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Month: November 2020

Robertson says reality is Goebbels propaganda

Published by digby on November 23, 2020
More projection from the right

John Amato at Crooks and Liars caught yet another TV Trumper poisoning the minds of their audience:

On this morning’s 700 Club, the televangelist and Trump mega supporter Pat Robertson claimed that by calling Joe Biden, the President-elect, Americans are succumbing to Joseph Goebbels propaganda and are being brainwashed to believe it’s true.

Robertson opened his program with a bumbling and stumbling recap of the crazy conspiracy theory about Dominion and Smartmatic, (that he couldn’t pronounce) which was promoted by the now fired Sidney Powell that’s already been debunked by all credible people.

Robertson also claimed that Trump has several more legal avenues to explore and have the Supreme Court overturn the election.

Then he took it further and compared calling Joe Biden President-Elect was the equivalent of bowing to Nazi propaganda.

“I look back to the Nazis, the man who was in charge of the propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, and he said ‘if you tell a lie often enough people begin to believe it’,” Robertson said. “I believe the fact that we keep calling Joe Biden the president- elect, he is not elected until the electors decide in that hasn’t happened yet.

“We call him president-elect, he’s already choosing his cabinet, he’s talking about cabinet positions, he’s asking for money to run his transition team and we keep calling him President- Elect. He is not the President-Elect. He is Joe Biden, citizen, until such time as his election is certified and it hasn’t happened yet. Remember that.”

He’s nuts. But keep in mind that his Christian Broadcast Network serves the largest faction of Trump voters: conservative Evangelical Christians. This article from 2017 is instructive:

While CBN News has had a Washington, D.C., bureau since the 1980’s, the office was recently renovated and 10 staff positions — including correspondents, videographers and producers — have been added since Trump’s election.

CBN founder Pat Robertson interviewed Trump on July 12, in what CNN noted at the time was the president’s first non-Fox News interview in two months. Trump said he’s mistreated by the mainstream media, but, he told Robertson, “As long as my people understand. That’s why I do interviews with you. You have a tremendous audience. You have people that I love.”

The network’s flagship show is The 700 Club, which airs weekdays on Freeform. CBN claims that show has an average daily audience of one million American viewers. Programming is streamed online on CBN’s website, which comScore said attracted more than one million U.S. multi-platform unique visitors in June. CBN shows also air around the country on local television networks.

And this is interesting. I had forgotten that Jay Sekulow was a big CBN star. He almost certainly served as a major Evangelical validator for Trump serving as his lawyer through all the trials and tribulations:

Another one of CBN’s breakout stars? Jay Sekulow. A longtime guest on the network, the attorney joined the president’s legal team in June and has since become a ubiquitous presence on cable news, often trotted out by the administration to explain the inexplicable. Sekulow made his name as a lawyer for the Christian right and has long served as the chief counsel of a law organization founded by Robertson. “Jay doesn’t pull any punches, and he’s kind of channeling Trump in a degree, so it seems like a match made in heaven,” Brody said.

When CBN News has a Trump administration guest, some of the interview questions might strike someone unfamiliar with the network as unusual. “We get a question all the time on Facebook, to you specifically,” Brody told Spicer during a July 19 interview. “It’s a question from folks out there, they want to know how they can pray for you.”

Because CBN sees the mainstream media as uninterested in serving a Christian audience and unwilling to treat the administration fairly, the network’s talent goes easy on the guests they book. When White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders appeared on Aug. 2, Brody said to her: “Here’s some breaking news for you: I’m not going to ask you about Russia right off the top. What do you think of that?” Sanders responded: “I like it. We’re off to a good start already.

Conservative Evangelicals are among Trump’s most loyal supporters. And those who watch CBN and Pat Robertson, likely the older set, are hearing that Joe Biden is a Nazi for doing what every president-elect does after they’ve won. Including, by the way, Donald Trump who was called president-elect starting the morning after election day. Of course Hillary Clinton didn’t act like a 5 year old and have a tantrum because she didn’t win, so I suppose that was on her…

Does the cult have a life of its own?

Published by digby on November 23, 2020

The Party has indulged his lunacy for their own purposes for four long years and this was always likely to be the result:

President Trump’s legal team seems bent on taking down not just Trump, but the entire Republican Party with it.

Having failed to make its case in several courts across the country, Trump’s legal team has begun to push baseless conspiracy theories that allege massive voter fraud. One of the many problems with this strategy is that it distracts from a real problem: Georgia’s two Senate run-off elections. Even worse, these accusations of fraud have actually begun to undermine Republicans’ chances in Georgia to a debilitating degree.

This weekend, attorney Sidney Powell claimed she was going to “blow up” Georgia with the “Kraken” of evidence that she refuses to give to anyone — even the rest of Trump’s legal team. She went on to accuse Republican Gov. Brian Kemp of accepting “financial benefits” to use Dominion Voting Systems, which she claims was used to switch nearly 7 million votes for Trump to President-elect Joe Biden. In other words, Powell accused Georgia’s Republican officials of actively working against the leader of their party.

Hundreds of thousands of Trump supporters will believe her. Indeed, immediately after Powell made her accusation, hundreds of pro-Trump users vowed on Twitter not to vote for either Georgia Republican senators because of Kemp’s alleged corruption. While Twitter may not be real life, this fiasco did prompt Donald Trump Jr. to urge his father’s base to show up in full force for Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue.

It will be interesting to see if the cult will follow instructions from the likes of Don Jr or will follow the wingnut rabbit down the conspiracy hole:

Meanwhile, on Planet Trump:

President Donald Trump is sweating over his campaign lawyers’ dismal and often outlandish efforts to reverse President-elect Joe Biden’s projected electoral victory.

Trump is worried that his campaign’s legal team, which is being led by his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, is composed of “fools that are making him look bad,” NBC News reported Monday…

I’m afraid that ship sailed a long time ago. Why couldn’t he see that Giuliani is a drunken embarrassment before now?

On Sunday, one of the team’s members, conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell, was effectively fired after suggesting — again without any proof — that the Republican governor and secretary of state of Georgia were part of a plot to rig the election for Biden.

Powell’s ouster came days after she made similarly over-the-top claims at a press conference at the Republican National Committee headquarters in Washington.

Trump has complained to White House aides and outside allies about how Giuliani and Powell conducted themselves at that event, NBC reported.

But when asked why Trump doesn’t fire Giuliani and other attorneys who remain on the team, a person familiar with the president’s thinking gave a profane shoulder shrug of an answer.

“Who the f— knows?” that person said to NBC News.

For now, Giuliani has kept his job as the president’s point man on the election challenge, even after a week in which he gave a widely derided argument in Pennsylvania federal court, only to see a judge on Saturday issue a scathing dismissal of the campaign’s vote challenge lawsuit.

Giuliani, who was once a top federal prosecutor in Manhattan, also presided over the press conference at RNC headquarters, where he stood and watched Powell promote the campaign’s most far-fetched vote fraud allegations to date.

At that event, Giuliani perspired so heavily that sweat apparently blackened from hair dye conspicuously ran down his cheeks as he made baseless allegations of electoral skullduggery.

Trump, who is obsessed with television and the personal appearances of people on it, was not happy with Giuliani’s look at the press conference, a person familiar with the president’s reaction told NBC News.

I’ve always thought Trump’s patience with Giuliani was odd for someone so obsessed with appearance. (That Borat thing alone…)

Of course this is a guy who thinks troweling on make-up and wearing a bird’s nest on top of his head is attractive so his standards are a little bit obscure. But evidently, he wasn’t thrilled with the slimy, black rivulets running down Giuliani’s face when he was giving an insane press conference . Imagine that.

I don’t know where this is all going. But we have entered a new phase. The GSA has finally allowed the formal transition to begin now that today’s gambit to get the Michigan Republicans to refuse to certify the election didn’t work.

But stay tuned. I doubt Trump is throwing in the towel just yet.

Karen Tumulty Cake Time!

Published by digby on November 23, 2020

Traditions!

Here you go folks. Since a lot of people are staying home and may have more time than usual this year, this is really worth taking the time to bake.


Karen Tumulty Pumpkin Cake A few years back on Thanksgiving eve I ran this recipe for Pumpkin Cake and received a very nice note from journalist Karen Tumulty saying that she’d been tooling around the web for something to bake and tried it and liked it very much. Ever since then I’ve called it Karen Tumulty Cake.It’s easy even for non bakers and it really is very good.

For cake


* (3/4 cup) softened unsalted butter.
* 2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour plus additional for dusting pan
* 2 teaspoons baking powder
* 1 teaspoon baking soda
* 1 teaspoon cinnamon
* 3/4 teaspoon ground allspice
* 2 tablespoons crystalized ginger, finely chopped
* 1/2 teaspoon salt
* 1 1/4 cups canned pumpkin
* 3/4 cup well-shaken buttermilk 
* 1 teaspoon vanilla
* 1 1/4 cups granulated sugar
* 3 large eggs


Icing


* 2 tablespoons plus 2 teaspoons well-shaken buttermilk
* 1 1/2 cups confectioners sugar, 
* 1/4 cup chopped walnuts
* a 10-inch nonstick bundt pan 


Preheat oven to 350°F. Butter bundt pan generously.


Sift flour (2 1/4 cups), baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon, allspice, and salt in a bowl. Whisk together pumpkin, 3/4 cup buttermilk, ginger and vanilla in another bowl.


Beat butter and granulated sugar in a large bowl with an electric mixer at medium-high speed until pale and fluffy, add eggs and beat 1 minute. Reduce speed to low and add flour and pumpkin mixtures alternately in batches, beginning and ending with flour mixture, just until smooth.


Spoon batter into pan, then bake until a wooden pick inserted in center of cake comes out clean, 45 to 50 minutes. Cool cake in pan 15 minutes, then invert rack over cake and reinvert cake onto rack. Cool 10 minutes more.


Icing:


Whisk together buttermilk and confectioners sugar until smooth. Drizzle over warm cake, sprinkle with chopped walnuts (keep a little icing in reserve to drizzle lightly over walnuts) then cool cake completely. Icing will harden slightly.


Easy as pie (easier, actually.) 

Love this from last year —-

Obama’s lightbulb

Published by digby on November 23, 2020

In Barack Obama’s book this comment in the preface is an important insight that I hope Joe Biden shares:

“I confess,” the 44th president of the United States says in the preface, “there have been times during the course of writing this book, as I reflected on my presidency and all that’s happened since, when I’ve had to ask myself whether I was too tempered in speaking the truth as I saw it, too cautious in either word or deed, convinced as I was that by appealing to what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature, I stood a greater chance of leading us in the direction of the America we’ve been promised.”

Yes, he was. He empowered slick hyper-partisans like Paul Ryan by pretending that he was an honest broker. And they paid him back by sabotaging as much of his presidency as they were able. It took Obama and his team way, way too long to realize that the Republicans were radical obstructionists regardless of what he proposed or how much he tried to “reach across the aisle.” They wanted to destroy his presidency and if it meant destroying the country they were fine with that. It made them sense their power which we saw with what McConnell did with Merrick Garland. After Trump they are no longer bound by any sense of shared commitment to the constitution or democracy in general.

And, by the way, it’s important to remember that Obama’s softball approach applied to some of the centrist divas in the Democratic caucus as well, people like Joe Lieberman, Ben Nelson and Blanche Lincoln. Everyone needs to understand that impediment to change going forward as well. Even if we are lucky enough to win the runoffs in Georgia there will still be Joe Manchin and Kirsten Sinema and probably Mark Kelly and Jon Ossoff along with some others who will join with the GOP “Concerned Caucus” of Murkowski, Collins and Romney to wring their hands and clutch their pearls about anything necessary for fundamental change. It is always pulling teeth.

Maybe the destruction of the past four years will change things. But I’m not sanguine that it will be easy. The GOP will be totally obstructionist, of course. That’s obvious. And even with a Democratic majority it will be tough. Remember that the democrats had a 60 vote majority in 2009 and getting Obamacare passed was a months long tremendously difficult negotiation that ended up being stymied when Kennedy died and was replaced by Scott Brown leaving only 59 seats. 59 seats! They had to pass it through reconciliation so they could do it with 50 votes and a bunch of Democrats voted against it. And most of them lost their elections anyway.

This stuff isn’t easy in the polarized country with an undemocratic institution like the senate and we had all better be prepared for it. I’m just hoping that Biden will use whatever executive power he has to fix the damage done by Trump’s wrecking crew and finds creative ways to move the country forward without depending on the Senate to be on the team regardless of which party is in the majority.

The worst is yet to come

Published by digby on November 23, 2020
Credit…The New York Times

James Fallows lives in Dr. Fauci’s neighborhood. I love this:

https://twitter.com/JamesFallows/status/1330705448102715393

I think that’s nice.

Here’s what the trusted Dr. Fauci had to say and I’m afraid it’s terrifying:

When we spoke to Dr. Anthony Fauci, he told us that what makes this surge different from past waves is the steepness of the curve.

“It’s almost an exponential curve,” he said. “It’s different because when you have an exponential curve up like that, by the time it peaks and then comes ultimately down, the duration of the surge is much longer.”

“I think that December, January and early February are going to be terribly painful months,” Dr. Fauci added.

Epidemiologists dread exponential growth because cases can quickly double, then double again. As the country edges closer to recording 200,000 newly detected infections a day, the numbers could become staggering. And even though a relatively small percentage of coronavirus patients actually die, that will be small comfort with cases in the millions.

“Earlier in the pandemic, it was possible for people to make reasonable plans based on risk levels,” said Apoorva Mandavilli, who covers science for The Times. “But for the next two to three months, no activity is truly safe unless you’re at home with your family.”

If you’re feeling weary about the prospect of a locked-down winter, there are signs — for perhaps the first time in the pandemic — of significantly better times ahead, provided we can get through the next few months.

Asked about what gives him hope, Dr. Fauci cited “the spectacular results of the vaccines.” Now that shots from Pfizer and Moderna are on their way, with Pfizer applying for emergency F.D.A. approval today,“this should be a motivation to double down even more to get us through this until the vaccine comes to the rescue.”

Don’t take the vaccines as an invitation to throw caution to the wind, he said. “It’s kind of like the last soldier to get killed in a war when the war is going to be over soon. You don’t want to be that person.”

The way most people become infected in the U.S. may be shifting. In the summer, a large driver of infections was young people socializing and bringing the virus home to their parents and relatives. Now, family and social gatherings are assuming a much more prominent role, Dr. Fauci said.

“Which is the reason why the Thanksgiving holiday makes me really nervous,” he said.

Dr. Megan Ranney, an emergency physician in Rhode Island, put it this way to our colleague Charlie Warzel, an Opinion writer at large: “I hate to be apocalyptic, but it’ll be the day that will determine our trajectory for the rest of the year.”

Apocalyptic is probably the right word:

More travelers were screened at airport security checkpoints on Sunday than on any day since the pandemic took hold in March, a worrying sign that people flying to visit their families for Thanksgiving could increase the spread of the coronavirus.

A little more than one million people were screened by the Transportation Security Administration on Sunday, according to federal data published on Monday. That number is about half of what it was in 2019, but it represents a big increase from the spring, when less than a half a million people flew on any given day.

I also read that 50+ million people will be travelling by car.

Stay safe everyone. This is just … chilling.

The anguish of the Never Trumpers

Published by digby on November 23, 2020

The lunatic antics of the Trump legal team continued unabated over this past weekend. After his mysteriously oozing press conference last Thursday, Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani kept an uncharacteristically low profile. Jenna Ellis, his partner in the “elite strike force,” took to Twitter to insult longtime Republican pollster Frank Luntz, accusing him of “micropenis syndrome,” but beyond that she too stayed quiet. They left the public appearances to Sidney Powell, the member of the team best known as former national security adviser Michael Flynn’s least competent attorney.

Powell made a Saturday appearance on Newsmax that was downright historic. She vowed to deliver a “biblical” voter fraud case this week in the state of Georgia, claiming there were massive pay-for-play kickbacks from voting machine companies to public officials, including Bernie Sanders and Georgia’s Republican governor and secretary of state. The Trump faithful immediately began a campaign to boycott the Senate runoff races in January to pay back the GOP for failing their Dear Leader, which set off alarm bells in Washington.

On Sunday night, somebody apparently whispered in the Trump campaign’s ear that they needed a human sacrifice to calm things down. So Giuliani and Ellis distributed a statement insisting that Powell was not on their team after all. It remains to be seen, however, if Trump will try to help get out the vote in Georgia. He’s not known for helping anyone if it doesn’t immediately benefit him.

Once again we’ve heard mostly crickets from the Republican establishment. A handful of senators, such as Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Kevin Cramer of North Dakota and Lamar Alexander of Tennessee (who is retiring), have timidly stepped forward to say that maybe it might be best if the administration didn’t try to pressure Republican officials to overturn a legal election. Some, like former New Jersey governor Chris Christie and Ari Fleischer, a White House press secretary under George W. Bush, have suggested ever so politely that Trump’s legal team might not be up to snuff. But for the most part, Republicans have maintained their usual passivity in the face of Trump’s latest assault on democracy.

There are some erstwhile Republicans who are becoming apoplectic however: the Never Trumpers. This post-election gambit is driving them ever farther from their former party. I’m now doubtful they will ever find their way back.

We’ve all observed the usual suspects among this crowd throughout the campaign, from the Cicero of Never Trumpers, Steve Schmidt, to the cutting wit of Rick Wilson and the soulful self-analysis of Stuart Stevens (whose political memoir “It Was All a Lie” is one of the rawest mea culpas I’ve ever read.) There are plenty of others, and they understandably inspire a lot of cynicism and suspicion among liberals and leftists. Their life’s work, after all, was electing Republicans and laying the groundwork for Donald Trump.

But thanks to social media we are watching the veil fall from their eyes in real time. I find that fascinating because it’s just so rare to see anyone in politics ever change their minds, much less people whose careers have been built around not doing so. Take, for example, this incredible Twitter thread from Michael Gerson, a conservative evangelical Christian, former Heritage Foundation fellow, and speechwriter and foreign policy adviser to George W. Bush. He now writes opinion pieces for the Washington Post and has been appalled by Trump from the beginning. But until recently, Gerson has resisted the idea that the Republican Party itself is corrupt. On Sunday he tweeted:

We are witnessing the attempt by an American president to maintain power by overturning a fair election. We are seeing the persecution of public officials for the crime of doing their evident duty. And we are seeing most GOP legislators become bystanders or cheerleaders during a frontal attack on American ideals.

It is a good thing we are wearing masks, because the stench of GOP hypocrisy is overwhelming. ..

Elected Republicans who speak of patriotism can’t be bothered to speak up for American traditions, beliefs and institutions…Those who frown but say nothing are especially disgraceful. Knowing better does not exculpate, it incriminates.

Their conscience has ceased to be a guide and become an accomplice. At some point, patience with iniquity becomes complicity.

We are not asking much of elected Republicans. The fear of being targeted by a presidential tweet and gaining a primary opponent is real enough. But it is hardly the risk of a young soldier on D-Day, or a protester at a segregated lunch counter.

I like many Republican members of Congress. But those who sacrifice their ideals to the ambitions and insecurities of a single corrupt ruler have ceased to serve the country. Their failure to defend democracy at this moment of testing can’t be excused and won’t be forgiven.

That is quite an indictment. Then Gerson concludes, “I know this judgment is harsh. But I am angry with elected Rs because I believed in many of them. Because I know they can be better. Losing a public office is ultimately a small matter in the soul’s long adventure. And losing office in a just cause is one of history’s honors.” He asks them to remember who they are.

In fact, those people have showed who they were by collaborating with Donald Trump for the past four years in order to maintain power and achieve their own goals by exploiting his ignorance, ineptitude and depravity. The years before that were little better as they cynically obstructed every move by Barack Obama and acted in bad faith over and over again.

A few spoke out against Trump and retired or left the party, people like Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona, Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee and Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan. But most of them cynically took advantage of the power Trump conferred and offered cover for his obvious unfitness for their own ends.

The Republican Party has been dedicated to the degradation of American democracy for a very long time. Its commitment to total obstruction and the delegitimization of their opponents was laid out in detail by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich many years ago. The will to power was never hidden and the methods Gingrich employed were right out in the open. Once the racists and the nationalists all gathered in one party, Trumpism — with or without Donald Trump — became inevitable.

https://twitter.com/stuartpstevens/status/1330310619157901315?s=20

It would be easy to dismiss the Never Trumpers outright and tell them to take a hike for having been part of this degradation of our politics. I think that’s foolish. Whatever they may have done to contribute to what the GOP has become, they were not willing to take that final step and submit to the insanity of Donald Trump. That’s not something you can say about the rest of the Republicans in power, who will still be here after Trump is gone and will be more powerful than ever, having discovered that there are no limits, no boundaries and no consequences.

People like Gerson and the Lincoln Project, their own former colleagues, are holding a mirror up to the Republican Party and showing them what they have become. That is a valuable thing and they seem to be serious about continuing that project:

As we can see with the Republican establishment’s acquiescence to Trump’s crude but dangerous attempts to overturn the election and Mitch McConnell’s determination to sabotage the incoming Democratic administration, this isn’t over. Donald Trump isn’t the real problem. His army of cynical enablers is. If the Never Trumpers want to devote themselves to fighting them, I’m certainly not going to wave them away. It’s a dirty job, but somebody’s gotta do it.

Update: Tim MIller’s “Goodbye To All That” piece from the weekend is worth reading. I don’t know where any of these guys ends up. But I do know that we’re all better off with them off the GOP team.

My Salon column

The right’s descent into authoritarianism isn’t my fault

Published by digby on November 23, 2020

The jury is still out but I have to hope that the following assessment from Tim Wu in Politico provides a little ray of light in all this madness:


We’ve learned something important about America’s resistance to an authoritarian takeover. Most republics, even the best of them, have struggled when confronted with a nationalist leader who shows up in bad economic times, blames everything on immigrants and foreigners, and promises to restore greatness. That’s the fate that befell, among others, the Roman, Spanish, German and Russian republics. Before Trump, it was widely thought that the written Constitution and its fabled “separation of powers” had spared the United States from a similar fate.

But over the past four years, we’ve watched constitutional checks repeatedly fail to control the president, trumped by party loyalty. Congress and the judiciary asserted limited control at best; even impeachment turned out to be just another party-line vote. What really mattered, in the end, was a different set of checks, upheld not by a document but by people: namely, the independence of federal prosecutors, the neutrality of the armed forces and the independence of the electoral system. He tried hard, but Trump ultimately couldn’t find a prosecutor to indict Joe Biden and his family. The armed forces declined to embrace Trump’s proposed occupation of liberal cities over the summer. And, finally, when it mattered, election officials, at a distance from the White House, conducted a fair vote.

In a manner that John Adams might have found satisfying, we have learned that internalized constitutional norms matter more than any external checks.

I’m not sure how many internalized constitutional norms will continue to exist among any member of the right who consumes the disinformation and propaganda on offer in their media stream. But maybe they aren’t all brainwashed yet.

That piece is from a Politico roundup of opinions on “What Trump showed us about America.” Unfortunately, most of the writers, from academia to culture to politics, and from both sides of aisle, agree on thing: everything that has happened is attributable to a failure of liberals, either to counter Trump by being more empathetic to his followers or refusing to accept that liberal elites are the reason for all the troubles in America and the great populist horde that finally rose up to put them in their place. If there’s one thing we can all agree upon, it seems, is that while Trump and his GOP collaborators are a problem it’s nothing to the disgusting, perfidious Democrats who really need to change everything about themselves lest the Republic implode.

Ok, I’m being a bit hyperbolic. There were thoughtful observations like the one by Tim Wu above. And some of the criticism of liberalism is right on the money. Liberalism is hardly perfect. But as I read through them I found myself getting angrier and angrier as I realized that instead of a united front to stop the fascist rise of the authoritarian right the left is probably going to revert to focusing on liberalism as the “real problem” and that is going to lead us right back to Trumpism (or whatever it evolves into — Cottonism? ) because we won’t be paying attention. And the right will exploit all the holes in our system that Trump has exposed.

So fuck this facile explanation for why the Republican Party has turned into a nihilistic, conspiracy addled bunch of unAmerican, authoritarian assholes. It is lazy, intellectual rot and we’ve heard it all before. Trump’s followers are not the poor and downtrodden of America. Those are Democrats. These Republicans are arrogant, middle class, white racists who drive around in monster trucks screaming “fuck your feelings” and worshipping the greatest con-man America has ever produced while praising Jesus as their savior in the same breath. There is nothing liberalism did to cause that except to refuse to live in the 19th century and declare themselves to be “avowedly with” the right wing in all their hatreds and resentments.

Yes, establishment Democrats, center-left elites, wine-moms and hipsters and whoever else you loathe on the left side of the dial are awful. Old baby boomer liberals like me are awful. Nobody is arguing otherwise. But they are not the cause of what’s happened on the right. What happened on the right is the result of a confluence of the long-term resentimmental strain in American life, a corrupt and power mad GOP establishment backed by big money and an unparalleled propaganda network that created an atmosphere allowing Donald Trump to rise to the apotheosis of American politics.

There is sickness everywhere in our politics and culture. But blaming the “liberal elites” for the current political atrocity is ridiculous.

Funky, at the very least

Published by Tom Sullivan on November 23, 2020
Image for post
Image via Alice Minium at Medium, memorializing the Second Civil War of July 4, 2018. #lettersfromthesecondcivilwar

Eric Boehlert’s newsletter today points out the dainty way the press describes the outgoing president’s attempt to reduce the United States of America to a tin-pot dictatorship, one nation under Trump:

Instead of referring to his treasonous post-election behavior surrounding the would-be coup by a power-hungry authoritarian out to steal an election, we get news updates about Trump’s “tactics,” his vague “moves” and “chicanery”; his legal “strategy” and “power play” while  “sulking” and “brooding” inside the White House. None of that captures the historic events that have unfolded since Election Day. Events that if they occurred in a foreign country would be covered much differently by the American press.

The idea that Trump’s harmlessly wandering the West Wing in a funk, despondent over his loss doesn’t match reality. In truth, Trump has spent weeks, with laser-like focus, actively trying to engineer the open theft of a presidential contest. He’s dispatched an army of lawyers who are committed to throwing out as many legitimate U.S. votes as possible. When that has proven to be a failure, he’s shifted to getting state Republicans to block or delay the certification of the popular votes in their states. And much of the Republican Party supports him, either publicly or tacitly by standing by and watching.  

Were these events to unfold in a foreign land an ocean away, the more militant of congressional Republicans would call for sanctions against such a country and for arms sales to its neighbors. (Have Canada or Mexico asked?) They would hold forth for C-SPAN cameras in their chambers or preach before reporters in Capitol hallways of their undying faith in the power of democracy to deliver the fruits of freedom to the oppressed in less-God-blessed nations. They would issue principle-laden statements on their websites and in fundraising letters. They would bask, not to put it daintily, in the warm glow of their own exceptionalist glory.

For now, they cower. Feckless cowards before an even bigger coward.

“Trump’s baseless argument that this is still an election up for grabs was prevalent in interviews with Republicans across the country on Friday,” the New York Times reported and Jay Rosen noted, tweeting, “A counter-majoritarian party has to be counter-factual too. The conflict with journalism is structural.”

Boehlert concludes:

Authoritarianism has been on display for weeks now, as Trump throws all his energy into casting doubt over free and fair elections in the world’s oldest democracy. The daily news coverage needs to say so, and drop the idea that Trump’s simply passing his days feeling sorry for himself, in a state of “denial.” He’s been waging a multi-pronged war on America.

From the shadows. One hopes Trump’s beefy, blustery, gun-toting foot soldiers are equally inept and cowardly.

It ain’t over until they stop attacking Black voters

Published by Tom Sullivan on November 23, 2020
  • Michigan GOP leader Laura Cox.
  • Ronna McDaniel - Wikipedia
Michigan Republican Party Chairman Laura Cox and Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel issued a letter on Saturday asking the Michigan Board of State Canvassers to delay the certification of election results for two weeks.

A former reality TV star eight years ago tweeted of President Barack Obama, “He lost the popular vote by a lot and won the election. We should have a revolution in this country!” The first statement was a lie — Obama won by almost 3.5 million votes. But that lie exhibited the facility with lying for which the faux billionaire would become infamous. He tweeted, “The phoney electoral college made a laughing stock out of our nation. The loser one!” and “More votes equals a loss…revolution!”

Those November 7, 2012 tweets followed others fired off the night before:

That last tweet is as true now as it was not then. And it is Donald J. Trump’s doing. Having lost the popular vote twice himself, the now-outgoing president suddenly he has use for the electoral college. His legal team is the laughingstock. But no less a threat to the country.

While the republic still stands, it is not for Trump’s and the Republican establishment’s lack of of trying to demolish it. Election law expert Rick Hasen has reassured voters those efforts to game the electoral college ultimately will fail:

The good news is that there is no real prospect that Mr. Trump can avoid a reluctant handover of power on Jan. 20. The bad news is that Mr. Trump’s wildly unsubstantiated claims of a vast voter fraud conspiracy and the litigation he has brought against voting rights have done — and will increasingly do — serious damage to our democracy. Our problems will deepen, in particular, because Mr. Trump’s litigation strategy has led to the emergence of a voter-hostile jurisprudence in the federal courts. New judicial doctrines will put more power in the hands of Republican legislatures to suppress the vote and take voters, state courts and federal courts out of key backstop roles.

Team Trump’s gonzo lawyering might fit well within a hallucinogen-laced, Hunter S. Thompson novel. Judge after judge recognizes the frivolousness of the conspiracy-fueled effort to undo Trump’s loss through litigation aimed at altering the electoral college count.

Judge Matthew W. Brann in Pennsylvania on Saturday dismissed Trump’s demand to throw out almost 7 million votes. A “conservative Republican” before his appointment, the Washington Post reminds, Brann wrote in his opinion:

“One might expect that when seeking such a startling outcome, a plaintiff would come formidably armed with compelling legal arguments and factual proof of rampant corruption, such that this Court would have no option but to regrettably grant the proposed injunctive relief despite the impact it would have on such a large group of citizens.

“That has not happened. Instead, this Court has been presented with strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations, unpled in the operative complaint and unsupported by evidence. In the United States of America, this cannot justify the disenfranchisement of a single voter, let alone all the voters of its sixth most populated state. Our people, laws, and institutions demand more.”

But that harsh rebuke is not enough to alleviate Hasen’s concerns:

All of that is indeed good news, but I am quite concerned about what comes next. By the time President-elect Biden takes the oath of office, millions of people will wrongly believe he stole the election. At least 300 times since the election, Mr. Trump has gone straight to his followers on social media to declare the election rigged or stolen and to claim, despite all evidence to the contrary, himself as the real victor. Mr. Trump’s false claims will delegitimize a Biden presidency among his supporters. It should go without saying that a democracy requires the losers of an election to accept the results as legitimate and agree to fight another day; Republican leaders echoing Mr. Trump’s failure to support a peaceful transition of power undermine the foundation of our democracy. It’s not only the fact that we have had to say this, but that we keep having to repeat it, that shows the depths that we have reached.

Mr. Trump’s litigation strategy also will make things worse when it comes to voting rights. The common thread in his campaign’s postelection litigation connecting Trump allegations of people of color illegally voting in Democratic cities in swing states and corrupted voting machines is a lack of any evidence to support the claims. Many of the lawsuits have been laughed out of court for lack of evidence, voluntarily dismissed, or involve so few votes that they could not plausibly change the outcome. These unsuccessful lawsuits will nonetheless provide a false narrative to explain how it is that Mr. Biden declared victory and serve as a predicate for new restrictive voting laws in Republican states. They already provided a basis for the now-aborted attempt of Republican canvassing board members in Wayne County, Mich., to reject votes from Democratic-leaning Detroit, and could be the basis for a similar move by Republicans when the Michigan state canvassing board meets Monday.

When our system works as intended, citizens have the luxury of largely ignoring it, the Washington Post Editorial Board observes. People entrusted with its operation, for the most part, act with integrity: “Secretaries of state of both parties, county judges, tireless vote counters and state boards like Michigan’s have managed a successful election, with a record number of Americans voting despite the challenge of a pandemic. Some of these officials undoubtedly rejoiced at the results, some undoubtedly despaired; they all did their jobs.”

Yet integrity is of no use to the outgoing president, nor to members of his cult of personality, nor to a disturbingly large fraction of his party’s members of Congress and in the states.

Despite failure after humiliating failure in court, Trump persists, the Post continues:

His target Monday is the Michigan Board of State Canvassers, which is scheduled to meet to certify the results in their state, which Democrat Joe Biden won by the healthy margin of 154,000 votes. Ronna McDaniel, the servile chair of the Republican Party, and her Michigan counterpart, Laura Cox, on Saturday called on the board to delay certification. Their ostensible justification: “numerical anomalies and credible reports of procedural irregularities.”

Never mind that overturning the counting tables in Michigan will not undo his loss. Trump hopes to inspire similar delays in enough states to somehow turn failure into success. Never mind that it would turn the republic into a petty dictatorship.

But more than that, Trump’s targets are as old as his demand innocents be put to death, no matter the weight of exonerating evidence. Nonwhite Americans are in his view suspect by definition, as are cities with large, nonwhite populations, Trump’s targets of opportunity.

Jim Rutenberg and Nick Corasaniti of the New York Times write:

“‘Democrat-led city’ — that’s code for Black,” said the Rev. William J. Barber II, the president of the civil rights group Repairers of the Breach. “They’re coupling ‘city’ and ‘fraud,’ and those two words have been used throughout the years. This is an old playbook being used in the modern time, and people should be aware of that.”

This ain’t over with the settling of this election. Nor with the inauguration of Joe Biden as president in January. One major party is committed to a de facto rolling back of the Reconstruction amendments as Jim Crow did for 100 years, and relegating nonwhite voters again to the back of the electoral bus, even those nonwhites who vote with them. Republicans will, as they have demonstrated time and again, sacrifice their own to secure power.

The cultists demonstrate fealty to their Dear Leader above all

Published by digby on November 22, 2020

Oh my:

Supporters of President Donald Trump have called for a boycott of the crucial Georgia Senate runoff elections in a move that threatens Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell‘s plan to restrain President-elect Joe Biden.

The two Georgia runoff elections, scheduled for January 5 with early voting starting on December 14, will determine control of the Senate, meaning Biden’s ability to push through a Democratic agenda under his first term. But a number of pro-Trump Republicans have taken to Parler, the “free-speech” social media platform, to discourage members of their own party from voting.

Screenshots shared by reporter Marcus Baram showed Trump supporters invoking a conspiracy theory about “rigged” voting machines to urge a boycott of the upcoming elections in Georgia. “Don’t vote! Don’t be part of the corruption” one post read.

“DO NOT VOTE IN THE GEORGIA RUNOFFS, THE DEEP STATE WILL BE COLLECTING EVERYONE’S INFO. THIS IS A CHARADE, MEANT TO IDENTIFY PEOPLE WHO DON’T VOTE DEMOCRAT,” another user wrote. “STAY HOME. OSSOFF AND WARNOCK ARE A SMALL PRICE TO PAY.”

This formerly respected defense lawyer, Lin wood, (who is defending Kyle Rittenhouse) is one of those leading the charge:

Mitch cast his lot with Donald Trump… it may just blow back on him.

Update: Well, it looks like someone’s getting nervous, probably Mitch and the boys:

NO, Powell was definitely part of the team,:

In case you are wondering why this member of the “elite strike force” has been exiled, it’s because she’s been the one spearheading the idea that Loeffler and Perdue are in cahoots with Georgia Governor Brian Kemp to steal the election in Georgia.

For real.

Here is Powell’s interview on Newsmax on Saturday in which she threatens to screw up the Georgia Senate election:

https://youtu.be/VzzXZ2hhgrA

Levying explosive claims of widespread voter fraud specifically tied to Dominion Voting Systems and potentially a pay-for-play scheme with GOP Gov. Brian Kemp, Trump campaign lawyer Sidney Powell on Newsmax TV vowed to deliver a “biblical” voter fraud case this week.

“We’ve got tons of evidence; it’s so much, it’s hard to pull it all together,” Powell told Saturday night’s “The Count” co-hosted by Rob Schmitt and Mark Halperin, teasing the explosive allegation of the Georgia governor in a contested and key battleground state.

“Hopefully this week we will get it ready to file, and it will be biblical.”

“It’s a massive project to pull this fraud claim together with the evidence that I want to put in,” she added.

“You name the manner of fraud and it occurred in Georgia.”

Among the most explosive claims alluded to by Powell were:

Joe Biden votes being “weighted” at 1.25 times and President Donald Trump votes being parsed at 3/4.

Algorithms that gave Democrats 35,000 extra votes.

Modifications made to voting machines after statuatory cutoff dates for changes.

Past election victories, including Hillary Clinton’s primary victory over Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., being forced decided by Dominion Voting Systems.

Alleged pay-for-play kick backs to public officials, potentially even Georgia GOP Gov. Kemp for a late grant to use Dominion Voting Systems.

“Georgia is probably going to be the first state I’m gonna blow up,” Powell said rhetorically with her pending lawsuits alleging massive voter fraud.

See Newsmax TV now carried in 70 million cable homes

And to think just a few days ago the RNC was singing her praises:

It sounds as though Mitch and the rest of the GOP finally stepped in but only because of the potential to suppress the vote in Georgia in the runoff. I hate to say though, they may be too late. This is the kind of conspiracy theory that once let out of the bottle on social media is very hard to contain. Unless Trump himself comes out and says its all a big lie — and I just can’t see him doing that — this could be a big problem even if Powell is deep-sixed.

Check it out: