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“Accentuate the positive, back burner the negatives, and run the campaign.”

Published by digby on February 20, 2024

I agree with Josh Marshall on this. The brouhaha over Ezra Klein’s article agitating for Biden to drop out at this late date has been overwhelming and it’s not helpful. The idea of choosing a new candidate at the conventions is downright fanciful. Not gonna happen.

I like Ezra. We are friendly acquaintances and he’s done a ton of good work so I’m not inclined to slag him. But he’s wrong about this and Josh Marshall has the best essay explaining why:

A number of you have written in to ask about Ezra Klein’s audio essay “Democrats Have a Better Option Than Biden: It’s requires them to embrace an old-fashioned approach to winning a campaign.” Is it a good argument? Does it change the equation? What do I make of it? Just for the purposes of cutting to the chase: my answers are “not really,” “no” and “not much.” But Klein is a smart, articulate guy and sitting at the top of the Times op-ed page he has vast influence. So I wanted to break the argument down into its moving parts.

Klein begins his essay by assuring us that he likes Joe Biden and actually thinks he’s done a good job as President. This is to soften the reader up and dispel any notion that he’s got some anti-Biden axe to grind. I don’t think Klein is disingenuous or cynical about this. I think he believes it. He not only doesn’t think age has hindered Biden in doing the job as President so far; he doesn’t think it would in a second term either. The issue for him, Klein says, isn’t about being President but running for President: Biden has slowed down considerably, even from his last run in 2019–2020, and Biden simply is not up to running a vigorous campaign in which the candidate is an asset, not a liability.

The middle part of the essay basically has Klein knocking down a series of straw man arguments, many of which I’ve never heard before. People say this is age-ism! I haven’t heard this stupid argument. But Trump’s also old! People do say this and it’s true. It’s not really an argument though. He knocks down a few other straw man arguments before getting to one of the real and strongest ones: Biden is, for all intents and purposes, already the nominee. It’s over.

It’s not too late at all, says Klein. How can it be too late when it’s February? (Which isn’t a bad point.) Biden may get all the delegates, which he certainly will. But if he steps aside and releases his delegates then you have an open convention in which party activists and delegates pick the nominee with a free choice. He then outlines a scenario in which a strong bench of possible alternative nominees vie for nomination, generating positive press and party enthusiasm which leads to a vigorous campaign and, hopefully, a general election victory.

This is the gist of Klein’s argument, his “old-fashioned approach” to winning a campaign which is essentially, in his accounting, not to drift into the general election unprepared but have the convention come up with a specific plan for victory. There’s a huge amount of wishful thinking and razzmatazz in this concluding third of the essay. But let’s zero in on two key pivot points.

First, will convention-chosen candidate X do better than Biden? As I noted on Friday, polling evidence makes that assumption at least highly questionable. That’s not the only question. Is early 21st century America really ready for a party nominee literally chosen by a few thousand party insiders and activists? I have real doubts about that. Will the convention not become a forum for litigating highly divisive issues like Gaza, Medicare for All and the broader contest between progressives and establishment-oriented liberals? The last half century of American politics has been based on the idea that the convention is a highly scripted unity launch event. This alternative would mean a free for all, in which the choice between a number of quite promising candidates will be made by a group whose legitimacy will likely be highly suspect. Not good!

Then there’s another issue. Okay, say you’ve convinced us. The thunderdome convention scenario is the better bet. How do we get there? Klein is refreshingly candid about this while somehow not being remotely realistic about how wildly improbable it is. You do it by mounting a public campaign to convince the people in Biden’s inner circle — Mike Donilon, Anita Dunn, Steve Ricchetti, maybe Barack Obama and whoever else — to convince Biden to step aside. That’s almost word for word the plan. Let’s drill down on what that means. Your plan is to convince the people who are pretty much by definition the most loyal to and invested in Biden — more than anyone in the entire political world — to abandon the plan they’re already two-thirds of their way through and convince Biden to step aside. We can add the more cynical point that this also means ending their own political careers at the top of the political game. As of today, the right-leaning RCP Average shows Biden 1.1 points behind Donald Trump. Are you really going to point to that and convince them that it’s hopeless? That to me is not remotely a serious plan. It’s not a serious anything.

And what exactly is the plan while you’re executing that plan? Unless I’m missing something, this plan means spending the spring perhaps not campaigning but in the midst of a public intervention trying to make the case that the party’s nominee is too old and frail to be President. On the off chance this plan doesn’t work, that seems pretty damaging to the nominee.

Many people I have this conversation with end the conversation here with a simple “the best thing is for Biden to step aside.” This, I confess, is where my brain generally freezes up. There is clearly a big sense of psychic release from arguing this. I share all the anxieties expressed by those anonymous Democratic insiders and campaign strategists who apparently can’t stop calling reporters and telling them how worried they are. I just don’t see the point of going down this path or, more accurately, waving vaguely toward that path, if there is no plan or likely scenario in which anything like it happens. Maybe I lack imagination.

Which brings me to my final point. Klein’s essay has been the top conversation of the political set since it was published three days ago. It’s garnered many responses like the one from Harvard Law Professor Larry Tribe who wrote on Twitter that while he didn’t agree with Klein, “we ignore this problem at our peril. Pretending that enough voters will be motivated by the catastrophic results of a second Trump presidency just won’t suffice. This is a crisis.” This is like others who’ve said that even though Biden is the nominee, “we have to address” the issue, or “can’t ignore” the issue, or have to “discuss” the issue.

(I should be clear: I’m not picking on Tribe. It’s just the last example I saw. It’s relevant because it’s like so many others.)

Given where we are in the calendar, we’re way past the time for general statements of concern. As far as I can see we are talking about it. A lot. Are we ignoring it? We seem to be giving it quite a lot of attention. The only way to “address” or do something about Biden’s age is to replace him with someone else. Of course there are course corrections you can make within the campaign. Jon Alter says the campaign should stop trying to insulate Biden from press availabilities because he might flub some words and put him out more. Accept the flubs, even embrace them. He’s right. But I don’t think that’s what any of these people are talking about.

The right answer to anyone making these kinds of open-ended statements of concern is to say, tell me specifically what course of action you’re advocating and, if it’s switching to a new candidate, how you get there in the next few weeks? Could I end up looking silly if Biden stumbles through the campaign with growing evidence of declining acuity and loses in November? I guess. But I don’t see how that changes the validity of any of the analysis above.

In life we constantly need to make choices on the basis of available options. Often they are imperfect or even bad options. The real options are the ones that have some shot at success. That’s life. Klein’s argument really amounts to a highly pessimistic but not unreasonable analysis of the present situation which he resolves with what amounts to a deus ex machina plot twist. That’s not a plan. It’s a recipe for paralysis.

I think the Democratic Party has thought — or is in the process of thinking — about this, is addressing it, not ignoring it, pick your vague verb. In addition to many strengths, including incumbency, Biden has a big campaign liability: his age. Democrats have decided that even with this liability he’s probably the best shot to defeat Donald Trump. And even if he’s not, there’s no viable path to switching to anyone else. Accentuate the positive, back burner the negatives, and run the campaign.

Exactly.

Oh, and by the way, Democrats have been winning every election since 2018 and Biden just made the biggest fundraising haul in history for the month of January. He’s also been one of the most successful presidents in history, which ought to count for something,

Democrats are perpetual hand wringers. Every election cycle we get this overwrought wailing about how they’re going to lose because of one thing or another. Why just two months ago, the economy was going to sink them because even though the economy was improving, the vibes weren’t. I don’t know if you’ve noticed but the vibes are improving substantially on that front, mainly because it takes time for public opinion to catch up with good economic news. Last month it was the border that was going to sink them because the Republicans have the upper hand on that issue and it’s all anyone in this country supposedly cares about. Then the Democrats called the Republicans’ bluff and the issue looks like it might be a wash.

It’s always something. The “age issue” isn’t going away. It’s the one the right wingers have been flogging since the 2020 election and they’ve never let up. Biden is old and he looks old. It’s going to be the thing that Republicans and the press will be hammering until next November. (Recall they did a similar thing with Clinton’s health. It was an undercurrent of that race the whole time too, even though nobody seems to remember that.) There’s no escaping it.

But the one thing people don’t seem to remember in all this hand wringing is that Biden’s opponent isn’t just old, he’s corrupt and he’s crazy on top of it. And that is the biggest problem America faces.

Nobody ever thought this election wouldn’t be close. How could it not be? Tens of millions of people in this country are members of the Trump cult and the Republican Party has become a wholly owned subsidiary of MAGA Inc whose leaders are either terrified of their voters or are craven opportunists who see the upside in a Christian Nationalist autocracy. We’re damned lucky that we even have a chance to defeat that at this point. And we do. But the tool we have for that purpose is the Democratic party and as much as everyone hates them and desires inspiring, wonderfully exciting leadership like they had with Barack Obama, we’re in a different time now. It’s not about feeling good, it’s about defeating fascism. Period. Biden and the Democrats are the instrument at hand to fulfill that mission and there is no choice but to keep ourselves together long enough to get that done.

And, by the way, when you think about Joe Biden being old and decrepit and a poor choice, also consider what his administration accomplished under the most difficult of circumstances.I guess there wasn’t enough drama to keep the press engaged, but it happened nonetheless and he deserves a lot more credit than he’s getting from the people who supposedly care about those things.

Good News

Published by digby on February 20, 2024

As those of you who read my blog regularly know, I have long been critical of the rather self-righteous decision of the networks not to show Donald Trump in all his unhinged glory out of a misplaced sense that it somehow “costs” them to do it. No. It has resulted in way too many people forgetting just what a total nutcase he is. I know they don’t want to think about it but it’s a reality and they need to see it.

This has obviously concerned the Biden campaign which has found through their own polling that people have forgotten what they hated about him and over time have come to see him as rather benign. After all, the Republicans are all still with him,how bad could he be? But they are wrong. He’s worse than he was before and they need to see that. So, that’s why the campaign has decided to highlight the crazy stuff and push it out there hard. It’s the only way to counter this insufferable obsession with Biden’s age and it’s entirely relevant.

You choose: the decent, accomplished old guy or the crazy, corrupt old guy. That’s what’s on the menu.

An Overdetermined Problem

Published by digby on February 20, 2024

From the man who runs 538 since Nate Silver left:

Mother Russia Is A Paradise?

Published by Tom Sullivan on February 20, 2024

Better unwoke than woke

Still image from Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985).

It’s one thing to watch a Terry Gilliam film. It’s another to live inside one. But the white, Christian-nationalist MAGA right wants to. And a child named Tucker will lead them.

Friends circulated this Gerard Baker op-ed from Monday’s Wall Street Journal mocking Tucker Carlson’s fawning, America-hating profile of life in Russia:

Why can’t we be more like Russia?

The minute you see the welcoming smiles on the faces of the kindly immigration guards, all spiffy in their shiny jackboots, at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport you realize that unlike our own morally louche, spiritually decrepit cesspit, run by a corrupt and brutal regime bent on destroying its opponents, Russia is a nation united around a vision of the historic greatness of its civilization.

From state-of-the-art supermarket cart technology to a president who is youthful and vigorous, able to dilate on European history at length, the contrast couldn’t be greater with a technologically backward and collapsing U.S. in the grip of a geriatric autocrat who can’t remember what day it is.

American capitalism is corrupt and exploitative. Russia’s is well-regulated and committed to the common good. In the U.S., tech billionaires and Wall Street fat cats get rich on the surplus value their workers produce. Benevolent Russian oligarchs, cooperating with the state for the benefit of the people, are able to supply all Russians’ needs at a fraction of the exorbitant prices Americans pay. They are so successful that they create demand for hard-pressed sectors of the global economy, such as yachts, luxury London real estate and Swiss casinos.

Unlike America, Russia has firm control over its borders. Millions of migrants flow into the U.S. Russia definitely doesn’t have that problem. The system works so well that in the past two years, almost a million Russians, many of them vigorous young men of fighting age, have left the country, and Russia is pushing its borders onto the territory of grateful neighbors.

For a glimpse of this nonsense, see Jon Stewart’s send-up from Monday night.

In Baker’s view, “A large part of the American right actively embraces the moral equivalence that used to be a defining feature of self-loathing left-wing elites.”

Okay, there have always been a few. But if Baker is remembering the antiwar left of the 1960s, he would have been (checks dates) maybe eight years-old at the end of that decade. The Brit’s memories may be suspect if not manufactured.

The 1960s left’s “better red than dead” is today the right’s “better unwoke than woke,” to paraphrase Stewart. Now it’s MAGA’s turn to idealize oppressive governments and condemn their own.

But Baker is right about the American right:

In some inexplicable way, they have chosen to see the nation that nurtured them and elevated them, equipped them with opportunities half the world can only dream of, as a moral monster. They use the freedom this country gives them to denounce it, insisting it is no better than a place in which even to harbor those kinds of thoughts could get you eliminated.

The only response of all decent people to the death of Alexei Navalny, the brave critic of Vladimir Putin’s regime, in a Siberian prison camp is grief, disgust and unqualified condemnation. It is the sort of event that defines the malevolent nature of Mr. Putin’s Russia.

See Stewart’s closing remarks at the top about “decent people” like Carlson.

Don’t worry, Baker goes on to quote Newt Gingrich equating Donald Trump facing 91 indictments handed down by grand juries of his peers with Biden condemning Putin “while Democrats in four different jurisdictions try to turn President Trump into an American Navalny.”

Careful where you point that moral equivalence, pal.

Biden should be held accountable for crimes of Baker’s imagination as well as for manipulating “the levers of justice” the way Putin held Navalny to account for thought crimes. Oh, but I go too far, Baker concedes:

But, need I say this? Mr. Biden isn’t Vladimir Putin. Mr. Biden doesn’t invade neighbors on a false pretext, killing indiscriminately. He doesn’t make people who have fallen into disfavor fall from the windows of tall buildings. He doesn’t throw a foreign journalist in jail for reporting the truth about what is going on in his country. He doesn’t arrange the murder of his domestic political opponents on the soil of other countries. And he doesn’t imprison, torture and preside over the “death by sudden death” of his principal domestic critic.

Let me remind you again of just where the MAGA right wants to take this country, if not to Moscow. Here’s the leading Republican candidate for governor in North Carolina:

“Tell our enemies on the other side of the aisle that would drag this nation down into a socialist hellhole that you will only do it as you run past me laying on the ground choking on my own blood — Christian patriots of this nation will own this nation and rule this nation.”

Yeah, Putin’s Russia must look like paradise to them. Terry Gilliam couldn’t write this stuff.

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More Than His Accomplishments

Published by Tom Sullivan on February 20, 2024

Houston Chronicle endorses Biden

Photo United States government work. Public domain.

President Joe Biden is more than his accomplishments in office, a knowledgable acquaintance advised. Rather than spit out a bullet list of them in its Monday endorsement, The Houston Chronicle connected them to wisdom, experience, and strength of character.

Newspaper endorsements mean less today than they once did, if they ever meant that much. But if any major newspapers issued them earlier than The Houston Chronicle Editorial Board’s endorsement of President Joe Biden (ahead of the March 5 primary), I can’t recall.

A president who “believes in the power of government to make life better for the American people, is a key reason we heartily endorse the reelection of President Joe Biden.” Another is “to fend off the chaos, corruption and danger to the nation” represented by a second Donald Trump term.

The paper provides a list of what Biden has accomplished in his first term with a narrow legislative margins in Congress.

For starters: “The economy has recovered from the perils of the pandemic and is now healthier than that of any other advancednation. With unemployment approaching a 50-year low, companies large and small need workers.”

But there’s more:

Inflation is trending downward, somehow, despite all dire prophecies of economists, without the bitter medicine of arecession or a period of high unemployment. Food prices are still high, and hard-working Americans are still wincing atgrocery store receipts, but gas prices have fallen, as the U.S. produces more oil than any country in history, including Saudi Arabia. In an ongoing effort to wean ourselves off fossil fuels, the administration is investing $7 billion in anambitious solar-power project and is promoting other alternative energy projects, as well.

The stock market is percolating along and hitting record highs.

“Infrastructure week” became a punch line during the inept Trump administration, but the Biden administration in its first year managed to pass a bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that’s expected to add an estimated 1.5 million jobs per year for the next 10 years. This administration’s “infrastructure week” is investing in clean water and high-speed internet. It’s repairing roads and bridges, upgrading air- and seaports, modernizing our power infrastructure, investing in public transit and pahssenger rail and cleaning up Superfund and brownfield sites.

The summary reminds readers that Democrats build, Republicans break. There’s been a lot of breaking lately.

There is more, of course, including a $35 monthly cap on insulin for Medicare recipients, semiconductor manufacturing, and a bipartisan gun safety bill that’s more than Republican “thoughts and prayers.” Biden reinforced NATO after Trump’s attempts at sabotage, and Biden has spearheaded European efforts to stop Russian aggression in Ukraine by Trump’s BFF Vladimir Putin.

Under the leadership of a president with decades of experience in the Middle East, the administration is seeking a path to peace and stability in the post-October 7 conflagration involving Gaza, Iran and Israel and the desperate Palestinian people. The administration also is trying to tamp down the potential danger of a region-wide war. It’s hard to imagine Biden’s predecessor having either the patience or the prowess to play a signifi cant role in resolving a devilishly complex crisis.

(Biden’s patience to date with Israel’s Bebe Netanyahu has failed to stem the slaughter of civilians in Gaza, yes. Trump would just egg him on.)

The Board acknowledges other Biden’s failures and the limits of his authority facing a hostile, MAGA-led House. Yet Biden brings underappreciated intangibles.

“One of the greatest gifts of a democratic civil society is the freedom not to think about government, to wake up and not worry about the mood of a leader,” recovering GOP operative Stuart Stevens writes in The New Republic. “Joe Biden has made governing boring and predictable, both fundamental rights of the people in a healthy democracy.”

We are well aware of Biden’s age, 81, (and Trump’s, 77), as well as memory lapses that have prompted near-panicamong many of the president’s fellow Democrats. Those of us who remember the energetic, garrulous, occasionallyeven eloquent Joe Biden of years past can see the difference a few years have made, even if he was always prone to gaffes. Accounts other than the report of Special Counsel Robert Hur suggest, however, that Biden remains focused, engaged and in command on the vital issues that occupy a president. Experience counts.

We are reassured in large part because Biden has restored the tradition of a capable team running the White House, atradition trampled by Trump’s deeply fl awed scheme to run a one-man show. Like Ronald Reagan, Lyndon Johnson andFranklin Roosevelt, Biden’s deft management of his team has made him, arguably, the most productive president since LBJ in the early months of his administration.

He has, as they say, forgotten more than his presumed Republican rival will ever know. That’s not saying much, and at the same time, it says it all.

“Forgotten more than you’ll ever know” is a phrase my EMT instructor used to describe doctors attempting poorly to do CPR or other tasks that EMT’s do routinely. He cautioned patience. Out of practice does not mean out of their minds or incompetent. Trump never bothered to learn anything that wouldn’t profit him personally, and famously blanches at the sight of blood. He is incompetent.

Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone

Citizenship is not guaranteed to be fun and exciting. Frankly, our republic works better when it goes unnoticed.

MAGA voted for fun and exciting. Don’t be like MAGA.

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What Are They So Afraid Of?

Published by digby on February 19, 2024

The angry mob

Atrios today:

Not a member of the “David French liberal fan club” but I’ll give him credit for addressing an incredibly undercovered – and certainly ignored by political reporters – story.

Amid the constant drumbeat of sensational news stories — the scandals, the legal rulings, the wild political gambits — it’s sometimes easy to overlook the deeper trends that are shaping American life. For example, are you aware how much the constant threat of violence, principally from MAGA sources, is now warping American politics? If you wonder why so few people in red America seem to stand up directly against the MAGA movement, are you aware of the price they might pay if they did?

Of course, he has the obligatory THE LEFT IS VIOLENT TOO paragraph, so fuck that guy, forever and always, but still.

Yep. I don’t think anyone should underestimate the power of the threat that Trump’s army of violent, brainwashed followers bring to the political system. Look what’s happened to James Lankford in the Senate for having the nerve to negotiate a hard right, draconian border bill that until five minutes ago would have been a Republican wet dream. Death threats, sanctions and probably a primary opponent.

Many GOPers Are Quitting

Published by digby on February 19, 2024

Can you blame them?

House Republicans were shocked by some of the recent high-profile retirements announced by their colleagues, which have included powerful committee chairs and rising stars inside the GOP.

But given the miserable state of affairs inside the House right now, they also weren’t exactly surprised.

“They’ve signed up to do serious things. And we’re not doing serious things,” said Rep. Ken Buck of Colorado, a conservative who is retiring after bucking his party on several key issues.

Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska, a moderate who represents a key swing seat, pointed to his party’s struggle to govern as driving the departures.

“When you’re divided in your own conference, the joy of the job is harder,” Bacon told CNN. “When you have folks on your own team with their knives out, it makes it less enjoyable.”

And Rep. Carlos Gimenez of Florida, an ally of deposed former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, said this is not how he or many of his colleagues imagined life in the majority, saying, “I thought that some of our members would be smarter.”

“A lot of us are frustrated with what’s going on, and that’s just being flat-out honest,” he told CNN. “It’s foolish. And it’s been proven to be foolish. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.”

As the 118th Congress has been dominated by deep dysfunction and bitter divisions inside the GOP, a number of Republicans – particularly from the so-called governing wing – are heading for the exits. So far, 23 GOP lawmakers have decided to not seek reelection or resigned early, including five committee chairs, though some have cited personal reasons or are seeking higher office.

Still, the caliber and timing of some of the retirements has raised alarm bells, particularly those who are giving up coveted committee gavels that some work their whole career to achieve.

Energy and Commerce Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington is not even term-limited yet in her plum post, while China select committee Chair Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin, a 39-year-old who was once seen as the future of the party, recently announced he was leaving Congress after facing intense blowback for voting against impeaching Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

And on the Energy and Commerce Committee alone – a highly sought-after assignment – there are eight Republicans who are retiring.

“Those are big losses for us,” said Rep. Greg Pence of Indiana, who is among the members on the panel hanging up his voting card. “It is alarming. Especially for the institutional knowledge … So, that’s a big deal.”

The wave of retirements is rattling some of the Republicans who are choosing to stick around and fueling concern about a potential brain drain as more senior members decide to leave and take their wealth of institutional knowledge with them.

“You get this panic and anxiety like, ‘OK, who’s going to step up? Is this a normal thing that happens every few years, or is it actually abnormal?’” said Rep. August Pfluger of Texas. “So, yeah, I’m very worried about it.”

They should be. And they should realize that their party has devolved into a full blown cult which is the reason for this.

Thank You

Published by digby on February 19, 2024

So much of the media seems determined to portray the Democrats as big huge losers with a constituency full of apathetic losers and it just ain’t true. Just because they aren’t staging freak show rallies with a bunch of nuts dressed like weirdos doesn’t mean people aren’t voting and voting in droves.

The problem with this stuff is that they are setting up Trump to say the election was stolen next November. After all, the media has been saying that Biden is universally loathed because he’s old, that the polls have Trump winning in a landslide and that nobody in the country knows anything about what Biden has done as president because he’s … old. How can trump possibly lose? It’s impossible! This stuff might as well be an in-kind donation to fund his legal challenges in the next election.

Trump’s Found His Running Mate: Vladimir Putin

Published by digby on February 19, 2024

That ad should appeal to the remaining normie swing voters but you never know. Still, this Pew Survey from a couple of weeks ago seems relevant:

That’s a lot of Republicans who say that the war in Ukraine is important to them. It’s true they don’t care as much about it as Democrats but when 75% of the entire country believes something is in the national interest you would think the Republicans would at least be a teensy bit worried that they’re on the wrong side of this one.

There is no sign of that as yet. The younger members of the Senate all walked away from the national security bill and are strutting around like they’re Matt Gaetz, proud as peacocks. And I don’t think I have to say anything about the House. They’re on vacation.

I always hesitate to post things by Bill Kristol, particularly on foreign policy, but I’ll do it today because this is a case in which I think there’s common ground between people like me and people like him. Putin (and Trump) are on the wrong side of both of us:

A broad coalition of political forces in the United States, ranging from Mike Pence on the right to Bernie Sanders on the left, is anti-Putin. Against them stand Donald Trump and some of his acolytes, who are pro-Putin.The likely nominee of one of our two major political parties is pro-Vladimir Putin. This is an astonishing fact. It is an appalling fact. It has to be a central fact of the 2024 campaign.

But the political professionals say foreign policy doesn’t matter in elections. Americans vote on the economy. Or immigration. Or abortion rights.

That’s true to some degree. But not as much as we might think—particularly now that the post-Cold War era has ended in the wake of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The world we now live in seems more like that of 1972, or 1980, or 1988. In such a world, issues of foreign policy and national security matter in selecting a president. Putin matters.

And American voters know who Putin is. In an August Gallup poll, 95 percent of all Americans had an opinion of the Russian dictator, making him better known than any American politicians other than Biden and Trump. In that poll, Trump was seen favorably by 41 percent of Americans and unfavorably by 55 percent, while Biden’s favorable/unfavorable split was 41 percent to 57 percent.

Putin’s numbers in that poll? 5 percent favorable, 90 percent unfavorable. A YouGov poll last week was a bit rosier: 13 percent in favor of the Russian dictator, 81 percent unfavorable.

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It’s actually striking that all the work of the pro-Putin right—from Trump himself to Tucker Carlson—has had so little effect in improving Putin’s image. Putin turns out to be a very hard sell. Which is all the more reason to hang Putin around Trump’s neck. It could well make Trump a harder sell to some number of swing voters.

Those who seek to save the country from a Trump second term can and should hammer home Trump’s fondness for Putin.

A Bush 1988 campaign operative was quoted as saying that they were going to make the American public believe that Willie Horton, the murderer paroled under a law signed by Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis, was Dukakis’s running mate. They did a pretty good job of that. There is far better justification for making Vladimir Putin into Donald Trump’s figurative running mate. Because it’s true: A vote for Trump is a vote for Putin.

It actually is. And when you look the American public’s attitude toward Putin I don’t think it’s a net plus.

Trump has said only one thing about Navalny since the word came down that he was dead. And it’s all about him, of course:

Notice he uses the Kremlin’s language in which they described Navalny’s cause of death as “sudden death syndrome.” I’m sure the next time he meets with Vlad he be reassured that Vlad had nothing to do with his death, just as he was reassured that he had nothing to do with the election interference in 2016 and that his other pal MBS had nothing to do with the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. He always defends his friends.

And when is someone going to ask him why he hates America so much? I’ve never heard anyone, right or left, degrade the country so often.

Robert Hur’s Revenge Redux

Published by digby on February 19, 2024

Marcy Wheeler takes a look at Robert Hur today and it’s very good. She is generally less critical of Merrick Garland than some but in this case she is unsparing. She points out that Garland tends to have a naive belief that all career DOJ employees are apolitical even as in the case of Hur who was appointed by Trump as a US Attorney and was involved in some of the most partisan actions of the Trump Justice Department. He clerked for Rehnquist, fergawdsakes!

The details of Hur’s tenure are not well known and they are damning:

The problem is, with Hur, Garland should have known better, and not just because Hur was obviously a senior member of Trump’s DOJ.

At the end of last week’s Jack podcast (YouTube; Simplecast), Allison Gill and Andrew McCabe discussed the role Hur played in Trump’s DOJ. Gill replayed McCabe’s warnings, a year ago when Hur was appointed, about the former PADAG’s willingness to engage in politics. McCabe pointed to Hur’s role in imposing limits on the Mueller investigation (to which, I’ve noted, Hur didn’t adhere in this review) and participation in a gang arrest press conference staged at the White House, breaching the separation between the White House and DOJ.

But Hur had a more specific role in carrying out a partisan hit job for Trump.

Just after 1:02 on the podcast, in the stuff recorded last week, McCabe described that Hur played a key role in, “overriding the process that I was entitled to and basically accelerating the decision to fire me in an effort to get it done before I could retire.” McCabe claimed that Hur violated his due process to fulfill Trump’s demands to fire the former FBI Deputy Director rather than let him retire on schedule.

As laid out in McCabe’s 2019 lawsuit against DOJ, for months leading up to McCabe’s firing, Trump had been complaining that DOJ hadn’t fired him yet. Against that background, on March 5, 2018, FBI and DOJ started the process of using DOJ IG’s problematic report finding that McCabe lacked candor about serving as a source for one of Devlin Barrett’s biennial right wing hit jobs as an excuse to fire him. Time was short. They had less than two weeks to do that before McCabe’s designated retirement date (depending on how you calculate it, any of the days from March 16 and 19, inclusive).

The process started with Candice Will, the head of FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility, preparing a recommendation to fire him.

After some discussion on March 5 about whether, in response to McCabe attorney Michael Bromwich’s request, McCabe’s team should get a copy of the IG Report in advance so as to have more time to respond, Will laid out, in a handwritten note sent March 7, that she would send just the letter reporting DOJ IG’s referral, but not the report, to Bromwich. Without saying it directly, Will was signaling she was not going to give Bromwich any extra time to respond.

That same note made it clear that without intervention from DAG — Rod Rosenstein’s office — “it seems unlikely that this will reach final resolution before Mr. McCabe’s March 18 retirement date.” Those rushing to fire McCabe before his retirement recognized on March 7 that the only way they could fire McCabe before he retired was via Rosenstein’s involvement.

The same morning Will explained that they couldn’t manage to fire McCabe before he retired without intervention from Rosenstein’s office, she sent Hur an email asking to speak to him on the phone, “about a matter being forwarded to the DAG?” Remember: at this point, Hur was Rosenstein’s top deputy.

Hur and Will spoke that evening.

Will’s notes from that conversation were, when released via FOIA, almost entirely redacted under a deliberative privilege. They appear to memorialize what happened at a meeting between Hur, Rosenstein, and Scott Schools that day. Schools, the senior career Associate Deputy Attorney General at the time, played a role in DOJ that was always supposed to ensure ethics; in that role, he oversaw the review process leading up to McCabe’s termination.

An email thread documenting how OLC head Steven Engel interpreted the SES guidelines on firing, which Hur then forwarded to Schools, who forwarded it to Will, likewise remains heavily redacted under b5 deliberative exemptions.

Those documents — what Robert Hur told Will on March 7, 2018 and how Steven Engel spun guidelines mapping out what kind of due process senior employees get before you can fire them — are among the records that McCabe would have gotten in discovery if DOJ hadn’t settled the lawsuit.

DOJ redacted less of the emails showing that Will kept Schools and, at times, Hur, informed of how Michael Bromwich frantically tried to review the entire case file in time to mount a legal challenge, but even there, there are deliberative discussions withheld from release.

One thing is clear: with each request Bromwich made, DOJ took days to respond.

In the lawsuit, McCabe’s lawyers noted that Bromwich wasn’t given emails and statements involving FBI’s press person, Michael Korten, that the DOJ IG had ignored — emails that were exculpatory — until the day before Bromwich had to present McCabe’s case to Schools.

Certainly, Andrew McCabe has reason to be biased against Robert Hur, because Hur was part of a team that forced McCabe to fight for years just to get a pension earned over decades.

But you don’t have to take McCabe’s word that Hur played a part in, “overriding the process that I was entitled to and basically accelerating the decision to fire me in an effort to get it done before I could retire.”

Take Merrick Garland’s word on what happened. In response to a question from Chuck Grassley shortly after the settlement, Garland explained why career lawyers at DOJ said they should settle: because they were going to lose the case.

The case … involved a claim that he was not given amount of time necessary to respond to allegations and the litigators concluded that they needed to settle the case because of the likelihood of loss on the merits of that claim.

Garland delivered this heavily rehearsed (and inaccurate — that’s not the only thing included in the suit) statement, explaining that the team that rushed to fire McCabe so they could take his pension had not given McCabe the amount of time required to respond to the allegations against him, on October 27, 2021, over a year before he named one member of that team that deprived McCabe of his due process to lead an investigation into Joe Biden.

Garland was clearly just repeating a well-rehearsed answer in this response to Grassley. It’s unlikely he reviewed the matter closely enough to know that Hur was one of the people, according to the career attorneys who said DOJ would lose the suit, who deprived Andrew McCabe of due process. Though Garland knows how DOJ works. He should have known the universe of people who might be involved.

Given how politically contentious the decision to settle was, however, it is also virtually certain that people in Lisa Monaco’s office did review the details closely. In fact, traditionally, the person who would review matters that — like this one — involve weighing ethical considerations and the potential of a big black eye for DOJ is the career Associate Deputy Attorney General, the successor to Scott Schools, who was involved in the firing.

In July 2018, Jeff Sessions appointed Bradley Weinsheimer as Schools’ successor.

It would be shocking if Weinsheimer didn’t review the decision to settle the McCabe lawsuit.

But if he did, that would be cause for further concern. That’s because Weinsheimer is the guy who rejected complaints from Biden’s attorneys about Hur’s politicized attacks on Biden.

By settling Andrew McCabe’s lawsuit, DOJ conceded that Robert Hur and others had deprived the former FBI Deputy Director of due process. They violated DOJ’s rules to do Trump’s bidding. Then, DOJ put Hur in charge of an investigation of Joe Biden.

Come on. Nobody’s asking Garland to break the law or do anything to protect Joe Biden. But it would be nice if he and his underlings would at least be attentive enough to not sabotage him by failing to recognize a partisan when they see one!

The McCabe episode was one of the clearest examples of Trump vengeance. There could be no mistaking what they were doing and putting someone involved in that grotesque display of partisan payback should have been fired. Putting him in charge of an investigation into the Democratic president who defeated his benefactor is simple malpractice.