Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Dispatch from the Trump cult

Watch the whole thing if you have time. Are there people like this at Biden events? I’m not saying there aren’t. But I’ve never seen them.

Democrats do have many crazies in their midst. it’s a big coalition. And I know there’s lots of woo and irrationality. Take RFK Jr. for example — there are plenty of left leaners who think he’s great. But I’d be surprised if there were many who believe that Donald Trump, for all his immense flaws, is draining blood from the brains of children and using it to drug the population. Yet Donald Trump has a not insignificant number of such people who believe this of Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton following him.

Even worse than that (if that’s possible) is the fact that the woman in the video dismisses every indisputable fact by questioning, “where did you hear that?” and insisting that it’s fake news. You can’t deal with people who believe that all reality they don’t like isn’t real.

This is cult stuff and it goes way beyond the kind of grotesque propensity for racism and bigotry that characterizes so much of our species. This is superstition and brainwashing. And there’s a lot more of it than we’ve probably seen since the early days of human civilization thanks to the internet. It’s beyond creepy.

We’d better hope not

Jack Smith’s office has been working over the holiday and they’ve dropped quite a filing responding to Trump’s claim of immunity. The consequences of the court granting it are dire:

Special counsel Jack Smith warned in a new filing Saturday that ex-President Donald Trump’s bid for immunity could “license presidents to commit crimes to remain in office.”

The brief lodged in the D.C. Court of Appeals came in response to the ex-president’s claims that he is immune to prosecution for his efforts to undo his 2020 defeat because he survived an impeachment proceeding in the Senate, and because his plotting fell within the powers and duties of his office.

If these arguments—which District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan rejected earlier this month—won out, a president could commit crimes freely so long as he threw up sufficient hurdles to keep two-thirds of U.S. senators from voting to remove him, Smith said.

“A former president could thus bank on the practical obstacles to impeachment (a remedy designed to remove, not hold criminally accountable, a corrupt officer) to provide a safe harbor insulating him from prosecution once he has left office,” the brief reads, highlighting one potential scenario that might unfold should Trump triumph. “Under the defendant’s framework, the nation would have no recourse to deter a president from inciting his supporters during a State of the Union address to kill opposing lawmakers—thereby hamstringing any impeachment proceeding—to ensure that he remains in office unlawfully.”

That was hardly the only apocalyptic vision that Smith and his colleagues conjured. The prosecutors attacked the defense’s claims that Trump’s conspiring with state and federal officials to block President Joe Biden’s victory in the Electoral College fell within the rights and responsibilities of a president to engage with other officials on matters of federal importance.

“That approach would grant immunity from criminal prosecution to a president who accepts a bribe in exchange for directing a lucrative government contract to the payer; a president who instructs the FBI director to plant incriminating evidence on a political enemy; a president who orders the National Guard to murder his most prominent critics; or a president who sells nuclear secrets to a foreign adversary,” Smith and his team wrote. “In each of these scenarios, the president could assert that he was simply executing the laws; or communicating with the Department of Justice; or discharging his powers as commander-in-chief; or engaging in foreign diplomacy.”

It’s hard to imagine that the Supremes could possibly be so short sighted and partisan that they would agree with Trump’s argument but you never know. I suspect it’s much more likely they’ll put the case off until after the election and then call it moot if they can. The hypocrisy will be evident if they do that — they raced to decide the 2000 election. And the effect will be the same as if they decided for Trump if he wins because he will take no decision as a win and will do exactly as Smith predicts.

Surely that 6-3 majority can’t all be that myopic can they? Even as rank partisan Republican hacks they must see the danger in letting Trump off the hook? Right?

Yeah…

Teach Yellow Dogs new tricks

Even if a Democrat wins the White House in November 2024, we could a year from now be sitting on pins and needles wondering if Coup 2.0 is in the works. Watching the January 6, 2021 insurrection unfold may have been the most harrowing day in the lives of ordinary Americans who’ve never served in combat. One wonders if Trump country watched with beer and pretzels as if it was the Super Bowl halftime show. In any event, the Department of Justice, D.C. and Capitol Police, and nearby national guard units, will be anxious as well, and better prepared.

There’s a lot to do between now and then.

You help keep me/us sane by reading our daily rants. Thank you so very much for that and for your support. I don’t say it enough, thank God for readers:

[T]his blog’s proprietor, began writing here New Year’s Day 2003 after attracting a following at Atrios’s blog. She wrote that being invited to write by Atrios was “kind of like having Eddie Van Halen invite you up on stage to join him in a guitar solo.”

That’s how I felt when Digby invited me to join her in August 2014. (We’d met at a conference in 2009.) I began writing occasional commentaries for the Asheville Citizen-Times in mid-September 2003, got named an official (unpaid) “community columnist” in 2005, and finally started up my own blog in March 2006. (It’s still out there gathering electrons.) Eventually, a local rabble-rouser invited me to join Scrutiny Hooligans (R.I.P.) before Digby asked me to fill in over a weekend. The weekend never ended. The Citizen-Times’ then-editorial editor, a Digby fan, greeted me at an event, smiled broadly, shook my hand and said, “My friend, you have arrived.”

Behind the scenes, I’ll be plugging away trying to teach Yellow Dogs new tricks. In North Carolina. In Arizona. Maybe even in Pennsylvania. In states where voters register by party, Democrats and aligned nonprofits might, with access to the right data and the capacity to think outside the box, turn out many more of those unaffiliated voters they’ll need to win races in November.

Amateurs talk strategy. Professionals talk logistics.
– attributed to Gen. Omar Bradley

Smaller, under-resourced, and less-experienced Democratic county committees may not get trained in the mechanics and logistics of turning out the vote for their candidates, especially those down-ballot candidates that constitute the farm team. State parties lack the budgets and bandwidth. So I do it.

For The Win, 5th Ed links will go out in a month or so to over 2,000 counties. (I’m essentially a spammer.) This county-level GOTV cookbook is still a lead-a-horse effort. But for county chairs open to learning new tricks, I can show them how to play like the big leagues on little league money.

Democrats tend to be policy liberals and campaign conservatives. Now is no time to go into a defensive crouch. If we mean to defend this republic from neighbors bent on turning it into an autocracy or worse — possibly much worse — we’ll need to stop listening to the Axelrods and Carvilles who stopped learning new tricks decades ago. Gen Z is bringing new energy to the table and gaining a foothold. Voters under 45 (you’ve seen the graphic) are where Democrats have the most potential for increasing voter turnout. Take risks.

Mansplaining to independents why they should vote Democrat is not the way to make that happen. Don’t ask them to do something for your party and candidate. Tell them why voting is doing something for themselves.

The new first principle of politics

The Games of the XXXIII Olympiad take place in Paris in July 2024. The organizers periodically add new events and remove others from sports that have fallen out of use/favor. Not having checked to see if that’s happened for the upcoming Olympics, I have a suggestion for a new event. Credit where due, David Frum inspired the idea.

Frum (indirectly) identifies in The Atlantic the dominant principle held by the Party of Trump: flexibility. “Flexibility is the first principle of politics,” Richard Nixon once advised a staffer and, hoo-boy, are Republicans flexible.* Frum provides a few examples where the Trump faithful nimbly pivot whenever it suits them. There’s a new first principle on the block.

Point out where Republicans benefit from and leverage our system’s anti-majoritarian features to engineer for themselves permanent minority rule? We’re a republic, not a democracy.

States rule that Donald Trump, post-insurrection, is ineligible under the 14th Amendment to hold public office in any capacity? Let the people decide!

Frum summarizes what we know of the Trump era — the lies, the hypocrisy, the attempts to rig the 2020 election, the attempts to rig the post-election. There’s no need to recount it all here. The point is this:

Trump and his supporters have conjured a series of self-serving rules. Where antique anti-majoritarian devices work for them, the antique anti-majoritarian devices prevail. Where crude gaming of filibusters and gerrymandering works for them, the crude gaming must prevail. Where fraud and violence work for them, fraud and violence must prevail. And where invoking democratic ideas works for them—well, you can complete the sentence.

How should people who are serious about democratic principles respond to this avalanche of bad faith? Democratic ideals don’t cease to be true just because they can be exploited by dishonest actors. Yet democracy also cannot become an optional principle that authoritarians can use when it suits them and then discard without consequences when it becomes an obstacle to their goals. Democratic systems have constitutions and constitutional remedies precisely to protect themselves against those who toggle in this way between breaking inconvenient rules and demanding the benefit of favorable ones.

Frank Wilhoit provided the most biting, class-based formulation of bad faith politics:

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:

There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

Even shorter: Heads, I win, tails, you lose.

Those of us living under minority rule know that one well.

Frum, once skeptical of disqualifying Trump under the 14th Amendment, is now “disqualification-curious.”

Maybe prudence genuinely does recommend leaving Trump’s disgraced name on primary and general-election ballots. But remember that old joke about the man who murdered both of his parents and then asked for mercy as an orphan? It needs to be replaced by a new joke about the ex-president who trashed democracy when he had the power, and then pleaded for the protection of democracy so he could have one more chance to trash democracy again.

As popular as public displays of conservative bad faith have become since the 2008 election, perhaps they deserve their own Bad Faith Olympic games event. Perhaps Donald Trump will compete. No one knows more about bad faith than Trump. Just ask him. He and his retinue already possess the necessary Nixonian flexibility.

* Read up on the Nixon renaissance at Politico Magazine.

This is one of the most surprising articles I’ve read in the NY Times in a long while. It’s about the Israeli military’s total lack of preparation for the October 7th attacks. I can’t really believe how bad it was. This was just not something most people ever thought could happen. They’re supposed to be the best military with the best intelligence in the whole region. My God.

Here is a gift link for you to read the whole thing which I highly recommend you do. The administration just approved a$147.5 million  emergency shipment of military aid. Wherever you come out on this issue, I think everyone can agree that the US should be very concerned about its ongoing military support for the country. And I would hope that it would convince even the hawks in both countries that Netanyahu has got to go. The buck stops with him.

A short excerpt:

The full reasons behind the military’s slow response may take months to understand. The government has promised an inquiry. But a New York Times investigation found that Israel’s military was undermanned, out of position and so poorly organized that soldiers communicated in impromptu WhatsApp groups and relied on social media posts for targeting information. Commandos rushed into battle armed only for brief combat. Helicopter pilots were ordered to look to news reports and Telegram channels to choose targets.

And perhaps most damning: The Israel Defense Forces did not even have a plan to respond to a large-scale Hamas attack on Israeli soil, according to current and former soldiers and officers. If such a plan existed on a shelf somewhere, the soldiers said, no one had trained on it and nobody followed it. The soldiers that day made it up as they went along.

“In practice, there wasn’t the right defensive preparation, no practice, and no equipping and building strength for such an operation,” said Yom Tov Samia, a major general in the Israeli reserves and former head of the military’s Southern Command.

“There was no defense plan for a surprise attack such as the kind we have seen on Oct. 7,” said Amir Avivi, a brigadier general in the reserves and a former deputy commander of the Gaza Division, which is responsible for protecting the region.

That lack of preparation is at odds with a founding principle of Israeli military doctrine. From the days of David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister and defense minister, the goal was to always be on the offensive — to anticipate attacks and fight battles in enemy territory.

In response to a series of questions from The Times, including why soldiers and officers alike said there had been no plan, the Israel Defense Forces replied: “The I.D.F. is currently focused on eliminating the threat from the terrorist organization Hamas. Questions of this kind will be looked into at a later stage.”

Unbelievable.

This isn’t the first time he’s said this, of course. He claims he actually won the popular vote in 2016 because of all the undocumented immigrants who voted for Clinton. He even created a commission to investigate it and, of course, they came up with nothing because it’s utter nonsense.

But today this actually refers to the Great Replacement Theory, which is much more pernicious. Sure, he’s laying the groundwork to claim he actually won again. And his people will be convinced of it, of course. But the Republican Party has now adopted this white supremacist theory and it’s inspiring people to take matters into their own hands. Example: The Tree of Life and El Paso mass murders, which were clearly inspired by this grotesque, racist propaganda. Trump may be doing it for his personal purposes, but a whole lot of people are absorbing this idea as a major threat to their way of life. It’s bad.

Her name is Marge

The Hill interviewed Marjorie Taylor Greene who has obviously feeling irrelevant since she bet on the wrong horse in MyKev. She’s loaded for bear:

In an extensive interview with The Hill, Greene did not hold back when asked about Johnson’s early Speakership record — “terrible” — or his need to earn her trust.

“He went from having a voting record to literally a month later … going against his own voting record and being Speaker of the House,” Greene later added. “Literally all of a sudden talking about doing things that he had literally voted against only a month before that. And, you know, that was unacceptable to me, and it still is.”

In the first two months of the Johnson era, Greene moved to force votes on a pair of politically prickly issues that split the Republican conference, hurled sometimes explicit insults at GOP colleagues who opposed those efforts, and frequently criticized the Speaker’s strategy on major issues including government funding, Ukraine aid and the annual defense policy bill.

While the role of rabble-rouser is nothing new for Greene, her reversion to that position has exacerbated the problems facing Johnson as he works to unite the GOP conference through a series of legislative landmines.

Greene maintains that despite her dramatic change during the McCarthy era, she is still the same antagonist deep down. 

She insists that she has never been a team player and never will be, despite her alliance with the ultimate establishment player, MyKevin. No, she just didn’t make the smart decision and she needs to change the story line so she’s going back to her bomb-throwing ways.

She’s going after Johnson and will do everything she can to destroy the country. Good old Marge.

Greene has dialed up her criticism of Johnson since he won the gavel on Oct. 25, sharply critiquing his strategy on a handful of policy pushes — including his call to pair Ukraine aid with border security.

As a growing contingent of Republicans oppose support for Kyiv, Johnson said any assistance must be coupled with substantive border security policy, a move that was viewed as an attempt to find common ground between Ukraine allies and conservative skeptics. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), a top supporter of Ukraine, got behind the play.

But Greene said the proposal was a “bad strategy.”

Right. She’s a strategic genius.

“Mike Johnson comes in and first thing he starts talking about is passing another CR, and I’m like, wait a minute, what? You just voted against it. That was the whole reason why Kevin McCarthy got ousted, was working with Democrats and passing a clean CR. And you know, for me I was like, what a hypocrisy,” Greene told The Hill.

“And then the next thing he starts immediately talking about is funding Ukraine, that shocked me,” Greene later added. “I was like, why would he even be talking about that? He voted against it.”

But Johnson had told GOP lawmakers in a “dear colleague” letter hours before his election as Speaker that he would put a short-term stopgap bill on the floor if needed to avert a shutdown — and Greene supported his candidacy despite that plan.

[…]

“Speaker Johnson worked with [Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.)] to cut a deal that removes all abortion and trans surgery prohibitions we passed under Speaker McCarthy,” Greene wrote this month on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. “No member of the NDAA conference had any influence on this process. It was done in secret meetings with no input from conferees,” she continued, referring to the annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).

The criticisms might be easily dismissed coming from another second-term lawmaker. But Greene has quickly made herself into a national brand — a fundraising juggernaut and close ally of former President Trump, who leadership can ignore only at their own peril. 

They can and should ignore her but they won’t. She’s popular with the fascist right. We know what that means.

And she’s learned how to use the procedural levers to gum up the works. She forced a vote to censure Rashida Tlaib right out of the gate which Texas congressman Chip Roy called “feckless.” (Now we know why Trump has been ragging on him for the last month.) Then she got into it with Darryl Issa over her stupid move to impeach DHS Secretary Mayorkas, calling Issa a pussy on twitter.

She has basically declared war:

“It’s still early in his Speakership, so I have given him — I’ve been patient, but the honeymoon’s over,” Greene said of Johnson minutes after she moved to force a second vote. “So at this point, yes, I’m frustrated.”

Her colleagues aren’t impressed. “I don’t know how that helps,” another House Republican, who requested anonymity to discuss the sensitive topic, said. “I truly don’t see how that helps.”

She doesn’t care.

When asked if she’s trying to force herself into Johnson’s inner circle by being a shrieking harpy, she says no, that she has more than one playbook.

No she doesn’t. She’s a crude bully and that’s all she knows.

She says she’d love to help Johnson but there are conditions:

“He’s got to earn it. But would I help him? Of course I would. If he listened,” Greene said. “See, there’s a difference. Kevin McCarthy would listen. Kevin McCarthy would, you know, he would take ideas, he would take suggestions, he would take help because he was willing to take it, and he didn’t try to do everything on his own.”

She’s such a horrible monster that others in the caucus are telling Johnson that he needs to appease her.

“She’s a good example of how she had influence and was highly effective. And she was able to do that behind closed doors. Now, in order for her to get the same effect, she has to do it publicly. Same set of goals. This is stuff that she’s worked on. So I don’t I view that as you know, no one in current leadership having an effective relationship with her, how it’s more a statement of our current leadership than it is about a change in her,” the lawmaker added.

What drivel. She’s nothing but a shit-disturber whose only agenda is to screw over her enemies which includes many Republicans and all Democrats. There is nothing else for her but dominance.

“Trust is earned and that’s based on actions, not on promises or intentions or saying, ‘I’m brand-new here,’” Greene told The Hill. “Honeymoon is over; it’s all about actions from here on out.”

Like Dear Leader, it’s all about boot licking. It will be interesting to see how Johnson handles her. I can’t stand the guy but this almost makes me pity him.

Nikki Haley finally gets some scrutiny

Over the holiday I heard a few people saying that we liberals really should get behind Haley and help her beat Trump because even though she polls better than Biden we should do what we can to defeat him even if it means losing the general election. My response (in my head) was “wtf are you smoking? Haley is horrible!” Sure, maybe she’s not as bad as Trump in some ways but we don’t really know that because she is an empty vessel and nobody knows what she really thinks about anything.

Politico took a look at the flap and what it says about her:

After evading attacks for weeks from her Republican rivals, it was a town hall question about the origins of the Civil War that finally seemed to stick.

And it couldn’t have come at a worse time. With weeks to go before voting starts, Haley is now facing the first major test of her ability to withstand a maelstrom in the presidential campaign. It is a significant moment not only for the former South Carolina governor, but for the broader effort among Republicans hoping to stop Donald Trump from steamrolling to the nomination.

“This is Haley’s first time under the bright lights, and she must power through this and tackle Trump now,” said Scott Reed, a veteran GOP strategist. “Or else.”

Haley’s rivals treated her Civil War comments as a lifeline for their own dimming prospects in the race. DeSantis and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie quickly condemned her answer at their own campaign events this week. And Haley, the former U.N. ambassador, spent much of Thursday addressing questions about her remarks, putting her in the position of explaining rather than selling her candidacy.

For nearly a year — from her beginning as a long shot to her recent rise in polls — Haley went relatively unscathed. Her opponents have highlighted, with little effect, her evolving answers on issues like abortion and transgender rights. But they spent less money against her, too. As of Wednesday, Haley had $14 million spent against her in negative advertising, compared with nearly $37 million for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and $19 million for Trump, according to Rob Pyers, a nonpartisan data analyst. Trump has focused his hammer-like attacks on DeSantis, not Haley. And much of the media scrutiny over the past year focused on the Florida governor’s campaign missteps and policy proposals.

But that changed Wednesday night in Berlin, New Hampshire. Haley’s halting and convoluted response to a town hall questioner — and her ensuing attempts to clarify her comments, later acknowledging slavery as a cause of the Civil War after first declining to do so — put a harsh spotlight on her, arguably for the first time during the primary. Within hours, news outlets had begun digging into her past remarks on the issue, resurfacing an interview she’d given in 2010 in which she offered similar beliefs about the root causes of the Civil War.

And for Haley, the timing and location carried outsize significance. With Trump building wide leads in the three other early primary states — Iowa, Nevada and South Carolina — New Hampshire has emerged as the key battleground in the effort to slow Trump’s momentum. Polls there have shown Haley moving into second place and gradually creeping up on Trump ahead of the Jan. 23 primary.

“The answer itself doesn’t have to be a huge problem,” said Liam Donovan, a former National Republican Senatorial Committee official. “But the media response tells you the free ride is over, and she’s in for her first taste of adversity.”

The controversy has given particular oxygen to Christie, who in recent weeks has faced questions about whether he will remain in the race. The former New Jersey governor is polling third in some recent New Hampshire surveys, and many top Republicans in the Granite State say he is potentially siphoning off support that could otherwise go to Haley. Christie has insisted he won’t drop out of the race — he released a direct-to-camera ad this week in which he said as much — but the firestorm could give him added incentive to stay in.

“The problem for Haley is that her path to the nomination already amounts to an early state Triple Lindy, and anything that stands to stunt her rise — or, perhaps worse, breathe new life into somebody like Chris Christie — is something she can ill afford,” said Donovan.

Haley was already starting to face a barrage of attacks from her lower-polling opponents in the days leading up to her Civil War comments. DeSantis and Christie have highlighted her seemingly shifting position on the issue of transgender medical rights for minors. After a clip resurfaced earlier this month of Haley in June saying “the law should stay out of it” when it came to underage children seeking gender transitions, Haley told the Christian Broadcasting Network last week “there should be federal involvement” to block anyone under 18 from undergoing gender-altering procedures.

Christie in recent weeks has likewise hammered Haley on her position on abortion, accusing her of speaking differently about the topic in Iowa and New Hampshire.

Officials from rival campaigns have privately expressed frustration about a lack of scrutiny by the media on Haley’s policy positions. Haley, throughout much of her campaign, declined to make herself available for media gaggles at campaign events, instead choosing to grant occasional one-on-one interviews with select reporters and to sit for television spots.

That’s in contrast to other Republicans in the field. Even Trump, the overwhelming frontrunner, has answered questions from mainstream news reporters on his plane and spoke with the press this fall outside a New York City courtroom. In the fallout of her Civil War comments, Haley on Thursday did address reporters while standing next to New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu.

It didn’t go well.

I don’t know how much this will hurt her in Iowa and New Hampshire. Most people in those states have already made up their minds. I suppose it could hurt her in Iowa where there’s no Democratic primary and some Democrats may have been planning to register for the caucuses to foil Trump. In New Hampshire she might have offended some of the Independents who were fueling her rise. Who knows?

But this whole thing has almost certainly dinged her image as the person who could best beat Biden. That idea depended on the notion that she could appeal to those suburban moms” who have defected from the GOP because of Trump. A controversy of slavery and abortion isn’t really going to help her there.

I’ve never respected her. She’s slick and craven and always has been. And she will follow the new fascist Republican Party wherever it wants to go. Just because she isn’t insulting everyone who crosses her in crude junior high school terms doesn’t mean she isn’t dangerous.