Radio Rwhite House
by Tom Sullivan
“It’s working. Don’t let anyone tell you different,” Charlie Pierce laments.
Pierce responded to news yesterday that a man in Encino, California phoned a series of death threats to the Boston Globe. Pierce worked there for nine years and has lots of friends and one relative there still. The Boston Globe itself reports the suspect Robert Darrell Chain, 68, was arrested by the FBI Thursday and charged with making a threatening communication in interstate commerce:
Federal prosecutors said that Chain made 14 calls to the Globe’s main newsroom number between Aug. 10 and 22 after the newspaper’s editorial page called on media outlets to unite in opposition to Trump’s angry rhetoric against the press, including repeated references to reporters as “the enemy of the people.”
Authorities said the calls were “profane, lewd, and peppered with antigay slurs.”
“Anyone — regardless of political affiliation — who puts others in fear for their lives will be prosecuted by this office,” said Andrew Lelling, the US attorney in Massachusetts. “In a time of increasing political polarization, and amid the increasing incidence of mass shootings, members of the public must police their own political rhetoric. Or we will.”
US attorneys might want to forward that public service message to the gentleman sitting behind the Resolute desk. When he’s not watching Fox News, he’s stoking public anger on Twitter or among supporters at rallies. He’s a one-man RTLM.
NBC News’ David Douglas reports that after his court appearance in Los Angeles, Chain told reporters, ““America was saved when Donald J. Trump was elected President.”
The FBI reportedly found 20 guns at Chain’s home. An FBI affidavit that includes some transcripts of the calls is here.
Conservative columnist Michael Gerson calls out the sitting president for stoking fear among evangelical Christians meeting at the White House this week. The November election is “a referendum on your religion,” Trump warned. If Democrats prevail, it will be “the beginning of ending” of everything they have, “and they will do it quickly and violently. And violently. There is violence.”
Gerson writes, “Fighting for Trump, the president argued, is the only way to defend the Christian faith. None of these men and women of God, apparently, gagged on their hors d’oeuvres.”
Meanwhile, someone from Team Trump is playing fast and loose with sensitive security information. And using it to target political enemies, no less:
WASHINGTON — A former C.I.A. officer running for Congress accused a super PAC aligned with Speaker Paul D. Ryan on Tuesday of improperly obtaining her entire federal security clearance application — a highly sensitive document containing extensive personal information — and then using it for political purposes.
Abigail Spanberger, the Democratic candidate challenging Representative Dave Brat of Virginia, sent a cease-and-desist letter to Corry Bliss, the executive director of the Congressional Leadership Fund, which has raised more than $100 million to help Republicans in the midterm elections. She demanded that the super PAC destroy all copies of the form and agree to not use the information in any fashion.
The United States Postal Service blamed human error for the release to a Republican-aligned (oppo) research firm. Since Spanberger is a Democrat, Alex Jones did not launch into a spittle-flecked rant about another deep state conspiracy.
But the most disturbing news of the week (as we discussed yesterday) is the State Department is denying passports to (in some cases passport renewals to) Latinos from the southern border region. Their citizenship is now under blanket suspicion. The burden of proving themselves true Americans is on them.
“At this point, the Trump administration has the burden of proving this is anything other than vile, unadulterated racism,” writes Eugene Robinson.
Charlie Pierce is less polite:
This is unprecedented. This is unAmerican in the extreme. This is the kind of thing out of which blood-and-soil laws are drawn. (Dr. Wilhelm Stuckert, please call your office in hell.) Your papers are never in order, if you happen to fit a broadly drawn racial profile. This is fascism, pure and simple.
First they came for the non-citizen troops and veterans promised citizenship. Then they came for military enlistees promised naturalization. Then they came for citizens suspected of falsifying their citizenship applications. Then they came for hundreds of U.S. citizens that look to ICE agents like noncitizens. Now, they’re coming for Americans who were infants delivered by midwives the government suspects (but cannot prove) may have falsified their birth documents many decades ago.
There’s a loud, strong signal broadcast from Radio Rwhite House that it won’t stop there.
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