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Month: October 2022

Chilling

Published by digby on October 1, 2022

Josh Kovensky of TPM:

When Ivan the Terrible’s bodyguards would execute a prisoner, they had a phrase they would shout.

“Goida!” they would scream at their unfortunate victims.

At a concert on Red Square on Friday in honor of Russia’s illegal annexation of four Ukrainian provinces, one speaker re-upped the Medieval chant for modern times. That speaker proclaimed that Russia was waging a “holy war,” and had the crowd chant “Goida” against the dishonest, perverted, “old world” of the West.

You can watch the video of the spectacle here. It’s worth getting a sense of the energy even without understanding the language. But it speaks to a larger theme of Putin’s decision to annex nearly 20 percent of Ukrainian territory. It’s not only that Putin’s regime is Medieval in its brutality and its bizarre exhortations. It’s that they’re trying very, very hard to scare us.

Putin himself accompanied the annexation of the Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhiya, and Kherson regions with a lengthy speech accusing the West of “Satanism,” while pointedly remarking that the U.S. had set a “precedent” with the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

These statements sound – and are intended to sound – terrifying. But they mask the reality on the ground: Putin had to admit that he was losing by launching Russia’s conscription campaign. Reports from the ground suggest that Russia is on the verge of losing another key city in Ukraine’s east – in a region that it just annexed.

Ukrainians, for their part, continue to regard the situation with a mixture of worry and gallows humor. One Ukrainian friend joked to me this week that Kyivans are planning an orgy on top of the tallest hill in the city to greet nuclear armageddon. It’s dark humor, but is effective at countering the kind of fear-mongering and lies that the Kremlin dishes out to achieve its aims.

Take Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Russian oligarch who has deployed forces in Ukraine and whose company was indicted in the Mueller investigation for interfering in the U.S. election. Today, he effectively admitted to that, issuing a statement in which he remarked that he always “felt good-will towards America, and even helped them correct their internal political problems.” The truth only comes out from these people in the form of more lies and taunting, years after it matters.

Wow… that video was something else.

BTW: CPAC celebrated the annexation. I’m not kidding:

They put some work into that thing. Somebody must have balked because they deleted it. But not soon enough.

Those of you of a certain age like me must feel as if the world has been turned upside down. I just can’t get over this.

The 3 million dollar potted plant

Published by digby on October 1, 2022

The smart move has been rejected:

After attorney Christopher Kise accepted $3 million to represent Donald Trump in the FBI’s investigation of government documents stored at Mar-a-Lago, the veteran litigatorargued that Trump should adopt a new strategy.

Turn down the temperature with the Department of Justice, Kise — a former Florida solicitor general — counseled his famously combative client, people familiar with the deliberations said.

Federal authorities had searched Trump’s Florida residence and club because they badly wanted to retrieve the classified documents that remained there even after a federal subpoena, Kise argued, according to these people. With that material back in government hands, maybe prosecutors could be persuaded to resolve the whole issue quietly.

But quiet has never been Trump’s style — nor has harmony within his orbit.

Instead, just a few weeks after Kise was brought aboard, he finds himself in a battle, trying to persuade Trump to go along with his legal strategy and fighting with some other advisers who have counseled a more aggressive posture. The dispute has raged for at least a week, Trump advisers say, with the former president listening asvarious lawyers make their best arguments.

A Wednesday night court filing from Trump’s team was combative, with defense lawyers questioning the Justice Department’s truthfulness and motives. Kise, whose name was listed alongside other lawyers’ in previous filings over the past four weeks, did not sign that one— an absence that underscored the division among the lawyers.He remains part of the team and will continue assisting Trump in dealing with some of his other legal problems, said the people familiar with the conversations, who like others interviewed for this article spoke on the condition of anonymity to reveal private talks. But on the Mar-a-Lago issue, he is likely to have a less public role.

It is apattern that has repeated itself since the National Archives and Records Administration first alerted Trump’s team 16 months agothat it was missing documents from his term as president — and strongly urged their return. Well before the May 11 grand jury subpoena, and the Aug. 8 search of Mar-a-Lago by the FBI, multiple sets of lawyers and advisers suggested that Trump simply comply with government requests to return the papers and, in particular, to hand over any documents marked classified.

Trump seems, at least for now, to be heeding advice from those who have indulged his desire to fight.

The approach could leave the former president on a collision course with the Justice Department, as he relies on a legal trust that includes three attorneys facing their own potential legal risks. The first, Christina Bobb, has told other Trump allies that she is willing to be interviewed by the Justice Departmentabout her role in responding to the subpoena, according to people familiar with the conversations. Another, M. Evan Corcoran, has been counseled by colleagues to hire a criminal defense lawyer because of his response to the subpoena, people familiar with those conversations said, but so far has insisted that is not necessary. The third, longtime Trump adviser Boris Epshteyn, saw his phone taken as part of the Justice Department’s probe of Trump’s fake elector scheme, and appearedbefore a Georgia grand jury Thursday.

Kise, Bobb, Corcoran and Epshteyn either declined to comment for this story or did not respond to requests for comment. Trump spokesman Taylor Budowich replied to a detailed list of questions about their roles with a statement that did not directly answer the questions. “While the media wants to focus on gossip, the reality is these witch hunts are dividing and destroying our nation,” Budowich said. “And President Trump isn’t going to back down.”

Essentially Trump is playing chicken with the US Government, assuming they will back down rather than risk the right wing freakout if they indict him. He might be right.

‘Lunkhead hypermasculinity’

Published by Tom Sullivan on October 1, 2022

Ukrainian brains are beating Russian brawn

Donald Trump’s plan for defending the coast from hurricanes like Ian was to nuke them. His plan for dealing with critics? “Knock the crap out of them.” Montana’s Greg Gianforte dealt with reporters he disliked by body slamming them. Gianforte, now the state’s governor, is Trump’s kind of guy. Fox News host Tucker Carlson believes real men tan their balls.

The Guardian’s Sam Wolfson observed:

It’s no surprise to see Fox News suggest that the answer to all of mankind’s problems are testosterone related. The channel is heavily invested in the idea that a decrease in testosterone is making men more liberal and less masculine, and many of its remaining advertisers sell pills that promise to increase men’s testosterone’s levels.

Is the answer to a complex world’s problems really less reasoning and more “knock the crap out of them”? For those who see it in black and white and cannot navigate subtlety, yes. But does that work worth a damn?

Phillips Payson O’Brien, professor of strategic studies at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, argues that Ukraine’s success against Russian invaders demonstrates brute force is not the answer. O’Brien is the author of “How the War Was Won: Air-Sea Power and Allied Victory in World War II.”

O’Brien derides Carlson’s take in The Atlantic:

By promoting diversity and inclusion, he insisted, military leaders were destroying American armed forces, supposedly the last great bastion of merit in the country. More recently, Carlson has complained that America’s armed forces are becoming “more feminine, whatever feminine means anymore,” just as China’s are “more masculine.”

Yet Ukraine manages to hold its own against what was thought, until recently, the second most powerful military in the world:

The success of the Ukrainian military over the past few months, along with the evolution of the Ukrainian state itself toward a more tolerant, more liberal norm, reveals what makes a better army in the modern world. Brains mean more than brawn, and adaptability means more than mindless aggression. Openness to new ideas and new equipment, along with the ability to learn quickly, is far more important than a simple desire to kill.

From the moment the Russian military crossed the border, the Ukrainians have outfought it, revealing it to be inflexible and intellectually vapid. Indeed when confronted with a Ukrainian military that was everything it was not—smart, adaptable, and willing to learn—the Russian army could only fall back on slow, massed firepower. The Battle of the Donbas, the war’s longest engagement, which started in late April and is still under way, exposed the Russian army at its worst. For months, it directed the bulk of personnel and equipment toward the center of a battle line running approximately from Izyum to Donetsk. Instead of breaking through Ukrainian lines and sending armored forces streaking forward rapidly, as many analysts had predicted, the Russian army opted to make painfully slow, incremental advances, by simply blasting the area directly in front of it. The plan seemed to be to render the area uninhabitable by Ukrainians, which would allow the Russians to advance intermittently into the vacuum. This was heavy-firepower, low-intelligence warfare on a grand scale, which resulted in strategically meaningless advances secured at the cost of unsustainably high Russian casualties. And in recent weeks, the Ukrainians have retaken much of the territory that Russia managed to seize at the start of the battle—and more.

I struggle to think of another case in the past 100 years when a major military power has performed as poorly against an adversary it was heavily favored to defeat. The supposedly second-strongest army in the world, with its martial spirit, brilliant doctrines, and advanced equipment, was thwarted and is now being pushed back by a Ukrainian military whose prospects most outsiders had dismissed before the war.

This phenomenon is not unfamiliar. I attended a small, upscale liberal arts university. They had a football program, fine, but not like more muscular ones in big schools. I recall one of our quarterbacks was a straight-A chemistry major. On occasion, we would play those larger teams, ones with players a head taller than our scholar-athletes. Ours held their own, sometimes even defeating teams with game plans based on brute force. Expected to lose and with nothing to prove, our guys played with their heads and performed over their heads.

This is what happened in Europe during World War II, argues O’Brien. English and U.S. forces “confronted with an overwhelming majority of German arms, planes, and ammunition” nonetheless “overcame brute force” by being “the most militarily skillful and adaptable.”

My late father-in-law was front-line infantry during that war. He remarked that German troops often abandoned their vehicles when they broke down. For Americans accustomed to tinkering with the family car or tractor back home, he said, it was a point of pride (masculine pride, if you like), to keep theirs running even if it took shoelaces, ballpoint pen springs, bubblegum, and ingenuity.

Brute force was not even the way to win a war back then:

The U.K., even though it fought around the world from 1939 to 1945, lost only 384,000 soldiers in combat. The U.S. lost even fewer, suffering approximately 290,000 battle deaths. The German armed forces, by contrast, lost more than 4 million soldiers.

Ukraine is proving the more adaptable force today, says O’Brien:

Just as the ability to absorb information is better than lunkhead hypermasculinity in a modern army, diversity and societal integration also bring major advantages. As Ukraine has become more diverse and tolerant, its army has benefited. In contrast with Putin’s homophobic military, the Ukrainian armed forces include LGBTQ soldiers who have incorporated “unicorn” insignia into their uniforms. The valor of these soldiers, and the rallying of the Ukrainian people around a vision of a tolerant and diverse society, have led to an overall increase in Ukrainian support for gay rights—and it underscores the belief that everyone has a role to play in the country’s defense.

The Russian experience could not be more different. Putin has made suppressing gay rights one of the hallmarks of his rule. Determined to capitalize on culture-war tropes of the American right, he has portrayed Russia as a victim of cancel culture. He has retained rigid control over Russian society. While the Ukrainians are opening up, he is clamping down—with what we are now seeing as rather extreme results.

O’Brien concludes, “Intelligence, technological savvy, and social integration are the assets that matter most on the modern battlefield.”

Or maybe Russians should tan their balls.

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Request a copy of For The Win, 4th Edition, my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us

Of hatred and fools

Published by Tom Sullivan on October 1, 2022

Exhibit … oh, who cares?

WWN veterans must have smiled at Roger Stone’s homage.

Donald J. Trump read the simmering GOP base better than party elders as early as 2011 and began flogging the birther conspiracy. A showman in the mold of P.T. Barnum, Trump knew what the marks would buy. The con man believed, then as now, there’s a sucker born every minute. The conservative base wanted red meat? He dished it to them, blasting immigrants, Muslims, and urban liberals with violent rhetoric, promising to “drain the swamp” in Washington and to “lock up” Hillary Clinton. They would follow him around the country, Deadhead style, bedecked in Trump-branded merch, for their regular feedings.

With such animosity breeds gullibility, suggests “Hatred Makes Fools of Us All,” the title of a Friday newsletter by The Atlantic‘s David French. The syllogism underlying the huckster’s pitch to the gullible begins, “If they’ll believe this….”

So, plucked from the far reaches of MAGAstan, Right Wing Watch posted this winner Friday morning:

Daily Beast fills in the details:

Two conspiracy-peddling former MAGA congressional candidates pushed an absolutely bonkers claim this week that the “Deep State” used “weather manipulation technology” to power up Hurricane Ian in order to hurt Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. DeAnna Lorraine, who unsuccessfully challenged Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi in 2020, said on her far-right online show that the federal government knows “how to manipulate and create big storms, hurricanes, tornadoes, climate change,” adding that “huge hurricanes seem to target red states” near elections. “In this case, possibly Ron DeSantis has been stepping out of line a lot and challenging, fighting the Deep State,” she added, noting that DeSantis is a likely GOP presidential candidate. Lauren Witzke, the Republican Party’s 2020 Senate nominee for Delaware, agreed that Ian “could be a weather-manipulated hurricane” before noting that the storm became a Cat-5 hurricane “overnight” and “does seem to be hitting the conservative areas of” Florida. “I’m not putting it past the elites to target something like this toward Florida as punishment for getting rid of vaccine mandates or getting rid of child grooming,” Witzke exclaimed.

Notice the blue strip at the bottom of the frame: “Biden Builds Transhuman Army using Immigrants.” It’s way out there.

ALIENS RAISE THE DEAD! CORPSE CORPS DRAFTED FROM BEYOND TO ATTACK HUMANS! — WWN

The Weekly World News ceased publication in 2007. Trump and the MAGA right filled the tabloid void with the Pillow Guy, Sidney Powell, Mike Flynn, Roger Stone, Rumble, Gab and Truth Social. The GOP is not-so-secretly WWN.

In May, for example, Stone told the ReAwaken America Tour event in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina:

“There is a Satanic portal above the White House, you can see it day and night,” the Trump ally claimed. “It exists. It is real. And it must be closed. And it will be closed by prayer,” he added, drawing claps and cheers. Stone went on to claim that this “portal” first appeared after President Joe Biden “became president, and it will be closed before he leaves.”

WWN veterans must have smiled at Stone’s homage.

This week, Ginni Thomas, fringe-right activist wife of Associate Justice Clarence, spoke with Jan. 6th Committee investigators. The details are not known, except that she did not renounce her conspiratorial faith (The Guardian):

Ginni Thomas, the hard-right conservative whose activities have raised conflict of interest concerns involving her husband, the US supreme court Justice Clarence Thomas, has told the committee investigating the January 6 insurrection that she still believes the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump.

And so it goes. Alien ambassadors, Satanic portals, bat boys. Oh, and rabid anti-communists are now Putinistas.

“I’m entirely unshocked that @CPAC has gone full Putin,” added The Lincoln Project’s Rick Wilson in responding to a since-deleted CPAC tweet (right).

“I don’t even RECOGNIZE this country anymore,” tweeted comedian Jay Black.

My high school journalism teacher brought in copies of National Enquirer, True Detective, and other such drug-store fare as examples of the breadth of journalism, even if of meager quality.

“At least they’re reading,” she said.

There is more afoot than the Weekly World News-ification of the extremist American right. What Rick F. once said about the redneck guy whose house we visited.

From a 2014 exploration of this type of disinfotainment, Steven Heller explained, “There are three three types of WWN reader, according to the editor—those who believe, those who don’t believe, and “those who want to believe but aren’t sure.”

Since then (and long before Trump), a large segment of the U.S. population has nurtured its own gullibility by feasting daily on its own grievance. Their drive to make America great again (for them only) has rendered the Republican Party “ideologically completely incoherent.” The Weekly World News just read its market first, even before Trump.

Hatred makes fools of us all. Ashli Babbit died for a cunning one.

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Request a copy of For The Win, 4th Edition, my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us