Month: November 2019

Coming attractions
by Tom Sullivan

Public presidential impeachment hearings into the actions of Donald Trump begin at 10 a.m. (EST). Today’s two witnesses are William Taylor, America’s top diplomat in Ukraine, and George Kent, deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs.

Expect Democrats to make the case that Trump’s actions with regard to Ukraine amount to an abuse of power. The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank reduced the matter to seven words: “He abused presidential powers for personal advantage.” Axios quotes an unnamed Democrat involved in their strategy as saying, “The president abused his power to rig and fix elections in his favor.” Democrats want to keep the issue easier for the public to digest than the 400-page Mueller report.

Axios outlines what today’s witnesses bring to the investigation:

• Ambassador Bill Taylor: The top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine. He says it was his “clear understanding” that Trump would not release military aid to Ukraine until its president promised to conduct the investigations Trump wanted.
• Deputy Assistant Secretary George Kent: He says Trump wanted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to go to the microphones “and say investigations, Biden, and Clinton.”

NBC reports:

In his closed-door deposition, Taylor said he threatened to quit after he was told Trump was withholding hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to Ukraine because he wanted “investigations.” He texted another diplomat that “it’s crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign.”

Kent told investigators in his deposition that he’d raised concerns that Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani was poisoning Ukraine policy with “a campaign of lies” — and was warned to “lay low” by his boss afterward.

Republicans issued a memo to caucus members on Monday outlining their defense strategy. They mean to limit focus as best they can to the contents of the July 25 Ukraine call summary (not an actual transcript) released by the White House.

Democrats expect witnesses to provide the context behind the call. As other witness statements have already confirmed, Trump through intermediaries and especially through his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani had been pressuring Ukraine for some time to investigate former vice president Joe Biden and his son, and to provide support for a debunked conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, had interfered in the 2016 presidential election. Trump withheld approved military aid to Ukraine pending Ukraine coughing up the “deliverables,” including a public statement that Ukraine had launched an investigation into the Bidens.

Republicans will retool “no collusion” to read “no pressure” on the Ukrainian president. They will attempt to discredit any testimony based on second- or third-hand knowledge of events. If witnesses did not get their information directly from the president, Republican questioners will challenge it as unreliable.

Their “no harm, no foul” strategy argues not only did Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky not feel pressured by Trump’s ask for an investigation, Ukraine was unaware military aid had been withheld. And anyway, they argue, the aid got there without action by Ukraine. Trump, they’ll argue, did nothing wrong. Or at least, nothing impeachment-worthy.

A majority of the public is already on the other side of that argument, according a Navigator Research poll showing “52% of Americans in favor of impeachment and 41% of Americans opposed.” Furthermore (emphasis added):

While support for impeachment holds firm, there remains an additional segment of Americans not yet convinced. Eight percent (8%) are undecided, and nearly half of impeachment opponents (18% of the public) oppose impeachment currently but do NOT agree with Trump that he did nothing wrong (just 23% of Americans offer the president full exoneration).

Rudy Giuliani’s shadow foreign policy apparatus, including his indicted colleagues Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, may be thrown under the bus during these hearings. Trump denies knowing the pair despite multiple interactions. That denial is already on its way to biting Trump in his broad, dorsal target. Parnas has signaled he will cooperate with investigators.

The New York Times anticipates some discussion of the ouster of former ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch and the Giuliani-led smear campaign against her. Yovanovitch testifies publicly on Friday.

Transcripts of prior testimony by Taylor and Kent are provided in the links.

The Hill reports the hearings should be easy to find:

ABC, CBS, NBC and PBS on Wednesday will preempt their regularly scheduled programming for live coverage of the House Intelligence Committee’s open impeachment hearings of President Trump.

As expected, all of the major cable news networks, including Fox News, MSNBC, CNN and CSPAN will also offer live coverage.

NBC reports the hearing may run until somewhere between 2:30 and 4:30 p.m. Naturally, that will depend on how much of a show Republican ringmaster Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio puts on for his audience of one.

Whiners gonna whine

by digby

But they are full of it:

Sean Hannity’s show October 29th:

“Another day of secret meetings, secret hearings, secret transcripts, a secret whistleblower, non-whistleblower, hearsay whistleblower, all because of a phone call between President Trump and the president of Ukraine,” he said. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) was “calling in witness after witness but only behind closed doors, without real Republican due process at all to speculate on the president’s intentions.”

Earlier that day, the witness who offered testimony to impeachment investigators was Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, a member of the National Security Council who’d participated on the July 25 call referred to by Hannity. Last week, investigators released a transcript of Vindman’s testimony, more than 8,000 lines of text in which he told members of Congress what he’d been privy to in his role.

What that transcript also allows us to do is see how unbalanced it was for Republicans, the extent to which Democrats dominated the questioning. We went through it line-by-line (as you can, should you wish), categorizing what was being asked and answered depending on who asked it. We set aside contextual issues or objections as a separate category of engagement and identified the relatively few instances in which a speaker couldn’t be identified or information was redacted.

The result looked like this:

Following the introductory discussion and Vindman’s opening statement, there were five timed segments over the course of the day in which both Democrats and Republicans had the floor.

The flow is pretty obvious visually. Each party took turns asking questions of Vindman, led by the Democrats. Generally, questioning was delegated to staff attorneys for either the Democratic majority or the Republican minority. At some points, members interjected with questions, as did Schiff.

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There were a number of verbal scuffles between Republicans and Democrats, generally when Republicans had the floor. Many of those debates were instigated by objections from Vindman’s attorney. Several were driven by the Republicans’ interest in asking questions about the whistleblower.

Overall, though, the distribution of the questioning is obvious. About 44 percent of the transcript is made up of questions or answers from Democratic members or staff. About 41 percent is from the Republicans. The remaining 15 percent was discussion and objections.

Give those little babies a blankie and put them down for a nap. They asked plenty of questions. They were all stupid, of course, but that’s their own fault.

You know they will be doing more of the same with these impeachment hearings.

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“I have Article II where I have the right to do whatever I want as president”

by digby

It looks like he’s been up to his old tricks:

President Trump has discussed dismissing the intelligence community’s inspector general, Michael Atkinson, because Mr. Atkinson reported a whistle-blower’s complaint about Mr. Trump’s interactions with Ukraine to Congress after concluding it was credible, according to four people familiar with the discussions.

Mr. Trump first expressed his dismay about Mr. Atkinson around the time the whistle-blower’s complaint became public in September. In recent weeks, he has continued to raise with aides the possibility of firing him, one of the people said.

The president has said he does not understand why Mr. Atkinson shared the complaint, which outlined how Mr. Trump asked the Ukrainian president to investigate Mr. Trump’s political rivals at the same time he was withholding military aid from the country. He has said he believes Mr. Atkinson, whom he appointed in 2017, has been disloyal, one of the people said.

Mr. Trump’s private complaints about Mr. Atkinson have come as he has publicly questioned his integrity and accused him of working with the Democrats to sabotage his presidency.

It is unclear how far Mr. Trump’s discussions about removing Mr. Atkinson have progressed. Two people familiar with what took place said they thought that Mr. Trump was just venting, and insisted that Mr. Atkinson’s dismissal was never under serious consideration.

But the mixture of public attacks and private discussions about a possible dismissal is a familiar way Mr. Trump has undermined investigators who have examined his conduct or that of people close to him. The president publicly criticized James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, and Jeff Sessions, the former attorney general, before he dismissed them for perceived disloyalty.

Mr. Trump believes he has the power to fire anyone in the executive branch, though aides say they have learned to ignore many of his private rants, unless the president brings up the subject repeatedly and appears on the precipice of making a move they feel could be damaging.

This is not the first time, of course:

People close to the president believe the political consequences of firing Mr. Atkinson could be devastating, especially when Mr. Trump needs all the Republican support he can get for a potential impeachment trial in the Senate.

Mr. Trump’s decision in May 2017 to fire Mr. Comey, who was leading an investigation into ties between Mr. Trump’s campaign and Russia, set off a firestorm that led to the appointment of the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III.

The following month, after it became public that Mr. Mueller was investigating Mr. Trump for obstructing justice, Mr. Trump told the White House counsel at the time, Donald F. McGahn II, to have Mr. Mueller removed. That incident later became a central episode in Mr. Mueller’s report, and House Democrats are still considering using that incident in an article of impeachment on obstruction of justice.

One simply doesn’t cross the king.

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What’s Bolton up to anyway?

by digby

I don’t know what Bolton is up to here. I don’t trust him as far as I can throw him and I’m certain he has his own agenda. Nonetheless, he knew very well that this would be reported. And it contains more than just teasers for his book although he clearly teasing his book.

It’s quite an indictment:

Former national security adviser John Bolton derided President Donald Trump’s daughter and son-in-law during a private speech last week and suggested his former boss’ approach to U.S. policy on Turkey is motivated by personal or financial interests, several people who were present for the remarks told NBC News.

According to six people who were there, Bolton also questioned the merits of Trump applying his business acumen to foreign policy, saying such issues can’t be approached like the win-or-lose edict that drives real estate deals: When one deal doesn’t work, you move on to the next.

The description was part of a broader portrait Bolton outlined of a president who lacks an understanding of the interconnected nature of relationships in foreign policy and the need for consistency, these people said.

Bolton has kept a low public profile since he left the administration on Sept. 10, and efforts by Democrats to have him testify in the House impeachment inquiry into the president have stalled. But his pointed comments, at a private gathering last Wednesday at Morgan Stanley’s global investment event in Miami, painted a dark image of a president and his family whose potential personal gain is at the heart of decision-making, according to people who were present for his remarks.

Bolton served as Trump’s national security adviser for 17 months. The Ukraine scandal began to unfold about a week after his contentious departure. Trump said he’d fired him, though Bolton said he had resigned.

Multiple people who attended Bolton’s private speech in Miami did not recall him mentioning Ukraine but said he told attendees that he had kept a resignation letter in his desk for three months. Bolton declined to comment for this article.
[…]
Bolton told the gathering of Morgan Stanley’s largest hedge fund clients that he was most frustrated with Trump over his handling of Turkey, people who were present said. Noting the broad bipartisan support in Congress to sanction Turkey after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan purchased a Russian missile defense system, Bolton said Trump’s resistance to the move was unreasonable, four people present for his speech said.

Bolton said he believes there is a personal or business relationship dictating Trump’s position on Turkey because none of his advisers are aligned with him on the issue, the people present said.

The Trump Organization has a property in Istanbul, and the president’s daughter Ivanka Trump attended the opening with Erdogan in 2012. Though it’s a leasing agreement for use of the Trump name, Trump himself said in a 2015 interview that the arrangement presented “a little conflict of interest” should he be elected.

During an Oct. 6 phone call with Erdogan, Trump agreed to pull back U.S. troops from northeast Syria so Turkish forces could launch an attack against America’s Kurdish allies in the area. The presence of U.S. forces had deterred Erdogan from invading Syria, which he had threatened to do for years. Trump’s decision, followed by an order for all U.S. troops to exit Syria, was widely criticized even among the president’s Republican allies and was seen by many as a gift to the Turkish leader.

It was. Clearly. And a gift to Assad, Iran and Russia too. I don’t know what specifically propelled him to do it but I think we should see the transcript of that call too. (It’s highly unlikely that we ever will, however…)

Like other former Trump advisers, Bolton said regardless of how much evidence is provided to Trump that Russia interfered in the 2016 election, the president refuses to take any action because he views any move against Moscow as giving credence to the notion that his election is invalid, the people present for Bolton’s remarks said.

At one point in his closed-door remarks, Bolton was asked what he thinks will happen in January 2021 if Trump is re-elected, people present for his remarks said. Bolton responded by taking a swipe at Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and Ivanka Trump — both of whom are senior White House advisers — and at Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., three people familiar with his remarks said.

Bolton said Trump could go full isolationist — with the faction of the Republican Party that aligns with Paul’s foreign policy views taking over the GOP — and could withdraw the U.S. from NATO and other international alliances, three people present for his remarks said.

He also suggested that Kushner and Ivanka Trump could convince the president to rewrite his legacy and nominate a liberal like Lawrence Tribe — a Harvard Law professor who has questioned Trump’s fitness for office and was a legal adviser to Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign — to the Supreme Court, the people present for Bolton’s speech said.

Bolton said, with an eye roll that suggested he doesn’t take them seriously, that Kushner and Ivanka Trump could do so in an attempt to prove they had real influence and were in the White House representing the people they want to be in social circles with at home in New York City, the people present for his remarks said.

Those present said that at that point, the audience appeared shocked.

Bolton has been writing a book, having reached a deal with Simon & Schuster, and people present for his remarks in Miami said he suggested to the audience several times that if they read it, there would be much more material along the lines of what was in his speech.

I have decided that this excuse that Trump refuses to give credence to the Russian interference because it calls his victory into question is bullshit. He lies about everything. He could have just declared that the Russian interference didn’t help him win and that trying didn’t buy them any favors. His people would have been just as happy with that. And anyway, this explanation can’t account for the dozens of other examples of him favoring Russia in inexplicable ways. Denying that Russia interfered in the election is the least of it.

As for Bolton, I just don’t know what to make of him. He’s self-dealing for sure. But it seems that he’s made a calculation that’s a little bit different from the rest of them. It may just be that he’s pimping his book. Or he may have calculated that being in Trump’s White House has ruined his professional reputation and he’s trying to salvage it. Or maybe he’s just as vicious as Trump and wants to get revenge.

I don’t know. But his criticisms are sound whatever it is. Trump’s foreign policy decisions are horrifying whether you look at them from the right or the left.

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“Have you lost your minds that you want to remove our Donald Ivanovych?”

by digby

We don’t know why virtually every foreign policy decision Donald Trump makes somehow ends up benefiting Vladimir Putin but we do know how the Russians see it, via their own state media From Joe Conason at the National Memo:

The message is emphatically not “Make America Great Again.”

No, the Russian outlook articulated by Russian commentators — who faithfully reflect Kremlin policy — is that Trump’s incompetence and incoherence greatly benefit the motherland by weakening its rival America. This mocking theme has aired consistently on the top Russian TV channels for years now and has only intensified as “their” president is threatened by impeachment and electoral defeat.

Indeed, the Kremlin’s broadcasters deride Trump not only for his crude style and obvious ignorance but also for his pathetic sycophancy toward their boss, President Vladimir Putin. In August, the top Moscow news program, called 60 Minutes, featured a video mashup with clips of Trump’s speeches to depict him warbling a pop song as Putin played the piano. The meaning was clear, especially to the snickering studio audience: The American president sings and dances to the Russian president’s tune.

But that disrespectful attitude toward Trump only strengthens their determination to protect and promote him, which is why the Russian media — and their friends in the United States, from far left to far right — so staunchly oppose impeachment.

“Have you lost your minds that you want to remove our Donald Ivanovych?” asked popular talk show host Vladimir Soloviev. Figures like Soloviev frequently apply that possessive (and protective) adjective to Trump, whom they discuss as if he were literally owned by a foreign state.

Of course, the Russians understand our system well and feel reasonably confident that even if the House votes to impeach Trump, he will survive a Senate trial. In the Daily Beast, Olga Skabeeva, host of that Russian 60 Minutes show, is quoted making a confident prediction: “A Republican majority in the Senate won’t allow the president whom we elected, wonderful Donald Trump, to be sent off. It’s impossible. He has 90 percent support in the Republican Party.”

In that same article, another prominent Russian media figure is even more candid. According to film producer Karen Shakhnazarov, who frequently appears on Russian TV: “They say Trump is making Russia great. That’s basically accurate. The chaos brought by Trump into the American system of government is weakening the United States. America is getting weaker and now Russia is taking its place in the Middle East. Suddenly, Russia is starting to seriously penetrate Africa … So when they say that Trump is weakening the United States — yes, he is. And that’s why we love him … The more problems they have, the better it is for us.”

That says it all, really.

Conason goes on to point out that this is why they’ve been happily exploiting all the right-wing useful idiots from Giuliani on down and getting them to profer this absurd alternate narrative that Ukraine frames Russia for 2016. As he says:

The entire right-wing apparatus is starting to look like a GRU intelligence operation.

That it is. And they’re fine with that because their Dear Leader need all the help he can get.

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Serving King Donald

by digby

The following is an unimportant story in the larger scheme of things. But it illustrates just how much Trump’s impulsivity, ego and narcissism guide every aspect of the Executive branch:

Senior aides at the Commerce Department forced the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to publicly rebuke its weather forecasters in Birmingham, Ala., for contradicting President Trump’s comments about the threat Hurricane Dorian posed to that state, even after NOAA informed them that the agency’s meteorologists were not aware at the time they were contradicting the president, according to three officials familiar with the matter.

The NOAA officials spoke to The Washington Post on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity surrounding ongoing investigations into the agency’s actions regarding Hurricane Dorian. NOAA and its National Weather Service are part of the Commerce Department.

According to emails released via a Freedom of Information Act request from The Post and other news organizations, Julie Kay Roberts, NOAA’s deputy chief of staff and communications director, was told on Sept. 2 about the motivation behind a tweet that the National Weather Service office in Birmingham had sent at 11:11 a.m. the day before. When forecasters there tweeted that “Alabama will NOT see any impacts from #Dorian,” they were responding to an influx of calls from worried residents and not to an earlier tweet from Trump.

Trump had wrongly tweeted at 10:51 a.m. the same day that Alabama would “most likely be hit (much) harder than anticipated,” sparking confusion and fear in the state. Alabama was not in the so-called “cone of uncertainty” for Dorian at the time, or close to the zone most likely to be affected by its hazardous conditions.

“I wanted to let you know that the forecasters in Birmingham who made the clarification post for Alabama [were] unaware of the POTUS tweet when they made their post,” Susan Buchanan, director of public affairs for the National Weather Service, wrote to Weather Service and NOAA officials, including Roberts, in an email on Sept. 2.

The Washington Post reported on Sept. 11 that this was the case. However, Buchanan’s email brings to light that senior agency officials knew this four days before NOAA issued the controversial, unsigned statement critical of the forecasters for speaking “in absolute terms.”

The new emails also show that Chris Darden, the meteorologist in charge of the Birmingham office, had written in an email to Weather Service officials, including Buchanan, on Sept. 1: “Some in [the] media assumed, understandably so, that our social media posts were a direct response to the [White House] post. In fact, they were not as we were not even aware of them at the time. It was directly in response to the increase in calls from anxious and panicked citizens and core partners.”

As the political storm swirled during this period, between Sept. 2 and when NOAA sent out its statement on Sept. 6, the agency was dealing with the high-stakes work of forecasting the actual hurricane, which peaked at Category 5 intensity and devastated the northwestern Bahamas.

Roberts received an early-morning phone call on Sept. 6 from senior Commerce Department aides traveling with Secretary Wilbur Ross in Greece, directing her to put together a timeline of events involving the forecast for Hurricane Dorian and the risk it posed to Alabama and related agency communications on the matter, according to two of the NOAA officials. She and acting NOAA head Neil Jacobs were then involved in providing feedback to the Commerce Department regarding an unsigned statement the agency ultimately sent out the same day that was critical of the Alabama forecasters, as The Post previously reported.

Knowing that the forecasters had no political motivations, Jacobs and Roberts tried but failed to block the paragraph admonishing them, which originated from the Commerce Department.
[…]
Senior political officials at the Commerce Department, including Michael Walsh Jr., chief of staff to Ross, Dave Dewhirst, deputy general counsel, and Earl Comstock, director of policy, orchestrated drafting the statement, The Post reported.

The president fucked up with his ridiculous tweet and high ranking people in the Commerce Department ended up demanding that other people be reprimanded despite having done nothing wrong.

This is the US government under Trump in a nutshell. It is all about him.

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The president and his dictator buds

by digby

Listen to this ridiculousness while reminding yourself that Trump's remarks to the Economic Club of New York is supposed to be an official White House event and hence not a campaign speech pic.twitter.com/LjiDbw7zI4— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 12, 2019

Trump on what kind of world leaders can visit his White House: "Dictators, it's okay come on in." He is currently facing bipartisan criticism for inviting Turkey's Erdogan to the White House. pic.twitter.com/eL2kBHMX6a— Oliver Willis (@owillis) November 12, 2019

He says he does it because it’s good for the country. Since he considers “the country” to mean “Trump” that is not reassuring.

For example:

Behind President Trump’s accommodating attitude toward Turkey is an unusual back channel: a trio of sons-in-law who married into power and now play key roles in connecting Ankara with Washington.

One, Turkey’s finance minister, is the son-in-law of its strongman president and oversees his country’s relationship with the United States.

Another is the son-in-law of a Turkish tycoon and became a business partner to the Trump Organization. Now he advocates for Turkey with the Trump administration.

And the third is Jared Kushner, who as the son-in-law of and senior adviser to Mr. Trump has a vague if expansive foreign policy portfolio.

Operating both individually and in tandem, the three men have developed an informal, next-generation line of communication between Mr. Trump and his Turkish counterpart, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who only weeks after his military incursion into northern Syria is scheduled to visit the White House on Wednesday.

At a moment when Mr. Trump has come under bipartisan criticism from Congress for a series of stands favorable to Mr. Erdogan, the ties among the three men show how informal and often-unseen connections between the two presidents have helped shape American policy in a volatile part of the world.

Mr. Erdogan predicted in a television interview this year that a private dialogue between Berat Albayrak, his son-in-law and finance minister, and Mr. Kushner would soon put “back on track” the vexed relations between Washington and Ankara. “The bridge works well in this manner,” Mr. Erdogan said.

“Backdoor diplomacy,” Mr. Albayrak called his work with Mr. Kushner.

Mr. Trump’s policy toward Turkey has confounded his fellow Republicans in Congress on a number of fronts. Mr. Trump twice surprised his own advisers by agreeing during phone calls with Mr. Erdogan to pull United States troops from northern Syria — and the second time, in early October, he followed through, clearing the way for Turkish forces to attack an American-backed militia there.

On the Russian missiles, banking sanctions and other matters, Mr. Erdogan has deployed both his own son-in-law and Mr. Trump’s Turkish business partner, Mehmet Ali Yalcindag, as emissaries to the administration, sometimes through Mr. Kushner, according to Turkish officials and public records.

In April, for example, Mr. Albayrak had come to Washington for a conference organized by Mr. Yalcindag at the Trump International Hotel. And in the middle of the event, Mr. Kushner summoned Mr. Albayrak to an impromptu meeting in the Oval Office, where Mr. Albayrak successfully pressed Mr. Trump to hold back the sanctions against Turkey for buying Russian weapons.

Both leaders appear to favor family or business connections as back channels, several advisers to Mr. Erdogan said, in part because both share a suspicion that the agencies of their own governments may be conspiring against them.

The term “deep state,” in fact, first emerged in Turkey decades ago, long before it came into vogue among Trump supporters, and Mr. Erdogan’s advisers say he has cultivated Mr. Trump by emphasizing their shared struggles against such entrenched forces within their governments.

“The U.S. has an established order that we can call a deep state — of course they are obstructing,” Mr. Erdogan said this spring, explaining his hopes for the “bridge” between sons-in-law. “These obstructions are one of our main troubles.”

Turkey is not the only case where Mr. Trump has applied an unusually informal, family-to-family approach to foreign policy. Mr. Kushner, for instance, has also played a role in managing relations with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, the de facto ruler and favorite son of the king.

“Trump is replacing formal relations among nations in several cases with family-to-family relationship, or crony-to-crony relationships,” said Eric S. Edelman, who served as under secretary of defense for policy and United States ambassador to Turkey during the George W. Bush administration.

“Certainly Erdogan would prefer that kind of relationship as he runs a crony capitalist regime of his own,” Mr. Edelman said. “But it ought to be a matter of concern to all Americans.”

It should be. But from what I gather about half the country think this is just great because Donald Trump is owning the libs. This suggests that our country may be suffering from a much deeper intellectual and moral rot than just Trump.

That whole story about Trump and Turkey is instructive. He admitted during the campaign that he had a conflict of interest there and the article shows that it’s as bad as you can imagine. This alone should be impeachable but I’m given to understand that he is too stupid to understand why this is unethical and he deserves to be reelected. So what do I know?

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Getting Over It
by batocchio

Dahlia Lithwick, who’s written great pieces on the Supreme Court and legal matters for a long time, has penned a thoughtful, sobering piece called, “Why I Haven’t Gone Back to SCOTUS Since Kavanaugh.” It’s worth reading in its entirely for her recap of the disgraceful confirmation process, the continuing, dreadful treatment of Christine Blasey Ford, and Lithwick’s personal experiences. Lithwick takes aim at sexism and misogyny, but also delivers a more expansive critique of power and its abuses:

That is the problem with power: It incentivizes forgiveness and forgetting. It’s why the dozens of ethics complaints filed after the Kavanaugh hearings complaining about the judge’s behavior have been easily buried in a bottomless file of appeasement, on the grounds that he’s been seated and it’s too late. The problem with power is that there is no speaking truth to it when it holds all the cards. And now, given a lifetime appointment to a position that is checked by no one, Washington, the clerkship machinery, the cocktail party circuit, the elite academy all have a vested interest in getting over it and the public performance of getting over it. And a year perhaps seems a reasonable time stamp for that to begin.

The problem with power is that Brett Kavanaugh now has a monopoly on normalization, letting bygones be bygones, and turning the page. American women also have to decide whether to get over it or to invite more recriminations. That is, for those keeping track, the very definition of an abusive relationship. You stick around hoping that he’s changed, or that he didn’t mean it, or that if you don’t anger him again, maybe it’ll all be fine when the court hears the game-changing abortion appeal this year. . . .

It is not my job to decide if Brett Kavanaugh is guilty. It’s impossible for me to do so with incomplete information, and with no process for testing competing facts. But it’s certainly not my job to exonerate him because it’s good for his career, or for mine, or for the future of an independent judiciary. Picking up an oar to help America get over its sins without allowing for truth, apology, or reconciliation has not generally been good for the pursuit of justice. Our attempts to get over CIA torture policies or the Iraq war or anything else don’t bring us closer to truth and reconciliation. They just make it feel better—until they do not. And we have all spent far too much of the past three years trying to tell ourselves that everything is OK when it most certainly is not normal, not OK, and not worth getting over.

The Beltway gang – or the Village, as Digby’s sometimes called it – generally doesn’t like accountability for their own, regardless of political party. The powerful rarely learn the error of their ways unless they are held to account. And when they’re not held responsible, it also sends the message to other powerful people that they can get away with misdeeds as well. Even if no one served jail time for lying the U.S. into the Iraq War or the Bush administration’s torture regime, at least we still could have a truth and reconciliation commission or something similar. But even that would go way too far for Beltway insiders like Peggy Noonan, who in 2009 said in reference to the torture regime:

Some things in life need to be mysterious. Sometimes you need to just keep walking. . . . It’s hard for me to look at a great nation issuing these documents and sending them out to the world and thinking, oh, much good will come of that.

Noonan, of course, was concerned with “good” coming to people in her social circle, of her class, not about justice for torture victims or all the other harm caused by the torture program. Nor was she concerned about ordinary U.S. citizens who might be bothered by abuses of power and might suffer the effects, later on if not immediately. She needn’t have worried; no one was held accountable, and indeed no good came of it, if not the way she meant. Similarly, nothing good ultimately came of Gerald Ford pardoning Richard Nixon. Nothing good came of George H. W. Bush pardoning Iran-Contra conspirators. (So are they all, all honourable men.) Nothing good came of barely holding anyone responsible for the financial industry’s malfeasance in creating the economic crash of 2008. Likewise, nothing good will come of the current human rights abuses on the border and grotesque and flagrant abuses of power by conservatives throughout government. This is not the time for politeness or gutless pleas for civility. A true “armistice” is impossible without remembrance, investigation and accountability.