Direct from the wingnut bubble
by digby
This could be satire but according to the tweeter it was first found on Reddit in 2017 as a response to Trump’s comments about preferring people who don’t get captured.
I don’t know how many people have seen it or believe it. But you know there probably are a few.
Personally, I don’t see all that much difference between that and this mainstream Trump kitsch:
Earnestness might just work
by digby
This fine piece by Quinta Jurecic in The Atlantic perfectly lays out the necessity for impeachment. She starts off by quoting Lincoln’s Lyceum Address in which he basically said that only Americans destroy the country by betraying the constitution and then discusses the current situation in that context:
The description of the United States as a “nation of freemen” three decades before emancipation was a bit of a stretch. But there is wisdom in Lincoln’s warning. It has been on my mind lately, as the country debates the question of impeachment in the wake of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report.
Here are the facts: The president is unsuited to his office. That should have been obvious well before the release of the special counsel’s report, but the text of the report, even with a smattering of redactions, makes his unfitness brutally clear. He shows no understanding of the responsibilities of the presidency. He delights in the abuse of his power. As Memorial Day approaches, he is reportedly planning to celebrate the holiday by pardoning, among other service members accused of war crimes, a Navy SEAL scheduled to stand trial for the murder of multiple unarmed Iraqi civilians.
To respond appropriately to Donald Trump’s behavior is to risk appearing absurd, because his own conduct is so extreme that any proportionate reaction could be deemed an overreaction. The industry of anti–anti-Trumpism is devoted to describing opposition to the president as hysterical—but an emotional excess of anger and sadness is exactly what this excessive presidency merits. What this means, in part, is that reaction to the president muted by circumstance or a desire to appear “reasonable” will always be insufficient. The only adequate response to Trump is the cry of protest. But every protest ends, even as the outrages that provoked it persist.
There is a constitutional mechanism for sounding that outrage in a more enduring way. It’s the impeachment process.
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi remains firmly opposed to beginning impeachment proceedings, even as multiple Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee have called for the start of an inquiry and one Republican, Representative Justin Amash, has outright declared that the president should be impeached. Pelosi’s argument appears to be that there is no need to begin this process; that Democrats can obtain information through litigation without resorting to an impeachment inquiry; and that such an inquiry risks shoring up support for Trump as the country heads toward the next presidential election.
This is a very practical argument. But there is value to an impeachment inquiry—and to impeachment—as an act in itself, regardless of whether the Senate will convict or what the president’s supporters will think.
Pelosi and the more hardheaded Democratic strategists regard this position as overly idealistic. That’s the point.
I have returned again and again in recent weeks not just to the Lyceum Address, but also to Albert Camus’ The Rebel—the philosopher’s attempt to grapple with what it means to live morally in an absurd world. For Camus, the foundational human experience is one of outrage: a “fruitless struggle with facts,” an “incoherent pronouncement” of pain and frustration with injustice.
Camus’ reasoning can apply to an almost endless range of situations, from frustration with a corrupt political regime to rage at the inevitability of death and the silence of God. Much is absurd about the Trump administration in a colloquial sense: Consider the spectacle of a tweeting commander in chief, the most powerful man in the world spending his time insisting on falsehoods and sniping over obvious insults. But his presidency is also absurd in the philosophical sense. What better to emphasize the gap between the desire for the Constitution to mean something and the reality of the document as some words on paper than the scene of Donald J. Trump swearing an oath to “faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and … preserve, protect and defend the Constitution”?
The Constitution is what Camus would call a “closed universe”—a space of “coherence and unity” in an incoherent world, in which words carry weight and actions have consequences. Trump’s disrespect for the law is a reminder of how fragile that structure of meaning can be. For that reason, there is a real service in using impeachment proceedings to push back against the notion that, in the parlance of the internet, “lol nothing matters.”
Susan Hennessey and I have argued that the House of Representatives has a duty to begin an impeachment inquiry insofar as representatives swear an oath to “support and defend the Constitution” and to “well and faithfully” execute the duties of their office. Another way of saying this is that an impeachment inquiry depends on an insistence that this oath really means something—and that the president’s oath means something as well. Keith Whittington, likewise, has written that impeachment is partially a matter of “norm creation and norm reinforcement.” And Yoni Appelbaum argued that the impeachment of Andrew Johnson “drew the United States closer to living up to its ideals.”
Gerald Ford, as a member of the House of Representatives, argued in 1970 that an impeachable offense is “whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history.” He was not wrong that impeachment is a political process; it is, after all, entrusted to Congress. To treat the subject as an entirely political calculation, though—as Ford did and as Pelosi appears to be doing now—is to slouch toward nihilism. Treating the words high crimes and misdemeanors as if they hold real significance, however, is a way of protesting that the world should not be as it inevitably is.
This is perhaps overly earnest. But there is a real humanity and purity of purpose in asserting earnestness against the void.
The House should take up the task of examining the president’s conduct as detailed in the Mueller report and evaluating whether it is fitting of the person who holds the nation’s highest office. It should investigate the many other instances of potentially impeachable conduct by the president, from tweets to pardons. It should debate how to understand what constitutes a “high crime and misdemeanor,” and whether relatively minor offenses can accumulate over time into something worthy of impeachment. The House should fulfill its constitutional duties and the process of constitutional interpretation, which by its nature is a declaration that the Constitution holds some significance.
Earnestness is a needed antidote to this brute exercise of executive power. And anyway, it’s all we’ve got. They have the market cornered on cynicism.
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How can the government ever function with people like this?
by digby
Fox News host Chris Wallace on Sunday forced Senator Lindsey Graham to watch a 1998 clip of himself talking about the dangers of ignoring subpoenas from Congress during an era when he was leading the impeachment effort against former President Bill Clinton.
During Graham’s appearance on Fox News Sunday earlier today, Wallace challenged the Republican senator on his past comments about impeachment, which appears to contradict his current stance on calls by Democrats to impeach President Donald Trump.
“You call all of what’s going on in Washington a political circus, but you took a different view back when you were leading the impeachment effort against Clinton back in the late ’90s. At that time, you said that any president, and you talked specifically about Clinton and Richard Nixon, who defied Congress when it came to subpoenas was in danger of impeachment,” Wallace said, before airing an old clip of Graham’s comments made in Capitol Hill.
“You’re becoming the judge and jury. It is not your job to tell us what we need. It is your job to comply with the things we need to provide oversight over you,” Graham can be seen saying in the December 18, 1998 clip. At the time, he was a member of the House of Representatives and one of the managers — de facto prosecutors — in Clinton’s impeachment trial before the Senate.
“Question: Why is it an impeachable offense for Clinton or Nixon back then to ignore congressional subpoenas but it’s okay for President Trump to do now?” the host asked Graham.
“Well, there’s two things here,” Graham explained. “[Special Counsel Robert] Mueller’s investigation was a special counsel appointed to find out if the president committed a crime; if he colluded with the Russians; if he obstructed justice. The president gave 1.4 million documents to Muller. Everybody around the president was allowed to testify. He never claimed executive privilege. He complied, no cover-up, worked with Mueller. Mueller’s the final word on this for me.”
“If Clinton had stiffed Ken Starr, that’s different,” the Republican senator continued. “What [Democratic House Judiciary Chairman Jerrold] Nadler is doing is trying to destroy the president and his family. If I were the president, I would fight back against this political revenge coming out of the House.”
“Mueller was the man of the law. Mueller was an independent voice that we all trusted to be fair. I don’t trust House Democrats to be fair. They’re trying to redo the Mueller report, they’re trying to make up other stuff and at the end of the day, it will be political suicide for them to impeach,” he added.
He knows he’s making no sense. But he knows he doesn’t have to. The GOP argument comes down to a simple “They’re out to get our Dear Leader!!” and it’s extending beyond the absurd FBI “spygate” (which they weirdly never deployed before the election) to this news angle which has the Democratic House is simply seeking “revenge” by doing what any normal congress would be expected to do in this situation.
Graham says Mueller is the final word on this and Mueller didn’t say if Trump had obstructed justice because of the DOJ policy that he couldn’t be indicted. In other words, he saw his mission as gathering evidence and only stating a conclusion that the president had not committed a specific crime — something he was unable to do in the obstruction case — and leaving the evidence for the congress (or other prosecutors once the president was out of office) to follow up on. Graham understands this, he’s just lying.
As for his weird statement that “if Clinton had stiffed Ken Starr, that’s different, it literally makes no sense. Clinton was accused of exactly the sort of cover-up that Trump is accused of, except that in Clinton’s case it was over some trivial personal nonsense and in Trump’s case it’s attempting to stop an investigation into a foreign assault on the United States electoral system.
And yes, he understands that too.
This situation is a test of character for everyone and the Republicans nearly across the board are failing it so badly that it’s hard to see how we can ever have a functioning government with any of them still in it. How could anyone think they will ever act in good faith again? On anything? After all, if they were this willing to sell out their own beliefs, much less the security of the nation, they cannot ever be trusted to care more about the nation than their own political power. We’ve always known this on some level. Now the truth is unavoidable.
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It can’t happen here? Oh yes it can.
by digby
I posted this article earlier but I thought this Memorial Day might be a good day to re-post this part of it.
As a historian specializing in the Holocaust, Nazi Germany, and Europe in the era of the world wars, I have been repeatedly asked about the degree to which the current situation in the United States resembles the interwar period and the rise of fascism in Europe. I would note several troubling similarities and one important but equally troubling difference.
In the 1920s, the US pursued isolationism in foreign policy and rejected participation in international organizations like the League of Nations. America First was America alone, except for financial agreements like the Dawes and Young Plans aimed at ensuring that our “free-loading” former allies could pay back their war loans. At the same time, high tariffs crippled international trade, making the repayment of those loans especially difficult. The country witnessed an increase in income disparity and a concentration of wealth at the top, and both Congress and the courts eschewed regulations to protect against the self-inflicted calamities of free enterprise run amok. The government also adopted a highly restrictionist immigration policy aimed at preserving the hegemony of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants against an influx of Catholic and Jewish immigrants. (Various measures barring Asian immigration had already been implemented between 1882 and 1917.) These policies left the country unable to respond constructively to either the Great Depression or the rise of fascism, the growing threat to peace, and the refugee crisis of the 1930s.
Today, President Trump seems intent on withdrawing the US from the entire post–World War II structure of interlocking diplomatic, military, and economic agreements and organizations that have preserved peace, stability, and prosperity since 1945. His preference for bilateral relations, conceived as zero-sum rivalries in which he is the dominant player and “wins,” overlaps with the ideological preference of Steve Bannon and the so-called alt-right for the unfettered self-assertion of autonomous, xenophobic nation-states—in short, the pre-1914 international system. That “international anarchy” produced World War I, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Great Depression, the fascist dictatorships, World War II, and the Holocaust, precisely the sort of disasters that the post–World War II international system has for seven decades remarkably avoided.
In threatening trade wars with allies and adversaries alike, Trump justifies increased tariffs on our allies on the specious pretext that countries like Canada are a threat to our national security. He combines his constant disparagement of our democratic allies with open admiration of authoritarians. His naive and narcissistic confidence in his own powers of personal diplomacy and his faith in a handshake with the likes of Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un recall the hapless Neville Chamberlain (a man in every other regard different from Trump). Fortunately the US is so embedded in the international order it created after 1945, and the Republican Party and its business supporters are sufficiently alarmed over the threat to free trade, that Trump has not yet completed his agenda of withdrawal, though he has made astounding progress in a very short time.
A second aspect of the interwar period with all too many similarities to our current situation is the waning of the Weimar Republic. Paul von Hindenburg, elected president of Germany in 1925, was endowed by the Weimar Constitution with various emergency powers to defend German democracy should it be in dire peril. Instead of defending it, Hindenburg became its gravedigger, using these powers first to destroy democratic norms and then to ally with the Nazis to replace parliamentary government with authoritarian rule. Hindenburg began using his emergency powers in 1930, appointing a sequence of chancellors who ruled by decree rather than through parliamentary majorities, which had become increasingly impossible to obtain as a result of the Great Depression and the hyperpolarization of German politics.
Because an ever-shrinking base of support for traditional conservatism made it impossible to carry out their authoritarian revision of the constitution, Hindenburg and the old right ultimately made their deal with Hitler and installed him as chancellor. Thinking that they could ultimately control Hitler while enjoying the benefits of his popular support, the conservatives were initially gratified by the fulfillment of their agenda: intensified rearmament, the outlawing of the Communist Party, the suspension first of freedom of speech, the press, and assembly and then of parliamentary government itself, a purge of the civil service, and the abolition of independent labor unions. Needless to say, the Nazis then proceeded far beyond the goals they shared with their conservative allies, who were powerless to hinder them in any significant way.
The article goes on to outline all the differences between then and now, and there are many. It’s not 1932 and history never repeats itself exactly. But you can see certain parallels. And it’s not just Germany. There are disturbing parallels between this current period and other totalitarian regimes in the making. This piece by Michael Tomasky in the Daily Beast will make the hair on the back of your neck stand up:
I’ve been trying to tell people, with varying degrees of success, that next year’s campaign is going to be—by far—the most ruthless and dishonest campaign that any living American has seen. Some people take me seriously. But most say something along the lines that it can hardly get any worse.
Oh yes it can. It can get a lot worse. And if you want to see how, watch this clip of Corey Lewandowski on Fox News Thursday night, via Josh Marshall’s Twitter feed:
Trump Advisor Lewandowski: Biden behind Steele Dossier; Comey, McCabe, Strzok and Page will all be on trial "March or April of the next year." pic.twitter.com/cDVU3rnYXd— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) May 24, 2019
Here’s the transcript, although you really have to study his face and eyes and hear his voice to get the full Weimar effect: “They should be fearful, and I’ll tell you why. The person who has gotten a pass on this so far is Joe Biden. Because I believe that the investigation which was launched came from somewhere inside the White House to greenlight Clapper, Comey, and Brennan to start this investigation into Donald Trump for no valid reason. We now know the State Department, we’ve seen the contemporaneous emails that were put into place after Victoria Nuland did a meeting with Christopher Steele, then notified the FBI this person had no credibility. But it continued. Because it came from the highest levels of the government.
“And Joe Biden has not answered what he knew and when he knew it of how this investigation began. And when Attorney General Barr and Mr. Horowitz release that report in approximately a month I think we’re gonna see additional criminal referrals, with McCabe getting another referral, Comey a referral, Strzok and Page, James Baker, possibly Bruce Orr, and other people we haven’t even meant [sic] as household names yet—but criminal referrals. And I think what we’re gonna see, Gregg, is in March or April of next year, Jamey Comey, Andy McCabe, Strzok and Page will be on trial for the crimes they have committed against the Fourth Amendment, against this president, and we can’t wait.”
“Gregg” was Gregg Jarrett, sitting in for Lou Dobbs; he added helpfully as Lewandowski was winding down that John Brennan and James Clapper were due for their time in the barrel as well.
[…]
But the second part of the rant was even more chilling. The plan here is to wait for the report from the Justice Department inspector general (that’s Horowitz) to hit next month, pry whatever passages they can out of that report to go on Pravda TV, and stitch together the appearance of a vast, deep state conspiracy to take Trump down.Then wait again, this time for Attorney General Bill Barr to do his part. Trump’s announcement Thursday that Barr would be in charge of releasing the intel on the Trump campaign probe is a staggering development, something we’ve never seen the likes of. Barr, who already demonstrated he’ll cherry pick evidence on Trump’s behalf, can pluck out whatever evidence he wants and leave buried whatever evidence he wants to leave buried.
It’s almost beyond comprehension. Read this tweet from Evan McMullin, the former GOP Hill staffer and presidential candidate:
But with everything filtered through a state television network and no Republicans in Congress willing to utter a syllable of protest, there will be no accountability.
And then, next spring (what a coincidence, election year!), Barr’s Justice Department can bring indictments against James Comey, Andy McCabe, Peter Strzok, and Lisa Page for—well, they’ll come up with something. And maybe John Brennan and James Clapper too.
Welcome, folks, to the first Stalinist show trials in the history of our country.
Justice has been miscarried in this country in a hundred different ways a thousand different times, usually with poor people, black people, or political radicals getting the short end of the stick. That’s not defensible, but it’s old hat, and it happens everywhere, not just in America.
What we have not seen in America, not even during the McCarthy era, is an orchestrated effort of this sort with the goal, if Lewandowski is to be believed, and I don’t see why he shouldn’t be, of sending political opponents to jail.
This is not Stalin’s Russia. They may not be able to pull it off. They may get an unlucky draw on the judge. A jury of Peter Strzok’s peers may determine he did nothing wrong.
But it won’t be for lack of trying. And if all goes to plan, the trials will stretch into the summer, into the fall, close to November. You can’t miss the point of that.
So take this seriously. On Friday, Trump accused Comey, McCabe, Strzok, and Page of “treason.” For investigating a presidential campaign. Treason is aiding an enemy during wartime. And is punishable by death. Trump used the word specifically to signal to his attack dogs that anything is fair game.
So yes, next year’s campaign will be a nightmare beyond the imagination of any novelist who has yet tried to capture and describe totalitarian, hall-of-mirrors horror, from Koestler to Orwell to Kundera or anyone else. They were all describing how a regime gets away with it in a totalitarian state. But these people will be getting away with it in a democracy.
This is the weekend we honor the men and women who’ve laid down their lives to keep that democracy breathing. Today, it is in serious danger of being suffocated. What would we say today to the men who stormed Omaha Beach; if they could speak to us and wanted to be reassured that the sacrifice they knew they were charging into was worth it, how would we tell them that the government they died to protect is now in the hands of at least some people who might well have fought on the other side? Contemplating that is the necessary patriotic gesture of this Memorial Day.
Don’t think it can’t happen here. Look what’s already happening.
I don’t know if they’ll get as far as show trials — in this first term. If they get a second I think you can absolutely depend upon it. And people who think they can’t possibly win a second term should really take a gut check. Even if they don’t have a majority of the population, they are showing they have a total willingness to win by any means necessary. That is not far-fetched at all. After all, there was a huge investigation showing that the Trump campaign welcomed the cheating and have been working feverishly to ensure that nothing inhibits such cheating in the future. Now they are engaged in an Orwellian propaganda campaign to say it was the other side that committed the crimes they themselves committed.
The Democrats winning in 2020 is anything but assured, even if Trump goes into the election with a 35% approval rating.
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QOTD: Sarah Huckabee Sanders
by digby
On Meet the Press this morning, Chuck Todd asked why Americans should not be concerned that the president of United States is essentially siding with a murderous authoritarian dictator over a former vice president in the United States:
SANDERS: Chuck, the president’s not siding with that. But I think they agree in their assessment of former Vice President Joe Biden. Again, the president’s focus in this process is the relationship he has and making sure we continue on the path towards denuclearization. … The president watched [Biden] and his administration with President Obama fail for eight years. He’s come in in two and a half, he’s cleaned up a lot of the messes that were left behind. We shouldn’t even be in the position that we’re in to have to deal with North Korea at the level we are if they had done their job in the first place.
They just say anything that comes into their heads with no regard for the consequences.
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Another foreign disaster
by digby
Helsinki remains the low point, but this is looking more and more like one of the big ones:
…After the two men strode to the podium on Monday afternoon, Mr. Abe declared that the friendship and alliance had been further cementedby a day on the golf course, inside the sumo arena and at a robatayaki dinner with their spouses. He said that he and Mr. Trump were “completely on the same page” on issues like trade and North Korea.
But Mr. Trump, after praising Japan’s hospitality and ancient culture, as well as Mr. Abe’s friendship, made it clear that he was there to put America, and in some cases his own grievances, first.
During the 40-minute news conference, Mr. Trump again shrugged off North Korea’s recent tests of short-range ballistic missiles, which, if fired at Japan, could kill thousands of civilians.
Mr. Trump had kicked off his four-day state visit the day before by making a similar declaration on Twitter, despite the fact that Mr. Abe and the president’s own national security adviser, John R. Bolton, had both called the tests a violation of United Nations Security Council resolutions.
“My people think it could have been a violation,” Mr. Trump told reporters, but he added that he was not “personally” concerned about the launches.
“Perhaps he wants to get attention, and perhaps not,” he said of the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, an autocrat with whom Mr. Trump has worked to forge warm relations in pursuit of a denuclearization agreement. “Who knows? All I know is there have been no nuclear tests, no long-range missiles going out. I think that someday we will have a deal.”
The president also bristled upon mention of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a hallmark of the Obama administration from which Mr. Trump withdrew the United States early in his presidency. “I have nothing to do with T.P.P.,” he said of the vast trade agreement championed by Japan, adding that “I’m not bound by anything.”
Additionally, Mr. Trump continued to nurse domestic grievances in front of his Japanese guests, taunting his Democratic enemies and reprising his denunciation of the special counsel’s Russia investigation.
The president refused to back down from a Twitter post a day earlier in which he took aim at Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic presidential candidate he is most concerned about. On Twitter, Mr. Trump appeared to praise Mr. Kim for calling Mr. Biden a “low I.Q. individual” — echoing Mr. Trump’s own words about the former vice president — after Mr. Biden had branded the North Korean leader a “tyrant.”
The tweet has earned Mr. Trump criticism back home, including among members of his own party, but in Tokyo, Mr. Trump did not seem concerned.
“Kim Jong-un made a statement that Joe Biden is a low-I.Q. individual,” Mr. Trump said. “He probably is, based on his record. I think I agree with him on that.”
He continued to fixate on Mr. Biden and what he called “the horrible Iran deal” that the Obama administration made.
“Joe Biden was a disaster,” he said. “His administration, with President Obama, basically a disaster when it came to so many things — economy, military, defense. They had a lot of problems; I’m not a fan.”
And, while I don’t blame Abe for this — what choice does he really have? — this is why Trump gets away with treating our allies like shit:
As Mr. Trump veered from topic to topic, Mr. Abe remained intent on praising the president and reinforcing the healthy state of their alliance.
At some point, quite soon, allies like Japan are going to have to make other arrangements. They cannot afford to count on the US. Look what we’ve put in charge.
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Distorting the Truth About Growing Anti-Semitism When The Facts are Staring You in the Face
by tristero
False equivalence at work in in the NY Times editorial offices:
For years, Europe maintained the comforting notion that it was earnestly confronting anti-Semitism after the horrors of the Holocaust. It now faces the alarming reality that anti-Semitism is sharply on the rise, often from the sadly familiar direction of the far right, but also from Islamists and the far left.
Whoever wrote this is consciously aware that is simply not so.
The clear implication is that anti-Semitism is becoming as influential and visible among “Islamists” and the “far left” as it is among the far right. But that is a gross and deliberate distortion of the facts. And I’m being kind here, because the proceeding grafs say this:
The worrisome trend was underscored by a report issued by the German government this month showing that anti-Semitic incidents in Germany had increased by almost 20 percent in 2018 from the previous year, to 1,799, with 69 classified as acts of violence. The most common offense was the use of the swastika and other illegal symbols; the rest ranged from online incitement and insults to arson, assault and murder.
Of the total, the report attributed 89 percent of the incidents to the far right.
Despite this — the use of the swastika, a far right symbol and the fact that nearly every single anti-Semitic offense reported was perpetrated by the far right — despite this, the Times writer(s) nevertheless repeat their utterly false equivalence of right, left, and Muslim:
What is clear is that these strains of anti-Semitism — from the right, from the left and from radical Muslims — have morphed into a resurgence of a blight that should have been eradicated long ago, and that is causing serious anxiety among Europe’s Jews.
What this does is minimize the exceedingly dangerous anti-Semitic actions of the far right, an extremist movement that currently has vastly greater political power throughout Europe and the US than any left-leaning or Islamist movement. And by minimizing the fact that anti-Semitism is an explicitly rightwing program, the Times misses the point, the rise in hateful actions directed against Jews and Muslims.
Look at it this way: although the term “anti-Semitism” is usually used to refer to hatred of Jews, Semites include both Jews and Muslims, according to Webster’s. Because (not coincidentally) both groups are the object of hateful actions by the far right in Europe and the US, it makes sense to combine incidents against Muslims and Jews together into the expression of a single bigotry. And if they were — if the statistics regarding the increase in anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish attacks were combined — the real danger of far right hate crimes would be much clearer.
The growth in theses dangerous incidents is a profoundly troubling problem and of course, bigoted, hateful actions are not confined to a single political/cultural/religious ideology. But the most prominent haters, the ones with real power to oppress and harm Jews and Muslims in Europe and the US are overwhelmingly from the right wing: white identity authoritarians who have taken over (or are poised to take over) many of the largest and most powerful nations in the world.
In short, the problem of bigoted hate crimes today, including anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim actions, remains primarily a right wing problem, the Times knows it, and yet they appear to have gone out of their way to avoid appearing to say so.
Playing “chicken” with the republic
by Tom Sullivan
Memorial Day honors those who died serving in the U.S. Armed Forces. Not in any particular conflict, but in defense of the republic. The holiday began in Charleston, SC, initiated by former slaves in memory of those who lost their lives freeing them in the course of the bloody fight to preserve the republic during its most serious crisis.
The crisis we face today at times feels no less dire. “A criminal administration” consolidates its power by undermining the very Constitution its leader swore an oath before the world to uphold. Obeying the law has always been an inconvenience to Donald Trump. The president is a man born and bred to treat the law as a cudgel against his enemies and otherwise irrelevant to restraining his appetites. He and his hirelings are bad faith incarnate.
Garrett Epps, professor of constitutional law at the University of Baltimore, writes, “The ongoing battle between this administration and the House committees is not, at heart, a legal dispute at all; it is an assertion by a president that the law and the Constitution are simply irrelevant when they conflict with his will.”
Defending the republic against Trump’s creeping autocracy are Democratic strategists in the House of Representatives led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi. In the face of increasing administration lawlessness and outright defiance of “black letter law,” Democrats seem determined to follow conventional rules in resisting an adversary waging an asymmetrical war against democracy.
Pelosi’s lieutenants appearing on Sunday talk shows clearly hew to her go-slow approach of stiff-arming allies on opening formal impeachment hearings.* Deferring until Donald Trump leaves them no other choice may provide cover for not appearing over-eager. Delaying hearings until Democrats see the whites of the president’s eye sockets could give televised impeachment hearings enhanced election-year impact as well. Then again, Democrats may be, one Twitter user wrote, “bringing Robert’s Rules of Order to a gun fight.”
“Legacy” Democrats for years have cowered before the prospect Republicans will brand their initiatives subversive or un-American. As if Republicans won’t anyway. Will Bunch worries (as I do) their caution has failed them again:
Waiting in a defensive crouch until an election in November 2020 is a terrible strategy, and not just because it’s too long to wait. It’s true a majority of voters will for now tell a pollster they don’t favor impeachment, but they also haven’t been presented the evidence in televised hearings as happened during Watergate. It’s also true that voters want action on issues. But they also trusted the people they elected to uphold the basic rule of law so that everyday folks don’t have to worry about it. We focus so much on issues – but voters care most about character.
And the character that voters admire most is courage.
The kind we honor on Memorial Day.
Norm Ornstein urges Democrats to display the kind of courage citizens will vote for:
You are trying to show impeachable offenses. Hold aggressive hearings with @benjaminwittes and some of the 900 prosecutors who signed the letter— let them lay out the evidence in stark terms. Then move to formal impeachment inquiry. Lay the right groundwork NOW.
The problem with the go-slow approach is that every day Democrats lay back, the Trump administration fortifies its position. Every day Democrats rely on the courts to show courage for them, they are taking fire that will become increasingly withering if not answered vigorously.
Paul Rosenberg and Ornstein believe flooding the zone is necessary to put the administration on the defensive before it gains the upper hand:
Up to now, “playing by the rules” has allowed for protracted delay and diffusion of attention, interest and understanding. Trump is a lifelong practitioner of twisting rules to his advantage. But Ornstein points out that the rules allow a dramatically different, politically potent and proactive approach that enables Democrats to proceed on their terms, flooding the zone with substantive findings to set their own agenda, and overwhelm Trump’s flood of crap.
So much wrongdoing has already come to light that Congress need not delay action waiting to get everything it might want, such as testimony from Barr and Mueller, which would normally kick off the hearing process. Congress can use hearings to dramatically inform the public of what’s already known — and in the process, it can ratchet up the pressure to get what’s still being held back.
Not doing so is playing “chicken” with the fate of the republic. Trump expects bluff and bluster will make opponents cower. Democrats cannot afford to be seen doing so if for no other reason than voters do not elect the timid as leaders. But also because Trump believes delay works to his advantage. He has used that tactic against opponents his entire career. Democrats fall into his trap by not denying it to him.
What they must consider is a frontal assault on his lawlessness before the only gambit left to them for saving democracy is Col. Chamberlain’s.
* My message on Saturday was not to count on additional authorities that come with a formal impeachment inquiry to wrest documents from an administration already breaking the law to withhold them.
So you think Trump is a one-off?
by digby
Think again:
Rep. Liz Cheney: "We had people that are at the highest levels of our law enforcement … saying that they were going to stop a duly elected president of the United States."
"That sounds an awful lot like a coup and it could well be treason," she adds https://t.co/tzEmm40vCp pic.twitter.com/RhAVMWRfBU— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) May 26, 2019
That is not some fringe-dwelling fever swamp extremist. It’s Liz Cheney, one of the Great Female Hopes of the Republican Party, daughter of the former VP and a member in good standing of what was once known as the Republican establishment.
She said this on ABC, not Fox. It is being mainstreamed by the mainstream media. This is real.
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Identity politics for me but not for thee
by digby
Helaine Olen in the Washington Post mused about the CAP conference last week which emphasized diversity and inclusion as an organizing principle, and where Stacy Abrams said boldly that “identity politics” is nothing to be ashamed of. Olen notes something about this particular argument (usually framed on the right as playing some sort of “card” and on the left as a distraction from the all-important class divide)that should not be overlooked if you want to understand all this:
[I]t occurred to me that too many of us think about identity politics in too narrow a way. It could be said the Trump administration is playing the most nasty form of identify politics of them all. Trump officials are then gaslighting everyone else for the sin of simply seeking equal rights.
At the CAP conference, the evidence for this came up again and again. When the subject of the new law in Alabama that would effectively ban almost all abortions came up, Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.) minced no words. “It is an attack on women’s lived lives,” she said. “Oppression,” she called it.
Tom Steyer — featured on a panel about climate change, not impeachment — pointed out that global warming often impacts poorer people harder than wealthy ones. There is a very inaccurate vision of who cares about the environment in America, Steyer said. In polling, Latinos are the group most likely to say they are concerned about the issue.
And then there is economics, whether it be the high cost of child care frequently forcing one parent — who usually happens to be female — out of the workforce, or African Americans possessing significantly less net worth than white households.
This is all the result of identity politics, but a form that goes mostly unrecognized and unacknowledged. A minority with power and money — white men, mostly wealthy, often religious or pretending to be so — has controlled societal and political norms so effectively that when those left outside simply insist on their rights, they are viewed as angry, resentful, demanding and divisive. When “identity politics” is practiced in such a way that it allows a small group to access and maintain power, it gets labeled as “norms” and treated as simply the way the world works.
The left pushes identity politics so we can one day live in a world where none of us need to do that. The right does it so a small stratum of the population can retain money and power. One way we can fight back is by calling what they are doing by its rightful name.
Ask yourself how many profiles have been done on the 2016 Hillary voters as compared to the Trump voters to see just how lop-sided this argument really is.
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