Month: October 2018

Susan Collins’s epic gaslight marks the final absorption of the establishment into Trumpism

by digby

My Salon column this morning:

Back in February of this year, Axios reported that Donald Trump had a plan for the midterms:

A source close to the White House tells me that with an eye to getting Republicans excited about voting for Republicans in midterms, the president this year will be looking for “unexpected cultural flashpoints” — like the NFL and kneeling — that he can latch onto in person and on Twitter. The source said Trump “is going to be looking for opportunities to stir up the base, more than focusing on any particular legislation or issue.”

I think we can accurately observe that the confirmation of the right-wing political operative and accused attempted rapist Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court counts as just such an “unexpected cultural flashpoint.” And as predicted, Donald Trump is taking full advantage of it. Since it happens to be the same “cultural flashpoint” that hit his campaign at roughly the same moment in 2016, when the “Access Hollywood” tape of him bragging about assaulting women was reported, he undoubtedly sees it as a winning strategy. It worked for him, after all.

Recall that after the tape hit and women started to come forward to say that Trump had assaulted them in exactly the way he described, he went on the offensive — in both senses of the word — by going before his cheering crowds and insulting the women as being too ugly to attack and declaring that they were all liars. He got angry. He promised to sue them all. And his crowds cheered him on. By this point in the campaign it had become nothing more than a rank racist misogyny festival, punctuated with chants of “Build That Wall!” and “Lock Her Up!”

Trump being Trump and believing that his every passing thought is genius, obviously believes that attacking women is an excellent way to win elections. And so, after insincerely proclaiming that he found her testimony credible, he switched gears and went after Kavanaugh’s accuser Christine Blasey Ford:

WATCH: President Trump mocks Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, who has accused Trump's Supreme Court pick Judge Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct, during rally in Mississippi. https://t.co/pZfWN8IFMV pic.twitter.com/81YEs8oXr5— MSNBC (@MSNBC) October 3, 2018

After the vote, Trump took credit for getting Kavanaugh over the line with this attack, telling Fox News’ Jeanine Pirro, “There were a lot of things happening that weren’t true and a lot of things left unsaid. I thought I had to even the playing field. Once I did that, it started to sail through.” This was nonsense in terms of the confirmation battle, but according to the Washington Post, GOP strategists believe it does fire up the conservative base.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is certainly on board. He’s been pushing the other “unexpected cultural flashpoint” they’ve adopted, which is that those women who came to Washington to protest the Kavanaugh confirmation, many of them assault survivors, are an angry, threatening mob who frightened those poor senators to death with all their chanting and yelling.

Fox News has taken it to the next level, telling their anxious elderly white viewers that Democrats are coming to kill them in their beds, following Trump’s rallying cry: “You don’t hand matches to an arsonist, and you don’t give power to an angry left-wing mob.” (This would be in contrast to the torch-bearing, murderous Nazis in Charlottesville whom Trump described, at least in part, as “very fine people.”)

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., having fully morphed into a poisonous, reptilian Trump toady, is on it as well. But then, Graham was obviously one of the strategists behind Kavanaugh’s explosive testimony in the hearing. He had telegraphed the white male rage tactic out in the hallway just prior, brushing off a rape survivor who was trying to talk to him by saying, “You should have told the cops.” Clearly that was meant to suggest that women who don’t report their rapes are not to be believed. As Salon’s Amanda Marcotte wrote on Tuesday, the mask has fallen from Republicans’ faces, at least for now, and the misogyny is staggering.

Graham’s line dovetailed nicely with the president’s sarcastic tweet:

I have no doubt that, if the attack on Dr. Ford was as bad as she says, charges would have been immediately filed with local Law Enforcement Authorities by either her or her loving parents. I ask that she bring those filings forward so that we can learn date, time, and place!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 21, 2018

Republicans have also exploited their insulting thesis that #MeToo is really about lying or delusional women falsely accusing men, which they are trying to spin into a female lament about sons and husbands and fathers and brothers being the real victims. Graham, naturally, finds a clever way to make the point:

Twenty-nine days from now you’ve got a decision to make, America. Do you want to live in the world of Sen. [Mazie] Hirono where you’re guilty until proven innocent because you’re a Republican, or do you want to live in the Susan Collins world where you will be listened to and evaluated?

Graham likes to use Hirono as his example of the angry woman trying to railroad the poor, white male, mostly because she made the statement “Men, shut up and step up” which he instinctively understands are fighting words to misogynist abusers. The fact that she is a woman of color makes it all the more potent.

But what of our nice Republican white lady, Sen. Susan Collins, the woman the entire political world, including Democrats, has put on a pedestal for years as the representation of modest, feminine moderation? Trump was effusive in his compliments after her speech — and her vote to confirm Kavanaugh. He told the press, “I thought that Susan was incredible yesterday. She gave an impassioned, beautiful speech yesterday. And that was from the heart, that was from the heart.”

He was referring to the speech in which Collins gaslighted the entire country with a paean to a man who doesn’t exist, calling him “an exemplary public servant, judge, teacher, coach, husband and father.” She told the entire country that the real Brett Kavanaugh was not the angry, petulant, bully they watched testify in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee. She whitewashed his record on health care and women’s rights, insisting that the man who just months ago, as a federal appeals court judge, voted to force a 17-year-old rape victim to give birth against her will, was not a threat to Roe vs Wade.

She attacked the protesters complaining about “dark money” being used to whip them into a “frenzy.” Worst of all, she adopted the absurd line that while she believed Christine Blasey Ford had likely suffered an attack, Kavanaugh was not the attacker. This has become the “empathetic” approach among Republicans who can read polls and see that women are running from the party as fast as they can.

But this line is nothing new. Women have been told they were “crazy” when they say things that people don’t want to hear since the beginning of time. And the echoes of the cruder formulation deployed against Anita Hill back in 1991 — “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty” — are obvious. It’s progress, I suppose, that they dropped the “slutty” part in 2018.

Collins was lobbied heavily by George W. Bush, Kavanaugh’s benefactor, and her deceitful speech shows the final absorption of the tattered remains of the GOP establishment into Trumpism. Collins and Trump are now two sides of the same coin, bound together with a common willingness to tell their voters that they can believe them or they can believe their lying eyes. It’s all there is.

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Yes, of course they said Feinstein should be “locked up”

He will say anything. They will do anything.

Take them seriously.

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The McDonald’s Index?
by Tom Sullivan

Photo by Jeff Rose.

With Hurricane Michael’s strike on the Florida panhandle imminent, FEMA may be dusting off the Waffle House Index. With a blue wave bearing down on the GOP-controlled U.S. House, perhaps it is time for a McDonald’s Index.

A group of seniors meets daily for breakfast at a McDonald’s down the street. Discussing politics is typically off the table. On Monday, however, the “Christian conservative, Mike Pence fan” in the group announced he would have to vote for Democrats this year.

A CNN poll four weeks out from the November 6 election places him among the likely voters contributing to a 13-point Democratic advantage in a generic ballot matchup, the largest for Democrats since 2006. The gender gap is staggering, with women favoring Democrats by 30 points. Men favor Republicans by only 5 points:

This year, Democrats’ enthusiasm about their congressional vote has increased and 62% now say they’re extremely or very enthusiastic to vote, up seven points since September among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents. Among Republicans and Republican leaning independents, enthusiasm has remained relatively steady, going from 50% in September to 52% in the most recent poll.

New CNN/SSRS poll — generic ballot:
Democrat: 54%
Republican: 41%https://t.co/qwfcl1k8w8 pic.twitter.com/lwDzAMoS36— David Wright (@DavidWright_CNN) October 9, 2018

Politico’s report reveals more of the trend:

The Republican House majority continues to show signs of collapsing, with Democrats steadily gaining ground toward erasing the 23-seat margin and ending eight years of GOP control.

A total of 68 seats currently held by Republicans are firmly in play — rated as “Lean Republican” or worse for the GOP — presenting a stark contrast to the Democratic side, where only a half-dozen Democratic seats are in similar jeopardy.

Bloomberg’s analysis of post-Labor Day ad buys shows more than a half dozen races considered competitive for Republicans have seen the party and allied PACs pull back funding:

All of the districts where national Republicans appear to be either holding their powder or in retreat are currently held by the GOP. If those districts are lost, they would offer a significant down payment on the 23 seats Democrats need to take control of the House and essentially halt President Donald Trump’s agenda in Congress.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee outraised its Republican counterpart in August by nearly $10 million.

Low voter turnout has been Democrats’ bane in mid-term elections cycle after cycle. But compared to 2014, Axios finds Democratic turnout up in the primaries of the 19 House races deemed competitive this year. Democratic turnout has doubled in over two-thirds of them. Republican turnout increased in 14 but doubled in none.

Our local get-out-the-vote operation may be atypical as a measure of voter enthusiasm, but so many volunteers showed up Tuesday afternoon for electioneering training, the county chair had to direct traffic and parking.

Getting back to the McDonald’s Index, 2018 is a “blue moon” election in North Carolina. No national, council of state or U.S. Senate races on the ballot. Congressional races top the ticket. The last blue moon election was 2006, a wave election for Democrats nationwide.

It rained here all day in 2006. Heading out to a rural polling station through one of the reddest areas of town, I stopped at a McDonald’s drive-thru at 5:30 a.m. The young woman who popped her head out the window as the rain splattered may have noticed campaign signs in the car. She said unprompted, “I’m going to vote for Heath Shuler, but I don’t know where I’m supposed to vote.”

It portended a good day for Democrats. Shuler unseated 8-term Republican incumbent Charles H. Taylor. Taylor’s bank was involved with fraud, conspiracy, and shady Russian deals before that was presidential.

* * * * * * * * *

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

Sabotage before your very eyes

by digby

Oh look, they’re doing it again:

The Trump administration is planning hours-long downtimes for maintenance on healthcare.gov during the coming ObamaCare sign-up period.

The administration drew criticism for a similar move last year from advocates who said the downtime would hinder efforts to sign people up for coverage, but the administration counters that maintenance downtime happens every year and is designed to occur during the slowest periods on the site.

The maintenance schedule is the same as last year, the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said Tuesday, meaning healthcare.gov is scheduled to be offline for maintenance from 12 a.m. to 12 p.m. each Sunday during the sign-up period, except for the final Sunday, for a total of 60 hours of downtime.

They couldn’t possibly do it any other time…

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Another nefarious dot in the Trump campaign’s collusion


by digby

In case you missed it:

A top Trump campaign official requested proposals in 2016 from an Israeli company to create fake online identities, to use social media manipulation and to gather intelligence to help defeat Republican primary race opponents and Hillary Clinton, according to interviews and copies of the proposals.

The Trump campaign’s interest in the work began as Russians were escalating their effort to aid Donald J. Trump. Though the Israeli company’s pitches were narrower than Moscow’s interference campaign and appear unconnected, the documents show that a senior Trump aide saw the promise of a disruption effort to swing voters in Mr. Trump’s favor.

The campaign official, Rick Gates, sought one proposal to use bogus personas to target and sway 5,000 delegates to the 2016 Republican National Convention by attacking Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, Mr. Trump’s main opponent at the time. Another proposal describes opposition research and “complementary intelligence activities” about Mrs. Clinton and people close to her, according to copies of the proposals obtained by The New York Times and interviews with four people involved in creating the documents.

A third proposal by the company, Psy-Group, which is staffed by former Israeli intelligence operatives, sketched out a monthslong plan to help Mr. Trump by using social media to help expose or amplify division among rival campaigns and factions. The proposals, part of what Psy-Group called “Project Rome,” used code names to identify the players — Mr. Trump was “Lion” and Mrs. Clinton was “Forest.” Mr. Cruz, who Trump campaign officials feared might lead a revolt over the Republican presidential nomination, was “Bear.”

They didn’t end up using the “service.” But it sure shows they were in the market, doesn’t it?

 You will recall that Gates was deeply involved in Manafort’s Ukraine business dealings and his top lieutenant for years before he and Manafort joined the Trump campaign. Gates, you’ll also recall, took a plea in exchange for cooperation with Mueller.

Though it appears that Trump campaign officials declined to accept any of the proposals, Mr. Zamel pitched the company’s services in at least general terms during a meeting on Aug. 3, 2016, at Trump Tower with Donald Trump Jr. That meeting, revealed in May by The Times, was also attended by George Nader, an emissary from the ruler of the United Arab Emirates, and by Erik Prince, a Republican donor and the founder of the private security company formerly known as Blackwater. 

Former Psy-Group employees said that, in anticipation of the Trump Tower meeting, Mr. Zamel asked them to prepare an updated version of the third proposal. A lawyer for Mr. Zamel said that Mr. Zamel had not personally discussed specific proposals with Donald Trump Jr. or anyone else from the Trump campaign. 

“Mr. Zamel never pitched, or otherwise discussed, any of Psy-Group’s proposals relating to the U.S. elections with anyone related to the Trump campaign, including not with Donald Trump Jr., except for outlining the capabilities of some of his companies in general terms,” said the lawyer, Marc Mukasey. 

Mr. Nader and Mr. Zamel have given differing accounts over whether Mr. Zamel ultimately carried out the social media effort to help the Trump campaign and why Mr. Nader paid him $2 million after the election, according to people who have discussed the matter with the two men. 

The reason for the payment has been of keen interest to Mr. Mueller, according to people familiar with the matter. 

It is unclear how and when the special counsel’s office began its investigation into Psy-Group’s work, but F.B.I. agents have spent hours interviewing the firm’s employees. This year, federal investigators presented a court order to the Israel Police and the Israeli Ministry of Justice to confiscate computers in Psy-Group’s former offices in Petah Tikva, east of Tel Aviv.

What we wouldn’t give to get a look at Mueller’s big whiteboard with all the dots they’re trying to connect. From what fragments we can see, it’s massive.

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Hey GOPers: women see you. It isn’t just Trump.

by digby

EJ Graff took a deep dive into the phenomenon of white college-educated Republican women leaving the party. It’s been happening for a while. But Trump shifted it into overdrive:

Trump’s election and performance in office have clearly pushed independent and Democratic women into action, resulting in record numbers of women running for office, and surges of women involved in local political organizing for the first time. But what about Republican women? Is it possible that Trump—and the Republican politicians who enable him—are not just alienating left-leaning women, but are permanently damaging the GOP’s female ranks, driving some splintering portion of women away for good?

Republican women still overwhelmingly support the president—84 percent of them, according to a POLITICO/Morning Consult poll this week. But that statistic overlooks a broader trend: Fewer and fewer American women identify as Republicans, and that slow migration is speeding up under Trump. My conversations with pollsters, political scientists and a number of women across the country who have recently rejected their lifelong Republicans identities suggested the same—and illuminate why this moment in American politics might prove a breaking point for women in the GOP. According to pollsters on both sides of the aisle, that doesn’t bode well for the Republican Party either in this fall’s midterms—which are likely to bring a record gap between how men and women vote—or for the party’s long-term future.

The gender gap began with white men leaving the Democratic Party in the late 1950s and early 1960s in response to the civil rights and women’s movements, Democratic pollster Anna Greenberg explains. Only more recently did women start actively leaving the GOP. For two decades now, they have been leaking away from the Republican Party, very slowly becoming independents, while independents have been drifting toward the Democrats. In 1994, according to Pew, 42 percent of women identified as or leaned Republican, as did 52 percent of men. By 2017, only 37 percent of women and 48 percent of men still did. In 1994, 48 percent of women and 39 percent of men identified as or leaned toward the Democrats. By 2017, those numbers were 56 percent of women and 44 percent of men.

Trump’s election put this gender shift “on steroids,” Greenberg says. According to Pew, the share of American women voters who identify with or lean toward the Republican Party has dropped 3 percentage points since 2015—from 40 percent to 37 percent—after having been essentially unchanged from 2010 through 2014. By 2017, just 25 percent of American women fully identified as Republicans. That means that when, say, 84 percent of Republican women say they approve of Trump and his actions, or 69 percent of Republican women say they support Kavanaugh, or 64 percent say they, like Trump, don’t find Ford very “credible,” those percentages represent a small and shrinking slice of American women.

These shifts in party allegiance might seem mild, but they matter. As Rutgers political scientist Kelly Dittmar recently wrote, women have voted in higher numbers and at higher rates than men for decades. In 2016, according to Dittmar, 9.9 million more women than men voted, and about 63 percent of eligible females voted, compared with 59 percent of eligible males. If more women than men vote in November, women’s shift toward the Democrats is likely to be over-represented on Election Day—especially in an election like this one, in which women are highly mobilized and motivated. The Cook Political Report’s Amy Walters recently noted: “The most recent NBC/Wall Street Journal survey found that [white college-educated women] support a Democrat for Congress by 22 points—58 percent to 36 percent. In 2014, they preferred a Democratic Congress by just 2 points.”

“If these trends continue,” political scientist Melissa Deckman of Washington College told me, “women’s preference for Democrats will be a big contributor to the midterm results.”

And beyond the midterms, too. “Once you give up that party label, you’re less inclined to easily take it back,” says University of Virginia political scientist Jennifer Lawless. Liam Donovan, a lobbyist and former National Republican Senatorial Committee staffer, notes that the Republican loss of college-educated white women “is not balanced out by a huge spike among white men—on net, that’s a real problem for the Republicans.” Former Trump strategist Steve Bannon, of all people, put it more starkly this summer: “The Republican college-educated woman is done. They’re gone. They were going anyway at some point in time. Trump triggers them.”

Graff spoke to a number of these former Republicans, women of various ages, incomes, and regions. They really don’t like Trump. I feel their anger. There is something very triggering about Trump — he’s many women’s worst nightmare of a man. Everything about him personally is offensive and disgusting to me from the incessant bragging and overall narcissism to the blaming and the lying and the cheating and the crude macho dominance. Others like me apparently agree.

But Graff found something else that I think is very important:

Trump alone didn’t push these women to shed their Republican labels; other GOP politicians’ unquestioning support for Trump did that. Several told me they were angry that an all-Republican government has become the party of fiscal waste, deficits, trade wars and rebates for the wealthy. Zalmat said she is angrier at the “spineless Republicans in the Congress” for “enabling [Trump’s] crazy” than she is at the president himself. “The Republicans that I knew and held beloved really have disappointed me,” Thrift agreed. “They’ve become such sycophants for power. It’s no longer about what’s right for people in my district or my state; it’s about how do I keep my position.” Or as Lawrence, the Kansas teacher, put it, “The Republican Party to me seems like it’s being run by white, upper-class or wealthy businessmen who aren’t paying attention to the rest of us.”

Sentiments like those are telling, says UVA’s Lawless. “If the Republicans had stood up to [Trump], not necessarily on substance, but in terms of style and rhetoric,” she says, the reactions among voters might be, “I’m still a Republican, but I’m not supporting Donald Trump.” Instead, she continues, “because the Republicans have been complicit in a lot of what Trump has done,” many women no longer feel they can consider themselves Republican. And that’s a big step out the door.

I’m not a Republican so I never would have voted for any of these fools in the first place. But even I thought there would be a few who might be willing to step up for patriotic reasons or, more likely, because there is a market for anti-Trump Republican political leaders. Sure, it would be a risk, but somebody in the party is going to benefit when people inevitably get tired of his repetitive schtick and you’d have thought there would be a few out there staking out that position. As far as I can tell the only one really doing it is John Kasich.

The Republican Party has doused itself in gasoline and set itself on fire for Donald fucking Trump. I guess they figure they can protect their interests with a Supreme Court majority and get what they need for their corporate masters in the fire sale before the whole thing turns to ash.

Read the whole Graff piece. It’s fascinating. I don’t know how this will all shake out in the end, but it does appear that a lot of GOP women have had it.

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Rosenstein and Trump: No collusion! No collusion!

by digby

Remember this?

Attorney General Loretta Lynch described her Monday meeting with Bill Clinton aboard a private plane as “primarily social,” but some Democrats are struggling to stomach the optics of the attorney general’s meeting with the former president while his wife is under federal investigation — while others are fiercely defending her integrity.

Lynch said she and Clinton talked only of grandchildren, golf, and their respective travels, but the fact that the two spoke privately at all was enough to rekindle concerns about a possible conflict of interest. Republicans have long called into question the ability of a Democratic-led Department of Justice to conduct an independent investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server, based inside her Chappaqua, New York, home, during her tenure as secretary of state.

Once news of their meeting on the tarmac at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport broke, Democrats made clear that while the meeting was likely as innocent as Lynch described, it did not give the Justice Department the appearance of independence.

“I do agree with you that it doesn’t send the right signal,” Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) said Thursday in response to a question about the meeting from CNN “New Day” host Alisyn Camerota. “She has generally shown excellent judgment and strong leadership of the department, and I’m convinced that she’s an independent attorney general. But I do think that this meeting sends the wrong signal and I don’t think it sends the right signal. I think she should have steered clear, even of a brief, casual social meeting with the former president.”

Those were the days:

President Trump on Monday said he had no plans to fire Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, giving a vote of confidence to the No. 2 Justice Department official after reports he had discussed secretly recording the president and mounting an effort to remove him from office.

Mr. Trump said the two men had a “great” conversation while flying together aboard Air Force One to Orlando, Fla., for a law-enforcement conference. The pair spoke for 45 minutes, a White House official said. Asked after returning to the White House if he planned to fire Mr. Rosenstein, the president replied, “I’m not making any changes.”

“I get along very well with him,” he said earlier Monday.

That’s fine. Sure it was a major scandal for the Attorney General to meet with the husband (a former president) of a candidate who had been cleared in an investigation of her email server management. But the Attorney General in charge of a current counterintelligence investigation of a current president palling around on Air Force One is just fine.

Trump has been screeching madly about the investigation being a “witch hunt” for months.

Yesterday, after he emerged from AF 1 with Rosenstein he smiled benignly and said “I think we’ll be treated very fairly.”

Tough as Texas?

by digby

Lol:

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Josh Marshall beaks down the politics behind Susan Collins’ line describing Dr. Ford’s experience of sexual assault.

Collins told Dana Bash: “I do not believe that Brett Kavanaugh was her assailant. I do believe that she was assaulted. I don’t know by whom. I’m not certain when.”

Senate GOPs Ludicrous Theory of the Case

Blasey Ford was sympathetic and highly credible in her testimony. She had taken and passed a lie detector test. She described an event populated by Kavanaugh’s 1982 friend set, something all but impossible to achieve if she did not at least know him fairly well at the time. Republicans knew that for Kavanaugh to be telling the truth, Blasey Ford had to be lying. Remember. She didn’t pick him out of a line up. It really can’t be a good faith misunderstanding. She knew him. She was sure it was him.

But calling her a liar was politically toxic. So they needed a theory that fit each political need. First, Kavanaugh had to be telling the truth and must in fact be innocent. Second, Blasey Ford must think she is telling the truth. (The straightforward answer is that she’s lying. But that’s bad politics.) Ideally, the theory must posit that she was in fact assaulted, just not by Kavanaugh. Otherwise, there’s no basis for the politically required notional empathy. A less plausible scenario is that she has a false memory and she was never attacked at all. But that’s also bad politics. It sounds like saying she’s crazy and not a victim at all.

Collins and her Republican colleagues settled on the one scenario which checks all the political boxes but at the cost of being ridiculously implausible. She was attacked. But even though she is certain that she was attacked by a person she knew already, Brett Kavanaugh, in fact she was mistaken about who attacked her and might well have been attacked at a totally different point in her life. The assault becomes a purely notional placeholder to hold together a bad faith argument. There is zero chance they all come to this argument independently. This is some unknown strategist’s over-clever ruse.

The real point here is that no one can really believe this. Only the most casual cynicism gets you to this argument. It is a poll-tested, built-in-a-lab argument that is driven purely by political needs and can’t possibly be the product of actual belief or reasoning based on the evidence at hand. It’s pure cynicism that too many people are taking seriously.

I understand Josh’s analysis. When I read this kind of analysis my activist mind engages. “What can we do with this?”

One strategy is to bust the GOP’s answers in real time using the media. But our current system of celebrity access journalism means reporters rarely ask follow-up questions. When they DO get a follow-up the politicians usually have one answer prepared and the reporter moves on.

When trapped, politicians are trained to stick to the script. To bust this requires smart questions from non-journalists working together in a format the politicians can’t control.

This is an opportunity for citizens to have “hold the elevator doors open” town halls.  
We saw the impact Maria Gallagher and Ana Maria Archila had on Jeff Flake. These kinds of conversations are very powerful, which means the right will start doing them to the politicians on the left. 

Expect elevator situations where men who were falsely accused ask their Democratic senators, “Where was justice for me!?”  They will demand apologies for how Kavanaugh was treated during the hearing. They will demand new investigations of Bill Clinton.

Women will tell stories about their sons, husbands or fathers who were falsely accused and how their lives were destroyed by a lying woman who was believed without question.

This strategy of continuing the attack, even after it appears that they have won, is a based on their fear of losing their gains when there is a reckoning.

Who’s the unknown strategist? 

Josh brought up the issue of an “unknown strategist” who provided the basis for Collins’ theory. I’m not sure who it was on the GOP senator side, but on the President’s side it might be Bill Shine, formerly of Fox News. now the White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Communications

Described as, “a right-wing media enforcer with a decades-long track record of fierce loyalty to his boss” Shine knows the Trump audience and what kind of fig leaf would work for Collins and the GOP senators so he set about making one available. 

Let Brett Channel Donald! 
You may have noticed that in the earlier Fox News interview Kavanaugh repeated phrases and maintained an even tone. That’s something that a standard media trainer or legal team would advise  him to do.  But when Trump and Shine saw the first Fox interview they knew it wouldn’t play to their audience.

I suspect Shine coached Kavanaugh on the TONE of his testimony with assistance from Kellyanne Conway on how to lie about definitions in the high school yearbook.

The prep team gave Kavanaugh permission to mirror Trump’s combative style. They assured him the Fox News base would love it.  Advisors like Sean Hannity and Jeanine Pirro helped support the flipped script of the “aggrieved victim” that the right loves. They also pushed the “Soros is paying for it all” conspiracy theory to discredit Dr. Ford’s supporters.

I watched Jeanine Pirro interview Trump about attacking Dr. Ford.  First she praised him for his earlier restraint and then asked why he “went off script.” She then set Trump up with a perfect question.

“What was it that got you to pivot from your restraint about her and to fight for Kavanaugh?” – Jeanine Pirro

Then she praises his mocking of Dr. Ford as the turning point saying, “it was instinctive, it was guttural and you did it and you won!” (I think it’s funny she said guttural when she meant from the gut. Her Freudian slip shows she knows he’s in the gutter AND his utterance was “strange, unpleasant,and disagreeable” )

The White House is using Fox to reinforce the attack strategy and to set Trump up with leading questions.  (Now with Hope Hicks installed as executive vice president and chief communications officer at Fox, the feedback loop of information to the WH is even stronger.)

Hope Hicks, the Donald Whisperer, is the new EVP and Chief Communications Officer at Fox

Expect More Conspiracy Theories and “Evidence”

Ed Whelan’s doppelganger theory was discredited, but not before it created a splash and got the idea of mistaken identity out there.

I expect that evidence supporting Dr. Ford and other assault survivors will come out.  Conspiracies about the evidence will also come out.  Expect the usual questions:

“Who brought it forth?
Who paid for it?  SOROS! SOROS! SOROS!
What is wrong with the people who brought it forward?”

When new evidence supporting Ford shows up, they will attack old evidence.

I know that hard evidence that will discredit Kavanaugh and his friends will become public eventually. My friend Lisa Graves brought up evidence of Kavanaugh’s  lying under oath in this September 7th issue of Slate. She wrote she expects more evidence when the Democrats have subpoena power after the election in November.

When that happens, I am on the record as saying I WANT all evidence to be questioned and vetted no matter if it looks bad or good for Kavanaugh.  

Between now and subpoena time evidence might show up that looks like it will hurt Kavanaugh and the left will jump on it before it is vetted. Then it will be shown that part of it was faked. (This is a method used to taint real evidence.  Remember the kerning of the Texas Air National Guard memos?)

I want to believe that the people behind the strategy to support Kavanaugh and discredit his accusers are not as sophisticated as the people from the Dubya White House. But then again they have help from the Russians, their own media networks, new social media tools and techniques plus an audience that is primed to believe even the most ludicrous theories.

When you see Trump’s people bragging about winning understand that they are bragging because they are insecure. They know the win was based on manipulations and lies.

They are like a Wile E. Coyote running as fast as he can on air before the gravity eventually kicks in and he falls. They can change the court but not the laws of gravity.  There will be a lot of gravity this fall.

Baiting the hook
by Tom Sullivan

Texas police have seized a political lawn sign that showed a GOP elephant with its trunk up a girl’s dress and the message: “Your Vote Matters.”- Huffington Post

Post-Kavanaugh, now would be the time to press hard with boots-on-the-ground Democratic campaigning rather than anti-Trump messaging. One good argument for that is it is clear the sitting president and his party are trying to provoke the left into behaving like the imaginary “angry mobs” of their recent rhetoric.

I was not about to watch the sitting president’s ceremonial swearing in of Brett Kavanaugh. Trump meant to show off his prize for his base and rub it in the faces of his opponents to de-focus their attention. With less than a month to go before the November election and just days before the start of early voting in many states, the party of Trump needs to keep its base angry. It’s their only play. The GOP tax break is not selling and the trickle down is still not trickling down.

No matter that they have their conservative court majority. No matter that they control all three branches of government. The barbarians are at the gates!

“It’s about outcomes for our friends on the left,” Sen. Lindsey Graham told Sean Hannity. “There’s nothing they won’t do to maintain power.”

To which Charlie Pierce quipped, “What power are the [sic] maintaining, Huckleberry?”

Matt Viser and Robert Costa write at the Washington Post about the “angry mob” strategy:

The characterization evokes fear of an unknown and out-of-control mass of people, and it taps into grievances about the nation’s fast-moving cultural and demographic shifts that Republicans say are working against them. With its emphasis on the impact on traditional values and white voters, particularly men, it strikes the same notes as earlier Trump-fanned attention to immigrants, MS-13 gang members and African American football players protesting police treatment of young black men.

Angry, leftist, elitist, radical-feminist immigrants with no political power — plus Michael Avenatti, George Soros, and Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) — are comin’ on one knee to impeach ya. Hide yer white men!

“It’s aimed at firing up Fox viewers and the more strident elements of Trump’s base; it’s fearmongering,” said John Weaver, a longtime Republican strategist who is a frequent Trump critic. “I’m sure there is some little old lady in Iowa who now keeps her doors locked because she thinks there’s going to be some anarchist mob coming through Davenport.”

The GOP may have control of all three branches of government, but needs the base to feel beset on all sides by foes as implacable as Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump, only from the opposing party. One after another in recent weeks, Republican pols have invoked “mob rule” to frighten the easily frightened heavily-armed.

Joel Mathis of The Week explains how a party in demographic decline uses “the mob” to smear the disapproving majority of the country:

This nickname is part of a broader conservative strategy to convince Americans that the Constitution’s countermajoritarian features — meant to restrain the majority of the country from unduly oppressing minority factions — are actually antimajoritarian features meant to let those minority factions rule. In other words, they’re trying to persuade Americans to stop believing in democracy.

As if they ever really believed in it.

Outside Washington, D.C., voters are concerned about health care and jobs and pay and reducing gun violence.

Stay focused.

[h/t CK]

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