Month: July 2019

Our new DNI nominee spewed this partisan gibberish on TV just hours before he was named

by digby

Another winnut brain thoroughly rotted by Fox News:

“I think the first thing we need to do is make sure we don’t do what the Democrats have done,” the Texas Republican told host Maria Bartiromo on Sunday Morning Futures. “They accused Donald Trump of a crime and then they try and reverse engineer a process to justify that accusation. So I’m not going to accuse any specific person of any specific crime, I just want there to be a fair process to get there. What I do know as a former federal prosecutor is that it does appear that there were crimes committed during the Obama administration.”
[…]
Ratcliffe explained this is why Barr, who has tasked U.S. Attorney John Durham to lead the so-called investigation of the investigators, must fill in the gaps.

“Now the things that Bob Mueller said he didn’t know about and his team clearly didn’t look at, those are things that would be fair for Bill Barr and the Department of Justice to look at. Because we know that things happened in the Obama administration that haven’t been answered. There’s been no accountability for that yet,” Ratcliffe said.

“Well, the special counsel told us … that they didn’t do it. And if they didn’t do it, the only place we can get the answers is from the Justice Department right now,” Ratcliffe said. “The American people want that. Their faith and trust, Maria, has been shaken in our Justice Department, and the only way to get that back is for there to be real accountability with a very fair process. Again, I have supreme confidence in Bill Barr’s ability to deliver that. And at the end of the day, wherever the outcome may be, as long as we know that the process was fair, the evaluation was fair, justice will be done. Look, the truth always defends itself.”

Relevant to the Barr-Durham review is Horowitz’s inspector general investigation into alleged government surveillance abuses against at least one adviser for Trump’s campaign, Carter Page, an American citizen who was never charged with wrongdoing. Barr has said he is working closely with Horowitz, who is expected to wrap up his inquiry this fall, and the Justice Department could take prosecutorial action depending on the findings and recommendations.

Ratcliffe recommended three leads for the “investigation of the investigators.”

The first related to former national security adviser Michael Flynn. “You talked earlier about Michael Flynn. His phone call with the Russian ambassador was a highly classified NSA intercept. Someone in the Obama administration leaked that call to the Washington Post. That’s a felony,” he said.

Then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions vowed in February 2018 that the Justice Department was investigating that leak, and that he was overseeing the inquiry himself. “I am directing it personally and we’re pursuing it aggressively,” Sessions said at the time.

Ratcliffe suggested investigators also look into conflicting congressional testimony between Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson and Justice Department official Bruce Ohr. Fusion GPS was the opposition research firm behind British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s dossier, which was full of unverified claims about Trump’s ties to Russia and was used extensively by the FBI in Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act applications before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to justify surveillance of Page. Ohr acted as an unofficial back channel between Steel and the FBI. “Glenn Simpson from Fusion GPS in talking about the Steele dossier, said under oath that he and Bruce Ohr did not meet until after the election. Bruce Ohr said under oath that they met three months before the election. One of them is not telling the truth. We need a process to identify that,” Ratcliffe said.

The third area of interest, Ratcliffe said, is former FBI Director James Comey’s memos on his interactions with Trump before he was fired in May 2017. “Where it all started, Jim Comey. He admitted that he leaked his confidential conversations with the president to a reporter. Did that include classified information? We need a fair processes to find out answers to that,” Ratcliffe said.

Comey said he leaked one of his memos to a friend to leak to the press in the hope that it “might prompt the appointment of a special counsel.” On May 16, 2017, the first Comey memo was reported for the first time. On May 17, 2017, then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed former FBI Director Robert Mueller to serve as special counsel.

“I trust, because Bill Barr has earned my trust already and the trust of the American people, that there’ll be a fair process with John Durham and with Michael Horowitz to get answers to that and provide accountability where it really belongs,” Ratcliffe said.

That fucking nutcase is probably going to end up as the new Director of National Intelligence.

God help us all.

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President soulmate
by Tom Sullivan

“Election integrity” is the euphemism the G.O.P. trots out when launching newer, more diabolical efforts to subvert democracy in these disunited states. Erecting barriers to disfavored Americas voting under the guise of “integrity” has been a popular Republican pastime for decades. But it took the rise of conservative talk radio, Fox News, and social media to give “voter fraud” legs. Like so many conservative enthusiasms before it — conservative Democrats once supervised Jim Crow — public professions of faith in the American system are just so much Elmer Gantry cow chips cheerfully flung while humming Lee Greenwood.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell makes the case once again. When the “Grim Reaper” is not killing bills passed in the Democrat led House, the
“gravedigger of American democracy” is rubber-stamping uber-conservative Federalist Society judges and #MoscowMitch is abetting Russian efforts to hack the next election:

The phrase “Mitch McConnell is a Russian” trended on Twitter early Saturday after the Senate majority leader repeatedly blocked election security legislation in recent days.

Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) blocked two attempts to pass election bills this week shortly after former special counsel Robert Mueller testified before lawmakers on Capitol Hill, warning that foreign governments likely will attempt to interfere in the 2020 elections.

Hundreds took to Twitter to decry the senator for blocking the bills. Democratic activist Scott Dworkin called McConnell “a traitor” and “an accomplice to the biggest traitor in American history — Donald Trump.”

McConnell called legislation requiring paper ballots and funding for the Election Assistance Commission partisan legislation. Paul Waldman gave a brief rundown of what Republicans worry would give Democrats an edge:

• Securing our voting systems from foreign hacking
• Allowing every American to vote
• Making it as easy as possible for Americans to vote
• Ensuring that all votes count equally

Let’s not forget fiscal conservatives’ fiscal conservatism. The House last week passed the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2019 that would add $300 billion to the Pentagon budget and add $1.7 trillion to the debt over the next decade. Democrats supported the measure to fund domestic spending, eliminate the “sequester,” and avoid another debt-ceiling crisis. But while opposed by a majority of Republicans in the House, their Senate colleagues will pass and the president is expected to sign the two-year budget deal.

John Cassidy writes at The New Yorker that Trump, McConnell and other prominent Republicans’ support proves “the G.O.P.’s devotion to fiscal conservatism was a sham, a cynical political strategy rather than the expression of a core philosophical principle.” When Democrats are in control, holding down the debt requires drastic measures, etc., etc. When Republicans have control, deficit-increasing tax cuts that shrink the tax base are de rigueur. Cassidy provides a thumbnail sketch of how that went down the last time Democrats held the White House. Rest assured, Republicans will be born again into fiscal conservatism when next a Democrat sits in the Oval Office. “Waste, fraud, and abuse” will rise again as a euphemism for federal money flowing into wrong-colored Americans’ pockets.

Meantime, the G.O.P. is employing every artifice at its disposal to monkey-wrench democracy and preclude results that don’t leave them in charge of seeing that doesn’t happen.

With an authoritarian con man occupying the Oval Office, the party now has a soulmate of president perfectly matched to their members’ slipperier proclivities. Old euphemisms are falling away as politically incorrect and inauthentic anyway. They’ve thrown out old rules like not wearing white after Labor Day. With Trump as president, they can display their preference for white year-round.

What dirt will journalists find on DNI nominee Ratcliffe?

By Spocko

….be leaving office on August 15th. I would like to thank Dan for his great service to our Country. The Acting Director will be named shortly.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 28, 2019

Journalists, start your search engines!

We know the White House doesn’t bother to vet their nominees for top administrative posts. He sees them on TV, likes what he sees, BAM! Nominee!

Then the media start looking into the person. If they find out something that should have disqualify them before even being nominated, the nominee withdraws.

Outsourcing the vetting of nominees to journalists is a good strategy. It slows down the whole process until he gets his Bill Barr/Roy Cohn. Meanwhile he has another acting director he can push around.

Did you know that there are over 60 people that Trump nominated that had to withdraw? There is a whole page dedicated to it. With photos and everything!

List of Donald Trump nominees who have withdrawn

Remember when he nominated his personal physician to head the VA? That was sweet. Payback for saying Trump weighed 239?

I am pleased to announce that I intend to nominate highly respected Admiral Ronny L. Jackson, MD, as the new Secretary of Veterans Affairs….

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 28, 2018

Ronnie: He said “Tell the press I’m 6 foot 3, 239 pounds.” HA! Yeah, right. As if they would believe me vs their own eyes.

Trump thought bubble,”Is something funny Jackson? You tell people my real weigh I’ll have Pence’s wife rat you out. On April 26, 2018, Jackson withdrew his nomination as Secretary of Veterans Affairs. He returned to duty with the White House Medical Unit but will no longer serve as Physician to the President. On February 2, 2019, President Trump appointed Jackson to serve as Assistant to the President and Chief Medical Advisor, a new position in the Executive Office. Wikipedia

Sorry about the whole VA thing. You’ll keep getting me the Adderall, right?

The Democrats don’t need any more information to impeach President Trump

by digby

So it changed nothing. Within those numbers is the usual partisan divide. A vast majority of Democrats are for impeachment, an equal number of Republicans are against it and Independents are slightly against it, reflecting the total as one would expect since they too are mostly partisans they just don’t like to admit it.

It’s important to acknowledge that Americans are living in different realities. And even most of those who don’t watch Fox News are unaware that this administration is doing something totally unprecedented and dangerous to keep them from knowing what they need to know in order to govern themselves. This piece by Mark Sumner at DKos is important:

The news that Donald Trump is openly feeding classified information to Devin Nunes should be upsetting. It not only represents a complete upending of the standard relationship between the executive branch and the legislative branch, but it’s just one aspect of a threat that Trump has set down brick by brick, until it has America poised on the edge of a cliff that many don’t even seem to realize is looming: the absolute inability to get at the truth due to a gross disparity in the availability of information. That may sound technical. Or even picayune. It’s not.

In any conflict, there is one factor that is certain to destroy any possibility of a fair resolution: asymmetrical information. Asymmetrical information is just what it sounds like, It’s when one side of a conflict has more or better information than the other. That information gives that side an advantage in both tactics and strategy. Now look at what Trump and Attorney General William Barr are doing, and have been doing, step by step, for months.

Trump hasn’t voluntarily provided a witness to Congress since Democrats took control of the House in January. He hasn’t turned over one page of documentation. Instead, Trump has ordered witnesses not to obey requests. Then to ignore congressional subpoenas. Then to ignore contempt citations. He has even extended this denial to former members of his staff, to members and former members of other areas of the executive branch far removed from direct contact with his office, and to members of his transition team.

In addition to denying Congress witnesses, or documents subpoenaed along with those witnesses, Trump has sued Congress to prevent the release of his personal information. He has continued to challenge the outcomes of those lawsuits. And he has ordered members of his Cabinet and their staff to ignore plain law in refusing to hand over information.

Should the situation ever reach the point where the Supreme Court orders Trump to produce the information, there is little doubt about what he will do. After all, this week has been a vivid reminder that, according to the Department of Justice, Donald Trump cannot be indicted. So why should he listen to any court? Should any of the witnesses Congress is seeking to interview ever be found in contempt, Trump has an answer for that. He can pardon them, just as he has his other friends and political supporters. Or Barr can claim privilege. In any case … no one is talking.

At the same time, Barr has expanded on Trump’s already expansive view of executive privilege. That’s included throwing a blanket over all source materials for the Mueller report, and even over the sort of ordinary data from agencies that was previously given to Congress as a matter of course.

The net result is that Congress is absolutely starved for information. Does the House seem indecisive and confused? Is there a frustrating schism within the Democratic Party? Yes. That’s because they are walking around in the dark, absolutely unable to get the information that usually fuels their decisions. Cautious representatives, used to checking every box in triplicate before making a move, feel suffocated by the lack of data, and frightened by the willingness of others to jump forward. In short, they’re afraid it’s all a trap. And it could be—both because they don’t have the information they want, and because Barr can create any information he wants.

Trump has authorized Barr to look at all classified information, no matter the context. And to selectively share that information with whomever he pleases. Trump explicitly included sharing information with Republicans in Congress, such as Devin Nunes.

Because Barr is authorized to release only what he wants, he can select the bits and pieces that support Trump, leaving any information that might be harmful to Trump hidden. Because he can share it with whomever he wants, the result is a massive imbalance of information.

Not only do Trump and Barr hold all the cards, but they own the places where the cards are printed. The ability to selectively release any information out of context is indistinguishable from the ability to simply make things up. Trump, Barr, or anyone they are feeding information to can make any claim without being disputed. Against anyone.

If Barr were to announce tomorrow that the DOJ inspector general’s report found that James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, and others were involved in a “deep state” conspiracy against Trump … how could it be disputed? Where would anyone turn for the truth?

If Nunes were to hold a press conference and say he had information connecting the Democratic campaign in 2018 straight to the Kremlin … how could it be countered? Would the House issue subpoenas? Would the DOJ take action?

This asymmetrical information war has already proceeded very nearly to the point where the truth is whatever Nunes says it is. Which is whatever Barr says it is. Which is whatever Trump says it is. Because they’ve completely isolated any source of information that might counter their claims.

And anyone thinking that a legal appeal might finally get some White House staffer’s butt into a seat after a contempt charge might want to consider this: Fully one-quarter of all appeals court judges were selected by Trump. How did Trump select 24% of all appellate court judges in the space of less than three years? It’s almost as if Mitch McConnell had been sitting on all the nominations for years before the 2016 election, so that Trump could quickly grab control of the courts. It’s almost as if that’s true because it’s true.

And, of course, should any court rule that someone from Trump’s team has to appear, they can still be pardoned, or still claim privilege. Because … why not? Trump has made it increasingly clear that, as far as he is concerned, Article 2 means he can “do whatever I like.”
[…]
How an autocrat in absolute control of the sources of information and the ability to mete out justice is dislodged is anyone’s guess.

The courts are now packed with hacks and the wingnuts have a majority on the Supreme Court.

This is the central issue at the moment. Yes, Trump committed crimes before and after he took office. He is corrupt on every level. But the primary high crime he is currently committing is his refusal to defend the US against another cyber-attack by a foreign adversary and his assumption of dictatorial power to refuse any and all cooperation with the co-equal branch of government, the US Congress.

This is happening right now, before our eyes. They don’t need any information or any cooperation to impeach him for this. It’s right out in the open.

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Donnie Jr and his best bud are swimming in the swamp

by digby

We all know that what Trump was talking about when he said “drain the swamp” had nothing to do with corruption. Obviously, I mean — corruption in Trump’s business. He meant that they would chase out every professional, expert, non-partisan, reality-based member of the government (as well as as many Democrats as they could root out.) They are doing a good job of that.

Meanwhile:

Over the past two years, the Trump administration has been grappling with how to handle the transition to the next generation of mobile broadband technology. With spending expected to run into hundreds of billions of dollars, the administration views it as an ultra-high-stakes competition between U.S. and Chinese companies, with enormous implications both for technology and for national security. Top officials from a raft of departments have been meeting to hash out the best approach.

But there’s been one person at some of the discussions who has a different background: He’s Donald Trump Jr.’s hunting buddy. Over the past two decades, the two have trained their sights on duck, pheasant and white-tailed deer on multiple continents. (An email from another Trump Jr. pal characterized one of their joint duck-hunting trips to Mexico years ago as “muy aggresivo.”)

Tommy Hicks Jr., 41, isn’t a government official; he’s a wealthy private investor. And he has been a part of discussions related to China and technology with top officials from the Treasury Department, National Security Council, Commerce Department and others, according to emails and documents obtained by ProPublica. In one email, Hicks refers to a meeting at “Langley,” an apparent reference to the CIA’s headquarters.

Hicks’ financial interests, if any, in the matters he has discussed aren’t clear. The interests are much more apparent when it comes to at least one of his associates. Hicks used his connections to arrange for a hedge fund manager friend, Kyle Bass — who has $143 million in investments that will pay off if China’s economy tanks — to present his views on the Chinese economy to high-level government officials at an interagency meeting at the Treasury Department, according to the documents.

00:00/00:00

⟲

Hicks is hardly the first private-sector power broker to emerge in a presidential administration, but he may represent a new subspecies: The Friend of the President’s Kid.

In fact, Hicks’ influence and career overwhelmingly hinge on two people: Trump Jr., his friend of about two decades, and, first and foremost, Hicks’ father. In a roughly 20-year career, Hicks has spent 17 of them working for investment funds and sports teams owned by his wealthy financier dad, Thomas Hicks Sr., and the other three working for a client of his father.

The generally privileged life of the younger Hicks has been speckled with occasional instances of misbehavior, one of them serious. At age 18, he pleaded no contest to misdemeanor assault, reduced from an original charge of felony aggravated assault, after he and two others were arrested in the beating of a fellow high school student at a party. (The victim was also kicked in the face during the assault, according to people familiar with the case. He told police that one of the three assailants — he didn’t say which — asked him, “What is your name, faggot?”) The criminal conviction did not prevent Hicks from being admitted to the University of Texas, where his father was an alumnus, a member of the Board of Regents and soon thereafter the first chairman of the University of Texas Investment Management Company, which manages the school’s endowment and other assets.

As an adult, friends say, Hicks’ carousing ways and occasional belligerent outbursts led some in his circle to bestow a heavily ironic nickname: “Senator Hicks.” His tenure as a director of the soccer team his father owned in Liverpool, England, a decade ago ended right after an email he sent to a heckling fan — “Blow me fuckface. Go to Hell. I’m sick of you.” — surfaced publicly.

Friends say Hicks has matured, particularly since he married and had three daughters. He has risen quickly in recent years. Hicks leveraged his Dallas financial network to become a top Trump campaign fundraiser in 2016 and a vice chairman of the inaugural finance committee; in January, he was named co-chairman of the Republican National Committee. His friends say he is motivated by patriotism.

There’s more over at Salon. What a nice little scam they have going.

Oh, and remember when Trump assured everyone that his sons would run the business and have nothing to do with politics?

Yeah. Another lie.

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Why they won’t protect elections Part XXI

by digby

They don’t need Russians to take advantage of this. Surely they have their own people who are willing to do it. But if Russians hap-pen to want to help out …

Watch the voting machine used in US swing states get hacked to rig an election. @Jhalderm, @UMich, and @nytimes demonstrate why every voting district needs an auditable paper ballot. Voting machines are *known* to be insecure. https://t.co/juvU7K3Qdl pic.twitter.com/prsrOGK17z— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) July 27, 2019

Welp, there goes the last vestige of independence in the Intelligence Community

by digby

Another sycophantic cultist for one of the most sensitive jobs in the world:

President Trump is expected to nominate Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-Texas) to replace Dan Coats as director of national intelligence, according to three sources familiar with the president’s deliberations.

Behind the scenes: Trump was thrilled by Ratcliffe’s admonishment of former special counsel Robert Mueller in last week’s House Judiciary Committee hearing. “The special counsel’s job, nowhere does it say that you were to conclusively determine Donald Trump’s innocence or that the special counsel report should determine whether or not to exonerate him,” Ratcliffe, a former prosecutor, said to Mueller.

“I agree with Chairman Nadler this morning when he said Donald Trump is not above the law,” Ratcliffe added. “But he damn sure should not be below the law which is where Volume II of this report puts him.”

But while Ratcliffe’s performance in the Mueller hearing helped his chances for the DNI appointment, it wasn’t what put him on the president’s radar. Advisers to Trump said the president was already seriously considering Ratcliffe to replace Coats. Trump had previously shortlisted Ratcliffe to replace Jeff Sessions as attorney general before he ultimately chose William Barr.

The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman was the first to report that Ratcliffe was in the mix to replace Coats as DNI. And CNN reported that Ratcliffe was under consideration for an unspecified job in the administration.

As with all of Trump’s decisions, his advisers caution that the president could still change his mind at the last minute, but senior administration officials familiar with the president’s deliberations say Ratcliffe is the favorite.

The big picture: Trump has been mulling replacing Coats since at least February, as Axios recently reported. The director of national intelligence serves as an overseer of the U.S. intelligence community and a close adviser to the president and National Security Council, producing each day’s top-secret Presidential Daily Brief.

Trump has privately said he thinks the Office of the Director of National Intelligence represents an unnecessary bureaucratic layer and that he would like to get rid of it. He has been told that eliminating the ODNI is not politically possible, but would still like to “downsize” the office, the source said.

Between the lines: Coats has rankled Trump more than once with his public comments, according to sources with direct knowledge. He angered Trump when he appeared to criticize the president’s relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin during an on-stage interview with NBC’s Andrea Mitchell at last year’s Aspen Security Forum.

And he drew Trump’s ire again in January when he told a Senate panel that North Korea was unlikely to give up its nuclear weapons, contradicting the president’s cheerier assessments.

When I reported on Coats’ impending departure earlier this month, Coats said in a statement provided by ODNI: “I am focused on doing my job, and it is frustrating to repeatedly be asked to respond to anonymous sources and unsubstantiated, often false rumors that undercut the critical work of the Intelligence Community and its relationship with the President.

“I am proud to lead an IC singularly focused on the vital mission of providing timely and unbiased intelligence to President Trump, Vice President Pence and the national security team in support of our nation’s security.”

We have zero reason to believe that Ratliffe is a patriot. He clearly thinks it’s just fine for the Russians and anyone else who might want to help out his cult leader should be perfectly free to do so. As long as they ensure that Dear leader is re-elected so they can remain in power, they don’t care who is pulling his strings.

*By the way, Ratcliffe’s fatuous comment that no president should be below the law was one of the low points of the hearing. The DOJ has determined that a president can’t be indicted. This comment (and Barr’s previous comments to this effect as well) suggest that they believe no (Republican) president can be investigated for crimes while in office and in no case can any damaging information about him be made public for the purpose of accountability.

In other words, during his term he is a king, as if he were ordained by God.

Here is your president saying it right out loud just this week:

TRUMP: "Then I have an Article 2, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president."

(Article 2 does not in fact empower the president to do whatever they want.) pic.twitter.com/qIFP1AbHw6— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 23, 2019

Article 2 does not say that. He won’t read so he is obviously being told that by his accomplices.

Update: looks like Coats is definitely stepping down. We don’t know yet if Ratcliffe is being tapped to replace.

But he probably is…

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Baltimore swings back

by digby

More racist bilgewater from the President this morning:

The Baltimore Sun is not having it:

In case anyone missed it, the president of the United States had some choice words to describe Maryland’s 7th congressional district on Saturday morning. Here are the key phrases: “no human being would want to live there,” it is a “very dangerous & filthy place,” “Worst in the USA” and, our personal favorite: It is a “rat and rodent infested mess.” He wasn’t really speaking of the 7th as a whole. He failed to mention Ellicott City, for example, or Baldwin or Monkton or Prettyboy, all of which are contained in the sprawling yet oddly-shaped district that runs from western Howard County to southern Harford County. No, Donald Trump’s wrath was directed at Baltimore and specifically at Rep. Elijah Cummings, the 68-year-old son of a former South Carolina sharecropper who has represented the district in the U.S. House of Representatives since 1996.

Rep, Elijah Cummings has been a brutal bully, shouting and screaming at the great men & women of Border Patrol about conditions at the Southern Border, when actually his Baltimore district is FAR WORSE and more dangerous. His district is considered the Worst in the USA…… 

….As proven last week during a Congressional tour, the Border is clean, efficient & well run, just very crowded. Cumming District is a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess. If he spent more time in Baltimore, maybe he could help clean up this very dangerous & filthy place

It’s not hard to see what’s going on here. The congressman has been a thorn in this president’s side, and Mr. Trump sees attacking African American members of Congress as good politics, as it both warms the cockles of the white supremacists who love him and causes so many of the thoughtful people who don’t to scream. President Trump bad-mouthed Baltimore in order to make a point that the border camps are “clean, efficient & well run,” which, of course, they are not — unless you are fine with all the overcrowding, squalor, cages and deprivation to be found in what the Department of Homeland Security’s own inspector-general recently called “a ticking time bomb.”

In pointing to the 7th, the president wasn’t hoping his supporters would recognize landmarks like Johns Hopkins Hospital, perhaps the nation’s leading medical center. He wasn’t conjuring images of the U.S. Social Security Administration, where they write the checks that so many retired and disabled Americans depend upon. It wasn’t about the beauty of the Inner Harbor or the proud history of Fort McHenry. And it surely wasn’t about the economic standing of a district where the median income is actually above the national average. No, he was returning to an old standby of attacking an African American lawmaker from a majority black district on the most emotional and bigoted of arguments. It was only surprising that there wasn’t room for a few classic phrases like “you people” or “welfare queens” or “crime-ridden ghettos” or a suggestion that the congressman “go back” to where he came from.

This is a president who will happily debase himself at the slightest provocation. And given Mr. Cummings’ criticisms of U.S. border policy, the various investigations he has launched as chairman of the House Oversight Committee, his willingness to call Mr. Trump a racist for his recent attacks on the freshmen congresswomen, and the fact that “Fox & Friends” had recently aired a segment critical of the city, slamming Baltimore must have been irresistible in a Pavlovian way. Fox News rang the bell, the president salivated and his thumbs moved across his cell phone into action.

As heartening as it has been to witness public figures rise to Charm City’s defense on Saturday, from native daughter House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Mayor Bernard C. “Jack” Young, we would above all remind Mr. Trump that the 7th District, Baltimore included, is part of the United States that he is supposedly governing. The White House has far more power to effect change in this city, for good or ill, than any single member of Congress including Mr. Cummings. If there are problems here, rodents included, they are as much his responsibility as anyone’s, perhaps more because he holds the most powerful office in the land.

Finally, while we would not sink to name-calling in the Trumpian manner — or ruefully point out that he failed to spell the congressman’s name correctly (it’s Cummings, not Cumming) — we would tell the most dishonest man to ever occupy the Oval Office, the mocker of war heroes, the gleeful grabber of women’s private parts, the serial bankrupter of businesses, the useful idiot of Vladimir Putin and the guy who insisted there are “good people” among murderous neo-Nazis that he’s still not fooling most Americans into believing he’s even slightly competent in his current post. Or that he possesses a scintilla of integrity. Better to have some vermin living in your neighborhood than to be one.

This morning, the White House sent its minions out to defend this atrocity:

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QOTD: Yvette Simpson, CEO DFA

by digby

On This Week with George Stephanopoulos I finally heard someone say the obvious:

SIMPSON: On the election security issue, I mean you’re absolutely right, everybody should be singing the same tune. But what we know is that one, Senate majority leader is compromised based on money that he’s taken recently from, you know, organizations that, you know, make and process voting machines.

Not only that, but we know that the Republican Party is afraid that without Russian interference, this president can’t win.

That set off Chris Christie:

CHRISTIE: That’s just ridiculous, it really is. That’s the kind of stuff – that’s why things don’t get done, because people like you say things –

SIMPSON: Well then let’s have a free and fair election.

CHRISTIE: — well look people like you say things like that and imply that somehow that’s what moved the election and you have no evidence of that.

(CROSS TALK)

SIMPSON: — let’s have a free and – let’s have a free and fair election then.

CHRISTIE: You have no evidence of that and that’s –

(CROSS TALK)

CHRISTIE: — it’s what we were before, let’s – I want that conversation to continue. Let it continue between now and the election and it will guarantee the president –

(CROSS TALK)

SIMPSON: There’s a reason that Republicans aren’t on board here.

Thank you.

Matthew Dowd went on to say they aren’t on board because the president isn’t on board.

I wonder why?

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Shorter Maureen Dowd 

by tristero

It’s all about me. 

Spare Me the Purity Racket

After I interviewed Nancy Pelosi a few weeks ago, The HuffPost huffed that we were Dreaded Elites because we were eating chocolates and — horror of horrors — the speaker had on some good pumps. 

Then this week, lefty Twitter erected a digital guillotine because I had a book party for my friend Carl Hulse, The Times’s authority on Capitol Hill for decades, attended by family, journalists, Hill denizens and a smattering of lawmakers, including Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and Susan Collins. 

I, the daughter of a D.C. cop, and Carl, the son of an Illinois plumber, were hilariously painted as decadent aristocrats reveling like Marie Antoinette when we should have been knitting like Madame Defarge. 

Yo, proletariat: If the Democratic Party is going to be against chocolate, high heels, parties and fun, you’ve lost me. And I’ve got some bad news for you about 2020.

The progressives are the modern Puritans. The Massachusetts Bay Colony is alive and well on the Potomac and Twitter. 

They eviscerate their natural allies for not being pure enough while placing all their hopes in a color-inside-the-lines lifelong Republican prosecutor appointed by Ronald Reagan. 

The politics of purism makes people stupid. And nasty. 

My father stayed up all night the night Truman was elected because he was so excited. I would like to stay up ’til dawn the night a Democrat wins next year because I’m so excited to see the moment when the despicable Donald Trump lumbers into a Marine helicopter and flies away for good. 

But Democrats are making that dream ever more distant because they are using their time knifing one another and those who want to be on their side instead of playing it smart. 

House Democrats forced Robert Mueller to testify, after he made it clear that he was spent and had nothing to add to his damning yet damnably legalistic, double-negative report, because they were hoping the hearings would jump-start howls for impeachment. 

But it’s hard to get the mad blood stirring with Muellerisms like “This is outside my purview,” “I can’t get into that,” “I don’t subscribe necessarily to your — the way you analyze that,” and “I’m not going to go into the ins and outs.” 

I never want to hear about the “O.L.C. opinion” again. 

And then, finally, finally, she eliminated the first person. In the rest of the piece she merely stated her opinions as facts so obvious that anyone who disagrees is, in her words, holding opinions that are “obviously stupid.”

Dear Maureen,

Trump is an existential threat to you. Every day he is in office, you are in danger. And if Congress does what you say and does not open an official impeachment inquiry, then when he wins in 2020, how will you feel knowing that you loudly advocated that Democrats deliberately tie their hands behind their back during this fight? You need to consider that history will judge you as the worst kind of appeaser.

Love,

tristero