Donald Trump denied directing Rudy Giuliani to go to Ukraine to look for dirt on his political rivals, in an interview with former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly.
“No, I didn’t direct him, but he is a warrior, he is a warrior,” Trump told O’Reilly in an interview streamed on the internet on Tuesday.
Giuliani has said publicly that he conducted an investigation “concerning 2016 Ukrainian collusion and corruption” on Trump’s behalf.
Asked by O’Reilly what Giuliani was doing in Ukraine, Trump said “you have to ask that to Rudy.”
“Rudy has other clients, other than me,” Trump said. “He’s done a lot of work in Ukraine over the years.”
Giuliani is under investigation by federal prosecutors related to his activities in Ukraine.
Trump’s effort to force Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, to open investigations that could be damaging to his political rivals including former Vice President Joe Biden is the subject of the House impeachment inquiry.
Witnesses in the inquiry have testified that Giuliani directed a shadow U.S. foreign policy in Ukraine aimed at securing the investigations Trump desired.
Rudy has clients there. And it looks like he’s in trouble with his former US Attorney’s office as a result.
But this doesn’t fly. There are too many people who’ve already testified that Trump was directing this and Rudy has been basing his own defense on the fact that he was Trump’s personal lawyer doing his business.
Rudy Giuliani put a lot of people behind bars over the course of many years. There is no way in hell that he will allow himself to go to jail like Cohen and Manafort even for a day.
LISTEN: President Trump is now distancing himself more than ever from lawyer Rudy Giuliani, claiming he did not direct Giuliani to act on his behalf in Ukraine in a new interview with Bill O'Reilly. pic.twitter.com/6JaP9oOLMI— TheBeat w/Ari Melber (@TheBeatWithAri) November 26, 2019
Fired Navy Secretary Richard Spencer says that Trump’s decision to stop a Pentagon review of Eddie Gallagher sends a message “that you can get away with things. We have to have good order and discipline. It’s the backbone of what we do.” Via CBS pic.twitter.com/SrSSBILvLV
The battle that culminated in President Trump’s firing of Richard V. Spencer once again illustrates an ugly truth about the Trump presidency: The only core value Trump aspires to in public service is that there are no core values.
For Trump, in other words, the impunity is the point.
Spencer, the Navy secretary who was ousted over his effort to discipline a Navy SEAL convicted of posing for a photograph with the corpse of a teen-aged member of the Islamic State, delivered a stark new warning about Trump’s decision in an interview with CBS News that aired Monday night.
“What message does that send to the troops?” Spencer said. “That you can get away with things. We have to have good order and discipline. It’s the backbone of what we do.”
You can get away with things. That might sound deeply troubling to many, but is there any doubt that this is Trump’s intended message? If Trump decides you’re one of his people, you can get away with things.
Trump, who ordered Spencer to refrain from taking away Chief Petty Officer Edward Gallagher’s Trident pin identifying him as a SEAL, claims he was protecting “our war fighters.”
“A war fighter is a profession of arms,” Spencer responded on CBS News. “And a profession of arms has standards that they have to be held to — and that they hold themselves to.”
It’s eerie how perfectly these Spencer quotes overlap, in reverse, on top of the message that Trump has blared about his whole presidency from Day One. In every conceivable way, Trump has proclaimed that he and his loyalists will not be held to any standards of any kind in public service — and will not hold themselves to any such standards, either.
He is the king and he makes the rules. If he decides that war criminals are heroes that is what they will be. If said war criminal spoke out against him or otherwise “betrayed” him he would do the opposite. It is all about him.
And apparently tens of millions of Americans are fine with that.
Trump’s perfect call moved the White House to action
by digby
The perfect call seems to have convinced the president and his henchmen that Zelensky needed that extra incentive to do his bidding. He turned the screws that very night:
The Office of Management and Budget’s first official action to withhold $250 million in Pentagon aid to Ukraine came on the evening of July 25, the same day President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky spoke on the phone, according to a House Budget Committee summary of the office’s documents.
That withholding letter, which was among documents provided to the committee, was signed by a career OMB official, the summary states. But the next month, OMB political appointee Michael Duffey signed letters taking over the decision to withhold both the Pentagon and State Department aid to Ukraine from the career official.
A hold was placed on the Ukraine aid at the beginning of July, and the agencies were notified at a July 18 meeting that it had been frozen at the direction of the White House, a week before the Trump-Zelensky call.
The career official who initially withheld the aid money was Mark Sandy, according to a source familiar with the matter.
The documents to the House Budget Committee provide additional insight into the actions going on inside the White House’s budget office to hold up the US aid to Ukraine, a key part of the House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry. The committee only received a partial production of documents, which are separate from the impeachment inquiry, and it’s unclear what the significance is that the money was officially withheld on the same day as the July 25 call.
Sandy testified before House impeachment investigators in a closed-door deposition, while Duffey defied a subpoena.
OMB issued several short-term withholdings of the Ukraine aid in August and September. Some of the aid money was released September 11, the summary says, and the remainder of the funds were released on September 27 and September 30, which is the last day of the fiscal year.
The letters from Duffey show that on August 9, OMB said it would begin releasing 2% of the State Department funds each day, which the committee says prevented the normal spending of those funds.
Then on August 29, one day after Politico first reported that the aid had been withheld, Duffey signed another letter releasing 25% of the State Department funds each Sunday between September 1 and 22, according to the summary.
Asked about the information, an OMB spokesman said: “OMB has and will continue to use its apportionment authority to ensure taxpayer dollars are properly spent consistent with the President’s priorities and with the law. This is the same old spin from Democrats.”
They knew there was something wrong with it because they used their little loophole of releasing 2% which was technically compliant without actually releasing the funds.
I don’t know that we’ve seen Sandy’s transcript but it will be interesting to hear what they told him the reason was.
Here’s another one, this time from one of the top presidential candidates for 2024 renowned for her “independence.”
JUST RELEASED: @NikkiHaley on whether God put @realDonaldTrump in place as president for such a time as this? She Says, “everything happens for a reason… I think God sometimes places people for lessons and sometimes places people for change.” Her @700club story Tuesday! @POTUSpic.twitter.com/8woXuAfAh1
This may be the creepiest aspect of Trumpism yet. Rick Perry’s was bad enough, but he’s a dolt. Haley is doing this because she believes she has to in order to maintain her political viability.
Wil Trump’s cult continue after Trump? I would normally have said no. I think they will purge him as they have purged others who are no longer useful. I’m not so sure about Trump. The cult is strong.
Bonfire Night in the United Kingdom celebrates the Gunpowder Plot every 5th of November.
Fiscal conservatives have sold the notion that taxes are theft and government is “inefficient” since the Reagan era. Yet, the no-free-lunch bunch has been selling Americans free lunches ever since. In the form of “win-win” solutions to social problems. In the form of “public-private partnerships” (P3s). Get a new highway, new bridges, without new taxes, and maybe while cutting them. (You’ll pay daily user fees instead.*) Foreign conglomerates will privatize the profits (and offshore them) if they succeed and socialize the costs (to you) if they don’t. Frequently, they don’t.
But “no pain, no gain” applies as much to country-building as it does to muscle-building. At least for countries fit to live in. The win-win ideology promoted by financial elites over the last several decades promised we plebes could have their scraps by letting them grab the rest, writes Anand Giridharadas (“Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World“) in a Time magazine cover story:
If a single cultural idea has upheld the disproportionate power of this class, it has been the idea of the “win-win.” They could get rich and then “give back” to you: win-win. They could run a fund that made them sizable returns and offered you social returns too: win-win. They could sell sugary drinks to children in schools and work on public-private partnerships to improve children’s health: win-win. They could build cutthroat technology monopolies and get credit for serving to connect humanity and foster community: win-win.
As this seductive idea fizzles out, it raises the possibility that this age of capital, in which money was the ultimate organizing principle of American life, could actually end. Something could actually replace it. After all, a century ago, America was firmly planted in the first Gilded Age—and then it found its way into the Progressive Era and the New Deal, an era of great public ambition. Business didn’t go away; it wasn’t abolished; capitalists didn’t go into gulags. It was just that the emphasis of the society shifted. Money was no longer the lodestar of all pursuits.
A series of jarring incidents once again has again challenged metastatic capitalism, Giridharadas explains. Amazon canceled its New York satellite office after citizens objected to granting Jeff Bezos “billions in tax breaks that wouldn’t be available to a regular Joe starting a business.” The college bribery scandal exposed how elites exploit the college admissions system to advantage their kids over the less-heeled. Facebook drew a $5 billion slap on the wrist in July for privacy violations that helped its platform polarize the world and channel Russian propaganda. Finally, the Jeffrey Epstein scandal exposed “systemic rot in our culture,” demonstrating in grotesque terms how with enough money a sexual predator might walk among the rich and powerful untouched by the law, burnishing his public image (as the elite will) by investing in reputation-cleansing philanthropic works.
Giridharadas believes an new Progressive Age may be struggling to be born amidst the decay of democracy and the avarice of “manic hyper-capitalism.” He is not the first to warn the plutocrats (“plutes,” he calls them) a hard rain’s a-gonna fall.
Dutch historian Rutger Bregman told an elite audience at the World Economic Forum this year that their philanthropy would not solve the world’s problems, reduced rampant inequality, or excuse their excesses. It was time they again pay their taxes:
He told his audience that people in Davos talked about participation, justice, equality and transparency, but “nobody raises the issue of tax avoidance and the rich not paying their share. It is like going to a firefighters’ conference and not talking about water.”
“This is not rocket science,” Bregman told the stunned audience that arrived on a fleet of private jets.
They prefer to paint themselves as the world’s benefactors — “job creators,” as venture capitalist Nick Hanauer pointedly explained to a TED conference in 2012:
Significant privileges have come to people like me, capitalists, for being perceived as “job creators” at the center of the economic universe; and the language and metaphors we use to defend the current economic and social arrangements is telling. It’s a small jump from “job creator” to “The Creator”. This language obviously wasn’t chosen by accident. And it’s only honest to admit that when somebody like me calls themselves a “job creator”, we’re not just describing how the economy works, but more particularly, we’re making a claim on status and privileges that we deserve.
TED initially deemed Hanauer’s speech “too politically controversial to post on their web site” before relenting under pressure. In 2014, Hanauer warned fellow plutocrats “The Pitchforks Are Coming… For Us Plutocrats.” Rising inequality will cause a revolution (of some kind). To think otherwise is to inhabit a dream world that ignores history:
The most ironic thing about rising inequality is how completely unnecessary and self-defeating it is. If we do something about it, if we adjust our policies in the way that, say, Franklin D. Roosevelt did during the Great Depression—so that we help the 99 percent and preempt the revolutionaries and crazies, the ones with the pitchforks—that will be the best thing possible for us rich folks, too. It’s not just that we’ll escape with our lives; it’s that we’ll most certainly get even richer.
Because consumers with disposable income actually drive the economy, not plutocrats, as Hanauer explained in his TED talk and now at his Pitchfork Economics podcast.
But more broadly than taxing the rich, reform must rework capitalism’s DNA, the corporate model for organizing business that was poorly designed … by us. Its underlying assumptions, like the myth of the “job creator,” are so ubiquitous as to render them invisible.
In a 2005 op-ed, I likened the modern corporation to Mary Shelley’s creature or Michael Crichton’s dinosaurs. Conceived in law and born on paper, corporations grow, consume resources and generate waste — even mate and spawn offspring. They need not die. Ever. They are intelligent (some more than others) and have personalities (some nicer than others). Corporate behavior is as businesslike as a great white shark’s. Charitable donations give corporations a human face but are ultimately window dressing. When their doll-like, black eyes roll back in their heads and bite through your family’s financial security by moving a factory to a lower-wage country, it’s nothing personal. Except to their victims.
What Milton Friedman called capitalism in 1962 looks more like an economic cult today. Question the basic assumptions behind corporate capitalism, publicly point out its shortcomings and suggest we are overdue for an upgrade, and the Chamber of Commerce practically bursts through the door like the Spanish Inquisition to accuse you of communism and heresy. Why you … you want to punish success! It’s weirdly reflexive and a mite hysterical. What their blind fealty and knee-jerk defense of this one particular style for organizing a capitalist enterprise says about them, I’ll leave for now. It suffices to say I find it rather peculiar.
We think we invented capitalism. Yet there have been “capitalist acts between consenting adults” [h/t Robert Nozick] since before Hammurabi. We don’t call one capitalist enterprise the world’s oldest profession for nothing. There’s a restaurant in China that has been in operation for nearly 1000 years. And pubs in England that have been in business for 900. All without being incorporated in Delaware or the Cayman Islands. (Communists?)
We upgrade our hardware and software every couple of years, yet capitalism has not seen an upgrade since the last Progressive Era. Sen. Elizabeth Warren wants to upgrade its operating system. Sen. Bernie Sanders wants a “revolution,” however that’s defined. The plutocrats fear any upgrade that challenges their privileged status. They still believe they can hold back the pitchforks and stop the hard rain building on the horizon.
* The Beltway area workweek commute that one day was free the next day cost nearly $60 when a P3 took control, an acquaintance observed last week. Same public road. New, private overseer.
If Donald Trump gets his wish, he’ll soon take the three convicted or accused war criminals he spared from consequence on the road as special guests in his reelection campaign, according to two sources who have heard Trump discuss their potential roles for the 2020 effort.
Despite military and international backlash to Trump’s Nov. 15 clemency – fallout from which cost Navy Secretary Richard Spencer his job on Sunday – Trump believes he has rectified major injustices. Two people tell The Daily Beast they’ve heard Trump talk about how he’d like to have the now-cleared Clint Lorance, Matthew Golsteyn, or Edward Gallagher show up at his 2020 rallies, or even have a moment on stage at his renomination convention in Charlotte next year. Right-wing media has portrayed all three as martyrs brought down by “political correctness” within the military.
“He briefly discussed making it a big deal at the convention,” said one of these sources, who requested anonymity to talk about private conversations. “The president made a reference to the 2016 [convention] and where they brought on-stage heroes” like former Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell, who refused to execute detained civilians ahead of a devastating Taliban attack.
Former Army Lt. Lorance was sentenced to 19 years in prison in 2013 for murder after ordering his soldiers in 2010 to fire on three unarmed Afghan men riding a motorcycle, killing two of them. He walked out of military prison at Fort Leavenworth on Nov. 15. Next month, former Green Beret Maj. Golsteyn was supposed to stand trial for the murder of an unarmed Afghan man whom he told the CIA he killed in the belief the man was a Taliban bombmaker. Golsteyn, who burned the man’s corpse, pleaded not guilty to the murder; the Green Berets stripped Golsteyn of his Special-Forces tab. Lorance and Golsteyn were both causes celebre in certain military circles and among their right-wing supporters, as was Navy SEAL Chief Gallagher.
A military jury this summer acquitted Gallagher for the murder of a wounded teenage fighter for the so-called Islamic State. The case, which both featured Trump’s conspicuous intervention boosting Gallagher and serious prosecutorial misconduct, began, like Lorance’s, with Gallagher’s own platoonmates reporting his conduct. Against Gallagher’s denial, two SEALs testified seeing the senior SEAL chief stab the wounded teenager in the neck. Gallagher as well took a photo with the severed head of the corpse and texted it with the caption “good story behind this, got him with my hunting knife.” But another SEAL reversed his testimony to say that he, not Gallagher, killed the wounded teenager by closing off an inserted breathing tube. Gallagher’s only conviction was for taking the photo and he was released for time served. Trump pardoned Lorance and Golsteyn and reversed Gallagher’s demotion in rank.
What else would you expect from scumbags like this?
Of course, it’s much more horrific that Trump celebrates the disgusting murder and mayhem of innocent humans. But killing beautiful big cats for sport tells you everything you need to know about what kind of humans the killers are.
There’s a lot going on right now with Giuliani, Devin Nunes, the Ukrainian-American frick and Frack, Donald Trump and Ukraine. It’s very hard to keep it straight or figure out the big picture to understand exactly what seems to have gone on. Josh Marshall does a nice job of synthesizing all that for you:
We already knew that Giuliani was visiting Ukraine looking for anyone who would claim or manufacture evidence helpful to Donald Trump and use it to intervene in the 2020 election. This came in two forms: manufacturing evidence either against the Biden Family or claims about Ukraine being the guilty party in the 2016 election.
Giuliani and his associates (DiGenova, Toensing, Solomon, Parnas, et al.) had the most luck with Dmitry Firtash, the exiled oligarch trying to escape deportation to the United States to face bribery charges. Giuliani brought in DiGenova and Toensing to plead Firtash’s case to Bill Barr and Firtash helped generate accusations against the Biden’s. Firtash was the source of affidavit in which the corrupt prosecutor Shokin made his accusations against the Bidens.
Firtash has strong ties to the Kremlin. But it’s not clear that that is the driving factor here. He needs those US charges dropped and the American President’s confidant seems like a good shot at getting that done.
We also knew that Giuliani tried to cut a similar deal with another oligarch Igor Kolomoisky. But that approach didn’t go well and even led to a legal fight between Kolomoisky and Parnas and Fruman. As Kovensky reported earlier this month, it was a meeting tied to that fight that Parnas and Fruman were en route to when they were arrested at Dulles Airport. The Times has a piece out this morning with lots of details about the Firtash and Kolomoisky angles the Giuliani group pursued.
Then there’s this report from Bloomberg News. Giuliani also sought work with a Ukrainian bank called Privatbank seeking to recoup lost assets from its previous owner, Igor Kolomoisky.
This requires a brief history lesson. Kolomoisky’s rise was fueled by his ownership and looting of Privatbank. Cleaning this up was part of the US anti-corruption in the country. The problem was that Privatbank was so massive in the Ukraine economy it was too big to fail. So they ended up nationalizing the bank and taking most but not all of Kolomoisky’s corrupt gains. This is when he went into exile in Israel. He only returned when Zelensky became President. He is seen as a backer of Zelensky in part because Zelensky’s TV show ran on a channel owned by Kolomoisky. The question of whether or not Zelensky will bend to the will of his perceived patron or stick to his anti-corruption promises is a central question hovering over his presidency. (Here’s more detail on this part of the story.)
As I said, it gets very complicated. But here is where it’s important to step a few paces back to see the big picture. Giuliani was going to various oligarchs looking for help for President Trump and intervention in the 2020 election. In each of these cases the oligarchs had interests and in most cases legal trouble in the US. This was the basis of working together. The oligarch manufactures dirt and election assistance for President Trump and Giuliani tries to make their US legal problems go away. But at each stage Giuliani was also trying to hawk his own ‘legal services’ or more accurately trying to set up his own personal revenue stream, whether it’s with Firtash or the gas concessions Parnas and Fruman were trying to arrange or the battle between Privatbank and Kolomoisky.
On multiple levels US foreign policy was being subverted to serve the personal legal ends of Donald Trump, the cash hunger of Rudy Giuliani and those of various corrupt oligarchs and public officials in Ukraine. As Fiona Hill said last week in her congressional testimony, she believed there was a “subversion of US foreign policy to push these people’s personal interests.”
Trump was getting legal and political help. Rudy Giuliani was getting money. They were both in exchange for changes to US foreign policy to assist indicted and/or corrupt officials in Ukraine. The key with Giuliani is that it is hard, probably impossible to disentangle which things were specifically to help Donald Trump and which were for payoffs to Rudy Giuliani. He probably lost track.
I’m reminded of the butt-dial we heard about the other day:
Giuliani can be heard telling the man that he’s “got to call Robert again tomorrow.”
“Is Robert around?” Giuliani asks.
“He’s in Turkey,” the man responds.
Giuliani replies instantly. “The problem is we need some money.”
The two men then go silent. Nine seconds pass. No word is spoken. Then Giuliani chimes in again.
“We need a few hundred thousand,” he says.
It’s unclear what the two men were talking about. But Giuliani is known to have worked with a Robert who has ties to Turkey.
His name is Robert Mangas, and he’s a lawyer at the firm Greenberg Traurig LLP, as well as a registered agent of the Turkish government.
This is just how he operates, combining his access, his job as the president’s personal attorney, political dirty tricks and ratfucking and making piles of money. It’s his business.
Watchmen Season 1, episode 6: This Extraordinary Being, screencap
McFarland’s piece brought insight I missed, enriching my experience. It’s a MUST read for fans of great TV cinema writing. It reminds me of the work of two of my favorite writers on TV and cinema, Matt Zoller Seitz and Mick LaSalle.
I know that some people don’t like the super-hero genre and I totally understand why. What I like about this series (and this episode) is it explores who created these heroes and what function they serve for some people, but not all.
I was talking to some friends about the presidential race the other day. I recalled this comment from Joy Reid, but not the specifics, so I looked it up, Here’s the clip.
“So the idea of united and coming together, that sound fine for Pete Buttigieg to say to middle class white America that wants to come together with their uncle that’s a Trumper, but that is not going to work in communities of color.”
I listen to white middle-class voters. I get that they want a “return to normalcy” that Biden represents or Klobachar offers. But that “normalcy” also excused and supported a lot of injustice. Racial, gender and financial. I get annoyed when I hear candidates talking about reaching across the aisle and working with Republicans to “get things done.” Who are these Republicans they are talking about? The same ones who have blocked the 100’s of bills the House has passed? Joy Reid,
“There is no conversation of interest to talk about uniting, to be blunt, with the party that has given up not just its moral standing, but its soul, to the person who is president of the United States right now.”
The MSM likes to push centrist candidates. They want to keep a conservative corporate system happy. Incremental change is okay, don’t do anything too radical. Pundits talk about the need for “kitchen table issues” believing it will lead to people feeling passion for a leader who addresses those issues. That’s true to an extent. I want to know candidates are addressing health care and education costs, but I also want someone to prosecute people who violated our Constitution and betrayed our ideals
I’ve been impressed by Warren’s acknowledgement and stories about how medical bankruptcies destroy lives and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that she set up to stop abuses of financial institutions. I like Sanders’ understanding of the positive role Medicare for All will play in strengthening the country. I enjoy hearing Harris talk about prosecuting criminals in government and corporations.
Not everyone desires “nice things” that will help all of us. Some people desire a leader whose actions won’t help them directly, but will hurt the people they hate and/or fear. This puzzling behavior came up talking with friends who don’t follow politics as closely as I do, who wonder why people would vote against their own interests. I talked about this piece that explains something I’ve seen but couldn’t articulate after two beers.
In January the New York Times’s Patricia Mazzei published a dispatch from Marianna, Florida — a small, politically conservative town that depends on jobs from a federal prison and thus has been deeply hurt by the government shutdown. “I voted for him, and he’s the one who’s doing this,” Minton told Mazzei. “I thought he was going to do good things. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”
He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.
Think about that line for a second. Roll it over in your head. In essence, Minton is declaring that one aim of the Trump administration is to hurt people — the right people. Making America great again, in her mind, involves inflicting pain.
This is not an accident. Trump’s political victory and continuing appeal depend on a brand of politics that marginalizes and targets groups disliked by his supporters. Trump supporters don’t so much love the Republican party as they hate Democrats, a phenomenon political scientists call “negative partisanship.” They like Trump not because he sells them on the GOP, but because they believe he’ll stick it to the Democrats harder than anyone else.
The right taps into anger. The left can too. Anger at injustice, unfairness, discrimination. From the Salon piece on The Watchmen:
“He’s [Will Reeves] the inheritance of a town and a nation that’s in denial about its legacy of racial strife and the resultant disparity and unrest, a man fortified not by magic or gamma rays, but precisely directed rage.”
I can hate a system, I can hate people. I can work to change a system, I can work to change the minds and heart of people. I can say to them, “We are better than this. We CAN have nice things.“
And wealso have to work to bring down the people and institutions that lie and cover up horrible acts. We live in a time where information silos enables a right wing media that systematically attacks on the truth. To quote from the scientist Valery Legasov in Chernobyl, written by Craig Mazin.
Valery Legasov : What is the cost of lies? It’s not that we’ll mistake them for the truth. The real danger is that if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognize the truth at all. Chernobyl, 1:23:45 Episode 1
So when people finally DO go down, and go to jail like Michael Cohen, Paul Manafort and soon Roger Stone, we need to celebrate those convictions and follow up by passing laws that reinforce our ideals so that the the next, smarter fascist will have to work harder.
I don’t want to hate my relatives who have identity fusion with Trump, a man who is cruel, lawless, corrupt, racist and sexist. But if I can’t reach them with the truth and proof that the people supporting Trump and his violation of our Constitution have gone to jail; my job is to support leaders and people who say to us, “We owe it to each other, as humans, as Americans, to be better. To do better.”
I’d like them see the world as I see it, a place where justice will prevail and with a hope for a better future.
The WaPo as well as the major cable networks are running more highly accurate (and horrific) stories of Republican perfidy, authoritarian initiatives, lies, and truly demented policy ideas. It’s really something to read, the news told as it really is, without any false both-siderism. Even the Times seems to understand (well, about the half the time or so) that balance does not mean placing Republican fantasies on the same rhetorical pedestal as reality.
If only the mainstream media had produced this level of journalistic accuracy the last time it could have made a difference, when they were stealing the 2000 election — and lying just as baldly.
I’m afraid it’s a little late now. The cultists have their media and simply aren’t listening to the mainstream anymore.
If the truth is shouted in a forest, but the trees only have ears for falsehood, the forest is silent.
