Month: August 2019

Of course Never Trumpers should vote for the Democrat

by digby

It isn’t even a close call. If they can’t do that then they are with him. This is not a difficult choice.

You may have many disagreements with Max Boot, as I do. As with so many Never Trumpers it can drive you crazy that intelligent people who clearly see the cartoon lunacy of Trump could not see the more sophisticated lunacy of Dick Cheney. (Good old Dick is going to do fundraisers for Trump, fergawdsakes!)

Nonetheless, I appreciate this rational pragmatism in the face of the global emergency we face today:

When asked earlier this month whether he could support Sens. Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren if one became the Democratic presidential nominee, former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg was noncommittal. I have the utmost respect for Bloomberg, whose fiscally conservative and socially liberal views closely mirror my own, but I will vote for any Democratic nominee, even Warren or Sanders, despite my profound disagreement with their far-left agendas.

If I needed any further confirmation, it came during the second half of August. This was by no means the worst period of the Trump presidency, but it nevertheless offers a snapshot of why President Trump cannot under any circumstances be reelected. Here are 14 of the lowlights:

—Trump exulted when, at his urging, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu refused to let two Democratic members of Congress visit Israel, making clear that he does not view himself as leader of the whole country. After Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D.-Mich.) refused Israel’s conditions to visit her grandmother in the West Bank, Trump even tweeted, “The only real winner here is Tlaib’s grandmother. She doesn’t have to see her now!” I can’t fathom the sadism that would lead Trump to drag a political opponent’s grandmother into the argument.

—Trump accused Jews of “great disloyalty” for not backing him despite his support for Israel, thereby perpetuating the anti-Semitic stereotype that American Jews owe their primary allegiance to Israel. He then quoted a discredited conspiracy-monger claiming Israelis “love him like he is the second coming of God.” (Note: Jews don’t think there was a first coming.)

Trump on trade war: ‘I am the chosen one’
President Trump on Aug. 21 again defended his trade war with China and downplayed fears of a recession. (The Washington Post)
—Trump proclaimed, “I am the chosen one.” He later said he was joking, but this was a perfect reflection of his real megalomania.

—Trump expressed interest in buying Greenland. When the prime minister of Denmark rightly dismissed this idea as “absurd,” Trump petulantly blasted her as “nasty” and canceled his visit to a staunch NATO ally that lost 43 soldiers in Afghanistan.

—Trump reversed his support for background checks for gun buyers — supported by 93 percent of Americans — under pressure from the gun lobby.

—Trump escalated his attacks on his own Federal Reserve chair, Jerome H. Powell, whom he wants to scapegoat for an economic slowdown. In an unprecedented demonization of a U.S. official, the president demanded: “who is our bigger enemy, Jay Powell or [Chinese] Chairman Xi [Jinping]?”

—During the recent Group of Seven summit in France, Trump skipped a meeting on climate change and the fires in the Amazon, apparently because he doesn’t care about global warming. A few days later, his administration announced plans to roll back regulations on methane, a major greenhouse gas.

—Trump floundered for a way out of his catastrophic trade war with China. Sounding like a Soviet central planner, he tweeted on Aug. 23: “Our great American companies are hereby ordered to immediately start looking for an alternative to China.” The same day, he called Xi an “enemy.” Within three days, he was calling Xi “a great leader” and a “brilliant man” and claiming he had received two phone calls from Beijing to restart talks. Chinese officials did not confirm any such calls, and two Trump aides told CNN he had lied to calm markets.

—Trump tried to get Vladimir Putin readmitted to the G-7 and blamed former president Barack Obama — rather than Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — for the Russian president’s exclusion. The administration is also slow-walking military aid to Ukraine, continuing Trump’s kowtowing to the Russian dictator who helped elect him.

—Trump suggested he might hold the next G-7 meeting at his troubled Doral resort. This would be a clear use of the president’s powers to enrich himself in violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clause.

—Trump was reported to have asked subordinates about using nuclear bombs on hurricanes. Trump denied this Axios article as “fake news,” meaning it’s probably true.

—Trump promised to pardon subordinates who broke the law to build a border wall. This is another impeachable offense. The only defense that White House officials could muster was that Trump was joking. Are you laughing? I’m not.

—Trump continued his vendetta against former FBI director James B. Comey, who exposed Trump’s possible attempts to obstruct justice. A Justice Department inspector general’s report found that Comey violated FBI policies but absolved him of leaking classified information, as Trump has repeatedly charged.

—On Friday, Trump taunted Iran by tweeting what was almost certainly a classified image of an Iranian rocket that had exploded, thereby potentially compromising U.S. intelligence capabilities.

This is by no means a comprehensive list of Trump’s erratic and unpresidential behavior recently, but it gives you the flavor of a presidency whose defining features are crassness, cruelty, incompetence and — most of all — sheer craziness. I may not agree with Warren or Sanders on most issues, but I am confident they would not do any of the offensive and even impeachable acts that Trump commits with mind-numbing regularity. That is reason enough to vote for them, even if I would prefer a more moderate alternative. Saving U.S. democracy from a mad king matters more than the specific policies of his successor.

I would have thought we’d see a majority of average Americans who voted Republican in the past taking this tack by now. But years of talk radio and Fox News have clearly rotted their brains and they actually revere the Mad King.

The only answer for those who do see what the party has become is to vote for the Democrat. No third party votes, no abstaining. If you can’t even do this one simple thing required as a citizen to save your country from four more years of this dangerous lunatic, you are part of the problem.

*And, by the way, it is not enough EVER for them to tut-tut his tweeting, as if that’s an adequate signal of disapproval. His ignorant tweeting isn’t he problem. It’s him. And if they won’t admit that they are just as bad as the ones who are showing up at his rallies with t-shirts that say “Fuck your feelings.”

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Would you take financial advice from this man?

by digby

Earlier this week some of the Fox News people like Brit Hume, Neil Cavuto and Shepard Smith objected to Trump’s tweeting that Fox is no longer doing a good job for him. They like to pretend they are “fair and balanced” and it makes them uncomfortable to have the president admitting out loud that they are a GOP propaganda outfit and more recently Trump state TV.

However, some of the Fox hosts were clearly upset that Trump had found them wanting and they went out of their way to make it up to their Dear Leader. Case in Point, Stuart Varney who is reduced to outright denial of reality.

Karoli at Crooks and Liars caught the exchange:

“I’m running against this president, because I believe he lies virtually every time he opens his mouth. You know that, too–” Walsh said.

Varney interrupted, clearly irritated at that last part. “No, I do not,” he huffed.

Walsh continued, “I believe he’s morally unfit—”

Interrupting again, Varney managed an indignant denial before warning, “Do not impute that to me, Joe Walsh.”

Undeterred, Walsh pointed out that Trump is a danger to the country.

Aside: I’m not at all convinced that Joe Walsh is playing a good guy role here, but it doesn’t really matter when you put him up next to Stuart Varney, who is clearly and obviously “working for” Donald Trump.

Getting madder and madder, Varney laid into Walsh.

“Don’t do it, Don’t do it. Do not impute that on me,” Varney yelled. “Look, I invited you on — you are on this program because I got questions … Look, you’re on the program because I’ve got questions that I want to ask. And when I get an answer like, I know — “Stuart Varney knows that the president lies,” I’m going to push back. Because that’s nonsense, and you know it’s nonsense. And don’t try to bring me into your phony arguments.”
[…]
WALSH: I believe, Stuart — I’ll give you an example, just from yesterday — and even his staff, Stuart, admitted that he lied this week when he said there were high-level phone calls between the United States and China. Trump said that repeatedly. His staff came out yesterday, and admitted that the President of the United States lied to the world
VARNEY: No, they didn’t.

WALSH: to manipulate the markets. I have a problem with that.

VARNEY: That’s not a lie. Let’s not get technical.

WALSH: That’s not a lie?

VARNEY: No, that’s not a lie. If the man says — and he did — that high-level talks had been held with China, that is not a lie. They were held with China.

WALSH: Stuart, he said there were high-level phone calls with Chinese officials. His staff admitted that was not true — that he lied in order to manipulate the market.

VARNEY: OK, Give me another one.

An incredulous Walsh asked Varney, “Really, you don’t believe that that’s a lie?”

Varney, with a straight face, answers that he doesn’t, and furthermore, “I really object to you saying to me, ‘And you know it is, Stuart.’ I do not know it is. And please, don’t bring me into your nonsense.”

NARRATOR: It is, in fact, a lie.

But Varney’s job isn’t to tell the truth, it’s to serve Donald Trump, which is why the segment ends this way:

WALSH: Stuart, do you believe this president lies?
VARNEY: No.

WALSH: You don’t believe he’s ever lied?

VARNEY: He exaggerates and spins.

WALSH: OK. Do you believe he’s ever told the American people a lie?

VARNEY: No.

You’d think even his staunchest supporters would flinch at such a ridiculous statement. But it appears to be an official talking point:

CNN host Chris Cuomo had to check that his earpiece was working properly on Wednesday night after Kayleigh McEnany, national press secretary for the Trump campaign, claimed with a straight face that President Donald Trump has never lied to the American people.

In case you are feeling just a little bit crazy after seeing these people, here’s a dose of clarity:

He’s not just a liar. He’s a pathological liar of a scale most of us have never seen before. In fact, I’m guessing there has never in world history a liar of such proportions in such a powerful position. That’s one thing. Maybe it’s a fluke or a function of ou celebrity culture that some with such sever psychological impairment could rise to high office.

But what can we say about the Stuart Varneys among us, the people who say “you can believe him or you can believe your lying eyes?”

They are either monumentally stupid, delusional or evil. And there are millions of them.

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Exceptionalism lives

by digby

Our tragic shame…

Mass shootings this year throughout the world.

🇦🇹 0
🇩🇰 0
🇫🇮 0
🇩🇪 0
🇮🇹 0
🇮🇪 0
🇱🇺 0
🇨🇭 0
🇬🇧 0
🇭🇺 0
🇪🇸 0
🇵🇹 0
🇸🇬 0
🇸🇦 0
🇧🇪 0
🇸🇪 0
🇦🇺 0
🇫🇷 0
🇳🇿 1
🇳🇱 1
🇧🇷 1
🇨🇦 1
🇲🇽 3
🇺🇸 292

— Sheila Nevins (@thesheilanevins) August 5, 2019

A Michigan high school is undergoing a $48 million renovation to fortify against mass shooters. Fruitport High School is adding curved hallways to keep people out of the line of sight of gunmen, barriers to provide protection and easy escape, classrooms that can lock on demand, shatterproof glass, and an extensive surveillance system, The Washington Post reported. The architect, Matt Slagle, whose firm also designs prisons, cautions that the fortifications won’t make the school invincible, since most school shooters are students who are already familiar with the campus layout. “Unfortunately, that’s the way things are now,” Slagle said.

I’m so, so proud to be an American where pathetic macho dudes are allowed to have killing machines to compensate for their insecurities. I feel so free.

Update:

Just another day in America

Gunfire broke out after a high school football game in Alabama, leaving 10 teens injured, half of them critically.
The victims in the shooting in Mobile ranged in age from 15 to 18, police said. They were at Ladd-Peebles Stadium on Friday night for the game between Leflore and Williamson high schools when shots rang out, Mobile Police Chief Lawrence Battiste told reporters.
Of those injured, five are in critical condition, CNN affiliate WKRG reported.
Parents whose children were at the stadium and are missing should call local hospitals, Battise told the affiliate, adding that the city will not tolerate shootings at public events.

“Why are the young people bringing this type of violence to public events. They’re bringing their beefs that they have with each other in their neighborhoods and they’re putting other people in harm’s way,” he said. “This is unacceptable for people to not to be able to come out and enjoy an event.”
It is unclear whether there was a fight before the gunfire and police are interviewing witnesses at the scene, he said. Two people are in custody.

Trump seems a bit worried about his “beautiful beauty”

by digby

Normally I wouldn’t care about this but since it’s Trump whose base is made up of a formerly hyper-moral evangelical cult, it’s fair game:

After two years in the White House, one former senior official said, “she thought she was a senior adviser” — one who tried recently to weigh in on drafting Mr. Trump’s tweets — rather than an aide in a secretarial role. In recent months, Ms. Westerhout had become more interested in traveling with the president, and in Bedminster, it was noticed at a campaign briefing that she was seated closer to Mr. Trump than was his chief of staff.
[…]
According to Mr. Alberta’s book, Mr. Trump would refer to Ms. Westerhout as “my beautiful beauty.” She was often at his side on trips to Mar-a-Lago, his Palm Beach, Fla., resort, where she would accept gifts on behalf of Mr. Trump and trade business cards with his supporters. Some of them knew that if they wanted to reach the president by phone, they could bypass his other gatekeepers and go directly to her.

But she also had a fairly large coterie of enemies, including some in the East Wing — the purview of the first lady, Melania Trump — which viewed her with suspicion. Some of the president’s friends counseled him over the past two years that she was, in the words of one, “immature,” and was blocking access to him from some people he had known for years.

Inside the faction-split White House, Trump loyalists cheered Ms. Westerhout’s departure as a move that was long overdue, and said they hoped it served as something of a wake-up call for Mr. Trump to bring in more loyalists into the West Wing. But current and former officials also expressed alarm about what information Ms. Westerhout could share down the road, not just about the president, but about her colleagues.

Adding to the concern was the fact that, unlike most other officials, Ms. Westerhout was not thought to have signed a nondisclosure agreement, a document that Mr. Trump has frequently used in effort to tamp down on leaks.

At least one publishing house on Friday had discussions about trying to approach Ms. Westerhout for a book, according to one person familiar with the discussions.

Somebody seems worried about this:

The fact that this is a big story when nobody has ever heard of this person makes it clear that there have been lots and lots of rumors about her and the president among the press corps. That innuendo in that NYT article couldn’t be any more obvious.

Trump’s tweet with the veiled threat about the confidentiality agreement while saying she’s a good person is classic.

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If he weren’t such a jerk, this would almost be sad

by digby

I’m pretty sure that all he thinks about is himself. Literally. It’s the only thing his sad, twisted mind is capable of doing.

In his upcoming memoir, newly appointed Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch IIIdescribes the private tour he gave President Trump of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, recalling that Trump’s reaction to the Dutch role in the global slave trade was, “You know, they love me in the Netherlands.”

Shortly before Trump took office in 2017, his administration asked to visit the newly opened museum, according to Bunch’s upcoming memoir, “A Fool’s Errand: Creating the National Museum of African American History and Culture in the Age of Bush, Obama and Trump.” Bunch was the museum’s founding director from 2005 until June, when he became the Smithsonian’s secretary.

The incoming president wanted to come on the holiday commemorating the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., according to the memoir. The administration also asked that the museum be closed to the public during the visit. “The notion that we could shut out visitors on the first King holiday since the opening of the museum was not something I could accept,” Bunch writes. Another day was chosen.

Among those who joined Trump were Ben Carson, a retired neurosurgeon who is featured in the museum and who had been nominated to lead the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) and King’s niece Alveda King. Bunch recalls hoping the visit “would contribute to a broader understanding of race relations in America. I am ever the optimist.”

Before the president-elect arrived, his aides told Bunch that Trump “was in a foul mood and that he did not want to see anything ‘difficult,’ ” Bunch writes. Nevertheless, Bunch started the tour in the history galleries, which begin with the global slave trade.

“It was not my job to make the rough edges of history smooth, even for the president,” he writes.

Trump greeted him warmly and expressed his wife’s enjoyment of a tour she had with Sara Netanyahu, wife of the Israeli prime minister, according to Bunch. Then they went into the galleries.

“The president paused in front of the exhibit that discussed the role of the Dutch in the slave trade,” Bunch writes. “As he pondered the label I felt that maybe he was paying attention to the work of the museum. He quickly proved me wrong. As he turned from the display he said to me, ‘You know, they love me in the Netherlands.’ All I could say was let’s continue walking.”

“There is little I remember about the rest of the hour we spent together. I was so disappointed in his response to one of the greatest crimes against humanity in history,” he continues. “Here was a chance to broaden the views and the understanding of the incoming president and I had been less successful than I had expected.”

He has absolutely no interest in broadening his views and understanding. He’s a stable genius:

He said in a series of interviews that he does not need to read extensively because he reaches the right decisions “with very little knowledge other than the knowledge I [already] had, plus the words ‘common sense,’ because I have a lot of common sense and I have a lot of business ability.”

Trump said he is skeptical of experts because “they can’t see the forest for the trees.” He believes that when he makes decisions, people see that he instinctively knows the right thing to do: “A lot of people said, ‘Man, he was more accurate than guys who have studied it all the time.’ ”

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“Republicans Post Anti-Semitic Video”

by tristero

“Republicans Post Anti-Semitic Video.” That was the print headline for this article in the NY. They weren’t kidding:

Dark clouds roll in while ominous orchestral music swells in a video posted on Wednesday night by the Rockland County Republican Party. 

Large text flashes slowly across the screen warning that “a storm is brewing” and “if they win, we lose.” 

The “they” are the ultra-Orthodox Jewish residents of the villages and towns just northwest of New York City, where tension has been steadily increasing between rapidly growing Hasidic enclaves and the surrounding secular and non-Jewish communities. 

The anti-Semitic video was widely denounced by Democrats.

Indeed it is anti-Semitic. Its clear intent was to energize the neo-Nazi Republican base. And its deployment follows the standard Republican playbook:

1. Knowingly release a blatantly racist/anti-Semitic/anti-immigrant attack ad.
2. Wait for the uproar which turbocharges awareness of the ad among white supremacists.
3. Tepidly denounce the ad and remove it.
4. Pivot immediately to a racist attack while denying the intent is racist.

And sure enough, that’s exactly what they did here. Here’s the tepid denouncement:

Even the chairman of the State Republican Party, Nick Langworthy, said it was “an ill-conceived, bad mistake…”

Bullshit. Ill-conceived it was not. Nor was it mistake. It was part of a deliberate, carefully thought-through anti-Semitic Republican strategy:

Numerous Rockland County Republican elected officials in February previewed the controversial video put out by the party that critics have branded as anti-Semitic for warning of a “takeover” by the Hasidic Jewish community, The Post has learned. 

The early look at the digital attack ad — some six months before its public release — shows that the targeting of the ultra-orthodox community was a well-thought-out, deliberate strategy, sources said. 

No one in the room objected to it, a GOP source who attended the February meeting told The Post.

But back to the original article from the Times for the pivot to a blatantly racist attack (complete with obligatory denial that it’s not racist at all):

After the video was taken down, Lawrence Garvey, the chairman of the Rockland County Republican Party, defended it in a statement. 

“Regardless of your thoughts of the video, there are facts that cannot be ignored,” he said. “This is not, nor has it ever been a religious issue. It is an issue of right and wrong.”

Racist message to the base (“we’re on your side, boys”) signed sealed, and delivered, courtesy your local Republican party.

“A dangerous inheritance”
by Tom Sullivan

Still image from Network (1976)

Why, why do some of our neighbors persist in cleaving to a political cult of personality bent on destroying the very nation whose principles they glorify in symbols and songs?

The answers to that are not only more complex than political soundbites, but difficult for a liberalism built on Enlightenment ideals to accept. The left’s adversaries are doggedly resistant to reason and facts. Progressives too proud by half of their command of both find it infuriating that their go-to tools have no measurable effect on a cult of personality undermining its own economic interests and professed values. If the American economic system is in a rush to bottom, determined to transform everything and everyone it touches to profits for those at the top, our neighbors are just as determined to wring the last measure of decency from the American experiment.

A couple of articles this week broadened my understanding. But first, let’s quickly review our theory of child-rearing.

George Lakoff’s “Moral Politics” got at part of the answer over two decades ago. People don’t vote their interests, they vote their identities. Lakoff believed conservatives and liberals view the world through a parent’s eyes. Liberals hope to nurture children and maximize their potential. Conservatives see a hostile world out there, a natural world with threats around every corner, where the strict father’s role is teaching children to navigate and dominate it. Success in that world begins with discipline, with listening to Daddy, first and foremost, and leaving undisturbed the (conservative) natural order’s strict, moral hierarchy:

The conservative moral hierarchy helps explain Republican attacks on affordable healthcare. Sound familiar? https://t.co/V0HEbgHu77 pic.twitter.com/YCwZMyKhEt— George Lakoff (@GeorgeLakoff) July 1, 2017

“You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won’t have it!” Ned Beatty bellowed in Network (1976). So have climate activist Greta Thunberg and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

In sailing across the Atlantic to attend to the UN’s Youth Climate Summit, 16-year-old, Swedish climate activist Thunberg has drawn media attention to her issue and personal attacks from the right. She’s experienced “a tsunami of male rage,” Martin Gelin writes at the New Republic. Men of the far right have called her a “deeply disturbed messiah of the global warming movement” and a petulant, “arrogant child.” Why? Because this female, this adolescent, is meddling with the primal forces of nature.

Researchers Jonas Anshelm and Martin Hultman of Sweden’s Chalmers University of Technology find a link between climate denialism and anti-feminist right. For climate skeptics, they write, “it was not the environment that was threatened, it was a certain kind of modern industrial society built and dominated by their form of masculinity.” That is, climate change threatens their identity:

The connection has to do with a sense of group identity under threat, Hultman told me—an identity they perceive to be under threat from all sides. Besieged, as they see it, both by developing gender equality—Hultman pointed specifically to the shock some men felt at the #MeToo movement—and now climate activism’s challenge to their way of life, male reactionaries motivated by right-wing nationalism, anti-feminism, and climate denialism increasingly overlap, the three reactions feeding off of one another.

What Hultman calls climate change is a threat to “industrial breadwinner masculinity.” That bundle of values is, as Lakoff described, built on viewing the natural world as a thing to exploit and dominate through development. To observe limits to that is to make them feel less, well, manly. Environmentalism is feminizing and “oppositional to assumed entitlements of masculine primacy.”

Ocasio-Cortez brushes off right-wing insults like lint from her shoulder. Young, smart, pretty, Latina, she has become an obsession with the American right for reasons similar to Thunberg. Promoting her Green New Deal has made her a target of male rage as nationalism and misogynist rhetoric bubble up not only in the U.S. but abroad. Fear of change is a powerful motivator, Gelin observes.

More rungs on the conservative moral hierarchy are at risk from immigration and demographic shifts. Eve Fairbanks examines for the Washington Post how conservatives sell themselves as “reasonable” in defense of their places atop a hierarchy they perceive as birthrights.

Raised near the Manassas battlefield in Virginia, Fairbanks immersed herself in Lincoln speeches, Civil War rhetoric, and soldiers’ letters. What she notices among “reasonable conservatives” is the same “antebellum reasoning” used to defend slavery. “The same exact words. The same exact arguments.”

Defenders of chattel slavery sought not to defend the vile practice, she explains, but to portray themselves as champions of “reason,” free speech, and “civility.” They were the persecuted ones, southern Davids facing down northern Goliaths, shamed “purely on the basis of freely held ideas, the right of every thinking man.”

Fairbanks writes:

All of this is there in the reasonable right: The claim that they are the little people struggling against prevailing winds. The argument that they’re the ones championing reason and common sense. The allegation that their interlocutors aren’t so much wrong as excessive; they’re just trying to think freely and are being tormented. The reliance on hyperbole and slippery slopes to warn about their adversaries’ intentions and power. The depiction of their opponents as an “orthodoxy,” an epithet the antebellum South loved.

Lincoln saw the threat “antebellum reasoning” posed, Fairbanks explains, that “by claiming to stand for freedom, reason and civility, and by framing themselves as beleaguered victims, pro-Southern thinkers could draft new warriors who thought they were fighting for something fundamentally American, even if they were wary of slavery itself.”

Today’s practitioners do not oppose admission of brown people to this country or refugees or Muslims. No, they simply want the laws enforced and borders respected and protected. In another era, the argument might be states’ rights.

“If you don’t have borders then, you don’t have a country,” the acting president told a rally in South Carolina last year. Fairbanks does not include him in the reasonable right, but the appeal to common sense in defense of bigotry is the same among “renegade thinkers” who portray themselves as stifled by political correctness.

Others, Fairbanks suspects charitably,

… seek the reassurance of antebellum reasoning to help reconcile their ambivalent feelings about cultural and demographic changes. Still others may simply be disillusioned with contemporary politics, intuit that important conversations are somehow not being had, and long for a discourse anchored on simple, easily shared principles. They may have no racist sympathies nor even be particularly conservative. But that’s why the South came up with this form of argument in the first place. It conscripted allies who had no taste for distasteful things into what was cast as a much wider fight.

In a complex world, an appeal to bedrock American faiths “is still the one, subconsciously, for which Americans reach when we feel blown off course.” But 150 years after the Civil War, Fairbanks warns, revanchist elements use appeals to those values “to turn opponents of conservatism into helpless hosts, transmitting its ideas,” as well as to skillfully paint liberal opponents as illiberal. The tradition, she concludes, is “a dangerous inheritance.”

It is not clear to which “opponents of conservatism” Fairbanks refers in that passage, although she cites a Nicholas Kristof quote in passing. But the right’s decades of “working the refs” has made an access-dependent mainstream press less aggressive in challenging the disingenuous nonsense spewed regularly by conservative guests. Republican lawmakers seem to receive more airtime as well, allowing them more weakly challenged opportunities to inject the body politic with its ideas.

They are far more practiced at spreading and defending theirs and their accustomed system of privilege than opponents on the left are at challenging it. Progressives committed to peaceful change had best not rely on demographics alone to do the convincing for them.

Friday Night Soother

by digby

I needed a monkey reunion more than I knew. pic.twitter.com/BFGkJPN9sa

— Sean Kent (@seankent) August 26, 2019

Great piece by Greg Sargent @ThePlumLineGS on the methods Trump uses to get what HE wants.
Trump is ‘joking’ about pardons? How is this a defense?

A fundamental flaw that this book struggles to overcome: “What’s the problem with mobster jokes? Mobsters don’t think they’re funny, and everyone else thinks they’re not jokes.”

 It’s important to note that it’s not just ONE thing that Trump does. There is not just one method to defeat him. He is cunning and has been trained by mendacious experts like Roy Cohen. He uses multiple legal, illegal and psychological methods to get what he wants and to protect himself in the process. If you want to stop him each method needs to be addressed because he uses them concurrently and/or serially.

We are now at the point where President Trump’s own officials are basically admitting that he has dangled pardons to underlings, as part of an apparent effort to get them to build his border wall in time for reelection.

But they are qualifying this. Or at least they think they are: They are claiming Trump is “joking.”

But how exactly is this a defense? It’s actually an admission — and can we please recall that Trump has repeatedly dangled pardons before, in a manner that had no joking aura around it whatsoever?

The New York Times is now the second news organization to report this pushback, after The Post reported on it Tuesday. A senior administration official told the Times that Trump never seriously offered any pardons: “He winks when he does it.”

These supposed joke-pardon offers have come after he has instructed aides to “aggressively seize private land and disregard environmental rules,” as The Post puts it, adding the crucial detail that Trump has offered pardons when aides object that such directives are illegal.

Trump raged on Twitter that any suggestion he offered pardons is “totally fake.” But his own aides, by allowing he has done this as a “joke,” have partially undermined this claim.

Let’s walk through the ways this isn’t actually a defense. First of all, as I’ve noted, it puts Trump’s underlings in the position of having to decide whether to interpret Trump’s apparent demand that they break the law, and his offer of a pardon, as a real directive and offer.

Bolstering this point, we now have it straight from a senior official that Trump “winks” when he says this. If that sounds familiar, that’s because it calls to mind former Trump fixer Michael Cohen’s arresting description of Trump’s M.O. when it comes to communicating nefarious directives to his consiglieri.

As Cohen testified to Congress, Trump doesn’t “directly” issue such instructions, because “that’s not how he operates.” Instead, Cohen said, Trump would “look me in the eye” and ostensibly state the opposite of what he really intended, a device Cohen came to understand perfectly well. This is unquestionably very plausible on its face.

The part about “It’s a joke!” is a line used by bullies when someone calls them on it. We all know that trick. So what would you do if you were in this situation and you KNEW that the bully would try this either in real time or after the fact?

NOTE: Right wing bullies use these same methods to threaten people. They use them to fight back if they are challenged. Anticipate they will use one or more trick then USE that against them. It’s a jujitsu move

Example, “I was joking!” can be disproved by providing them with context showing it is not which has the added benefit of nullifying another dodge, the “It’s out of context!” complaint.  Often times the context makes it worse, not better. 

When I think about how I would respond I realize that people have tried to get Trump using these methods and have either failed or have been blocked by his other methods used by his protectors and fixers. We must learn from their experience.

1) Have witnesses who can testify that he asked them to do something illegal. Prepare for:
Their word to be questioned and to be threatened online, their money or freedom to be taken away. Their family threatened with violence.  I can point to specific examples of Trump using all these tactics.

If they do testify in front of someone who can do something about it, the findings will be dismissed, downplayed or lied about. Sometimes, as we saw in a deposition, Trump finally is busted and throws money at the problem to make it go away like Trump University.

2) Have it recorded (video is best, but audio in a pinch because tone of voice and facial expressions can be used to show he wasn’t joking.)
 Prepare for:
The video to be blocked. (The Apprentice tapes) People to be threatened by massive legal fines if they release them. If the video gets out, the Trump team dismisses what is said as, “Out of context. That is not what he meant. It was a joke! It’s not a big deal.  It’s locker room talk! Why didn’t they object at the time? They knew it was a joke. They played along. They are out to get me because I’m successful and they are not. I’m the victim here. “

I cannot prove Trump is doing something similar when he dangles a pardon with a “wink.” But would it be unreasonable for officials (or indeed the rest of us) to at least wonder whether he might be? And isn’t putting those officials in that position itself a flagrant abuse of power?

Second, administration officials who are in a position to shed light on Trump’s habit of dangling pardons — jokingly or not — are clammed up tight.

Recall that the Times reported in April that Trump privately urged Kevin McAleenan, the acting head of the Department of Homeland Security, to close the border to migrants entirely — then said he’d pardon McAleenan if he encountered legal trouble. This, too, was explained away as potentially being a joke, but it “alarmed” officials, though DHS denied it.

Subsequently, House Judiciary Committee Democrats requested that McAleenan provide a list of all employees present at the meeting at which that reportedly happened, with an eye toward fleshing out the truth about the episode.

Yet now a spokesman for the Judiciary Committee tells me that on this issue, they have received “no response and no documents.” This is newly significant in light of the latest reports that Trump has again dangled pardons.

How do you deal with delay tactics? Anticipate that they will happen, use the next time he uses them to bring previous ones back to light.

Trump has done this repeatedly Third, we know Trump is capable of dangling pardons in a deadly serious manner — indeed, with corrupt intent — because he’s done it before. The special counsel’s report concluded Trump’s public statements about former campaign chair Paul Manafort “suggested that a pardon was a more likely possibility if Manafort continued not to cooperate” with the government.

Crucially, the special counsel also concluded that these statements were “intended” to induce Manafort not to cooperate. That’s improper intent.

Thus, Trump is perfectly capable of nakedly abusing the pardon power. And this is no small thing: as Benjamin Wittes put it, this was a “grotesque abuse of power for impeachment purposes,” and indeed “one of the most singular abuses of the entire Trump presidency.”

We know that in the legal system intent is often hard to prove. The good news is that Trump will often come out and confirm his improper intent. Why?  Because he’s stupid? Yes, but he also believes that he can get away with it because he has done so multiple times in the past.

The unabashed, openly contemptuous nature of Trump’s abuse of the pardon power is key here. He cheerfully flaunted it; he delighted in advertising his willingness to use it. For Trump to dangle pardons as a “joke” inevitably shades into this kind of flaunting, albeit of a private sort: I’m only joking, but as I direct you to skirt laws and rules, maybe you should keep in mind that I really do have this power.

Trump’s underlying directivesWhich leads to what most of us aren’t even talking about here: the very orders Trump is issuing that might ultimately require a pardon — just kidding, not really! — which he obviously isn’t joking about.

It’s still vague what precisely he has ordered. But here’s what we do know: that Trump wants the project sped up primarily so he can boast about more wall completion as part of his reelection campaign.

This is the other part of dealing with right wing bullies. They will use the various systems: legal, linguistic, media and psychological to parse their words and actions. They will attempt to get others to give them the benefit of the doubt. 

So, prepare for this use of the systems. I’m not a chess player, I’m a time traveler. I can go back and forth in time and see how they use the same methods over and over and what worked to defeat them. One thing that you can NOT do is assume that they are stupid. They often anticipate your move you aren’t the only one who figured this out.

They will figure out that you will use A, B, and C and have counter strategies. Prepare for their responses to your counter strategies. Sometimes their responses are overreactions which makes them vulnerable. One of the things we know is that when they are thwarted, they often want to “take the gloves off” and go right to violence.  They aren’t joking.

I’ll remind people that both people Sargent quotes here, Cohen and Manafort are in jail. Trump protects himself first.  We all want the catharsis of Trump getting busted. But let’s appreciate the work done to get those two convicted.

Michael “I’d take a bullet for him”
  Cohen knew what to record and why. What he didn’t anticipate was Trump’s use of smarter lawyers, like Bill Barr, to protect Trump.

I/we need to learn from that experience.

Impeachment, like a criminal case needs more than just legal evidence. It needs to be built with an understanding of your opponent. Learn their tricks and the  tricks of their supporters.

Who is supporting Trump NOW? They should be reminded they could be next to Cohen and Manafort in jail, especially if they break the law to help Trump to get what he wants.

Prepare, catch, prosecute, convict. Sentence.  Repeat until done.

. 

Oh my:

Madeleine Westerhout, who left her White House job suddenly on Thursday as President Trump’s personal assistant, was fired after bragging to reporters that she had a better relationship with Trump than his own daughters, Ivanka and Tiffany Trump, and that the president did not like being in pictures with Tiffany because he perceived her as overweight.

Given Westerhout’s sensitive role as a confidante to the president, the few details the White House shared about her abrupt firing had Washington’s political-media class in a quiet frenzy on Thursday night and Friday.

The critical comments happened at an off-the-record dinner, according to two people familiar with the matter, that Westerhout and deputy White House press secretary Hogan Gidley held earlier this month with reporters who were covering Trump’s vacation at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey.

Westerhout also jokingly told the journalists that Trump couldn’t pick Tiffany out of a crowd, said one of the people. “She had a couple drinks and in an uncharacteristically unguarded moment, she opened up to the reporters,” the person said.

At some point, Gidley left the restaurant for a television interview on Fox News. During that time — around 45 minutes to an hour — Westerhout made the comments to the reporters.

After the Aug. 17 dinner, which took place at the restaurant inside the nearby Embassy Suites hotel and included the Washington Post’s Phil Rucker, Bloomberg’s Jennifer Jacobs, Reuters’ Steve Holland and the Wall Street Journal’s Andrew Restuccia, Westerhout rode back to a different hotel, the Marriott, with Rucker and Holland.

White House staffers having off-the-record dinners or drinks with reporters has long been a commonplace practice when a president is traveling.

“This was an off-the-record dinner and the media blatantly violated that agreement,” an administration official said.

Arthur Schwartz, a confidant of Donald Trump Jr. who spars frequently with the media, accused Rucker on Friday in a series of tweets of having “burned” Westerhout and of violating the Washington Post’s policies on sourcing.

Rucker referred a request for comment to the Washington Post, while the other reporters present either declined to comment or referred requests to spokespeople for their news organizations.

“Philip Rucker is one of the best and most scrupulous reporters in the news business,” said Steven Ginsberg, national editor at the Washington Post, in an emailed statement. “He has always acted with the utmost honor and integrity and has never violated Washington Post standards or policies.”

The White House and Westerhout declined to comment.

This story doesn’t spell out how Rucker supposedly violated the agreement. It doesn’t seem likely.

As for Westerhout, it’s clear she was wrong about being closer to the president than Ivanka. As for Trump not wanting to be photographed in picture with Tiffany because he thinks she’s overweight — of course that’s true. It’s who he is.