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Month: May 2019

Real men go to Tehran

Published by digby on May 14, 2019

Real men go to Tehran

by digby

It is not fake news. It’s possible that Bolton isn’t telling Trump what he’s doing, I suppose. After all, the president has a lot on his plate what with wanking to Fox News at least 14 hours a day and tweeting bullshit about his trade war and the “coup” against him. But it’s not fake news.

And we are seeing some serious pushback from allies:

U.S. Secretary of State Michael Pompeo made scant progress persuading European Union counterparts to take a harder line toward Iran during a quick visit to Brussels, with the EU standing behind the nuclear accord abandoned by Washington — and warning of a potential military conflict.

Pompeo presented what the U.S. says is fresh intelligence on the threat posed by Iran in meetings with counterparts from the three EU nations that joined the landmark 2015 accord that President Donald Trump abandoned a year ago. The top U.S. diplomat received a cool initial response to the surprise visit as foreign ministers from the 28-member bloc convened in the Belgian capital.

“I confirm my worry about the risks of an escalation in a region that definitely doesn’t need further elements of destabilization and tensions,” European Union foreign-policy chief Federica Mogherini told reporters after the meetings. “Our call is to show maximum restraint from all sides.”

As alarm in European capitals grows at Trump’s hard-line approach in the region, there was no appreciable movement in the talks with Pompeo. The U.S. stance has left European allies irritated at the lack of strategy and powerless to sway an American administration that’s failed to provide answers on where it all leads, according to diplomats in Berlin, Paris and London.

“We’ll see what happens with Iran. If they do anything it’ll be a very bad mistake,” Trump told reporters at the White House on Monday. “If they do anything they will suffer greatly.”

The State Department’s top envoy for Iran, Brian Hook, described the visit as a “signals check” aimed at sharing intelligence with European allies and not a trip aimed at getting Europe to change its position.

“The secretary wanted to give people an update on the current threat streams that we have been analyzing and to stay in close sync with them,” Hook told reporters after the meetings on Monday. “The developments warrant sharing more information and this was a very good and convenient opportunity.”

Foremost among European concerns is the risk of a return to a nuclear threat in the Middle East, diplomats said on condition of anonymity as talks proceed behind closed doors. The Europeans are in a bind, with limited options to protect the deal.

Pompeo gave his European counterparts little time to prepare on Monday as ad-hoc meetings were scheduled individually. The other 25 member states were left out as Pompeo met with Mogherini, German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt and France’s Jean-Yves Le Drian.

Looming over the shuttle diplomacy lies a sense that more than 15 years of heavy lifting that culminated in the nuclear deal is slipping away, according to senior European diplomats. And even if few expect an open conflict in the near term, the fear is that Trump’s unpredictable approach could have unintended consequences.

Yeah. His “unpredictable approach” could have unintended consequences alright. Tearing up the existing world order out of simple stupidity and narcissism might not work out very well.

Here’s the New York Times:

At a meeting of President Trump’s top national security aides last Thursday, Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan presented an updated military plan that envisions sending as many as 120,000 troops to the Middle East should Iran attack American forces or accelerate work on nuclear weapons, administration officials said.

The revisions were ordered by hard-liners led by John R. Bolton, Mr. Trump’s national security adviser. They do not call for a land invasion of Iran, which would require vastly more troops, officials said.

The development reflects the influence of Mr. Bolton, one of the administration’s most virulent Iran hawks, whose push for confrontation with Tehran was ignored more than a decade ago by President George W. Bush.

It is highly uncertain whether Mr. Trump, who has sought to disentangle the United States from Afghanistan and Syria, ultimately would send so many American forces back to the Middle East.

It is also unclear whether the president has been briefed on the number of troops or other details in the plans. On Monday, asked about if he was seeking regime change in Iran, Mr. Trump said: “We’ll see what happens with Iran. If they do anything, it would be a very bad mistake.”

There are sharp divisions in the administration over how to respond to Iran at a time when tensions are rising about Iran’s nuclear policy and its intentions in the Middle East.

Some senior American officials said the plans, even at a very preliminary stage, show how dangerous the threat from Iran has become. Others, who are urging a diplomatic resolution to the current tensions, said it amounts to a scare tactic to warn Iran against new aggressions.

European allies who met with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Monday said that they worry that tensions between Washington and Tehran could boil over, possibly inadvertently.

More than a half-dozen American national security officials who have been briefed on details of the updated plans agreed to discuss them with The New York Times on the condition of anonymity. Spokesmen for Mr. Shanahan and Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, declined to comment.

The size of the force involved has shocked some who have been briefed on them. The 120,000 troops would approach the size of the American force that invaded Iraq in 2003.

Deploying such a robust air, land and naval force would give Tehran more targets to strike, and potentially more reason to do so, risking entangling the United States in a drawn out conflict. It also would reverse years of retrenching by the American military in the Middle East that began with President Barack Obama’s withdrawal of troops from Iraq in 2011.

But two of the American national security officials said Mr. Trump’s announced drawdown in December of American forces in Syria, and the diminished naval presence in the region, appear to have emboldened some leaders in Tehran and convinced the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps that the United States has no appetite for a fight with Iran.

This wild unpredictability is the greatest threat from Trump and always has been. It will be a heavy lift to repair the damage he’s done to American politics but repairing the damage he’s done to our own society and political culture. But internationally, I don’t know if it’s going to be possible to avoid some kind of devastating conflagration much less move forward. And we desperately need to move forward since the planet faces an existential threat.

Donald Trump couldn’t have come along at a worse time in human history.

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Being dumb is his religion

Published by digby on May 14, 2019

Being dumb is his religion

by digby

It’s not a strategy. He truly can’t understand:

Senior administration officials tell Axios that a trade deal with China isn’t close and that the U.S. could be in for a long trade war.

The state of play: A senior administration official said the differences between the two sides are so profound that, based on his read of the situation, he can’t see the fight getting resolved before the end of the year.

Trump yesterday held out the possibility of meeting Chinese President Xi Jinping at the G20 in Japan next month. That statement may have been made in part to calm the stock market, which yesterday had its worst day since January. (Lead Financial Times headline: Global markets reel.”)

The bottom line: White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow was right when he said on Sunday that “both sides will suffer” in a U.S.-China trade war.

The Chinese economy will be harmed. But so, too, will America’s. And so will American consumers, who will pay higher prices, and American farmers, who will be targeted for retaliation by China.

The question remains: Can Trump, facing a re-election race in 2020, outlast China’s “president for life”? 

Both Trump and Xi have to contend with hardliners in their parties. But only one of them can harness all the tools of authoritarianism.

Trump’s mindset on the Chinese is simple: They only respond to shows of brute force.
And he thinks they’ll suffer more than America will, because they buy fewer products.

I’ve asked several current and former administration officials whether Trump actually believes that China pays the tariffs — rather than the reality that U.S. importers and consumers do.


The consensus is “yes”: That’s what he actually believes.

And as one former aide said: There’s little point trying to persuade Trump otherwise, because his belief in tariffs is “like theology.”

This is the most powerful man in the world.

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That spirit is dead by @BloggersRUs

Published by Tom Sullivan on May 14, 2019

Their spirit is dead
by Tom Sullivan

Access to health care, debate over privatizing public education, deepening xenophobia, inaction on climate change, and decline of civic pride in people’s mad scramble to cover their own asses reminded me of this famous movie exchange:

Mr. Trask : Are you finished, Mr. Slade?

Lt. Col. Frank Slade : No, I’m just gettin’ warmed up. I don’t know who went to this place, William Howard Taft, William Jennings Bryan, William Tell, whoever. Their spirit is dead, if they ever had one. It’s gone.

— Scent of a Woman (1992)

Fairfax Community Hospital faces closure. Ninety minutes outside Tulsa, OK, the small rural facility is out of funds. What staff remains works for free. Bills go unpaid. Supplies are running thin.

The situation is familiar across the country. In rural communities such as Belhaven, NC, where Vidant Health closed Pungo Hospital on July 1, 2014, the sick and injured must now travel over an hour, if not hours, to find care. If they live that long.

The Washington Post reports:

More than 100 of the country’s remote hospitals have gone broke and then closed in the past decade, turning some of the most impoverished parts of the United States into what experts now call “health-hazard zones,” and Fairfax was on the verge of becoming the latest. The emergency room was down to its final four tanks of oxygen. The nursing staff was out of basic supplies such as snakebite antivenin and strep tests. Hospital employees had not received paychecks for the past 11 weeks and counting.

This is what a for-profit health care system looks like to Americans who inhabit vast stretches of rural America. Do they feel abandoned? They have reason to:

In the past decade, emergency room visits to America’s more than 2,000 rural hospitals increased by more than 60 percent, even as those hospitals began to collapse under doctor shortages and historically low operating margins. Hospitals like Fairfax Community treat patients that are on average six years older and 40 percent poorer than those in urban hospitals, which means rural hospitals have suffered disproportionately from government cuts to Medicaid and Medicare reimbursement rates. They also treat a higher percentage of uninsured patients, resulting in unpaid bills and rising debts. A record 46 percent of rural hospitals lost money last year. More than 400 are classified by health officials as being at “high risk of imminent failure.” Hundreds more have cut services or turned over control to outside ownership groups in an attempt to stave off closure.

In a country as rich as ours, it need not be this way. Shyteria Shardae “Shy” Shoemaker, 23, of Chickasaw County, MS need not have died. Nor Patricia “Po” Swindell of Hyde County, NC. Leaving Americans’ lives to the gentle mercies of the marketplace is a choice we, all of us, have made. Profit trumps people. Profit trumps community. Profit trumps pride.

Drafters of the Constitution imagined a country that provided not just for an army and a navy, but for universal postal service. Members of the Midas cult do not yet demand the military pay its own way: profit or perish. Profits from production of weaponry spread out across enough states and congressional districts to make that demand a political nonstarter. Cultists demand, however, the United States Postal Service turn a profit or turn itself over to private, for-profit competitors that do.

Same, too, with public schools. Cultists’ push to charterize, voucherize, or tax-credit scholarship public education out of existence — supported by a religious right profiteers have co-opted — is a betrayal of the country’s founding vision. Public education is the largest portion of annual budgets in all 50 states. The cult sees public schools (and children) as resources to strip-mine.

In the late 18th century, this tiny, backwater nation had defeated the world’s premiere military power. It had big dreams. It would push west, as David McCollough chronicles in his recent book, “The Pioneers.”

Andrew C. Isenberg, professor of history at the University of Kansas, takes McCollough to task for photoshopping the blemishes of pioneers who settled the Northwest Territories. “The fortitude of the settlers McCullough describes was quite real,” Isenberg writes. “So too was land fraud, racial hierarchy and the ousting of Native Americans from their homes.”

Granted. But as I have noted, the Northwest Ordinances that enabled creation of Midwest states imagined a country with greater civic pride than the one that exists today:

John Adams (a tea party favorite) wrote in 1785, “The whole people must take upon themselves the education of the whole people and be willing to bear the expenses of it. There should not be a district of one mile square, without a school in it, not founded by a charitable individual, but maintained at the public expense of the people themselves.”

To that purpose, the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 (passed under the Articles of Confederation prior to ratification of the U.S. Constitution) called for new states formed from what is now the American Midwest to encourage “schools and the means of education,” and the Enabling Act of 1802 signed by President Thomas Jefferson … required — as a condition of statehood — the establishment of schools and public roads, funded in part by the sale of public lands. Enabling acts for later states followed the 1802 template, establishing permanent funds for public schools, federal lands for state buildings, state universities and public works projects (canals, irrigation, etc.), and are reflected in state constitutions from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

That spirit is dead. An anachronism. The Midas cult believes that America leaves too much unplundered. Cultists, too, stand in the way of this country’s citizens (including unprofitable rural ones) from enjoying health protection as comprehensive as that provided by the not-for-profit military. People want that no matter how much it costs. But providing universal, publicly funded health care is anathema. It will cost money.

Saving the planet will cost money, too, Bill Nye explains.

Orban and Anti-Semitism by tristero

Published by tristero on May 14, 2019

Orban and Anti-Semitism 

by tristero

Yes, as Digby writes, Orban traffics in anti-Semitic tropes and is doing whatever he can to re-write Hungarian history in order to: (1) minimize Hungarian actions against Jews during World War II; (2) minimize the atrocities that the right wing have perpetrated in the past; and (3) imply that the Communists were Jews. An excerpt from William Echikson’s excellent article:

In the 2017 parliamentary election, Orbán promoted anti-Semitic imagery of powerful Jewish financiers scheming to control the world. Thousands of posters of a grinning Soros with the slogan “Let’s not allow Soros to have the last laugh!” were posted around the country on billboards, on the metro, and on the floors of Budapest’s trams. Just this year, a new media campaign featured Soros and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker with the caption: “You also have the right to know what Brussels is preparing for!” 

The Hungarian government’s anti-migrant rhetoric endangers all minorities, including Jews, and its comparisons with the 1930s are unmistakable. 

Szabolcs hesitated and struggled a minute for an effective response. He ended up answering that the ads were needed to prevent Soros from flooding Europe with Muslim migrants. That does not make things better. 

The Hungarian government’s anti-migrant rhetoric endangers all minorities, including Jews, and its comparisons with the 1930s are unmistakable. Not by chance, the Hungarian leader is rewriting his country’s history of that period. In the Holocaust Remembrance Project that I recently edited, we showed how the country’s right-wing government has rehabilitated wartime figures as anti-communist icons.

It has inflated Hungary’s role in “saving” the Jews of Budapest and minimized discourse on their own complicity in deporting and killing Jews. State-appointed “historians” have relativized the horrors of the Holocaust, and often depict their own people as victims of what they say was Jewish-supported communism. 

After Orbán came to power in 2010, he appointed András Levente Gál to direct the Holocaust Memorial and Documentation Center in Budapest. According to Paul Shapiro of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Gal’s first proposal was to eliminate mention of [wartime Hungarian leader] Miklós Horthy’s alliance with Adolf Hitler and participation in the dismemberment of three neighboring states — Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia — as ‘irrelevant’ to the Holocaust.” 

Gal’s second proposal, Shapiro recounted, “was to sanitize the record of Hungarian participation in the ghettoization and deportation of the country’s Jews and place full blame for the destruction of Hungarian Jewry on Germany.” Even though the resulting international outcry led to Gál’s dismissal, Orbán’s government went ahead anyhow and built a “Memorial to the Victims of German Occupation” with the same message. 

Orbán has persisted in rewriting history. He has praised Horthy for reconquering lost territories. Several towns have erected statues or placed plaques on buildings in the wartime leader’s honor. Busts of Horthy still stand across the country, despite his record of virulent anti-Semitism. According to Shapiro, Horthy wrote “with pride to his Prime Minister in 1940, ‘I have been an anti-Semite my whole life.’”

Orban should be an international pariah. But nooooooo…

They must act

Published by digby on May 14, 2019

They must act

by digby

This piece by Jamelle Bouie about the Democrats being McClellan is spot on. I don’t think it’s a reach to say that we are in a sort of cold civil war, which is why the Democratic caterwauling about impeachment being “divisive” is so inane. That ship has sailed.

Anyway, Bouie’s piece is exactly right IMO. I pick it u about haldway through:

Despite the president’s lawlessness, key Democratic leaders are still wary of impeaching him. The same week she said he was “self-impeachable,” Pelosi also said “Trump is goading us to impeach him.” She continued: “He knows that it would be very divisive in the country, but he doesn’t really care. He just wants to solidify his base.” Pelosi believes impeachment would backfire and help Trump, raising his chances of re-election.

Impeachment is so rare in American history that it’s difficult to draw broad conclusions about its political impact, but congressional investigations are common and there’s no evidence of this backlash effect. The belief that says otherwise suggests a risk aversion that may prove counterproductive.

I have been revisiting a few popular histories of the Civil War, both for personal interest and future work. It’s almost impossible to count all of the connections to make between that period, Reconstruction and present-day political life. But there’s one event, or series of events, that stands out as a potentially useful analogy for thinking about the Democratic Party’s decision-making as it prepares, again, to face Trump in a presidential election.

In January 1862, after weeks of prodding from President Abraham Lincoln, Gen. George B. McClellan — at that point the commanding general of the United States Army as well as commander of the Army of the Potomac — submitted plans for a spring offensive against the Confederate garrison at Manassas, Va.

McClellan was a talented organizer but an infamously cautious battlefield leader. He believed Confederates held the tactical advantage at Manassas, with their strong fortifications and an army of nearly equal size. Instead of direct engagement with the rebels, he planned to send his force of 100,000 men down the Chesapeake Bay to the mouth of the Rappahannock River, placing Union forces between the Confederate garrison and Richmond, Va. The rebel general, Joseph E. Johnston, would have to head south, an 80-mile march from Manassas. By then, McClellan believed, the Army of the Potomac would have either captured the Confederate capital or forced Johnston into a battle on ground of McClellan’s choosing.

But Johnston anticipated this maneuver and withdrew his forces to a position behind the Rappahannock, forcing McClellan to improvise. When Union forces eventually surveyed the evacuated Confederate position at Manassas, they found modest defenses, not the impenetrable fortress McClellan feared. “The fancied impregnability of the position turns out to be a sham,” a newspaper correspondent wrote. “Utterly dispirited, ashamed, and humiliated,” wrote another reporter, “I return from this visit to the rebel stronghold, feeling that their retreat is our defeat.”

McClellan’s new plan was a landing and assault on the peninsula formed by the York and James rivers. He pulled off the logistics. But when half of his army approached rebel defenses near Yorktown, Va., he hesitated. McClellan believed he was at a disadvantage, if not outnumbered. In reality, his 55,000 men greatly outnumbered the roughly 13,000 Confederate defenders. Lincoln urged him to attack and warned that with “delay the enemy will relatively gain upon you.” But a wary McClellan opted for an artillery siege instead.

This pattern would repeat itself over the course of the campaign, with McClellan overestimating Confederate strength and opening his armies up to attack and defeat. At the Battle of Seven Pines outside of Richmond, Union armies sustained heavy casualties but successfully repelled a rebel assault. Unnerved by the experience, McClellan settled in for a siege of the capital rather than press his advantage. Now led by General Robert E. Lee, Confederate armies fortified defenses around Richmond and counterattacked, ultimately breaking McClellan’s will to fight. The Union commander withdrew to a base on the James River before returning to Washington on Lincoln’s command. A potential strategic breakthrough had become a bona fide defeat that would prolong an already brutal war.

The way I see it, the Democrats are roughly in McClellan’s position. With the House of Representatives in hand, they have the power and authority to aggressively check the president’s behavior. Voters, who cast a vote against Trump as much as they did for a Democratic majority, may not expect it, but it’s hard to think they would oppose it. And Trump is unpopular, with a 42 percent approval rating despite presiding over strong economic growth.

Democrats have the upper hand, but they aren’t acting like it. Yes, they have taken action against the president — that’s why he has fought to stymie their investigations. But the logic of their arguments and accusations leads to impeachment, and there, they have flinched, worried that the public — or at least Republican voters — will rally to his side. Instead of a direct confrontation using everything at their disposal, Democrats want to maneuver around the president as if there’s another path to victory.

But there isn’t. The next election will be about Trump. His base, as well as most Republican voters, will almost certainly be with him. What Democrats need is the confidence of their position. At this stage, when most Americans say they won’t vote for Trump in 2020, they have the public. They have evidence of wrongdoing. They have all the tools they need to seize the initiative and center the next year of political conflict on the president’s contempt for the Constitution and the welfare of the American people.

On April 9, 1862, an agitated Lincoln sent McClellan a telegram, urging him to move against Confederate defenses. “I beg to assure you that I have never written you, or spoken to you, in greater kindness of feeling than now, nor with a fuller purpose to sustain you, so far as in my most anxious judgment, I consistently can. But you must act.” McClellan refused, the Confederacy claimed the field, and the Union paid the price.

Oh and by the way, the country was nearly destroyed.

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Trump welcomes Europe’s most explicitly anti-Semitic leader to the White House

Published by digby on May 13, 2019

Trump welcomes Europe’s most explicitly anti-Semitic leader to the White House

by digby

We all know that the following is what Trump finds admirable about Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban which is why he invited him to White House when neither Obama or Bush ever did — and for good reason:

With all the handwringing about Muslim congresswomen you’d think that the big GOP defenders of Jews would at least feel a little bit leery of this:

It’s pretty clear what he talking about there isn’t it?

If you think it’s safe to live in a modern fascist state then I’m sure that’s true.

I wouldn’t.

Update: 

Re-upping this from a few months back:

I’ve written about this before but I think it’s worth repeating. This piece at the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage is well worth reading. It discusses how a country in the heart of Europe has recently devolved from democracy to autocracy, using methods that are far more subtle than the historical examples with which we are most familiar.

Since coming to power in 2010, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has undermined key democratic institutions in his country. He’s attacked foreign-funded nongovernmental organizations, worked to tighten his control over courts and forced a leading private university out of the country.

But Orban has rarely done the things typically associated with autocracy. His government hasn’t banned any opposition candidates, and few have been attacked. Hungary holds no political prisoners. No journalists have been arrested. The country continues to hold relatively clean multiparty elections with virtually no outright fraud.

According to standard conceptions of democracy — which focus on violations of civil liberties, including freedom of speech, assembly and the press — Hungary’s status as an autocracy is ambiguous. The two most widely used indexes of democracy — conducted by Freedom House and Polity — continue to code Hungary as democratic.

Clearly, Hungary is not a democracy. But understanding why requires a nuanced understanding of the line between democracy and autocracy.

Democracy requires a level playing field

In our work on hybrid or what we call competitive authoritarian regimes, we show how democracy can be fundamentally compromised even without obvious civil liberties violations or electoral fraud. Leaders can create an “uneven playing field” by using administrative powers to strengthen their party and systematically deny the opposition access to crucial resources, media or state institutions. These autocrats submit to meaningful multiparty elections — but engage in serious democratic abuse.

[Should you worry about American democracy? Here’s what our new poll finds.]

In any democracy, elected officials have advantages over their challengers, including an easier time attracting media coverage and business support, because the government can deliver resources and policy benefits. But an uneven playing field means leaders use those advantages in ways that profoundly impair the opposition’s ability to compete. Let’s look at how that works.

First, leaders may systematically prevent opposition parties from gaining financial resources. Former Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma, for example, regularly ordered tax authorities in the 1990s and 2000s to audit businesses that financed the opposition. Governing parties may also create a biased news media. In Malaysia, all major private newspapers and private television stations were controlled by individuals or firms linked to the governing party.

Governing parties may also manipulate the rules to disadvantage the opposition. The most common example is gerrymandering — drawing election districts where the governing party is far more likely to win. A country is not a democracy when gerrymandering makes it all but impossible for the opposition to win national power.

Finally, ruling parties may pack judiciaries, electoral commissions and other nominally independent bodies to ensure that the incumbent will win critical electoral, legal or other disputes.

Authoritarianism, Hungarian style

Orban’s Hungary is a prime example of a competitive autocracy with an uneven playing field. In 2010, Orban’s Fidesz party won 53 percent of the vote and 68 percent of parliamentary seats. Since then, the party has increasingly denied opposition access to resources necessary to compete for power.

First, Fidesz infiltrated much of the state bureaucracy. By 2012, Fidesz loyalists were already entrenched in every corner of the state, as Miklós Bánkuti, Gábor Halmai and Kim Lane Scheppele documented — including in the constitutional court, budget council, electoral commission, national judicial office, state audit office, public prosecutor’s office and national bank. That brings significant advantages. For example, in the 2014 elections, the electoral commission rejected a wide range of complaints on inconsistent and formalistic grounds.

Next, Fidesz now controls most of the news media, dominating the staffing of major state media outlets — and driving away most international media groups. For example, in 2014, a pro-government media company borrowed from two banks with government ties to buy Origo.hu, a leading news website that had been highly critical of the government. Orban’s allies now control more than 500 media outlets, making it increasingly difficult for critical voices to reach large audiences.

The government has been able to influence news coverage by selectively distributing government advertising. Meanwhile, independent media have trouble attracting advertisers, because companies fear government repercussions. For example, after Fidesz’s election in 2010, many companies stopped advertising on the opposition broadcaster Klubradio, fearing political consequences. Many opposition and independent news outlets have had to shut down. The dearth of visible coercion has allowed the government to portray such closures as the outgrowth of objective market forces rather than autocratic pressure.

Finally, Fidesz has changed the electoral rules in ways that make it easier for the party to dominate. That includes significant gerrymandering — splitting off constituencies with a leftist majority to dilute the opposition vote.

Fidesz’s opposition is weak for many reasons having nothing to do with Orban’s abuse of power — including scandals and economic problems from the 2000s, when opposition leaders last held power. But the uneven playing field creates a daunting obstacle to opposition victory at the ballot box.

The advantages of an uneven playing field

Killing a journalist or firing on crowds of protesters can easily rally international opinion and turn an autocrat into a pariah. But few notice or care if party supporters infiltrate the electoral commission or a pro-government entrepreneur uses government funds to take control over an opposition website. And using the legal system to force out independent voices enables the government to argue that it has not abused power. For example, after forcing a leading independent university out of Hungary, the government argued that this was the result of a “perfectly reasonable requirement under Hungary’s legislation.”

Fidesz’s ambiguous tactics have succeeded. Most importantly, the European Union has, with a few exceptions, failed to confront Orban’s government about its democratic backsliding. As long as Orban is able to maintain such ambiguity, he is unlikely to face serious consequences for his country’s democratic failures.


Here in the US we have seen a decades-long right-wing strategy to dishonestly raise doubts about the press and the electoral system. Until recently our institutions were holding fairly well.

For instance, we all knew the electoral system had systematically excluded blacks, but the disagreement wasn’t about whether it was happening but rather whether it was the right thing to do. As the country became less overtly racist over time, we instituted some legal barriers to doing that.  That’s changed. The conservative Supremes struck down the voting rights act and the GOP is right back at suppressing the votes of racial and ethnic minorities in order to maintain their power.

Likewise, we haven’t before had one party entirely in thrall to an openly partisan media operation which is now engaged in total disinformation on a daily basis as Fox is.  And in the next few years we will see what happens when the judiciary is populated by right-wing extremists across the federal courts.

We aren’t as far gone as Hungary. Our federalist system prevents something like that happening at all levels all at once. And the fact that Donald Trump is a cretinous moron rather than a savvy operator like Orban makes this move more difficult along with the GOP as a whole which has gone insane. But the system is being tested as never before.




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The natural successor to Trump isn’t Mike Pence

Published by digby on May 13, 2019

The natural successor to Trump isn’t Mike Pence

by digby

… it’s this guy:

He is much, much smarter than Trump. But he’s just as malevolent in many of the same ways. He’d be much better at enacting the far-right agenda than Trump is, and Trump’s not doing badly at it. He won’t engender the same hostility from the media, that’s for sure. And everyone can go back to pretending that hypocritical piety is something we have to takeseriously.

He is a serious danger, the prototype of the new Republican leader post-Trump. I could easily see a Tom Cotton-Liz Cheney ticket. You don’t even want to think about what those two could do to us.

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Trump is certainly making a power grab. But he’s not the one driving the train

Published by digby on May 13, 2019

Trump is certainly making a power grab. But he’s not the one driving the train

by digby

Jonathan Bernstein has some of the same concerns I’ve been articulating for a while about Trump’s power grab. The difference is that while I’m sure that Trump wants more power, I don’t think he’s driving this train. It’s being driven by the “Unitary Executive” Republicans who see their chance to test out the theory with a friendly judiciary, cowed GOP congress and a president who’s willing to push the envelope because he doesn’t understand or care about the possible fall-out. IN any case, it’s pretty clear to me that there’s more going on here than Trump’s ego:

If President Donald Trump thinks he’s been totally exonerated, as he says, why is he stonewalling Congress? Why wouldn’t he want special counsel Robert Mueller to testify about a report that supposedly clears him? Why not encourage all the witnesses Mueller’s team spoke with to come forward? Why is he attempting to block 20 separate investigations, if he’s done nothing wrong?

Those are the very sensible questions the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent has been asking. One possible answer is that Trump is trying to hide information from Congress because it would only confirm the parts of Mueller’s report that weren’t exonerating at all. Although the probe didn’t establish a criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russian agents, it did find a whole lot of dubious choices and a whole lot of obstruction of justice. It would make sense if the president didn’t want further details of that misconduct made public.

What worries me is that there’s another possible answer, and it’s a lot worse.

What if Trump is stonewalling Congress because the lesson he took from the Mueller report is that his behavior was perfectly okay? That is, what if Trump isn’t pretending that he didn’t do the misdeeds detailed in the report? What if instead he thinks that Attorney General William Barr, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and other congressional Republicans are now willing to go along with a theory of presidential power so expansive and unrestricted that even John Yoo and other advocates of executive authority are alarmed?

Unfortunately, that theory fits with Rudy Giuliani’s perfectly open plan to pressure Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden. It also fits with a series of tweets and statements and actions by the president that appear to be a continuation of a cover-up. Perhaps Sargent is right: Trump knows how bad the underlying facts of the Mueller investigation are, and simply doesn’t want them scrutinized. Or perhaps it’s something worse. I don’t know.

But the biggest questions are the same either way: Are Republican members of Congress really going to endorse the idea that presidential campaigns can urge foreign governments to interfere in U.S. elections? And do they really think that the president should use the full weight of the criminal justice system to protect himself and go after his political opponents? If so, are they so certain they’ll never be among those opponents?

Yes, they are going to endorse it because they know that the Democrats will self-police and if they don’t the Republicans will fall on them like a pack of starving hyenas without a care in the world for their own hypocrisy. They are shameless which is the true power they have discovered.

If the Democrats don’t use all of their institutional power to stop this, Trump will welcome more foreign involvement and will likely also back vote rigging on some pretext of “voter fraud” as they did in Georgia in 2018. The executive branch has tremendous power and the states in the hands of Republicans will get the same signal.

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QOTD: Lindsey Graham

Published by digby on May 13, 2019

QOTD: Lindsey Graham

by digby

Graham told Fox News Sunday:

If I were Donald Trump Jr.’s lawyer, I would tell him, you don’t need to go back into this environment anymore. You’ve been there for hours and hours and nothing being alleged here changes the outcome of the Mueller investigation. I would call it a day.

That’s the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee telling the son of the president to ignore a Senate subpoena, issued on a bipartisan basis by a Republican colleague.

He should be censured. Instead he’ll be applauded.

Has anyone ever sold himself out so brazenly?

No:

By the way, Chris Cilizza is, as I speak, chuckling about this and pointing out that politicians often flip-flop.

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What are the risks of *not* impeaching Trump?

Published by digby on May 13, 2019

What are the risks of not impeaching Trump?

by digby


My Salon column this morning:

The president of the United States blew up an epic tweetstorm this past week-end hitting on subjects from the trade talks with China to his son’s subpoena from the Senate Intelligence committee and a number of others in between. It was a manic performance that returned repeatedly to one subject, however. He continues to publicly vent his spleen about the Russia investigation and the Mueller Report even taking the risky step of contradicting his former White House Counsel Don McGahn:

He was clearly glued to his television all weekend and worked himself up into a frenzy, finally culminating with this final series late on Sunday evening:

His last tweet said:

….overthrow the President through an illegal coup. (Recommended by previous DOJ)

In other words, he’s not only blaming the last administration, he’s now turned his aim at the current FBI Director Christopher Wray, who said last week that he didn’t consider what the FBI did during the last campaign to be “spying.” So now he is accused of protecting people who tried to overthrow the president through an illegal coup.

We’ve long since come to the point at which the media just figuratively rolls its eyes at Trump’s comments and twitter feed, as if its some kind of primal scream therapy for the man. Much of the country probably does the same thing. But the people who follow him take this seriously and they have been convinced that the Special Counsel’s investigation wasn’t just a “witch hunt” but an attempted coup. And anyone in government who says otherwise will soon be in the crosshairs.

This is a president who has already been named as an unindicted co-defendant in a felony for which his former lawyer is now serving time in a federal prison. The Mueller investigation found that he and his campaign welcomed the sabotage of his opponent in the 2016 election which falls under the category of grossly unethical even if it isn’t strictly illegal. And there is little doubt that he repeatedly obstructed justice during that probe. The Special Counsel, precluded from bringing charges by DOJ policy, clearly meant for his report to be a “roadmap” for the House of Representatives to consider an impeachment inquiry.

So far the Democratic majority has balked at doing that because they believe it presents too big a risk. Some are fighting the last war, believing that the Clinton impeachment worked against the Republicans and would do the same to them. (This will come as a surprise to President George W. Bush.) Others believe they will be punished for “over-reaching” and that Trump will garner sympathy from people who don’t currently support him. A few contend that this is a big trap laid by the master strategist Trump who knows he will become much more popular if he’s engaged in an impeachment fight. But the most common excuse is that impeachment would simply be too divisive and the country just can’t deal with that.

All of these reasons are based upon the simple calculation that since Republicans are so blindly partisan there is no chance to convict Trump in a Senate trial, which requires a 2/3rds vote to remove him. This means that an impeachment proceeding will result in a failure to remove the president, which Democrats think people will interpret as more evidence of his omnipotence. And that could happen, no doubt about it. Trump will certainly spin it that way and the GOP seems ready to echo all of his ridiculous boasts. It’s a risk.

As Martin Longman at The Washington Monthly pointed out in this post, the problem is a result of a mistake by the founders: the failure to properly reckon with factionalism, a tendency they desperately wanted to avoid, after having observed centuries of civil wars in Europe. But they clearly failed. Political parties emerged almost immediately and have been part of the system ever since. There have been terrible periods of partisan strife but with the exception of the immediate post civil war presidency of Andrew Johnson, there were no presidential impeachment proceedings until 40 years ago. Perhaps that was a function of working norms of political behavior that kept presidents and their partisan opposition in the congress from pushing that envelope. If so, it’s clear those norms are gone.
We are seriously contemplating a third impeachment out of the last eight presidencies. T

In all the recent cases it was one faction, the Republicans, that busted the norms. Nixon committed high crimes, the Clinton impeachment was a GOP farce which the public rejected in massive numbers and now we have Trump. In all the cases, however, no president has yet been convicted. (Nixon resigned but you have to wonder if he might have been able to tough it out after all.) What all these failed impeachments demonstrate is that as long as a president can hold one-third of the Senate plus one, they are immune from removal or legal punishment. The point is that our system has an extremely poor mechanism for removing a president who commits high crimes and misdemeanors.

Donald Trump has decided to push that weakness to the limit. He isn’t just exercising executive privilege. He’s defying all congressional oversight. The White House has refused to respond to any requests from the House of Representatives at all since the new Congress was sworn in. He and his henchmen have surmised that the Democrats will flail about impotently, demanding witnesses and issuing subpoenas and the public will reward Trump for his strength and defiance.

If that’s true, we have a much bigger problem. And it raises the question: what are the risks if the Democrats don’t impeach?

On a political level, consider whether or not Trump’s criminal behavior and defiance of congressional oversight results in nothing but delayed court cases and handwringing in the press. Will he not get just as much credit from his base for resisting the Democrats’ demands as he would for fending off an impeachment conviction by the good graces of Senator Majority Leader Mitch McConnell? He technically “wins” either way but I think it’s debatable as to which benefits him more.

But the stakes are much bigger than just the short term political considerations. If Republicans are able to demonstrate that Democrats won’t move even in the face of a president like Trump, I think we can be very sure that further Republican presidents will no longer even bother to observe the law much less the norms and rules that have governed us since the beginning. They’ve been heading this way for some time.

 Regardless of whether or not the Senate can protect the president from conviction, the risk of failing to impeach Trump is greater than the risk of doing it. If the Democrats refuse to even open an impeachment inquiry with all the evidence they have at hand, it’s pretty clear that the entire concept is dead. At that point we will have shown that a president is literally unimpeachable and is therefore above the law. Trump won’t be the last to take advantage of that fact.

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