Month: June 2019

Kim Jong Un says he likes Trump because he isn’t moral and doesn’t judge. He’s must love Tucker Carlson

by digby

Tucker Carlson is now literally defending mass murder😳

"You've got to be honest about what it means to lead a country, it means killing people. A lot of countries commit atrocities, including our allies. It's silly & stupid to point out KJU is 'so mean''pic.twitter.com/k5PwASgELP— Qasim Rashid, Esq. (@QasimRashid) June 30, 2019

TPM:

President Donald Trump brought Fox News host Tucker Carlson to North Korea on Sunday instead of his own national security adviser, John Bolton.

Several journalists reported seeing Carlson on the sidelines of Trump’s historic visitto the the demilitarized zone separating North and South Korea, and the hosts of “Fox & Friends” confirmed Carlson was there during a phone interview with him.

Meanwhile, Bolton was shipped off to Mongolia over the weekend.

While speaking to his Fox colleagues, Carlson defended Trump’s friendliness with the brutal North Korean dictator.

“[North Korea]’s a disgusting place, obviously. So there’s no defending it,” Carlson said. “On the other hand, you’ve got to be honest about what it means to lead a country. It means killing people.”

“Not on the scale that the North Koreans do, but a lot of countries commit atrocities, including a number that we’re closely allied with,” he continued.

You have to love “there’s no defending” North Korea followed by a sickeningly cynical defense of North Korea.

I’m not a Bolton fan, to say the least, but Tucker’s “anything goes” attitude toward totalitarian violence is not any better. I know Trump doesn’t know any history but surely Carlson does. This sort of thing tends to lead to very, very, very bad things that you end up being drawn into whether you like it or not.

Carlson is a wily opportunist who is clearly enjoying his brush with power. But beware of thinking he’s some kind of moderating influence on Trump. He’s this guy.

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A Brilliant Cartoon

by digby

Guess what?

Michael de Adder was born, raised, and educated in New Brunswick province and was a regular presence in its newspapers. Brunswick News Inc., which owns the Saint John Telegraph-Journal, the Moncton Times & Transcript, and the Moncton Daily Gleaner, has now disassociated itself from de Adder.

The above cartoon is apparently the one that went a step too far for Brunswick News Inc.

According to Wikipedia de Adder “draws approximately 10 cartoons weekly and, at over a million readers per day, he is considered the most read cartoonist in Canada.”

Can you believe it? In Canada, fergawdsakes.

Political cartooning is under tremendous duress from all sides these days. In fact, all of political satire is under duress. And that’s a shame. It’s an important part of political commentary and has been for a very long time.

Here are some historic cartoons that changed the world from Victor Navasky:

James Gillray

Napoleon once said that the English caricaturist James Gillray “did more than all the armies in Europe to bring me down.” Here’s an example: “Manic ravings, or Little Boney in a Strong Fit” (1803).

Honore Daumier

In 1832, two years after King Louis Philippe famously abolished censorship of the press in France, Honore Daumier produced his famous pear-shaped caricature of Louis Philippe called “Gargantua.” Daumier, his publisher, Philipon, and his printer were all indicted for “arousing hatred of and contempt of the King’s government, and for offending the King’s person.” Only Daumier went to prison.

Thomas Nast

Nast’s depictions of Boss Tweed are justly credited with bringing him and his corrupt Tammany Hall cronies down. Tweed famously said, “I don’t care a straw for your newspaper articles. My constituents can’t read. But they can’t help seeing them damn pictures.”

Art Young and Robert Minor:

Young and Minor were two of the artists whose work appeared regularly in The Masses. In August 1917, the Post Office revoked The Masses’ mailing privileges. The Masses was brought to trial twice as the editors (including the cartoonists) were charged with “conspiring to obstruct conscription.” Although Young and Minor stayed out of prison, the lawsuits caused the magazine to suspend publication.

Louis Raemaekers:

During World War I, no cartoonist exercised more influence than Louis Raemaekers of Holland. Charged with “endangering Dutch neutrality,” his cartoons led the Germans to offer a 12,000 guilder reward for his capture, dead or alive. A German newspaper, summarizing the terms of peace Germany would exact after it won the war, declared that indemnity would be demanded for every one of Raemaekers’ cartoons. Example shown here: “The German Tango.”

David Low:

As Lord Halifax, the foreign secretary, reported to David Low’s publisher, “You cannot imagine the frenzy that these cartoons cause. As soon as a copy of The Evening Standard arrives, it is poured over for [David] Low’s cartoon and if it is of Hitler, as it usually is, telephones buzz, tempertures rise, fevers mount, the whole governmental system of Germany is in an uproar. It has hardly subsided before the next one arrives. England can’t understand the violence of the reaction.”

Actually, Low had a theory to explain Hitler’s fits. “No dictator is inconvenienced or even displeased by cartoons showing his terrible person stalking through blood and mud. That is the kind of idea about himself that the power-seeking world-beater would want to propagate. It not only feeds his vanity but unfortuntely it shows profitable returns in an awed world. What he does not want to get around is the idea that he is an ass, which is really damaging.” For example, “Rendezvous.”

Der Sturmer:

Every week, Der Sturmer, the notorious anti-Semitic Nazi weekly (whose masthead slogan read: “The Jew is our misfortune”), ran vicious, ugly caricatures of Jews on its cover. A Der Sturmer Jew was easily recognized: ugly, unshaven, short, fat, drooling, hook-nosed. After the war, the Nuemberg Tribunal indicted 24 defendants, who represented a cross section of Nazi leadership, on charges of crime against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity (including an overarching conspiracy count). Der Sturmer’s Jules Streicher was the only editor among them. Primarily as a result of running weekly cartoons like “The Satanic Servant Judah” by Fips (1934), Streicher was found guilty, hanged, and cremated at Dachau.

More at the link.

Kavanaugh is exactly what he appeared to be

by digby

This piece by Ian Millhiser at Think Progress says it all:

Indelible in the hippocampus is the anger.

The rage. The red faced, snarling incomprehension from Brett, who spent decades preparing for his ascension, only to have it threatened by some woman he claims not to remember assaulting.

Brett was careful. Brett came from the right family. Took the right jobs. Made all the right friends. And wrote all the right opinions. When excessive partisanship was a liability for men seeking ascension, Brett artfully said nothing about Obamacare. When ideological purity became fashionable, Brett made sure everyone knew he would overrule That Decision.

Brett. Went. To. Yale.

But now she was here. And she wanted Brett to pay for something that men like him do not pay for.

“I love coaching more than anything I have ever done in my whole life,” Brett screamed to his inquisitors. “But thanks to what some of you on this side of the committee have unleashed, I may never be able to coach again.” (Brett still coaches.)

“Thanks to what some of you on this side of the committee unleashed,” he raged. “I may never be able to teach again.” (Brett still teaches.)

Brett let it all out. He glared at those who dared to take from him what he’d worked for — what belonged to him. And he threatened revenge. “We all know in the United States political system of the early 2000s,” Brett told them, “what goes around comes around.”

Days later, when the fury subsided to a simmer, Brett told a different tale. “I might have been too emotional at times,” Brett admitted in the Wall Street Journal. “I know that my tone was sharp, and I said a few things I should not have said.”

“Going forward,” Brett promised, “you can count on me to be the same kind of judge and person I have been for my entire 28-year legal career: hardworking, even-keeled, open-minded, independent and dedicated to the Constitution and the public good.”

One Supreme Court term later, Brett has a record. We now know how he behaves when liberated from having to follow precedent, and when he is free to express his unvarnished views. That record tells us something important. It tells us that, in the crucible of his entitled madness, we saw the real Brett.

“What goes around comes around” is the real Brett Kavanaugh. We know this because we know how he’s behaved on the Supreme Court.

Read on for the full indictment.

This was his first term. The one where they usually keep their heads down try not to make waves…

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Trump wasn’t the first delusional celebrity the GOP foisted on us

by digby

This piece in the NYRB about Reagan and the movies shows us just how long the right has been enamored of this particular style of politician. In fact, they revere it:

For Reagan, movies were a source of knowledge. He waxed enthusiastic over WarGames (1983), in which a teenage hacker inadvertently sets off the nuclear codes. He was impressed by Firefox (1982), in which Clint Eastwood, a heroic bomber pilot fluent in Russian (!), is recruited to steal a Soviet fighter jet controlled by telepathy. Firefox inspired government research into a form of enhanced jet-fighter command controls based on an “ocular attention-sensing interface system,” perhaps the subject of the phone call Reagan placed to Eastwood after seeing the film.

Another instance of movie-empathy preceded Reagan’s determination to visit the Bitburg cemetery was a response to German Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s blubbering reaction to being left out of the 1984 D-Day commemoration extravaganza. After seeing the Oscar-nominated German-made wartime submarine drama Das Boot in 1982, the president mused in his diary that it was “strange to find yourself rooting for the enemy.”

Understanding that movies were information for Reagan, aides suggested that he screen Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears (1981) before his first meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev (who was evidently briefed to ask him about Kings Row), but there was another movie on the president’s mind. Reagan flummoxed both the Soviet general-secretary and his own staff with this departure from script by advancing the notion that extraterrestrial invasion would trump national differences and cold war rivalry. But national security adviser General Colin Powell recognized that the proposal was inspired by the 1951 movie The Day the Earth Stood Still.

I confess that my own sense of Reagan was formed by his last movie, Don Siegel’s 1964 remake of The Killers, which I first saw in 1969, a year after spending the summer in Berkeley. It would be difficult to overstate my loathing of Governor Reagan, whom I regarded as a personal enemy. For me, Reagan’s supporting role as the movie’s criminal mastermind was an inexplicable bit of self-revelation.

In fact, it was a blunder. “I don’t think that Ronnie fully appreciated until he saw the film that he was really the most evil person in the picture,” Siegel would recall in 1980. At the same time, Siegel praised candidate Reagan’s political instincts:

After all he is an actor… He’s not going to be frightened when he’s having debates with anybody. He feels that he’s in better shape than they are, and he is. It’s not easy to get up on your own and look out at a sea of faces and mikes sticking up and, God knows how many millions of people are going to be looking at it. It doesn’t bother him at all.

As president, Reagan provided the nation with a new collective memory and a new representation—as well as a representative—of the national past. His last leading role would be his greatest. By the time, thirty-six years later, that another professional entertainer was elected, Reagan was imagined by many as the greatest American president since Franklin Roosevelt.

Hollywood was founded on the proposition that scenarios that are naturally hegemonic and usually reassuring will appeal to the largest possible audience. Seamlessly merging the concept of “Freedom” with the gospel of “Entertainment,” Reagan was Hollywood incarnate, the embodiment of happy endings and uncomplicated emotions, with a built-in Production Code designed to suppress any uncomfortable truth.

Reagan’s movie was America as America imagined itself. Trump’s reality TV show is Trump, as America imagines him. The Killers was revelatory, after all, just not in the way I’d thought.

Let’s not forget about Schwarzenneger, a huge movie star who won on the basis of his role as “The Terminator.”

As one of the few historians who deeply studies the intersection of American popular culture and modern politics, Rick Perlstein saw this phenomenon playing out with Trump from the get-go:

In The Invisible Bridge I wrote about what it was like in this New York in 1974, the summer when the federal lawsuit against the Trumps was approaching its climax, the summer when a controversial new movie began packing theaters across the five boroughs.

“Death Wish” starred a then-obscure Charles Bronson as a New York City architect who used to be liberal, until his daughter was raped and his wife murdered. His son-in-law pronounces defeat: “There’s nothing we can do to stop it. Nothing but cut and run.” The architect, by contrast, learns to shoot a gun—in an Old West ghost town—so he can start mowing down muggers at point-blank range. He soon cuts the city’s murder rate in half, and wins a spot on the cover of Time.

Liberal reviewers registered their disgust: The Times’s Vincent Canby called it “a bird-brained movie to cheer the hearts of the far-right wing,” then, 10 days later, branded Bronson a “circus bear.” Time called it “meretricious,” “brazen,” and “hysterical.” Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times labeled it “fascist.” But in the real-life New York City, where the murder rate had doubled in 10 years, and where a psychiatrist published a Times op-ed bragging about the violence he had prevented by leveling a pistol that he kept “never far from my reach while I attend to patients in my mid-Manhattan office,” each onscreen vigilante act won ovations from grateful fans—sometimes standing ovations.

Two years later came an even darker, and considerably more critical, portrait of New York City’s escalating culture of vigilantism. In Taxi Driver, a deranged Vietnam veteran speaks what must have been the unspoken inner monologue of any number of real-life New Yorkers who felt trapped in an urban sewer: “Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.” Pistol in hand, he rehearses his revenge in the mirror: “Listen, you fuckers, you screwheads. Here is a man who would not take it any more. A man who stood up against the scum, the cunts, the dogs, the filth, the shit. Here is a man who stood up.”

When, around that time, Wall Street Journal columnist Irving Kristol coined the phrase “a neoconservative is a liberal who’s been mugged by reality”—a bowdlerization of the older adage “a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged”—he probably didn’t have Charles Bronson in mind, let alone taxi driver Travis Bickle. Nonetheless the politics is all of a piece. Charles Bronson conservatism, Travis Bickle conservatism, the conservatism of avenging angels protecting white innocence in a “liberal” metropolis gone mad: this is New York City’s unique contribution to the history of conservatism in America, an ideological tradition heretofore unrecognized in the historical literature. But without it, we cannot understand the rise of Donald Trump.

He literally sees himself as Charles Bronson in Death Wish. He even acted out the vigilante shooting from the stage at his rallies and led the crowd in chants of “Death Wish.”

Democrats have their myths as well, of course. Our rather high self-regard about “progress” tends to ignore the ebbs and flows and backlashes to our goals. But for all the power of the so-called liberal media and entertainment complex, it’s the right that has successfully harnessed its power for its own partisan political purposes.

Why is that?

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QOTD: Kim Jong Un

by digby

When he’s right, he’s right.

The highest-ranking North Korean defector in decades told me Kim Jong UN likes President Trump because he’s not “moral,” and doesn't judge."All previous US presidents so far have been very moral and they paid great attention on the America’s moral image," he said of Trump.— Richard Engel (@RichardEngel) June 30, 2019

And Trump is fine with that. makes him strong:

Trump at the DMZ breaking the fourth wall like he’s starring on @fleabag pic.twitter.com/71dsB6QWZv— Krister Johnson (@KristerJohnson) June 30, 2019

Aaaand, of course. He became president today:

The coverage of Trump’s failed diplomacy with a nuclear armed madman is dangerously stupid. https://t.co/6ttIOJZ37f— Tommy Vietor (@TVietor08) June 30, 2019

Time to learn from 2016
by Tom Sullivan

For all the hard-to-quantify damage Russian disinformation did during the 2016 presidential campaign, it is wise to remember Americans were willing accomplices. In one case at least, a profiteer of fake news who didn’t live long enough to enjoy his profits. Others spread disinformation from Macedonia. Still others from New York.

Jennifer Rubin last week cited a study published in the Columbia Journalism Review that analyzed how American news outlets covered the 2016 campaign. Aready infamous for its promotion of the Bush administration’s case for war with Iraq, The New York Times comes in for criticism of how it contributed to the disinformation melee. The Times itself admitted, “Every major publication, including The Times, published multiple stories citing the D.N.C. and Podesta emails posted by WikiLeaks, becoming a de facto instrument of Russian intelligence.” CJR documented how much the press added:

The research team investigated this question, counting sentences that appeared in mainstream media sources and classifying each as detailing one of several Clinton- or Trump-related issues. In particular, they classified each sentence as describing either a scandal (e.g., Clinton’s emails, Trump’s taxes) or a policy issue (Clinton and jobs, Trump and immigration). They found roughly four times as many Clinton-related sentences that described scandals as opposed to policies, whereas Trump-related sentences were one-and-a-half times as likely to be about policy as scandal. Given the sheer number of scandals in which Trump was implicated—sexual assault; the Trump Foundation; Trump University; redlining in his real-estate developments; insulting a Gold Star family; numerous instances of racist, misogynist, and otherwise offensive speech—it is striking that the media devoted more attention to his policies than to his personal failings. Even more striking, the various Clinton-related email scandals—her use of a private email server while secretary of state, as well as the DNC and John Podesta hacks—accounted for more sentences than all of Trump’s scandals combined (65,000 vs. 40,000) and more than twice as many as were devoted to all of her policy positions.

These reports were not generated by Russian bots, but by U.S. news organizations ranging from The New York Times and The Washington Post to The Wall Street Journal, CJR observes.

To the extent that voters mistrusted Hillary Clinton, or considered her conduct as secretary of state to have been negligent or even potentially criminal, or were generally unaware of what her policies contained or how they may have differed from Donald Trump’s, these numbers suggest their views were influenced more by mainstream news sources than by fake news.

Viewing a New York Times front-page story highlighting the racial components of Joe Biden’s legislative history, Rubin wonders if anyone has learned from 2016:

For example, the article persistently references Biden working with segregationists in overhauling crime legislation. However, it neglects to put in information that appeared in a prior article (notice the repetition of the same negative story) on June 21: “Mr. Biden accurately noted that he presided over the renewal of the Voting Rights Act in 1982 for 25 years as the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, and fought for years to extend and expand the law, which protected racial minorities from discrimination at the voting booth. He was a liberal on most civil rights issues, but he was also a leading opponent of integrating schools through busing from the 1970s to 1980s, though his efforts largely failed.” The most recent article omits that critical context.

Also missing is the overwhelming support that the crime bills garnered. You’d think from the piece it was just Biden and those segregationists toiling away. But the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act, for example, passed the Senate 97 to 2. The 1984 bill cited to illustrated that Biden was buddy-buddy with Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.) was co-sponsored by “liberal lion” Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.). And that bill initially passed the Senate on a voice vote.

There is more in that vein, including a quote last week from former senator Carol Moseley Braun (D-Ill.) who served with Biden. She described the hits on him as “opportunistic.” Rubin’s warning is history may be repeating itself here.

There may be a generational component to the Biden-segregationists stories. That is, what may not have been as big a deal then is a bigger deal now. Nicholas Kristof writes about a disagreement with his daughter over a college professor helping in the defense of Harvey Weinstein. Of course, Weinstein deserves a proper defense, he argued. But a house dean has no business being the one to do it, his daughter argued back. She had a point, Kristof admits.

“Progressives of my era often revere the adage misattributed to Voltaire: ‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.,'” Kristof writes. “For young progressives, the priority is more about standing up to perceived racism, misogyny, Islamophobia and bigotry.” The question is “how to live liberal values in an illiberal age.”

The difficulty for legitimate journalism in the digital age is knowing how to prioritize between what generates clicks and what citizens really need to know to make informed decisions. The former lends itself to promoting fake news and catapulting the propaganda. In 2016, that tendency helped elect Russia’s preferred candidate.

Biden himself may have delivered “the greatest self-own in debate history” when he uttered, “My time is up.” There is a sense in which Biden is out of his time like Billy Pilgrim. But the normal crucible of primary season will reveal that without slanted reporting or opponents spreading fake stories on social media. Rubin’s concern is the press is again poised to do Vladimir Putin’s work for him, and Donald Trump’s. It is not clear news outlets have learned from 2016.

Nor Democrats, for that matter. Donald Trump wants to run against Biden. Trump won in a change election as an outsider running against a consummate Washington insider. He wants that scenario again. Biden is the closest thing in the Democrats’ lineup he gets to running against Hillary a second time. Judging by early polls showing Biden with a comfortable (and comforting) lead, nervous Democrats may not have figured that out.

Democratic primary voters are 3-6 on picking winning presidential candidates over the last 50 years. They are 3-7 if you include Kennedy’s challenge to Carter in 1980. Not an inspiring track record for conventional wisdom.

Saturday Night at the Movies

The Byrds and the beads: Echo in the Canyon *** & Model Shop (1969) ***

I believe I just heard an echo of The Bryds singing: “To everything (turn, turn, turn) …”

Speaking of odd coincidences, there is a scene in Echo in the Canyon where its director Andrew Slater mentions that one of the inspirations for his joint tribute concert/documentary project was Jacques Demy’s relatively obscure 1969 drama Model Shop (Slater weaves in brief snippets of Demy’s film all throughout Echo in the Canyon).

Suddenly, a little bell went off in my head (talk about echoes…lots of space in that empty noggin), and I realized that I had an unwatched copy of that very film sitting in my DVR (it recently aired on TCM). So, I figured-what the hell…sounds like a perfect double-bill.

While I am familiar with Demy’s work (mostly due to having Criterion’s excellent six-film box set  in my collection), Model Shop has somehow eluded me. The film represents a period in the late 60s when Demy and his wife, filmmaker Agnes Varda took a hiatus from their native France to explore America’s counterculture scene (speaking of which- Criterion’s three-film Agnès Varda in California box is another great set I recommend).

Like many films of its era, Model Shop is a leisurely, episodic character study. It’s about a restless, late-twenty something Los Angelino named George (Gary Lockwood) who is experiencing possibly both the worst and best day of his life. His morning doesn’t start well; he and his girlfriend are awakened from their slumber by a repo man who is there to seize George’s beloved MG convertible. George manages to beg a 1-day reprieve, based on his promise to make an in-person payment of $100 to his bank by end of business day.

George’s girlfriend (Alexandra Hay) is quite chagrined over witnessing a scenario she has experienced once too many times. This is obviously not their first fight over money; and it looks like the relationship is just shy of going “kaput”. George is an architect by trade; but has recently quit in a fit of pique (existential crisis?). George flees the escalating spat in his MG as he brainstorms how he’s going to scare up that $100 by 6pm.

George’s day (and the film) turns a 180 when he goes to visit a pal who runs an auto repair shop and espies a lovely woman (Anouk Aimee) who is there to pick up her car. On pure impulse, he decides to follow her in his MG (yes, it’s a bit on the stalking side). He follows her high up into the hills over L.A., and then seems to lose interest. He stops and takes in a commanding view of the city and the valley beyond, deeply lost in thought.

In my favorite scene, he drives up into (Laurel Canyon?) to visit a friend who’s a musician in an up-and-coming band. George’s pal turns out to be Jay Ferguson, keyboardist and lead singer of the band Spirit (and later, Jo Jo Gunne). Ferguson (playing himself) introduces George to his bandmates, who are just wrapping a rehearsal. Sure enough, the boys in the band are Ed Cassidy, Randy California, and Matthew Andes-that would be the classic lineup for Spirit! The band also provided the soundtrack for the film.

After the band splits, Jay plays a lovely piano piece for George; a song he’s “working on”. After some small talk, George sheepishly hits Jay up for a loan. No problem, man. Jay’s got him covered. George delivers this short, eloquent soliloquy about Los Angeles:

I was driving down Sunset and I turned on one of those roads that leads into the hills, and I stopped at this place that overlooks the whole city; it was fantastic. I suddenly felt exhilarated. I was really moved by the geometry of the place…its harmony. To think that some people claim that it’s an ugly city, when it’s really pure poetry…it just kills me. I wanted to build something right then; create something. It’s a fabulous city.

When George calls his parents to hit them up for money, he gets some dark news from mom. He has just received something he’s been dreading…a draft notice, and he is required to report for processing in just a few days (Vietnam hangs heavily over the film).

By pure chance, he once again spots the woman he had followed earlier. This time, he is determined to meet her. He tails her around Santa Monica, where she eventually disappears into a “models for rent” studio, where clientele pay to take pictures of women in various stages of undress. Undeterred, George pays for a session with the woman he is apparently becoming obsessed with. Their first conversation is as awkward as you would imagine; however, it turns out that George’s interest in her is more heartfelt than prurient.

What ensues is a “one-night-stand” tale that is bittersweet and affecting. The film is a unique entry in Demy’s oeuvre. Interestingly, it is both very much of its time, and ahead of its time; a precursor to films exploring modern love in the City of Angels like Hal Ashby’s Shampoo and (especially) Alan Rudolph’s Welcome to L.A. Like those films, this is a gauzy, sun-bleached vision of a city that attracts those yearning to connect with someone, something, or anything that assures a non-corporeal form of immortality; a city that teases endless possibilities, yet so often pays out with little more than broken dreams.

Previous posts with related themes:

The Wrecking Crew
David Crosby: Remember My Name
Incense and liniment: Monterey Pop turns 50
Of the beginning: Revolver at 50
10 Essential Rock Albums of 1969
10 Essential Rock Albums of 196

More reviews at Den of Cinema
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— Dennis Hartley

More GOP ratfucking. Donald Segretti would be so proud

by digby

New York Times:

For much of the last three months, the most popular Joseph R. Biden Jr. website has been a slick little piece of disinformation that is designed to look like the former vice president’s official campaign page, yet is most definitely not pro-Biden.

From top to bottom, the website, JoeBiden.info, breezily mocks the candidate in terms that would warm the heart of any Bernie Sanders supporter: There are GIFs of Mr. Biden touching women and girls, and blurbs about his less-than-liberal policy positions, including his opposition to court-ordered busing in the 1970s and his support for the Iraq war. Pull quotes highlight some of his more famous verbal gaffes, like his description of his future boss, Barack Obama, as “articulate and bright and clean.” The introductory text declares, “Uncle Joe is back and ready to take a hands-on approach to America’s problems!”

All the site says about its creator is buried in the fine print at the bottom of the page. The site, it says, is a political parody built and paid for “BY AN American citizen FOR American citizens,” and not the work of any campaign or political action committee.

There is indeed an American behind the website — that much is unambiguously true. But he is very much a political player, and a Republican one at that. His name is Patrick Mauldin, and he makes videos and other digital content for President’s Trump’s re-election campaign. Together with his brother Ryan, Mr. Mauldin also runs Vici Media Group, a Republican political consulting firm in Austin whose website opens with the line “We Kick” followed by the image of a donkey — the Democratic Party symbol often known by another, three-letter, name.

The Biden website was intended to help Democrats “face facts,” Mr. Mauldin said in an interview. He kept his name off it because “people tend to dismiss things that they don’t like, especially if it comes from the opposite side,” he said.

Yet in anonymously trying to exploit the fissures within the Democratic ranks — fissures that ran through this past week’s debates — Mr. Mauldin’s website hews far closer to the disinformation spread by Russian trolls in 2016 than typical political messaging. With nothing to indicate its creator’s motives or employer, the website offers a preview of what election experts and national security officials say Americans can expect to be bombarded with for the next year and a half: anonymous and hard-to-trace digital messaging spread by sophisticated political operatives whose aim is to sow discord through deceit. Trolling, that is, as a political strategy.

Mr. Mauldin, who has not been previously identified as the creator of the website, said he had built and paid for it on his own, and not for the Trump campaign. But the campaign knows about the websites, raising the prospect that the president’s re-election effort condoned what is, in essence, a disinformation operation run by one of its own.

Tim Murtaugh, the Trump campaign’s communications director, did not directly address that issue, though he said it was “great that talented supporters of President Trump use their time to help his re-election.”

“We appreciate their efforts in their own time with parodies like this that help the cause,” he added.

Inside the campaign, Mr. Mauldin, 30, is seen as a rising star, prized for his mischievous sense of humor and digital know-how, according to two people familiar with the operation. He also appears to be very much on point in his choice of targets: Mr. Biden is the Democrat polling strongest against Mr. Trump and has been repeatedly singled out on Twitter by the president.

Mr. Biden’s campaign knew about the fake website for months, but had not been of aware of who was behind it, said T.J. Ducklo, a campaign spokesman. “Imagine our surprise that a site full of obvious disinformation,” he said, “is the handiwork of an operative tied to the Trump campaign.”

Mr. Ducklo sought to place the website firmly in the context of Mr. Trump’s own social media habits — such as tweeting doctored videos — and what he said was the president’s lack of interest in measures to ensure the integrity of American elections.

In addition to Mr. Biden, Mr. Mauldin has anonymously set up faux campaign websites for at least three other Democratic front-runners. “Millionaire Bernie” seeks to tar Mr. Sanders as a greedy socialist; “Elizabeth Warren for Chief” mocks her claim of Native American ancestry; and “Kamala Harris for Arresting the People” highlights her work as a prosecutor who, the site says, “put parents in jail for children skipping school — and laughed about it.”

None, though, has proved as successful as the Biden website. Mr. Mauldin boasted in the interview that he had fooled people into thinking his Biden website was the real campaign page. Some offered to donate money, he said, and others wanted to volunteer.

Remember:

Meddling by foreigners is illegal. But trolling or disinformation spread by American citizens is protected by the First Amendment, and if Mr. Mauldin’s work is any guide, Americans may well do a far better job deceiving one another than any Russian troll could hope for.

No doubt.

Birtherism lives

by digby

Of course it does. And it’s spreading much faster than it used to:

Harris, 54, was born in Oakland, California to a father from Jamaica and a mother from India. She spoke of her experience growing up black in the debate, recalling a story about neighbors who wouldn’t let their children play with Harris and her sister because of the color of their skin.

The attacks on Harris’s background started Thursday when Ali Alexander tweeted she is not an “American black.”

“She is half Indian and half Jamaican,” Alexander wrote. “I’m so sick of people robbing American Blacks (like myself) of our history. It’s disgusting. Now using it for debate time at #DemDebate2? These are my people not her people. Freaking disgusting.”

Alexander’s claim was picked up by Donald Trump Jr., who tweeted it to his nearly 3.6 million followers. “Is this true?” Trump Jr. wrote. “Wow.”

Trump Jr., who later deleted his tweet, wasn’t the only one using Alexander’s tweet to question Harris’s ethnicity.

Harris’s team denounced the comment as racist. “This is the same type of racist attacks his father used to attack Barack Obama. It didn’t work then and it won’t work now,” a Harris spokesperson told The Daily Beast.

More Twitter users copied and pasted Alexander’s message verbatim and tweeted it as their own, according to screenshots posted by writer Caroline Orr. Some of those accounts, like “@prebs_73,” have copy-pasted other popular right-wing tweets verbatim. Other accounts with right-wing references in their usernames and biographies piled on, accusing Harris of not being black.

“Ummmmm @KamalaHarris you are NOT BLACK. you are Indian and Jamaican,” wrote a Twitter user with a cross emoji, the word “CONSERVATIVE,” a red “X” emoji (a right-wing Twitter trope), and three stars (a QAnon symbol) in their username.

At least one known network of bot accounts was found spreading Alexander’s original tweet, BuzzFeed reported.

“The conversation is, no matter who we are, our blackness should be challenged because what we look like is not ‘American enough.’”
— Shireen Mitchell, Stop Online Violence Against Women
Shireen Mitchell, a technologist and founder of the group Stop Online Violence Against Women, said the accusation against Harris plays into a long-running debate that has been used to drive a white nationalist wedge through black communities.

“We are and have always been, for centuries in this country, having this little fight about who gets opportunities as black people and who doesn’t,” Mitchell said. “That includes colorism; that includes distinctions of where the ship actually landed; it includes if you are (and I am) a descendant of a slave who was born here versus a descendant of slavery from another country. Those distinctions, from my perspective, make no sense ever. But what it does is allow for white nationalist and nativist conversations to be planted in my community.”

A spokesman for Trump Jr. said Trump sent the tweet originally because he had not known that Harris’s mother was Indian.

“Don’s tweet was simply him asking if it’s true that Kamala Harris was half-Indian because it’s not something he had ever heard before and once he saw that folks were misconstruing the intent of his tweet he quickly deleted it,” the spokesman said.

Alexander, who describes himself as black and Arab, said that Harris has a “nasty, lying history with Black people.”

“Me pointing out that Kamala Harris has a mother from India and a father from Jamaica went viral last night because many people assume she descends from Black American Slaves,” he said in a statement to The Daily Beast. “She does not. I corrected Kamala Harris last night because she stole debate time under the premise that she is an African-American when she is in fact a biracial Indian-Jamaican who is a first generation American.”

This isn’t the first time pro-Trump activists have tried to undermine Harris and her authority to speak on issues of race based on her parents.

In January, right-wing operative Jacob Wohl, an associate of Alexander, argued on Twitter that Harris was ineligible to be president because her parents weren’t from the United States, even though she was born in California. Wohl’s claims were circulated by other right-wing figures online, in an attempt to create a birther-style question about whether Harris could legally run for president.

Mitchell, who has monitored harassment campaigns against black women since 2013, said Harris is facing a new, digital permutation of the birther conspiracy theory attacks President Trump levied against Obama.

“It’s a different iteration of birtherism: ‘where were you born?’ She was born in Oakland!” Mitchell said, referring to the conspiracy theory that falsely accused Obama of being born outside the U.S. “The conversation is, no matter who we are, our blackness should be challenged because what we look like is not ‘American enough.’”

Mitchell draws a distinction between two kinds of fraudulent accounts that try to discredit black people online. Botnets, an automated network of fake accounts, often tweet the same message. The technique allows a message to spread far and fast, with little effort. Some of the copy-paste accounts sharing Alexander’s message appear to be operated by real people.

Mitchell also monitors a trend called “marionetting,” in which someone will falsely pose as a black person online to push ideas that many black people might otherwise find objectionable.

Recent examples of marionetting include a troll who stole a black transgender activist’s picture to pose as a Trump supporter, and Russian-run accounts like “Blacktivist” that impersonated black Americans to sway black voters away from Hillary Clinton in 2016.

“I actually thought the botnet was going to die, because I felt like more marionetting was happening … After this debate, I saw more botnets responding again, versus just marionetting.”

Fraudulent accounts often rely on stereotypes that trolls hope to apply to a collection of fake accounts, Mitchell said.

“The ‘black enough’ line has been a stereotypical frame,” she said.

“It has always been a systemic narrative. It’s just being expanded in this national debate”

This is not the last we’ll see of this. Trump and his minions are no doubt thrilled. And people are, unfortunately, losing their bullshit detectors and common sense in the age of social media.

*sigh*

.

Never Trumpers have ONE JOB: explain to the wingnuts that Trump is an existential threat.

by digby

These goddamn Never Trumpers really and truly do believe they can dictate to the Democratic Party what policies they can have and how they are allowed to appeal to their own voters. In fact, what they seem to be saying is that the only way to win is to treat their own base like shit and kiss the asses of Republicans.

Implicit in this is the threat that they will vote for the man they consider an existential threat to democracy unless Democrats turn into Jeb Bush, and I mean right now. Oh wait, Jeb Bush was too liberal too. He spoke Spanish all the time. In fact, he was even married to a Latina immigrant.

Here’s Steve M on alleged Never Trumper Bret Stephens:

Beto O’Rourke, Cory Booker, and Joaquin Castro spoke Spanish in the first Democratic presidential debate this week. The response from Bret Stephens: Speak English or die.

Amigos demócratas,
Si ustedes siguen así, van a perder las elecciones. Y lo merecerán. 

Translation for the linguistically benighted: “Democratic friends, if you go on like this, you’re going to lose the elections. And you’ll deserve it.”

Channeling Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson, Stephens continues, decribing the Democrats as

a party that makes too many Americans feel like strangers in their own country. A party that puts more of its faith, and invests most of its efforts, in them instead of us.

And who exactly are “they” and “we”?

They speak Spanish. We don’t.

Yes, it’s horrible when candidates speak Spanish in debates. Regular Americans are morally offended by it, and it instantly seals a candidate’s electoral doom. No Republican would ever do such a thing, and any Republican who did would lose the party’s nomination instantly….

Oh right. It isn’t just Jebbie:

Steve M found a number of videos of GWB speaking Spanish. That wasn’t always a crime in the GOP> In fact, they once believed that the Latinx vote was something worth fighting for. Now not so much.

I have news for them. The Democrats tried to be more like Republicans. The Sistah Soljah’s their base to death. Over and over and over again. For a couple of decades. Now we have Donald Trump.

So please, do something useful and spend the next 16 months explaining to your fellow Republicans why it’s more important for them to save the country than it is to worry about candidates speaking Spanish.

That’s your job now. Ambassador to the wingnuts. Make them understand. YOU bring them over to the light.

If you keep hectoring the Democrats instead, validating this idiotic premise that they are the problem, we’ll know your objections to Trumpism have been shallow and stupid and in the end, you’ll go along with the authoritarian program. I’m pretty sure I know the answer.

Steve M addresses all the other fallacies in Bret Stephens’ steaming op-ed pile. I didn’t have the stomach for it.