Month: November 2019

Was the Biden stuff just an add-on? 

by digby

Pentagon official Catherine Croft’s testimony today featured this interesting little tidbit:

So Mulvaney, obviously working on Trump’s orders— and over the objections of everyone else in the government — didn’t want to release the military aid because Putin wouldn’t like it? And he said this out loud?

This is interesting because we’ve been operating on the assumption that all Trump wanted was the CNN statement. But one of the witnesses, Bill Taylor, said that he was worried that even if the Ukrainians delivered the Biden and Clinton dirt, Trump would still not release the aid anyway. He wrote in his text to Sondland:

“The nightmare” is they give the interview and don’t get the security assistance. The Russians love it (and I quit.)”

If it’s true that they had earlier said they wanted to withhold the aid because it would make Putin unhappy, then that might very well be true. It sounds as though they might have had “other reasons” besides the dirt. Indeed,  the silly DNC  conspiracy theory was very much about defending Russia from the US and foreign alies’ conclusions that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election. Maybe the Biden stuff was just Trump’s little taste.

Here’s the Taylor testimony:

a. What did you mean by “the nightmare” and what would the Russians love?

A “The nightmare” s the scenario where President Zelensky goes out in public, makes an announcement that he going to’investigate Burisma and the election interference in 2016 election, maybe among other things. He might put that in some series of investigations. But the nightmare was he would mention those two, take all the heat from that, get himself in big trouble in this country and probably in his country as we11, and the security assistance would not be released. That was the nightmare.
The Russians loving it. The Russians are paying attention. The Russians are paying attention to how much support the Americans are going to provide the Ukrainians.

The Russians are leaning on Ukraine. They are leaning on Ukraine about Donbas. They are leaning on Ukraine about sovereign small little sovereign countries here little statelets. They are leaning on economically, they have got the Nord Stream coming through, they have got they are putting pressure on they have to come to a new gas agreement by the 1st of January.
So they are leaning on them. And they, the Russians want to know how much support the Ukrainians are going to get in general, but also what kind of support from the Americans.

So the Russians are loving, would love, the humiliation of Zelensky at the hands of the Americans, and would give the
Russians a freer hand, and I would quit.

And why would that make you quit?

A That’s exactly the scenario that I was worried about when I had my meeting with Secretary Pompeo on the 28th of May where I said: Mr. Secretary, you know, your current strong policy of support for Ukraine is one I can support and I would be glad to go out to Kyiv and support it and push it hard. However, I told him and the others who were in the room, if that changes and this would have been a change, this would have been it was a nightmare. This would have been throwing Ukraine under the bus. And I told the Secretary: If that happens, I’11 come home. You don’t want me out there, because I’m not going to defend it, you know. I would
say bad things about it. And you wouldn’t want me out there doing that. So I’m going to come home on that. So that was the message about I quit.

Update: Check this out…

The story here is consistent with so much else: a deep, inexplicable subservience to/admiration of Putin. Yet this is triggered, apparently by a CNN report, not some angry call from Putin. And a couple months later they went ahead and made the visit anyway. No CNN, no problem.— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) November 12, 2019

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Oh look, another impeachable offense

by digby

Erdogan bodyguards beating Kurdish protesters in Washington DC They also beat up members of the Secret Service

As we all watch the impeachment hearings unfold while Trump entertains his bud Recep Tayyip Erdogan in the White House let’s keep in mind that Ukraine is just the tip of the iceberg.

This is from the Daily Beast’s Rabbit Hole:

Golden boy: At the heart of the controversy over Trump’s relationship with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is a criminal case. Reza Zarrab, a Turkish-Iranian gold trader, was charged in 2016 with helping Iran violate U.S. sanctions in New York by then-U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara. The Turkish bank implicated in Zarrab’s sanctions-busting scheme, Halkbank, was under investigation by New York prosecutors for similar Iran sanctions offenses for years until the Southern District of New York finally indicted the bank in October.

Turkey has long tried to get the U.S., under both the Obama and Trump administrations, to ditch the charges against Zarrab and the investigation of Halkbank. During a 2016 meeting with Joe and Jill Biden and Erdogan and his wife, Ermine, pressed the vice president to fire the prosecutors involved in the Zarrab case. After all, Erdogan had done the same thing himself in 2013 when prosecutors there charged Zarrab and the case threatened to implicate family members of senior officials in Erdogan’s cabinet.

Erdogan’s pitch to Biden to intervene in a criminal case echoes exactly what Trump and his associates have accused the former Vice President (without any evidence) of doing in Ukraine. Unlike Biden, however, Trump appears to have at least contemplated taking Erdogan up on the offer.

Bitch, pleas: For years, the U.S. mostly ignored Erdogan’s pleas. That is, until Trump.

Just two months after the Trump administration came to office, prosecutors in the Zarrab case learned that the defendant had hired Trump pal and soon-to-be personal attorney Rudy Giuliani.

Rudy soon went into action, lobbying former of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to help him intervene in the Zarrab case. Officials told the Washington Post that Trump also pressed Tillerson for help with the idea towards using the Zarrab case as leverage to secure the return of an American pastor arrested by Turkish officials on bogus charges after a 2016 coup attempt in the country.

Call me, maybe: The efforts to kill the Zarrab case ultimately proved futile—Zarrab pleaded guilty in October of 2017, served his sentence, and returned to his home country. But the case against Halkbank, which had featured prominently in the Zarrab case, carried on, much to Erdogan’s annoyance.

In an April phone call eerily similar to Trump’s infamous July 25 chat with Ukainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Erdogan pressed Trump to kill the investigation underway against Halkbank, according to Bloomberg. And like the Ukraine call, Trump reportedly told the foreign leader that he’d put him in touch with Attorney General William Barr, who would handle the issue.

Like the Zarrab case, Halkbank ultimately couldn’t avoid charges. Federal prosecutors in New York indicted the bank on sanctions and money laundering charges in October. The charges came just as Trump was getting flak from Republicans incensed over his abandonment of U.S.-backed Kurdish forces in Syria to a Turkish invasion. The timing of the charges in the midst of a presidential Twitter tirade about possible sanctions on Turkey raised questions about whether the Trump administration had used the case this time not as a carrot but a stick against the Turkish government.

‘Stache house: In any case, the appearance of political interference in a criminal case is the main point of tangency between Trump’s Turkey and Ukraine scandals. The most important difference—and the one that explains their differing impact in Washington—is that the alleged quid-pro-quo in Ukraine involved a personal and political benefit for Trump. The payoff for Trump’s alleged criminal justice interference for Erodgan, however, is less clear.

I’m going to go with money on that one.

By the way, those bodyguards are back in town. Because:

U.S. prosecutors have quietly dropped charges against 11 of the 15 members of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s security detail who were criminally indicted in an assault on protesters last year during a visit by Erdogan to Washington.

Criminal charges related to the incident against four of the bodyguards were dismissed last November while the indictment against the seven others was withdrawn February 14, the day before outgoing Secretary of State Rex Tillerson visited Turkey to meet with Erdogan in a bid to mend ties between the two NATO allies.

The timing has fueled speculation that the decision to dismiss the indictment was made as a goodwill gesture to Erdogan, who saw the charges against his security personnel as an affront and called the indictment “a complete scandal.”

Why he needs all these “goodwill gestures remains a mystery.”

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Trump plus nothing
by Tom Sullivan

President Donald J. Trump delivers remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast | February 8, 2018 (Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian).

Surrounding the House impeachment inquiry into President Donald J. Trump, what Americans and the world are witnessing is a Stanford Prison Experiment with a touch of Stanley Milgram. Or maybe Jesus. (I’ll explain in a minute.)

In Dr. Philip Zimbardo’s famous 1971 social experiment, he had a group student volunteer males “arrested” (there was a squad car), booked, and placed in a mock prison in the basement of one of the university’s buildings for an experiment in the psychological effects of prison life. Another group of average, “healthy, intelligent, middle-class males” would serve as prison guards. All would receive $15/day for participating in the videotaped experiment.

Things went downhill within 36 hours. The guards became abusive. The prisoners rebelled:

Every aspect of the prisoners’ behavior fell under the total and arbitrary control of the guards. Even going to the toilet became a privilege which a guard could grant or deny at his whim. Indeed, after the nightly 10:00 P.M. lights out “lock-up,” prisoners were often forced to urinate or defecate in a bucket that was left in their cell. On occasion the guards would not allow prisoners to empty these buckets, and soon the prison began to smell of urine and feces – further adding to the degrading quality of the environment.

Six days into the two-week experiment, Zimbardo had to stop it for the psychological toll it was taking on the students. He later served as an expert witness during one of the Abu Ghraib prisoner torture trials. The accepted lesson of the controversial experiment is that, under the right circumstances, “institutional forces and peer pressure” can turn good people evil.

That assumes they were good people to start. A tweet that came across my feed questions that proposition when it comes to the Trump cult:

I have said this before and it bears repeating, President Trump doesn’t cause people to lose their character, he reveals people’s character for who they truly are. And for that we should all be grateful that we can see clearly.— Matthew Dowd (@matthewjdowd) November 11, 2019

Now, cult members are tasked with defending their leader’s actions and (soon) their own. Trump places fealty to Himself above the national interest. His defenders so far are condemning the impeachment process. Trump demands they defend his actions vis-à-vis Ukraine explicitly. Will they accede to his demand and sink to defending the indefensible?

“Tribalistic party identity is basically all the president’s defenders have left,” Eugene Robinson writes:

They complained that the House had not taken a formal vote to proceed with impeachment . . . but then the House held such a vote. They complained that the House impeachment investigators were taking depositions of witnesses in secret . . . but Republican committee members already had access to those hearings. They complained that transcripts of those interviews had not been released . . . but now they are being released, and one of the loudest complainers, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) says he will refuse to read them. They complained that there had been no public testimony that would allow the American people to judge for themselves . . . but a public phase of the House investigation is beginning this week, with the first witnesses scheduled to appear Wednesday.

Team MAGA has already sunk to promoting propaganda and disinformation from a Russian-inspired effort designed to exonerate Russia’s role in interfering with the 2016 elections. Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Fla.) is the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee. He has made clear he plans to shrug off Trump’s endangering national security and possible violations of law as justified by Trump’s “documented belief that the Ukrainian government meddled in the 2016 election.”

Michelle Goldberg explains:

The conspiracy theories that undergird the president’s “documented belief” aren’t really coherent, but they don’t have to be to serve their purpose, which is sowing confusion about the well-established fact that Russia assisted Trump’s campaign. They posit not just that [Paul] Manafort was set up, but also that Democrats worked with Ukraine to frame Russia for hacking Democrats’ emails, a dastardly Democratic plot that led to Trump’s election. Naturally, George Soros, perennial scapegoat for the far right, is also involved.

“George Soros was behind it. George Soros’s company was funding it,” Giuliani said on ABC in September, spinning tales of Hillary Clinton’s collusion with Ukraine. Speaking to The Post, Giuliani accused Marie Yovanovitch, the former ambassador to Ukraine, of “working for Soros.” Indeed, Hill in her testimony suggested that a sort of Infowars-era McCarthyism has been loosed on the national security bureaucracy, with “frankly an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory about George Soros” used to “target nonpartisan career officials, and also some political appointees as well.”

Some of these conspiracy theories originated with Manafort colleague Konstantin Kilimnik, a former Russian intelligence officer, and worked their way into Trump’s already fevered brain.

But the behaviors exhibited by Trump’s defenders from America’s evangelicals to Capitol Hill wags seems to mirror those Jeff Sharlet found among “The Family.” The powerful men among Washington’s most elite, “invisible” prayer circle, Sharlet wrote in 2003, included “Senators Don Nickles (R., Okla.), Charles Grassley (R., Iowa), Pete Domenici (R., N.Mex.), John Ensign (R., Nev.), James Inhofe (R., Okla.), Bill Nelson (D., Fla.), and Conrad Burns (R., Mont.) are referred to as “members,” as are Representatives Jim DeMint (R., S.C.). Frank Wolf (R., Va.), Joseph Pitts (R., Pa.), Zach Wamp (R., Tenn.), and Bart Stupak (D., Mich.).”

Their mission? To bring Jesus to the world by removing him from “the religious wrapping.” Sharlet wrote about one of their Alexandria, Va. meetings:

“All right, how do we do that?” Tiahrt asked. [Todd Tiahrt, (R-Kansas)]

“A covenant,” Doug [Coe] answered. The congressman half-smiled, as if caught between confessing his ignorance and pretending he knew what Doug was talking about. “Like the Mafia,” Doug clarified. “Look at the strength of their bonds.” He made a fist and held it before Tiahrt’s face. Tiahrt nodded, squinting. “See, for them it’s honor,” Doug said. “For us, it’s Jesus.”

Coe listed other men who had changed the world through the strength of the covenants they had forged with their “brothers”: “Look at Hitler,” he said. “Lenin, Ho Chi Minh, Bin Laden.” The Family, of course, possessed a weapon those leaders lacked: the “total Jesus” of a brotherhood in Christ.

“That’s what you get with a covenant,” said Coe. “Jesus plus nothing.”

Except now that covenant is Trump plus nothing. Trump’s base as well as his Beltway defenders have been condition — programmed, if you like — by their religious discipline to give themselves over to higher (spiritual) authority. In the inveterate alpha dog, Donald Trump, they’ve found a temporal one. Their predisposition threatens us all.

The Republican Party is a Delusional and Nihilistic Death Cult

by tristero

And you think I’m exaggerating:

The Trump administration is preparing to significantly limit the scientific and medical research that the government can use to determine public health regulations, overriding protests from scientists and physicians who say the new rule would undermine the scientific underpinnings of government policymaking. 

A new draft of the Environmental Protection Agency proposal, titled Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science, would require that scientists disclose all of their raw data, including confidential medical records, before the agency could consider an academic study’s conclusions. E.P.A. officials called the plan a step toward transparency and said the disclosure of raw data would allow conclusions to be verified independently… 

The measure would make it more difficult to enact new clean air and water rules because many studies detailing the links between pollution and disease rely on personal health information gathered under confidentiality agreements. And, unlike a version of the proposal that surfaced in early 2018, this one could apply retroactively to public health regulations already in place. 

“This means the E.P.A. can justify rolling back rules or failing to update rules based on the best information to protect public health and the environment, which means more dirty air and more premature deaths,” said Paul Billings, senior vice president for advocacy at the American Lung Association. 

Public health experts warned that studies that have been used for decades — to show, for example, that mercury from power plants impairs brain development, or that lead in paint dust is tied to behavioral disorders in children — might be inadmissible when existing regulations come up for renewal. 

For instance, a groundbreaking 1993 Harvard University project that definitively linked polluted air to premature deaths, currently the foundation of the nation’s air-quality laws, could become inadmissible…

And so on, and so on, and so on…

They’re really trying to kill us all. Seriously.

A Powerful Ad

by digby

I’m so old I remember when the Tea party was waving around the Constitution like it was a sacred text. They aren’t so fond of it anymore with all that drivel about “the phony emoluments clause” and “freedom of the press” and impeachment and whatnot. Today it’s all about one thing: their worship of Donald Trump. It just goes to show that they were always full of shit, which we knew right? But now it’s so obvious that we really don’t even have to pretend that they mean it. When they revert to being flag-waving patriots enamored of the “rule ‘o law” I will just say, “two words: Donald Trump”.

They are exposed.

Trump let them ethnically cleanse the Kurds just because he could

by digby

Oh look, the troops are staying right where they were:

As many as 600 U.S. troops will remain in northeastern Syria to continue counterterrorism operations against the Islamic State, Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Sunday.

“There will be less than 1,000 for sure,” Milley said, referring to the number present when President Trump ordered their complete withdrawal last month. Trump later was persuaded by national security advisers and congressional supporters, such as Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), to retain an unspecified number of troops whose mission, the president said, was to “secure the oil” from a takeover by the Syrian government or militants.

Milley, speaking on the ABC News program “This Week,” said the number of troops that would remain was “probably in the 500-ish frame. Maybe 600.” He did not mention Syrian oil but said “there are still ISIS fighters in the region and unless pressure is maintained . . . then there’s a very real possibility that conditions could be set for a reemergence of ISIS.”

So basically the only reason for the “withdrawal” last month was to allow Turkey to ethnically cleanse the Kurds so they can move other refugees into their towns and Trump can claim he’s “keeping the oil” (which the Pentagon just cooked up so he could save face with his base.)

And Republicans just let it happen. I guess we shouldn’t be too surprised. The only reason they were so determined to invade Iraq was that they wanted revenge for 9/11 and any Arab country would do. But letting this imbecile get away with this without the slightest rationale other than wanting to please some strongmen to make him feel good about himself is just … well, you know.

All that suffering, fear and death because this man had a phone call one night and said, “sure go for it.” It’s madness.

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Yes there is a witch hunt. It’s just not the one Trump shrieks about.

by digby

If you think it isn’t a cult, read this about the demise of Congressman Francis Rooney’s congressional career after he spoke out about Trump:

Venting privately about the president has become a hallowed pastime in Republican-controlled Washington, a sort of ritualistic release for those lawmakers tasked with routinely defending the indefensible, and Rooney had long indulged without consequence. Certainly, his friends noticed, the Florida congressman had grown more animated in private over the past year—railing against the improprieties detailed in the Mueller report, decrying the Trump family’s brazen attempts to enrich themselves off the presidency, wondering aloud what the president needed to do before voters would turn on him. Still, there was no real risk. To the extent GOP leaders heard echoes of Rooney’s discontent, they dismissed it as just another member blowing off steam.

But as summer turned to fall, Rooney wasn’t just bitching and complaining anymore. He was talking about impeachment. And he was talking not in a manner that was abstract or academic, but concrete and ominous. Initially in one-on-one conversations, and then in larger group settings, Rooney cautioned his colleagues that there could be no turning a blind eye to the fact pattern emerging from Trump’s relationship with Ukraine. It seemed possible, if not probable, that congressionally approved military aid to the embattled country—long a cause dear to Democrats and Republicans alike—had been held up contingent on investigations into Trump’s domestic political rivals. The question, Rooney told his friends, was not whether there was clear evidence of wrongdoing, but whether the president himself was culpable—and if so, whether congressional Republicans were going to cover for him.

All of a sudden, the once-invisible congressman was the subject of constant surveillance. Rooney could go nowhere, say nothing, without the eyes of the party on him. House Republican leaders, having been made aware of Rooney’s agitating, deputized lawmakers to monitor the malcontent. The White House—both its political team and its legislative affairs shop—did likewise. Before long, the president himself was briefed on the threat from Rooney. Disturbed, Trump began calling his friends and associates, on Capitol Hill and in Florida, trying to make sense of the situation.

“Who the hell is this Rooney guy?” the president asked Florida Governor Ron DeSantis during one phone call, according to sources familiar with their conversation. “What’s his deal?”

All the president’s allies agreed Rooney was a problem. But there was no obvious solution. The congressman had yet to say anything menacing about Trump in public; taking some type of punitive measure against him, be it a closed-door belittling or a presidential tweet-lashing, would be strange and possibly counterproductive. If the overarching goal was to keep Republicans unified in the face of impeachment’s advance—for the sake of immediate political advantage, if not also for the president’s legacy—keeping Rooney close made more sense than alienating him.

Ultimately, Republican leaders in Washington and Florida settled on a simple course of action. They would beat Rooney at his own game, doing nothing to undermine him openly but instead orchestrating a whisper campaign aimed at sowing doubts about his devotion to the president. The focal point would be Florida’s 19th, Rooney’s bloody red district, which Trump had carried by 22 points. That way, if and when Rooney broke ranks, the uprising back home would appear instant and organic. The recoil wouldn’t just scare Rooney straight; it would provide a cautionary tale for any Republican tempted to follow his lead.

The latest impeachment resolution was starkly divided along partisan lines, but whether the Republican caucus will remain steadfast may depend on how some members weigh their support or distaste for the president against their own electoral futures, or lack thereof.

Rooney knew the trap was being laid, but he didn’t bother avoiding it. On Friday, October 18, the congressman appeared on CNN and said there was “clear” evidence of a quid pro quo based on acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney’s own description of events. Asked whether he was ruling out voting for impeachment, Rooney replied, “I don’t think you can rule anything out until you know all the facts.” He also added, “I’m very mindful of the fact that back during Watergate everybody said, ‘Oh, it’s a witch hunt to get Nixon.’ Turns out it wasn’t a witch hunt. It was absolutely correct.”

Rooney’s remarks—in particular, his unsolicited comparison of Trump to Nixon—left his colleagues slack-jawed. House Republicans, having received hair-on-fire emails from staffers alerting them to the comments, tip-toed through the Capitol to avoid reporters asking for comment. Video of the little-known congressman’s interview rocketed around Twitter and turned official Washington on its head for a matter of hours, fueling immediate speculation that a broader revolt might be brewing. Here, at last, was a Republican lawmaker openly entertaining the prospect of impeaching a Republican president.

And sure enough, as though a switch had been flipped, Rooney found himself under siege.

“The blowback from the people in Southwest Florida was something. I mean, I had people down here in the local Republican leadership mad at me, yelling at me, telling me nothing should happen to make me waver in my support of Donald Trump. Nothing,” he recalls in an interview. “Now, I’m pretty immune to pressure. I’ve got a great company, a great family, I’ve done some wonderful things in my life. So, the fact that I got criticized by some local Republican officials doesn’t bother me one bit. But still … ”

Rooney’s voice trails off. The intensity of that criticism—and the threats on his career, made implicit and explicit by Florida Republicans in the hours after his CNN appearance—left him with an inescapable conclusion: There would be no coming back to Congress. He had mulled retirement in the months prior, but now the decision was being made for him. The very next day, appearing on Fox News, Rooney announced he would not seek reelection in 2020.

I wish I understood the hold this monster has on these people, but I honestly don’t think I ever will. But it’s real. And I think we need to be aware of that and prepare for how they are going to react if he doesn’t win another term. If they are doing this to their own, I’d imagine they are going to be overwhelmingly angry at the rest of us.

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A prescient vision of Trump’s reign

by digby

This piece by Adam Gopnik from May of 2016 really called it. I was writing in a bit of a panic at the time over Trump and I remember reading this and thinking, “wow, is it really going to be this bad?”

It is. In some way it’s worse:

Vice is a monster of so frightful mien, / As, to be hated, needs but to be seen,” the poet Alexander Pope wrote, in lines that were once, as they said back in the day, imprinted on the mind of every schoolboy. Pope continued, “Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face, / we first endure, then pity, then embrace.” The three-part process by which the gross becomes the taken for granted has been on matchlessly grim view this past week in the ascent of Donald Trump. First merely endured by those in the Republican Party, with pained grimaces and faint bleats of reluctance, bare toleration passed quickly over into blind, partisan allegiance—he’s going to be the nominee, after all, and so is our boy. Then a weird kind of pity arose, directed not so much at him (he supplies his own self-pity) as at his supporters, on the premise that their existence somehow makes him a champion for the dispossessed, although the evidence indicates that his followers are mostly stirred by familiar racial and cultural resentments, of which Trump has been a single-minded spokesperson.

Now for the embrace. One by one, people who had not merely resisted him before but called him by his proper name—who, until a month ago, were determined to oppose a man they rightly described as a con artist and a pathological liar—are suddenly getting on board. Columnists and magazines that a month ago were saying #NeverTrump are now vibrating with the frisson of his audacity, fawning over him or at least thrilling to his rising poll numbers and telling one another, “We can control him.”

No, you can’t. One can argue about whether to call him a fascist or an authoritarian populist or a grotesque joke made in a nightmare shared between Philip K. Dick and Tom Wolfe, but under any label Trump is a declared enemy of the liberal constitutional order of the United States—the order that has made it, in fact, the great and plural country that it already is. He announces his enmity to America by word and action every day. It is articulated in his insistence on the rightness of torture and the acceptable murder of noncombatants. It is self-evident in the threats he makes daily to destroy his political enemies, made only worse by the frivolity and transience of the tone of those threats. He makes his enmity to American values clear when he suggests that the Presidency holds absolute power, through which he will be able to end opposition—whether by questioning the ownership of newspapers or talking about changing libel laws or threatening to take away F.C.C. licenses. To say “Well, he would not really have the power to accomplish that” is to misunderstand the nature of thin-skinned authoritarians in power. They do not arrive in office and discover, as constitutionalists do, that their capabilities are more limited than they imagined. They arrive, and then make their power as large as they can.

And Trump announces his enmity in the choice of his companions. The Murdoch media conglomerate has been ordered to acquiesce; it’s no surprise that it has. But Trump’s other fellow-travellers include Roger Stone, the Republican political operative and dirty-tricks maven, while his venues have included the broadcasts of Alex Jones, a ranting conspiracy theorist who believes in a Globalist plot wherein “an alien force not of this world is attacking humanity”—not to mention Jones’s marketing of the theory that Michelle Obama is a transvestite who murdered Joan Rivers. These are not harmless oddballs Trump is flirting with. This is not the lunatic fringe. These are the lunatics.

Ted Cruz called Trump a pathological liar, the kind who does not know the difference between lies and truth. Whatever the clinical diagnosis, we do appear to be getting, in place of the once famous Big Lie of the nineteen-thirties, a sordid blizzard of lies. The Big Lie was fit for a time of processionals and nighttime rallies, and films that featured them. The blizzard of lies is made for Twitter and the quick hit of an impulse culture. Trump’s lies arrive with such rapidity that before one can be refuted a new one comes to take its place. It wasn’t his voice on that tape of pitiful self-promotion. O.K., it was—but he never mocked the handicapped reporter, he was merely imitating an obsequious one. The media eventually moves on, shrugging helplessly, to the next lie. Then the next lie, and the next. If the lies are bizarre enough and frequent enough, they provoke little more than a nervous giggle and a cry of “Well, guess he’s changed the rules!”

He’s not Hitler, as his wife recently said? Well, of course he isn’t. But then Hitler wasn’t Hitler—until he was. At each step of the way, the shock was tempered by acceptance. It depended on conservatives pretending he wasn’t so bad, compared with the Communists, while at the same time the militant left decided that their real enemies were the moderate leftists, who were really indistinguishable from the Nazis. The radical progressives decided that there was no difference between the democratic left and the totalitarian right and that an explosion of institutions was exactly the most thrilling thing imaginable.

The American Republic stands threatened by the first overtly anti-democratic leader of a large party in its modern history—an authoritarian with no grasp of history, no impulse control, and no apparent barriers on his will to power. The right thing to do, for everyone who believes in liberal democracy, is to gather around and work to defeat him on Election Day. Instead, we seem to be either engaged in parochial feuding or caught by habits of tribal hatred so ingrained that they have become impossible to escape even at moments of maximum danger. Bernie Sanders wouldn’t mind bringing down the Democratic Party to prevent it from surrendering to corporate forces—and yet he may be increasing the possibility of rule-by-billionaire.

There is a difference between major and minor issues, and between primary and secondary values. Many of us think that it would be terrible if the radical-revisionist reading of the Second Amendment created by the Heller decision eight years ago was kept in place in a constitutional court; many on the other side think it would be terrible if that other radical decision, Roe v. Wade, continued to be found to be compatible with the constitutional order. What we all should agree on is that the one thing worse would be to have no constitutional order left to argue about.

The conclusion is extremely important and we all have to grapple with what that means:

If Trump came to power, there is a decent chance that the American experiment would be over. This is not a hyperbolic prediction; it is not a hysterical prediction; it is simply a candid reading of what history tells us happens in countries with leaders like Trump. Countries don’t really recover from being taken over by unstable authoritarian nationalists of any political bent, left or right—not by Peróns or Castros or Putins or Francos or Lenins or fill in the blanks. The nation may survive, but the wound to hope and order will never fully heal. Ask Argentinians or Chileans or Venezuelans or Russians or Italians—or Germans. The national psyche never gets over learning that its institutions are that fragile and their ability to resist a dictator that weak. If he can rout the Republican Party in a week by having effectively secured the nomination, ask yourself what Trump could do with the American government if he had a mandate. Before those famous schoolroom lines, Pope made another observation, which was that even as you recognize that the world is a mixed-up place, you still can’t fool yourself about the difference between the acceptable and the unacceptable: “Fools! who from hence into the notion fall / That vice or virtue there is none at all,” he wrote. “Is there no black or white? / Ask your own heart, and nothing is so plain; / ’Tis to mistake them, costs the time and pain.” The pain of not seeing that black is black soon enough will be ours, and the time to recognize this is now.

I don’t think people have fully realized just how destructive it would be to have the system tested in this way and I’m afraid they don’t get it even now. Those who just want to “go back to normal” are in for a rude awakening because that normal has been exposed as weak and porous. And those who are looking for massive systemic change may also find themselves frustrated because these same weaknesses are difficult to exploit for positive ends. Keep in mind that a huge number of people worship this demagogic imbecile and the entire Republican establishment has turned itself into his vassal. They aren’t just going to bow down and submit. The wealthy are already gathering itself into opposition, illustrating once again that they are a huge part of the problem.

If we survive him, the aftermath is going to be very difficult.

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More troop-hating on the right

by digby

This really is shameful:

In a country where we celebrate and honor those who heeded the call to serve in the military, most Americans would be shocked to learn that just south of the U.S.-Mexico border in Tijuana, Mexico, exists the Deported Veterans Support House, better known as “The Bunker.” Marked by a banner in red, white, and blue, and located next to a tire shop in a residential neighborhood, the bunker is a shelter for veterans of the United States Armed Forces who were deported from the same country they fought to protect, even after being honorably discharged.

Once inside, you might be greeted by veterans who are miles away from their homes and their families and denied access to the benefits they earned, need, and are still eligible for under the law. In the face of this injustice, however, they are still proud of their service to our nation and are fighting to return home. It’s time for Congress to join this fight and bring them back to the families and nation they risked their lives to protect.

Immigrants from around the world, and those aspiring to become citizens through service, have played a critical role in the U.S. Armed Forces since our country’s founding. These brave men and women have protected our freedoms and swore an oath to defend our Constitution against all enemies. In return, America made these recruits a promise: citizenship in exchange for service. Our government and our military have failed these veterans, and the road of broken promises has inflicted numerous traumas on those caught in the middle.

The deportation of military veterans is disgraceful on many levels. With deportation, veterans are denied the ability to stay in the country they fought for. Often, they are forced to return to a country they barely knew and is now foreign to them — away from their home, their family, and their loved ones. This problem is made more severe because these veterans can’t access the benefits they have rightfully earned for their service. Once deported, it is nearly impossible for veterans to access their earned benefits or receive the care they need.

The Department of Defense estimates that about 25,000 immigrants are currently serving in the U.S. Armed Forces. It is up to Congress to do everything it can to prevent the deportation of more non-citizen veterans by enacting sensible reforms that will help America keep our promise of naturalization to these men and women, protect them from deportation, and bring deported veterans home.

The truth is, we have no idea how many veterans have been deported, because according to a government watchdog, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement has been breaking its own protocol and not tracking the veteran status of those they are trying to deport. The findings in the Government and Accountability Office report are alarming and point to the urgent need for a legislative solution. We must dispel the myths that the naturalization process is easy and that immigrant veterans who find themselves in immigration proceedings will automatically be identified for elevated consideration. All federal agencies that encounter potentially removable veterans must do their part to prevent unjust deportations.

I think many deportations are shameful but these really do take the cake. If there’s one group that earned the right to stay, it’s veterans. The right supposedly reveres the military but I guess their racism takes precedence. As usual.

This op-ed was written by Representatives Mark Takano, Juan Vargas and Raúl M. Grijalva, who have sponsored a bill called theVeteran Deportation Prevention and Reform Act. McConnell won’t pass it and Trump won’t sign it but if they could be voted out of power this could be implemented almost immediately.

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The far-right triggered Don Jr

by digby

Good morning everyone. Here’s a little bit of fun to start this historic week:

Donald Trump Jr ventured on to the University of California’s overwhelmingly liberal Los Angeles campus on Sunday, hoping to prove what he had just argued in his book – that a hate-filled American left was hell-bent on silencing him and anyone else who supported the Trump presidency.

But the appearance backfired when his own supporters, diehard Make America Great Again conservatives, raised their voices most loudly in protest and ended up drowning him out barely 20 minutes into an event scheduled to last two hours.

The audience was angry that Trump Jr and his girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, would not take questions. The loud shouts of “USA! USA!” that greeted Trump when he first appeared on the stage of a university lecture hall to promote his book Triggered: How The Left Thrives on Hate and Wants to Silence Us quickly morphed into even louder, openly hostile chants of “Q and A! Q and A!”

The 450-strong audience had just been told they would not be allowed to ask questions, “due to time constraints”.

It gets better

At first, Trump and Guilfoyle tried to ignore the discontent, which originated with a fringe group of America Firsters who believe the Trump administration has been taken captive by a cabal of internationalists, free-traders, and apologists for mass immigration.

Lol!

When the shouting would not subside, Trump Jr tried – and failed – to argue that taking questions from the floor risked creating soundbites that leftwing social media posters would abuse and distort. Nobody was buying that.

In minutes, the entire argument put forward by the president’s son – that he was willing to engage in dialogue but that it was the left that refused to tolerate free speech – crumbled.

“I’m willing to listen…” Trump began.

“Q and A! Q and A!” the audience yelled back.

“We’ll go into the lion’s den and talk …” Trump tried again.

“Then open the Q and A!” came the immediate response.

Guilfoyle, forced to shout to make herself heard, , told students in the crowd: “You’re not making your parents proud by being rude and disruptive.”

She and Trump Jr. left the stage moments later

Were you triggered Donnie?

And if you thought the campus left was a problem, wait until you see what the right is cooking up:

The fiasco pointed to a factional rift on the Trump-supporting conservative right that has been growing rapidly in recent weeks, particularly among “zoomers” – student-age activists. On one side are one of the sponsors of Trump Jr’s book tour, Turning Point USA, a campus conservative group with a track record of bringing provocative rightwing speakers to liberal universities.

On the other side are far-right activists – often referred to as white supremacists and neo-Nazis, although many of them reject such labels – who believe in slamming the door on all immigrants, not just those who cross the border without documents, and who want an end to America’s military and diplomatic engagement with the wider world.

A number of the loudest voices at Sunday’s event were supporters of Nick Fuentes, a 21-year-old activist with a podcast called America First that has taken particular aim at Turning Point USA and its 25-year-old founder, Charlie Kirk. In a number of his own recent campus appearances, Kirk has faced questions accusing him of being more interested in supporting Israel than in putting America first. He has responded by calling his detractors conspiracists and racists.

On Sunday, Kirk appeared alongside Trump Jr. and Guilfoyle but said nothing.

Two Fuentes supporters, delighted with the outcome of Trump Jr’s appearance, later told the Guardian the pro-Trump movement was being infected with “fake conservatism” and that the president himself was at the mercy of a cabal of deep state operatives who wouldn’t let him do many of the things he campaigned on.

The pair, who called themselves Joe and Orion Miles, said: “It was an absolute disaster for them. We wanted to ask questions about immigration and about Christianity, but they didn’t want to face those questions.”

Also, if Trump Jr was expecting “triggered” leftwingers to clamour for his silence, he did not get it. No more than 35 protesters showed up and, despite making a lot of noise with drums and whistles and shouts of “Trump-Pence Out Now!”, resisted taunts and insults from provocateurs in Make America Great Again hats from across a line of metal barriers.

How do you like your right-wing buddies now, Donnie?

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