… not with a bang but a whimper.
This report from the Washington Post’s Dan Balz ostensibly about Trump’s bad couple of weeks stepping on his message is something else. Read the following and then think about what’s missing from it:
Trump, however, is not without assets to use in the final weeks. As president, he can use the levers of the federal government to benefit himself politically — and is doing so.
On Friday, he announced an agreement between Israel and Bahrain to establish diplomatic relations, a month after a similar agreement between Israel and the United Arab Emirates. How significant these will be remains an open question, but they are markers he can point to as progress.
He is pushing for an early announcement of an effective vaccine against the virus that causes covid 19. Despite cautions to the contrary, that a vaccine probably won’t be ready before the end of the year at the earliest, he can use his bully pulpit to promise the public and cajole the Food and Drug Administration.
Four years ago, then-FBI Director James B. Comey reopened an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of private emails as secretary of state in the final two weeks of the campaign, an unexpected development that disrupted her candidacy, even though that reopening came to naught.
Trump could have his own version of this kind of judicial intervention: U.S. Attorney for Connecticut John Durham, who was appointed by Attorney General William P. Barr, is investigating the role of U.S. intelligence agencies looking into Russian interference in 2016. His report could be released before the election.
On Friday, it was reported that Nora Dannehy, one of the senior prosecutors on Durham’s team, had resigned, a move that could prompt questions about whether the investigators are under undue political pressure to finish their work.
Finally, Trump continues his efforts to discredit voting by mail — in most states at least — and thereby to seed the ground for doubts about whether the election will be fairly decided if he falls short.
With seven weeks left until Election Day and with Biden holding a lead in the polls, Trump has ground to make up, though the electoral college math remains friendlier to him than the popular vote. Each week that he is trapped in a controversy about his own leadership, the less time he has to make his case against his challenger.
Wow. Trump really has some incumbent advantages at his disposal doesn’t he? How lucky for him that he can deploy them for his re-election campaign.
I’m sure you noticed that he doesn’t point out anywhere how corrupt all those tactics are.
1.) Pushing a vaccine for a deadly pandemic before its ready is one of the most irresponsible and reckless acts any leader has ever done. He might have mentioned that.
2.) Barr’s outrageous decision to interfere in the election is as corrupt as it gets. Balz suggests what he’s doing (and Comey last time) is just business as usual. It’s not.
3.) Trump is out there saying “the only way I can lose this election is if it’s rigged.” His discrediting of the Vote By Mail, which is perfectly safe, is as unethical as it gets since it’s obvious that he is just laying the groundwork to claim the election was stolen from him, regardless of how big a loss he suffers. You’d think Balz would mention that somewhere too.
None of this is “making the case against his challenger.” It’s lying, cheating, manipulating and dirty tricks along with reckless disregard for the lives of millions of Americans.
This bland recitation of Trump’s corruption as if it’s just another tactic is as “norm-breaking” as Trump himself. The Village is alive and well.
This little quote from an undecided voter makes you want to bang your head against a wall:
Ellen Christenson, a 69-year-old Wisconsinite, said she voted for former President Barack Obama twice before backing Jill Stein, the Green Party nominee, in 2016. Now Ms. Christenson said she was torn between Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden and “could go either way.”
Mr. Biden, she said, had not sufficiently “condemned the violence and the burning.”
Originally a supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement, Ms. Christenson said she now felt it had “gone too far,” and she said she “kind of resented” that her workplace recently forced her to take a seminar on microaggressions.
Ok, so a supporter of the first Black president now think BLM has gone too far and resents being told about microaggressions. So, while she voted for the far-left Jill Stein in 2016 now she thinks she might vote for … the fascist Donald Trump.
This person is incoherent about politics and clearly is not voting on the basis of any rational consideration of character, culture or ideology.
There are a lot of people like this. It reminds me of the first piece I ever read by Chris Hayes, back in 2004. It remains one of the best insights ever written into the “undecided” voter this late in the game:
Decision Makers
November 17, 2004 · The New Republic · Permalink
For those who follow politics, there are few things more mysterious, more inscrutable, more maddening than the mind of the undecided voter. In this year’s election, when the choice was so stark and the differences between the candidates were so obvious, how could any halfway intelligent human remain undecided for long? “These people,” Jonah Goldberg once wrote of undecided voters, on a rare occasion when he probably spoke for the entire political class, “can’t make up their minds, in all likelihood, because either they don’t care or they don’t know anything.”
And that was more or less how I felt before I decided to spend the last seven weeks of the campaign talking to swing voters in Wisconsin. In September, I signed up to work for the League of Conservation Voters’ Environmental Victory Project–a canvassing operation that recruited volunteers in five states to knock on doors in “swing wards” with high concentrations of undecided or persuadable voters. During my time in suburban Dane County, which surrounds Madison, I knocked on more than 1,000 doors and talked to hundreds of Wisconsin residents. Our mission was simple: to identify undecided voters and convince them to vote for John Kerry.
My seven weeks in Wisconsin left me with a number of observations (all of them highly anecdotal, to be sure) about swing voters, which I explain below. But those small observations add up to one overarching contention: that the caricature of undecided voters favored by liberals and conservatives alike doesn’t do justice to the complexity, indeed the oddity, of undecided voters themselves. None of this is to say that undecided voters are completely undeserving of the derision that the political class has heaped on them–just that Jonah Goldberg, and the rest of us, may well be deriding them for the wrong reasons.
Undecided voters aren’t as rational as you think. Members of the political class may disparage undecided voters, but we at least tend to impute to them a basic rationality. We’re giving them too much credit. I met voters who told me they were voting for Bush, but who named their most important issue as the environment. One man told me he voted for Bush in 2000 because he thought that with Cheney, an oilman, on the ticket, the administration would finally be able to make us independent from foreign oil. A colleague spoke to a voter who had been a big Howard Dean fan, but had switched to supporting Bush after Dean lost the nomination. After half an hour in the man’s house, she still couldn’t make sense of his decision. Then there was the woman who called our office a few weeks before the election to tell us that though she had signed up to volunteer for Kerry she had now decided to back Bush. Why? Because the president supported stem cell research. The office became quiet as we all stopped what we were doing to listen to one of our fellow organizers try, nobly, to disabuse her of this notion. Despite having the facts on her side, the organizer didn’t have much luck.
Undecided voters do care about politics; they just don’t enjoy politics. Political junkies tend to assume that undecided voters are undecided because they don’t care enough to make up their minds. But while I found that most undecided voters are, as one Kerry aide put it to The New York Times, “relatively low-information, relatively disengaged,” the lack of engagement wasn’t a sign that they didn’t care. After all, if they truly didn’t care, they wouldn’t have been planning to vote. The undecided voters I talked to did care about politics, or at least judged it to be important; they just didn’t enjoy politics.
The mere fact that you’re reading this article right now suggests that you not only think politics is important, but you actually like it. You read the paper and listen to political radio and talk about politics at parties. In other words, you view politics the way a lot of people view cooking or sports or opera: as a hobby. Most undecided voters, by contrast, seem to view politics the way I view laundry. While I understand that to be a functioning member of society I have to do my laundry, and I always eventually get it done, I’ll never do it before every last piece of clean clothing is dirty, as I find the entire business to be a chore. A significant number of undecided voters, I think, view politics in exactly this way: as a chore, a duty, something that must be done but is altogether unpleasant, and therefore something best put off for as long as possible.
A disturbing number of undecided voters are crypto-racist isolationists. In the age of the war on terror and the war in Iraq, pundits agreed that this would be the most foreign policy-oriented election in a generation–and polling throughout the summer seemed to bear that out. In August the Pew Center found that 40 percent of voters were identifying foreign policy and defense as their top issues, the highest level of interest in foreign policy during an election year since 1972.
But just because voters were unusually concerned about foreign policy didn’t mean they had fundamentally shifted their outlook on world affairs. In fact, among undecided voters, I encountered a consistent and surprising isolationism–an isolationism that September 11 was supposed to have made obsolete everywhere but the left and right fringes of the political spectrum. Voters I spoke to were concerned about the Iraq war and about securing American interests, but they seemed entirely unmoved by the argument–accepted, in some form or another, by just about everyone in Washington–that the security of the United States is dependent on the freedom and well-being of the rest of the world.
In fact, there was a disturbing trend among undecided voters–as well as some Kerry supporters–towards an opposition to the Iraq war based largely on the ugliest of rationales. I had one conversation with an undecided, sixtyish, white voter whose wife was voting for Kerry. When I mentioned the “mess in Iraq” he lit up. “We should have gone through Iraq like shit through tinfoil,” he said, leaning hard on the railing of his porch. As I tried to make sense of the mental image this evoked, he continued: “I mean we should have dominated the place; that’s the only thing these people understand. … Teaching democracy to Arabs is like teaching the alphabet to rats.” I didn’t quite know what to do with this comment, so I just thanked him for his time and slipped him some literature. (What were the options? Assure him that a Kerry White House wouldn’t waste tax dollars on literacy classes for rodents?)
That may have been the most explicit articulation I heard of this mindset–but it wasn’t an isolated incident. A few days later, someone told me that he wished we could put Saddam back in power because he “knew how to rule these people.” While Bush’s rhetoric about spreading freedom and democracy played well with blue-state liberal hawks and red-state Christian conservatives who are inclined towards a missionary view of world affairs, it seemed to fall flat among the undecided voters I spoke with. This was not merely the view of the odd kook; it was a common theme I heard from all different kinds of undecided voters. Clearly the Kerry campaign had focus groups or polling that supported this, hence its candidate’s frequent–and wince- inducing–America-first rhetoric about opening firehouses in Baghdad while closing them in the United States.
The worse things got in Iraq, the better things got for Bush. Liberal commentators, and even many conservative ones, assumed, not unreasonably, that the awful situation in Iraq would prove to be the president’s undoing. But I found that the very severity and intractability of the Iraq disaster helped Bush because it induced a kind of fatalism about the possibility of progress. Time after time, undecided voters would agree vociferously with every single critique I offered of Bush’s Iraq policy, but conclude that it really didn’t matter who was elected, since neither candidate would have any chance of making things better. Yeah, but what’s Kerry gonna do? voters would ask me, and when I told them Kerry would bring in allies they would wave their hands and smile with condescension, as if that answer was impossibly naïve. C’mon, they’d say, you don’t really think that’s going to work, do you?
To be sure, maybe they simply thought Kerry’s promise to bring in allies was a lame idea–after all, many well-informed observers did. But I became convinced that there was something else at play here, because undecided voters extended the same logic to other seemingly intractable problems, like the deficit or health care. On these issues, too, undecideds recognized the severity of the situation–but precisely because they understood the severity, they were inclined to be skeptical of Kerry’s ability to fix things. Undecided voters, as everyone knows, have a deep skepticism about the ability of politicians to keep their promises and solve problems. So the staggering incompetence and irresponsibility of the Bush administration and the demonstrably poor state of world affairs seemed to serve not as indictments of Bush in particular, but rather of politicians in general. Kerry, by mere dint of being on the ballot, was somehow tainted by Bush’s failures as badly as Bush was.
As a result, undecideds seemed oddly unwilling to hold the president accountable for his previous actions, focusing instead on the practical issue of who would have a better chance of success in the future. Because undecideds seemed uninterested in assessing responsibility for the past, Bush suffered no penalty for having made things so bad; and because undecideds were focused on, but cynical about, the future, the worse things appeared, the less inclined they were to believe that problems could be fixed–thereby nullifying the backbone of Kerry’s case. Needless to say, I found this logic maddening.
Undecided voters don’t think in terms of issues. Perhaps the greatest myth about undecided voters is that they are undecided because of the “issues.” That is, while they might favor Kerry on the economy, they favor Bush on terrorism; or while they are anti-gay marriage, they also support social welfare programs. Occasionally I did encounter undecided voters who were genuinely cross-pressured–a couple who was fiercely pro-life, antiwar, and pro-environment for example–but such cases were exceedingly rare. More often than not, when I asked undecided voters what issues they would pay attention to as they made up their minds I was met with a blank stare, as if I’d just asked them to name their favorite prime number.
The majority of undecided voters I spoke to couldn’t name a single issue that was important to them. This was shocking to me. Think about it: The “issue” is the basic unit of political analysis for campaigns, candidates, journalists, and other members of the chattering classes. It’s what makes up the subheadings on a candidate’s website, it’s what sober, serious people wish election outcomes hinged on, it’s what every candidate pledges to run his campaign on, and it’s what we always complain we don’t see enough coverage of.
But the very concept of the issue seemed to be almost completely alien to most of the undecided voters I spoke to. (This was also true of a number of committed voters in both camps–though I’ll risk being partisan here and say that Kerry voters, in my experience, were more likely to name specific issues they cared about than Bush supporters.) At first I thought this was a problem of simple semantics–maybe, I thought, “issue” is a term of art that sounds wonky and intimidating, causing voters to react as if they’re being quizzed on a topic they haven’t studied. So I tried other ways of asking the same question: “Anything of particular concern to you? Are you anxious or worried about anything? Are you excited about what’s been happening in the country in the last four years?”
These questions, too, more often than not yielded bewilderment. As far as I could tell, the problem wasn’t the word “issue”; it was a fundamental lack of understanding of what constituted the broad category of the “political.” The undecideds I spoke to didn’t seem to have any intuitive grasp of what kinds of grievances qualify as political grievances. Often, once I would engage undecided voters, they would list concerns, such as the rising cost of health care; but when I would tell them that Kerry had a plan to lower health-care premiums, they would respond in disbelief–not in disbelief that he had a plan, but that the cost of health care was a political issue. It was as if you were telling them that Kerry was promising to extend summer into December.
To cite one example: I had a conversation with an undecided truck driver who was despondent because he had just hit a woman’s car after having worked a week straight. He didn’t think the accident was his fault and he was angry about being sued. “There’s too many lawsuits these days,” he told me. I was set to have to rebut a “tort reform” argument, but it never came. Even though there was a ready-made connection between what was happening in his life and a campaign issue, he never made the leap. I asked him about the company he worked for and whether it would cover his legal expenses; he said he didn’t think so. I asked him if he was unionized and he said no. “The last job was unionized,” he said. “They would have covered my expenses.” I tried to steer him towards a political discussion about how Kerry would stand up for workers’ rights and protect unions, but it never got anywhere. He didn’t seem to think there was any connection between politics and whether his company would cover his legal costs. Had he made a connection between his predicament and the issue of tort reform, it might have benefited Bush; had he made a connection between his predicament and the issue of labor rights, it might have benefited Kerry. He made neither, and remained undecided.
In this context, Bush’s victory, particularly on the strength of those voters who listed “values” as their number one issue, makes perfect sense. Kerry ran a campaign that was about politics: He parsed the world into political categories and offered political solutions. Bush did this too, but it wasn’t the main thrust of his campaign. Instead, the president ran on broad themes, like “character” and “morals.” Everyone feels an immediate and intuitive expertise on morals and values–we all know what’s right and wrong. But how can undecided voters evaluate a candidate on issues if they don’t even grasp what issues are?
Liberals like to point out that majorities of Americans agree with the Democratic Party on the issues, so Republicans are forced to run on character and values in order to win. (This cuts both ways: I met a large number of Bush/Feingold voters whose politics were more in line with the Republican president, but who admired the backbone and gutsiness of their Democratic senator.) But polls that ask people about issues presuppose a basic familiarity with the concept of issues–a familiarity that may not exist.
As far as I can tell, this leaves Democrats with two options: either abandon “issues” as the lynchpin of political campaigns and adopt the language of values, morals, and character as many have suggested; or begin the long-term and arduous task of rebuilding a popular, accessible political vocabulary–of convincing undecided voters to believe once again in the importance of issues. The former strategy could help the Democrats stop the bleeding in time for 2008. But the latter strategy might be necessary for the Democrats to become a majority party again.
I think the Trump era has proved that a vast number of Americans don’t care about policy or values. Right-wing voters care about someone articulating their rage and giving them the comfort of believing they are part of a special club, with hats and flags and rallies. A cult of personality today. Fascism tomorrow.
Undecided voters in 2020 are the same as those voters in 2004: irrational and uninformed. I don’t think there’s any specific way to appeal to them. You have to try to win by a big enough margin that you don’t need them. They are completely unpredictable and unpersuadable as a bloc and each individual is incoherent in his or her own way.
He is disintegrating. I think he may literally have a mental health problem:
I never liked the guy and loathed the valorizing of him after 9/11 since many of his actions made everything worse. But it’s kind of sad to see someone fall apart like this on television. If he weren’t carrying water for the most vicious monster to ever set foot in the White House I might even feel sorry for him.
That’s what they are living in:
Meanwhile:
If you think reality is going to penetrate, I think this proves that it will not. They are impervious to it.
Axios reports that just three percent of voters have not made up their minds on the 2020 presidential race. That is a mighty small pool amenable to persuasion efforts. Still, every fraction of a percent matters in tight races. It did in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin in 2016.
Here is their evidence:
Better work on turnout then. Much depends on how well Democrats inclined to vote by mail navigate any obstacles to their votes counting. The “higher rejection rates for improperly cast mail-in ballots mean more potential for uncounted votes,” Axios notes.
So far as I am aware, mail delivery for ballots has not been an issue yet. But voting as early as possible is a way around delivery issues. If drop boxes are available, use them. If you can drop off your ballot in person at the local Board or at an early voting site, do it. If you intend to vote early, vote as early as the calendar allows. Early means there is time for correcting for errors, yours as well as others’. See the story of my friend “Herbert.” Waiting means setting yourself up for failure. Don’t do that.
Again, Trump won by a faction of a point in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin in 2016. Turnout matters. Fractions matter. Your vote matters.
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“It’s a fake pandemic created to destroy the United States of America,” a man at a Michigan Donald Trump rally this week told CNN’s Jim Acosta. He refused to wear a mask in the crowd against a phony virus. He dismissed the acting president’s taped admission to Bob Woodward that the virus is deadly.
“That’s his opinion,” the man scoffed.
Years of propagandizing, racist dog whistles, xenopohobia, and vilification of the media by Republicans and their media allies created Trump. Now Trump (and the alternate reality he inhabits) is out of their control. And now Trump’s followers are out of his.
A series of posts this week leads to concerns that can no longer be dismissed out of hand. At the Washington Post, Colbert I. King hears echoes of former Alabama Gov. George Wallace in the acting president’s speeches and tweets.
“I want to say that anarchists — and I am talking about newsmen sometimes — I want to say — I want to make that announcement to you because we regard that the people of this country are sick and tired of, and they are gonna get rid of you — anarchists,” Wallace told a crowd in Toledo, Ohio in 1968.
That is eliminationist rhetoric. David Neiwert (Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right, 2009) posted a lengthy tweet storm on the topic two years ago.
King cites more parallels between Wallace and Trump and concludes:
See Wallace, making his stand for segregation in a schoolhouse door. See Trump, standing outside St. John’s Episcopal Church, holding up a Bible and pretending to be a protector of the faith — even as he left America unprotected against the coronavirus.
Purveyors of lies and a mean-spirited “us-against-them” virus for which, sadly, there is no vaccine.
And it is spreading. Time magazine this week reported on how conspiracy theories are shaping the 2020 electorate. A hairdresser in Kenosha, Wisconsin says she is not a QAnon supporter while regurgitating its memes.
“I went down the rabbit hole. I started doing a lot of research,” she says.
Asked what she means by research, she continues cautiously, “This is where I don’t know what I can say, because what’s integrated into our system, it stems deep. And it has to do with really corrupt, evil, dark things that have been hidden from the public. Child sex trafficking is one of them.”
It is the day-care sex-abuse hysteria of the 1980s and 1990s all over again. Pizzagate (2016) was a leading indicator of its return. It is back with a vengeance.
Time’s Charlotte Alter has more:
On a cigarette break outside their small business in Ozaukee County, Tina Arthur and Marcella Frank told me they plan to vote for Trump again because they are deeply alarmed by “the cabal.” They’ve heard “numerous reports” that the COVID-19 tents set up in New York and California were actually for children who had been rescued from underground sex-trafficking tunnels.
Arthur and Frank explained they’re not followers of QAnon. Frank says she spends most of her free time researching child sex trafficking, while Arthur adds that she often finds this information on the Russian-owned search engine Yandex. Frank’s eyes fill with tears as she describes what she’s found: children who are being raped and tortured so that “the cabal” can “extract their blood and drink it.” She says Trump has seized the blood on the black market as part of his fight against the cabal. “I think if Biden wins, the world is over, basically,” adds Arthur. “I would honestly try to leave the country. And if that wasn’t an option, I would probably take my children and sit in the garage and turn my car on and it would be over.”
A staff writer from the Daily Banter this week commented on the phenomenon:
This is a tiny peek inside the growing movement that is Qanon. Qanon literally, not figuratively, LITERALLY thinks the left is controlled by an international (read as: “Jews”) cabal of pedophiles who also, and I fucking kid you not, drink the blood of children.
This is a repackaging of the “blood libel”, a centuries old piece of propaganda invented to demonize Jews.
The blood libel exists for one purpose and one purpose only: To allow the persecution and mass murder of Jews with no guilt. To give the imprimatur of morality as they slaughtered us; first by the hundreds. Then the thousands. Then the millions.
Now the right is applying the blood libel to all of us on the left.
Why?
To justify the coming terrorism and fascism. They know they’re going to lose the election and they have every intention of violently seizing control.
In order to do this, they will murder men, women, and children with a smile on their face and a song in their heart. Because they “know”, deep in their heart, that they are fighting “evil.”
And that is the point of Qanon’s blood libel. If you are fighting blood-drinking pedophiles, there is absolutely nothing off limits. There are no lines you cannot cross. Your moral authority is absolute because the evil you are fighting is absolute.
The right is laying the groundwork for atrocities and afterwards, they’ll find all the “proof” they’ll need. History is written by the victors.
If you do not understand yet how depraved and dangerous the right has become, you need to wake the fuck up before they’re burning you at the stake as a pedophile.
Too much?
Gabriel Trumbly, a 29-year-old Army veteran and Portland videographer, set out in his car this week with his partner Jennifer Paulson to get images of the fires spreading across the state. He soon saw descriptions of his vehicle on Twitter and Facebook. Rumors had spread that they were Antifa terrorists and setting the fires overtaking local towns.
A vague Facebook message by the Molalla Police Department posted Wednesday evening fed suspicion among the rumor- and fire-stricken residents.
“To those of you still in and around town, please report any suspicious activity (strange people walking around/looking into cars and houses/vehicles driving through neighborhoods that don’t belong there) to 911 immediately,” the MPD post read.
“Make them dig a grave then shoot them,” read one of the posts calling for them to be shot.
Trumbly called the Molalla Police Department who issued a clarification: “There has been NO antifa in town as of this posting at 02:00 am. Please, folks, stay calm and use common sense. Stay inside or leave the area.”
The more stressed people get and the more worried the Right becomes at the prospect of losing power in November, the more dangerous this situation will become.
John Stoehr at Religion Dispatches considered the hysteria problem this week, seeing it as a phenomenon of the rural-urban divide, one elite reporters from the national press are not equipped to grasp:
Fact is, when rural Arizonans talk about “law enforcement” over a plate of eggs and bacon, what they mean is punishing the weak. When they talk about their “liberty,” what they mean is their dominance. When they talk about their “traditional values,” what they mean is their control. A Times reporter can’t possibly know any of that. The problem is made worse when sources give voice to this or that conspiracy theory. She can’t know her sources aren’t delusional. She can’t know they aren’t crazy. She can’t know that conspiracy theories are central to their authoritarian view of the world. So she doesn’t report how dangerous their politics are.
She ends up reporting that some Americans believe, for instance, that a “secret cabal” of Democrats and other “radical leftists” in the “deep state” is, in addition to sexually molesting innocent children and perhaps eating them, too, trying to bring down Donald Trump. (This is the QAnon conspiracy you’ve read about lately.) What she should be reporting is that some Americans are willing to say anything to justify any action—violence, insurrection, even treason—to defeat their perceived enemies. Elite reporters, and some non-elite reporters who are following suit, keep talking about conspiracy theories as if they were a “collective delusion.” They are no such thing. The authoritarians who espouse them don’t care if QAnon is true. They don’t care that it’s false. Conspiracy theories are a convenience, a means of rationalizing what they already want to do, which is precisely what elite reporters can’t know and do not report.
For Stoehr, it is not necessary that people in these stories literally believe what they are saying. These tales reinforce their authoritarian world view. That is sufficient. Reporters are being played. Or are they?
That the truth no longer matters has been in evidence since before Stephen Colbert coined “truthiness” in 2005. The right-wing chain emails I collected before Facebook and Twitter took off demonstrated that. “Nice” white people joined propaganda campaigns aimed at getting people angry and keeping them angry about imaginary slights committed against them by liberal neighbors:
Easily debunked on Google in the time it takes to attach your email list and forward to all your friends. They are lies and, deep down, right wingers know it. Yet they pass them along dutifully, almost gleefully. They know it’s wrong and they don’t care.
But they became addicted to the daily outrage right-wing talk radio had been feeding them since the early 1990s. By the aughts, it was emails filled with altered photos, misleading statistics, or incidents twisted or misinterpreted like rock lyrics and debunked by Snopes. Now armed vigilantes are in the streets hunting Black Lives protesters, news photographers, imaginary Antifa arsonists, and (soon) imaginary cannibal pedophiles.
Two are dead and one maimed in Kenosha. This is dangerous shit.
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It’s soothing to be reminded in the middle of all this awful time that there are good people doing God’s work for very good boys and girls.
Bonus soother:
Good staff work is a good sign for a competent administration.
We don’t know yet what this means, but it’s an interesting development:
A top aide to Connecticut U.S. Attorney John Durham, who is conducting a politically sensitive investigation into the origins of the federal investigation into potential ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, has resigned from the Justice Department amid mounting pressure from President Donald Trump and his allies to publish results from the probe before the November election.
Veteran federal prosecutor Nora Dannehy, who returned from the private sector to assist Durham soon in March 2019, exited the government in recent days, according to a Durham spokesman.
“We can confirm that she’s resigned from the Department of Justice,” the spokesman, Tom Carson, said Friday.https://tpc.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html
A spokeswoman for Barr, who tapped Durham to assess the basis for and conduct of the initial probe, referred questions about Dannehy’s departure to Durham’s office.
The Hartford Courant first reported the development and said her resignation was “at least partly out of concern” that investigators are facing political pressure to complete a report on their findings before the election.
POLITICO asked Durham’s spokesman last week about Dannehy’s status with the office. “Nora Dannehy is employed by our office,” Carson replied Saturday. Dannehy did not respond to messages seeking comment on her plans.
The Courant said Dannehy sent an email to colleagues Thursday announcing her departure. Carson said Friday that Friday was her last day with the office.
Carson declined to comment on other issues related to Dannehy’s exit, such as whether pressure to produce a report in the coming weeks contributed to her decision. While the office issued a press release last year announcing her return to government service and it was widely reported that she was assisting in the Russia-related inquiry, Durham’s office never confirmed that publicly.
In recent interviews, Trump has expressed impatience with the Durham inquiry, suggesting that it should be producing more prosecutions as well as disclosures of information the president contends will be damaging to his political rivals. The situation also seems to have put a chill in Trump’s relationship with Barr.
“Bill Barr has the chance to be the greatest of all time, but if he wants to be politically correct, he’ll be just another guy, because he knows all the answers, he knows what they have, and it goes right to Obama and it goes right to Biden,” Trump said last month in an interview with Fox Business Network’s Maria Bartiromo.
Last month, Barr predicted “significant developments in the probe before the election” and he has indicated he sees Justice Department policy as presenting no obstacle to releasing a report on Durham’s findings in advance of the November vote.
It seems likely that Barr really is pushing to get Durham’s report or indictments or whatever, out before the election, most likely sometime in October. He’s signaled as much:
Asked by NBC’s Pete Williams in an interview Wednesday whether Durham is wrapping up his probe, the attorney general declined to say.
“I’m not going to characterize exactly where he is. I’ll just leave it at that,” Barr said.
When Williams asked if it was unlikely there will be further charges, the attorney general replied: “No, I wouldn’t say that at all, no.”
And pressed on whether the public might see a final report or even an interim report from Durham before the election, the attorney general remained Sphinx-like.
“I’m not gonna get into that either,” Barr told NBC. “I’m not going to get into what there might be. … I’m conscious of the election, and I don’t think any of the things that are being worked on are going to have an adverse effect on that. And … also there’s, you know, strong public interest involved as well.”
The “public interest” could wait until after the election — unless his interpretation is that the public needs to know the result before they vote.
This is outrageous, if true. Comey did what he did and was met with massive disapprobation by almost everyone — including Bill Barr! Yet Barr seems to be planning to do the same thing.
This prosecutor quitting may end up being about something entirely different. At thins point there just isn’t much information. But most of the DOJ observers say that it would be highly unusual for this woman to quit in the middle of a big case like this unless there was something very wrong. It really looks like Barr has just lost all constraints and will literally do anything to help Donald Trump’s re-election.