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Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Do You Think Trump Would Have Done This?

Published by digby on February 22, 2024

Not on your life

yt

From Foreign Policy:

Two weeks ago, Brazil’s federal police launched a high-profile raid against former President Jair Bolsonaro and more than 10 of his allies, including Brazil’s former navy chief, national security advisor, and ministers of defense and justice. Authorities accused the group of plotting a potential coup after Bolsonaro’s failed 2022 reelection bid.

Court documents related to the raid suggest that Bolsonaro personally edited a decree that would have overturned election results and imprisoned a Supreme Court justice; a general loyal to the president confirmed he would provide the troops needed to carry out the coup. Bolsonaro also allegedly pressured his cabinet to more forcefully share disinformation about supposed weaknesses in Brazil’s electoral system. The former president was asked to hand over his passport to authorities and may face decades in jail.

The recent revelations suggest that Brazilian coup-mongers’ plans were more advanced than initially believed. In the end, however, they did not get their way—in part due to divisions within Brazil’s armed forces that were the target of concerted pro-democracy efforts by U.S. President Joe Biden.

Biden’s stated commitment to defending democracy worldwide is often brushed off as mere rhetoric. After all, during his tenure, the United States has made uneasy compromises with autocrats to achieve its geopolitical objectives. Amid continued U.S. support for Israel’s assault on Gaza, Washington has also been branded a hypocrite in much of the global south.

This tide of criticism may explain why one of Biden’s most significant foreign-policy achievements to date remains curiously overlooked. Not only was Brazil’s democracy closer to the brink than initially understood, but targeted U.S. pressure on key Brazilian officials was likely decisive in guaranteeing the eventual outcome: a largely peaceful transition of power in the country after its October 2022 presidential election.

The account presented in this article comes from interviews with Brazilian policymakers and issue-area experts as well as Brazilian and international media reports. In conversations with Foreign Policy, several individuals, including a high-ranking Brazilian diplomat and a military expert, confirmed that, in their views, external pressure was critical to preventing members of Brazil’s military from executing Bolsonaro’s plans for a coup.

Evidently, the pressure came not just from the president but the entire US Government, most importantly the Pentagon which was very influential with the Brazilian Generals who were necessary for the coup to succeed.

It’s very sad to me that the administration isn’t getting more credit for things like this and the Afghanistan withdrawal. The Gaza situation is a nightmare and I too, of course, wish that the US would be able to exert more power to put an end to it. But it doesn’t wipe out everything else that’s happened. And the alternative is so much worse… alas, that’s where we are.

“I’m Not In Church”

Published by digby on February 22, 2024

Oh yes, you are Congressman GOPer, whether you like it or not

We’ve been warning about this Christian Nationalist theocratic faction in the GOP for a couple of decades now and nobody ever took it seriously. The chickens are coming home to roost. They got Roe banned, now they’re effectively banning IVF in the states, birth control, LGBTQ rights and even “recreational sex” is now openly on the agenda. And these people have power.

Even some Republicans are chaffing at the overt proselytizing:

Speaker Mike Johnson delivered a presentation at a weekend GOP retreat that — although it was billed as a map to keeping the House majority — took on a surprisingly religious tone, according to two people in the room.

Johnson’s private remarks to a small group of Republican lawmakers at Miami’s Mandarin Oriental Hotel over the weekend alarmed both people, who addressed the speech on condition of anonymity. Rather than outlining a specific plan to hold and grow the majority, these people said, Johnson effectively delivered a sermon.

The Louisiana Republican showed slides to the members of his Elected Leadership Committee (ELC) team in a bid to tout the party’s prospects of hanging onto its two-seat majority in November. Johnson, a devout Christian, attempted to rally the group by discussing moral decline in America — focusing on declining church membership and the nation’s shrinking religious identity, according to both people in the room.

The speaker contended that when one doesn’t have God in their life, the government or “state” will become their guide, referring back to Bible verses, both people said. They added that the approach fell flat among some in the room.

“I’m not at church,” one of the people said, describing Johnson’s presentation as “horrible.”

“I think what he was trying to do, but failed on the execution of it, was try to bring us together,” that person said. “The sermon was so long he couldn’t bring it back to make the point.”

A third person in the room who is close to Johnson said that the speaker dipped into historical and religious points for perhaps a third of his presentation, arguing that the party needed to save the country. That person, who spoke on condition of anonymity about the private gathering, said Johnson also talked about polling on the border, how President Joe Biden compares to Donald Trump on various issues and the House GOP’s core message.

The weekend retreat also featured notable tension between GOP conference leaders and Freedom Caucus Chair Bob Good (R-Va.), who argued in Miami that Johnson needs to lead Republicans in the direction that is favored by conservatives.

Rep. Lisa McClain (R-Mich.) pushed back, questioning if Good — who had voted to oust former Speaker Kevin McCarthy — would let Johnson lead or if he would block him whenever he disagreed with the GOP leader’s approach, according to all three people who addressed the speaker’s presentation. Conservatives have blocked legislation from being considered on the floor several times this term.

Those dissenters had better get used to it. These people now own the party. And they obtained ownership with the help of a cult leader who is depraved, immoral and beyond ignorant. His narcissism has allowed them to take the reins of power because he doesn’t know or care what they are doing as long as he is adored by his followers.

I don’t know how much longer any of them will hold out. The party is shedding non-MAGA elected officials two at a time these days and those who are staying are all spineless or just as immoral and their Dear Leader, taking advantage of the opportunities authoritarianism provides. And when Trump has shuffled off his mortal coil and the excitement cools, guess who’s going to be in charge? The theocrats.

Nikki, you’re so full of it

Published by digby on February 22, 2024

This is a moderate?

Aaaand:

“I think what’s really important is to know that the majority of Americans dislike Donald Trump and Joe Biden,” she said. “So we think that there needs to be an alternative.”

While critical of both men — who she called “too old” to be president — she said “Biden is more dangerous” due to his management of immigration and the economy. Haley hinted that, if Biden and Trump were to face a rematch, she would back Trump if he wins the Republican presidential nomination.

The former South Carolina governor also spoke against what she called “hate, division and chaos” fomented by Trump. She compared the ex-president to a “bully,” and stressed that he failed to obtain significant portions of the electorate in Iowa and New Hampshire.

“People don’t like when he goes off the teleprompter and says crazy things like he’d rather take Putin’s side over our allies,” Haley said. “People don’t like it when he mocks the military. People don’t like it when he calls people names.”

The economy is roaring and the GOP just blocked a right wing immigration bill. Trump is threatening our allies and licking Putin’s boots. But she thinks Biden is more dangerous :in immigration and the economy” so she’ll probably endorse Trump.

Why The Biden White House Believes The NY Times Is Out To Get Them

Published by digby on February 22, 2024

Page A1:

Page A16

This is what we’re dealing with. It shouldn’t have to be this hard.

Check this out from Politico:

That’s right. He’s four points up in that poll. But that headline is how they chose to frame the story.

How about this?

What does being beleaguered have to do with student loan forgiveness? How about “determined” or “committed”?

Here you can see that they originally had a neutral headline and actually revised it to make it demeaning toward Biden:

Every headline is about how poor, old Biden is just floundering, over and over and over again. It’s astonishing.

They Want Nothing, They Want Nothing

Published by Tom Sullivan on February 22, 2024

Emo Trump revisited

“Nah.” This clip evoked a memory from Donald “91 Counts” Trump’s tenure.

Post by @fightforprogress
View on Threads

USA Today (2/13) op-ed:

Donald Trump on Friday acknowledged his cowardice when it comes to America’s epidemic of gun violence and the resulting slaughter of this country’s children.

Being Trump, he tried to make that sound like a virtue.

Speaking at a National Rifle Association gun show in Pennsylvania’s capital city Friday, Trump bragged about his record of inaction.

“During my four years nothing happened,” Trump said. “And there was great pressure on me, having to do with guns. We did nothing. We didn’t yield.”

That’s Trump telling the truth for a change. 

“We did nothing,” Trump brags. It’s a Republican thing. You wouldn’t understand.

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Tali-bans For All Of Us

Published by Tom Sullivan on February 22, 2024

It’s Free States and Slave States again

“If you don’t think this country is sliding toward theocracy, you’re not paying attention,” writes Charles Blow, reacting to the Alabama Supreme Court’s Tuesday ruling that frozen embryos are children. Destruction of those embryos, even by accident, the court ruled, falls under the state’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act. 

From the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe to plans by Trump-aligned think tanks to restructure the United States to suit Christian nationalists to Alabama’s Tuesday ruling, Tali-bans will pop up all over in a second Trump term. A national abortion ban is clearly on the agenda.

“Control of women’s bodies is the endgame,” Blow continues.

But is it? Reducing women to birthing vessels and daycare attendants is only one part of the plan. Theists who have long argued that the founders intended to create a Christian nation publish textbooks, build theme parks, ban books, and rail against public education on that basis in a bid to force the rest of us to live according to their worldview. And not just women. Women in their minds are simply easier targets.

Will Bunch this week posted a Heritage Foundation clip from last year advocating the elimination of birth control. Bunch comments, “If Democrats can’t defeat a party that wants to end recreational sex then I give up.” Women are not their only targets, boys. They’ll be coming for IUDs and condoms in short order. The most radical among them believe even barrier methods are murder.

Their Mandate for Leadership (over 900 pages) and its supporting organizations toss around the word freedom liberally, but neither liberality nor freedom is their goal. Not, at least, as the majority of Americans living outside their looking-glass world would recognize it.

Speaker emerita Nancy Pelosi reminds people that the IVF ban impacts men as well as women, mothers and fathers, families, couples, everyone. The Christian nationalist vision is fueled not simply by isolationism and xenophobia. Their vision is totalizing, and they’ve written it down.

It is ironic how, especially post-September 11, whenever a Muslim ran for office, the right screamed that she/he meant to introduce Sharia law to the United States. Some other faith’s religious law: bad. Christian theist’s law: good.

The extremist right threatens civil war whenever it does not get its way in a democratic process it has already abandoned. And they have not gone to guns yet. But already in the post-Roe era we are devolving into free states and slave states where it is not only women’s rights to control their bodies being restricted, but the rights of anyone who wants to become a parent and start a family. Our most intimate decisions are at stake. Christian nationalists’ targets are all of us.

Update: Too good not to add.

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He’ll Just Start With “The Bad Ones”

Published by digby on February 21, 2024

He’ll come for “the good ones” next

At last night’s S. Carolina town hall, Trump was asked what the actual plan was for the rounding up of immigrants:

Here’s one of his lackeys today:

The Washington Post reports today:

Faced with a surge of migrant families at the U.S.-Mexico border in 2018 and 2019, Donald Trump’s White House discussed ways to more aggressively deploy the resources and the might of the U.S. military.

Aides and officials spoke privately about detaining migrants on military bases and flying them out of the country on military planes — ideas that the Pentagon headed off. Throughout his presidency, Trump himself would frequently demand to send troops to the border and catch people crossing.

“He was obsessed with having the military involved,” said a former senior administration official, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private discussions.

That approach and unfinished business have taken on renewed significance and urgency as the country confronts another migrant crisis on the U.S.-Mexico border, and as Trump closes in on the Republican presidential nomination. The former president is making immigration a core campaign theme, promoting a proposal for an unprecedented deportation effort if he is returned to power.

Trump pledges that as president he would immediately launch “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” As a model, he points to an Eisenhower-era program known as “Operation Wetback,” using a derogatory slur for Mexican migrants. The operation used military tactics to round up and remove migrant workers, sometimes transporting them in dangerous conditions that led to some deaths. Former administration officials and policy experts said staging an even larger operation today would face a bottleneck in detention space — a problem that Trump adviser Stephen Miller and other allies have proposed addressing by building mass deportation camps.

“Americans can expect that immediately upon President Trump’s return to the Oval Office, he will restore all of his prior policies, implement brand new crackdowns that will send shock waves to all the world’s criminal smugglers, and marshal every federal and state power necessary to institute the largest deportation operation in American history,” said Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt in a statement. She added that undocumented immigrants “should not get comfortable because very soon they will be going home.”

Trump has made similar promises and hasused inflammatory smears since his 2016 campaign. But he, his aides and allies say a second turn in office would be more effective in operating the levers of the federal bureaucracy and less vulnerable to internal resistance. During his term, former officials said, Trump learned to install more officials at the Department of Homeland Security who would carry out his orders instead of trying to curb his impulses.

Anyone who believes that letting these psychos win will teach Joe Biden and the Democrats the lesson that they’d better accept their policies regarding climate/Palestine/immigrants/whatever need to have their heads examined. And yes, I am reading and hearing this on social media.

QOTD

Published by digby on February 21, 2024

What it means to be an American has always had many definitions and not all of them good. But selling out to an autocratic foreign power in order to keep power at home is a new one. We haven’t actually done that one before. But it’s the natural consequence of the radicalization of the GOP over many years which has culminated in the elevation of a psychopathic conman to lead the party. And here we are.

The Really Big Story

Published by digby on February 21, 2024

It’s right in front of them and they don’t want to acknowledge it

Last night it was reported that the House GOP’s confidential informant, who has been charged with lying to the FBI about Hunter Biden and Burisma (I wrote about that here), was actually working as a Russian agent. It should be the final nail in the Biden impeachment coffin but they seem determined to keep humiliating themselves with this thing (anything for their Dear Leader) so it doesn’t appear they’re ready to roll it up.

This piece by Josh Marshall says it all. (It’s from his newsletter which you should subscribe to, it’s really great.)

A Bigger Story Than You Can Possibly Imagine

I know that’s a big headline that promises a lot. But I think it’s true. David has a good rundown of the events in the Morning Memo. But I want to do my best to set them out on a larger canvas that goes back to the “Hunter Biden laptop” and really all the way back to 2015, a continuing Russian information operation that has been ongoing for almost a decade.

Let’s review recent events. First came the news that prosecutors in special counsel David Weiss’s office had decided that the confidential FBI informant who had been one of Biden’s top accusers had been lying and that they were charging him for lying to the FBI. That next step is critical. Informants lie to prosecutors all the time. They seldom get charged. It’s one standard to decide your informant isn’t telling the truth and/or won’t hold up at trial. It’s an entirely different one to think that you can prove they knowingly lied beyond a reasonable doubt. Clearly investigators felt they had caught Alexander Smirnov dead to rights. Yesterday came news that Smirnov has admitted that he got his false stories from Russian intelligence officers. Smirnov isn’t just at the center of the DOJ investigation, he’s at the center of what we have to generously call James Comer’s House inquiry, the premise for Joe Biden’s increasingly wobbly impeachment.

And on top of that, Hunter Biden’s lawyers are now claiming, as part of their effort to force new disclosures by Weiss’s office, that it was new or newly specific accusations from Smirnov which scuttled the plea deal which blew up as it was being agreed to in a federal court room. That point about the plea deal remains an accusation and obviously an interested one from Biden’s attorneys. But given what we’ve learned over the last week from the prosecution side — the folks who were repeatedly duped and took actions on the basis of disinformation directly from Russian intelligence — it seems to me highly likely that it’s true.

[…]

We were told that Russia’s effort to meddle in the 2016 election was obviously bad. And Rudy Giuliani’s dumpster diving in Ukraine and other parts of the former USSR in 2018 and 2019, which led to Donald Trump’s first impeachment, was probably hoovering up Russian disinformation too. But that was then. Now we’re on to Hunter Biden, obviously the troubled son of a powerful politician whose life skidded into a longterm fugue of drugs and alcohol. That wasn’t real. This is. That was then. This is now. Stop bringing up Russia every time you don’t like a story! This Hunter Biden story is real. But really what we see now, which many of us long suspected, is that this is one ongoing influence operation now going back almost a decade.

For years I’ve continued saying, against what seems like the unified thinking of every reporter, editorialist and credentialed smart person, that the fabled “Hunter Biden Laptop” was obviously the product of a Russian influence operation. The story was absurd on its face. Somehow Hunter Biden decided in a drugged-up fugue that he needed to take his laptop to a computer repair shop. He then forgot about it. The legally blind owner of the repair shop decided to crack it open and look at the files (as one does, of course) and then somehow managed to get the contents to Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon.

Sounds totally legit, as they say!

The standard response has always been: but the emails are real! Hunter’s attorneys don’t deny it. But this is silly. The DNC emails were real too. That’s always how these things work. I don’t know whether some bogus documents were added into the trove that eventually made it to news organizations and the FBI. But very clearly some party either hacked into Biden’s computers or physically stole the laptop and then devised this cover story to launder it into the public realm.

And yet basically everybody and I mean everybody ended up falling for this. Indeed, the very brief efforts to remain wary of the laptop story in the final days of the 2020 election have evolved into an object case of the dangers of censorship and even liberal media election meddling. It’s a decision — albeit one lasting only a few days — that everyone now agrees “we got wrong.” It was the centerpiece of Elon Musk’s “Twitter Files” nonsense. But Elon Musk going in for it isn’t the point. He’s a clown. All the serious people ended up doing exactly the same. This has always been bullshit. Media organizations at first wouldn’t touch the story because they’d spent the previous four years kicking themselves for allowing themselves to become the promoters of a Russian election interference and disinformation campaign with the purloined DNC emails back in 2016. Since the Hunter Biden laptop stories had all the hallmarks of exactly the same thing somehow happening to pop up in the final days of the 2020, of course they were suspicious.

At worst, that initial resistance was very reasonable, given the record for 2016, even if it had been the case that the story was entirely legitimate. But it wasn’t. Even though the Smirnov revelations themselves don’t speak directly to the laptop story, they tell us very clearly that Russian intelligence operations have continued to drive stories at the center of the American political debate right up until today. Their work likely engineered the collapse of Hunter Biden’s plea deal which was one of the biggest bad news stories for the President last year.

Are we really supposed to believe that these Russian operations, which kicked off in 2015 and continued into 2017, were going full force through 2018 and 2019 with Rudy Giuliani and continue right up until today somehow played no role in the unbelievable story of Hunter Biden’s laptop? Of course they did.

This entire thing has been based on Russian plants and intelligence operations from the start. Every bit of it. It’s been obvious. And yet, well … they’re all dupes. Somehow almost a decade after this whole thing started we’re shocked to see, wow, Weiss’s office was being led around by another cat’s paw of the Russian intelligence services. We’re shocked. But why are we shocked? Every last person among the serious people of the nation’s capital and the sprawling thing called elite received opinion has egg on their face. And it’s not even clear they fully realize it yet.

The point is that Republicans may or may not have been willing dupes. At this stage it’s really hard to extend them the benefit of the doubt. This has been going on for years and years now and it’s become one of those “first as tragedy finally as farce” things. But an even greater problem for us in this moment is, as Josh says, the “reporters, editorialists and commentators, who vouched for and credited this whole edifice of lies and bullshit.” They knew it was bullshit. All you have to do is listen to these clowns for five minutes to know exactly what they were doing. But they wanted the sweet, sweet thrill of taking down Biden. That dynamic has been going on for decades and it’s at the heart of what’s gone wrong in this country.

The 2020s Counterculture

Published by digby on February 21, 2024

It ain’t the 60’s, folks

JV Last at the Bulwark takes a look today at the way the Republicans now see institutions since they realized that they have lost the educated, financially successful American cohorts. Their first order of business was to create alternative institutions which they’ve done successfully with the media which has made it very easy to control politicians by propagandizing their constituents. A case in point:

As a result of losing the popular culture, they now believe that they can only control it by using the power of the state, thus authoritarianism.

-Republicans can no longer create popular majorities, but they can take control of the apparatus of government.

-The institutions of civil society have historically been a mediating layer between citizens and government. But Republicans have also lost the argument with educated and financially successful voters, leading to their loss of support within many American institutions.

-In response, Republicans have decided that the existing institutions of civil society are illegitimate and that all power should be centrally located with the state.

-But if Republicans are also a persistent minority who can only take control of the state intermittently, then they must seek electoral advantage wherever they can: Voting laws to shape the electorate. Post-election lawsuits to change outcomes. Insurrections. Coups.

-Because their only hope of holding off both the popular majorities they see as evil and the institutions they see as illegitimate is to win some final victory in which state power is concentrated within the party and then used to overcome the party’s small-d democratic weakness.

-This is either authoritarianism or, if you prefer, illiberal democracy.

As he says, if you think this is an exaggeration, think again:

He writes that we are in the process of finding out if they will prevail:

The party’s current weaknesses in popularity and institutional footholds mean that it will shift away from the traditional field of political conflicts—elections and institution-building—toward asymmetric conflicts where it has advantages.

Instead of trying to regain a place in mainstream media, it has propaganda outlets. Instead of civil society institutions, it has the Proud Boys. Instead of lobbying efforts, it has direct action. Instead of electoral victories, it has post-election maneuvering. Instead of constitutional governing, it has a . . . more expansive view of executive power.

Meanwhile, there are the “Christians.” I’m sure you’ve been reading about the GOP’s Christian nationalist agenda the last couple of days. It’s been all over the internet although we’ve been talking about it here for quite some time. Alabama this week pretty much voided the ability of people to obtain fertility treatments and IVF because their high court declared that frozen embryos have full human rights. (Pregnant women do not, however.) So, it’s happening.

Here’s just a taste of what the cultists backing their twice divorced, porn star bedding, adjudicated rapist Dear Leader have in mind:

The vast majority of Americans are not on board with any of that. But by the time they figure out that Donald Trump is a liar and a tool (or that yes you should vote for the lesser of two evils) it may be too late.