Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

🚨🚨🚨Last night, Sen. Mike Lee wrote a blueprint for destroying Social Security. Lee’s thread was quickly amplified by Elon Musk, who Donald Trump has put in charge of slashing our earned benefits.This is a declaration of war against seniors, people with disabilities, and the American public.

— Social Security Works (@socialsecurityworks.org) 2024-12-03T14:47:44.926Z

Here is that thread:

 1. Of all the deceptive sales techniques the U.S. government has used on the American people, one of them—the Social Security Act—gets far too little attention. Buckle up because this is a wild ride.

2. In 1935, the American people were sold a bill of goods. They were told, “Pay into this system, and it’ll be YOUR money for retirement.” Sounds great, right?

3. But here’s where it gets juicy, in a really ugly way. Two years later, when the Supreme Court was considering the constitutionality of the Social Security Act, the government did a complete 180.

4. The government—through Assistant Attorney General Robert Jackson—argued in essence, “Oh no, this isn’t YOUR money at all. This is a TAX, and we can do whatever we want with it.” Classic bait and switch.

5. Let’s not forget the ruling in Helvering v. Davis, where the Supreme Court upheld the Social Security Act by embracing the government’s argument / admission that what people pay into Social Security is tax revenue—available to be used as Congress may direct—and not at all money belonging to those who paid it.

6. So, to summarize: the proponents of the Social Security Act told American workers that what they paid into the system would remain *their* money, not the government’s—to get Congress to pass it—and then told the courts the exact opposite when defending the Act’s constitutionality. The Supreme Court accepted the government’s argument, to the great detriment of the American people.

7. Now, let’s talk about what happens to “your money” once it’s in the government’s hands. Spoiler alert: it’s not managed like your IRA or 401(k). 

8. First of all, this money doesn’t sit in a nice, individual account with your name on it. No, it goes into a huge account called the “Social Security Trust Fund.” 

9. But here’s the kicker—the government routinely raids this fund. Yes, you heard that right. They take “your money” and use it for whatever the current Congress deems “necessary.” 

10. Every few years, there’s talk in Congress about “saving Social Security.” I’ve introduced and cosponsored a number of measures over the years that would fix it. But most in Congress show little desire to fix it, and are instead constantly looking for ways to “borrow” from it—with no plan to put it back. 

11. And the returns? Forget about compound interest or stock market gains. Your “investment” in Social Security can give you a return lower than inflation. 

12. If you had put the same amount into literally ANYTHING else—a mutual fund, real estate, even a savings account—you’d be better off by the time you reached retirement age, even if the government kept some of it! 

13. Do the math: with Social Security, you’re looking at a return that’s pathetic compared to market averages. It’s not even an investment; it’s a tax. 

14. And let’s talk about how this system is set up to fail. The demographic shift? More retirees, fewer workers. It’s almost fair to compare it to a Ponzi scheme that’s running out of new investors. 

15. Every dollar you pay into Social Security, only to see it gobbled up by the government itself, is a dollar you can’t invest in your own future. It’s government dependency at its worst. 

16. Remember, this isn’t just about retirement. It’s about independence, about controlling your own destiny. With Social Security, you control nothing. 

17. The government promises you security but gives you dependency. It promises ownership but gives you a tax receipt. 

18. And don’t get me started on the management. The Social Security Administration is a bureaucratic behemoth, not exactly known for its efficiency or innovation. 

19. If you think your money is safe there, you’re in for a rude awakening. The mismanagement, the waste, the deception—it’s all on display. 

20. So, what’s the solution? We need real, genuine reform. Within the Social Security system, Americans should be able to invest in their own future, and not be shackled by the worst parts of this outdated, mismanaged system. 

21. It’s time we acknowledge the truth: Social Security as it now exists isn’t a retirement plan; it’s a tax plan with retirement benefits as an afterthought. 

22. We were sold a dream, but received a nightmare. It’s time for a wake-up call. We need real reform. 

23. It’s time for Americans to know the true history of the Social Security Act. The more people learn the truth, the more they’ll start demanding answers, options, and real reform from Congress. Please help spread the word. 

24. The history of the Social Security Act—which sadly must include the deceptive manner in which it was sold to the American people—is yet another reason why America’s century-long era of progressive government must be brought to a close.

I’m not going to take the time to rebut all that. I’m sure you know it’s bullshit and that Social Security is a social insurance plan which is paid for the way all such programs are paid for.

But go ahead Elon. Try it.

Would you buy a used covert operation from this man?

Frank Figliuzzi, former FBI assistant director for counterintelligence and national security contributor for NBC News and MSNBC, flagged this on the hellsite. (Yes, I still monitor.):

A self-described “deep state” wrecking ball, Kash Patel is a favorite of Trump’s MAGA base. However, during the first Trump administration, Patel’s actions revealed him as a bombastic fool who put SEAL Team Six in harm’s way through his ineptitude. open.substack.com/pub/theicema…

— Seth Hettena (@hettena.bsky.social) 2024-12-01T16:08:46.292Z

Kash Patel’s knees are scabbed from making obeisance to Donald Trump. And he’s got a fanatic’s zeal (check the eyes) for punishing Trump’s enemies. Which is why Trump wants to make him director of the FBI next year.

Hettena points out at SpyTalk just how cavalierly Kash Patel operates in the security sphere:

On October 30, 2020, President Trump signed off on a mission to have SEAL Team Six rescue Philip Walton, a 27-year-old American who gunmen had abducted from his farm in the West African nation of Niger, near the border with Nigeria. The kidnappers had hustled Walton across the border to Nigeria and were demanding a $1 million ransom.

In their book Only I Can Fix It, journalists Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker reported that the plan called for the SEALs to parachute into northern Nigeria and move three miles on foot to reach the compound where Walton was being held.

Overflying Nigeria required permission from thge Nigerian government. I know you are surprised that the Trump administration bothered. But the Pentagon thought it best not to violate another country’s sovereignty without asking.

Patel told Secretary of Defense Mark Esper that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo “got the airspace cleared.”

Um, no. Pompeo later told Esper that he’d never spoken with Patel.

A few hours later, the Pentagon learned that Patel’s information was — what? — inaccurate. By this point, the SEALS were minutes away from crossing into Nigerian airspace. The aircraft circled for an hour while State obtained the necessary clearances.

The mission proceded successfully with no SEAL injuries.

But the Pentagon was still furious at Patel. Tony Tata, the Pentagon official to whom Patel had given the green light, confronted Patel in a rage.

“You could’ve gotten these guys killed!” Tata shouted at Patel, according to a report in The Atlantic. “What the fuck were you thinking?”

Patel’s response was: “If nobody got hurt, who the fuck cares?”

Yes, put that man in charge of a federal law enforcement agency and his agent’s lives.

Like Trump’s loyalty is a one-way street. So is hypocrisy where the press is concerned.

Kevin Kruse, the Princeton historian, caught my attention Monday night when he posted the cancellation of his Washington Post subscription. Kruse posted a screenshot of the Post’s landing page making the Hunter Biden pardon out to be the biggest national story since Nov. 5. In disgust, Kruse threw up his hands and hit “cancel. “

The Post’s front page caught me by surprise because I was otherwise tied up with North Carolina Republicans trying to cancel 60,000 votes, including those of several friends. More on that in a minute.

— Kevin M. Kruse (@kevinmkruse.bsky.social) 2024-12-03T00:09:30.084Z

Author/journalist Mikel Jollet replied that the focus perfectly encapsulated what’s wrong with American journalism:

Is it a story? Sure.

But every newspaper in America devoting front page headlines to Hunter fucking Biden while Trump appoints a cabal of rapists, racists and con-men to positions of enormous power is MADNESS.

Donald Trump’s plans to spend his second term seeking vengeance against opponents, tanking the economy, ethnically cleansing nonwhite people, lining his pockets, selling out U.S. allies, and cozying up to brutish dictators is now background noise unworthy of the kind of attention the Post just gave the Bidens.

Know why? Because Democrats have a hypocrisy problem.

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes responded: “A thing everyone has forgotten is that Donald Trump basically sprang Roger Stone from prison so he could help with the coup and it was maybe a one day story.”

Josh Marshall of TPM responded: “This is why I seriously don’t want to ever hear from anyone about this pardon. Politico says it’s the most consequential pardon since Richard Nixon.”

Here’s a list of Trumps truly corrupt pardons

— Rachel Bitecofer (@rachelbitecofer.bsky.social) 2024-12-02T02:31:26.664Z

You get the point. Had Kamala Harris actually won the presidency last month, the press narrative would be “bad news for Democrats.” As is, losing by a whisker is “bad news for Democrats.”

But back to Republicans backstabbing voters in North Carolina. This deserves headlines it will never get.

While you were inundated with stories about the Biden pardon, Judge Jefferson Griffin (remember him?), the Republican challenger for a North Carolina state Supreme Court seat, is trailing incumbent Democrat Justice Allison Riggs in the ballot counting. Something must be done, amirite?

Griffin trails Riggs by over 600 votes as recounts continue. Desperate, Griffin and GOP attorneys assembled a list of 60,000 voters statewide whose ballots they allege were improperly counted. On the Buncombe list (my county) are several friends who have voted for years: a former president of the local NAACP, a manager at a downtown hotel, a former Asheville talk show host.

Chris Cooper, a political science professor at Western Carolina University, tells the Raleigh News and Observer that Griffin’s challenge is “a choose-your-own-adventure” gambit with no penalty for trying. “So the incentive is to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks.”

Griffin is not only attempting to stick it to Democrats. His attorneys can read election results. Throwing out 1,600 Buncombe votes in bulk will hurt Riggs more than Griffin. (Riggs won the county 64-36 percent.) Republican and unaffiliated votes Griffin cancels in pursuit of a win by any means necessary are simply collateral damage. They’ll always throw their own under the bus to win.

If you live in North Carolina, is your name on the GOP hit list? Here are the links by county.

Remember this big 2020 lie?

On a warm evening in May, a small galaxy of MAGA stars in tuxedos and floor length sparkling gowns stood around a pool sipping cocktails, eating plates of risotto and clinking champagne glasses under perfect palm trees.

They had gathered there, at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club, not for a campaign fundraiser or a holiday affair; but, rather, for a glitzy film premiere.

Dinesh D’Souza, the conservative provocateur, was releasing his documentary, “2000 Mules,” the most recent addition to the cannon of right wing conspiracy flicks questioning the well-established outcome of the 2020 election. And for the first formal viewing, he had chosen the site dubbed by the 45th president as the “Winter White House.” In doing so, D’Souza joined a growing list of those dabbling in MAGA film noir to turn to Mar-a-Lago for their coming out party.

[…]

“I mean, if you’re going to do a movie about the 2020 election, I don’t think you’re going to do it at the Javits Center in New York,” said conservative activist Charlie Kirk, one of the main figures in the D’Souza documentary.

The transformation of a Palm Beach club into a MAGA movie destination is yet another way in which Trump has managed to keep himself at the epicenter of modern conservatism. Barack Obama may have joined Netflix to help produce documentaries about climate change and the planet. Trump is convincing the documentarians to cover his election gripes and to come to him.

Well guess what?One theory Trump has cited often, based on a report he shared six times and deemed “fully verified,” outlines an “avalanche of irregularities” in five swing states. The document’s author and origin are unnamed and much of its evidence disproved. A more well-known lie he has frequently shared on Truth Social is the debunked “2,000 Mules” conspiracy theory, which he referenced eight times.

As Election Day 2022 approached, elections officials in Maricopa County, Arizona, were grappling with an unanticipated problem. Voters returning ballots to official drop boxes were being harassed and confronted. In one incident, men dressed in tactical gear were stationed near a drop box in Mesa.

There was an obvious trigger for the pattern: the release earlier that year of the film “2000 Mules.” The film asserted that the 2020 presidential election was stolen by “mules,” people hired to stuff drop boxes with ballots. The claim, filling demand for a narrative explaining Donald Trump’s loss that year, was taken seriously by his supporters. As NPR reported at the time, one Republican official in Arizona, responding to the film, encouraged state residents to police drop box locations in precisely the manner that was demonstrated in Maricopa.

But there was never any reason to take the film’s claims seriously. Over the weekend, one notable figure belatedly acknowledged that the film misled its audience: its creator, Dinesh D’Souza.

Oops.

One theory Trump has cited often, based on a report he shared six times and deemed “fully verified,” outlines an “avalanche of irregularities” in five swing states. The document’s author and origin are unnamed and much of its evidence disproved. A more well-known lie he has frequently shared on Truth Social is the debunked “2,000 Mules” conspiracy theory, which he referenced eight times.

Never mind…

The Trumpers think they’re a joke and that Biden has been a joke for adhering to them:

Donald Trump and his incoming administration officials think Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are suckers. They’re not shy about saying it.

Within the past month, Biden, Harris, and the current administration have repeatedly vowed an orderly, peaceful, fully cooperative transfer of power between Biden and Trump — a twice-impeached former president and convicted felon whom the president, vice president, and Democratic leaders regularly denounced as a “fascist” tyrant and clear threat to the constitutional order. 

It hasn’t just been the legal transfer and procedures to which Democrats have committed themselves. Biden has promised to attend Trump’s 2025 inauguration, even though Trump refused to grant him the same grace after the 2020 election. Of course, then-President Trump actively sought to overturn Biden’s 2020 election victory and even helped foment a violent coup at the U.S. Capitol as part of his monthslong effort to cling to power.

Not long after the election this early November, Biden hosted Trump at the White House for a pleasant photo opportunity. The president and vice president congratulated Trump, and Biden told him “welcome back” to his face, as the two men sat down for the news cameras, as if they were old pals who had just resolved a mildly heated argument.

These actions are all far, far above and beyond what Trump and his first administration were willing to do during the last U.S. presidential transition for Biden — including in its commitment to basic decorum and photo ops that don’t even technically affect the legal transfer of power. 

And — in the same way that top Trump adviser Stephen Miller privately found it funny that Biden actually preserved some of his and Trump’s preferred immigration crackdown methods — members of Team Trump find this asymmetrical level of commitment to norms, well, funny. 

“Some of us have been laughing about it,” an incoming Trump administration official tells Rolling Stone. 

It doesn’t matter if they are laughing. They’re just assholes, we know that. But it does say something about our current situation. The idea that norms can be upheld by Democrats alone is sophistry. Norms by definition cannot be norms if they are only upheld by one party.

I think Biden should have agreed to the the transition, as he did, but refused to meet and hold a photo op. And while he should go to the inauguration to show there is a peaceful transfer of power, plenty of other Democrats including dignitaries like Obama and Clinton should decline. Norms for thee but not for me just doesn’t work. (And yes, as I wrote earlier, Biden was right to pardon Hunter under the circumstances. Political pardons have been done by most presidents and there is no reason for Biden to sacrifice his son on the alter of “norms” that don’t apply to anyone but Democrats. Fie on that.)

Former Defense Secretary @MarkTEsper tells @kasie of Pete Hegseth: "It's one thing to have your political opponents attack you, but it's pretty damning when… a letter is uncovered where your mother is talking about your character and integrity and how you treat women." pic.twitter.com/zwuY0DcTRc

— CNN This Morning with Kasie Hunt (@CNNThisMorning) December 2, 2024

Former Defense Secretary Mark Esper: “It’s one thing to have your political opponents attack you, but it’s pretty damning when… a letter is uncovered where your mother is talking about your character and integrity and how you treat women.”

Over the weekend two bombshells hit the Pete Hegseth nomination for Defense Secretary. The first was that story in the NY Times revealing an email his mother sent to him a few years back castigating him for his grotesque treatment of his second wife and women in general. She has since repudiated it but admits that she sent it. And all the available evidence shows that she was absolutely right about her son’s lack of character and integrity. He’s a misogynist through and through.

Then last night The New Yorker dropped a story by Jane Mayer about Hegseth’s time running a couple of veteran’s groups, his only previous management experience. It’s not good. In fact, it’s very, very bad. Not only did he mismanage millions of dollars from the donors, he was a racist, abusive, drunk on the job and at many events in which was representing the group:

A previously undisclosed whistle-blower report on Hegseth’s tenure as the president of Concerned Veterans for America, from 2013 until 2016, describes him as being repeatedly intoxicated while acting in his official capacity—to the point of needing to be carried out of the organization’s events. The detailed seven-page report—which was compiled by multiple former C.V.A. employees and sent to the organization’s senior management in February, 2015—states that, at one point, Hegseth had to be restrained while drunk from joining the dancers on the stage of a Louisiana strip club, where he had brought his team. The report also says that Hegseth, who was married at the time, and other members of his management team sexually pursued the organization’s female staffers, whom they divided into two groups—the “party girls” and the “not party girls.”

In addition, the report asserts that, under Hegseth’s leadership, the organization became a hostile workplace that ignored serious accusations of impropriety, including an allegation made by a female employee that another employee on Hegseth’s staff had attempted to sexually assault her at the Louisiana strip club. In a separate letter of complaint, which was sent to the organization in late 2015, a different former employee described Hegseth being at a bar in the early-morning hours of May 29, 2015, while on an official tour through Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, drunkenly chanting “Kill All Muslims! Kill All Muslims!”

Only the best people.

Trump is allegedly hostile to drunks so we’ll see. aybe Hegseth has gone through rehab and can claim that he’s reformed. But this should still be a disqualifier sionce he isn’t qualified in the first place. He’s an accused rapist, which this story would indicate is more than believable. And we know that he couldn’t run a 7-11 much less the largest employer in the country. His nomination is absurd on its face.

The fact that this man and his fellow Trumpers are on a literal crusade against “DEI” saying that it results in people being hired into jobs for which they are unqualified is just:

Once upon a time there was a Trump toadie who wrote a fatuous children’s book about a good king being persecuted by an evil queen named Hillary Queenton until one day a virtuous wizard comes to his rescue and saves the day:

FBI Director nominee Kash Patel has published 2 children’s books that lionize Trump. “The Plot Against the King” features a thinly veiled Hillary Clinton as the villain going after “King Donald,” while Kash, a wizard called the Distinguished Discoverer, exposes a nefarious plot. pic.twitter.com/mdJshTpUKj

— John Tures (@JohnTures2) December 1, 2024

One might not think too much of such a silly little project except the “writer” of those books, Kash Patel, has been nominated to run the FBI in the new Trump administration. The story is a thinly veiled narrative of Patel’s original claim to fame, working for former congressman Devin Nunes’s House Intelligence Committee investigation into the origins of the Russia probe back in 2016. They weren’t written to entertain kids. They were written to cozy up to Trump and demonstrate his loyalty by literally portraying him as a king.

Trump hired Patel to join his National Security Council after the Nunes report came out where he quickly established himself as a direct conduit to Trump feeding him whatever he thought he wanted to hear. According to Trump’s Russia and Ukraine expert on staff, Fiona Hill, Trump even thought Patel was the man in charge of Ukraine in the White House when he had nothing to do with it at all. He insinuated himself into Trump’s inner circle so tightly that as the term was winding down and the coup attempt was getting going after the 2020 election, Trump named him as chief of staff to Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher C. Miller. Trump wanted to install him as either the Director of the CIA or the FBI the latter of which was met with Attorney General Bill Bar saying that he would do it “over my dead body.”

It looks like he’s finally going to get his wish, assuming the Senate goes along with the appointment. It’s always possible that they won’t. Considering Patel’s reputation for extremism and the threats he’s made during the time he was out of government, one would hope that at least a handful of Republicans would say it’s unacceptable. But it’s a very thin hope at this point.

All of this assumes that Trump fires the current director Christopher Wray, his own appointee, who still has three years to go on his term. That job is unique in that it was designed to be so above partisan politics that the 10 year term can extend even beyond an 8 year presidency. Presidents have the power to dismiss them but until Trump fired James Comey because he wasn’t “loyal” enough to drop the investigation into Russian interference, there had only been one other instance when it was a case of the Director facing serious ethical violations. Trump apparently plans to fire Wray for no reason at all except that he wants to install a personal henchman in the job. The idea of an apolitical FBI Director is no longer operative. From now on, they will always be seen as members of the president’s team, something that really was not true until Trump. It almost seems quaint to think about it now.

Patel has made the agenda clear with this clip that succinctly lays out what he believes his mission at the FBI would be:

Here is Trump’s nominee for FBI Director Kash Patel calling for “offensive operations” to jail Americans who they consider “the enemy.”

“We will go out and find the conspirators… Yes, we are going to come after the people in the media” pic.twitter.com/2PMNHWN5U7

— No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen (@NoLieWithBTC) December 1, 2024

A year ago, Trump appeared before a gala of young Republicans and he looked at Patel in the crowd, saying, “Get ready, Kash, get ready.” He’s ready.

During the Trump exile in Mar-a-lago Patel took advantage of the wingnut welfare racket and made himself some money. He worked for Trump, of course, along with various think tanks. But he also created a brand for himself (K$h) and sold those childrens books and another one called Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for Our Democracy  about his years fighting the against the evil cabal that wants to destroy America. He sold K$h wine, clothing, playing cards among other things. He endorsed products and even modeled them:

As history professor and author of “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present” Ruth Ben-Ghiat wrote on X/twitter, “Note the K$H logo. I could update the masculinity chapter of #Strongmen with this image.”

The Atlantic published the definitive profile of Patel last year, a piece by Elaina Plott Calabro which delved deeply into his early years growing up in New York and time spent working as a lawyer. He was a public defender for a while and then became a federal prosecutor where early on he was apparently considered a bit of a showboating lawyer but generally a nice guy. But something happened along the way (beyond his burning ambition) when he found himself embarrassed in the courtroom one day and developed an intense grievance against the Justice Department for allegedly failing to defend him in the press. There were other perceived slights that followed and that resentment seems to have fermented into a poisonous hostility toward the institution and the goverment itself. Like Trump, he believes that he’s been persecuted and oppressed and is determined to wreak revenge on all those he believes have wronged him — and wronged the man to whom he has pledged his total fealty, Donald Trump.

That sense of persecution is what all of the Trump nominees for the law enforcement, intelligence and military institutions share. Their eagerness to burn it all down is what they have in common and I would imagine that after what they’re going to go through with the confirmation process and the media attention, those feelings will be even more intense. There is no reason to believe that any of them will moderate once they assume the mantle of responsibility.

Trump is drunk with power right now. According to Axios, he has Elon Musk beside him 24/7 whispering in his ear “pushing ‘radical reform’ of, well, almost everything. As he sits next to Trump discussing administration picks, Musk often asks if the person embodies “radical reform” — massive cuts and blow-it-up-to-rebuild instincts.” He’s no doubt telling Trump how he fired everyone at the companies he bought and rebuilt them from the ground up, something which Trump, with his little family business has never done having only played a real boss on a reality TV show. Trump wouldn’t want to look weak to the richest man in the world. He’s ready to blow it all up to impress him.

Kash Patel is a loyal true believer with a readiness to do whatever it takes to get revenge. Trump has finally found his Roy Cohn.

Kash’s Enemies List:

Salon

Hunter Biden was set to be sentenced and probably put in jail this week on a trumped up charge that was brought solely because he was Joe Biden’s son. He lied on a form about being on drugs and he paid his taxes late. He entered into a plea deal in which he would admit guilt and get probation, a fair sentence, and the prosecution blew it up in court. He could have faced years in jail for crimes that no one who hadn’t also committed much more serious crimes would have ever been prosecuted.

Biden pardoned Hunter tonight and he did the right thing.

HunterHere’s the reality. No USAtty would have charged this case given the underlying facts. After a 5 year investigation the facts as discovered only made that clearHad his name been Joe Smith the resolution would have been – fundamentally and more fairly – a declinationPardon warranted

— Eric Holder (@ericholder.bsky.social) 2024-12-02T01:08:38.641Z

There is a lot of discussion over on BlueSky decrying this saying that Biden has destroyed the argument that presidents shouldn’t use abuse the pardon power and Trump will now be able to say he can pardon all the J6ers.

First of all, Trump doesn’t need any excuse to pardon his henchmen. He already pardoned Steve Bannon, Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, Roger Stone and Jared Kushner’s father whom he just named to be the Ambassador to France! Even Dinesh D’Souza and Joe Arpaio! Roger Stone is his best friend. The others are close political allies and in laws.

Trump also pardoned every manner of criminal, some of whom gave his friends money for the privilege, many of whom have gone on to commit crimes again. It’s utter nonsense to think that pardoning Hunter changes anything when it comes to Trump.

In any case, if you want a precedent that Trump could use if he wanted to (he sees no need for such things) this is the one that is the most analagous:

President Joe Biden pardoned thousands of people who were convicted of use and simple possession of marijuana on federal lands and in the District of Columbia, the White House said Friday, in his latest round of executive clemencies meant to rectify racial disparities in the justice system.

The categorical pardon builds on a similar round issued just before the 2022 midterm elections that pardoned thousands convicted of simple possession on federal lands eligible. Friday’s action broadens the criminal offenses covered by the pardon. Biden is also granting clemency to 11 people serving what the White House called “disproportionately long” sentences for nonviolent drug offenses.

Biden, in a statement, said his actions would help make the “promise of equal justice a reality.”

Should Biden not have done it so that no one could say that it set a precedent for Trump?

The reason they brought the charges against Hunter was to break Biden, just as he said in the pardon statement:

No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son – and that is wrong. There has been an effort to break Hunter – who has been five and a half years sober, even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution. In trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me – and there’s no reason to believe it will stop here. Enough is enough.

I wrote about this a while back:

The right has attempted to turn Joe Biden’s care and concern for a son who was going through a major life crisis, which included substance abuse, wild partying and a range of self-destructive behavior, into a corruption scandal. No one can possibly read the emails from father to son that have been extracted from Hunter Biden’s laptop and see anything but compassion and love. In fact, I’m sure Republicans understand that: What they are really trying to do is push Joe Biden to break down and cry in public.

Seriously: It’s an old ratfucking trick from the Nixon years whose dastardly crew famously goaded Sen. Edmund Muskie, the Democratic frontrunner early in the 1972 campaign, into getting emotional over a fake letter impugning his wife. I have no doubt that the right-wing dirty tricksters of today are believing their own propaganda that Biden is a feeble old man who is overly sentimental about his family, and they think they can push him into doing the same thing.

We are a long way from 1972 and I suspect that even if Biden did cry about his son, the country would feel kinship with him, not disdain. There is hardly a family in America that is not touched by similar trauma.

He didn’t break. As Dave Weigel quipped on BlueSky:

Biden, wanting to Uphold the Norms, agreed to keep on a Trump-appointed prosecutor who was probing his son. Created a special counsel to probe his own post-VP document retention. Kept on Durham so he could finish a Trump-ordered probe of 2016.

What did he get? Nothing.

He got nothing. Nobody cared. It changed nothing. He realized that sacrificing his son to prison on the alter of the same “norms” that have been and will again be shat upon by Donald Trump and his henchmen at every turn would have been meaningless.

By the way, before anyone gets too excited about pardon “norm breaking” it pays to recall that George Bush Senior pardoned half the Reagan administration on Christmas eve before he left office on Iran Contra charges — they were culpable in selling arms to Iran in exchange for hostages and using the money to circumvent congress by sending it to the Nicaraguan contras in secret. Not THAT was a norm buster.

And then there’s this from one of our favorite Democrats, Jimmy Carter:

Everyone needs to get a grip. There have been political pardons since the beginning of the country and Trump would have pardoned his cronies and cult members no matter what Joe Biden did. He’s already proved that! All of our remonstrating about how Biden was pure and he is evil would have meant absolutely nothing unless we all want to see Hunter martyred over this nonsense just to prove a point (which woulodn’t be proven anyway.) Meanwhile, Kash Patel and Pam Bondi are on record saying they would go after Hunter Biden and the rest of the “Biden Crime Family” with everything they have. It’s probably a good idea to take that seriously right now.

A rule of law turned inside out

The whole world will watch Donald Trump and his gang of thieves defenestrate the “rule of law” in Putinesque style.

Michael Tomasky considers the implications of Trump nominating Kash Patel to run the FBI inside what Trump likes to call the Department of Injustice. Trump 2.0 aims to make the name a reality. Patel’s only real qualification is that he is a “one-thousand-percent Trump loyalist,” Tomasky writes:

We’re about to enter a world where the rule of law is going to be turned inside out—where everything is converted into its bizarro-world version. It’s a world the conservative movement has been building for 50 years. It took Trump to dare to say the things that no other Republican president would quite say—about how the entire legal apparatus of the United States government is illegitimate and corrupt. But Trump said those things, and he opened the floodgates. For the next four years, we will be living, assuming Patel’s confirmation and that of Pam Bondi as attorney general, under a justice system where the following black-is-white presumptions will hold true:

• Donald Trump, far from being the one-step-ahead-of-the-law hoodlum he’s been his entire adult life, is America’s last honest man, and every legal effort that attempts to say otherwise is, by definition, corrupt and a lie.
• Joe Biden’s near 50-year record of never having been attached to scandal (except a case of plagiarism) is not evidence that Biden has lived an unusually clean public life; it’s evidence of a broad conspiracy by the deep state to protect Democrats. Just wait and see.
• It’s axiomatic that the 2020 election was stolen, as the federal government, now that it is in honest hands, will prove.
• January 6, 2021, was not an insurrection; it was a patriotic outcry by citizens who know the truth, and the attempt to “get to the bottom of” it was the real insurrection—a conspiracy against truth of unfathomable proportions that will now be justly avenged.

Etc., etc.

For all the raising of alarms, the punditry is short on countermeasures. I’m reminded of the anti-nuclear movement’s Helen Caldicott and her rapid-fire, scare-them-straight speech about the horrifying effects of nuclear weapons. Even her allies grew weary of the scare tactics:

“We knew it was past when someone interrupted the speech one evening, actually interrupted it, and said, ‘We know all that, but what can we do?’”

From his remove in England, Brian Beutler recommends Democrats find some actual leaders, stat, while they still have time to define the incoming Trump regime.

“Instead, the spectrum of congressional opposition to Trump ranges from total silence to voluntary obeisance,” he writes. If not naive offers by Democrats to work together on progressive-ish policies toward which Trump made feints but will in no way deliver.

Beutler offers a model from the Obama-era, that used by Republicans against him:

When Barack Obama won a genuinely overwhelming victory in 2008, Republicans began plotting lockstep opposition before he’d governed a full day.

Voting was a component of their strategy, but far from the totality. Their rhetoric was defiant. Their procedural maneuvers were designed not to expose Democrats’ promises as hollow, but to mire them in legislative quicksand. When they proclaimed interest in bipartisan dealmaking, the bad faith was palpable. They might as well have crossed their fingers behind their backs and chortled.

They refused to help Obama revive the economy, then blamed him for the economic destruction they had caused. When the right-wing grassroots proved restive, Republicans and their allied groups egged them on and helped them organize.

The strategy was a wild success.

Maybe. It wasn’t enough of a success to prevent Obama’s reelection in 2012, but it launched the T-party movement that morphed into MAGA once Trump rode his golden escalator into history. That T-party opposition model could work for Democrats, Beutler argues, giving them something to offer voters in 2026 and 2028:

• If Republicans destroy the agencies that protect consumers, workers, and the environment from rapacious oligarchs, a new generation of Democrats will be prepared to reconstitute it, leaner and meaner, the moment they retake power.
• If Republicans rescind the federal health-coverage guarantee Democrats enacted under Obama, Democrats will restore it—this time by extending Medicare to all Americans, without hesitation.
• If Republicans dissolve the rule of law, Democrats will be prepared to re-establish a legitimate anti-corruption apparatus, and it will seek justice for any crimes committed between now and whenever that day comes.

But this is still more policy-speak, the sort that 77 million voters “in no mood for quiet professionalism” tuned out in 2024 while Democrats pursued their pet kitchen-table issues. The T-party protests were more visceral, and only nominally about being “taxed enough already.”

Benjamin Wallace-Wells argues in The New Yorker that perhaps the opioid crisis had as much of an impact in red areas of the country as economic conditions. A study by Carolina Arteaga, of the University of Toronto, and Victoria Barone, of Notre Dame, noticed the overlap in red areas among depopulation, job loss, cancer rates, and the opioid epidemic. Right-wing outlets wrapped the opioid crisis with border issues and made hay of it:

Many post-election op-eds have instructed the Democratic Party to move to the center, or to become more pragmatic, or to break with the neoliberal system more sharply. But the Democrats’ failure in the fentanyl case had little to do with political theory or economic systems. It was, much more simply, a failure of political attention. The history that Arteaga and Barone describe is not one that primarily apportions blame for the fentanyl crisis to more liberal immigration controls at the southern border. Bernie Sanders might look at this material and, not unfairly, call the ongoing suffering of the opioid epidemic a Purdue Pharma plot. But as with the other temporary crises that eventually came to doom the Biden Administration—the withdrawal from Afghanistan, the migrant surge at the southern border, and, perhaps most important, post-pandemic inflation—the Democrats were a little too ready to dismiss the hubbub over opioids as partisan hysteria, and a little too slow to notice that people were actually troubled.

The anxieties the right exploited were less about economic policy and more about people’s uneasiness about their own life circumstances.

Again, the GOP works people’s guts, not their heads. Democrats can’t seem to get out of theirs. Nor do they make enough fuss that earns enough press to improve their brand-image. Doing that will take some relearning. What I find is that teaching yellow dogs new tricks is a helluva challenge. It will be even more challenging in a world where the rule of law is a matter of caprice.

Now you see it, now you don’t

Before the 2024 election itself disappears down the memory hole, take a moment to consider the disappearance of voter fraud as a campaign issue. Democrats would cheat. There would be massive corruption in the election. Migrants Democrats were importing through Joe Biden’s open southern borders would tip the scales for Kamala Harris. Nearly 9 in 10 Trump voters believed voter fraud would play a major role in 2024. Etc.

Then Donald Trump won. Voter fraud vanished like ground fog at sunrise. It was morning in MAGAstan.

Politico and Morning Consult ran a poll:

In polling just days before the election, Trump supporters expressed little confidence in the election outcome, with a whopping 87 percent substantially or somewhat agreeing with the statement that voter fraud was a “serious issue” that could determine the outcome of the election. Among Harris supporters, roughly half expressed similar worries.

That partisan divide disappeared after Election Day.

Shocked?

Views on the economy flipped as well, considered a “very important” issue ahead of Nov. 5:

A week before the election, just 8 percent of self-identified Trump voters described the economy as on the “right track,” the polling found. But after Trump’s victory, that number swung to 28 percent — still a minority, but a substantial swing in a span of just a few weeks when economic conditions did not change dramatically.

Poynter examined election fraud claims and found that after Trump won “Republicans’ claims of chicanery mostly dissipated.” A few left-leaners picked them up, but not leaders among Democrats.

Politifact fact-checked multiple fraud claims (above). They mostly focused on swing states.

One pundit observed that for four years Donald Trump complained he’d been cheated and would be cheated again in 2024. It only took about four hours of election returns for voter fraud to disappear as an issue both for him and his base.

But he’ll always have 2020.