We had some progress. We’re going backwards.
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Digby's Hullabaloo Posts
“Democrats have no spine”
A month ago, I asked, “Who would you rather have watching your back, lackadaisical voter? Dick Durbin or Rocky Balboa?” When Democrats panic at the first sign of trouble, Ms. or Mr. Independent has got to question whether they have what it takes to lead the country.
Granted, Republicans still scare-monger about communists and Marxists, etc., decades after the collapse of the Soviet empire. Ms. or Mr. Independent might insist that if they want to lead this country in the 21st century they might first try living in it.
That said, steadfastness is not one of Democrats’ strong points. Hell, I don’t have warm fuzzies about voting for us right now. And I’m not the only one to observe that Democrats running around with their hair on fire over Joe Biden’s debate performance last week is a lousy advertisement for any of their candidates.
Self-doubts and timidity are not confidence-inspiring. One need not be particularly savvy to know that. Stuart Stevens made the case to MSNBC that Democrats need to start projecting strength and quit the public second-guessing.
American University’s Allan Lichtman tells CNN, “Debates are not predictors of outcomes.”
Lichtman continues, “The same pundits and pollsters who led us down the primrose path in 2016 are giving Democrats horrible advice.” Which leads him to observe, “Republicans have no principles, Democrats have no spine.”
Biden’s debate performance may not matter anymore. I missed the Axios post-debate reporting (based on anonymous White House sources) that Biden is “dependably engaged” principally between 10am and 4pm. He might not be able to fight both Trump and this rabid media, as well as his own easily shaken party members.
Even as the Biden campaign and the DNC insist that there is no alternative to Biden, NBC reports that “as the party’s rules stand now, according to three people who are familiar with them and the DNC’s 2022 document outlining procedures for the convention, there is a process for replacing Biden if he voluntarily chooses to step aside after the convention ends on Aug. 22.”
Multiple pundits suggest that the only viable alternative is Kamala Harris. Marcy Wheeler dismisses for multiple reasons the idea of Biden resigning and making Harris the 47th president. (I admit the idea that it would immediately render obsolete all the MAGA merch with 47 on it makes me gleeful.) A Republican-controlled House might refuse to confirm a replacement VP for President Harris. And then?
…may not have a big portfolio on most days. But she does on [January 6] that, recent history warns us, is a fragile moment of our democracy. Certainly, it’s possible Democrats could convince Republicans to let Patty Murray do that job, as Chuck Grassley was prepared to do back in 2021.
But the bigger problem is the target you would put on Kamala Harris’ back if she became a President, running for re-election, without a Vice President as her designated successor. Trump has already made it clear he plans to return to power by any means necessary. Trump has already spent years frothing up his followers to a frenzy that could (and has) tipped into violence with little notice.
But all the “can’t win” speculation takes focus away from the truly horrifying SCOTUS decision favoring a man-child who would be king. And it’s a sorry advertisement for Democrat’s ability to lead. Biden seems determined to weather the storm or else to run out the clock on his stepping aside.
Frankly, I’ll take Biden over Trump even if I get him only between 10am and 4pm. But campaigning hours run longer. Much longer.
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Lincoln’s Second Inaugural address
March 4, 1865:
“Fellow countrymen: at this second appearing to take the oath of the presidential office there is less occasion for an extended address than there was at the first. Then a statement somewhat in detail of a course to be pursued seemed fitting and proper. Now, at the expiration of four years during which public declarations have been constantly called forth on every point and phase of the great contest which still absorbs the attention and engrosses the energies of the nation little that is new could be presented. The progress of our arms, upon which all else chiefly depends is as well known to the public as to myself and it is I trust reasonably satisfactory and encouraging to all. With high hope for the future no prediction in regard to it is ventured.
“On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it ~ all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place devoted altogether to saving the Union without war insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war ~ seeking to dissolve the Union and divide effects by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came.
“One eighth of the whole population were colored slaves not distributed generally over the union but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen perpetuate and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war while the government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces but let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered ~ that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. “Woe unto the world because of offenses for it must needs be that offenses come but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.” If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which in the providence of God must needs come but which having continued through His appointed time He now wills to remove and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him. Fondly do we hope ~ fervently do we pray ~ that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword as was said three thousand years ago so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’
“With malice toward none with charity for all with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan ~ to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
Eleven years ago at Crooks & Liars:
The Republican Party is acting out one of those dreary murder ballads with America. You know the ones, where the rejected suitor declares, “If I can’t have you, then no one can!” Then he murders the woman to put her out of his misery.
Lincoln knew the type.
For all their patriotic bluster, the tea party dresses like colonists and acts like royalists. They’re more Tory than tea party. And they vote that way.
Historians estimate that perhaps only 20 percent of the King’s loyal supporters emigrated from the United States after the British lost the war. The rest stayed.
Two hundred-plus years later, their children are still with us. They have found a home in the Republican Party. It’s where corporations can order custom-tailored legislation and where a tradesman can dream that if he emulates his betters – or wins the lottery – he might find acceptance among them. Or failing that, maybe touch the hem of their garments as they pass.
As Lincoln observed of the slave states in his 1860 Cooper Union Address, the royalist faction will not be satisfied. Democratic coexistence is no longer enough. They want to rule. These Americans(?), Christian royalists, pine for an aristocracy and for a king — an earthly one now, seeing Jesus is 2,000 years tardy. Thus, the Roberts Court’s conservative majority on Monday granted them an imperial presidency. They declare their intent to destroy the republic without war in a “second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless” so long as Americans still dedicated to the proposition that all persons are created equal do not resist.
On Independence Day 2024, God save these United States.
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Aaaaand this from someone who has been leading the piranha press pack:
That’s where we are right now folks. I just don’t think Biden in his weakened condition can fight both Trump and this rabid media and win. One hope now is that if he drops out that the press will feel at least slightly chagrined and will turn the same laser focus on Trump’s unfitness. I’m not holding my breath.
They are applying “the cackle” to Kamala Harris already. It was a common description of Hillary Clinton. And it wasn’t Republicans who came up with it.
This just in: Hillary Clinton has been laughing a lot lately. Yes, it’s true — a candidate long accused of being cold and unappealing has taken to emitting a hearty chuckle in public, and on the airwaves. We hope you were sitting down for that one.
Actually, in this highly-monitored campaign, the decisions of its most-disciplined and most-focus-grouped candidate are news, and the Hillary Laugh Tactic has been noticeable. Jon Stewart picked up on it in earlier this week, splicing laugh segments together (in a way that, let’s be honest, would make anyone appear manic), but it certainly set up the punchline: Jon fixing the camera with an intense, humorless gaze and saying “I’M JOYFUL.” Frank Rich noted it too: “Now Mrs. Clinton is erupting in a laugh with all the spontaneity of an alarm clock buzzer.” And then, of course, there was The Cackle.
NYT reporter Patrick Healy is an expert on The Cackle. He’s been observing it carefully since January 2005, he tells us right off the bat. In the middle of heated press questioning, “suddenly it happened: Mrs. Clinton let loose a hearty belly laugh that lasted a few seconds…This was my first close encounter with Senator Clinton, and with The Cackle.” This reads with all the slow-building horror of a B-movie Professor explaining to his save-the-world student how he first came face to face with Evil, and learned to name it.
“Friends of hers told a different story,” says Healy, that she actually had a “fantastic sense of humor.” (Well, they would say that, but Healy can see through them.) Then there’s this:
Mrs. Clinton goes for the lowest-common-denominator display of her funny bone: She shows that she can laugh, and that her laugh has a fullness and depth.
Oh, you — you with your laugh of fullness and depth — we’re on to you. Go back to the gutter you crawled out of, lowlife.
Seriously. What IS this? This article was deemed significant enough by the NYT to publish not once, but twice, under two separate headlines and two separate dates (Sept. 28th on the web, graduating to Sept.30th in the paper). But when I look at it, I see a hit piece masquerading as analysis. Why? “The Cackle.”
If Harris becomes the nominee or is simply seen as the shadow president going forward since the concerns about Biden are so acute this is the type of thing that’s going to happen to her. Trump will do it, of course. But the media will help.
This may end up being the worst 4th of July ever…
Sorry, Village media…
This issue is not going away no matter how much the media wants to sound the Democratic party’s death knell:
By the way, Ed Martin was fired from CNN for being a racist. Interesting they didn’t mention that.
Aaaaand this….
It does not sound like the anti-abortion zealots are on board with Trump’s inane “everyone always wanted it to go to the states” construction. We know what they want. And they don’t think they need to shut about it just to help Trump win.
By the way, the RNC has chosen three right wing extremists to write the party platform in secret. Martin is one, and one of the others is Russ Vought, who I wrote about in depth here. The third member of the secret committee is this guy:
They seem like a great bunch of guys.
Right-wing commentators are praising former President Donald Trump for managing to “keep his mouth shut” and “remaining completely silent” after President Joe Biden’s June 27 debate performance, which triggered widespread concern about Biden’s fitness for office and ability to win reelection.
“Donald Trump has run the most disciplined campaign, maybe, over the last 25 years,” Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade said on July 3. “The fact that he is laying out during this whole news cycle shows a discipline at a whole new level.”
That strategically silent, disciplined Trump does not exist. Since the debate, the former president and presumptive Republican presidential nominee has repeatedly promoted calls from his supporters to jail his perceived political enemies for “treason” and other purported crimes.
On Sunday, Trump “ReTruthed” a post calling for former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) to face a “televised military tribunal” for her purported “treason.”
He also “ReTruthed” a post stating that 15 current or former lawmakers, including Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, former Vice President Mike Pence, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), “SHOULD BE GOING TO JAIL.”
Trump also “ReTruthed” a post urging him to “BRING DOWN THE ENTIRE SOROS FAMILY AND ALL THESE TREASONOUS TRAITORS THAT HE FUNDS” as part of a “COUP AGAINST AMERICA.”
And Trump “ReTruthed” a post describing Judge Juan Merchan, who oversaw the former president’s New York hush-money trial, as a “corrupt globalist judge” and called for Merchan to be “removed and charged.”
The latter three posts were from accounts that promote QAnon, continuing the former president’s habit of using his Truth Social platform to amplify the phraseology and adherents of a conspiracy theory which calls for mass violence directed at his foes. Indeed, Trump also once again “ReTruthed” a post using the QAnon slogan, “Where we go one, we go all.”
At a Friday rally, Trump also called for the release of rioters who had been prosecuted for storming the U.S. Capitol in response to his 2020 defeat, saying, “Free the J6 hostages now. They should free them now for what they’ve gone through.” The Associated Press also noted that “Trump repeated several of the false claims he made” during Thursday’s debate in his speech.
Pundits and journalists have spent the last eight years predicting Trump would change, or prematurely declaring that he had done so. But he is what he is — an unhinged demagogue with an authoritarian’s view of American institutions. No amount of wishful thinking from his right-wing media allies promoting a new, more disciplined Trump will change that.
Pro-Publica released its full unedited interview with Joe Biden from September:
In the wake of President Joe Biden’s poor debate performance, his opponents and most major media organizations have pointed out that he has done few interviews that give the public an opportunity to hear him speak without a script or teleprompters.
Defend the facts. Support independent journalism by donating to ProPublica.Donate Now
So much has been made of this limited access that the impressions from Special Counsel Robert K. Hur about his five hours of interviews with the president on Oct. 8 and 9 drove months of coverage. The prosecutor said Biden had “diminished faculties in advancing age” and called him a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Biden angrily dismissed these assertions, which Vice President Kamala Harris called “politically motivated.”
House Republicans on Monday sued Attorney General Merrick B. Garland for audio recordings of the interview as the White House asserts executive privilege to deny their release.
ProPublica obtained a rare interview with Biden on Sept. 29, nine days before the Hur interviews began. We released the video, which was assembled from footage shot by five cameras, on Oct. 1. We edited out less than a minute of crosstalk and exchanges with the camera people, as is customary in such interviews.
Today, we are releasing the full, 21-minute interview, unedited as seen from the view of the single camera focused on Biden. We understand that this video captures a moment in time nine months ago and that it will not settle the ongoing arguments about the president’s acuity today. Still, we believe it is worth giving the public another chance to see one of Biden’s infrequent conversations with a reporter.
Here’s the press conference with Zelensky two weeks ago, He starts off on the teleprompter but then answers questions.
I don’t have an explanation for Biden’s performance at the debate. I know that elderly people can rather suddenly deteriorate or show signs of mental and physical fatigue rather abruptly. Maybe something specific has happened. I don’t know. But it’s clear that he isn’t some kind of vegetable that they’ve been hiding through his entire presidency. Maybe it comes and goes but it certainly isn’t constant.
I’m not sure that makes a difference as he and others assess whether he can continue. But I thought it was worth showing in any case.
In 1973 the Senate Watergate Committee uncovered a plan that had been hatched three years earlier by a man named Tom Charles Huston, a White House liaison to the Interagency Committee on Intelligence (ICI), a group chaired FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to monitor “left wing radicals.” The Huston Plan, as it was known, laid out detailed operations to burglarize the homes and conduct electronic surveillance of these co-called radicals and even detain anti-war protesters in camps to be created in western states. President Richard Nixon signed off on the plan only to rescind his approval a few days later under objections from Hoover himself.
It was one of a number of nefarious plots uncovered during the investigations, including the actual burglarizing of Pentagon Papers whistle blower Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, an order to bomb the Brooking s Institute and the Watergate burglary itself. The Huston Plan was one that was never carried out but went directly to the president who signed the order.
I bring this obscure bit of Watergate lore up because it was the Huston plan that precipitated a very important historical question posed to Nixon by David Frost in their interviews in 1977. Frost asked Nixon:
So, what in a sense you’re saying is that there are certain situations and the Huston plan or that part of it was one of them where the president can decide that it’s in the best interest of the nation or something and do something illegal.
Nixon famously replied, “well, when the president does it … that means that it is not illegal.”
That answer caused a national uproar. The mere idea of a president being above the law, especially one who had been driven from office and then pardoned for his crimes by his successor was outrageous.
Nixon further explained that position in some detail. He said,:
[I]f, for example, the president approves something … approves an action, ah … because of the national security or in this case because of a threat to internal peace and order of, ah … ah … significant magnitude … then … the president’s decision in that instance is one, ah … that enables those who carry it out to carry it out without violating a law. Otherwise they’re in an impossible position.
Frost followed up asking if the “black-bag” jobs that were authorized in the Huston plan would have been made legal by his action. Nixon said:
Well … I think that we would … I think that we’re splitting hairs here. Burglaries per se are illegal. Let’s begin with that proposition. Second, when a burglary, as you have described a black-bag job, ah … when a burglary, ah … is one that is undertaken because of an expressed policy decided by the president, ah … in the interests of the national security … or in the interests of domestic tranquility … ah … when those interests are very, very high … and when the device will be used in a very limited and cautious manner and responsible manner … when it is undertaken, then, then that means that what would otherwise be technically illegal does not subject those who engage in such activity to criminal prosecution. . .
He went on to say that he wasn’t suggesting that a president is above the law just that during war time and “virtual revolution in certain concentrated areas at home” the president does have under the Constitution extraordinary powers.
It sounded completely daft at the time and reinforced most of the country’s belief that Nixon was a tyrannical monster who never should have been anywhere near the presidency. He sounded absolutely nuts. However, there was a small group of conservative legal thinkers who agreed with Nixon’s views of presidential power and thought it was a shame that the congress and the courts had taken upon themselves to usurp the imperial power of the presidency.
The fact is that the presidency had been accumulating power ever since WWII. One of the stalest political tropes around is that once attaining power institutions and leaders rarely give it up and it’s true. By the time Nixon came along to crudely abuse the presidency to punish his political enemies, the presidency was already hurtling out of control. And sadly the reforms put in place after Watergate didn’t hold for very long.
The Reagan administration set about evading and disarming them immediately and a whole generation of young legal Reagan revolutionaries adopted the view that Nixon was right and the presidency had been inappropriately emasculated. They pushed novel new legal concepts like the “unitary executive” theory which puts strong constraints on any congressional authority to grant independent authority to executive branch agencies.
Five members of the Supreme Court came up in that legal atmosphere. Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito were lawyers in the Reagan administration and Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, were in the George W. Bush administration. Justice Amy Coney Barrett didn’t work directly for a president and notably dissented in part of the majority opinion but she did work on Bush v. Gore with Kavanaugh and Roberts. This was a fundamental belief among the elite legal minds of the conservative movement.
But according to NPR Supreme Court correspondent Nina Totenberg, this isn’t just about ideology. They were also shaped by a long-standing gripe that their presidents had been unfairly constrained and harassed. It’s personal for them:
It is apparent that the Supreme Court majority, like the average MAGA voter and Donald Trump himself, is filled with bitter resentment. In fact, I would suggest that this entire unitary executive, imperial president philosophy stems from grievance over Richard Nixon being forced out of office all those years ago.
The ruling in Trump v. United States was the culmination of many years of careful, strategic planning by the right wing legal community. The six partisan justices in the majority played the long game and when they got the chance to implement their dream of an imperial presidency they did not hesitate. Not even the prospect of allowing a corrupt president unlike any other, including Richard Nixon, gave them pause.
Perhaps like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, they are counting on the Democrats to “take care of him” so they feel free to overlook his obvious criminality to advance their pet cause. Or maybe they are just grateful that his crimes gave them the opportunity to address the issue that’s animated them for so long. Either way, they have not only given the Donald Trump a get-out-of-jail free card they have weaponized the presidency knowing what criminals like Nixon and Trump are capable of. It’s not at all unfair to assume that’s exactly why they did it.
Salon