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Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

What’s So Hard About This?

Published by Tom Sullivan on July 17, 2024

They’re both old. The Republican is a lying criminal.

Joe Biden is an aging but accomplished public servant who occasionally loses his train of thought. Donald Trump is a self-obsessed, wannabe dictator, a convicted criminal three years younger, a pathological liar who falls asleep during his own trial and nominating convention. When Biden rambles, there’s a point at the end. When Trump rambles about sharks and showers and windmills, he’s incoherent.

A large swath of Americans finds it a challenge to choose between the two.

The press is more obsessed with Biden’s age and poor debate performance than with Trump’s firehose of lies and Project 2025 plans for euthanizing the republic. In Lester Holt’s NBC interview with Biden this week, Holt asked if Biden is considering dropping out of the presidential race. (Biden’s repeatedly said he won’t.) Biden answers, no. Holt won’t move on. He asks if Biden wants a chance to “get back on the horse” and “what happens if you have another episode like we saw during the debate?”

On Tuesday afternoon, Biden delivered a fiery, 30-minute speech before the NAACP convention in Las Vegas (watch it). He condemned Trump for “lying like hell” about the strong economy:

Then, capitalizing on Trump’s comment in last month’s debate in which he referenced “Black jobs,” Biden said, “Folks, I know what a Black job is: it’s the Vice President of the United States! I know what a Black job is: the first Black president in American history, Barack Obama!” as audience members roared in approval.

Biden forcefully touted his administration’s accomplishments and detailed legislative proposals for his second term, including a 5% cap on rent increases and a new assault weapon ban. He is finalizing plans for passing term limits for the Supreme Court and an enforceable ethics policy. Try finding coverage on today’s front pages.

“For more than two weeks, Biden had difficulty moving beyond the fallout from his faltering debate performance on June 27,” the Washington Post reports. Trump fomented an insurrection and picks a vice president more MAGA than himself, but Biden loses his place on the teleprompter and that merits a mention.

It’s not paranoia if they’re really out to get you. It doesn’t help that members of his congressional caucus are still trying to push him out of the race egged on by pundits. The virtual vote scheduled in late May to get around a ballot deadline in Ohio is now seen by “Pass the Torch, Joe” members as “an attempt to ram through his nomination.“

How many times do I have to say, get back to me with an alternate candidate and a plan and we’ll talk?

The irony here is that it’s progressives (the party’s DFHs) like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders who are keeping their heads and wanting to press ahead to the election fight without further ado.

Weeks after the first presidential debate (as Markos Moulitsas observed), Biden is still old and Donald Trump is still a liar.

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Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dumb Chose Vance

Published by digby on July 16, 2024

I can’t say I’m surprised. Choosing Vance was very dumb and it’s the kind of dumb I didn’t expect from Trump whose feral instincts are usually better than this:

MILWAUKEE — With the clock ticking to the Republican National Convention last week, Donald Trump met privately to discuss his running mate search with two of his closest advisers: his sons. 

The conversation quickly turned tense when the former president indicated that he was leaning toward Doug Burgum, until recently the largely unknown governor of North Dakota — but someone whose low-maintenance, no-drama personality would never threaten to outshine Trump.

That’s when Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump chimed in.

“Don Jr. and Eric went bats— crazy: ‘Why would you do something so stupid? He offers us nothing,’” a longtime Republican operative familiar with the discussion told NBC News.

“They were basically all like ‘JD, JD, JD,’” the operative said.

Trump ratified his sons’ recommendation here Monday, selecting Sen. JD Vance of Ohio as his vice presidential candidate. Trump called Vance with the news 20 minutes before announcing it on social media, a source familiar with the call said.

In choosing Vance, Trump made a different calculation than he did in 2016 and leaned fully into his MAGA base. Back then, he looked to his daughter and her husband — the more establishment-friendly Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner — for strategic advice. This time, his red meat-throwing sons have a more central role. And instead of going with a longtime traditional Republican like Mike Pence, Trump chose the MAGA warrior Vance. 

Burgum would have been the best choice. Fairly milquetoast, central casting, and could have been a pitch to the suburban whites Trump is having trouble with. The successful billionaire ticket. Rubio would have been better too. Hispanic, younger an establishment rep which could have possibly brought in some stragglers.

Vance is a hardcore online warrior type. He will repel the normies and the MAGAs were already in the tank.

Don Jr and Eric made the choice essentially by pushing their apparently weak daddy to pick their guy. A bad move in so many ways.

Who Goes Nazi?

Published by digby on July 16, 2024

In 1941, Harper’s Magazine published a piece by Dorothy Thompson called “Who Goes Nazi?”

It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi. By now, I think I know. I have gone through the experience many times—in Germany, in Austria, and in France. I have come to know the types: the born Nazis, the Nazis whom democracy itself has created, the certain-to-be fellow-travelers. And I also know those who never, under any conceivable circumstances, would become Nazis…

Let us look round the room.

It’s a fascinating piece, highly recommended, even if it shows its age in certain respects. I had not read it until someone on twitter pointed out that one character in particular describes J.D. Vance.

“Mr A” is a pillar of the community, a WASPy type who doesn’t have money but is well educated and cultured. He would never in a million years become a Nazi. “Mr. B” is similar but would probably go along to get along if it meant power and money but he wouldn’t be a true believer.

“Mr. C” is Vance:

The saturnine man over there talking with a lovely French emigree is already a Nazi. Mr. C is a brilliant and embittered intellectual. He was a poor white-trash Southern boy, a scholarship student at two universities where he took all the scholastic honors but was never invited to join a fraternity. His brilliant gifts won for him successively government positions, partnership in a prominent law firm, and eventually a highly paid job as a Wall Street adviser. He has always moved among important people and always been socially on the periphery. His colleagues have admired his brains and exploited them, but they have seldom invited him—or his wife—to dinner.

He is a snob, loathing his own snobbery. He despises the men about him—he despises, for instance, Mr. B—because he knows that what he has had to achieve by relentless work men like B have won by knowing the right people. But his contempt is inextricably mingled with envy. Even more than he hates the class into which he has insecurely risen, does he hate the people from whom he came. He hates his mother and his father for being his parents. He loathes everything that reminds him of his origins and his humiliations. He is bitterly anti-Semitic because the social insecurity of the Jews reminds him of his own psychological insecurity.

Pity he has utterly erased from his nature, and joy he has never known. He has an ambition, bitter and burning. It is to rise to such an eminence that no one can ever again humiliate him. Not to rule but to be the secret ruler, pulling the strings of puppets created by his brains. Already some of them are talking his language—though they have never met him.

Trump is “Mr. D”


D over there is the only born Nazi in the room. Young D is the spoiled only son of a doting mother. He has never been crossed in his life. He spends his time at the game of seeing what he can get away with. He is constantly arrested for speeding and his mother pays the fines. He has been ruthless toward two wives and his mother pays the alimony. His life is spent in sensation-seeking and theatricality. He is utterly inconsiderate of everybody. He is very good-looking, in a vacuous, cavalier way, and inordinately vain. He would certainly fancy himself in a uniform that gave him a chance to swagger and lord it over others.

Read the whole thing. You’ll recognize quite a few people in her portrait.

The World’s Largest Mosquito

Published by digby on July 16, 2024

“What do they call that, an AR-15 or something. A pretty big gun…”

Just listen to his ignorant rant on vaccines. I think he believes this, by the way. He was anti-vax for years blaming them for autism:

From 2018:

f there is one thing pro-vaccine campaigners and their opponents probably agree on, it is that Donald Trump has provided a major boost to the anti-vaccine cause.

On more than 20 occasions, Mr Trump has tweeted about there being a link between vaccines and autism, something experts at the government’s leading public health institute say is not true. He also repeated the claim during a Republican primary debate, a remark that was immediately dismissed as false by the Autistic Self Advocacy Network.

Prior the election, Mr Trump met with four prominent anti-vaccine campaigners at a fundraiser in Florida – disbarred British doctor Andrew Wakefield, Mark Blaxill, editor-at-large of the Age of Autism website, Gary Kompothecras, a chiropractor and Trump donor from Sarasota, and Jennifer Larson, an entrepreneur who has campaigned against the use of vaccines in her home state of Minnesota.

The campaigners celebrated after Mr Trump won the election and met with another anti-vaccine campaigner, Robert F Kennedy Jr (son of Robert Kennedy who was assassinated in 1968).

Mr Kennedy later told members of his environmental law firm he would be taking a leave of absence to chair an advisory panel on the issue at the president-elect’s request. “Mr Trump has some doubts about the current vaccine policies and he has questions about it” he told reporters.

After news of the meeting emerged, Ms Larson wrote on the Age of Autism website: “Now that Trump won, we can all feel safe in sharing that Mr Trump met with autism advocates in August. He gave us 45 minutes and was extremely educated on our issues. Mark [Blaxill] stated ‘You can’t make America great with all these sick children and more coming’. Trump shook his head and agreed.”

He got tied up in knots over the COVID vaccine trying to have it both ways and ruined his cred on the subject. But he was anti-vax long before that.

I won’t be surprised if Kennedy takes him up on his offer. He’s that bad.

Junior’s Crying

Published by digby on July 16, 2024

Jacob Soboroff wrote a book on the subject so he knows what he’s talking about. And Junior is lying but I suppose he may not even know it. He’s very dumb.

After acting like a cheap thug, he went on Newsmax and whined about it:

Apparently, reporters were supposed to speak in hushed tones and not ask any real questions because of Trump’s close call on Saturday. That might make sense except for the fact that they are at a massive political event that’s being covered on all the news networks and policy is on the menu, Evidently, they assumed this was just a coronation like the one England just produced for King Charles. Sorry guys, this is America.

Besides, that’s pretty much what they have. The networks were unbearable yesterday with the endless solemn admonitions that “political violence is NEVER acceptable” and “turn down the temperature” over and over again even as the GOP speakers were indulging in their usual trash talk. and the crowd was rhythmically fist pumping while chanting “fight, fight, fight.” Their ritualized “concern” was bizarre in that context and made for very disjointed coverage. It made me yearn for the old “thoughts and prayers” since none of their lugubrious commentary was actually based on knowledge that the shooting was motivated by politics at all.

They really need to do better. Good for Soboroff for at least trying.

Lowlight Reel

Published by digby on July 16, 2024

I know most of you probably spared yourselves the pain of watching the right wing Trumpfest last night. Here are a few of the more indicative moments of the “unity” convention:

It was awful. Of course it was.

Incompatible With Democracy

Published by Tom Sullivan on July 16, 2024

Trump, Vance, Project 2025

Zack Beauchamp over at Vox reflects on his encounter with Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) in 2022. In 20 words or less: “He was friendly, thoughtful, and smart — much smarter than the average politician I’ve interviewed.”

Also, Vance’s “worldview is fundamentally incompatible with the basic principles of American democracy.” Donald Trump selected Vance as his election-denying 2024 running mate on Monday. A mere 18 months into his first-ever elected office, Vance is another in the line of “best people” Trump has selected, and ready to step into the Oval Office when Trump is gone.

A second Trump administration, Vance suggests, should “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat” in the US government and “replace them with our people.” And if a court objects, Trump should ignore the law. It’s a king’s divine right.

Vance is an admirer of authoritarian Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. He is, according to inmate Steve Bannon, “at the nerve center of this movement.” He would enable Trump’s worst instincts and place his interpersonal and intellectual skills at Trump’s disposal.

Beauchamp elaborates:

Vance’s ascendance represents the death of this “adults in the room” model. Backed by people drawn from the lists of loyal staffers being prepared by places like Heritage, Vance would not only support Trump’s radical impulses but seems likely to spearhead efforts to implement them.

He would be a direct conduit from the shadowy world of far-right influencers, where Curtis Yarvin is a respected voice and Viktor Orbán a role model, straight to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

In 2004, Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean described himself as hailing from “the Democratic wing of the Democratic party.” If the GOP under Trump has indeed evolved into an authoritarian party, then Vance hails from its authoritarian wing.

An alarm bell in the night

“Some of the most fervent and ruthless authoritarian apparatchiks started as opportunists,” William Kristol and Andrew Egger observe of Vance at The Bulwark:

Vance has been more consistently and fervently America First in foreign policy than Trump. He’s more committed to ethno-nationalism and anti-“elite” populism than Trump. He’s been more committed to destroying any non-political civil service than Trump. He’s more contemptuous of the norms, institutions, and mores of liberal democracy than Trump.

Trump is a con man, a liar, and a demagogue with authoritarian tendencies who might be said to have stumbled into leadership of an authoritarian movement. As a result, Trump’s opponents have at times failed to take him seriously. That’s been a mistake.

But not to take the current Trump-Vance moment seriously would be a bigger mistake.

By 2028 (if Trump wins), Vance will

… have Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and all the wannabe leaders of American-style fascism organized behind him.

The selection of J.D. Vance confirms that the Trump movement now is a full-on authoritarian movement. There are no excuses for the many varieties of acquiescent Trump supporters and enablers failing to see that.

Vance’s selection is “an alarm bell in the night.”

Court Accountability Action (CAA) offers a rogues’ gallery of dossiers on Project 2025 players including Vance.

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For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.

Don’t Worry, Get Busy Winning

Published by Tom Sullivan on July 16, 2024

Democrats have the better turnout operation

Minutes before the Pennsylvania shooting on Saturday, Markos Moulitsas, the founder of Daily Kos, argued before a Netroots nation audience in Baltimore that the fundamentals of this presidential election still favor Democrats. Don’t panic.

Whatever the progressive left thought in 2020, Black voters in South Carolina “picked the least inspiring, most boring candidate” in the Democratic field. What we got for that choice was a win that November and, unexpectedly, “a great president.”

Many Democrats who should have second-guessed themselves in 2020 are failing to do it again in 2024. Every day we focus on Biden’s age is a day Donald Trump wins the news cycle. Meantime, Democrats have overperformed the polls in special elections. They’ve won abortion-related ballot initiatives everywhere while Trump underperformed in his primaries. Republicans tell pollsters they support Trump, Markos reminded, but then don’t show up for him. Voters proved polling favoring the right wing wrong in India, in Poland, and in France. You don’t have to be Simon Rosenberg to have Hopium.

Mike Lux reminds readers that Biden is in a dead heat with Trump in a slew of recent national polls compiled by Rosenberg:

  • 50%-48% NPR/Marist
  • 44%-42% GW/YouGov
  • 47%-46% Split Ticket/Data For Progress
  • 47%-46% Clarity
  • 50%-50% Emerson College
  • 46%-46% Washington Post (Harris leads Trump 49-47)
  • 42%-43% Redfield & Wilton
  • 42%-43% Bendixen and Amandi (Harris leads Trump)
  • 41%-42% Big Village
  • 42%-44% Morning Consult
  • 40%-43% Economist/YouGov

And in the three most important battleground states, Biden is tied (MI), down 1 (WI), and down 2 (PA) in the public poll averages. Even in the four battleground states he is a little further behind in, the margins are barely outside the margin of error: 4 points in NV and AZ, 5 in GA, and 6 in NC.

People are calling Biden too old, but in the last few days he hosted and led a successful week long NATO summit, did an hour-long press conference, gave an inspiring speech at a Black church in Philly, and gave a passionate, fighting populist speech to a fired up crowd in Michigan.

If elections come down to turnout, the better turnout operation wins. Basic blocking and tackling. Trump has outsourced his to Turning Point Action, a “bonkers” decision, Bill Scher noted last month. Turning Point has a “nonexistent track record of successful electioneering and [a] reputation for financial mismanagement.” Bill Scher warned on Monday that the Turning Point decision could be disastrous:

Don’t take my word for it. The Atlantic’s Tim Alberta published an in-depth investigation of Trump’s campaign infrastructure and found other Republicans quietly fretting about the outsourcing plan:

[Trump’s political director James] Blair explained that allied organizations such as Turning Point Action, America First Works, and the Faith and Freedom Coalition would handle much of the right’s canvassing effort moving forward … (This isn’t the relief Republicans officials have been hoping for: Turning Point, for example, became a punch line among GOP strategists and donors after it promised to deliver Arizona— where its founder, Charlie Kirk, resides—in the 2022 midterms, only for Democrats to win every major statewide race. Kirk’s group is assuring dubious party officials and major donors that its operation has scaled up, but several told me they aren’t buying it.)

The fundamentals of the 2024 election remain favorable to Democrats. Gross Domestic Product is growing. Unemployment is low. Wages have been beating inflation for more than a year. American soldiers aren’t fighting and dying in an unpopular ground war. For over a century, incumbent parties in power have won American elections under these conditions.

Democrats have the better turnout operation. Biden is funding it well and fielding “a behemoth of a campaign.” (You should help out where you are.)

Trump is cocky and doubling down on MAGA. Days after the failed assassination attempt on Trump and weekend demands for lowering the rhetorical temperature, Republicans trotted out N.C. Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson on the first night of the “unity” Republican national convention. Robinson recently shouted (and didn’t care who didn’t like it), “Some folks need killing!”

The MAGA GOP is a clown show, albeit a dangerous one. Will they take everything you hold dear while you sit on your hands?

On Monday, Judge Aileen Cannon in dismissing the Trump classified documents case on procedural grounds demonstrated once again that the MAGA agenda is to gut accountability to the rule of law for Republicans. You, of course, will experience the full weight in the Republic of Trump.

Yesterday too, Trump selected Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance as his running mate despite Vance bringing nothing to the table electorally and being more radical than Trump on banning women’s reproductive freedoms. Trump wants a VP who will do what Mike Pence wouldn’t more than he wants to win.

This election will come down to who wants to win more. Do you?

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For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.