforts will gear up with voter registration drives around the Fourth of July and voter education that will focus on a half-dozen states that could determine control of the Senate.

Their tactics are almost identical to the work they used during the presidential campaign to unite a fractured evangelical base. The June meeting in Washington is a follow-up to a gathering in New York in the summer of 2016 that soothed tensions after it became apparent that Mr. Trump would be the Republican nominee.

Leaders of the Christian right have not only largely accepted Mr. Trump’s flaws and moved on; they seem to almost dare the president’s opponents to throw more at him. Ms. Nance said she heard a common sentiment from volunteers and supporters who did not seem bothered by the allegations of Mr. Trump’s infidelity. “We weren’t looking for a husband,” she said. “We were looking for a body guard.”

Concerned Women for America’s fund-raising pitch claims, “This is our Esther moment,” referring to the biblical heroine whose resourcefulness saved Persia’s Jews from annihilation hundreds of years before Jesus. The group plans to have get-out-the-vote organizers in 10 states where Democrats are defending Senate seats in states where Mr. Trump won.

Mike Mears, the Republican National Committee’s director of strategic partnerships and faith engagement, described the midterm campaign as “a call to arms.”

“You like what the president is doing?” he asked. “We need your help.”

The danger for Republicans is the many evangelicals who do not like what the president is doing. His petty insults, coarse language, lack of humility and private life are difficult to square with Christian faith, opponents say. The president has helped devalue character, morality and fidelity as essential qualities in political leaders, they say.

A meeting of evangelical leaders in Illinois last week featured a frank and candid discussion of the president’s failings, prompting some pro-Trump attendees to walk out.

But for evangelicals loyal to Mr. Trump, the criticism is irrelevant. They say that as challenging as the political realities may be, they remain hopeful that voters understand what is at stake. “We are living in unusual times,” said Jerry Falwell Jr., the president of Liberty University and one of Mr. Trump’s earliest evangelical supporters. “And after what happened in 2016, I think anything is possible.”

The message is that criticizing Trump equals criticizing Jesus and the Church. To these activists and Trump fans the president is not only the state (l’etat c’est moi”) he is also the church.

And no, I don’t think these people should be allowed to mau-mau the rest of American into respecting this bullshit. They are the ones who are betraying their religion. That’s their problem. They are also proving once and for all with Trump that they are simply political opponents, doing what political opponents do, nothing more. They deserve no more “respect” and sensitivity than anyone else.

.

Devin Nunes, true believer

by digby

This profile of Devin Nunes in the New York Times is astonishing. His rise is a perfect illustration of the final metamorphosis of the Republican right wing into to the Trump cult. He’s as much a believer as the those fanatics at the Trump rallies. This is the conclusion:

For House Democrats, Nunes’s “midnight run,” as they now call it, represented a fundamental break. “Devin and I had a very good relationship until March 21,” Schiff told me. “From that point on, I think that he considered it his primary mission to protect the White House no matter the cost.” In the process, Nunes has all but destroyed what was once the House Intelligence Committee’s greatest asset. When the committee was being created in 1977, to exercise legislative oversight of American intelligence agencies, Speaker Tip O’Neill pledged, “This is a nonpartisan committee; there will be nothing partisan about its deliberations.” Although that goal was occasionally tested, the spirit of nonpartisanship generally prevailed and at times even flourished, as it had under Nunes’s predecessor, Mike Rogers, and his Democratic counterpart, Representative Dutch Ruppersberger of Maryland. “It’s not like Dutch and Mike weren’t stalwarts of their own parties, but they knew they had a national security mission,” says Jamil Jaffer, a Republican lawyer who was a senior counsel on the committee. “They got together and said, ‘Look, this stuff is too important to screw up.’ ”

But since Nunes’s midnight run, the committee has been crippled by partisan fighting. When the committee met in late March to discuss releasing the Republicans’ incomplete report on Russia, not one Democrat on the committee voted to do so. Representative Mike Quigley, an Illinois Democrat, openly mocked his Republican colleagues, clucking at them like a chicken. Now that the committee’s Russia investigation is essentially over — Schiff and his fellow Democrats have pledged to keep investigating on their own, but they won’t get far without subpoena power — the ill will isn’t likely to dissipate. “I don’t know that it can recover, given the degree of bad blood that’s developed between the members,” Representative Tom Cole says. Eric Swalwell, a California Democrat and member of the committee, told me: “It is irreparable as long as Devin Nunes is the chairman. He is Trump’s Michael Cohen in Congress. He is Trump’s fixer.” Beyond that, Nunes has damaged the relationship between the committee and the intelligence agencies themselves. “A lot of your effectiveness in overseeing the intelligence community is based on them wanting to have a good relationship with the overseers,” says a former Intelligence Committee staff member. “That’s all blown up. They’re not going to do anything they don’t absolutely have to do. They’re going to marginalize the community.” The former staff member adds: “It’s totally toxic. It’s irreversible. I think the committee has been essentially rendered useless.”

From the ashes of his own committee, though, Nunes has emerged in a far more powerful position. His congressional district is so sufficiently red that despite his Democratic challenger’s multiple appearances on MSNBC, his seat should be safe this November, even in what’s shaping up to be a strong Democratic year. In fact, his stature in the area has been enhanced by the Russia controversy. Jim Brulte, the chairman of the California G.O.P., told me: “If you’re a Republican officeholder in California, and Nancy Pelosi attacks you, I think most Republican voters turn around and go, ‘Wow, I’ve never heard of this guy, but if Pelosi is against him, I’m for him.’ ”

More important, the Russia brouhaha has elevated Nunes far beyond the Central Valley. Once considered the scourge of the Tea Party, he is now viewed as a rock star by the activist Republican base across the country. The National Republican Congressional Committee, the campaign arm of the House G.O.P., uses him in its fund-raising emails. And among his Republican colleagues on Capitol Hill, he has never been more popular — so much so that more than one prominent Republican with whom I spoke predicted that Nunes is on track to one day become the top Republican on the all-powerful Ways and Means Committee.

In February, at its annual Conservative Political Action Conference outside Washington, the American Conservative Union presented Nunes with its Defender of Freedom Award for “concerted courage, standing up for truth and freedom under intense duress.” When Nunes accepted the award, he was greeted with cries of “We love you, Devin!” His familiar grimace gave way to a broad smile.

“I don’t know, Mr. Chairman,” Matt Schlapp, the A.C.U. leader, told Nunes as they appeared onstage together. “I think they like you.”

He loves Trump. They love him. That’s all it takes.

How many of these people are there in this country? 50 million?

.

QOTD: Trump”Special” edition

by digby

Your president, ladies and gentlemen

“We have a very special relationship, in fact I’ll get that little piece of dandruff off. We have to make him perfect — he is perfect.”

“When the aging gorilla is confronted with the much more virile, new alpha-male, he shows submissiveness by grooming the alpha-male, but the gesture is actually a vain attempt by the old gorilla to humiliate his much younger rival.”

— Jane Goodall
pic.twitter.com/fx85I1KwVy— Mrs. Betty Bowers (@BettyBowers) April 24, 2018

.

The new civil libertarians

by digby

I wrote about the conservative handwringing over privacy rights and civil liberties for Salon this morning:

What’s the old saying? A liberal is a conservative who’s been arrested and a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged? Well, the Donald Trump era is proving this to be more true than we knew. Liberals certainly feel mugged by the corruption, ineptitude and chaos of the Trump administration and conservatives are all becoming “card-carrying members of the ACLU” as the senior George Bush used to spit derisively at his political opponents. The former are uncomfortably counting on the rule of law to bring some sanity to an insane political environment, while the latter claim to believe that the “deep state” is involved in a massive conspiracy to remove their president from power.

Trump supporters have tried out a lot of different tactics to derail special counsel Robert Mueller and his investigation. But as the months have gone by and we have seen indictments and guilty pleas in various strands of the Russia investigation, along the latest move by the U.S. attorney in New York against Michael Cohen the president’s self-identified “Ray Donovan,” they have adopted a new strategy. And it’s really something.

Essentially, Team Trump is now claiming that the rule of law is only applicable for Donald Trump as it pertains to Russian “collusion.” Any other crimes that may be uncovered from any source are to be ignored:

That tweet referred to a New York Times op-ed about Trump’s myriad shady overseas business deals in Russia and elsewhere. The president, who has refused to divest himself from his business, appears potentially vulnerable to blackmail for previous unsavory activity with criminal elements. These things should have been sorted out before the election, but nobody ever considered that the president of the United States might retain his domestic and international business — still less that he would refuse to open his books and reveal his financial ties. It is still mind-boggling that Trump is getting away with that.

The special counsel referred the Cohen investigation to the New York federal prosecutor because he came across information suggesting criminal activity that fell outside his mandate. That should give all these people pause. Mueller, and presumably his boss, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, are playing it by the book. It seems not to have occurred to these Trump defenders that federal law enforcement authorities might be pursuing these cases not because they hate Trump but because they keep finding evidence of corruption and criminality. Contrary to Trump’s insistence, most of these cops are Republicans. Many of whom probably voted for him, although as they would surely agree, that’s irrelevant.

While Republicans fret about Mueller exceeding his mandate, it’s because the Cohen case has the Trump highly agitated at the moment. His supporters have all been out there telling reporters that Cohen is going to “flip,” either because Trump treated him like dirt or because he is afraid of being raped in prison. Either way, the whole discussion is sordid. Trump himself tweeted about it:

If I were a cynical person I would observe that that comment lays the groundwork for Trump to claim that Cohen was coerced into lying if he does cut a deal. (Unofficial Trump legal adviser Alan Dershowitz explicitly spells out that narrative in this op-ed.) Of course, the problem for Trump is more than Cohen’s testimony. There are communications, financial records and purportedly audio recordings that could be just as incriminating.

That brings us to the other player in the Cohen saga, Fox News host and shadow White House chief of staff Sean Hannity. When it was disclosed that he was one of Cohen’s three clients, the right raced to his defense with the same fervor with which they defend the president. Judicial Watch’s Tom Fitton said Hannity had been “victimized in this process. I mean, his name was leaked out … forced out by the court.” Fox News’ Tucker Carlson suddenly sounds like liberal Justice William O. Douglas:

Attorney-client privilege no longer means anything, we learned that the other day. Neither does privacy or public reputation or fairness. If Cohen’s other clients can be exposed by the left solely to embarrass them, what is the next step exactly? Could you punish a Trump ally by, I don’t know, revealing his internet search history? What about someone’s medical records? How about a private conversation with a priest or rabbi? Why not? All of that will happen, no question.

Why Hannity should feel the mere fact of this professional relationship should stay private, even as he comments on the case on a daily basis, remains an open question. Most news organizations would call that unethical. But then this is Fox News we’re talking about.

At the time Hannity’s name was revealed, he said that he had asked Cohen for some casual real estate advice but nonetheless expects attorney-client privilege, which is within his rights but piques everyone’s natural curiosity. Why in the world would he need to consult about real estate deals with a “fixer” like Cohen? This is particularly true considering that we have since learned that Hannity has a professionally managed real estate portfolio worth tens of millions of dollars. If anything, it appears that Hannity may more successful in real estate than Donald Trump, who was reduced to flogging cheap perfume and hosting a cheesy game show just a few years ago.

Whatever Hannity consulted Cohen about will probably never see the light of day. The feds are only seeking evidence of criminal behavior and unless Hannity is lying, that will be the end of that. We’ll all still be able to talk to our rabbis without Robert Mueller squeezing us for the details.

Think small
by Tom Sullivan

Vox‘s Dylan Matthews cautions against the allure of a deus ex machina arriving from the wings on a clothesline to end the Trump era and fix our beleaguered democracy. We would prefer to see the scoundrels swept out on a tempest followed by a return to democratic tranquility. But that that is both politically unlikely and an oxymoron.

Matthews writes:

This yearning is understandable — but it is both dangerous and misplaced. Ending the Trump presidency will not fix, or even substantially ameliorate, most of the problems plaguing the American political system. They were mounting for years before he took office — indeed, they made him possible — and they will continue to plague us for years after he leaves.

Our current fix breeds a host of conspiracy theories, Matthews believes, plus predictions of and a desire for revolutionary change that will repair the republic in a twinkling. They are driven in part by the sense that things just can’t go on like this and that only dramatic change will suffice to repair the damage to the republic (and to the planet) in time.

We can’t see what’s happening to American politics as just a succession of events that, in themselves, mean nothing. They have to be leading up to a climactic Götterdämmerung in which our slate is wiped clean. This is the yearning behind bold predictions of the Trump administration’s collapse, or of a dramatic descent into tyranny at Trump’s hand.

We fantasize about an early, dramatic end to the Trump years in part because that signals a return to normalcy and a rejection of all the dysfunctions he symbolizes. For more sophisticated observers who know that the forces that produced Trump will continue after he’s gone, you see either a wallowing into dystopia — musing about an American descent into outright tyranny, of the kind occurring in the formerly democratic Hungary and Poland right now. Or you see fantasies of utopia, as in Bernie Sanders’s characterization of the anti-Trump resistance as a broader “political revolution, something long overdue” that will sweep into power “an agenda that works for the working families of our country and not just the billionaire class.”

We like a clean narrative with a beginning, a middle, and a dramatic ending. “Shit happens” leaves us as uneasy as an unresolved musical passage. A big finish is more satisfying. It’s just that revolutions generally end poorly. What if we just have to muddle along? Matthews asks. He offers a few suggestions, however unlikely:

What does that look like? An unsatisfying litany of heavy political lifts, most of which will fail, and each of which on its own would only mildly improve matters if adopted. We should abolish the filibuster and Electoral College and eliminate midterm elections by having the House, Senate, and president serve concurrent four-year terms. We should adopt the Fair Representation Act to end gerrymandering and move toward proportional representation. We need a robust right to vote in the Constitution, public financing for elections, and more transparency for corporate and nonprofit political spending.

But all the energy of the first Obama presidential run quickly melted away. Watergate did not leave us purified and renewed. Clearly, Matthews writes, “the financial crisis did not usher in a new era of ethical banking.”

Maybe that is why my motto these days is: If you’re not Goliath, fine. Be David.

After an acquaintance’s misdialed yesterday, I listened to a familiar rant about the Democrats’ dysfunction and another of frequent demands for better messaging. Agreed. What message exactly? Republicans bad. Right. And there progress comes to a halt before it begins. Even if “the Democrats” (whoever they are) could agree on a message with vision, the left lacks the message discipline and the budget for making anything of it.

Think small.

It is not magic potions that win in sports (honestly, at least), but retooling a golf swing, timing the leap from the starting block, and the work of perfecting the slider. Building skills is the difference between a revolution that peters out and change that is sustainable. Many activists have no patience for working at small improvements that make big wins possible. We want dramatic. John Snow would probably have prefered his party had “game.”

Perfecting the unsexy nuts-and-bolts of campaign grunt work can provide an edge where endless arguing over what message or policy will win elections fails. I’m not suggesting message and policy are unimportant. I’m just tired of getting nowhere arguing over them. Mechanics are chronically ignored. The field is wide open. Plus, there’s little competition.

I would rather be lucky than good, the saying goes. “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity” would seem a better bet.

* * * * * * * *

For The Win 2018 is ready for download. Request a copy of my county-level election mechanics primer at tom.bluecentury at gmail.