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Month: December 2021

It’s a good thing Trump doesn’t read

Published by digby on December 7, 2021

… or he’d have been livid at his loyal henchman’s new book:

President Donald J. Trump’s blood oxygen level sank to a precariously low level after he announced that he had tested positive for the coronavirus last year, according to a new book by Mark Meadows, his former chief of staff.

The new details contradict Mr. Trump’s denials this year that his Covid bout was more dire than White House medical officials had acknowledged at the time.

Mr. Meadows’s book, titled “The Chief’s Chief,” goes on sale on Tuesday. He describes his tenure in the White House, alternately promoting Mr. Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him and attacking the news media. Mr. Meadows also revealed previously undisclosed details about the former president’s medical condition in October 2020.

Mr. Trump, who has long been fearful of appearing weak, has tried to camouflage those details. The White House staff and members of his medical team aided that effort, publicly downplaying how sick he was at the time. The former president denied a detailed New York Times report this year that he was more ill than his aides had revealed, with depressed oxygen levels and lung infiltrates, which occur when they are inflamed and filled with fluid or bacteria.

Mr. Meadows recounts in extraordinary detail how severe Mr. Trump’s illness was.

On Friday, Oct. 2, 2020, hours after the president announced on Twitter that he had tested positive for the virus, he recorded a blood oxygen level of about 86 percent, Mr. Meadows wrote. That is roughly 10 points below what would be considered normal. Most healthy people have a blood oxygen level of about 95 to 98 percent, although some people may have lower normal readings.

Mr. Trump’s health had deteriorated so much that day that members of his medical team feared they would not be able to treat him adequately without immediate attention from hospital staff, Mr. Meadows wrote.

“That morning, Dr. Conley pulled me aside and delivered some bad news,” Mr. Meadows wrote, referring to Dr. Sean P. Conley, the head of Mr. Trump’s White House medical team. “Although the president’s condition had improved slightly overnight, his oxygen levels had now dipped down to about 86 percent and could be trending lower, a dangerously low level for someone his age.”

Mr. Meadows wrote that Mr. Trump’s doctors “had decided to put the president on oxygen in the residence and hope for the best.”

When it was clear he would need outside care, Mr. Trump’s medical team made the case to Mr. Meadows to intervene.

“We don’t have the resources to do it here,” Dr. Conley told Mr. Meadows about the president’s condition.

“I worried that the notion of him going to the hospital, in his mind, would seem like an act of capitulation,” Mr. Meadows wrote. “I was right.”

He described walking into Mr. Trump’s private residence to see him in a T-shirt, sitting up in bed. “It was the first time I had seen him in anything other than a golf shirt or a suit jacket,” Mr. Meadows wrote. The president, he said, was making phone calls and trying to work.

“If it hadn’t been for the oxygen tank by his side, I might have forgotten he was sick at all,” Mr. Meadows wrote. But his attention snapped back to Mr. Trump’s appearance: “I remembered what Dr. Conley had said. We were in trouble, and the president needed to get to the hospital.”

Mr. Trump had red streaks in his eyes, Mr. Meadows recounted, and “his hair was a mess from the hours he’d spent getting Regeneron in bed,” referring to an antibody infusion the president had received.ImageMr. Trump arrived at Walter Reed on Oct. 2, 2020. Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times

The president was initially resistant to leaving the White House and told Mr. Meadows that he was going to be fine. Mr. Meadows intensified his pleas. “It’s better that you walk out of here today under your own strength, your own power, than for me to have to carry you out on a gurney in two days,” he recounted.

Mr. Trump relented. On the walk out to his helicopter, he had lost so much strength that he dropped a briefcase he had planned to carry outside, where reporters were lined up to observe him, Mr. Meadows recalled.

A spokeswoman for Mr. Trump did not respond to an email seeking comment.

Last week, The Guardian obtained a copy of Mr. Meadows’s book and revealed that Mr. Trump had first tested positive for the coronavirus on Sept. 26, 2020, three days before his first presidential debate with Joseph R. Biden Jr.

Mr. Meadows has criticized reporters for focusing on that test and not the negative result from a different test a short time later. Mr. Trump has tried to make the same case, insisting that Mr. Meadows had affirmed that he was not sick before or “during” the debate.

Yet in his own book, Mr. Meadows writes that “we’ll probably never know whether President Trump was positive that evening.” Mr. Trump, according to an adviser, has grown angrier at Mr. Meadows in recent days, describing him as “dumb” for discussing the test results.

On Oct. 1, 2020, Mr. Trump revealed he was taking a coronavirus test after news reports that his aide Hope Hicks had tested positive. Although the president implied that it was Ms. Hicks who had infected him, Mr. Meadows wrote that it was clear to him that Mr. Trump was already significantly ill that night.

“I’ve lost so much strength,” Mr. Meadows quoted Mr. Trump as telling him, adding, “The muscles are just not responding.”

By then, Mr. Meadows had arranged for a monoclonal antibody therapy made by Regeneron to be secretly delivered to the White House. He said he asked the company’s chief executive, Leonard S. Schleifer, for four doses, mentioning that Ms. Hicks and Melania Trump, the first lady, had tested positive. Mr. Meadows did not reveal who else might have needed it.

He wrote that a senior aide had orchestrated a “special authorization” to land a small jet at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, where the doses would arrive and be ferried to the president. Food and Drug Administration officials cleared the treatment for Mr. Trump, even though it had not yet been authorized by the agency.

“We’d rigged the four-poster bed in the president’s room so that he could recline and take the drug while he was still alert and giving orders,” Mr. Meadows wrote.

Mr. Trump’s condition after he was hospitalized was still grave. After he was moved to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, in Bethesda, Md., Mr. Meadows asked for an update from one of the president’s doctors about his condition.

“The Regeneron treatment we’d given him was working, they said, but his oxygen levels were still dangerously low,” Mr. Meadows wrote. “Judging by the details he gave me, it was clear that the staff at Walter Reed was prepared for a long stay — weeks, maybe longer.”

He wrote that “every movement was difficult for” Mr. Trump. “Every few minutes, he would need to sit back down and rest.”

At one point during the president’s stay, Mr. Meadows tried to surreptitiously tell reporters that the situation was more dire and was caught on camera. Mr. Trump erupted in anger, according to people who spoke with him.

Within days, and with the help of a cocktail of other drugs, Mr. Trump was back at the White House, with aides fearful that he might still have been contagious.

Someone should be looking at the White House medical team. Did they administer steroids to him for the debate? It would explain that insane debate performance. I hope Biden transferred all of them out of there.

This book is actually quite devastating to Trump, maybe worse than any of the tell-all books that came before. He was obviously quite sick when he was out there.

BYW, Mark Meadows has suddenly decided not to cooperate with the january 6th Committee. I’m going to guess that Trump no longer trusts him not to accidentally spill the beans and put him on restriction.

According to the former White House chief’s lawyer, George J. Terwilliger III, Meadows was spooked by something he heard from the committee a week ago about executive privilege — a supposed top priority for Meadows even though he just wrote a book about his time in the Trump White House. 

All he has to do is say that he’s claiming executive privilege when asked the question. But he’s very dumb and might get confused. I’m sure Daddy Trump belatedly recognized that.

A tale of two Americas

Published by Tom Sullivan on December 7, 2021

This is not exactly the Two Americas John Edwards once spoke of.

The Covid-19 vaccination map looks almost exactly like the election map, declares CNN:

Florida is more vaccinated than many states. At 62%, the vaccination rate in Florida is above the national average, but that includes both highly vaccinated places in southern Florida — Miami-Dade County is 79% fully vaccinated — and places in the northern part of the state that are well under 50% vaccinated.

This is a pattern that repeats across the country. In fact, look at these two maps: the 2020 election map and CNN’s current vaccination map, which includes state-level data.

They’re very similar. Blue states that voted for President Joe Biden are generally more than 60% vaccinated. Red states that went for former President Donald Trump are generally under that average.

Florida and Wisconsin, battlegrounds at the political level, are exceptions on the vaccine. They voted for Trump but have vaccination rates above 60%.

Other battlegrounds, like Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Georgia, are also exceptions. They went for Biden, but their vaccination rates are below 60%.

Have a look:

https://www.cnn.com/election/2020/results/president
https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2021/health/us-covid-vaccinations/

A thirst for revenge

Published by Tom Sullivan on December 7, 2021

Republicans may put the hapless in haphazard, but it would be a mistake to underestimate haplessness. Just yesterday, a friend observed how many mediocrities advance through the Democratic Party’s ranks on familiarity rather than accomplishment.

Remember this?

“I don’t get it. When a consultant on the Republican side loses, we take them out and shoot them. You guys — keep hiring them.”
— Nationally prominent Republican official

“Crashing the Gate,” by Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas Zúniga (2006)

Still. “Anyone who thinks the Republican Party is some kind of well-oiled juggernaut ready to steamroll Democrats in November might want to check out what’s happening in Georgia, where the GOP is busy trying to steamroll itself,” writes Eugene Robinson.

Donald Trump steamrolled the GOP once already this year when he depressed turnout in Georgia for the Senate elections on January 5th that cost his party two Senate seats.

The Trump-fueled steamrolling continues there. Seeking revenge against yet another apostate, Trump is backing former senator David Perdue’s bid to oust Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) in the gubernatorial primary next year. The internecine fight could weaken whichever Republican wins the GOP primary and help Democrat Stacey Abrams emerge Georgia’s governor next November. If so, Trump’s covid-infected hand will be to blame. Blame he will never own, of course.

Trump is also backing a primary challenge to a second apostate. Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, refused Trump’s entreaty to “find 11,780 votes” so Trump could secure the state’s electoral votes in 2020. Trump may not be good at much but he’s hell at settling scores. And in enlisting others to settle them for him.

“And all of this reflects the GOP’s devolution into a cult of personality devoted to former president Donald Trump,” as Robinson sees it.

The GOP had the chance to make a definitive break with Trump after the Capitol insurrection in January. The party decided to stick with him — and now it’s stuck with him.

That’s the thing about Faustian bargains. They rarely end well.

No, they don’t. But knowing that is little comfort to the victims. Cults of personality have a rather deadly if not enduring track record over the last century: in Italy, in Germany, in Russia, in China and elsewhere.

Robinson is a sharp analyst, but this is another church-of-the-savvy take that downplays the existential threat to the republic posed by Trump and his blundering band of anti-democracy brigands.

Major Strasser:
You give him credit for too much cleverness. My impression was that he’s just another blundering American.

Captain Renault:
We musn’t underestimate American blundering. I was with them when they blundered into Berlin in 1918.

The January 6th insurrection may have failed to overthrow the government, but The Atlantic‘s Barton Gellman finds no solace in that. A failed coup that goes unpunished is just a dress rehearsal for the next. Columns reinforcing the haplessness of the first attempt undermine the urgency of preparing to fend off the next.

Gellman writes:

Donald Trump came closer than anyone thought he could to toppling a free election a year ago. He is preparing in plain view to do it again, and his position is growing stronger. Republican acolytes have identified the weak points in our electoral apparatus and are methodically exploiting them. They have set loose and now are driven by the animus of tens of millions of aggrieved Trump supporters who are prone to conspiracy thinking, embrace violence, and reject democratic defeat. Those supporters, Robert Pape’s “committed insurrectionists,” are armed and single-minded and will know what to do the next time Trump calls upon them to act.

Democracy will be on trial in 2024. A strong and clear-eyed president, faced with such a test, would devote his presidency to meeting it. Biden knows better than I do what it looks like when a president fully marshals his power and resources to face a challenge. It doesn’t look like this.

Few mistake Donald Trump for some genius strategist. But novels are filled with tales of evil men with unquenchable thirsts for revenge. It’s what Trump drinks instead of alcohol.

How Rep. Massie will cash in on dead school kids @Spockosbrain

Published by Spocko on December 6, 2021

When Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky put this photo of him posing with his family & their guns, my friend Jeff Tiedrich tweeted. “Every single one of these guns cost more than a Le Creuset pot.”

So I asked some of my friends in the Gun Violence Prevention movement if they knew what all these guns were, how much they cost and the cost of the ammo to fill their magazines.

I expect this photo will be discussed on the cable shows and late night comedy because this is the kind of sick trolling that the GOP engages in and is easy to talk about. “That’s disgusting! Here his Joy Reid calling Massie the “Absolute Worst”

Good for Joy! I’m liking her more and more. Sadly that will be the end of it. Few things change their behavior, unless it might cost them money. I wanted to know if there was anyone whose opinion Massie cared about he would listen to. So I looked up his donors. It’s filled with right wing PAC money from right wing donors & gun rights groups.

Oh look! The National Association for Gun Rights spoke up! Cool.

I haven’t contacted corp donors directly yet, like Judd Legum did with the corporations who donated to the elected officials who voted not to certify the election results on January 6th. Corporation PR departments usually have an answer, ranging from, ‘No comment to” “While the photo is in poor taste, Rep. Massie did not violate any laws by publishing that photo.”

But some people might be disgusted, especially Joe Kiani, who founded medical tech company Masimo and is a big Biden donor. He was appointed to President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. He might want to make a donations to the #Oxford victim funds that is the equivalent of what he donated to Massie.

(If any of you do want to donate here is a Gofundme link & local news story on how to mail checks to the official Oxford Community Memorial & Victims Fund.)

NRA blood money was used to fund Trump and other politicians, but because of the weakness of the FEC, nothing has happened. The pro-guns everywhere people know how to fund politicians who think as they do. Corporations fund these people because they are on important committees. But these corporations need to be alerted to just how extreme these people are, and the consequences of continuing to support them.

I don’t expect any corps to engage in a twitter thread about funding Massie, that will be done behind the scenes, unless they are called out on it and need to make a comment because there is pressure internally or from the public. So if you want these companies to know, just tell them. You don’t have to threaten to boycott, just let them know so they can change their donation pattern.

Cashin’ In

Published by digby on December 6, 2021

The congressman who sued a cow is packing it in to get his share of that sweet Trump grift:

Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) plans to leave his seat at the end of this month to become CEO at a new media company founded by former president Donald Trump, the company announced Monday. The move was confirmed by a political ally of Nunes, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the congressman’s plans. Nunes’s office did not respond to inquiries.

Nunes, who was first elected to Congress in 2002 at age 30, was just reelected to his seat last year for a 10th term, which ends in January 2023. A news release Monday said Nunes would be joining the “Trump Media & Technology Group” as its CEO starting in January.

If the GOP were to take back the House majority in 2022, Nunes would be in line to be chairman of the House Ways and Means committee. By stepping down, he would potentially be giving up what is considered the most powerful committee gavel.

Nunes represented a safely Republican district that was growing more competitive even before the current round of redistricting. In 2012, Barack Obama lost Nunes’s 22nd Congressional District, in California’s Central Valley, by 15 points. Last year, Joe Biden lost it by just 6 points.

As he became better known as a Trump defender, Nunes became one of the party’s strongest fundraisers. He spent $11.6 million on his 2018 reelection, when he held off a Democratic challenger by single digits, and spent most of the $26.8 million he raised for his 2020 race.

Early drafts of California’s next map put Nunes in a less Republican district in the Fresno area, one that backed Biden by 9 points. Before the announcement Monday, Republicans were watching to see whether would switch to a new seat that was safer for his party — which would have pitted him against one of his Republican colleagues.

The odds of this enterprise ever making any money are very long. Trump is a terrible businessman and what Nunes knows about running a company and social media is confined to suing a twitter user and losing. Should work out great.

Good riddance to Devin Nunes. He has been an embarrassment to the state of California for years now. I only wish he’d take Loose Lips McCarthy with him.

We are in trouble

Published by digby on December 6, 2021

The most alarming thing you will read this year is this piece from Barton Gellman in the Atlantic. It’s very long and full of frightening details. I urge you to read it. We are in big trouble. Here is the opening:

Technically, the next attempt to overthrow a national election may not qualify as a coup. It will rely on subversion more than violence, although each will have its place. If the plot succeeds, the ballots cast by American voters will not decide the presidency in 2024. Thousands of votes will be thrown away, or millions, to produce the required effect. The winner will be declared the loser. The loser will be certified president-elect.

The prospect of this democratic collapse is not remote. People with the motive to make it happen are manufacturing the means. Given the opportunity, they will act. They are acting already.

Who or what will safeguard our constitutional order is not apparent today. It is not even apparent who will try. Democrats, big and small D, are not behaving as if they believe the threat is real. Some of them, including President Joe Biden, have taken passing rhetorical notice, but their attention wanders. They are making a grievous mistake.

“The democratic emergency is already here,” Richard L. Hasen, a professor of law and political science at UC Irvine, told me in late October. Hasen prides himself on a judicious temperament. Only a year ago he was cautioning me against hyperbole. Now he speaks matter-of-factly about the death of our body politic. “We face a serious risk that American democracy as we know it will come to an end in 2024,” he said, “but urgent action is not happening.”

For more than a year now, with tacit and explicit support from their party’s national leaders, state Republican operatives have been building an apparatus of election theft. Elected officials in Arizona, Texas, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and other states have studied Donald Trump’s crusade to overturn the 2020 election. They have noted the points of failure and have taken concrete steps to avoid failure next time. Some of them have rewritten statutes to seize partisan control of decisions about which ballots to count and which to discard, which results to certify and which to reject. They are driving out or stripping power from election officials who refused to go along with the plot last November, aiming to replace them with exponents of the Big Lie. They are fine-tuning a legal argument that purports to allow state legislators to override the choice of the voters.

By way of foundation for all the rest, Trump and his party have convinced a dauntingly large number of Americans that the essential workings of democracy are corrupt, that made-up claims of fraud are true, that only cheating can thwart their victory at the polls, that tyranny has usurped their government, and that violence is a legitimate response.

Any Republican might benefit from these machinations, but let’s not pretend there’s any suspense. Unless biology intercedes, Donald Trump will seek and win the Republican nomination for president in 2024. The party is in his thrall. No opponent can break it and few will try. Neither will a setback outside politics—indictment, say, or a disastrous turn in business—prevent Trump from running. If anything, it will redouble his will to power.

As we near the anniversary of January 6, investigators are still unearthing the roots of the insurrection that sacked the Capitol and sent members of Congress fleeing for their lives. What we know already, and could not have known then, is that the chaos wrought on that day was integral to a coherent plan. In retrospect, the insurrection takes on the aspect of rehearsal.

Even in defeat, Trump has gained strength for a second attempt to seize office, should he need to, after the polls close on November 5, 2024. It may appear otherwise—after all, he no longer commands the executive branch, which he tried and mostly failed to enlist in his first coup attempt. Yet the balance of power is shifting his way in arenas that matter more.

Trump is successfully shaping the narrative of the insurrection in the only political ecosystem that matters to him. The immediate shock of the event, which briefly led some senior Republicans to break with him, has given way to a near-unanimous embrace. Virtually no one a year ago, certainly not I, predicted that Trump could compel the whole party’s genuflection to the Big Lie and the recasting of insurgents as martyrs. Today the few GOP dissenters are being cast out. “2 down, 8 to go!” Trump gloated at the retirement announcement of Representative Adam Kinzinger, one of 10 House Republicans to vote for his second impeachment.

Trump has reconquered his party by setting its base on fire. Tens of millions of Americans perceive their world through black clouds of his smoke. His deepest source of strength is the bitter grievance of Republican voters that they lost the White House, and are losing their country, to alien forces with no legitimate claim to power. This is not some transient or loosely committed population. Trump has built the first American mass political movement in the past century that is ready to fight by any means necessary, including bloodshed, for its cause.

It’s very long and I can’t post it here. But if you can’t read it, know that it goes into every swing state which has Republican power, whether in the legislature, the Governor’s mansion or the courts. and shows just how thoroughly they are subverting the democratic election process. I guess we knew they were doing it. I had no idea how much of it there was.

He interviews a Trumper who is devoted to the Big Lie and tries to plumb the depths of his conspiracy addled mind. It’s quite … something:

Patterson was not in Washington on January 6, but he is fluent in the revisionist narratives spread by fabulists and trolls on social media. He knows those stories verse by verse, the ones about January 6 and the ones about the election rigged against Trump. His convictions are worth examining because he and the millions of Americans who think as he does are the primary source of Trump’s power to corrupt the next election. With a sufficient dose of truth serum, most Republican politicians would likely confess that Biden won in 2020, but the great mass of lumpen Trumpers, who believe the Big Lie with unshakable force, oblige them to pretend otherwise. Like so many others, Patterson is doing his best to parse a torrential flow of political information, and he is failing. His failures leave him, nearly always, with the worldview expounded by Trump.

We fall into a long conversation in the sweltering heat, then continue it for weeks by phone and email. I want to plumb the depths of his beliefs, and understand what lies behind his commitment to them. He is prepared to grant me the status of “fellow truth-seeker.”

“The ‘Stop the Steal’ rally for election integrity was peaceful,” he says. “I think the big takeaway is when Old Glory made its way into the Rotunda on January 6, our fearless public officials dove for cover at the sight of the American flag.”

What about the violence? The crowds battling police?

“The police were seen on video in uniform allowing people past the bicycle-rack barricades and into the building,” he replies. “I mean, that’s established. The unarmed crowd did not overpower the officers in body armor. That doesn’t happen. They were allowed in.”

Surely he has seen other video, though. Shaky, handheld footage, taken by the rioters themselves, of police officers falling under blows from a baseball bat, a hockey stick, a fire extinguisher, a length of pipe. A crowd crushing Officer Daniel Hodges in a doorway, shouting “Heave! Ho!”

Does Patterson know that January 6 was among the worst days for law-enforcement casualties since September 11, 2001? That at least 151 officers from the Capitol Police and the Metropolitan Police Department suffered injuries, including broken bones, concussions, chemical burns, and a Taser-induced heart attack?

Patterson has not heard these things. Abruptly, he shifts gears. Maybe there was violence, but the patriots were not to blame.

“There were people there deliberately to make it look worse than what it was,” he explains. “A handful of ill-behaved, potentially, possibly agents provocateur.” He repeats the phrase: “Agents provocateur, I have on information, were in the crowd … They were there for nefarious means. Doing the bidding of whom? I have no idea.”urn:uuid:81b357bf-aa57-1b9b-51fa-1b9baa5781b3

“‘On information’?” I ask. What information?

“You can look up this name,” he says. “Retired three-star Air Force General McInerney. You got to find him on Rumble. They took him off YouTube.”

Sure enough, there on Rumble (and still on YouTube) I find a video of Lieutenant General Thomas G. McInerney, 84, three decades gone from the Air Force. His story takes a long time to tell, because the plot includes an Italian satellite and Pakistan’s intelligence service and former FBI Director James Comey selling secret U.S. cyberweapons to China. Eventually it emerges that “Special Forces mixed with antifa” combined to invade the seat of Congress on January 6 and then blame the invasion on Trump supporters, with the collusion of Senators Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell, along with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

In a further wrinkle, Pelosi, by McInerney’s account, became “frantic” soon afterward when she discovered that her own false-flag operation had captured a laptop filled with evidence of her treason. McInerney had just come from the White House, he says in his monologue, recorded two days after the Capitol riot. Trump was about to release the Pelosi evidence. McInerney had seen the laptop with his own eyes.

It shook me that Patterson took this video for proof. If my house had caught fire 10 years before, my life might have depended on his discernment and clarity of thought. He was an Eagle Scout. He earned a college degree. He keeps current on the news. And yet he has wandered off from the empirical world, placing his faith in fantastic tales that lack any basis in fact or explicable logic.

McInerney’s tale had spread widely on Facebook, Twitter, Parler, and propaganda sites like We Love Trump and InfoWars. It joined the January 6 denialist canon and lodged firmly in Patterson’s head. I reached the general by phone and asked about evidence for his claims. He mentioned a source, whose name he couldn’t reveal, who had heard some people saying “We are playing antifa today.” McInerney believed they were special operators because “they looked like SOF people.” He believed that one of them had Pelosi’s laptop, because his source had seen something bulky and square under the suspect’s raincoat. He conceded that even if it was a laptop, he couldn’t know whose it was or what was on it. For most of his story, McInerney did not even claim to have proof. He was putting two and two together. It stood to reason. In truth, prosecutors had caught and charged a neo-Nazi sympathizer who had videotaped herself taking the laptop from Pelosi’s office and bragged about it on Discord. She was a home health aide, not a special operator. (As of this writing, she has not yet entered a plea.)

The general’s son, Thomas G. McInerney Jr., a technology investor, learned that I had been talking with his father and asked for a private word with me. He was torn between conflicting obligations of filial loyalty, and took a while to figure out what he wanted to say.

“He has a distinguished service record,” he told me after an otherwise off-the-record conversation. “He wants what’s best for the nation and he speaks with a sense of authority, but I have concerns at his age that his judgment is impaired. The older he’s gotten, the stranger things have gotten in terms of what he’s saying.”

I tell all of this and more to Patterson. McInerney, the Military Times reported, “went off the rails” after a successful Air Force career. For a while during the Obama years he was a prominent birther and appeared a lot on Fox News, before being fired as a Fox commentator in 2018 for making a baseless claim about John McCain. Last November, he told the WVW Broadcast Network that the CIA operated a computer-server farm in Germany that had helped rig the presidential vote for Biden, and that five Special Forces soldiers had just died trying to seize the evidence. The Army and U.S. Special Operations Command put out dutiful statements that no such mission and no such casualties had taken place.

Of course, Patterson wrote to me sarcastically, “governments would NEVER lie to their OWN citizens.” He did not trust the Pentagon’s denials. There are seldom words or time enough to lay a conspiracy theory to rest. Each rebuttal is met with a fresh round of delusions.

Patterson is admirably eager for a civil exchange of views. He portrays himself as a man who “may be wrong, and if I am I admit it,” and he does indeed concede on small points. But a deep rage seems to fuel his convictions. I asked him the first time we met if we could talk “about what’s happening in the country, not the election itself.”

His smile faded. His voice rose.

“There ain’t no fucking way we are letting go of 3 November 2020,” he said. “That is not going to fucking happen. That’s not happening. This motherfucker was stolen. The world knows this bumbling, senile, career corrupt fuck squatting in our White House did not get 81 million votes.”

He had many proofs. All he really needed, though, was arithmetic. “The record indicates 141 [million] of us were registered to vote and cast a ballot on November 3,” he said. “Trump is credited with 74 million votes out of 141 million. That leaves 67 million for Joe; that doesn’t leave any more than that. Where do these 14 million votes come from?”

Patterson did not recall where he had heard those figures. He did not think he had read Gateway Pundit, which was the first site to advance the garbled statistics. Possibly he saw Trump amplify the claim on Twitter or television, or some other stop along the story’s cascading route across the right-wing mediaverse. Reuters did a good job debunking the phony math, which got the total number of voters wrong.

I was interested in something else: the worldview that guided Patterson through the statistics. It appeared to him (incorrectly) that not enough votes had been cast to account for the official results. Patterson assumed that only fraud could explain the discrepancy, that all of Trump’s votes were valid, and that the invalid votes must therefore belong to Biden.

“Why don’t you say Joe Biden got 81 million and there’s only 60 million left for Trump?” I asked.

Patterson was astonished.

“It’s not disputed, the 74 million vote count that was credited to President Trump’s reelection effort,” he replied, baffled at my ignorance. “It’s not in dispute … Have you heard that President Trump engaged in cheating and fraudulent practices and crooked machines?”

Biden was the one accused of rigging the vote. Everybody said so. And for reasons unspoken, Patterson wanted to be carried away by that story.

This guy is super engaged so he probably has more disinformation at his fingertips than most. Nonetheless, his general attitude is shared by millions of people, many of them ready to take up arms if their candidates don’t win every election going forward. They believe it is impossible for them to lose — just like Donald Trump.

As I said, we are in trouble.

The Pentagon still has to answer for its response on January 6th

Published by digby on December 6, 2021

This is what they did for the Black Lives Matter protests in DC:

A whistleblower has come forward to claim the pentagon engaged in a cover-up of their behavior on January 6th:

A former D.C. National Guard official is accusing two senior Army leaders of lying to Congress and participating in a secret attempt to rewrite the history of the military’s response to the Capitol riot.

In a 36-page memo, Col. Earl Matthews, who held high-level National Security Council and Pentagon roles during the Trump administration, slams the Pentagon’s inspector general for what he calls an error-riddled report that protects a top Army official who argued against sending the National Guard to the Capitol on Jan. 6, delaying the insurrection response for hours.

Matthews’ memo, sent to the Jan. 6 select committee this month and obtained by POLITICO, includes detailed recollections of the insurrection response as it calls two Army generals — Gen. Charles Flynn, who served as deputy chief of staff for operations on Jan. 6, and Lt. Gen. Walter Piatt, the director of Army staff — “absolute and unmitigated liars” for their characterization of the events of that day. Matthews has never publicly discussed the chaos of the Capitol siege.

Flynn is Michael Flynn’s brother. Surprise.

On Jan. 6, Matthews was serving as the top attorney to Maj. Gen. William Walker, then commanding general of the D.C. National Guard. Matthews’ memo defends the Capitol attack response by Walker, who now serves as the House sergeant at arms, amplifying Walker’s previous congressional testimony about the hourslong delay in the military’s order for the D.C. National Guard to deploy to the riot scene.

Matthews’ memo levels major accusations: that Flynn and Piatt lied to Congressabout their response to pleas for the D.C. Guard to quickly be deployed on Jan. 6; that the Pentagon inspector general’s November report on Army leadership’s response to the attack was “replete with factual inaccuracies”;and that the Army has created its own closely held revisionist document about the Capitol riot that’s “worthy of the best Stalinist or North Korea propagandist.”

The memo follows Walker’s own public call for the inspector general to retract its detailed report on the events of Jan. 6, as first reported by The Washington Post. Walker told the Post he objected to specific allegations by the Pentagon watchdog that Matthews’ memo also criticizes, calling the inspector general’s report “inaccurate” and “sloppy work.”

Reached for comment on Matthews’ memo, Walker, the former head of the D.C. Guard, said the report speaks for itself and that he had nothing further to add. A Jan. 6 committee spokesperson declined to comment.

I don’t know if what this guy is saying is true but the fact that Flynn’s brother was anywhere near this thing automatically makes it suspicious. It will be interesting to see how this shakes out.

He knew he was exposing people. He didn’t care.

Published by digby on December 6, 2021

The Ny Times’ Maggie Haberman tweeted the following this morning:

Trump, in new statement, ignores Meadows’ own book. “My Chief of Staff Mark Meadows confirmed I did not have Covid before or during the debate,” Trump says. Actually, Meadows writes in his book that we’ll never know if Trump had it during the debate.

Here’s what Meadows actually says. Don’t take my word for it.

Meadows also confirms my reporting from that weekend about Trump – who I wrote was on oxygen – having precariously low oxygen levels.

It’s extremely hard to fathom on what planet Meadows thought Trump would reward him for sharing this.

Meadows also confirms my reporting from that weekend about Trump – who I wrote was on oxygen – having precariously low oxygen levels.

Here was our accurate story a few months ago on how sick Trump was, which Trump denied. Meadows book makes the denial all the flimsier

Meadows also confirms my reporting from that weekend about Trump – who I wrote was on oxygen – having precariously low oxygen levels.

When Meadows lectures on television about how the media doesn’t really know Trump and to believe Meadows’ view, it’s pretty clear that Meadows doesn’t know him well if he thought this book would be met with a smile.

Originally tweeted by Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) on December 6, 2021.

I’m sue she’s right hat Trump isn’t happy about it. But he just lie and says black is white and 40% of the country believes him. Because he “tells it like it is.”

The Washington Post has a huge story this morning looking at the seven days between Trump’s positive test and his announcement that he had COVID. It is not pretty. They estimate he exposed at least 500 people.

When he first learned he had tested positive for the corona­virus, President Donald Trump was already aboard Air Force One, en route to a massive rally in Middletown, Pa.

With him on the plane that Saturday evening were dozens of people — senior aides, Air Force One personnel, junior staffers, journalists and other members of the large entourage typical for a presidential trip — all squeezed together in the recirculating air of a jetliner.

“Stop the president,” White House physician Sean Conley told Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, according to a new book by Meadows set to publish Tuesday that was obtained by the Guardian newspaper. “He just tested positive for covid.”

But Meadows asserts in his book that it was too late to stop Trump and that a second rapid antigen test — apparently done using the same sample — came back negative. But under guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Trump should have taken a more accurate polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test to confirm whether he had the coronavirus.

“Had I been there, and Dr. Conley would have told me they would have received a positive test, I would have assumed it was accurate and frankly canceled everything right away,” said John F. Kelly, one of Trump’s previous chiefs of staff, adding that he also would have rushed Trump to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. “To do anything else would be irresponsible.”

In fact, Trump was hospitalized at Walter Reed about a week later. From the day he tested positive until his hospitalization, Trump came in contact with more than 500 people, either those in proximity to him or at crowded events, not including rallygoers, according to a Washington Post analysis of the president’s interactions during that period.

That seven-day window reveals a president and chief of staff who took a reckless, and potentially dangerous, approach to handling the coronavirus, including Trump’s own positive test.

I am sure he knew he had it. But he thought it would be manageable and he didn’t want to look weak. So he just went around maskless, glad-handing and breathing on people, including Joe Biden. Because he is a monster.

If you ever believed in karma this should disabuse you of it. Trump came it just fine. Who knows how many people he gave the virus to.

Laura Logan has always been a wingnut

Published by digby on December 6, 2021

It’s always a fool’s game trying to keep up with the latest right-wing outrage. Theirs is a profit-making enterprise — and the customer base is in a buying mood. In the last month or so, we’ve seen an unusually high volume of vomitous rhetorical spew coming from both elected Republican politicians and conservative media figures. I guess it’s their way of celebrating the holidays.

First, we had Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar distributing a noxious anime video depicting the killing of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-NY, and attacking President Joe Biden. The Republican leadership shrugged their shoulders and it was left to the Democrats to take action, which they did by stripping Gosar of his committee assignments and censuring him.

In her floor speech on the subject, Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert attacked Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., saying “The Jihad Squad member from Minnesota has paid her husband, and not her brother husband, the other one, over a million dollars in campaign funds.” A few days later Boebert was caught on camera joking around with laughing supporters about Omar being a suicide bomber. She did apologize on Twitter to “anyone in the Muslim community I offended with my comment,” but then accused Omar of anti-American rhetoric in a phone call.

Boebert and her bestie, Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., then exchanged insults with another Republican, Nancy Mace R-S.C., with Green calling Mace “trash” for criticizing Boebert and Mace saying, “bless her f–king heart,” leading Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker to dub them “The Plastics” after the nasty high school clique in the movie “Mean Girls.”

But despite the obvious immaturity of all those involved, that trivializes the issues involved.

This is the U.S. Congress we’re talking about, not WWE wrestling. The Islamophobia openly expressed by Boebert and Greene has a toxic effect on our culture at large. As Li Zhou of Vox reported:

Researchers have indeed found that Islamophobic rhetoric by politicians has real-world consequences and has been directly linked with hate speech targeted toward Muslim Americans. If Congress doesn’t impose more penalties regarding this incident, lawmakers could — whether they mean to or not — further normalize anti-Muslim rhetoric and sentiment, affecting not only Muslim lawmakers but millions of Muslim Americans as well.

Of course, it’s too much to expect Republicans to take any action against these people.

Rhetorical bomb throwers like Boebert and Greene raise huge amounts of money from their fans and are favorites of Donald Trump. In fact, Greene even went running to him during her spat with Mace apparently expecting him to take action against her — which he probably will. It remains to be seen if the Democrats will sanction Boebert as they have done with Green and Gosar but in an interview on Sunday, Omar said she is very confident that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will take “decisive action” this week.

But for all this bigotry and nastiness among GOP elected representatives, they’re amateurs compared to what’s happening in the conservative media.

There’s no need to recapitulate the ongoing horror that is the nightly Fox News Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham insult hours. Just know that they aren’t alone. Last week, we saw an act of character assassination that goes beyond even their worst. Fox Nation host Lara Logan said that people all over the world are comparing NIH scientist Anthony Fauci to the Nazi Joseph Mengele:

It’s a truly stunning statement and one which you would think would instantly garner a response from the network. But so far, crickets. She hasn’t appeared on the network but they haven’t said anything either. And people are asking, “what happened to Lara Logan?” the former glamorous foreign correspondent :

Actually, nothing happened to Laura Logan.

She may have joined the ranks of full-blown Fox News trolls but it was clear she was a right-winger for years when she was working for CBS. Logan had very strong opinions about America’s handling of terrorism, the military and war and she didn’t hide it. For instance in 2011, she appeared with Marvin Kalb at the National Press club and suggested that the US needed to get tough with Pakistan:

You take 24 to 48 hours out of your day where you target all the people who you know where they are and you send a message to the Pakistanis that putting American bodies in Arlington Cemetery is not an acceptable form of foreign policy.

In another speech to the Better Government Association in Chicago, after the attack on the embassy in Benghazi, she said this:

I hope to God that you are sending in your best clandestine warriors to exact revenge and let the world know that the United States will not be attacked on its own soil, its ambassadors will not be murdered and the United States will not stand by and do nothing about it.

It was more than obvious that Logan had a strong right wing point of view and that she was prone to bloodthirsty hyperbole. So it shouldn’t have come as a huge surprise when in 2013 she was caught in a major scandal over a big blockbuster story on Benghazi for 60 Minutes which turned out to be a hoax. She relied on a contractor who went by the name “Morgan Jones” who said he was an eyewitness to the attack and told her that the American government was slow to respond and totally unprepared. He even claimed that he climbed the wall and fought off the terrorists in hand-to-hand combat and Logan hailed him as a hero.Advertisement:

It turned out this man, whose real name is Dylan Davies, was nowhere near the compound that night. In the investigation that followed it was revealed by the rest of the news media that all the facts were easily debunked but Logan failed to check them out. 60 Minutes had to pull the story and issue a retraction and Logan apologized. But she wasn’t fired. In fact, she remained with the network for five more years. When she finally left she immediately started caterwauling about “the liberal media” and ran first to the far-right broadcast network Sinclair and then signed on with Fox.

Her reporting was taken as face value for years when she worked at CBS and even the Benghazi hoax scandal wasn’t seen as a matter of her bias but rather a mistake even though it was right in front of them. Her show on Fox Nation today is unironically called “Lara Logan Has No Agenda.”

Comparing Dr. Fauci to Joseph Mengele and calling Ilhan Omar a jihadist suicide bomber is now just mainstream right-wing rhetoric, rewarded with tons of money and attention from the base of the Republican party. And it’s the natural consequence of allowing people like Lara Logan to shape the mainstream media narratives that have defined our politics for years. 

Salon

This seems … significant

Published by Tom Sullivan on December 6, 2021

Politico has this little news item up this morning:

A former D.C. National Guard official is accusing two senior Army leaders of lying to Congress and participating in a secret attempt to rewrite the history of the military’s response to the Capitol riot.

In a 36-page memo, Col. Earl Matthews, who held high-level National Security Council and Pentagon roles during the Trump administration, slams the Pentagon’s inspector general for what he calls an error-riddled report that protects a top Army official who argued against sending the National Guard to the Capitol on Jan. 6, delaying the insurrection response for hours.

Matthews’ memo, sent to the Jan. 6 select committee this month and obtained by POLITICO, includes detailed recollections of the insurrection response as it calls two Army generals — Gen. Charles Flynn, who served as deputy chief of staff for operations on Jan. 6, and Lt. Gen. Walter Piatt, the director of Army staff — “absolute and unmitigated liars” for their characterization of the events of that day. Matthews has never publicly discussed the chaos of the Capitol siege.

Matthews does not mince words:

Matthews’ memo levels major accusations: that Flynn and Piatt lied to Congressabout their response to pleas for the D.C. Guard to quickly be deployed on Jan. 6; that the Pentagon inspector general’s November report on Army leadership’s response to the attack was “replete with factual inaccuracies”;and that the Army has created its own closely held revisionist document about the Capitol riot that’s “worthy of the best Stalinist or North Korea propagandist.”

[…]

Reached for comment, Matthews said the memo he wrote is entirely accurate. “Our Army has never failed us and did not do so on January 6, 2021,” he said. “However, occasionally some of our Army leaders have failed us and they did so on January 6th. Then they lied about it and tried to cover it up. They tried to smear a good man and to erase history.”

I don’t have time to read that memo in full with post-time approaching, but seeing the Politico article posted at 4: 30 a.m. EST and Marcy Wheeler lives five hours ahead of that, I suspected she has some thoughts about the Pentagon’s inspector general’s report. She does.

Really looking forward to the Jan. 6 committee’s public hearings. Must check the popcorn supply.