Month: February 2020

Everyone keeps quoting the latest Gallup poll that has Trump at 49%.

It is one poll and it is an outlier. It was taken from January 16-29. The polling average has him ticking up a bit but not much:

The media’s need to create a horserace is driving this meme. Don’t believe it. He may have gained a tiny bit but he’s still under 45% and that’s not a good place to be 9 months before the election. I think he can still win, of course. If nothing else, we know he’ll cheat, and who knows what will happen with the Democrats.

But please, this non-stop handwringing over his 49% approval rating is just wrong, at last right now. All the polling taken in recent days has him right where he’s always been, mired at 45% or below.

Tom mentioned the Sherrod Brown op-ed in the New York Times yesterday in his larger piece about GOP cowardice this morning. I thought I would just excerpt the whole Brown piece here because it’s important:

History has indeed taught us that when it comes to the instincts that drive us, fear has no rival. As the lead House impeachment manager, Representative Adam Schiff, has noted, Robert Kennedy spoke of how “moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle.”

Playing on that fear, the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, sought a quick impeachment trial for President Trump with as little attention to it as possible. Reporters, who usually roam the Capitol freely, have been cordoned off like cattle in select areas. Mr. McConnell ordered limited camera views in the Senate chamber so only presenters — not absent senators — could be spotted.

And barely a peep from Republican lawmakers. One journalist remarked to me, “How in the world can these senators walk around here upright when they have no backbone?” Fear has a way of bending us.

Late in the evening on day four of the trial I saw it, just 10 feet across the aisle from my seat at Desk 88, when Mr. Schiff told the Senate: “CBS News reported last night that a Trump confidant said that Republican senators were warned, ‘Vote against the president and your head will be on a pike.’” The response from Republicans was immediate and furious. Several groaned and protested and muttered, “Not true.” But pike or no pike, Mr. Schiff had clearly struck a nerve. (In the words of Lizzo: truth hurts.)

Of course, the Republican senators who have covered for Mr. Trump love what he delivers for them. But Vice President Mike Pence would give them the same judges, the same tax cuts, the same attacks on workers’ rights and the environment. So that’s not really the reason for their united chorus of “not guilty.”

For the stay-in-office-at-all-cost representatives and senators, fear is the motivator. They are afraid that Mr. Trump might give them a nickname like “Low Energy Jeb” and “Lyin’ Ted,” or that he might tweet about their disloyalty. Or — worst of all — that he might come to their state to campaign against them in the Republican primary. They worry:

“Will the hosts on Fox attack me?” “Will the mouthpieces on talk radio go after me?” “Will the Twitter trolls turn their followers against me?”

My colleagues know they all just might. There’s an old Russian proverb: The tallest blade of grass is the first cut by the scythe. In private, many of my colleagues agree that the president is reckless and unfit. They admit his lies. And they acknowledge what he did was wrong. They know this president has done things Richard Nixon never did. And they know that more damning evidence is likely to come out.

So watching the mental contortions they perform to justify their votes is painful to behold: They claim that calling witnesses would have meant a never-ending trial. They tell us they’ve made up their minds, so why would we need new evidence? They say to convict this president now would lead to the impeachment of every future president — as if every president will try to sell our national security to the highest bidder.

I have asked some of them, “If the Senate votes to acquit, what will you do to keep this president from getting worse?” Their responses have been shrugs and sheepish looks.

They stop short of explicitly saying that they are afraid. We all want to think that we always stand up for right and fight against wrong. But history does not look kindly on politicians who cannot fathom a fate worse than losing an upcoming election. They might claim fealty to their cause — those tax cuts — but often it’s a simple attachment to power that keeps them captured.

Bingo. It’s the attachment to power, no matter what it takes. That’s a lack of principles and morals.

These are all people who could do something else. The vast majority are very wealthy and all of them could find another line of work if they chose. If they worked together to resist Trump they would have safety in numbers from the backlash as well, at least from the kind of people who would likely give them memberships on corporate boards or hire them for speeches or publish their books if they get out of politics. But they choose to stay and grovel for the president’s attention.

Yes, they’re cowards. But they are empty people anyway, devoid of any convictions about anything but remaining in power.

Their performance today at the White House, with people like Mike Lee practically crying with joy at Trump’s compliments despite his alleged opposition to Trump’s lies about nearly getting the US into WWIII just a month ago. It was sickening.

It’s still disorienting to listen to the President of the United States speak like a deranged imbecile in the White House. But here he was, this morning.

Let’s just say he wasn’t trying to bind up the nation’s wounds.

Some highlights:

Here’s the whole thing. It was …. surreal:

The Senate is now a full-fledged arm of the Trump re-election campaign:

The Treasury Department has complied with Republican senators’ requests for highly sensitive and closely held financial records about Hunter Biden and his associates and has turned over “‘evidence’ of questionable origin” to them, according to a leading Democrat on one of the committees conducting the investigation.

For months, while the impeachment controversy raged, powerful committee chairmen in the Republican-controlled Senate have been quietly but openly pursuing an inquiry into Hunter Biden’s business affairs and Ukrainian officials’ alleged interventions in the 2016 election, the same matters that President Trump and his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani unsuccessfully tried to coerce Ukraine’s government to investigate. 

Unlike Trump and Giuliani, however, Sens. Charles Grassley, chairman of the Finance Committee; Ron Johnson, chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee; and Lindsey Graham, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, have focused their efforts in Washington, seeking to extract politically useful information from agencies of the U.S. government. They’ve issued letters requesting records from Cabinet departments and agencies, including the State Department, the Treasury, the Justice Department, the FBI, the National Archives and the Secret Service. 

And guess what? These agencies all jumped right on it.

Grassley and Johnson have sought to obtain some of the most sensitive and closely held documents in all of federal law enforcement — highly confidential suspicious activity reports (SARs) filed by financial institutions with FinCEN, an agency of the Treasury that helps to police money laundering. 

The senators’ requests to the Treasury have borne fruit, according to the ranking Democratic senator on the Finance Committee, Ron Wyden of Oregon, who contrasted the cooperation given to the Republican senators with the pervasive White House-directed stonewall that House Democrats encountered when they subpoenaed documents and witnesses in the impeachment inquiry.

“Applying a blatant double standard, Trump administration agencies like the Treasury Department are rapidly complying with Senate Republican requests — no subpoenas necessary — and producing ‘evidence’ of questionable origin,” Wyden spokesperson Ashley Schapitl said in a statement. “The administration told House Democrats to go pound sand when their oversight authority was mandatory while voluntarily cooperating with the Senate Republicans’ sideshow at lightning speed.”

Keep in mind that Hunter Biden’s alleged unethical behavior happened years ago.

Biden looks very weak right now and it is looking more and more likely that he will not be the nominee. But it also appears more and more that the GOP vendetta against him wasn’t really about the election. I think it was their way of paying back Obama and attempting to destroy his legacy as a clean administration.

Nothing is too petty for Trump and his henchmen. It is a dominance play to show the American people that anyone who resists will be pursued. It’s worked very well to tame the GOP. We’ll have to see if they can use their combined strength to force the rest of us to submit.

Update:

There’s more …

Two Republican senators have said they are continuing to look into “potential conflicts of interest” with Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine and China, shortly after President Donald Trump was acquitted by the Senate on articles of impeachment for his own conduct in Ukraine.

Sens. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Ron Johnson, R-Wis., sent a letter to Secret Service Director James Murray on Wednesday asking for clarification on “whether Hunter Biden used government-sponsored travel to help conduct private business” and details of his travel records.

So they ratfucked Iowa?

The phone number to report Iowa caucus results was posted on a fringe internet message board on Monday night along with encouragement to “clog the lines,” an indication that jammed phone lines that left some caucus managers on hold for hours may have in part been due to prank calls.

An Iowa Democratic Party official said the influx of calls to the reporting hotline included “supporters of President Trump who called to express their displeasure with the Democratic Party.” The party official’s comments were first reported late Wednesday by Bloomberg News.

It’s going to get worse. This piece by McKay Coppins is going to keep me up tonight. He starts off by writing about his experience in starting up a new Facebook account and clicking “like” on Donald Trump’s Facebook page. What followed was a cascade of disinformation and propaganda the likes of which would make your hair curl.

The story that unfurled in my Facebook feed over the next several weeks was, at times, disorienting. There were days when I would watch, live on TV, an impeachment hearing filled with damning testimony about the president’s conduct, only to look at my phone later and find a slickly edited video—served up by the Trump campaign—that used out-of-context clips to recast the same testimony as an exoneration. Wait, I caught myself wondering more than once, is that what happened today?

As I swiped at my phone, a stream of pro-Trump propaganda filled the screen: “That’s right, the whistleblower’s own lawyer said, ‘The coup has started …’ ” Swipe. “Democrats are doing Putin’s bidding …” Swipe. “The only message these radical socialists and extremists will understand is a crushing …” Swipe. “Only one man can stop this chaos …” Swipe, swipe, swipe.

I was surprised by the effect it had on me. I’d assumed that my skepticism and media literacy would inoculate me against such distortions. But I soon found myself reflexively questioning every headline. It wasn’t that I believed Trump and his boosters were telling the truth. It was that, in this state of heightened suspicion, truth itself—about Ukraine, impeachment, or anything else—felt more and more difficult to locate. With each swipe, the notion of observable reality drifted further out of reach.

What I was seeing was a strategy that has been deployed by illiberal political leaders around the world. Rather than shutting down dissenting voices, these leaders have learned to harness the democratizing power of social media for their own purposes—jamming the signals, sowing confusion. They no longer need to silence the dissident shouting in the streets; they can use a megaphone to drown him out. Scholars have a name for this: censorship through noise.

That is exactly what’s happening, isn’t it? And imagine what it must be like for people who are busy and only following the news in dribs and drabs. How can they figure out what’s true and what isn’t?

And if that doesn’t send a chill down your spine, get a load of this:

Every presidential campaign sees its share of spin and misdirection, but this year’s contest promises to be different. In conversations with political strategists and other experts, a dystopian picture of the general election comes into view—one shaped by coordinated bot attacks, Potemkin local-news sites, micro-targeted fearmongering, and anonymous mass texting. Both parties will have these tools at their disposal. But in the hands of a president who lies constantly, who traffics in conspiracy theories, and who readily manipulates the levers of government for his own gain, their potential to wreak havoc is enormous.

The Trump campaign is planning to spend more than $1 billion, and it will be aided by a vast coalition of partisan media, outside political groups, and enterprising freelance operatives. These pro-Trump forces are poised to wage what could be the most extensive disinformation campaign in U.S. history. Whether or not it succeeds in reelecting the president, the wreckage it leaves behind could be irreparable.

Good lord. I have been saying “get your BS detectors in good working order” at least once a week for a while. It’s never been more important.

“How in the world can these senators walk around here upright when they have no backbone?” a journalist remarked to Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio). “Fear has a way of bending us,” Brown writes in the New York Times.

During the Senate impeachment trial of Donald Trump that concluded in acquittal Wednesday, House impeachment manager Rep. Adam Schiff recounted a CBS news report that Republican senators had been warned, “Vote against the president and your head will be on a pike.”

Brown writes:

The response from Republicans was immediate and furious. Several groaned and protested and muttered, “Not true.” But pike or no pike, Mr. Schiff had clearly struck a nerve. (In the words of Lizzo: truth hurts.)

“The coward caucus,” Republican political strategist Rick Wilson branded Senate Republicans Wednesday night on MSNBC’s “The Last Word.”

It’s not simply that they like what Trump gives them: tax cuts, conservative judges, relentless assaults on the environment and workers’ rights, Brown explains. As president, Mike Pence would give them those things as well. They stick with Trump because they are afraid of him. Afraid he’ll call them nasty names. Afraid he’ll campaign for a primary challenger. Afraid Fox News will attack them.

I have asked some of them, “If the Senate votes to acquit, what will you do to keep this president from getting worse?” Their responses have been shrugs and sheepish looks.

They stop short of explicitly saying that they are afraid. We all want to think that we always stand up for right and fight against wrong. But history does not look kindly on politicians who cannot fathom a fate worse than losing an upcoming election. They might claim fealty to their cause — those tax cuts — but often it’s a simple attachment to power that keeps them captured.

Maine’s Republican Sen. Susan Collins was as Susan Collins as ever. She told Norah O’Donnell of CBS Tuesday that while what Trump did in pressuring Ukraine on the July 25 call was wrong, impeachment had taught Trump “a pretty big lesson.” Collins said, “I believe that he will be much more cautious in the future.”

Asked during a Tuesday luncheon if he’d made any mistakes or would do anything differently, Trump insisted, “It was a perfect call.”

Collins backed away from her Tuesday statement on Wednesday, admitting she shouldn’t have said she believes Trump has learned his lessons. She should have said “hopes.”

Fear has a way of bending us.

The only Republican senator with the courage to vote to convict Trump was Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah. Romney spoke of honoring his oath before God in an emotional speech destined for the history books. The New York Times got a jump on historians and printed the speech in full. Romney was the first senator ever to vote to convict a president from his own party. Not to follow what his conscience demands would “expose my character to history’s rebuke and the censure of my own conscience,” Romney wrote, adding:

I acknowledge that my verdict will not remove the president from office. The results of this Senate court will, in fact, be appealed to a higher court, the judgment of the American people. Voters will make the final decision, just as the president’s lawyers have implored. My vote will likely be in the minority in the Senate, but irrespective of these things, with my vote, I will tell my children and their children that I did my duty to the best of my ability believing that my country expected it of me.

“Bravo,” writes the Los Angeles Times Editorial Board. If Trump takes acquittal as a green light for more and perhaps worse crimes, “the senators who winked at his wrongdoing will be co-conspirators.”

Arguments could be made, Josh Marshall writes at TPM, for admitting Trump’s wrongdoing, yet “prudential reasons” constrain voting for his removal. But that’s not what Republicans did. Voting not to hear any witnesses “means you know it is very bad but you have different priorities. You don’t care.”

Romney blemished Trump’s exoneration. Trump will care about that. The Coward Caucus will have to live with it.

Trump’s acquittal by all but one Senate Republicans illuminates a shift towards authoritarianism decades in the making. Conservative demagogue Rush Limbaugh paved the way for Trump the way John the Baptist preceded Jesus. Indeed, Trump is for his apostate evangelical base a corrupt, earthier version of their king. The wrathful idol once dwelled above Fifth Avenue in halls of gold. He descended a golden escalator as their protector and savior. Limbaugh received a Presidential Medal of Freedom on Tuesday for his years of service as the king’s herald during Trump’s State of the Union pageant.

Many evangelical and conservative politicians have for years practiced their religious and civic faiths more in form than in substance. They have crafted a new god, as Aaron did in the desert, an unholy amalgam of Jesus Christ, Ayn Rand, and Horatio Alger. In Trump, they brought this golden golem to life. Form without soul.

I attended what was decades ago a Baptist university. Drinking on campus was verboten. So, it was a shock one night to see cases of champagne and racks of champagne glasses staged in the dining hall kitchen for a scheduled trustees’ dinner. I removed one bottle from an open case. Dimpled bottom. Wired cork. Foiled top. The label read “Sparkling Catawba.” Nonalcoholic. A fake.

They planned a champagne toast without champagne. All the external form. All the ritual. Even the effervescence. But empty of substance.

That is how Real Americans™ now practice their faith in the Constitution and show devotion to this democratic republic. The Coward Caucus may regret it sooner rather than later. The king’s vengeance is already on display.

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Actually, Romney votes Trump nearly 79% of the time. In other words, Romney’s just one more far right Republican hack.

Adding: everyone is quoting Profiles in Courage right now when it comes to Romney’s vote. But I think Doug Jones, who also voted to convict, has it exactly right:

There will be so many who will simply look at what I’m doing today and say it is a profile in courage,” the senator said. “It is not. It is simply a matter of right and wrong. Where doing right is not a courageous act. It is simply following your oath.”

Translated: it’s not that Romney is some kind of paragon. He’s not. It’s that every single other Republican has demonstrated that they are cowards, dishonest, and likely both.

What say you Susan?

Yeah, that worked out well.

Minutes after the Senate vote to acquit him on Wednesday afternoon, President Donald Trump posted a tweet undercutting the belief a number of Republican senators expressed in recent days that getting impeached might prompt him to tone it down a little.

Trump posted a video with an edited animation of a Time magazine cover teasing that he, or at the very least someone with the same last name, will be running for president in 2020, 2024, 2028, and beyond. It ends with Trump standing being an election placard reading, “TRUMP 4EVA.”

And lookee here:

I’m sure Graham has something teed up as well.

An American tragedy.